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The Japanese government, led by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, has been militarizing the country since October last year in violation of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. Article 9 states that “[Japan aspires] sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.”
To achieve this goal, Japan never built up a serious military fitting of the country’s global importance, nor other means of war as the right to wage war is not recognized by the Constitution. Kishida continues the line of previous prime ministers and members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party though, who have violated the peace clause in the constitution in many ways.
Japan has long had a Self-Defense Force of 300,000 soldiers – that is more than the 240,000 active and reserve personnel of the French military (not including paramilitary forces) and the 231,000 active and reserve personnel of the British military. This is in addition to weapons that are comparable to many Western European armies. The Japanese Navy goes far beyond national waters, especially when we recall that a Japanese warship sailed off the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea recently, an issue that Japan is not a disputant of.
In a statement, Kishida acknowledged the possibility of missile strikes against military targets in neighbouring countries, but he did not specify whether he meant North Korea, China or Russia. By alluding to threats, without specifying what the exact threat is, the Kishida government is planning an unprecedented increase in defense spending in the 2022/2023 fiscal year. The Japanese defense budget, usually not exceeding 1% of the country’s GDP, will now double to rise to 2% of GDP. Scarily, this budget increase will be used to modify cruise missiles so that the range can reach neighbouring countries.
In the new year, Tokyo hosts the 4th QUAD Summit (USA, Australia, India and Japan). The QUAD organization can be seen as a precursor to an Indo-Pacific NATO aimed against China in particular, but potentially also against Russian interests in the region. It is for this reason that the Kishida government has particularly strengthened military ties with the US, Australia and India.
In late 2021, Washington and Tokyo agreed to cooperate in the development of hypersonic weapons. Only last week, Kishida and his Australian counterpart Scott Morrison signed a document to significantly strengthen and facilitate military cooperation between the two countries. The Reciprocal Access Agreement provides for the interoperability of the Australian and Japanese armed forces and the ability to share each other’s military infrastructure. Japan also has such an agreement with the US, but Tokyo wants to sign similar agreements with other NATO/NATO-aligned countries, particularly Britain.
Tokyo wants world leaders to believe that Japan’s current militarization is a natural and legitimate process. Washington and NATO countries encourage Japan’s militarization in the hope of weaponizing the country against its traditional rival, China.
However, whether intentionally or not, and most likely the latter, by Japan militarizing and opening up to NATO-aligned forces, it is bringing the bloc to Russia’s eastern shores. Japan still disputes Russian sovereignty over the four southernmost Kuril Islands and it is recalled that although Japan and the Soviet Union ended their formal state of war with the Soviet–Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956, they did not sign a peace treaty. As the Russian Federation is the successor state of the Soviet Union, this means that there is still no peace treaty between Moscow and Tokyo.
Although it is unlikely that Japan and Russia will go to war over the islands in the current situation, by Tokyo changing the regional status quo by opening up to NATO-aligned navies, the country could be coerced into becoming openly hostile to Russia. If Kishida continues down this path, he risks turning Japan into a NATO staging ground used to challenge and antagonize Russia for no gains or advantages, but rather only negatives, much in the same way as has happened to Ukraine, Lithuania and Georgia.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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Once again, rumors about the existence of a Russian plan to invade Ukraine are prompting American lawmakers to implement radical measures against Moscow. This time, a new bill threatens to impose even more US sanctions on Russia in the name of defending Ukrainian sovereignty. The project comes at a very delicate moment in relations between the US, Russia and Ukraine, being able to significantly worsen the search for a peaceful solution to the crisis in Eastern Europe.
Recently, Democrat lawmakers introduced a new bill in the US Senate aimed at imposing “crippling sanctions” on Russia – predominantly the Russian financial sector – in the event of a violation or hostile activity against Ukrainian national sovereignty. The bill was titled “Defending Ukraine Sovereignty Act of 2022”, and was introduced by Bob Menendez, the New Jersey’s Democrat who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The project basically consists of proposing measures that completely disable Russian financial activity, affecting the banking sector, large companies and, on a personal level, military, politicians, and prominent bureaucrats. Measures would also be imposed on Russian industry, with the aim of undermining exports and causing the country’s economic collapse. International bank transactions would also be affected, damaging the use of the SWIFT system in Russia. In other words, the new bill has the public objective of completely crippling economic and financial activities in Russia, if Moscow violates Ukrainian sovereignty.
In addition to trying to harm Russia in every way possible, the bill also establishes a provisional measure for the provision of 500 million dollars in “supplemental emergency security assistance” in the event of a Russian invasion. Some measures are also proposed for Washington to act more actively in the fight against “Russian disinformation”, as well as to strengthen ties with US regional partners in Ukraine that fight the alleged “Russian aggression”.
In fact, this bill can be described as a bold and bellicose proposal for the US to definitely take Ukraine’s side in the regional rivalries between Kiev and Moscow. The Democrats seem to want their country to bet on a policy of total and unrestricted opposition to Russia. It is a step for Washington to abandon its current policy on the Ukrainian issue, which consists of “using” Kiev as a destabilizing agent in Eastern Europe and adopt a more radical policy in defense of Ukraine and in complete opposition to Russia, not open for dialogue. Undoubtedly, this is the result of the growth of an extremely dangerous and anti-diplomatic Russophobic mentality, which could begin to have negative effects on American foreign policy soon.
The project came just a day after talks between Russian and American representatives in Switzerland. Considering that the attempt to resolve the Ukrainian case through diplomatic dialogue has not been productive, the Democrats seem to be taking advantage of the moment in order to advance an agenda of tightening anti-Russian measures. Some recent words by Menendez support this argument:
“As the Biden administration seeks a diplomatic path forward this week in Europe to avoid another bloody escalation in Ukraine, I find little reason to believe that Putin is negotiating in good faith nor do I believe he has any newfound respect for Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity (…) That is precisely why we are coming together to send a clear message – Putin need not collapse his entire economy nor does he need to sacrifice the lives of his own people in a futile attempt to rewrite the map of Europe.”
What appears to be happening here is not an attempt on the part of the Democrats to pressure Russia to accept NATO’s terms, but rather an attempt at a non-peaceful and non-diplomatic resolution of the demand. The lawmakers who proposed this bill simply want to pressure the US government to consider a coercive and bellicose solution to the Ukrainian crisis. The aim is simply to make Washington openly try to provoke economic and social collapse in Russia.
If the bill is interpreted honestly and the measures proposed therein are only implemented in a possible scenario of Russian invasion, its meaning will be practically null, since, obviously, such an “invasion plan” does not exist and Moscow would be, in this case, immune to coercive measures. However, recently NATO has regarded Moscow’s activities within Russian territory itself as a “threat” to Ukraine – and this raises a serious concern. The problem here is what the Americans will interpret as a “violation of Ukrainian sovereignty” – and whether Russian domestic activities near the western border will be viewed that way.
Indeed, it is not surprising that such a bill is proposed by the Democrats, which are the political party that has historically been most tied to ideological agendas in defense of American global hegemony. Biden, even though being a Democrat, is forced to take more realistic actions because of the current material situation in the US, but the pressure from his party is for him to use all possible means to suffocate Russia and all geopolitical enemies of the US. There is not much strategic value in that, just ideological commitment. It remains to be seen whether Biden will give in to the pressure.
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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
After hearing the witness statements to the German Corona Investigative Committee by former vice president of Pfizer Dr Mike Yeadon who has been a scientist for 36 years, lawyers with Reiner Füllmich draw the same conclusion: The injections normally called Corona vaccines are designed to experiment on the human race and to find out what dosage of a yet unknown toxin is needed in order to kill people.
At the outset of the corona crisis, the number of so-called confirmed positive cases was abysmally low, starting with 83 positive cases outside China (6.4 billion people). These ridiculously low numbers were nonetheless used to justify the launching on January 30th 2020 of a Worldwide Public Health Emergency leading up six weeks later to the official declaration of a Worldwide Pandemic on March 11, 2021 (44,279 covid positive cases outside of China).
This article demonstrates unequivocally that mortality and morbidity has increased dramatically as a result of the vaccine. The incidence of Covid positive cases has also increased.
There is a great paradox in the increasingly aggressive US and NATO military stance towards Russia, and China, when measured against the clearly suicidal national Green Agenda economic policies of the USA as well as the EU NATO states. An astonishing transformation of the economies of the world’s most advanced industrial economies is underway and gaining momentum.
I regard Washington’s refusal to accommodate Russia’s security concerns as totally irresponsible. By denying security guarantees to Russia, Washington essentially told the Kremlin that the U.S. intends to locate nuclear missiles on Russia’s borders and to use color revolutions among former Russian provinces to destabilize the Russian Federation.
At the end of 2020, we reported how the CDC was caught manipulating the death statistics to make “COVID deaths” appear to be much higher than they actually were.
A Kyodo News agency report on Friday cited Japanese government sources to the effect that Tokyo and Washington have drawn up a draft joint operation plan that would enable the setup of an attack base along the Nansei island chain in Japan’s southwest in the event of a Taiwan contingency.
From vaccine and booster mandates to restricting what students can do off-campus, a growing number of universities are forcing students to jump through hoops in hopes of avoiding an increase in COVID cases.
The very essence of traditional medical practice is open discourse and debate. Years of education and experience grant physicians the right to analyze data, question it and demand answers. Any attempt to silence practitioners who are true to their profession, is an egregious assault on their autonomy and undermines the doctor-patient relationship.
African American woman journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has released a nearly 600-page hardcover book entitled “A New Origin Story: The 1619 Project” as a continuation of the work which began with the release of a New York Times Magazine special issue during the Summer of 2019.
Six weeks into the Soviet Army’s counteroffensive, on 15 January 1942 Adolf Hitler at last agreed that German Army Group Centre could make a gradual, fighting withdrawal to a straighter and shorter line slightly further west of Moscow.
Canada continues to creep into unventured territory with regards to the powers we’ve given our government in the last two years. What was a conspiracy theory only a few months ago is now becoming reality – the CBC and the Trudeau government are suddenly talking about forced vaccine policies.
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Lawmakers on Tuesday attacked what some called the Biden administration’s “confusing” messaging and disastrous rollout of COVID booster shots. Meanwhile scientists raised questions about the administration’s mandates strategy.
In a Senate Health Committee hearing Tuesday, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the ranking Republican, blasted the Biden administration for failing to coordinate policy on testing, boosters and quarantine recommendations, even as medical and legal experts questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s COVID vaccine mandates.
“This administration has time and again squandered its opportunities and made things worse in the decisions you’ve made on testing and treatments and most crucially in communicating with the American people,” Burr said.
“I’m hoping that you’ll understand that my criticism comes from a place of concern,” he added, “because your communication efforts are a mess and have only made things worse.”
Burr called the rollout of boosters a “disaster” and said the recent update of information about quarantine periods left people “confused.”
In late December, the CDC shortened the time for self-quarantining from 14 to 10 days. Fauci suggested a negative COVID test might be required to end this shorter quarantine, but Walensky did not agree, stating only that people should test and/or continue to quarantine only if they still felt ill.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration on Tuesday announced new rules to begin Feb. 15 requiring all unvaccinated federal health employees to be tested weekly.
This decision comes despite mounting evidence vaccination itself has little to no effect on transmission of the Omicron variant.
As Dr. Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize laureate in 2008 for discovering the human immunodeficiency virus, wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal:
“As of Jan. 1, Omicron represented more than 95% of U.S. COVID cases, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because some of Omicron’s 50 mutations are known to evade antibody protection, because more than 30 of those mutations are to the spike protein used as an immunogen by the existing vaccines, and because there have been mass Omicron outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations, scientists are highly uncertain the existing vaccines can stop it from spreading.”
The scientific basis for the administration’s vaccine mandate policies are now obsolete, according to Montagnier and his co-author, Jed Rubenfeld, a constitutional scholar, since the legal standard can no longer be met.
That standard, enunciated by the U.S. Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), establishes that the right to refuse medical treatment can be overcome only if society needs to curb the spread of a contagious epidemic.
For Omicron, said the authors, “there is as yet no such evidence” the vaccines curb the spread.
With even CNN’s Jake Tapper questioning the administration’s pandemic data now and the president’s approval rating for his handling of the pandemic dropping, some observers wonder when the administration will realize its pandemic playbook is obsolete.
There’s a reason CNN’s @jaketapper is intent on branding me a “menace” and “a liar,” and why he refuses to debate me on the merits of facts and scientific evidence. Here’s the back story.https://t.co/saP2FMTra2
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David Charbonneau, Ph.D. is a fellow for The Defender.
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A Kyodo News agency report on Friday cited Japanese government sources to the effect that Tokyo and Washington have drawn up a draft joint operation plan that would enable the setup of an attack base along the Nansei island chain in Japan’s southwest in the event of a Taiwan contingency.
According to the report, the forthcoming “2+2” ministerial of foreign and defence chiefs of the US and Japan on January 7 in Washington is expected to “formalise” the operation plan.
The report details that under the plan, “US Marines will set up a temporary attack base” on the Nansei Islands (also known as Ryukyu Islands) initially in a chain stretching southwest toward Taiwan, with around 40 “candidate sites” amongst around 200 islands, including uninhabited ones.
The report comes in the wake of the recent remarks by Japan’s hawkish former PM Shinzo Abe that any Taiwan contingency would also be an emergency for Japan and for the Japan-US security alliance.
This report comes only a day after the approval by the Japanese Parliament on Friday to approve the countries biggest ever increase in defence spending since World War 2.
What remains to be seen is whether the Japanese government will now push ahead with a constitutional amendment that will allow Japan to wage war. The existing pacifist constitution, a legacy of the World War 2, forbids Japanese armed forces waging wars except strictly in self-defence.
Seven decades ago, the US imposed a pacifist constitution on Japan — which was drafted over the span of just a week by a small team of Americans led by Gen. MacArthur, the supreme commander for the Allied powers. Ironically, the US is now actively encouraging Tokyo to jettison the restrictions and be a “normal” country so as to recruit it as a fill-fledged participant in its alliance system in waging wars in the Asia-Pacific.
Japanese militarism is a fact of modern history. The Great Depression affected Japan by a great amount, and led to a rise in militarism. Succinctly put, Japan wanted to expand in order to gain more natural resources and to create its own economic empire in the Pacific. Its genesis can be traced to the period of rapid militarisation to modernise quickly and keep up with the Western world.
Circumstances then and now have similarities and dissimilarities. The main difference in the early 20th century was that Japan was unhappy with the massive wave of modern globalisation by the Western powers, which resulted in the colonisation of numerous countries around the world whose ramifications were felt especially in Asia. In sum, Japan protected itself against colonisation from western powers.
To protect itself from what it perceived as the possibility of war with Western powers, Japan developed a National Defense State, which was effectively a highly militarised government in which the political establishment made the militaristic decisions with strength of the nation’s economy tied with that of its military.
Of course, an ideological revitalisation went hand in hand whereby the Japanese nation came to believe in serving the militant, ultra-nationalistic state as a sacred duty. Thus it was that Japan turned into an imperialist type power of Asia with its rapid industrialisation and invasions in China, Korea and Manchuria.
Beijing and Moscow do not seem overly worried about Japan’s moves right now. But they are watching closely, given the geopolitical reality that any revival of Japanese militarism will now be also anchored on the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy against China and Russia. They may yet be waiting to see if Japan makes its biggest move yet — actually amending its antiwar constitution for the first time.
Russia’s tensions with the US over Ukraine also has a Far East vector. Second, Russia and Japan are yet to sign a Peace Treaty bringing their World War 2 hostilities to a formal end. Russia increasingly sees a congruence of interests with China.
On November 23, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu told his Chinese counterpart Wei Fenghe that US air patrols near Russia’s eastern borders had increased, with a total of 22 strategic flights over the Sea of Okhotsk in 2020 – up from three the previous year – which he said posed a threat to both Russia and China. “Against this background, Russian-Chinese coordination is becoming a stabilising factor in world affairs,” Shoigu said.
This conversation took place on the sidelines of the signing of “a road map” for military cooperation by the two defence ministers. Only three days earlier, Chinese and Russian air forces conducted a joint strategic air patrol over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea. China sent two H-6K aircraft to form a joint formation with two Russian Tu-95MC aircraft.
This was the third joint strategic air patrol by the Chinese and Russian militaries aimed at enhancing “the level of strategic coordination and joint operational capabilities, and jointly maintain global strategic stability,” according to a Chinese readout.
A month before that, after wrapping up a joint naval exercise in the Sea of Japan on October 17, ten powerful Chinese and Russian warships undertook an unprecedented mission to sail through the Tsugaru Strait into the Pacific Ocean in their first joint maritime patrol encircling Japan.
Russia’s defence ministry said, “The tasks of the patrols were the demonstration of the Russian and Chinese state flags, maintaining of peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region and guardianship of the subjects of maritime economic activities of the two countries.”
Quite obviously, Moscow’s line has hardened in the recent months on the Kuril Islands problem with Japan. President Putin unveiled a new proposal in September to establish a special economic zone in the disputed islands under Russian law. Evidently, Russia plans to intensively and rapidly develop the Kuril and strengthen its integration.Tokyo has protested.
Moscow fears possible deployment of US missile systems on the islands if they are returned to Japan, creating a direct military threat to Russia. The Russian Defense Ministry announced on December 2 the deployment of advanced mobile coastal defense missile system Bastile on the Kuril Islands.
The Russian Defence Ministry also announced on December 21 a plan to hold two strategic command-and-staff exercises, headlined Vostok and Grom, next year. The Vostok (East) drills in the Russian Far East are planned as a key combat training event for all Russian troops.
The disclosure by Kyoto of a joint US-Japan joint operation plan to set up an attack base along the Nansei island chain will most certainly draw a backlash from Moscow. The Kyodo report said the US deployment will include “high mobility artillery rocket system”. Russia has repeatedly warned the US against the deployment of intermediate range missiles in Japan. (here and here) China too has a similar position and has warned that it would “not stand idly by” if the US deployed ground-based missiles to Asia.
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Ankara is seemingly more emboldened than ever as early signs show that the bloody unrest that engulfed Kazakhstan had significant Turkish involvement, not only through its intelligence services, but also through Kazakhstan’s Turkey-oriented politicians and business community.
The Kazakh elite, led by its leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, expedited the development of multilateral relations and established an alliance with Ankara. This alliance was cultivated under the formula of a “multi-vector course”, with inspiration of a supranational entity called “Great Turan.”
“Great Turan” is a relatively new concept born out of fringe nationalist movements that opposed the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. It was also propelled in Turkey by Kemalist ideology to Turkify Anatolian Muslims and Christians alike. Today, one of the greatest champions of a “Great Turan” – the ideology of unifying Turkic-speaking people from the Balkans to Siberia and Xinjiang, is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
It is recalled that when speaking to the Organization of Turkic States, Erdoğan said:
“Turkistan is our ancestral home, our main hearth. We are a very large family of 300 million people who speak the same language, believe in the same religion, have the same history, culture, share the same civilization. I know that our Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tajik and Turkmen brothers look at Turkey the same way we do. They consider Turkey their home.”
Turkey has consistently worked towards this “Great Turan” project since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire left the country as a rump state in Anatolia. First was the 1939 grab of Liwa Iskenderun, now Hatay Province, from Syria. Then there was the 1974 invasion of northern Cyprus. The 2010’s saw more areas of northern Syria occupied by Turkey. Next was Turkey’s direct assistance to Azerbaijan’s 2020 invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh as the two country’s share the ideology of “one nation, two states. ”Azerbaijan is important for Turkey as it is the country’s gateway to Central Asia and its riches, especially Kazakhstan with its innumerable natural resources. Uranium ore deposits alone, as an example, are estimated at more than 40% of the world’s total.
For Ankara to become a dominant force in Central Asia, it must break Russia’s influence, and in this way has been engaged in a number of projects to propel this. This includes encouraging Kazakhstan’s switch from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. Also, about a hundred mosques and madrasahs have been built in Kazakhstan with Turkish funding to Islamize the country and break it from its Soviet-era secularism.
More than 200 officers of the Kazakh army graduated from Turkish military institutions. Annually, hundreds of Kazakh military personnel, including the highest echelon of the military leadership, are sent to Turkey to improve their professional training for short-term courses. In recent years, Kazakhstan has actively purchased Turkish-made infantry fighting and armored vehicles, and is keen to purchase bayraktar drones.
Erdoğan had no choice but to express formal support for the Kazakh decision to request peacekeeping assistance from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). The Turkish leader was hoping that President Kasym-Zhomart Tokayev would be undecided and delay requesting CSTO assistance so that pro-Turkish-minded local politicians and major businessmen could be activated. This was in the hope that they would create enough pressure to demand Turkish troops be deployed in order to stabilize the country.
Albeit, this is far from what actually happened as the Kazakh president acted decisively.
Tokayev said there was a “single center” coordinating the uprising in Kazakhstan. Acording to geopolitical analyst and journalist Pepe Escobar, Tokayev was referring to a ‘secret’ US-Turk-Israeli military-intel operations room based in the southern business hub of Almaty. Escobar reported that there were 22 Americans, 16 Turks and 6 Israelis in the center and were coordinating sabotage gangs – trained in West Asia by the Turks – and then rat-lined to Almaty. However, their operation unravelled when Kazakh forces – with the help of Russian/CSTO intel – retook control of the vandalized Almaty airport, which was supposed to be turned into a hub for receiving foreign military supplies.
Escobar speculated that “the Hybrid War west had to be stunned and livid at how the CSTO intercepted the Kazakh operation at such lightning speed” and that the Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, was able to prepare for a potential Color Revolution as he “saw the Big Picture eons ago.”
Despite this setback, Erdoğan will not abandon his attempts to return to Kazakhstan and will continue to pursue a “Great Turan.” Time will tell whether Kazakhstan will be able to solve internal problems of national security, but the continuation of the “multi-vector course” is unlikely to ensure consistent stability in the Central Asian country.
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In an interview Wednesday with “Fox & Friends,” parents of university students expressed growing concerns that mandatory vaccines, facemasks and discriminatory practices far outweigh the risks of getting COVID.
From vaccine and booster mandates to restricting what students can do off-campus, a growing number of universities are forcing students to jump through hoops in hopes of avoiding an increase in COVID cases.
But some parents say these restrictions are unwarranted and are negatively impacting their child’s college experience.
In an interview Wednesday with “Fox & Friends,” parents of university students expressed growing concerns that mandatory vaccines, facemasks and discriminatory practices far outweigh the risks of getting COVID.
Dr. Dwayne Dexter, the father of a sophomore at the University of Delaware, said every student was required to get a COVID test before starting the winter session whether they were vaccinated or not — and now the university is mandating all students receive a booster before the spring semester.
“He’s under a tremendous amount of stress trying to understand what the booster shot means, is the school going remote,” Dexter said. “He’s really trying to deal with the restrictions that have been in place for the past year and a half.”
Dexter said he feels parents are “standing in the woods shouting at nobody” that these “shut up and comply mandates” are starting to impact the social and emotional well-being of kids. “They really aren’t having that college experience,” he said.
Dexter explained:
“If you look at the data out there today, are any of these mandates really impacting the infection and transmission rate of COVID, and they’re not. Our kids are in an age group where the impact of COVID on their health is very very minimal and I don’t think anybody is measuring or evaluating what is the psychological toll on these kids versus what the mandates are doing to impact their health against COVID.”
Greg Luttrell, the father of a junior at the University of Memphis, said his daughter transferred from the University of Tennessee when learning was moved online.
“For her to have to pay for housing on campus, to having to go to the cafeteria to get takeout food and to wear a mask everywhere outside of her room, she just didn’t feel that was the college experience,” Luttrell said. “They weren’t even sure there would be football games or whether they could have any social [interaction] or spend any time together.”
Although the University of Memphis does not require COVID vaccinations, masks are mandated and the school uses COVID daily symptom monitoring.
Kristina Kristen is the mother of a freshman at the University of California Irvine where COVID vaccines, booster shots and wearing facemasks indoor are mandatory. The university also requires weekly COVID testing for unvaccinated students.
“[My son] has been subjected to what can only be described as discriminatory protocols, having to be tested weekly and being subjected to different isolation protocols from those who are vaccinated,” Kristen said. “In addition to that, I think the strict masking protocols in their dorms are kind of reaching these absurd levels where they have to cite each other if the mask is slightly under the nose and get these citations.”
Kristen said it is a living situation that is far less than the experience a parent would hope their child would have during their college years.
Kristen, a Children’s Health Defense board member, said from the beginning everybody knew, and data showed, students are the lowest-risk population on the planet.
She explained:
“It’s a stratified risk all around, you have basically virtually zero risk to the students between the ages of 16 to 25 of COVID, but you have massive risks from the adverse effects from the vaccines where they are showing that they’re having myocarditis, pericarditis, thrombocytopenia — all these pretty serious adverse effects from vaccines — and on top of that, they’re showing the highest vaccinated countries in the world such as Israel, Iceland, Gibraltar have in fact the highest cases and death rates.
“So this is very very alarming that as the global data is showing what is happening with the vaccinations, they’re going on with this agenda.”
Kristen said she is puzzled that institutions of higher learning are supposed to be holding science in high esteem, but she is not “seeing this laying out on the ground.”
Students, parents, faculty urge colleges to drop booster mandates
As The Defender reported Jan. 10, more than 325 students, parents, alumni, faculty and staff at Cornell University signed an open letter to the university’s president and board of trustees asking Cornell to drop its COVID vaccine booster mandate.
The authors of the petition argued Cornell’s own data highlights that vaccination, even with the booster, has very limited capability in stopping virus transmission.
325+ students parents alumni faculty + staff of Cornell University signed open letter to university’s president + board opposing Cornell’s COVID booster mandate, warning university would have to bear responsibility for death/disability caused by vaccines.https://t.co/mJ4t1gVDC4
As of last December, the school had identified more than 1,600 COVID positive cases with every case of the Omicron variant to date found in fully vaccinated students, a portion of whom had also received a booster shot.
The petition raised concerns that Cornell is ignoring natural immunity in favor of mandating a booster “based on older variants, which Cornell knows is ineffective at stopping the spread of Covid-19 in the Cornell community.”
In addition to Cornell, more than 300 Boston College parents, students, alumni, faculty and staff signed a petition on Jan. 3 to the college’s president, Fr. William Leahy, opposing the college’s one-size-fits-all COVID booster mandate because it fails to recognize natural immunity.
This new mandate was issued even though more than 97% of the campus was fully vaccinated by mandate — and despite the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not changed the definition of “fully vaccinated” to include a booster shot.
The petition requests the college create rational “off-ramps” to the policy to protect individuals with “hybrid immunity” and those with serologically verifiable evidence of robust COVID-19 antibody immunity.
Cornell and Boston College are just two of many elite universities and colleges now mandating indiscriminate COVID vaccine boosters across the board.
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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
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There is much confusion and disinformation regarding the nature of the so-called Covid-19 “pandemic”.
The definition of a pandemic is rarely mentioned by the governments and the corporate media.
What confirms the existence of a pandemic is not only the number of people affected by Covid-19, but also reliable evidence of a disease outbreak which is spreading over a wide geographic area “including multiple countries or continents”.
“A pandemic is an epidemic that becomes very widespread and affects a whole region, a continent, or the world” (Nature)
The above definition does not in any way describe the alleged spread of SARS-CoV-2.
There Never Was a Pandemic
I have investigated this matter extensively since January 2020 and have come to the conclusion based on relevant definitions, the history of the corona crisis as well as the official WHO “estimates” of “Covid positive cases” that there never was a pandemic.
At the outset of the corona crisis, the number of so-called confirmed positive cases was abysmally low, starting with 83 positive cases outside China (6.4 billion people). These ridiculously low numbers were nonetheless used to justify the launching on January 30th 2020 of a Worldwide Public Health Emergency leading up six weeks later to the official declaration of a Worldwide Pandemic on March 11, 2021 (44,279 covid positive cases outside of China).
Test, Test, Test
It was only in the wake of the official announcement of the pandemic (March 11, 2020) that the number of Covid-19 cases went fly high. And that had nothing to do with the alleged spread of the disease to major regions of the World.
A highly organized Covid testing apparatus was established. The mandate was Test Test Test.
The “customized” and flawed PCR-RT Test(which does not under any circumstances identify the SARS-CoV-2 virus) has been used Worldwide to generate millions of erroneous Covid positive cases.The latter were then used to sustain the illusion that the alleged pandemic was Real and that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was spreading relentlessly to all major regions of the World.
This assessment based on erroneous numbers was then used to spearhead the fear campaign.
Erroneous figures of positive cases are now part of a giant data base, coupled with fake data on so-called Covid-19 mortality.
In turn, these millions of positive cases are then used to justify every single Covid-19 related policy adopted since March 2020, including the lockdown, confinement of the labor force, social distancing, the facemask, the closure of schools, colleges and universities, the suspension of cultural and sports events, etc.
