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Hunter Biden is a dangerous criminal, just like his father brain-dead Joe Biden. The “sweetheart deal” he got from the Justice Department and the hands-off attitude the FBI has shown him contrast with the political persecution of former President Trump. But so much is coming out about him that there is a chance he will go down and take his criminal father with him.

According to a story in May of last year on NBC News by Tom Winter, Sarah Fitzpatrick, Chloe Atkins, and Laura Strickler,

“From 2013 through 2018 Hunter Biden and his company brought in about $11 million via his roles as an attorney and a board member with a Ukrainian firm accused of bribery and his work with a Chinese businessman now accused of fraud, according to an NBC News analysis of a copy of Biden’s hard drive and iCloud account and documents released by Republicans on two Senate committees.”

The documents and the analysis, which don’t show what he did to earn millions from his Chinese partners, raise questions about national security, business ethics and potential legal exposure. In December 2020, Biden acknowledged in a statement that he was the subject of a federal investigation into his taxes. NBC News was first to report that an ex-business partner had warned Biden he should amend his tax returns to disclose $400,000 in income from the Ukrainian firm, Burisma. GOP congressional sources also say that if Republicans take back the House this fall, they’ll demand more documents and probe whether any of Biden’s income went to his father, President Joe Biden.

‘No government ethics rules apply to him,’ said Walter Shaub, a former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics who is now an ethics expert with the Project on Government Oversight. Shaub added, however, that ‘it’s imperative that no one at DOJ and no one at the White House interfere with the criminal investigation in Delaware.’ Shaub had previously raised questions about Hunter Biden’s new line of work, selling his own paintings, which created the potential to purchase a painting to buy perceived influence, and also because the White House became involved in the transactions, arranging that none of the buyers’ names be known to Biden, the White House or the public.

Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI’s former assistant director for counterintelligence, said there is a national security risk when foreign powers like China see an opportunity to get close to someone like Biden. ‘It’s all about access and influence, and if you can compromise someone with both access and influence, that’s even better,’ said Figliuzzi, now an NBC News contributor. ‘Better still if that target has already compromised himself.’

The documents and the analysis indicate that few of Biden’s deals ever came to fruition and shed light on how fast he was spending his money. Expenditures compiled on his hard drive show he spent more than $200,000 per month from October 2017 through February 2018 on luxury hotel rooms, Porsche payments, dental work and cash withdrawals.

Biden has admitted to burning through cash to pay for drugs and partying with strangers who routinely stole from him, and he struggled to pay multiple mortgages or keep up with alimony and child support payments to his ex-wife. In his autobiography, ‘Beautiful Things,’ he says the money from Burisma ‘turned into a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction’ and ‘hounded me to spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively. Humiliatingly. So I did.’

In a February 2017 divorce filing, an attorney for Biden’s ex-wife said the couple’s outstanding debts were ‘shocking and overwhelming’ and that they owed $313,000 in back taxes. According to the filing, they had bounced checks to their housekeeper and owed money to doctors and therapists. The filing alleged that Hunter Biden had spent copiously on drugs, strip clubs, prostitutes and girlfriends ‘while leaving the family with no money to pay legitimate bills.’

A representative for Biden says all of his tax responsibilities to the IRS are now satisfied. Two sources familiar with the matter have confirmed to NBC News that Hollywood attorney Kevin Morris began advising Biden in 2020 and arranged to pay off the approximately $2 million Biden owed the IRS.

Legal experts say, however, that paying the bill won’t relieve Biden of criminal liability or necessarily erase his debts.

NBC News analyst Chuck Rosenberg, a former Justice Department official, said that Biden’s paying what he owes could even be seen as an admission of criminal violations. Not paying taxes for many years, rather than one or two, Rosenberg said, helps establish intent, which can otherwise be a struggle for prosecutors in white-collar cases.

Paying the bill, Rosenberg said, might help Biden if he faced sentencing and ‘mitigate some of the damage, but it doesn’t undo the crime. That would be like returning money to a bank that you robbed. You still robbed the bank.’

Biden is represented by former federal prosecutor Christopher Clark in the ongoing criminal investigation in Delaware. Clark declined to comment on the record. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware declined to comment.

NBC News obtained a copy of Biden’s laptop hard drive from a representative of Rudy Giuliani and examined Biden’s business dealings from 2013 to 2018 based on the information available on the hard drive and the scope of the documents released by the Senate.

Biden made $5.8 million, more than half his total earnings from 2013 to 2018, from two deals with Chinese business interests.

Biden’s most lucrative business relationship was acting as a consultant in a project with a company that belongs to a once-powerful Chinese businessman who is now thought to be detained in his homeland.

According to business records referred to in the Senate report, Hudson West III, a venture funded by the Chinese oil and natural gas company CEFC and its chairman, Ye Jianming, paid $4,790,375.25 to Owasco P.C. over about one year.

Filings with the Washington, D.C., government show Owasco P.C. is controlled by Hunter Biden.

A review of the personal and corporate emails on Biden’s hard drive yield little information about any business he conducted on behalf of Hudson West III, and his autobiography doesn’t discuss his Chinese business dealings in any detail.

One of the few potential business opportunities discussed appears in a series of email exchanges among Biden, several U.S. partners and Chinese individuals associated with Hudson West III.

They talked about a potential gas deal on Monkey Island in Louisiana in 2017, but it appears no deal was made, and no publicly available documents indicate any sort of purchase, sale or agreement.

Britt Singletary, the attorney who conducted due diligence for the Monkey Island deal and another deal, told NBC News that ultimately the deals didn’t come together because they just didn’t make sense.

‘Financially, it wasn’t going to work,’ said Singletary, because the deals were too big and too risky for Hunter Biden, his uncle Jim Biden and their Chinese partners.

Citing attorney-client privilege, Singletary said he couldn’t discuss his advice on the deals to Hunter Biden, his uncle Jim or two Chinese employees of Hudson West III, Mervyn Yan and JiaQi Bao. He described Yan and Bao as ‘very smart’ and said two meetings occurred, one in Atlanta and one in New Orleans. Hunter Biden attended the meeting in New Orleans.

Singletary was counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1970s, where he met then-Sen. Joe Biden. Singletary says he believes he was chosen because Joe Biden and ultimately Hunter Biden knew he wouldn’t get the Chinese businesspeople or the Bidens into bad business deals.

In 2018, Chinese prosecutors accused Ye Jianming of ‘economic crimes,’ including alleged fraud and bribery, and detained him for questioning. He hasn’t been seen in public since.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington told NBC News, ‘We are not familiar with the case you mentioned, and I’m afraid we can’t offer information on this.’

According to the Republican Senate report, Hudson West III, CEFC and another firm were involved in certain transactions that were ‘among those identified as potential efforts to layer funds.’

The U.S. Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network describes the layering of funds as ‘separating the illegally obtained money from its criminal source by layering it through a series of financial transactions, which makes it difficult to trace the money back to its original source.’

Biden also appears to have done work for one of Ye’s business associates. Patrick Ho was convicted in U.S. federal court of bribing top officials in Chad and Uganda in pursuit of oil deals in those countries starting in September 2014. A jury found that Ho, while working for CEFC, bribed or attempted to bribe officials as much as $2 million. He was sentenced to three years in prison in March 2019 and then expelled from the U.S. at the end of his prison term.

Federal court filings and emails on Biden’s hard drive indicate Ho was employed by CEFC and was an associate of Ye. Ho worked on the failed Monkey Island project.

Hudson West wired Biden’s company, Owasco, $1 million from Hudson West III in March 2018 with a memo line for ‘Dr Patrick Ho Chi Ping Representation,’ according to the Senate report and emails on the Biden hard drive.

Now it has come out that the Burisma matter is much more serious. It appears that  Joe Biden and Hunter Biden got bribes from Burisma: “President Joe Biden was allegedly paid $5 million by an executive of the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, where his son Hunter Biden sat on the board, a confidential human source told the FBI during a June 2020 interview, sources familiar told Fox News Digital.

The sources briefed Fox News Digital on the contents of the FBI-generated FD-1023 form alleging a criminal bribery scheme between then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national that involved influence over U.S. policy decisions.

The FD-1023 form, dated June 30, 2020, is the FBI’s interview with a ‘highly credible’ confidential source who detailed multiple meetings and conversations he or she had with a top Burisma executive over the course of several years, starting in 2015. Fox News Digital has not seen the form, but it was described by several sources who are aware of its contents.

An FD-1023 form is used by FBI agents to record unverified reporting from confidential human sources. The form is used to document information as told to an FBI agent, but recording that information does not validate or weigh it against other information known by the FBI.

The Burisma executive sought the advice of the confidential source, a business professional, on gaining U.S. oil rights and getting involved with a U.S. oil company, the sources familiar with the document said. The Burisma executive was speaking with the confidential source to ‘get advice on the best way to go forward’ in 2015 and 2016.

According to the FD-1023 form, the confidential human source said the Burisma executive discussed Hunter’s role on the board. The confidential human source questioned why the Burisma executive needed his or her advice in acquiring access to U.S. oil if he had Hunter Biden on the board. The Burisma executive answered by referring to Hunter Biden as ‘dumb.’

The Burisma executive explained to the confidential source that Burisma had to ‘pay the Bidens’ because Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was investigating Burisma, and explained how difficult it would be to enter the U.S. market in the midst of that investigation.

The confidential source further detailed that conversation, suggesting to the Burisma executive that he ‘pay the Bidens $50,000 each,’ to which the Burisma executive replied, it is ‘not $50,000,’ it is ‘$5 million.’

‘$5 million for one Biden, $5 million for the other Biden,’ the Burisma executive told the confidential human source, according to a source familiar with the document.

A source familiar said according to the document, the $5 million payments appeared to reference a kind of ‘retainer” Burisma intended to pay the Bidens to deal with a number of issues, including the investigation led by Shokin. Another source referred to the arrangement as a ‘pay-to-play’ scheme.

Sources familiar told Fox News Digital that the confidential human source believes that the $5 million payment to Joe Biden and the $5 million payment to Hunter Biden occurred, based on his or her conversations with the Burisma executive.

The confidential source said the Burisma executive told him he ‘paid’ the Bidens in such a manner ‘through so many different bank accounts’ that investigators would not be able to ‘unravel this for at least 10 years.’ The document then makes reference to ‘the Big Guy,’ which, has been said to be a reference to Joe Biden.

The Burisma executive told the confidential source that he ‘didn’t pay the Big Guy directly.’

Fox News Digital has learned that the confidential human source has been used by the FBI as a regular, reliable source of information since 2010 and has been paid approximately $200,000 by the bureau.

Sources said the Burisma executive appears to be at a ‘very, very high level’ of the company. One source familiar suggested the confidential source could be referring to the head of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, but said the name of the Burisma executive is redacted in the document.

Biden has acknowledged that when he was vice president, he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin. At the time, Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, and at the time, Hunter had a highly-lucrative role on the board receiving thousands of dollars per month. The then-vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion of critical U.S. aid if Shokin was not fired.”

David R. wrote to me:

Lew:

Tucker Carlson has already alluded to it, but this is how they will probably prevent Joe Biden from running in 2024. 

Those classified documents in and of themselves are not enough to disqualify Biden from running. 

But one or two classified documents tied directly to Hunter Biden’s activities with overseas clients involving either Ukraine or China should do the trick to disqualify ole Joe. 

Especially when they find large sums of money involved in those transactions. 

The beauty of it is neither the son nor the father because of their limited mental capacities would have had exact memories on the locations or import of those many classified documents floating around town.  

They could have easily been planted by anyone.”

Let’s hope he is right. We must do everything we can to get the criminal Bidens out of our lives.

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Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

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Britain and its partners such as the US are imposing economic sanctions on dozens of governments they don’t like, but some individuals in Nicaragua are being targeted on the basis of little or no evidence.

The UK, along with the US and Canadian governments and the European Union, has created a sanctions regime targeting around 40 countries across the globe.

While economic sanctions against states are best-known, they also include thousands of individuals whose assets have been frozen or confiscated, their travel restricted and their ability to do business constrained.

Typically, names are added to a government’s sanctions lists with no prior warning or “due process”. The individuals affected are in practice unable to challenge their inclusion, since it would require expensive legal action in different countries with an uncertain chance of success.

There is a growing body of opinion, reflected in the work of those such as the Sanctions Kill campaign, that these “unilateral coercive measures” are illegal in international law if they affect the enjoyment of human rights, such as freedom from hunger or access to health care, in the countries targeted.

Neither the UK nor US governments seem deterred either by this or by the adverse effects of their sanctions on the human rights of poor communities.

Targeting Nicaragua

One example is Nicaragua, which was initially targeted during the first Sandinista government in the 1980s, and, more recently, following nationwide protests beginning in April 2018.

Those protests quickly escalated into open and often violent confrontations between groups of protestors and groups of government supporters with the national police.

The UK government has sanctioned 16 public officials ranging from vice-president Rosario Murillo to various ministers or former ministers, judges and police officers.

A year after he was sanctioned by Washington, last December the UK sanctioned the mayor of the city of Matagalpa, Sadrach Zelodón Rocha, one of the best known mayors of the ruling Sandinista party in the country.

Strangely, his vice mayor, Yohaira Hernández Chirino, was also added to the UK list, although she has never been sanctioned by the US, Canada, or the EU.

Zelodón Rocha and Hernández Chirino are the only Nicaraguan mayors or deputy mayors on the UK list. The sanctions, subjecting both to “an asset freeze and travel ban”, also extend to members of their immediate families.

Freedom of information

As one of us has known Zeledón Rocha and the rest of his immediate family for more than 30 years, we submitted a formal Freedom of Information request to the UK government asking for clarification of the sanctions decisions that affect both him and Hernández Chirino.

It took several months to get a reply, and it only came on the day on which the UK government’s Information Commissioner had threatened to start legal proceedings against the Foreign Office because of its failure to respond.

The most important question, of course, was on what basis the decisions had been made. The Foreign Office declined to provide specific evidence. 

It stated only:

“Zeledón and Hernandez were designated for their involvement in violations of the right to life and right not to be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, by promoting and inciting serious human rights violations against protesters.”

It added:

“Before the sanctions were imposed against Zeledón and Hernandez, evidence was collected from a variety of open sources, including civil society reports and media reports.”

Elsewhere in the response, the Foreign Office clarified that its actions relate solely to events in 2018, almost five years before the UK imposed its sanctions.

Nicaragua’s three months of protests in 2018 affected Matagalpa less than some other cities. But they involved, in addition to relatively peaceful marches, an attempted assault on its town hall and police headquarters, the looting and burning of the municipal depot, and attacks on individual homes by various opposition groups.

Those groups also set up a roadblock controlling all traffic on the only road directly connecting the city to the Pacific half of the country, restricting the flow of food and other goods to and from the city.

Human rights reports

We researched the human rights reports that may have been used by the Foreign Office, seeking to uncover hard evidence for the two classes of human rights violations which empowered the UK government to impose sanctions.

Perhaps the most detailed, and certainly one of the most internationally cited reports, is the one by the Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes. The GIEI was set up by the Organization of American States in May 2018, with the agreement of the Nicaraguan government, and reported the following December.

Of the 500 pages in its report, around 12 are dedicated to the May 2018 events in Matagalpa, which are at the core of the accusations against Zeledón Rocha.

The GIEI report lists three deaths in Matagalpa from the relevant time period, two of whom were Sandinistas and members of the governing party and none of whom were likely targets of the mayor or deputy mayor.

The report does not attempt to link Zeledón Rocha directly to any of the three deaths. A subsequent petition by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights makes no mention of him either.

It therefore appears that the Foreign Office’s evidence for Zeledón Rocha’s “violations of the right to life” is flimsy at best. The sanctions against him cannot therefore be due to the “right to life” class of human rights violations.

It is important to note that it is typical of many human rights reports of this period that deaths among Sandinistas, government officials or police, are either unrecorded or wrongly added to the tally of deaths caused by the government. For example, six other Sandinistas or government officials were killed in Matagalpa in 2018.

Evidence?

What then of the evidence for Zeledón Rocha’s violations of the “right not to be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, by promoting and inciting serious human rights violations against protesters”, the second class of human rights violations that can serve as reasons for sanctions under UK law?

The sole piece of visual evidence linking him to any violations is a single photograph in the GIEI report that allegedly shows him with “shock groups” prior to May 11. Interestingly, none of those visible in the photo are armed, and none are wearing any sort of military gear or face coverings.

In an adjacent photo purportedly showing the same “shock groups”, a woman is wearing shorts and sandals – hardly the sort of gear appropriate for paramilitary action. The report then goes on to cite an interview in which Zeledón Rocha was accused of “that day leading the [paramilitaries]”.

That apparently sufficed as evidence, in spite of the multiple questions that might be raised. For example, why appoint Zeledón Rocha, when he was never in the military, much less in any command position?

During the 1980s, as a licenced civil engineer, he held positions in the ministries of housing and commerce, in the International Red Cross and in the Electoral Commission for the 1990 elections.

In 2001-2005 and since 2008, Zeledón Rocha has served as mayor of Matagalpa, winning national acclaim – including among opposition media outlets – for the extensive development of the city’s housing, health, transportation, educational and recreational infrastructure.

His administrative, technical, and managerial skillset seems conspicuously inappropriate for leading paramilitaries, especially given the plethora of other Sandinistas who have extensive military experience gained during the Contra war of the 1980s.

The wounded

The GIEI report states that 40 people were wounded during the May 15 confrontations between protesters and counter-protesters over a blockade which cut the entire city off from the Pacific side of the country, starving Matagalpinos of supplies and food.

Although there are several photographs of wounded protesters, Zeledón Rocha’s name is unmentioned. Instead, blame for the wounded is laid at the feet of the national police, who allegedly fired with military grade weaponry.

Turning to Hernández Chirino, she does not appear at all in the GIEI report, nor in any others we have been able to find. Her appearance in the sanctions list is therefore puzzling and appears to be a case of guilt by association.

She most certainly does not appear to be directly implicated in any way to any human rights violations and was purportedly surprised, if not bewildered, by her inclusion in the sanctions list.

The case for “promoting and supporting grievous violations of human rights” against Hernández Chirino, at least according to the GIEI report, is literally non-existent, and the case against Zeledón Rocha verges on non-existent.

The stated rationale behind the sanctions therefore cannot possibly be the real rationale behind them.

Symbolic importance

It’s hard to believe that those in the US or UK governments charged with deciding who to sanction are aware of the subtleties of Nicaraguan politics at the municipal level. The most straightforward and most probable explanation for the inclusion of Zeledón Rocha and Hernández Chirino in the sanctions list is their symbolic political importance.

Zeledón Rocha in particular is widely known for his achievements, including in opposition media outlets, in developing the region’s infrastructure, for the competency of his administration, and for his willingness to work with all sectors of Nicaraguan society, regardless of their political persuasion.

He has therefore earned ever increasing responsibilities, making him an obvious target for those aiming to discredit the government and its policies.

We should also ask why sanctions are used at all. It is widely acknowledged, even by conservative think tanks such as the Cato Institute, that they’re utterly ineffective.

Neither Zeledón Rocha nor Hernández Chirino have any assets or interests in assets in any of the countries that have sanctioned them. Neither of them take holidays or travel professionally to any of those countries.

Both the US and the UK governments could easily have discovered that the net effects would be close to zero, and both had the means and the reach to research all that we have covered in this article before imposing their sanctions.

They did not consider it necessary or important to do so, raising the question of what exactly they aimed to achieve, or what behaviour they aimed to change in imposing the sanctions.

Political theatre

Given the lack of compelling evidence coupled with the predictable ineffectiveness of the sanctions, the inescapable conclusion is that the sanctions are simply a piece of political theatre, for domestic consumption in the imposing countries.

Both the US and the UK governments would apparently like to be seen as promoting “free and open societies around the world”, in the parlance of the UK foreign secretary. Unilateral sanctions are an approved means towards that end.

Underlying all of this, however, is the uncomfortable truth that this symbolic political posturing has real, material effects, perhaps not directly on those sanctioned, but on the overall climate of international aid, loans, and cooperation with a poor country still trying to recover from the violence of 2018 and the economic damage of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The actions against individuals may be ineffective, but the wider economic sanctions are not. Nicaragua has not been as badly hit in this respect as neighbouring Cuba or Venezuela, but has seen the blocking of loans from the World Bank, several trade sanctions and only minimal medical aid from western countries during the Covid crisis.

According to Nicaragua’s finance and housing minister, development loans have fallen from an average of over $800 million before 2018 to under $300 million since then, mainly because of US influence over or blocking of finance from international institutions.

Just as in the cases of Zelodón Rocha and Hernández Chirino, there is neither due process nor any accessible appeal mechanism where Nicaragua can contest these wider actions of foreign governments.

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Erik Mar lived in Matagalpa, Nicaragua for several years and now lives in the United States.

John Perry writes from and lives in Masaya, Nicaragua, where he has lived for 20 years.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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Is there a link between COVID-19 vaccines and Multiple Sclerosis?

2021 April – 35 year old UK nurse Rachel McKinney developed Multiple Sclerosis a few weeks after getting her first 2 Pfizer mRNA jabs in Dec. 2020 and Jan. 2021, and was dead by April 2021 (click here).

Rachel was among the first recipients of Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in England, receiving 1st dose in late Dec 2020 and 2nd dose in Jan. 2021.

Weeks after her 2nd dose in February 2021, Rachel started having slurred speech and feeling confused. She was hospitalized and soon became paralyzed and lost her ability to speak.

She was diagnosed with Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis and after multiple seizures she was placed in a medically induced coma.

Rachel died on April 3, 2021, after 46 days in the hospital. Doctors said Rachel developed a rare form of Multiple Sclerosis after her COVID-19 vaccines.

VAERS 970658 – 62 year old Florida man was diagnosed with “Exacerbation of multiple sclerosis” 4 days after 1st Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.

This is one of the first documented cases of “Multiple Sclerosis exacerbation” that were being published in the VAERS database as early as January 2021.

Published Research 

March 2023 – Alluqmani studied 32 people who developed MS after COVID-19 vaccines. He found:

• mean age 30 years old (range 21 to 45)
• 21 had vertigo and imbalance, 7 had visual symptoms, 3 had motor symptoms
• 20/32 had Pfizer, 3/32 had Moderna, 9/32 had AstraZeneca
• 25 had MS symptoms after 1st dose, 7 after 2nd dose

• 14 had brainstem demyelinating lesions, 12 had cerebral lesions, 6 had cervical spinal cord lesions, 2 had dorsal spinal cord lesions

• risk factors for developing MS: low Vitamin D, antibodies for Epstein-Barr Nuclear Antigen, family history of MS

March 2023 – Jeon et al. reported a 19 year old soldier who died suddenly

• 19 year old Korean soldier was found dead in barracks on March 22, 2022
• had 2nd mRNA vaccine 6 months before death
• 3 months before death he started getting seizures
• 17 days before death he had COVID-19, self-limited course at home
• several days before death he complained of recurrent seizures at night

Jan.2022 – Toljan et al. reported 5 new diagnoses of MS post mRNA vaccine

• 29 yo woman had acute left leg weakness 1 day after Pfizer
• 37 yo man had left hand paresthesia 3 days after 1st Pfizer
• 41 yo man had bilateral foot numbness 1 month after 2nd Moderna
• 46 yo woman had bilateral arm pain and left foot drop 3 days after 2nd Moderna
• 43 yo woman had right arm weakness 5 weeks after 2nd dose of Pfizer
• all 5 cases had brain or brain stem lesions on MRI.

Pfizer and Moderna’s involvement in Multiple Sclerosis 

Pfizer/BioNTech is making an mRNA vaccine for Multiple Sclerosis (click here)

Interestingly, just as Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines were being rolled out and first cases of Multiple Sclerosis after COVID-19 vaccination were being reported, the founders of Pfizer’s mRNA partner BioNTech published a paper in January 2021 on a newly invented mRNA vaccine for Multiple Sclerosis they “successfully” tested on mice.

On Jan.13, 2022, world famous journal “Science” published a paper claiming that Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) caused most cases of Multiple Sclerosis (click here).

“We tested the hypothesis that MS is caused by Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) in a cohort comprising more than 10 million young adults on active duty in the US military, 955 of whom were diagnosed with MS during their period of service.”

“Risk of MS increased 32-fold after infection with EBV but was not increased after infection with other viruses…suggest EBV as the leading cause of MS.”

Jan. 14, 2022 – Forbes Magazine announced Moderna started human trials for EBV mRNA vaccine (click here) 

Just one day after Science published a paper claiming EBV causes Multiple Sclerosis, Forbes announced that Moderna just started human trials of “an mRNA vaccine for a virus (EBV) that likely causes Multiple Sclerosis.

My Take…

WHO’s VigiAccess Database (click here) has 2180 cases of Multiple Sclerosis reported linked to COVID-19 vaccines. Here is a comparison to other neurological injuries:

• 21,786 Seizures
• 11,723 Bell’s Palsy
• 7,693 Guillain-Barre syndrome
• 5,650 brain fog
• 5,413 paralysis
• 2,180 multiple sclerosis
• 1,300 transverse myelitis

The extent of coordination between the biggest journals like Science, and big pharma, is very visible in the case of Multiple Sclerosis.

Just as the first COVID-19 vaccines were being rolled out and first cases of post-vaccine Multiple Sclerosis were being reported in VAERS, Pfizer/BioNTech announced to the world they had successfully tested their new mRNA vaccine for Multiple Sclerosis on mice.

A year later, one of world’s biggest journals “Science” published a paper claiming most cases of Multiple Sclerosis are caused by Epstein-Barr Virus. The next day, Forbes announced that Moderna had just begun human trials of its EBV mRNA vaccine that can treat Multiple Sclerosis.

There is no nice way to say it:

Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna knew they would cause COVID-19 mRNA vaccine injuries and both were already positioned and fully prepared to profit from the very injuries they caused. 

This is the new big pharma business model in the 2020s. 

The implication is that Pfizer & Moderna knew exactly the types of injuries their COVID-19 mRNA vaccines would cause, before they released them on the public in December 2020.

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

Featured image is from the author

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On the side of an apartment high-rise block dominantly visible between buildings surrounding Brussel’s Gare du Midi railway station, the finishing touches are being made to an extraordinary piece of art. One can just perceive the figure in the cage extended out on the hydraulic arm of the vehicle which provides the platform from which the artist can apply his paints to this vast canvas.

The work depicts, as I grasp it, a shining techno-industrial mobile phone tower pinnacling out of the summit of a vast concrete temple flanked by two grand curving stairways, at the bottom of which is a platform covered with a great crowd of people. Above the tower wispy chemtrails have formed an X in the sky, while the bottom quarter of the artwork is dominated by a voluminous sea of red dotted with flecks of black.

The symbolism is powerful. The work might be titled “So here we are”. For yes, this is where we are – if by ‘we’ one understands the current materialistically imprisoned post industrial world – driven on by the relentless force of globalisation.

Brussels, still a remarkably human city by today’s standards, has the misfortune of housing the European Union HQ, which is not a very human conglomerate. And what goes on in it is equally devoid of humanity. For it is about being ‘big, central and dominating’.

Big, central and dominating is the future of the planet if you subscribe to the techno-industrial mind’s two dimensional determinism.

In the soothing words of Klaus Schwab and Yuval Noah Harari, it is to be an Information Technology/Artificial Intelligence future, in which Schwab tells us “we will have nothing and will be happy”.

The mobile phone tower and mast which tops the temple of techno-industrial prowess, is an ugly, spindly piece of steel which is an expression of dominance in its own right. The vast global infrastructure formed by these Saturnian steel structures carry with them a penetrating EMF amplified soup of toxicity.

It is this ‘network’ which acts as the gateway to the virtual reality world of those who depend on it for their ‘signals’. Signals that have an abstracted kind of dominance and pronounced tendency to thin the blood and blur the brain.

The majority of messages that come through this gateway concern how to get on in ‘the system’.

How to get from A to B faster; news faster; financial reports faster; connections with family and friends faster; everything faster.

Being permanently plugged-in to this hyper electromagnetic crossroads of life is said to be the only way to ‘stay in touch’, to be a participant in the mental matrix; to be part of ‘the programme’.

But already twenty years ago I decided to cut my ties with this programme. Dispensing with the mobile phone turned out to be an act of liberation, soon to be followed by the ousting of the TV.

Big Brother was consigned to the back seat and I saw that a life that belonged to myself still existed, all be it with the proviso that one prioritised one’s values with a solid dose of determination to be true to that which is ‘real’ in life.

Perhaps this is why I can see so clearly how those who continue to participate in the ‘programme’ are running blindly towards an uncompromisingly sheer cliff-face, and how their voracious demands on the natural environment are increasingly undermining her natural resilience.

I can see something particularly shocking – that this frenetic rush to the cliff face and the great consumption of finite resources it involves – has no other purpose than playing-out a quasi demonic fascination with ever more refined toys of distraction. Distraction from the real pulse of life.

Yet this techno-industrial suicide machine is staffed by humans who appear not to recognise that their joint mission is programmed to end in collapse.

On the contrary, they seem to think that by increasing the efficiency and speed of the means of travel, it will somehow consummate its own need to arrive at where it is headed for. Where or what that is – simply never gets asked.

However, the psychotic gods of insentient ‘progress’ who designed the programme have built into it a series of ‘events’ which reach a certain conclusion in something they call the Transhuman. A robotic state of computer connected and controlled brain power for those able to pay for it.

To pay for the right to be dehumanised and rendered devoid of the need – and indeed ability – to think. Freed from emotion and freed from a soul based link to one’s Creator.

Stations on the way to this dark point of human annulment are laid-out under the WEF creed known as ‘The Great Reset’. A ‘Reset’ from human to non human.

Here are some of stations along the Great Reset route to the Transhuman:

The cessation of food grown in soil and the manufacturing of synthetic food produced in laboratories (at least six of which are already in production).

The end of farming the land as we know it and the removal of redundant farmers and country dwellers into 5 and 6G controlled total surveillance ‘smart cities’.

Countryside and farm landscapes redesigned to accommodate ‘rewilding’ projects and gated access to designated ‘leisure sites’ for those who can afford access. 

The end of bank notes and coinage, replaced by a centrally controlled digital currency whose availability will depend upon one’s ‘social credit’ a la China.

The confiscation of one’s assets and private property with the option to ‘rent’ aspects of them back from the corporate state that is to become the new owner.

‘Self-autonomous’ 5G guided transportation systems operating between major cities.

100% surveillance via satellite and ‘the internet of everything’ and the profligate use of algorithms to pick-up any signs of resistance in communications.

The repression of true spirituality in favour of a ‘one world religion’.

Deliberate blurring of sexual delineation ‘man/woman’ and the decline of normal sexual reproduction.

Sperm-counts further reduced due to de-vitaminised synthetic GMO foods, vaccinations and polluted air and water –  population control.

Enforced ‘15 minute cities’ as centres of local authority control.

Designer gene-altered babies via laboratory cloning of DNA sequences and cell tissues.

The removal of certain words from the common language, particularly poetic and spiritual ones.

Real art reduced to pseudo art as an expression of the will of the state, including dark-side ritual.

‘Medical health’ seen as the sole domain of Big Pharma with natural medicine outlawed.

Further media/government control over the passing of public information.

There is more, much more.

But this is enough to show the basic composition of the stations on the way to ‘Transhumanism’. The arrival point of which is said to be circa 2035.

Behind this in-your-face destruction of hard won human liberties is a vast global propaganda/indoctrination exercise already in existence for more than two decades and built around the now infamous ‘Zero carbon by 2045’ or ‘Net Zero’ in news-speak (Orwell).

When challenged by those still able to question the need for these deadly impositions, the answer is always the same “To save the world from Global Warming.”

This piece of acute brainwashing, initially devised at the Club of Rome in 1972, is key to the whole ‘programme’.

As long as enough people buy into it for long enough, the slavery exercise will be irreversible.

Based on the current rate of awakening, the discovery that anthropogenic Global Warming is a mega lie will likely be neutralised by the impositions already in place to prevent an uprising.

The techno-industrial god will then have served its purpose. Like the rocket booster that gets the capsule into orbit, it will have taken the majority of mankind over the brink into abject slavery to its hypnotic convenience culture, before imploding in on itself and taking much of humanity and nature’s life sustaining diversity with it.

BUT, all this can be avoided. It doesn’t have to happen.  It won’t happen. Our lives do not depend upon adopting the smart technology of tomorrow, today. We won’t any longer be seduced by ‘convenience’ once we recognise it is leading to our self destruction, will we?

We will retain sufficient will-power to get shot of this addiction to the IT/AI life inhibiting distractions that make up the mind controlled road to Armageddon.

The only way to recognise just how diabolical is the trap that has been set for us – and that we have set for ourselves – is to get a grip on our sense of deeper purpose in this life. To make an unbreakable commitment to listen and respond to the call of our souls. The true self. And then pull this true self out of any association with the metaverse mincing machine.

Let no one in possession of a soul ever allow himself/herself to become processed into a sub human product of the techno-industrial behemoth. Stick with what’s solid, what’s real – and ditch the counterfeit virtual world that snares the unweary and turns once healthy minds into casualties of a blind rush to a dystopian digital nowhere land.

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, a writer and international activist. His recent book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind’ is a powerful call to resist the Transhuman agenda. Visit Julian’s website at www.julianrose.info

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

The optics don’t favor Russia since it looks like it was hoodwinked yet again without doing anything to deter future violations of other deals by Turkiye or other supposedly trusted partners. If the political will is present, which is impossible to know due to the traditional opacity of Russia’s decision-making processes, then the most that it could realistically do is seriously consider replacing Turkiye’s prior mediating role with another country or collection thereof.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov condemned Turkiye’s violation of the deal that it helped broker between Moscow and Kiev last year over the release of Azovstal fighters as part of a larger prisoner exchange between the two sides. They were supposed to remain in that West Asian state until the end of the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine but were just sent home on Zelensky’s plane following his latest trip there, after which they then pledged to return to the frontlines.

Peskov noted that Turkiye was under immense pressure from NATO ahead of its upcoming summit next week, but he still said that “a breach of an agreement flatters no one.” Nevertheless, nobody should be surprised by this development since it should have been assumed that those fighters would inevitably be released before the conflict’s end the moment that they were sent to that country. This cynical assessment is premised on three points.

First, NATO’s pressure upon Turkiye was predictable, especially in the run-up to its upcoming summit. Second, President Erdogan calculated that it would be better to release those fighters during Zelensky’s latest trip ahead of that event than to keep them in his country since this could counteract the false claims pushed by the Mainstream Media alleging that he’s “pro-Russian”. And finally, he expected that Russia’s response would be contained to rhetoric and that no meaningful consequences would follow.

