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It’s early in the new Congress, but lawmakers are already hotly debating spending and debt levels. As they do so, they risk losing track of an important issue hiding in plain sight: massive Pentagon waste. At least in theory, combating such excess could offer members of both parties common ground as they start the new budget cycle. But there are many obstacles to pursuing such a commonsense agenda.
Pentagon waste is a longstanding issue in desperate need of meaningful action. Last November, the Department of Defense once again failed to pass even a basic audit, as it had several times before. In fact, independent auditors weren’t even able to assess the Pentagon’s full financial picture because they couldn’t gather all the necessary information to complete an evaluation. In some ways, that should have been devastating, the equivalent of a child receiving an incomplete on an end-of-year report card. No less alarming, the Pentagon couldn’t even account for about 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets. Yet the last Congress still approved $858 billion in defense programs for fiscal year 2023, a full $45 billion more than even the Biden administration requested.
Spending levels aside, poor financial management has a serious negative impact on both service members and taxpayers. Last month, for example, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed that the Pentagon can’t account for at least $220 billion worth of its property, including such basics as ammunition, missiles, torpedoes, and their component parts. For its part, Congress (and so the average taxpayer) doesn’t have the faintest idea how much it’s spent on weapons or their components distributed to contractors for maintenance and upgrades. Worse, the GAO reports that the $220 billion in unaccounted-for equipment and parts is “likely significantly understated.”
Such irresponsible financial management also applies to Pentagon weapons purchases, creating another set of problems. The Department of Defense commits staggering numbers of taxpayer dollars to new weapons programs without doing its due diligence, all too often resulting in dysfunctional systems. The GAO has reported on this issue for 20 years and yet there’s been little discernible change in Pentagon behavior.
There is a better way, though. For example, in its most recent Annual Weapons Systems Assessment Report, the GAO notes that obtaining basic information at critical points in the weapons-buying process produces better cost and delivery outcomes. In defense-speak, this is called “knowledge-based acquisition.” Of course, requiring crucial information about a program before proceeding to its development stage should be a no-brainer. Yet the Pentagon has wasted untold billions of dollars on ill-functioning weaponry like the F-35 combat aircraft by proceeding to the development stage without faintly adequate information.
And the status quo guarantees future disasters like the F-35. According to the GAO, more than half of the major defense-acquisition programs it reviewed in fiscal year 2022 “did not demonstrate critical technologies in a realistic environment before beginning system development.” That’s like buying a house without checking whether the water pressure is adequate or the roof leaks — or, in the case of the F-35, a few thousand houses. An independent assessment of that fighter jet in fiscal year 2021 found more than 800 unresolved deficiencies, six of which are so serious that they may cause death or serious injury to those operating the plane, or critically restrict its capabilities in a combat setting. In the 20 years since the program began, the Pentagon has yet to approve that deeply deficient, wildly expensive plane for full production. Put another way, it has already spent nearly $200 billion on a system that may never actually be fully ready for combat.
Aside from the fact that the F-35’s engine doesn’t work, the main reason the Pentagon hasn’t gone full speed ahead on production is that even its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, can’t assess the aircraft’s performance. Why? Because the company hasn’t finished developing the simulator required to properly test it. Still, the money keeps flowing and, by current estimates, the program’s lifecycle cost will exceed $1.7 trillion, making it one of the most expensive weapon programs in Pentagon history.
Looking Down from the (Capitol) Hilltop
Pentagon waste is, of course, nothing new. Still, the need to trim the fat only grows more urgent as this country faces mounting security challenges ranging from the increasing devastation of climate change to strategic competition with other powers. The war in Ukraine is already straining the Pentagon’s buying system in striking new ways. As the need to get weapons out the door quickly becomes its number one priority, its penchant for wasting taxpayer dollars will undoubtedly only grow worse.
Still, there are reforms that could quickly improve the situation. There’s no need for Congress or the Pentagon to reinvent the wheel, since the steps toward making weapons-buying more accountable have been clear for years — as have the roadblocks along the way.
One of the biggest obstacles to reform is that so many lawmakers have vested interests in a hands-off approach to the Pentagon budget. As a start, striking numbers of them have instant conflicts of interest with respect to the defense industry, since they own stock in major weapons-making firms. Those companies make major campaign contributions to keep the lawmakers in their camp. Open Secrets.org, a group that tracks money in politics, reported, for instance, that, in the 2020 election cycle, the arms sector contributed $50 million to political candidates and their committees.
To mask such obvious conflicts of interest and their wasteful consequences, lawmakers generally prefer to change the subject. When the Pentagon budget is threatened with even modest reductions, they routinely trot out tired arguments about how such enormous sums create jobs, jobs, and more jobs. Forget that the data shows education spending produces more than twice as many jobs, while clean energy and healthcare generate 50% more. In short, taxpayers would be far better off if Congress repurposed significant amounts of Pentagon spending for more productive endeavors.
Beyond long-overdue campaign finance reform and a congressional stock-trading ban, lawmakers have a lot of ground to cover when it comes to making Pentagon spending more accountable. The GAO has clear recommendations for ways to mitigate the risks and challenges of prospective weapons programs before making investment decisions. It has also recommended developing significantly better ways of assessing “military readiness” (the fitness of units to engage in combat). Too often, an alleged lack of readiness is used as another excuse to further pump up the Pentagon budget. The Congressional Research Service has, however, pointed out that Congress doesn’t even have a standard definition of military readiness, so how can legislators begin to evaluate the real-world impact of the hundreds of billions of dollars they routinely authorize for the Department of Defense?
The bottom line is simple enough: Congress needs to cut the Pentagon budget dramatically. It’s not only outrageously oversized, but some parts of it are genuinely dangerous. Take, for instance, the newest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) now being prepared by Northrop Grumman for a prospective $264 billion over its lifetime. Such missiles will only increase the risk of an accidental nuclear war because a president will have just minutes to decide whether to launch them in a crisis (and once they’re launched, you can’t take them back).
Unfortunately, lawmakers have proven remarkably unwilling to address the issue of Pentagon waste. Take the chair of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, for example. The new incumbent Ken Calvert (R-CA) recently offered this boilerplate response on the subject:
“Despite various reports on budget numbers, while I support reforms that will yield cost savings in any government program, I do not support cuts to national security that would negatively impact readiness or slow our ability to deliver capability to the warfighter.”
Never mind that Congress can’t assess military readiness, his statement obscures the fact that he undoubtedly intends to press for even higher budgets, while threatening to make the search for “waste” a modest sideshow.
Such an approach, of course, directly benefits politicians like Calvert. After all, he was the second-highest recipient of defense-industry contributions in Congress between 2021 and 2022 at $415,850. Only current House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) received more. So don’t expect either of them to go after the F-35, despite its cost overruns and dismal performance, or any other major weapons system.
In fact, last December, Rogers said all too bluntly that his priority this year would be “no cuts whatsoever to defense spending.” In January, he turned around and told a Defense News reporter, “We’re going to start meeting right away about what I see as threats and challenges that we’ve got to meet… because we intend to do some cutting. There’s some legacy systems and fat. There’s a lot that can be taken out.” Count on one thing, though, as with Calvert, Rogers’ idea of what can be “taken out” will not include spending on any of the Pentagon’s costliest weapons programs.
Still, these days even retiring some old weapons programs would count as a modest victory in Washington. Rogers and Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking Democrat on the armed services committee, do appear to agree on the importance of dumping outmoded systems, so maybe they’ll actually trim a little fat.
Thankfully, there are a number of lawmakers across the ideological spectrum who are genuinely interested in broader Pentagon spending cuts. While some progressive Democrats press for a smaller Pentagon budget and refocusing “national security” on people, not corporations, a few on the Republican right argue for military cuts with the debt ceiling in mind. Unfortunately, supporters of such reductions are fighting an uphill battle.
Contractors First, Taxpayers Last
Members of Congress routinely favor major weapons makers over the needs of taxpayers and military personnel. As lawmakers fight for military contracts that will generate revenue in their districts or states, they have become remarkably complicit in the consolidation of the industrial part of the military-industrial complex, which threatens actual national security, in part by reducing corporate competition.
For decades, Congress stood by while weapons companies gobbled each other up through mergers and acquisitions. The result: the five largest contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — have, in recent years, split a staggering $150 billion-plus in Pentagon funding annually, often in “sole-source contracts” that virtually guarantee overcharging and cost overruns.
In 2015, for instance, Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, acquired Sikorsky aircraft for $9 billion. At the time, the Pentagon expressed some concern about the impact of corporate conglomeration, without actually opposing the deal because, as the Justice Department decided, Sikorsky wasn’t a direct competitor. It manufactured helicopters and Lockheed didn’t. The Justice Department later rebuked Frank Kendall, a Pentagon official who expressed concerns about the deal, while pushing back on his calls for a more formal Pentagon role in potentially blocking such mergers.
Three years later, Northrop Grumman acquired Orbital ATK, then the biggest manufacturer of rocket motors in the country. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) imposed guardrails on the deal because Northrop also made missiles and acquiring a company that produced motors for its missiles could give it an unfair advantage over other missile manufacturers. Still, the merger went through.
In 2019, L3 Technologies and the Harris Corporation combined in a “merger of equals” to create L3Harris, the sixth-largest defense contractor. Both companies were the sole suppliers of critical components for the military’s night-vision equipment. As a result, the Justice Department concluded that the merger would monopolize that technology and required Harris to sell its night-vision business. The company is now, however, trying to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne, the last remaining independent supplier of missile propulsion systems in the United States. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently called on the FTC to block the deal, arguing that it would decrease competition in rocket motors.
In 2020, Raytheon and United Technologies combined in the biggest defense merger in decades, valued at about $121 billion. The resulting company, Raytheon Technologies, now an aerospace conglomerate, has established itself as a global supplier of everything from jet engines to missiles. As this country’s second-biggest weapons contractor, only Lockheed Martin outdoes it in annual defense revenues.
It is, of course, long past time for Congress to push back against such merger mania in the arms industry and the wild Pentagon overspending, waste, and poor weaponry that goes with it. Reducing the political clout of the major weapons makers would do more than just save billions of tax dollars. It just might prompt a broader debate about the purpose of a Pentagon budget now rising toward the trillion-dollar mark annually, a sum that would undermine the very concept of defense.
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The big purge in Kiev continues.
After the purge of Defense Minister Oleksii Rezhnikov, two Deputy Defense Ministers Ivan Rusnak and Oleh Hayduk will now be purged. Earlier, anotherDefense Deputy Vyacheslav Shapovalov was fired on 24 January 2023 and arrested on 2 February 2023. And a “helicopter crash” on 18 January 2023 removedInterior Minister Denys Monastyrsky,Deputy Interior Minister Yevhen Yenin, State Secretary Yurii Lubkovych and 6 others in the helicopter including the pilot. The top of Ukraine’s coercive Ministeries – the Military and Police – is taken out.
Additional top-Ukrainians were purged in January 2023
Deputy Prosecutor General Oleskiy Symonenko
Deputy Minister for Development of Communities and Territories Ivan Lukerya
Deputy Minister for Development of Communities and Territories Vyacheslav Negoda
Deputy Minister for Social Policy Vitaliy Muzychenko
The 5 governors of the key regions Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, Sumy, and Kherson
We cannot count the total number of key Ukrainians who are purged lately. They are so many and the reports that surface are only intermittent. Including Zelensky’s former Liar-in-Chief Aleksii Arestovych, who was fired for accidentally once telling the truth (!), we can say that the purged Ukrainian top-officials number more than 17 – but the real number when including lower ranks and lower profiled centers of power is probably several times higher.
As Kiev loses everywhere on the front, the US and its government media like Washington Post continue to spin the unbelievable narrative that the Kiev purge is just about “corruption”. That Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov continues as minister, only in a ministry without coercive powers, is proof that Reznikov did no misdemeanor. The whole point was to replace the mild-mannered Reznikov who was close to Zelensky with the Himmler-like Bodanov as Defense Minister, to keep the Ukrainian killing machine going as Ukraine breaks down. The funny thing about Oleksii Reznikov, that the new ministerial position given to Reznikov will be as Minister of Strategic Industries – yes, little coercive power, but indeed with exorbitant opportunities for Reznikov to enrich himself and others through corruption. Instead of corrupting with millions, Reznikov can now corrupt with billions.
The US resistance to “corruption” in Ukraine is not believable. Nowhere in history has the US ever before had an urge to interfere in the corruption of its client states as long as they obeyed US orders. On the contrary, corruption makes it easier for the US to control its clients with money and threats of revealing. And President Biden and his son Hunter Biden have personally profited enormously from Ukraine’s corruption. The US Congress had to investigate Biden and found, that due to the unfathomable corruption in Ukraine’s Burisma company, “the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.” Yes indeed. The US has only for show “pushed against corruption” in Ukraine for more than 8 years, so why do purges just happen now?
For those who can think, it is clear that “corruption” as explanation for the Stalinist purges and show-allegations in Ukraine does not hang together. Not because corruption is not endemic in Ukraine, but rather because it was always so, and not just recently. What is equally clear to people who can think is, that Ukraine in spite of US lies is losing the war, and that this has severe personal consequences for top-people in a more and more paranoic environment in Kiev and the ever more desperate US push to keep Ukrainians fighting – and dying.
Being a US puppet doesn’t always end well.
Just like Zelensky, Georgia’s ex-President Saakashvili was also hailed by Joe Biden (yes) and US media as a hero and “crusader” against corruption. As such, Saakashvili was showered by the US as a “fighting corruption” when he quickly fired the whole police force in a “corruption drive”. Saakashvili’s Georgian purge of the police was also just a ploy to strengthen US power in Georgia. When the Georgians wanted to get rid of Saakashvili, Joe Biden moved his retainer Saakashvili to Ukraine as governor of Odessa. When even the Ukrainians no longer wanted to see the back of Saakashvili, the criminal Saakashvili was sheltered by now-President Joe Biden in the USA but is today jailed in Georgia for abuse of power and … corruption. The US is now trying to get Saakashvili out of Georgia to Poland under the pretext of “bad health”.
President Zelensky, just like the other purged Ukrainians, has also demonstrably stashed a fortune in tax havens – money which nobody knows how Zelensky even as an “actor” has acquired.
Zelensky can fare worse than his friend Saakashvili once the US does not need Zelensky any more…
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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: President Zelensky hailed as a ‘democratic’ leader. Photo supplied
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Recently, the US Embassy in Moscow urged Russia-based Americans to leave the country as soon as possible. In the same vein, US residents outside of Russia were discouraged from traveling to the country. Washington’s close allies, such as Canada and France, also joined the measure and issued notes recommending that their citizens leave Russia and Belarus.
The US diplomatic delegation in Moscow published a document on Feb. 12 advising Americans to leave Russia or avoid arriving there. According to diplomats, it is possible that Americans will suffer some kind of hostility in Russian territory due to the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine – and Washington’s support for the Kiev’s side. The Embassy stated that the ability of the American government to help citizens in Russian territory is extremely limited, which is why their stay in the Eurasian country would not be safe.
“Do not travel to Russia due to… the potential for harassment and the singling out of US citizens for detention by Russian government security officials, the arbitrary enforcement of local law, limited flights into and out of Russia, the embassy’s limited ability to assist US citizens in Russia, and the possibility of terrorism”, the Embassy’s document says, adding that “The US government’s ability to provide routine or emergency services to US citizens in Russia is severely limited, particularly in areas far from the US Embassy in Moscow, due to Russian government limitations on travel for embassy personnel and staffing, and the ongoing suspension of operations, including consular services, at US consulates”.
Following the decision of American diplomats, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Canada also joined the provocation. In a declaration, the country’s authorities said that Canadians should leave Russia while commercial flights are “still available”, suggesting that transport blockade measures will begin to be implemented soon. In the same sense, referring to Canadians unable to leave Russia, it was advised that they maintain a “low profile”, avoiding exposure.
“If you are in Russia, you should leave while commercial means are still available (…) [But] If you remain in Russia, maintain a low profile”, the statement says.
On the 13th, France also adopted similar guidelines, emphasizing, however, the need for its natives to leave Belarus. According to the French authorities, the geographical proximity of Belarus to the conflict zone and the close political partnership between Minsk and Moscow pose dangers to the stay of French people in the country. Therefore, they are encouraged to leave as quickly as possible, preferably via the routes of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland – which are considered “safe” territories due to their ties to NATO.
“Amid the Russian army offensive in Ukraine and the closure of Belarus’ airspace, we strongly advise you to refrain from visiting Belarus (…) [If you are in Belarus now, we advise you] to leave the country immediately by motor transport across the borders with Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland”, the statement says.
In fact, this is not the first time this has happened. Western countries have repeatedly encouraged their natives to leave Russia and Belarus since the beginning of the special military operation. The last occasion on which the American Embassy in Moscow issued this type of alert was on September 28, 2022. As far as Belarus is concerned, on October 4, Washington’s State Department published an alert for Americans to leave the country. In practice, advising nationals of western states to leave Russia and Belarus has become commonplace.
The main arguments for these guidelines have been the alleged “dangers” of harassment, arbitrary detention, terrorism and other types of violence by Russians and Belarusians against foreigners, but there have also been rumors of forced mobilization of non-Russians with permanent residence in the country. Both arguments are absolutely unsubstantiated, considering that there is no report of violence against foreigners in Russia or Belarus, and that troops’ mobilization is obviously restricted to Russian nationals – in addition to taking place voluntarily, not by force.
However, it should be noted that this type of measure also sounds like a threat and blackmail for the residents of the countries in which the alerts are being issued. By discovering that foreigners are being evacuated, some Russians, Belarussians may believe that their country is really threatened, about to be bombed, which tends to generate collective panic.
In this sense, there seems to be a psychological operation that works in two directions: 1- against Western citizens, who begin to believe that they are actually threatened by Russia and Belarus and start to support NATO’s actions; 2- against Russians and Belarusians themselves, who see this type of action as a suggestion that an open war can start at any moment, with the enemy side trying to save their nationals from possible attacks.
The evident reality, however, contradicts any provocative narrative from the West. There is no danger for western people in Russia or Belarus. And the risks of escalation to an open conflict, although they exist, are not so high, depending exclusively on Western goodwill for them to cease to exist, considering that NATO is the provoking side. The best thing for the West to do is stop trying to generate collective panic among ordinary people and engage in effective proposals to reach a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
It is a clear indicator of the disappearance of freedom from our so-called Western democracies that Sy Hersh, arguably the greatest living journalist, cannot get this monumental revelation on the front of The Washington Post or The New York Times, but has to self-publish on the net.
Is the Biden administration committed to the use of nuclear weapons as an instrument of peace? The cost of America’s “peace-making” nuclear weapons program is of the order of 1.3 trillion dollars. The focus of US military doctrine since the Bush administration has been on the development of so-called “more usable nuclear weapons”.
UKHSA’s report shows that instead of “protecting” people from Covid-19, Covid vaccines significantly increase the risk of hospitalization in months 7-9 after vaccination.
A new and increasingly popular Twitter hashtag is “#diedsuddenly” in response to a surge of sudden unexplained deaths among mostly young and healthy individuals, including athletes, occurring over the past 2 years. Here are but a few recent news stories.
n February 9 the Washington Post published a report claiming that the Kiev regime forces “never launch HIMARS rounds without detailed coordinates provided by US military personnel situated elsewhere in Europe”. This also seems to include other NATO member states, while Washington DC gives the final authorization for any given HIMARS attack.
The US is actively recruiting Islamists for terrorist attacks against Russia according to the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (SVR). Undoubtedly, this is another demonstration of Washington’s consistent and persistent strategy of pressuring and provoking Russia.
The “Rage Against The War Machine” rally promises to be the first large-scale rally against Washington’s aggressive war lobby in many years. I am looking forward to sharing the stage with my good friends and former House colleagues Dennis Kucinich and Tulsi Gabbard, as well as my good friend and fellow libertarian Judge Andrew Napolitano, and so many more speakers from a broad political spectrum.
Israel’s new government, again headed by the monstrous Benjamin Netanyahu, has shifted hard to the right, incorporating as it does the extremist settlers’ movement as well as parties that have spoken casually of forcing the Palestinians out and even of extermination if it comes to that.
We must bear in mind that these pipelines were jointly owned by Russia’s Gazprom and French, German and Dutch companies and the gas passing through Nordstream 1 and potentially through Nordstream 2 was critical to the entire European energy and therefore industrial market.
Objective analyses of the war in Ukraine are hard to come by through the thick fog of war propaganda. But we should pay attention when a series of senior Western military leaders, active and retired, make urgent calls for diplomacy to reopen peace negotiations, and warn that prolonging and escalating the war is risking a full-scale war between Russia and the United States that could escalate into nuclear war.
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[Author’s Note: I was going to speak at the Rage against the War Machine rally, scheduled for February 19 at the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C. For personal reasons, I will no longer be speaking.
In short, I have decided to take one for the team.
I wish all participants and attendees at this rally to have a very successful event, and hope that it can serve as the start of something even bigger down the road.
This is the speech I was planning to deliver at the rally. I think it would have done the event proud.]
Thank you very much for allowing me the opportunity to address you today.
I speak to you from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a place of history filled with gravitas worthy of the task we have set for ourselves at this time in our collective history: to stand up—no, to rage—against a war machine that has perverted the very definition of what it means to be an American.
We stand here today at the very nexus of this war machine. To our right, just over the Potomac River, lies the Pentagon, a structure built at a time when America called upon its collective might to defeat the scourge of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, but which has since then morphed into the very symbol of evil itself, a breeding ground for weapons and plans that are used by the other partners, in what has become known as the military-industrial complex, to spread malfeasance around a world we once protected, but now enslave through a process of perpetual conflict used to sustain the American war machine.
And who are these other partners? Before us, past the monument to our founding father, George Washington, stands the Capitol of the United States, where the people’s representatives fund, in great secrecy, the nefarious schemes cooked up in the bowels of the Pentagon.
And to our left stands the White House, the seat of Executive authority, where individuals we invest with singular authority betray the trust of those who put them there by conceiving and implementing policies designed to further the Pentagon’s war efforts.
This is the very nexus of evil, an unholy trinity of terroristic madness, which some 61 years ago Dwight D. Eisenhower, an American warrior turned political leader, warned the American people about, cautioning that
“in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
In the history of the United States that has transpired since that speech, no truer words have been spoken by an American president, and no greater wisdom has been disregarded by those whom Eisenhower entrusted with that message—we, the people of the United States.
We stand here today to announce to this terrible trinity, this military-industrial complex, this war machine, that we hear you now, President Eisenhower—we hear you, and we will act on your warning to bring this nexus of un-American conspiracy to an end.
Of all the weapons produced by the military-industrial complex, of all the evil schemes hatched in the minds of the so-called national security experts—most of whom are unelected by, and unknown to, we, the American people—none reek of madness more than nuclear weapons.
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” the father of the American atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, said at the time of the first American nuclear test.
Destroyer of worlds.
This is the ever-present reality that we all live in today—that from this nexus of evil we call the military-industrial complex comes the very weapons necessary to bring the words of the Hindu sacred text that Oppenheimer quoted—the Bhagavad-Gita—to life and, in doing so, bring about our collective deaths.
Most Americans, including many of you assembled here today, live in blissful ignorance of just how close the world has come to being destroyed by Oppenheimer’s progeny.
On 26 September 1983, a Soviet Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov, was on duty at a nuclear early-warning station when the system reported that five nuclear armed missiles had been launched from the United States.
Colonel Petrov disregarded protocol requiring him to report this detection as a factual launch, an act that would have triggered a Soviet response, and in doing so bought precious time for the error to be identified, and nuclear war averted.
In November 1983 the United States and NATO carried out a command post exercise code-named “Able Archer 83” which tested the launch control procedures for the release of NATO nuclear weapons against Soviet and Warsaw Pact targets.
The Soviets, believing this exercise to be a cover for a first strike, placed its nuclear forces on high alert. Later, the CIA assessed that the Able Archer 83 exercise brought the US and Soviets closer to nuclear conflict than any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
And on January 25, 1995, the Soviets detected the launch of a Norwegian atmospheric test rocket that mimicked the track of a US Nay Trident submarine-launched nuclear weapon. Fearing a high-altitude nuclear attack that could blind Russian radar, Russian nuclear forces went on high alert, and the “nuclear briefcase” was delivered to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who had to make a split-second decision whether to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike against the United States
These three incidents underscore the razor’s edge we all walk daily when it comes to living in a world where nuclear weapons exist. One mistake, one error or judgement, and the Bhagavad-Gita becomes reality.
We were saved from the inevitability of our collective demise by one thing, and one thing only—arms control. The deployment into Europe by both the US and Soviet Union of intermediate-range nuclear armed missiles in the 1980’s only increased the possibility of a mistake or misunderstanding that could trigger a nuclear conflict. The fact that these weapons could reach their respective target in five minutes or less once launched meant that the 30–40-minute buffer of time that existed regarding the use of strategic nuclear forces was no longer there.
To put it more starkly, if it were not for the implementation of the intermediate nuclear forces treaty in 1988 that eliminated these new and dangerous weapons, the January 25, 1995 atmospheric rocket incident would have more than likely resulted in a general nuclear war, simply for the fact that Boris Yeltsin would have been denied the luxury of time to decide not to launch his missiles.
Everyone standing here today should reflect on this statement and say a quiet word of thanks to those men and women, American and Soviet alike, who made the intermediate nuclear forces treaty a reality and, in doing so, literally saved the world from nuclear destruction.
Scott Ritter will discuss this speech and answer audience questions on Episode 44 of Ask the Inspector.
Arms control, however, is no longer part of the US-Russian dialogue.
The American war machine has conspired to denigrate the notion of mutually beneficial disarmament in the minds of the American public, instead seeking to use arms control as a mechanism to achieve unilateral strategic advantage.
When an arms control treaty becomes inconvenient to the objective of American global domination, then the war machine simply quits. America’s record in this regard is damnable—the anti-ballistic missile treaty, the intermediate nuclear forces treaty, the open-skies treaty—all relegated to the trash bin of history in the cause of seeking unilateral advantage for the American war machine.
In a world without arms control, we will once again be confronted with a renewed arms race where each side develops weapons that protect nothing while threatening everything. Without arms control, we will return to a time where living on the edge of the abyss of imminent nuclear annihilation was the norm, not the exception.
The war machine has allowed the principled position of peaceful coexistence regulated by mutually beneficial treaties governed by the time-tested maxim of trust but verify to be replaced by a new posture defined by a war machine that uses the nuclear weapons establishment, and the billions of dollars it costs to maintain it annually, as a means of buying off politicians at the expense of the population our government is sworn to protect. This is the final corruption of the military-industrial complex—its conversion to the military-industrial-congressional complex, where we the people are excluded from every consideration, whether it be funding or consequence.
The key to sustaining this inherently un-American mechanism is the ability of the military-industrial-congressional complex—the war machine—to generate fear amongst the American people derived from ignorance of the true nature of the threat or threats these nuclear weapons are designed to address.
In the case of US-Russian relations, this fear is produced by systemic Russophobia imposed on the American public by a war machine and its compliant minions in the mainstream media. Left to its own device, the collusion between government and media will only further reinforce ignorance-based fear through a process of dehumanizing Russia and the Russian people in the eyes of the American public, until we have become desensitized to the lies and distortions, accepting at face value anything negative said about Russia.
It is here, in such a situation, that we can turn to scripture, John 8:32, for some guidance:
“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
But what truth? The truth as told by the government? As promulgated by the mainstream media? That is no truth, but rather a bodyguard of lies constructed on behalf of a war machine that wants every American to accept without question the legitimacy of weapons the only known utility of which is the destruction of all mankind.
Some 60 years ago, on these very steps, in this very place, a man of peace gave a speech that captured the imagination of the nation and the world, searing into our collective hearts and minds the words, “I have a dream.”
Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic address confronted America’s sordid history of slavery, and the inhumanity and injustice of racial segregation. In it, he dreamed “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
All men are created equal.
These words resonated in the context of America’s desperate internal struggle with the legacy of slavery and racial injustice.
But these words apply equally, especially when taken in the context that we are all God’s children, black, white, rich, poor.
American.
Russian.
You see, I too have a dream.
That the audience gathered here today can find a way to overcome the ignorance-based fears generated by the disease of Russophobia, to open our minds and our hearts to accept the Russian people as fellow human beings deserving of the same compassion and consideration as our fellow Americans—as all humankind.
I too have a dream.
That we the people of the United States of America, can unite in common cause with the Russian people to build bridges of peace that facilitate an exchange of ideas, open minds closed by the hate-filled rhetoric of Russophobia that is promulgated by the war machine and its allies, and allow the love we have for ourselves to manifest itself into love and respect for our fellow man.
Especially those who live in Russia.
Newton’s Third Law, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, applies to the human condition every bit as much as it applies to the physical world.
Love thy neighbor as thyself is applicable to all humanity.
I too have a dream.
That by overcoming the hate generated by systemic Russophobia we can work with our fellow human beings in Russia to create communities of compassion that, when united, make a world filled with nuclear weapons undesirable, and policies built on the principles of mutually beneficial arms control second nature.
I too have a dream.
That one day, whether on the red hills of Georgia, or the black soil of the Kuban, the sons and daughters of the men and women who today operate the Russian and American nuclear arsenals will be able to quote Dr. King, “to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
This is not an impossible dream.
I have lived it. I once was corrupted by the hatred that comes from fear generated by the ignorance about the reality of those whom I was trained to kill.
But I then embarked on a remarkable journey of discovery, facilitated by the implementation of the very same intermediate nuclear forces treaty that ended up saving humanity from nuclear annihilation, where I came to know the Russian people not as enemy, but as friend. Not as opponent, but colleague. As fellow humans capable of the same emotions as myself, imbued with the same human desire to build a better world for themselves and their loved ones, a world free of the tyranny of nuclear weapons.
I too have a dream.
That the people gathered here today will join me on a new journey of discovery, one that tears down the walls of ignorance and fear constructed by the war machine, walls designed to separate us from our fellow human beings in Russia, and instead builds bridges that connect us to those we have been conditioned to hate, but now—for the sake of ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren—must learn to love.
This will not be an easy journey, but it is one worth taking.
This is my journey, your journey, our journey, where we will embark, literally, down the road less travelled.
And yes, it will the one that will make all the difference.
It will take us, as Dr. King once cried out from these very steps, to the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, the mighty mountains of New York, the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania, the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado, the curvaceous slopes of California…to every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
This is an American journey—a journey of Americans, united in the cause of peace and justice, and a world free from the tyranny of nuclear weapons. Our numbers will grow, from two thousand, to twenty thousand, from twenty thousand to a hundred thousand, and from a hundred thousand to a million or more.
And who knows? Maybe in June of 2024, on the anniversary of the 1982 gathering of a million people in New York City’s Central Park, where they rallied in favor of nuclear disarmament and an end to the nuclear arms race, we can come together and send a similar message to the war machine.
A million people or more demanding that their government act in a manner that preserves and protects the lives and future of all Americans—of all humanity.
The 1982 rally set in motion events that led to the implementation of the intermediate nuclear forces treaty in 1987—a treaty that literally saved the world from nuclear destruction.
I too have a dream.
That together, we can harness the same energy, the same vision, the same passion as those who have gone before us and create a movement of people united in the principles of peace that will lead to a future arms control agreement between the United States and Russia that will preserve our collective futures.
There will be forces that will try to disrupt us, to dissuade us—to destroy us.
We cannot allow ourselves to be intimidated.
We must not go gently into that good night, but instead rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Rage, rage against the war machine.
Rage, rage so that together we may breathe life into the words of President Lincoln inscribed on the memorial behind me:
“…to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Let us get to work.
Thank you.
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***
Brazil-based reporter and author Brian Mier outlines the strategy of lawfare and how it has been used in Latin America, particularly in the Lava Jato investigation.
“Lawfare is the use of the law as a weapon of war, and it is the newest characteristic of 21st Century Combat.” — Colonel Charles Dunlap
Lawfare is the weaponized use of the law to annihilate a political or business enemy.
Common tactics used in Lawfare include: forum shopping – when public prosecutors transfer a case to a jurisdiction with a friendly judge; excessive use and abuse of coerced plea bargain testimonies which are often the only evidence presented; suppressing evidence beneficial to the defense; and close collaboration with the media to create a public spectacle.
One example of the later tactic is the time Brazilian Java Jato judge Sergio Moro ordered former Economy Minister Guido Mantega to be forcibly removed from his wife’s chemotherapy session and tipped the press off in advance, to create a media circus around his arbitrary arrest on charges he was later ruled innocent of.
There are indications that US DOJ use of Lawfare was piloted in the US before being rolled out through Latin America.
In July, 2008, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it was filing corruption charges against Senator Ted Stevens (R/AK) for allegedly receiving illegal reforms on a vacation property, damaging his reputation and causing him to lose his first election in over 36 years.
Like future cases in Latin America, there was no material evidence presented, just a coerced plean bargain testimony made by a man who was trying to get out of jail. Months after the election, Stevens was ruled innocent, and in 2012 Judge Emmett Sullivan ruled two DOJ officials guilty of proprietorial misconduct. Nearly all of the tactics cited in the kangaroo court persecution of Ted Stevens would go on to be used against Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva within the ambit of the the US DOJ-backed Lava Jato (Car Wash) investigation. Coincidence or not, it is clear that these tactics would soon be exported throughout the Americas and the World, especially through partnerships with local law enforcement officials within the ambit of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
What is Lawfare?
As two members of Lula’s defense team, Cristiano Zanin and Valeska Martins wrote with legal scholar Rafael Valim in their 2021 book Lawfare: Waging War through Law it first appeared as a military term in the 1970s, but gained popularity in a series of texts by US Air force Colonel Charles Dunlap starting in 2001, when he wrote,
“Lawfare is the use of the law as a weapon of war, and it is the newest characteristic of 21st Century Combat.”
Originally described as a weaponized use of international human rights law to criticize military campaigns by the US and Israeli governments on human rights issues and to weaken support for things like the war in Iraq, it was alluded to in the in the Pentagon’s March, 2005 National Defense Strategy, which refers to law as “the weapon of the weak who use international legal cases and terrorism to usurp America.”
Soon, however, military strategists began suggesting that Lawfare could be more than just something that the US government had to defend against and that it could also benefit national security, being preferable to expensive and destructive forms of war, and more neutral definitions of the term began to emerge. Dunlap later wrote that Lawfare could be converted into a “strategy of using or misusing law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve military objectives.”
In 2016, Orde Kittre published the book Lawfare: law as a weapon of war and, based on the ideas of Dunlap, tried to perfect the concept of Lawfare by breaking it into two elements: 1) the use of the law to create effects similar to those achieved in conventional military actions; and 2) actions motivated by the desire to weaken or destroy an adversary.
As international attention drew to the kangaroo court procedure initiated against former Workers Party Brazilian President Lula da Silva in 2016, his defense team began referring to it as a form of Lawfare. As Martins told this author in an interview conducted in 2018, “when people say we are politicizing the defense, this is a lie because, in reality, this is a technical diagnosis. When we understand that, technically speaking, there is no material evidence, that the accusations are illogical, that the legal arguments are misrepresented, we come to the unequivocal conclusion that we are dealing with a process of Lawfare.”
As they worked with international human rights lawyers to publicize Lula’s plight, Zanin, Martins and Valim created their own definition of the term: the abuse and misuse of the law in a violent manner to conduct political persecution.
The law was certainly abused during the political persecution of politicians throughout Latin America within the ambit of the Lava Jato investigation, which started in 2014 as collaboration between the US Department of Justice (DOJ), the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), the Swiss Federal Police and a local district attorneys office and judge based out of the conservative Brazilian city of Curitiba. The investigation crippled Brazil’s national development project, bankrupted many of its largest companies, transferred billions of dollars in fines to the United States and ultimately resulted in the illegitimate presidency of a neofascist former army captain named Jair Bolsonaro who is currently facing genocide charges in the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague. Initially presented to the US media as a legitimate partnership within the ambit of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) through a series of 2016 press releases by the Department of Justice itself, it later came out that investigators violated national sovereignty laws by engaging in secret, bilateral communications,including years of secret meetings between Brazilian prosecutors and a group of 18 FBI agents led by Leslie Bakshies.
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977, is a US federal law that was originally conceived to prohibit US companies from committing acts of bribery overseas. Twenty years later, a modified version of the law was incorporated into an international treaty, the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention of 1997, which enabled the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) to act in any signatory nation in consort with local authorities. At this point, according to the modified terms of the law, these international partnerships enabled US authorities to investigate any foreign company or individual located in a Convention signatory nation that has a US bank account, owns real estate in the US, has stock traded in the US, or even that has ever conducted any type of transaction in US dollars, as long as the investigation is conducted in partnership with local law enforcement officials. It was the FCPA, for example, that enabled FBI agents to raid FIFA headquarters in Zurich in 2015 and arrest several non-US citizens on foreign soil.
In his academic paper, “The uncomfortable truths and double standards of bribery enforcement,” legal scholar Mike Koehler shows how the US government selectively uses the FCPA to advance its own objectives. According to Koehler, uncomfortable truths that weaken the US moral authority to act as international anti-corruption police include: how the US government actively participates in bribery; how the highest levels of the US government knowingly engage in and support private bribery; how the identity of the alleged bribe payer influences the US government’s enforcement of bribery laws; the subtle difference between US government and private sector attempts to influence foreign government action; and how the US government employs overblown and inconsistent rhetoric regarding bribery enforcement.
It’s common knowledge that the CIA gave away bags of money to government officials in Afghanistan. So why would the US Department of Justice (DOJ), the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the FBI be so worried about corruption in Latin America that the US government would prioritize the issue in the 2017 National Security Strategy if it isn’t political?