This tabulation of Covid positive cases was also used as a pretext to justify the March 2020 “closure” of the global economy (simultaneous “closure” of 190 national economies of member states of the United Nations) allegedly with a view to saving lives.
And since December 2020, the alleged “Covid-19 pandemic” is used to convince people Worldwide that the Covid-19 vaccine (coupled with the Vaccine Passport) is the “solution” to curbing the spread of the disease.
Defining the Pandemic
In analyzing the evolution of the Covid-19 crisis, we must distinguish between three important concepts: The Outbreak of the Disease, the Epidemic and the Pandemic.
The Outbreak constitutes:
“a sudden rise in the incidence of a disease” and typically is confined to a localized area or a specific group of people. Should an outbreak become more severe, and less localized, it may be characterized as an epidemic. If it broadens still further, and affects a significant portion of the population, the disease may be characterized as a pandemic. Webster-Merriam
The Epidemic is defined as a disease outbreak:
“affecting or tending to affect a disproportionately large number of individuals within a population, community, or region at the same time”
The Pandemic is broadly defined as an extension of the epidemic:
“An outbreak of a disease occurring over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affecting a significant proportion of the population” (Webster-Merriam, emphasis added)
Based on the above definitions, as well as data released by the Chinese health authorities pertaining to positive cases, there was an Outbreak of the Disease inWuhan, Hubei Province in late December 2019.
A review of the data leading up to the official WHO decision to declare a Pandemic on March 11, 2020 confirms the following:
no evidence of a pandemic, characterized by an outbreak of Covid-19 “over a wide geographic area such as multiple countries or continents”
The official published data of the WHO pertaining to the alleged spread of Covid-19 do not confirm the existence of either an epidemic nor a pandemic.
The Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC)
The first step towards building a fake consensus on the potential spread of the disease was initiated on January 30, 2020 with the decision by the WHO to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
Under the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR), the member states of the WHO have “a legal duty to respond promptly to a PHEIC”.
Without a shred of evidence, the Director General of the WHO declared the PHEIC, pointing to
“a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response”.
This warning pointed to the possible occurrence of a pandemic.
A Global Health Emergency based on 83 Covid-19 Positive Cases Outside China
The January 30 2020 PHEIC intimates the possibility of a pandemic. In an advisory published on December 19, 2019 (barely two weeks before the Wuhan outbreak), the WHO reconfirmed the definition of the PHEIC:
“a situation that is:
serious, sudden, unusual or unexpected;
carries implications for public health beyond the affected State’s national border;
may require immediate international action.”
The calling of a PHEIC was a fraudulent decision on the part of the WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Why? Because on the 30th of January 2020 there were 83 Covid positive cases outside China for a population of 6.4 billion people.
83 cases in 18 countries, and only 7 of them had no history of travel in China. (see WHO, January 30, 2020).
The “Evidence” Points to Fraud
There was nothing “serious, sudden, unusual or unexpected” requiring immediate international action.
These ridiculously low numbers which were not mentioned by the media, did not prevent the launching of a Worldwide fear campaign.
In the week preceding this historic WHO decision, the PHEIC was the object of “consultations” at the World Economic Forum (WEF), Davos (January 21-24). The WHO Director General Dr. Tedros was present at Davos. Were these consultations instrumental in influencing the WHO’s historic decision to declare a PHEIC on January 30th.
Was there a Conflict of Interest as defined by the WHO? The WHO’s largest donor is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which together with the WEF and CEPI had already announced in Davos the development of a Covid-19 vaccine prior to the historic January 30th launching of the PHEIC.
The WHO Director General had the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Big Pharma and the World Economic Forum (WEF). (See Michel Chossudovsky, E book, Chapter II)
“Divisions” Within the WHO
There are indications that the decision of the WHO Director General to declare a PHEIC was taken on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos (January 21-24) overlapping with the Geneva January 22 meeting of the WHO emergency committee on 22 January, 2020. According to the minutes of this meeting (excerpt below), there were divisions within the Emergency Committee regarding the calling of a PHEIC:
On 22 January, the members of the Emergency Committee expressed divergent views on whether this event constitutes a PHEIC or not. At that time, the advice was that the event did not constitute a PHEIC, but the Committee members agreed on the urgency of the situation and suggested that the Committee should be reconvened in a matter of days to examine the situation further.
“Divergent views” is an understatement. There was firm opposition to the implementation of the PHEIC. 83 positive cases on January 30th “does not constitute a PHEIC”.
I should mention that the first PHEIC goes back to 2009. It was inaugurated by the WHO in relation to the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, which turned out to be a fraud.
On January 29, 2020, the day preceding the launching of the PHEIC (recorded by the WHO), there were 5 cases in the US, 3 in Canada, 4 in France, 4 in Germany.
There was no “scientific basis” to justify the launching of a Worldwide public health emergency.
And bear in mind that the figures quoted above are based on Covid positive estimates generated by the contentious and disputed PCR-RT methodology
… Trump announced that he would deny entry to the US of both Chinese and foreign nationals “who have traveled in China in the last 14 days”. This immediately triggered a crisis in air travel, transportation, US-China trade relations as well as freight and shipping transactions.
…The five so-called “confirmed cases” in the US were sufficient to “justify” President Trump’s January 31st 2020 decision to suspend air travel to China while precipitating a hate campaign against ethnic Chinese throughout the Western World. (Michel Chossudovsky, E-Book Chapter II)
This historic January 31st 2020 decision paved the way towards the disruption of international commodity trade as well as the imposition of Worldwide restrictions on air travel. It has also led to the bankruptcy of major airlines, hotel chains and the tourist industry Worldwide.
And all they needed was 83 Covid Positive cases.
The next step of the COVID-19 saga unfolds on February 20, 2020.
February 20-21, 2020. Dr. Tedros Intimates that the Pandemic is Imminent. 1073 Covid Positive Cases Outside China
“concerned that the chance to contain the coronavirus outbreak was “closing” …
“I believe the window of opportunity is still there, but that the window is narrowing.”
Nonsense and outright lies. On the day of Dr. Tedros’ historic press conference (February 20, 2020) the recorded number of confirmed cases outside China was 1073 out of which 621 were passengers and crew on the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship (stranded in Japanese territorial waters).
On that same day, 57.9 % of the Worldwide Covid-19 “confirmed cases” were from the Diamond Princess, hardly representative of a Worldwide “statistical trend”. From a statistical point of view, the WHO decision pointing to a potential “spread of the virus Worldwide” did not make sense.
A quarantine had been imposed on the cruiser See NCBI study. Many passengers fell sick due to the confinement on the boat. All the passengers and crew on the Diamond Princess undertook the PCR test. Without the Diamond Princess data, the so-called confirmed cases worldwide outside China on February 20th 2020 were of the order of 452, out of a population of 6.4 billion. (See the graph below indicating International Convenience (Diamond Princess))
Needless to say, this so-called data was instrumental to spearheading the fear campaign and the collapse of financial markets in the course of the month of February 2020.
Note: The tabulated data above for February 20, 2020 indicates 1073 cases. 1076 cases in WHO Press Conference)
Dr. Tedros’ Statement (based on flawed concepts and statistics) had set the stage for the February 20-21 stock market collapse.
These are the figures (table right) used to support Tedros’ warnings that the pandemic is imminent.
Early March 2020
The recorded covid positive cases remain exceedingly low. On March 5, the WHO Director General confirms that outside China there are 2055 cases reported in 33 countries. Around 80% of those cases were from three countries (South Korea, Iran, Italy).
On March 8, three days before the official launching of the Covid-19 Pandemic, the number of “confirmed cases” (infected and recovered) in the United States was of the order of 430, rising to about 600 on March 8, 2020.
Compare these ridiculously low figures to those pertaining to Influenza B Virus: The CDC estimated for 2019-2020 “at least 15 million [U.S] virus flu illnesses… 140,000 hospitalizations and 8,200 deaths. (The Hill)
It is worth noting that in early March, reported new cases in China fall to double digit. 99 cases recorded on March 7.All of the new cases outside Hubei province were categorized as “imported infections” (from foreign countries). The reliability of the data remains to be established:
99 newly confirmed cases including 74 in Hubei Province, … The new cases included 24 imported infections — 17 in Gansu Province, three in Beijing, three in Shanghai and one in Guangdong Province.
While the outbreak in Hubei province was virtually over, the fake pandemic outside China launched on March 11, was commencing.
March 11, 2020: The Historic Covid-19 Pandemic, 44,279 “Confirmed Cases”
The WHO officially declared a Worldwide pandemic at a time when there were 44,279 confirmed cases outside China (6.4 billion population). Here is the justification of the WHO Director General regarding the WHO’s decision to declare a Worldwide pandemic:
As I said on Monday, just looking at the number of cases and the number of countries affected does not tell the full story.
Of the 118,000 cases reported globally in 114 countries, more than 90 percent of cases are in just four countries, and two of those – China and the Republic of Korea – have significantly declining epidemics.
81 countries have not reported any cases, and 57 countries have reported 10 cases or less.
Nonsensical and contradictory statement. No evidence of an unfolding pandemic.
These are the figures used to justify the lockdown and the closing down of 190 national economies, with a view to saving lives.
In the US, recorded on March 11, 2020, there were according to John Hopkins: 1,335 “cases” and 29 deaths (“presumptive” plus PCR confirmed).
No evidence of a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
Immediately following the March 11, 2020 WHO announcement, the fear campaign went into high gear. Stock markets collapsed on the following day: Black Thursday.
On March 18, 2020 a lockdown was launched in the US.
The Upward Trend of Covid Positives In the Wake of the March 11, 2020 Lockdown
What can be observed in the diagram below is that the recorded Covid positive cases were exceedingly low prior to the official declaration of a pandemic on March 11, 2020: 44,279 cases outside China. There was absolutely no justification to launching the lockdown as a means to combating a non-existent “pandemic”.
As of March 11, 2020, following the lockdown, national governments were urged to implement the PCR-RT test on a massive scale, with a view to pushing up the numbers of covid positive cases Worldwide.
Test, Test, Test: The numbers started to climb with a view to generating more and more fake statistics.
Look at the table below. A very small number of positive cases in early March. And then, Covid positive cases going fly high as of April, May June 2020.
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In Part II, we will examine the role of the flawed PCR-RT Test and how it has been applied to sustaining the illusion of a Worldwide pandemic.
Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.
He has undertaken field research in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific and has written extensively on the economies of developing countries with a focus on poverty and social inequality. He has also undertaken research in Health Economics (UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), UNFPA, CIDA, WHO, Government of Venezuela, John Hopkins International Journal of Health Services (1979, 1983)
He is the author of thirteen books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015).
He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia. He can be reached at [email protected]
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The years-long war in Yemen sees no end, and 2022 is not an exception. The year began with a large-scale operation, dubbed Southern Storm aimed to expel the Houthis (Ansar Allah) from Yemen’s central-southern province of Shabawah. The operation is mainly led by the UAE-backed Giant Brigades, a force of an estimated 15,000 fighters, with support from the Yemeni Armed Forces and backed by air cover from Coalition warplanes.
The operation took the Houthis by surprise and resulted in significant gains since its first days.
On January 2, the Giants Brigades managed to capture the center of Usaylan district. On January 3 and 4, the group’s fighters captured the mountain of Bin Aqil and the key town of al-Nuqub.
The Giants Brigades managed to enter the district of Bayhan on January 5. On the same day, the group’s fighters seized the 163rd Infantry Brigade Camp.
On the next day, the Giant Brigades imposed fire control over the al-Sa’di junction, cutting the Houthis main supply line between Bayhan and the district of Harib in the neighboring province of Ma’rib.
The second phase of the operation was also a success. On January 7, Yemeni forces captured the district center of Bayhan in the western part of Shabawah, while, fighters of the Giant Brigades took control over the area of al-Hanou and managed to reach the outskirts of the town of al-Ulya.
The third and final phase of the operation began on January 9, when Yemeni forces kicked off a large-scale offensive in the district of Ain. A few hours into the third phase, the Houthis were expelled from the areas of Taraf as Saq and Qarn al-Mujajib in Ain. The Giants Brigades later stormed the center of the Noaman district in Al-Bayda.
On January 10, the Giants Brigade announced in a statement that all the districts of the province of Shabawah had been totally liberated from Huthi control after a 10-day assault.
The Houthis likely opted to withdraw their remaining fighters in Shabawah to more fortified positions in the neighboring province of Ma’rib, but important supply lines to this province are now cut down.
The operation resulted in significant losses on both sides. On January 8 alone, the Coalition claimed the killing of 435 Houthi fighters in one day in Marib and Shabawah.
Amid the important military gains, the Saudi-led coalition failed in the field of propaganda.
A coalition spokesman was caught using footage from an old US documentary film “Severe Clear” during a press briefing on January 9. Showing an abandoned Iraqi missile factory, he claimed that it was a ballistic missile workshop of the Houthis in the western Yemeni province of al-Hudaydah.
The poorly thought-out propaganda stunt should damage the coalition’s credibility, but any “major scandal” was avoided, as the MSM traditionally ignored the truth.
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As readers are aware, I regard Washington’s refusal to accommodate Russia’s security concerns as totally irresponsible. By denying security guarantees to Russia, Washington essentially told the Kremlin that the U.S. intends to locate nuclear missiles on Russia’s bordersand to use color revolutions among former Russian provinces to destabilize the Russian Federation. In other words, Washington has shown that the US represents a life-threatening hostility to Russia.
Russia is not going to sit and wait for that to happen. Ukraine most certainly will not be permitted to be a member of NATO. Russia would reincorporate Ukraine into Russia rather than permit that to happen. No US or NATO missile bases will be permitted in Ukraine. If they are there or are put there, they will be destroyed.
The existing US missile bases in Romania and Poland will be destroyed. Russia can achieve this by air or missiles and has no need to invade. It would be pointless for NATO to mobilize as its conventional forces are small compared to Russia and incapable of putting up any kind of fight against Russian armies. Russia could overrun Eastern Europe long before the US could mobilize enough forces to put up a fight.
Stratfor, which provides geopolitical intelligence information to corporate clients says that the four armies in Russia’s Eastern Military District are in the process of being moved to the Western front. I have no opinion about the reliability of Stratfor’s information or any knowledge of who might be behind the organization.
The Stratfor report perhaps is an indication that the Kremlin expected the talks with the West to be unsuccessful and is positioning Russia to roll back NATO as the Russian deputy foreign minister indicated. Unless Russia’s security problems are resolved, he said, there will be dire consequences.
Prior to using force, Russia is likely to position nuclear missiles 200 miles off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the US as a constraint on Washington turning a low-key conventional action into nuclear war in order to save face. Washington in its arrogance and stupidity has set itself up for a defeat that it will find difficult to accept, especially as Washington will have brought it on itself.
Putin has expressed his despair many times that Washington cannot accept the sovereignty of other countries and learn to live together in the world. To maintain peace, all Washington needed to do was to demilitarize the NATO members that border Russia and cease adding countries to NATO. Instead, an over confident Washington drowning in hubris made a bad decision.
It is possible that nuclear war will be the result. But it would require more stupid decisions in Washington. It is not Russia’s intent.
Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told reporters on Wednesday that Russia and NATO failed to find common ground. He summed up Wednesday’s meeting: “By NATO’s decision, all practical cooperation between Russia and the alliance in areas of common interest have been suspended. Today we do not have any unifying positive agenda, none at all.” He said that the West has presented Russia with an “unacceptable threat” that Russia will have to counter.
In other words, neither Washington nor its NATO arm heard the Russians tell them that military bases on Russia’s borders are unacceptable. As the Kremlin has found reason and diplomacy to be useless in dealing with the West, the prospect of building common European security is no longer in the picture. Russia has “no choice but to implement a policy of counter-containment and counter-intimidation.”
Having refused Russia security, the idiot West can expect war.
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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102 Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling) PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
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At the end of 2020, we reported how the CDC was caught manipulating the death statistics to make “COVID deaths” appear to be much higher than they actually were.
Just after the first of the year in 2021, however, this page disappeared from the CDC website, and an entirely new section was put up on the CDC’s website that tracked deaths, and the total deaths for 2020 were revised to be 3,389,094, a difference of 486,430 deaths.
Now, one year later, it appears that those additional deaths attributed to 2020 were basically being pre-added to cover up the deaths that were going to be caused by the experimental COVID-19 “vaccines” for 2021.
Here is what the CDC is currently reporting today, at the time of publication of this article:
Source. (Click on “Yearly” at the bottom of the table.)
As you can see, according to the CDC, flu deaths have all but disappeared, as they dropped from their already record low number of 8,785 in 2020, to only 932 in 2021.
And in spite of the fact that hundreds of millions of the American population were injected with the experimental gene-therapy shots for COVID-19 in 2021, COVID deaths, according to the CDC, increased from 385,443 in 2020 to 444,951 in 2021.
And if we use the CDC’s number of total deaths for 2020 on December 30, 2020 before they revised their numbers, we have an increase in total deaths in the U.S. in 2021 that is an increase of over 400,000 deaths that occurred in 2020.
And we have to conclude that the majority of those were COVID-19 vaccine injury deaths.
According to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), if we exclude the foreign reports, VAERS shows 9,778 reported deaths following COVID-19 injections in 2021. (Source.)
We are watching the world’s population be reduced right in front of our eyes, while the masses continue to think it is all a “conspiracy theory.”
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Lebanese parliamentary elections are set for March 27. While the social, political, and economic crisis which has caused the collapse of Lebanon is far from over, the various political factions are jockeying for position and making promises.
One political party leader has emerged and is a very old face on the scene. Samir Geagea, the leader of the Lebanese Forces (LF) since 1986. The LF is a political party that began as an armed militia, with no connection to the national army, the Lebanese Army. Geagea still makes promises that he has 15,000 armed and trained fighters in the LF, and has suggested to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) that his Christian militia is capable of fighting Hezbollah, which has 100,000 armed members. Geagea, though representing a Christian sect, is, in fact, the agent of the KSA in Lebanon, while his bitter rival is President Michel Aoun and his Free Patriotic Movement, who are the country’s largest representatives of Christians.
In a recent interview, Geagea defended KSA and tried to distance KSA from connection to ISIS. It was the US administration of President Obama who created the Free Syrian Army, which later evolved into Al Qaeda, and finally ISIS. It wasn’t until 2017 that President Trump cut the funding on the CIA program which supported terrorists following Radical Islam. KSA, UAE, and Qatar all had bankrolled the US program for regime change in Syria, which failed, but succeeded in destroying Syria.
Trump famously stated it was the US who kept the King on his throne in Riyadh. The oil-rich Gulf states were used to following orders dictated by Washington. The US Embassy in Lebanon is similarly seen as issuing orders in Lebanon. For example, the head of the Lebanese Central Bank, Riad Salameh, has been protected from corruption charges by the order of the US Ambassador, who said Salameh is a “red line”.
During the Lebanese civil war, 1975-1990, Geagea and his fighters all received their training in Israel, and with various Arab countries now making relationships with the occupiers of Palestine, this positions Geagea as a conduit between shared interests. The Syrian Social National party called for the dissolution of the LF, originally an Israeli surrogate militia which later transformed into a political party after the 2005 release of Geagea from prison.
Geagea will be remembered most for his brutal war crimes. He massacred all sects, even going so far as to blow up a church full of Christians. He spent 11 years in jail and was pardoned in 2005.
In the past, it was Rafik Hariri, and then his son Saad Hariri who represented the Saudi interests in Lebanon. Both were Saudi citizens, with Saad having been born and raised in KSA. However, the current de-facto leader of KSA, Muhamed bin Salman (MBS), held Saad Hariri against his will in a shake-down and caused Hariri to announce his resignation while in captivity. MBS was furious that Hariri had managed to work with Hezbollah in the political arena, even though his party was opposed to the group. It took French President Emmanuel Macron personally to gain the release of Hariri, where he returned to Beirut and rescinded his resignation.
Saad Hariri, like his father, was Prime Minister but was unable to form a government in 2021, and he left Lebanon to take up residence in the UAE. Now, with parliamentary elections on the horizon, Hariri has announced he will return to Beirut in January 2022, and at that time will announce if he will participate in the parliamentary elections for his Future Party.
Some analysts predict Saad Hariri will not participate in the upcoming elections but will defer to his older brother’s campaign. Bahaa Hariri, the eldest son of Rafik Hariri, and a successful businessman who has developed a unique style of citizen-activism in Lebanon in response to the Lebanese crisis.
Bahaa has taken a tough stance on Hezbollah, which will be enticing to the US and KSA. His current campaign list “Sawa Li Lubnan” is raising billboards across Beirut, and has 10 offices in Lebanon, with a supporting TV campaign as well. The platform is secular, appealing to all Lebanese, and has a modern reform base ideology, which emphasizes national unity in the face of corruption reforms.
The road back to stability in Lebanon may take years and may hit bumps along the way, but it would appear the March elections may be a starting place to build upon. The age-old political players remain the KSA and USA, each trying to call the shots in a tiny country best known for its geographical position, and it’s 18 different religious sects all living side by side in the Middle East.
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Julian Assange has now been in the maximum-security facilities of Belmarsh prison for over 1,000 days. On the occasion of his 1,000th day of imprisonment, campaigners, supporters and kindred spirits gathered to show their support, indignation and solidarity at this political detention most foul.
Alison Mason of the Julian Assange Defence Committee reiterated those observations long made about the imprisonment at a gathering outside the Australian High Commission in London on that day. The WikiLeaks founder was wrongfully confined “for publishing the war crimes of the US military leaked to him by whistleblower Chelsea Manning.” She, along with supporters, had gathered before the High Commission “because Julian’s country could save him with a simple phone call.” Mason’s admirably simple reasoning: that Australia had “a bargaining chip with AUKUS and trade deals.” If only that were true.
The continued detention of Assange in Belmarsh remains a scandal of kaleidoscopic cruelty. It continues to imperil his frail health, further impaired by a stroke suffered in October last year and the ongoing risks associated with COVID-19. It maintains a state of indefinite incarceration without bail, deputising the United Kingdom as committed gaolers for US interests. “Julian,” stated his fiancée Stella Moris, “is simply held at the request of the US government while they continue to abuse the US-UK extradition treaty for political ends.”
A report drawn from unannounced visits to Belmarsh by the Chief Inspector of Prisons last July and August did not shine glorious light upon the institution. “The prison has not paid sufficient attention to the growing levels of self-harm and there was not enough oversight or care taken of prisoners of risk of suicide. Urgent action needed to be taken in this area to make sure that these prisoners were kept safe.”
The next gruelling stage of Assange’s confinement is being marked by an appeal against the High Court’s unfathomable, and even gullible overturning of the lower court decision against his extradition to the United States. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) continues to seek the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder to face 18 charges, 17 based on that relic of state paranoia and vengeance, the US Espionage Act of 1917. A successful prosecution could see him face a 175-year sentence.
The original decision, shoddy as it was for the cause of journalism, accepted that the extradition would be oppressive within the meaning of the US-UK Extradition Act. District Court Justice Vanessa Baraitser accepted the defence contention that such oppression arose from Assange’s “mental condition”. Despite relentless prosecution attacks on the neuropsychiatric evidence adduced by the defence, the judge accepted that Assange was autistic and would be at serious risk of suiciding in the US prison system. The prosecutors also failed in convincing the court that Special Administrative Measures would not be applied that would restrict his access to legal counsel and family, and ensure solitary confinement. They also failed to show that he would not, on being convicted, serve his time in the vicious supermax prison, Colorado’s ADX Florence.
The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Ian Burnett, and Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde, were having none of that. In their December ruling, the High Court accepted the prosecution appeal that the US could easily make assurances for keeping Assange in better conditions despite not doing so at the original trial. The Lord Justices also proved crotchety at the fact that Baraitser had not gone out of her way to seek those assurances in the first place. Besides, Britain could trust the good diplomatic undertakings of the United States.
So it came to pass that muddle headed judicial reasoning prevailed on the bench. There was no mention of the fabricated evidence being relied upon by the prosecution, or the discomforting fact that operatives in the US Central Intelligence Agency had contemplated kidnapping and poisoning Assange. Nothing, either, about the US-sanctioned surveillance operation conducted by the Spanish security firm, UC Global, during his time in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Work on the appeal began immediately. Solicitors Birnberg Peirce, in a statement, outlined the importance of the application.
“We believe serious and important issues of law and wider public importance are being raised in this application. They arise from the court’s judgment and its receipt and reliance on US assurances regarding the prison regimes and treatment of Mr Assange is likely to face if extradited.”
The wider public importance of the case is hard to measure. Authoritarian governments and sham democracies the world over are gleefully taking notes. Liberal democratic states with increasingly autocratic approaches to media outlets are also going to see promise in the way the United States is using extradition law to nab a publisher. Black letter lawyers will err in assuming that this matter is narrow and specific to the wording of a treaty between two countries.
Having already done untold damage to the cause of publishing national security information that exposes atrocities and violations of law domestic and international, the US is making the claim that the Extradition Act, in all its nastiness, has tentacled global reach. A phone call from Australia’s insipid Prime Minister Scott Morrison will hardly matter to this. He, and other members of Washington’s unofficial imperial court, will do as they are told.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
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African American woman journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has released a nearly 600-page hardcover book entitled “A New Origin Story: The 1619 Project” as a continuation of the work which began with the release of a New York Times Magazine special issue during the Summer of 2019.
The year represented the 400th anniversary of the kidnapping and importation of approximately 20 Africans from Angola stolen from a Portuguese vessel and transported to the British colony of Virginia.
In August of 1619 the British settlers had occupied sections of what later became known as the State of Virginia for more than a decade. After the introduction of enslaved Africans in the colony, the plantation system accelerated through the production of tobacco and other agricultural commodities which required the acquisition of more human laborers who would never be paid for their work.
By the time of the separation between the British Crown and its possessions, there were 13 colonies extending from the southeast to the northeast of the territories. The formation of the United States of America during the latter decades of the 18th century did not end African enslavement or the confiscation of Indigenous land.
In fact, Hannah-Jones advances the argument made by other scholars that the unprecedented Somerset v. Stewart case of 1772 in Britain, where it was ruled by Lord Mansfield that, “ The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, more or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory”, served to undermine the economic status of the Europeans colonized by London in North America. Many interpreted the Somerset ruling as the beginning of the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade. (See this)
Therefore, the political leadership of the colonial territories which later became the U.S., were motivated not by the ideals of freedom, due process, and electoral representation. They were compelled to break from the British monarchy in order to exert their own economic interests within the expanding world system based upon the Atlantic Slave Trade and the super-exploitation of African people throughout the Western Hemisphere.
African enslavement and tobacco production (Source: Alamy)
The purported ideals of 1776 did not extend to the liberation of enslaved Africans across the country. For nearly a century after the Declaration of Independence from Britain, enslavement continued until the Civil War (1861-1865) within the U.S.
Hannah-Jones points out in Chapter I of the book that:
“Indeed, when the South seceded from the Union, white Confederates believed they were the inheritors of the founders’ revolutionary legacy and upholders of the true Constitution. Jefferson Davis gave his second inaugural address as president of the Confederate States of America on George Washington’s birthday, vowing that the Confederacy would ‘perpetuate the principles of our Revolutionary fathers. The day, the memory, and the purpose seem fitly associated…. We are in arms to renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of Constitutional liberty.’”
Even after the Civil War and the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments along with other Civil Rights Acts from 1866 through 1875, the overthrow of Reconstruction beginning in 1877 resulted in the reimposition of forced labor through peonage, sharecropping, tenant farming and the penal system. By the conclusion of the 19th century, the fallacious concepts of “separate but equal” had been firmly entrenched in U.S. Constitutional law requiring a decades-long struggle in the 20th century to claim the humanity of African people and other oppressed communities.
The new book is an interesting mix of historical essays and literary works. The poetry chapters are based upon significant historical conjunctures.
A variety of issues are discussed in the book including the role of the sugar industry in enslavement and colonialism; Black music; capitalism and its growth spawned by the Atlantic Slave Trade; the contradictions within democratic practice; the importance of fear; healthcare; the Black Church; punishment and the criminal justice system; etc.
Significance of the 1619 Project in the Present Period
The publication of the book comes at a time of contentious debate and political struggle over the status of African Americans and other oppressed peoples within the framework of the U.S. political and social system. Writers such as Hannah-Jones have come under attack by conservatives and liberals for the arguments made in both the New York Times Magazine and photographic supplement of 2019 and the subsequent popularity and praise.
In response to the Hannah-Jones and the New York Times publications, the former administration of President Donald J. Trump, commissioned the “1776 Project” in a hostile attempt to refute the work of African American journalists, artists and scholars who have developed alternative paradigms to the fictional narratives promoted by the educational system and popular culture.
Trump was not acting alone in his release of the “1776 Project” just days prior to his exit from office in 2021. The conservative movement in the U.S. views the ideological struggle over the contours of historical studies and other social sciences as a means to justify the censoring of African American studies, including the banning of books by Black and other people of color authors.