About the last-mentioned point, these two countries’ strategic partnership has remained rock-solid in the sixteen months since the start of Russia’s special operation despite immense pressure from NATO upon Turkiye to completely cut off ties with Moscow. It’s a testament to how important President Putin considers these relations to be that he didn’t order his side to curtail bilateral ties one bit in spite of Ankara arming Kiev with lethal drones for use against his own country’s servicemen.

It would thus be inconsistent with precedent for him to overreact to Turkiye’s violation of the Azovstal deal by using it as the pretext for unilaterally weakening their strategic partnership that he’s so patiently kept intact despite comparatively much worse provocations as explained above. That said, there’s also no denying that the optics don’t favor Russia since it looks like it was hoodwinked yet again without doing anything to deter future violations of other deals by Turkiye or other supposedly trusted partners.

If the political will is present, which is impossible to know due to the traditional opacity of Russia’s decision-making processes, then the most that it could realistically do is seriously consider replacing Turkiye’s prior mediating role with another country or collection thereof. In practice, this could take the form of India, the UAE, and/or the African Union taking on associated responsibilities per their previously expressed interest in doing so if they were requested by both sides to play this role.

Therein lies the challenge, however, since Zelensky and/or his Western patrons might insist on Turkiye continuing to play this role for whatever reason. In that case, even the strongest political will by Russia to have another country or group thereof mediating between it and Kiev could be doomed to fail, though the counterpoint is that no mediation can take place at all if those two don’t agree on who should facilitate their talks. It’s with this in mind that everything could possibly get a lot more interesting.

As was argued in this analysis here, several developments last week strongly suggest that Russian-Ukraine talks will recommence in some form by the end of the year, though it was thought that Turkiye would once again host them due to Zelensky’s recent visit and President Putin’s upcoming one. That can no longer be taken for granted after it violated the Azovstal deal in the event that Russia has the political will to deter future violations of other deals by that country or other supposedly trusted partners.

In that case, if it adamantly insists behind the scenes on someone else playing this role instead, then Kiev and its Western patrons could be forced to begrudgingly agree to explore other options if they’re serious about resuming these talks. Of course, it could very well be that President Putin prefers for his Turkish counterpart to continue mediating between his country and Ukraine, but that can’t be known for sure until such a signal is unambiguously sent.

Until then, there are grounds to believe that another country or collection thereof could replace Turkiye’s role, or at the very least be discretely approached by Russia about this. Objectively speaking, India, the UAE, and/or the African Union might be more reliable in this respect since they’re not NATO members like Turkiye is and therefore can’t be pressured in the same way. India is also truly neutral towards the Ukrainian Conflict since it’s consistently abstained from anti–Russian UNGA Resolutions.

Turkiye, the UAE, and a little over half of the African Union’s members all voted in support of at least some of them, with the first-mentioned backing all four since the latest phase of the conflict began. Coupled with its sale of lethal drones to Kiev and violation of the Azovstal deal, the case can be made that it’s long overdue for Russia to finally consider another country or collection thereof as mediators instead of letting Turkiye retain this role and think that its unfriendly actions won’t have consequences.

*

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

In the aftermath of the chaotic US and UK withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir warned in the Washington Post of the dangers of “ignoring one important consequence of the Taliban takeover: the coming boom in Afghanistan’s narcotics trade.” 

Mir then boldly predicted that, “in the next few years, a flood of drugs from Afghanistan may become a bigger threat than terrorism.”

This projection of an international drug trade boom seemed plausible, considering the longstanding accusations that the Taliban funded their two-decade insurgency against the occupying forces by controlling opium production. In fact, it was believed that 95 percent of heroin used in Britain originated from Afghan opium.

It comes as a surprise then, that a June 2023 report published by Alcis, a British-based geographic information services firm, revealed that the Taliban government had all but eliminated opium cultivation in the country, wiping out the base ingredient needed to produce heroin. This outcome mirrored a similar move by the Taliban in 2000 when they were in power for the first time.

Ironically, instead of praising Kabul’s new leaders for quashing the source of illicit drugs, the international community responded to this development with criticism. Even the US Institute for Peace (USIP), which is funded by the US government, argued that “The Taliban’s successful opium ban is bad for Afghans and the world.”

Such western displeasure towards the Taliban’s efforts to dismantle the global heroin trade may seem perplexing at first glance.

However, a closer examination of events in Afghanistan reveals a different perspective. Under the guise of the “War on Terror,” the 2001 US and UK invasion was driven in part by the desire to restore the heroin trade, which the Taliban had abruptly terminated just a year earlier. 

The western powers sought to reestablish the lucrative flow of billions of dollars that the heroin trade provided to their financial systems. In fact, “For 20 years, America essentially ran a narco-state in Afghanistan.”

‘Dollar for Dollar’

To understand the origins of the Afghan heroin trade, a review of US involvement in the central Asian nation is necessary, beginning in 1979 when the CIA embarked on a covert program to undermine the pro-Soviet Afghan government in Kabul. 

The US covertly supported an umbrella of Muslim guerrilla fighters known as mujahideen, with the hope that provoking an insurgency would entice the Soviet Army to intervene. This calculated move would force the Soviets into occupying Afghanistan and engaging in a protracted and costly counter-insurgency campaign, thereby weakening the Soviet Union over time.

To accomplish this, the CIA turned to its close allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, for help. Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan facilitated a meeting between CIA Director William Casey and Saudi King Fahd, in which the Saudis committed to matching “America dollar for dollar supporting the mujahedeen.”

The US and Saudi Arabia, with help from Pakistani’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), set up training camps for the mujahideen in Pakistan, and supplied them with advisors, weapons, and cash to fight the Soviets. 

Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the founder of the Hizb-i-Islami militia, was among the most prominent mujahideen leaders, receiving some $600 million in aid from the CIA and its allies.

Journalist Steve Coll writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars that Hekymatyar recruited from the most radical, anti-western, transnational Islamist networks to fight with him, including Osama bin Laden and other Arab volunteers. CIA officers “embraced Hekmatyar as their most dependable and effective ally,” and “the most efficient at killing Soviets.”

Caravans of Opium

Aid to Hekymatyar and other mujahideen leaders was not limited to cash and weapons. According to renowned historian Alfred McCoy:

“1979 and 1980, just as the CIA effort was beginning to ramp up, a network of heroin laboratories opened along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. That region soon became the world’s largest heroin producer.”

The process involved smuggling raw opium gum to Pakistan, where it was processed into heroin in laboratories run by the ISI. The finished product was then discreetly transported via Pakistani airports, ports, or overland routes. 

Image: U.S. troops guarding an opium poppy field in Afghanistan.

By 1984, Afghan heroin supplied a staggering 60 percent of the US market and 80 percent of the European market, while devastatingly creating 1.3 million heroin addicts in Pakistan, a country previously untouched by the highly-addictive drug.

McCoy states further that, “caravans carrying CIA arms into that region for the resistance often returned to Pakistan loaded down with opium.” Reports from 2001 cited by the New York Times confirmed that this occurred “with the assent of Pakistani or American intelligence officers who supported the resistance.”

In May 1990, the Washington Post reported that the US government had for several years received, but declined to investigate, reports of heroin trafficking by its allies, including “firsthand accounts of heroin smuggling by commanders under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.”

Rise of the Taliban

When the Soviets did finally withdraw in 1989, the country fell into civil war as the major CIA-backed factions began fighting among themselves for control of the country. Mujahideen leaders became warlords and committed terrible atrocities against the local population while fighting amongst themselves. 

It was during this anarchy that religious students from the madrassas (seminary schools), the Taliban, emerged with the help of Pakistani intelligence to take control of the country in 1996, subsequently inheriting the opium trade, which continued unhindered for several years. 

Portrait photograph of Mullah Omar in 1993, just before he founded the Taliban (Licensed under Fair Use)

In July 2000, however, Taliban leader Mullah Omar ordered a ban on all opium cultivation. Remarkably, the Taliban successfully slashed the opium harvest by 94 percent, reducing yearly production to only 185 metric tons.

Five months later, in December 2000, the US and Russia used the UN Security Council to impose harsh new sanctions on Afghanistan, citing the Taliban’s refusal to hand over Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, in which 17 US sailors were killed. Bin Laden had taken refuge in the Islamic Emirate in 1996 after he was expelled from Sudan.

The New York Times reported that US officials sought to impose the new sanctions, despite warnings from the UN that “a million Afghans could face starvation in coming months because of a drought and continued civil war.”

Following the attacks on 11 September, 2001, Bush administration officials demanded the Taliban hand over Bin Laden once again. Mullah Omar insisted the US first provide evidence of Bin Laden’s guilt, but President Bush refused this request and ordered the US air force to begin bombing Afghanistan on 7 October.

In the wake of the bombing, Mullah Omar dropped the demand for evidence, and offered to hand over Bin Laden to US ally Pakistan for trial. Bush administration officials once again refused.

Journalist and author Scott Horton highlights in his book Fool’s Errand a peculiar aspect of the US campaign: the lack of a clear focus on capturing or eliminating Bin Laden. In fact, President Bush had already stated on 25 September that success or failure should not be defined solely by capturing Bin Laden. 

Horton notes further that US planners made no initial effort to hunt down Bin Laden and the foreign Arab fighters supporting him. Instead, head of US Central Command, General Tommy Franks prioritized partnering with Afghan warlord Rashid Dostum to take control of the north of the country, and establish a “land link” to Uzbekistan.

Turning to the Warlords

To also capture the capital, Kabul, and other key cities in the south, Alfred McCoy notes the CIA:

“Turned to a group of rising Pashtun warlords along the Pakistan border who had been active as drug smugglers in the south-eastern part of the country. As a result, when the Taliban collapsed, the groundwork had already been laid for the resumption of opium cultivation and the drug trade on a major scale.”

Though US forces were too late to prevent Bin Laden’s escape to Pakistan, the US bombing campaign came just in time for the beginning of poppy planting season. Poppies are planted in the autumn so that the juice from the plant, from which opium is extracted, can be harvested in spring. 

McCoy clarified further that, “the Agency (CIA) and its local allies created ideal conditions for reversing the Taliban’s opium ban and reviving the drug traffic. Only weeks after the collapse of the Taliban, officials were reporting an outburst of poppy planting in the heroin-heartlands of Helmand and Nangarhar.”

In December, one of these rising Pashtun warlords, Hamid Karzai, was appointed Chairman of the Afghan Interim Administration and later president.

By the spring of 2002, large amounts of Afghan heroin were once again being transported to Britain via daily flights from Pakistani airports. The Guardian observed the case of a 13-year-old girl who was stopped after she stepped off a Pakistan International Airlines flight from Islamabad to London carrying 13kgs of heroin with a street value of £910,000.

Industrial Scale

Thanks to the “land link” established by General Franks, heroin also immediately began flowing north from Mazar-e-Sharif, under CIA ally Rashid Dostum’s control, to Uzbekistan and then to to Russia and Europe.

The flow of heroin was witnessed by Craig Murray, the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who explained that Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, facilitated the smuggling of heroin from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, where it was then shipped up the railway line, in bales of cotton, to Moscow and then Riga. As Murray noted:

“Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker…The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government – the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.”

‘A Hands Off Approach’

In addition to Dostum, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, quickly secured a prominent role in the Afghan heroin trade.

Image: Ahmad Wali Karzai (U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Mark O’Donald/Released)

Credible reports emerged that Wali Karzai was deeply involved in the heroin trade, however, according to the New York Times, the incidents were never investigated, “even though allegations that he has benefited from narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan.”

Senior officials at the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) complained that the Bush “White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter.”

The Times later reported that according to a top former Afghan Interior Ministry official, a major source of Wali Karzai’s influence was his control over key bridges crossing the Helmand River on the route between the opium-growing regions of Helmand Province and Kandahar. This allowed Karzai to charge huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the bridges.

Like Dostum and Hekmaytar, Wali Karzai built his heroin empire while on the CIA payroll. The agency began paying Karzai in 2001 to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operated at the agency’s direction in and around Kandahar and to rent a large compound for use as the base of the Kandahar Strike Force. The CIA also appreciated Karzai’s help in communicating and sometimes meeting with Afghans loyal to the Taliban.

Karzai also served as the head of Kandahar’s elected provincial council. According to a senior US military officer in Kabul quoted by the Times, “Hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional leadership knowing about it.”

The Blame Game 

In late 2004, as reports of Karzai’s involvement in the heroin trade were emerging, Alfred McCoy writes that “the White House was suddenly confronted with troubling CIA intelligence suggesting that the escalating drug trade was fueling a revival of the Taliban.” 

A proposal from Secretary of State Colin Powell to fight the heroin trade was resisted by US ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, and then-Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani. As a compromise, the Bush administration used private contractors for poppy eradication, an effort that New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall later described as “something of a joke.”

Additionally, reports of a 2005 cable sent by the US embassy in Kabul to Powell’s successor, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, viewed Britain as being “substantially responsible” for the failure to eradicate poppy cultivation. British personnel chose where the eradication teams worked, but those areas were often not the main growing areas, and “the British had been unwilling to revise targets.”

The cable also faulted President Karzai, who “has been unwilling to assert strong leadership.” The State Department nevertheless defended him, saying, “President Karzai is a strong partner, and we have confidence in him,” despite reports of his brother’s key role in the heroin trade.

But the problem went beyond Wali Karzai. A UN report for the World Bank published in February 2006 concluded the Afghan heroin trade was operating with the assistance of many top Afghan government officials and under the protection of the Afghan Ministry of Interior.

As evidence of CIA and Afghan government involvement in the heroin trade grew, the focus of the western media shifted towards blaming the Taliban for using drug profits to fund their insurgency against foreign forces.

However, historian Peter Dale Scott challenged this narrative, citing UN estimates that the Taliban’s share of the Afghan opium economy was a fraction compared to that of supporters of the Karzai government. Scott emphasized that the largest share of the drug trade was controlled by those aligned with the Afghan government.

The Surge

In early 2010, the Obama administration announced a “surge” of 33,000 US troops to help pacify the country, with a particular focus on key districts known for poppy cultivation. One such district was Marja in Helmand province, which McCoy referred to as “the world’s heroin capital.” 

Despite the surge’s mission, US commanders seemed unaware of Marja’s significance as a hub for heroin production, fueled by the surrounding opium fields that accounted for 40 percent of the world’s illicit opium supply.

In September 2010, eight months after the start of the surge, “unsubstantiated” reports emerged that British soldiers were involved in trafficking heroin out of Afghanistan using military aircraft at airports in Camp Bastion and Kandahar.

Camp Bastion, jointly operated by the UK and the US, was located near Lashkar Gah, another major center of poppy cultivation. In 2012, it was alleged that poppy cultivation was taking place just outside the base’s perimeter, with British soldiers providing protection to farmers against Afghan security forces.

By late 2014, British and US forces withdrew from Camp Bastion, handing it over to Afghan forces, who renamed it Camp Shorabak. However, according to a UN report, “the opium-growing area around Britain’s main base in Afghanistan nearly quadrupled between 2011 and 2013.” 

Despite the withdrawal, opium exports from Camp Shorabak apparently continued, and a small number of British military personnel returned in 2015 in what was described by the Ministry of Defense as an advisory role.

In 2016, Obaidullah Barakzai, a member of the National Assembly of Afghanistan, claimed, “It’s impossible for a few local drug smugglers to transfer opium in thousands of kilos. This is the work of the Americans and British. They transport it by air from Camp Shorabak.”

After US forces chaotically withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban once again succeeded in eliminating poppy cultivation, showing it was far from a “dedicated drug cartel” after all.

Follow the Money

In November 2021, an opium merchant claimed that “All the profits go to the foreign countries. Afghans are just supplying the labor.”

Peter Dale Scott noted that according to the UN, some $352 billion in drug profits had been absorbed into the western financial system, including through the US’ largest banks in 2009. As a result, Scott said the “United States involvement in the international drug traffic links the CIA, major financial interests, and criminal interests in this country and abroad.”

In 2012, the Daily Mail reported that HSBC, Britain’s biggest bank, faced up to £640million in penalties for allowing “rogue states and drugs cartels to launder billions of pounds through its branches,” and for becoming “a conduit for criminal enterprises.”

The billions in profits flowing from the Afghan heroin trade into western banks have now been eliminated by the Taliban not once, but twice in the past two decades. 

Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s pronouncement in July 2000 that poppy cultivation was “un-Islamic” was, therefore, a more likely cause of the US sanctions imposed in December of the same year, and of the US invasion of Afghanistan a year later, than was any US desire to apprehend Bin Laden and dismantle Al-Qaeda.  

In March 2002, just six months after the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, a journalist asked President Bush, “Where’s Osama bin Laden?” Bush replied, ‘I don’t know. I don’t really think about him very much. I’m not that concerned.”

The Afghan drug trade serves as a stark reminder of the intricate connections between geopolitics, illicit economies, and global finance, and the need for greater transparency and accountability in addressing these complex issues.

The historical evidence also challenges the simplistic narrative that the Taliban largely controlled the Afghan drug trade, highlighting the dominant role played by the US-backed Afghan government and its allies in the CIA.

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America’s “War on Terrorism”

Author: Michel Chossudovsky

ISBN Number: 0-9737147-1-9

Year: 2005

Pages: 365 with complete index

Product Type: PDF File

Price: $9.50

In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

Click here to purchase.

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***

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Thus begins Việt Thanh Nguyễn’s book of essays, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.¹

In fact, war is much more than a memory for Việt people who continue to navigate a landscape of unexploded ordnance (UXO) and chemical contamination. All wars are fought endlessly in the bodies, minds, and lands of those who are invaded as well as those who fight.

From 1964 to 1973, the United States released 6,162,000 tons of bombs and other ordnance in Indochina, far greater than the combined amount during the Second World War and the Korean War.

Việt people, in particular, were up against an unprecedented arsenal. Even after combat ended in 1975, an estimated 800,000 tons of UXO were left behind in Vietnam, including massive amounts of bombs, mines, and shells that frequently failed to detonate as planned (namely, “duds”), but remained active and unpredictable.² UXO has subsequently killed 40,000 and maimed 60,000 Việt people, while causing severe environmental damage that impedes agriculture and other forms of development.³

The extensive wartime use of cluster bombs remains an ongoing threat to civilians, as these baseball-sized weapons explode in the air and disperse small bomblets over a great distance. In fields and forests all over Southeast Asia, cluster bombs lurk as deadly hazards lying in wait for farmers’ plows or children attracted by their bright colors. The United States, having used these weapons most recently in Yemen in 2009, has still not signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions endorsed by 123 other countries.⁴ Not only did the United States fail to provide war reparations to Vietnam,⁵ but a trade embargo placed on Vietnam was in force until 1994.

Recent US contributions to Agent Orange clean-up efforts and disability services through the Department of State and the Department of Defense have stemmed from a combination of forces:

• civil society activities in Vietnam,
• persistent lobbying by solidarity activists in the United States,
• a few stalwart Congressional advocates,
• the wish to project a benevolent US image, and,
• critically, the current desire for a political and military alliance with Vietnam to serve US strategic interests in the region.

Throughout the war and since its conclusion, the involvement of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and global citizens has been key to building antiwar consciousness and activism, as well as sustaining support for humanitarian efforts.

In 2001, the Việt government collaborated with international NGOs to initiate Project RENEW, which became a highly successful integrated model of explosives survey and clearance, mine risk education, victim assistance and rehabilitation, and income generation in Quảng Trị province—the most heavily bombed place on Earth.

More than eighty percent of the land in Quảng Trị is still contaminated by mines and explosives; accidental detonations have killed more than seven thousand residents since the end of the war.⁶

Equally devastating, Quảng Trị was among the ten provinces most targeted by chemical weapons.⁷ The province was sprayed with 613,000 gallons of Agent Orange and other toxic herbicides, leaving another ongoing legacy of disease, severe disability, death, poverty, fear, and anxiety for prospective pregnancies.⁸ Thus, RENEW’s mission also includes support for Agent Orange victims and their families.

When he was interviewed for this article in September 2022, Ngô Xuân Hiền (NH) was visiting  Washington, D.C. for a fundraising event organized by Friends of Project RENEW—a US-based NGO formed to support RENEW’s mission.

The goal of this event was to finance the adaptation of RENEW’s model in nearby Quảng Ngãi, at the request of provincial leadership. Trịnh Thị Hồng Thắm (TT), Leader of Project RENEW’s All-Women’s Emergency Response Team, was in Vietnam at the time. While Hiền graciously served as translator, it was not possible to interview Thắm at the same depth for this article. The shorter excerpts from Thắm in no way diminish the importance of her leadership and her team’s impact on the communities served by Project RENEW.

SftP: Can you tell me your background coming into Project RENEW?

NH: I am forty-six years old and the father of three. I have been with Project RENEW for almost fifteen years. Before that, I taught English at a high school in Khe Sanh—the former combat base of US Marines—for two years. In 2000, I was transferred to work for a Swedish-funded project on public administration reform at the provincial Department of Home Affairs. The project phased out in 2006, and I continued working in the public sector. In May 2008, I saw a recruitment announcement from Project RENEW on local TV, and I immediately applied. On June 5, 2008, I was accepted into Project RENEW after I was interviewed by its co-founders, Hoàng Nam and Chuck Searcy.⁹

In my first six months at Project RENEW, I worked as an interpreter and operations officer for the Demining Research and Development Program in partnership with Golden West Humanitarian Foundation. In early 2009, Chuck and Nam agreed that I should be in charge of communications and development for Project RENEW. I have been working in this position until now.

TT: I am thirty-two years old, and I have been working with Project RENEW for seven years. After spending three years in a technical survey team, I joined the all-women’s clearance team as a deputy team leader until 2021. In December 2021, I was assigned to lead the all-women’s emergency response team, funded by Friends of Project RENEW.

I spent my childhood on land heavily impacted by unexploded bombs left from the war. I once witnessed the passing of a neighbor. He died when part of a cluster bomb exploded while he was hoeing his land. He left behind his elderly mother, wife, and two very young children. The tragedy was a grim reminder of the deadly legacy of the war and also a motivation for me to work for Project RENEW.

Team leader Trinh Thi Hong Tham briefs her team members when responding to a UXO emergency call (photo by Hien Ngo).

SftP: Why do you think it’s important to have an all-women’s team, and how have you been received in the community?

TT: As we work together in an all-women’s team responding to UXO sightings reported by local residents to the hotline number, we have affirmed that women are capable of doing the job safely and efficiently. Every time we approach local people who report their UXO sightings, everyone is amazed, but they like our work. They say the work we are doing is for men. Sometimes we hear them talking about our team—for example, “Why do women have to undertake this dangerous and heavy work?” or “Oh, they drive pickup trucks to where bombs are found like men do.” Or “What brave ladies!”

NH: Having an all-women’s team to take over the job which many say only men can do has changed public opinion. Recent years have seen a greater recognition of the role of women, not only in mine action but also in other aspects of life.

SftP: Do you think women have special advantages or unique challenges in this kind of work?

TT: Dealing with UXO is a dangerous and challenging job not only for men but also for women. The job needs healthy and resilient persons who can work under scorching heat or torrential rain. You have to walk a long distance carrying heavy tools. You have to be prepared for dealing with land leeches, snakes, and stinging caterpillars. Above all, you have to be disciplined to do the job safely.

SftP: What is the most satisfying aspect of your work with Project RENEW?

NH: In the early 1980s, as a primary school pupil, I witnessed a schoolmate four years older than me being carried home on a stretcher from a hilltop where he had tampered with a cluster bomb while collecting firewood. The explosion killed him on the spot.

Another tragic incident that shook our village occurred when three adults were trying to dismantle an artillery shell to extract explosives for fishing. Two died and one was seriously injured as a result of the blast.

I am proud to be part of Project RENEW. Through partnerships with other international NGOs, we have made impressive progress in clearing UXO, and contributed to reducing the number of deaths and injuries in Quảng Trị. From sixty accidents annually for two decades, this number has been reduced to almost zero from 2018 to 2022. Quảng Trị has become a humanitarian mine action model that can be adopted in other provinces in Vietnam still plagued by bombs and mines.

TT: For me, being accepted to work at Project RENEW was my good luck. I am so proud of this job. Prior to field deployment, I had undergone training that provided me with basic knowledge and skills needed to deal with UXO. Working alongside experienced, dedicated, and helpful colleagues has enabled me to enrich my knowledge and accomplish my tasks. I am satisfied and proud of my work.

SftP: What are the greatest challenges of your work?

NH: Support to families of severely disabled persons related to Agent Orange/dioxin remains a challenge. Quảng Trị, one of the most heavily sprayed areas with such defoliants, has a high prevalence of such families. We need funding to bring interventions right to the homes of these families—including home modification, health care, and income generation—so that life with disabilities can be made more bearable for these families.

Another challenge is that while survey and clearance of UXO are taking place, a substantial amount of resources needs to be allocated for risk education and victim assistance. Children born many years after the war must be educated on how to keep themselves from accidents and injuries, and those who were affected need to receive support to overcome their tragic accidents and rebuild their lives.

SftP: Are memories of the war still alive among younger generations in Quảng Trị? In what ways?

NH: It’s been almost fifty years since the fighting came to an end in Quảng Trị province. For younger generations who live in far-off and rural areas, memories of the war may only be occasional sightings of leftover explosives of war by their parents and even themselves. The three Rs: “Refrain from tampering, Retreat, and Report,” help protect them. Two recent incidents so far in 2022, four years after having zero accidents, are grim reminders that explosive leftovers are still capable of killing even five decades later.

SftP: How was your own family affected by the war?

NH: My mother’s father was a Việt Minh guerrilla platoon commander, and he made his ultimate sacrifice in 1950 when his daughter was three. My mother grew up and got involved in the anti-war movement led by Buddhist monks in the early 1960s. She was arrested and imprisoned for three years in Huế. When released, she joined the National Liberation Front (NLF) and fought from 1967 to 1969—the period that saw the bloodiest fighting between American GIs and the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) in Quảng Trị province.¹⁰ She was wounded three times.

Back in 2008, when I told my mom that I would resign from the public sector to join Project RENEW, she was totally supportive. I contemplated introducing her to Chuck Searcy and other American veterans who returned to help Vietnam. However, my mother died of a stroke in 2009 when she was sixty-two.

SftP: Are there any stories you would like to share about people who have been helped by Project RENEW?

NH: In the summer of 2000, fifth grader Hồ Văn Lai and two other boys in his village went to play on a sand dune near their home. They encountered several rusty cluster munitions, locally known as bombies, lying scattered on the ground. Too curious to stay away, Lai wanted to tamper with them. As he was hitting those bombs with a stone, an explosion occurred. The other two boys died on the spot. Lai lost two legs and one eye. His right hand was torn apart.

Now Lai is a full-time member of Project RENEW’s Risk Education program, providing life-saving UXO safety messages to children in Quảng Trị province. Working with the RENEW team helps Lai assert himself and help his community. Lai has left behind negative feelings that a disabled person would understandably have.

TT: The following story has impressed me, and it is also a motivation for me to try harder. A local resident was preparing concrete for the foundation of his new home when suddenly his workers encountered an artillery shell. They had to stop their work, and they made an emergency call to the Quảng Trị Mine Action Center (QTMAC). After receiving information from QTMAC, I called the informant asking for his address. He sounded frightened and urged our team to deal with the ordnance so that he could start the home’s foundation as planned. Our team arrived shortly afterward and safely dealt with the shell. I saw his smiling face when he thanked our team over and over. We felt happy, too. At that moment, I felt proud of the work we were doing because it helped remove a danger and bring back peace of mind to the community.

SftP: Do women in Quảng Trị have special needs due to war legacies and their family and work responsibilities? For example, are women fearful about the effects of Agent Orange on their pregnancies?

TT: Being born and growing up on a land impacted by bombs, mines, and toxic chemicals left from the war is worrisome for everyone. One of my nieces was born with severe disabilities related to Agent Orange. She is now eighteen years old but must be looked after like a child. That is difficult for her family and troubling for many.

We women, when working in an environment affected by war toxins, often feel anxious, particularly during our pregnancies. Notwithstanding, the organization improves conditions for us, and we receive assistance from our colleagues while we are pregnant. We have monthly prenatal medical checkups. One month prior to taking maternity leave, we switch to office work.

SftP: How do you see the impact of Project RENEW on the community?

NH: The comprehensive model that RENEW has introduced and developed over the past two decades assures the community that the lingering impact of the war is being solved. The community feels that they are part of today’s solution to the problem. Without support and cooperation from the community, we would have never advanced this far.

Project RENEW illustrates the long-lasting and devastating harms of war, and the importance of local leadership in devising the most appropriate and effective strategies for remediation.

Chuck Searcy pointed out that “Project RENEW, unlike many other foreign organizations, was led by the Vietnamese from the beginning…with Vietnamese responsible for policy and management decisions in a working partnership with international organizations (for example, Norwegian People’s Aid) that could bring in technical expertise and years of experience from the outside.” Since UXO is not uniformly distributed throughout the province, Project RENEW’s goal shifted from surveying the entire land mass to focusing on the areas where people are most vulnerable, keeping people safe and confident to live normal lives.

The planned implementation of Project RENEW’s model in Quảng Ngãi province will serve, among others, survivors of the US massacre of up to five hundred unarmed civilians in the village of Mỹ Lai in 1968. This atrocity committed in Quảng Ngãi was not an isolated event.¹¹ So-called rules of war cannot banish the horrors unleashed by imperialist aggression and overwhelming force.

Ultimately, NGOs can neither compensate for the lack of full and prompt reparations by aggressor nations, nor substitute for governmental policy and action that can only be achieved at a certain level of development—which are hindered by colonialism and war.¹²

The United States committed crimes against humanity in Vietnam, and in other countries before and since. Perhaps for this very reason, on a basis of imperial arrogance, the United States has to this date refused to be a member state of the International Criminal Court (which, in any case, can only prosecute individuals and has no power of enforcement).

Universal justice seems tragically remote at this moment, but there are experiments—some of them in the NGO sector—that may be instructive for grassroots organizing in the future. Among the many lessons we might learn are those embodied in Project RENEW: the ingenuity of survivors, the devastating and long-lasting effects of war trauma on civilians as well as combatants; the need for adequate, prompt, and globally enforced war reparations; the importance of direct participation by frontline communities in crafting solutions; and the healing of wounds of war via compassion, solidarity, and justice as we work to end the systems built upon militarism.

*

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Notes

1. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 4. Unlike in the main text, we do not add diacritics to the footnoted references so that readers wishing to conduct further research will be more easily able to locate the cited works, which usually do not contain diacritics. 
2. Michael Clodfelter, Vietnam in Military Statistics: A History of the Indochina Wars, 1772-1991 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Books, 1995).
3. Jonathon Guthrie and Portia Stratton, “The Quang Tri Integrated Survey and Clearance Project,” The Journal of ERW and Mine Action 81, no. 1 (April 2015): 16–18; ​​Minh Vu, “War Explosive Remnants Kill 40,000 People in Vietnam since 1975,” Hanoi Times, December 16, 2022, https://hanoitimes.vn/war-explosive-remnants-kill-40000-people-in-vietnam-since-1975-320434.html.
4. Olivia Riggio, “Action Alert: NBC Off by 18 Years on US’s Last Use of Cluster Bombs,” FAIR, March 3, 2022, https://fair.org/home/action-alert-nbc-off-by-18-years-on-uss-last-use-of-cluster-bombs/. 
5. Article 21 of the January 23, 1973 Paris Peace Accords stated that “…the United States will contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam [sic] and throughout Indochina.” In 1977, the US State Department declassified a letter addressed to North Vietnam’s Prime Minister Phạm Văn Đồng and signed by President Richard Nixon four days after the Paris Peace Accords, detailing $3.25 billion worth of payments to be given to Vietnam over five years, in addition to “$1 billion to $1.5 billion in other forms to aid.” However, U.S. officials later declared that any commitments to reparations were not binding. See Marvin E. Gettleman et al., eds., Vietnam and America: The Most Comprehensive Documented History of the Vietnam War, 2nd ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 479, 487.
6. Guthrie and Stratton, “Quang Tri Integrated Survey.”
7. Riggio, “Action Alert.”
8. Riggio, “Action Alert”; Tine M. Gammeltoft, Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
9. Chuck Searcy is a US Army veteran who served in military intelligence in Sài Gòn (now Hồ Chí Minh City) and later co-founded Project RENEW while employed by Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. He was also a founding member of Chapter 160 of Veterans for Peace in Vietnam. He accompanied Hiền to Washington, D.C. in September 2022.
10. Coalition established in 1960 to conduct guerrilla warfare in South Vietnam in support of national elections and a unified country that “represented all social classes and religions.” NLF forces were derisively called “Việt Cong” by their opponents.
11. Nick Turse, Shoot Everything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013).
12. Gettleman, et al., Vietnam and America, 479, 487.

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***

As most of us know, Werner Heisenberg formulated his ‘uncertainty principle’ for quantum mechanics, a subject I know as much about as I know about the intricacies of general relativity – both being domains of science to be admired for their ability to account for profound phenomena of the natural world. But these domains, intellectually fetching as they may be, don’t enhance my experience of a casual walk or an apprehension of a beautiful piece of music. I seem to know that they underpin much of the foundation of humankind’s technical abilities, and for this I am hazily grateful.

I understand too that this famous principle of uncertainty has been taken up by philosophers and laypeople of all stripes and applied metaphorically to support a relativistic notion of truth, admonishing us that we can never be really certain about anything, and that, in essence, virtually everything is ‘relative’.

I trust that the Nobel-laureate Heisenberg will forgive this layman an inaccurate rendering of his mathematical achievement, but I will use the general notion of uncertainty and apply it to our political landscape in general, and the Corona Operation in particular.

When wealthy and high-flying movers and shakers meet to execute their programs for the underlings (us), they, being human, are subject to the usual human frailties and foibles: arrogance, hubris, stupidity, emotionality, misunderstandings, propensity to conflict, and egoism. Even a well-oiled phalanx of the Elite will be riven by disagreements and confusion, and breaches in unity are enough to give a keen-eyed conspiracy detector headaches. The best laid plans of mice and men, not to mention psychopathic reptiles, ‘gang aft agley’ – which is not to say that their plans are unsuccessful or not cogent, but that uncertainties inevitably creep into their execution.