The fact that Brazil signed the Anti-Bribery Convention in 1997 enabled the DOJ to work as a partner—some critics argue it took the lead—in Lava Jato, levying billions of dollars in fines on Brazilian companies in civil cases, generally based in the Southern New York Court District. In 2015, Lava Jato judge Sergio Moro bankrupted Brazil’s five largest engineering and construction companies by refusing to treat them as too big to fail – like the US government did with Goldman Sachs during the subprime mortgage crisis – and paralyzed all of their operations for 6 months due to the alleged actions of a few of their business executives. Studies show that this arbitrary action by a district court judge in Curitiba caused 500,000 direct and 3.6 million indirect job layoffs and a 2.5% drop in GDP growth in 2015, severely damaging the reputation of President Dilma Rousseff during the lead up to the April, 2016 parliamentary coup, which was also helped by Lava Jato Judge Sergio Moro’s illegal wiretapping of a conversation between President Rousseff and former President Lula, which he edited to make her look as bad as possible then shared with Brazil’s largest TV network, O Globo, on the eve of the impeachment vote. The Lava Jato investigation was also responsible for the election-year, arbitrary political imprisonment of ex-President Lula for reforms to an apartment the prosecutors were unable to prove he ever owned or set foot in. Although the signs of judicial and prosecutorial overreach in Lava Jato were crystal clear by 2016, after hacker Walter Delgatti (who is currently facing a 300 year prison sentence) shared leaked Telegram conversations showing illegal collusion between Lava Jato prosecutors and the judiciary with the Intercept, Brazilian Federal Police, the Supreme Court and Lula’s defense team, all doubts about the criminal nature of Lava Jato were put to rest.
Lava Jato started in Brazil, but soon, with support from the US DOJ, it expanded across Latin America and Lusophone Africa and was used used to attack politicians in other countries where Brazilian engineering and construction companies like Odebrecht and OAS operated. Attempts to use it against Venezuelan politicians failed due to the wise decision of that government to never sign the FCPA agreement, but dozens of politicians in other countries were targeted. Here are a few examples:
Jorge Glas – Ex-Vice President of Ecuador
Arrested in October 2017, Progressive International board member Jorge Glas was sentenced to 6 years in prison by Ecuadoran Lava Jato prosecutors for allegedly receiving bribes from Odebrecht construction company, based on the plea bargain of a single, corrupt business executive, José Conceição Santos, who received a reduced sentence and partial asset retention in exchange for his testimony. He was released on parole in November, 2022.
Mauricio Funes – Ex-President of El Salvador
In June, 2018, a judge in El Salvador issued an arrest for former President Mauricio Funes and 30 top members of the FMLN, based on coerced plea bargain testimony transcripts supplied by Brazil’s Lava Jato task-force, taken from corrupt businessmen who received sentence reduction and partial retention of their illicit assets in exchange for their testimony. Already living in Nicaragua at the time, they were unable to arrest him and he lives there to this day.
Rafael Correa – Ex-President of Ecuador
In April, 2020, an Ecuadoran kangaroo court sentenced Rafael Correa to 8 years in prison and barred him from running for office for 25 years based in part on coerced plea bargain testimony from an Odebrecht executive that was shared by the Lava Jato Taskforce. With Ecuador currently in chaos, the former President has been living in political exile in Belgium since 2017.
Gleisi Hoffmann – President of Brazilian Workers Party
After Lula was illegally barred from running for President in September, 2018, one of the names cited to replace him was Gleisi Hoffmann. A rising star in the PT, the Lava Jato taskforce tried to annihilate her political career by frivolously accusing her of receiving illegal campaign donations from Odebrecht without any material evidence, while using illegal leaks to create a media circus over an arbitrary search and seizure operation in her house in 2016. Since Hoffmann was a Senator at the time, her case was taken directly to the Supreme Court where she was ruled innocent by a vote of 11-0, due to, as in the case of Lula and so many other victims of Lava Jato, a total lack of material evidence in a case that was entirely built on coerced plea bargain testimony by corrupt business executives who changed their story several times before receiving massive reduction of prison sentence, transfer to house arrest and partial retention of millions of dollars in illicit assets.
Lava Jato – an investigation which has now been proven to be critically flawed due to criminal collusion between chief judge and prosecutors – has spread its tentacles all over the world. In Mozambique, it resulted in the arrest of former Transportation and Communications Minister Paulo Zacula, and Lava Jato was also used to accuse prominent politicians of corruption in the Dominican Republic, Panama and Angola. As Lula defense lawyer Valeska Martins emphasizes, Lawfare is a tactic that can be used against any political enemy from across the political spectrum. Three right wing former Presidents of Peru were sentenced to prison due to coerced plea bargain testimonies by corrupt, imprisoned Brazilian businessmen, with former President Alan Garcia committing suicide on the day they were coming to arrest him him.
Conclusion
Although frivolous criminal investigations against politicians and business leaders as tactics to gain an upper hand over rivals has certainly been engaged in as long as politics and business have existed, the concept of Lawfare as a hybrid war tactic really begins in the 21st Century, in actions that seem to have been piloted by the US DOJ within the US itself before being applied selectively to advance US business and political interests abroad.
The US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, initially created in the 1970s a means to reduce the ability of US companies to bribe foreign officials overseas – in theory strengthening sovereignty in countries around the world – has been transformed into a weapon used as justification to arrest foreign political leaders and bankrupt foreign competitors to US corporations. Furthermore, the we can see the toxic legacy of this imperialist strategy in the form of local initiatives, unrelated to the FCPA, that use similar Lawfare tactics to annihilate political enemies such as Argentina’s Vice President Cristina Kirchner. With a new round of electoral victories of the working class left in Latin America, it is more important than ever to develop defense strategies against Lawfare.
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This article, originally published in Kawsachun News, was made possible by Common Frontiers.
Brian Mier is a correspondent for teleSUR English in Brazil, and editor of the book Year of Lead: Washington, Wall Street and the New Imperialism in Brazil. He has lived in Brazil for more than 25 years. Brian is a host of a weekly program on Brasil 247 and he’s an editor of Brasil Wire.
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***
SUMMARY: UKHSA’s report shows that instead of “protecting” people from Covid-19, Covid vaccines significantly increase the risk of hospitalization in months 7-9 after vaccination.
The reports were designed to have several statistical sections meant to highlight vaccine successes. Funnily, many sections had to be discontinued as “vaccine successes” turned into spectacular failures. This happened with case and death rates and the section about pregnancies, which has not been updated for months but shows a 15% drop in UK pregnancies year-on-year.
However, another section of the report allows us to see something interesting. Look at the latest Vaccine Surveillance Report for Week 5, 2023. It shows hospitalization rates for various ages based on how long ago was their last dose. The rates apply to January 2023, which is the most recent data.
The most important fact we see is that for people over 50, the most dangerous period after vaccination is between 6 and 9 months after their last dose.
Their risk of hospitalization is several times higher than before six months or after nine months. The increase in risk far outweighs a small reduction in the first six months.
As a side note, this chart shows that additional boosters outright do not reduce risks for people under 50. However, those have very few hospitalizations, making the data less reliable for those ages.
So, people who take a Covid booster first go through a somewhat reduced hospitalization risk for the first six months, then go through a dramatically heightened risk of hospitalization, then hospitalization rates “return to normal,” with the normal being very high. Does that look like the vaccine provides any benefit? Not to me!
Consider, for example, the 65-74 age group. According to the above chart, for those 6-9 months after vaccination, the hospitalization rate is about 300 per 100,000 for just one month of exposure (this January). This means one out of three hundred Brits aged 65-74 who were 6-9 months after their last booster, was hospitalized for Covid this January.
The hospitalization rate of 300 per 100,000 is enormous!
The last time UKHSA reported hospitalization rates per 100,000 was in week 13 2022 report. (, which showed hospitalization rates for similar age groups (also for a four week period) (click UKSA Report, Table 14, page 45):
The age groups do not exactly match, but you can see that vaccinated people 65-75 years old had a roughly 25per 100,000 hospitalization rate last March. In contrast, unvaccinated people’s hospitalization rate was about 40per 100,000 during that period.
Now, people 6-9 months after vaccination have 300 per 100,000 or about 8-10 times greater hospitalization rates than they would have last March.
While the numbers are not directly comparable, their disparity is enormous. It should raise questions about what is going on with vaccines and why they enhance COVID hospitalization rates so much, at a certain time after the last dose.
The overall higher hospitalization rates for all ages suggest that Covid was more severe this January, compared to last March. Again, while being mindful that age groups do not match, you can compare rates on the January 2023 Figure 13 chart with those in the March 2022 table 14. Hospitalization rates per 100,000 for vaccinated people in all age groupsseem to have increased by about three times.
Mind you, there were more Covid cases last March than this January, according to the British Covid-counting app Zoe, which is based on symptoms recorded by the Zoe app users, not on official tests:
So,
there were about half as many Covid infections this January compared to the last March, but
the hospitalization rates per 100,000 population for January were about three times greater,
This suggests 3/0.5 = six times greater disease virulence (a rough estimate).
Does this six times greater virulence represent Covid becoming more intrinsically severe (the Geert variant), or are vaccines and/or reinfections contributing to enhanced mortality, perhaps via the IgG4 mechanism? We cannot tell that from these charts.
I believe we are getting closer to getting answers about what is going on with mortality, as the data coming out narrows the range of possibilities.
What do you think causes all this worsening? Vaccines, new variants, reinfections, or all of the above?
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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
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Inside the beating heart of many students and a large number of learners lies an inner cheat. To get passing grades, every effort will be made to do the least to achieve the most. Efforts to subvert the central class examination are the stuff of legend: discreetly written notes on hands, palms and other body parts; secreted pieces of paper; messages concealed in various vessels that may be smuggled into the hall.
In the fight against such cunning devilry, vigilant invigilators have pursued such efforts with eagle eyes, attempting to ensure the integrity of the exam answers. Of late, the broader role of invigilation has become more pertinent than ever, notably in the face of artificial intelligence technologies that seek to undermine the very idea of the challenging, individually researched answer.
ChatGPT, a language processing tool powered by comprehensive, deep AI technology, offers nightmares for instructors and pedagogues in spades. Myopic university managers will be slower to reach any coherent conclusions about this large language model (LLM), as they always are. But given the diminishing quality of degrees and their supposed usefulness, not to mention running costs and the temptations offered by educational alternatives, this will come as a particularly unwelcome headache.
For the student and anyone with an inner desire to labour less for larger returns, it is nothing less than a dream, a magisterial shortcut. Essays, papers, memoranda, and drafted speeches can all be crafted by this supercomputing wonder. It has already shaken educational establishments and even made Elon Musk predict that humanity was “not far from dangerously strong AI.”
Launched on November 30, 2022 and the creative offspring of AI research company OpenAI, ChatGPT is a work in progress, open to the curious, the lazy and the opportunistic. Within the first five days of launching, it had attained over 1 million users.
It did not take long for the chatbot to do its work. In January, the Manchester Evening Newsreported that a student by the name of Pieter Snepvangers had asked the bot to put together a 2,000-word essay on social policy. Within 20 minutes, the work was done. While not stellar, Snepvangers was informed by a lecturer that the essay could pass with a grade of 53. In the words of the instructor, “This could be a student who has attended classes and has engaged with the topic of the unit. The content of the essay, this could be somebody that’s been in my classes. It wasn’t the most terrible in terms of content.”
On receiving the assessment from the lecturer, Snepvangers could only marvel at what the site had achieved: “20 minutes to produce an essay which is supposed to demonstrate 12 weeks of learning. Not bad.”
The trumpets of doomsday have been sounded. Beverly Pell, an advisor on technology for children and a former teacher based in Irvine, California, saw few rays of hope with the arrival of the ChatGPT bot, notably on the issue of performing genuine research. “There’s a lot of cheap knowledge out there,” she toldForbes. “I think this could be a danger in education, and it’s not good for kids.”
Charging the barricades of such AI-driven knowledge forms tends to ignore the fundamental reality that the cheat or student assistance industry in education has been around for years. The armies of ghost writers scattered across the globe willing to receive money for writing the papers of others have not disappeared. The website stocked with readily minted essays has been ubiquitous.
More recently, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, online sites such as Chegg offer around the clock assistance in terms of homework, exam preparation and writing support. The Photomath app, to take another striking example, has seen over 300 million downloads since coming into use in 2014. It enables students to take a picture of their maths problems and seek answers.
Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is also less than impressed by claims that ChatGPT is somehow bomb blowing in its effects. “In terms of underlying techniques, ChatGPT is not particularly innovative.” It was merely “well put together” and “nicely done.” Half a dozen startups, in addition to Google and Meta, were using “very similar technology” to OpenAI.
It is worth noting that universities, colleges and learning institutions constitute one aspect of the information cosmos that is ChatGPT. The chatbot continues to receive queries of varying degrees of banality. Questions range from astrology to suggest gift ideas to friends and family.
Then come those unfortunate legislators who struggle with the language of writing bills for legal passage. “When asked to write a bill for a member for Congress that would make changes to federal student aid programs,” writes Michael Brickman of the American Enterprise Institute, “ChatGPT produced one in seconds. When asked for Republican and Democrat amendments focused on consumer protection, it delivered a credible version that each party might conceivably offer.”
What are the options in terms of combating such usurping gremlins? For one, its gratis status is bound to change once the research phase is concluded. And, at least for the moment, the website has a service that occasionally overloads and impairs responses to questions users may pose. To cope with this, OpenAI created ChatGPT Plus, a plan that enables users to access material even during those rocky fluctuations.
Another relevant response is to keep a keen eye on the curriculum itself. In the words of Jason Wingard, a self-professed “global thought leader”, “The key to retaining the value of a degree from our institution is ensuring your graduates have the skills to change with any market. This means that we must tweak and adapt our curriculum at least every single year.” Wingard’s skills in global thought leadership do not seem particularly attuned to how university curricula, and incompetent reformers who insist on changing them, function.
There are also more rudimentary, logistical matters one can adopt. A return to pen and paper could be a start. Or perhaps the typewriter. These will be disliked and howled at by those narcotised by the screen, online solutions and finger tapping. But the modern educator will have to face facts. For all the remarkable power available through AI and machine related learning, we are also seeing a machine-automated form of unlearning, free of curiosity. Some branches off the tree of knowledge are threatening to fall off.
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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 licensed under Wikimedia Commons
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***
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just granted $1,977,031 to a physician-researcher in a five-year effort to investigate the incidence of myocarditis associated with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. This research will use advanced cardiovascular imaging, including cardiac MRI (CMR) led by Supriya Jain, MD, a clinical associate professor of pediatrics and of radiology and clinical education liaison at New York Medical Hospital and Called a Broad Agency Agreement (BAA), Jain leads the study depending on a collaborative research network of clinical investigators across 30 academic trial site locations.
This latest important study is based on previous research led by Jain that started with 63 patients under the age of 21 and diagnosed with myocarditis post-COVID-19 vaccination, enrolled from across 16 hospitals in America.
Dr. Jain has since then helped organize a substantial investigator trial network involving cardiology and advanced cardiovascular imaging expertise across 30 trial site locations and over 300 patients.
Lead Research/Investigator
Supriya Jain, MD, a clinical associate professor of pediatrics and of radiology and clinical education liaison at New York Medical Hospital, director of pediatric cardiac MRI/advanced cardiovascular imaging at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital, a major clinical affiliate of NYMC.
Call to Action: To read more about this important study, see the link.
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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
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***
A new and increasingly popular Twitter hashtag is “#diedsuddenly” in response to a surge of sudden unexplained deaths among mostly young and healthy individuals, including athletes, occurring over the past 2 years. Here are but a few recent news stories.
In Australia, “Fit and healthy 21 year old son dies suddenly in his sleep.” From the University of Arizona, “A recent member of Arizona’s men’s swim team has unexpectedly passed away.” In Detroit, a high school basketball player suffered a cardiac arrest during a basketball game. While they restarted his heart, he hasn’t woken up.
Or this athlete in his early 20’s, “A former Florida Gators offensive lineman died suddenly on Thursday night according to multiple media reports.” From the US Army, “A soldier stationed at Fort Stewart died Tuesday while traveling to California for a training exercise.” Is this some type of black magic? Not likely, “America’s Got Talent magician suddenly dies at just 52.”
Let’s not forget Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin going into cardiac arrest after an unremarkable tackle during a January NFL game. These are anecdotes, and while compelling are not the same as collected data.
Several brave researchers recorded these “sudden” and “unexplained” deaths, as they are described in the media. Here is one report, “An investigation of official statistics has found that the number of athletes who have died since the beginning of 2021 has risen exponentially compared to the yearly number of deaths of athletes officially recorded between 1966 and 2004.”
This trend was quite worrisome, “So much so that the monthly average number of deaths between January 2021 and April 2022 is 1,700% higher than the monthly average between 1966 and 2004.”
Where are the 3-letter health agencies? Why haven’t the FDA, NIH, or CDC offered their own data to refute this alleged increase in sudden deaths? If this is all “misinformation” as big tech and the corporate media describes it, the health agencies should easily be able to disprove it, rather than calling on social media giants to censor or ban anything contrary to their “safe and effective” mantra.
Big Medicine and the media attempt to play this all off as normal but average Americans are noticing and are understandably concerned. Since when is it “normal” for high school and college athletes to have heart attacks and blood clots, often fatal? Why are these daily news stories now compared to years ago when one might hear of only a few cases per year, typically attributed to a previously undiagnosed congenital heart defect? Why are these deaths frequently “unexplained” leaving “doctors mystified”?
America has the best medical care in the world and few medical maladies remain “unexplained” in 2023, other than the recent surge in sudden deaths among the young and healthy.
Are people noticing? Rasmussen Reports asked Americans what they think about all of this. In a national telephone and online survey of 1000 adult Americans published a month ago, four questions were asked.
Have you received a COVID-19 vaccination?
How likely is it that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths?
Do you personally know anyone whose death you think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines?
Which is closer to your belief, that there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, or that people who worry about vaccine safety are spreading conspiracy theories?
How did they answer? 71% of those surveyed were vaccinated, comparable to the national average. Virtually half of respondents don’t believe the “disinformation” mantra propagated by “fact checkers”, mainstream media, and the government. “49% of American adults believe it is likely that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths, including 28% who think it’s very likely.”
Furthermore, “28% of adults say they personally know someone whose death they think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.” And “48% of Americans believe there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.”
The 2022 film “Died Suddenly” reinforces the above concerns, despite critics describing the movie as “baseless”, “propaganda”, or “pseudoscience”. Maybe it is, maybe not. If this is all nonsense, it should be as easy to disprove as it would be to dispel the notion that the sun orbits the earth, rather than vice versa.
Why doesn’t the CDC do a simple analysis, as Steve Kirsch has suggested, linking death and vaccination records? Kirsch has even offered a 10X return on a bet anyone wants to make with him disproving his analysis or conclusions. Any takers?
Since COVID-19 began 3 years ago, trust in medical authorities has declined. According to Pew Research, “29% of U.S. adults say they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public, down from 40% who said this in November 2020.”
Much of what we have been told over the past few years has turned out to be false. A recent Cleveland Clinic study found that more vaccine doses lead to a greater likelihood of getting COVID-19. Or a Cochrane analysis concluding that masks in the community made “little to no difference” in COVID-19 infections or deaths. Weren’t we told otherwise by authoritative doctors in white coats? Challenges to the approved party line were met with threats to one’s medical license, job, or reputation.
Someday there will be another public health emergency and it would behoove health authorities to set the record straight, either proving their assertions, or admitting they were wrong and thoughtfully analyzing why. Otherwise, they will have little future credibility, much like the boy who cried wolf.
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Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a physician and writer. He is not “anti-vaccine”, having been vaccinated against COVID-19 and he is not offering any medical advice, which should take place in a discussion between patients and their physicians.
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (desktop version)
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
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***
On February 9 the Washington Post published a report claiming that the Kiev regime forces “never launch HIMARS rounds without detailed coordinates provided by US military personnel situated elsewhere in Europe”.This also seems to include other NATO member states, while Washington DC gives the final authorization for any given HIMARS attack.
This effectively means that the political West (particularly the United States) is a party to the conflict in Ukraine and although this was clear from the very start, there was still no conclusive evidence to support such claims. However, the latest reports are an indisputable confirmation that NATO personnel is directly targeting both Russian soldiers and civilians.
According to the Washington Post, at least one senior US and three Kiev regime officials confirmed the reports. This doesn’t only include the HIMARS, but also similar platforms such as the M270 MLRS (multiple-launch rocket system) used by other NATO member states. The unnamed senior US official acknowledged “the key American role in the campaign” and stated that “the targeting assistance served to ensure accuracy and conserve limited stores of ammunition for maximum effectiveness”, further adding that “the United States provides coordinates and precise targeting information solely in an advisory role”.
The conclusion is quite laughable given the fact that the so-called “advisory role” of the political West has been rather decisive and as direct as it could possibly be (short of WW3, albeit this is also now in question). The aggressive US-led alliance is still posing as “not a party to the conflict”, but the level of involvement of both Washington DC and Brussels leaves no doubt that Moscow effectively sees both as direct military threats and that the Eurasian giant is now holding back only due to its desire to prevent direct confrontation which would inevitably lead to a world-ending thermonuclear exchange. Russia is perfectly aware this is the political West’s most important proxy war since World War Two and that the belligerent power pole has been planning this for decades (if not longer).
Washington Post further claims that the US officials consistently declined to comment on how exactly they provide coordinates for the HIMARS attacks, citing “concerns about operational security”, instead “highlighting the limitations of American involvement”. A senior Kiev regime official also stated that their military personnel identifies targets they want to attack, as well as their location, and that information is sent up the chain of command. Senior commanders then relay this to their US counterparts for more accurate coordinates. And while both Washington DC and the Neo-Nazi puppet regime insist that the role of the US is “strictly advisory” and that Kiev could use the HIMARS on its own, they admit they “don’t want to waste valuable ammunition and miss”, so they “usually choose not to strike without US confirmation”.
As previously mentioned, this admission alone should be enough to present the US as a party to the conflict, despite the rather comical attempts to justify and exonerate Washington DC. Worse yet, for nearly a year, the Neo-Nazi junta has been insisting on getting longer-range weapons from NATO, which would enable strikes deeper within Russia. The systems currently fielded by the Kiev regime forces have an official range of up to 80 km, but this too has been called into question, as there is ample evidence that it could be double, since the Neo-Nazi junta has routinely been launching strikes from as far as 150 km. Although neither the US nor Kiev have yet confirmed which type of munitions are being used for these longer-range strikes, various sources indicate that it could be an updated version of the GMLRS guided rockets [Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System].
For the time being, it seems the Neo-Nazi junta still hasn’t received the ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems) system capable of strikes at ranges of up to 300 km, but given the political West’s propensity toward a “very liberal” understanding of what truth is, such claims are indeed highly questionable.
Various intelligence sources now suggest that the Kiev regime uses not just the standard M30 and M31 munitions, but also the new ER-GMLRS rockets. The US pressed these weapons into service (production began only in early 2022) and then secretly transferred them to their favorite puppet regime. On the other hand, the mainstream propaganda machine is trying to whitewash Washington DC, insisting that the US “consistently refuses to allow the delivery of longer-range missiles to avoid escalation with Moscow and drag us directly into the war”.
As previously mentioned, such claims are hardly taken seriously in Russia given the sheer magnitude of the inconsistency between America’s claims and actions. What’s even less credible is the Kiev regime’s insistence that “it would not use the longer-range missile to strike across the border inside Russia” given the fact that it has already launched several attacks up to 700 km within Russia. Despite ample evidence that the Neo-Nazi junta couldn’t be trusted, it claims it would be limited in longer-range attacks by Washington DC’s will to provide targeting data.
The unnamed Kiev regime official stated that “you’re controlling every shot anyway, so when you say, ‘We’re afraid that you’re going to use it for some other purposes,’ well, we can’t do it even if we want to”, while another senior Kiev official added that targeting Russian forces “goes through an American installation on NATO soil” and described the process as “very fast”.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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***
The Church of England has announced it will explore alternative words to describe God, after some clergy asked to use more inclusive language in services.
The dominance of masculine language for God certainly matters. As feminist theologian Mary Daly wrote: “If God is male, the male is god”. In other words, talking about the Christian God in exclusively masculine terms privileges men in society and underpins male dominance.
According to a Church spokesperson, the official Christian doctrine is that God has no gender. Yet “He” is described almost exclusively in masculine terms. And since the Church continues to struggle with issues of gender equality, this project is likely to be contentious.
Critics will see this as an attempt to undo the long Christian tradition of calling God “He” and “Father”. But feminine language and imagery has also been part of Church history.
Hildegard of Bingen, a respected abbess (also known as a mother superior) in the Middle Ages, imagined the feminine side of God in her artistry and writings. And in the 1300s, female mystic Julian of Norwich spoke of the motherhood of God.
Modern feminist commentators such as Mary Daly and Joan Engelsman, have argued that God in feminine form has been strategically written out of Christian history.
Initial reports indicate the Church’s project will explore gender-neutral terminology – “Parent” instead of “Father”. But there have been other recent proposals to use feminine language like “She”.
When Libby Lane was appointed the Church of England’s first female bishop in 2014, she called for the mainstream acceptance of feminine names and pronouns for God.
At the same time, the chair of Women and the Church, a group that advocates for gender equality in the Church, stated that the introduction of female bishops would impact women’s lives in the Church “only if God is she as often as she is he – because this is such a formative aspect of our church life, and a real bastion of sexism”. Rachel Treweek, consecrated as bishop in 2015, joined the debate by arguing for the elimination of all gendered pronouns for God.
A genderless ‘Father’?
In my research with women clergy, there are clues that some might be unsettled by moves away from traditional masculine language. One woman vicar described how in a bible study “all hell broke out” at the suggestion that the Lord’s Prayer could begin with “Our Mother”.
The more gender-neutral “Parent” worries Rev Ian Paul, who has commented that such words are not interchangeable and have different meanings. The way words collect gendered meaning is, of course, part of the problem. Feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether argues that even words that seem neutral are not – “God” conjures male imagery.
Complicating this further, I found that sometimes masculine words are forced to mean both male and female. This is awkward and ultimately unsatisfactory. One woman priest, for example, told me that she sees “Father” as the only way of describing God, but “it might be that ideas about fatherhood need to change”.
Another interviewee told me she sees the term “Father” to include male and female. These complications around language and gender suggest that a project exploring gender-neutral language will need to think deeply about what constitutes “neutral”.
Exploring other names for God
While my research suggests there is an attachment to words such as “Father” among some women clergy, several interviewees told me they tried to avoid any gendered language for God. Some mentioned “Godself” as a possible candidate to replace masculine pronouns. One woman told me:
Where I heard ‘Godself’ being used, I quite like that. That is a suggested way. Again, at the moment … [but] within the parishes I think it would draw attention when it’s not necessarily what you want them to focus on.
There’s a sense here that some congregations may not be willing to embrace language change, even if there is a desire among clergy.
The project to look at gender-neutral language to describe God is, at the very least, a recognition that the dominance of masculine language is a problem. Many would welcome the possibility of worshipping in Church without the constant references to “He” and “Father”, given that God is supposed to be beyond gender. A reform of patriarchal language may open the door to tackling other social injustices. Perhaps we are witnessing a sea change in the Church.
But right now the Church of England’s inclusivity credentials are in tatters. It has problems with institutional racism, there is gender inequality in the priesthood and after years of discussion, same-sex marriage is still not recognised. Given the institution’s record on equality, any radical change coming out of this project would be quite miraculous.
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Sharon Jagger is a Lecturer in Religion, York St John University.
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***
The appointment of Richard Sharp as BBC chairman is the latest chapter in the long history of close links between the corporation and the upper reaches of the British establishment, including the intelligence agencies, declassified files show.
The controversy over the appointment of Richard Sharp as chairman of the BBC sheds fresh and intriguing light on Britain’s governing elite and the workings of Westminster and Whitehall.
Sharp, a Tory donor, is an old friend of Boris Johnson and former economics adviser at 10 Downing Street, and of Sam Blyth, a wealthy Canadian businessman and Johnson’s distant cousin. Sharp is also Rishi Sunak’s former boss at Goldman Sachs. Sharp helped put Johnson in touch with Blyth about help over a huge loan for him.
Sharp also introduced Blyth to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Simon Case, about whether Blyth could act as a loan guarantor for Johnson.
In light of the unresolved controversy, Sharp was summoned on 7 February by the House of Commons culture, media and sport committee to explain his position. He said he told Johnson and Sunak of his ambition to be BBC chair before applying for the job. And he added that he raised with Case Blyth’s suggestion that Blyth help Johnson secure a £800,000 loan, and also told the Cabinet Secretary he was going for the BBC job.
Sharp told the committee: “My involvement was to ensure due process was followed. I was not party to any subsequent events that took place. I gave no financial advice to the prime minister”.
Critical report
In a highly critical report published on Sunday, the committee said Sharp’s failure to disclose, either to the MPs on the committee or to his appointments panel, his role in facilitating Johnson’s loan, constituted a “significant error of judgement”.
Sharp also did not disclose he had told Johnson of his intention to apply for the BBC job.
But questions remain over Simon Case’s judgement. Sharp told the Cabinet Secretary about his role as a go-between between Johnson and Blyth. Case appeared to have said that was fine and neither he nor Sharp needed to pass the information on.
Blyth, meanwhile, had been put forward as a candidate for the post of chief executive of the British Council, though he has said this was unsolicited and he did not discuss the job with Johnson.
When it became clear, despite the government’s best efforts, that the controversy over Sharp’s appointment to the BBC was not going away, Downing Street advisers suggested that the circumstances of Sharp’s appointment should be investigated by the Public Appointments Commissioner, Sir William Shawcross.
William Shawcross
Shawcross had been recommended for that job by Johnson. But it happens that Shawcross’ daughter, Eleanor, is Rishi Sunak’s head of policy at 10 Downing Street.
Shawcross said he should recuse himself from the investigation since he had met Sharp on a number of occasions. He delegated it to Adam Heppinstall KC, a barrister with experience of acting for government departments.
Shawcross has other connections. He is the “independent reviewer” of the government’s controversial Prevent programme that was set up in 2003 and later enshrined in law by the 2015 Counter Terrorism and Security Act, to reduce the threat posed by extremist ideologies.
In a report last week, Shawcross concluded that Prevent had concentrated too much on the far right, and not enough on Islamist extremism.
Shawcross is also a member of the consortium led by Sir Robbie Gibb, former head of communications at 10 Downing Street, that bought the Jewish Chronicle newspaper in 2020.
BBC and intelligence
The Sharp affair is the latest episode in a long history of the close relationship between the BBC and the upper reaches of the British establishment, a relationship that spread, in the utmost secrecy, to the world of intelligence.
MI5 kept a sharp eye on senior BBC appointments. Vetting and blacklisting procedures were stepped up in 1982 when a former Army officer, Brigadier Ronald Stonham, was given the title of “Special Assistant” to the BBC’s director of personnel, Christopher Martin, a former Royal Marine.
Journalists were barred from jobs because of associations which were considered “subversive” only in the minds of paranoid members of the security establishment.
Papers released to the National Archives show how the BBC hierarchy approached the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), the government’s secret propaganda unit, after discreet contacts with senior intelligence officials. They began at the time of Harold Wilson’s Labour government.
Charles Curran, the BBC’s director general, wrote to IRD officials on 24 July 1974, stating: “I think that Denis Greenhill [the Foreign Office’s link with MI6] may have told you of the interest which was evident in a recent discussion at our Board of Governors in the activities in this country of movements which would be regarded by most people as subversive”.
He spoke of an “opportunity for discreet discussions” about the distribution of “communist -influenced activities”.
Curran then referred to the possibility of contacting Gwyn Morgan, head of the Labour Party’s Overseas Department (later chief adviser to one of Britain’s first European Commissioners, George Thomson) and Tom McNally, political adviser to the foreign secretary, Jim Callaghan.
Dealing with ‘extremists’
Sir Tom Brimelow, Greenhill’s successor in the Foreign Office, wrote a note dated April 1975 which was copied to Sir Michael Hanley, the head of MI5. Marked “Secret and Personal”, it stated: “I suggest the BBC should put itself in the best possible stance to deal with extremists who still want to grind their axes” – a reference to BBC journalists.
One file, dated a year earlier, in April 1974, reveals an obsession with alleged “subversives” including not only trade union leaders but “Black Power”, the Chile Solidarity Campaign Committee and even the Woodcraft Folk. Hanley was to ensure that “MI5 information” was sent to IRD for the use of officials there.
Hanley’s memo was copied to Sir Leonard Hooper, the head of GCHQ, with a warning to keep their discussions secret – if they were leaked, it could lead to “acute embarrassment”.
Another file refers to MI6 chief Sir Jack Rennie’s view that “the threat now was much more of an internal one”. IRD material should be sent to MI5, argued Sir John Hunt, the Cabinet Secretary.
Hunt reminded Harold Wilson that when the Labour prime minister was previously in office in 1968 he had approved “arrangements under which covert and discreet actions designed to expose communist activities in the UK was undertaken by the English section of the FO’s [Foreign Office] IRD” which was “in constant touch with the Security Service [MI5]”.
Planting stories
Many IRD files have been withheld, but some refer to the unit’s attempts, many of them successful, in planting stories in British newspapers and magazines and promoting suitable and useful books.
One was Revolutionary Politics in Modern Britain published by Bodley Head in 1976. It was written by Richard Shipley, whose employment as a Home Office official was kept quiet.
BBC editors and journalists caused the security and intelligence agencies most concern. In a report dated 1 September 1982, titled “Intelligence and the BBC”, a Foreign Office official responsible for liaising with MI6, wrote: “A number of recent BBC programmes have dealt with the operation of the intelligence agencies in a manner which has given rise to serious concern”.
A programme on the Falklands was singled out and led to Sir Robert Armstrong, then Cabinet Secretary, writing to Ian Trethowan, the BBC’s director general. Armstrong is reported to have said that the government “still face a problem in convincing the BBC to be more circumspect in treating these matters”.
The Foreign Office’s top MI6 contact warned “of the need to persuade the BBC’s senior management that they should supervise programme content more closely, and should act more responsibly”.
A year earlier, in 1981, Trethowan had intervened to censor a BBC Panorama programme on Britain’s intelligence agencies.
The following year, in a letter to Armstrong copied to Sir John Jones, then head of MI5, Sir Antony Acland, permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, warned of the need to be “careful not to give the impression (we) are trying to ‘gag’ the BBC”.
Vigilance
The history of the security and intelligence establishment’s meddling in the BBC demonstrates the need for vigilance on the part of the corporation’s viewers and listeners. Not cynicism or suspicion, just vigilance.
The BBC will always be a special target for the British establishment urging compliance on the part of editors.
There have been spectacular BBC disputes with governments, including over interviews with the IRA, Ian Curteis’ play on the Falklands war, and exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons arsenal leading to the death of the government’s weapons inspector, Dr David Kelly.
But the lessons of the past, including files declassified years later at the National Archives, is that successive governments apply pressure on senior BBC executives, often behind closed doors, and with different degrees of subtlety. The Richard Sharp affair should carry a warning.
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Richard is a British editor, journalist and playwright, and the doyen of British national security reporting. He wrote for the Guardian on defence and security matters and was the newspaper’s security editor for three decades.
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Text messages between Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla could shed light on billion euro deals to purchase Covid-19 shots. An American newspaper is challenging the European Commission in court to release them.
The New York Times will be taking the European Commission to court over the failure of its president to release the messages between herself and Bourla.
“The newspaper will face off against EU lawyers in the bloc’s highest court, arguing that the Commission faces a legal obligation to release the messages, which could contain information on the bloc’s deals to purchase billions of euros worth of Covid-19 doses,” Politico reported.
The case was lodged on January 25 and published on the European Court of Justice’s public register on Monday, but the NYT declined to comment on the matter. In a statement it said: “The Times files many freedom of information requests and maintains an active docket. We can’t comment at this time on the subject of this lawsuit.”
Therefore, “the Commission President’s personal office was not required to identify any text messages”. The Ombudsman subsequently took the view that this constituted maladministration.
The German tabloid Bild had previously filed a series of lawsuits against the Commission seeking the disclosure of documents related to negotiations to purchase the mandated jabs, but information on von der Leyen’s prior contacts with Bourla were not disclosed.
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Featured image: EC President von der Leyen, 2023. Facebook
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (desktop version)
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
In December, the Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Haq, released a report accusing major corporations of maintaining Israel’s water apartheid on Palestinians living in the occupied territories.
According to Al-Haq, businesses are instrumental in helping Israel restrict water access to Palestinians and destroy Palestinian water infrastructure. Additionally, foreign companies profit from Israel’s system of water discrimination.
Al-Haq’s paper named both Israeli and international companies as:
“Complicit in the violation of the Palestinian right to self-determination and permanent sovereignty over natural resources, as well as the war crime of pillage and inhumane acts of expropriation of natural resources amounting to the crime of apartheid.”
The report detailed the actions of Israeli water companies Mekorot and Hagihon but also included outside firms TAHAL Group International B.V., Hyundai, Caterpillar Inc., JC Bamford Excavators Ltd. (JCB), and Volvo Car Group.
International Companies Complicit in Apartheid
Generally, international companies’ involvement in Israel’s water apartheid is through demolitions of water infrastructure such as cisterns, pipelines, and wells. According to Al-Haq’s research, from 2017-August 2021, Hyundai carried out 24 demolitions of Palestinian water equipment, JCB is responsible for 16, Volvo demolished 14 structures, and Caterpillar executed seven demolitions.
Hyundai is a South Korean multinational manufacturer. Its excavators are often used in home demolitions in addition to razing water equipment. Caterpillar is an American manufacturer heavily involved in Israel’s occupation through demolitions, military agreements, and construction of the settlements and the apartheid wall. The company’s major shareholders include BlackRock, an investment company criticized for fueling climate change, State Farm’s investment group, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust.
Volvo is a Swedish multinational company with major shareholders also, including BlackRock and Norges Bank Investment Management, which is owned by the state of Norway. JCB is a British construction equipment manufacturer which helped finance ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s campaign. In return, Johnson promoted the company’s products on the campaign trail.