“During the closing days of the Trump administration, the outgoing president fulfilled a promise to issue a report that promotes a ‘patriotic education’ about race and the birth of the nation. The ‘1776 Report,’ released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, followed Donald Trump’s September announcement to form a commission to refute teachings on systemic racism, critical race theory, and deeper examinations of how slavery has affected American society. The ‘crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison, that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together, will destroy our country,’ he said at the time.”
Yet this report does not complete the refutation of the 1619 Project. There is also the “1776 Project Political Action Committee” which has declared its intentions saying:
“We are a political action committee dedicated to electing school board members nationwide who want to reform our public education system by promoting patriotism and pride in American history. We are committed to abolishing critical race theory and ‘The 1619 Project’ from the public school curriculum.”
Then another effort called “1776 Unites” is a program by conservative scholars, many of whom are African American, to contradict the views advanced in the 1619 Project that the growth of African enslavement during the 17th century is the underlying historical conjuncture which has shaped the political, economic and cultural life of the U.S. The 1776 Unites approach is to emphasize the professional and business accomplishments of African Americans.
According to their website: “We are building a positive movement in response to the overwhelming narratives of oppression, grievance and ignorance to America’s history — and its promise for the future.” However, despite the professional, athletic, scientific, cultural, economic and intellectual contributions made by people of African descent in the U.S. since the 17th century, the statistics related to impoverishment, educational attainment, incarceration, healthcare, victimization by law-enforcement and the criminal justice system cannot be denied by those seeking to literally “whitewash” history and social studies.
These attacks on antiracist education have extended to public libraries which provide avenues for enhancing literacy through books and other learning materials that are often not available in schools. The enemies of the 1619 Project falsely characterize all education methods that are based upon the actual history and social dynamics of the U.S. and the world as “Critical Race Theory.”
Nonetheless, CRT was developed by scholars such as Derrick Bell at Harvard Law School during the 1980s and 1990s. Its tenets are based upon the institutional nature of racial oppression in the U.S. These concepts are usually not taught in a K-12 educational settings.
As Hannah-Jones has stated in several interviews, that no one has produced a fifth-grade teacher who is writing lesson plans based upon the legal concepts within CRT. Obviously, the use of CRT as a wedge political issue by conservatives is part and parcel of the arsenal deployed to halt the further democratization of U.S. society.
These attacks extend into the state legislative campaigns to restrict voting rights all across the U.S. through the passage of bills which prohibit early voting, same-day registration, mail-in ballots, the delivery of water and food to people waiting in line to vote, among other measures. Consequently, with the failure of the Supreme Court and the Congress to uphold the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the midterm elections of 2022 will serve as a measurement of the impact of these right-wing assaults on nationally oppressed communities and their allies.
This updated and expanded 1619 Project book makes an important contribution to the debate and discussion over the history, contemporary situation and indeed the future of the U.S. and the world. The outcome of this struggle against racism and capitalism will not necessarily be determined within the realm of academic discourse, it requires a continuation of the mobilization and organization of the masses for the total liberation of the people.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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The very essence of traditional medical practice is open discourse and debate. Years of education and experience grant physicians the right to analyze data, question it and demand answers. Any attempt to silence practitioners who are true to their profession, is an egregious assault on their autonomy and undermines the doctor-patient relationship. The danger of creating a top-down authoritarian practice of medicine, such as the AMA, in collusion with the FSMB, is advocating, would mean the end of a noble profession.
In an ideal world, we expect societies and organizations that have been the vanguard of the medical profession to hold true to the ideals of medicine. In reality, we find many of these organizations to be compromised, having significant undisclosed conflicts of interest which bring their impartiality into question. To use the trust built up over many years to declare that medical and scientific knowledge belongs only to them is an abuse of their position and a betrayal of their great responsibility.
Misinformation and disinformation are nebulous terms created to cause confusion among lay people. In the world of science there are facts, genuine opinions and disingenuous lies. In the practice of medicine, lying is a crime; especially lying that results in harm.
Your article, “Flow of damaging COVID-19 disinformation must end now” published on the American Medical Association (AMA) website December 14, 2021 (1), feigns concern for the harm false information causes, not just to the health of the patients, but also to the doctor-patient relationship. This harm has been pre-defined as any concern, skepticism, challenge or contradiction to official government narratives. However, many independent scientists and physicians, worldwide, analyzing real-time raw data, are coming to conclusions which are not in alignment with the current agenda of medical and political authorities. We have a legal and ethical duty to speak out.
In the article, you state:
“The COVID-19 pandemic continues to spawn falsehoods that are spread by a whole host of people such as political leaders, media figures, internet influencers, and even some health professionals—including by licensed physicians”.
The undersigned argue that organizations such as the AMA and the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) are using their Read the rest of this entry »
Comments Off on “Political Power to Silence and Penalize Physicians who Question Certain Views on COVID-19”: Open Letter to Dr. Harmon and the American Medical Association (AMA)
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Now that we have a full year of injecting people with an experimental gene altering shot for COVID-19, we can conclusively state that this is most definitely a weapon of mass destruction, as it not only kills and cripples people in the present, but it destroys unborn children in the womb as well, and is most likely making an entire generation of child-bearing aged females infertile.
And the facts that support this statement are found in the government’s own database of Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), as incomplete as that data set is.
I have basically employed two methods of analyzing the data in VAERS in my reports for the past year, and that is by comparing what is published by the government for the experimental COVID-19 shots with all the FDA-approved vaccines for the past 32 years, since VAERS began in 1990.
This gives us a true “apples to apples” approach using only the data that they supply.
The other method is to determine the “under-reporting multiplier” as everyone admits, including the government health authorities, that VAERS is a passive system that is vastly under reported.
I have used Dr. Jessica Rose’s analysis done on the under-reporting multiplier that is published here, and she determined that based on her analysis, the COVID-19 reporting in VAERS needs to be multiplied by a factor of 41X.
To arrive at the number of fetal deaths recorded in VAERS I had to test several different searches on listed “symptoms” and then see if the search results documented fetal deaths, since there is no demographic for “fetal deaths.”
The following is the current list of “symptoms” in VAERS that reveals fetal deaths:
Aborted pregnancy
Abortion
Abortion complete
Abortion complicated
Abortion early
Abortion incomplete
Abortion induced
Abortion induced incomplete
Abortion late
Abortion missed
Abortion of ectopic pregnancy
Abortion spontaneous
Abortion spontaneous complete
Abortion spontaneous incomplete
Ectopic pregnancy
Ectopic pregnancy termination
Ectopic pregnancy with contraceptive device
Foetal cardiac arrest
Foetal death
Premature baby death
Premature delivery
Ruptured ectopic pregnancy
Stillbirth
This list may not be exhaustive. But using this list with the last update in VAERS that contains data through December 31, 2021, I have found 3,147 fetal deaths recorded following the COVID-19 shots into pregnant women, or into women of child-bearing age who became pregnant shortly after receiving one of the experimental COVID-19 injections (such as ectopic pregnancies). (Source.)
Using the under-reporting multiplier of 41X, the truer number of fetal deaths following COVID-19 injections becomes 129,027 fetal deaths.
Please note that these deaths would be in addition to the recorded deaths of people already born, which as of the December 31, 2021 VAERS data release is 21,382 (source).
Using the under-reporting multiplier of 41X, we have 876,662 deaths after the COVID-19 shots, and that is in addition to the 129,027 fetal deaths.
THAT’S OVER 1 MILLION DEATHS IN JUST THE FIRST YEAR OF THE COVID-19 “VACCINES”!
You don’t believe it? Just look around you at the so-called “supply chain” bottlenecks that are getting worse, not better, and understand that there is NOT a shortage of products, but a shortage of HUMAN LABOR!
Using the “apples to apples” analysis of the VAERS data, I performed the exact same search on the symptoms listed above for all FDA-approved vaccines in the database prior to December, 2020, which is the month the first two COVID-19 shots were issued emergency use authorization.
That search returned a value of 2,479 fetal deaths following ALL vaccines for the previous 31 years, or an average of about 80 fetal deaths per year. (Source.)
Fetal deaths following FDA-approved vaccines: 80 per year
Fetal deaths following experimental COVID-19 shots in first year: 3,147
That’s a 3,834% increase in fetal deaths, using just the government data reported in VAERS.
And if someone like myself just sitting at home behind a computer searching the U.S. Government’s VAERS database can see this, you can be sure that all the scientists and doctors who work for the government that also have access to this data see it too.
Here is a video report on this atrocity that we published in October last year.
Stop calling this a “conspiracy theory” and wake up!
This is population reduction planning. This is genocide. These are crimes against humanity.
THIS IS PURE EVIL!
God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well.
This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels.
He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power. (2 Thessalonians 1:6-9)
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Comments Off on Thousands of Miscarriages Following COVID-19 Injections Reported in VAERS Are Being Censored as an Entire Generation Is Being Sterilized
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Canada continues to creep into unventured territory with regards to the powers we’ve given our government in the last two years. What was a conspiracy theory only a few months ago is now becoming reality – the CBC and the Trudeau government are suddenly talking about forced vaccine policies.
The Trudeau government continues to demonize the unvaccinated and claim that the only way out of this pandemic is through vaccinations. But as hospitals fill up with vaccinated and unvaccinated Canadians, it’s clear this is no longer the pandemic of the unvaccinated.
As Candice Malcolm explains on The Candice Malcolm Show, this must be our red line. Every Canadian needs to push back against this insane and radically authoritarian idea.
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Collette Martin, a practicing nurse of seventeen years, spoke at a Louisiana Health & Welfare hearing earlier this month about what she has seen in the hospital system during the COVID pandemic.
As the vaccination train rolls on, tales of horrifying side effects continue to pile up. The mainstream media reports only on these cases in isolation, if at all, deliberately ignoring the wider pattern of serious blood clots directly linked to vaccination.
It’s looking increasingly likely that the US Federal Reserve and the globalist powers that be will use the dramatic rising of inflation as their excuse to bring down the US financial markets and with it, crash the greatest financial bubble in history.
For almost two years we have been experiencing the onslaughts of a brand new form of warring aggression. For all but a tiny percentage of the global population, we have become the targeted enemy. The we that is being attacked extends to most of the global population.
It is unnecessary to analyze the extent to which the tectonic rupture between the empire in which the sun never sets, Pax Britannica, and the arrival of Pax Americana has influenced the global geopolitical processes of the 20th century. An American global hegemony is an indisputable fact.
High-level international banking officials and organizations gathered last month for a global “war game” exercise simulating the collapse of the global financial system. The tabletop exercise was reminiscent of “Event 201,” the pandemic simulation exercise that took place just before COVID-19 entered the global scene.
Just for the record, the 1991 agreement between Europe and the new Russia, stipulated that there would be no new NATO bases further to the east (of Berlin), was never respected by the west. That’s why President Putin is drawing red lines, and rightly so.
Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs.
Pfizer is making headlines again after the CEO of the controversial company Albert Bourla made a recent statement about the efficiency of the COVID shot. He recently said in a video that’s all over Twitter that two shots of the covid vaccine offer limited protection against covid 19, “if any.”
Highly vaccinated nations such as Israel have all but proven this to be true as they continue to see record numbers of Covid deaths, cases and hospitalizations despite being the first country on Earth to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens.
“Impasse, Deadlock” says The Washington Post describing the outcome of the high-level U.S.-Russia talks Monday, with a tone of self-congratulation (we told you so), tinged with wishful thinking.
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The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) concludes that the full responsibility for the dangerous crisis unfolding in Ukraine has its genesis in the illegal policies of the U.S./EU/NATO “Axis of Domination” beginning in 2014. As the corporate press presents a one-sided presentation of event in Ukraine as part of a massive propaganda effort to mobilize public opinion to support the reckless positions of the Biden administration, BAP believes that the public must be presented with a counternarrative of the chronology of events in Ukraine. BAP National Organizer; Ajamu Baraka summarizes some of those events:
“During the latter part of 2013 until February 2014, the Obama/Biden administration gave material support and encouragement to anti-democratic right-wing elements in Ukraine to execute “regime change” against the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych. This plunged Ukraine into crisis because substantial sectors of Ukrainian society did not support the coup, especially sections of predominantly Russian speaking Ukrainian citizens in the Eastern portions of the nation. Those Ukrainian citizens rejected the legitimacy of the coup government and began to voice support for independence from the neo-Nazi government that took power. And what was the response from the illegal coup regime? It attacked their citizens in the East. In other words, they attacked their own citizens – a crime that the Obama administration pretended was the excuse for U.S. subversion in Syria. “
The conflict that ensued as a result of the invasion of Eastern Ukraine by the Ukrainian government with the full support of right-wing paramilitary forces like the neo-Nazi Azon battalions, did not succeed in forcing the republics that subsequently referred to themselves as the Donbas Peoples’ Republic to submit to the coup government. An agreement between Donbas and the coup government was arrived at that became known as the Minsk II agreement. Terms of the agreement included a commitment to a ceasefire along with relative autonomy for Donbas. The agreement avoided all-out war and provided some degree of “stability” until the Biden administration came back to power.
Back in power, Biden and the democrats who have now become the party of war, begin to encourage Ukraine authorities to ignore Minsk and to forcefully take back control of Donbas. Even more dangerously, the U.S. and some European powers began to indicate that Ukraine might be invited to become a member of NATO. That could allow NATO with its nuclear weapons to be positioned right on the borders of Russia and with its nuclear arsenal.
BAP regards NATO as an illegitimate offensive force in the service of Western imperialism. Therefore, we call on all social forces committed to peace to join us in demanding that NATO be dismantled. In the meantime, and specifically on Ukraine, BAP is calling on the international Anti-war movement to demand that the U.S. and NATO deescalate the situation. Concretely this means demanding that:
All parties to the conflict adhere to the provisions reflected in the Minsk II agreement
And that the Ukrainian situation is taken up by the United Nations Security Council, the only body by international law tasked with the responsibility to address international threats to peace – not the arbitrary and illegal activities of the United States and its allies.
The undermining of international law by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination committed to maintaining Western imperialist hegemony by operating outside the framework of international law, is now seen by much of the non-European world as the primary threat to international peace, security, and human rights.
BAP shares that assessment and pledges to continue to oppose U.S. policies, understanding that today as it was more than fifty years ago when Dr. King first uttered these words – “the U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
No Compromise, No Retreat!
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Kazakhstan is amid a political crisis today after the escalation of violent protests. It is very likely the situation was exploited by foreign actors in the manner of some of the so-called “velvet revolutions”of the last few years. Such turmoils often start with protests pertaining to legitimate issues – in Kazakhstan’s case, a rise in gas prices. Not much is talked, though, about how the issue of cryptocurrencies “mining” factors into this equation – this country became last year the world’s second-largest centre for such mining. In fact, Kazakhstan’s crisis also shows us the geopolitical and strategic importance of the digital currencies’ issue.
Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin being the most famous, are a kind of online digital currency and as such they are basically collections of binary data employed as a medium of exchange as a digital asset – that is, a fiat currency, generally speaking. The records about ownership of individual “coins”’ are stored in a digital database, and through certain transactions additional “coins” are created. Usually they are not issued by any central authority. The whole sector has raised concerns about money laundering, scams, taxation matters, and other issues, and so some regulations have been pushed by several governments especially in 2021.
In cryptocurrency networks, “mining” is the validation of transactions and also the very process by which new digital coins are created or “minted”, by updating new blocks of data to a blockchain (thereby serving the purpose of exchanging “labor” for payment). By doing so, “miners” get new cryptocoins as a reward, which decreases transaction fees and creates incentives. The labor however is performed by computers. This industry created a kind of arms race for cheaper and more efficient machines capable of running complex algorithms required for such difficult operations.
Cryptocurrency mining might appear to be a quite “abstract” issue, taking place under the sign of immateriality in the virtual or digital world but in fact it consumes large amounts of energy and thus indirectly impacts the environment and the natural resources, just like the traditional mining of minerals. It requires a lot of computer power, which means a lot of electricity – and more global emissions, for that matter, not to mention electronic waste due to the rapid obsolescence of the hardware needed.
The Chinese province of Sichuan was a major cryptocurrency mining hub, being home to several centers equipped with countless computer processors. This was so due to the large number of hydroelectric power plants there, which allow for cheaper electricity.
But things have changed. China, once a global hub for mining, quite unexpectedly banned Bitcoin mining in June 2021 and making all transactions illegal. As a result, the US became the leading ground for it. Kazakhstan embraced it, too, and cryptocurrency mining boom ensued. It grew so rapidly that already in October 2021 there were reports according to which the practice took its toll on the electricity levels in some towns. Most Kazakhstani energy is generated from fossil fuels, the country being home to coal mines which provide a cheap supply of energy.
It is not far-fetched at all to say that mega Bitcoin mining overloaded the country’s energy system and might have played a role in the current crisis. The internet shutdown during the turmoil, in its turn, has been a major blow to crypto miners: an estimated 15% of the global Bitcoin miners went offline, and Bitcoin dropped in trade below $43,000 (last Thursday) for the first time since September. This situation could generate a huge influx of crypto miners into the US and no one knows if that country can absorb it. There are concerns about bottlenecks, congestion, and host capacity, not to mention environmental concerns. So, it should become a hot topic. Meanwhile, it is about time further regulations are discussed regarding online currencies, and the internet, too.
The very topic of cryptocurrencies is part of the larger theme of digital currencies in general, including central bank (digital) currencies. These are centralized unlike most cryptocurrencies and thus allow for tax collection, the prevention of illicit activities, the avoidance of seigniorage income’s reduction plus many other advantages. Beijing may have banned Bitcoins, but it has also created its own digital currency, the cyber yuan, a kind of money that is not linked to the dollar-dominated financial system.
Different states are interested in controlling not only digital currencies, but the internet itself too, a related topic – and this is not necessarily a bad thing. The very history of the internet is intertwined with government agencies and it will always be so. Of course, the World Wide Web itself (the Internet) dates back to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which was established by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
In 2013, then Brazilian President Dilma Roussef wanted to route internet traffic away from Washington, in an attempt to counter American National Security Agency espionage: the bold plan involved creating an undersea fiber-optic cable system that would basically funnel all internet traffic between the South American continent and Europe, thereby bypassing entirely the US, but it did not follow through. So, in our age both the realm of digital currencies and the very realm of the internet become an arena for geopolitical dispute.
Regarding the latter, Russia for instance has already advanced towards such a goal with the development of its own (under construction) internal internet (national intranet) called RuNet, and so have other countries: much is talked about the Iranian National Information Network, the North Korean Kwangmyong network, and the so-called Chinese Great Firewall, but not so much is talked about Washington’s plans to create its own national quantum internet, as announced by the US Department of Energy, following the National Quantum Initiative Act, signed into law by then President Donald Trump in December 2018.
We live in an age of online piracy, espionage, child pornography, terrorism, hacker attacks, and sophisticated money laundering operations. In the same way the chaotic internet zone must eventually be circumscripted under the sign of law and order, digital currencies too eventually shall be further regulated. And the recent events in Kazakhstan have certainly brought attention to these themes.
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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.
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“Impasse, Deadlock” says The Washington Post describing the outcome of the high-level U.S.-Russia talks Monday, with a tone of self-congratulation (we told you so), tinged with wishful thinking.
Yes, wishful thinking. Given the very high stakes, the media is a huge part of the problem, since they keep millions in the dark about the real world and hinder progress toward reducing U.S.-Russian tensions. This should come as no surprise, since the corporate media are part – indeed the linchpin of – the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex that profiteers on war. The Post and other Establishment media are doing their level best – against growing odds – to be consistent.
Consistent: A more ‘charitable’ explanation for media misfeasance can be seen in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Emerson was writing about people who allow their ideas and opinions to be dictated by what they used to think. He noted that little minds are too afraid of change – even when contradictory data suggests a better, more accurate idea.
So, after Monday’s talks in Geneva, little minds at The Washington Post, for example, were happy to run this headline: Russia-U.S. talks hit impasse over NATO expansion, but Moscow says the situation is not ‘hopeless’. In my view, those little (and/or warmongering) minds miss the the significance of what just happened in Geneva. Here’s how the headline should have read: Geneva: Agreement to Discuss Where Missiles Can Be Emplaced.
As Emerson reminded us, hobgoblins don’t find it necessary to keep up on significant events. This is made still easier for U.S. media stenographers who, in normal circumstances, can rely on “The Memo” from Washington with the needed guidance. What has been abundantly clear since Dec. 25, 2021 is that “mainstream” corporate media have not been fed the guidance without which they simply do not know how to spin major stories.
They were at a loss, for example, to explain Moscow’s announcement on Dec. 25, that 10,000 Russian troops had been pulled back from areas near Ukraine. And editors who depend on credulousness among their readers/watchers apparently considered it too much of a stretch to take this one off the shelf: “There is always someone who doesn’t get the word” – this time 10,000 troops ended up going the wrong way for the ‘planned invasion’ of Ukraine.
The Dec. 30 Telephone Call
Then out of the blue came President Vladimir Putin’s urgent request for a telephone conversation with President Joe Biden. That took place on Dec. 30 and set the dates and – now we know – at least one highly important term of reference for the bilaterals yesterday in Geneva. On Dec. 30, one could only guess at the reasons behind Putin’s abrupt request, but those who took the trouble to look at the Kremlin’s immediate readout could figure it out without super-analytical skills:
[Excerpt]
On December 30, Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with President of the United States of America Joseph Biden. The conversation focused on the implementation of the agreement to launch negotiations on providing Russia with legally binding security guarantees, reached during their December 7 videoconference. … [at this point come a few standard, boilerplate sentences] … The presidents agreed to personally supervise these negotiating tracks, especially bilateral, with a focus on reaching results quickly. In this context, Joseph Biden emphasised that Russia and the US shared a special responsibility for ensuring stability in Europe and the whole world and that Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine. [Emphasis added.]
The media apparently did not get the customary guidance Memo on this, and so they ignored it. So did the pundits who feed only on mainstream media, even though Putin’s top adviser on these matters, Yuri Ushakov, immediately told the Russian media: “Biden made it clear that the US does not intend to deploy offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.”
Let It Be the US’s Idea: No Problem
According to The NY Times Monday afternoon, “The American side raised ideas about where US and Russian intermediate-range missiles are located, Ms. Sherman said, and the United States made clear that it is open to discussing “ways we can set reciprocal limits on the size and scope of military exercises and to improve transparency about those exercises.”
Earlier, we had suggested that the Biden promise to talk about locations for offensive missile emplacement was an opening “Quid” for the talks. It seems now that this turned out to be the case. In due course, one can expect a sizable Russian troop withdrawal from areas near Ukraine. (And, in all likelihood, this time corporate media will receive guidance as to how to play it.)
Wendy Sherman on the Outlook
US chief negotiator, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman gave remarks to reporters after the Monday talks: “If Russia stays at the table and takes concrete steps to de-escalate tensions, we believe we can achieve progress,” Sherman said. …Sherman also said the US told Russia that it is open to discussing the future of certain missile systems in Europe related to the former Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF).
Sherman added the US is ready to continue discussions on bilateral issues and said her Russian counterpart, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, agreed that “negotiations on complex topics like arms control cannot be completed in a matter of days or even weeks …”
Impasse, Deadlock? I don’t think so.
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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
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Again in 2021, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly passed 14 resolutions aimed at criticizing Israel (and supporting the Palestinians). On every resolution, only a handful of countries (among them the USA, Canada and a sprinkle of small Pacific island nations) stood with Israel. Some others abstained.
The assembly debates the SAME (or nearly the same) motions every year, and all of them denounce Israel’s repeated violations of UN General Assembly resolutions.
Example:
Condemning the settlements
Affirming Palestinian right to self determination
Rejecting Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem
Support for Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA)
Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the UN General Assembly has passed more resolutions criticizing Israel than ALL OTHER STATES COMBINED!!
WHY??
Palestinians: “Israeli human rights abuses are well documented”
For Palestinian activists and human rights supporters around the world, the answer is obvious.
Israeli human rights abuses of Palestinians are flagrant and well documented.
Reports from a wide range of organizations including the UN, the International Court of Justice, B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, leave no doubt that Israel’s actions deserve condemnation. Repeated reports from the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories have highlighted abuses in the West Bank, in Jerusalem and in Gaza. Even Israeli organizations like the Association for Human Rights in Israel (ACRI) and Breaking the Silence are critical of Israeli actions. So it’s not surprising that the UN is vocal in its condemnation.
Israelis: “This is Israel bashing. Why only Israel?”
Israel’s defenders are indignant. “Why so much focus on Israel when there are many other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere whose human rights abuses are at least as bad as those in the West Bank?”, they ask. ”Surely Saudi Arabia’s public floggings and beheadings, Egypt’s feared prisons and Jordan’s secret police deserve as much criticism as Israel.”
Furthermore, point out Israel’s supporters, many of the countries voting against Israel are themselves serial human rights offenders. So why the double standard?
The underlying suspicion of course, sometimes stated, sometimes only hinted at, is that the UN applies a double standard, perhaps revealing an underlying antisemitism.
UN Resolution in December 2021, on “UNRWA”. All of Israel’s New “Abraham Accord” Partners Voted to Support UNRWA over Israeli Objections. Only 4 Countries Supported Israel. Source: UN Watch
Yet there are reasons for the special focus. Let’s explore them.
The global south: “It’s European colonialism”
There are 193 member states in the United Nations. Three quarters of them were still colonies in 1947 when the decision was made to give part of Palestine to European Jewish refugees to form a state of their own. The global south does not feel any responsibility for the Holocaust, nor does it share the European guilt. The UN General Assembly is the biggest forum where the global south gets to present its anti-colonial case to the world. It sees Israel as a prime case of European colonialism and feels justified in opposing it.
The UN perspective is clear: “Israel has obligations to the UN and the UN has obligations to the inhabitants of former Palestine”.
As the UN General Assembly stated a year ago:
“The United Nations has a permanent responsibility towards the question of Palestine until the question is resolved in all its aspects in a satisfactory manner in accordance with international legitimacy.”
Israel has a unique relationship to the UN. UN General Assembly resolution 181 of 1947 proposed carving a new Jewish state out of historic Palestine. It was passed by 33-13, with 10 abstentions. Israel quickly embraced UN resolution 181. Its own Declaration of Independence cites UN 181 as recognition of its right to exist.
While “awarding” 55% historic Palestine to the new Jewish State, resolution 181 also included provisions for the protection of minorities inside each of the two new states. These included:
“No discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants on the ground of race, religion, language or sex.”
“All persons within the jurisdiction of the State shall be entitled to equal protection of the laws.”
“No expropriation of land owned by an Arab in the Jewish State (or by a Jew in the Arab State) shall be allowed except for public purposes.”
But it rapidly became clear to the international community that Zionist forces had no intention of respecting many of UN’s provisions. In fact, by its Independence Day on May 14, 1948, Zionist militias had already seized more land than had been allotted under the UN plan and had driven out over 350,000 Palestinians.
The UN General Assembly responded by voting through another resolution (194) in December 1948 affirming that those refugees have the right to return and to compensation. (The vote was 35-15 with 8 abstentions.)
When Israel sought membership in the UN a few months later, it promised to respect all relevant UN resolutions. The UN was divided on whether Israel should in fact be admitted, but US and European domination of the UN awarded Israel UN membership.
But while Israel adopted the part of the UN proposal giving it a Jewish state, Israel defied the UN proposal in that it:
Seized much more land than proposed in the partition plan (78% vs. 55% of historic Palestine)
Took over Jaffa and seized West Jerusalem
Expelled over 750,000 Palestinians
Confiscated their property
Destroyed over 400 villages
Prevented refugees from returning
Restricted the civil rights of the Palestinians who remained in Israel
As former General Secretary Kofi Annan said in remarks after leaving the UN in 2006, Israel’s defiance of UN provisions is a painful and festering sore for the UN.
“The failure to achieve an Arab-Israeli peace remains for the UN a deep internal wound as old as the organization itself, (…) a painful and festering sore consequently felt in almost every intergovernmental organ and Secretariat body.”
“No other issue carries such a powerful symbolic and emotional charge affecting people far from the zone of conflict.”
(Kofi Annan, Interventions (2011), p. 254)
Conclusion: both principle and posturing
The repeated UNGA votes condemning Israel and supporting the Palestinians are not based on the claim that Israel is the worst abuser of human rights in the world. There are others that are just as bad or perhaps worse.
Nor is it because the whole world is antisemitic. Many of the countries which vote to support Palestinian rights have never had any significant Jewish communities.
The fundamental reason is that Israel, a UN member, continues to ignore the commitments it made to the UN when it was admitted in 1949 and repeated UN warnings about the occupation of 1967.
But there is also a significant element of political posturing. The annual spate of UN resolutions on “The Question of Palestine” gives the global south a forum for brandishing their opposition to the effects of European colonialism. Even some rather reactionary regimes, like Saudi Arabia and the other Abrahamic Accord states, voted to support the Palestinians in the UNGA resolutions.
Politics is often a mixture of principle and posturing. But if Israel continues to ignore UN resolutions, it can expect mounting frustration in the international community and a continuation of world criticism every year at the UNGA.