• Yes, the world was effectively and astonishingly shut down in 2020,
• and yes, the imposition of a permanent control and surveillance world government has been relentlessly plied and,
• yes again, most unwitting and unthinking people believe that weather is climate and that climate change is disastrously upon us and that carbon credits are necessary to prevent man-made catastrophe,
• and that global vaccination of virtually every living mammal is an ideal to aspire towards – but then again, there must be dissension in the ranks of the Overlords as well as opposition from their subjects,

thanks to the cantankerous few who stand their ground against the onslaught of State-sponsored propaganda.

But just as there really was no magic single bullet that made phenomenal and sudden changes in course as it ripped through JFK and Texas Governor John Connally on that fateful day in Dallas, despite the strenuous efforts of Arlen Specter to convince the Warren Commission and thence the public that a lone gunman and only a lone gunman killed the President, there is not now, for us, any single and complete theory to explain the everything about the covid operation.

We have questions about not only the origin of the pathogen that set off the supposed pandemic, but also the whereabouts of the origin, the appearance of the virus, the sequences of the virus, the problems in isolating the virus, its infectiousness and fatality rate and the highly variable responses to the pathogen around the globe.

We have questions about the very nature and existence of viruses in fact, and their role in illness and disease, just as we have even more questions about how many people really died of covid – whatever it was – or the flu or the plethora of other maladies that generally account for normal death.

We have questions about the nature of an operation designed to cull the overweening numbers of human souls because it wasn’t so immediately apparent or devastating – even as the second punch of the combination (I am referring to the Jab) may yet produce deleterious effects long into the future.

There is the very human tendency to seek for a single cause of any event, something nice and neat and devastatingly clean. Even in psychoanalytic treatment there is a particular tendency to ascribe the root cause of a person’s malady to a particular memory or fantasy or mental ‘structure’ responsible for pathologic reverberations.

Causality, however, in anything outside highly controlled experimental conditions where single variables may be isolated, is inevitably very complex. The mapping of the human genome gave rise to cheerful expectations of precision in the diagnosis and management of human illness, but this has not panned out because the presence of a gene does not necessarily imply a clear and simple consequence. In fact, genes and the enveloping cellular environment make for an increasingly baffling series of challenges for biomedical researchers.

Despite the condensation and concentration of enormous technical – and financial – power into the hands of a relatively few, the inevitable divisions among these few and the inevitable interpolations of chance, create an inevitable uncertainty. We must be prepared to accept that we can and will never know the complete and inviolable tale of this Corona War.

But this does not mean that our humility in accepting the complexity and unpredictability of human relations blinds us to broad and definitive truths.

There is no question that we ‘little’ people have been under siege, that governments and corporations and other entities have sought to diminish our freedoms, to censor us, and to monitor and control our every moves. There is no question that the organized media outlets that have been the repositories of trust for so many decades have betrayed our trust. There is no question that once-revered authoritative bodies in Medicine have destroyed their credibility by promulgating falsehoods and undermining the very principles of what they purport to espouse as authorities.

As I have written many times before, we are in the biggest and most fateful fight of and for our lives, despite the insufferably obtuse zombie indifference of so many around us who either cannot or will not accept the irrefutable.

Will the zombies be revived in time? Will the transnational Deep State Cabal implode? Will the citizenry stand strong? Who can be sure?

I’ll end this excursion with a brief observation about the recent film that swept Disney aside during the blockbuster 4th of July weekend: Sound of Freedom. I watched with great interest this dramatic exposition of an episode in the battle against human trafficking, an industry reputed to generate 150 billion dollars annually.

A courageous agent attempting to rescue enslaved children is pitted against a ruthless gang of cut-throats, pedophilic abusers and violent criminals who inhabit a secluded jungle retreat. The agent masquerades as a doctor, a doctor on a mission to help the rural population, a doctor who brings vaccines …

I smiled wryly during this scene. Even the most hardened, cynical, suspicious and street-smart low-life bowed down to the Church of Vaccinology and let the agent into their lair. Their belief – nay, their certainty – in the utility and benevolence of vaccines led to their downfall.

*

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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand. Visit his substack at https://newzealanddoc.substack.com/

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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In February 2021, Pfizer launched a randomized, placebo-controlled, observer-blind study to evaluate the safety of its COVID-19 shot — BNT162b2 — in healthy pregnant women

The injections were set to take place between 24 and 34 weeks’ gestation, with participants randomized 1-to-1 to receive a COVID-19 shot or placebo

The study was initially set to enroll 4,000 women, but Pfizer only signed up 349, then stopped enrollment entirely

The CDC’s widespread endorsement of COVID-19 shots for pregnant women before the study was completed may have negated the need for the trial

Pfizer stated that because so many pregnant women had already gone ahead and gotten the shot, due to the government’s endorsement, enrollment dropped and there was no reason to move ahead with the study

*

No randomized trial data are available for use of the COVID-19 shot in pregnant women, and Pfizer cut its pregnancy trial short.¹ But this doesn’t stop the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from recommending COVID-19 injections for everyone 6 months and older, including “people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, trying to get pregnant now, or those who might become pregnant in the future.”²

“Not having any good data didn’t seem to bother the CDC,” Dr. Martin Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, wrote in Tablet.³ He and a team of scientists petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to add a disclaimer to the shot’s label about the lack of trial data on its safety in pregnant women. The FDA declined, stating that this information wouldn’t be relevant.

Pregnant women, however, do need to know about the shot’s lack of testing during pregnancy — it’s the foundation of informed consent. They’d also likely be interested to know why Pfizer stopped its pregnancy trial early and has yet to make the results it did find public.

Pfizer Stopped COVID Jab Pregnancy Trial, Withholds Data

In February 2021, Pfizer launched a randomized, placebo-controlled, observer-blind study to evaluate the safety of its COVID-19 shot — BNT162b2 — in healthy pregnant women. The injections were set to take place between 24 and 34 weeks’ gestation, with participants randomized 1-to-1 to receive a COVID-19 shot or placebo.⁴ But while the study was initially set to enroll 4,000 women,⁵ Pfizer only signed up 349, then stopped enrollment entirely.⁶

“Most concerning,” Makary explained, “the pregnancy outcomes of those who participated in the trial, and their babies, are still not public today, nearly two years later.”⁷ Pregnant and breastfeeding women were excluded from Pfizer’s and Moderna’s phase III clinical trials,⁸ but in April 2021, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky announced, “CDC recommends that pregnant people receive the COVID-19 vaccine.”⁹

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM) soon echoed this statement, recommending pregnant women get injected, as did the UK’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.¹⁰

So, as the months passed, hundreds of thousands of pregnant women globally rolled up their sleeves to receive the vaccine, despite the absence of any clinical trials. “The message from authorities was clear — the harm from COVID-19 infection outweighed any harms from the mRNA vaccine — but in truth, they couldn’t possibly have known,” noted Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., a former medical scientist with the University of Adelaide and former reporter for ABC News in Australia.¹¹

Animal Studies Show Fetal Loss, Skeletal Variations

Pfizer’s product labeling suggested, “No vaccine-related adverse effects on female fertility, fetal development or postnatal development were reported.” But, Demasi reported, a freedom of information request from 2021 showed this was based on an animal study of just 44 rats, which showed concerning findings about fetal loss:¹²

“The study found the vaccine led to a statistically significant doubling in fetal loss (9.77% mRNA vs 4.09% saline), but Pfizer concluded that the difference between the two groups was “not biologically meaningful.”

The label also states that Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine was not tested for its potential to cause carcinogenicity (ability to cause cancer), genotoxicity (ability to damage genetic information), or impairment of male fertility.”

An animal study conducted by Moderna also showed a significant number of rats were born with skeletal variations after their mothers were injected with the COVID-19 shot while pregnant. But, according to Demasi, “Moderna concluded that the “Skeletal variations are structural changes that do not impact development or function of a developing embryo” and therefore “not considered adverse.””

Trial Stopped Because Many Pregnant Women Already Injected

Pfizer hasn’t publicly explained why its trial on pregnant women was stopped short, nor why the resulting data hasn’t been published. It’s possible they ended the trial because of unfavorable results. It wouldn’t be the first time.

However, in this case it appears the CDC’s widespread endorsement of COVID-19 shots for pregnant women — before the study was completed — may have negated the need for the trial altogether, at least from Pfizer’s perspective. As Makary put it:¹³

“In the case of the COVID vaccine trial in pregnant women, the trial may have been terminated not because the results were unfavorable, but because no data was needed. The medical and public health establishments had already made up their minds, declaring it safe and effective regardless of what the data was going to show. Why evaluate a product if the CDC and ACOG are already sold on the product?”

Demasi agreed. In fact, she published an email from Pfizer, in which the company admitted that enrollment for their trial significantly declined in the end of 2021, because health officials had already given the shot their seal of approval. Because so many pregnant women had already gone ahead and gotten the shot, due to the government’s endorsement, there was no reason to move ahead with the study. Demasi published Pfizer’s email response, which reads:¹⁴

“In the fourth quarter of 2021, enrollment was stopped in C4591015 Study (a Phase 2/3 placebo controlled randomized observer-blind study to evaluate the safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of BNT162b2 against COVID-19 in healthy pregnant women 18 years of age and older). This study was developed prior to availability or recommendation for COVID-19 vaccination in pregnant women.

The environment changed during 2021 and by September 2021, COVID-19 vaccines were recommended by applicable recommending bodies (e.g., ACIP in the U.S.) for pregnant women in all participating/planned countries, and as a result the enrollment rate declined significantly.

With the declining enrollment, the study had insufficient sample size to assess the primary immunogenicity objective and continuation of this placebo controlled study could no longer be justified due to global recommendations. This proposal was shared with and agreed to by FDA and EMA.”

As for the lack of published data, Pfizer stated it doesn’t have it:¹⁵

“Pfizer does not yet have a complete data set from the maternal immunization study, C4591015. Pfizer and BioNTech plan to complete the analysis of the clinical trial C4591015 and share it with global public health regulators and seek publication or presentation as is our standard practice.

It is important to note that relevant real-world evidence on the use of COVID-19 vaccines in pregnant women has been presented and published numerous times by various parties in multiple journals and forums.”

Natural Immunity Is Still Being Ignored

Not only does ACOG “strongly recommend” that pregnant women get a COVID-19 shot, but they also recommend a booster dose.¹⁶ “Vaccination may occur in any trimester, and emphasis should be on vaccine receipt as soon as possible to maximize maternal and fetal health. This recommendation applies to both primary series and booster vaccination,” ACOG states.¹⁷

But missing from their information is data about natural immunity. Research by Makary and colleagues, published in JAMA,¹⁸ showed that natural immunity to COVID-19 — achieved by prior infection, not an injection — was durable for about two years, suggesting it’s longer lasting than any protection gained from a COVID-19 shot.¹⁹

A systematic review and meta-analysis published in The Lancet²⁰ also revealed natural immunity to be at least as effective as, and likely superior to, COVID-19 injections.²¹ Health officials don’t have the data from Pfizer’s randomized trial of the shots in pregnant women. But rather than erring on the side of caution — especially for those with natural immunity — they’re still recommending everyone get the shots.

Scientists Warn Pregnant Women Not to Receive COVID Shots

Not everyone’s onboard with health agencies’ push for pregnant women to get injected. “The pushing of these experimental COVID-19 vaccines globally is the greatest violation of medical ethics in the history of medicine, maybe humanity,” Dr. James Thorp, a maternal fetal medicine expert, told Tucker Carlson.²²

Thorp and colleagues published a preprint study that found striking risks to pregnant women who received the shots, along with their unborn babies.²³ The outcomes were so dire that the researchers concluded pregnant women should not receive COVID-19 shots until further research is completed.

“A worldwide moratorium on the use of COVID-19 vaccines in pregnancy is advised until randomized prospective trials document safety in pregnancy and long-term follow-up in offspring,” they explained.²⁴ Compared to the flu vaccine, COVID-19 shots were associated with a significant increase in adverse events (AE), including:²⁵

The data also revealed a 27-fold higher risk of miscarriage and a more than twofold increased risk of adverse fetal outcomes across six different categories, according to board-certified internist and cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough.²⁶

NIH Study Confirms Menstrual Changes Post-Jabs

Delayed menstruation has also been confirmed following COVID-19 shots, according to a study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology — funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Research on Women’s Health.²⁷

The study involved 3,959 individuals between the ages of 18 and 45 years. Those who had not received a COVID-19 shot noted no significant changes in cycle four during the study compared to their first three cycles. But those who received COVID-19 shots had longer menstrual cycles, typically by less than one day, when they received the shots.

The European Union, meanwhile, has recommended that “heavy menstrual bleeding” be added as a side effect to mRNA COVID-19 shots.²⁸ Makary noted:²⁹

“Here in the U.S. there’s been no such update to product labeling. This lack of humility was also evident when healthy young women were told with incredible absolutism that the COVID vaccine cannot affect fertility. The right answer should have been: We don’t think it will affect fertility but we don’t have any good data on the question.”

Officials Choose ‘Stern Paternalism’ Over Informed Consent

In the absence of data for a vulnerable population — pregnant and breastfeeding women — health officials should have urged caution. As the effectiveness of natural immunity became clear, people should have been informed of this and warned of potential risks from COVID-19 shots. This way, they could make an informed decision before consenting to an injection that could have serious reproductive effects.

The Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK) felt the data were compelling enough in 2021 to withdraw the shots for vulnerable populations like pregnant women,^30,31 but health officials chose, instead, to make them guinea pigs for an untested, experimental shot.

“In the absence of good data, organized medicine chose the path of stern paternalism. But in my experience as a physician, it’s far better to properly inform a patient rather than steamroll their questions,” said.³² If and when Pfizer does release the data, it’s possible that health agencies will have some explaining to do if the data aren’t favorable. Makary continued:³³

“It may be that Pfizer’s pregnancy trial would have been favorable to the vaccine, showing that the benefits outweigh harms, but Pfizer has not released the data. Perhaps the data was not favorable, or perhaps Pfizer realized they had convinced the medical establishment without data, so why run the risk of sharing what a placebo-controlled trial shows?”

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Notes

^{1, 5, 6, 7, 21, 29, 32, 33} Tablet June 21, 2023

^2, 3, 13 U.S. CDC, COVID-19 Vaccines While Pregnant or Breastfeeding October 20, 2022

⁴ ClinicalTrials.gov, To Evaluate the Safety, Tolerability, and Immunogenicity of BNT162b2 Against COVID-19 in Healthy Pregnant Women 18 Years […]

^8, 10, 11 Substack, Maryanne Demasi reports February 23, 2023

⁹ CBS News April 27, 2021

^12, 14, 15 Substack, Alexander COVID News February 25, 2023

^16, 17 ACOG, COVID-19 Vaccines and Pregnancy: Conversation Guide

¹⁸ JAMA. 2022;327(11):1085-1087. doi: 10.1001/jama.2022.1393

¹⁹ Twitter, Marty Makary February 3, 2022

²⁰ The Lancet March 11, 2023

²² Rumble February 27, 2023, 1:00

^23, 24, 25 Preprints 2022, 2022090430

²⁶ Substack, Courageous Discourse March 2, 2023

²⁷ Obstetrics & Gynecology: January 5, 2022 – Volume – Issue – 10.1097

²⁸ European Medicines Agency October 28, 2022

^30, 31 Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law Volume 4:130-143 November 2021

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It seems that China has finally had enough of foreign attempts to slow down or effectively stop its technological advances. The Asian giant is now making very concrete moves against the United States and its numerous vassals and satellite states, targeting their own high-tech industries, including their massive Military Industrial Complex (MIC). The troubled Biden administration (but also the previous one) has started an essentially suicidal economic confrontation with Beijing, particularly against its high-tech sector, by far the fastest growing in the world. This includes a US attack on Chinese semiconductor advances.

In response, last week Beijing decided to impose export restrictions on two rare-earth elements it produces in abundance (up to 95% of global production, depending on the source) – gallium and germanium. The two metals are heavily imported by the countries of the political West and its satellites, particularly for semiconductor production. It also seems that China’s timing for this was perfect, as it greatly strengthened its negotiating position, particularly as it came mere days before US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visited China last week. In other words, Beijing is finally capitalizing on its absolute dominance in rare-earth mining and refining.

As such capacities are sorely lacking in the political West, China believes that this move would finally open up talks and “help convince” the US that any future restrictions on microchip and semiconductor development in China will be equally (if not more) painful for the political West. On July 7, The Wall Street Journal reported that Yellen and the Chinese Premier Li Qiang discussed economic competition that “would benefit both countries” and precisely this was almost certainly one of the hotly debated topics during closed doors talks. The US has a very clear and easy choice in this regard. Unfortunately, it’s extremely likely to choose confrontation once again.

China’s pushback is already yielding results, as the global prices of the aforementioned rare-earth elements have already spiked and continue to grow. Gallium soared 27% last week, traders who spoke with Bloomberg complained, adding that the gallium market, although well-supplied for the time being, will eventually be hit by export controls starting next month, causing a flurry of panic buying as traders are scrambling to purchase the metal in greater quantities than ever. On July 7, Fastmarkets data showed Gallium prices soared $43 on the week to $326 a kilogram. As of this writing, it has soared to at least $368 and is projected to grow further in August and beyond.

Starting on August 1, exporters must apply for special licenses with the Chinese Ministry of Commerce to ship gallium and germanium abroad. This will greatly impact Washington DC, as data from the US Geological Survey shows that the belligerent thalassocracy imported an estimated 14,000 kilograms of germanium in 2022 while consuming approximately 30,000. In that same year, imports of gallium were around 12,000 kilograms, while consumption was an estimated 18,000 kilograms. It can only be expected that the US will try to stockpile these metals and try to diversify imports, while there are some indications that the troubled Biden administration might move to increase domestic mining and refining of rare-earth elements.

However, this will require time and effort that will not prevent price spikes that are already affecting entire industries across the political West. According to Bernard Dahdah, an analyst at Natixis, the move by China is far from being the “nuclear option that it could have chosen”, but it’s the first “warning shot”, emphasizing that “China does control other metals through which it can inflict more severe consequences”. And this is certainly true. China’s dominance in rare-earth elements extraction and production is well known and while Beijing never intended to “weaponize” this, it is now being forced to do as the US and its vassals and satellite states are targeting China’s economic growth and technological innovations.

In the meantime, the Pentagon seems to be in quiet panic. On July 7, it announced that it’s invoking the Defense Production Act to boost the domestic mining and processing capacity of the two metals. This is because gallium is one of the key elements used in the production of advanced AESA (active electronically scanned array) radars used in modern fighter jets, air defense systems, ground and sea-based ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) equipment, etc. These radars heavily depend on the foundational materials of gallium arsenide (GaAs) and gallium nitride (GaN), with US MIC giants such as RTX (formerly Raytheon) and Northrop Grumman on the brink of launching new systems that primarily rely on GaN.

Such systems were supposed to provide superior performance over the older GaAs-based AESA radars and this advanced technology has already started being implemented into the radars for F/A-18E/F “Super Hornet” carrier-based fighters, as well as the deeply troubled F-35 stealth fighter jets. This will affect not only Washington DC, but also its vassals and satellite states that are taking part in US aggression in the Asia-Pacific, where they aim to “contain” China and curb its growth and development. The US (and now also the EU) routinely sends its fighter jets, strategic bombers and warships to the South and East China Seas, deliberately provoking the Asian giant.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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Background

The US Treasury Secretary has wrapped up her visit to China, which was dominated by talks over trade and tech disputes.

Janet Yellen says Washington and Beijing have made some progress and will have more frequent contact in the future. She vowed that any curbs on US outbound investments would be “transparent” and “very narrowly targeted.” In an earlier address in Beijing, Yellen warned against the decoupling of the two economic powers.

The Treasury Secretary said the US and its allies will fight back against what she called China’s unfair economic practices. Beijing has in turn called on Washington to stop weaponizing and politicizing trade and tech. Those are just two of the host of sticking points between China and the US. Last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken also visited Beijing. China says the U-S should take concrete actions to improve trade ties.

PressTV: What precisely did Ms. Yellen mean by her warning against the decoupling of the two economic powers?

Peter Koenig (PK): Most of the substantive talks on the topics of trade and monetary issues between the US and China were held behind closed doors. Therefore, assessments may be more indicative than precise.

Let me say this, though, Ms. Yellen’s warning against decoupling of the two world’s largest economies, was like a plea for discouraging de-dollarization. And this refers to more than just China’s economy, foremost the economy of the Global South.

The US Treasurer, Janet Yellen, may hope that if China leading the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – 9 full members and 4 observer status “members” with Iran the latest full member joining SCO on 1 July 2023 — would work along the lines of joint world currencies, the US dollar and the Chinese Yuan, international trade could be guaranteed and would flourish.

Because these are the two currencies in which most trade is taking place today.

It is a fully globalist idea – aiming at maintaining US-dollar hegemony, because currently close to 60% of all so-called “convertible currencies” floating around the world are US-dollar denominated papers. Compare this to only about 5% of the Chinese Yuan, with China’s economy of about equal strength.

And if one looks at China’s economy’s composition, her GDP components – most of it is hard manufacturing and production output, whereas the US GDP is composed mostly of services and the output of the US Military Industrial Complex.Mmost of consumer  production has been outsourced.

Madame Yellen may know the reason for rapid dedollarization, not just by China and Russia, but especially by the Global South, including the BRICS-plus countries, is largely the US sanctions policy. It drives once upon a time US allies to the east, where they feel their economic autonomy is better preserved.

US-dollar domination is best reflected by the US sanctions policy. Without it, the US dollar hegemony is a tiger without teeth.

Countries even within the European Union (EU) are sick and tired of the constant “ambiance of threat” which many believe, is responsible for the extreme submissiveness of the vassalic EU.

In summary, the US Secretary of Treasury may have come to China to seek more monetary and trade harmony for their, the US’s globalist interests.

PressTV: What does Ms. Yellen mean by “China’s unfair economic practices”?

PK: Does the US Treasurer maybe refer to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)? BRI, this year celebrates its 10th anniversary. BRI has made enormous inroads throughout the world, not in war-type destruction, as practiced by the west, but by connecting countries and continents with infrastructure, trade, cultural exchange – and not least, as the world may have noticed over the past 12 months, with peace-bringing diplomacy. See BRI map below.

China in Red, the members of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in orange. The proposed corridors (see this and this) in black (Land Silk Road), and blue (Maritime Silk Road). (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

The BRI is a thorn in they eyes of the west, as is known for years, because it uses a harmonious approach in connecting people. The BRI is an international economic development scheme. So far more than 150 nations and international organizations have joined BRI – and growing.

This could indeed be considered a threat to the west – a counteract to western influence peddling, and, therefore, be called “unfair economic practices.”

The term may also refer to China’s largest Asean-plus-4 Trade Agreement – the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). It entered into force on 1 January 2022, meaning that businesses in Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Japan, Laos, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam will now benefit from tariff elimination on about 92% of goods over time.

It is estimated that within 5 years RCEP trade will surpass in absolute terms any other trade agreement worldwide. RCEP is a China initiative. It has been negotiated during ten years. (See RCEP map below).

Source: MPG

Would Washington call it “unfair trade”?

If anything is unfair in international commerce, it is the US “sanctions” policy, that – by the way – includes outright theft of countries’ reserve deposits in western banking institutions.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

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This article was originally published in October 2021.

See our latest coverage on this issue.

The Weaponization of Mosquitos: WHO and Gates Inc Announce Plans to Flood Africa with Ultra Dangerous Malaria “Vaccines”

By Jordan Schachtel, July 10, 2023

Researchers Use GMO Mosquitoes to Vaccinate Humans in NIH-Funded Malaria Study

By Michael Nevradakis, October 04, 2022

Why Did Gates and the Pentagon Release “Gene Edited” (GMO) Mosquitoes in Florida Keys?

By F. William Engdahl, July 10, 2023

***

It has been a good year for vaccines. Remarkably effective inoculations were engineered, tested, and rolled out to rein in the COVID-19 pandemic which has killed over 4.8 million people, and on October 6 the World Health Organization (WHO) officially recommended a “groundbreaking malaria vaccine for children at risk.” It’s hard to wrap our heads around the numbers that make up the fabric of mass infectious illnesses like malaria. In 2019, the number of cases of malaria all over the world wasestimated at 229 million. That’s a little over the total population of Pakistan, the fifth most populous country on Earth. For that same year, deaths from malaria added up to 409,000. Two-thirds of those deaths were in children under the age of five.

The announcement by the WHO that a vaccine against malaria, more than thirty years in the making, could finally be recommended was greeted with joy in the media. But our vaccine efficacy expectations, raised aloft by the COVID-19 vaccines’ stunning results, need to be tampered down in this case. And while anti-vaccination activists claim, wrongly, that the approved RNA vaccines are “experimental” and are administered to people without their informed consent, the way in which the malaria vaccine’s implementation was pilot-tested in three African countries has raised the ethical questions of what constitutes research and whether or not proper consent was indeed secured in those children.

A protean adversary

If the crash course the public received in 2020 about how a respiratory virus infects the body was a beginner’s class in infectious diseases, malaria is the advanced lesson.

A coronavirus spitting out its genetic guts inside our cells so that their replication machinery will make more copies of it is plain sailing compared to the complex, shape-shifting life cycle of malaria, a disease that wrangles at least three different organisms. First, there’s the infected human. Then, there’s the female mosquito, which could be any one of 41 species under the larger umbrella known as Anopheles. Finally, and most interesting of all, there’s the vector, the go-between, the shapeshifter itself. It’s a microscopic, single-celled parasite called Plasmodium whose adaptable existence has forced exotic nomenclature from the pens of scientists, words to describe its life stages like “merozoites” and “schizont.”

Put simply, the mosquito bites you and its saliva delivers the Plasmodium parasite inside your body. For the first week or two, the malaria parasite enters the liver stage of its existence: it replicates itself asexually inside the human liver. Its numbers grow. Eventually, it infects new red blood cells, and thus begins the blood stage and with it the symptoms of malaria.

For the uncomplicated form of the disease, these include the non-specific symptoms we associate with the flu, like fever, headache, chills, and body aches. For the severe form of malaria, this tiny parasite can cause acute injury of the lungs and kidneys, coma, and birth complications with long-term consequences. The parasite continues to make copies of itself asexually inside the red blood cells until the cells burst and the parasites look for new cells to infect. Some of the Plasmodium parasites turn into the equivalent of immature sperm and eggs, sexual cells known scientifically as gametes. When you get bitten by another mosquito, these immature gametes get scooped up and the parasite’s life cycle continues inside its new mosquito host. The “sperm” and “egg” mature, meet-cute, and lead to new infectious versions of the parasite ready to travel from the mosquito’s long proboscis and into a fresh human host.

To complicate matters, Plasmodium is not just one thing. It includes six species of parasites that are known to give humans malaria, the most famous of which is Plasmodium falciparum, responsible for the vast majority of malaria deaths. But other species—specifically P. vivax and P. ovale—have the superpower to lay dormant in the form of hypnozoites, which can awaken and cause a relapse of the infection months or years later.

This ability the malaria parasite has to change over the course of its life cycle—a good word for that being “protean,” after the mythological Greek god Proteus who would assume different shapes—has really vexed researchers.

Developing a vaccine against a coronavirus is relatively easy, but against this? Which form of the parasite should even be displayed as the crown jewel of a vaccine?

The asexual form that couch-surfs in our liver?

The one that spreads in the blood?

The immature gametes? The mosquito stage?

Should we use the full parasite or a simple protein from it? Given that different forms of the parasite can express different proteins, selecting one such protein for the vaccine also spoils us for choice, unless we should choose two or three proteins together to cover more bases. Different strategies were used by scientists over decades, and while a small number of vaccines managed to make it to a phase II trial in humans, their efficacy was judged “modest” and the immunity they granted was not sustained.

Finally, a large clinical trial in thousands of children and infants yielded encouraging results in 2015 for a specific malaria vaccine that targeted the liver stage of the parasite’s life cycle. The vaccine is commonly called RTS,S (an initialism for a shockingly long descriptor), with Mosquirix as its trade name. Whether or not it will be a safe and effective “game-changer” requires a closer look at the results of its testing and how the testing itself was conducted.

“A serious breach of international ethics standards”

Mosquirix prevents 4 in 10 cases of malaria. In terms of efficacy, we have certainly seen better, with two doses of the MMR vaccine being 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps. Even the COVID-19 vaccines had higher efficacies in their clinical trials. When compared to the WHO’s goal of having licensed malaria vaccines with efficacies of at least 75% by the year 2030, Mosquirix clearly doesn’t check the box.

But given the enormity of the problem, preventing 4 in 10 cases of malaria is still an impressive achievement, especially given that Mosquirix is the only vaccine of a crop of 25 to successfully make it through all three phases of human testing.

This vaccine could save the lives of tens of thousands of children each year. However, as the results of the Mosquirix clinical trials came to light, a number of key questions lingered. Would a four-dose regimen of the vaccine be feasible in the real world of sub-Saharan Africa, where most people are affected by malaria?

Would vaccine recipients assume they were fully protected and dismiss other protective measures, like insecticide-treated bed nets?

Given the complexities of malaria, the potential for reinfection, and the relatively short length of the phase III trial, would the vaccine really prevent deaths in the long run?

A seven-year follow-up in children who participated in the phase II trial of Mosquirix revealed that the efficacy of the vaccine had gone down over time. There was a rebound effect later on in areas particularly prone to malaria. And more disturbingly, in the biggest trial of the vaccine, three safety signals were picked up: there was a ten times higher rate of meningitis, a higher chance of cerebral malaria, and a doubling of deaths from all causes in girls who had received the vaccine and not the placebo. Were these effects real or chance artefacts?

To answer these questions, the WHO launched a pilot evaluation of the vaccine roll-out in Malawi, Ghana, and Kenya, and this is where we find what has been described as “a serious breach of international ethics standards.”

This pilot was registered withClinicalTrials.gov. Its master protocol clearly calls it a “study” and it contains many sections dedicated to “research questions” and “research methods.” Indeed, areas within these countries were randomized to either receive the vaccine or not. This is why there was outrage in the scientific community when it was revealed that the WHO had not used informed consent during this pilot study.

Informed consent is when a patient is properly informed about the potential risks, benefits, and alternatives of an intervention and, being of sound mind, can decide to go forward with it or not. Ever since the Nazis’ sickening experiments, informed consent has become enshrined in medical ethics.

But in the case of the Mosquirix pilot study, the WHO denied that it was a research activity and stated it had used “implied consent,” meaning that the children who received the vaccine and their parents or guardians were not informed that they were taking part in a study.

What emerged out of an investigation by the British Medical Journal is that the WHO said it had sent training material to country partners about the potential risks, although the association with an increased risk of deaths among girls seen in the clinical trial was not mentioned in the training material. The vaccine deployment was handled by the countries as part of routine vaccinations. It is this protean roll-out—appearing clearly as a risk assessment research project to some people and as a routine vaccination campaign to others—that the WHO used to recently endorse the wider use of Mosquirix, to much media acclaim.

When interviewed by German radio station Deutschlandfunk, Professor Charles Weijer, who co-wrote the ethical rules on the kind of randomized design the WHO used for their pilot study and which were adapted in collaboration with the WHO, declared that the WHO was violating the very rules it had co-authored. This waiver of informed consent looks to Weijer like there is one standard for research in wealthier countries and a different standard for research done in poorer countries. “It looks like colonial science to me,” he told the interviewer.

But what about the potential risks of the Mosquirix vaccine detected in the clinical trial?

Were they seen in the pilot roll-out?

According to the WHO, it is now clear that there is no link between the vaccine and these original concerns, but the lack of follow-up at an individual level, the low vaccine coverage, and the short duration of this pilot study (which, to be fair, is still on-going) mean that the actual effect of the vaccine on female mortality, real or not, may have been missed, according to a 2020 analysis by Dr. Christine Benn of the University of Southern Denmark and colleagues. These safety signals, for meningitis, cerebral malaria, and deaths from all causes in girls, have to be sufficiently addressed. A petition, which now has close to 35,000 signatures, is calling for the WHO to be more transparent about its pilot evaluation and to answer the ethical questions that have been raised.

Trust

What a mess. The fight against malaria has been plagued by difficulties. Plasmodium is a slippery beast to successfully sketch out for the “Wanted” poster that is a vaccine. It owns many fake moustaches. Mosquirix began testing in 1987, the year that saw the release of Good Morning, Vietnam and the first Lethal Weaponmovie. It has reportedly cost over USD 750 million, a substantial bill that was mostly settled by GlaxoSmithKline and the Gates Foundation. Its efficacy is not great but it can’t be dismissed, especially considering the magnitude of the problem. Other interventions exist to prevent or treat malaria, but none are perfect. Bed nets are affordable, but in 2016, only a little over half of people at risk for malaria in sub-Saharan Africa were sleeping under one. Not everyone wants to spend the whole night under a net and, as a WHO spokesperson explained, the nets don’t stop mosquitos by day. Treatment with the drug artemisinin, which led to the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has saved millions of lives, but the emergence of drug resistance in Southeast Asia is sounding the alarm. A vaccine, even if it does not prevent every case of malaria, would be a useful part of the armamentarium.

But doubts remain, in my mind, about Mosquirix’s safety. It is worth pointing out that travellers to Africa will, by and large, not be eligible for Mosquirix, as the WHO has recommended its use only in children at the moment. This vaccine is meant for the children who live in countries where malaria is widespread. There are, of course, other vaccines in the works, like R21/MM which was recently tested in a phase II clinical trial with 450 children and found to have an efficacy of up to 77%. We will have to see if it and others can clear the hurdle of making it through a phase III trial.

It is high time Africa got a safe and effective vaccine against malaria, but ethical standards and transparency cannot be sacrificed. A vaccine’s protection does not simply come from its building blocks. It also comes from trust.

Note: To any reader genuinely curious as to what Mosquirix’s generic name, RTS,S/AS01E, stands for, this article unfurls it as “the central repeat region (R) and T-cell epitopes (T) of P. falciparum circumsporozoite protein carried by the hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg, S), and co-expressed within Saccharomyces cerevisiae with unfused copies of HBsAg(S)/adjuvant system 01E.” Worth infinite points in Scrabble.

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***

Since 1967, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has largely been seen and discussed from the prism of the various conflicting issues over territory, security, Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugees, the settlements, and historic rights.

On each of these issues, Israel’s actions have blatantly violated the Palestinians’ basic human rights, creating humanitarian crises on every level. Israel’s actions and their devastating impacts are completely inconsistent with Jewish values. Had these values been followed in every encounter and sincere efforts were made by both sides to reach a peace agreement, the conflict might have been resolved decades ago and the humanitarian disasters inflicted on the Palestinians could have been averted.