Machinery used for water infrastructure demolitions documented by Al-Haq field workers between January 2017-August 2021. Source | Al-Haq
Other companies involved in the destruction of water infrastructure include Turkish company Hidromek, Japanese engineering firm Daio, and Chinese construction company LiuGong.
Kardan N.V. is a Dutch company specializing in real estate and water infrastructure. It owns more than 98% of Tahal International Group, which has been involved in water development projects in Israeli settlements, over-extraction efforts limiting the availability of water to Palestinians, and has helped enforce the permit system for the development of wells on Palestinian communities.
Al-Haq reached out to these companies but did not receive a response. Daio was the only company that responded to MintPress News’ requests for comment, stating, ”We have not been able to confirm the facts as you have inquired about our group company, Daio Engineering Co., Ltd.”
Al-Haq noted that most of these demolitions are done because the structures lack permits or are located on Israeli state land, meaning Palestinian land confiscated by Israel for allegedly not being cultivated after a number of years. Most Palestinian buildings in Area C of the occupied West Bank, which is under the full control of the Israeli military, often lack the proper licenses because Israeli authorities deny Palestinians permits on the grounds these areas have not been zoned for construction. Yet zoning plans in Area C are also often rejected by Israeli officials.
“This is part of a broader strategy of harassment against Palestinian farmers to stop their agricultural activities,” Al-Haq wrote, describing these demolitions’ effect on Palestinian farming and their overall economy. Without the proper equipment, Palestinian farmers cannot irrigate their land and, thereby are unable to grow produce.
“The World Bank has estimated that out of a total of [about 175,000 acres] of irrigable land in the West Bank and Gaza, only [about 61,000 acres] are irrigated, costing the Palestinian economy as much as $410.70 million…in irrigated agriculture opportunities and 96,000 agricultural jobs,” Al-Haq wrote.
Al-Haq argues that several Israeli and transnational companies are in violation of international law. The authors wrote:
Since the unlimited water supply to Israeli settlements contributes to their expansion (and prolonged occupation), corporate actors, such as Mekorot, Gihon and Tahal Group International, Middle East Tubes Company (B Gaon Holdings), Mehadrin, Minrav Projects, David Ackerstein Ltd., Einav Ahets are complicit in the transfer of Israel’s civilian population into the OPT and East Jerusalem thus acting in blatant violation of Article 43 and 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
It also accused corporations Mekorot, Volvo, Caterpillar Inc, Daio, JCB, LiuGong, Hyundai, and Hidromek of carrying out a war crime for assisting in the destruction and confiscation of Palestinian water infrastructure.
Many of the international companies involved in Israel’s water apartheid have human rights policies on their website, including Volvo, Caterpillar, Daio, and Hyundai.
Kathryn Ravey, a business and human rights legal researcher for Al-Haq and one of the report’s authors told MintPress News that Al-Haq highlighted how these companies are going against their human rights guidelines in their letters to the corporations.
“A lot of them even have it in their core principles that they’re going to do due diligence, not be contributing to unequal situations or situations in which human rights are at fault or liable of being violated,” Ravey said. “And they basically ignore them and act against them. And this is the frustrating aspect of business and human rights.”
A Climate Change Issue
Despite Israel touting itself as environmentally conscious, the water apartheid it imposes on Palestinians is actually contributing to climate change.
“The thing with water is it’s linked to so many other things, like the environment and the economy,” Ravey said. Israel controls 85% of water resources in the West Bank. As previously reported by MintPressNews, Israel dominating the West Bank’s water sector diminishes Palestinians’ capability to adapt to climate change. Damage to water infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank — whether through war or direct demolition — reduces its ability to handle heavy rainfall or prepare for droughts and heat waves.
Ravey explained that the diversity of the ecosystem also becomes disrupted when Palestinians are prevented from harvesting various fruits and vegetables because of the lack of water. And soil erosion problems occur when Palestinians are denied permits to fix leaky water pipelines.
Ultimately, these issues lead to a land uncultivated and without the necessary resources for communities to thrive. And with that, it strips Palestinians of their sovereignty.
“A lot of Palestinian communities aren’t able to grow the agriculture that they used to grow. And that also prevents them from profiting off of a lot of agricultural pursuits that they used to live off of,” Ravey said. “And not just profit, but also use from their own land.”
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Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based journalist for MintPress News covering Palestine, Israel, and Syria. Her work has been featured in Middle East Eye, The New Arab and Gulf News.
February 14th, 2023 by Sen. Diana Iovanovici Sosoaca
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***
In the video below, Romanian senator Diana Iovanovici Sosoaca made a political statement entitled “People had to die, and it’s not over yet”.
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***
The US is actively recruiting Islamists for terrorist attacks against Russia according to the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (SVR). Undoubtedly, this is another demonstration of Washington’s consistent and persistent strategy of pressuring and provoking Russia.
“According to credible reports, special attention is being paid to attracting people from the Russian North Caucasus and Central Asia,” the statement says, adding that in January of this year, US intelligence agencies recruited 60 militants in Syria who, after training at the El Tanf base, will be sent to Russia and neighbouring friendly countries to carry out terrorist attacks.
“Particular emphasis is paid to planning attacks on heavily guarded facilities, including foreign diplomatic missions,” the SVR statement adds.
The statement also stressed that the US plans to send small groups of militants to Russia and other former Soviet nations that make up the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
“Such actions put Washington on par with major international terrorist groups,” the SVR statement concludes.
The instrumentalization of jihadists is a constant theme of the American global strategic relationship towards Russia.
Washington is fully aware that jihadism in Russia and its neighbourhood can be disruptive. Ever since Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, Russia has strengthened its security structures and found resolutions in the Islamic-majority Caucasus region. These actions significantly reduced Islamic terrorism that plagued Russia in the 1990’s and 2000’s despite American intelligence services supporting Caucasian terrorists.
It cannot be forgotten that the US instigated an Islamist uprising in Russia-allied Syria that eventually led to Al-Qaeda’s Al-Nusra and ISIS taking large swathes of territory and terrorising civilians for years.
Given the failure to depose President Bashar al-Assad and Ukraine now being demilitarized at an unprecedented scale, Washington is seemingly so desperate to break Russian unity and bring terror to the civilian population that it is once again recruiting Islamic terrorism to serve its agenda.
Although Moscow disclosed the intentions of the US to once again weaponize jihadism, it was not revealed exactly how they plan to respond to this threat. It can be assumed that Russia’s intelligence and security system will act in a timely manner to prevent any incidences.
According to the head of the Eurasian Security Forum, Retired Serbian Major General Mitar Kovač, the overwhelming majority of Islam is opposed to American foreign policy.
“Many in the world appreciate that only five percent of Islamic countries or Muslims around the world are ready to follow US policy and be abused, while about 95 percent of countries or Muslim movements are on the side of sovereignty, the idea of sovereignty, and hence it is no wonder that most Muslim countries in the world today supports the Russian Federation’s fight against Western aggression and against its national interests in Eastern Europe,” Kovač said. He effectively highlights those jihadists, who mostly serve Washington’s interests, make up a small percentile of Muslims.
The utilization of jihadists come as the head of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, admitted that the alliance has depleted stocks of munitions. This comes at a time when the Russian Army is preparing, according to the NATO chief, to launch a fresh offensive. As Newsweek reported, the fighting has intensified ahead of the first anniversary of the war, “leading to Kyiv using ammunition at an unprecedented rate.”
For their part, the Financial Times reported that the Ukrainian military is firing more than 5,000 artillery rounds each day— “equal to a smaller European country’s orders in an entire year of peacetime. Russia meanwhile, is estimated to be firing four times that amount each day.”
“It is clear that we are in a race of logistics. Key capabilities like ammunition, fuel and spare parts must reach Ukraine before Russia can seize the initiative on the battlefield. Speed will save lives,” Stoltenberg said.
According to him, the new offensive has already started as Russian troops are closing in on the strategic town of Bakhmut in the Donbass region.
“We see how they are sending more troops, more weapons, more capabilities. The reality is that we are seeing the start [of a new offensive] already,” Stoltenberg said.
Although the expected major spring offensive has not yet started, as Stoltenberg claims, it is undeniable that Russia is amassing hundreds of thousands of troops and heavy equipment. Russia is anticipated to launch a new offensive once the snows has melted and the muds have dried.
With Ukraine experiencing manpower, ammunition and supply issues, the US hopes that jihadist attacks within Russia can alleviate some pressure. However, not only will the SVR keep on top of terrorist activities, Russia will not be deterred from completing the demilitarization of Ukraine and the full liberation of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye and Kherson.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
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***
This morning, a missile that Russia fired at Ukraine flew over Moldova and came within 22 miles of Romania, which is a member of NATO. If the missile had hit Romania, there would have been immediate demands under NATO’s Article 5, especially within the Ukrainian leadership, for NATO to respond immediately by attacking Russia.
It’s also worth noting that NATO wants to make Moldova a member of NATO, which would bring the total number of countries that the American people are automatically required to defend to 31.
As the Pentagon gets the American people ever-closer to all-out, life-destroying nuclear war with Russia, one cannot help but be reminded of the warning that President Eisenhower issued to the American people about America’s deep state.
In his Farewell Address, Ike stated:
Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Ike wasn’t some leftist peacenik. He was a West Point graduate. He was a former military general — a five-star general to be exact. In fact, he was the supreme allied commander in World War II. He had a deep understanding of the military establishment.
Ike delivered his speech during America’s Cold War with Russia and the rest of the communist world. Thus, when Ike stated, “We recognize the imperative need for this development,” he was pointing out that the Cold War required the massive rise of the American deep state.
I question that justification. I hold that the greatest mistake America ever made was to convert the federal government from our founding system of a limited-government republic to a national-security state, which wields many of the same totalitarian-like powers that communist and totalitarian regimes wield, including the power of state-sponsored assassinations. A free nation fights communism with freedom, not with totalitarianism and dark-side deep-state powers.
Regardless, it is indisputable that the Cold War ostensibly ended in 1989. Therefore, Ike’s justification for a deep state evaporated in that year. All that was left was his warning of the dangers to our way of life posed by this gigantic, permanent military-intelligence establishment in our midst — an establishment that has now gotten us perilously close to nuclear war, just as it did in the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
This would be a good time for the American people to do some serious thinking and reflection on Ike’s warning to us and to ponder a different direction for our nation — one toward the restoration of America’s founding system of a limited-government republic and the restoration of America’s founding foreign policy of non-interventionism.
There is no question but that the Pentagon is moving America in the highly dangerous and destructive direction about which Ike warned us. Let’s just hope that the Pentagon doesn’t make the matter moot by succeeding in bringing about an all-out, life-destroying nuclear war before Americans have the opportunity to change the direction of our country.
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
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***
Twenty years ago this spring the US government was finally successful in lying us into war with Iraq. Administration after administration had sanctioned and bombed and even invaded the country, but finally 20 years ago next month the Bush Administration unleashed “shock and awe” to flatten a country that did not and could not threaten the United States.
After eight years of battle in Iraq perhaps as many as a million innocent people died, either directly or indirectly, from Washington’s aggression. No one was brought before a tribunal over the lies and destruction. No one even apologized. Washington’s puppet of the day, Ahmed Chalabi, brushed off the lies about Iraq’s WMDs by proclaiming that the war promoters were “heroes in error.” They got their regime change and that’s all they cared about.
The propaganda machine pushing the Iraq war seemed overwhelming at the time. At that time several fellow Members of Congress began to open communication across party lines to look for way to stop the war. From conservatives like the late Rep. Walter Jones and Rep. John Duncan, to progressives like Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Rep. Jim McGovern, and so many more, we began to organize and strategize.
One tool we used to our advantage was the idea of an “improbable” coalition of left and right uniting to oppose the war. The media may not have been interested in our antiwar views, but they could not help themselves when presented with this “man bites dog” story. Time and again this “unlikely” group held press conferences, introduced various legislative tools, and communicated behind the scenes to try and grow the movement against the Iraq war.
Unfortunately with the 2008 election of Barack Obama, who ran as an antiwar candidate but then launched numerous military attacks abroad, that old coalition fell apart. Some progressives excused Obama’s militarism and lost interest in cooperating with conservatives. Some conservatives were driven by their personal dislike of Obama and lost sight of the target.
Suddenly, as we face the once-unimaginable prospect of a direct military conflict with nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine, a beyond Left-Right coalition is emerging from its long slumber. This Sunday, February 19th, a broad and very diverse group will assemble in Washington, DC at the Lincoln Memorial to denounce Washington’s sleepwalking into World War III.
The “Rage Against The War Machine” rally promises to be the first large-scale rally against Washington’s aggressive war lobby in many years. I am looking forward to sharing the stage with my good friends and former House colleagues Dennis Kucinich and Tulsi Gabbard, as well as my good friend and fellow libertarian Judge Andrew Napolitano, and so many more speakers from a broad political spectrum.
Many of us have watched with alarm as the Biden Administration – with the enthusiastic backing of many Congressional Republicans – has continuously escalated involvement in the Russia/Ukraine conflict and now sits dangerously close to a direct, hot war with the largest nuclear superpower on earth.
How did we get here? Where are the sane voices and cooler heads? Just when it seemed they were nowhere to be found, here we are! I hope as many people as possible will join us and continue to come together for this important cause. We must join together while we still can. No war with Russia!
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Featured image: CODEPINK “No War with Russia Rally, Negotiate Ukraine, Don’t Escalate.” (2022)
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***
This is starting to spiral out of control:
On February 6, 2023, 17 year old William Caron-Cabrera (Laval, QC) died in his sleep following a cardiac arrest (click here).
On February 4, 2023, 17 year old Tyree Rogers (Chestermere, AB) died in his sleep (click here).
On January 11, 2023, 17 year old Noah Bouzane (Paradise, NL) died in his sleep (click here).
On January 6, 2023, 19 year old Jayden Lopez (Edmonton, AB) died in his sleep (click here)
On December 30, 2022, 18 year old Theo James Gibbs (Regina, SK) died in his sleep (click here)
All deaths occurred suddenly and unexpectedly during sleep:
Latest COVID-19 Vaccine uptake in this age group:
My take…
Something is very wrong here. Healthy teenagers ages 17-19 shouldn’t die in their sleep. And certainly not at this high frequency.
Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway have halted booster shots in healthy teenagers under 18. Canada must do the same. Immediately.
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Featured image is from the author
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
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***
There is what passes for a sick joke among those who watch the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians with increasing shock over what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his thugs have been allowed to get away with. It goes something like this: Israel has succeeded in killing or driving out the remaining three million or so Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza, describing them as “terrorists.” President Joe Biden, his cabinet and virtually all of Congress respond afterwards by saying how the move was unfortunate but “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
Such is the power of Israel as manifested through its Lobby in the US, and the saddest part of the joke is that it reflects quite likely exactly what would happen. The Palestinians have no constituency in the United States, where Israel and its friends rule the roost. But one of the real ironies of watching a genocide being carried out now in the twenty-first century is that the killers come from a group that constantly flaunts its claimed status as history’s perpetual victims. This duality is a convenience, to be sure, providing as it does immunity from its own crimes as it also escalates the criminal policies that might lead to the genocide of a whole category of potential “enemies.”
Israel’s new government, again headed by the monstrous Benjamin Netanyahu, has shifted hard to the right, incorporating as it does the extremist settlers’ movement as well as parties that have spoken casually of forcing the Palestinians out and even of extermination if it comes to that. Half of Israelis are comfortable with the Arabs having minimal civil rights even if they are Israeli citizens and many accept the desirability of forced expatriation of the Palestinians to neighboring states like Jordan or Lebanon. Arab residents of Israel have only limited legal rights and, contrary to the US domestic Israel Lobby’s constant assertion that the Zionist entity is a “democracy,” Israel in reality became an apartheid state by law when it in 2018 declared itself to be legally the nation state of the Jews with “exclusive right of self-determination.”
More recently Netanyahu has made clear exactly what his government stands for. In late December, he stated that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel.” He was explicit that “all parts” was intended to include the West Bank and even Gaza, which have long been the presumed to be the basis of a future Palestinian state. With Washington’s support, they presumably will become part of Eretz Israel, which will stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
To be sure, Israel and its powerful US lobby know very well that the constant claim of victimhood combined with labeling its perceived enemies as antisemites and holocaust deniers to discredit them is little more than a tool employed in part to excuse war crimes and human rights violations committed by the Israelis. In 2002 a former Israeli government minister Shulamit Aloni revealed in an interview how labeling a critic as an antisemite to discredit what is being is little more than “a trick.” She said “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country [the US] people are criticizing Israel, then they are antisemitic.” She added that there was an “Israel, my country right or wrong” attitude and “they’re not ready to hear criticism”. Antisemitism, the holocaust and “the suffering of the Jewish people” are used to “justify everything we do to the Palestinians.”
Indeed, there is every indication that Prime Minister Netanyahu will be taking a much harder line not only with the Palestinians, but as well with its foreign “enemies” the Syrians, Iranians and Lebanese. And there is every sign that he has drawn the United States into his web. President Joe Biden, a self-declared Catholic “Zionist”, is politically too weak to take on the Israel Lobby even if he wanted to, and he has in any event surrounded himself with Zionist Jews as a foreign policy and national security team that would consider any weakening of ties with Israel to be unimaginable. Quite the contrary. Jewish power in the US demands unconditional military, financial and diplomatic support for Israel, even as its government moves to the right and becomes more dangerous regionally, threatening to involve the United States in new wars. Seemingly blind to what is developing, the US last month proceeded with the largest wargames ever involving the Jewish state. The games simulated an attack on Iran and could be a model for a series of pointless conflicts initiated by the more hawkish Israeli government.
Israeli warplanes attacked hundreds of towers and civilian ‘targets’ in the Gaza Strip. (Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)
And there is almost certainly much more to come, including a bill in the Knesset that will make it nearly impossible for Arab citizens to organize political parties. The new government in Israel has also placed police under the control of ultra-nationalist Jewish Power party head Itamar Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister. He is exploiting his position to already call for a war to destroy Hamas in Gaza. Meanwhile, the shoot to kill policy vis-à-vis Palestinians has increased the number of deaths already in 2023, totaling twelve on January 25th and 26th alone when a refugee camp at Jenin on the West Bank was raided by the army and two teenagers elsewhere were shot dead. Another shooting a week later took 5 Palestinian lives. Many more Palestinians were wounded in all the army attacks and the Israelis, as is their practice, routinely deny them any access to medical help. The army’s Chief of Staff has declared that its policy on using firearms will not be changed in spite of the large number of civilian deaths. Israeli soldiers and policemen who kill Palestinians, who are routinely described as “terrorists,” are almost never investigated or prosecuted and have been, in some cases, praised in the media and promoted.
And Ben-Gvir is not the only fanatic who has surfaced as a worrisome character in the new government. Another is Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionism party and now finance minister, who has called for Israel’s annexation of the entire West Bank and the imposition of citizenship requirements that would make Jewishness a prerequisite for inclusion.
Smotrich’s party aspires to make Israel a theocracy governed by the racist Talmud, and both he and Ben-Gvir have support the expulsion of Arabs who fail to agree that “the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people.” Smotrich has stated that his immediate plans include authorizing dozens of new and completely illegal West Bank outposts to include continuing the demolition of what he claims are unauthorized Palestinian homes there. Smotrich is also enthusiastically racist when it comes to the Palestinians, asserting that new Jewish mothers in hospitals should be separated from new Palestinian mothers. “[My wife] would not want to sleep next to someone who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby in twenty years.”
Zvika Fogel, another prominent right wing Israeli member of parliament, has called for genocide in his promotion of a “final war” against the Palestinians to “subdue them once and for all,” saying in an interview that Israel’s policy of going to war with Palestinians “every two or three years” was no longer good enough and that there should be one last war to “subdue them once and for all. It would be worth it because this will be the final war…”
"It's time to subdue them (the Palestinians) once and for all, and to make it the final war" – Zvika Fogel a member of the Knesset and the ruling coalition, from the "Jewish Power" party, interviewed on Channel 12, a mainstream Israeli TV channel. This is Judeo-Nazism. pic.twitter.com/azvyupRG5U
Home demolitions, property seizures, checkpoints and other round the clock harassment of Palestinians also are increasing in frequency as the Israelis accelerate their expansion into areas that are nominally Palestinian. Palestinians who marry foreigners are not allowed to enter the country with their spouses while the Palestinian flag has now been declared illegal. The possibility that the Arabs will stage a general uprising increases daily, leading to more demands from some Israelis that remaining Palestinian centers of resistance be utterly destroyed.
To be sure, many young Jewish Israelis have recently been demonstrating against their own government’s shift rightwards. And in the United States many liberal Jews are concerned at developments, though they are critical of what is happening for all the wrong reasons. An increasing number of American Jews believe that Israel is indeed an apartheid state and that its treatment of the Palestinians is inhumane to say the least. But they, at the same time, oppose doing anything to punish the Israeli government to make it draw back from its most brutal and dangerous policies. They argue that the Netanyahu government is risking a confrontation with the US government, and the Jewish community will splinter over Israeli human rights abuses, weakening political support in Washington for a strong and enduring relationship with the Jewish state. In a sense the power of the Jewish diaspora both in the US and elsewhere thereby becomes the enabler of Israeli bad behavior even as it disapproves of what is taking place.
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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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Apparently, the western military alliance is already preparing for the hypothesis of an open and direct conflict against Russia. According to reports recently published in the media, NATO is expected to advise its members to significantly expand stocks of arms and ammunition. Sources familiar with the matter say that NATO members will be becoming militarily weakened in the near future, with their stock almost depleted due to the policy of military aid to the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev.
Some Western media outlets have expressed concern about Western countries’ ammunition reserves. Military informants have been consulted by journalists, notifying that the Atlantic alliance may formally request that all member states start stockpiling more ammunition as soon as possible. This possible attitude seems to be an emergency measure to remedy the military shortage, which is becoming an increasingly serious problem in the West.
The main reason for this crisis is the conflict in Ukraine. The irresponsible policy of systematically sending weapons has been implemented in an anti-strategic way, without taking into account the production and supply capacity of the NATO’s countries. Weapons have been exported faster than they have been produced, culminating in empty stocks for the armed forces of the exporting countries, which puts them in a vulnerable situation.
As expected, the items with the biggest shortages are 155mm shells, HIMARS missiles, and ammunition for air defense systems such as IRIS-T, Patriot, and Gepard – which are precisely some of those Western equipment most used by Ukrainian forces on the battlefield.
The sources said that in an eventual direct war against Russia, the European states would not be able to maintain the fighting for more than a few days, due to the low amount of ammunition. In this sense, it is possible that, by saying this, the informants are suggesting that NATO is indeed preparing for an open war scenario in the near future.
Informants, however, were skeptical about the possibility of the problem being resolved quickly. According to them, while the conflict lasts in Ukraine, the systematic sending of military aid by the West will prevent the reserves from being kept in safe quantities. Furthermore, it is necessary to mention that the western defense industry is severely affected by the global shortage of semiconductors and some other types of raw materials essential for the production of heavy weapons.
“If Europe were to fight Russia, some countries would run out of ammunition in days (…) I don’t necessarily think that within the next year our stockpile levels will increase massively. Any additional stockpiles we will have will be heading to Ukraine”, a source said.
More specific decisions, such as establishing precise production and stockpile objectives, are expected to be officially announced at the next NATO summit, scheduled to take place in July in Lithuania. But the most likely possibility is that some emergency measures will be implemented in advance, before the summit, in order to boost the defense industry in the countries of the alliance.
Indeed, this is not the first time that military advisors have reported on the crisis in NATO’s ammunition stockpiles. Previously, Tobias Ellwood, head of the UK’s Parliamentary Defense Committee, had already said that the British army is “in a dire state” of reserves – despite the multi-billion-dollar investments in defense made by the country in recent years.
Although the conflict in Ukraine is essentially responsible for the drastic decrease in domestic ammunition supply, some experts believe that the problem predates the start of Russia’s special military operation. Particularly among European states, accustomed to decades of “protection” under the American military umbrella, there was a belief that wars of attrition would be a “thing of the past”, unfeasible in the contemporary era – where forms of warfare would only be hybrid and asymmetrical. This has led many countries to maintain minimal reserves of arms and ammunition. Obviously, with the beginning of the aid to Kiev, the resources started to run out, resulting in the current scenario.
These factors are just one more evidence of the unfeasibility of the Western support to Kiev. The correct thing to do is the immediate interruption of the supply of arms, allowing both the restructuring of the defense capacity of the European countries and the reduction of tensions, leading to the end of the risks of escalation. NATO seems “concerned” with how its members would deal with a possible situation of open war against Russia, but it is NATO itself that can prevent such a scenario from becoming real. Instead of starting an arms race, it should just stop promoting anti-Russian war machine and adopt a responsible and diplomatic stance.
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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
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Alberta became the second province after Saskatchewan to decline participation in any type of national healthcare “digital ID” program as a condition to receive funding for health care from the federal government.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith made clear to Albertans this past Friday that their personal medical information would not be shared with the federal government.
“I agree and stand firmly with @PremierScottMoe in protecting Albertans’ private health information,” Smith tweeted.
“I will ensure that any agreements with the Federal Government do NOT include the sharing of any such personal information with the Feds or third party. #cdnpoli#abpoli.”
Smith included in her tweet an open letter written by Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe that was released publicly over a week ago.
I agree and stand firmly with @PremierScottMoe in protecting Albertans’ private health information. I will ensure that any agreements with the Federal Government do NOT include the sharing of any such personal information with the Feds or third party. #cdnpoli#abpolipic.twitter.com/PfXXboyflo
“Government of Saskatchewan is not creating a digital ID, nor will we accept any requirements for the creation of a digital ID tied to healthcare funding.”
In Canada, as per the constitution, health care falls 100 percent under the authority of the provincial governments. However, some federal money is transferred to provinces, but this amount has declined in recent years.
There has been some talk that future federal funding could be tied to a sort of national healthcare “digital ID.”
An online campaign urging people to call Smith’s office to get her to oppose a federal digital ID had been growing over the past week.
Last week, all of Canada’s premiers met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to try and hash out a funding deal for health care with the federal government.
Canada’s premiers collectively asked the federal government to live up to its end of the bargain in healthcare funding, after the total amount dropped from 35 percent to 22 percent in recent years.
The meeting resulted in Trudeau offering a lower amount than the premiers had asked for in healthcare funding.
When it comes to digital IDs, the federal government under Trudeau has been actively open to the idea.
Last year, through an Inquiry of Ministry, Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP Leslyn Lewis demanded information from the Trudeau government and Transportation Minister Omar Alghabra over its participation in the World Economic Forum’s “Known Traveler Digital Identity (KTDI)” pilot program.
Through this action, it was reported that the Trudeau government has a $105.3 million contract with the WEF to create a digital ID system for travel.
The provinces of Ontario, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, and New Brunswick have already forged ahead with pushing a digital ID on the public and are all listed on the Digital ID and Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC) as members.
It should be noted that Alberta has had a form of its own optional provincial digital ID for a few years now.
Saskatchewan did at least temporarily pause implementing its own local digital ID system last year after a public outcry.
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Featured image: Alberta premier Danielle Smith (Source: Global News / YouTube)
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***
Things are getting rather bizarre at the US Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Its increasingly prominent commanding chief, one General Glen VanHerck, has abandoned any initial sense of frankness in discussing the destruction of an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon on February 4.
Since that disproportionately violent event, more public relations than sense, three other objects have also been destroyed. “We’re calling them objects, not balloons, for a reason,” the general said cryptically in remarks made on February 12. The briefing came in the aftermath of the downing of an octagonal-shaped object over Lake Huron on the US-Canada border.
Cultures of paranoia and suspicion approach such statements the way crops take to manure. The line between extra-terrestrial fantasies and human-made balloons can become grainy. Tinfoil hats become charged; fear finds a funnel to travel through. The suggestion from the general that “the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out” signalled an avalanche of speculation. This was given further impetus by VanHerck’s assertion that he “hadn’t ruled out anything” to a question on whether aliens featured in the mix. “At this point, we continue to assess every threat or potential threat unknown that approaches North America with an attempt to identify it.”
On February 13, the White House was left to deal with the excitement caused by the Pentagon’s speculations. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was given the bucket to dampen the enthusiasm. “I know there have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no sign, again no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.”
John Kirby, coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council in the White House, was also adamant in his briefing: “I don’t think the American people need to worry about aliens with respect to these crafts, period.” Hardly reassuring to those glued to such reports as that from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June 2021, which refused to rule out the possibility that 144 unidentified aerial phenomena might have extra-terrestrial provenance.
The bafflement over these objects has added some zest to the already exaggerated China threat. It is a throwback to the Cold War, which was characterised by ill-educated second guesses about performance, capability, and awareness about an inscrutable enemy. Foes, drunk with threat inflation, jousted in the dark and groped in the wilderness, finding a mirage of reality.
With the latest belligerent undertakings by the US government, an escalation is being encouraged by the hawks in Congress. Kirby, wishing to add a sting to the China effort, told the press that Biden, on coming to office, directed the US intelligence community to conduct a broad assessment of Chinese intelligence capabilities. “We know that these [Chinese] surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners.”
This is hardly a unilateral game. Having accused Beijing of such airborne surveillance present and past, the Biden administration is now facing accusations of its own. According to the PRC, the US has conducted its own exercises in flying high-altitude balloons in its airspace – no fewer than 10 times last year. To that can be added hundreds of reconnaissance missions. “It’s very common that the US intrudes [into] others’ airspace,” remarked Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin, citing 657 sorties made by Washington in 2022 and 64 aircraft flights in January “over the South China Sea alone”.
Kirby was cocksure in denying such claims, even those alleged missions that might apply to Taiwan or the South China Sea. “There is [sic] no US surveillance aircraft over Chinese – in Chinese airspace.”
The Balloon Affair has also tickled the interest of Washington’s allies. Object fever is catching. The United Kingdom, that reliably unquestioning transatlantic appendage of US power, is hopping on the bandwagon. The country’s transport minister, Richard Holden, did not even care to cite any evidence of “Chinese spy balloons” making their way through British airspace. What mattered was that it was “possible” and “that there will be people from the Chinese government trying to act as a hostile state.”
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace further suggested, with forced graveness, that, “The UK and her allies will review what these aerospace intrusions mean for our security. This development is another sign of how the global threat picture is changing for the worse.” Blame it on those objects.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also reminded the good people of Britain that the country is ever vigilant to any incursions from hot air objects or anything similar to them. “We have something called the quick reaction alert force which involves Typhoon planes, which are kept on 24/7 readiness to police our airspace, which is incredibly important.”
Tobias Ellwood, Conservative chairman of the Commons defence select committee, swallowed the suggestion that those sneaky Orientals were “exploiting the West’s weakness” with their mysterious aerial instruments. At least there was no mention of aliens, but that is increasingly becoming a distinction without a difference.
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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]
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***
South Korea claims a 85.8% fully COVID-19 vaccinated rate, with over 130.6 million doses administered (Pfizer 62%, Moderna 20%, AZ 16%, JJ 1%) (click here).
It is a model of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine failure.
South Korea’s COVID-19 booster rollout appears to have driven ever increasing waves of COVID-19 infection and death throughout 2022 and into 2023 (click here).
Doubling down on mRNA vaccine failure:
On Feb.8, 2023, Korean news reported that SK bioscience will invest $258 million to build a manufacturing facility “aiming to become a key player in the vaccine industry” (click here)
“SK bioscience cooperated with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop SKYCovione, Korea’s first domestically-developed COVID-19 vaccine.
The facility is not only for the vaccine but also cell and gene therapy and mRNA technology”
It gets more interesting:
Fierce biotech reports (click here): “SK bioscience…plans to invest $261 million in a R&D hub designed to establish it as a leading force in the global response to new infectious diseases”
“The South Korean company put the planned global research and process development center in Songdo, a so-called smart city 18 miles from Seoul”, at the heart of the strategy…total outlay of $261 million to support the creation of a vaccine/biopharmaceutical hub on the 320,000 square foot site.
“Completion is scheduled for the first half of 2025. Once the site is ready, SK bioscience will relocate its headquarters…to help the company preemptively respond to emerging infectious diseases.
“The establishment of the R&PD Center will be a crucial milestone for us to advance the entire vaccine and biopharmaceutical industry beyond Korea to the world”
“SK bioscience manufactured COVID-19 vaccines for AstraZeneca and Novavax”
Making new mRNA vaccines within 100 days with Gates Foundation:
SK Bioscience press release Nov.2022 (click here): “Through securing the mRNA technology, product development, and platform expansion, SK bioscience plans to establish a system that can develop vaccines against new infectious diseases within 100 days and supplies them within 6 months with global partners, including Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CEPI, and Hilleman Laboratories.”
“SK bioscience also operates ‘Glocalization’ project which transfers vaccine development, manufacturing, and production capabilities to each government and partner companies in the world to establish a vaccine manufacturing infrastructure for the needs in each region”
Tripling of cancer cases in Korea since mRNA rollout?
There seems to be some controversy around alleged tripling of cancer cases in South Korea in 2022 “due to COVID-19 vaccines” (click here)
A Facebook post showed a photo of a datasheet titled: “Massive spike in patients diagnosed with cancer after Covid vaccinations”.
The datasheet is credited to South Korea’s Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA), a government agency responsible for reviewing and evaluating healthcare costs and services.
The document says there were between 1.2 million and 1.5 million new cancer cases every year between 2016 and 2021, but that this shot up to more than 3 million new cancer cases in 2022 — the year after South Korea began its Covid-19 vaccine roll-out in February 2021.
While South Korea’s government health insurance agency denies the claim, they don’t deny the increased numbers, only what those numbers mean:
“The numbers seen in this chart represent the number of patients who filed health insurance claims related to cancer each corresponding year, not the number of new cancer patients,” the spokesperson told AFP on February 3.”
“A claim may be recorded each time a person visits the hospital to be treated for cancer, and a patient may visit the hospital several times a year,” they added.
“data for 2021 and 2022 would be released towards the end of the year.”
My take….
It is clear that no matter how much mRNA fails, big pharma continues to invest 100s of millions of dollars building new mRNA facilities.
This one is straight out of a dystopian novel. A 320,000 sq ft mRNA factory located in a “smart city” that can produce new mRNA vaccines within 100 days in partnership with Gates Foundation against “new infectious diseases”?
That should concern everyone.
Also, the tripling of cancer related insurance claims isn’t adequately explained by Korean government officials. I suspect cancer cases are skyrocketing and the Korean government is holding back the 2021 and 2022 data on “number of new cancer patients” for a good reason.
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Comments Off on South Korea Invests $261 Million Into New mRNA Factory Located in a “Smart City”, Will Produce New mRNA Vaccines Within 100 Days in Partnership with Gates Foundation
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***
After a year of incessant propaganda about the Kiev regime’s supposed military successes, NATO leadership seems to have started accepting the reality and finally relaying it to the public. On February 13, the aggressive US-led alliance’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg held a briefing and warned that the political West is now essentially in an arms race with Russia, with the task of getting as much equipment and ammunition as possible to supply the Neo-Nazi junta forces. He further stated that a “race of logistics” was also underway, with Russia “currently having the upper hand”. Stoltenberg thinks that Russia already launched its next large-scale offensive.
“The war in Ukraine is consuming an enormous amount of munitions and depleting allied stockpiles. The current rate of Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production. This puts our defense industries under strain,” he said. “It is clear that we are in a race of logistics. Key capabilities like ammunition, fuel and spare parts must reach Ukraine before Russia can seize the initiative on the battlefield… …If Putin wins in Ukraine the message to him and other authoritarian regimes is force is rewarded. That would make the world more dangerous and all of us more vulnerable.”
The admission that the belligerent alliance, by far the largest in the world, spending approximately $1.2 trillion a year is being outproduced by Russia with a military budget nearly 20 times smaller might seem quite shocking to many, but is hardly surprising to most military experts. NATO has been outsourcing ammunition production for years, with much of its supply chain depending on other countries, including China, which is also being targeted under the aggressive alliance’s new doctrine. And while Stoltenberg called for NATO member states to ramp up production, this might prove problematic, to say the least, as the level of manufacturing in Western countries has fallen dramatically as labor costs increased over the last several decades.
As for Stoltenberg’s claim that if Russia wins this would somehow be “dangerous for the world” as it would show that “force is rewarded” then the political West should look no further, as the US-led NATO has been conducting a comprehensive aggression on the world since its very inception. The belligerent alliance’s most powerful members all have a history of brutal colonialism and have waged wars on all continents while trying to preserve their colonial empires. And to this day, this format has survived through the establishment of numerous clients, including the Kiev regime, which is “shedding blood for a NATO mission”, according to the Neo-Nazi junta’s own admission.
Stoltenberg lamented that “NATO has a challenge”, stating: “Yes we have a problem… …but we have a strategy to tackle that.” He also admitted that despite the political West’s tens of billions in weapons, ammunition and other supplies, the Kiev regime’s logistics issues are “acute”, as it is still completely outgunned by Russia, with some estimates going as far as 10:1 in Moscow’s favor. The Neo-Nazi junta is estimated to be spending more than 5,000 artillery shells each day, while the Russian military is firing up to 6 times more. Once again, it should be noted that this is quite different from last year when the mainstream propaganda machine presented Russia as supposedly losing to the Kiev regime forces.
The NATO chief also stated that “what Russia lacks in quality, they try to compensate in quantity.” Such statements are certainly laughable to anyone familiar with the situation on the ground. With the latest reports on the casualties on both sides showing that the Kiev regime is suffering losses orders of magnitude greater than Russia, it’s quite clear which side lacks in quality and tries to compensate for this in quantity. Stoltenberg also admitted that NATO is now faced with a severe problem, as current waiting times for large-caliber ammunition have grown from 12 to 28 months. This is causing logistics issues not just for the Neo-Nazi junta, but also for NATO members themselves.