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Peter Larson is Chair of the Ottawa Forum on Israel/Palestine. He blogs regularly at www.CanadatalksIsraelPalestine.ca
Featured image: The U.N. General Assembly Votes on the Partition Resolution in 1947. Public Domain. (Posted by The Center For The Humanities.)
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In a recent interview, a former CIA agent reported that his country is opening a military base in Albania in order to contain China. A unit of American special forces in the Balkan country has as its main objective to stop any form of rapprochement between Tirana and Beijing, turning Albania into a mere regional satellite of Washington’s interests.
Last Friday, the US European Command (better known by the acronym, EUCOM) announced that it was establishing a new headquarters in the Balkans – a special operations unit based in Albania, which would form part of an overall US government effort to increase the capacity of Western forces to guarantee stability in that region, commonly strained by various conflicts with historical roots. The unit would be responsible for ensuring the interoperability between US and Albanian forces, as well as the strategic access to key Balkan military centers.
Commenting on the case during an interview with Sputnik, former CIA agent Ray McGovern stated that the US government decided to open a military base in the region “because they [the US] just learned that Albania is a tight ally of the Chinese Communists”. In this sense, the purpose of this new unity would be to undermine Chinese influence in the region and prevent the rapprochement between Tirana and Beijing, with little or no real interest on the part of Washington in guaranteeing stability and peace for the Balkans.
Analyzing the recent history of cooperation between China and Albania, it is really possible to see a significant increase in bilateral partnership. In a recent report by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (a pro-Western Balkan NGO), were identified at least 135 cooperation projects between China and Albania whose value exceeds US$36 million. The projects work in the most diverse areas, including high technology, computing, metallurgy, mining, energy, transport, infrastructure, security, among others. One of the projects that most dislikes the West is cooperation in technology with Huawei, a Chinese company that has been the target of conspiracy theories and fake news promoted by Washington, which accuses it of spying and stealing data in favor of Beijing.
In addition to economic cooperation, Beijing and Tirana have also expanded cultural cooperation ties, with an increase in mutual educational and scientific projects. Indeed, cultural and scientific cooperation is a key element of Chinese diplomacy, with Beijing trying to communicate with other states through the exchange of knowledge and academic professionals – and this is no different in the current Albanian case. In the same sense, it should be mentioned that the Chinese government also invests heavily in health diplomacy with the Balkan country, sending vaccines and medical equipment at low cost, which has been fundamental for Albania to deal with the new coronavirus pandemic.
All these measures are no surprise considering the Chinese project to create a global development platform for emerging nations. The search for acquiring new partners among emerging states has already become a central aspect of Chinese foreign policy, boosting cooperation projects within the scope of the Belt and Road Initiative. China is not doing any “kindness” or “charity” with this type of attitude, but a real investment: for Beijing, it is profitable that as many emerging countries as possible develop, integrating the BRI, so that in the future China can reduce part of its industrial production (fulfilling its ecological goals) and take advantage of foreign goods that will arrive in the country through the platform.
In October, Albanian President Ilir Meta and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met at an important summit in which they emphasized the great potential of bilateral cooperation and agreed to boost international trade, with the aim of integrating Albania more and more to the BRI. It is clear that these ties have increased even more in the last three months due to this summit’s results – and this is precisely what worries Washington: the arrival of the BRI in the Balkans.
Faced with this scenario, the American attitude seems simple: to inaugurate a special forces unit in Albania in order to intimidate the Albanian government to abdicate its ties with the Asian country. The US appears to act hurriedly and is unwilling to deal with any signs of growing Chinese influence, responding at the military level to a peaceful partnership. Washington seems determined to make Tirana to conform to a role of regional satellite of American interests.
On the one hand, the American attitude seems even irrational, as it is not common for a country to open a military base abroad just to undermine economic cooperation between two other states. On the other hand, this is consistent with recent US incursions against China. Washington seems desperate to stop Chinese growth in any way possible. And for that, it is willing even to extreme attitudes like this.
In this scenario, for China, nothing changes. The Chinese international attitude usually ignores political and military factors, focusing on economic cooperation. Beijing will continue to try to integrate Tirana into the BRI and it will be up to the Albanian government to decide whether to accept foreign impositions or limit American attitudes and ensure the fulfillment of its own national strategic interests.
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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Science sat the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
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First published on Global Research on January 1st, 2022
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Collette Martin, a practicing nurse of seventeen years, spoke at a Louisiana Health & Welfare hearing earlier this month about what she has seen in the hospital system during the COVID pandemic.
Collette says she and her colleagues have witnessed “terrifying” reactions to the COVID shots, but their concerns about the vaccines are being ignored and dismissed.
Collete went on to say that vaccine-injury report databases like VAERS are so little used that most doctors and nurses don’t even know that it exists, let alone how to file a report.
“The Majority of our nurses, nurse managers, and some doctors do not even know what VAERS is. I’ve spoken to our chief medicine managers and other nurses on why we’re not reporting to VAERS, and the most common response is: ‘What is VAERS?‘.”
As if this were not bad enough already, she then said that none of the hospitals are reporting any data, meaning that even if someone was investigating, there would be no data to investigate.
“This is not just where I work. I know many nurses, friends and other local hospitals in Southeast Louisiana that say the same thing.”
However, what she says about the potential long-term effects of the jabs is shocking.
“We are not just seeing severe acute [short term] reactions with this vaccine, but we have zero idea what any long term reactions are. Cancers, autoimmune [disorders], infertility. We just don’t know.
We are potentially sacrificing our children for fear of maybe dying, getting sick of a virus, a virus with a 99% survival rate.”
Collete concludes by saying that these vaccine side-effects are being covered up as being caused by the new variant.
“As of now, we have more children that died from the COVID vaccine than COVID itself. And then for the Health Department to come out and say the new variant has all the side effects of the vaccine reactions we’re currently seeing now.
It’s maddening, and I don’t understand why more people don’t see it. I think they do, but they fear speaking out and, even worse, being fired.”
Watch her full testimony here:
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The US went into overdrive in propagating against the short Russian-led peacekeeping operation in Kazakhstan under the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) mechanism. The Wall Street Journal speculated whether “the Crisis in Kazakhstan [was] the Rebirth of the Soviet Union” and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday that “one lesson of recent history is that once Russians are in your house, it’s sometimes very difficult to get them to leave.”
Blinken’s statement ended up being humiliated in yesterday’s announcement by Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev that the CSTO troop pull-out would begin on Thursday. As a whole, the withdrawal will take less than two weeks since the peacekeepers already restored order in the Central Asian country in a swift manner.
In a tit-for-tat, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on its Telegram social media channel that
“If Antony Blinken loves history lessons so much, then he should take the following into account: when Americans are in your house, it can be difficult to stay alive and not be robbed or raped.”
It is recalled that the new year began in Kazakhstan with protests over rising LPG prices, leading to a dissolved government, destruction of infrastructure and 164 people reportedly killed, including one police officer that was beheaded. Stability and peace were only restored in Kazakhstan when CSTO finally intervened. The mission was so successful that it achieved its aims in only a few days and is already being decommissioned.
Despite the success of the intervention and Blinken still obviously angered by the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Saturday statement, he said on Sunday that the US has “real questions [to Kazakhstan] about why they felt compelled to call this organization that Russia dominates.” He added that “[Kazakhstan] should be able to deal with the protests peacefully. We’re asking for clarification on that.”
This is of course hypocritical considering that Kazakhstan called upon a bloc for assistance in which it is a member of and does not need to respond to the condescending demands made by the US’ top diplomat. Blinken’s statement reeks of contradictions when we consider how the US is conducting missions and occupying areas of Syria without permission from Damascus, invaded Iraq and Afghanistan without a UN mandate, and has troops deployed in Taiwan – an island that Beijing considers a “rebel province” and is recognized as a part of “One China.”
Rather, Washington attempted to piggyback off the unrest in Kazakhstan as the North American country wields very little influence in the region, especially after last year’s troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. In this way, the US could only resort to cheap propaganda tricks as there is not much they can do on the ground to force a Color Revolution in Central Asia like they did in Eastern Europe and the southern Caucasus.
Despite the misinformation emanating from the US to demonize Russia and CSTO, Kazakh authorities announced on Wednesday that 1,678 people were detained in the past 24 hours over their alleged participation in the violence that rocked the country, the worst since Kazakhstan gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The additional 1,678 people being detained now brings the total number to about 12,000. More than 300 criminal investigations into mass unrest and assaults on law enforcement officers, including a brutal beheading, have been opened.
There is little doubt that the US would have preferred to see widespread chaos in Kazakhstan continue, especially as it would open a new pressure point on a large swathe of Russia’s border. Kazakhstan is also Russia’s main access point to the Central Asian states of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. By removing a Russia-friendly government, the US would block Russia from reaching the resources and markets of Central Asia.
The US believed that the crisis in Kazakhstan would be an opportunity to overthrow a Russia-friendly government and install a liberal government that would be friendly to the West, or an Islamist Emirate like Afghanistan that would be a constant source of terrorism and instability for Russia. As said though, the US wields no real influence in Central Asia, and for this reason, it is left red-faced after audaciously predicting “a return of the Soviet Union” and that “Russian troops will never leave”.
This ultimately turned out to be false.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
It’s looking increasingly likely that the US Federal Reserve and the globalist powers that be will use the dramatic rising of inflation as their excuse to bring down the US financial markets and with it, crash the greatest financial bubble in history.
The enormous inflation rise since the malicious political lockdowns and the trillions of dollars in emergency spending by both Trump and Biden, coupled with the continuation of the Fed’s unprecedented near-zero interest rate policies and asset purchases of billions in bonds to keep the bubble inflated a bit longer– have set the stage for an imminent market collapse. Unlike what we are told, it is deliberate and managed.
Supply chain disruptions from Asia to normal truck transport across North America are feeding the worst inflation in four decades in the USA. The stage is set for the central banks to bring down the debt-bloated system and prepare their Great Reset of the world financial system. However this is not an issue of inflation as some mysterious or “temporary” process.
The context is key. The decision to crash the financial system is being prepared amid the far-reaching global pandemic measures that have devastated the world economy since early 2020.It is coming as the NATO powers, led by the Biden Administration, are tipping the world into a potential World War by miscalculation. They are pouring arms and advisers into Ukraine provoking a response by Russia.
They are escalating pressures on China over Taiwan, and waging proxy wars against China in Ethiopia and Horn of Africa and countless other locations.
The looming collapse of the dollar system, which will bring down most of the world with it owing to debt ties, will come as the major industrial nations go fully into economic self-destruction via their so-called Green New Deal in the EU, and USA and beyond.
The ludicrous Zero Carbon policies to phase out coal, oil, gas and even nuclear have already brought the EU electric grid to the brink of major power blackouts this winter as dependency on unreliable wind and solar make up a major part of the grid. On December 31, the “green” new German government oversees the forced closing of three nuclear power plants that generate the electricity equivalent of the entire country of Denmark. Wind and solar can in no way fill the gaps. In the USA Biden’s misnamed Build Back Better policies have driven fuel coats to record highs. To raise interest rates in this conjuncture will devastate the entire world, which seems to be precisely the plan.
The Fake US Inflation Data
Ever since the early 1970s when President Nixon asked his pal, Arthur Burns, then head of the Federal Reserve, to find a way to get rid of politically damaging consumer inflation monthly data that reflected soaring oil prices along with grain, the Fed has used what they called “core inflation” which means consumer price rises MINUS energy and food. At the time energy made up a significant 11% of inflation data. Food had a weight of 25%. Presto by 1975 a 400% OPEC rise in oil prices and a 300% global grain price rise owing to harvest failures in the Soviet region, “core inflation” fell significantly. This, despite the fact that American consumers had to pay far more for gasoline and bread. Very few real people can live without energy or food. Core inflation is a scam.
By 1975 the Burns Fed had eliminated major costs of housing and other factors leaving a Consumer Price Index that was a mere 35% of the original basket of commodities measured. By then real everyday inflation was out of control. In the real world, USA gasoline today is 58 percent more expensive than in 2020 and over the last 12 months, food prices have gone up by more than 6 percent on average. Today the US Consumer Price Index does not include the cost buying and financing houses, and also not of property taxes or home maintenance and improvement. These factors have been soaring across America in the past year. Now all that is lacking is a statement by the Fed that inflation is more alarming than they thought and required aggressive rate hikes to “squeeze inflation out of the system,” a common central bank myth made dogma under Paul Volcker in the 1970s.
The Bloated US Stock Market
Wall Street markets, today with stocks at historic bloated highs, aided by near zero Fed rates and $120 billion of monthly purchases by the Fed of bonds as well, are at a point where a policy reverse by the Fed, expected now in early 2022, could begin a panic exit from stocks to “get out while the getting is good.” That in turn will likely trigger panic selling and a snowballing market collapse that will make the recent China Evergrande real estate and stock collapse look like nothing at all.
Since the global financial crisis of September 2008, the Federal Reserve and other major central banks such as the ECB in the EU and Bank of Japan have pursued unprecedented zero interest rates and often “quantitative easing” purchases of bonds to bail out the major financial institutions and Wall Street and EU banks. It had little to do with the health of the real economy. It was about the largest bailout in history of brain dead banks and financial funds. The predictable result of the Fed and other central banks’ unprecedented policies has been the artificial inflation of the greatest speculative bubble in stocks in history.
As President, Donald Trump constantly pointed to new record rises in the S&P 500 stocks as proof of the booming economy, even though as a savvy businessman he knew it was a lie. It was rising because of the Fed zero interest rate policy. Companies were borrowing at low rates not to expand plant and equipment investment so much as to buy back their own stocks from the market. That had the effect of boosting stocks in companies from Microsoft to Dell to Amazon, Pfizer, Tesla and hundreds of others. It was a manipulation that corporate executives, owning millions of their own company shares as options, loved. They made billions in some cases, while creating no real value in the economy or the economy.
How big is today’s US stock market bubble? In October 2008 just after the Lehman crisis, US stocks were listed at a total of $13 trillion capitalization. Today it is over $50 trillion, an increase of almost 400% and more than double the total US GDP. Apple Corp. alone is $3 trillion.
Yet with massive labor shortages, lockdowns across America and huge disruptions to trade supply chains especially from China, the economy is sinking and Biden’s phony “infrastructure” bill will do little to rebuild the vital economic infrastructure of highways, rains, water treatment plants and electric grids. For millions of Americans after the 2008 housing collapse, buying stocks has been their best hope for retirement income. A stock crash in 2022 is being prepared by the Fed, only this time it will be used to usher in a real Great Depression worse than the 1930’s as tens of millions or ordinary Americans see their life savings wiped out.
Stock Buyback Game
Over the past four quarters, S&P 500 companies bought back $742 billion of their own shares. Q4 of 2021 will likely see a record increase in that number as companies rush to pump their shares ahead of a reported Biden tax on corporate stock buybacks. Since the beginning of 2012, the S&P 500 companies have bought back nearly $5.68 trillion of their own shares. This is no small beer. The dynamic is so insane that amid a Microsoft decision last month to buy back ever more shares, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dumped over 50% of his Microsoft stock in one day. But the stock barely budged because Microsoft itself was busy buying back shares. That indicates the level of unreality in today’s US market. The insiders know it’s about to crash. Tesla’s Elon Musk just sold $10 billion of his stock, allegedly to pay taxes.
Making the stock market even more vulnerable to a panic selloff once it is clear the Fed will raise interest rates, there is nearly $1 trillion in margin debt as of data from October, debt for those buying stocks on borrowed money from their brokers. Once a major market selloff begins, likely early in 2022, brokers will demand repayment of their margin debt, so-called margin calls. That in turn will accelerate the forced selling to raise the cash calls.
Taper?
There is much discussion about when the Fed will reduce its buying of US Treasury securities as well as government-linked home mortgage bonds. That buying has been huge. Since the start of the covid pandemic hysteria in February 2020, total Federal Reserve holdings of such securities have more than doubled from $3.8 trillion to $8 trillion as of end of October 2021. That has kept home mortgage rates artificially low and fueled panic home buying as citizens realize the low rates are about to end. That the Fed calls “taper”, reducing the monthly buying of bonds to zero at the same time it raises key interest rates, a double whammy. This is huge, and blood will flow from Wall Street beginning 2022 when the Fed taper picks up momentum early in 2022 combined with raising rates.
Already in November the Fed began reducing its monthly market supporting buying. “In light of the substantial further progress the economy has made toward the Committee’s goals of maximum employment and price stability,” the FOMC declared in its recent minutes. It announced that it is decreasing the amount of Treasury and Mortgage backed securities purchases in November and December.
Since the Vietnam War era under President Lyndon Johnson, the US Government has manipulated employment data as well as inflation numbers to give a far better picture than exists. Private economist John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics, estimates that actual USA unemployment far from the reported 4.2% for November, is actually over 24.8%. As Williams further notes, “The Inflation Surge Reflects Extreme Money Supply Creation, Extreme Federal Deficit Spending and Federal Debt Expansion, Pandemic Disruptions and Supply Shortages; It Does Not Reflect an Overheating Economy.” Federal Budget Deficits are running a record $3 trillion a year with no end in sight.
Raising rates at this precarious juncture will bring down the fragile US and global financial system, paving the way for a crisis where citizens might beg for emergency relief in the form of digital money and a Great Reset. It is worth noting that every major US stock market crash since October 1929 including 2007-8, has been a result of deliberate Fed actions, disguised under the claims of “containing inflation.”
This time the damage could be epochal. In September the Washington-based Institute of International Finance estimated that global debt levels, which include government, household and corporate and bank debt, rose $4.8 trillion to $296 trillion at the end of June, $36 trillion above pre-pandemic levels. Fully $92 trillion of that is owed by emerging markets such as Turkey, China, India and Pakistan.
Rising interest rates will trigger default crises across the globe as borrowers are unable to repay. This has been deliberately created by central banks, led by the Fed, since their 2008 crisis by pushing interest rates to zero or even negative.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
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“The truth of the matter is that the end of the American era had come much earlier.” – Francis Fukuyama, Тhe Economist, Nov.8, 2021
History: Truman 1947. Pax Britannica is Dead! Long Live Pax Americana!
On March 12th 1947, the 33rd President of the United States, Harry Truman, delivered a live speech to the United States Congress announcing $400 million in financial assistance to the governments of Turkey and Greece.
How did this prosaic speech, in of itself, turn out to be the most important defining geopolitical trajectory of the 20th century? Truman states three fundamental sentences:
Quote – “Great Britain finds itself under the necessity of reducing or liquidating its commitments in several parts of the world, including Greece.”
At this moment, the USA is the only country capable of providing financial aid: Quote – “There is no other country to which democratic Greece can turn”.
From this moment on, US foreign policy has been radically transformed: Quote – “The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world — and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation”.
What was Truman trying to convey using this diplomatic, yet unambiguously firm tone and language?
In French royal court lexicon, his words may sound akin to: Le Roi est mort! Vive le Roi!
Truman’s 1947 speech has one essential message: Pax Britannica is dead!Long Live Pax Americana!
It is unnecessary to analyze the extent to which the tectonic rupture between the empire in which the sun never sets, Pax Britannica, and the arrival of Pax Americana has influenced the global geopolitical processes of the 20th century. An American global hegemony is an indisputable fact.
December 17, 2021
But let’s go back to December 17th, 2021. Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs published two documents that, I would say, have the same geopolitical significance for the current 21st century.
In a very direct tone, to put it bluntly, Russia has issued an ‘ultimatum’ (despite Putin rejecting such formulation) to the United States and NATO: if you do not accept our terms, we will be forced to use military and military-technical means.
Obviously, it is not customary to speak of a hegemon, even more so of the global hegemon, who after the collapse of the USSR triumphantly declared not only the planet ‘American’, the so-called unipolar world, but also the 21st century the “American Century”, based on the famous doctrine of the “New American Century Project”.
What, actually happened on December 17th 2021?
In the same way that the end of the British Empire was announced to the world, on that date the end of American hegemony was publicly announced.
Russia’s proposals in these two documents are numerous, but in summary, the main pitches are as follows:
Retraction of the 2008 NATO Invitation to Ukraine and Georgia.
Legally binding guarantee that no strike systems which could target Moscow will be deployed in countries next to Russia.
No NATO or equivalent (UK, U.S., Pl.) ‘exercises’ near Russian borders.
NATO ships, planes to keep certain distances from Russian borders.
Regular military-to-military
Please note:
Withdrawal of US and NATO military contingents and bases from Central and Eastern Europe, maintaining military parity since 1997, before Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria are accepted as members of NATO.
Despite the inevitable shock in Washington and NATO to the tone of Russia’s peace proposals, this time Russia has decided to cross the Rubicon and dictate its terms to the collective West – and has done so from a position of strength.
Translated into lay terms, the meaning of this ultimatum is: meet “the new sheriff in town” either in a peaceful way, by meeting with Foreign Minister Mr. Lavrov, or in the painful way, as has already been expressed figuratively and unequivocally by an influential foreign policy analyst, by “meeting with Mr. Iskander, Mr. Caliber, Mr. Kinjal and Mr. Zircon”.
Is such a threat exaggerated?
The answer is probably not!
According to the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and First Deputy Minister of Defense General Valery Gerasimov, warned that the confrontation will not be verbal which sentiment was echoed by the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko who bluntly said on Solovyov Live YouTube channel. “The moment of truth has come“
Such a tone would be completely unthinkable for Washington if we exclude the time of the 1962 Caribbean crisis, much less coming from a “gas station”, as the late Senator John McCain, described Russia. But this time, it seems, Washington is willing to negotiate.
Why?
Let us recall the categorical statement of the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexander Grushko:
“We only make it clear that we are ready to talk about the transition from a military or military-technical scenario to a political process that will strengthen security in all countries. The OSCE area, the Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian regions.If that doesn’t work, we’ve signaled to them [NATO] that we’ll move on to creating counter-threats as well, but then it will be too late to ask us why we made these decisions and why we deployed these systems.“
The possibility of a new deployment of weapons systems, including hypersonic weapons, threatening the United States not only from Russia but also from Belarus, the Arctic, the Atlantic (including the Gulf of Mexico) and the Pacific would force the United States to seriously rethink these proposals. Why? One possible explanation… is the insufficiency of 5 minutes required to destroy strategic sites on US territory, including Washington, given the speed of the new Russian hypersonic attack systems: Zircon – Mach 9 (9,800-11,025 km / h or 3 km per second) and the Avangard 20-27 Mach (30,000 km / h or 8.5 km per second).
It should be noted that the new generation of hypersonic systems does not address the sole challenge of the new geopolitical reality that Washington should address at this time.
The China-Russia Alliance: “Rock Solid”
In addition, there is one particularly significant, unavoidable factor, which should not be ignored – China. Days before the publication of Russia’s ultimatums, Chinese President Xi Zing Ping described relations with Russia using a particularly enigmatic diplomatic lexicon: “We (understand) (Russia and China) are much more than allies“.
Whatever truly lies behind this statement, the Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijiang of China described relations between the two countries as “rock solid”.
In this sense, the United States will have to respond to the Russian ultimatum given the Moscow-Beijing axis – i.e. the absolute nightmare of the parent of modern geopolitics Halford Mackinder, according to whom the only obstacle to global hegemony of the “collective West” is the creation of a union of two major Eurasian colossus – Russia and China.
It remains to be seen how the United States will accept this new geopolitical reality.
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Prof. Ivalyo Grouev is a prominent author and geopolitical analyst, teaches political science at the University of Ottawa.
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Here are the latest COVID trends, following on from the COVID trends summarized in August,September, October, November and December last year in 2021. The news is a mix of good and bad, with COVID tyranny continuing but with more and more truth coming to light. Although some US courts are ruling in pro-freedom ways, the current mentality of some US Supreme Court judges leaves a lot to be desired. This month’s report features some of the deeper aspects of the NWO (New World Order) COVID operation: depopulation and microchipping. Here are the 13 current COVID trends as of January 2022.
COVID Trend #1: Depopulation Becomes Apparent? Life Insurance CEO says Mortality Rates for Working Age People Increased by 40%
In yet another moment when conspiracy theory became conspiracy fact (as been happening all the time since the COVID scamdemic began), people were shocked to learn that the mathematics is showing the reality of the depopulation agenda. After all, insurance companies are in the business of accurate mortality data. The CEO of OneAmerica, Scott Davison, announced that death rates for people aged 18-64 had increased by 40%:
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica … The data is consistent across every player in that business … Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic. So 40% is just unheard of.”
OneAmerica is not a small player in the life insurance industry. It brings in about 2 billion dollars in revenue annually and it has been around for more than 140 years:
“OneAmerica is a major insurance company located in Indianapolis with annual revenue of around $2 billion and total assets of around $74 billion. This is not a fly-by-night internet “insurance” company. OneAmerica is the real deal, selling both individual and group life insurance, and it has data and actuarial tables that go back 145 years.”
The first-linked article actually states that “most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths” which lets the cat out of the bag.
This echoes the predictions of doctors like Dr. Michael Yeadon and Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi who stated that the COVID vax would result in genocide or mass murder. Of course, the NWO (New World Order) controllers and architects of the scamdemic would have wargamed and simulated this scenario out.
They would have known very well this would happen.
They would have known that this scenario of mass death would eventuate, and they would have also known that many of these deaths would be attributed to different causes, thereby sparing the COVID fake-vaccine from blame. If someone gets a stroke from the COVID vax while driving and then crashes the car, it would be a traffic fatality. If someone loses their balance and falls off a ladder or down the stairs to die of head injuries, the vax would escape liability. If an athlete dies unexpectedly on the pitch or court, it could be chalked up to something else.
This entire sad and shocking scenario, unfolding right before our eyes, had been baked into the cake. Just how far it will go is still anyone’s guess. However, depopulation is only one of the agendas here, and I would suggest that the transhumanist agenda, i.e. the agenda to make a slave class of machine-like and controllable citizens, is a more prominent motivator for the NWO criminals than the desire to kill everyone. I would suggest that, to the NWO, those who don’t survive the clot shot and the transforming of their genes are more like collateral damage, eugenic weaklings, useless eaters and/or cannon fodder for the ultimate agenda.
COVID Trend #2: Company is Already Selling a COVID Passport Microchip
“This technology exists and is used whether we like it or not.
I am happy that it is brought into the public conversation.
New technologies must be broadly debated and understood.
Smart implants are a powerful health technology.
That is what we are building at Dsruptive and our goal is to transform healthcare on a global scale.”
Sjobald said the technology makes the vaccine passports more “accessible.”
“This means it is always accessible for me or for anyone else, really, who wants to read me.
For example, if I go to the movies or go to a shopping center, then people will be able to check my status even if I don’t have my phone.”
Sweden seems to have been chosen as the place to first roll out human microchipping agenda. The fact that the COVID agenda has helped advance this more sinister, longstanding agenda is highly disturbing. This underscores the gravity of the situation humanity is in as 2022 begins and people worldwide fight for their rights and freedom.
COVID Trend #3: Some Nations Roll Out Digital Tech Combining State ID, Driver’s License and COVID Vaccine Status
The microchip or nanochip is the end goal, but there are stepping stones along the way. The COVID plandemic has always just been the vehicle for the NWO technocrats to push forward their deeper agendas. Chief among these is the all-encompassing social credit system with one system or form of ID that tells officials everything about you, including your so-called health status (not that these sociopaths have any idea what true health is). This article reveals that Greece is poised to introduce a full mobile version of its digital ID/driver’s license. This COVID trend is occurring worldwide.
COVID Trend #4: Numerous US Federal Officials Make Stunning Admissions that Contradict the Official Narrative
As the new year starts, some federal officials have made some surprising and embarrassing admissions which contradict the official narrative. Teleprompter-in-chief Joe Biden admitted that there was no federal solution to COVID, thus confirming the limitation of the US Federal Government to try to force things like vaccine mandates onto Americans.
Vaccine pusher-in-chief Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that the mandates were just a mechanism to get more people vaccinated. Another vaccine pusher, CDC director Rochelle Walensky, admitted that the reason the CDC recently changed the quarantine period from 10 days to 5 days was that they thought people would tolerate it more. Hmmm … weren’t all these measures supposed to be based on science, not how much tyranny people would endure? Walensky also admitted that 75% of COVID deaths occurred in people with at least 4 comorbidities. Did you catch that? Talk about letting the cat out of the bag.
The CDC also just admitted that PCR positive results could last up to 12 weeks, way after supposed infection. The PCR technique was the standard used by governments worldwide to declare an emergency and a pandemic. It also led of course to the phenomenon of the casedemic. With the CDC now in 2022 withdrawing its request (to the FDA) for an EUA (Emergency Use Authorization) for the COVID PCR “test,”this essentially means the CDC is no longer endorsing the validity of the PCR technique as a legitimate COVID diagnostic tool. Based on this, it may be possible for more lawsuits pushing back against the tyranny to be successful. Patrick Wood writes:
“So, the CDC is pulling the experimental RT-PCR test while telling clinicians to find “authorized COVID-19 diagnostic methods” instead.You don’t need to be a PhD, MD or epidemiologist with a peer-reviewed study to figure this out. In fact, you don’t need any medical expertise whatsoever.