The intensifying violent encounters between the two sides since the beginning of the year have claimed the lives of 147 Palestinians and 23 Israelis. The vicious cycle of violence which has been escalating, as we have seen in recent days in Jenin in the West Bank, will continue to fester, especially because of the sense of entitlement which the current Israeli government in particular and the settlers have in spades.

The recent killing of four innocent Israeli settlers by a Palestinian terrorist cannot be justified under any circumstances. But for the perpetrators, this was an act of revenge that was taken as vengeance for the killing of several Palestinians in the days prior. The Palestinian attackers felt that they had no choice left but to fight for their freedom – for their dreams and aspirations – preferring to die as martyrs with honor rather than live in servitude for the rest of their lives.

Defying Jewish Values

Although the pogroms committed by the settlers that followed were condemned by Netanyahu and the leaders of the opposition, the settlers have been listening all along to the likes of ministers Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, to whom the life of any Palestinian is dispensable and have said as much publicly time and again. In February, following the killing of two Israeli brothers and the settler-led pogrom that ensued against the village of Huwara, Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich stated, “I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the state of Israel should do it.”

Image: Bezalel Smotrich, an extremist Israeli Jewish MK [File photo]

Thus, dispossessing the Palestinians of everything they have, setting fire to scores of houses and cars, and wanton destruction of properties while Israeli soldiers watch with equanimity makes a mockery of these Jewish values that Israeli officials pretend to uphold so high.

The irony here is that while some officials condemned the pogroms because such horrendous acts defy Jewish values, they have conveniently forgotten that for decades Israel has regularly been violating these values by acting inhumanely against the Palestinians in the name of national security. Successive Israeli governments ignored the historical account of the Jews’ survival throughout the centuries, which was attributed to their collective adherence to these values and their commitment to never forsake them, as they constituted the religious and ethical foundation of the Jews’ continuing survival.

These Jewish values include caring for and being compassionate toward other human beings, not turning away from people in need, loving one’s neighbors, forgiving and having mercy, clothing the naked, upholding the right to justice and ownership of property, freeing the oppressed, sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and respecting the right of every person to life. Finally, there is Tikkun Olam, which translates to ‘repairing the world,’ to restore it to how its creator made it, or make it better for all.

How do Israeli governments square these values to the uprooting of olive trees that deprive the owners of their main source of income and force them to live on handouts with humiliation; to the horrifying practice of incarcerating mostly young men often for months without being charged with any crimes; to the frequent night raids that terrify the young and kidnap fathers and eldest sons, not to be seen again sometimes for months?

And how do you square Jewish values to the routine forcible eviction of Palestinians from their homes and cruel acts of demolishing houses under the pretext of being built without a permit, or because the government decided to rezone the area for some obscure reason, leaving them homeless and despairing; or annexing more land for military training, leaving many families without the land which was the source of their livelihood?

Do these horrifying acts of cruelty that happen routinely and are hardly criticized pass the litmus test of Jewish values? Indeed, successive Israeli governments led by Netanyahu in particular have egregiously and shamelessly violated every single value the Jews have held for centuries. But then, leave it to the avid right-wing Israelis and officials to justify these punitive measures on the grounds of national security. In fact, these inhumane measures are designed not only to force Palestinians out of their land but to deliberately instigate Palestinian violent resistance, which in turn the government uses as a pretext to take retaliatory measures against the Palestinians and justify the continuing occupation.

Inviting Violence

The Netanyahu government has continued its sinister scheme to make the Palestinians’ lives unbearable so that they leave their homes and communities out of despair and hopelessness—an effort to clear the land of all Palestinians for Israelis to move in. These officials and millions of staunch right-wing Israelis quietly condone these pogroms and gross violations of the Palestinians’ human rights simply because they serve their long-term goal of controlling all the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

Conversely, had Israeli successive governments truly applied Jewish values, they would have ended the ruthless measures they take that precipitate massive humanitarian crises. Every Palestinian, wherever they may live, feels each tragic event as if they have experienced it themselves, which only strengthens their resolve to counter the Israelis’ brutality and ruthlessness by taking revenge through acts of terror.

More than any previous government, this current shameless government particularly makes a mockery of Jewish values. But then Netanyahu and his charlatan ministers try to toe the line between what’s right and wrong by paying less than lip service to these violent pogroms. It is incomprehensible that we Jews, who have suffered from countless pogroms throughout the centuries, allow settlers who are living on land usurped from the Palestinians to commit such reprehensible acts with impunity.

The Harshness of the Occupation

Let me illustrate how deeply this Netanyahu government has degraded and tarnished Jewish values, which smacks in the face of those who speak of such values with pride but happily ignore them when it suits their needs.

In December, the son of a Palestinian mother and father was arrested and imprisoned after being accused of carrying out two bus attacks on settlers, killing two. Within days, Israeli security officials came to the family home, where he no longer lived, to map out the home for destruction. This is the standing Israeli policy, to demolish the home of a Palestinian terrorist who kills an Israeli to deter others from committing a similar crime.

The house was slated to be demolished in February; after failed appeals, and despite the fact that the son was still imprisoned with no sign of impending release, the Israeli army came to the home last month and leveled it to the ground. The suspect’s parents and four sisters, none of whom have been suspected or accused of any wrongdoing, now find themselves staring at a pile of rubble, which was only the day before a warm home that shielded them from all outside elements. While this inhumane practice continues with the current Netanyahu government and the vicious National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, the plight of the Palestinians is only worsening with no end in sight.

For the parents, their son was not a terrorist; he was a young man with dreams and aspirations, to make something of himself. I asked those Israelis who talk about Jewish values with pride, does the destruction of the home of a family and four children conform with Jewish values when the core of these values is rooted in compassion, in caring, in loving and healing another human being?

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who are proud of being devout Jews, maybe should take another look at what the Hebrew Bible teaches about crime and punishment. The book of Ezekiel (18:19 NIV) states: “The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.” Why then does a government that claims to be guided by Jewish values and religious ethics commit such naked crimes that make a mockery of these values enshrined in the Tanakh? To be sure, every day of occupation diminishes and tarnishes Jewish values.

But leave it to the wicked Smotrich who shamelessly stated that “The attempt to create an equivalency between murderous Arab terror and [Israeli] civilian counteractions, however serious they may be, is morally wrong and dangerous on a practical level.” On a practical level? Let me tell you, Mr. Smotrich, what the practical level is.

The way the Israeli government is treating the Palestinians is doing nothing but sowing the seeds for the next terrorist attack against innocent Israelis, for the next pogrom against innocent Palestinians, for the coming massive conflagration between Israelis and Palestinians that will claim the lives of hundreds if not thousands of innocent men, women, and children on both sides. That is the practical level.

Israel is now on a collision course with history. The Israelis must make up their minds. Do they want to live in an occupying country, an apartheid state that routinely oppresses other people, stamps on their dignity, and denies them their basic human rights while provoking violence and spreading fear and uncertainty, not knowing what tomorrow might bring? Or do they want to live in the country for which they were yearning for centuries, where justice is pursued with vigor, where every Jew, regardless of their religious affiliation, color, or country of origin can find a home, a refuge, be free, independent, and safe while fully adhering to the values that the Jews have proudly espoused?

Successive Netanyahu governments have betrayed what the Jews stood and suffered for throughout the centuries. Now he is determined to subordinate the Supreme Court and the appointment of judges to the whims of politicians, which will destroy Israel’s democracy and render it a de facto dictatorship that will rain havoc on the Palestinians without any accountability. Sadly, and unconsolably, Israel will become, if it hasn’t already, a liability rather than a source of pride and security for all Jews, especially to diaspora Jewry which constitutes the majority of the global Jewish population.

As long as the occupation continues, no Israeli can tell with any certainty where Israel will be in 10-15 years. The Israeli extremists who believe that they can indefinitely sustain the occupation, confiscate more territories, build new and expand current settlements, force despairing Palestinians to leave, and uproot others are ominously misguided and render a horrifying disservice to the country and to world Jewry. Can they really be so oblivious to the continuing rise of Palestinian militancy which Israel is nurturing and will only intensify and exact heavy blood and treasure from Israel? Palestinian youth whose futures have been usurped are happily sacrificing themselves to be free rather than live hopelessly in bondage.

As long as Israel continues to be an occupying power, it cannot and will not ever be in a position to claim the moral high ground rooted in Jewish values. It is now up to the Israeli public to demand an end to the 56 years of occupation and live up to the premise behind Israel’s creation: to be free, secure, inventive, and a light onto other nations.

The next article will argue that Palestinian leaders have missed many opportunities to make peace with Israel. Their resistance and unrealistic demands have played directly into Israel’s hand and severely sabotaged their national cause. They must come to terms with Israel’s existence in peace and security if they ever want to establish a state of their own. The third article will offer a way out of this continuing tragic conflict.

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Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Palestinians look at the rubble of a store following demolished their sheds by Israeli bulldozers, in Ras al-Amud in Jerusalem on June 02, 2014. Israel destroyed more than 500 Palestinian properties in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2013, displacing over 850 people, according to UN figures. Photo by Saeed Qaq

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This video was first published in December 2018.

The film reveals how the international trade in weapons – with the complicity of governments and intelligence agencies, investigative and prosecutorial bodies, weapons manufacturers, dealers and agents – fosters corruption, determines economic and foreign policies, undermines democracy and creates widespread suffering.

The film unravels a number of the world’s largest and most corrupt arms deals. It illustrates why this trade accounts for almost 40% of all corruption in global trade, and how it operates in a parallel legal universe, in which the national security elite who drive it are seldom prosecuted for their often illegal actions.

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“Farmland lost is farmland lost forever.” That catchy phrase is a popular slogan distributed by the Virginia-based land trust called the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC). While it’s an accurate statement, apparently, the PEC and its like-minded Green brethren are only concerned about losing vital farmland to housing developers. Meanwhile, thousands of farmers and ranchers are losing their industries to radical environmental policies supported and promoted by such groups. Obviously, hypocrisy runs deep in the leftist Green movement.

However, farmland is under attack across the nation, mainly under the guise of climate change and environmental protection. Let’s review some of the main threats America’s farmers are facing.

The central unifying issue driving the attack on America’s farming industry is “climate change.” SUSTAINABLE! That’s the trigger word driving the attack on farming. Green activists say we face an impending apocalypse and so society, they warn, must pursue a stated goal of achieving “sustainable development” or all will be lost. “Sustainable development” determines how food will be grown, processed, packaged, and marketed. Very specific rules determined what kind of crops may be grown, and how much land may be used for that purpose, while much of a farm’s private property is forced into open space for habitat, wetlands, and “supposedly endangered species.

Meanwhile, Biden’s Energy Czar, John Kerry, has accused small farms of being significant emitters of nitrogen. Of course, this is the primary attack on cattle for their burps, flatulence, and manure. The current term is “Climate Smart.” As sustainable development forces higher costs on the farmers, Biden’s massive inflation makes it nearly impossible for farmers to stay afloat.

While the Biden cabal is pushing to maneuver it all into place, the real driving force is being driven by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its Great Reset agenda. The WEF has actually launched something called its New Vision for Agriculture (NVA) initiative, which it defines as a “roadmap for Stakeholders.” Stakeholders are not farmers, property owners, or others in the agriculture industry. They are Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) many of whom have been working directly with the United Nations for decades to direct climate change policy.

“The World Economics Forum’s New Vision for Agriculture initiative is led by 17 global companies that are Industry Partners of the Forum,” according to the WEF/McKinsey report. It continues, “the 17 global companies that championed the initiative are Archer Daniels Midland, BASF, Bunge, Cargill, The Coca-Cola Company, Dupont, General Mills, Kraft Foods, Metro, Monsanto company, Nestle, PepsiCo, SABMiller, Syngenta, Unileve4r, Wal-Mart Stores, and Yara International.”

Now add the funds of private foundations such as the Rockefellers, Blackrock, and Gates Foundation, then the true road map of those stakeholders and their funders begins to emerge. These forces are NOT protectors of the environment; they are destroyers of it and 0ur current living standards.

Now comes the implementation of the plan. How do they intend to ultimately change the entire food production system of the nation and make it sustainable? Answer: target the land.

Wind and Solar

Reports from the solar industry as far back as 2017, indicate that the Midwestern states are the “growing hotspot for solar and wind power” to replace traditional coal and gas power plants – meaning thousands of acres of valuable farm land would be required to replace current energy sources that now use only a few acres. A World Bank study published in 2017 admitted that “clean energy” technology is “significantly more material intensive” than hydrocarbon energy sources, and that estimate didn’t even consider farmland destruction.

The solar panels are made of plastic – which takes oil to produce. Underneath those solar panels that run end to end, row by row, for thousands of acres, is cement for infrastructure wires. Little can grow underneath them – no grass, no animals. That’s how farmland is being destroyed.

In addition to solar, the Midwest states are also targeted for wind power. Wind power needs enormous amounts of oil for the turbines to turn. And those blades are not degradable when they no longer work. Again, they also need the massive infrastructure under the planned forests of turbines. How much raw material, including limestone, steel, aluminum, cobalt, and nickel will it take to produce a single wind turbine? And what about the transmission lines needed to get the electricity onto the power grid?

Picture thousands of acres of these turbines – the death of scenic views, of peaceful land, and in the air, nothing will be flying. Millions of birds, rapture, and endangered species destroyed – in the name of environmental protection. Ask the Interior Department how many birds are killed yearly. Such information, they will tell you, is classified. Why?

Wind and solar are a joke. Remember when we used to call environmentalists “Tree Huggers?” Well, where are they now? Why are they not standing up to stop wind and solar from destroying the environment? For example, the Wind industry has cleared over 17,283 acres in Scotland for wind farms. To do it they have wiped out 14,000,000 trees – to save the planet!

Wind and solar processes produce next to nothing for the power grid. If all other sources of fuels were banned and all power was to come from wind and solar, estimates are that it would only provide between 4% and 12% of the energy we need to run the country. Yet millions of acres of vital farmland – private property needed to produce our food supply — are targeted to be buried under this insanity.

Carbon Capture Pipelines

Those pushing for more solar and wind energy also champion carbon capture pipelines. They insist that manmade CO2 is driving climate change and therefore pipelines are needed to be used to safely bury this threat from fossil fuel plants into the ground. Here’s the scheme.

Private corporations have targeted thousands of acres of privately-owned, food-producing Midwest Corn Belt farmland to build several interconnecting pipelines. A letter being sent to targeted property owners from Navigator Heartland Greenway LLC says, “Navigator is proposing to build a large-scale carbon capture pipeline system spanning 1300 miles across five states in the Midwest…” The letter goes on to explain that “the pipeline will materially reduce the participant’s carbon footprint and further the global goal of carbon neutrality… The pipeline system… will capture carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from local facilities before these emissions reach the atmosphere and transport the CO2 safely via pipeline to a permanent and secure underground sequestration site in Illinois.”

There is no sound scientific reason for such a project. Trees and plants need CO2 to live. Here are some actual scientific facts that prove CO2 is not a pollutant but is necessary for a sound environment:

• More CO2 enhances plant growth.
• More CO2 boosts crop yields which helps feed more people worldwide.
• Nearly all plants increase photosynthesis in response to increasing CO2 (CO2
  fertilization). More plant growth means less topsoil erosion.
• More CO2 makes plants grow faster, with less stress and water. Moister soil.
• More CO2 helps plants to create natural repellants to fight insect predators.

The Carbon Capture Pipelines are unnecessary and dangerous to all of human society. Many scientists warn of a growing CO2 shortage that will lead to famine.

The U.S. Navy has produced a chart entitled “CO2 Starvation. The chart reports that average CO2 needs for plant life is 1,600 Parts Per Million(PPM). However, according to the Navy. we are currently at 400 PPM. These figures have been verified by other scientists, including Climate expert Dr. Willy Soon and Dr. Lee Merritt. Dr. Merritt also predicts a “dust bowl” phenomena as a result of plants starving from CO2. Millions of acres covered by solar panels and wind turbines will lead to the destruction of the environment.

Today, in targeted states, including Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Minnesota, there is growing opposition to the pipelines. Farmers are beginning to understand the threat to their property rights. In response, the corporations behind the scheme resort to ruthless intimidation tactics to scare the farmers into compliance as they boldly trespass on private farmland with armed guards and heavy equipment, damaging crops. With this tactic employed, will local and state governments stand with the farmers who feed us or the powerful corporations?

Attack on the Cattle Industry – Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef

“Meat consumption is devastating some of the world’s most valuable and vulnerable regions, due to the vast amount of land needed to produce animal feed.” The quote is from a report issued by one of the most powerful environmental NGOs, the World Wildlife Fund. They have made it their mission to stop beef consumption. How can they do that, you may ask?

First, the WWF was influential in creating the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. Quick to join were the four min packing companies that control access to the beef market, including Tysons, Cargil, JBS and National Beef. Next to join was the National Cattleman’s Beef Association (NCBA), the largest association representing the beef industry.

Working together, these organizations began to create new rules that coerced cattlemen to be “certified” to attain what is called “Beef Quality Assurance” recognition from the federal Department of Agriculture. This would grant them the label of being “sustainable,” of course. In the name of environmental protection, these new rules placed restrictions on water grazing, reduced productive uses of the ranchland to make way for wildlife habitat, and forced cattle growers to have smaller herds. All this served to make the ranching process more expensive.

Worst of all is the removal of “Nation of Origin” labeling, so consumers don’t know where their beef is coming from. This allows the packers to use foreign beef which is exempt from the strict Roundtable rules, making it much cheaper than American beef.

The WWF’s Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef is nothing short of a monopoly controlling the industry. There is no free market per se. A few years ago, an independent company called Northern Beef Packers was created at an investment cost of approximately $50 million to create an independent packing company not tied to the Roundtable. The four major packers simply lowered their costs to block the competition by making the price of beef so low that it drove the independent company out of business.

Many suspect the goal is to stop beef consumption and replace it with the fake meat now being offered by Bill Gates and others. Of course, the packers will still have something to market without contending with the animal rights lobby. These corporations will continue to stuff their pockets while gaining the power to set what products will be offered to consumers.

It’s important to once again emphasize that one of the main packing companies, Cargill, is one of the 17 global companies that are Industry Partners of the World Economic Forum’s New Vision for Agriculture, which, as already reported, is dedicated to transforming the U.S. food industry. Another piece of the puzzle put in its place.

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Tom DeWeese is one of the nation’s leading advocates of individual liberty, free enterprise, private property rights, personal privacy, back-to-basics education and American sovereignty and independence.

Featured image is from APC

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Israeli forces removed a Palestinian family from their home in occupied East Jerusalem early on Tuesday morning to make way for settler groups to take it over.

Around 20 heavily armed officers stormed the house in the Old City at dawn, forcing the current residents, the Sub Laban family, out of the building they have lived in for 70 years.

Mustafa Sub Laban, 72, was inside the house when officers arrived, while his wife, Nora Sub Laban, 68, was outside. 

The house is located in Aqabat al-Khalidiya neighbourhood, near al-Aqsa Mosque. 

“They [Israeli forces] don’t know democracy… They are a government of criminals, thieves who have stolen everything from us,” Nora told local media after returning to her home to find it seized by police. 

According to local media, eyewitnesses reported that Israeli forces, who were reinforced with special units, set up military checkpoints around the neighbourhood and surrounded the family home before storming it.  

Videos shared online showed members of the family pushed out into the streets, shouting and crying in distress.

“They have stolen homes, land, youth, children, women, they have stolen everything. The whole world witnessed what they did in Huwwara, Jenin, Nablus, Silwan and in Sheikh Jarrah as well as the Old City of Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa Mosque,” Nora said, sitting outside her home.

“I am surrounded by Israeli settlers, we are the only Arabs left here in this home. They hate us, you can see one of the settlers dancing around here, happy that they are taking our home from us.”

"Jerusalem remains Arab"… Jerusalemite Nora Sub Laban in front of her house in the Old City of occupied Jerusalem, after the occupation forces and settlers seized it pic.twitter.com/wBwX5zhaKm

— AlQastal News (@QastalNewsEn) July 11, 2023

Activists had came out to support the family and denounce the Israeli forces’ use of violence to seize the home. They were quickly dispersed along with journalists at the scene. 

Police arrested at least five people, according to media reports.

The removal of the family comes after the Israeli Supreme Court previously ruled in favour of a settler group, the Galicia Settlement Association, which claimed the house was owned by Jews before 1948.  

The Sub Laban family had been renting the house from the Jordanian government since 1953, with Nora living there since she was born.  

The family had been fighting the expulsion attempts in Israeli courts since 2010. 

“Imagine a family where the parents are all the time going to the Israeli court, where they’re putting all their money to a lawyer just to protect their property,” Ahmad Sub Laban, Mustafa and Nora’s son, previously told MEE. 

“I remember when I was young, my parents would always be going to the court. It was awful, all the time.” 

Nearly 700,000 Israeli settlers live in more than 250 settlements and outposts across the West Bank and East Jerusalem in violation of international law. 

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Featured image: Nora Sub Laban is seen outside of her home after being forcibly removed by Israeli forces (MEE/Oren Ziv)

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Several crucial decisions likely will be made at this week’s NATO summit meeting. The most important of all involves Ukraine’s application to join the Alliance. Zealotry for Ukraine in some NATO capitals is so strong that that a path to membership for that country is being considered even in the midst of an ongoing war and unresolved territorial disputes. The most likely move would be to approve a Membership Action Plan (MAP) for Kyiv, which normally is the final substantive measure that an applicant country must fulfill before being admitted to the Alliance. The usual pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine lobbyists in the West are pushing very hard for that step.

It is a sad comment on the judgment and prudence of NATO leaders that they are even considering such a move. The Kremlin has made it clear on multiple occasions since President George W. Bush first proposed NATO membership for Ukraine in 2008 that such a step would cross a bright red line as far as Russia’s vital security interests are concerned. Yet policymakers in the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations remained stunningly tone-deaf to Moscow’s repeated, ever-more-emphatic, warnings.

Bush’s initial diplomatic foray, which was supported by most East European members of the Alliance, was blunted by opposition from some of NATO’s older members, especially France and Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was especially reluctant to add Kyiv, citing both Ukraine’s endemic corruption and the danger of antagonizing Russia. Unfortunately, French-German resistance could only produce a compromise that delayed Ukraine’s ambitions to join NATO. No explicit membership invitation was extended in the final declaration from the 2008 Bucharest summit, but a commitment was made that Ukraine could join at some point in the future.

Moscow viewed even that move as a suspicious provocation. Subsequent U.S. and NATO actions deepened the level of suspicion and hostility. Western meddling in Ukraine to help nationalists overthrow the country’s elected, pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovich, in 2014 produced the first significant hostile response by the Kremlin, seizing Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula, the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Matters grew steadily worse after those events.

Indeed, the United States, the United Kingdom, and some other NATO countries worked to make Ukraine a member of the Alliance in all but name. Arms shipments flowed to Kyiv, Washington trained Ukrainian troops and built ties with Kyiv’s intelligence apparatus, and joint military exercises between NATO and Ukrainian forces took place. Russia’s 2021 demands for the withdrawal of Alliance troops and military hardware from its borders and insistence on Ukraine’s neutral status made it clear that President Vladimir Putin and his colleagues were not concerned merely about a NATO membership card for Kyiv. The West’s increasingly unsubtle attempt to make Ukraine an informal NATO military asset was considered equally unacceptable.

The failure of Washington and its alliance partners to heed the escalating warnings coming from Moscow was the principal contributor to the ongoing tragedy of the Russia-Ukraine war. Instead of backing away, however, the Biden administration and other NATO hardliners seem determined to make matters even worse. Not only have several countries provided Kyiv with ever more potent weaponry (as though it is an Alliance member warranting aid under Article 5), but the issue of formal membership is back on the table.

Offering to let Ukraine join NATO (now or in the future) would be the final insult and provocation to Russia. France and Germany should have stuck to their positions in 2008 and made it clear that the Alliance would never include Ukraine. A great deal of needless tragedy might have been avoided if they had done so. Instead of firmly closing the door, they accepted the eventual goal of NATO membership for Kyiv.

The key question now is whether France, Turkey, Hungary, and other more prudent NATO countries will stand firm and prevent an even greater folly. Germany, under the leadership of Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his odious, pro-war foreign minister Annalena Barbock, cannot be counted upon to act sensibly. However, because Alliance decisions supposedly must be made by consensus, opposition to Washington’s latest reckless initiative by those three countries should be more than sufficient. All of those governments, though, are under tremendous pressure from the United States and other members to go along with the latest reckless course.

Instead of caving to such bullying, they need to push Washington, London, Warsaw, and other centers of pro-Ukraine dogmatism in the opposite direction. The only hope for a peaceful Eastern Europe going forward is a fully neutral Ukraine. That country must have the same status as Austria. Anything else will remain an intolerable provocation to Moscow, generating fears that NATO will continue to use Kyiv in proxy wars against Russia. The current summit gives more prudent members of the Alliance an opportunity (perhaps the final opportunity) to save Europe from the consequences of the policies that Ukraine’s pro-war patrons are pushing.

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Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute, following a 37-year career at the Cato Institute. He is the author of 13 books and more than 1,200 articles on international affairs. His books include NATO: The Dangerous Dinosaur (2019).

Featured image: NATO soldiers during a parade to mark Independence Day in Kiev © Sputnik / Mykhailo Markiv

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While Americans were enjoying hot dogs and fireworks this Fourth of July, federal Judge Terry A. Doughty commemorated Independence Day by striking a blow for the separation of big tech and state. Specifically, he issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting a number of government officials and agencies from communicating with social media companies to request they censor certain posts.

Judge Doughty wrote that, “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” This may seem like hyperbole until one considers that the list of those affected by this injunction includes White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State and Health and Human Services Departments, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

Among the plaintiffs are Harvard Professor Martin Kulldorff and Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya. Professors Kulldorff and Bhattacharya were among the health experts who big tech censored at the behest of government because they dared question the government’s message regarding covid. People questioning government supported claims of the benefits of lockdowns, the efficacy and safety of covid vaccines, the use of masks to protect against infection, and vaccine immunity being superior to natural immunity was silenced.

Eventually the establishment was forced to admit that many of the arguments of those like Kulldorff and Bhattacharya were correct. However, by that point many of those courageous enough to speak out had already suffered irreparable damage to their reputations and careers. Contrary to the covid authoritarians and other users of science claims to promote statist policies like the anti-“climate change” movement, science is in fact never settled.

While much of the lawsuit concerns covid censorship, some of the components revolve around efforts to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. The effort to suppress and discredit the story may have influenced the election. Some Biden voters would have voted differently had they had full access to the information.

The suppression of the truth about covid and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story were both justified as serving a “higher good.” With regard to covid, the online censorship was justified as necessary to protect public health. In the case of the laptop story, it was justified as necessary to prevent Donald Trump from winning a second term. The now more widely known revelations regarding Hunter Biden’s business dealings and the possibility that his father not just profited from them but used his position in government to be an active participant may help Donald Trump regain the Oval Office in 2024.

Reading the emails between government officials and employees of big tech companies shows that government officials clearly believed they had every right to tell these private companies how to run their businesses. The government officials even “reminded” them that the companies were in danger of having increased regulations imposed on them by the White House and Congress. This shows the folly of those who think that increasing government involvement with big tech will somehow reduce big tech censorship. The only way to make the internet a free speech zone is to build on Judge Doughty’s decision: separate big tech and state.

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Journalist Celia Farber is the author of “Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS.” In it, she highlights the work of virologist and retrobiologist Peter Duesberg, who since 1987 has insisted that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS

According to Duesberg, retroviruses such as HIV are harmless and do not cause disease. And, up until Dr. Robert Gallo claimed he’d discovered HIV in his laboratory in 1984, and determined that it caused AIDS, this was the scientific consensus

Duesberg was vehemently attacked by AIDS researchers and activists, and internationally discredited by media for not going along with the AIDS narrative promoted by the medical establishment, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci

As with COVID-19, one of the key tools used to promote the “HIV causes AIDS” narrative was the use of the PCR test. There are also other similarities to what happened with COVID, including the vilification and discrediting of scientists and therapies that could effectively address the disease

Bactrim was an inexpensive generic drug that effectively treated AIDS-related pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, which was frequently fatal. This drug, like ivermectin, was withheld. Instead, Fauci insisted AIDS patients be treated with AZT, a horrendously toxic and expensive cancer drug that was never proven to work, and which killed an estimated 300,000 AIDS patients, most of them gay men

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In this video, I interview journalist Celia Farber about her recently republished book, “Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS.” As a young reporter working for SPIN magazine, Farber started questioning the official narrative around AIDS, and this book is the outgrowth of her decades-long investigation into and writing about this “hot potato” topic.

Long before censorship went mainstream, Farber was put through the wringer. In 2006, she published an article in Harper’s Magazine titled “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science.” In it, she highlighted the work of virologist and retrobiologist Peter Duesberg, who insisted that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.

In my view, Duesberg was brilliant, but like so many other brilliant scientists, he was widely discredited for not going along with the narrative promoted by the conventional medical establishment.

As a result of her reporting, Farber was vehemently attacked by leading AIDS researchers and activists,¹ so much so, she ended up suing three of the attackers for defamation. The New York County Supreme Court dismissed² her claim in 2011 and upheld the verdict in 2013. Still, she did not quit or back down, and kept searching for the truth.

‘The Passion of Duesberg’

As explained by Farber, Duesberg worked at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, one of the most well-respected scientific institutions in the world. After moving to the United States, he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1987, he published a paper in Cancer Research, proposing that retroviruses are not the cause of cancer, nor the cause of AIDS. According to his scientific biographer, this was the paper that “sealed his scientific doom forever after.” Farber notes:

“Duesberg mapped the genetic structure of retroviruses. So to him, yes, they were entities, but no, they didn’t do anything. They didn’t infect or kill cells. They were harmless. And he had phrases like, ‘HIV, that’s a pussycat. It’s not going to do anything. Saying that HIV is going to cause AIDS is like saying you’re going to conquer China by killing three soldiers a day.’

In other words, there’s no ‘there’ there. There was no cell death. And fascinatingly, or disturbingly, the HIV orthodoxy never contested that. So, I would say they had a supernatural belief in HIV. They would say, ‘We just know HIV causes AIDS,’ and anybody who doesn’t know that is dangerous, homophobic, murderous and so forth.”

Mid-Air Flip in the ‘Scientific Consensus’

As explained by Farber, up until Dr. Robert Gallo claimed he’d discovered HIV in his laboratory in 1984, and determined that it caused AIDS, the scientific consensus had been that retroviruses, as a class, were not pathogenic.

“So, there’s this very strange midair complete flip where everything changes overnight,”Farber says. “It’s like a revolutionary change, and the classical scientists of integrity were so thrown by this. They didn’t even attend the press conference.

They didn’t think there was any chance, as they said, that this would fly, this press conference where Robert Gallo announces that a so-called retrovirus is the cause of AIDS.

Back to Peter. What he does that’s so monumental in the history of American science, post 1980s, is that he, first of all, dissents. And he has no idea that he’s doing anything dangerous, never mind career annihilating. And he’s conducting himself as a scientist should. He’s innocent in what he’s doing, and it’s like a building just falls on him.

Next thing you know, his name becomes synonymous with ‘wrong, dangerous, homophobic, murderous.’ And then this culture kicks in where it becomes a sport and a career advancement to trash Duesberg if you have anything to do with AIDS research.

It was gladiatorial. They went out of their way to come up with lurid and hideous things to say about him. And it went all over the international press. So, he became this scapegoat for the errors and crimes of [Dr. Anthony] Fauci’s AIDS apparatus.

Meanwhile, over in AIDS land, everything they were predicting and terrorizing people with was not coming true at all, was not panning out, whereas Duesberg’s predictions and critiques were panning out exactly. And the more he was right and they were wrong, the more trashed he got.

So, in a sense, what I’ve covered is not just about the nitty-gritty of the science and who’s correct. It’s about this moment of where science becomes, under Tony Fauci, ‘woke.’ It wasn’t called woke then. It was then called political correctness.

So, in other words, ‘AIDS spreads like this or like that and is going to affect everybody,’ because that’s what we’re supposed to say politically, not because that’s true biologically or epidemiologically. So, we’re all stuck now in this brand new era where you get flogged for observing 2+2 = 4 …

The question fascinated me because I just couldn’t square the circle. How come these guys over here are all saying this, and then this top scientist is saying this, and then others rallied around him? Kary Mullis, who invented PCR, and was a staunch defender and friend of Duesberg, always said, ‘He’s absolutely right.’

So, the dissent movement was saying, ‘There must be proof in science.’ Gallo provided no proof that HIV was the cause of AIDS or a coherent pathogen. So, it just kept growing and growing, and with a few exceptions, I had the field to myself. Nobody wanted to interview these people because it was absolutely radioactive to your career, and I can certainly attest to that.

I actually didn’t realize it was dangerous. I was naïve. And I was already way too far out at sea when the bludgeoning began and I realized how dangerous it, in fact, was, and that the people we were up against were of a much more dangerous variety than I had realized.”

Fauci’s Legacy: A Lifelong Suppression of Science

Farber’s experience is proof positive that even four decades before Fauci sold us on his destructive COVID protocols, he had the power to destroy people and convince the entire country to support a fake narrative.

“Let me speak a little bit how he did that, having lived through it. Let’s say that an editor at a major magazine or newspaper became interested in a story and thought to get a reporter on it. Somehow, he had, I guess it was a surveillance network. He knew and went in there, and somehow the story dies. The reporter gets taken off it. The show gets canceled.

I had one friend who had a major local ABC show. It was a new talk show, and he had Duesberg on and myself. The next thing you know, the whole show is canceled, and he never worked again. It was GDR [German Democratic Republic] stuff and it was across the board. It was 100% consistent that anybody who touched it [was warned they’d be destroyed] … That was their word, ‘destroy.’

One top level AIDS researcher named John P. Moore sent out an open declaration of war [against AIDS] ‘denialists’ that said, ‘We will crush you. We crush all of you.’ So that was the climate of it. Now, after all these years, I’m realizing they were part of something much larger.

They were part of this new revolutionary, post-modern, 2+2 does not equal 4 science. ‘It is whatever we tell you it is.’ They created that empire of terror during AIDS, for sure.

It’s just that not that many people knew about it because it was still within the corridors of certain risk groups and some unfortunate journalists or scientists who got caught up in it. Then with COVID, they threw a much bigger net because … it was a little more difficult to get people into the trap.”

The PCR Scam and Suppression of Useful Drugs

As with COVID-19, one of the key tools used to promote the “HIV causes AIDS” narrative was the use of the PCR test, which the inventor, Mullis, was vehemently against.