With such issues affecting the political West, the Kiev regime’s prospects are rather grim. Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent “fighter jets tour” ended with more promises of arms deliveries, but not much more as major NATO members are now trying to “toss the hot potato” to each other. And while Stoltenberg’s claim that Russia’s large-scale offensive has already started is questionable, most military experts expect it will start soon, which will certainly further exacerbate the Neo-Nazi junta’s already precarious position. However, they have only themselves to blame, as Moscow has been trying to find a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian conflict for approximately a decade. The political West is now admitting that the negotiations with Russia were only an attempt to stall while preparing the Kiev regime for war. It seems they should have prepared much better.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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***
Having asserted at the time on Freenations that the USA was responsible for blowing up the Nordstream pipelines, I am pleased that the veteran US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has confirmed (with enormous detail from insiders) what I wrote then. A Pulitzer prize winner cannot be easily dismissed.
If you say you are going to do something (as Biden and Nuland had said about the pipelines) then it happens and then you rejoice at your success – then you did it. As I wrote at the time (October 2022):
There is no serious doubt about the fact that it was the USA which sabotaged the two pipelines Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2 bringing gas from Russia to Germany not least because President Joe Biden, Russophobic State Department official Victoria Nuland and Republican Senator Ron Johnson are all on the record demanding the Nord Stream pipelines be taken out.
As Sea Power Magazine reported on June 14th, the US Navy’s 6th Fleet Task Force 68 was running underwater explosives removal drills in the exact area where these sabotage explosions took place.
Sputnik has analyzed Flightradar24 data showing that US and German navy aircraft regularly circled over the sites of future explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines during the NATO Baltops 22 exercise last summer.
And indeed – according to Hersh – it was precisely under cover of such naval exercises that the USA and apparently Norway organised the attack.
This Profitable Attack on Europe
We must bear in mind that these pipelines were jointly owned by Russia’s Gazprom and French, German and Dutch companies and the gas passing through Nordstream 1 and potentially through Nordstream 2 was critical to the entire European energy and therefore industrial market.
Not only did a small clique of US politicians (acting without Congressional authority) blow up the pipelines but they then profited by replacing those supplies with LNG shipped from the USA. Equally the enormous profits accruing to US Defence contractors from the Ukraine war are mimicked at a lower level by British Defence industries which may now contract Ukraine to produce British defence products in Ukraine! (Sunday Telegraph 12th February). Biden profits from much lower US gas prices together with subsidies designed to tempt European corporations to re- locate to the USA.
Russia has not yet retaliated for the pipeline destruction. For the moment they have other fish to fry. But they can afford to wait to see:
the build up of German anger,
the continued massive losses in Ukraine,
the denuding of western weapons stocks,
the blatant American profiteering from the sale of their LNG resulting from their criminality,
the alienation of the global south who have either stayed neutral or condemned western attacks on Russia through Ukraine and
the rising revulsion by European electorates at this totally unnecessary war and the tragi-farce of the devastating effect on Europe of sanctions designed to harm Russia.
And all this rather than make peace on the basis of devolution in Eastern Ukraine, a neutral Ukraine and the recognition of Crimea as the historical, military (since 1783) and cultural territory of Russia. Crimea and its naval base there is far more legitimately Russian than Guantanamo Bay is a military base for the USA in Cuba! See this.
The question now is the extent of the international response to a blatant international crime and act of war and the domestic US consequences of acting illegally without congressional approval.
But since Republicans were equally gung ho about removing Russian gas from Europe, their neocon ideology might “trump” (appropriately given his stance) their willingness to attack Biden on this illegal act of war. The USA has become a very dangerous place.
The Biden administration planned the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines well in advance of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine knowing that if it were traceable to the USA Government it would be an act of war.
Biden had already said he would shut down the pipeline if Russia dared to defend Russians in Ukraine (as US armed and trained Ukrainians, mainly Nazi units, shelled them) The unit selected to carry out the destruction was the U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center in rural Panama City which had expertise and a track record of “blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals.”
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines.
“SPOKESPERSONS” for the White House and the CIA said that Hersh’s report was false and fiction! They were bound to. But it is significant that no high office holder denied the report – only functionaries! Hersh writes significantly:
The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership
The planning and implementation of the attack was carried out by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—who together in different roles at the time worked on the Maidan coup in Ukraine. Also involved was of course the CIA’s William Burns according to Hersh.
USA Previously Attacking and Surrounding Russia
I have previously on Freenations detailed the extent of NATO and American military bases surrounding Russia (see this) and contrasted them with the lack of any equivalent proximate Russian threat to the USA.
When there was such a threat in the Cuba missile crisis in 1963 it was of course the USA which threatened nuclear war rather than see Russian missiles in Cuba. Those missiles would have been some 1100 miles from Washington whereas a nuclear armed NATO member Ukraine would have been about 300 miles from Moscow.
Other examples of the extent to which the modern USA and NATO have been threatening, surrounding and even attacking Russia has been revealed by Hersh.
Apparently the naval unit involved in the Nordstream destruction had some years ago carried out a successful operation to tap a Russian undersea cable in the Sea of Okhotsk. It worked for a decade until betrayed by a Russian speaking US National Security Agency technician Ronald Pelton.
Equally significant and demonstrative of the recent anti Russian aggression by NATO/EU has been the greatly expanded US military presence in Norway. Hersh writes:
The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of penetrating deep into Russia
Pipeline Destruction Downgraded to Bypass Congress
Hersh ASSERTS THAT following the public remarks by leading US politicians including Biden about the aim of stopping the Nordstream pipelines, the plans to destroy them were in effect no longer covert – so:
“The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret”
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission.
For decades the USA has spied on (even European allies) undermined and “changed regime” all over the world but never has it so blatantly attacked NATO allies as in the case of the destruction of these gas pipelines. The West in general and the USA in particular have lost allies and sympathy all over the world with its 20 year attack on Russia through Ukraine and its exploitation and distortion of the international banking and payment systems to attack other nations.
The Nordstream pipeline affair could be the straw that breaks the back of what little international sympathy remained. As one of the insiders in this affair remarked to Hersh:
“The only flaw was the decision to do it.”
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This article was originally published on Freenations.
Featured image is from Freenations
And Into The Fire
Fascist elements in post war Europe and the development of the European Union
By Rodney Atkinson
With contributions from William Dorich and Edward Spalton
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Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize Winner for his reportage on the infamous My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, has just broken the colossal true story of how America took out Russia’s Nord Stream I & II LNG Pipelines. Hersh’s account now affords all concerned to more clearly see and understand what the real underpinnings are of the rough-and-tumble geo-political world in which we all, somehow, are now captives of, beholden to, or, in one way or another, feel the brunt of the driving forces behind the commission of the war in Ukraine.
The world is constantly victimized by the habitual chronic lies of the American Government, representatives of NATO itself, and newspapers of note, like the New York Times and Washington Post, who essentially, so far, have blown off what Hersh has had to report about the sabotage by the U.S.-led BALTOPS 22 Task Force as it pertains to the on-going War in Ukraine; not to mention the many sordid, outrageous geo-political events that precipitated, and since have followed, the proxy U.S., NATO and Ukrainian forces fighting against Russias Special Military Operation (SMO) in Eastern Ukraine. It’s a classic textbook case of dissimilitude from beginning to end.
Before this earth-shattering expose by Hersh broke in the international press, the mysterious cause, or cloak and dagger identity/identities of the terrorist saboteurs who perpetrated the BALTOPS 22 SABOTAGE OF RUSSIAS NORD STREAM 1 & 2 PIPELINES hadn’t yet, to date, been adequately investigated by any responsible world body; especially regarding what serious punitive economic and political consequences, sanctions or military actions must now be taken by the UN Security Council and other responsible world authorities.
Like Hersh, this writer himself has spent the past several months trying to crack the same nut, researching and writing about the outrageous ABCs of the crisis in Ukraine that led up to America and its NATO allies obvious need to commit such a serious and damnable Act of War against Russia.
Seymour has now gone the long mile to help all of us fill in the dots of a most distasteful, jarring reality check of what, when push comes to shove, his revelations mean in the rough and tough world of hardball geo-politics in which we all, collectively, now find ourselves engulfed.
There exists so much geo-political fellatio that underlies the sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream 1 & 2 Pipelines that still needs much more elaboration and erudition of what lies behind this latest travesty against human life.
Its time to probe deeper below the surface at the real ugly hose job if there ever was one, that has been perpetrated on the world since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine that one could say the entire world received right in the good old derriere over this scandalous sabotage. It personifies the endless stream of falsities that underlie America’s long-standing culpable, malevolent military and corporate involvement in the complicated, Machiavellian politics of Ukraine’s modern political history and the war itself.
It behooves the world at this point to know more about the long-standing dirty role America’s CIA and its black ops divisions have long since played in Ukraine’s rough and-tumble geo-political turmoil, going back decades, with the hands-on involvement of every succeeding U.S. Democratic President and their administrations, since the 1990s, and even long before, going back to at least the administrations of George Herbert & George W. Bush, and forward to Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and the present-administration of Joe Biden.
American politicians have a lot of bloody fingerprints smeared all over the evidence of who among them did what to whom that has led up to not only the inception of the war in Ukraine that continues unabated, and now, the case of this pipeline sabotage itself.
The still muddied, unanswered question in the Western Press is how much of the primary cause of the war is due to Russia’s and the West’s long-standing corporate-financial entanglements and power struggles that have existed in the world’s corporate energy sector, especially since the 1990s and early 2000s, between America’s big energy players who ever strive to greedily-corner for themselves whatever the world’s natural energy resources market (water, coal, oil, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera); and now, seeks to take advantage of the coming harsh Northern winter, by seizing total control of the world’s LNG energy market and then sell it back to Germany and Europe at four times the price at which Russia was originally prepared to sell it before its Nord Stream Pipelines 1 & 2 were sabotaged.
Not to mention that this single, ignorant act of the war so far may end up becoming one of the war’s most monumentally-stupid errors that very well may destroy the economies of Western and Eastern Europe and lead to even further colossal political dissension, possibly even leading to yet another civil war or world war somewhere else, like that which kicked off WWI.
America and NATO’s misadventures in Ukraine and the Baltic Sea remind this writer of Agatha Christies, And Then There Were None.
One Little, Two Little, Three Little Indians
It’s now clear the United States, NATO, and their allies, in which they operate in the dark inner sanctums of the twisted, contorted minds of their military-corporate Dark State keepers and handlers, are somehow mixed up to their necks in the under-handed ways the war in Ukraine has progressed from the get-go to cover up America and the Western World’s always cut-throat international business dealings; and now the attempted regime change and final overthrow of Russia, as one of the three remaining big empires left in the world.
Once Russia is finished with as an empire, China no doubt will be America’s next targeted focus. It’s One Little, Two Little, Three littleIndians.all over again, until only One Little Indian -America –is left. Or so America hopes!
Excerpted here now is a chapter from this writer’s earlier writings in December 2022 on the BALTOP AFFAIR that offers the reader yet a different spin and takes on Hersh’s revelations.
It’s a Whodunnit Case of Sloppy Fellatio Logic from Start to Finish
There are so many sordid, unsolved whodunnits of this war so far; the outrageous sabotage of the Nord Stream Pipelines at the top of the whodunnit list. To see it in a different light requires a bit of portmanteau wordplay with the term fellatio (i.e. fallacy), as it often is used to describe sloppy logic, especially the kind of fallacious political logic that continues to raise its ugly head among those who possess an unquenchable thirst for fallacious thinking that keeps them doing such dumb things as listening to mainstream corporate news, following the short-sighted wisdom of the governments think tanks, Pentagon strategists, arms merchants advisors and the like.
Especially when they know the answers to whatever the whodunnit arguments are in the West’s corporate press, specifically about the sabotage of the Nord Stream Pipelines, amount to nothing more than a lot of bogus suppositions based upon fallacious arguments that, to put it bluntly, even fools know suck when it comes to knowing the real criminals who committed this heinous sabotage are those sitting right beside you in the next comfy, easy chair. Subterfuge and Denial are everywhere in the war climate that now has totally permeated the world.
The Smoking Guns Abound, Yet It’s All Quiet on the UN and Corporate News Front
Whoevers bloody hands and fingerprints remain smeared all over this clandestine act of sabotage, whatever insipid investigation so far has been pursued by the United Nations outrageously have excluded Russia, the owner of the actual Nord Stream pipelines, from even participating in the investigations themselves. It’s pathetic. The silence is deafening!
Of course, by now, an enormous brouhaha would have already been made in the U.N. about any other international investigation of similar magnitude and circumstances and, at the very least, already would have resulted in the United Nations’ immediate stinging censure, if not military action, taken against whatever countries were responsible, and still are involved in such an outlandish, unprecedented-aggressive act of corporate terrorism of the most bald-faced kind; that, in any other circumstance, would have immediately sparked a war in and of itself. But, of course, that is, if the war already underway in Ukraine hadn’t already been deviously used as cover to hide all traces of the bloody fingerprints of whatever high-level Western corporate-military-political criminals were involved.
The sabotage of Nord Streams 1 & 2 Pipelines, that essentially all but eliminated, at present, Russia as the chief fossil fuel supplier to Germany and Europe, unquestionably, was planned by the biggest of corporate, military, and political interests at the highest levels in the West, no doubt well in advance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The question is what came first, the Chicken or the Egg! Was it the West’s constant goading aggravations and provocations of Russia and its Empire, or was it Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that set off the whole war? What about the West’s bombing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea? Is that not yet another fundamental war provocation against Russia by the West? Both aggressive acts are tantamount to Acts of War that have long tails that well proceed the war in Ukraine, stretching all the way back to the U.S.-led Maidan coup in 2014 and even long before to at least 2004, and longer back still to the year. But who is really listening? The lights are on but is anyone minding the store?
Still, other existing bloody fingerprints of unparalleled aggression by the West, NATO, and the US against Russia, of which we all now are too well aware, thanks to Seymour Hersh, can be seen in the composition of the Baltic Naval Strike Force (BaltOps 22), that was headed by the USS Kearsarge, an amphibious, special ops vessel, that led this strike forces enormous flotilla of ships and personnel and logistics, not to mention the enormous amount of logistical planning that would have been required to occur long before Russias invasion in February 2022.
At the time of the sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream 1 & 2 pipelines, the USS Kearsarge was part of a U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa so-called exercise, executed by Naval Striking Forces Europe and Naval Striking and Support NATO that included 14 NATO Allies, two NATO partner nations, more than 75 aircraft, 7000 personnel, in June 2022 that included anti-submarine, mine-clearing operations, explosive ordinance disposal, and unmanned underwater personnel recovery training exercises aboard a submarine. Clearly, no small undertaking that would have demanded a high degree of pre-planning!
Yet the world is all but tone-deaf, dumb, and blind to what has gone on in the war before now and has been willing to believe that this Naval Task Force, at the time of the sabotage of the Nord Stream I & 2 Pipelines, just happened to be directly over the area when the pipelines sabotage is known to have created enormous upwellings of methane gas (Sea Power magazine.org).
But, if the U.S., NATO, and BaltOps22 had had nothing to do with the sabotage of Nord Stream, why then did Rodek Sikorski, a member of the European Parliament, a key figure in the U.S.-backed 2014 coup of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, following the sabotage operation, post on Twitter a photo of the methane-blasted region of the Baltic Sea showing a furiously-churned upwelling of bubbling methane gas at that location, with the cryptic three-word caption, THANK YOU, USA.
Or why, again, if this was just an innocent note that referred to something entirely different and unrelated, was it then that the Twitter note also was quickly removed after Poland’s Foreign Minister seconded Sikorski’s affirmation, or what the U.S. Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, already knowingly meant when he warned, well in advance, We have not deployed the full set of tools that could significantly undermine, if not outright stop, the Nord Stream Project (Reuters, Nov 13, 2018).
Then again, there was that incident back in 2018, when Richard Greenwell, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, repeatedly sent threatening letters to German companies working on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, warning them, Companies involved in Russian energy exports are something that could prompt significant risks (Bold am Sontag, Jan. 13th, 2019)
Or yet again, what did U.S. President Biden imply, during a February 2022 state visit to Germany, before Russia had even invaded Ukraine, when, during a press conference, Biden threatened: The United States is able to shut down Nord Stream 2 in the Baltic Sea if Russia invades Ukraine. Yet, when a reporter at that press conference repeatedly pressed Biden, “But how would you do that?” President Biden would only smugly smile and repeat what certainly sounded like a thinly-veiled threat of a pre-ordained given when he replied several more times, “I promise you we will be able to do that.”
Something, clearly, Is Rotten in Denmark!, as Shakespeare would say if he were here. But does anyone really care at this point? And so it goes……
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The writer Jerome Irwin is a Canadian-American writer who originally was a Criminology student working in one of America’s local police departments. For decades, Irwin has sought to call world attention to problems of environmental degradation and unsustainability caused by a host of environmental-ecological-spiritual issues that exist between the conflicting world philosophies of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples.
Irwin is the author of the book, “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle Island Odyssey” (www.turtle-island-odyssey.com), a spiritual odyssey among the native peoples of North America that has led to numerous articles pertaining to: Ireland’s Fenian Movement; native peoples Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance Movement; AIPAC, Israel & the U.S. Congress anti-BDS Movement; the historic Battle for Palestine & Siege of Gaza, as well as; the many violations constantly being waged by industrial-corporate-military-propaganda interests against the World’s Collective Soul. The author and his wife are long-time residents on the North Shore of British Columbia.
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Perhaps the most agonizing experience for a family, for any bystander, even for humanitarian professionals, is a double tragedy—a death or calamity where they are refused access, where they are forced to helplessly witness suffering, unable to offer succor. This is surely what faces millions of able-bodied Syrians today. It affects Syrians within the stricken nation along with their faraway relatives and friends.
Anyone seeing suffering is involuntarily driven forward– to assist. Yet Syrians globally, those most affected by the agonizing images and stories emerging from the earthquake sites, feel both immobilized and shy behind their tears and frustrations. It’s not any threat of personal danger in a war zone that inhibits them from joining the rescue. It’s the international embargo against Syria.
Given the strict measures imposed by the U.S. and its allies on the Syrian government, even those eager to arrange help are hesitant to gather urgent support at such a critical time. This includes me, unable during the past decade to even send a gift to my close friends.
From my longtime association with Syria, and from regular talks with people residing there, I keep abreast of the toll the war and blockade are taking. I know economic and health conditions well. I know how, month after month, rising food prices mean more citizens go hungry. I know that medicines are in desperately short supply, whereas Syria was once an exporter of pharmaceuticals.
I know that the rich farmland of Northeast Syria, breadbasket of the region, is under U.S. occupation, making its wheat crop inaccessible to Syrians. I know too that Syria’s oil from that same NE region is commandeered by foreign companies under U.S. military protection. I know that most young men are now outside the country; the same for doctors who may manage to find a country to use their talent and training. (Syria, once celebrated for its high medical standards, had had a surplus of doctors.)
I know that no foreign exchange is permitted with Syrian banks, so that anyone wanting to send funds to a family left behind, cannot do so.
I know that Syrian homes have electricity for barely a few hours daily because the electricity system is in disrepair, unfixable without imported parts. I know that Lebanon, which had been helping thousands of Syrian families, can hardly continue this because of its own economic collapse. Humanitarian aid from Iran too has dwindled due to its domestic problems. Whoever can leave do, risking the flight to neighboring countries, including Turkey, then venturing further afield. For over 12 years their absence has drained the nation of its professionals– writers and artists, filmmakers and pharmacists, scientists and social workers, teachers and IT experts. What is more, the country is regularly bombed by Israel.
These conditions are disturbingly and piteously similar to those ravaging Iraq throughout the 1990s, a saga I myself chronicled. That nation was shredded by years of embargo, leading up to the U.S.-led military assault and occupation in 2003.
Whether or not the destruction following the February 6th earthquake is as extensive in Syria as in Turkey is irrelevant. Urgently needed assistance to Syria is prohibited or held up, largely from cumulative U.S. embargoes imposed during almost twenty years of Washington’s hostile policy towards the country. Algeria, one of the few nations supportive of Syria, has pledged $15 million in aid, noting that this gift is “to the brotherly Syrian people, in solidarity”.
Algeria will have to overcome U.S.-created hurdles to ensure needed supplies get to Damascus. Meanwhile a United Nations aid convoy to Syria was evidently assigned only to “the rebel-held areas” (no questions raised about that!) where the much-heralded White Helmets operate. As far as we know, relief from 74 nations reportedly rushing supplies and technical assistance to Turkey might not be shared with devastated parts of Syria administered by Damascus (and thereby embargoed).
But that may change. On Thursday, February 9th the U.S. Dept. of Treasury, the agency that stringently monitors compliance with U.S. policy embargoes, announced that it would suspend some sanctions for relief that’s directed toward earthquake issues. Doubtless there will be close monitoring, with bureaucratic delays. And individuals eager to send aid directly to family or to particular charities in Damascus could face time-consuming formalities. We don’t yet know whether this temporary U.S. license permits Syria’s embassies and consulates to work with American donors to funnel relief aid to the country. And will organizations and individuals be able to transfer funds from abroad directly to Syrian banks? That is unclear too.
Syrians have a long and unassuming tradition of charity. They also are among the most economically successful of immigrants, wherever they reside. They will, if allowed, prove, like New Jersey doctor Souheil Saba, they’re ready to join others leading aid efforts from abroad. (Although Saba can reach Damascus only by road from Beirut, after flying there via Istanbul.)
How one decides which Syrian charities will be authorized and which banks cleared to receive funds will consume precious time. Syrians and their supporters eagerly wait for instructions and clearances. Like their Turkish counterparts, they must now turn all efforts to the injured, homeless, hungry and cold survivors.
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A century ago Yogmaya and Durga Devi, two women champions of justice, emerged from a remote corner of rural Nepal to offer solutions to their nation’s social and political ills. Then they were forgotten.
Years after their demise, in 1980 veteran anthropologist Barbara Nimri Aziz first uncovered their suppressed histories in her comprehensive and accessible biographies. Revelations from her decade of research led to the resurrection of these women and their entry into contemporary Nepali consciousness.
This book captures the daring political campaigns of these rebel women; at the same time it asks us to acknowledge their impact on contemporary feminist thinking. Like many revolutionaries who were vilified in their lifetimes, we learn about the true nature of these leaders’ intelligence, sacrifices, and vision during an era of social and economic oppression in this part of Asia.
After Nepal moved from absolute monarchy to a fledgling democracy and history re-evaluated these pioneers, Dr. Aziz explores their legacies in this book.
Psychologically provocative and astonishingly moving, “Yogmaya and Durga Devi” is a seminal contribution to women’s history.
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In a recent column, military analyst William Astore wrote, “[Congressman] George Santos is a symptom of a much larger disease: a lack of honor, a lack of shame, in America. Honor, truth, integrity, simply don’t seem to matter, or matter much, in America today… But how do you have a democracy where there is no truth?”
Astore went on to compare America’s political and military leaders to the disgraced Congressman Santos. “U.S. military leaders appeared before Congress to testify the Iraq War was being won,” Astore wrote. “They appeared before Congress to testify the Afghan War was being won. They talked of “progress,” of corners being turned, of Iraqi and Afghan forces being successfully trained and ready to assume their duties as U.S. forces withdrew. As events showed, it was all spin. All lies.”
Now America is at war again, in Ukraine, and the spin continues. This war involves Russia, Ukraine, the United States and its NATO allies. No party to this conflict has leveled with its own people to honestly explain what it is fighting for, what it really hopes to achieve and how it plans to achieve it. All sides claim to be fighting for noble causes and insist that it is the other side that refuses to negotiate a peaceful resolution. They are all manipulating and lying, and compliant media (on all sides) trumpet their lies.
It is a truism that the first casualty of war is the truth. But spinning and lying has real-world impacts in a war in which hundreds of thousands of real people are fighting and dying, while their homes, on both sides of the front lines, are reduced to rubble by hundreds of thousands of howitzer shells.
Yves Smith, the editor of Naked Capitalism, explored this insidious linkage between the information war and the real one in an article titled,
“What if Russia won the Ukraine War, but the Western press didn’t notice?”
He observed that Ukraine’s total dependence on the supply of weapons and money from its Western allies has given a life of its own to a triumphalist narrative that Ukraine is defeating Russia, and will keep scoring victories as long as the West keeps sending it more money and increasingly powerful and deadly weapons.
But the need to keep recreating the illusion that Ukraine is winning by hyping limited gains on the battlefield has forced Ukraine to keep sacrificing its forces in extremely bloody battles, like its counter-offensive around Kherson and the Russian sieges of Bakhmut and Soledar. Lt. Col. Alexander Vershinin, a retired U.S. tank commander, wrote on Harvard’s Russia Matters website, “In some ways, Ukraine has no choice but to launch attacks no matter the human and material cost.”
Objective analyses of the war in Ukraine are hard to come by through the thick fog of war propaganda. But we should pay attention when a series of senior Western military leaders, active and retired, make urgent calls for diplomacy to reopen peace negotiations, and warn that prolonging and escalating the war is risking a full-scale war between Russia and the United States that could escalate into nuclear war.
General Erich Vad, who was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s senior military adviser for seven years, recently spoke to Emma, a German news website. He called the war in Ukraine a “war of attrition,” and compared it to the First World War, and to the Battle of Verdun in particular, in which hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers were killed with no major gain for either side.
Vad asked the same persistent unanswered question that the New York Times editorial board asked of President Biden last May. What are the U.S. and NATO’s real war aims?
“Do you want to achieve a willingness to negotiate with the deliveries of the tanks? Do you want to reconquer Donbas or Crimea? Or do you want to defeat Russia completely?” asked General Vad.
He concluded,
“There is no realistic end state definition. And without an overall political and strategic concept, arms deliveries are pure militarism. We have a militarily operational stalemate, which we cannot solve militarily. Incidentally, this is also the opinion of the American Chief of Staff Mark Milley. He said that Ukraine’s military victory is not to be expected and that negotiations are the only possible way. Anything else is a senseless waste of human life.”
Whenever Western officials are put on the spot by these unanswered questions, they are forced to reply, as Biden did to the Times eight months ago, that they are sending weapons to help Ukraine defend itself and to put it in a stronger position at the negotiating table. But what would this “stronger position” look like?
When Ukrainian forces were advancing toward Kherson in November, NATO officials agreed that the fall of Kherson would give Ukraine an opportunity to reopen negotiations from a position of strength. But when Russia withdrew from Kherson, no negotiations ensued, and both sides are now planning new offensives.
The U.S. media keep repeating the narrative that Russia will never negotiate in good faith, and it has hidden from the public the fruitful negotiations that began soon after the Russian invasion but were quashed by the United States and United Kingdom. Few outlets reported the recent revelations by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett about the ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey that he helped to mediate in March 2022. Bennett said explicitly that the West “blocked” or “stopped” (depending on the translation) the negotiations.
Bennett confirmed what has been reported by other sources since April 21, 2022, when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, one of the other mediators, told CNN Turk after a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, “There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue… They want Russia to become weaker.”
Advisers to Prime Minister Zelenskyy provided the details of Boris Johnson’s April 9 visit to Kyiv that were published in Ukrayinska Pravda on May 5th. They said Johnson delivered two messages. The first was that Putin and Russia “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” The second was that, even if Ukraine completed an agreement with Russia, the “collective West,” who Johnson claimed to represent, would take no part in it.
The Western corporate media has generally only weighed in on these early negotiations to cast doubt on this story or smear any who repeat it as Putin apologists, despite multiple-source confirmation by Ukrainian officials, Turkish diplomats and now the former Israeli prime minister.
The propaganda frame that Western establishment politicians and media use to explain the war in Ukraine to their own publics is a classic “white hats vs black hats” narrative, in which Russia’s guilt for the invasion doubles as proof of the West’s innocence and righteousness. The growing mountain of evidence that the U.S. and its allies share responsibility for many aspects of this crisis is swept under the proverbial carpet, which looks more and more like The Little Prince’s drawing of a boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant.
Western media and officials were even more ridiculous when they tried to blame Russia for blowing up its own pipelines, the Nord Stream underwater natural gas pipelines that channeled Russian gas to Germany. According to NATO, the explosions that released half a million tons of methane into the atmosphere were “deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage.” The Washington Post, in what could be considered journalistic malpractice, quoted an anonymous “senior European environmental official” saying, “No one on the European side of the ocean is thinking this is anything other than Russian sabotage.”
It took former New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh to break the silence. He published, in a blog post on his own Substack, a spectacular whistleblower’s account of how U.S. Navy divers teamed up with the Norwegian navy to plant the explosives under cover of a NATO naval exercise, and how they were detonated by a sophisticated signal from a buoy dropped by a Norwegian surveillance plane. According to Hersh, President Biden took an active role in the plan, and amended it to include the use of the signaling buoy so that he could personally dictate the precise timing of the operation, three months after the explosives were planted.
The White House predictably dismissed Hersh’s report as “utterly false and complete fiction”, but has never offered any reasonable explanation for this historic act of environmental terrorism.
President Eisenhower famously said that only an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” can “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
So what should an alert and knowledgeable American citizenry know about the role our government has played in fomenting the crisis in Ukraine, a role that the corporate media has swept under the rug? That is one of the main questions we have tried to answer in our book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. The answers include:
The U.S. broke its promises not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, before Americans had ever heard of Vladimir Putin, 50 former senators, retired military officers, diplomats and academics wrote to President Clinton to oppose NATO expansion, calling it a policy error of “historic proportions.” Elder statesman George Kennan condemned it as “the beginning of a new cold war.”
NATO provoked Russia by its open-ended promise to Ukraine in 2008 that it would become a member of NATO. William Burns, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow and is now the CIA Director, warned in a State Department memo, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red-lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).”
The U.S.backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 that installed a government that only half its people recognized as legitimate, causing the disintegration of Ukraine and a civil war that killed 14,000 people.
The 2015 Minsk II peace accord achieved a stable ceasefire line and steady reductions in casualties, but Ukraine failed to grant autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk as agreed. Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande now admit that Western leaders only supported Minsk II to buy time for NATO to arm and train Ukraine’s military to recover Donbas by force.
During the week before the invasion, OSCE monitors in Donbas documented a huge escalation in explosions around the ceasefire line. Most of the 4,093 explosions in four days were in rebel-held territory, indicating incoming shell-fire by Ukrainian government forces. U.S. and U.K. officials claimed these were “false flag” attacks, as if Donetsk and Luhansk’s forces were shelling themselves, just as they later suggested that Russia blew up its own pipelines.
After the invasion, instead of supporting Ukraine’s efforts to make peace, the United States and the United Kingdom blocked or stopped them in their tracks. The U.K.’s Boris Johnson said they saw a chance to “press” Russia and wanted to make the most of it, and U.S. Defense Secretary Austin said their goal was to “weaken” Russia.
What would an alert and knowledgeable citizenry make of all this? We would clearly condemn Russia for invading Ukraine. But then what? Surely we would also demand that U.S. political and military leaders tell us the truth about this horrific war and our country’s role in it, and demand that the media transmit the truth to the public. An “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” would surely then demand that our government stop fueling this war and instead support immediate peace negotiations.
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The San Remo Festival will be remembered as the “Festival of the two Presidents”: the President of the Italian Republic Mattarella at the opening and the Ukrainian President Zelensky at the closing. The latter does not appear live, following the protests that were raised in Italy.
The shadowy architects of The Great Reset/New World Order/One World Government pulled-off a clever trick in designing a totalitarian programme for top-down change whose individual parts each contradict one another. So, when put together by the ‘rational’ public mind, it makes people feel that they must be suffering a diminished personal level of intelligence, because they can’t make the agenda make any logical sense.
It is difficult for the person-on-the-street to get a proper handle on what is happening in a war. Regarding the current fighting between Russia and Ukraine, the monopoly media in the “West” has often pointed to Ukraine winning. Other independent sources will state the opposite. Who should one believe?
On the morning of February 6, 2023 the people of Turkey and Syria were struck by a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake, followed by a 6.7 aftershock and then a final (we hope) 7.5 M quake in the late afternoon. The effects of the three-fold quake struck deep into Syria and as of this writing, over 23,000 deaths, and 500,000 injured have been counted in Turkey and Syria, along with tens of thousands of injuries and incredible destruction to infrastructure.
Everyone with a brain already knew the Empire did it. Now Seymour Hersh’s bombshell report not only details how Nord Stream 1 and 2 were attacked, but also names names: from the toxic Straussian neoliberal-con trio Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland all the way to the Teleprompter Reader-in-Chief.
The leader of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council is Oleksyi Danilov. Danilov is a powerful and interesting figure. After taking Soledar a few weeks ago, Russia just took another strategic fortified town Krasna Gora yesterday. Russia is developing fast all the way around Bakhmut. Russia is pressing everywhere on the frontlines and Ukrainian losses in men and matériel are enormous.
Anybody who seriously thinks that Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs of the future won’t be full blown social credit systems need look no further than Brazil, where newly selected “socialist:” / globalist Lula da Silva just decreed that the Bolsa Familia program will require family members to be vaccinated in order to continue receiving benefits.
Mind control is the final frontier of the technocratic revolution. What you say, do, buy, and sell is increasingly trackable through technology. Yet, so far, the human mind remains a sanctuary free from prying foreign eyes – the last refuge.
The International Movement for a Just World (JUST) urges the American, British, Australian, Canadian, Swiss and some European Union and Arab League governments to lift the unjust, immoral sanctions against Syria in order to lessen the immense sufferings of the people caused by the massive earthquake of 6th February 2023.
There is little doubt that the war in Ukraine has always been about decimation of Russia’s energy, financial and military resources; especially as the September 26, 2022 attack on Nord Stream 2 (NS) pipeline confirmed any lingering doubt.
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A 2021 lawsuit filed by Baylor Scott and White Health system against world-renowned internist, cardiologist, and COVID-19 expert Dr. Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH, has been dismissed by the 191st Judicial District Court, Dallas County, Texas. Associate Judge Tahira Khan Merritt granted the nonsuit and dismissed with prejudice all claims asserted or that could have been asserted in the case. Dr. McCullough stated,
“This is a strong victory for freedom of speech and fair balanced publication and media presentation of clinical data as it has emerged over the course of the pandemic crisis. My analyses and conclusions have been accurate, consistent, and have always been my own, not those of any institution.”
The lawsuit alleged Dr. McCullough violated his separation agreement by using the Baylor Scott and White Health System name during media appearances. As the national crisis has drawn on, Dr. McCullough has been a public voice of data-driven reason in the media, delivering concise scientific interpretation of the available science, and providing a focused assessment of the pandemic landscape.
He has also been one of America’s leading physicians on the early treatment of COVID-19. His protocols and scientific publications have been relied upon to help millions globally. However, Dr. McCullough has drawn harsh criticism for expressing valid concerns over the public health response, including the mass vaccination of entire populations in the face of an incredible lack of data, from a public health apparatus that has often lacked consistency in it’s public health decisions on Covid-19.
An established medical cancel culture has been running in the background, outside of mainstream awareness, for years. During the COVID response, the unethical behavior of both companies and professional licensing bodies has become a topic of vigorous debate.
Dr. McCullough’s recent court vindication came on the back of another win for open scientific discussion and the free expression of medical professionals as a federal judge has also just blocked a law that punishes doctors for ‘misinformation’ in California.
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… NATO doesn’t respect anything about Russia. NATO knows no limits. — Scott Ritter
It is difficult for the person-on-the-street to get a proper handle on what is happening in a war. Regarding the current fighting between Russia and Ukraine, the monopoly media in the “West” has often pointed to Ukraine winning. Other independent sources will state the opposite. Who should one believe?
Beware. The aphorism “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” cautions against too readily believing a known source of disinformation. To do so runs the risk of being made to look foolish. There are several instances of the United States pulling the wool over gullible people’s eyes. But one instance of lying is sufficient to throw doubt on the source of disinformation.
A legal maxim holds, Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one thing, false in everything). According to this legal wisdom, one instance of mendacity suffices to discredit future information from the same source. At the very least, one should regard with extreme skepticism what that discredited source claims.
In 2003, then-US secretary of state Colin Powell, to his everlasting disgrace, held up a vial of anthrax and lied throughout his testimony to the UN security council. The US subsequently launched a devastating war (“shock and awe” as the military behemoth bragged) against Iraq, on the pretext of it having WMD. It didn’t.
Why then would thinking people trust the US about not having committed the war crime of sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines? Why would people believe the monopoly media that has so often gotten it wrong but somehow still manages to attract a readership/viewership?
So again: who to trust?
There are two American patriots steeped in US militarism: former Marine intelligence officer (and the UN weapons inspector who warned that Iraq was “fundamentally disarmed”) Scott Ritter and retired colonel Douglas MacGregor, both of whom have stated emphatically, and have done so all along, that Russia will win and is winning the war in Ukraine. That these two sources are former US military and profess to love their country gives them credibility.
Giving credence to the statements of Ritter and MacGregor is a Turkish media source, Hürseda Haber[yet to be verified], that has reported data on the fighting in Ukraine that indicates a one-sided death toll. But the data also reveals that the fighting is not two-sided:
Ukraine
The casualties of Ukraine, which was on the ground with 734 thousand soldiers (plus 100 thousand reservists) and NATO officers, soldiers and mercenaries, are as follows:
Aircraft – 302
Helicopters – 212
(S)UAV – 2,750
Tanks and armored vehicles – 6,320
Howitzers (Artillery systems) – 7,360
Air defense systems – 497
Dead – 157,000
Injured – 234,000
Captives – 17,230
Dead – NATO military trainers (US and UK) – 234
Dead – NATO soldiers (Germany, Poland, Lithuania, …) – 2,458
Dead – Mercenaries – 5,360
Russia
Russian losses in the field with 418 thousand soldiers (plus 3,500,000 reservists) and the increasing number of Wagner mercenaries:
Giving further credence to Ritter and MacGregor, and so many others that have stated this is a proxy war, is the death toll that reveals that the Russians are fighting not just Ukrainians but also NATO military trainers, NATO soldiers, and mercenaries (thousands of the NATO personnel and mercenaries having died).
Ritter had pointed out the consequence of failing to accept the Russian demands that Ukraine be neutral, eliminate Nazism, and recognize the independent republics of Donetsk and Lugansk:
… basically what the Russian position will be is, if you don’t accept this, then what we can offer you is death. And not just death of your soldiers, but death of the nation.
