Honoring Julian Assange in Boston (via Zoom)

By Ray McGovern, June 9, 2021

Julian Assange’s father, John Shipton, and his brother Gabriel, together with Jill Stein and me among others, spoke briefly earlier today at Community Church of Boston as the “Home Run for Assange” U.S. Tour/2021 reached New England.

The highlight was Julian’s father accepting the Sacco and Vanzetti Award given annually for the past 45 years by Community Church of Boston — the first church to protest loudly the travesty of justice accorded Sacco and Vanzetti, both of whom were falsely convicted and executed in 1927. A Community Church stalwart, David Rothouser, presented a brief summary of that sordid affair and discussed the continuing support for justice provided by 101 year-old Community Church.

Order of Talks  

Fast-forward: The actual event does not begin until minute 26:05 of the YouTube video (see link below) with a song and brief welcome by Dean Stevens, musician and a leader of the church.  David Rothouser begins speaking at minute 29:00; Jill Stein at min. 37:00.  I speak for 11 minutes, starting at min. 49.

John and Gabriel Shipton are then interviewed before the Sacco and Vanzetti award is accepted by John on behalf of the awardee — his son, Julian Assange.

Musician David Rovics provides a moving coda to the affair, singing a song he composed about Julian — a song he actually performed in front of the walls of Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh. The song is “Behind These Prison Walls”.

Why Major Media Mostly Mum on Hunter’s Laptop

By Ray McGovern, June 3, 2021

On The Critical Hour today, I was asked to comment on Hunter & Joe’s Excellent Adventure regarding Ukraine. 

Ray on Critical Hour; June 6, 2021

The interview was pegged to a Politico report that the Justice Department is investigating Democratic Party-aligned “Blue Star Strategies” for possible illegal lobbying for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Yes, the same Burisma that was giving Hunter Biden extravagant remuneration for sitting on its Board, clearly because he was a son of a Biden, so to speak.

Politico’s story ( See: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/03/blue-star-burisma-justice-department-investigation-491681 ) was based on information from “four people familiar with the probe”.  It seemed to me that the newly announced investigation was a typical PR stunt to demonstrate “balance”; that is, to show that our intrepid, ostensibly apolitical DOJ will go after Democrats as well as folks like Rudy Giuliani to investigate illegal lobbying on behalf of a foreign country — in both these cases Ukraine. Some semblance of “balance” was needed after the feds raided Rudy Giuliani’s office and home in late April.

Having given that relatively minor PR ploy more attention than it might deserve, I moved on to more important issues, which I’ll point to below. 

Dems Learn From Comey Overconfidence in 2016

This latest focus on Burisma brought to mind how the Democrats were hell bent on suppressing reporting on the damning evidence in Hunter’s laptop against Hunter and Joe Biden first reported by the New York Post on October 14, 2020 (19 days before the election). And the truly shocking, egregious complicity of Establishment media — including Twitter, Facebook and virtually everyone else except the incorruptible Glenn Greenwald, who quit The Intercept over its attempt to censor his reporting on the issue.***

But what lesson did the Dems learn from 2016?  Recall that the polling heavily favored Hillary Clinton.  But on October 28, 2016 (just 10 days before the election) then-FBI Director James Comey announced that more Clinton emails had been found and that he had to reopen the investigation. Smart pollsters should have realized at that point that they should have thrown out all polling before Oct. 28 and started afresh.

Exogenous Shock Brings the Traumatic Shock of Trump

In the wake of the Trump surprise win, Donald L. Buresh & Theresa Pavone wrote a scholarly paper titled: Why No One Knew that Hillary Clinton Would Lose the 2016 Election ( See: http://www.ivyunion.org/index.php/ajpsr/article/view/1248 ) The following is culled from their summary:

Blind reliance on the use of predictive models led to the major pollsters never knowing that Hillary Rodham Clinton might lose … Predictive models assumed the existence of a steady-state which was not present at the time. … When a predictive model experiences an exogenous shock or a superseding intervening cause, the dependence on data before the shock occurred is unwarranted.

In fact, it is argued that all data before the exogenous shock or superseding intervening cause should be ignored, and only the data that appears after the shock should be used in making predictions.

The predictive models used by the pollsters during the 2016 Presidential election were incapable of recognizing an exogenous shock and that human intervention was needed to correct for the limitations of the predictive models.

Dems Taking No Chances

In 2020, the Democrats were not going to take any risk that something similar might happen after the New York Post — exogenously — published its story, based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which showed all manner of corruption — some of it in graphic detail. What speaks volumes is that the Democrats were able to enlist the entire “mainstream” media and Silicon Valley in a common effort to suppress Biden-damaging reporting for the following 19 days. Had they been unable to control the media during that critical period, who would have won the election? It is a fair — if probably unanswerable — question.

*** Regarding Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi has an excellent commentary today ( See: 

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/congratulations-elitists-liberals-6ec? ) on how Glenn has been vilified by the media.  Matt points to a “hilarious headline” in the Daily Beast yesterday: “Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right-Wing Media? FROM HIS MOUTH TO FOX’S EARS!” (See: https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-glenn-greenwald-the-new-master-of-right-wing-media?via=twitter_page )

And so it goes.

Looking Toward an Inauspicious Summit

By Ray McGovern, May 26, 2021

The “Critical Hour” asked me to elaborate on my gloomy prediction for the June U.S.-Russia summit in Geneva — so far, it has been the most bizarre, acerbic pre-summit period of any I have watched in the past five decades. The “Is the Biden-Putin Summit Doomed?” article published earlier Wednesday was the jumping off point ( See: https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2021/05/25/is-the-biden-putin-summit-doomed/. )

Critical Hour, 5/26/2021, 14 mins

In addition to my pointing out the important role likely to be played by the increasingly close relationship between Russia and China, I must mention more mundane modalities having to do with Biden’s first venture abroad as president. As the Western press seems to relish reporting, Biden’s visit with Putin “is being tacked onto the end” of his travels  … a kind of afterthought — as in, Oh, and let’s not forget to hit Geneva before we turn around and go home.”

As if to add insult to afterthought, Biden is attending the Group of Seven summit (June 11-13) in Britain, and then the NATO summit in Brussels (June 14) before going to Geneva to meet Putin on the 16th.

The G-7 was the G-8 before Russia was unceremoniously kicked out in March 2014. NATO, of course, is a military alliance created to stop the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe. As most people outside NATO headquarters know, the Soviet Union fell apart 30 years ago. The NATO bureaucracy, though, pretends to believe still that the Russians are coming anyway.  That belief is good, of course, for the bureaucracy and excellent for the MICIMATT, which needs as many enemies as it can find or contrive.

As for what Biden’s motivation might be in proposing a summit (that is, beyond telling the Russians how to behave), one theory Ray passed along is that the Pentagon is genuinely worried at the progress the Russians have made with hypersonic and other highly advanced weapons, and consequently Biden may suggest renewing strategic arms control talks as a way to apply brakes on what has become growing Russian superiority in some areas.

I recounted the various illusory hopes — like Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” ABM system — that an airtight missile defense system could one day be produced and deployed.  Billions have been thrown toward that illusory goal and billions more are likely to follow.  This, despite the reality that Russia’s latest weapons make ABMs absolutely obsolete, so to speak. Putin has actually made that claim, and the Pentagon presumably knows he is not bluffing.