The PCR was used to measure “viral load,” which was supposed to give you a sense of how sick or well you could expect to be. This kept HIV-positive patients going back to the doctor to get tested repeatedly. But it was nothing more than a numbers game, just as it was during COVID.

There are other similarities to what happened with COVID, including the vilification and discrediting of scientists and therapies that could effectively address the disease. Just like they vilified ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, even going out of their way to fund fraudulent studies to discredit these drugs, they did the same during the AIDS epidemic.

For example, bactrim was an inexpensive drug that effectively treated AIDS-related pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, which was frequently fatal. This drug, like ivermectin, was withheld. Instead, Fauci insisted AIDS patients be treated with AZT, a horrendously toxic and expensive cancer drug that was never proven to work, and which killed hundreds of thousands of AIDS patients.

“AZT is one of the darkest, most shocking chapters. AZT was a chemotherapy compound that was shelved in the early ’60s for being too toxic for human use. For reasons that cannot be fathomed, they pulled that compound out of the drawer, put it in capsule form and made it the first drug to treat AIDS, a condition of immune devastation …

The estimate I’ve heard is that upward of 300,000, mostly gay men, died from high-dose AZT in the early years. That’s 1,200 to 1,800 milligrams. All of a sudden, Fauci drops the dose to 500 mg and people start dying less, which incredibly he spun into that he was saving lives because they lowered the dose of what was killing people.

So, a lot of these dark tricks are exactly the same as COVID. AZT was a black swan event, I would say, in medicine. But what it achieved, that we’re still suffering from, was this demolition of the formerly conservative FDA drug approval process, which was turned into something bad, evil. ‘You only support [the FDA drug approval process] if you hate people and you want them to die. You want it to take 10 years to test a drug? That’s cruel’ …

So, a lot of what we’re in today, like these insane ways of medicating and treating people without any regard for safety or possibility of death, a lot of these concepts were put into place during the AIDS epidemic.”

AIDS Activists Played Into Fauci’s Hands

Farber also reviews how AIDS activists empowered Fauci to circumvent historical safety protocols to get experimental drugs to patients as quickly as possible. AIDS activists also acted as Fauci’s foot soldiers or henchmen in that they helped him quash the opposition. In many ways we saw this during COVID as well. People brainwashed into believing masks could block viruses, for example, acted as civilian enforcers of Fauci’s clearly unscientific recommendations.

“It’s a good question ‘Who was Fauci in the beginning there?’ How did he transform into somebody so ruthless, so unaccountable? And I’m being nice right now. As an historian of all of this, I place a lot of credence in the symbiosis between Fauci and the AIDS activists, because the AIDS activists were revolutionary, and they did have a revolutionary creed, which was, ‘By any means necessary, we demand what we demand.’

And [Fauci] was a bureaucrat. A trained Jesuit … I think he’s a perfect general in a much bigger war that seeks to destroy many things outside of science. That’s my take on it. I think this is the big international war that seeks domination over human beings, period. Full stop. And these spectral virus diseases are a good revolutionary tool to get us there.

We made the mistake of seeing them as genuine outbreaks of something … I don’t believe any of that anymore. I think this is all part and parcel of the great leap forward.”

Fauci Spent a Lifetime Undermining Health Wisdom

Farber continues:

“One thing Fauci really honed over so many years is that nothing [but drugs or vaccines] makes a difference. There’s no terrain. Nutrition doesn’t matter. No research went to that, and it was absolutely scorned, again, both by Fauci and by the AIDS activists and so forth.

So, it was a culture of ‘You’re a machine, you’ve got this bad bug in you.’ It’s the machine model of biology. The bad bug is eating up your T-cells on an algorithm that’s inevitable and unstoppable, and nothing will influence that. Getting out in the sun, swimming in the ocean, eating well, what you think, whether you meditate or pray, none of that’s going to affect it.

So, in that sense, he’s advocating for a complete inversion of everything we all know to be true about health. And that’s really his legacy. He spent 40, 50 years getting Americans to think about everything else but how to stay healthy.”

How We Can Undermine the Public Health Tyranny

In addition to that, Fauci has also played a central role in furthering the ideology of technocracy and transhumanism, which aims to implement a One World Government under the veil of global biodefense. What we’re facing now is public health tyranny, in the sense that food and medicine are being turned into tools to control and manipulate entire populations.

“With AIDS, there was still choice,” Farber says. “You were heavily brainwashed. But if you got tested and you tested HIV positive, you still had a choice to take the drugs or not. What they are going to do next is, of course, what we’re all worried about.

I think people are largely woken up, very much so. But does it matter how awake you are if they have seized control of the whole apparatus of functional life? That’s what we have to stop, and I want to talk about how. How is that done? I think, by and large, it’s done by keeping your body healthy, keeping your mind clear, keeping your soul clear, and then you can go from there.

We can’t necessarily control whatever they’re going to try to do. But the good news is, to my mind, how stupid they are, how sloppy they are, how many mistakes they’ve made, and how much people hate them right now.”

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Notes

¹ Courthouse News February 27, 2013

² Supreme Court Decision November 2, 2011

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Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS

By Celia Farber

Publisher: ‎ Chelsea Green Publishing (March 23, 2023)

ISBN-10: ‎ 1645022072

ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1645022077

On April 23, 1984, in a packed press conference room in Washington, DC, the secretary of health and human services declared, “The probable cause of AIDS has been found.” By the next day, “probable” had fallen away, and the novel retrovirus later named HIV became forever lodged in global consciousness as “the AIDS virus.”

Celia Farber, then an intrepid young reporter for SPIN magazine, was the only journalist to question the official narrative and dig into the science of AIDS. She reported on the “evidence” that was being continually cited and repeated by health officials and the press, the deadliness of AZT, and Dr. Fauci’s trials on children, infants, and pregnant mothers. Throughout, Faber’s reportage was largely ignored. She was maligned, maliciously attacked, and ultimately canceled.

Now, forty years after her original reporting, Farber’s Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS is reissued with a new foreword by Mark Crispin Miller, shining much-needed light on her groundbreaking work once again. More relevant than ever, this book serves as an essential foundation to understanding its catastrophic sequel: COVID-19. Serious Adverse Events makes clear that the tactics employed at the height of HIV/AIDS―the fearmongering, cancel culture, and “woke” takeover of science, medicine, and journalism―persist today. The response to COVID-19 isn’t new: it is a well-trod and dangerous path in the social landscape.

Click here to purchase.

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A major scandal is unfolding internationally which is shaking the global medical establishment.

Click here to view the video

Our landmark paper with autopsy evidence (largest ever) showing 74% of sudden deaths post COVID-19 vaccination were caused by the vaccines, was censored within 24 hours by a top medical journal!

Click here to view the video

Latest update (I am a co-author and adjudicator): 

The paper is currently on the Zenodo server (Swiss server operated by CERN – European Organization for Nuclear Research)

It currently has over 41,000 downloads and 52,000 views.

Summary of Findings 

This landmark paper reviewed the largest number of autopsy reports published to date relating to COVID-19 vaccination, injury and sudden death.

We identified 44 papers with 325 autopsy cases and three physicians (including myself) independently reviewed all deaths and found:

• 74% of all deaths were either caused or contributed to by COVID vaccines
• 53% of these deaths involved the cardiovascular system
• 17% of these deaths involved the hematological system
• 8% of these deaths involved the respiratory system
• 7% of these deaths involved multiple organ systems
• The mean number of days from vaccination to death was 14.3 days.

My Take… 

This is one of the most important papers of the entire COVID-19 era.

Even though it was censored by Lancet (parent company Elsevier) within 24 hours, when they saw that it was being downloaded hundreds of times per MINUTE, it is currently submitted for peer review and will get published.

This paper will lay the foundation upon which other papers will build as we collectively expose the toxicity of the COVID-19 vaccines.

I want to thank Dr.Peter McCullough for his leadership and his tireless efforts, and my colleagues at the Wellness Company for their support and hard work in helping bring this important paper forward.

The “died suddenly” phenomenon post COVID-19 vaccination is very real and devastating.

COVID-19 vaccines should be immediately taken off the market and the entire LNP/mRNA platform should be suspended and thoroughly investigated.

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

Featured image is from NaturalNews.com

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This country will still have to make major reforms, despite having already brought its military up to the bloc’s average standards after serving as its anti-Russian proxy since February 2022, so the latest development is just symbolic. Even NATO itself doesn’t expect Ukraine to join anytime soon, which that’s why it’s being extended an “Israel-style umbrella” instead.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba tweeted on Monday that “NATO allies have reached consensus on removing MAP from Ukraine’s path to membership” ahead of this week’s summit. This isn’t as important as it seems, however, since his country has arguably fulfilled the typical military obligations of those who participate in Membership Action Plans (MAPs). The Ukrainian Armed Forces are trained and equipped by NATO for waging its proxy war against Russia, thus making it a de facto member of the bloc.

Following intensive talks, NATO allies have reached consensus on removing MAP from Ukraine's path to membership. I welcome this long-awaited decision that shortens our path to NATO. It is also the best moment to offer clarity on the invitation to Ukraine to become member.

— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) July 10, 2023

Even so, Biden told reporters last month that “we’re not going to make it easy” for Ukraine to join NATO. He then said over the weekend prior to setting off for Europe that “I don’t think there is unanimity in NATO about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the NATO family now, at this moment, in the middle of a war.” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan also informed reporters en route to the UK that Ukraine still needs to undertake far-reaching “democratic, security sector, and economic reforms” before joining.

The policy statements shared above discredit what Kuleba also wrote in his tweet about how removing Ukraine’s MAP requirement “shortens our path to NATO.” While it’s true that this former Soviet Republic is already a de facto member by dint of waging the bloc’s proxy war against Russia using their training, equipment, intelligence, logistics, and other forms of support, it can’t formalize this status with the guarantees that Article 5 is commonly thought to entail without completing other major reforms.

That being the case, while the military aspect of Ukraine’s MAP is arguably redundant as was explained, the other dimensions have yet to be fulfilled and might not be for quite some time until long after the hot phase of its conflict with Russia ends. In other words, Kuleba’s announcement mostly only serves to manipulate popular perceptions about Ukraine’s path towards formally joining NATO when the reality is that it’s still far very away from doing so.

This observation is also based on the other part of Sullivan’s press gaggle en route to the UK where he explained a bit more about what the US envisages regarding “Israel-style security assurances” to Ukraine. According to him, this will involve a series of bilateral commitments “to provide various forms of military assistance, intelligence and information sharing, cyber support and other forms of material support” for a presently undetermined period of time.

His team is obviously only considering this scenario as an alternative to formal NATO membership otherwise they’d be investing their time in discussing the details of Article 5 if they truly expected Ukraine to join the bloc anytime soon. Foreign Affairs recently wrote that there are some who believe that “the sort of weapons, training, and diplomatic support already being given to Kyiv are sufficient to meet NATO’s Article 5 mandate, meaning it is not necessary to also promise or deploy military forces.”

They have a valid point too since Article 5 doesn’t mandate the use of armed force but only “such action as [a member state] deems necessary” to assist those under attack, which does indeed mean that the bloc’s existing support to Ukraine satisfies this in principle. The US’ “Israel-style security assurances” would therefore formalize the support that’s already being provided, which importantly remains below the level of directly engaging Russian forces like many wrongly assume that Article 5 mandates.

From an American soft power perspective, it’s better for the public not to have any false expectations regarding their country’s security commitments to Ukraine such as those that they’d imagine that its formal membership in NATO would entail. That’s not to say that the US won’t resort to armed force in defense of existing members like the those along its eastern flank, which it would feel compelled to do in order to retain Western unity in that event, but just that the case of Ukraine is qualitatively different.

Not only does it remain in a state of hot conflict with Russia, which disqualifies it from membership until the conflict ends, but it also has to resolve all border disputes too. The first is much easier to do than the second, so Ukraine’s formal membership will either be indefinitely postponed or NATO would have to agree to grant it an exemption from this requirement. Since the latter is unlikely due to the risk that this could embroil them in war with Russia, they therefore settled on the “Israel-style” workaround instead.

Politico reported on Sunday that the US is working with the UK, France, and Germany to create a so-called “umbrella” under which they can multilaterally manage their military aid to Ukraine, with this potentially being the most significant outcome to emerge from this week’s summit. In essence, it would formalize the support that they’re already providing to Kiev without likely committing to employing armed force against Russia on its behalf in order to temper expectations.

It’s important not only to avoid getting Ukrainians’ and average Westerners’ hopes unrealistically high, which could completely discredit NATO if it fails to fulfill what’s popularly expected of it, but also to manage the bloc’s very dangerous security dilemma with Russia. If Moscow was convinced that its enemies will employ armed force against it on Kiev’s behalf, then it could be tempted to preempt this by carrying out a first-strike against NATO, hence why all efforts must be made for it not to think so.  

For that reason, it would be highly irresponsible from the US’ soft power and strategic perspectives to signal that it might directly engage Russian forces on behalf of Ukraine as part of the “Israel-like umbrella” that it’s planning as an alternative to that country’s formal NATO membership. No such commitments are therefore expected to be made, but on the off chance that they are, then it would signify that warmongers regained policymaking influence from their rapidly ascending pragmatic rivals.

The earlier cited statements from Biden and Sullivan don’t give any indication to think that the US will promise to employ armed force against Russia on Ukraine’s behalf, nor did NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenbeg’s press conference from Friday either. To the contrary, every signal that’s been sent from top officials until this point is that Ukraine won’t join NATO and thus shouldn’t expect armed force being employed in its support in accordance with the popular interpretation of Article 5.

Circling back to the lede, one can now better understand why removing Ukraine’s MAP requirement for joining NATO isn’t as important as it seems. This country will still have to make major reforms, despite having already brought its military up to the bloc’s average standards after serving as its anti-Russian proxy since February 2022, so the latest development is just symbolic. Even NATO itself doesn’t expect Ukraine to join anytime soon, which that’s why it’s being extended an “Israel-style umbrella” instead.

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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“A riddle wrapped up in an enigma” is a shortened form of a quotation made in October 1939, just one month after the Second World War had begun, by Sir Winston Churchill in a radio broadcast to the British people. At the time, Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty. The full comment was “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma…” Somehow that statement popped up into my head as I tried to decipher the meaning of the Yevgeny Prigozhin alleged coup attempt in Russia on Saturday June 24^th, an unanticipated development that has energized the imaginations of pundits and government officials worldwide, generating a torrent of written articles as well as many hours’ worth of spoken commentary.

Predictably, the blather coming out of US Government officials like Secretary of State Antony Blinken is worthless propaganda-speak, replaying the standard line about evil Russia and the autocrat Vladimir Putin, who, per Blinken, is in serious trouble in a Russia that is in chaos over the continuing Ukraine war, which, he claims, the Kremlin is losing.

President Joe Biden also played his part in distancing the US from the Prigozhin affair by declaring emphatically that the US government was not behind the alleged coup attempt, though he also ladled it on thick last Wednesday by declaring, like Blinken, that Russia was losing the war in Ukraine and Putin has become “a bit of a pariah around the world.” Both those assertions could easily be challenged.

There was almost no bloodshed in the initial move by Wagner Group mercenary units to Rostov on Don, which houses the Army’s Southern Command. Afterwards, while on the road to Moscow, there was no resistance from regular army troops along the way, though there are reports that several Russian army helicopters and a surveillance aircraft shadowing the column were shot down. But surely beyond that something potentially game changing vis-à-vis Russia-Ukraine came close to happening even if we do not yet know with any certitude why or even how it all occurred. The central problem is that there are many explanations of what took place that are plausible but which cannot be confirmed based on the fact that no one directly involved in the event’s genesis or execution is likely to provide any honest answers to questions that might logically be raised.

Consider for a moment some of the elements in the drama. As it was occurring, Putin initially went on television to denounce the apparent march on Moscow by the Wagner group soldiers as an attempted coup d’etat which made participants traitors to the Russian government. Prigozhin, however, quickly rejected that characterization, claiming that he was making his move to confront the generals in Moscow who were failing in their duty to win the war against Kiev as expeditiously as possible, i.e. possibly because they were dragging their heels by avoiding any risk and making a war that could have been concluded seem interminable and possibly even unwinnable.

The march on Moscow should thus be seen as an “demonstration of dissent” according to Prigozhin. And to thicken the plot even further, two senior generals Valery Gerasimov and Sergei Surovikin have not been seen in public since Saturday and there are unconfirmed reports that one of them, Surovikin, a former commander of Russian forces in Ukraine, has been arrested. Gerasimov is Army chief of staff and the current commander of forces in Ukraine while Surovikin is now serving as his deputy. The handing over of Gerasimov was one of the demands allegedly made by Prigozhin.

US intelligence sources are also now claiming that Surovikin knew about the rebellion in advance, which suggests that CIA and the Pentagon also knew about it. And there is also a comment made by Ukraine’s head of defense intelligence, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, who said Kyiv knew both about Prigozhin’s plans and a separate plot by Russia’s intelligence agency the FSB to assassinate him. If any or all of that is true, that rather suggests that there might have been a real foreign intelligence agency driven plot against Putin or at least that the Kremlin is proceeding with caution to include the generals’ accounts of their activities being verified to make sure they were not complicit in any way with either the CIA or the Ukrainian government or Prigozhin himself.

So one has to ask whether Putin’s advisers and his intelligence resources were accurately portraying what Prigozhin was up to or was the speech about “treason” a cover story designed to hide a more complicated sequence of events. Did, for example, Putin’s intel chiefs really know in advance that the “coup” or what is possibly better described as an “armed protest” would be taking place? If that is so, did they let it start, assuming that it could not succeed, to attempt to rally the Russian people behind the government and the war? And an even deeper, darker possibility is that the entire episode was contrived by Prigozhin and Putin in support of some still undetermined agenda.

Prigozhin’s subsequent exile to Belarus in exchange for his ending the insurrection and the dropping of any-and-all charges against the alleged Wagner Group insurgents rather suggests that the business of what it was all about was not as straightforward as it seemed on day one. Whilst denouncing the “mutiny plotters” Putin carefully distinguished between those individuals and “the majority of Wagner Group soldiers and commanders” who “are also Russian patriots, loyal to their people and their state.” Indeed, Prigozhin’s role aside, the Wagner Group was founded and commanded by former military intelligence (GRU) officers and funded and provisioned by the Ministry of Defense. Beyond that, Wagner’s soldiers were heroes, the legendary victors of the “battle of Bakhmut.”

And then there is the possible US role denied by Biden. The Washington Post has confirmed that the claim that the CIA knew about what it referred to as the “rebellion,” i.e. the plan to march on Moscow, at least several days in advance. The Agency briefed the so-called Gang of Eight in Congress regarding what was expected to occur but it has not shared what it knew with the public. That might suggest to some that the United States and quite likely Britain were behind an actual coup attempt and may have even initiated it, possibly as some kind of false flag operation, a scenario suggested by Putin in his television address where he hinted darkly that

“They [the West and Ukraine] wanted Russian soldiers to kill each other, so that soldiers and civilians would die, so that in the end Russia would lose, and our society would break apart and choke on bloody civil strife (…) They rubbed their hands, dreaming of getting revenge for their failures at the front and during the so-called counter-offensive, but they miscalculated.”

That is a pretty direct accusation of presumed guilt and it has been suggested that Prigozhin may have met secretly with Ukrainian and NATO intelligence officers in Africa where Wagner has also been operating. If that is true, he might have been recruited by CIA or MI-6, or possibly even was allowed to cooperate with them after consulting with Putin, again in support of an as-of-yet undetermined objective, though seriously embarrassing the US and NATO might have been envisioned.

And it is important to remember that Prigozhin might have had what would be best described as a personal grievance against the generals in Moscow and also against Putin. Many of the commentators on his “rebellion” ignore the important fact that he is a businessman, not a soldier.

He is an oligarch who made his billions largely by catering to the military and government and he has sometimes been referred to as “Putin’s chef.” Given that, his primary interests center on protecting his investments and assets, of which the Wagner mercenary group is one. He has been dismayed at how his manpower has been getting exploited in desultory fighting that seems to go nowhere and has been loudly complaining for months about various issues relating to the progress of the war.

Concerning Wagner, Prigozhin was about to get demoted on July 1^st when Wagner was supposed to sign a contract that would place it under the de facto control of the Russian Ministry of Defense, with at least a third of its active strength being transferred to Belarus for garrison duty against Polish threats, though subsequent reports indicate that the soldiers have not begun to move from their existing bases in Russia and Ukraine.

Interestingly, Prigozhin, who strongly opposed and actually refused to sign the contract, was reportedly in his exile in Belarus and was not seen for many days immediately after the coup attempt, though the Kremlin has now revealed that he actually met with Putin five days after the alleged mutiny during a three hour meeting to pledge his loyalty also attended by both Wagner and regular army officers.

There have, however, been subsequent reports of a possible brief trip by Prigozhin to his hometown St. Petersburg in Russia early last week. The visit had an intriguing angle to it as Prigozhin reportedly visited the Federal Security Service (FSB) office to pick up his small arsenal of personal weapons and a large quantity of cash and gold bars, which had been confiscated when his lavish principal residence and offices in and near the city were searched after he was detained. Multiple passports and a large number of theatrical type costumes were also obtained in the mansion together with a few sledgehammers – a tool the Wagner group allegedly used to murder defectors, numerous pictures of Prigozhin in various disguises as well as a stuffed alligator and “a framed photo which is purported to show the severed heads of [Prigozhin’s] enemies.”

In an impromptu interview last Thursday Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko told surprised reporters that Prigozhin has apparently remained in St. Petersburg in spite of brokered peace deal granting him exile status in Belarus that was guaranteed by Lukashenko himself, who opined that for all he knows Prigozhin might well be back in Moscow. There has also been some speculation that Prigozhin is back in Russia to somehow cooperate in the breakup of his business empire. If all of that is true, something very strange is going on.

Indeed, it is to be presumed that many of Prigozhin’s business interests and the Wagner Group are now being taken over by the Russian state. Indeed, one Russian Member of Parliament Andrey Kartapolov has suggested that the disputed contract was the initial principal reason for Prigozhin’s “mutiny.” There are also claims that the amnesty and changes in ownership of Prigozhin’s assets notwithstanding, there will be investigations of Wagner’s internal operations, to include its corrupt spending of Ministry of Defense money, which apparently benefited Prigozhin directly and possibly immensely. The personal grievance issue also opens the door to the possibility that Prigozhin was cleverly playing his own game in an attempt to maintain his status and benefits as director and head of the group, possibly making him in intelligence jargon a double or even a triple agent depending on how many levels and varieties of his numerous potential contacts he has been manipulating.

One point that Prigozhin made that most sources concede to have resonance is his claim that the Ukraine war should be pushed to a conclusion, with the implication that the Russian people are getting tired of it.

In effect, he was challenging why Russia went to war in the first place as well as the execution of it since that time. Colonel Douglas Macgregor opines that Putin will have to think hard over whether he can continue the relatively slow methodical destruction of the Ukrainian Army or speed things up, with a corresponding increase in deaths, to bring an end to the process and avoid unrest among the Russian public and also among the many grumbling rank-and-file soldiers over the issue of how the war is being fought. There are reports from Moscow that the Putin regime is indeed responding to possible unrest, with the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) monitoring social media posts and internet inquiries by ordinary Russians to determine levels of public support. Ukrainian sources, admittedly unreliable, are claiming that 17 out of Russia’s 46 regions might have supported Prigozhin.

So what do I think? I believe that CIA has come to the conclusion that the “coup” as it played out was a “deception operation” carried out by Prigozhin and Putin inter alia to embarrass the western intelligence agencies which may have been able to contact Prigozhin and induce him somehow to march on Moscow.

Beyond that, whether Prigozhin as this played out may have changed his mind on how to perform due to exposure of the plan to Russian intelligence or because he never intended to comply with any agreement in the first place is unknowable at this point.

So, was there a real insurrection or coup? I honestly don’t know but rather suspect that Prigozhin seriously wanted to challenge the generals in Moscow over how the war was being fought.

Was there a western and NATO hand in what developed? Almost certainly, though exactly how that developed is unclear and may never be known. Ditto how the Russian side was playing the cards it was dealt though the dropping of charges against Prigozhin rather suggests that there was considerable maneuvering behind the scenes to produce an outcome that would not heighten the admittedly low-level threat of the march on Moscow turning into a removal of Putin’s government. The coup story still has considerable legs in the US and western media, which predictably are out to fry Vladimir Putin, and there is even considerable reporting and commentary coming from Russian sources. It will be very interesting to see what might surface in the next several weeks.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The U.S. seeks to transform India into a center for resupplying and maintenance of naval vessels in the South Asia region, where it has been stretched thin with such capabilities.

U.S. President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to comprehensive defense and economic partnerships when Modi visited the White House in late June for a summit with Biden.

“The U.S.-India Major Defense Partnership has emerged as a pillar of global peace and security,” the joint statement from the summit reads.

The U.S. will provide India with support to develop infrastructure that will be used to resupply, repair and maintain ships and aircraft.

“We’ll have much more to follow in the near future, but the aim here is to make India a logistics hub for the United States and other partners in the Indo-Pacific region,” said Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, to reporters in late June.

As part of this effort, the U.S. Navy will sign ship repair agreements with Indian shipyards.

The navy has concluded a Master Ship Repair Agreement with the Larsen & Toubro shipyard near the Indian city of Chennai, according to the White House. The navy is close to finalizing separate deals with two other shipbuilders, based in Mumbai and Goa.

The U.S. military looks to build readiness for quickly handling resupply activities and repairs in the Indo-Pacific region. If the navy has access to more hubs in the region, then vessels and aircraft will waste less time pausing operations for both. The time savings can be allocated to joint exercises with other countries.

“There’s a big gap between the bases the United States sustains in the bilateral hub agreements they have in the Middle East and then the Western Pacific,” said Jeffrey Payne, assistant professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies. “So, India fulfills this.”

At present, Japan and Singapore serve as key naval hubs for the U.S. in Asia.

Harry Harris, former commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, hailed the initiative.

“Currently, we operate from Diego Garcia and Western Australia in the Indian Ocean,” he told Nikkei via email. “Securing a maintenance, repair, and logistics hub on the Subcontinent is significant as this would give us much-needed flexibility in the vast Indian Ocean region.”

The Chinese navy has about 355 ships and submarines, making it the world’s largest numerically, according to the 2021 edition of the Pentagon’s annual report on China. If American vessels cannot spend more time at sea, then the U.S. will risk falling behind China in terms of naval capabilities, weakening deterrence.

Because the Indo-Pacific is defined by large stretches of water, many believe that conducting supply activities in the region during emergencies will prove more difficult than similar activities in Europe, with its land routes.

“Are we ready today? Yes, we are,” Rear Adm. Mark Melson, commander of the U.S. Navy’s logistics group stationed in Singapore, told Nikkei in an interview in early June. “But I will never claim to be ready enough.”

“We are certainly trying to improve the amount of access into a number of places where we can conduct expeditionary resupply, expeditionary refuel [and] if required, expeditionary rearm,” Melson said.

The Biden administration plans to deepen the partnership with India beyond the Indian Ocean in the maritime space. Daniel Kritenbrink, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, attended an event hosted by a U.S. think tank at the end of June and touched on strengthening the collaboration with India in the South China Sea.

Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar met with Philippine Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo in New Delhi at the end of June. The two ministers released a joint statement that backed a 2016 arbitration ruling at The Hague rejecting Chinese claims to nearly all of the South China Sea.

This marked the first time that India expressed support for the Hague ruling, which is based on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, according to Gregory Poling, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. It put India in line with Japan and major Western countries on the issue.

India, as a representative of the so-called Global South emerging and developing countries, is gaining a stronger role and voice in the international community.

On the security front, India appears to have shifted focus on relations to the West. Modi’s visit to Washington in June is evidence of this. India on Tuesday hosted the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, which was held in a virtual format out of consideration for the U.S.

But the basic theme of India’s diplomacy remains “strategic autonomy,” which entails working with other countries according to its own interests.

In recent years, the U.S. apparently threatened to impose sanctions on India when it sought to acquire air defense systems from Russia. In 1971, the U.S. sent an aircraft carrier to threaten India during the third Indo-Pakistani War. Whether today’s partnership between the U.S. and India will completely dispel the latent distrust of Washington remains to be seen.

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In yet another major escalation, on July 9, the Kiev regime fired several missiles at Bryansk and Rostov oblasts (regions) and at least one cruise missile at Russia’s strategically important Crimean Bridge. According to the governor of Crimea Sergey Aksyonov, the Russian military, specifically its 37th Air Defense Division, shot down the missile, preventing any possible damage to the bridge. There’s speculation that the missile could have been either a Soviet-era S-200 SAM (surface-to-air missile) system modified for ground attacks or the Anglo-French “Storm Shadow”, a relatively long-range, “stealthy”, subsonic, air-launched cruise missile. The intercept took place over the city of Kerch on the Crimean peninsula.

The Crimean Bridge has been a prized propaganda target for the Neo-Nazi junta forces for over a year and a half now. Drones have become a regular feature of attacks on key Russian regions, including Crimea. However, this marks the first time long-range missiles have been used in such strikes. And if the missile intercepted over Kerch was indeed “Storm Shadow”, it also marks the first time a NATO-sourced long-range missile was used in such attacks. According to local reports, the incident resulted in a temporary halt to all traffic over the immense bridge, although it was restored soon after Russian air defense systems and units made sure there were no any additional threats.

Elsewhere, the Rostov oblast authorities reported that another missile was also intercepted over this area in southern Russia. Governor Vasily Golubev reported that there were no casualties and that the debris only partially damaged the roofs of several buildings. In addition, Alexander Bogomaz, governor of the Bryansk oblast, stated that two missiles fired by the Kiev regime forces have been shot down in the area. There were no casualties, although a small sawmill had been destroyed in the village of Bitosh. Meanwhile, several Telegram channels posted footage of what appears to be a 5V28 missile of the S-200 SAM system hitting the rooftop of a civilian building in the village of Dyatkovo, marking the first filmed usage of this missile for ground attack purposes.

This sort of attacks have escalated significantly in recent months, although Russia’s second-to-none air defenses have prevented casualties in virtually all targeted Russian regions. Still, the Kremlin cannot ignore the immediate danger to its citizens and has accused the United States and its NATO vassals and satellite states of directly assisting in these attacks, as the Neo-Nazi junta is incapable of conducting long-range attacks without the support of Western ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) platforms. Russia has repeatedly warned that it could target the Kiev regime’s decision-making centers in response to these attacks and has actually done so in recent days, reportedly striking residences of General Valeriy Zaluzhny and GUR chief Kirill Budanov.

It should be noted that these attacks once again prove that Russian President Vladimir Putin was right in his assessments that NATO-sourced long-range weapons in the hands of the Neo-Nazi junta would be an existential threat to Russia and that Moscow would never allow any mass deployment of such missiles along its western borders. Putin has been warning about this prospect for years, at least since mid-2000s and has stated that Russia would develop advanced, next-generation long-range weapons to ensure its security. And indeed, Russia has developed a plethora of new weapons, particularly hypersonic platforms with virtually no analogues anywhere in the world in terms of capabilities and particularly not in terms of operational deployment.

Still, Moscow cannot ignore the danger of mass usage of long-range missiles against targets all across Russia, as it’s virtually impossible to defend the entire territory of the country. The simple reason is that it’s just too immense for such defenses to even be viable. For this reason, Moscow has revised its strategic posturing and military doctrine in a way to ensure the staging areas for such attacks are destroyed while air defenses would be tasked to intercept the initial wave of strikes, giving Russia the opportunity to respond accordingly. Unfortunately, the Kremlin is perfectly aware that it cannot count on any sort of agreement with the political West (much less with the Kiev regime), as the latter has so far unilaterally broken virtually every single one signed by the two sides.

In addition, the Neo-Nazi junta is getting desperate, as it’s now under extreme pressure to show results before the upcoming NATO summit in Vilnius, scheduled to start this week. As its suicidal attacks against Russian forces have been a catastrophic failure, with horrendous losses in both manpower and equipment, these long-range attacks serve as the only propaganda tool that could be used to present the funds and resources sent by the political West as supposedly “worthwhile”. NATO itself is effectively taking part in such strikes, both by providing the necessary weapons, as well as by providing ISR information on the targets within Russia. For its part, Moscow has exercised extreme restraint by not targeting NATO assets directly for such blatant belligerence, but its patience is not endless.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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A 17-year-old teenager was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop, sparking strong emotions in French society.

1. At 8 a.m. on June 27, 2023, in Nanterre, near Paris, two police officers stopped a car occupied by three people, all minors, following a refusal to stop. The driver was a 17-year-old teenager called Nahel. When the car started up again, one of the police officers fired at point-blank range, killing the youngster, the only child of a single-parent family. The video available on social networks clearly shows that the car posed no danger to the two police officers.

2. Unaware of the existence of the video, the two police officers stated that the car ran into them and that they had been obliged to use their firearms to protect their lives. This was clearly a lie. Alain Bauer, Professor of Criminology at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers and a recognized specialist in training police officers and gendarmes, insisted: “The false version, totally contradicted by the images, ruins the whole edifice. It’s a lie. The car didn’t run him over. The car didn’t run into him.” He also denounced “the few rotten, corrupt police officers and black sheep of the profession […] who cast opprobrium on all those who respect law and order and are defenders of freedoms”. Without the video, the police officers’ false version would have prevailed, and the person responsible for the teenager’s death would never have been brought to justice.

3. Relaying the false police version, the media were quick to portray the teenager as a dangerous, multi-recidivist delinquent. In reality, young Nahel had no criminal record. The Nanterre public prosecutor’s office even opened an investigation against the driver for “refusal to obey orders and attempted voluntary manslaughter of a public official”. This decision was greeted with general incomprehension, as the images formally refute the police version. What’s more, the death of the driver automatically puts an end to all legal proceedings. The public prosecutor’s office also opened an investigation against the police officer for “voluntary manslaughter by a public official”. He was brought before a judge and remanded in custody at the Santé prison.

4. The officer’s lawyer, Maître Laurent-Franck Liénard, emphasized the exceptional nature of the detention: “In my 31-year career of defending cases involving the use of weapons, I have never had a client taken into custody after being brought before a judge”. This statement illustrates the reality of police impunity, and reinforces the widespread feeling in French society that justice protects police officers who commit crimes. Maitre Jean-Pierre Mignard, a lawyer representing victims of police violence, is categorical on this point: “All professions have a genetic code: that of the police is impunity”.