Russia is one country going up against many countries. That will magnify the success of attaining Russian military objectives. Conversely, such a NATO defeat will be a massive loss of face for hyped-up American military dominance and throw cold water on the NATO alliance.
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Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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Interestingly this work by Nada Elia – Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts – takes off from what the last book I read on Palestine discussed as images of Palestine and the imagination arriving with that. The first image used here is that of a political cartoonist Naji al–Ali and his creation of Handala – named after the native bitter gourd fruit – forever ten years old, never exposing his face to the viewer – “To be a refugee is…a bitter experience.” The second image is the most significant for Palestinians – the house keys they took with them when forced into exile, into refugee status.
From that introduction she quickly introduces the concept of her title, the intersection of feminism, settler-colonialism, state-sanctioned violence, resistance to imperialism and the need to go beyond the truth of apartheid and the BDS movement to say “Zionism itself must be abolished….it cannot be reformed.”
The first chapter, “Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Resistance from Palestine to Turtle Island” reiterates the last idea, “the movement [Zionism] is…a European colonial project, which gradually evolved to become more generally “Western” imperial project, sustained by the USA.” From there Elia develops the inter/connections between the indigenous people of Turtle Island (North America), Black Lives Matter, and other groups protesting alongside Palestinians.
In a subsection “Colonialism” a short, accurate precis of the history of Zionist thought provides a strong background to her arguments regardless of any previous awareness of the Zionist narrative – or lack thereof. With references mostly to Ze’ev Jabotinsky and including Benny Morris and a few contemporary U.S. Israeli advocates, she concludes it is not just a question of decolonization, but “It is resistance to imperialism, colonialism, and oppression, not “terrorism,” nor anti-Jewish hatred.”
In “Déjà Vu” comparisons with South African apartheid are made, partly to show similarities and differences but also to show the intersection of other ideas. Discriminatory citizenship laws, voting and political representation, the “whataboutism” (where Israel/white South Africa complain about unfair treatment) of the Israeli narrative, and the patriarchal non-democratic reign of Mahmoud Abbas outlines her argument that “these discriminatory laws that impact families as one of the many reasons that abolishing the Zionist system is a feminist issue.”
That idea is further developed in “Social and Political Liberation: No Free Homeland Without Free Women and Queers” which she opens with “Palestine is a feminist issue,” an idea she summarizes with,
“…today progressive women of colour and Indigenous women, along with anti-imperialist, anti-racist white women, are firmly anti-Zionist, understanding that no ideology that hinges on supremacy and discrimination is reconcilable with feminism.”
Discussing the “Demograhic Threat” Elia shows the role of Palestinian women and the restrictive burdens they carry ranging from rape to lack of medical assistance with pregnancy and child birth. The patriarchy and oppression under capitalism is introduced as being “one of the interlocking systems of oppression.” Honor killings – femicide – and Israel’s superficial openness to gay culture – pinkwashing – are presented as other facets of the overall struggle for liberation.
One of the more important elements of colonialism and capitalism is land. In the early 1980s – as a side note – the Canadian Film Board had an excellent documentary on indigenous land claims called “The land is the culture”. It very critically saw that the land and all that lived on it, all its resources, was the basis for the culture of B.C. natives, and indeed, all indigenous people – not surprisingly it has long disappeared from NFB listings on the internet.
Elia understands, as do most indigenous people, the truth of the land being the culture,
“The land acknowledgements that are now routine among liberals in the USA and Canada are worthless when they are not accompanied by land restitution.”
Police as property protectors (and slave protectors), as protectors against labor protests, creates a system of violence over the people to protect land ownership by the settler-colonialists. Dead buffalo and “public property” are part of this, the latter indicating the land is no longer indigenous, but owned by the colonial government. Water, forestry, agriculture and food all become part of apartheid.
While discussing food apartheid and its critical role on women’s lives, Elia chastises – correctly – white liberal women for their feminism, providing the definition that does not fit the normal western narrative,
“Feminism [is] “ a broad political strategy of structural transformation because violence and inequality are structural problems.
Food sovereignty…unlike food security, involves questions of culture, power, identity, ecology, and land.
“…where the settlers have tried to impose human and agricultural monocultures, the Indigenous have responded with their insistence on biodiversity as essential for survival.”
“A global intifada” covers a wide range of topics: the arms industry, militarization of the police, security training, and global awareness of societal violence (partly via BLM and Red Nation Collective) is creating a global intifada of anticolonial sentiment and reaction.
In her final “Pledge – Feminsim is a Palestinian Issue” she argues that “in contrast to liberal feminist traditions in the US that continue to weaponize feminist discourse against Palestinians…by failing to confront the structural forms of gendered and sexual violence inherent to colonial-settlerism, imperialist wars, racial capitalism and global white superemacy.”
“Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts” is a clearly written, instructive, and critical examination of society in general as it affects the apartheid and Zionist structures in Palestine. It provides a unique view into the problems of Palestine and the resourcefulness of the indigenous people, feminists, and the LGBTQ community globally in the struggle against white racism, capitalism, and colonial-settlerism and their many effects on society.
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A recent Pentagon conference on psychological warfare noted that the forces of indoctrination “cannot wait until a crisis begins.” A high-ranking chief at the Department of Defense suggested a model for propaganda, in no way new: “Look at marketing…What makes people drink Coke, what makes people drink Pepsi?” In short, public “marketing.” “I think,” the chief lauded, that “the private sector has used the information domain through marketing to the Nth degree…And I think we as a department and in the national security enterprise, need to be able to pull some of those lessons.”
In fact, the “lessons” of effective indoctrination and public persuasion have been perfected in the domain of U.S. government propaganda, in conjunction with a servile free press. A natural prediction of this is that in discussions of war, peace, diplomacy, violence and so on, essentially any fact that is unfit for U.S. and Western goals will be either ignored, distorted or falsified, and Western geopolitical ambitions will be revered to the point of almost being beyond what words can describe. In the case of Western imperialism in today’s Asia, this is precisely verified.
I. Aggression in Fact and Fiction
The Biden administration declared early in 2022 that official American policy in Asia and the Pacific sought domination and control over “every corner of the region,” while deploring Chinese “coercion and aggression” which “spans the globe”—a statement which is too ludicrous to comment, and was in fact ignored by the media, though presumably not for that reason. The military branch is usually quite honest about intentions: “This grand strategy uses,” quite effectively, “security and financial institutions to both bound and reshape China’s power within the system to bolster U.S.” imperial power (U.S. Air Force’s journal). Putting all euphemisms aside, the West must ensure that “all nations can benefit”—that is, all nations that obediently serve the U.S.—“from resource-rich” assets in Southeast Asia, as the Chief of Naval Operations, Michael Gilday, put it. Surely actions confirm the urgency among elites of achieving this.
Thus, the U.S. has stationed about 375,000 troops in the Indo-Pacific, of which 80,000 are in South Korea and Japan—while conducting constant offensive large-scale military operations aimed at China, through what is an offensive “global NATO” in Asia, to use the phrase of Liz Truss.
Throughout 2021, U.S. and European “warships and planes carried out more than 2,000 close spying operations aimed at China,” including at the “coastal area of the Chinese mainland.” Although lavishly funded Western news agencies mysteriously found minimal opportunity to report on the incidents, the reader of the Asian press could have learned that Western “strike groups” in “the South China Sea” nearly doubled their activity since 2020—repeatedly to the protest of the Chinese and in fact most of Asia, though to the enthusiastic celebration of the Western liberal and humane press.
This is virtually a continuation of the policy of the Trump administration, from which Biden is scarcely different—insofar as not being more hawkish, which the one-party-two-factions military oligarchy in Washington ensures. Therefore, the U.S. government declared in mid-2020 that the West must mobilize against the “Marxist-Leninist regime” and its “desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism,” which threatens “freedom everywhere.”
Finally, we became aware of the “threat they pose to our very way of life.” The “ambitions for ideological control” of “Joseph Stalin’s successor” (Xi Jinping) are “not limited to his own people,” and violent Chinese global control “is well under way.”
Predictably enough, this was met with not a horse laugh, but rather a deluge of awe. However, liberal critics had their reservations: This policy “is meaningful only if it is accompanied by a firm commitment by the Trump administration to a robust and coordinated policy” (NYT). “China’s strategy also aims to encircle the West” (naturally, no map depicting stationed military forces was presented in the article), and so the West must strike back “in the decisive battle,” “hopefully led once again by the United States” and its “enlightened leadership,” to quote the former director of national intelligence, Dan Coats.
However, not everyone was satisfied, since confrontation with China had to be conducted with “unalterable counterforce at every point,” as New York Times columnists demanded. Crucially, the Trump administration escalated the provocations against China—both maritime and by air— setting new records of daily U.S. military operations and aircraft spying raids against China, and stationing tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel in the Asian region.
Of course, nothing comparable is done by Chinese vessels and aircraft off the coast of Miami, London, Normandy and so on. It is simply taken for granted that we have the right to do anything we feel like, and that this has to be received with stoic equanimity by those who we deem as the Enemy.
Needless to say, the European satellites—convinced that the Boss will share a piece of the cake—have happily joined in on the one-sided military confrontation off the shores of China. Thus, the main Asian diplomatic journal, East Asia Forum, noted:
Since 2016, France has mobilized support for a European presence with annually rotating forces which have expanded with participation from a growing number of countries…The German frigate Bayern was deployed in the Indo-Pacific from August 2021 to February 2022 to conduct operations…and exercise with the navies of Australia, Singapore, Japan and the United States. Germany’s contribution was considered a key decision in forging French-German unity on building a permanent and effective European military presence in the Indo-Pacific. The United Kingdom has also delivered significant contributions to Indo-Pacific defense, decoupling a carrier strike group in 2021 and two warships permanently in 2022.
The Free press insists on the Chinese leader being “the modern-day emperor he has now become,” and China now “hunkering down” in a position of hostility toward the West—that is from David Ignatius at The Washington Post, who concedes that the Chinese perceive “bullying” from “America” with their massive military build-up along China’s borders, aiming to “win the 21st century.”
In short, to “make it harder for Beijing to maintain growth,” as the technical Asian press openly points out. However, he neatly left the last parts out, naturally. In fact, they are “driven by the leader’s vision of an ascendant and uncompromising China,” unwilling to give the West any chance of respite from its overwhelming confrontational stance—unquestionably “a combative approach,” informedTheWall Street Journal.
Incidentally, in that same day, international wire services (Agence France-Presse) published an official declaration by Xi Jinping, who noted that the U.S. and China have to “find ways to get along” through diplomacy, and invited Washington to increased “cooperation.” China is “willing to work with the U.S. to give mutual respect, coexist peacefully” and “find ways to get along.” That went unreported in the major press, though the vast Western readership of, for example, The Hindu had access to the statements.
The very fact that the Western powers are openly and explicitly provoking China with massive military infrastructure in order to stifle its progress through a military coalition of powerful Western and Asian countries, constantly building new military bases in the South China Sea, is unmentionable in the Free press. However, as one moves away from the typical propaganda channels, and closer to the military strategists, official diplomatic documents and so on, one can discern the obvious.
Thus, a study conducted by the U.S. Air Force observed that
“There is an abundance of evidence that documents China’s discontent with US SRO,” military reconnaissance operations off China’s coast, and that the country is “extremely prickly about sovereignty-related issues.”
The study points out that “China’s sensitivity in this area is further aggravated by ‘ever-present aerial reconnaissance aircraft off the coast,’” conceding that such action “compels Beijing to ‘defend their sovereignty,’” including “with military means.” Consider this report published in perhaps the most respected international Asian journal, South China Morning Post:
As one senior naval officer put it, [constant American and European military operations in the South China Sea] are “an in your face, rub your nose in it operation that lets people know who is the boss.” The Donald Trump administration increased the tempo of U.S. military activities in the South China Sea…The situation became so fraught that Beijing feared an attack against its installations. Yet President Joe Biden’s administration has continued fervently down this path and even worsened the situation … The U.S. now undertakes an average of four [military ship] missions a day over the South China Sea. That is about 1,500 a year.”
That is done in combination with large-scale offensive attack exercises by NATO and its regional allies against China, rarely causing any raised eyebrows at home.
Notice that it is not perceived as relevant, then, to stop these military campaigns, or that any question could arise regarding the justness of such calculated provocations, which once again illustrates the shared consensus in an obedient culture. Rather, we must learn “the hard lessons about hard power” in order to not “succumb to the utopian path of disarmament,” and we must not “allow the fear of escalation to dominate our decisions,” as Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI) noted in a Wall Street Journal piece.
Speaking of which, the same Journal warned us the next day that the West now faces an “uncompromising China that challenges” us, and has “championed a combative approach in dealing with the West.” You will notice that this was printed as a news article, not an opinion piece, thus exposing the paper’s actual role as a servile tool of state propaganda.
Another window of opportunity for diplomacy opened itself in mid-November, when the Chinese president noted that the West and China “should respect each other, coexist in peace, pursue win-win cooperation” and avoid a “collision.” We do not know whether this was seriously meant, principally because the call was rejected by the West, which responded by saying that it will “continue to compete vigorously”—“compete,” meaning militarize and massively provoke near the shores of China. As we will discover, this sort of response to diplomacy generalizes.
II. The concocted nuclear peril and the predictable response
Using the Chinese “threat” to keep the domestic population in line, the military sector now has free access to unlimited welfare funding to high-tech industry, known in Newspeak as “defense spending.” “The imperative to innovate is back,” as military journals celebrate. Consider in this context the concern over alleged mindless Chinese “nuclear militarism,” a topic of extreme furor and concern in both Western press and government agitprop (essentially the same thing). The media has been saturated with headlines pointing out all kinds of threats to nuclear non-proliferation and expansion. As with every depoliticized and indoctrinated culture, the usual suspects are always fit for attack. In our case: North Korea, Iran and, crucially, China.
Thus, the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review warns of the “PRC” and its ever-increasing ability to conduct “nuclear coercion,” repeated by Pentagon and State Department officials, who regularly decry “China’s nuclear modernization and its rapid expansion.”
That is a staple in government propaganda and, hence, the Free press, which refuses to expose it as the obvious fraud that they in fact know it to be. The best grasping at the straw to illustrate the global intent of the “rogue regime brandishing nuclear weapons and threatening its neighbors” (WSJ editorial commenting on both China and NK l) was in the summer of 2021, in which TheWashington Postclaimed that “China is building more than 100 new missile silos” to be armed with nuclear warheads. That number later increased, though that cannot be said about the presenting of evidence. The entire thing was quickly exposed as falsification, as these “turn out to be wind turbines” (e.g., TFI Global and Council on Pacific Affairs). However, that lie was simply too useful to let go of, and the actual facts of the matter are yet more or less literally unreported in the West, and the ploy has now been forgotten after having properly served its propaganda function.
The intelligentsia made sure to not miss this splendid opportunity of showing complete loyalty to the state disinformation system. Former CIA agent and Atlantic Council propagandist Matthew Kroenig warned that America “should continue with bipartisan plans to modernize U.S. nuclear weapons. In addition, the Pentagon” has to be able to “meet its deterrence requirements with existing stockpile numbers,” and beyond.
The CIA’s and State Department’s favored China analysts declared that “China is now shifting to war-fighting mode.”
“Beijing’s refusal to talk and its insistence on secrecy about its arsenal means Washington has no choice but to believe but to believe Beijing intends to build a bigger nuclear force than America’s” (Gordon Chang)—that is, to build 14-20 times that of their existing amount of nuclear weapons. The falsifications continued well after the entire episode had been exposed, with media pretending not to know, while describing the “explosive growth” of Chinese nuclear arms as “breathtaking, and frankly, the word ‘breathtaking’ may not be enough” (The Sun, U.S. edition).
Incidentally, had the free press actually been concerned about “explosive growth” of nuclear arms, they would certainly have had no difficulty finding and reporting material documenting such “breathtaking” developments. Just prior to the carefully orchestrated furor about Chinese windmills purported to be “nuclear silos,” the UK openly declared that it would “expand” its “nuclear warhead stockpile by over 40%,” closer to 300 warheads in total.
This fact, too, was totally useless for the purposes of ideological warfare, and was therefore quickly forgotten in the ever-expanding memory hole. However, this is marginal compared to the nuclear escalation that by far puts in the shade other countries’ combined such. Namely, the dramatic American nuclear expansion program—which, of course, also happens to be the one never mentioned in the Free press. It consists of new nuclear missiles, strategic bombers (the newly revealed B-21), submarines and so on, which in total will cost $1.7 trillion, according to congressional numbers—all in all an impressive escalation.
Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review calls for “Modernizing U.S. nuclear forces,” and an openness to a first nuclear strike, which is in order with earlier policy of the only country to have used the nuclear bomb on a population.
The Union of Concerned Scientists deemed the Review to be “a terrifying document” that “not only keeps the world on a path of increasing nuclear risk, in many ways it increases that risk.” Somewhat of an understatement.
Not everyone agrees, however. Nuclear weapons producers and retired military generals inform us that nuclear bombs must serve “as a mainstay of deterrence,” and defense
“is based on our demonstrated capabilities and the will power to use nuclear weapons.” A no-first-use policy of nuclear bombs must, therefore, be regarded as “narcissistic, self-indulgent, dangerous and destabilizing” (C. Robert Kehler, retired general and board member of Maxar Technologies).
You will notice that the entire publication about the alleged threat posed to us by China from which we have to defend ourselves is complete hypocrisy; apparently the West is not obliged to non-proliferation.
That is reserved for our adversary—a funny thought, given that China has about the same number of nuclear weapons as countries such as France, Israel or the UK. The U.S., on the other hand, has 14 times the amount China does, is spending close to two trillion dollars on nuclear weapons modernization, and is carrying out massive provocation off the Chinese border. Though this militarism and nuclear arms proliferation is off the agenda, for reasons obvious enough, while the media goes along.
No sane person would like China, or any other nation for that matter, to have a nuclear arsenal, let alone for them to expand it. Therefore the first thing one who is seriously concerned about Chinese nuclear armament would do, naturally, is to not act in such a way which is known to advance it. In fact, there is a perfectly clear way to stop China from arming itself, and everyone in the government knows it. That is: for the West to stop carrying out massive military provocations against the Chinese.
Thus, military experts, in Senate hearings, note that U.S. nuclear bombs and military infrastructure established in southern Asia “pose threats to China’s ability to retain an assured retaliation capability” and to its ability “to deter” a “first strike by the United States.” “So what accounts for this pattern of change and continuity in China’s strategic posture?” the Senate asked—“Several external drivers play important roles. Foremost among them are developments by the United States [and its allies],” deploying their military forces in China’s backyard, and massively increasing their already overwhelming nuclear capacities.
In the technical diplomatic literature it is conceded all the time that “China” is merely sending “a response to the gratuitous, unrestrained nuclear policies” of the U.S. and its allies. “Massively outgunned, China is acting rationally and predictably…By modernizing its nuclear force, the United States is giving China every reason to expand its own” (Foreign Affairs). Or to quote military analysts in Forbes: The (exaggerated) Chinese modernization of its military and nuclear forces “is a rational response to decades of American provocations. And if those provocations don’t end, rivals such as China are sure to develop even more capable nukes.”
“China” does this, notes Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, one the leading arms-control experts, “because they want to be able to have a secure second-strike capability” were the U.S. to attack—as it regularly simulates in military exercises off China’s borders, together with a hostile alliance of nuclear-armed nations. And so the technical military analyses go, all in virtually the same tune and all equally unreported to the general public.
With the U.S. knowingly acting precisely to increase the Chinese nuclear threat against itself, we can discard the alleged concern and fear over Chinese nuclear arms. The trivial truism that the U.S. is knowingly and actively driving the Chinese to the path of militarization, is far beyond what can be perceived in the Free press. Although the person who fanatically reads the entire press can learn about these facts, one will likely not read the very plausible reality that U.S. policy is in fact designed to induce this Chinese response, as a cover for further aggressive military escalation and renewal. Though all of this is inaudible among the current jingoist blast, favored by hawks and doves alike.
Reaching a frenzied pitch in the fall and winter of 2022, a media barrage sought to inform that, on nuclear talks, there is “zero give on Beijing’s side,” noting “the fact that Xi” will not “negotiate on any of the contentious issues…because of his long record of deception,” to quoteTheWashington Post’s Josh Rogin.
A few days earlier, the same Postwarned in an editorial that “the United States faces” a menace “who might prove far less willing to sign up for new treaty limits”—that is, “China, which has refused to engage in negotiations about its nuclear forces.” Obviously the West has to respond accordingly, and so it “is time for diplomatic rock ‘n’ roll. Let’s prevent whining from isolationists,” to use advice given in TheWall Street Journal by John Bolton.
The record of diplomatic proposals is clear and easy to discover, had there been an interest to do so. But the actual facts are entirely unacceptable to Western government propaganda, and are therefore simply not facts. Namely, that China on multiple occasions has signaled its willingness to establish a nuclear weapons settlement.
Let us pick just a few examples. In 2020 and 2021, there were concerns over how to “bring the Chinese to the negotiating table” to be held between the U.S. and Russia in the START talks in early 2021, as then U.S. top arms negotiator Marshall Billingslea, put it.
Shortly after this announcement, the Chinese leadership declared that it would be “happy” to participate to reach a settlement on the nuclear issue, “happy to participate the next day.” But on one condition: The U.S. dramatically reduces its nuclear arsenal—a perfectly sensible condition, given the astronomical discrepancy between China’s and the U.S.’s arsenals. It is not as if the U.S. ignored the proposal. It responded. Namely, it responded by totally rejecting the diplomatic proposal, boasting that it would outspend China “into oblivion”: “We know how to win these [arms] races and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion,” Billingslea trumpeted.
Last year, in November 2021, Xi Jinping informed, that “China supports ASEAN’s [Southeast Asia’s intergovernmental body] efforts to build a nuclear weapon-free zone, and is prepared to sign the Protocol to the Treaty on the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone as early as possible.” “Beijing’s demand for a nuclear-free Southeast Asia comes as the U.S. and UK empower their ally Australia with nuclear-armed submarines,” as the Asian press noted.
But none of this can be reported in the West, since it would give the game away, and would render unusable the inversion of fact suggesting that the West is hopelessly trying to reach a settlement, facing “Chinese unwillingness to join any arms-control regime in the foreseeable future” (Global Asia). That is not allowed to happen, since the cover for aggression against China would be exposed for what it plainly is.
One could extend the discussion beyond merely the questions of militarism and diplomacy in Western conduct toward China, though very little unexpected is to be discovered. It was once observed by leaders of the early modern PR and propaganda industry that “it is as impossible to imagine a genuine democracy without the science of persuasion,” namely propaganda, “as it is to think of a totalitarian state without coercion.”
This never ceases to be verified. In short, the behavior of the intellectual classes in their analysis of Western imperial policy in Asia is yet another illustration of how close we are to reaching “the ideal of a propaganda-managed democracy.”[1]
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Andi Olluri lives in western Sweden. He just turned 20 and is studying dietetics. Andi has been an activist since he was a young teenager. He can be reached at [email protected].
Note
1. Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 19, 82.
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The psychopathic Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, is trying to have it both ways, for and against the world’s only remaining empire, which now is the U.S. empire (India formerly having been “The Raj” of the English Empire — now replacing the old vassalage by a different one); and in doing so is displaying that he adheres to traditional power-politics, instead of to India’s former principled anti-imperialistic neutrality (from India’s anti-imperialist Congress Party) as regards which of the world’s nations will be establishing the socio-cultural-political system that will guide the world in the future.
By Modi’s obsession with power-politics, instead of concern for continuing India’s anti-imperialism, he is leading his country into an Asia that will be increasingly Americanized — which means more hostile toward world peace, more military-dominated, and more encouraging of a World War Three — as being part of the world’s only remaining empire (the U.S. empire) necessarily is.
Modi is turning his country gradually hostile toward Russia and China, and more hostile than before against Pakistan. India is heading to become another American colony — a nation that will be at war not just internally but also externally, and joining America’s decline, and thereby increasing the world’s decline, by slowing the world’s move toward peace and encouraging the war-industries that increasingly lead the U.S. Government to lead the world toward a nuclear WW III.
In the wake of the US surmounting China as India’s top trade partner in 2021 – 22, it is pertinent to take a look at South Asia’s biggest economy’s top 10 trade partners. Interestingly, barring the top trade partner, the US, India has a trade deficit with the rest of the nine partners, amounting to a colossal $154.7 billion.
Only the top two partners, the US and China have bilateral trade above $100 billion whereas the bottom three, Indonesia, South Korea and Australia roughly have the same quantum of around $25 billion.
America replaces China, now, as India’s top trading partner; and, whereas India imports from China far more than it exports to China, India exports to America far more than it imports from America.
“Starkly, the US is the only trade partner in the top 10 club with which India enjoys a trade surplus, $32.7 billion.”
In balance-of-power politics (the politics that drove imperialism, and that produced both of the two World Wars, and that FDR tried to replace by inventing and starting to design a U.N. that would be empowered to create and enforce democratically produced international laws but which Truman stopped), exports — which enrich the billionaires most of all — supposedly benefit a nation more than imports do (that’s not actually true); and, so, India’s trying now to export more than it imports (which would benefit India’s billionaires) is really India trying to become an imperial power: a goal that’s both evil and stupid, and that will never realistically be possible in the foreseeable future (especially because it would require India to replace America as the world’s only imperial power — and that won’t happen).
India and the U.S. last week launched a joint initiative on critical and emerging technologies (iCET). This was discussed in Tokyo back in May 2022 at the Quadrilateral Dialogue summit. Now the signing took place in Washington just after the U.S.-India Business Forum.
The meeting was reportedly preceded by tweets from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Joe Biden, reflecting an agreement on the two sides’ strategic, commercial and scientific approaches to technology.
On January 31, 2023, the first iCET meeting was held in Washington, D.C., hosted by the two countries’ national security advisers Jake Sullivan and Ajit Doval. On the part of the U.S. there was also the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the director of the National Science Foundation, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, and senior officials from the Department of State, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, and the National Security Council. On the Indian part there were the Indian Ambassador to the United States, the Chief Science Advisor to the Government of India, the Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, the Secretary of the Department of Telecommunications, the Science Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, the Director General of the Defense Research and Development Organization, high-ranking officials from the Department of Electronics and Information Technology and the Secretariat of the National Security Council.
According to the White House webside, “The two sides discussed opportunities for greater cooperation in critical and emerging technologies, co-development and coproduction, and ways to deepen connectivity across our innovation ecosystems. They noted the value of establishing “innovation bridges” in key sectors, including through expos, hackathons, and pitch sessions. They also identified the fields of biotechnology, advanced materials, and rare earth processing technology as areas for future cooperation”.
In recent years, cooperation between India and the U.S. has grown rapidly in all spheres, from trade and economic deals to military exercises and intelligence exchanges. The two sides have their own reasons for deepening such cooperation – the U.S. has an interest in containing China by proxy, as well as keeping an eye on Pakistan, which from time to time shows a zeal for autonomy. Both countries pose threats to India, so New Delhi’s external support is in the Indian leadership’s interest.
In this regard, U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks told Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval that “building alliances and partnerships are a top priority” for the Pentagon. …
Though Modi speaks out of both sides of his mouth — the imperialist (pro-U.S.) and anti-imperialist (pro-China and pro-Russia) sides of his mouth— he now is finally behaving clearly as an imperialist.
He aims for India ultimately to be a part of the American global empire.
He is toxic to the Indian people but a blessing to India’s billionaires.
His imperial dreams for India can only prolong and slow the decline of America’s empire, by India’s joining it as yet another U.S. ‘ally’ or vassal-nation (colony).
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This article was originally published on The Duran.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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Incisive Analysis of renowned author Colonel Douglas Macgegor
“I think it is clear that the American people are largely divorced from the reality of this [Ukrainian] conflict, as they have been for the last 30 years.
War has always been something that happened far away on somebody else’s soil. The difference this time is that Washington has decided, along with help and assistance particularly from its allies and London and the global financial community run out of New York City, to wage war on the Russian state with the goal of not simply of regime change but destroying the state particularly dismembering it.” – Col. Douglas Macgregor
Watch his interview below.
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The leader of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council is Oleksyi Danilov.
Danilov is a powerful and interesting figure.
After taking Soledar a few weeks ago, Russia just took another strategic fortified town Krasna Gora yesterday. (see map below)
Russia is developing fast all the way around Bakhmut.
Russia is pressing everywhere on the frontlines and Ukrainian losses in men and matériel are enormous.
Dispatch of NATO tanks is still far away and will not make a significant difference anyway. Obviously, Russia has taken all the initiatives and is extremely successfully preparing the battlefield for even bigger offensives.
US think-tanks and media are becoming openly nervous. US think-tanks like CSIS is getting desperate that Russia is depleting US military stocks, and RAND (Pentagon affiliated) has begun to shriek that
“US interests must overrule Ukrainian interests”, and that a continuation of the war is suddenly “no longer in US interests”. The Times of London suddenly starts to talk about that Zelensky “owes the West” and they want to put strings on Zelensky to stop him.
In spite of that, Danilov claims that Russia has “big problems” – just like the CIA institute for the lies about war.
Simultaneously with Ukrainian and US lies about the course of the war, the enormous purges in Kiev continue to grow.
Obviously, the Ukrainian purges are organized by the USA in efforts to stabilize Kiev in spite of Ukraine’s breakdowns at the front.
And Danilov seems to be central in the purge process.
Purges in Kiev follow the classical pattern
They started in the top of the security organs, using the secret service SBU and spreading to the Interior Ministry (police), Defense Ministry etc. A “corruption scandal” took awayDefense Minister Oleksii Reznikov.
A “helicopter crash” took away all the top of the Interior Ministry, including Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky himself. Various “incidents” take away other key-figures like Zelensky’s spin-doctor and buddy Oleksii Arestovych.
A murder by the SBU takes away a former member of Ukraine’s negotiation team in Istanbul.
Now the Kiev purges proceed laterally “down the ranks” in the SBU and military – and the purges spread horizontally to other powerful centres like the tax authority.
The Kiev purges are becoming a massacre.
Danilov in the Security Council with Budanov as the new Defense Minister while still controlling the SBU through a henchman as successor – they are the new axis running Kiev. Steered by the US, of course.
Is Zelensky part of that ?
CIA boss William Burns’ trip to Kiev included personal talks to calm down a nervous Zelensky.
Zelensky more and more looks like a one-man show.
Zelensky is kept until his soft utility for PR has to be sacrificed for the increasing US need to openly resort to massive violence against Ukrainians – the bloody show must get bloodier to go on.
Then Zelensky will suffer an “accident” or a “scandal” – “ohh, we didn’t know”that Zelensky had stashed millions of dollars in Monaco and the Virgin islands. Though for a long time, reports flourish that Zelensky’s people have flooded Monaco.
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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: Oleksyi Danilov (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)
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Anybody who seriously thinks that Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs of the future won’t be full blown social credit systems need look no further than Brazil, where newly selected “socialist:” / globalist Lula da Silva just decreed that the Bolsa Familia program will require family members to be vaccinated in order to continue receiving benefits.
“we can’t play around. It is a question of science. If there are ten covid vaccines, 50 to take, I will take as many as necessary because I like my life. I think everyone has a duty to their children’s life, take them [to vaccinate] at the right age ”.
The news comes via The Rio Times, which describes the Bolsa program as “a social welfare program for the poorest families in Brazil” and “a kind of Universal Basic Income”.
Lula says Brazilians can receive financial aid only if they have taken the vax. Bolsa Família will require vax certificates from participants & their children: We can't play, it's a question of science. If I have 10 covid vaccines to take, I will take all that is necessary. 💉 💰 pic.twitter.com/hqrYq4jO6r
UBI is considered by many to be beneficent and inevitable. I personally believe the latter but not the former.
However it shouldn’t surprise anyone that if you’re dependent on The Saviour State for your sustenance (as Charles Hugh Smith calls it), you are, in effect, their chattel.
CBDCs will be the rails for UBI programs
The emergence of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) initiatives in nearly every nation on earth clearly signals the direction this is going. Nearly every CBDC white paper or proposal I’ve come across have the following three characteristics spelled out in plain text, and I expect every CBDC to have these five capabilities baked-in, whether or not they are initially enabled (or documented).
#1) Expiry dates / use-by dates
CBDCs will have expiry dates after which their value will evaporate or erode. What I’ve noticed is white papers coming out of central banks started framing it as a feature, not a bug, to facilitate “recovery of lost funds”.
Abstract
An important feature of physical cash payments is resilience, which is due to their indifference to power outages or network coverage. Many central banks are exploring issuing digital cash substitutes with similar online payment functionality. Such substitutes could incorporate novel features, making them more desirable than physical cash. This paper considers introducing an expiry date for online digital currency balances to automate personal loss recovery. We show that this functionality could substantially increase consumer demand for digital cash, with the time to expiration playing an important role. Having more information available to the central bank improves accuracy of loss recovery but may decrease welfare.
— Best Before Expiry? Expiring Digital Currency and Loss Recovery, Bank of Canada Staff Paper, December 24, 2021
However the real reason CBDCs will have expiry dates is to stimulate money velocity and keep recipients dependent.
#2) “Anti-hoarding” features
Saving for the future is being rebranded as “hoarding” and it is becoming officially unfashionable because personal savings reduces dependancy on the state. The easiest mechanism for achieving this will be through negative interest rates on savings accounts, as per this IMF white paper,
“A world with lower inflation (and even zero inflation) and no persistent recessions may sound like a pipe dream, but we argue that it is possible by transitioning to an “electronic money standard.” Such a transition requires eliminating the zero lower bound, which central banks can achieve using readily available tools. Breaking the zero lower bound implies that the optimal rate of inflation will be lower than in the presence of the lower bound. This will empower central banks to quickly restore full employment and, over the medium term, possibly move toward targeting full price stability with zero inflation.”
…which goes on to outline the challenges there would be in eliminating the “arbitrage” between digital and physical cash:
A zero lower bound can be broken through a combination of (1) adopting or strengthening an electronic money standard in which electronic money is the unit of account and (2) implementing a time-varying interest rate (or more generally, rate of return) on paper currency (cash). Then, as the interest rate on cash moves in line with the official policy rates, there is no arbitrage between cash and money in the bank. Operationally this can be done while remaining quite close to the current monetary system, but there are several legal, communication, and political challenges to a transition to such an electronic money standard (Agarwal, and Kimball 2019).
(Despite the current rise in rates, once the money printers fire back up, this is where we’re headed).
#3) Total Information Awareness
Once it’s digitized in a centralized database (central banks) as opposed to being cryptographically secured on a decentralized blockchain (Bitcoin) – everything becomes known to central authorities instantly. Taxation can be applied per-transaction, but more interestingly – prices can also be modified on the fly.
If you’re behind on your property or income taxes – or have an unpaid fine (maybe because you’re fighting it), for example, they could simply enable a rolling garnishee on your wallet until it’s paid off.
While all transaction signatures are public on Bitcoin – they are pseudonymous and more importantly, unalterable. It’s true it may be known or discoverable that A sent sats to B, but there’s nothing any third-party can do about it. With Lightning on the ascent, combined with various privacy enhancements there – Bitcoin development is moving in the direction of more freedom and more privacy – which is the opposite direction of most CBDC initiatives.
Finally, whether CBDCs are launched with the noblest of intentions, there will at some point arise “an emergency” which will make it necessary for The People in Charge to “flip the switch” and turn them into:
#4) Social Credit Systems
Imagine if “LoonCoin” was a thing last year when the #FreedomConvoy hit Ottawa (and signalled the beginning of a worldwide revolt against Covid tyranny). Instead of emailing a list of bank accounts to be frozen that were cribbed from a (hacked) spreadsheet, they could simply direct the Bank of Canada to turn off everybody’s digital wallets who were in the vicinity of the protest, or who contributed to their crowdfund, or who retweeted the #HonkHonk hashtag.
Do you think they wouldn’t have done it?
Covid vaxports have already been weaponized in China, Brazil is doing it with their UBI program and when this is all formaized into a CBDC, they will probably not launch it without the framework for widespread social credit and control systems being part of the plumbing.
We all know from our experience with the pandemic, emergencies tend to drag on in perpetuity. The “War on Terror” is still in effect, and there are still legions of collectivist automatons tweeting #CovidIsntOver.
So when “The Long Emergency” (to use James Kunstler’s term) becomes a never ending, rolling climate crisis, the social credit systems built into CBDCs will be used to enforce:
#5) Carbon footprint tracking
Back in Carbon Rationing, CBDCs and Sound Money I wrote how this trajectory is more or less baked-in now, and that the state-run financial system is undergoing a shift from a debt-backed monetary system to one based on carbon quotas.
This is the ultimate end-game of CBDCs. There is no hidden agenda or conspiracy around this (there’s already a Mastercard that cuts off your spending when you exceed your carbon quota), and globalist elites are quite up front about it….
Notice how he pitched it as “track your own footprint” then described it as “track their”, “what they’re eating”, “where they’re travelling” https://t.co/omHLzwqJAZ
— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) February 9, 2023
Why CBDCs will ultimately fail
The developments of CBDCs is something we monitor in The Bitcoin Capitalist (formerly The Crypto Capitalist). Every month we put out our coverage of CBDCs in the “Eye On Evilcoin” section and it’s not always bad news:
There is still some time to stop CBDCs
Despite all the jawboning about CBDCs, nobody has really deployed anything viable. It’s all still design and planning – with some test beds going on. The few projects that have launched formal, actual CBDC’s have largely stiffed: Nigeria’s Enaira, Venezuela (lol). Even China’s much vaunted Digital Yuan had an underwhelming reception at last year’s Olympics (my suspicion is that the global financial system is unraveling faster than CBDCs can be developed, so they may have to go with something already out there, like Ethereum).
I should note one exception to all the proposals out there in former CFTC Commissioner Chris Giancarlo (a.k.a “CryptoDad”) and the Digital Dollar Project. So far it’s the one proposal I’ve seen bucking the trend among all CBDC specifications in that there is no talk of expiry dates, and an actual emphasis on tokenization, custody and privacy.