An unapproved experimental testing diagnostic was used to trick people into taking unapproved experimental mRNA injections.”
COVID Trend #5: Authorities Intensify their Vitriol against the Unvaxxed
Another noticeable COVID trend of late has been the increasing tendency of those in power to dehumanize the unvaccinated – a trend I warned about in my February 2021 article The COVID Cult and the 10 Stages of Genocide. In that article, I discussed how a group of people could gradually be made the enemy of the state through isolation, discrimination, dehumanization and (eventual) murder. The rhetoric of 2 politicals leaders – French President Macron and Canadian PM Trudeau – is extremely disturbing, as is that of a German police officer.
Macron recently said that he really wants to piss the unvaccinated off and make life difficult for them. He actually said that “when my freedom threatens that of others, I become irresponsible. An irresponsible person is no longer a citizen,” which could imply that he thinks governments should regard the unvaccinated as non-citizens, or that he proposes stripping people of citizenship if they refuse to comply with vaccine mandates. Trudeau asked whether the unvaccinated should be tolerated. In Germany, a police officer called unvaccinated people indirect killers and said they were not human! This kind of rhetoric is not simply judgemental and aggressive; it is indicative of a mass hypnosis and psychosis I discussed in previous articles.
COVID Trend #6: Freudian Slips – Authorities Get a Little Too Honest
Those paying close attention to the words of our misleaders can sometimes find some startling admissions. The most recent egregious example was WHO head Tedros who admitted that “it’s better to focus on those groups who have risk of severe diseases and death, rather than as we see some countries are using to give boosters to kill children, which is not right.” His English is a little wobbly, but his meaning is clear enough. Why would he say that the COVID boosters kill children?
COVID Trend #7: Bills Introduced that, If Passed, Would Authorize Health Officers to Arrest and Detain the Unvaxxed
There are several proposed New York State (although A416 has now been stricken probably due to public outcry) and Washington State Bills which, if passed, would allow the State (via techniques like giving the Health Officer sheriff-like powers) to “involuntarily detain” unvaccinated people. In the case of Washington State, it would authorize a “strike force” to enter people’s homes. To say these kind of bills are unconstitutional and outrageous is a gross understatement. They absolutely gut the 4th, 5th and 6th amendments, among many others, and proceed on the assumption of guilty until proven innocent per the new bioterrorism model.
COVID Trend #8: Shocking Number of Athlete Heart Attacks
According to this article, as of January 2022, there have been 405 athlete cardiac arrests and 237 athletes who have died after COVID shot – an unprecedented pattern in the history of sport. How many more athletes need to die (which is very conspicuous after all) before more people put 2 and 2 together?
COVID Trend #9: More Research Shows Vaccines Ruin the Immune System Permanently
Another important COVID trend is the ever-increasing number of studies showing just how dangerous the new COVID DNA/mRNA devices are (falsely called vaccines). The Daily Expose ran this article explaining how studies prove that the non-vaccines damage the immune system, probably permanently, while official German Government data suggests that the fully vaccinated will develop AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) by the end of this month – January 2022.
COVID Trend #10: Unhealthy Bureaucrats Restrict the Rights of Healthy Citizens – Based on the Idea They Know More About Health
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, double masked and reportedly triple vaxxed, still got COVID. Australian PM Scott Morrison tried to deny world tennis #1 men’s player, Novak Djokovic, from entry into Australia (but at this stage Novak won the legal fight). Both soldiers and athletes in general train long hours and are indisputably in great shape. The chance of them getting sick of anything is very low compared to the average person, and yet they are being dictated to, and having their rights stripped away, by unhealthy, often obese bureaucrats and politicians who claim they know more about health than their citizens. What a clownworld we inhabit.
COVID Trend #11: The Meaning of Fully Vaccinated Continues to Be Altered
This COVID trend has been a long time coming, because being fully vaccinated is an endless destination. The ruling class is always fine-tuning their buzzwords and propaganda phrases for maximum effect in molding perception. Nothing is left to chance. Also, they want a permanent control system where fully vaccinated means you have done anything and everything they want, and if you have disobeyed any decree, then they’ll change your designation (the essence of the social credit system). Dr. Fraud-ci recently announced that they will be changing the term “fully vaccinated” to “up to date”:
“A few weeks ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci hinted that the federal government would soon change its definition of “fully vaccinated” to include not just the two original shots but at least one booster dose as well.
But in the latest indication that Dr. Fauci has succeeded in pushing this scheme, the good doctor said Tuesday during a lecture at the National Institutes of Health that new terminology would be used in place of the “fully vaccinated” language. Instead of referring to somebody as “fully vaccinated”, they will be referred to as having their vaccinations “up to date” to reflect the notion that they have gotten their booster shots.
“We’re using the terminology now ‘keeping your vaccinations up to date,’ rather than what ‘fully vaccinated’ means,” Fauci said during a National Institutes of Health lecture Tuesday.”
COVID Trend #12: Several US Supreme Court Judges Show Their Supreme Lack of Knowledge about the Scamdemic
The US Supreme Court may be weighing in on some of the COVID restrictions that have been foist upon the American people, but their decisions will only be as good as how well informed they are. In a recent discussion, Judge Sotomayor showed herself to be woefully misinformed about the number of child COVID cases. We can only hope that truth will prevail in the 9-person panel when it comes to them actually making a decision. Soveriegn Man Simon Black writes:
“You probably heard that the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Friday regarding the federal government’s vaccine mandate. Specifically, Hunter Biden’s dad told the Occupational Safety Health Administration, which regulates workplace safety, to require businesses across America with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccines in the workplace, or masking/testing. This order was almost immediately challenged, and the case was heard in two separate federal courts. One court ruled in favor of an injunction, the other ruled against it. And so the case landed rather quickly in front of the US Supreme Court …I listened to the entire 4+ hours of audio over the weekend, and frankly some of the Justices’ remarks were simply ridiculous. First, it’s worth pointing out that everyone in the room had to produce a negative COVID test before being allowed to enter. Everyone present was double vaccinated, and most were boosted. And almost everyone was wearing a mask. Yet Justice Sotomayor still refused to be in the room. She phoned it in from her private office down the hall. Clearly it doesn’t matter what protocols are in place; this person has chosen to be terrified no matter what. And unsurprisingly her remarks smacked of fear, paranoia, and ignorance. Sotomayor stated that, for example, that “over 100,000” children are in serious condition, i.e. hospitalized, “many on ventilators”. This is 100% patently false. Even the CDC had to refute her comments. Nevertheless, Sotomayor thinks that the OSHA mandate is a great idea and will save lives. Therefore she seems to have no problem with it, regardless of the legality. She even concluded that since Congress isn’t willing to pass a law requiring a nationwide vaccine mandate, that OSHA should do it.
Similarly, Justice Breyer was practically exasperated in citing all the death statistics and case numbers, and wondered how in the world could anyone possibly be against the OSHA order? Justice Kagan chimed in stating that “we all know” that OSHA has put forth “the best policy”. Apparently she speaks for all of us. These are all extraordinary comments. And their general nature was that these Justices like the OSHA mandate, therefore they’re in favor of it. This is a gross, despicable violation of their most sacred responsibility. Their personal opinion about the OSHA order is not relevant. The only thing that matters is whether or not it’s legal.”
Meanwhile, lower federal court judges have delivered some good results recently, including a judge who rejects the FDA’s proposed 75 year delay on vax data by ordering them to release all of it in 8 months.
COVID Trend #13: US Federal Court Decisions Uphold Religious Exemption
Another important COVID trend is the upholding of the religious exemption to the vaccine. Religious exemptions, like medical and philosophical exemptions, have been repeatedly under attack even before the scamdemic. Recently, a US Federal Judge ruled in favor of unvaccinated Navy SEALs and blocked the Pentagon from punishing them.
Final Thoughts: Remain Sane in an Insane World
I have often heard people over the years talk about the importance of being or remaining free in an unfree world, and giving advice on how to do that. I agree, but in today’s world, I would take it one step further: we need to remain sane in an insane world. The idea of mass formation psychosis (as discussed in previous articles months ago), that has developed since the scamdemic began, has began to spread. People are getting used to the idea that the world at large has been hypnotized. The key here is to remain sane by being aware of all the insanity that could penetrate your consciousness. This is no mean feat. However, unlike a supposed killer virus, sanity is contagious. The more people that can do this, the more it will spread to others.
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Bribery is one of the serious factors hindering effective development of a state and is a huge social threat. How do those who deal with public finances on an everyday basis fight it?
Developing anti-bribery mechanisms becomes a significant and urgent problem in the development of modern society and the State. At that, the international community sees readiness to effectively combat it as a key indicator of civility and commitment to democratic values.
With this in mind, and given the growing popularity of anti-bribery programmes focusing on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, many countries are opting for greater protection in this area. The effective implementation of an anti-bribery course depends on many factors and touches on all areas, including the selection of reliable quality standards and trustworthy suppliers. This case concerns public authorities and their suppliers as well. Often, they deal with public money on a regular basis, which increases their risk of bribery. How exactly do they put anti-bribery measures into practice?
Complexity that pays off
One of the recognized benchmarks here is ISO 37001, the international standard for anti-bribery management systems. It prevents, detects and combats bribery and covers the issue in the public, private and non-profit sectors, including bribery by an organization or its suppliers. One of the distinguishing aspects of ISO 37001 is the difficulty of passing it: to be certified, an organization must show an implemented set of anti-bribery measures.
Thus, the Peruvian government had to introduce a range of measures to adopt the standard and make it work: a number of training programmes for both public- and private-sector stakeholders was carried, and a working group was established. “We have engaged government authorities and private institutions interested in implementing an anti-bribery system and their response has been most positive,” says Rosario Uría Toro, Director of the National Peruvian Directorate of Standardization. It turned out that the efforts paid off: the standard was introduced in late 2017, and the country’s Corruption Index by Transparency International has been climbing up ever since.
The difference that will be noticed
The complexity of passing the test looks scary for many: “These [arguments against the certification] include the cost, the burdensome internal processes, and of course the burning question at the end of it all: What difference will an ISO certification make in the eyes of law enforcement?” asks the Basel Institute of Governance, offering an intra-industrial collective action initiative for the fiduciary industry instead.
Bank Al-Maghrib, the Central Bank of Morocco, disagrees. The institution has been ISO 37001 certified back in 2019, and, while the certification process should have been quite a challenge for the weighty and large organization, they carried it well. What is most important, the effort was highly regarded by the country’s law enforcement and overseeing agencies, such as the national anti-corruption agency, the authority regulating capital markets and the authority regulating the insurance sector. A praise like this definitely eliminates the question of difference posed above.
Public sector suppliers, and namely, suppliers in the financial sector, also recognise the importance of independent certification. For instance, French security printer Oberthur Fiduciaire opted for ISO standards even though it had already had other intra-industry certifications, such as the ECB certificate: “The ISO standards we have put in place, whether in terms of quality, respect of the environment, safety or the fight against corruption, with ISO 37001 for example, are, in my opinion, much more relevant arguments than any statements that we could make,” saidThomas Savare, CEO of the company. The fact that Oberthur is trusted by more than 70 central banks worldwide only confirms the high level of ISO certificates and their holders.
Reinforcing integrity
Speaking of trust, this is the last but not the least issue to be touched upon. ISO 37001 contains mandatory requirements and implies firm commitment of top chiefs. In this way, certification provides assurance to all concerned that the organisation is making every reasonable effort to avoid bribery. The voluntary nature of the certification only underlines the commitment and intention to cooperate in good faith, says the Government of Québec, which has also adopted the standard to be double sure : “In recent years, the government has put several measures in place to reinforce the integrity of public contracts… This pilot project [ISO 37001 certification – ed.] is another action aiming to keep Québec at the forefront of best practices.”
Bribery is still a burning issue. Its risks vary across sectors and are particularly high in the financial industry, where organisations deal daily with money, one of the most powerful instruments of influence in human history.
Under these circumstances, anti-bribery measures become an essential factor in assessing the integrity and reliability of a public authority and its suppliers, and actions taken in this regard become a measure of trustworthiness. At the same time, the careful selection of a yardstick is important, which is why those public sectors and suppliers who want to show that their money is well-managed opt for the most reliable standards, such as ISO 37001.
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Pfizer is making headlines again after the CEO of the controversial company Albert Bourlamade a recent statement about the efficiency of the COVID shot.
He recently said in a video that’s all over Twitter that two shots of the covid vaccine offer limited protection against covid 19, “if any.”
Check out the relevant tweet below:
Pfizer CEO: “Two doses of the vaccine offers very limited protection, if any. 3 doses with a booster offer reasonable protection against hospitalization and deaths. Less protection against infection.”@US_FDA -Come get your boy!
The controversial video triggered massive backlash considering the fact that back in 2021, the CEO of Pfizer was claiming that the vaccine his company created in 100% effective in preventing covid 19 cases. The has been taken off Twitter, but you can still see it on this website.
Check out his tweet from April 2021:
Excited to share that updated analysis from our Phase 3 study with BioNTech also showed that our COVID-19 vaccine was 100% effective in preventing #COVID19 cases in South Africa. 100%! https://t.co/E2ksTJSopU
More than that, it’s been also revealed that the original shots have also lost some of their efficacy at preventing hospitalization.
He also stated the following:
“The third dose of the current vaccine is providing quite good protection against deaths, and decent protection against hospitalizations.”
He also made sure to explain the fact that this variant of the virus is a more difficult target than previous variants.
“Omicron, which has dozens of mutations, can evade some of the protection provided by Pfizer’s original two shots.”
FDA and Pfizer controversy
There has been a massive scandal involving the fact that the FDA asked for 75 years to produce Pfizer vaccine safety data. Now, it seems that things are changing, and you should check out the latest reports on the issue below.
It’s been just reported that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will have eight months — not the 75 years it requested — to release all documents related to the licensing of Pfizer’s Comirnaty covid vaccine. This is what a federal judge ruled a few days ago.
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Passionate about subjects from the science and health-related areas, Rada has been blogging for about ten years and at Health Thoroughfare, she’s covering the latest news on these niches.
Comments Off on Pfizer Scandal: CEO Albert Bourla Reveals Two COVID Vaccine Shots Offer ‘Very Limited Protection, If Any’ after Claiming Shot Was ‘100% Effective’
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Kazakhstan reminds me of Armenia (September 2015), also energy price increases, Georgia (April 2009), opposition attempting to force pro-Russian President Mikheil Saakashvili from power; and even to some extent of Ukraine (2014) – Maidan riots supposedly because then President Viktor Yanukovych lured into negotiations with Europe for an association agreement with the European Union, behind which was – who else – NATO. The majority of Ukrainians had no idea about these ongoing negotiations and their background. So, the riots were planned by long hand and had nothing to do with the short-cut EU negotiations. Talks were eventually interrupted when Yanukovych received assurance from Russia for a “better deal”.
That’s when hell broke out on 21 February 2014 and the Maidan massacre took place. Its violent destruction was disproportionate to the cause. Western hired mercenaries were behind the merciless killing. The Maidan massacre murdered some 130 people, including some 18 policemen. That’s when it became clear – another Color Revolution was being instigated by the west and always, but always with NATO in the back. NATO’s goal, was setting up one or several bases in Ukraine, the closer to Moscow, the better.
Just for the record, the 1991 agreement between Europe and the new Russia, stipulated that there would be no new NATO bases further to the east (of Berlin), was never respected by the west. That’s why President Putin is drawing red lines, and rightly so.
Perhaps, one of the first such Color Revolutions in recent history was Serbia, when in early 2000 Serbian youth chanted “Slobo, Save Serbia! Slobo Save Serbia!” Later that year, a “reform-minded” foreign-funded and trained group of young people infiltrated the Serbian pro-Milosevic youth and brought Milosevic, the president loved by most Serbs, to fall in October 2000. He was arrested immediately shipped to the ICC prison in The Hague where he awaited trial for highest treason and crimes against humanity, which he did not commit.
His lawyers accumulated enough proof for Milosevic to demonstrate that the west was behind this Color Revolution – and, indeed, the total dismantling of former Yugoslavia. If these documents would become known to the Court, the ICC, one of the most important interferences and destruction of a country in recent history would shed an irrevocable light on the crimes of the west, at that time by President Clinton et al. So, Milosevic had to be “neutralized’. On March 11, 2006, he was found dead in his prison cell, a so-called suicide. This, despite the fact that since June 2001, he was on constant suicide watch.
Well, these are the stories of Armenia, Georgia and Serbia – but back to Kazakhstan, which resembles in many details these preceding so-called Color Revolution stories. NATO having been unsuccessful under Russia’s strict red line – to advance further toward Moscow in Ukraine, or before in Belarus, is trying now on the southern front, with Kazakhstan.
This is clearly an attempted coup, no longer just protests about a gas price hike. It was engineered by the west – see this interview on Kazakhstan crisis of Dr. Marcus Papadopoulos with Kevork Almassian (video 46 min. 6 January 2022).
No chance of success with this new coup attempt – just more propaganda for the west.
President Putin will never allow these former Soviet republics to slide into the power base of the west, of NATO, especially now, since it is well known that over 90% of the population of all these former Soviet Republics want to stay firmly in Russia’s orbit.
The repeated protest pattern in Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Belarus, and now in Kazakhstan are clearly indicative of western / NATO pressure to destabilize Russia and, ideally, so they keep dreaming since WWII – bring Russia into the “western influence base” – call it slavehood. In several of these cases the base reason for riots were massive energy price hikes, were just a pretext to heavy violent interference by western mercenaries under the guidance of NATO.
Never forget NATO is always the powerbase behind these moves, because the end game is one or several NATO bases in the countries they are trying to putsch. Yet, it doesn’t seem to be very smart, as the west ought to know that none of these former Soviet Republics will betray Russia – almost all the people, including all the higher-level politicians, want to remain firmly in Russia’s zone of influence. Kiev was an exception. Kiev since WWII has been a Nazi stronghold, something that doesn’t apply to the rest of Ukraine.
In Kazakhstan, after what appears as local rather peaceful riots, violent elements were introduced from “outside”, in the form of well-trained almost para-military protesters, out to kill. It is what has become known as an attempted “Color Revolution”.
In Kazakhstan the death toll far exceeds 30, including 18 policemen, at least two of whom were decapitated. Hundreds have been injured. While according to Kazakh President Tokayev, constitutional order was largely restored last Friday, 7 January, unrest continues and nearly 4000 people were arrested. The extreme violence took over government buildings and burnt them down; the airport was occupied. The level of violence was way disproportionate for a gas price hike. Clearly other motives are at stake.
The vast majority of the 19 million Kazakhs have not taken to the streets, because of the gas price increase, which was not as dramatic as the western mainstream media has you believe. The majority lives in rural areas and avoids violence.
These latest Kazakh upheavals could also be called a below-the-belt NATO approach to destabilize Russia, since NATO seems to have failed in Ukraine. In other words, undermining Russia’s position on Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks with member states of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) on Friday. Peacekeepers from Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan were deployed to Kazakhstan earlier last week. President Tokayev was saying they would stay “for a limited period of time” to support the local security forces.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense later clarified that the CSTO forces have also been tasked with the protection of important facilities and key infrastructure and were not supposed to participate in “operational and combat” activities. The EU, a typical undecided hypocritical agent, also offered the bloc’s assistance to help resolve the crisis with several countries calling on both the protesters and government forces to refrain from violence.
Yeah, right: calling on both parties to refrain from violence, when in fact the violent element was introduced clearly by NATO members, most of whom are Europeans. Once again, the trustworthiness of Europe is down the pits. All it will do is appease some ignorant western, mostly European citizen with a massive flood of pro-western propaganda.
The question in the room is – why Russian and Kazakh governments’ special services did not foresee this type of “Color Revolution” coming, especially after Russia’s drawing a red line on Ukraine? And after the west had lost her coup attempt in Belarus? Is it possible that the Ukraine distraction – hyped up by the western media with constant threats of a nuclear WWIII scenario – diverted President Putin’s attention from other vulnerable attack areas, such as Kazakhstan? And possibly Belarus? The latter is currently quiet. But to an outside eye, it looks like a temporary calm. And Ukraine is far from over.
As long as Russia is running after the problem, rather than taking an offensive surprise lead, Putin may remain in a defensive bind. Reacting, rather than being pro-active. That’s always a disadvantage and may deserve strategic rethinking.
Just imagine what a pro-active surprise move might be. For example, Russia setting up a military base in Mexico. And why not? Russia would certainly have the stature and standing in terms of a friendly relation with Mexico to do so. It would be a game changer. It would put a different spin on world geopolitics. Why not give it a try by starting talks with AMLO, Mr. Lopez Obrador, Mexico’s President.
The west’s / NATO’s intent has been since the 1990s to separate Kazakhstan from the orbit of the former Soviet Union and today’s Russia. So far unsuccessfully, for the reasons pointed out before. Kazakhstan exports 30% to and imports 60% from Russia and China. Today more than ever Kazakhstan is part of the Eurasian alliance. It is a de facto integrated nation and one in close partnership.
The Russians and Kazakhs have learned from Ukraine. It didn’t take President Kassym-Jomart Kemelevich Tokayev long to request assistance from Russia; and it didn’t take long for President Putin to respond, through the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO – Eurasian security organization; members: Russia (de facto leader), Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan).
The first Russian troops are already arriving in Almaty go help bring the situation under control. In addition to the CSTO troops, Russia is also sending air force troops to counter the militants. Chances are that his will not become a new Kiev, where Assistant Foreign Minister Victoria Nuland, so eloquently said “f*ck Europe!” since the US had already spent 10 million dollars over the past years to prepare this coup.….
What we see in Kazakhstan are very well trained and armed militants – not peaceful protesters, as would have been the case when protests started over gas price increases – it is clear that peaceful protesters do not take over government buildings and airports, they do not shoot police officers to kill – this is clearly foreign intervention.
Time will tell whether the CSTO troops will be able to stop the violence, or whether Russian troops need to be dispatched – and a new “red line” needs to be drawn by Moscow.
It is amazing – and sad – to watch how Europe plays along, letting NATO troops eventually ravaging the European territory – when Russia interferes. Only brainless European leaders (sic) will allow NATO playing war games that could turn anytime “hot” – hot again on the territories of Europe.
That’s what the European Union has become. She is led by an unelected lady, Madame Ursula von der Leyen, formerly Germany’s Defense Minister, but more importantly and much less visibly, she is a Member of the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum. We know who calls the shots over the European Union – and most of the viciously dictatorial leaders (sic) of the EU member countries, stripped of their sovereignty are scholars from Klaus Schwab’s special courses for “Young Global Leaders”. This also applied for the most covid-tyrannical heads of states around the world.
They shall not prevail.
Back to Kazakhstan. The same people who scare (mostly) the western people to death for a virus that has never been isolated and identified, are also behind destroying Russia and China.
If they were to succeed in Kazakhstan – they would have managed to weaken Russia considerably and the next step would most likely be, NATO’s ignoring Moscow’s red line on Ukraine and with the aim of arming Ukraine and making it eventually a NATO country.
This is however still unlikely because Putin then would not hesitate invading Ukraine through the Donbass area, not hesitating in defending Russia’s interests. NATO and the US know that they have no chance against Russia’s newest defense systems. Would they let it happen and letting Europe being obliterated for the third time in a bit more than 100 years?
The fight for Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus, is a pivotal strategic chess game. Undoubtedly, Russia will win it. But at what cost for Europe – for Eurasia? The more severe the covid restrictions the west will impose, the higher the price for maintaining or regaining sovereign European and Eurasian countries.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
January 12th, 2022 by Cornell University Community
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Dear President Pollack and Cornell Board of Trustees,
We are students, parents, alumni, faculty, and staff of Cornell University. We are grateful for Cornell’s efforts at keeping students and the Ithaca community safe during this pandemic. As concerned members of the global Big Red family, we write this open letter to express our strong opposition to Cornell’s Covid-19 booster mandate. In light of new data available about both the vaccine and the virus, we urge you to change the “mandate” to a “recommendation” based on the factors outlined below.
We appreciate that the booster mandate and new procedures for the spring term stem from the good intention to prevent severe illness. But as with any public health policy, many factors — scientific, ethical, and legal — must be considered and weighed. We are concerned that Cornell, in issuing this booster mandate, has overlooked recent and evolving scientific data regarding the vaccine and the virus that makes a booster mandate inappropriate and unnecessary, raising serious ethical and legal questions.
In December 2021, Cornell identified over 1,600 Covid-19 positive cases with “every case of the Omicron variant to date [being] found in fully vaccinated students, a portion of whom had also received a booster shot.” Cornell’s own data highlights that vaccination, even with the booster, has very limited capability in stopping virus transmission. A similar conclusion has been reached by CDC’s research: vaccinated people seem to transmit Covid-19 similarly to unvaccinated people. The virus will continue to be transmitted among our highly vaccinated campuses. In a recent campus-wide email, Cornell explicitly acknowledged the impossibility of containing or eliminating Omicron, the flu, or other respiratory illnesses, which is why it will “shift from counting positive cases.” Cornell is fully aware that vaccines and booster injections cannot stop the spread of Covid-19.
As so many students test positive, they are, in essence, receiving a natural booster based on the very latest variants of the virus. And yet, Cornell is ignoring the natural immunity in these students and mandating a booster injection based on older variants, which Cornell knows is ineffective at stopping the spread of Covid-19 in the Cornell community. This decision is counter to science and seems like it was made less to promote students’ health and more to achieve some other unstated goal of the administration. Otherwise, why require a booster injection that is ineffective, and potentially dangerous, for students who are naturally contracting and fighting off a virus that many scientists believe is becoming more endemic than pandemic?
Mounting evidence points to serious risks from exposure to the Covid-19 vaccines. The latest scientific research shows that Covid-19 vaccine side effects such as myocarditis, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, and pericarditis are more common in young people than we think (see references 1-5 listed below). Recently, an Oxford-conducted study of men under the age of 40 demonstrated that the risk of myocarditis after one dose mRNA exceeds the risk of myocarditis from an actual Covid-19 infection. Even more alarmingly, the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) indicates that there were over 15,000 Covid-19 vaccine related death cases in 2021, compared with the previous average of 158 vaccine related deaths per year (Pre-Covid-19), in the context of a yearly total of 280 million injections and 70 different vaccines. This data shows that, compared to other vaccines, Covid-19 injections carry around 100 times the risk of death.
Why force such risks on our students when the rate of severe Covid-19 illness in the 16 to 40 year age group is exceedingly low? Newer variants appear to pose a near-zero risk of death for college students. Data now shows that the vaccine itself can pose more risk to young people than the virus itself, and repeated injections only increase those risks without any discernible reduction in the spread of the virus.
All students are individuals, each someone’s child with unique medical, psychological, and emotional needs. Indeed, as the CDC has recognized, “people aged 18-64 years who are at increased risk for COVID-19 exposure and transmission because of occupational or institutional setting may receive a booster shot of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine at least 6 months after their Pfizer-BioNTech primary series, based on their individual benefits and risks” (emphasis added). With its blanket mandate, Cornell seems to be interpreting eligibility as a directive, ignoring both the science and CDC’s own guidance regarding individual benefits and risks.
The power differential between the university and students, which Cornell briefly acknowledged last year, raises serious ethical issues. In addition to the risk of side effects and death, Cornell’s injection mandate can trigger generational trauma in some students from intrusive, experimental, and other medically questionable procedures. For many students, the coercive nature of a third injection, after being told that they needed only two injections to attend Cornell, is contributing to psychological distress and emotional disorientation about future academic, social, and professional potential. We are seeing staggering mental health problems on campus and beyond. At this point in the pandemic, after nearly two years of following constantly changing rules, we would do right by our students to give them control over whether they receive additional doses of the Covid-19 vaccine.
That is why we believe that the question of whether a student should receive a third (or fourth or fifth) booster must be answered individually by each student, in consultation with a medical professional or doctor, rather than by school administrators.
Considering new data on the virus and the vaccine, the university may very well cause disability or death by imposing further vaccine requirements, and it will have to bear the responsibility. Please do the right thing, and end this unnecessary and unethical mandate.
Members of the Cornell community, please sign HERE or click this link.
Add your name here, and wewill update the list with your name and affiliation.
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High-level international banking officials and organizations gathered last month for a global “war game” exercise simulating the collapse of the global financial system. The tabletop exercise was reminiscent of “Event 201,” the pandemic simulation exercise that took place just before COVID-19 entered the global scene.
High-level international banking officials and organizations last month gathered in Israel for a global “war game” exercise simulating the collapse of the global financial system.
The tabletop exercise was reminiscent of “Event 201” — the pandemic simulation exercise that took place in October 2019, shortly before COVID-19 entered the global scene.