5. Camille Chaize, spokeswoman for the French Ministry of the Interior, dismissed the controversy surrounding the victim’s alleged criminal record, which the police and the media put forward to justify the officer’s action. Asked about this, she replied: “That’s not the point of the debate, it doesn’t make sense to think that way, regardless of whether or not he was known to the police. […] But it’s true that some police sources […] put forward criminal records, or even entries in the handrail, which is infra-judicial, which is not the criminal record, but all that doesn’t make sense, doesn’t matter”.

6. The victim’s family lawyer, Maître Yassine Bouzrou, announced that he had filed a complaint against the two police officers, one for voluntary manslaughter and the other for complicity in voluntary manslaughter. He explained in the following terms: “There is no doubt about his intention to cause death, since it is clear from the soundtrack of the video that he announced before firing: ‘I’m going to put a bullet in your head’. The complaint will also target his colleague for complicity in voluntary manslaughter, who appears to be ordering his colleague to fire by saying ‘shoot him’ just before the shot is fired”.

7. The testimony of the passenger sitting next to Nahel is incriminatory. He recounted the facts in detail: “The first policeman asked Nahel to roll down his window, which Nahel did. He told him: ‘Turn off the engine or I’ll shoot you’. He gave him the first blow with his rifle butt. Then the second policeman came along and also hit him with the rifle butt, and positioned himself at windshield level opposite Nahel. From there, the first policeman, who was at window level, pointed a gun at him and said: ‘Don’t move or I’ll put a bullet in your head’. The second policeman said, ‘Shoot him’. The first policeman gives him another shot, with the butt of his gun. The car has an automatic gearbox. The car wasn’t in ‘park’. When he received the third rifle butt, his foot left the brake pedal and the car moved forward. And the second policeman, who was at windshield level, fired. Then his foot hit the gas pedal. I saw him in agony, shaking. We hit a barrier. I got scared and got out of the car. I ran away. I thought they might even shoot me. So, I ran”.

8. The rear passenger, aged 14, also gave evidence. He was on his way to college to pass the brevet middle-school exam and came across Nahel, who offered him a lift. “The police officers pointed their guns at Nahel” who took “about three” blows, tried to “protect his head”. One policeman claimed “he was going to put one in his head”. Nahel then “let go of the brake probably out of panic, trying to protect himself. The car drove off on its own. It was an automatic. And the policeman told his colleague to shoot. And the gun went off”.

9. French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the police officer’s action in a public statement: “I want to express the emotion of the entire nation, and tell his family of the nation’s affection […]. We have a teenager who has been killed, it’s inexplicable, inexcusable”. For his part, Gérarld Darmanin, Minister of the Interior, pointed to “extremely shocking images”.

10. February 2017, François Hollande’s Socialist government pushed through the Public Security Law authorizing police to use their firearms in cases of refusal to obey. Paragraph 4 stipulates that officers may use their weapons “when they are unable to immobilize, other than by the use of weapons, vehicles, boats or other means of transport, whose drivers do not obey the order to stop and whose occupants are likely to perpetrate, in their flight, harm to their lives or physical integrity or those of others”. The Human Rights League and numerous members of parliament denounced the law as a “license to kill”, calling for its repeal. Maître Liénard himself publicly opposed the law: “If we start telling police officers they can shoot at a fleeing car, we’ll have more shootings, more injuries and more police convictions”.

11. Since 2017, the number of people who have lost their lives as a result of refusal to yield has risen sharply. From 17 people between 2002 and 2017, an average of 0.88 people per year, it has risen to 13 people for the year 2022, some of whom were mere passengers. The victims have two main characteristics: they are mostly young, even very young, and racialized. By way of comparison, in Germany, there has been only one death as a result of a refusal to stop in ten years.

12. On June 30, 2023, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights denounced the structural racism present within France’s police and gendarmerie forces. Its spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani appealed to the authorities: “Now is the time for the country to seriously address the deep-rooted problems of racism and racial discrimination among law enforcement officers”. A few days later, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination denounced “the murder of Nahel M., 17, of North African origin, by a police officer in France” and expressed its “deep concern at the persistent practice of racial profiling, combined with the excessive use of force in law enforcement, in particular by the police, against members of minority groups, notably of African and Arab origin, which frequently results in recurrent killings, disproportionately, with virtual impunity”.

13. Questioned on this subject, Laurent Nuñez, Prefect of the Paris police, denied the reality of the situation: “There is no racism in the police”. Yet even the President of the Republic has acknowledged the existence of persistent discriminatory practices: “Today, when you have a skin color that is not white, you are much more controlled […]. You’re identified as a problem factor, and that’s unbearable”.

14. According to various studies, the majority of police and military personnel vote for the far right. For example, according to the Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences-Po (Cevipof), the Ipsos polling institute and the Fondation Jean Jaurès, 60% of police and military personnel voted for Marine Le Pen in 2022. In 2017, 67% of active police officers voted for the far-right candidate.

15. A study carried out in 2017 by Jacques Toubon, Defender of Rights and former Minister of Justice under Jacques Chirac, illustrates the racist prejudices present within the police force and the police mistreatment of young people from working-class neighborhoods. Individuals perceived as Black or Arab are “20 times more likely than others to be stopped” by the police. The Defender of Rights points out that 40% of these people claim to have been on a first-name basis, 21% insulted and 20% brutalized during their last stop. Another study by the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) points out that “the behavior of the French police […] can be likened to racial profiling”. Christian Vigouroux, deontologist at the French Ministry of the Interior, even submitted a 160-page report in 2021 on “combating discrimination within the security forces”, formulating 54 proposals that have gone unheeded.

16. According to international law, “racial discrimination is a particularly odious form of discrimination and, in view of its dangerous consequences, requires special vigilance and a vigorous reaction on the part of the authorities”. Article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights stipulates that “all persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. In this respect, the law shall prohibit any discrimination and guarantee to all persons equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status”.

17. According to Amnesty International (AI), “in France, the practice of identity checks is widespread, deeply embedded in police action, to the extent that it fosters systemic discrimination”. According to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, systemic discrimination “can be understood as a set of predominant legal rules, policies, practices or cultural attitudes in the public or private sector that create relative disadvantages for some groups, and privileges for others”. AI adds that “the practice of discriminatory identity checks is known and amply documented”, denounces its “scale” and stresses “its devastating effects on victims, including children sometimes as young as twelve”.

18. The French Supreme Court (Cour de cassation), the highest court in the French legal system, recognized the existence of this practice in a 2016 ruling, and stressed that “facial” identity checks constituted a serious misconduct for which the State is liable.

19. Jean Hossam Botros Messiha, far-right activist, born in Egypt and naturalized in France at the age of 20, still considered an immigrant by INSEE, spokesman for Éric Zemmour during the 2022 presidential campaign, proponent of the racist “grand remplacement” theory, who declares that immigration – from which he benefited at the age of 8 – today constitutes a “historic existential threat to France”, has opened an online kitty in support of the police officer under investigation for voluntary manslaughter. In the space of a few days, the “kitty of shame”, as it was dubbed by many observers, raised 1.6 million euros with more than 76,000 donors, making a millionaire of a man responsible for the death of a teenager, arousing the legitimate anger of the family and the indignation of public opinion. 

20. Nahel’s death triggered an explosion of anger across France, the political dimension of which was downplayed by the authorities, who preferred to see these urban revolts as nothing more than a destructive impulse. On the side of the rioters, the feeling reigns that only violence can make their voices heard. Numerous businesses and public buildings, mainly in working-class neighborhoods, were ransacked by young people, some as young as twelve. Nearly 12,000 cars were burned and 2,500 public buildings damaged, including over 250 police stations and more than 150 schools. The personal home of the mayor of La Häy-les-Roses was even attacked with a ram car while his family was inside.

21. The state’s response to social protest has been uniquely authoritarian and repressive, with the mobilization of 45,000 law enforcement officers, including elite corps such as the GIGN, RAID and BRI. In Marseille, a 27-year-old father lost his life following a “probable” flash-ball shot, according to the public prosecutor’s office. In Meurthe-et-Moselle, a young man in his twenties is in a coma after being shot in the head by police. According to the judicial authorities, there is no evidence to suggest that these two people were involved in the riots. Both are of North African origin. Nearly 3,500 people were arrested, and nearly 60% of them had no criminal record, according to Gérald Darmanin. According to the Minister of the Interior, 90% of those arrested were French. At his Senate hearing, Gérald Darmanin dismissed the identity-related explanation: “I looked around the police stations. Yes, there are people who apparently could be from an immigrant background. But there were a lot of Kevin’s and Mattéo’s”.

22. Justice, for its part, was swift and merciless. For example, a 28-year-old man was sentenced to 10 months’ imprisonment with a committal order for stealing a can of Red Bull worth 1.15 euros. His lawyer, Camille Bal, commented: “The main actors in the violence are the ones who were largely absent from yesterday’s hearings. Those who were picked up by the police were the ones who appeared after the crime, after the store had been targeted by the thugs. My client came into the Monoprix in the dark, took a can of Redbull, went out and was plucked like a rose”. For Maître Camille Vannier, who took part in the collective defense system, “justice is completely instrumentalized” by political power. She points out that the judges blindly follow the requisitions: “It’s very worrying from the point of view of the independence of the judiciary. Warrant of committal, warrant of committal, warrant of committal… for minor offences”. Maître Elsa Marcel also expresses her astonishment: “The sentences are extremely harsh, the procedures sloppy, there are many scenarios where people are not recognized, the arrest reports are extremely vague, it’s political justice”.

23. On June 30, 2023, the two main police unions, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA Police, published a communiqué of rare violence, confirming all the accusations of racism levelled at the police force. Protesters from working-class neighborhoods are animalized and described as “savage hordes” and “pests” who must be fought, calling for “all means” to be used to this end. The press release also directly threatens the government with sedition in barely veiled terms, something unprecedented for a republican police force whose mission is to obey the executive and uphold the law: “For these reasons, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA Police will assume their responsibilities and warn the government right now that, in the end, we will be in action, and without concrete measures for the legal protection of police officers, an appropriate penal response and the provision of substantial resources, police officers will judge the level of consideration shown. Today, police officers are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow, we will be in resistance, and the government will have to realize this”. In another unprecedented move, UNSA Education publicly condemned the communiqué, denouncing the words as “disturbing and unbearable”. As for the government, it has taken no action against the authors of this statement.

24. Young Nahel’s death was the spark that ignited a social powder keg in neighborhoods abandoned by the Republic. In addition to the systemic racism suffered mainly by people of immigrant origin (47% of people from sub-Saharan Africa and 30% of people from the Maghreb are victims), disadvantaged populations are neglected by the public authorities. The figures speak for themselves: 7.5% of the French population (5.5 million inhabitants) live in the suburbs. Unemployment in these areas is twice the national average. Half of young people are unemployed. Nearly 40% of residents have no qualifications, compared with a national average of 20%. There are almost half as many libraries and three times fewer sports facilities in working-class neighborhoods as in the rest of the country. The poverty rate is three times higher than in the rest of the country (42% vs. 14.9%). As a reminder, there are 9 million poor people in France, including 3 million children. While the national average is 400 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants, there are only 250 in working-class neighborhoods. 40% of working-class neighborhoods have no crèches, while single-parent families are twice as numerous as in the rest of the country (20%). Contrary to popular belief, social transfers are lower in these areas: 6,100 euros per inhabitant per year, compared with the national average of 6,800 euros. What’s more, far from being on life support, these neighborhoods contribute more to the national effort than the rest of the country. For example, Seine-Saint-Denis is the third-poorest department in France (and the first in France) out of a total of 101 departments, and the one that receives the least social protection per inhabitant, despite being the eighth-largest contributor to the country’s public finances. For example, Seine-Saint-Denis has 1,100 hospital civil servants per 100,000 inhabitants, compared with an average of 1,800 for the rest of the country. Governments pay little heed to the plight of these impoverished populations, as they wield very little political or electoral power. In fact, 48% of people living in working-class neighborhoods either did not vote or abstained from voting in the last presidential elections.

25. Urgent action is needed by politicians in general and the government in particular:

• The 2017 Public Safety Act must be suspended pending its repeal. This will protect both citizens and police officers by returning to the status quo ante, which sets a strict framework for the use of firearms.
• It is imperative that the denial within the police force, government authorities and political leaders about the structural racism present in the police force cease.
• It is essential that impunity for police officers guilty of crimes and misdemeanors be brought to an end, and that they be punished in an exemplary fashion, commensurate with the crime committed. Racist police officers, and more generally those who do not respect the ethics and code of conduct of the profession, must be excluded from the corps of peacekeepers.
• Cases of police violence must be systematically dismissed to guarantee the serenity of the debates – a demand made by the Magistrate’s Union (Syndicat de la Magistrature) – given the close links between the public prosecutor’s office and the forces of law and order.
• A “Justice and Truth” commission, made up of independent members, must be set up to analyze all cases of police violence and provide a response to victims and their families.
• The General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN), which has lost all credibility due to the scarcity of sanctions against officers responsible for crimes and offenses, needs to be reformed and staffed by independent individuals unconnected with the forces of law and order.
• Police officers and gendarmes must be equipped with pedestrian cameras, which will provide guarantees for both officers and the public, and improve the quality of checks.
• Peacekeepers should issue a receipt for each check to reduce discrimination.
• The State must review its doctrine, practices and methods, with a return to a policy based on prevention rather than repression. For example, community policing, praised by all social players for its effectiveness and ability to forge links with young people, must be re-established, particularly in working-class neighborhoods.
• It is essential to improve the salaries of police officers and offer them better working conditions, in order to facilitate their work and make the profession more attractive.
• Candidates for the peacekeeper competitive examination must undergo a more rigorous selection process, to weed out those who are not suited to the profession. In the same way, the police must ensure the integration of immigrants into their ranks by offering them dignified working conditions, free from any form of discrimination.
• The training process must also be thoroughly revised, improved and extended over a much longer period, as the profession has long been demanding (psychological tests, stress tolerance test, respect for the values of the republic, etc.).
• The government must provide a political, economic and social response to the issue of poverty, social exclusion and discrimination, by implementing ambitious affirmative action in favor of people from working-class neighborhoods, whose suffering has been ignored by public authorities for far too long.

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Salim Lamrani holds a doctorate in Iberian and Latin American Studies from Sorbonne University, and is a lecturer at the Université de La Réunion, specializing in relations between Cuba and the United States.

Featured image: Cars burn in the aftermath of clashes between protesters and police following the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed by a French police in Nanterre during a traffic stop, in Toulouse, France, June 28, 2023. (Source: TIMOTHEE FORGET/VIA REUTERS)

 

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On Monday, a group of lawyers from ten countries released a statement voicing their opposition to the World Health Organisation’s (“WHO’s”) proposed Pandemic Treaty, officially known as WHO CA+, and the amendments to the International Health Regulations (“IHRs”). 

Over the weekend of 30 June to 2 July, the first international lawyers’ congress of Anwälte für Aufklärung e.V. (English translation Lawyers for Enlightenment e.V.) was held in Cologne, Germany. The congress focused on the IHRs and the Pandemic Treaty.

A strong alliance of lawyers from all over Europe, supported by lawyers worldwide, is forming against the WHO Pandemic Treaty. “We, the lawyers say: No to totalitarianism. Clear statements by the lawyers about the plans to make the WHO a kind of ‘health world government’: We say NO!,” tweeted Dr. Alexander Christ on Sunday.

Below is their press statement both the images tweeted as tweeted by Markus Haintz and the text as extracted from the images.

Further reading from Anwälte für Aufklärung e.V. (“AfA”):

• Loss of sovereignty or system failure?
• WHO

Press release of the Lawyers for Enlightenment e.V. Cologne, July 3, 2023

Lawyers from ten countries addressed the issues of the WHO pandemic treaty and the planned amendment of the International Health Regulations at an international lawyers’ congress this weekend in Cologne. As hosts of the congress, we, the Anwalte fur Aufklarung e.V. (Lawyers for Enlightenment) from Germany invited to a press conference today, in which lawyers from Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, France, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Israel and Germany, among others, took part.

The main results of the meeting: We lawyers reject the plan to draft a pandemic treaty of the World Health Organization WHO and to amend the health regulations IHR. In particular, we call on the states of Europe not to participate in the plans to give the WHO far-reaching rights in the future to declare future pandemics as well as to establish regulations to combat such pandemics, which the member states would then have to comply with mandatorily and without any further possibility of national intervention or review.

In order to be able to react more effectively and more clearly in the future to violations of fundamental human rights and to restrictions of freedom and basic rights against populations by democratic states, the lawyers gathered in Cologne have joined together to form an International Lawyers Association, the International Association of Lawyers for Human Rights (IAL). 27 signatures of the first signatories are on the founding document of the lawyers’ association, which will grow decisively in the coming weeks. Behind the foundation are, among others, the Lawyers for Fundamental Rights/Attorneys for Enlightenment Austria, the Lawyers for Enlightenment e.V. Germany, members of the Lawyers Committee from Switzerland, lawyers from the Spanish association Units per la Veritat, to name just a few as examples.

The conference serves to expand the international cooperation of lawyers who have already critically addressed the illegality of state measures and the fragility of national rule of law during the Corona period. These undesirable developments are being raised to the level of supranational organisations such as, in particular, the World Health Organisation (WHO), which, with the help of the so-called Pandemic Treaty, is to be enabled to circumvent national as well as European sovereignty rights in the event of a future pandemic.

This is opposed by the lawyers gathered in Cologne, who, on the other hand, are committed to strict compliance with human rights, fundamental rights and freedoms. The core principle here is: human dignity is inviolable. The UN Charter, from which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights derives, the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic and Social Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights all claim indispensable validity. Under no circumstances may these be actually or de facto invalidated by a WHO pandemic treaty, not even and especially not in times of pandemics or other health crises.

We lawyers stand for: the protection of fundamental principles of democratic rule of law, for a strict separation of powers in the sense of the principle of “checks and balances”, for the principle of legality, for the right of self-determination of peoples, for the principle according to which all power must emanate from the people, for freedom of information and above all for a comprehensive ban on censorship in all states.

All these principles are contradicted by the contents of the so-called “WHO Pandemic Treaty”, which is currently being drafted, and the expected changes to the “International Health Regulations” (IHR), which are to be submitted for decision at the WHO General Assembly in 2024. According to the current state of knowledge, which can be found on the European Council’s website, among others, the pandemic treaty and amendments to the IHR are aimed at bringing the World Health Organisation into the role of a de facto “world health government” as a supranational and global super organisation. In the future, the WHO is to be charged with the following tasks, among others:

• Early detection and prevention of pandemics, which required the establishment of a cause-free global early warning and surveillance system,
• Establishment and strengthening of the WHO as the coordinating authority for global health issues, which would effectively disempower national and local health authorities and thus fundamentally contradict the principle of subsidiarity,
• Strengthening international cooperation in areas such as surveillance, alerts, and response, which would be tantamount to establishing a global surveillance system of citizens by states, enforced by WHO; and
• combating “misinformation” worldwide, which would be equivalent to the introduction of censorship.

From the point of view of us lawyers, all four goals would lead to a global surveillance and paternalism system of the WHO in an intolerable way that fundamentally contradicts the principles of the rule of law. Among the principles claiming unbreakable validity, the first to be mentioned is individual self-determination, which, especially in a crisis such as a real pandemic, must always be given priority over state or even supranational paternalism. Secondly, there is the principle of subsidiarity, according to which a higher state or social unit may only intervene to help and take over functions if the forces of the subordinate unit are not sufficient to perform the necessary function. Especially in a pandemic, priority must always be given to local decision-making on necessary measures.

In the past Corona pandemic, for example, the WHO showed through a global failure that it was at no time able to assess the situation correctly. The transfer of power to an anonymous, not democratically legitimated organisation with mafia-like structures, which is supplied from dubious sources of money and is close to the pharmaceutical lobby – to put it mildly – and which in the future is to be able to determine uncontrollably when a pandemic has broken out, when it is over and how people worldwide are then to behave, is to be decisively rejected.

We lawyers say: No to the WHO pandemic treaty and No to the amendment of the International Health Regulations!

Dr. Alexander Christ, Spokesman AnwSite fur Aufldarung e.V., Hohenzollerndamm 112, 14199 Berlin, kontaktaafaev.de vrww.afaev.de 

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Featured image is from The Expose

Video: Nuclear War Between Russia and the US. “Nuclear Winter”

By Future of Life Institute and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, July 10, 2023

All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped. It should be understood, that there are powerful financial interests behind the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) which are tied into America’s $1.3  trillion nuclear weapons program initiated under President Obama. 

The Counter-Enlightenment: The Origin of Conservative Politics?

By Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, July 11, 2023

The Counter-Enlightenment is the name given to the oppositional forces that formed during the Enlightenment that fought against the philosophes’ writings on democracy, republicanism and toleration. These forces were known as the anti-philosophes and sought to maintain the dominance of the monarchy and the church.

Heart Disease Risk Skyrockets 13,200% Following COVID Injections, CDC Admits

By Ethan Huff, July 11, 2023

The top two public health agencies in the United States conducted a joint study showing that the risk of developing autoimmune heart disease among the “fully vaccinated” for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) is a shocking 13,200 percent higher than it is among the unvaccinated.

Comprehensive Study: There Are Zero Amish Kids Suffering From Cancer, Diabetes or Autism – Why Is That?

By S.D. Wells, July 11, 2023

In a brand new, comprehensive study (as of June 2023), presented by Steve Kirsch to the Pennsylvania State Senate, it was calculated that for Amish children, who are strictly 100 percent not vaccinated (fully unvaccinated), typical chronic conditions barely exist, if any at all.

Despite All Rhetoric, Ukraine NATO Accession Would Not Do Washington Any Good

By Uriel Araujo, July 10, 2023

This week, starting on July 11, NATO leaders will meet for their annual summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. Besides Sweden’s pending accession to the organization (currently blocked by Turkey), clearing a membership path for Ukraine is sure to be one of the main topics.

Video: Ukraine Counter-Offensive. “Small Assault Groups”. Heavy Losses

By South Front, July 10, 2023

The local authorities confirmed that on the evening of July 6, Ukrainian forces sharply increased their operations on a wide front of up to 30 kilometers in the Zaporozhie region. In the area of Orehov the Ukrainian Army launched attacks on Russian positions near Nesteryanka and Kopani to the south and Novofedorovka, Verbovoe to the southeast.

Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS): Neurological Injury Caused by COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines

By Dr. William Makis, July 10, 2023

Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is a rare auto-immune disease that triggers the immune system of the body to attack its own nervous system, specifically the peripheral nerves responsible for sensation and motor control.

Connecting Dots and Opening Doors: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr Tells Us the Truth

By Dr. Emanuel Garcia, July 10, 2023

What Mr. Kennedy has done recently, however, while on his campaign tour, is astonishing. He has openly declared that the “Deep State” murdered John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., and that MKUltra exists.

An Accident Waiting to Happen: NATO Looks to Asia

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, July 10, 2023

Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has distinctly strayed from its original purpose. It has become, almost shamelessly, the vessel and handmaiden of US power, while its burgeoning expansion eastwards has done wonders to upend the applecart of stability.

Godless Fake Science. The Importance of Truth

By Mark Keenan, July 10, 2023

Modern society has been subjected to a network of lies and false narratives so pervasive it has become the accepted ‘norm’. However, the lies are certainly not accepted by all people. We have all been subjected to fake science and related ideologies that we were ‘born into’, and ‘educated’ to accept, and have thus been living in a ‘systematized delusion’.

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The Counter-Enlightenment is the name given to the oppositional forces that formed during the Enlightenment that fought against the philosophes’ writings on democracy, republicanism and toleration. These forces were known as the anti-philosophes and sought to maintain the dominance of the monarchy and the church.

The philosophes (French for ‘philosophers’) were eighteenth century intellectuals who “applied reason to the study of many areas of learning, including philosophy, history, science, politics, economics and social issues.” Most importantly, they believed in progress and tolerance and in many different ways sought to highlight injustice and seek ways of changing society for the better.

The anti-philosophes rose up to defend ‘throne and altar’ and over time many of the ideals of the anti-philosophes were taken over by Romanticism in the nineteenth century, and the conservative politics of the twentieth century, for example, in Western culture, “depending on the particular nation, conservatives seek to promote a range of social institutions such as the nuclear family, organized religion, the military, property rights, and monarchy.”

The origins of right-wing politics in Europe are often attributed to Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the Irish philosopher, who is seen as the philosophical father of modern conservatism. His book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, is a criticism of the French Revolution, which itself was partly fueled by the writings of the philosophes, thus setting up the dividing lines between the supporters of radical republicanism and revolution, in opposition to the supporters of the older monarchy and church of the ancien régime.

The idea of the Counter-Enlightenment is itself controversial as some academics argue that an organised force against the Enlightenment was non-existent, or at the very least, a complex debate. For example, Jeremy L. Caradonna (‘There Was No Counter-Enlightenment’) and Robert E. Norton (‘The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment’) both look at contradictory aspects of the individuals called anti-philosophes. As has been noted the thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment “did not necessarily agree to a set of counter-doctrines but instead each challenged specific elements of Enlightenment thinking, such as the belief in progress, the rationality of all humans, liberal democracy, and the increasing secularisation of society.”

It was Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), the Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas who popularised the term in his essay ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’. Berlin was critical of the irrationalism of the early conservative figures from the 1700s such as Joseph de Maistre, Giambattista Vico, and J. G. Hamann. He also examined the German reaction to the French Enlightenment and Revolution as the main source of reaction to the Enlightenment in general and which eventually led to the Romanticist movement. Berlin noted that:

“Such influential writers such as Voltaire, d’Alembert and Condorcet believed that the development of the arts and sciences was the most powerful human weapon in attaining these ends [e.g. satisfaction of basic physical and biological needs, peace, happiness, justice etc] and the sharpest weapon in the fight against ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, oppression and barbarism, which crippled human effort and frustrated man’s search for truth and self-direction.” [1]

Writers like Darrin M. McMahon have looked at the early opponents of the Enlightenment in pre-Revolutionary France, while Graeme Garrard has shown in detail the conservative counter-Enlightenment ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a very different perspective on one of the heroes of the French Revolution.

In this essay I will look at the individuals and groups who took a stand against the philosophes through their movements, books, and journals in support of the church and monarchy.

Early opposition to the Enlightenment

Opposition to the philosophes of the Enlightenment did not start with the French Revolution. According to McMahon in his book Enemies of the Enlightenment:

“Only recently have scholars begun to acknowledge that conservative salons existed in the eighteenth century in which the philosophes‘ ideas were regarded with horror…” [2]

Many writers in France mocked the progressive ideas of the philosophes in “a host of satirical plays, libels, and novels published in the late 1750s, 1760s and early 1770s”. [3]  McMahon comments that: “It stands to reason that the reaction to the Enlightenment should also have occurred first in the place of its birth and been spearheaded by the very institution – the Catholic Church charged with maintaining the faith and morals of the realm”. [4]

This can be seen, for example, in the Frontispiece to the physician Claude-Marie Giraud’s Epistle from the Devil to M. Voltaire which chronicled Voltaire’s ‘traffic with Satan’, and was republished over thirty times between 1760 and the outbreak of the Revolution.

“Frontispiece to the physician Claude-Marie Giraud’s Epistle from the Devil to M. Voltaire. This brief work, chronicling Voltaire’s traffic with Satan, was republished over thirty times between 1760 and the outbreak of the Revolution.” (Image: Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Text: Darren McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2002) p.20)

The adverse reaction to the ideas of the philosophes was evident in the hundreds of books, pamphlets, sermons, essays, and poems written against them, as well as becoming the raison d’être of journals such as the Anée littéraire, the Journal historique et littéraire, and the Journal ecclésiastique. [5] McMahon writes about how the enemies of ‘throne and altar’ and their ‘treasonous’ activities were perceived by the anti-philosophes:

“The anti-philosophes saw the philosophes as ‘enemies of the state’, ‘evil citizens’, ‘declared adversaries of throne and altar’, and unpatriotic subjects guilty of human and divine treason. […] Thus, the anti-philosophes frequently accused their opponents of spreading “republican” and “democratic” ideas. The philosophes, they claimed, preached the sovereignty of the people, advocated “perfect equality,” and spoke endlessly of “social contracts.” They lauded the political institutions of the United Kingdom, spreading a contagious “Anglomania” that held up Parliament and the limitations placed on the powers of the English crown as models to be emulated in France. And they talked ad nauseum of “liberty and equality,” natural rights and the “rights of the people” without ever mentioning duties and obligations.” [6]

They even appealed to the new dauphin [The distinctive title (originally Dauphin of Viennois) of the eldest son of the king of France, from 1349 till the revolution of 1830] to be wary of the new anti-religious attitude that was being spread by the philosophes: “From this anarchy of the physical and moral universe results, necessarily, the overthrow of thrones, the extinction of sovereigns, and the dissolution of all societies. Oh Kings! Oh Sovereigns! Will you be strong enough to stay on your thrones if this principle ever prevails?” [7]

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President Biden may have crossed a new red line for the Democratic Party when he announced he would send banned cluster munitions to shore up Ukraine’s slow counter-offensive against Russian troops. 

On Friday, 19 House Democrats, led by Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA-7), signed a letter to Biden warning that his decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine “severely undermines our moral leadership.” 

This time it’s not just left-leaning activists in CODEPINK and the Peace in Ukraine Coalition who recoil in horror at Biden’s escalation in Ukraine, but congressional Democrats who previously stood by their President. These are the same Democrats who voted to approve over $100 billion in Ukraine spending, an estimated half for weapons and military assistance for which there is no accountability.

Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN-4),  ranking member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, told Politico: 

“The decision by the Biden administration to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine is unnecessary and a terrible mistake …The legacy of cluster bombs is misery, death and expensive cleanup generations after their use.”

On Sunday other prominent Democrats took to the airwaves, with Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), a former Vice Presidential candidate, telling Fox News he had “real qualms” about the President’s decision, and Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA-13), Chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and US Senate candidate, telling CNN, “Cluster bombs should never be used. That’s crossing a line.” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and former Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who visited Vietnam following the US withdrawal, joined the chorus with a Washington Post OpEd explaining how they had witnessed firsthand the “devastating and long-lasting effects these weapons have had on civilians.” 

Even before the official White House cluster bomb announcement, House Democrats Sara Jacobs (D-San Diego) and Ilhan Omar (D-Mpls) introduced an amendment to the 2024 military budget to ban the issuance of export licenses for cluster munitions.  

Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA), the ranking member of the House Rules Committee, was one of the first to co-sponsor the bill. McGovern told the New York Times that cluster munitions, “disperse hundreds of bomblets, which can travel far beyond military targets and injure, maim and kill civilians — often long after a conflict is over.”

The amendment, however, will need overwhelming bipartisan support to pass–as well as a President who will obey the law should the ayes have it.

In greenlighting cluster munitions, Biden thumbed his nose at 18 NATO partners that joined with over 100 other state parties to sign the 2008 UN Convention on Cluster Munitions. As Biden headed to Vilnius, Lithuania, for the NATO summit this week, Newsweek reported representatives of the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Spain were not on board for cluster bombs.

Biden also chooses to bypass current US law that restricts the use of cluster munitions to only those with a failure to detonate rate of less than one percent. In its last publicly available estimate, the Pentagon estimated a “dud rate” of 6%, meaning that at least four of the 72 submunitions from each shell failed to explode when unleashed. 

With a bow to hawkish Republicans, such as Alabama’s Tom Cotton on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Biden invokes the exception to the rule embedded in the statute against the use of cluster munitions. This exception allows for shipment of cluster munitions in the interest of vital national security.

Who controls eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, the Russian army or the Ukrainian army, is hardly a US national security interest on par with mitigating the threat of climate catastrophe or providing clean water to those with lead in their pipes or investing in housing for the unsheltered living under freeway overpasses.

Nonetheless, the same President Biden who a year ago warned of the risk of nuclear Armageddon, has reversed himself yet again to up the ante. Biden first said no, then flip flopped on a host of weapons: Stinger missiles, HIMARS rocket launchers, advanced missile defense systems, M1 Abrams tanks, F-16 fighter jets. Each one of these has been a kind of Russian roulette, testing Putin’s “red lines.” 

With Biden’s latest decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine, anti-nuclear activists wonder if the President–whose Nuclear Posture Review approves of “first use”– might also cross the nuclear red line, even though it’s Putin who has issued veiled nuclear threats–and Biden and Putin in June of 2021 signed a statement that said, “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” 

The impetus for the 2008 landmark UN Convention on Cluster Munitions came precisely from the indiscriminate U.S. use of these weapons in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. In Laos, the U.S. military blanketed the country with almost 300 million bomblets, many that failed to immediately detonate, only to later–after the US withdrew from Southeast Asia– maim adults and children who accidentally stepped on the cluster bombs or picked up the shiny balls thinking they were toys. 

Both Ukraine and Russia have already used cluster bombs in Ukraine, a development roundly condemned by human rights groups documenting the resulting  deaths and serious injuries of civilians. The hundreds of thousands of rounds that Biden is planning to send would significantly increase the use of these banned weapons. 

Biden’s appalling decision to send cluster bombs can be seen as a sign of desperation in the face of Ukraine’s failing counteroffensive in southern and eastern Ukraine. Biden told CNN it was a “difficult decision” but Ukraine is “running out of ammunition.” The truth is that adding this new indiscriminate weapon will not miraculously break the stalemate to achieve “military victory” but  guarantee the unexploded bombs eventually kill and wound Ukrainian civilians for years to come while encouraging other countries to also violate the cluster munitions ban.

In the next week or so, the House may consider Jacobs and Omar’s NDAA amendment as Congress tackles a $920 billion military budget. Now is a critical time for constituents to click on CODEPINK’s action alert requesting  House representatives co-sponsor the amendment to ban the export license for cluster munitions. While skeptics may question whether Biden would respect any law limiting his power to wage war, only loud and vigorous opposition can pull the political levers that control our destiny. 

Rather than escalating an arms race to risk nuclear war, the Biden administration should promote a ceasefire and negotiations without preconditions. Instead of breaking international law, the U.S. should break the military stalemate by joining the global call for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.

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Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Peace in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. 

Marcy Winograd serves as the Co-Chair of the Peace in Ukraine Coalition and Coordinator of CODEPINK Congress.

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***

The top two public health agencies in the United States conducted a joint study showing that the risk of developing autoimmune heart disease among the “fully vaccinated” for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) is a shocking 13,200 percent higher than it is among the unvaccinated.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) discovered that compared to the background risk in the general population, the risk of myocarditis is 133 times greater in those who took the mRNA injections from either Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna.