CBDCs will not be permanent
It amuses me that when I read these plans around social credit flavoured CBDC’s, policy makers still continue to believe that by hobbling “cash”, making it impossible to save, eliminating privacy and layering on Orwellian levels of social control, they still get something that the public will prefer to cash, crypto or Bitcoin.
Only a central banker would be worried that people are going to want to hoard a statist shitcoin. (Especially after they put expiry dates on it).
— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) February 8, 2023
It’s delusional.
Incentives matter, and that’s why nobody in their right might isn’t going to hold any wealth in CBDCs and keep their transactions within it to the lowest practical level.
The overall global system of governance is in a Fourth Turning style restructuring. With institutional legitimacy in tatters and public trust plummeting, CBDCs are typical and symbolic of the last gasp of industrial era, centrally planned economies.
The transition period between where we are now (Late Stage Globalism) and where we are headed – decentralized Network States, is going to be rough, so I advise battening down the hatches and reducing one’s reliance on government entitlements as much as possible…
Pro Tip: Don’t be poor
This is where we’re headed folks, so at the risk of sounding flippant, the solution is not to need financial aid.
Anybody depending on state entitlements or financial support will be CBDCerfs, their affairs fully regulated by the state, their carbon footprints metered, and rationed, while their lives are gamified through their smartphones.
Among the affluent G20 nations where woke-ism reigns supreme and neo-Marxism is still fashionable, a lot of them may even like it.
But for the rest of us, who would prefer not to “own nothing and be happy”, it’s imperative that you have zero reliance on government subsidies, entitlements or support payments.
If you haven’t already:
Start a business. (Even a kitchen table business or an online venture)
Start stacking sats (Bitcoin) – get off zero, today.
Start taking sats at your business.
If you already own or run a business, buy, start or invest in another one.
It’s going to get a lot more expensive to be free. It’s not right or fair, but that doesn’t matter.
The good news is there’s never been a better time in history to learn, create, innovate and grow and these are the dynamics and incentives that will ultimately prevail. We’re in a period of Peak Collectivism and Peak Centralization now (for the next few years). This dominating ideology is ultimately an anti-human philosophyand this too shall pass.
Be ready for it, either way.
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Mark E. Jeftovic is the founder of Bombthrower and CEO of easyDNS.com, a company he co-founded in 1998 which has been operating along the lines described within these pages.
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Argentina’s so-called Dirty War lasted from 1976 to 1983. As many as 5,000 people, considered political subversives by the ruling junta, were ‘disappeared’ — mainly by being sedated, then dropped into the ocean from airplanes.
Bill C-11 is intended to ‘disappear’ what Justin Trudeau refers to as “unacceptable views” — with no sedation or airplanes required.
Trudeau explained what “unacceptable views” were clearly to Canadians during last winter’s convoy protest.
He was asked why he supported and participated in BLM protests, but would not even meet with convoy protestors.
He explained he participated in the former because they had “acceptable views,” while he denounced the latter — and then brought the full power of the state upon their heads — because they had “unacceptable views.” It was a given he and committees he appointed would get to decide which views were “acceptable” and which were “unacceptable.”
Bill C-11 incorporates this thinking into what — if it becomes legislation — will make “unacceptable views” so hard to find on the internet that they will be “disappeared” just as effectively as if they had been dropped into that cold, dark South Atlantic ocean.
Through the use of manipulating algorithms by de-boosting, (decreasing visibility), shadow banning and other tricks, Canadians will see one side of a debate only — the side the current government wants us to see.
The government vehemently denies that they are not going to to this, but “methinks they protest too much.”
They are lying.
What are some examples of how manipulation might work? Let me suggest three:
First, the “phobes.”
Take the “transphobe” issue. Trans people are those who suffer from gender dysphoria — men who believe they should live their lives as women, and women who believe they should live their lives as men. So far, no problem. They should be able to live their lives as they wish. They should not be persecuted, and should have the same rights and legal protection as everyone else. No reasonable person disagrees with that.
A well known trans person is Kaitlin Jenner. Jenner lived most of his, her or their life as Bruce Jenner — one of the truly great athletes. He always felt he was meant to be a woman and after his children grew up and left home, he “transitioned.”
He explained publicly he intended to live the rest of his life as a woman. I don’t think anyone has a problem with that. His business. However, Jenner clearly says he’s fully aware transitioning did not actually make him a woman. He believes trans men should not be able to participate in women’s sports or enter women spaces, and he is generally respectful of the rights of biological women. He simply wants to be left alone to live his life as he chooses. Everyone can agree with that.
Except for the small radical fringe of loud trans activists. They insist men with gender dysphoria actually become women simply by declaring themselves to be so. And everyone must agree with their view.
That is the “acceptable view” according to the Trudeau Liberals. Anyone disagreeing with that view — like J.K. Rowling, who says that “sex is real” — have an “unacceptable view” that must be made subject to C-11. So, the “acceptable view” is “boosted” and is on page one of Google, while the J.K. Rowling “unacceptable view” is “de-boosted” so far back on the pages it has been effectively “disappeared.”
Or “Islamophobes.”
Islam is one of the world’s major religions and Canada has a healthy and growing Muslim population. A disproportionate number of Canada’s Muslim population are doctors, engineers and other high achievers. No issue there. Muslims have exactly the same right as any other Canadian to live their life and practice their religion as they please.
However, this does not mean that Islamism — political Islam — is not a threat domestically and internationally. Pointing this obvious fact out is not Islamophobia, Xenophobia or any other phobia. That ISIS, Al Quaeda and other Islamic groups use their religion as a weapon to cudgel their enemies, or exposing unacceptable practices.
But, judging by this government’s conduct in recent cases, it’s clear radical Islamist voices will find favour with Liberal C-11 manipulated algorithms, while the voices of those warning about such dangerous people — including moderate Muslims — will be called Islamophobes and effectively disappeared.
Then there are the the “denialists.”
The overwhelming majority of Canadians know many indigenous people were abused while in residential schools, and they suffered long term consequences. That majority also supported compensating those people for the harm done to them. However, this does not mean they believe absolutely nobody ever benefitted from attending the schools, or they believe the increasingly extreme claims now being made by some indigenous communities about priests murdering and secretly burying children, hanging them on meat hooks in barns, throwing their dead bodies in rivers, streams and lakes and poisoning them by deliberately infecting their milk with tuberculosis bacilli.
But judging by this government’s behaviour, it’s almost certain the group making the extreme claims that will be boosted, while people questioning these claims will be labelled denialists and effectively disappeared.
We have recently seen how a charge of “residential school denialism” resulted in the case of Frances Widdowson. She was fired from her assistant professor position at Calgary’s Mount Royal College and publicly humiliated and refused permission to speak at the University of Lethbridge, largely for contradicting the residential school narrative preferred by the government.
Similarly, we have seen how Senator Lynn Beyak was hounded out of the Senate for simply making the perfectly valid statement some people benefited from their time at residential schools. C-11 would in effect make moderating voices, such as Widdowson’s and Beyak’s, disappear.
Finally, much of Bill C-11 is concerned with finding yet more ways to further subsidize an already subsidized legacy media — particularly wokeism’s advocacy group called the CBC. The bill also addresses many legitimate needs. However, the algorithmic manipulation parts that the Senate did not fix are the most insidious parts of the proposed legislation.
The above are just three possible examples of how C-11 will do serious damage to the free exchange of ideas in Canada. There are many more.
I realize that Orwell references are overused, but I can’t help but think Orwell would see in a minute what these scoundrels are up to: C-11 is a blatant attempt at thought control.
The Trudeau Liberals are attempting to implement the same sneaky tricks Twitter used, and that Elon Musk has recently exposed. This legislation should not be passed.
In fact, I will venture to guess if those Argentinian junta generals had Bill C-11, they wouldn’t even have bothered with airplanes to kill those 5,000 dissidents.
They would just have used C-11 to “disappear” their voices from the internet.
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Brian Giesbrecht is a retired Manitoba judge.
Featured image: Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis has been a strong critic of Bill C-11. As writer Brian Giesbrecht points out, if passed C-11 will give the government the ability to use technology to not only try and control what’s visible on the internet, but ultimately society itself. Photo Courtesy, Lewis’ leadership campaign.
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The WHO is working through at least two parallel plans to achieve the same objective: an unelected global dictatorship. These are the IHR amendments, and the Pandemic Treaty. The IHR amendments are a fast track underhanded path, while the Pandemic Treaty may be a decoy or a plan B. The Pandemic Treaty is more obvious in name, and is meant to establish the same global dictatorship, though at a slightly slower pace.
Please join me in thanking my friend James Roguski for keeping meticulous vigil on the schemes and back room deals of the World Health Organization. In this 6 minute video, he exposes the contents of the “zero draft” of the Pandemic Treaty published February 1st, 2023. The WHO continue plotting, on behalf of evil WEF oligarchs, to enslave us all. We must stop them!
James Roguski will be keynote speaker at the World Council for Health General Assembly #76 at 2PM EST on Monday February 13, 2023 in the WCH Newsroom. If you miss the live event, you can watch this, all WCH GA’s, and more here. WCH GA’s can be joined live every Monday at 2 PM EST here. Please help support the World Council for Health here.
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On February 8, 2023, while arguing on behalf of fired NYC workers who declined covid vaccination, attorney John Bursch stated in open court that unvaccinated teachers in New York City were flagged with problem codes in their personnel files, and when that occurred “their fingerprints are sent with that flag to the FBI and the New York Criminal Justice Services.”
The source of this information is Betsy Combier who wrote an affidavit (see pdf below) in the Kane v. de Blasio case where she stated unvaccinated teachers were given a “problem code” label that was “then sent to the national databases at both the Federal Bureau of Investigation” (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ).
In federal court on February 8th attorney Susan Paulson who was defending NYC stated that educators fired for declining covid vaccination were not removed for misconduct, but rather for not meeting a requirement for employment.
If there was no misconduct, why are unvaccinated educators fingerprints sent to the FBI?
I believe that unvaccinated NYC educators were being setup to be viewed as “right-wing extremists” or even “terrorists.” We know for many years Dr. Peter Hotez has been promoting an insane narrative that those who are “vaccine hesitant” are an extremely dangerous group, and that we need to look to Homeland Security and even NATO for suggestions of how to deal with such a “threat.” (watch Part 1 & 2 of Dan Cohen’s investigation into Dr. Peter Hotez)
If we look at those who declined covid vaccination through this lens, it is easy to see why their sensitive biometric information (like fingerprints) would be illegally sent to the FBI.
Educators who declined covid vaccination – including myself – had every right to do so. No one is a “terrorist” or “extremist” for holding the line on what does and does not go inside of their bodies – especially injected directly into their muscle tissue.
These developments are certain to open up a new round of lawsuits.
Violations of educators (and students) rights to their biometric information by NYC is no surprise to me. The first time I sued the city was back in 2020 over in-school covid testing and the privacy rights to the DNA in the specimen provided. Turned out the covid testing company then-mayor Bill de Blasio contracted – FULGENT GENETICS – reserved the right to utilize DNA samples obtained from covid testing and catalogue it in proprietary libraries the company owned. Also turned out Fulgent had close ties to the Chinese Government.
Never trust NYC or their Department of “Education.”
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Michael Kane is the founder of TeachersforChoice.org. He was an NYC public school teacher for over 14 years until he was fired for declining covid vaccination. He is also the Grassroots Organizer for Children’s Health Defense.
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It is a clear indicator of the disappearance of freedom from our so-called Western democracies that Sy Hersh, arguably the greatest living journalist, cannot get this monumental revelation on the front of The Washington Post or The New York Times, but has to self-publish on the net.
Hersh tells the story of the U.S. destruction of the Nordstream pipelines in forensic detail, giving dates, times, method and military units involved. He also outlines the importance of the Norwegian armed forces working alongside the U.S. Navy in the operation.
One point Sy does not much stress, but it is worth saying more about, is that Norway and the U.S. are of course the two countries that have benefitted financially, to an enormous degree, from blowing up the pipeline.
Not only have both gained huge export surpluses from the jump in gas prices, Norway has directly replaced Russian gas to the tune of some $40 billion per year. From 2023 the United States will appear in that list in second place behind Norway, following the opening in the last two months of two new liquefied natural gas terminals in Germany, built to replace Russian gas with U.S. and Qatari supplies.
So Russia lost out massively financially from the destruction of Nordstream and who benefited? The U.S. and Norway, the two countries who blew up the pipeline.
But of course, this war is nothing to do with money or hydrocarbons and is all about freedom and democracy….
To return to Hersh’s account, particularly interesting are the series of decisions taken to avoid classification of the operation in various ways which would require it to be reported to Congress. In terms of United States history, this ought to be a big deal.
For the executive branch to commit what is an act of war without the approval of the legislature is fundamentally unconstitutional. But that is one of those quaint remnants of democracy that the neoliberal elite consensus can quietly sidestep nowadays.
Hersh sets out the well-known background in compelling detail, including that, from U.S. President Joe Biden down, the Americans effectively announced what they were going to do, openly.
At a Senate hearing, top US diplomat Victoria Nuland celebrated the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bombing:
"Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea." pic.twitter.com/KS5OM4N165
But what most worries me about the entire story is the unanimous complicity of the mainstream media in ignoring the completely obvious.
The media line, parroted here relentlessly by the BBC and corporate media, was that the Russians had probably themselves blown up the pipeline on which they had expended such great resources and three decades of intense diplomatic activity, and which was to be the key to Russia’s single most valuable source of income for the next 40 years.
This was always quite literally incredible. You would have to be deranged to believe it.
How the Big Lie Works
It actually taught me not just that we truly are in the realm of totalitarianism and the Big Lie, but I learnt something very important about how the Big Lie works.
The secret is not that people genuinely believe an outrageous claim. The secret is that people do genuinely believe that they are in a battle of good against evil, and it is necessary to accept the narrative being promoted, in the interests of fighting evil.
Don’t question, just follow. If you do question, you are promoting evil.
I am sure that is how it works.
State and corporate stenographer journalists are actually intelligent individuals. If they thought about it, they would realise that the narrative that Russia blew up its own pipeline is obvious nonsense.
But they are convinced it is morally wrong to think about it.
Seymour Hersh signing books at the London Review of Books bookshop, April 2016. (David Jones, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Which is why none of them challenged the equally mad claims that Russia was repeatedly shelling its own forces occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. It’s also why none of them challenged the utterly risible official version of the Skripal story.
I previously told the anecdote from when I worked in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and asked a good friend if he really believed the misinformation on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) with which he was involved.
He replied by referring to the video game “Championship Manager” (now renamed “Football Manager”), which we used to play together. He said when he was in the game, it was immersive, he was manager of Liverpool and it fully absorbed him.
Similarly, when he walked through the FCO gates, the world of the intelligence reports was immersive and Iraq did have these WMDs inside that world. He worked in the “reality” of the FCO. Once he left in the evening, he lived in a different reality, the world of us in the pub.
I know of journalists bright enough to detach their professional output from what they really think, in a similar way. (I once had a conversation along these lines with Jeremy Bowen in Tashkent.)
Most however don’t think like this. They simply think that all right-thinking people support the historic struggle against the evil Russians, so it must be right to read out the propaganda without thinking too much about it.
Those of us critical of the aggressive promotion of war in Europe, are not only barred from all mainstream media and confined to corners of the internet. Even there we are heavily suppressed on social media (which is why Sy Hersh’s article does not have the scores of millions of readers it merits).
We can’t even obtain freedom of assembly.
Two established left-wing venues have cancelled the “No-2-NATO” meeting I am addressing in London on Feb. 25. Conway Hall’s reasons for cancellation included threats to funding and fears for the safety of staff.
We are now reduced to a guerrilla meeting, the Central London venue for which will not be announced until the evening before.
Is this really a democracy, where it is not possible for dissidents to hold a public meeting without secrecy, subterfuge and hiding from supporters of the state?
I do urge you to come along on the day, whatever your views on the subject, to support the right to freedom of speech.
I have a different view from perhaps all of the other speakers, on the legitimacy of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which I oppose.
But I also oppose NATO expansion which is an underlying cause of the war, and indeed oppose the existence of NATO itself.
NATO is a war machine that sucks resources from working people to benefit the military industrial complex, and unleashes devastating destruction on the developing states that do not make their natural resources available to Western billionaire elites.
It is also a fundamental node of the propaganda apparatus that manipulates and controls our society, particularly as counter narrative. Dissident thought is now rigorously and systematically excluded.
There is no longer an Overton window of permitted debate. It has narrowed and should be renamed the Overton letterbox.
One of those small difficult ones right down at the bottom of the door. With a very fierce spring, and snarling dogs guarding it.
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Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.
Featured image: LNG site in the Norwegian industrial island of Melkøya, end point of the undersea pipeline for natural gas from the Snøhvit fields in the Barents Sea. (Andreas Rümpel, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
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***
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky appeared before Congress this week, and blamed “dis and misinformation” for kindergarten children showing up at school without being fully vaccinated.
And where could these parents be getting this “misinformation” that is causing them not to vaccinate their children?
Maybe they are getting it from the CDC’s own Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) which is available to anyone in the public.
According to VAERS, there were 77,990 injuries including 263 deaths recorded in 2021 and 2022 following all vaccines. (Source.)
Of those 77,990 cases filed during 2021 and 2022, 61,375 were following COVID-19 “vaccines,” including 160 of the deaths recorded. (Source.)
Prior to 2020, for the 10-year period covering 2010 through 2019, there were 120,783 cases of vaccine injuries and deaths recorded in VAERS, or about 12,000 per year. (Source.)
That’s an increase of over 200% for vaccine injuries and deaths since the COVID shots were introduced, according to the CDC’s own data.
Could this be the “misinformation” that Walensky was talking about?
Of course Walensky knows all of this, since it is the CDC’s own data, so by petitioning Congress and parents to give more vaccines to their children is intent to commit premeditated murder.
Why would parents want to avoid that?
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Featured image is from HIN
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (desktop version)
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***
An extremely significant video features three activists in today’s truth and justice movement, each playing a seminal role championing the cause of human freedom and redress from the genocidal killers. The three are involved in several exciting related developments currently breaking that are unprecedented regarding game-changing tipping points involving potential landmark lawsuits against both national governments and the primary mRNA Big Pharma giant – Pfizer-BioNTech as the fascist business model for merging corporate and state power.
The second speaker in the video is retired Swiss international banker, author and filmmaker Pascal Najadi, who filed a criminal case on December 2nd, 2022 in Lucerne, Switzerland against the sitting President of the Swiss Confederation Alain Berset. Since March 2020 Berset heads Switzerland’s COVID response. Pascal Najedi’s lawsuit charges him and other prominent national government officials for abusive process – deceptively inflicting risk of injury and death to Swiss citizenry based on Pfizer’s experimental vaccine deception.
Switzerland’s future President Alain Berset falsely claimed on national television that those vaccinated with Covid-19 vaccines could not spread the virus, but has not yet been held accountable. One Swiss man wants to change that.
Like nearly 70% of the Swiss citizens who listened to their medical and government authorities and in good faith, received at least one vaccine injection, trusting the authorities, Pascal Najadi along with his wife and mother complied with the national policy and received three Pfizer injections. Pascal was shocked when Pfizer director Janine Small on October 11, 2022 speaking before the European Union’s Covid-19 Response answered Dutch EU member Rob Roos’ all-important question:
Was the Pfizer vaccine tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market?
Janine Small’s response:
Regarding the question around did we know about stopping immunization before it entered the market…No.
Having carefully noted previous official statements issued by Swiss public health authorities, including back on August 3, 2021 when then Swiss Health Minister Alain Berset was present at a press conference admitting that those vaccinated are transmitting the COVID virus as much as those unvaccinated. Then on October 27, 2021 on national television, in an effort to push through his Covid-19 legislation agenda, Alain Berset stated that with the vaccine certificate, Swiss citizens will demonstrate that they are not contagious but safe, thus contradicting his less than three months earlier announcement. Essentially, this confirms that current Swiss President Alain Berset knew his October 2021 statement was false and misleading. Pascal concluded that his nation’s leader knowingly, recklessly and falsely promoted the dangerous experimental vaccines that placed Pascal, his family and millions of his fellow citizens at considerable risk of harm.
Pascal Najadi’s case is the first lawsuit of its kind calling for investigation and prosecution at the national level of any country in the world, once Switzerland’s current Attorney General Stefan Blättler agreed to prosecute the criminal case against the current Swiss president, seeking adjudication in a federal court of law, charging the top political officeholder for willfully deceiving the public, persistently misleading and pushing the mRNA vaccine as safe and effective as national COVID policy when it’s clearly been proven that vaccines are neither safe nor effective.
Pascal Najadi cites Article 6 of the Swiss Constitution that grants every citizen the right and duty to uphold justice in compliance with Swiss law according to the Constitution.
Pascal asserts that as a citizen it is his duty in observance of the law to file the criminal charges against the top leaders within the Swiss government for violating the law. Pascal’s lawsuit also contends that Pfizer, the CDC and every national and international medical regulator in the world cannot legally authorize or impose a drug injection on a population when its legal authorization is limited as an experimental drug only that we now know carries an extraordinarily long list of potential adverse and even deadly side effects, and that according to both the Nuremberg Code and Swiss national law, it cannot be administered without signed consent of every person prior to voluntarily submitting to COVID inoculation.
Also, in the first part of the video international attorney and activist Todd Collender shares that he is now working on behalf of the royal family of Thailand to seek a military tribunal in Thailand. 44-year old Princess Bajrakitiyabha and daughter of the King of Thailand Maha Vajiralongkorn, collapsed 23 days after her third Pfizer injection, slipping into a coma due to alleged heart failure, leading to lack of oxygen to her brain. For over six weeks she has been in a comatose state, likely now brain dead and an apparent fatality according to American attorney Todd Collender.
Thus, at least two major cases are currently underway on record with international implications that may well be instrumental in triggering many more criminal lawsuits filed at the national level in numerous countries. Perhaps the so far, lame International Criminal Court at The Hague might be prompted to belatedly follow through on the Reiner Fuellmich lawsuit filed a year ago seeking redress for crimes against humanity.
BREAKING NEWS: Swiss President and the Minister of Health are under investigation, indictment, and prosecution by the Attorney General for Covid Crimes involving lying about the vaccine effectiveness and safety. Thailand convening war crime tribunals to nullify Pfizer Contracts. pic.twitter.com/3RfT4t3puq
The tide has changed, it’s really changed, and now you’re going to see the floodgates open. These are universal jurisdiction crimes, which means that if Switzerland wanted to prosecute our president, they would not only have the ability to do that in abstentia, they would have the ability to sentence and actually carry out that sentence in abstentia, meaning that extraterritorially, they were able to find a treaty partner that could go and grab whoever it is responsible, bring them back to Switzerland for the execution if that what the sentence was. This is a big deal, this is a huge deal, the first sovereign to do this.
The promising development in Thailand was also explained on the video by Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, a fellow Thai and professor of virology and immunology as well as renowned COVID activist and physician who has been passionately warning of the dangers of Covid-19 vaccines for the last three years. The doctor announces that for the first time he was invited by a nation’s authorities and advisors from the Thai government in this case, to offer his expertise testimony in a hearing. Dr. Bhakdi laid out details how the “entire Covid-19 agenda was fake” based on fraud, which then prompted the Thai government to declare its contract with Pfizer-BioNTech null and void. Dr. Bhakdi maintains that Pfizer is now obligated to pay back billions to Thailand for the government to then recompensate its harmed citizens.
Dr. Bhakdi along with Todd Collender are part of the professional team now working with the royal family of Thailand to seek justice at the national level to hold the perpetrators accountable. Dr. Bhakdi was informed by German lawyers that a criminal case can also be filed in the United States against Pfizer for harming and killing millions. These unfolding actions together represent a fundamental turnaround and necessary sea change that so many of us around the globe have been seeking and waiting for, as the beginning of a worldwide legal movement through criminal lawsuits filed in national federal courts and governments to ensure that Big Pharma giants like Pfizer conspiring with the WHO, major governments, their public health agencies and medical organizations along with mainstream corporate media and Big Tech industry will all have to pay for their guilt in each’s active contributory role committing genocidal crimes against humanity.
Finally, Dr. Bhakdi mentions that Bill Gates has spoken of new viruses coming, that Dr. Bhakdi warns will be released in the spring of 2023 and that Pfizer has patents placing the same lipid poisons in today’s flu vaccines as well as all the veterinary vaccines worldwide, containing the same deadly poison secretly included in all the vaccines being given to pets around the world. He says profit from this income source will be used to pay out settlements as Pfizer’s plotted scheme to stay solvent and remain in business.
Meanwhile, recent legal actions in Florida in December 2022 report that Governor Ron DeSantis requested a grand jury investigation of any Big Pharma wrongdoing regarding its so-called Covid-19 vaccinations, specifically any false claims that they could effectively prevent the spread of the virus. And on December 23, 2022, the Florida Supreme Court approved the governor’s request to convene a grand jury of 18 members that will last a year to determine if criminal indictments are warranted and make viable recommendations.
Implications of potential criminal wrongdoing by Pfizer emerged in late January 2023 when watchdog activist group Project Veritas caught on tape Pfizer executive Jordon Trishton Walker, boasting how the company is exploring vaccine marketability profits based on the drug company’s own mutated virus in the lab. Of course, it didn’t take long for Pfizer’s vehement denial, claiming it “has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research.” RNA technology pioneer and harsh Covid-19 critic Dr. Robert Malone labeled Pfizer’s doublespeak denial a “word salad” likened to “renaming a child kidnapping and claiming it was an impromptu adoption.”
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Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate, former Army officer and author of “Don’t Let the Bastards Getcha Down,” exposing a faulty US military leadership system based on ticket punching up the seniority ladder, invariably weeding out the best and brightest, leaving mediocrity and order followers rising to the top as politician-bureaucrat generals designated to lose every modern US war by elite design. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In Los Angeles he found himself battling the largest county child protective services in the nation within America’s thoroughly broken and corrupt child welfare system.
The experience in both the military and child welfare system prepared him well as a researcher and independent journalist, exposing the evils of Big Pharma and how the Rockefeller controlled medical and psychiatric system inflict more harm than good, case in point the current diabolical pandemic hoax and genocide. As an independent journalist for the last decade, Joachim has written hundreds of articles for many news sites, like Global Research, lewrockwell.com and currently https://jameshfetzer.org. As a published bestselling author on Amazon of a 5-book volume series entitled Pedophilia & Empire: Satan, Sodomy & the Deep State, his A-Z sourcebook series exposes the global pedophilia scourge is available free at https://pedoempire.org/contents/. Joachim also hosts the Revolution Radio weekly broadcast “Cabal Empire Exposed,” every Friday morning at 6AM EST (ID: revradio, password: rocks!).
Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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***
The San Remo Festival will be remembered as the “Festival of the two Presidents”: the President of the Italian Republic Mattarella at the opening and the Ukrainian President Zelensky at the closing. The latter does not appear live, following the protests that were raised in Italy. However, the substance remains: Zelensky sent a speech to the San Remo Festival which – the anchorman Amadeus in charge of this reading announced – “it is even translated by the Ukrainian Embassy in order to be very faithful to President Zelensky’s writing”.
Zelensky’s performance at the Festival is confronted with the reality happening in Ukraine, reconstructed through dramatic visual documentation in this episode of Grandangolo.
What Zelensky’s real role is, has been revealed by a journalistic investigation published by The Guardian. In the 2019 presidential election, actor Zelenski, who became famous for his TV sitcom on the corruption of Ukrainian political leaders, pledged to end the war in Donbas and clean up the oligarch-dominated government system. He accused wealthy Petro Poroshenko, incumbent president, of hiding his assets in tax havens abroad.
Regarding his first commitment, once in the presidency, Zelensky’s role was not to end the war in Donbas, unleashed in 2014 against the Russian populations of this region, but to fuel the NATO-led de facto war to target Russia.
Regarding the second commitment to eliminate corruption, in particular the export of capital to tax havens, the investigation elements published by The Guardian are clear. Zelensky is the co-owner of three companies headquartered and capitalized in Belize and the British Virgin Islands (Central America) and Cyprus. Upon assuming the post of chairman, Zelensky “transferred” his company shares to two of his partners. And, once in office, he appointed his first partner as his special assistant and the second one as head of the Ukrainian secret service.
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This article was originally published on byoblu.
Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image: Ariston Theater in Sanremo February 16, 2013 during the last night of the 2013 Festival (Licensed under the Public Domain)
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***
Mind control is the final frontier of the technocratic revolution. What you say, do, buy, and sell is increasingly trackable through technology. Yet, so far, the human mind remains a sanctuary free from prying foreign eyes – the last refuge.
This will not last if the technocrats have their way.
“Can you imagine that in ten years when we are sitting here we have an implant in our brains and I can immediately feel… because you all will have implants [gesturing to audience], I can measure your brain waves,” cartoon James Bond villain Klaus Shwaub giddily introduced the prospect of shared consciousness at Davos.
Duke University Professor Nita Farahany, also at Davos, surveyed the current state of mind-monitoring technology.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is very interested in monitoring our thoughts. – “Imagine a world of total transparency, where every thought you think is visible to everyone else,” they eagerly state. – Duke University Professor Nita Farahany 2023. pic.twitter.com/7aTKqz9sCX
Nita Farahany, Professor at Duke University talks about “the coming age of wearable neurotechnology” where your ear pods monitor your brainwave activity “all day every day” to “track brain health” #wef23
(1/2) Nita Farahany, Professor at Duke University, discusses if employers and insurance companies should have access to data about “genetic predictions” of people’s future health.
Likely, the technology is actually further along than publicly acknowledged, as the technocrats tend to roll out controversial advances incrementally to slowly acclimate the slaves to their new reality.
Note the apparent lack of any hesitation on the part of Farahany, Schwab, or any of these WEF technocrats to these novel technologies. Normal people (who don’t crave total control) don’t casually discuss monitoring every human’s brain activity 24/7/365 with no acknowledgment of the obvious risks of abuse. The only logical conclusion here is that there is something fundamentally broken in their psychological/spiritual makeup that allows them to decouple their normal human intuition from their work advancing The Science™.
Farahany’s WEF talk featured a short accompanying narrated animation to help digest what unrelenting surveillance of the mind might mean for everyday life.
The story centers around a fictitious dystopian techno-hell office in which the victim’s boss monitors her brain activity to make sure she’s doing her work and not fantasizing about sex with her coworker, “given the policy against intra-office romance.”
Government agents later show up at the protagonist’s workplace, commandeer every office worker’s brain activity, and cull through it indiscriminately to look for “synchronized brain activity” between co-workers to see who was thinking what illegal thoughts.
Dystopian prophet George Orwell, brilliant though he was, did not have the same vision as his contemporary Aldous Huxley did in the context of tech’s facilitation of tyranny. Orwell understood power brilliantly but not necessarily how the state would implement technology to underwrite its power.
Huxley, on the other hand, was plugged into the transhumanist, technocratic elite which even in the early 20th century had ambitions of total domination of humanity – not just physical control, but psychological as well.
Rather than Orwell’s infamous nightmarish “boot stamping on a human face forever” prophecy, the future of enslavement will more closely mirror Huxley’s vision in Brave New World, in which the state uses various technological and pharmacological implements to cull and pacify the population, so that physical force becomes unnecessary to maintain control.
In fact, in 1949, Huxley, after reading 1984, penned a little-known letter to Orwell, explicating their analytical differences in their respective novels:
“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that… the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”
This is impressive foresight for a man writing in the pre-internet era, when the pharmaceutical industry was still in its infancy.
The tyrants of tomorrow won’t appear in gaudy military attire; they’ll be the kind of soft-spoken HR administrator whose inflections trends upward at the end of her sentences as if her commands are just questions– in other words, totally non-threatening.
The technocracy’s footsoldiers won’t goosestep in orchestrated shows of force as an intimidation tactic; they’ll coo their charges into submission like a mother singing an infant to sleep with a lullaby. Without firing a bullet or dropping a bomb, they’ll infiltrate and subvert the human mind with drugs and irremovable implants.
Humans are conditioned by millions of years of evolution to respond with commensurate force to clear physical threats like armed goons rolling through their community. We are considerably less vigilant about insidious threats that do not rely on brute force but rather subtle psychological manipulation and unseen control mechanisms.
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This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Locals, Gab, and Twitter. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
Alberta government censored & hid all data about COVID-19 vaccine injuries to the immune systems of the double vaccinated (Part 1), the failure of the first COVID-19 booster (Part 2), and more immune system damage to the triple vaccinated (Part 3).
I haven’t even begun addressing COVID-19 vaccine damage caused to University and College students, high school students, children, newborns, pregnant women, doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers. That comes later.
COVID-19 Vaccine immune system damage is dose-dependent (more jabs leads to more injury)
A recent study of 51,011 Cleveland Clinic employees showed that those with more doses of COVID-19 vaccine were more likely to get infected with COVID-19 than those with fewer or none, and this risk of infection increased over the first 100 days after COVID-19 vaccine injection (click here).
I have seen this pattern before. Yes, the data that Alberta government permanently deleted in January 2022 showing that the double vaccinated were more likely to get infected with COVID-19 as time passed after their 2nd vaccination:
That’s almost the same pattern for the first 100 days. While the Cleveland Clinic’s data ends there, Alberta’s data showed that the immune system damage from COVID-19 vaccines continued for the first 8 months (240 days), before the double vaccinated began to partly recover from their immune system injuries.
Albertans were owed FULL access to this data for the 0x, 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x-vaccinated until today. We have never seen it for the 3x, 4x, and 5x-jabbed.
The best we got from the Alberta government was a very brief glance at data that showed the triple vaccinated had higher COVID-19 infection rates than the double vaccinated (click here) and the govt deleted that data on March 23, 2022 (click here):
During this time (March 2022), UKHSA data also showed this same relationship between more jabs and higher rates of COVID-19 infection, nicely broken down by age groups (click here):
The triple vaccinated were the most immune damaged group in every age category and had the highest infection rate in every age category.
Let’s add the last piece: the quadruple vaccinated. We have no data from Alberta but we do have data from Australia. It is, as one would expect. The quadruple vaccinated led in hospitalizations and deaths throughout (click here). It’s not even close.
COVID-19 Vaccine induced immune damage was known:
The Alberta government had to be aware of research showing the breadth and variety of immune system damage that COVID-19 vaccines were causing (beyond increased risk of infections). For example: Chen et al, “New-onset autoimmune phenomena post COVID-19 vaccination” was published online on Jan.7, 2022 (click here).
Another paper published online on June 5, 2022: Yamamoto, “Adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines and measures to prevent them”, raised many alarms about immune system damage to the vaccinated (click here):
The message couldn’t be more clear: “frequent COVID-19 booster shots could adversely affect the immune response and may not be feasible…As a safety measure, further booster vaccinations should be discontinued.”
From post COVID-19 vaccine immune system damage to skyrocketing excess mortality
In July 2022 it was clear that the triple vaccinated were disproportionately dying from COVID-19 but what about non-COVID-19 deaths? What about the 3,362 Albertans who died of “unknown causes” in 2021 ? (click here). What about the 4000+ excess dead Albertans in 2022? In a province where autopsies are all but forbidden, the answers were not forthcoming. The fact that Alberta government to this day has refused to investigate these deaths shouldn’t surprise anyone – it is one more cover-up in a long series of cover-ups. It really reminds me of the way Alberta Health Services Executives operate: once they’ve committed a crime, they’re committed to it.
COVID jabs = increased mortality; more jabs = more excess death
These days, it seems everywhere you look there is some new evidence of significantly increased mortality in the vaccinated:
UK data (2022) (source: testimony to US Senate by Insurance Analyst Josh Stirling:Vaccinated had 26% higher mortality
Vaccinated under age 50 had 49% higher mortality (click here)
England (2022) (source: Daily Sceptic) (click here)Higher vaccinated areas of England had higher excess deaths
Israel, Australia, India (source: Denis Rancourt, et al.) (click here)Vaccine-dose fatality rate of up to 1% in Australia
Vaccine-dose fatality rate of 1% in India
Vaccine-dose fatality rate of up to 0.6% in Israel
US data (2021) (source: Steve Kirsch, Medicare database (click here)Dose #1 increases your risk of death by 20%
Dose #2 increases your risk of death by 20%
Dose #3 increases your risk of death by 10%
Germany (2021-22) (source: Kuhbandner et al.) (click here)100,000 excess deaths ages 15-79 starting to accumulate only from April 2021 onwards (vaccine rollout)
World (2022) (source: Alex Berenson) (click here)1,000,000 excess deaths in COVID-19 mRNA vaccine countries
Conclusion
For what will ultimately be the deadliest cover-up in Alberta’s history, it has been a rather sloppy one. Alberta’s Public Health Chief Dr.Deena Hinshaw was likely relieved to be fired, she’s not really cut out for this level of criminal activity. She seeks asylum in British Columbia, with a pharma left BC NDP govt which will protect her.
Her deputy Chief Medical Officers of Health Dr.Jing Hu (a respirologist from Wuhan, China) and Dr.Rosana Salvaterra resigned (click here) and no one knows where they are now. At least their “cash benefits” for their hard work and long nights of deleting COVID-19 vaccine injury data from government websites, kept up with inflation.
Alberta Health Services CEO Dr.Verna Yiu, who was the source of a lot of tainted and manipulated pandemic data, was fired through a revolving door right into a $700,000+ job as the new Vice President of University of Alberta (click here). She continues to make arrogant, hypocritical and tone-deaf comments on Twitter about leadership, honesty and integrity.
Albertans deserve investigations and criminal prosecutions of these healthcare leaders who caused them so much harm. I suspect we will see neither.
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Featured image is from NaturalNews.com
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (desktop version)
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
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***
The West/NATO has always lacked a long-term strategy. After all, it was militarily, economically and politically superior and could impose its will. Didn’t have to think.