The “Collective Strength” initiative was held for 10 days, beginning Dec. 9, 2021, at the Israeli Finance Ministry in Jerusalem. It was relocated to Jerusalem from the Dubai World Expo over concerns about the Omicron variant.
Israel led a 10-country contingent that also included treasury officials from the U.S., Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates.
Representatives from supranational organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and Bank of International Settlements (BIS), also participated.
Described as a simulated “war game,” the exercise sought to model the response to various hypothetical large-scale cyberattacks on the global financial system, including the leaking of sensitive financial data on the “Dark Web,” hacks targeting the global foreign exchange system, and subsequent bank runs and market chaos fueled by “fake news.”
However, the main theme of “Collective Strength” appears not so much the simulation of such cyberattacks but, as the name of the initiative implies, the strengthening of global cooperation in cybersecurity and the financial sector.
As reported by Reuters, participants in the simulation discussed multilateral responses to a hypothetical global financial crisis.
Proposed policy solutions included debt repayment grace periods, SWAP/REPO agreements, coordinated bank holidays and coordinated delinking from major currencies.
The idea of simulated delinking from major currencies raised some eyebrows because of its timing — on the same day participants gathered to launch “Collective Strength,” reports circulated that the Biden administration was considering removing Russia from the global electronic-payment-messaging system known as SWIFT, short for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.
This measure would be part of a package of economic sanctions the U.S. would levy against Russia should it attack Ukraine.
However, what may raise even more eyebrows is the list of participants in the “Collective Strength” simulation, which includes: the IMF and World Bank, and indirectly, the World Economic Forum (WEF).
It was the WEF, along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which ran the simulated “Event 201” in October 2019.
As previously reported by The Defender, the WEF also supported the development of financial instruments, such as credit and debit cards, that would track “personal carbon allowances” on an individualized basis.
An executive summary issued in November 2020 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in collaboration with the WEF, provided a rundown of just the type of scenario that was simulated as part of “Collective Strength.”
The report’s authors, Tim Maurer and Arthur Nelson, described a world whose financial system is undergoing “an unprecedented digital transformation … accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.”
In such a world, the authors argued, “cybersecurity is more important than ever.”
Describing protection of the global financial system as an “organizational challenge,” the report pointed out there is no clear global actor in charge of protecting the global financial system or its digital infrastructure.
The executive summary went so far as to describe a “disconnect between the finance, the national security and the diplomatic communities.”
The solutions identified by Maurer and Nelson included:
The need for “greater clarity” regarding roles and responsibilities
Bolstering international cooperation
Reducing fragmentation and increasing “internationalization” among “siloed” financial institutions
Developing a model that can then be used in unspecified “other” sectors.
But which “other” sectors?
This set of recommendations was classified by the authors in their report under “Digital Transformation: Safeguard Financial Inclusion.”
One such recommendation reads as follows:
“The G20 should highlight that cybersecurity must be designed into technologies used to advance financial inclusion from the start rather than included as an afterthought.”
Technology that is “used to advance financial inclusion from the start” would appear to include digital “health passports” and accompanying “digital wallets.”
It also seems to be aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals — in particular, Goal 16.9, which calls for the provision of a digital legal identity for all, including newborns, by 2030.
Goal 16.9 also brings to mind the European Union’s insistence that its vaccine passport, the so-called “Green Pass,” which is used in numerous European countries to bar the unvaccinated and those with natural immunity from all sorts of public and private spaces, protects individuals’ privacy.
In a further connection between two distinct issues — security of the global financial system and public health — the GAVI Vaccine Alliance called for “innovations that leverage new technologies to modernize the process of identifying and registering the children who are most in need of life-saving vaccines.”
However, the use of these technologies would not stop with registering childhood vaccinations. GAVI described potential uses of these “new technologies” as encompassing “access to other services,” including the broadly defined “financial services.”
The authors of the Carnegie Endowment executive summary mirrored their proposals in a spring 2021 article that appears on the IMF’s website, although issues of “financial inclusion” are left out.
While the two authors of the Carnegie report, and the participants in the “Collective Strength” initiative, emphasize the need for the financial system and its digital data to be better protected, it remains unclear how a continued transformation toward a fully digital, cloud-based environment can indeed be considered “secure.”
Consider, for instance, the following remark by Micha Weis, financial cyber manager at the Israeli finance ministry, in reference to “Collective Strength”: “[a]ttackers are 10 steps ahead of the defender.”
Such words don’t offer much comfort to those who are already wary of “FinTech,” or the increasing proximity between “Big Tech” and “Big Finance.”
Similarly, yet another “simulation” of a large-scale and destructive global catastrophe will, for some, bring back recollections of “Event 201” and what followed thereafter — infamously described on March 20, 2020, by then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as a “live exercise.”
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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
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Currently on view at the Currier Museum, Philip Guston’s mural Pulpwood Logging (1941) is right beside its original partner, Musa McKim’s Wildlife in the White Mountains (1941). Both fourteen-foot murals were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) — a federal program created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat the unemployment of the Great Depression — and were originally installed in the Forestry Building in Laconia, New Hampshire.
Guston’s mural is a vision of sustainable logging — and given the global pace of deforestation, it is as timely as ever. As a representational painter, the piece is the culmination of Guston’s work for he would soon go on to become one of the foremost Abstract Expressionists.
Wildlife in the White Mountains, 1941 oil on canvas 79 x 165 in. Originally located in the Forestry Building, Laconia N.H. Fine arts collection U. S. General services
The mural is a depiction of four men working together – all but one of whom face the viewer. The one with his back to us is overseeing the day’s work. Interestingly, we see what he sees: as if he is showing us the logging process. To his left, a man uses a peavey to roll the logs into place, while another cuts a log with a crosscut handsaw. The leftmost figure is hunched over as he lays a link chain in place. Guston has made each worker distinct and in so doing, imbued each individual with a quiet dignity.
In 1937, Musa McKim and Philip Guston were married. Her mural, depicting the rich biodiversity of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, rewards one who pays close attention. She has rendered the grouse, deer, moose, bear, beaver, raccoon, chipmunk, wood duck, great egret, and belted kingfisher with a simple and loving fidelity. In the lower right corner, a family of three visitors to the National Forest — presumably a mother, and her two children – resonates with the mother bear and her two cubs in the lower right corner.
Pulpwood Logging, 1941 oil on canvas 79 x 165 in. Originally located in the Forestry Building, Laconia N.H. Fine arts collection U. S. General services Administration
Through January 16, these two murals will be happily reunited at the Currier Museum in Manchester, NH — and the timing is significant. These great works were the fruit of The New Deal and the efforts of the WPA which hired over ten thousand artists from across the country to create works of art.
Today, many Americans desperately need to see a similar initiative from the Federal Government — and yet, even relatively modest efforts in that direction have been stalled indefinitely. These murals are a reminder of what can be done when America invests in its workers and its artists — that is, when it truly embraces and harnesses its powers of collective rebirth and reinvention.
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Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Comments Off on History of Art: Philip Guston and Musa McKim at the Currier Museum: “What can be done when America Invests in its Workers and its Artists”
The person with whom we are all most intimate is oneself. It’s just the way it is. I don’t mean that in some oracular Delphic “know thyself” way, or in any deep psychoanalytical sense, but very simply. We have our own thoughts and feelings that come and go like breaths, most of which never get expressed in words.
Bastille 2022 pertains not only to the restoration of these fundamental rights. It seeks to reverse and disable the criminal Covid-19 agenda which in the course of the last two years has triggered economic, social and political chaos Worldwide in 193 member states of the United Nations, coupled with bankruptcies, unemployment, mass poverty and despair.
Gibraltar (34,000 inhabitants) started vaccination in December 2020 when the health agency counted only 1040 confirmed cases and 5 deaths attributed to covid19 in this country. After a very comprehensive vaccination blitz, achieving 115% coverage (vaccination was extended to many Spanish visitors), the number of new infections increased five-fold (to 5314) and the number of deaths increased nineteen-fold.
Wendy Sherman thinks her aim in talks with Russian officials starting Monday is to lecture them on the cost of hubris. Instead she’s set to lead the U.S., NATO, and Europe down a path of ruin, warns Scott Ritter. If ever a critical diplomatic negotiation was doomed to fail from the start, the discussions between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine and Russian security guarantees is it.
Shankara Chetty could be called a second Zelenko. He is a medical doctor, a general practitioner in South Africa who has treated more than 7000 Covid patients successfully, without the need for extra oxygen or hospitalization. Through meticulous observation he was able to discern the nature of Covid-19 as a two-phase illness with a respiratory and an allergic phase, and to develop a treatment protocol which he describes in the first part of the interview.
As we’ve seen over the past two years, data and statistics can be manipulated and skewed in a wide variety of ways. COVID cases, for example, have clearly been overinflated by including people with no symptoms (likely false positives) and diagnosing anyone entering the hospital for an unrelated issue as a COVID patient if they test positive (again, falsely) for SARS-CoV-2.
Despite the dialogue, NATO continues to maintain an aggressive rhetoric towards Russia, promising a new armed conflict if current negotiations fail to reach a consensus. In a interview, the Secretary General of NATO stated that the Western military alliance is prepared for a situation of war in Europe if Russia does not collaborate towards a resolution of the Ukrainian issue.
Putin and President Biden discussed the Russian proposals and other issues in a phone conversation on December 30th, in which Biden called for diplomacy, and both he and Putin reportedly took steps to defuse the possible confrontation.
As U.S. policy grows more reckless, the corporate media perceives threats everywhere. After Putin and Biden spoke by zoom, Putin and President Xi Jinping of China had a New Year’s exchange Dec. 15. This conversation was headlined by The Hill as “‘Allies’ China and Russia Are Ganging Up on America.”
His accusation of Russia invading Crimea in 2014 is the standard Western characterization of Russia reclaiming the peninsula without firing a shot. His accusation of aggressive Russian actions against Moldova – a charge no one in the West has leveled until recent weeks – appears to be an allusion to the presence of 1,500 Russian troops in Transnistria, the continuation of a Russian peacekeeping deployment that began in 1992.
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Canadian Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos told the nation on Friday that he believes mandatory vaccinations will be announced soon.
Asked if the government would consider instituting mandatory Covid vaccination laws, Duclos said, “I personally think we will get there at some point. I see it coming personally. Not now. I don’t think we are there yet. But I think discussions need to be had about mandatory vaccinations because we have to get rid of Covid 19.”
Canadian Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said Friday he believes a mandatory vaccination policy for all citizens is necessary, and will likely be coming to Canada in the months ahead.
He continued, “Our people are tired and the only way as we know through COVID–19, be it this variant or any future variant, is through vaccination.”
This sentence totally contradicts previous comments made by Fiji Public Health Professor Michael Baker, who told the world in October that “you can’t vaccinate your way out of a epidemic that is this intense.”
Highly vaccinated nations such as Israel have all but proven this to be true as they continue to see record numbers of Covid deaths, cases and hospitalizations despite being the first country on Earth to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens.
The federal health minister noted that the decision to mandate Covid vaccines will be left up to the provinces, saying, “Provinces and territories will continue to take decisions that are within their jurisdiction. As a government, we will continue to do everything we can within our federal authority to keep Canadians safe.”
Canadians lashed out at the idea on Twitter.
Fascist Liberal minister is preparing the ground for draconian violation of our fundamental rights and bodily autonomy.
Bullshit, Trudeau cant give the order as his Federal Employees only have to say they are vaccinated, he wants Premiers to start the war while he hides at home…
"Provinces are likely to introduce mandatory vaccination policies in the coming months to deal with surging COVID-19 caseloads, Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said "
Check out Canadian mainstream media’s coverage of Duclos’ announcement in the video below:
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A 2017 lawsuit alleging five pharmaceutical companies helped finance terror attacks against U.S. service members and other Americans in Iraq during the “War on Terror” was unanimously reinstated and remanded by a three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals.
The lawsuit against the five companies in question — Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Roche and GE Healthcare — was dismissed in July 2020 by a federal district court in Washington, D.C. before being reinstated last week.
The lawsuit claims the five companies regularly paid bribes, including free drugs and medical devices, to officials in Iraq’s Ministry of Health between 2005 and 2011, in their efforts to secure drug contracts.
In turn, the suit alleges, these companies’ contracts with the Iraqi health ministry helped “fund terrorism” perpetrated by a Shiite militia that killed Americans during that period.
The militia in question, Jaysh al-Mahdi, or the “Mahdi Army,” maintained control of the health ministry at that time.
The amended lawsuit was filed on behalf of 395 Americans who were killed or injured in Iraq during the six-year period.
The plaintiffs seek damages under the federal Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), which states plaintiffs must demonstrate the terror attacks were conducted by an organization formally designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. government.
While the Mahdi Army has not been formally classified as a terrorist group, the lawsuit alleges the army’s attacks carried out in Iraq were “planned and organized” by Hezbollah, which the U.S. in 1997 labeled a terror group.
The initial lawsuit also prompted an investigation of the pharmaceutical companies by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), in 2018.
An alleged web of corruption and kickbacks
The allegations made in the lawsuit are based on information provided by 12 confidential witnesses, public and private reports, contracts, email communications and documents published by WikiLeaks.
Included in the lawsuit are 27 pages of itemized deaths and injuries sustained by U.S. service members in attacks by the Mahdi Army between 2005 and 2009, and claims of pain and suffering submitted by their family members and relatives.
One of the main planks of the lawsuit pertains to bribes and kickbacks the five companies named in the suit are alleged to have provided to the terrorists who controlled the Iraqi health ministry between 2005 and 2011.
The lawsuit alleges the five companies obtained contracts with the ministry through the illicit payments, which were then used to “aid and abet” terror attacks against Americans.
The central argument put forth in the original lawsuit is that the companies must have been aware that Iraq’s health ministry operated as a de facto terrorist organization, and this knowledge should have resulted in an insistence, on the part of the five companies, that any contracts with the ministry be structured to reflect this knowledge and to guard against potential corruption and misuse of funds.
This point is crucial, as it is illegal under U.S. law to knowingly fund terror groups.
In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the procurement budget for the Iraqi health ministry skyrocketed, from $16 million in 2003 to approximately $1 billion in 2004, due to U.S. financial assistance.
It was in 2004, according to the lawsuit, that the Mahdi Army took control of the Iraqi health ministry, at a time when various political factions in the country took over government ministries as the U.S. devolved power back to the Iraqis.
Having taken over the ministry, the Mahdi Army allegedly used it as a vehicle for financing terrorist acts, using local agents to deliver cash kickbacks to terrorists on the ground and selling medical supplies “off the books” on the black market, to further fund terror operations.
Indeed, many of the officials employed in the ministry at the time are said in the lawsuit to have been senior members of the Mahdi Army. This group maintained strongholds in parts of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad and in the south of the country, vying for control of cities such as Basra and Amara.
The Mahdi Army, in turn, was loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, a political figure described by The New York Times as a “firebrand” cleric who operated death squads targeting Iraqi Sunnis and Americans.
The group emerged in 2003, following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, operating as a security guarantor in neighborhoods dominated by al-Sadr. In 2004, the Mahdi Army fought U.S. forces in Najaf and Sadr City.
According to the lawsuit, the pharmaceutical companies financially supported the Mahdi Army in two ways. One way was through bribes that were paid in the form of “discounts” — which were offered by the companies not through reduced prices, but through the provision of “free” medical goods, often equalling up to 20% of the total value of the contract.
These bribes, the suit alleges, amounted to millions of dollars annually. It is noted that this form of bribery is commonplace in the Middle East because, unlike direct cash transfers, companies can claim these “free” goods were “charitable” contributions, in the event such transactions are discovered.
Another alleged means of financial support on the part of the five companies was through the hiring of local intermediaries to register their companies, receive government approval for the use of their products domestically, and negotiate contracts.
The lawsuit describes the payments made to these intermediaries as “thinly disguised bribes.”
Between 2004 and 2013, the companies in question also allegedly operated a “slush fund,” under the guise of paying for after-sales support and other services related to the products they sold.
These services were “illusory” and the funds instead went into the pockets of corrupt health ministry officials and local agents, the plaintiffs allege.
Goods said to have been sold to the Iraqi health ministry during this period include GE electrocardiogram machines; Johnson & Johnson catheters and anti-epilepsy drugs; Depo-Provera, a birth control shot produced by Pfizer; Seroquel, an anti-psychotic medication produced by AstraZeneca; and Herceptin, a breast cancer drug produced by Roche.
As a result of the “commissions” and “free” goods provided to members of the Mahdi Army, the militia became known among U.S. officials as the “Pill Army,” as its fighters often received prescription medications as medicines. These drugs could then be resold.
An August 2007 draft report prepared by the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad accused the Iraqi health ministry of “operating a pharmaceutical diversion scheme” and operating “openly under the control of the Mahdi Army.”
Pharma money funded violent acts against Americans
The lawsuit alleges bribes facilitated the Mahdi Army’s acquisition of weapons, as well as training and logistical support.
Indeed, the lawsuit claims the Iraqi health ministry and the Mahdi Army were, at the time, essentially interchangeable, and by late 2004, the ministry was too dangerous for Americans to enter and “functioned more as a terrorist apparatus than a health organization,” with headquarters, as well as hospitals, plastered with posters of al-Sadr captioned with slogans declaring “death to America.”
Hospitals and ambulances are said to have been utilized as part of the terrorist acts perpetrated by the Mahdi Army, while the ministry is said to have employed approximately 15,000 armed men who were known as the “Facilities Protection Service,” using ministry supplies, such as vehicles and uniforms, for terrorism and other criminal activities, including kidnapping.
Numerous such incidents are detailed in the lawsuit.
In April 2006, for instance, U.S. forces arrested seven bodyguards of then-health minister Ali al-Shemari after a Sunni health official entered the ministry on the pretext of being interviewed for a ministerial post, never to be seen again.
Mass kidnappings repeatedly carried out in Baghdad in 2006 – 2007 were also blamed on the “Facilities Protection Service,” with victims frequently delivered to the health ministry’s basement for torture and, sometimes, murder.
The deputy health minister at the time, Hakim al-Zamili, was also arrested by U.S. troops at the time, charged in the disappearance of another deputy minister, Ammar al-Saffar, whose body was never located.
A report by global intelligence company Stratfor accused al-Zamili of “selling health services and equipment in return for millions of dollars that he later funneled to Shiite militias.”
In other incidents, mortars were fired at U.S. forces, and at Sunni neighborhoods, directly from the roof of the health ministry.
The violence originating from the health ministry was such that a 2006 State Department cable available on WikiLeaks described it as “The Ministry of Weapons Transportation.”
In reinstating the lawsuit, the D.C. Circuit judges noted:
“The complaint describes how Jaysh al-Mahdi controlled the ministry and used it as a terrorist headquarters.
“Accepting those allegations, defendants’ dealings with the ministry were equivalent to dealing with the terrorist organization directly. The ministry was therefore not an independent intermediary that broke the chain of causation, but a front for Jaysh al-Mahdi.”
Pharma companies will have to respond to reinstated suit
The lawsuit was filed following an investigation by the Washington, D.C. law firms of Sparciano & Andreson and Kellogg, Hasen, Todd, Figel & Frederick.
In the lawsuit, the firms allege the five named companies were aware their business practices were inappropriate and potentially illegal, based on settlements they reached previously for prior accusations where identical tactics and even some of the same intermediaries were used as part of a United Nations-sponsored oil-for-food program prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion.
After the reinstatement of the lawsuit, the companies in question issued a joint statement denying any wrongdoing.
In 2018, the DOJ launched a separate investigation against the companies, which came to light when AstraZeneca mentioned the lawsuit in a 2018 securities filing.
Pfizer, Roche, and Johnson & Johnson also acknowledged the investigation in SEC filings that year.
It is unclear what the current status of the DOJ investigation is, or why the lawsuit was reinstated, a year-and-a-half after its initial dismissal.
Settlements in cases of alleged overseas corruption are not new for at least some of the companies named in the lawsuit.
For instance, in 2011, Johnson & Johnson agreed to a $70 million settlement stemming from civil and criminal charges that its subsidiaries had paid bribes to officials in countries such as Greece, Poland and Romania, and as part of the Iraqi oil-for-food program.
And in 2010, GE paid a settlement exceeding $23 million to settle charges levied by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleging the company paid kickbacks in the oil-for-food program.
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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
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“Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.”—George Carlin
Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs.
Everything is now fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.
In this way, the most controversial issues of our day—race, religion, sex, sexuality, politics, science, health, government corruption, police brutality, etc.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support.
This tendency to censor, silence, delete, label as “hateful,” and demonize viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite is being embraced with a near-fanatical zealotry by a cult-like establishment that values conformity and group-think over individuality.
For instance, are you skeptical about the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines? Do you have concerns about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election? Do you subscribe to religious beliefs that shape your views on sexuality, marriage and gender? Do you, deliberately or inadvertently, engage in misgendering (identifying a person’s gender incorrectly) or deadnaming (using the wrong pronouns or birth name for a transgender person)?
Say yes to any of those questions and then dare to voice those views in anything louder than a whisper and you might find yourself suspended on Twitter, shut out of Facebook, and banned across various social media platforms.
This authoritarian intolerance masquerading as tolerance, civility and love (what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners”) is the end result of a politically correct culture that has become radicalized, institutionalized and tyrannical.
In the past few years, for example, prominent social media voices have been censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that were deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.
Most recently, Twitter suspended conservative podcaster Matt Walsh for violating its hate speech policy by sharing his views about transgendered individuals. “The greatest female Jeopardy champion of all time is a man. The top female college swimmer is a man. The first female four star admiral in the Public Health Service is a man. Men have dominated female high school track and the female MMA circuit. The patriarchy wins in the end,” Walsh tweeted on Dec. 30, 2021.
J.K. Rowling, author of the popular Harry Potter series, has found herself denounced as transphobic and widely shunned for daring to criticize efforts by transgender activists to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender. Rowling’s essay explaining her views is a powerful, articulate, well-researched piece that not only stresses the importance of free speech and women’s rights while denouncing efforts by trans activists to demonize those who subscribe to “wrongthink,” but also recognizes that while the struggle over gender dysmorphia is real, concerns about safeguarding natal women and girls from abuse are also legitimate.
Ironically enough, Rowling’s shunning included literal book burning. Yet as Ray Bradbury once warned, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
Indeed, the First Amendment is going up in flames before our eyes, but those first sparks were lit long ago and have been fed by intolerance all along the political spectrum.
Consider some of the kinds of speech being targeted for censorship or outright elimination.
Offensive, politically incorrect and “unsafe” speech: Political correctness has resulted in the chilling of free speech and a growing hostility to those who exercise their rights to speak freely. Where this has become painfully evident is on college campuses, which have become hotbeds of student-led censorship, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and “red light” speech policies targeting anything that might cause someone to feel uncomfortable, unsafe or offended.
Bullying, intimidating speech: Warning that “school bullies become tomorrow’s hate crimes defendants,” the Justice Department has led the way in urging schools to curtail bullying, going so far as to classify “teasing” as a form of “bullying,” and “rude” or “hurtful” “text messages” as “cyberbullying.”
Dangerous, anti-government speech: As part of its ongoing war on “extremism,” the government has partnered with the tech industry to counter online “propaganda” by terrorists hoping to recruit support or plan attacks. In this way, anyone who criticizes the government online can be considered an extremist and will have their content reported to government agencies for further investigation or deleted. In fact, the Justice Department is planning to form a new domestic terrorism unit to ferret out individuals “who seek to commit violent criminal acts in furtherance of domestic social or political goals.” What this will mean is more surveillance, more pre-crime programs, and more targeting of individuals whose speech may qualify as “dangerous.”
The upshot of all of this editing, parsing, banning and silencing is the emergence of a new language, what George Orwell referred to as Newspeak, which places the power to control language in the hands of the totalitarian state.
Under such a system, language becomes a weapon to change the way people think by changing the words they use.
The end result is mind control and a sleepwalking populace.
In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.
In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind lest they find themselves ostracized or placed under surveillance.
Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination and infantilism.
The social shunning favored by activists and corporations borrows heavily from the mind control tactics used by authoritarian cults as a means of controlling its members. As Dr. Steven Hassan writes in Psychology Today: “By ordering members to be cut off, they can no longer participate. Information and sharing of thoughts, feelings, and experiences are stifled. Thought-stopping and use of loaded terms keep a person constrained into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing world. This controls members through fear and guilt.”
This mind control can take many forms, but the end result is an enslaved, compliant populace incapable of challenging tyranny.
As Rod Serling, creator of TheTwilight Zone, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry, one that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”
The problem as I see it is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us. And we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government and its corporate partners to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean. The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.
In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.
As Nat Hentoff, that inveterate champion of the First Amendment, once observed, “The quintessential difference between a free nation, as we profess to be, and a totalitarian state, is that here everyone, including a foe of democracy, has the right to speak his mind.”
What this means is opening the door to more speech not less, even if that speech is offensive to some.
Understanding that freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society, James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the press freely.
We haven’t done ourselves—or the nation—any favors by becoming so fearfully polite, careful to avoid offense, and largely unwilling to be labeled intolerant, hateful or closed-minded that we’ve eliminated words, phrases and symbols from public discourse.
We have allowed our fears—fear for our safety, fear of each other, fear of being labeled racist or hateful or prejudiced, etc.—to trump our freedom of speech and muzzle us far more effectively than any government edict could.
Ultimately the war on free speech—and that’s exactly what it is: a war being waged by Americans against other Americans—is a war that is driven by fear.
By bottling up dissent, we have created a pressure cooker of stifled misery and discontent that is now bubbling over and fomenting even more hate, distrust and paranoia among portions of the populace.
By muzzling free speech, we are contributing to a growing underclass of Americans who are being told that they can’t take part in American public life unless they “fit in.”
The First Amendment is a steam valve. It allows people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world. When there is no steam valve to release the pressure, frustration builds, anger grows, and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation.
Be warned: whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.
Eventually, “we the people” will be the ones in the crosshairs.
At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “hate” or “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.
When that time comes, there may be no one left to speak out or speak up in our defense.
After all, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.
We are on a fast-moving trajectory.
In other words, whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, for the sake of the greater good or because you like or trust those in charge, will eventually be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.
This is the tyranny of the majority against the minority marching in lockstep with technofascism.
If Americans don’t vociferously defend the right of a minority of one to subscribe to, let alone voice, ideas and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different, then we’re going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt in, opt out, or forge our own paths as individuals).
No matter what our numbers might be, no matter what our views might be, no matter what party we might belong to, it will not be long before “we the people” constitute a powerless minority in the eyes of a power-fueled fascist state driven to maintain its power at all costs.
We are almost at that point now.
Free speech is no longer free.
On paper—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—we are technically free to speak.
In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.
The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.
The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship, spying and policing.
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In May, within four months, the new nuclear bomb B61-12 large-scale production will begin in the United States: this announcement was made by the National Nuclear Security Administration of the United States Department of Energy (NNSA is part of the US Department of Energy). As they leave the factory, the new nuclear bombs will be delivered to the US Air Force, which will install them in US bases in Italy and other European countries replacing the B61s.
The B61-12 is a new nuclear weapon replacing three of the current B61 variants (3, 4, and 7). It has a nuclear warhead with four selectable power options according to the target to destroy. It does not drop vertically like the B61, but at distance from the target to which it is directed, and guided by a satellite system. It can penetrate underground, exploding deep to destroy command center bunkers to “behead” the enemy nation in a nuclear first strike. For this attack the US Air Force also has the fourth variant of the B61 bomb, the penetrating B61-11 was modernized in 2001. The B61-12, NNSA confirmed, can be launched from both B-2A stealth bomber and future B-21 aircraft, both conventional and nuclear dual-capable fighters. These aircrafts include the US F-16C / Ds deployed in Aviano and the Italian PA-200 Tornadoes deployed in Ghedi. The F-35A fighters, already operational in the Italian Air Force, are even more suitable for a nuclear attack with the B61-12.
NNSA announced that “all the needed production of B61-12s” will be completed in the fiscal year 2026. The program foresees the construction of 500 bombs at a cost of about 10 billion dollars (each bomb costing twice as much if it were built entirely of gold). Their actual number, however, remains secret as their geographical location is largely secret. It is the determining factor in the offensive capacity of the B61-12 nuclear bombs. If they were all located in US territory, ready to be transported with strategic bombers, this would not constitute a substantial modification of the current strategic assets. The B61-12 will instead be located in other countries, especially close to Russia, ready to be transported and launched with F-35s and other fighters.
Aviano and Ghedi bases have been restructured to accommodate the F-35A fighters armed with the new nuclear bombs. Thirty Italian F-35A fighters can be deployed in Ghedi, ready to attack under US command with 60 B61-12 nuclear bombs. It is not excluded that they will also be located in other bases on the Italian territory. In addition to being located in Germany, Belgium, and Holland, they could be also deployed in Poland, whose air forces have been participating for years in NATO nuclear warfare exercises. It is not excluded that they could be located in other Eastern countries. The NATO fighters located in the Baltic republics, close to Russia, can also be armed with the B61-12s. It is not excluded that the new nuclear bombs can also be deployed in Asia and the Middle East against China and Iran. Despite being classified as “non-strategic nuclear weapons”, close to target the B61-12 bombs have offensive capabilities similar to those of strategic weapons (such as the nuclear warheads of intercontinental ballistic missiles). They are therefore destabilizing weapons, which will cause a chain reaction and accelerate the nuclear arms ra.