Researchers from several top universities and hospitals across America contributed to the study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Using data from the government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the CDC and the FDA identified 1,626 cases of myocarditis, which were cross-checked to ensure the results comply with the CDC’s official definition of myocarditis.

Based on this, researchers determined that the most high-risk mRNA jab is the one produced by Pfizer-BioNTech, meaning this one is the most dangerous in terms of potential health effects.

The Pfizer jabs, according to the data provided to VAERS, caused 105.9 cases of myocarditis per million doses after the second injection in the male 16- and 17-year-old age and sex demographic. In the 12-15 age group for males, there were 70.7 cases of myocarditis per million doses following the second shot.

The 18-24 male age group had the highest risk at 52.4 cases per million for Pfizer and 56.3 cases per million for Moderna. The median time to symptom onset was just two days for both jabs.

Since VAERS only captures around 1% of vaccine damage, what is the TRUE risk of autoimmune heart disease following covid injection?

As previous studies have found, the vast majority of covid jab-related heart problems, around 82 percent, occur in males. In the vast majority of cases, around 96 percent, those who became inflicted with myocarditis had to be hospitalized, and in most cases were treated with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).

By the time of discharge, 87 percent of those hospitalized saw symptom resolution, at least initially. There is no telling what these people might suffer as the years go by, especially into older age.

Among the most commonly reported symptoms are:

• chest pain, pressure, or discomfort (89 percent)
• shortness of breath (30 percent)
• abnormal ECG results (72 percent)
• abnormal cardiac MRI findings (72 percent)

Recognizing the strong and undeniable link between covid jabs and heart disease, the CDC has commenced an active surveillance program for adolescents and young adults to monitor their progress following these post-injection heart-related incidents.

Since the jabs have only been out since late December 2020, and really only started to get into people’s bodies well into 2021, there is still no long-term data to evaluate concerning the long-term impact of covid jab-related heart disease.

The American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC) are both advising that people with myocarditis refrain from competitive sports for three to six months, otherwise they could die suddenly on the field.

Only after normal ECG and other test results start to appear should a person afflicted with covid jab-related heart disease even think about resuming strenuous exercise.

By the way, VAERS only captures as little as one percent of all vaccine-related injuries and deaths. So as shocking as these figures and percentages are, one must multiply them by a lot in order to gain a more accurate picture of the injury and death tolls from these injections.

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The current population of Amish folks in America is quickly approaching 400,000, with the largest concentrations of 90,000 in Pennsylvania and 82,000 in Ohio. Amish have settled in as many as 32 US states, and have an average of 7 kids per family, so the population is growing rapidly. In a brand new, comprehensive study (as of June 2023), presented by Steve Kirsch to the Pennsylvania State Senate, it was calculated that for Amish children, who are strictly 100 percent not vaccinated (fully unvaccinated), typical chronic conditions barely exist, if any at all.

These chronic conditions, also called preventable diseases and disorders, that nearly many vaccinated children and swaths of Americans suffer from, include auto-immune disease, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, ADHD, arthritis, cancer, and of course… wait for it… autism (think ASD and Asperger’s Syndrome).

Expert Panelists Testified How Healthy Amish Children Are Compared to Vaccinated American Children

Maybe scaring people off vaccines is a good thing, for all those pro-jab-fanatics who think every natural health advocate is a “conspiracy theorist” who spreads disease and disorder by talking about dirty vaccines, vaccine injuries and vaccine-induced deaths. During testimony, expert health advocates shared WHY there’s never been any reports published regarding the health of Amish children in general, saying “After decades of studying the Amish, there’s no report because the report would be devastating to the narrative. It would show that the CDC has been harming the public for decades and saying nothing and burying all the data.”

Dr. Peter McCullough, a top cardiologist in America, with mountains of peer-reviewed, published work, testified before the U.S. Senate and before legislatures throughout the U.S., regarding dangers of vaccines, including the COVID-19 gene-mutating jabs. Speaking of the pandemic, the Amish did NOT lock down, they did NOT put on bacteria-breeding masks, and they most certainly did NOT “vaccinate” for the Wuhan Lab Flu. They ignored every single CDC and Fauci-propagandized mandate and protocol, including the deadly clot shots (because they knew better than to get injected with millions of toxic, sticky spike proteins and graphite nanoparticles).

Guess what happened? The Amish had a survival rate of COVID 90 times higher than the rest of America. Nobody wants to talk about this, except natural health advocates. If you post anything about it on social media, you immediately get banned, blacklisted and labeled “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

Why is it so important to AVOID vaccines like the plague? Just take a look at all the insane ingredients used in vaccines, including preservatives, emulsifiers, adjuvants, genetically modified bacteria, mutated viruses and sterility-causing chemicals. This is all listed right out in the open. No human should ever have any of this injected into their blood and muscle tissue, bypassing the normal defensive shields of the body, including the skin, lungs and digestive tract.

These toxic, sometimes lethal ingredients include mercury (high doses in the multi-dose flu jab), human blood (albumin from abortions), deadly pig viruses called circovirus (in Rotateq Rotavirus jabs), eagle blood, dog blood, infected green monkey kidney cells, sucralose, monosodium glutamate (MSG), cow blood, chicken blood, eggs, dairy, antibiotics, peanut oil (yes, residuals remain, hence all the deathly peanut allergies), latex (from the stoppers on the needles and vials that the needles penetrate), aluminum and much more.

Bookmark Vaccines.news to your favorite independent websites for updates on experimental gene therapy injections that lead directly to vascular clots, hypertension, myocarditis, pericarditis, heart attacks, strokes and death.

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The Ukrainian military lacks tanks, armoured vehicles, and ammunition to dislodge Russian forces from their well-entrenched positions, demonstrating that over half a year of planning and training for the current counteroffensive has dissipated into complete failure. The situation for Ukraine is so bad that it was even forced to withdraw its German-made Leopard 2 tanks from the front lines so they could be preserved for the future. This revelation comes as the Biden administration announced on July 6 that it would send cluster munitions to Ukraine.

According to the Wall Street Journal,

“Ukraine is now attempting to dislodge an entrenched enemy, one of the most daunting operations any military can undertake. Russian troops have spent months building physical defences that include bunkers, tank traps and mine fields.”

The same outlet quoted Lt. Col. Oleksiy Telehin of Ukraine’s 108th Territorial Defence Brigade as saying that it was not only impossible to destroy well-prepared positions before advancing but that Ukrainian forces were suffering from a shortage of armoured vehicles, with infantry forced to advance on foot, which makes it vulnerable to flanking manoeuvres.

The Ukrainian military has only managed to capture a few villages in Zaporozhye and the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). A month of fighting has resulted in only the capture of some villages and failure to reach Russia’s first defensive line, and more disturbingly, at the cost of thousands of deaths and hundreds of destroyed tanks and armoured vehicles. 

Ukrainian personnel admit to horrific losses, with soldiers “presumably in Zaporozhye, saying they could have lost dozens of men” in a single attack. 

“We had to evacuate the evacuation team,” said a 19-year-old combat medical professional, according to the US outlet. The teenager also recalled a case where a mortar hit his vehicle during an evacuation of the wounded.

According to reports, Russian helicopters fly less than 8 kilometres from Ukrainian positions, which should ordinarily make them vulnerable to air defences, but as a platoon commander from the 108th Brigade said, “We don’t have proper air defence systems to deal with the threat. When we’re warned that an enemy plane has taken off, the only way to deal with it is to take cover.”

The Russian Defence Ministry reported on July 9 that since the beginning of the special military operation, their forces have destroyed from Ukraine 453 planes, 241 helicopters, 4,948 unmanned aerial vehicles, 426 air defence missile systems, 10,604 tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, 1,137 fighting vehicles equipped with MLRS, 5,396 field artillery cannons and mortars, as well as 11,547 special military motor vehicles.

In the face of these major losses, the US will supply Kiev with cluster bombs even though this will do nothing to change the balance of forces, mainly due to the Ukrainian military’s lack of training and adequate experience of its officers.

“I can confirm from personal experience that cluster munitions are indeed quite powerful, but also that by themselves they will not tilt the balance of power in the war towards Ukraine,” retired US lieutenant colonel Daniel Davis wrote in an article on 19FortyFive

According to Davis, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will not be able to benefit from these munitions due to insufficient training, officers’ lack of experience and lack of time to create cohesive and equipped combined arms formations.

“Regardless of how much more lethal they are than standard 155 mm HE rounds, [cluster munitions] will not make a difference in the outcome of the current offensive. The cluster rounds will increase the lethality of Ukrainian gunners against the Russian enemies, but alone cannot change the course of the war. The same, sadly, will be true of F-16s and long-range missiles which may be provided later this year,” he added.

One of the Pentagon representatives, Patrick Ryder, claims that the enhanced conventional dual-purpose munitions (DPICM) that Washington will supply to Kiev have a non-detonation rate of less than 2.35%. The percentage of failure, non-detonation, means that they will remain active in the location and could explode after civilians, including children, pass through.

Due to the risk that these weapons pose to civilians, 123 countries adopted in 2008 a convention that prohibits the use of cluster munitions since it is estimated that more than half of the victims of these munitions are civilians. Yet, with the Ukrainian military lacking any weapon to push back Russian forces, the delivery of cluster munitions is just a signal of the desperate situation it finds itself in.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

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***

According to the reports from the front, the Ukrainian military likely began another wave of massive offensive on the southern front lines.

The local authorities confirmed that on the evening of July 6, Ukrainian forces sharply increased their operations on a wide front of up to 30 kilometers in the Zaporozhie region. In the area of Orehov the Ukrainian Army launched attacks on Russian positions near Nesteryanka and Kopani to the south and Novofedorovka, Verbovoe to the southeast. The attacks are carried out by small assault groups of reserve units that were not previously involved in operations. All Ukrainian attacks thus far have resulted in no victories at the cost of heavy losses.

To the west, Ukrainian units continue constant attacks near the village of Pyatikhatki, where they have already lost dozens of units of military equipment while achieving no gains on the ground.

There, the Ukrainian command uses the same tactics of constant attacks by small assault groups in an attempt to exhaust the Russian defense.

According to local reports, up to five waves of attacks were launched from Pyatikhatki towards Zherebyanki over the past day. After intense artillery shelling, troops of the 128^th mountain assault brigade of the Ukrainian army went on the offensive. The first four waves were mainly stopped by Russian minefields and dispersed by artillery fire. By the evening, the fifth and largest assault began. It reportedly involved up to 200 fighters that were covered by Ukrainian artillery but were thrown into battle without almost any armored vehicles. Ukrainian assault groups were spotted in advance by Russian reconnaissance UAVs and destroyed by Russian fire.

In the Kherson region, the Ukrainian military has already reportedly lost several hundred fighters under the Antonovsky Bridge, where they have gained a stronghold but failed to develop their success and advance. The Ukrainian grouping on the eastern bank of the Dnieper River is constantly shelled by Russian artillery, as well as TOS-1 MLRS utilizing thermobaric warheads, FAB bombs, and even Iskander missiles.

Despite heavy losses, the Ukrainian military command is again preparing new forces to throw them on Russian positions. After a months of futile bloody offensive operations, Kiev urgently needs to show some victories on the battlefield to please its Western patrons. In recent weeks, the Ukrainian military has been pulling reserves up to the southern frontlines, transferring them closer to the front by small parts under the cover of night. These are units that did not take part in the first stage of the offensive, including the so-called “Offensive Guard”.

The recent assault operations were carried out by Ukrainian infantry without almost any armored vehicle support, which signals that despite large supplies from NATO, the Ukrainian Army already suffers from a lack of heavy military equipment and is saving it for the upcoming escalation. All of this while losses in manpower continue to grow.

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***

Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is a rare auto-immune disease that triggers the immune system of the body to attack its own nervous system, specifically the peripheral nerves responsible for sensation and motor control.

GBS causes the demyelination of Schwann cells, which causes damage to peripheral nerves and affects the way signals are sent. As a result, GBS can cause weakness, tingling, changes in sensations and paralysis in individuals affected.

The first symptoms reported are often a feeling of altered sensation in the feet and hands, and a feeling of weakness in lower legs. The feeling of weakness may also progress through the arms, legs, chest and face. In most cases, this weakness will progress to become paralysis of the muscles in these areas.

If significant weakness or paralysis occurs in the chest, individuals will experience respiratory issues. This may result in patients needing more care, mechanical ventilation and suctioning from their healthcare team.

2022 April 13 – Rio Grande, Brazil – Juliana Soares’ 13 year old daughter got GBS after COVID-19 jab. She was placed in the ICU, became tetraplegic and needed mechanical ventilation. She is recovering (click here).

2022 March 22, Rosedale, NY – 25 year old Krystalle “Krystal” Perry” was diagnosed with GBS after 2nd dose of Pfizer mRNA and had to be intubated. (click here)

2022 Jan – 26 year old Actor and writer Cody Hively developed GBS which left him paralyzed for months. He is recovering (click here).

2022 Jan – Dallas, TX – Dionne Staten, a school nurse was diagnosed with GBS after her booster shot. She ended up on a ventilator.

2021 Dec.14 – Boeing employee Doug Picard developed GBS and became temporarily paralyzed. (click here)

2021 Nov – California Governor Gavin Newsom apparently developed GBS after he received Moderna COVID-19 booster shot on Oct. 27, 2021. (click here)

2021 Nov – Ashton Robertson is a young man who developed GBS with nerve damage throughout his body.

2021 Sep – Saint Martinville, LA – Ryan (brother of Dani Fuselier) took J&J COVID-19 vaccine and became almost paralyzed 4 months later. He was diagnosed with GBS.

2021 Sep – Arkadelphia, AR – Rachel Gierth was injured after 2nd COVID-19 vaccine, doctors told her she had GBS (GoFundme)(Facebook).

2021 May – Peterborough, ON – Kris McNeeley developed GBS after his COVID-19 vaccine which he had 10 days prior.

2021 May – 36 year old Drew is a US Army combat veteran disabled by 2 Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines, when he got GBS. He is now in a wheelchair (click here)(click here).

2021 March, Stoke-on-Trent, UK – Tony Shingler was left disabled with GBS after taking AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.

My Take…

GBS is one of the more common neurological injuries caused by COVID-19 vaccines.

WHO’s VigiAccess Database (click here) has 7693 cases of GBS reported linked to COVID-19 vaccines. Here is a comparison to other neurological injuries:

• 21,786 Seizures
• 11,723 Bell’s Palsy
• 7,693 Guillain-Barre syndrome
• 5,650 brain fog
• 5,413 paralysis
• 2,180 multiple sclerosis
• 1,300 transverse myelitis

Yu et al. reviewed the literature on GBS post COVID-19 vaccination, 60 cases and they conclude:

“we proposed a possible association between the risk of GBS and the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccines, especially DNA vaccines”

Reddy et al. analyzed 30 cases of GBS caused by mRNA vaccines and found:

• Mean age 57 years old, 53% men, average 11 days post jab to get GBS
• 79% had limb weakness
• 77% had sensory symptoms
• 53% had facial palsy
• 25% had respiratory insufficiency
• 24% had dysautonomia

Abolmaali et al. found 20% of post COVID jab GBS patients needed intubation.

CONCLUSION: GBS is a common and very serious neurological injury caused by all COVID-19 vaccines. Some recover, some remain permanently disabled.

Manage with spike protein elimination (3-day fasting, Nattokinase, Quercetin, Olive Leaf).

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

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***

Actor Roger Moore, while filming one of his slew of James Bond movies, was reputedly asked by a reporter whether he did his own stunts, to which came the legendary reply: “I say my own lines.”

Well, unlike his uncle or his father, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. not only says his own lines, but he writes them as well. He has accomplished, particularly with his magisterial work on Fauci, what neither of his two more famous relatives ever did: to compose a complex and compelling work of tremendous scholarship, all the while leading an overbusy life as lawyer, health advocate and, now, as a politician.

I regard The Real Anthony Fauci as one of the holy trinity of truth-telling covid tomes, the other two being the books by the Breggins (Covid-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey) and Michel Chossudovsky (The Worldwide Corona Crisis).

What Mr. Kennedy has done recently, however, while on his campaign tour, is astonishing. He has openly declared that the “Deep State” murdered John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., and that MKUltra exists.

So far as I know this is the first admission by a major public figure about JFK’s assassination, which is sending shock waves through the neoliberal globalist predator community masquerading as do-good lefties, because their attack dogs have been unleashed against him.

Kennedy Jr. has of course been famous for quite some time as an environmentalist and as indefatigable investigator of the pharmaceutical-vaccine industrial complex with its powerful tentacles througout government and its mission to leave no good person unjabbed, multiply, ad infinitum.  In his person Kennedy represents the shining nexus that reveals just how State-sponsored murder and harm are accomplished – whether by assassination of for-the-people peacemaking politicians, or inoculation of tricked, duped, comforted or mandated millions.

He has connected the dots, cogently and visibly, for us all. Which leads me to a general observation about those of us who have fought against the covidian deceptions and learned about the plethora of other large-scale deceptions along the way – lies about the deaths of the famous four who died trying (JFK, MLK, RFK and X), 9/11, the Iraq WMD, and the climate scam that has been shoved into our ears and eyes relentlessly for years.  And if one is industrious enough one can find many many more, because once the door is opened, once one has a glimpse into the horrendous callous indifference of the Ruling Powers, one cannot fail to see how we have all been played.

Yes, we have all been played, and as a consequences many people have suffered and died, whether it has been through military shock and awe campaigns or sanctified mass vaccination, wars small or large (Vietnam, anyone?) but always, it seems, endless.

But now the war has reached such proportions, is so massively global, so oppressively prosecuted upon us all – remember how the entire world was shut down in a matter of weeks in 2020? – that the stakes cannot be higher, as the intrepid Breggins, Chossudovskys and the Kennedys of our time are showing us.

For those of us, like myself, who grew up in post-World War II America with its economic engine and the flourishing of ideals derived from the founding documents of our complex country, the murder of JFK was a catastrophic apotheosis. It signalled the strong hand of the Occult Elite, the hard hand of the Deep State, culminating now in a transcendent exercise that has ensnared everyone.  However as long as their work was in the shadows they could work with impunity against our interests.  Many people have worked for many years to show us a glimpse into the murky machinations of Power, and RFK Jr. has now very publicly represents, as it were, the bow that ties the knots of deception together, nice and neat and for us all to see.

The fight will go on, and it will continue to be messy. They – governments and corporations and the Overlords of Finance and Terror – will censor, control, abuse, make a mockery of the courts they hold up as representing law, and persecute and harass those who raise their voices against such oppression.

But they no longer have the upper hand.

Their jig is up, the curtain has been pulled, the cat is out of the bag and every dog will have his day.

They will not win.

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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand. Visit his substack at https://newzealanddoc.substack.com/

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Former Advisor to Pentagon and CIA: “Under Biden’s new Executive Order, your God-given freedoms could be at severe risk. Do THIS today…”

Where were you on March 9, 2022…

…when President Biden signed the death warrant on American freedom?

On that day, in a hushed ceremony at the White House…

…without the approval of Congress, the states, or the American people…

Biden signed into law Executive Order 14067.

Buried in his Order are a few paragraphs, titled Section 4…

The language in Section 4 makes Order 14067…

…the most treacherous act by a sitting President in the history of our republic.

Because Section 4 sets the stage for…

Legal government surveillance of all US citizens…

Total control over your bank accounts and purchases…

And the ability to silence all dissenting voices for good.

In this new war on freedom, the Dems aren’t coming for your guns.

No, they’re thinking much bigger than that…

They’re coming for your money.

And it’s already started.

My name is Jim Rickards.

I’m a former advisor to the Pentagon, the White House, Congress, the CIA, and the Department of Defense.

I’m also an attorney, investment banker…

…and author of 7 books on currencies and international economics.

When places like Fox, CNBC or Bloomberg want to know what’s about to shakeup the global economy, they call me.

Click here to view the video.

TRANSCRIPT

Most of all, like you, I’m a proud American patriot.

The disturbing predictions you’re about to see are based on my independent research and my contacts in the intelligence community.

I’ve never made this kind of public announcement before…

But it’s my duty to pull the alarm.

This is what I believe Section 4 of Biden’s Order means for all Americans… it is laying the groundwork for…

The US dollar being made obsolete.

Soon, your cash will be confiscated – or will simply be worthless paper.

The cash currency we have now will be replaced with a new, programmable digital tokens.

But the truth is, few outside the deep state recognize Biden’s move for what it really is.

If my predictions are correct, this so much more sinister than simply replacing the cash dollar with a new digitized version…

Friend, this new currency will allow for total control of all American citizens.

Because every “digital dollar” will be programmed by the government…

…that means they will be able to “turn on or off” your money at will.

Not only that, but they’ll be able to TRACK and RECORD every purchase you make.

This is very different than “online banking”…

And it has nothing to do with crypto.

I’ll explain everything in a moment, but what you need to know now is…

AOC has already publicly declared her support for a government controlled “spyware” currency…

The digital dollar means Dems would be able to punish any contribution, purchase, or even social media comment they don’t like.

And this isn’t something years away…

It’s starting now.

Biden’s secret army has been hard at work, and…

US trials are already well underway.

In fact, our government is racing to catch up…

China and Russia have already launched pilot programs for their own digital currencies.

More than half the countries in the world and almost 90% of central banks are testing or exploring a digital currency right now.

In my opinion, it’s not a question of “Will the US implement a digital dollar?”

It’s just a question of “When”…

And the answer to that is…

It’s already happening.

Under Project Lithium and Project Hamilton, the new “spyware” currency has been quietly tested for several years.

There’s no stopping it.

I predict we’ll see a digital dollar hit circulation next year – or 2024 at the latest.

But I do have some good news for you.

It’s almost too late, but you can still protect your assets and your freedom…

…if you know exactly what to do.

In the next 84 seconds, I’m going to show you everything.

You’ll see the ugly proof of their plan.

You’ll see what this could mean for you and your life savings.

I’m also going to show you the ONLY way I trust to protect your money and your freedom from Biden’s new surveillance machine.

I call it “Asset Emancipation” – and it’s easy to do and understand.

If you choose to take advantage of it…

Asset Emancipation is a way to legally secure – and even GROW – your wealth…

While hiding it safely away from Democrat surveillance and control.

It’s a loophole designed to outsmart a new spyware currency…

While potentially increasing your personal wealth.

But you must know exactly how to do it.

And that’s what I’m going to show you today.

I must warn you – some of this will be difficult to watch.

But if you care about your money and your freedom, please do not turn away.

Thanks to what you’ll witness here…

You’re about to be much more prepared for the coming storm than your neighbors…

…and that’s a very powerful position to be in.

Imagine if you were German in 1923 and able to somehow avoid the 29,500% hyperinflation that made their money worthless…

Or if you could have “opted out” of Roosevelt’s confiscation of all private gold in 1934…

That’s the power of Asset Emancipation.

And I’ll show you everything right now.

Thanks to Section 4 of Biden’s Order 14067 ordering urgent research into developing the digital dollar…I believe the US dollar, the standard of the world since 1792…

…will be REPLACED by a new currency, the digital dollar.

These new electronic currencies are called CBDCs – or “central bank digital currencies”.

(I call the digital dollar “Biden Bucks” because I want him to take full credit for what I consider to be crimes.)

This is not like the money in your online bank account…

No, this is new and different.

Every digital dollar will be a programmable token, like bitcoin or other crypto currencies.

But there’s a big difference…

Cryptocurrencies are decentralized digital currencies. Instead, if it plays out the way I see it…

Biden Bucks will have the full backing of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

They will REPLACE the cash (“fiat”) dollar we have now…

And will soon be the sole, MANDATORY currency of the United States.

When Biden Bucks are rolled out, many experts – myself included…

…believe they will begin an era of total government control and surveillance.

This is not hyperbole.

This would dramatically expand the power and influence of the federal government… essentially acting as a new type of “spyware”.

With Biden Bucks, the government will be able to force you to comply with its agenda.

Because if you don’t, they could turn off your money.

This won’t be like freezing a bank account, it will be so much easier.

Because Biden Bucks will be “digital tokens” programmed at the source…

…they could be “turned on or off” at will, with just a keystroke.

And they could be reprogrammed at any time.

With Biden’s secret surveillance army running the show, the anti-freedom implications are almost limitless…

For example, Biden Bucks could be programmed to allow only certain kinds of purchases…

Imagine what this new world could look like…

You want to keep your internal combustion engine car?

Your digital dollars suddenly won’t pay for gas.

Instead, you can be forced to buy an electric vehicle…

That’s just the tip of the fascist iceberg…

They can force you to get vaccinated…

They can force you into solar…

They can force you to use less water or heat…

They can force you to eat fake, plant-based meat…

They can control where you are allowed to travel…

They can stop you purchasing certain items – like guns, ammo, or survival supplies.

They can control to which candidates you are allowed to donate.

And they’ll know every single place you ever spend money. Forever.

America would become a surveillance state like China or North Korea.

Every single aspect of your life could be controlled…

Because they’ll control your money.

In fact, I fully expect them to implement a “social credit rating” like in China.

Say the “wrong” thing on social media…

Buy the “wrong” thing…

Subscribe to the “wrong” news channel…

Give money to the “wrong” candidate…

And your rating drops…

Suddenly, your Biden Bucks are frozen or disappearing from your account…

This is already happening in China.

There, a low social score gets you officially labeled “untrustworthy”.

They can take away your ability to travel…

…restrict your internet access…

…deny your family the best schools or jobs…

They may even take away your pets.

I’m not kidding.

All of this is going on today.

But that’s China… an oppressive, communist country.

Could this really happen in a democracy?

Just ask the truckers in Canada.

Because that’s exactly what happened to them.

Their Prime Minister Trudeau was granted “special emergency powers” during the peaceful trucker protests over his forced vaccination law…

He then ordered all banks to freeze the accounts of the protestors…

AND anyone who aided them in any way.

And it wasn’t just a threat…

That fascist froze the bank accounts of non-violent protestors.

He locked up over $6 million in private accounts for protesting a forced vaccination law the truckers believed violated their sovereign human rights.

Think about that…

They protested his policies…

So he took away their money.

Think our current government would love to do that?

Me too.

Under Biden Bucks, we’ll lose many of our God-given American rights.

They’ll be replaced by total government surveillance and control.

For almost all Americans, this will be the death of freedom. Forever. Almost all Americans…

Not you.

You won’t be a victim.

You can beat Biden’s surveillance army at its own game.

The key is what I call “Asset Emancipation”.

Asset Emancipation was created to help you maintain and even grow your personal wealth…

…regardless of what happens to the cash dollar.

Even better…

It’s designed to legally hide your assets away from government surveillance…

And allow you to potentially profit from the turmoil.

For the record…

Asset Emancipation has nothing to do with giving up your passport or fleeing the country…

It also has nothing to do with offshore banks or foreign currency trading…

And you won’t hear about it from your financial advisor, because it’s almost certain…

…he has no clue about this loophole for legally “opting out” of the Biden Bucks surveillance program.

I’ll reveal everything in a moment, but I want to expose how deep this new conspiracy runs…

Programmable currencies will soon replace ALL the cash currencies on earth.

More than HALF of countries and almost 90% of central banks are exploring or testing a digital currency right now.

This includes Japan, Germany, India, France, the UK, Russia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, and China.

In fact, China’s new digital currency – the e-yuan – was used for millions of dollars’ worth of transactions at the Beijing Winter Olympics.

The Economist has announced the rise of government-backed digital currencies, warning they will “shift power from individuals to the state”.

Even an institution as conservative as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) admits these new currencies are “The future of money”.

Make no mistake…

No matter the outcome of any future elections…

This is happening.

The storm is closing in.

If my research and predictions are correct…

Soon, there will be no more cash.

The dollar we know will be dead and buried.

Replaced by programmable Biden Bucks.

The secret surveillance army has been working on this for years…

The U.S. Federal Reserve has been quietly partnering with scientists at MIT to develop a digital currency to replace the dollar.

They call this initiative Project Hamilton.

Then, this year, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, the clearinghouse for US stocks, bonds, and other security trades…

…quietly launched Project Lithium.

Project Lithium is testing how a digital dollar will work in the financial markets once the current dollar is dead.

Project Lithium is partnering with the Digital Dollar Project…

…a joint effort started in 2020 between Accenture, US regulators, and tech leaders to create the digital dollar…

Then, on March 29, 2022, just days after Biden’s Order 14067 was signed…

Representative Stephen F. Lynch introduced H.R. 7231, the Electronic Currency and Secure Hardware Act.

This act, co-sponsored by 4 other Democrats…

…ORDERS the Secretary of the Treasury to develop a digital dollar.

I believe we’ll see the first rollout of the new digital dollar – Biden Bucks – in 2023 or 2024.

And it’s right on schedule.

You see, about every 40-50 years there’s a major disruption in US monetary policy…

…that increases government power at the expense of citizen rights.

The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 was the first currency quake.

In that shocking act of fascism…

Democrat President Roosevelt ordered all US citizens to hand in their gold.

Yes, privately owning gold was made illegal.

The government wanted it all.

If you failed to comply, you faced huge fines or were jailed.

Interesting how this fascist plot isn’t taught in our history classes, isn’t it?

Then came currency quake number 2…

…the Gold Standard Act of 1971, when the US abandoned the gold standard for good.

What happened then?

The dollar got destroyed, rampant inflation continued…

And the power of the Federal Reserve increased dramatically.

I predict The Death of the Dollar is the third and final currency quake.

But it will be more dangerous and far-reaching than any that came before.

If the US dollar is replaced by Biden Bucks spyware, I believe…

The government will be able to track, control, and limit your spending.

Soon, there will be no more privacy. Zero. Gone.

The government will know your whereabouts and habits at all times…

…because they will know exactly where all your money is spent.

This new state surveillance army will be everywhere.

In history, I don’t know of one example of a government with access to a citizen surveillance system that hasn’t used it.

Not one.

In fact, surveillance is the true driving force behind the new Chinese digital currency.

China already uses facial recognition software, mobile phone GPS, and the purchase of plane or train tickets to track their citizens.

They use this to detect “anti-state activities” and to arrest anyone who does not strictly follow the orders of Chairman Xi.

Now, can you imagine the Dems having this kind of total government control?

In fact, the coronavirus pandemic gave them a playbook for how to control a population.

They’ve been practicing for 2 years…

Now, thanks to Biden’s Order 14067…

I predict the US will soon be a surveillance state like China.

On March 26, 2022, Fox News sounded the alarm:

“[Biden Order 14067] is a truly remarkable and deeply troubling development.”

“If a [digital dollar] were to be created, it would dramatically expand the power and influence of the federal government and Federal Reserve…

“…in ways most Americans won’t understand until it’s too late to roll it back.”

With Biden Bucks as our mandatory currency…

…it would be so easy for the government to confiscate assets and freeze accounts at will.

In fact, Biden Bucks could allow one party to hold on to power… forever.

Imagine…

Merrick Garland could say, “We have the voting records. We know if you voted for Trump.”

“And if you did, we’re going to disable your bank accounts.”

Does that sound like a stretch in this day and age?

I don’t think so either.

There’s more…

Your retirement savings could disappear.

They’ll do this through the introduction of a negative interest rate.

This is not far-fetched.

In fact, I believe it’s extremely likely.

Here’s why: It’s simple economics.

The government doesn’t want us holding on to cash.

They need us spending, spending, and spending some more to prop up their house of cards economy.

So, how do you stop people holding on to cash?

Step 1: You eliminate cash altogether – with the Biden Bucks digital currency.

Then, Step 2: You introduce a negative interest rate on all accounts.

After all, you can program a digital currency to do anything, at any time.

With the negative interest rate, if you don’t spend your money, it starts shrinking.

Think of it this way…

How do you slaughter cattle?

You need to get them into a chute first – otherwise they’ll all run away.

Biden Bucks are a digital cattle chute.

You cut off access to all other forms of currency…

You do away with everything except this programmable, trackable digital dollar…

And then you can march us all right to the slaughterhouse.

They’ll control how and where you spend your money.

And if you don’t spend it, they’ll make it disappear.

Friend, all of this is underway right now.

I believe we are at the dawn of the total surveillance state.

There’s no stopping it.

There’s no escaping it.

Unless.

Unless you know how to legally “sidestep” Biden Bucks…

And protect your savings and your freedoms.

I call it Asset Emancipation.

And that’s what I’m going to show you now.

I hold a master’s degree in International Economics and another in Taxation.

I got my law degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.

I worked at the highest levels of Wall Street and international finance for 40 years.

I held senior positions at Citibank, Caxton Associates, and the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.

I’ve been inside the West Wing of the White House.

I helped negotiate the end of the Iranian crisis for the Reagan administration.

The Nixon administration asked me to help craft the Petrodollar Accord.

I’ve attended strategic sessions in the “vaults” – the secure meeting rooms inside the Pentagon.

Here’s a photo of me there. (This is all I’m allowed to show you of the inside.)

In fact, I hosted the first ever financial war games for the Pentagon.

I’ve been asked to the CIA Directors’ secure conference room on the seventh floor of Langley headquarters.

I’ve been inside the U.S. Treasury and spoke privately with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

I’ve been invited into the Federal Reserve and had conversations with Ben Bernanke.

Here’s a snapshot of our discussion…

I really don’t like to brag.

But my experience and connections give me a unique insight into the coming storm…

And when it comes to showing you how to protect your wealth and freedom, you want someone with my credentials.

Don’t trust anyone with less.

And I have good news today…

You can still protect yourself, your family, and your wealth.

Just like I have.

But there’s one thing:

You must act now.

There’s almost no time left.

They’re currently working on Biden Bucks…

Look, my eyes are wide open about the problems in America, but I love our country.

I refuse to stand back and let the fascists take control.

Not without a fight.

That’s why I’ve created something you won’t find anywhere else on earth.

A true gameplan for sidestepping Biden Bucks…

…for protecting your savings…

…for outsmarting Biden’s surveillance army…

And emerging stronger, safer, and potentially wealthier than before.

It’s called Asset Emancipation.

And it’s a financial survival plan for the coming storm.

Asset Emancipation allows you to legally hide your money from a Biden Bucks surveillance state…

And even better than that…

It was designed to help you PROFIT from the turmoil it will bring…

My background inside the US intelligence community, investment banks, and global currency markets…

…has shown me how smart investors could profit from the digital dollar disaster.

That’s exactly what Asset Emancipation was designed to do.

Now, of course, you don’t have to do this.

And you can sit back and trust our government if you like…

But by watching this full presentation…

I know you’re a lot smarter than the average Joe.

You see that America will soon be transformed into a total surveillance state…

And that you could be forced to comply with the Dem’s fascist agenda.