Hoping Ukraine would join NATO without fuss was hubris-ridden wishful thinking, and stupid to boot, in that it’s been convincingly documented that Russia’s leaders, from Gorbachev to Putin for the past 30 years, have said that NATO expansion was: a) a clear violation of the promises made by all important Western leaders to Gorbachev – and it’s true; b) a humiliation and counterproductive if you want common security; and c) that if it could be no other way, then Ukraine would be Russia’s definitive red line.
No one listened. Because, as former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussenso aptly put it: Putin knows NATO can beat him to a pulp because we spend ten times more on weapons than he does.
So, as some of us have predicted, it went wrong – which is not a sign of support for Russia’s invasion. I distanced myself from that the next day. But neither do I support the West’s response to this invasion, the rearmament of Ukraine, and the anti-intellectual narrative NATO countries are running, including the claim that NATO is not responsible for anything and that Russia’s invasion was ‘unprovoked.’
Then, on 30 January 2023, the heads of the Danish government visited Ukraine. One understands from the Danish Broadcasting’s (Danmarks Radio) report that there was no attempt to push President Zelensky towards a negotiating table. No, Denmark comes with promises of more weapons and aid to its twin city. To that I wrote immediately on my Facebook page:
“Holy simplicity!
Surely it makes an impression to see the horror of war. Some of us have done that more times than these three put together.
But then Denmark will have to supply even more weapons so that there can be even more suffering, death and destruction.
The conflict between NATO and Russia in Ukraine must be settled on the battlefield and not at a table. More than usually short-sighted and, well, foolish…
It’s almost unbearable to watch Løkke Rasmussen bombing in Syria. Today 12 million – half the population – are starving there, over 300 000 have died and 12 million are refugees and internally displaced persons, IDPs.
But that war – the war of the West – is not to be talked about.
And no government delegation will visit Syria and see the results of the West’s – failed – war of regime change there from 2011-2016. With Denmark’s full political support and military contribution.
The absence of any moral thought is palpable. Far into the heart. In some of us, but not in these people for whom sacrifice can apparently be categorized in two:
The worthy – victims of Russia’s wars – Christians
in contrast to:
The unworthy – victims of NATO countries’ wars – Muslims.”
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An imminent Russian major offensive and what do the US, NATO, the EU – and Denmark – do?
It’s a strange war, the one in Ukraine. In the picture above, the Danish ministers are talking to President Zelensky in the street, none of them wearing bulletproof vests and no military protection to be seen. There are large areas of Ukraine that are not affected at all by this war, which is otherwise being blown up to be the most horrific proportions in living memory. But it is good PR for Denmark’s increasingly militaristic and anti-intellectual foreign and defence policy – with photo opportunities like few.
With sadness in my heart – because I am Danish-born, it could all have been avoided and it will get worse – I would say that this will probably be the last time they can visit Ukraine.
More and more articles are now appearing in international media – written by independent and self-reliant civilian experts as well as by experienced soldiers – arguing convincingly that time is running out for Ukraine, and that Russia has now mobilised for an imminent major offensive. You can find many of them at The Transnational and at TFF 2 – the online magazine “TFF Peace Affairs.”
So reverse beating to a pulp? Putin’s pluck fish? After all, the logic and rules of war dictate that you don’t just sit idly by while third parties spend years arming your opponent – just in the last year, to the tune of at least US$150-200 billion, or more than twice Russia’s entire defence budget. Instead, you try to get ahead of them.
Putin still has time, to some extent, because all the hardware the West is pumping in takes a long time to learn how to manage, repair and operate effectively, because the leadership in Kyiv has obvious internal conflicts and extensive corruption, because the fighting spirit is wearing off over time, because Ukrainian human and material losses are probably far greater than we are told in Western media, and because the NATO side so wants to win but does not have the courage to deploy its own troops and more advanced weapons. It will only fight to the last Ukrainian – sacrificing nothing itself in this cowardly and strategy-less proxy war.
Let me make it clear here that I certainly do not think NATO should do so; I am simply pointing out that it will not fight (or pay a human price) for the Ukraine it holds so dear – and that that it is not particularly noble. High technology is the Pentagon/NATO weapon, not morality, courage or sacrifice.
Russia, as I said, has time, but not infinite time. What President Putin called a special military operation may, as this time passes, become more of a great new Patriotic War. Ukraine is Russia’s neighbourhood and vitally important to Russia, not the US. Yet Ukraine must get into NATO by devil’s force, against a host of expert warnings. The only country it did not want in was Russia, whose leaders repeatedly – including Putin – have suggested that Russia should join NATO.
I wonder if the 70-odd high-priced Leopards and Abrams tanks will arrive in time and someone can learn to operate them in time to make a difference on the battlefield? (Some say 320 tanks, but who will supply the other 250?)
I wonder if Denmark’s Caesar artillery system will arrive in time. And I wonder how much longer people in Europe and the US are prepared to cough up the money and pay sky-high prices for everything – not because of Russia’s invasion, but because of the panicky, short-sighted and self-justifying response with which the West responded to the invasion: the indefinite sanctions, the exclusion of all things Russian, the withdrawal of businesses, the loss of markets, the inflation, the armament, the Great Day of Prayer (a Danish religious holiday to be cancelled by the government on which people must instead work to collect money for the Danish military!) – and the destruction of Nordstream 2 (which you don’t hear about any more in the media because it just can’t be sold as something Russia did).
And add to all this the colossal misjudgment that “the international community” would follow US/NATO policy. The fact is that 85% of humanity lives in countries that either directly oppose Western policy or remain as neutral as they can. When NATO’s Stoltenberg travels to South Korea and Japan to tie them closer as NATO ‘partners’ and rally military support for the war in Ukraine, it is obvious that desperation is escalating as well.
I predict a Russian major offensive very soon. When the superior party in a conflict (NATO) refuses to negotiate and only aims to become even more superior, well then it’s pretty clear what the other side will think and do. The clock is ticking, and timing is essential.
Then a much larger part of Ukraine will be destroyed, and we in Europe will be forced to deal with infinitely higher numbers of refugees – and later spend untold billions rebuilding Ukraine – even more than the US$ 300 billion it intends to take from Russia, namely its deposits in Western banks.
We’re talking about ordinary, peaceful Ukrainians who cannot survive either because of the war or because of chaos, unemployment, hunger, and cold – sick people who can no longer get help in wildly overloaded hospitals. They will knock on the doors of the EU.
I wonder what the Danish government and Defence Minister, Jakob Elleman Jensen, will say? Today he has only this – banal – to say:
“But even though the Russian bombs are still falling over Ukraine and the future may look bleak, according to Danmarks Radio, Defence Minister Jakob Ellemann Jensen is sending an appeal to the Danes:
“From the Danish side we should be proud of our contribution. For it is massive, he says. Their wish list is, by nature, endless. If they are to defeat evil – and they must – they can only do so with our help.
At the end of December, the Danish government donated DKK 300 million to an arms fund.”
Here Elleman Jensen promises “evil” – not Russia, but evil – that it will be beaten into a pulp. With Danish help. None of Denmark’s three leaders seems to have any substantial clue about either the laws of war or its psychology – much less the conflict underlying the war.
And the consequences of their actions must then be felt by others. Prime minister Mette Frederiksen does not put her own hand on the Ukrainian hotplate (a rather strange formulation she has used about Denmark needing to be at the forefront of conflicts and wars with the US).
Future issues now the Western consensus on Ukraine begins to crumble
In passing, there are some arguably big questions about the boomerang effects of NATO and EU policies: If/when the battle over Ukraine’s membership in NATO is somehow lost (because in NATO it will never be, and fortunately, there are many other viable options), will NATO be able to survive? The Alliance’s biggest blunder ever?
Can the EU, which has been there all along and, as usual, has not been able to unite around one policy, let alone a policy different from that of the US? How will the US evolve in the next few months, and will it be an ever weaker, often unclear-speaking Biden, Trump or someone today unknown who will carry out the policies of the US MIMAC – Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex? Will the country’s president be swept aside if he or she takes the path of negotiation and coexistence instead? (Don’t forget that the biggest winner of the Ukraine war so far is the arms industry).
Will the US empire, parts of the US society be dismantled peacefully or with violence, with a Bang or with a Whimper? Will the EU survive or fall apart, partly because Germany – one must assume – cannot go all the way? Will Sweden, having gambled everything, including 200 years of good experience in non-alignment, not get in after all? Will Turkey stay and prevent Sweden’s membership or leave NATO and turn completely to the East? (It is NATO’s biggest military power after the US).
Will Hungary leave the EU and NATO? And how much longer will Serbia accept to be bullied since the 1990s, NATO’s illegal bombing of Kosovo and Serbia and various ultimate demands repeatedly made of the country – in which, by the way, China is already the single largest trading partner?
Western media are not exactly beating the drum for the growing criticism of Western policy in Ukraine. Zoran Milanovic, the president of the NATO and EU member Croatia, has said everything that should not be said in EU and NATO circles, calling parts of NATO’s policy counterproductive and immoral.
And then, on 1 February came the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) assessment, reproduced here by the New York Times: “The resilience of Russia’s economy is helping fuel global growth, according to a new [I.M.F.] report … suggesting … [Western] efforts … to weaken Moscow because of its war in Ukraine appear to be faltering. … [T]he I.M.F. predicts … Russian output will expand 0.3 per cent… this year and 2.1 per cent next year, defying earlier forecasts ….”The sanctions are having little impact on Russia’s economy, explaining that “[the West’s] efforts … to weaken Moscow over the war in Ukraine appear to be falling flat. … [The IMF] predicts that … Russian output will grow by 0.3 percent … this year and 2.1 percent next year, defying earlier forecasts.”
New RAND report should make all decision-makers in the West think
And as if these “cracks in the wall” weren’t enough, the American hawkish think tank, the Rand Corporation, has just released a report – “Avoid A Long War” – that says in no uncertain terms that the US must take urgent steps to stop this war because it is not in the US’s long-term interest. If Ukraine is to retake all its territory, it will, it says, be a much longer and more destructive war and increase the risk of nuclear weapons being used. A long war would have devastating consequences for the global economy, take US attention away from other major issues and increase Russia’s ‘dependence’ on China.
And beyond that, RAND points out, there are plenty of difficult dilemmas – like this one: By steadily increasing arms aid to Ukraine, Zelenskyj will feel empowered to oppose negotiations; if the US/NATO cut back on arms aid, Russia could feel empowered. How to balance expectations and action/reaction?
Or: US/EU massive sanctions are imposed to punish Russia forever; it means Russia has no hope that its policies will have any effect on them, that they will never be lifted, so to speak. (They should have been conditional instead, of course: if you Russians stop this war, we will lift the sanctions, JO).
So RAND suggests that the US must say clearly what it is Russia must do for sanctions to be lifted and then negotiate from there.
RAND even says (p. 24) that Russia has already paid a very high political and economic price – NATO enlargement with Finland and Sweden, NATO rearmament, loss of prestige, Europe’s reduction of energy and trade cooperation with Russia, reduction of Russia’s defence capability, etc.
Finally, RAND makes it clear that Ukraine’s regaining of lost territory is not the most important thing; instead, the US should give it some kind of security guarantees of neutral status and non-NATO membership, get peace talks going and discuss how sanctions can then be lifted.
If this authoritative report by RAND – which basically demonstrates how counterproductive everything the US, NATO and the EU have done so far is and also argues that a long war with nuclear risks is not in the US interest – does not make a deep impression and finally make decision-makers in all NATO headquarters – including Copenhagen – think, there is hardly anything that can.
And it is interesting that RAND – of all people – says in its own way what we peace professionals have been saying all along: what is happening now is counterproductive, creates a long war with ever-increasing risks and that the only solution must come about at a negotiating table and with a clear recognition that Ukraine can never become a NATO member, but can surely gain security in other ways (see my analysis here with texts from 2014 and up to 2022).
How to contain the protests of people around Europe, when the prices of energy, petrol and groceries have risen to levels that are pushing living standards ever lower – and social services and healthcare are deteriorating further? When people discover that they have been deceived by the propaganda of NATO’s innocence and have to pay even more to the alliance which bears the main responsibility for the conflict and is also now engaging in a war which this so-called defensive peace-building alliance was set up precisely to avoid? Trillions of dollars extracted from the taxpayers of 30 countries over decades only to demand even more in a time of multi-crisis?
I actually think Western leaders have enough to think – deeply – about.
But today, politics is reduced to photo-ops, symbolic politics with flags, pin badges and blue-and-yellow dresses, fancy Twitter-esque statements and the total absence of an awareness of one’s own professional ignorance and, therefore, also of the fact that what one is experimenting with just to be proven right is the possible destruction of large parts of Europe.
There is certainly no prudent statesmanship, caution or coherence between action, tactics and long-term strategy to be seen anywhere. It’s helter-skelter, more or less panicking, positioning and signalling politics.
Or perhaps it is the megalomaniacal illusion that NATO members and partners – when on the other side of all this and when “we” have won and Russia has been chopped up like Yugoslavia was – will defeat China, expand NATO even further and liberate Taiwan… the China that in no way wants war or is waging war anywhere and threatens no one in NATO?
Weapons and armaments are, after all, the only area where the West still has a comparative advantage. There is only the Aberdabei about it, that the very use of this advantage, this military superiority, will with unerring certainty destroy the West itself. Sooner rather than later. The pervasive militaristic culture is like cancer spreading.
But like a puppet on the strings of His Master’s Voice, NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg repeats himself endlessly about China as the great challenge, China’s armament and provocative behaviour and disinformation, and… most recently during his visit to South Korea and Japan at the end of January.
The people of Ukraine will pay the highest price and Europe will get the boomerang of the US/NATO response to Russia’s invasion
I wonder how much will be left of Ukraine and its people in a few months’ time, who are, after all, innocent in the game played by their own Poroshenko and Zelensky governments, the governments of NATO countries and, last, by Russia, full well knowing that millions of these by definition innocent Ukrainian fellow human beings could well have their lives and future destroyed for decades ahead.
As always, it is ordinary people who pay the price for the heartless power games of leaders – including Danish leaders.
While I have no sympathy for Ukrainian leaders’ interactions with the US/NATO since the 2014 US-orchestrated regime change in Kyiv, with their rearmament of Ukraine, their civil war against their own citizens that has cost 14,000 lives, or with the shenanigans called the Minsk Accords, one can only have sympathy for the innocent Ukrainians whom all sides have sacrificed like pawns on a chessboard.
And in this case, the cause of this suffering is that everyone in NATO circles denies every co-responsibility for the conflict that has sparked off the war – indeed, that there is a conflict at all, which presupposes two parties. Russia is the only party to this unique conflict and NATO, according to Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, is not even a participant in it.
No one in either the media or politics understands the essential difference between the war (symptom) and the underlying conflicts (causes), and no one seems to possess the self-awareness and diplomatic ability to do anything other than drive ever deeper into the dead end of military escalation.
Like a lemming train towards the abyss.
It’s called mission creep, and it’s terribly dangerous – especially when the actors are blinded by the self-righteous winner’s groupthink that rejects all alternative interpretations and courses of action and day by day confirms the group that it is infallible and, therefore on the right path.
This kind of thing happens when militarism has become a religion and NATO its church, the main – last – cohesive factor in the Western world whose time as the world’s self-appointed leader is definitely over and a new cooperative, multi-polar world order without hegemons rapidly evolving.
One can only hope today that it will implode and not explode.
Here is President Zelensky speaking about the visit of the Danish politicians:
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Featured image: The Danish foreign, defence and the prime minister is greeted by President Zelensky (right) (Source: The Transnational)
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Barcelona becomes the first city administration in the world to suspend relations with Israel since the BDS movement was started. It has also announced the suspension of the twinning agreement with the Tel Aviv city council.
Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona, announced on Wednesday, February 8, her city’s temporary suspension of all official relations with Israel over its apartheid practices and systematic violations of Palestinian rights in the occupied territories.
Colau wrote a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday announcing the decision to suspend relations with Israel. She also announced that the twinning agreement with the Tel Aviv city council, signed in 1998, was suspended “until the Israeli authorities put an end to the system of violations of the Palestinian people and fully comply with the obligations imposed on them by the international law and the various United Nations resolutions.”
Colau clarified that the decision was solely related to the institutional relationship between authorities in Barcelona and Israel, and did not affect relationships between the residents of Israel and the city.
The decision was taken after a petition for the same was signed by a federation of over 110 human rights groups—called Lafede.cat—from and more than 4,000 residents of the city.
Lafede.cat, also known as the Organizations for Global Justice, had first published its demands in May 2021 during the 11-day-long attack on the besieged Gaza strip by Israel, in which more than 250 Palestinians were killed and over 2,000 injured. It had also demanded that the Spanish government stop selling weapons to Israel and end all business deals with Israeli companies.
Action against Israeli apartheid
Colau claimed that the petitioners had asked her to “condemn the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people, support Palestinian and Israeli organizations working for peace, and break off the twinning agreement between Barcelona and Tel Aviv.”
The Deputy Mayor of Barcelona and the leader of the Catalan Socialist Party in Barcelona, Laia Bonet, opposed the decision and demanded the “restoration” of the relationship. She said that authorities should make efforts to “reinforce, not weaken, the role of Barcelona in the world,” Catalan News reported.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry responded to the news by claiming that the decision was not backed by the majority of the residents of Barcelona. Some Jewish groups have also called the decision “sophisticated anti-semitism.”
This prompted a wave of international solidarity in favor of Colau and her party Barcelona En Comú on Thursday.
URGENT 🇪🇸: Barcelona mayor Ada Colau has been attacked for her courageous decision to suspend ties with the State of Israel. Join leaders around the world rallying to her defense — and call on cities everywhere to join her fight for Palestinian rights.https://t.co/zCllc8k03j
European Jews for Just Peace, a federation of 12 European Jewish peace groups, supported Colau’s decision, claiming that “boycott is a legitimate, time-honored method for civil society to protest against a country that commits human rights abuses. Mayor Colau is following the footsteps of those who boycotted apartheid South Africa.”
The Palestinian national committee of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement also welcomed the decision, “[saluting] the Mayor of Barcelona.” It also noted that Barcelona’s move to suspend ties with Israel was “reminiscent of the historic and courageous city councils that pioneered cutting ties with apartheid South Africa.”
The decision will be voted on in the city council on February 24.
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Featured image: Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau. (Photo: Blanca Blay via Catalan News)
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says that the United States shot down an unidentified flying object (UFO) over Canada’s Yukon at his request Saturday. “I ordered the takedown of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace,” Trudeau wrote on Twitter.
This is the second time in a few days that a strange object has been shot down by the United States. Another object was detected entering U.S. airspace around 9 p.m. Alaska time on Thursday, February 9th and the U.S. government subsequently sent a surveillance plane to track it. The object was flying between 20 and 40 mph ( 32 and 64 km/h) at an altitude used by civilian aircraft, according to Live Science.
I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace. @NORADCommand shot down the object over the Yukon. Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled, and a U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object.
Canada is currently in the process of recovering the wreckage of the UFO to determine its origins. The U.S. is also in the process of recovering what it can to determine where the first object came from. Oddly enough, it was shot down even though it didn’t pose a “military threat.”
The news of these objects comes as the U.S. faces criticism for its handling of the Chinese spy balloon debacle that took place earlier in the week.
The news has been barely touched on by the ruling class’s mainstream media puppets, which tells us one thing: someone is hiding and distracting. These UFOs could also be cause to convince the public to get involved in a third world war.
Additionally, Japanese and local astronomers said a Chinese satellite has been caught on video beaming down green lasers over the Hawaiian Islands. A National Astronomical Observatory of Japan live stream camera atop the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea recorded the footage in late January.
According to a report by KHON2, a University of Hawaii astronomer says that the “green lasers” were measuring pollutants. “It’s a Chinese satellite that is measuring pollutants, among other things, it has many different instruments on it,” said UH Institute of Astronomy associate astronomer Roy Gal. “Some kind of topographical mapping or they’re also used for measuring stuff in Earth’s atmosphere, and I think that’s what it is, environmental measurement satellite.”
“The U.S. has satellites to do the same thing, so, in this case, despite all the flurry, well deserved flurry, about Chinese spy satellites and other devices, this one is just orbiting earth and has a known orbit,” Gal said.
However, the ruling class may not take it the same: “I’m not sure, and this is my opinion, why the Chinese — who are probably some of the most prolific polluters on the planet — would be collecting data on pollutants on this side of the Pacific, said Ray L’Heureux, former marine forces Pacific chief of staff.
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“Can we forecast earthquakes? No. Neither the United States Geology Survey (USGS) nor any other scientists have ever predicted a major earthquake. We do not know how, and we do not expect to know how any time in the foreseeable future.” –United States Geology Survey website
On the morning of February 6, 2023 the people of Turkey and Syria were struck by a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake, followed by a 6.7 aftershock and then a final (we hope) 7.5 M quake in the late afternoon. The effects of the three-fold quake struck deep into Syria and as of this writing, over 23,000 deaths, and 500,000 injured have been counted in Turkey and Syria, along with tens of thousands of injuries and incredible destruction to infrastructure.
Were it not for the political obfuscation that has derailed all fields of science over the past decades, then this tragic loss of life would have been entirely preventable.
How?
Because despite the clamorings of the priests of standard model geology managing the US Geological Survey, the fact is that earthquakes are completely forecastable.
Take the singular case of Dutch scientist Frank Hoogerbeets, representing the self-funded Solar System Geometry Survey (SSGEOS) who published the following tweet a full three days prior to the February 6th disaster:
Reflecting on the method he and other like-minded scientists use within the international forecasting community, Hoogerbeets explained:
“As I stated earlier…this would happen in this region, similar to the years 115 and 526. These earthquakes are always preceded by critical planetary geometry, as we had on the fourth-fifth of February”
What sort of “planetary geometries” is Hoogerbeets talking about?
It isn’t that Hoogerbeets uses a crystal ball, believes in astrology or has better data than the scientists of the US Geographical Survey, but rather that he is simply a real scientist who doesn’t believe in dogmatic procedures masquerading as “science” if they don’t actually work. His method of looking at “planetary geometries” as an important component to his success was laid out in a three minute introductory video Earthquakes and Electro Magnetic Waves:
It should also be noted that this was not Hoogerbeets’ first successful forecast.
On February 2, 2023, the SSGEOS published that there was “potential for stronger seismic activity in or near the purple band (indicating the east side of South America) in 1-6 days.” This warning was followed by a February 5, 2023 5.6 magnitude earthquake that struck Cuiquimbo Chile.
On January 29, 2023, SSGEOS predicted stronger seismic activity in an area which he outlined on a map as southern China and northern India. This was followed within a day by a 5.8 magnitude earthquake that hit southern Xinjiang.
Since setting up the SSGEOS in 2014, Hoogerbeets and his team have made hundreds of successful forecasts which stand in loud contrast to their mainstream rivals whose commitment to statistical probability theory, and linear computer modeling have resulted in dismal failure consistently for decades.
What sets Hoogerbeets apart from the statisticians who have come to dominate the field of seismology is simply his emphasis upon the electro-magnetic, chemical, and galactic properties of earth’s dynamics.
Unlike the modern “seismologists” who assert that everyone must adhere to the absurd “elastic rebound theory”, which presupposes the sole cause of earthquakes is located within tectonic plates and gravitational forces, those scientists who make successful predictions in this contentious field choose instead to focus on the electromagnetic properties of the earth and broader solar system (and galaxy) shaping the earth’s environment.
As Hoogerbeets states:
“Based on our research, it appears that gravity is not responsible for larger earthquakes at the time of critical planetary and lunar geometry. The most likely force acting on Earth’s crust at the time of critical geometry is electromagnetic. This could also explain the lightning in Earth’s atmosphere prior to larger earthquakes which could be the result of atmospheric forcing induced by electrogmagnetic charge from critical geometry between celestial bodies in the solar system.”
Throughout Hoogerbeets’ writings and educational videos, the Dutch forecaster explains that space between planets and between stars is not empty but permeated by subtle but efficient magnetic fields, and electric currents which feed into each of the planets, moons, and sun. The analogue used for this process is not a computer model with abstract notions of “gravitational forces pulling on objects within empty space” as is so often the case, but rather an electrical process with the sun acting as a form of dynamo and the planets acting as both antennas that simultaneously receive, transform, and emit signals according to certain specific wavelengths.
“The similarity between an electrical generator with its carefully placed magnets and the sun with its ever-changing planets is intriguing. In the generator, the magnets are fixed and produce a constant electrical current. If we consider that the planets are magnets and the sun is the armature, we have a considerable similarity to the generator”
This property of the planets and moons within the solar system was confirmed by the Voyager and Cassini satellites which recorded specific EM waves emitted from all planets ranging from radio wave, microwave, infrared, and even smaller wavelengths.
It was also outlined beautifully by Safire project lead scientist Dr. Michael Clarage in his recent 16 minute video, “Function in the Cosmos”:
Admittedly, what causes the EM emissions/absorption between planets is not understood. Also not fully understood is how these emissions influence activity both within the atmosphere, ionosphere of the earth — not to mention the deep crust, mantle, and core of the earth. Humans have, after all only pierced 16 km through the 60 km crust and have no direct knowledge of the mantle or lower.
Despite our ignorance of so much, we do know some things about the magnetic fields and resonances within our solar system, and simply acknowledging this reality and its influence on the affairs of earth is itself the first step to making a discovery… which is more than can be said of the standard theory gatekeepers attempting to keep new discoveries from emerging.
Core Precursors to a Science of Earthquake Forecasting
One of the factors which appear to be playing a much larger role within the science of earthquakes involves the chemical secretions of elements like radon from ground water near earthquake epicenters days and hours before and after an event.
What causes the release of radon is still unknown but this was what technician Gianpalo Giuliani was looking at when he predicted a 2009 earthquake that would strike l’Aqila Italy days later.
Another particularly important variable in earthquake forecasting involves the behavior of the large layer of ionised plasma surrounding the earth beginning at 40 miles and stretching to 600 miles above the surface. This zone is called the ionosphere and is replete with electrons and electrically charged atoms and molecules driven by the constant fluxes of radiation (mostly UV and Xray) emitted by the sun, but also influenced by the EM pulses of other planets within the electrical circuit that is our solar system.
In the relatively recent case of the deadly magnitude 9.1 earthquake that struck Japan, it resulted in the tsunami that smashed into the Japanese coast in March 2011 killing over 20,000 and leaving $38 billion in damage in its wake. As can be seen in the graphic below, this tragedy would have been entirely forecastable had anyone looked at the spike in electron density in the ionosphere above the epicenter which began eleven days prior to the disaster as demonstrated during a forensic analysis by Chinese researcher Fuying Zhu at the Wuhan Institute of Seismology in August 2011.
Another study conducted by Japanese seismologist Kosuke Heki not only substantiated Zhu’s findings but went further back and found the same electron fluxes in the ionosphere days before the 2010 magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Chile killing 524 people and prior to the 8.3 Hokkaido earthquake in 1994.
In 2011, a team of researchers began pouring over data accumulated by the DEMETER satellite which was the most advanced satellite designed to trace earthquake precursors from space while it was operational between 2004-2010. The researchers were looking for any electromagnetic anomalies that would have given the government of Haiti time to foresee the 7.0 earthquake that took the lives 250,000 people on January 12, 2010.
The team published a paper on their findings where they wrote: “One day (11 January 2010) before the earthquake there is a significant enhancement of electron density and electron temperature near the epicenter… Statistical processing of the DEMETER data demonstrates that satellite data can play an important role for the study of precursory phenomena associated with earthquakes.”
As is the case in most instances of electromagnetic/chemical precursors, the project had no budget to pay for any staff to analyse the data in real time, and thus nothing was seen or done.
Earlier work on successful forecasting which turns the supposed rules of ‘elastic rebound theory’ upside down include the work of Stanford electrical engineer Dr. Antony Frasier Smith who accurately forecast a Magnitude 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area California two weeks before it struck on October 17, 1989. Dr. Frasier-Smith had installed sensors near the eventual epicenter of the quake which noticed a 20-fold spike in ultra low frequency (ULF) radio waves 14 days before the shock, and which rose to a 60-fold spike above average three hours prior to the event.
Similar precursors were observed by researchers in Armenia before a magnitude 6.9 earthquake in December 1988 and again days prior to a magnitude 8.0 earthquake in Guam in August 1993.
Inspired by Dr. Fraser-Smith’s 1989 forecast in California, a scientist named Tom Bleier set up Quake Finder in Palo Alto California in 2000 which currently oversees a network of 125 magnetometers around the San Andreas Fault which makes up the massive earthquake dense zone called the Ring of Fire stretching from Japan around Russia, Alaska and the western coast of the Americas. Working with a group called ‘Stellar Solutions’, Bleier’s team has spent 20 years accumulating evidence of similar precursors that have occurred before dozens of small to medium earthquakes.
Another team of researchers took Frasier-Smith’s insights and reviewed the case of the massive Taiwanese earthquake of September 22, 1999 that resulted in 2500 deaths and $300 billion of damages. Not only did this team discover the ULF signals days in advance, but also found multiple points of connection to solar wind streams that accompanied those ultra low radio emissions that emerged from at least 8 km below the earth’s surface.
Another electromagnetic precursor that has borne fruit has been infrared emissions which also spike prior to large earthquakes. This was observed by NASA’s Terra Earth Observing satellite on January 21, 2001 which caught such “thermal anomalies” in Gujarat India five days prior to a 7.7 magnitude earthquake that killed over 20,000 civilians and destroyed 350,000 buildings. This anomaly disappeared immediately after the quake ended.
As can be seen in the image below, the magnitude 9.3 earthquake/tsunami that killed 228,000 people in Sumatra, Indonesia on December 26, 2004 was preceded by an anomalous spike in infrared radiation five full days before the tragedy. Unfortunately due to the dismissal of this entire field of science as “fringe” heresy, these precursors are either not listened to, OR they were only discovered AFTER the disasters struck as no financial resources were made available to staff the facilities needed to interpret the data in real time.
There are many more cases of earthquake forecasting which could have been raised that take into account all those parameters mentioned above and more.
Keplerian Roots of Modern Forecasting
It is important to hold in mind that this is not a new or ‘fringe’ field that emerged in recent history, but goes back literally millennia. Perhaps the earliest outline of planetary geometries and harmonics playing a direct role upon the material conditions of nature on earth was developed in the Timaeus dialogue by Plato in 360 BCE.
While the Pythagorean study of the harmony of the spheres and the lives of humans remained in the realm of philosophy for two millennia after the Timaeus was written, it was the scientist Johannes Kepler who first established an actual science of astrophysics and planetary forecasting with his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1594), followed by his New Astronomy (1609) and culminated in his Harmonies of the World (1619).
It was in this last work which saw Kepler consummate 30 years of research on the Pythagorean hypothesis and shaped his famous third law (aka: harmonic law) of planetary motion.
In Book 4, Chapter 7 of the Harmonies of the World, Kepler writes:
“The view that there is some soul of the whole universe, directing the motions of the stars, the generation of the elements, the conservation of living creatures and plants, and finally the mutual sympathy of things above and below, is defended from the Pythagorean beliefs by Timeaus of Locri in Plato… a Christian can easily understand by the Platonic mind, God the Creator and by the soul, the nature of things” [p. 358]
Kepler worked through several chapters outlining the planetary and lunar geometries (which he dubbed ‘aspects’) that conform to visual harmonies in the form of archetypal angles generated from elementary polygons. Those elementary geometries include, but are not limited to triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons and octagons as well as the internal angles generated from these shapes. With this accomplished in book three of his Harmonies, Kepler outlined a set of angles that define specific quantized states using the earth’s relationship to various planets, the moon, and the sun.
Kepler was no numerologist and recognized that numbers were not self-contained causes but rather the effect of those archetypical shapes that permeated all physical space-time. For example, numbers like 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 would be expressed by the elementary shapes (triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, octagon) that can then be combined into the five Platonic Solids and 13 Archimedean polyhedra.
When nested into each other, these Platonic solids determine a set of proportions which Kepler used to guide 30 years of research into the causes for the positions of the planets around the sun which he also speculated was moved by an electric fluid within his New Astronomy[1].
Internal angles contained within the elementary shapes are also treated as properties of qualities rather than self-contained quantities. For example: Squares generate internal angles of 90, while triangles feature internal angles of 60 and 120 degrees. Pentagons generate internal angles of 135 and 72 degrees while hexagons generate internal angles of 120 and 60 etc.
In his Harmonies of the World, Kepler demonstrates the musical proportions of these numbers as functions of resonance/consonances demonstrating a model of the solar system built on the well-tempered musical scales featuring both major and minor modes.
Johannes Kepler’s 3 planetary laws unshackled physics from mysticism and relied on a musical insight outlined in his 1619 masterpiece featuring his model of the solar system above. The fact that his 3rd Law of Planetary Motion, which is still used today, was the effect of this theory should cause the sceptic to think twice before dismissing Kepler’s insight as rubbish.
Within Book Four of the Harmonies, Kepler breaks from the astrologers and statisticians dominating the ‘standard models’ of his day by outlining various verifiable weather phenomena that coincide with these “aspects” saying: “I was moved to that… only and solely by observation of the weather and study of the aspects by which it is excited. For I saw that with great consistency the state of the atmosphere was disturbed whenever planets were either in conjunction or configured in the aspects commonly spoken of by the astrologers. I saw that there was generally calm in the atmosphere if few or no aspects occurred or if they were quickly completed or concluded. Indeed I considered that this business should not be considered so lightly as the common herd of forecasters usually does.”
One of dozens examples of planetary geometries examined in Kepler’s Harmonies of the World which imposed a reasonable scientific method onto a domain long dominated by astrologers.
Later on, Kepler discusses various weather phenomena and their correlation with various geometrical configurations of the solar system saying:
“I took account of consistent experience, not indeed concentrating in that way on snows in particular, or winds, or thunder and the other things which astrologers usually predict, but observing in general that the state of the air was disturbed in some way or other if there were aspects, for example if Mars and Jupiter were in conjunction, and were peaceful or if there were not any [conjunctions].”
Gauss-Weber Pioneer the Electric Model of the Atom and Universe
Later on, German scientists Carl Gauss (1777-1855) and Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) developed the Keplerian model of a universe of harmony even further by leading an international scientific program to chart the invisible magnetic field shaping the world which was accomplished in 1838.
“As Gauss stated in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Olbers (1781–1862), he was interested in the terrestrial magnetic field as early as 1803. This interest was greatly stimulated after meeting Baron Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and Wilhelm Weber (1804–1891) in Berlin in 1828. After 1831, his major collaborator was Wilhelm Weber. Inspired by Alexander von Humboldt, Gauss and Weber realized that magnetic field measurements needed to be done simultaneously and globally with standardized instruments. This research program led to the foundation of the Göttinger Magnetischer Verein in 1836, an organization without much formal structure, only devoted to organizing magnetic field measurements throughout the world.”
Three leading scientists who fought against the Newtonian British school of empiricism during the 19th century (left to right: Wilhelm Weber, Carl Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt).
Gauss was also a forecaster of the highest order who was the first to discover the location of the asteroid Ceres in 1801 which verified an earlier forecast made 200 years earlier by Kepler who stated that the gap between Mars and Saturn would necessarily contain a planet (in this case it appears that the asteroid belt is either a residual of a former planet or the material that may someday form into a planet).
Gauss was also the first scientist to recognize the necessity for a layer of charged electrical current above the stratosphere in order to contain the radio signals passing across the surface of the globe, and would be verified by the discovery of the ionosphere in 1929.
It was also Gauss’ close friend and collaborator Wilhelm Weber who pioneered the Keplerian hypothesis of harmonic relations shaping the frequencies of space into the domain of the micro universe. In the 1850s, Weber actually became the first scientist to measure the exact distance of an electron circling the orbit of a nucleus (which he successfully did without actually seeing the electron or nucleus).
Neither Weber, nor Max Planck, who later picked up the torch which Weber left to posterity, saw a schism between the macro universe in the large and the micro universe in the small. For these scientists, keys discovered in one domain were also valuable in unlocking doors of the other domain.
Max Planck Stands up for Truth
It is thus no small irony that Planck’s success in founding a new science in the quantum world was motivated by his commitment to Kepler’s method that trumped “the common herd of forecasters” of the 17th century.
In his Where is Science Going? (1932), Planck warned of the corruption of science and forecasting caused by the spread of the statisticians and formalists who lacked a creative flexibility and love of truth needed to continue the momentum of new discoveries that had been opened up by the great minds of Planck’s generation. The old musician/scientist contrasted Johannes Kepler with his contemporary Tycho Brahe who both had access to the same date, although only one had the spark of love of truth that ushered in the creation of a new physics. Max Planck wrote:
“Kepler is a magnificent example of what I have been saying. He was always hard up. He had to suffer disillusion after disillusion and even had to beg for the payment of the arrears of his salary by the Reichstag in Regensburg. He had to undergo the agony of having to defend his own mother against a public indictment of witchcraft. But one can realize, in studying his life, that what rendered him so energetic and tireless and productive was the profound faith he had in his own science, not the belief that he could eventually arrive at an arithmetical synthesis of his astronomical observations, but rather the profound faith in the existence of a definite plan behind the whole of creation. It was because he believed in that plan that his labor was felt by him to be worth while and also in this way, by never allowing his faith to flag, his work enlivened and enlightened his dreary life. Compare him with Tycho de Brahe. Brahe had the same material under his hands as Kepler, and even better opportunities, but he remained only a researcher, because he did not have the same faith in the existence of the eternal laws of creation. Brahe remained only a researcher, but Kepler was the creator of the new astronomy.”
The Statisticians Play Dice with Truth
While it is under appreciated today, as Max Planck was saying these words amidst the rise of a new techno-feudal system of fascism in his native Germany, a pitched battle was being waged over what direction science would go in the 20th and 21st century.
On the one side stood Planck, Einstein, Madame Curie and other great scientists who actually made revolutionary discoveries into the universe, and on the other side stood the mathematical statisticians led by the “Copenhagen school” of Niels Bohr, Max Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli. This latter school of probability theorists correctly demanded that a new science was needed due to the anomalous data emerging in the realm of the quantum and new studies of deep space which couldn’t be explained by the “classical model” of Newtonian science.