The 5 nuclear powers permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom – affirmed in a joint declaration (January 3, 2022), that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought ”and that “we remain committed to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of to nuclear arms race and nuclear disarmament”.
The US should therefore commit not to deploy the new B61-12 nuclear bombs in other countries, even better not to produce them at all.
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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.
Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102 Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling) PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
Fra quattro mesi, in maggio, inizia negli Usa la produzione su larga scala della nuova bomba nucleare B61-12: lo annuncia la U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (L’Amministrazione per la sicurezza nucleare nazionale, NNSA, facente parte del Dipartimento Usa dell’Energia). Man mano che usciranno di fabbrica, le nuove bombe nucleari saranno consegnate alla US Air Force, che le installerà nelle basi in Italia e altri paesi europei al posto delle B61.
La B61-12 è una nuova arma nucleare polivalente che sostituisce tre delle varianti dell’attuale B61 (3, 4 e 7). Ha una testata nucleare con quattro opzioni di potenza, selezionabili a seconda dell’obiettivo da distruggere. Non viene sganciata in verticale come la B61, ma a distanza dall’obiettivo su cui si dirige guidata da un sistema satellitare. Può penetrare nel sottosuolo, esplodendo in profondità per distruggere i bunker dei centri di comando così da «decapitare» il paese nemico in un first strike nucleare. Per tale attacco la US Air Force dispone anche della quarta variante della B61, la B61-11 penetrante, ammodernata nel 2001. La B61-12, conferma la NNSA, può essere lanciata sia dal bombardiere stealth B-2A e dal futuro B-21, sia da caccia a duplice capacità convenzionale e nucleare.
Tra questi vi sono gli F-16C/D statunitensi schierati ad Aviano e i Tornado italiani PA-200 schierati a Ghedi. Ancora più idonei all’attacco nucleare con le B61-12 sono gli F-35A, già operativi anche nell’Aeronautica italiana. La NNSA comunica che «tutta la produzione necessaria di B61-12» sarà completata nell’anno fiscale 2026. Il programma prevede la costruzione di 500 bombe, con un costo di circa 10 miliardi di dollari (per cui ciascuna viene a costare il doppio di quanto costerebbe se fosse costruita interamente in oro). Il loro numero effettivo resta però segreto, come resta in gran parte segreta la loro dislocazione geografica.
Essa costituisce il fattore determinante della capacità offensiva delle bombe nucleari B61-12. Se fossero dislocate tutte in territorio statunitense, pronte ad essere trasportate con i bombardieri strategici, ciò non costituirebbe una sostanziale modifica degli attuali assetti strategici. Le B61-12 saranno invece dislocate in altri paesi a ridosso soprattutto della Russia, pronte ad essere trasportate e lanciate con gli F-35 e altri caccia.
Le basi di Aviano e Ghedi sono state ristrutturate per accogliere i caccia F-35A armati delle nuove bombe nucleari. A Ghedi possono essere schierati 30 caccia italiani F-35A, pronti all’attacco sotto comando Usa con 60 bombe nucleari B61-12. Non è escluso che esse vengano dislocate anche in altre basi sul territorio italiano. Non è escluso che, oltre ad essere dislocate in Germania, Belgio e Olanda, siano schierate anche in Polonia, le cui forze aeree partecipano da anni alle esercitazioni Nato di guerra nucleare, e in altri paesi dell’Est. I caccia Nato dislocati nelle repubbliche baltiche, a ridosso della Russia, possono essere anch’essi armati delle B61-12. Non escluso che le nuove bombe nucleari possano essere schierate anche in Asia e Medioriente contro Cina e Iran.
Nonostante siano classificate come «armi nucleari non-strategiche», le B61-12, avvicinate agli obiettivi, hanno capacità offensive analoghe a quelle delle armi strategiche (come le testate nucleari dei missili balistici intercontinentali). Sono quindi armi destabilizzanti, che provocheranno una reazione a catena accelerando la corsa agli armamenti nucleari.
Le 5 potenze nucleari membri permanenti del Consiglio di Sicurezza delle Nazioni Unite – Stati Uniti, Russia, Cina, Francia e Regno Unito – affermano, in una dichiarazione congiunta (3 gennaio), che «una guerra nucleare non può essere vinta e non deve mai essere combattuta» e che «rimaniamo impegnati a portare avanti negoziati in buona fede su misure efficaci relative alla cessazione della corsa agli armamenti nucleari e al disarmo nucleare». Si impegnino allora gli Usa a non schierare in altri paesi, ancora meglio a non produrre, le nuove bombe nucleari B61-12.
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Sometimes it seems that when it comes to international relations Russian president Vladimir Putin might be the only head of state who is capable of any rational proposals. His recent negotiating positions conveyed initially by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybakov to step back from the brink of war between his country and the United States over Ukraine are largely eminently sensible and would defuse the possibility that Eastern Europe might become a future Sarajevo incident that would ignite a nuclear war. Per Putin,
“We need long-term legally binding guarantees even if we know they cannot be trusted, as the US frequently withdraws from treaties that become uninteresting to them. But…something [more is needed], not just verbal assurances.”
Putin and President Biden discussed the Russian proposals and other issues in a phone conversation on December 30th, in which Biden called for diplomacy, and both he and Putin reportedly took steps to defuse the possible confrontation. In the phone call the two presidents agreed to initiate bilateral negotiations described as “strategic stability dialogue” relating to “mutual security guarantees” which have now begun on Sunday, January 9th, in Geneva. That will be followed by an exploratory meeting of the NATO-Russia Council on Wednesday and another meeting with the Organization for Security and Cooperation on Thursday.
Pat Buchanan, who is somewhat skeptical about Russian overreach, has summed up the Putin position, which he refers to as an ultimatum, as “Get off our front porch. Get out of our front yard. And stay out of our backyard.” Putin has demanded that NATO cease expansion into Eastern Europe, which threatens only Russia, while also scaling back planned missile emplacements in those former Warsaw Pact states that are already members of the alliance. He also has called on the US to reduce harassing incursions by warships and strategic bombers along the Russian border and to cease efforts to insert military bases in the five ‘Stans along the Russian federation’s southern border. In other words, Russia believes that it should not have hostile military forces gathering along its borders, that it should have some kind of legally guaranteed and internationally endorsed strategic security zone such as the United States enjoys behind two oceans with friendly governments to north and south.
Buchanan concludes that there is much room for negotiating a serious agreement that will satisfy both sides, observing that the US now has through NATO untenable security arrangements with 28 European countries. He notes how “The day cannot be far off when the US is going to have to review and discard Cold War commitments that date to the 1940s and 1950s, and require us to fight a nuclear power such as Russia for countries that have nothing to do with our vital interests or our national security.”
Secretary of State Tony Blinkenhas been openly skeptical about the Russian proposals, arguing that Moscow is a threat to Europe, though the extent that the Biden administration will play hard ball over the details is difficult to assess. Blinken and NATO have already declared that they will continue their expansion into Eastern Europe and the White House is reportedly preparing harsh new sanctions against Russia if the talks are not successful. To be sure, Administration pushback may be a debating technique to moderate or even eliminate some of the demands, or there may actually be hard liners from the Center for New American Security who have the administration’s ear who want to confront Russia. Either way, both Blinken and Biden have warned the Russians “not to make a serious mistake over Ukraine,” also stating that there would be “massive” economic consequences if there were any attack by Russian troops. After a meeting with Germany’s new Foreign Minister, Blinken asserted last week that there would be no progress with in diplomatic approaches to the problem as long as there is a Russian “gun pointed at Ukraine’s head.” In reality, of course, Moscow is 5,000 miles away from Washington and the truly dangerous pointed gun has been in the hands of NATO and the US right on Russia’s doorstep.
To be sure, fighting Russia is popular in some circles, largely a result of incessant negative media coverage about Putin and his government. Opinion polls suggest that half of all Americans favor sending troops to defend the Ukrainians. The Republicans, notably Senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio, appear to be particularly enthusiastic regarding going to war over Ukraine as well as with China over Taiwan and openly advocate both admitting Ukraine into NATO as well as sending troops and weapons as well as providing intelligence to assist Kiev. They argue that it is necessary to defend American democracy and also to maintain the US’s “credibility,” the last refuge of a scoundrel nation, as Daniel Larison observes, since Washington frequently “goes back on its word.” And then there are the crazies like Ohio Congressman Mike Turnerwho says that US troops must be sent to Ukraine to defend American democracy. Or Republican Senator from Mississippi Roger Wickerwho favors a possible unilateral nuclear first-strike to “rain destruction on Russian military capability,” leading to a global conflict that wouldn’t be so bad as it would only kill 10 to 20 million Americans.
Russia has a right to be worried as something is brewing in Kazakhstan right now that just might be a replay of the US-supported NGO-instigated successful overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014. The Collective Security Treaty Organization members Russia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Armenia, have sent soldiers responding to the Kazakh government’s request for help. Unfortunately, US foreign policy is not only about Russia. The Taiwan issue continues to fester with a similar resonance to the Ukraine crisis. China, a rising power, increasingly wants to assert itself in its neighborhood while the US is trying to alternatively confront and contain it while also propping up relationships that evolved after the Korean War and during the Cold War. The status quo is unsustainable, but US moves to “protect” Taiwan are themselves destabilizing as they make the Chinese suspicious of American intentions and will likely lead to unnecessary armed conflict.
And let’s not ignore America’s continued devastation by sanctions and bombs of civilian populations in Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan and Yemen to punish the governments of those countries. And, of course there, is always Israel, good old loyal ally and greatly loved by all politicians and the media, Israel, the Jewish state. Biden continues to waffle on reentry into the Iran nuclear non-proliferation agreement, which is good for the US, under pressure from Israel and its domestic “Amen chorus.” Just last month, speaking at a Zionist Organization of America Gala, former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeointoned that “There is no more important task of the Secretary of State than standing for Israel and there is no more important ally to the United States than Israel.” Add to that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s unforgettable bleat about her love for Israel, “I have said to people when they ask me if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid…and I don’t even call it aid…our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are.”
You might ask how any American leader could so blatantly state that US interests are subordinate to those of a foreign country, but there we are. And it is tragic that our president is willing to sacrifice American military lives in support of interests that are completely fraudulent. The truth is that we have a government that in bipartisan fashion does everything ass backwards while the American people struggle to pay the bills and watch their quality of life and even their security go downhill. Again citing Vladimir Putin’s wisdom on the subject, one might observe that as early as 2007 at the Munich Security Conference, the Russian president said that the “lawless behavior” of the United States in insisting on global dominance and leadership did not respect the vital interests of other nations and undermined both the desire for and the mechanisms established to encourage peaceful relations. He got that right. That is the crux of the matter. There is neither credibility nor humanity to American foreign policy, and everyone knows that the United States and allies like Israel are basically rogue nations that obey no rules and respect no one else’s rights. This has been somewhat true since the Second World War but it has become routine practice in nearly all of America’s international relations since 9/11 and the real losers are the American people, who have to shoulder the burden of an increasingly feckless and hopelessly corrupt political class.
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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.
Featured image is from Andrey_Popov / Shutterstock
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Despite the dialogue, NATO continues to maintain an aggressive rhetoric towards Russia, promising a new armed conflict if current negotiations fail to reach a consensus. In a interview, the Secretary General of NATO stated that the Western military alliance is prepared for a situation of war in Europe if Russia does not collaborate towards a resolution of the Ukrainian issue. More than a warning, Stoltenberg’s attitude appears to be a true boycott against the negotiations and tends to make the pacification of Eastern Europe even more difficult.
Jens Stoltenberg, during a recent interview with the Financial Times, stated that his bloc is prepared for a new armed conflict on European soil in case bilateral negotiations fail. Stoltenberg’s words created an atmosphere of tensions and mistrust on the eve of one of the most important events in recent history between Moscow and NATO – in which terms for the peaceful resolution of the Ukrainian question will be discussed.
These were some of the Secretary’s words:
“I am aware of Russia’s history. For centuries they have experienced conflict with neighbors (…) [But] Russia has an alternative: to co-operate, to work with Nato (…) It is possible to find together a path, a political way forward, and also to address Russia’s concerns… But there continues to be a risk of conflict (…) Nato’s deterrence is credible and strong… We have to hope and work hard for the best, but be prepared for the worst.”
Stoltenberg and the pro-Western analysts justify this type of speech based on the movement of troops operated by the Russians in recent months, mainly in regions close to the border with Ukraine. It is estimated that around 100,000 troops were deployed on the western borders, in addition to military vehicles and other equipment. For months, Washington has been promoting the thesis that this troop movement would be an indication of an alleged Russian invasion plan against Ukraine, which is why tensions increased in 2021, leading to the need to schedule a summit. However, this kind of justification sounds fallacious and weak.
First of all, it must be remembered that at no time did the Russian government try to allocate troops outside its own territorial limits. The moves took place strictly within the Russian State’s sovereign space, which in no way can be interpreted as any kind of international threat. Every state has the right to distribute its military forces throughout its territory in the most convenient and strategic way possible, and it is absolutely normal that a tense zone such as the western border is receiving special attention from Moscow.
Also, the very reason why Russia is acting this way is due to NATO’s previous attitudes in the region. Western maneuvers in Ukraine have been a real threat to the integrity of western Russian territory and the entire Moscow’s strategic environment. And so, it has been the same process for years: NATO allocates troops on the Russian western border and makes threats, which are responded to with mere troop movement (which is an elementary security measure) by Moscow, within Russian territory itself – and then the West promotes the speech that the Russian government is preparing its troops for an invasion of Ukraine.
Considering these facts, Stoltenberg’s words can be interpreted in only one way: the condition for NATO to reach an agreement with Russia on the Ukrainian case is linked to the imposition of limits on Russian troops’ movements within Russian territory. Moscow must give “clear signals” that it does not plan to invade Ukraine – and these signals cannot be the repeated declarations of the Russian government that such a plan does not exist, but something more: a true self-limitation of its own military power. NATO wants Russia to keep its western border insecure, allowing eastern European space to become an arena of western occupation.
This is just another attempt by NATO to subvert the negotiations in order to impose abusive conditions on Russia, trying to make its interests prevail unilaterally, using the threat of war. The problem with this speech is that Stoltenberg’s threat will be interpreted as a bluff. It is very clear to both NATO and Russia that Ukraine is not such an important scenario for the West to the point of justifying the beginning of a war on European soil, with the confrontation of antagonistic nuclear powers.
Stoltenberg just tried, in a very unsophisticated way, to impose the interests of his bloc to intimidate Russia before and during the forthcoming talks. Even if his words are not a bluff and he personally defends the idea of war against Russia, his plans would be frustrated by the governments that are part of the alliance, which would never consider Ukraine a sufficient reason for a new war in Europe.
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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Geopolitical consultant.
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OneAmerica, a national life insurance company based in Indianapolis, reports working age people (18 to 64) are dying at a rate that is 40% higher than prepandemic rates
There’s also been an uptick in disability claims. Initially, there was a rise in short-term disability claims, but now most claims are for long-term disabilities
Hospitalizations in Indiana are also higher than before the COVID shots were rolled out in in 2021, and the highest they’ve been in five years
The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India also reports a 41% rise in death claims in 2021
COVID-19 deaths were significantly lower in 2021 than 2020, so COVID-19 can be ruled out as the cause for this historical rise in excess deaths and disabilities. Right now, the most probable cause is the experimental COVID jabs
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As we’ve seen over the past two years, data and statistics can be manipulated and skewed in a wide variety of ways. COVID cases, for example, have clearly been overinflated by including people with no symptoms (likely false positives) and diagnosing anyone entering the hospital for an unrelated issue as a COVID patient if they test positive (again, falsely) for SARS-CoV-2.
One of the most reliable data points we have is all-cause mortality. It’s very hard to massage that statistic, as people are either dead or they’re not. Their inclusion in the national death index database is based on one primary criteria — they’ve died — regardless of the cause.
From there, their cause of death, as identified on their death certificate, is added in to more granular statistics, such as the number of people who died from cancer and heart disease in any given year, for example. But while the cause of any given death can be manipulated and altered, the fact that there was a death is more certain. What’s more, death rates tend to be very stable.
As noted in a (not peer-reviewed) study led by scientist Denis Rancourt, who looked at U.S. mortality between March 2020 and October 2021,1 “All-cause mortality by time is the most reliable data for detecting true catastrophic events causing death, and for gauging the population-level impact of any surge in deaths from any cause.”
40% Rise in Deaths Among Working Americans
With that in mind, OneAmerica’s announcement that the death rate of working-age Americans (18 to 64), in the third quarter of 2021, was 40% higher than prepandemic levels is rather stunning. OneAmerica is a national mutual life insurance company based in Indianapolis. During an early January 2022 press conference, CEO Scott Davidson said:2
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business — not just at OneAmerica. The data is consistent across every player in that business.
And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic. Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic. So, 40% is just unheard of.”
According to Davidson, a majority of the death claims filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths, so something else is driving up the death rate. As reported by The Center Square:3
“The CDC weekly death counts, which reflect the information on death certificates and so have a lag of up to eight weeks or longer, show that for the week ending Nov. 6, there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago — 195 verses 336 — but more deaths from other causes — 1,350 versus 1,319.”
Disability Claims Have Also Risen
At the same time, OneAmerica has also noticed an uptick in disability claims. Initially, there was a rise in short-term disability claims, but now most claims are for long-term disabilities. The company expects the rise in claims will cost them “well over $100 million,” an unexpected expense that will be passed on to employers buying group life insurance policies.
During that press conference, Brian Tabor, president of the Indiana Hospital Association, confirmed Indiana hospitals are seeing a dramatic increase in both deaths and hospitalizations for a wide variety of conditions.4
Not only are the number of hospitalizations in Indiana higher than it was before the COVID shots were rolled out in in 2021, it’s the highest it’s been in five years.5 Meanwhile, the daily deaths from COVID-19 are less than half that of 2020.
What’s Killing Younger Healthy Americans?
Since COVID-19 isn’t killing younger, healthy Americans, what is? What changed in 2021 that might have such a devastating effect on people’s health? Well, the most obvious change is that more than 100 million Americans got the experimental COVID shots, and doctors and scientists have elucidated several mechanisms by which these gene transfer technologies might injure or kill. As reported by vaccine safety blogger Steve Kirsch:6
“Normally death rates don’t change at all. They are very stable. It would take something REALLY BIG to have an effect this big. The effect size is 12-sigma.7 That is an event that would happen by pure chance every 2.832 years. That’s very rare. It’s basically never.
The universe is only 14 billion years old which is 1.413. In other words, the event that happened is not a statistical ‘fluke.’ Something caused a very big change … Whatever it is that is causing this, it is bigger and deadlier than COVID and it’s affecting nearly everyone.”
Kirsch lists 14 clues as to what this deadly “something” might be, including the following:8
Adverse Events May Be More Underreported Than Calculated
Kirsch continues:9
“We know that about 3M people die a year in the U.S.10 75% are over 65 years old, so that leaves us with 750K deaths per year for under 65. If that jumped by 40% from pre-pandemic levels in Q3 and Q4, we should assume that Q2 was the ramp up period (we’ll assume a linear ramp up in Q2).
So that is 75K deaths per quarter for Q3 and Q4 and half of that, 37K deaths in Q2. So that means roughly 187K excess deaths are probably happening for ages 18-64 due to some new cause.”
He then goes on to compare that rough estimate of 187,000 excess deaths to the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) which, as of the December 24, 2021, data release, included 2,156 deaths between the ages of 17 and 65.
Subtracting the background death rate of 40 from 2,156, multiplied by Kirsch’s calculated underreporting factor (URF) of 4111 gives us 87,000 deaths. In other words, assuming vaccine injuries are underreported by a factor of 41, the real death toll from the COVID jab would be 87,000. However, that’s 100,000 short of the 187,000 excess death rate calculated above.
This means “either there is another effect at play which is actually killing more people 18 to 64 than the vaccine is, (unlikely but possible),” Kirsch writes, or “my URF of 41 is underestimating deaths by a factor of 2.15.” Kirsch is not alone in suspecting the novel COVID shots are the causative factor for this dramatic rise in excess deaths.
A Government Imposed Health Disaster Looms Large
Dr. Robert Malone addressed OneAmerica’s finding in a Substack article, stating:12
“AT A MINIMUM, based on my reading, one has to conclude that if this report holds and is confirmed by others in the dry world of life insurance actuaries, we have both a huge human tragedy and a profound public policy failure of the U.S. Government and U.S. HHS system to serve and protect the citizens that pay for this ‘service.’
IF this holds true, then the genetic vaccines so aggressively promoted have failed, and the clear federal campaign to prevent early treatment with lifesaving drugs has contributed to a massive, avoidable loss of life.
AT WORST, this report implies that the federal workplace vaccine mandates have driven what appears to be a true crime against humanity. Massive loss of life in (presumably) workers that have been forced to accept a toxic vaccine at higher frequency relative to the general population of Indiana.”
Jessica Rose, Ph.D., a research fellow at the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge in Israel, also weighed in on the new data:13
“So what does this tell us? It tells us that we are potentially in a huge steaming pile of shit. To be frank. These indications from our friend at the insurance company are simply that — indications.
If what we are seeing in VAERS, and the other adverse event reporting systems, is the mere reflection of what is actually going on with regards to injuries, which I presume it is, then we ain’t seen nothing yet.
And if what is being reported with regards to immune deficiencies associated with these injections is not simply anecdotal or representative of a small sub-cohort of individuals, we could be looking at a government-imposed complete health disaster.”
The Defender also reported other studies and data suggesting the COVID shots are causing massive harm:14
“In a September study15 described as ‘narrative-shattering,’ Harvard, Tufts and Veterans Affairs researchers reported that approximately half of hospitalized patients ‘showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021’ had likely been admitted ‘for another reason entirely.’
In Ventura County, California, which is witnessing a startling spike in non-COVID-related hospitalizations,16 nurse whistleblowers argue the vaccines should be one of the first explanations considered. Why else, they ask, would otherwise healthy adults be showing up in droves with brain bleeds, heart attacks, autoimmune issues and lung abnormalities?
Autopsies17 of individuals who died following COVID vaccination reveal shocking pathological alterations most frequently affecting the heart and lungs but also the brain and other organs …
Far from being willing to contemplate the elephant in the room, the Indiana insurance executive indicated he plans to require all OneAmerica employees to get vaccinated. Somewhat counterintuitively, the industry’s ability to pass along costs for elevated claims activity by raising premiums now has analysts rosily predicting the insurance industry is ‘buckled up to accelerate growth in 2022’ …
On the consumer side of the fence, the picture is far less rosy — for both the unvaccinated and vaccinated. For example, New York State Assemblyman Patrick Burke (D-Buffalo) proposed punitive legislation that would permit insurers to deny COVID-related treatment coverage for individuals who choose not to get vaccinated.
Adding insult to injury, there are also reports of insurance companies imposing premium increases on employers in counties with low vaccination rates. Meanwhile, many of those injured by COVID vaccines report18 denials of health and disability insurance coverage.”
Same Trend Seen in Many Other States and Countries
As noted by Davidson, OneAmerica is not alone in seeing an unprecedented spike in excess deaths. It’s also not limited to the United States. The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India, for example, also reports a 41% rise in death claims in 2021.19 That’s near-identical to the 40% increase reported by OneAmerica.
According to Kirsch, Phoenix, Arizona, is reporting a 100% rise in the death rate among city employees. In 2021, it was double that of the 10-year average.20 “There is clearly something going on that is not unique to Indiana,” he writes, adding:
“Excess mortality figures in Europe21 and the UK seem to show younger people are dying faster than the elderly, and that people 0-14 are dying faster in the second half of 2021 as compared to the first. More evidence showing that the vaccines are killing kids.”
You may recall that at the end of October 2021, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a ridiculous “study”22 that would have even failed a seventh-grade science experiment that claimed to show the COVID shot reduced the risk of death from all causes, including accidents, by 34%.
The CDC can lie up and down all day long and attempt to confuse people with fraudulent studies, but what they are simply unable to do at this point is to manipulate the death rates. Independent third-party insurance carriers are now validating the depth of the CDC cover-up and fraud. The real-world excess deaths we’re now seeing clearly refute the CDC’s attempt to prop up the COVID jab narrative with manipulated data.
Safety Signal Is Indisputable
As cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough has repeatedly stated, we had a clear safety signal all the way back in February 2021, and it’s only gotten more pronounced over time. Despite that, not a single safety review has been conducted, and our health authorities refuse to address the astronomical death toll.
At this point, anyone who says the COVID shots are “safe and effective,” full stop, immediately loses all credibility. There’s not a shred of data to suggest either is true. Everything we have points to these injections being the most lethal drugs ever used in modern medical history.
Perhaps the saddest part of it all is that they’re completely unnecessary. Doctors have identified several effective treatment options that can slash the COVID death rate by 85% or more. There’s no medical reason to include the global population in a novel drug experiment. We could have avoided all these excess deaths by making sure early treatment was given, rather than exclusively relying on an experimental “vaccine.”
Early Treatment Options
While the overall risk of COVID-19 has been grossly exaggerated, early treatment is key, both for preventing severe infection and preventing “long-haul COVID.” Here are a few suggestions:
• Oral-nasal decontamination — The virus, especially the Delta variant, replicates rapidly in the nasal cavity and mouth for three to five days before spreading to the rest of the body, so you want to strike where it’s most likely to be found right from the start.
Research23 has demonstrated that irrigating your nasal passages with 2.5 milliliters of 10% povidone-iodine (an antimicrobial) and standard saline, twice a day, is an effective remedy.
Another option that was slightly less effective was using a mixture of saline with half a teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate (an alkalizer). You can also gargle with these to kill viruses in your mouth and throat. When done routinely, it can be a very effective preventive strategy. You can find printable treatment guides on TruthForHealth.org.
• Nebulized peroxide — A similar strategy is to use nebulized hydrogen peroxide, diluted with saline to a 0.1% solution. Both hydrogen peroxide and saline24,25 have antiviral effects. You can view my previous videos on this on BitChute.
In a May 10, 2021, Orthomolecular Medicine press release,26 Dr. Thomas E. Levy — board-certified in internal medicine and cardiology — discussed the use of this treatment for COVID-19 specifically. Levy has in fact written an entire book on peroxide nebulization called “Rapid Virus Recovery,” which you can download for free from MedFox Publishing.
• Vitamin D optimization — Research has shown having a vitamin D level above 50 ng/mL brings the risk of COVID mortality down to near-zero.27
• Other key nutraceuticals — Vitamin C, zinc, quercetin and NAC all have scientific backing.
• Key drugs — For acute infection, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine or monoclonal antibodies can be used. While monoclonal antibodies and hydroxychloroquine must be used early on in the disease process, ivermectin has been shown to be effective in all stages of the infection.
Doxycycline or azithromycin are typically added as well, to address any secondary bacterial infection, as well as inhaled budesonide (a steroid). Oral steroids are used on and after the fifth day for pulmonary weakness and aspirin or NAC can be added to reduce the risk of clotting.
Full-strength aspirin is also typically recommended, but I believe lumbrokinase and serrapeptase may be a better, at least safer, alternative, as they help break down and prevent blood clots naturally.
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The U.S. Postal Service has asked the Biden regime for a temporary waiver from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s COVID-19 vaccine requirement, and if the agency gets one, then that proves beyond any doubt that no American companies should be required to force their workers to get the jab or face weekly testing.
Because the reason is obvious: The administration does not really believe the virus is a planet-ending strain and is just imposing a mandate as a way of exerting authoritarian control over the population.
For its part, the USPS is claiming that the requirement will worsen staff shortages and exacerbate the still worsening supply chain crisis.
“Given the significant challenges that our nation’s supply chains are already experiencing, we respectfully suggest that the nation cannot afford the additional potential substantial harm that would be engendered if the ability of the Postal Service to deliver mail and packages is significantly negatively impacted,” Deputy Postmaster General Douglas A. Tulino wrote in the request to OSHA in a Jan. 4 letter obtained by The Epoch Times.
Tulino went on to argue that the vaccine-or-test mandate that is part of OSHA’s mandate, which was issued under a very little-used provision known as an “emergency temporary standard,” could lead to a “critical disruption to our vital operations” during the ongoing pandemic, which seems like some want it to be never-ending.
The deputy postmaster went on to claim that the Postal Service, which operates around 30,000 locations around the country, would have to train “tens of thousands of local supervisors and managers” in order to monitor workers’ compliance with the mandate.