Unless you know exactly how to defeat them.

That’s why, today, I’m going to share my full Asset Emancipation system with you.

I feel it’s my responsibility as a patriot and sovereign citizen.

I’ve written up the full step-by-step gameplan in a new report called…

The Asset Emancipation System: Securing Your Sovereign Wealth and Freedom.

In a moment, I’m going to show you how to claim your own copy of The Asset Emancipation System report…

Inside, you’ll see step-by-step details on how to escape the coming surveillance state…

…including how to:

1. Create an off-the-grid fortune: Secure $1.1 million in wealth inside a hollow “soda can” safe
2. Save your God-given freedoms: Have liquidity and spendable wealth without using Biden Bucks
3. Grow your personal wealth: You’ll get specific investment upside as events unfold
4. Ensure you maintain your wealth — regardless of external conditions

And that’s just the start of what you’ll get…

The bottom line is this…

I believe having some of your assets secured — and “off the grid” — now…

…will mean you’re able to prevent the government control that comes with a digital currency.

If that’s what you want to do…

My Asset Emancipation system was designed for you.

Not only that, but everything you’ll see is completely legal.

It might infuriate Biden, AOC, and the state surveillance army…

…but there’s nothing they can do about these survival “loopholes”.

Your wealth – and your freedom – will be secure.

And you’ll be the only one on your block who knows these secrets.

Feel free to share them with your most trusted friends and loved ones.

They’ll be so grateful – and you can relish saving them from the new surveillance state.

All you have to do is say “YES, Jim” to this special opportunity today…

And I’ll send you your own personal copy of my new report The Asset Emancipation System… FREE.

That’s right.

I’m not asking you to pay one red penny for my new strategy…

…for securing, and even growing, YOUR personal wealth.

I’ve set aside one free copy for you.

And I’ll explain exactly how to claim it in a moment…

But I want to give you one more thing first.

Anyone who has followed my career knows I trust the strength of gold.

Gold is the most stable long-term form of money the world has ever known.

Throughout human history, there have been thousands of fiat currencies (or “paper money”).

And as far as I can tell, 100% of fiat currencies have eventually lost ALL value.

But gold?

Gold has been accepted as currency across the globe for more than 5,000 years.

And when digital currencies radically alter the world banking system…

I’d rather put my faith in 5,000 years of human history.

Gold has always increased in value over time…

…and, of course, it can’t be tracked.

That’s why I want to send you another FREE report today…

It’s called The Perfect Physical Gold Portfolio: Everything You Need to Know About Buying the Right Kind of Physical Gold.

It’s 35 pages long, answering everything you need to know, including…

Is gold safe to invest in?

How much should I invest in precious metals?

What kind of precious metals should I buy and in what quantities?

Which kinds of metals should I avoid?

Where are the best places to buy gold (and other precious metals)?

And what are the best — and safest — ways to store them to avoid theft or government confiscation?

Because of the imminent replacement of the dollar with a digital currency…

And to help you invest in gold before prices potentially skyrocket, and it’s too late…

I’ve created a way for you to claim a free copy of this report today…

…so you can have all the information you need to invest in precious metals the RIGHT way.

That’s still not all I have for you…

You see, I’ve learned of another little-appreciated asset that’s a liquid form of wealth…

It can’t be tracked or traced…

It’s completely legal and easy to find (if you know where to look)…

Over time, its value has steadily grown.

But very few people know anything about its investment potential…

You’re about to be one of the few.

I believe you must include this “secret” asset in any off-the-grid portfolio…

I tell you exactly what it is and how to get it in…

America’s Secret Currency: Get in on the Ultimate Off-the-Grid Asset.

If you want to keep your wealth hidden away from the government’s prying eyes…

…you’ll want to read this report first.

But that’s still not all I want to send you.

I just finished writing one more free report for you…

And this one could be the most valuable of all.

How would you like to profit FROM Biden Bucks…

…to beat them at their own game?

The way I see it, this coming “currency quake” is going to be a national crisis…

But with turmoil comes opportunity.

Why not potentially GROW your current wealth…

…by investing in the handful of companies positioned to EXPLOIT the digital dollar?

Right now, there are certain digital payment processing companies…

…who are building out the infrastructure for the new programmable dollar.

They’re at the right place, at exactly the right time.

The digital dollar is poised to be a windfall for these firms.

And thanks to my global currency expertise…

I know exactly who they are.

I believe 3 companies in particular are going to generate significant gains over the next 24 months.

And if you get in now, you could ride the wave with them.

That’s why I’ve written a new report called How to Profit from Chaos: The 3 Companies Building Biden Bucks…

In How to Profit from Chaos I reveal the 3 companies building out the digital dollar infrastructure…

And I share my specific investment picks for profiting during this new “currency quake”…

Including my personal picks for when to buy in… and when to get out.

Friend, you could be one of the few who WINS during this coming storm.

When it hits your inbox, make sure you open your How to Profit from Chaos report right away…

…to be sure you don’t miss out.

When you get all 4 free reports…

1. The Asset Emancipation System
2. The Perfect Physical Gold Portfolio
3. America’s Secret Currency
4. How to Profit from Chaos

…you’ll be prepared to:

Create a liquid, legal “off-the-grid” $1.1M portfolio…

Shield your purchases and activities from government surveillance…

Invest in the 3 companies poised to profit from the digital dollar…

Hold the right amount of the right kind of gold…

Invest in America’s little-appreciated, untraceable, liquid asset…

Potentially increase your personal wealth with specific hard asset holdings…

Protect your family’s freedoms…

And be in a position of power compared to others who don’t have your knowledge…

Fact is…

You’re about to join an elite group of people…

…who know the truth about this new war on our freedoms…

…and how to make it work to your personal advantage.

I predict the forced implementation of Biden Bucks will bring a new era of total government surveillance and control.

And it’s more important than ever that good Americans stand up for what’s right.

What you’ve learned today isn’t widely known.

The media has largely ignored the threat…

Or they simply don’t understand the danger.

The American public is being led to the slaughter.

But there are some who are prepared.

There are a few Americans whose freedoms are secured…

And who are ready to profit from the turmoil…

You see, everything you’ve seen today was first shared with a small, private circle of citizens.

Every month I take what I’ve learned from my contacts and connections in the intelligence and global finance communities…

And I write it all up in private issues of a newsletter I call Strategic Intelligence.

In Strategic Intelligence, I warn my readers of the coming threats to our economy and our freedoms.

In 2008, I predicted the US housing collapse.

No one believed me at the time.

Three weeks later, Lehman Brothers went belly up and markets crashed…

…devastating the retirement savings of millions of Americans.

Then, in 2016, the “experts” were shocked when I predicted Brexit…

The media said it could never happen…

Until I was proved right.

Then, despite 99% of polls showing the opposite…

I stood outside Trump Tower the night before the 2016 election…

And declared Donald Trump would be our next President.

Then, in late 2021, several months before the first shots were fired in Ukraine…

I alerted my readers this war was an almost certainty.

It gets bigger.

I’m watching a global situation unfold right now could make all these events seem minor…

There’s a coming crisis that would bring devastating bank defaults across the world…

Including here in America.

There’s more.

I’m also hearing early whispers of another military conflict brewing…

And this time it’s much closer to home.

What will this do to the financial markets, your retirement savings…

And American global security?

Because of my contacts and experience…

I have access to certain information that even our own government doesn’t know…

And I share every detail with my private circle of Strategic Intelligence readers.

But even better than that…

I show them how to PROFIT from these events.

Of course, nothing is ever guaranteed in the markets, but I’ve developed a revolutionary way of looking at the financial system and stock markets.

It’s called Complexity Theory.

It’s unlike anything you’ve seen before.

I estimate less than 10 people in the world know how to apply it.

Complexity Theory gives me insight on exactly how the dollar’s replacement could play out…

…what stocks might fall…

…and what assets could rocket up in price.

It allows me to warn my Strategic Intelligence readers well in advance of the coming collapse.

I use my expertise to help show them how to build safe investment positions in stocks, bonds, cash, art, land, precious metals, and other hard assets.

Today, I want to extend a personal invitation to you.

I’d like you to join my private “inner circle” of Strategic Intelligence readers.

If you say “yes”, you’ll be privy to the similar secrets, predictions, and advice…

I usually reserve only for the US intelligence community and my private high net-worth clients.

My goal with Strategic Intelligence is to help you PROFIT while others flounder.

Every month, I’ll write directly to you…

…keeping you informed and armed on how the dollar’s collapse and replacement is unfolding.

I’ll warn you about the potential triggers that may set off an economic or social crisis.

And I’ll use Complexity Theory to give you specific investment recommendations and wealth protection strategies intended to…

…help you increase YOUR wealth even during the meltdown.

My Strategic Intelligence issues are unlike any other resource on the planet.

Only YOU will be prepared to survive and even thrive in the coming storm.

Only YOU will benefit from insights and advice from 40 years’ operating at the highest levels of government and financial institutions.

Each dossier is easy to read and follow, but I don’t pull any punches.

Strategic Intelligence is for Americans who appreciate the uncensored truth…

…and who want to WIN while weaker thinkers struggle.

I believe you’re my kind of person.

I believe you’re poised to profit during the turmoil to come.

And I believe you’ll never sit back and abandon your freedoms.

So let’s do this.

Say YES to my invitation.

Join my private circle of monthly Strategic Intelligence readers…

I request a small fee to join.

It helps cover my time and the expense of mailing each monthly dossier.

It’s normally $99 a year, which is a bargain for the level of insight you’ll gain…

…and the potential profits you’ll enjoy.

After all, my speaking fee at events is typically $25,000.

And my clients don’t blink an eye.

They know their returns will far outpace that investment.

But $99 is not what I’m going to ask you to pay today.

The situation is urgent…

Biden and the Dems have set their sights on your freedom…

…and your life savings.

And I don’t want there to be any reason you won’t have access to the information you and your family need now.

So, effective immediately, I’m cutting the regular price in half.

Today, I’d like to offer you a full year (12 issues) subscription to my Strategic Intelligence newsletter for just $49.

That’s a 50% discount.

It means for the equivalent of just a few bucks a month, you’ll get…

…private insight into threats against our democracy and freedom…

…and wealth-building opportunities most people will never hear about.

Plus, I guarantee today’s special price will never increase as long as you’re a subscriber.

Even if I’m forced to raise the price in future…

Your discounted price is locked in forever.

But it gets better…

Because, when you subscribe today, I’ll immediately send your 4 FREE bonus gifts…

FREE Report #1: The Asset Emancipation System: Securing Your Sovereign Wealth and Freedom

Inside this new report, you’ll get step-by-step details on how to outsmart Biden Bucks and…

1. Create an off-the-grid fortune: Secure $1.1 million in wealth inside a “soda can” safe
2. Save your freedoms: Have liquidity and spendable wealth without using Biden Bucks
3. Grow your personal wealth: You’ll get possible investment upside as events unfold
4. Ensure you maintain your wealth — Regardless of external conditions

Building your own “off the grid” portfolio now will protect you from the coming government surveillance state.

Biden Bucks testing is underway.

The digital dollar could be rolled out soon.

Before it’s too late, protect yourself and your retirement savings.

You’ll find everything you need in your free report.

(Note: Please share it with your most trusted friends and loved ones.)

And you’ll also immediately get your…

FREE Report #2: The Perfect Physical Gold Portfolio: Everything You Need to Know About Buying the Right Kind of Physical Gold

5,000 years of history proves that gold outlasts every other currency.

But I believe Biden Bucks could cause the price of gold to skyrocket.

In your 2^nd free report…

You’ll find everything you need to know about investing in gold before the price blasts through the ceiling, including…

Is gold safe to invest in?

How much should I invest in precious metals?

What metals should I buy – and what should I avoid?

Where are the best places to buy gold (and other precious metals)?

What are the safest ways to store gold to avoid theft or government confiscation?

And much more.

Plus, I’ll also send you…

FREE Report #3: America’s Secret Currency: Get in on the Ultimate Off-the-Grid Asset

Your new report exposes a little-appreciated asset that can’t be tracked or traced…

And has increased in value over time.

This “secret” asset should be a part of any off-the-grid portfolio…

And, in America’s Secret Currency, I show you everything you need to know.

Finally, you’ll get…

FREE Report #4: How to Profit from Chaos: The 3 Companies Building Biden Bucks

This brand-new report reveals the 3 companies currently building the infrastructure for the digital dollar…

And how YOU could profit from the Biden Bucks currency quake…

All 4 reports are my gifts to you simply for giving my Strategic Intelligence profit-building dossiers a try.

And, make no mistake, these 4 reports are truly a gift.

They’re always yours to keep, even if you end up canceling for a full refund.

Let me explain.

In a moment, you’ll have the opportunity to join my private inner circle of Strategic Intelligence readers…

When you do, I’ll send you all 4 free reports immediately…

In fact, you should have them within minutes of subscribing today.

Then, I’ll also start sending off your exclusive monthly Strategic Intelligence dossiers the minute I write them…

When they arrive in your mailbox, I encourage you to read them right away…

…because some of the best investment opportunities are time sensitive.

But make sure the value FAR exceeds the subscription fee…

Make sure you’re enjoying real profits on the little-known investment opportunities I recommend to my private subscribers…

Make sure the markets and America are rocked by the threats I warn you about in advance every month…

And make sure you feel smarter, more secure, and more powerful than you did before you subscribed.

Take your time.

In fact, I want you to take up to a full 6 months of reading your Strategic Intelligence dossiers…

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***

Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has distinctly strayed from its original purpose. It has become, almost shamelessly, the vessel and handmaiden of US power, while its burgeoning expansion eastwards has done wonders to upend the applecart of stability.

From that upending, the alliance started bungling. It engaged, without the authorisation of the UN Security Council, in a 78-day bombing campaign of Yugoslavia – at least what was left of it – ostensibly to protect the lives of Kosovar Albanians. Far from dampening the tinderbox, the Kosovo affair continues to be an explosion in the making.

Members of the alliance also expended material, money and personnel in Afghanistan over the course of two decades, propping up a deeply unpopular, corrupt regime in Kabul while failing to stifle the Taliban. As with previous imperial projects, the venture proved to be a catastrophic failure.

In 2011, NATO again was found wanting in its attack on the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. While it was intended to be an exemplar of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, the intervention served to eventually topple the doomed Colonel Gaddafi, precipitating the de-facto partitioning of Libya and endangering the very civilians the mission was meant to protect. A continent was thereby destabilised. The true beneficiaries of the intervention were the tapestry of warring rebel groups characterised by sectarian impulses and a voracious appetite for human rights abuses and war crimes.

The Ukraine War has been another crude lesson in the failings of the NATO project. The constant teasing and wooing of Kyiv as a potential future member never sat well with Moscow and while much can be made of the Russian invasion, no realistic assessment of the war’s origins can excise NATO from playing a deep, compromised role.

The alliance is also proving dissonant among its members. Not all are exactly jumping at the chance of admitting Ukraine. German diplomats have revealed that they will block any current moves to join the alliance. Even that old provoking power, the United States, is not entirely sure whether doors should be open to Kyiv. On CNN, President Joe Biden expressed the view that he did not “think it’s ready for membership of NATO.” To qualify, Ukraine would have to meet a number of “qualifications” from “democratisation to a whole range of other issues.” While hardly proving very alert during the interview (at one point, he confused Ukraine with Russia) he did draw the logical conclusion that bringing Kyiv into an alliance of obligatory collective defence during current hostilities would automatically put NATO at war with Moscow.

With such a spotty, blood speckled record marked by stumbles and bungles, any suggestions of further engagement by the alliance in other areas of the globe should be treated with abundant wariness. The latest talk of further Asian engagement should also be greeted with a sense of dread. According to a July 7 statement, “The Indo-Pacific is important for the Alliance, given that developments in that region can directly affect Euro-Atlantic security. Moreover, NATO and its partners in the region share a common goal of working together to strengthen the rules-based international order.” With these views, conflict lurks.

The form of that engagement is being suggested by such ideas as opening a liaison office in Japan, intended as the first outpost in Asia. It also promises to feature in the NATO summit to take place in Vilnius on July 11 and 12, which will again repeat the attendance format of the Madrid summit held in 2022. That new format – featuring the presence of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, or the AP4, should have induced much head scratching. But the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Washington’s beady eyes in Canberra, celebrated this “shift to taking a truly global approach to strategic competition”.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is also much in favour of such competition, warning member states of Beijing’s ambitions. “We should not make the same mistake with China and other authoritarian regimes,” he suggested, alluding to a dangerous and flawed comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan. “What is happening in Europe today could happen in Asia tomorrow.”

One of the prominent headscratchers at this erroneous reasoning is French President Emmanuel Macron. Taking issue with setting up the Japan liaison office, Macron has expressed opposition to such expansion by an alliance which, at least in terms of treaty obligations, has a strict geographical limit.  In the words of an Elysée Palace official, “As far as the office is concerned, the Japanese authorities themselves have told us that they are not extremely attached to it.” With a headmaster’s tone, the official went on to give journalists an elementary lesson. “NATO means North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” The centrality of Articles 5 and 6 of the alliance were “geographic” in nature.

In 2021, Macron made it clear that NATO’s increasingly obsessed approach with China as a dangerous belligerent entailed a confusion of goals. “NATO is a military organisation, the issue of our relationship with China isn’t just a military issue. NATO is an organisation that concerns the North Atlantic, China has little to do with the North Atlantic.”

Such views have also pleased former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, whose waspish ire has also been trained on the NATO Secretary-General. In his latest statement, Stoltenberg was condemned as “the supreme fool” of “the international stage”. “Stoltenberg by instinct and policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen”. In thinking that “China should be superintended by the West and strategically circumscribed”, the NATO official had overlooked the obvious point that the country “represents twenty percent of humanity and now possesses the largest economy in the world … and has no record for attacking other states, unlike the United States, whose bidding Stoltenberg is happy to do”.

The record of this ceramic breaking bloc speaks for itself. In its post-Cold War visage, the alliance has undermined its own mission to foster stability, becoming Washington’s axe, spear and spade. Where NATO goes, war is most likely. Countries of the Indo-Pacific, take note.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from The Transnational

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***

Until the Last Ukrainian

Ukraine just lost another 740 soldiers on the front lines yesterday. As usually, after more than a month of “counteroffensive”, without gain. It’s all for nothing – except a bloody show for NATO. The Ukrainian forces are now so weak that their pressure forward has nearly stopped everywhere on the long front. In Pryvilia in Zaporizhzhia region, the Ukrainians even retreated from a once feebly taken village because a whole brigade was annihilated. The Ukrainians now attack on foot without artillery support, through minefields against Russian defense positions and against Russian armor under heavy artillery and air attacks. Why? Because Russia has destroyed so many Ukrainian tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery, that Ukrainians have practically nothing but their boots and Kalashnikovs left. Around Vremivka, the Ukrainians are taking an ever longer “pause”. Attacks around Artemovsk (Bakhmut) have lost momentum too.

Russia is now destroying the third army Ukraine has built. The first one was destroyed in the first half of 2022. The second one was destroyed in Ukraine’s offensives in Kharkov and Kherson regions in Autumn 2022. Now the third Ukrainian army is being obliterated, and Ukraine has started a “total mobilization” to scrape together the last males who can still walk.

NATO is running out of stuff to give Ukraine. Biden admits that the dispatch of 155 mm artillery cluster shells is only a desperate second “solution” because the US and NATO are out of ordinary 155 mm artillery ammunition to send. The US will send another 30 Stryker armored vehicles, that is not more that Ukraine loses on any given day. There will come F16s for Ukraine, but it won’t change a thing.

There Will be No Ceasefire

The “Putin is weak” narrative of illusional collapse of Russia has replaced the horrible reality for NATO in the heads of the NATO leaders.

Send more Ukrainian cannon fodder to their certain death, and through magic, perhaps Russia will crumble by itself.

“This is the weakest Putin has been since taking power,” said Ian Bremmer.

“The president has been clear that we are going to support Ukraine for as long as it takes and provide them an exceptional quantity of arms and capabilities,” said national security adviser Jake Sullivan

… right now the priority is to hold the line on Ukraine for as long as possible,” said Rachel Rizzo, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center

See this.

NATO and Kiev will continue until Ukraine is no more.

This will define the postwar European order.

NATO Cannot Defend Lithuania

NATO is not capable of defending Lithuania. See this.

They also can’t defend Finland.

Even a Polish led NATO expedition force into Ukraine will be obliterated by Russia.

New NATO members are a stretch of obligations far beyond the means of NATO. Because NATO is simply not capable of fighting a large scale war in Europe. Just ask Col. Douglas Macgregor.

That will become horribly evident to everybody, once what remains of Ukraine is destroyed.

What Then?

After the war in Ukraine, Russia will be in a position to politely ask Finland and the Baltic countries to leave NATO. Or else …

Kaliningrad will become a hub – both for military, trade, and finance. Want bank secrecy? Want protection of your wealth? Forget Switzerland. Go to Kaliningrad.

This will completely change the dynamics in the Baltic Sea and all of Northern Europe.

Through control of all of Ukraine, incl. the western part, Russia will build a Eurasian Landbridge from Russia and China to Hungary and Serbia. This will connect to mega transport routes “Between Three Seas” already being built in eastern Europe by NATO-EU-US in the “Visegrad countries”. The existing part of the Eurasian Landbridge through Belarus and Poland will get a strong alternative. Slovakia may decide to grasp these opportunities too.

Hungary and Serbia will experience enormous economic and political advantages as a center of east-west business and security. China and Germany are already investing big in Hungary, and it will be much bigger. That will completely change the dynamics in Central Europe and the Balkans.

As a consequence of both the above, Russian influence both north and south of Poland, Poland will become much more isolated and vulnerable. Germany on its hand, will likely seek to reestablish the advantages of Russian and Chinese business.

France may suddenly “rediscover” strategic autonomy.

Britain? Are they Europe? They might then find that they are not.

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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Europe – Karsten Riise and Christian Lue, Unsplash CC0

The WHO’s Burgeoning Biomedical Police State: Who’s Going to Stop It?

By Ben Bartee, July 09, 2023

The organization atop the world Public Health™ hierarchy, the WHO, is now explicit in stating these aims out loud in public, apparently unafraid to flaunt its ill-gotten power to the people it is in the process of fully subjugating.

Joe Biden and His Warmongering Minions Seem Absolutely Determined to Drag America Into World War III

By Michael Snyder, July 10, 2023

When the nukes start falling, nobody will be able to say that they weren’t warned. Thanks to Joe Biden and his warmongering minions, we are steamrolling toward World War III, but most Americans don’t seem to care. Most of us just continue to party our lives away, but meanwhile our leaders seem absolutely determined to drag us into an apocalyptic conflict.

Shocking Real Reasons for COVID Shot! “The Pandemic of Lies”

By Neenah Payne, July 10, 2023

Vaxxed shows that Dr. William Thompson was a CDC whistleblower who came forward with documents and data that strongly indicate the CDC illegally manipulated data in the MMR study. Dr. Thompson alleged that during the study, highly significant increases in the risk of autism were found in several populations and the CDC did everything from kicking children off the study to throwing data out to cover it up.

The Weaponization of Mosquitos: WHO and Gates Inc Announce Plans to Flood Africa with Ultra Dangerous Malaria “Vaccines”

By Jordan Schachtel, July 10, 2023

During a Wednesday press conference, WHO director Tedros Adhanom declared that 12 African countries will be receiving 18 million doses of malaria vaccine in the coming months, declaring that climate change is largely responsible for the continuing disease burden in the continent.

Tensions in Ukraine Show Why ‘Nuclear Power Is the Most Dangerous Way to Boil Water’

By Jessica Corbett, July 10, 2023

With Ukrainian and Russian officials trading accusations about a possible looming attack on Europe’s largest nuclear power plant this week, global experts and campaigners are sharing fresh concerns about the facility and the energy source more broadly.

Those Committed to Helping Ukraine Must First Decide What Constitutes Real Help for the Country’s People

By Bharat Dogra, July 10, 2023

Are common people of Ukraine helped by ever-increasing supply of western/NATO weapons and military training (including increasingly dangerous ammunition having long-term highly hazardous impacts), or is this pushing them deeper into war and conflict?

More Weapons for Kiev Regime? NATO Chief Stoltenberg’s Confused and Contradictory Statements

By Andrew Korybko, July 09, 2023

To be absolutely clear in order for this analysis not to be misinterpreted or spun as meaning something that it doesn’t, there’s no guarantee that the US will cut off Kiev’s arms supply, peace talks will then resume, and the conflict will be successfully frozen.

The Syrian Refugees in Germany Face Danger

By Steven Sahiounie, July 09, 2023

Lebanese clans living in Germany, who are involved in drug trafficking, have caused death and mayhem. The German police responded to a massive brawl which broke out on June 16 in front of a restaurant in Essen that left a 23-year-old Syrian man dead, several German police officers injured, and 150 Lebanese arrested.

Lancet Study on COVID Vaccine Autopsies Finds 74% Were Caused by Vaccine – Study Is Removed Within 24 Hours

By Will Jones, July 09, 2023

A Lancet review of 325 autopsies after Covid vaccination found that 74% of the deaths were caused by the vaccine – but the study was removed within 24 hours. The paper, a pre-print that was awaiting peer-review, is written by leading cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch and their colleagues at the Wellness Company and was published online on Wednesday on the pre-print site of the prestigious medical journal.

A Bankrupt Calculus: Sending Cluster Munitions to Ukraine

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, July 09, 2023

There is a certain desperation in the logic of those who argue that a depraved solution has merit because it’s only slightly less depraved than that of the opponent. Torture is bad but should still be used because your adversary feels free to resort to it. Only do so, however, via judicial warrant.

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US occupation forces positioned in al-Tanf region on the Syrian-Iraqi border handed missiles with warheads filled with poisonous substances to Daesh “ISIS” terrorist organization, with the aim of carrying out chemical provocations and accusing the Syrian government of them, said Sergei Naryshkin, Head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

Naryshkin’s comments came in a report on Monday quoted by Novosti news agency.

“Deputy Commander of the U.S Army Central Command, James Malloy, is leading the activities of Daesh “ISIS” terrorist organization in Syria, as he is delivering missiles with warheads filled with toxic materials in an area near the illegal US military base at al-Tanf,” Naryshkin added.

Naryshkin noted that the site surrounding al-Tanf base has become a launching pad for terrorist gangs, as a joint US-British intelligence committee was established, and it is in fact the main headquarters to direct the activities of the “ISIS” terrorist organization in the vicinity of Damascus and southern Syria.

According to Naryshkin

“The Anglo-Saxons, as they usually do, are preparing to support their machinations with a powerful media campaign, aimed at showing the countries of the Arab world that their choice of resuming dialogue and relations with Syria was a strategic mistake, and that those who do not agree with this approach are directly threatened with Western sanctions.”

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Featured image is from SANA

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***

Nearly half of the country’s tap water could be contaminated with cancer-causing “forever chemicals,” according to a new study.

The study — released Wednesday by the U.S. Geological Survey — found that at least 45% of tap water in the United States is estimated to have one or more types of per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states that PFAS, or per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, are a group of about 14,000 man-made chemicals that are “very persistent in the environment and in the human body – meaning they don’t break down and they can accumulate over time.”

PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals” by the NIH, can last for years without breaking down and are linked to cancer, fetal complications, liver disease, kidney disease, thyroid disease, fertility problems, autoimmune disorders and other serious health issues.

The USGS said the study is the first to test for PFAS in tap water from both private and public water supplies, testing 716 locations across the country between 2016 and 2021. Of the locations, both rural and urban areas, 447 rely on public water supplies and 269 rely on private wells.

Scientists estimate that there is about a 75% chance of PFAS being found in rural areas and about a 25% chance in urban areas. High exposure areas were reported in the Great Plains, Great Lakes, Eastern Seaboard, and Central/Southern California regions. 

“USGS scientists tested water collected directly from people’s kitchen sinks across the nation, providing the most comprehensive study to date on PFAS in tap water from both private wells and public supplies,” said USGS research hydrologist Kelly Smalling, the study’s lead author. “The study estimates that at least one type of PFAS – of those that were monitored – could be present in nearly half of the tap water in the U.S. Furthermore, PFAS concentrations were similar between public supplies and private wells.”  

The EPA regulates public water supplies while private water supplies are maintained, tested and treated by homeowners. Anyone interested in testing and treating private wells should contact their local and state officials for guidance as testing is the only way to confirm the presence of PFAS in wells. 

“If the average American is worried about the quality of their drinking water, they can use this and other studies to get informed, evaluate their own [personal] risk and reach out to their local health officials about testing or treatment,” Smalling told NPR.

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***

When the nukes start falling, nobody will be able to say that they weren’t warned.  Thanks to Joe Biden and his warmongering minions, we are steamrolling toward World War III, but most Americans don’t seem to care.  Most of us just continue to party our lives away, but meanwhile our leaders seem absolutely determined to drag us into an apocalyptic conflict.  The Biden administration is constantly provoking China and constantly escalating the war in Ukraine, and one of these days they could cross a line that will never be able to be uncrossed.  They are literally playing with fire, but they won’t be the only ones that get burned if they push things too far.

This week, we learned that the Biden administration has decided to give cluster munitions to Ukraine as part of a new $800 million military assistance package.

If you don’t know what cluster munitions are, here is a pretty good explanation from NBC News…

The dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, or DPICMs, are surface-to-surface warheads that explode and disperse multiple small munitions or bombs over wide areas — bringing more widespread destruction than single rounds. The rounds can be charges that penetrate armored vehicles, or they can shatter or fragment to be more dangerous for people.

Some human rights groups oppose their use because of concerns that unexploded bomblets, or duds, could explode after battle, potentially injuring or killing innocent civilians.

These weapons are considered to be extremely dangerous to civilians, because many of them fail to go off initially and end up getting detonated by civilian activity much later…

As the bomblets fall over a wide area, they can endanger non-combatants.

In addition, somewhere between 10% to 40% of the munitions fail, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The unexploded munitions can then be detonated by civilian activity years or even decades later.

The Cluster Munition Coalition, an activist group trying to get the weapons banned everywhere, says potentially deadly cluster submunitions still lie dormant in Laos and Vietnam 50 years after their use.

As you can see, there is a reason why so many countries have banned the use of such weapons.

In fact, at this point more than 120 nations have agreed to ban them…

A convention banning the use of cluster bombs has been joined by more than 120 countries who agreed not to use, produce, transfer or stockpile the weapons and to clear them after they’ve been used.

The United States, Russia and Ukraine are among the countries that have not signed on.

But even though there is such an international consensus, the Biden administration is sending them to Ukraine anyway…

But White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the munitions were critical for Ukraine to sustain its military operations against the Russian invaders.

“We will not leave Ukraine defenseless at any point in this conflict, period,” he said.

Why aren’t more people talking about Jake Sullivan?

He is a warmongering nutjob, and Joe Biden does pretty much whatever Jake Sullivan tells him to do.

And so when Jake Sullivan suggests provoking China again, Joe Biden goes along with it.

Zero Hedge is reporting that the U.S. will now start providing Volcano Vehicle-Launched Scatterable Mine Systems to Taiwan…

Taiwan has finalized a new defense deal with the US worth $146 million to acquire Volcano Vehicle-Launched Scatterable Mine Systems, seen as crucial for defense of the self-ruled island in the event of a Chinese military invasion. This comes the same week the State Department announced approval for $440 million more in ammo and logistics deals for Taiwan.

The pending Volcano mine-laying systems deal had first been previewed by the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency in December 2022. It additionally included M977A4 trucks, M87A1 anti-tank mines, as well as M88 and M89 training munitions.

Needless to say, this is yet another move that has greatly angered the Chinese.

And our trade war with China just went to another level.

In response to new restrictions imposed by the U.S., China has just implemented export controls on two absolutely critical raw materials…

A trade war between China and the United States over the future of semiconductors is escalating.

Beijing hit back Monday by playing a trump card: It imposed export controls on two strategic raw materials, gallium and germanium, that are critical to the global chipmaking industry.

“We see this as China’s second, and much bigger, counter measure to the tech war, and likely a response to the potential US tightening of [its] AI chip ban,” said Jefferies analysts. Sanctioning one of America’s biggest memory chipmakers, Micron Technology (MU), in May was the first, they said.

Ever since Joe Biden entered the White House, our relations with China have gone into the dumpster.

And I think that there is a chance that the Chinese could actually choose to invade Taiwan before Joe Biden’s time in the White House is over.

If that happens, it would be a complete and utter catastrophe for the global economy…

A military conflict over Taiwan would set the global economy back decades because of the crippling disruption to the supply chain of crucial semiconductors, according to the head of one of the island’s leading makers of microchips.

Taiwan, a self-ruling democracy about 100 miles off China, makes the world’s most advanced microchips — the brains inside every piece of technology from smartphones and modern cars to artificial intelligence and fighter jets.

We simply cannot afford for such a war to happen, because we must have access to those chips.

Without the chips that Taiwan produces, we would be in a world of hurt…

The island is a microchip fabrication hotbed, producing 60% of the world’s semiconductors — and around 93% of the most advanced ones, according to a 2021 report from the Boston Consulting Group. The U.S., South Korea and China also produce semiconductors, but Taiwan dominates the market, which was worth almost $600 billion last year.

So why don’t we just start building more chips in the United States?

Well, a 40 billion dollar factory is going to be constructed in Arizona, but it is many years away from completion…

The U.S., which produces about 10% of the world’s semiconductor chips and none of the most advanced ones, is also trying to boost domestic manufacturing, offering tax incentives for projects like the $40 billion factory being built in Arizona by the Taiwanese chip giant TSMC.

But building such a complex industry will take time, Wu said. “I would say 10 years,” he added.

If our leaders were smart, they would be trying to find a way to maintain peace.

But instead they just keep antagonizing both Russia and China, and that is just pushing them closer to one another…

China said it wants closer ties with Russia’s military, a sign Moscow still has Beijing’s support after the aborted Wagner mutiny.

Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu said in a meeting Monday with Nikolai Yevmenov, commander-in-chief of Russia’s navy, that “with the joint efforts of both sides, the relations between the two militaries will continue to deepen and solidify, constantly make new progress and reach a new level.”

If we end up fighting Russia and China at the same time, it would be a nightmare.

And needless to say, such a conflict would inevitably go nuclear, and a full-blown nuclear war would have the potential to kill billions of people…

So let us pray for peace.

Unfortunately, our leaders don’t seem interested in peace at all.

Joe Biden and his warmongering minions are playing a very dangerous game, and the fate of humanity hangs in the balance.

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Michael Snyder has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News which are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. 

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