The 5th Solvay Conference of 1927 featured an all-out battle between two opposing schools of physics over how the paradoxes of the quantum domain should be treated. On the one hand, actual creative scientists who made sincere breakthroughs such as Planck, Marie Curie, Lorenz and Einstein defended the idea of causality and truth while the new breed of statistical probability theorists of the Copenhagen School of Bohr, Heisenberg, Paoli et al asserted the contrary. Unfortunately for the 20th century, the “old guard” scientists were discarded as obsolete and naive.
The fact that this new school of statisticians never discovered anything didn’t stop them from being dubbed the victors of the Solvay Conference in 1927. In the wake of this battle, pioneering scientists like Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Mendeleyeev and Marie Curie were placed in the same category as rigid “classical” positivists of the Newtonian sect (including Ernst Mach, Bertrand Russell, Rudolph Clausius and David Hilbert) who demanded that the only definition of “truth” acceptable in the realm of science had to be mathematical perfection.
According to these anti-creative positivists, IF it could be proven that mathematical perfection were an impossible ideal, then TRUTH ITSELF had to be rejected as having any assumed existence.
By treating all scientists that believed in truth as “positivists”, a straw man was created which the young Copenhagen statisticians jumped on. Since the universe could be demonstrated to be shaped by a non-linearity and elements of uncertainty (evidenced by Kurt Gödel’s famous 1932 proof) that denied the possibility of absolute mathematical truth, it was asserted that only the science of “dice rolling” (aka: statistical probability) be permitted by scientists wishing to conduct any experimental research on reality — either of the atomic world, or even in the macrocosm. This was the context shaping Einstein’s famous statement to Niels Bohr that “God does not play dice with the universe”.
In this perversion of science, randomness and uncertainty became presumed “laws” in the domain of the quantum in the very small, while a stiff mechanistic determinism became the assumed dominant law of the macrocosm in the very large. It didn’t take long for these contrary impulses to become forced together into something called “Standard Model Cosmology” which became a soulless dead corollary to “Standard Model Quantum Mechanics” during the Cold War.
And within the insanity of the shadowland of lies that was the Cold War, the fear of nuclear annihilation increasingly swept the love of truth in science away, and the unbounded financial resources of the monstrous military industrial complex absorbed cutting edge scientific work into the classified world of black budgets and espionage with no connection to the benefit for the civilian sector or universal knowledge more generally. Scientists who didn’t conform to the new normal were increasingly purged from the scientific establishment as a newer generation of cognitively handicapped scientists emerged onto the scene, leaving nothing unaffected by their toxic irrationalism.
The Cancer Metastasizes: Economics, Ecology, and Geology Infected
All of a sudden, scientists were told to accept the deterministic rules of a universe that supposedly emerged out of nothing exactly 13.7 billion years ago, and would die a slow heat death in some linear extrapolation into the future. While this fatalistic determinism was enforced from the top down, a fatalistic indeterminism was enforced from the bottom up whereby scientists had to accept that nothing could be known of the specific principles shaping the existence of protons, electrons, or other sub-atomic behavior. Every system in the universe from organisms, human economies, galaxies, and solar systems were assumed to be both rigidly closed and deterministic AND ALSO random, fluid, and irrational.
This self-contradictory dualism embedded as a Trojan Horse not only derailed discoveries in atomic science (with fusion power increasingly dubbed ‘the impossible dream of forever being 30 years away’), but also in political economy and climate science.
In economics, this dualism was unleashed with the post-1971 floating of the US dollar onto global speculative markets as a new consumer society cult was imposed onto the western world. Under this new era that became known as “globalization”, economics was defined as the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure driven by atomized consumers which were likened to gas particles stochastically bumping around within an aerosol can. The macro-system (aka aerosol can) in which the “markets” were located was increasingly shaped by a new technocratic class of “scientific engineers” who would impose closed system determinism onto humanity in a bid to maximize the “perception” of freedom, with none of the actuality of it.
Forecasters in this new surreal wonderland were told that they could extrapolate present trends into the future using probability functions, but they could not think about boundary conditions shaping the invisible (albeit real) constraints shaping those very economies they sought to influence.
In climate science, computer models were imposed onto a field which once took the sun, fluctuating magnetic fields, cosmic radiation, and broader galactic environment into consideration. Instead of thinking about top-down factors like solar wind, magnetic fields, and cosmic radiation determining earth’s climate, the new generation of climate scientists trained by Club of Rome computer models during the 1970s and beyond increasingly found themselves mentally handicapped by the acceptance of dualistic absurdities.
Chief among these absurdities was the assumption that although predicting short term weather patterns were intrinsically unknowable (beyond statistical probability functions), it was absolutely certain that the globe would heat up in a new furnace within a century.
In the geological sciences, things did not fare much better.
While real scientists were making pioneering discoveries into earthquake science by observing the magnetic and planetary/solar alignments of the solar system through the 1930s-1960s, the false dualism again asserted itself as the new era of computer modeling emerged onto the scene.
Compare the article from the July 18, 1959 edition of Nature magazine, showcasing the new insights into earthquake forecasting, with the modern gospel of the United States Geographical Survey (which sets the standards for all “acceptable educational practices” across the trans-Atlantic):
Concepts such as those published in the 1959 Nature magazine became increasingly verboten over the years to the point that the current US Geological Survey official website addresses the question “can earthquakes be predicted with the following answer:
“No. Neither the USGS nor any other scientists have ever predicted a major earthquake. We do not know how, and we do not expect to know how any time in the foreseeable future. USGS scientists can only calculate the probability that a significant earthquake will occur in a specific area within a certain number of years. An earthquake prediction must define 3 elements: 1) the date and time, 2) the location, and 3) the magnitude.”
Unless one is able to satisfy the impossible standards set by the priests at the USGS (demanding mathematically PERFECT results in predicting the exact date and time, exact location, and exact magnitude of an earthquake)… if there is even a slight deviation from mathematical perfection between forecast and empirical result, then it is asserted that no forecast is made. The irony of course, is that if scientists like Kepler, Weber, Gauss, or Planck actually used the standards promoted by the scientists at the USGS, then none of their discoveries could ever have been made.
Those scientists wishing to make actual discoveries in this new field of earthquake forecasting, which would do much to expand humanity’s knowledge of the cosmos and also save countless lives, would be much better rewarded eating some humble pie, spitting out some “elastic rebound” kool aid and thinking like Kepler, Gauss, Planck and Frank Hoogerbeets.
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[1] Kepler always maintained that magnetism was the form that this species of attraction and motion took, saying: “Therefore, as the sun forever turns itself, the motive force or the outflowing of the species from the sun’s magnetic fibres, diffused through all the distances of the planets, also rotates in an orb and does so in the same time as the sun, just as when a magnet is moved about, the magnetic power is also moved, and the iron along with it, following the magnetic force.”
The author developed some of these concepts in a recent episode of the Great Game viewable here:
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***
Everyone with a brain already knew the Empire did it. Now Seymour Hersh’s bombshell report not only details how Nord Stream 1 and 2 were attacked, but also names names: from the toxic Straussian neoliberal-con trio Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland all the way to the Teleprompter Reader-in-Chief.
Arguably the most incandescent nugget in Hersh’s narrative is to point ultimate responsibility directly at the White House. The CIA, for its part, gets away with it. The whole report may be read as the framing of a scapegoat. A very fragile, shoddy scapegoat – what with those classified documents in the garage, the endless stares into the void, the cornucopia of incomprehensible mumbling, and of course the whole, ghastly, years-long family corruption carousel in and around Ukraine, still to be completely unveiled.
Hersh’s report happened to pop up immediately after the deadly earthquakes in Turkey/Syria. This is an investigative journalism earthquake in itself, straddling over fault lines and revealing countless open air fissures, nuggets of truth gasping for air amidst the rubble.
But is that all there is? Does the narrative hold from start to finish? Yes and no. First of all, why now? This is a leak – essentially from one Deep State insider, Hersh’s key source. This 21st century “Deep Throat” remix may be appalled at the toxicity of the system, but at the same time he knows that whatever he says, there will be no consequences.
Cowardly Berlin – ignoring the nuts and bolts of the scheme all along – will not even squeak. After all the Green gang has been ecstatic, because the terror attack has thoroughly advanced their medieval de-industrialization agenda. In parallel, as an extra bonus, all the other European vassals receive further confirmation this is the fate that awaits them if they don’t follow His Master’s Voice.
Hersh’s narrative frames the Norwegians as the essential accessory to terror. Hardly surprising: NATO’s Jens “Peace is War” Stoltenberg has been a CIA asset for perhaps half a century. And Oslo of course had its own motives to be part of the deal; to collect loads of extra cash selling whatever spare energy it had for desperate European customers.
A little narrative problem is that Norway, unlike the U.S. Navy, still does not have any operational P-8 Poseidon. What was clear at the time is that an American P-8 was commuting back and forth – with mid-air refueling – from the U.S. to Bornholm island.
A positive screamer is that Hersh – rather, his key source – had the MI6 completely vanish from the narrative. SVR, Russian intel, had focused like a laser on MI6 at the time, as well as the Poles. What still cements the narrative is that the combo behind “Biden” provided the planning, the intel and coordinated the logistics, while the final act – in this case a sonar buoy detonating the C4 explosives – may have been perpetrated by the Norwegian vassals.
The problem is the buoy may have been dropped by an American P-8. And there’s no explanation of why one of the sections of Nord Stream 2 escaped intact.
Hersh’s modus operandi is legendary. From the perspective of a foreign correspondent on the ground since the mid-1990s, from the U.S. and NATOstan to all corners of Eurasia, it’s easy for someone like me to understand how he uses anonymous sources and how he accesses – and protects – his extensive list of contacts: trust works both ways. His track record is absolutely unrivalled.
But of course the possibility remains: what if he is being played? Is this no more than a limited hangout? After all, the narrative oscillates wildly between minute detail and quite a few dead ends, constantly featuring a huge paper trail and too many people in the loop – which implies exaggerated risk. The CIA hesitating too much to go for the kill is a certified red alert throughout the narrative – especially when we know that the ideal underwater actors for such an op would have come from the CIA Special Activities Division, and not the U.S. Navy.
What will Russia do?
Arguably the whole planet is thinking what will be the Russian response.
Surveying the chessboard, what the Kremlin and the Security Council see is Merkel confessing Minsk 2 was merely a ruse; the imperial attack on the Nord Streams (they got the picture, but might not have all the insider details provided by Hersh’s source); former Israeli PM Bennett on the record detailing how the Anglo-Americans killed the Ukraine peace process which was on track in Istanbul last year.
So it’s no wonder that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has made it clear that when it comes to nuclear negotiations with the Americans, any proposed gestures of goodwill are “unjustified, untimely and uncalled for.”
The Ministry, on purpose, and somewhat ominously, was very vague on a key issue: “strategic nuclear forces objects” that have been attacked by Kiev – helped by the Americans. These attacks may have involved “military-technical and information-intelligence” aspects.
When it comes to the Global South, what the Hersh report imprints is Rogue Superpower, in giant blood red letters, as state sponsor of terrorism: the ritual burial – at the bottom of the Baltic Sea – of international law, and even the Empire’s tawdry ersatz, the “rules-based international order”.
It will take some time to fully identify which Deep State faction may have used Hersh to promote its agenda. Of course he’s aware of it – but that would never have been enough to keep him away from researching a bombshell (three months of hard work). The U.S. mainstream media will do everything to suppress, censor, demean and ignore his report; but what matters is that across the Global South it is already spreading like wildfire.
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Lavrov has gone totally unplugged, much like Medvedev, denouncing how the U.S. has “unleashed a total hybrid war” against Russia, with both nuclear powers now on a path of direct confrontation. And as Washington has declared the “strategic defeat” of Russia as its goal and turned bilateral relations into a ball of fire, there can be no “business as usual” anymore.
The Russian “response” – even before Hersh’s report – has been on another level entirely; advanced de-dollarization across the spectrum, from the EAEU to BRICS and beyond; and total reorientation of trade towards Eurasia and other parts of the Global South. Russia is establishing firm conditions for further stability, already foreseeing the inevitable: the time to frontally deal with NATO.
As kinetic responses go, facts on the battleground show Russia further crushing the American/NATO proxy army in full Strategic Ambiguity mode. The terror attack on the Nord Streams of course will always be lurking in the background. There will be blowback. But that will be at a time, manner and place of Russia’s choosing.
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Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
The sheer scale of the disastrous series of earthquakes in southeast Turkey and northwest Syria is hard to absorb, especially in a region already blighted by a decade of war, displacement, drought and disease.
As if that were not sufficient punishment, the cruel weather has added another layer of suffering with its comfortless blanket of snow, making rescue efforts even tougher, whilst leaving thousands of shell-shocked souls to freeze in the open, homeless.
For many outside the region, it may seem a faraway tragedy that has no direct bearing on their own lives.
But as someone who has visited the area repeatedly over several decades, I feel that, beyond the humanitarian crisis unfolding day by day, there is a bigger picture that needs to be explained, to help grasp how connected we all are by oft-forgotten historical and cultural ties.
The discovery in the 1990s of the world’s oldest temples, a series of mysterious circular structures on the summit of Gobekli Tepe (“Pot-bellied Hill” in Turkish), turned all previous perceptions of man’s early history on their head.
Overlooking the once lush grasslands of the Fertile Crescent, northeast of Urfa, they were built by nomadic hunter-gatherers some 12,000 years ago, pre-dating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, and the world’s earliest city at Catalhoyuk, also in eastern Turkey, by a full 3,000 years.
Similar groupings of circular temples have been identified in northern Syria, collectively proving that man’s first construction efforts were devoted, not to building settlements, but to the worship of deities connected with the sun, the moon and the circular seasonal cycles on which he depended.
The temples were first unearthed in 1994 by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, who tragically died before seeing Unesco inscribe them on its World Heritage List in 2018.
A world heritage site
As recently as 2021, Unesco added the late Hittite site of Aslantepe (Lion Hill) near Malatya and the Euphrates, in recognition of its significance in illustrating how a state society first emerged in the Near East, along with a sophisticated bureaucratic system that predated writing.
Among the finds were the world’s earliest known swords, evidence of the first forms of organised combat used by the new elite to maintain their political power.
Towering above the Tigris, Unesco’s other World Heritage Site (2015) that lies within the earthquake zone is the brooding city of Diyarbakir, whose mood seems reflected in its massive black basalt walls. It, too, is part of the ancient Fertile Crescent, an important regional centre commanding the surrounding fertile plains throughout Hellenistic, Roman, Sassanid Persian, Byzantine, Islamic and Ottoman times. Its elegant “Ten-Eyed” bridge, built by the Seljuks in 1065, still spans the river below.
Further testimony to the onetime prosperity of the region is the site of Zeugma on the Euphrates, famous for its collection of superb mosaics, among the finest in the world. Once a thriving frontier town on the eastern edges of the Roman Empire, where 5,000 troops were garrisoned to defend against the Persians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, it was also known as Belkis, a reference to the Queen of Sheba and her legendary wealth.
Rescued, along with many other ancient sites, from the flooding caused by the modern Birecik Dam on the Euphrates, the spectacular mosaics graced the floors of rich villas, but today are housed a new purpose-built museum in nearby Gaziantep, epicentre of the first 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck at dawn on 6 February.
Those who know Aleppo will find in Gaziantep many echoes of that more famous Syrian city. Not for nothing did so many Syrian refugees fleeing war in their own country take refuge in Gaziantep as their city of choice.
In the days before the artificial borders imposed by Britain and France after World War One, the two cities were closely linked. Easily the most sophisticated city in southeast Turkey, Gaziantep, long hailed as the pistachio capital of the world, boasts around its prominent Seljuk citadel an old quarter, much of which was built by the Ottoman governor of Aleppo.
Like Aleppo, it has a mixed Muslim-Christian population, with its Christian population in Ottoman times likewise much larger than today. Their churches and mansions are still scattered about the old Christian quarter, often now converted to musical venues or boutique hotels.
The citadel itself has suffered damage in the earthquake, so the historic quarter of which it forms the heart must also have been affected. Like Aleppo’s historic centre, it was the subject of extensive restoration projects, and experienced boom-level growth in recent times, its citizens deeply proud of their shared heritage and identity.
Border ironies
Earthquakes do not recognise political boundaries, and just as Gaziantep was part of the Ottoman province of Syria till 1922, so Aleppo too, less than 200km to the south, has suffered damage, both to its iconic citadel mound and to its surrounding historic areas. Friends have told me of their homes, newly restored from the war, damaged once again, by force majeure, as if accursed.
Aleppo’s Great Umayyad Mosque, located at the foot of the citadel, has been undergoing restoration funded by Ramzan Kadyrov, president of Chechnya. The mosque’s unique 1,000-year-old Seljuk minaret miraculously survived many earlier earthquakes, only to collapse in cross-fire in 2013. Its rebuilding is a dauntingly complex jigsaw that has yet to begin.
In more border ironies, Hatay province in southeast Turkey belonged to Syria till 1939. Known before then as the Sanjak of Alexandretta, it was incorporated into Syria under the French mandate in 1918 at the Ottoman Empire’s demise, but the French then gave it to Turkey in anticipation of a new war against Germany, a bribe to buy Turkish neutrality.
Syrians have never accepted the transfer and most Syrian maps still show it as part of Syria.
Now eclipsed by the mosaics at Zeugma, Hatay boasts its own, much older mosaic museum in its capital city of Antakya, ancient Antioch, also hit by the earthquake. Built by the French, it was considered in its day second in the world only to the Bardo Museum in Tunis, displaying, in scenes like Narcissus and Echo and the Drunken Dionysus, the licentious lifestyle of banqueting and dancing against which the early Christians here preached.
St Peter’s Rock Church cut into the cliffs behind the city was founded in 47 CE by Peter, Paul and Barnabas as the first church after Jerusalem. Matthew is said to have written his Gospel in Antioch. Even before the arrival of Christianity, the city was very mixed, with Greek, Hebrew, Persian and Latin all spoken in its streets.
“If your aim in travelling is to get acquainted with different cultures and lifestyles, it is enough to visit Antioch,” wrote Roman historian Libanius. ‘There is no other place in the world that has so many cultures in one place.”
Cycles of history
Today the population remains very mixed, with large communities – both Muslim and Christian – blended together. Among the early churches in Antioch was the octagonal Domus Aurea (Golden House), a magnificent structure thought to have been Constantine the Great’s palace chapel, built in 327 CE.
Destroyed by fires and earthquakes in 588, its exact location is lost to us today, but it is known through the description of contemporaries to have served as the prototype for the octagonal Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, from where the Emperor Charlemagne took his inspiration for his own palace chapel at Aachen, Germany.
Parts of the Crusader castle of Marqab, built from black basalt to dominate the Mediterranean coastal plain, are also damaged from the earthquake, with collapsed towers. Second in power only to the mighty Krak des Chevaliers, its cellars were stocked with enough provisions to last a thousand men for a five-year siege.
Originally an Arab stronghold fortified in 1062, it was captured by the Byzantines in 1104, then sold to the Knights Hospitaller. It fell following a brief siege to the Mamluk army of Sultan Qalawun in 1285, who whitewashed and thus preserved the frescoes in the chapel.
One depicts a striking vision of Hell in which a huge bishop is sitting naked in a fire, with two devils tending the flames, along with two monster-headed figures flying overhead.
Such cycles of history, filled with so many seismic twists and turns like earthquakes, wars and invasions, have all played their part in the ever-shifting balances of power in this region of great strategic significance.
When looking at the horrors that are unfolding in southeast Turkey and northwest Syria today, it is impossible to predict how the current disaster will shape the future of this most volatile of regions.
The complex political landscape at play in both countries is likely, without huge international support, to hamper progress towards the imperative delivery of aid, while fledgling efforts that were underway for restoration of cultural heritage sites, especially in the blighted and fractured territory of Syria, will inevitably be pushed even further down the agenda.
One thing is certain however – the tectonic plates of so many past civilisations that have struggled for survival here, learning from each other’s failures and successes, have shaped us all.
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Diana Darke is a Middle East cultural expert with special focus on Syria. A graduate in Arabic from Oxford University, she has spent over 30 years specialising in the Middle East and Turkey, working for both government and commercial sectors. She is the author of several books on Turkey, including Eastern Turkey (2014) and The Ottomans (2022) as well as on Middle East society, including My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis (2016), The Merchant of Syria (2018), a socio-economic history and “Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe” (2020).
Featured image: The black basalt walls of Marqab Crusader Castle, overlooking the Mediterranean. Parts of the castle have been affected by this week ‘s quake (Supplied)
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***
This past Friday I joined a few hundred people who gathered on the slopes of the New Zealand Parliament to commemorate the massive protest that took place a year before.
I was on the grounds of Parliament last year every day but one and saw firsthand a unique and wonderful coming together of New Zealanders from all walks of life in a kind of glorious unity against the mandates that had been illegally and immorally imposed upon us all. What emerged, out of the general good will and spontaneity, was a fascinating community of participants who helped one another generously, stood firm against the puerile tactics of the government to disrupt the peaceful occupation, who smiled a great deal, embraced, who articulated grievances and were determined not to let our unalienable rights be traduced. Throughout that assembly we asked members of Parliament, including our then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, for a meeting, a hearing, an exchange, a debate – we asked, simply, for those people who derived their political power from the people to lend their people an ear.
They did not. Not one of them dared to traverse the steps of the building to greet us, to welcome our questions and our voices. Not once did they do what any democratically imbued government has a duty to do during our time on the people’s soil.
The day before the government unleashed its stormtroopers to clear out New Zealand citizens with violence, I was part of a group scheduled to meet with representatives of the Police force and negotiate a peaceful end to the impasse that had developed. The Police failed to show up. Later that same afternoon I sat in (virtually, via Zoom) on a meeting called by Paul Hunt, New Zealand’s Human Rights Commissioner. Before this meeting I warned everyone I knew – various group leaders, press, friends, filmmakers on site – that a police action would be imminent because I had seen amassed at Wellington’s central station a veritable battalion of unmarked vans.
I understand that Mr. Hunt had been apprised of the planned invasion and that he had been begged at the very least to stand witness as a symbol of the high importance of human rights, and as a safeguard against their violation. Instead, he did nothing. The meeting he had called, and which I attended as an observer, turned out to have been nothing but an exercise in bureaucratic hypocrisy. If he set an example to anyone, it was an example of political and moral cowardice.
The following morning, 2 March 2022, the anticipated invasion commenced, and brutally so. I assisted an elderly man whose hip was fractured by the police assault. The first ambulance that had been called refused to take him to hospital, for reasons we could hardly fathom. A second arrived, given the developing medical emergency, and thankfully did what it was supposed to do, and this man underwent surgery and recovered.
These events were much in my mind when I said a few words the other day to those who returned to the scene. I kept my comments brief. I had two words for those Parliamentarians who had refused to engage us in a civil exchange to hear us out: “Why not?” And I had two words for those who joined the commemoration: “Never forget.”
Life in Wellington, more especially given this year’s exceptionally warm summer, has the appearance of normality. People crowd the harbour beaches when the sun is out, the cruise ships have returned to give retailers who survived the lockdowns some business, and I can now get a haircut despite not having received a Pfizer inoculation.
The freedom-loving friends I gained during the past three years, and particularly during the demonstrations at Parliament, have been a boon to my life: they far outweigh the friendships lost, and these friendships lost I fear will be forever. Why? Because these former friends did nothing to support those of us who ‘naively’ extolled bodily autonomy as an ingrained right; to those of us who protested against the cruelty of an apartheid nation; to those of us who quite sensibly warned against an untested medical intervention; to those of us who criticized the quarantining of the healthy, the destruction of livelihoods, the shutting down of commerce, the prevention of public worship, the forbidding of public protest, the wholly inhumane isolation of our suffering relatives from family contact, the ubiquitous and absurd use of inefficacious and psychologically damaging masks; to those of us who stood true against tyranny and its purposeful inculcation of never-ending fear.
Make no mistake. The corona respiratory virus, whatever its origins, did not kill as we were led to believe, not even by wildly erroneous PCR standards. People do not transmit respiratory viruses when they are asymptomatic. Effective treatments did and do exist for such viruses, along with protective healthy lifestyle habits that enhance our ability to manage them.
As I left Parliament grounds a few days ago, after having heard others speak eloquently about our show of pacific force, I thought of a passage from the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. In chapter five, King Belshazzar is hosting a feast, a feast attended by his underlings, concubines and princes, and in the midst of his revels he perceives a hand that has written a message in a language unknown on the palace chamber walls. He is taken aback. None of his wise men can elucidate the mystery, so the king sends for Daniel, who had served his father well and who was known for his perspicacity and fearless interpretation of dreams and signs. Daniel translates the message for Belshazzar: “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.” By morning, King Belshazzar was no more.
I wonder if Jacinda Ardern, or Paul Hunt, or Ashley Bloomfield and their ilk here in New Zealand have thought about how they will be judged? I wonder about those dancing doctors and nurses who had time to take video-selfies for YouTube. I wonder about the Faucis and Tedros’s of the world, and their little soldiers who scolded us for not being afraid enough. I wonder, in fact, if the one-world government I have inveighed against so often, is already here.
After all, as many have observed, the entire globe was brought to a standstill in short order on the back of a lie.
There is, to my mind, a consortium of groups with power and money and military might who have managed to organize a very effective campaign to depopulate (meaning: murder) and safeguard (meaning: enslave) humanity. Digital IDs and total surveillance, control over our ‘carbon expenditure’ and who knows what else, are being openly touted by the likes of the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. The World Health Organization is warning again of another ‘pandemic’ and arrogating unto itself dominion over national sovereignty, given the eager genuflection of countries like New Zealand to its will.
But this consortium will have to meet the likes of an ever more determined resistance among those who, from the beginning, smelled a bat, fought against manufactured fear, and refused to renounce the birthright of autonomy to a domineering State.
I now have no bones about predicting an ever growing cascade of excess morbidity and mortality as a result of the covid injections over the next number of years: more sudden deaths, more earlier than usual deaths, more sickness and ill-health generally.
These unstoppable realities will shake even the most unquestioning followers of the established order – those who feed on the mainstream news outlets as their meat and potatoes of reality, and who can’t imagine that their countries’ political authorities or big corporations could ever tell a lie, let alone attempt a genocide-in-the-making whose breadth has already begun to rival the familiar genocides of the previous century. I sincerely hope that they, when the inevitable showdown comes to pass, will err on the side of humility and compassion, instead of the vehemence and savagery they espoused not long ago.
I hope that they too see the writing on the wall – and understand it.
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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/
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***
The US Navy and Marines Corps are conducting drills in the South China Sea amid heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing over the Chinese balloon incident.
The US Navy’s Seventh Fleet said in a statement that the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its strike group conducted the drills on February 11 with the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit. The Seventh Fleet did not say when the drills started or when they would end.
The US has stepped up its military activity in the South China Sea in recent years and has formally rejected most of Beijing’s claims to the waters. China, the Philippines, and several other Southeast Asian nations all have overlapping claims to the South China Sea.
The US has involved itself in the dispute, and starting under the Obama administration, the US began sailing warships near Chinese-controlled islands in the South China Sea. The Biden administration is looking to expand the US presence in the region and recently signed a deal with the Philippines that will give the US access to four more military sites in the country.
The current exercises come after China declined a call from Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin following the US downing of the Chinese balloon. Washington claimed the balloon was a spy device, while Beijing insisted it was a weather balloon only used for civilian purposes.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a planned trip to China when the balloon was first announced by the Pentagon. Since the incident, the US military has shot down two unidentified objects, but the White House says they didn’t look like Chinese balloons.
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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
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***
European citizens express their dissatisfaction with the irresponsible policy of supporting Kiev. In a recent online petition, a quarter of a million people called for an end to the aid to Ukraine. Indeed, the desire for peace among Europeans has been ignored by EU officials in recent months, but, at some point, this situation will need to change, otherwise an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy will arise.
The petition was created on the initiative of German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and journalist Alice Schwarzer. They argue that the best way to end the current conflict is through bilateral negotiations, the possibility of which is thwarted by the western policy of sending weapons, since with military aid the hostilities are prolonged. Therefore, they ask that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stop his military partnership with Kiev, which would increase the chances of a resumption of peace talks and the achievement of a peaceful resolution.
In recent interviews, Wagenknecht and Schwarzer said that negotiating is not the same as surrendering, so there would be no reason for Kiev to refuse to talk to the Russians and try to find mutually beneficial terms. They emphasized that peace discussions are a way to avoid that Ukraine ends up becoming a “depopulated, devastated country”. With this statement they evidently admit the Russian victory and the serious situation of the Kiev’s forces, which suffers terrible losses on the battlefield.
The online petition reached an extraordinary level of popularity, achieving over 250,000 signatures in only forty-eight hours. The case revealed the real desire for peace of a large portion of the German, European people, who, as expected, are increasingly impatient with the economic and social consequences of the conflict.
“We call on the Chancellor to stop the escalation in arms deliveries. Now! He should lead a strong alliance for a ceasefire and peace negotiations at both German and European level (…) Now! Because every lost day costs up to 1,000 more human lives – and brings us closer to a 3rd World War”, the document says.
The petition was appropriately named “the Manifesto for Peace” and has gained so much force that it has already crossed the limits of the virtual world. On her social media, Sahra Wagenknecht called subscribers to a demonstration in Berlin, scheduled for February 25. In the words of Wagenknecht, the protests will be “against armament deliveries and for peace and diplomacy”. This may be a new motivation in the wave of anti-NATO demonstrations that have taken place in several European countries – mainly in Germany itself – since last year.
There are many reasons why the German people are becoming increasingly angry with the extended conflict. During the winter, with the energy crisis and the rise in gas prices, German citizens had their living conditions drastically affected, which motivated many people to take an anti-sanctions stance. Some pro-Western experts believed that after January the people’s indignation would diminish, as the worst moments of winter would be over. However, the Scholz government’s insistence on an anti-Russian aggressive policy did not please German citizens.
It is necessary to remember that Berlin recently approved the supply of Leopard 2 tanks to the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev. The government has also committed to training Ukrainian forces in accordance with the necessary instructions to operate this type of tank. In addition, the German state has also used its “diplomacy” to foment anti-Russian hostility around the world, asking other countries to also supply arms to the Zelensky regime. This was done with Brazil, for example, which is a country that produces ammunition for Leopard tanks – the Brazilian government, however, refused getting involved in the conflict.
In fact, Germans see these measures and rage against their own government because they know that this will prevent the end of the conflict, thus making Europe’s social crisis permanent. It seems increasingly clear that for people it does not matter which side is the winner – there is only concern that peace is achieved as quickly as possible. This contradicts the Western narrative that “the entire Europe supports Ukraine”. Only political leaders and economic elites linked to the military industry sector seem to have an interest in continuing the war against Russia until a Ukrainian victory, while ordinary citizens call for peace.
However, despite correct in their wish, Wagenknecht and Schwarzer also seem quite naive. Negotiations, unfortunately, have become a scenario virtually removed from the current reality of the conflict. After so many war crimes, terrorist attacks and unnecessary provocations committed by Ukraine with the support of the West, the situation has escalated to a level where resolution only seems possible through Kiev’s unconditional surrender.
However, both for there to be hope for negotiations resumption and for the possible surrender of Ukraine to occur quickly, the path must be the same: stopping Western aid. Indeed, at some point European governments will have to admit this and attend to the interests of their people – otherwise, it will be impossible to reverse unpopularity and the crisis of legitimacy, generating a dangerous situation of social instability.
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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
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***
There was an air of magical realism in the daylong visit to Kiev last Friday by the EU’s policy commissioners comprising the executive branch of the group — the so-called College — led by the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
At the end of the day in Kiev on Friday, during a joint press conference in Kiev with President Volodymyr Zelensky, all that the EU’s super bureaucrats would promise was that “Ukraine’s future is in the EU.”
However, as the BBC reported, “Typically, it takes years for countries to join — and the EU has declined to set a timescale, describing the sign-up process as “goal-based.” It all depends now on what sort of Ukraine emerges out of the war.
Surely, there is a pall of gloom in the western media lately about the war storms gathering on the horizon. A Ukrainian military officer told the BBC that the Russian forces have occupied a third of the highly strategic Bakhmut city, the hub of the so-called Zelensky Line in Donbass. Since then, there have been reports of more Russian successes. The Ukrainian defence line is cracking through which an elephant can pass to the steppes en route to the Dnieper River.
An AP report quoting Ukrainian officials in Kiev says, “Russian forces are keeping Ukrainian troops tied down with attacks in the eastern Donbass region as Moscow assembles additional combat power there for an expected offensive in the coming weeks.” Reuters too reports thatRussian forces have been advancing “in relentless battles in the east. A regional governor said Moscow was pouring in reinforcements for a new offensive that could begin next week.”
Writing for Bloomberg, Hal Brands at the American Enterprises Institute, drastically trims the Biden Administration’s priorities to “reluctance to further inflame Putin’s ire.” Hal sums up: “Washington’s goal is a Ukraine that is militarily defensible, politically independent and economically viable; this doesn’t necessarily include retaking difficult areas such as the eastern Donbass or Crimea.”
There is no more talk about destroying the Russian “war machinery” or an insurrection against the Kremlin and a regime change.
Two recent think tank reports that appeared in the US last month — Avoiding a Long War by the Rand Corporation (affiliated to the Pentagon) and Empty Bins by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies — epitomise a rude awakening.
The Rand Corporation report starkly warns that given the NATO countries’ indirect involvement in the war — “breathtaking in scope” — keeping a Russia-NATO war below the nuclear threshold is going to be “extremely difficult.”
It introduces another chilling thought that a protracted war in Ukraine, which “many” in the Beltway subscribe to as a means to degrade the Russian military and weaken the Russian economy, “would also have consequences for US foreign policy,” as the US’ ability to focus on other global priorities — particularly, competition with China — will remain constrained.
The Rand report argues that “Washington does have a long-term interest in ensuring that Moscow does not become completely subordinated to Beijing.” The report concludes that the paramount US interest lies in avoiding a long war, since “the consequences of a long war — raging from persistent elevated escalation risks to economic damage — far outweigh the possible benefits.”
The report presents a frank assessment that “it is fanciful to imagine that it [ Kiev] could destroy Russia’s ability to wage war.” Its most astounding finding, perhaps, is two-fold: firstly, the US does not even share Ukraine’s drive for retrieving “lost” territories”; and, secondly, that it is in the American interest that Russia remains independent of China with a measure of strategic autonomy vis-a-vis the US-China rivalry.
On the other hand, the CSIS report, authored by the well-known strategic thinker Seth Jones (formerly at the Rand) is a wake-up call that the US defence industrial base is grossly inadequate for the “competitive security environment that now exists.” The report has a chapter titled Ukraine and the Great Awakening, which underscores that the US arms supples to Ukraine have “strained the [US] defence industrial base to produce sufficient quantities of some munitions and weapon systems.” Jones represents the duality of the US military-industrial complex, which is disinterested in the objective of the war in Ukraine as such.
His grouse is that the US defence industrial base — including the munitions industrial base — is not currently equipped to support a protracted conventional war, although, as the UK newspaper Sunday Times wrote last week, “All wars spawn profiteers, and the Ukraine conflict is no exception… The enormous supply of western arms to Ukraine has bolstered all weapons manufacturers, mainly in restocking Nato’s own arsenals and fulfilling the big orders from countries now spending more on defence….In the US, Lockheed, Raytheon and Northrop are among the big arms and jet fighter manufacturers with bulging order books.”
The Rand and CSIS reports appeared at a time when the war has reached a tipping point. Thus, within the last month, the US has announced three of the largest aid packages to Ukraine in a sign of ongoing support as the war nears its one-year mark. And on Friday, the Biden Administration announced yet another new Ukraine security package worth approximately $2.2 billion that includes longer-range missiles with a range of 90 miles for the first time.
Herein lies the paradox. On February 1, four senior Defense Department officials reportedly told the US House Armed Services Committee lawmakers in a classified briefing that the Pentagon doesn’t believe Ukraine has the ability to force Russian troops out of the Crimean peninsula. After the briefing, the House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) asserted in an interview that the war “needs to end this summer.”
Senator Rogers said:
“There’s a school of thought … that Crimea’s got to be a part of it. Russia is never going to quit and give up Crimea…What is doable? And I don’t think that that’s agreed upon yet. So I think that there’s going to have to be some pressure from our government and NATO leaders with Zelensky about what does victory look like. And I think that’s going to help us more than anything to be able to drive Putin and Zelensky to the table to end this thing this summer.”
This is the first time that a top US political personality has called for a timeline for the war. It came as no wonder, as Senator Bob Menendez the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who presided over the hearings on Ukraine on January 26 — also addressed the core issue in a question for the record to the US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland who was testifying.
The influential senator bemoaned that Washington has “no definition of victory,” and sought an answer from Nuland, who was rendered speechless. But it must have rankled her, for, at the fag-end of the hearing, she volunteered a reply: “If we define winning as Ukraine surviving and thriving as a cleaner democratic state, it can, it must, it will.” Period.
Nuland fudged. But that is also what President Biden did in his State of the Union address on Wednesday by sticking to his tiresomemantra — that the US will support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” That said, significantly, Zelensky has taken off for a tour of major European capitals to discuss what could possibly constitute peace.
“With the visit of the College to Kyiv, the EU is sending today a very clear message to Ukraine and beyond about our collective strength and resolve in the face of Russia’s brutal aggression. We will continue supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes. And we will continue to impose a heavy price on Russia until it ceases its aggression. Ukraine can count on Europe to help rebuild a more resilient country, that progresses on its path to join the EU.”
There is something that either Von der Leyen doesn’t know about, or doesn’t want to talk about. Meanwhile, Biden seems closer to her than to Rand and the CSIS or Senator Menendez andNuland — leave alone Republican Senator Rogers. That must be an optical illusion.
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Featured image: A Ukrainian soldier adds wood to a fire to stave off the bitter cold, Bakhmut, Donbass (File photo)
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
And Into The Fire
