Well, let me revise that: Very few care. English teachers may care because they may find it fascinating the phrase “violent coup” is one of the only English phrases often introduced with the prefix “US-backed.”

But I can tell you for certain the mainstream media don’t want you to care. They don’t even want you to know it happened. And they certainly don’t want you to know that it followed a simple formula for US-backed coups in leftist and anti-imperialist nations throughout Latin America, a formula our military intelligence apparatus has implemented in numerous countries tirelessly, like an overused football play.

On the corporate airwaves you won’t hear about US-backed anything. If the US military backed up a truck, CNN wouldn’t mention it, NPR would tell you the truck was dealing with an “organic internal protest movement” and Fox News would blame a black person.

For example, there’s the US-backed genocide going on in Yemen right now. As a recent Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting study made clear, over the 12 months prior to July 3, MSNBC aired a grand total of zero stories about Yemen while it spewed forth 455 stories about the porn star our president pooned. (Which is roughly 445 too many, even if you’re really into presidential erotic fan fiction.)

Back to Latin America. The US has had a long policy of undermining, infiltrating and bringing down any Latin American government that doesn’t line up with our unfettered capitalistic neoliberal policies. If a leader says, “Hey, let’s live a different way in which everyone is taken care of and we help out our brothers and sisters,” then the US will make sure he or she ends up wearing cement shoes at the bottom of a lake somewhere. (And those cement shoes won’t even be crafted by union cement workers because all the unions have been destroyed. So you’ve got freelance underpaid children making the shoes—probably part of the “gig economy” with some sort of cement shoe app that tricks cement layers into working for pennies because they don’t understand the algorithm is screwing them hard!)

Anyway, Nicaragua is the latest US-backed attempted coup. So, this seems like a good time to present: How to Create a US-Backed Government Coup!

You can play along at home—especially if your home is in Nicaragua or Venezuela.

STEP ONE: Create a strong US-backed “fifth column”

Don’t tell me you don’t know what a “fifth column” is. How could you be so naive! (This is the part where I mock you for lacking knowledge that I myself learned only last week.)

As smart person Peter Koenig explains, “A Fifth Column is a group of people who undermine the government of a country in support of the enemy. They can be both covert and open.”

There are various ways to create fifth columns. We here in the US like to create ours with a good, wholesome front: nonprofit organizations. Our two favorites are USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). What is the NED? Well, as Editor of Consortium News Robert Parry put it,

“In 1983, NED essentially took over the CIA’s role of influencing electoral outcomes and destabilizing governments that got in the way of U.S. interests, except that NED carried out those functions in a quasi-overt fashion while the CIA did them covertly. NED also serves as a sort of slush fund for neocons.”

(When I picture a neocon slush fund, I picture Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell and Bill Kristol naked in a small bathtub filled with the vomit of all their victims. Yes, it’s gross. But it’s less gross than what a neocon slush fund really is.)

So we use NED and USAID to destabilize countries. Keep in mind, though it may not sound like much, there are consequences to destabilizing countries. By doing it, we indirectly kill a lot of people, or at least ruin their lives, leaving them poor or destitute. But to create a successful coup, it’s important you don’t care about any of that stuff. Leave that for the nerds with their pencils and their statistics. If babies die because they can’t get the medical treatment they need, not your problem. You’ve got other stuff to do—like wipe bird shit off your $1,200 loafers.

Firefighters received numerous calls at around 7:40 pm, on Tuesday, from frantic locals who had caught a glimpse of the fireball. Some said they suspected it was a UFO, while others phoned because they feared it could start a massive fire.

One woman said she was in the shower when she heard something akin to a “plane crashing.”

Rosena Cox told ABC: “I just heard this enormous bang, it sounded like an explosion and I just thought ‘what on earth was that’ because it was so intense.”

Another said it couldn’t have been just thunder because of the “boom” that accompanied it. Robyn Garratt said people felt like “the sky was falling.”

“It shook the whole house, the windows, the dog went psycho,” Garratt added.

Twitter was afloat with shocked accounts of the blazing ball.

One branded it “bloody huge”, while another believed he had been “flashed by a speed camera”.

Director of the Desert Fireball Network, Professor Phil Bland, said initial observations suggested the inferno ball had hit Earth. He said because the object was “unusually bright” it must have been “big,” before adding that the sonic booms reported by people are a compelling factor indicating that the fireball entered the atmosphere.

CCTV and witness footage of the burning object is now being reviewed by the Perth Observatory in a bid to understand its origin.

Source

David Zublick has revisited the death of investigative journalist Michael Hastings, who was killed in his car in Los Angeles under highly suspicious circumstances in 2013. Many of us believed he was taken out because of the story he was working on at that time.

Federal agents had visited Hastings at his home and he was spooked, leaving town for his safety when his car suddenly sped up and crashed into a palm tree, sending the engine flying out of the vehicle. Some suspect explosives; some, a “Boston Brakes” style assassination. Others have shown us how any newer vehicle can be controlled electronically from a laptop—just as an airplane can be remotely controlled.

Was that alleged “hit” about John Brennan? At the time there was a suggestion it was about Obama’s fake birth certificate, but we knew that wasn’t true. That was old news and well understood by then.

Thomas Williams will be updating us with his news analyses, intel and Q&A tomorrow afternoon/evening August 30 on the Truth, Honor & Integrity Show at 7:30 EDT/4:30 Pacific on Spreaker.com or via the website at Think Different.