The Epoch Times continued:
The letter stated that requiring the USPS “to absorb what could inevitably be a dramatic loss of employees at a time when the labor market is extremely tight and in the middle of the Postal Service’s Peak Season would have a potentially catastrophic impact on our ability to provide service.”
The U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 7 [heard] oral arguments on the rule, which affects private businesses with 100 or more workers. It stipulates that workers either submit to weekly COVID-19 testing and mask-wearing or get vaccinated.
A spokesperson with the Labor Department, which OSHA falls under, said the agency is reviewing the USPS request, but added that OSHA determined that compliance was “feasible for employers with 100 or more employees, including the postal service.”
“The Postal Service is seeking temporary relief because it wants to ensure that its ability to deliver mail and packages is not hindered amid the current disruptions in the nation’s supply chain,” said Darlene Casey, a USPS spokeswoman. “In addition, the Postal Service wants to adopt policies and procedures that comply with the [OSHA rule] while also fulfilling the organization’s other legal obligations.”
If the Postal Service is granted an extension or a reprieve, then it will prove beyond any doubt that the regime doesn’t consider the virus to be nearly as serious as they claim it is.
Meanwhile, 183 lawmakers sent a “friend of the court” brief to the U.S. Supreme Court asking justices to strike down the rule as unconstitutional and unnecessary.
“[OSHA] was never meant to be the health police,” they wrote. “Moreover, mandatory vaccinations do not stop individuals from contracting and transmitting COVID-19. Vaccinated workers can still contract and transmit COVID-19, including the new Omicron variant. Given that fact, imposing masking and testing restrictions only on unvaccinated workers makes no sense because all workers regardless of vaccination status remain potential carriers and transmitters of the virus.”
“Congressional members have an interest in the powers they delegate to agencies not being abused,” the lawmakers added. “The legislative authority vested in the federal government belongs to Congress, not the Executive branch. In this case, the promulgation by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) of a sweeping, nationwide vaccine mandate on businesses intrudes into an area of legislative concern far beyond the authority of the agency.”
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The person with whom we are all most intimate is oneself. It’s just the way it is. I don’t mean that in some oracular Delphic “know thyself” way, or in any deep psychoanalytical sense, but very simply. We have our own thoughts and feelings that come and go like breaths, most of which never get expressed in words. Together with our actions, including speech, they make up our lives. We try to anchor them with photos and memorabilia and lots of things, but time has no mercy; it sweeps us all away. Then our things remain for a while until they become a burden to those who remain, and then the things go. As the song reminds us, “We come and go like a ripple on a stream.”
For most people, their congeries of living experiences evaporate as quickly as soap bubbles in a pan of dish water. This is also true for the social and personal facts of our lives that leave but vague traces. Yet some strange people record them. They are a small minority, writers being chief among them. They keep words. Words unspoken and spoken words.
I have kept notebooks since my mid-twenties. They sit in cartons in a closet. They were at first my imaginary friends who never responded. Maybe I didn’t want them to. They are still silent, although every once in a while I seem to hear inarticulate sounds coming from the boxes.
I usually give them my ear at the end of each year when I read my notebook for the previous year. I then extract any entries that I have not yet used in my writing and put them in a small writing project notebook. But this year it was very strange. There was only one entry for 2021: “It’s all lies.” Those words keep echoing in my mind.
Most years I encounter many things that I have forgotten: a scene I saw and recorded; a snatch of conversation overheard; thoughts and musings; little paragraphs that I write that I might use later; feelings and emotions; questions; notes for future writing projects; things I did, people I met, books I read; events both personal and social that seem significant – almost anything that comes to mind. I have a love/hate relationship with these jottings, for I know that when I am dead, few, if any, people will care to read them. Why should they? I don’t, except once at the end of each year. For some strange reason I feel that if I burn the lot of them, the real me might disappear. But I also don’t really believe that, for I know I am not in those boxes. But I keep writing to myself nevertheless and then shut those words up.
“It’s all lies” concisely summed up my private disgust throughout 2020-21. I had tried in my public writing to expose those lies while having no energy or inclination left to write to or for myself. The past two years have been so absurd, the Covid propaganda so all-consuming, its madness so disturbing as so many people have gone off the deep end believing such outlandish garbage, that to contemplate this madness any more than I was already doing publicly must have seemed…I don’t know what. All I know is that I didn’t. I could only take so much.
Anyway, to start this year, having read my three words for 2021, I turned to reading the notebooks of my companion since my early twenties, Albert Camus. He too kept notebooks – cahiers – from the age of twenty-two until his strange death in a car crash – accident or assassination? – on January 4, 1960, a few months after his forty-sixth birthday, the age my daughter will reach this month. Camus was born in 1913, the same year as my father. These facts may be significant. I am writing this on January 4, 2022.
Brother Albert had always striven to serve both justice and beauty; to find a way to oppose a world of lies while living fully. I have recently concluded that many people who accept or oppose the vast tapestry of lies within which we now exist, the closing down of freedom and the rise of a new totalitarianism, have in a strange way unknowingly embraced a trick of the propagandists: they have become so one-dimensional in their obsessive need to defend or oppose their positions that they have forgotten to relish life.
One side lives in perpetual fear of disease and death and has turned into obedient and vengeful children wanting to ban the dissidents from society or burn them at the stake. The other side, flabbergasted at the credulous behavior of the compliant ones in the face of so many official lies and contradictions, feels compelled – and rightly so – to resist at every turn the gradual slide into a digital dystopian totalitarianism. But emotions are so raw and twisted that they flip at the drop of a pin. Or are flipped. This is how great propaganda works. For those behind the COVID hoax, Russia-gate, etc. want all the peons to hate life itself and embrace their dark and evil nihilism. To forget that life is both beautiful and tragic. To cut each other to pieces.
The journalist Andre Vltchek used to remind us, as he traveled the world reporting on the empire’s atrocities, that to dispense with poetry and song and passion is to succumb to evil; it is to forget that true revolution demands art as well as politics, the best expressions of the human spirit. For years before his untimely death in 2020, he noted how a grim sense of joylessness and indifference had descended on so many western countries, especially those, led by the United States, which cause so much human misery throughout the world. And he reminded us repeatedly, that throughout the world where people are oppressed, the spirit of resistance is preserved in remembering the great and beautiful poetry and music of their countries’ artists, whose words regular people have memorized and celebrate for their beauty and joie de vivre – despite oppressive conditions.
Speaking for himself, in a moving essay, “Return to Tipasa,”Camus wrote:
To give up beauty and the sensual happiness that comes with it and devote one’s self exclusively to unhappiness requires a nobility I lack…isolate beauty ends in grimaces, solitary justice in oppression. Anyone who seeks to serve the one to the exclusion of the other serves no one, not even himself, and in the end is doubly the servant of injustice.
So I have turned to Camus’ notebooks to see if I might fill in some gaps and learn some lessons for 2022.
On May 5, 1935 Camus made his first entry. Here is the opening sentence:
What I mean is this: that one can, with no romanticism, feel nostalgic for lost poverty.
That can be easily misunderstood, but he clarifies it. For Camus grew up in poverty but under the sun and by the sea in Algeria where he found beauty and joy in nature. He knew there was a grey, depressing form of poverty that did not provide such solace. He was trying at a young age to express what he later said differently: “I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”
Yet here we are in 2022 drowning in an excess of things, possessions that keep the world captive to the evil genius of consumer capitalism and the false rhetoric of freedom, things that people don’t need but want because of advertising’s brainwashing and the existential emptiness that convinces people that if you surround yourself with enough things you are somehow protecting yourself, while that delusion feeds an environmental crisis that is destroying the earth. Possessions as a form of demonic possession, a protection racket that doesn’t protect. But they give people an imaginary boost. Call them boosters. See the front page of The New York Times for all the latest consumer goods no one needs. They call it news, and the boosters, booster shots.
April 1937:
In the evening, the gentleness of the world on the bay. There are days when the world lies, days when it tells the truth. It is telling the truth this evening – with what sad and insistent beauty.
Yes, this has always been so, but it is terrifying and exhilarating. Living in constant fear as so many are now doing blocks both the sun and the clouds and reduces life to a caricature of its possibilities. All the official lies have produced passionless people afraid of themselves and others.
April 1941:
“It is always a great crime to deprive people of its liberty on the pretext that it is using it wrongly.” (Tocqueville)
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. When Camus wrote this, Germany was occupying France and the French Resistance was born. These days so many minds are occupied by endless propaganda that penetrates to the primal emotions and reduces carnal truth to digital abstractions. I think we will lose our freedom if we continue to embrace digital technology. Resistance is necessary.
August 1942:
Novel. Don’t put the “plague” in the title. Put something like “The Prisoners.”
He instinctively knew that is was not a plague that imprisons people but the mind-forged manacles of those who are afraid to confront it. Those who lack the courage to see the truth and resist it. To collaborate with the Nazis was for cowards. Free people fight back. As editor of Combat, the banned newspaper, he knew that when voices were censored it was because the censors were afraid the truth would prevail. A good lesson for 2022.
October 1946:
What makes a man feel alone is the cowardice of others. Must one try to understand that cowardice too? But it’s beyond my strength. And, on the other hand, I cannot be a scorner.
Ditto.
September 1949:
One must love life before loving its meaning, Dostoevsky says. Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning consoles us for it.
Even depression is good. Even confronting evil is good. Even arguing. Pleasure is good. It’s all good. Life is an agon, always conflictual and agreeable. We were born to love and fight and try always to make the fight a loving fight. Words are our best weapons. I have always enjoyed writing them, for they always have seemed to be like wild birds in my breast, struggling to leave the nest. They are always taking us somewhere. Where is the question. Or better yet: Where do we want to go?
February 1950:
Later write an essay, without hesitation or reservation, on what I know to be true. (Do what one doesn’t want, want what one doesn’t do.)
What was that? I think he never wrote the essay but left us with his beautiful, unfinished novel, The First Man, wherein he wrote without hesitation or reservation and opened his heart. His was an unfinished life. I wonder if that is true for all of us.
June 1951:
Man of 1950. He fornicated and read the newspapers.
Sort of still right. 2022: They masturbated and checked their cell phones. Call it transhumanism. What’s love got to do with it?
February 1953:
Two common errors: existence precedes essence or essence existence. Both rise and fall with the same step.
So the sagacious intellectuals ripped him for this. Subtleties of thought always escape them. Today’s common errors: Obama differs from Trump or Trump differs from Obama (Biden). I once thought I was an intellectual until I understood their thinking. Small minds looking through the wrong ends of their binoculars.
May 1954:
Play. A happy man. And nobody can put up with him.
So what is happiness? There are those who think that it consists of having “fun.” They cannot understand the joy of struggle, the artist’s efforts to give form to chaos. One can only live if one is drunk with life, Tolstoy said. And he spent a bit of his life writing. Was he happy? Of happiness and despair we have no measure.
November 1, 1954:
I often read that I am atheistic. I hear people speak of my atheism. Yet these words say nothing to me; for me they have no meaning. I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
I do believe in God and yet one of my sisters years ago said to me that “I thought you were an atheist.” This shocked me. Camus too was shocked by the meaningless of such terms. He knew there was a sharp distinction between the heart and the head and that belief and faith were not the same thing. Only the living-dead cannot distinguish them. Faith guides me. Camus, too, was led by an invisible star; he said it differently: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” The current age denies the invisible and promotes defeatism.
July 1, 1958 (his last notebook entry):
The lie lulls or dreams, like the illusion. The truth is the only power, cheerful, inexhaustible. If we were able to live only of, and for truth: young and immortal energy in us. The man of truth does not age. A little more effort and he will not die.
How to say it when “It’s all lies”? Keep trying, and try to make it beautiful. Only the artistic imagination can accomplish this. As you said, Albert, “Beauty never enslaved anyone…And for thousands of years, every day, at every second, it has instead assuaged the servitude of millions of men and, occasionally, liberated some of them once and for all.
After all, perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.
Art advances between two chasms, which are frivolity and propaganda.”
Create dangerously indeed, you advised! For we are in the heat of combat.
Let us rejoice and fight on.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.
Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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According to the report citing four people familiar with the matter, much of the $200 million package included military equipment such as small arms, ammunition, security radios, and medical equipment.
The media outlet adds that Congress was notified of the White House decision earlier this month, but other U.S. officials learned of the matter through classified channels.
The report says that the new security assistance will take some time to reach Ukraine.
It further says, citing two congressional aides, that the Biden administration wanted to keep this new security package secret ahead of the US-Russia security talks that took place in Geneva on Monday.
Another source told CNN that the additional $200 million in security aid to Ukraine is not substantial enough to deter any Russian aggression.
Kiev has made it clear that it wants more security assistance beyond the defensive weaponry already being provided by the U.S.
Western countries accuse Russia of allegedly deploying thousands of troops near the Ukrainian border in preparation for aggressive action.
Moscow has repeatedly denied the accusations.
Following Monday’s talks between Washington and Moscow, a Council between Russia and NATO will meet in Brussels this Wednesday to discuss this issue, among others.
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Featured image: US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, left, and Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Rybakov attend security talks at the United States Mission in Geneva, Switzerland | Photo: DENIS BALIBOUSE / POOL
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Wendy Sherman thinks her aim in talks with Russian officials starting Monday is to lecture them on the cost of hubris. Instead she’s set to lead the U.S., NATO, and Europe down a path of ruin, warns Scott Ritter.
If ever a critical diplomatic negotiation was doomed to fail from the start, the discussions between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine and Russian security guarantees is it.
The two sides can’t even agree on an agenda.
From the Russian perspective, the situation is clear: “The Russian side came here [to Geneva] with a clear position that contains a number of elements that, to my mind, are understandable and have been so clearly formulated—including at a high level—that deviating from our approaches simply is not possible,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the press after a pre-meeting dinner on Sunday hosted by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who is leading the U.S. delegation.
Ryabkov was referring Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands to U.S. President Joe Biden in early December regarding Russian security guarantees, which were then laid out by Moscow in detail in the form of two draft treaties, one a Russian-U.S. security treaty, the other a security agreement between Russia and NATO.
The latter would bar Ukraine from joining NATO and rule out any eastward expansion by the trans-Atlantic military alliance. At the time, Ryabkov tersely noted that the U.S. should immediately begin to address the proposed drafts with an eye to finalizing something when the two sides meet. Now, with the meeting beginning on Monday, it doesn’t appear as if the U.S. has done any such thing.
“[T]he talks are going to be difficult,” Ryabkov told reporters after the dinner meeting. “They cannot be easy. They will be business-like. I think we won’t waste our time tomorrow.” When asked if Russia was ready to compromise, Ryabkov tersely responded, “The Americans should get ready to reach a compromise.”
All the U.S. has been willing to do, it seems, is to remind Russia of so-called “serious consequences” should Russia invade Ukraine, something the U.S. and NATO fear is imminent, given the scope and scale of recent Russian military exercises in the region involving tens of thousands of troops. This threat was made by Biden to Putin on several occasions, including a phone call initiated by Putin last week to help frame the upcoming talks.
Yet on the eve of the Ryabkov-Sherman meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken simply reiterated these threats, declaring that Russia would face “massive consequences” if it invaded Ukraine.
“It’s clear that we’ve offered him two paths forward,” Blinken said, speaking of Putin. “One is through diplomacy and dialogue; the other is through deterrence and massive consequences for Russia if it renews its aggression against Ukraine. And we’re about to test the proposition of which path President Putin wants to take this week.”
Lessons of History
Moscow, June 23, 1941: Soviet soldiers on their way to the front. The sign reads: “Our cause is just. The enemy will be crushed. The victory will be ours! ” (Anatoliy Garanin .License: CC BY SA 3.0.)
It is as if both Biden and Blinken are deaf, dumb, and blind when it comes to reading Russia.
Ryabkov has alluded to a fact already made clear by the Russians—there will be no compromise when it comes to Russia’s legitimate national security interests. And if the U.S. cannot understand how the accumulation of military power encompassed in a military alliance which views Russia as a singular, existential threat to its members’ security is seen by Russia as threatening, then there is no comprehension of how the events of June 22, 1941 have shaped the present -day Russian psyche, why Russia will never again allow such a situation to occur, and why the talks are doomed before they even begin.
As for the American threats, Russia has given its response—any effort to sanction Russia would result, as Putin told Biden last month, in a “complete rupture of relations” between Russia and those countries attempting sanctions. One need not be a student of history to comprehend that the next logical step following a “complete rupture of relations” between two parties that are at loggerheads over matters pertaining to existential threats to the national security of one or both is not the peaceful resumption of relations, but war.
There is no mealy-mouthed posturing by Foggy Bottom peacocks taking place in Moscow, but rather a cold, hard, statement of fact—ignore Russia’s demands at you own peril. The U.S., it seems, believes that the worst-case scenario is one where Russia invades Ukraine, only to wilt under the sustained pressure of economic sanctions and military threats.
Russia’s worse-case scenario is one where it engages in armed conflict with NATO.
Generally speaking, the side that is most prepared for the reality of armed conflict will prevail.
Russia has been preparing for this possibility for more than a year. It has repeatedly shown a capability to rapidly mobilize 100,000-plus combat-ready forces in short order. NATO has shown an ability to mobilize 30,000 after six-to-nine-months of extensive preparations.
The Shape of War
What would a conflict between Russia and NATO look like? In short, not like anything NATO has prepared for. Time is the friend of NATO in any such conflict—time to let sanctions weaken the Russian economy, and time to allow NATO to build up sufficient military power to be able to match Russia’s conventional military strength.
Russia knows this, and as such, any Russian move will be designed to be both swift and decisive.
First and foremost, if it comes to it, when Russia decides to move on Ukraine, it will do so with a plan of action that has been well-thought out and which sufficient resources have been allocated for its successful completion. Russia will not get involved in a military misadventure in Ukraine that has the potential of dragging on and on, like the U.S. experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. Russia has studied an earlier U.S. military campaign—Operation Desert Storm, of Gulf War I—and has taken to heart the lessons of that conflict.
One does not need to occupy the territory of a foe in order to destroy it. A strategic air campaign designed to nullify specific aspects of a nations’ capability, whether it be economic, political, military, or all the above, coupled with a focused ground campaign designed to destroy an enemy’s army as opposed to occupy its territory, is the likely course of action.
Given the overwhelming supremacy Russia has both in terms of the ability to project air power backed by precision missile attacks, a strategic air campaign against Ukraine would accomplish in days what the U.S. took more than a month to do against Iraq in 1991.
On the ground, the destruction of Ukraine’s Army is all but guaranteed. Simply put, the Ukrainian military is neither equipped nor trained to engage in large-scale ground combat. It would be destroyed piecemeal, and the Russians would more than likely spend more time processing Ukrainian prisoners of war than killing Ukrainian defenders.
For any Russian military campaign against Ukraine to be effective in a larger conflict with NATO, however, two things must occur—Ukraine must cease to exist as a modern nation state, and the defeat of the Ukrainian military must be massively one-sided and quick. If Russia is able to accomplish these two objectives, then it is well positioned to move on to the next phase of its overall strategic posturing vis-à-vis NATO—intimidation.
While the U.S., NATO, the EU, and the G7 have all promised “unprecedented sanctions,” sanctions only matter if the other side cares. Russia, by rupturing relations with the West, no longer would care about sanctions. Moreover, it is a simple acknowledgement of reality that Russia can survive being blocked from SWIFT transactions longer than Europe can survive without Russian energy. Any rupturing of relations between Russia and the West will result in the complete embargoing of Russian gas and oil to European customers.
There is no European Plan B. Europe will suffer, and because Europe is composed of erstwhile democracies, politicians will pay the price. All those politicians who followed the U.S. blindly into a confrontation with Russia will now have to answer to their respective constituents why they committed economic suicide on behalf of a Nazi-worshipping, thoroughly corrupt nation (Ukraine) which has nothing in common with the rest of Europe. It will be a short conversation.
NATO’s Fix
If the U.S. tries to build up NATO forces on Russia’s western frontiers in the aftermath of any Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia will then present Europe with a fait accompli in the form of what would now be known as the “Ukrainian model.” In short, Russia will guarantee that the Ukrainian treatment will be applied to the Baltics, Poland, and even Finland, should it be foolish enough to pursue NATO membership.
Russia won’t wait until the U.S. has had time to accumulate sufficient military power, either. Russia will simply destroy the offending party through the combination of an air campaign designed to degrade the economic function of the targeted nation, and a ground campaign designed to annihilate the ability to wage war. Russia does not need to occupy the territory of NATO for any lengthy period—just enough to destroy whatever military power has been accumulated by NATO near its borders.
And—here’s the kicker—short of employing nuclear weapons, there’s nothing NATO can do to prevent this outcome. Militarily, NATO is but a shadow of its former self. The once great armies of Europe have had to cannibalize their combat formations to assemble battalion-sized “combat groups” in the Baltics and Poland. Russia, on the other hand, has reconstituted two army-size formations—the 1stGuards Tank Army and the 20th Combined Arms Army—from the Cold War-era which specialize in deep offensive military action.
Even Vegas wouldn’t offer odds on this one.
Sherman will face off against Ryabkov in Geneva, with the fate of Europe in her hands. The sad thing is, she doesn’t see it that way. Thanks to Biden, Blinken and the host of Russophobes who populate the U.S. national security state today, Sherman thinks she is there to simply communicate the consequences of diplomatic failure to Russia. To threaten. With mere words.
What Sherman, Biden, Blinken, and the others have yet to comprehend is that Russia has already weighed the consequences and is apparently willing to accept them. And respond. With action.
One wonders if Sherman, Biden, Blinken, and the others have thought this through. Odds are, they have not, and the consequences for Europe will be dire.
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Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.
Featured image: Ahead of the formal talks, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman met with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov on Sunday in Geneva and told him Washington “would welcome genuine progress through diplomacy.” (Russian Mission in Geneva)
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Based on the transcript of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union show on January 9, below, as posted on the State Department website.
Much of what has been excised is standard diplomatic verbiage along the lines of we’d prefer a diplomatic solution but….We’d like to think our aggressive adversary is occasionally capable of exercising reason and restraint but….We’d prefer that Russia peacefully evacuate Crimea, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh and Kazakhstan, but if they don’t…. And so on.
Blinken’s tone remains what it was the preceding day after the NATO foreign ministers conference, harsh and bellicose to an alarming degree, and many of the particulars of his CNN interview appear identical to those used the same day by John Bolton in his article in The Wall Street Journal entitled Is the Crisis in Kazakhstan the Rebirth of the Soviet Union? For example, denouncing Russia for aggression against Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine in the same sentence. And when asked by Tapper if what “drives Putin is a desire to restore the old Soviet Union,” responding: “I think that’s right. I think that’s one of President Putin’s objectives.”
His accusation of Russia invading Crimea in 2014 is the standard Western characterization of Russia reclaiming the peninsula without firing a shot. His accusation of aggressive Russian actions against Moldova – a charge no one in the West has leveled until recent weeks – appears to be an allusion to the presence of 1,500 Russian troops in Transnistria, the continuation of a Russian peacekeeping deployment that began in 1992.
Regarding NATO expansion along Russia’s entire western border – fourteen new members in Eastern Europe since 1999 – Blinken is intractable on refusing to even discuss withdrawal of U.S. and NATO military assets from those nations. As he is on Ukraine’s and Georgia’s right to join the military alliance. In his words Washington remains uncompromisingly committed to “the principle that one country can’t change the borders of another by force, the principle that one country can’t dictate to another its foreign policy and the choices – and its choices including with whom it will associate….”
Yet shortly afterwards when speaking of Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev requesting assistance from fellow members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization Blinken states, “We have real questions about why they felt compelled to call in this organization that Russia dominates.” Adding that, “We’re asking for clarification on that.”
In condemning Russian actions in and relating to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Moldova as he does, he identified half of the former union republics of the Soviet Union not already in NATO. They, and Russia itself if included, are identified by Blinken as political and potentially military conflict zones in the worsening confrontation between the U.S./NATO and Russia. And in addition to those, seven or more of what were formerly called frozen conflicts by the West, but which the U.S. and NATO recently have rebranded temporarily occupied territories.
Thirty-one years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union a unipolar U.S. and a global NATO are poised to finish the war of Soviet succession.
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Tapper: Hello. I’m Jake Tapper in Washington, where the state of our union is having Cold War flashbacks.
…President Putin demanding that the U.S. pull some troops back out of Eastern Europe and rule out expanding NATO to include Ukraine. Are either of those on the negotiating table?
Blinken: Neither of those is on the table, Jake, but here’s where we are. There are two paths before us. There’s a path of dialogue and diplomacy to try to resolve some of these differences and avoid a confrontation. The other path is confrontation and massive consequences for Russia if it renews its aggression on Ukraine. We’re about to test the proposition about which path President Putin’s prepared to take.
Tapper: It seems unlikely Putin will withdraw troops or take at least some of them off the border without some concessions by the U.S. You’ve already said that those two that I mentioned up top are off the table or not on the table. What about moving heavy U.S. weaponry out of Poland, moving it further west? Or what about moving missiles? What about limiting the scope of U.S. military exercise? Are any of those on the table?
Blinken: Look, first, Jake, I don’t think we’re going to see any breakthroughs in the coming week….
[I]t’s hard to see making actual progress as opposed to talking in an atmosphere of escalation with a gun to Ukraine’s head. So if we’re actually going to make progress, we’re going to have to see de-escalation, Russia pulling back from the threat that it currently poses to Ukraine.
Tapper: So you didn’t rule any of those out, which doesn’t mean you’re going to do them, but just they’re not off the table as the earlier items you said were.
Blinken: Yeah, it’s – Jake, it’s exactly the opposite. First of all, why are we here? We’re here because repeatedly over the last decade, Russia has committed acts of aggression against neighbors: Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine in 2014, and now the renewed threat about Ukraine today. Second, there are large principles at stake that go to the fundamentals of international peace and security: the principle that one country can’t change the borders of another by force, the principle that one country can’t dictate to another its foreign policy and the choices – and its choices including with whom it will associate, the principle that one country can’t exert a sphere of influence to subjugate its neighbors.
All of that is on the table. That’s exactly why not only are we standing up, but we have rallied countries not just in Europe, but indeed beyond to make it clear to Russia that this aggression will not be accepted, will not be tolerated, will not stand, so that the choice is Russia. It’s also not about making concessions….
Tapper: Right. So you say the U.S. will respond with massive consequences to any Russian aggression in Ukraine. President Biden has ruled out U.S. unilateral troops on the ground. What sanctions is the U.S. willing to impose, and are U.S. troops as part of a NATO or international force on the table?
Blinken: Well, first, when it comes to consequences, it’s not just us who has been saying this. The G7, the leading democratic economies in the world, made clear there would be massive consequences for renewed Russian aggression. So has the European Union, so has NATO. And we have been working very closely with all of these countries in recent weeks….I’m not going to telegraph the details, but I think Russia has a pretty good idea of the kinds of things it would face if it renews its aggression.
Second, we’ve made clear that we will continue to provide and supply Ukraine with defensive military equipment to be able to defend itself. And it’s also clear that in the event of further Russian aggression, NATO is going to have to further reinforce its eastern flank. And you know Jake, what’s interesting about all of this is that President Putin talks about lots of things he’s concerned about —
Tapper: Right.
Blinken: …and yet the very actions he’s taken have precipitated much of what he says he wants to prevent….So it’s President Putin’s actions that are precipitating what he says he doesn’t want.
Tapper: Yeah.
Blinken: There’s now an opportunity – if he takes it – through dialogue…as well as address many concerns that the United States and Europe have over Russia’s conduct.
Tapper: Right. Beyond this military buildup on the Ukraine border, Russian-led troops are now intervening in violent protests in Kazakhstan. They also stepped in after recent Belarus elections and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said a few years ago that what he believes drives Putin is a desire to restore the old Soviet Union. Do you agree?
Blinken: I think that’s right. I think that’s one of President Putin’s objectives, and it is to re-exert a sphere of influence over countries that previously were part of the Soviet Union. And as we’ve said, that’s unacceptable. We can’t go back to a world of spheres of influence….
Tapper: Yeah. Do you the invasion is likely – do you think an invasion of Ukraine is likely?
Blinken: Look, I can’t tell you whether it’s likely or not. I can tell you this:…we’re prepared to deal very resolutely with Russia if it chooses confrontation, if it chooses aggression. We’ll see. It is now up to President Putin to decide which path he wants to follow. We’re prepared, again –
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Tapper: So Kazakhstan’s president is publicly saying that he gave an order, quote, to “open fire,” to “kill without warning” the protesters in the street. President Biden said in October that your administration, quote, “put human rights back at the center of our foreign policy” and, quote, “No U.S. president should stand by when human rights are under attack.” They’re under attack in Kazakhstan. At least 164 people were killed during protests this week.
Blinken: Yeah, and I condemn that statement, and if that’s the national policy, condemn that policy, the shoot to kill.
…We have real questions about why they felt compelled to call in this organization that Russia dominates. We’re asking for clarification on that….
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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image: Then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken testifies before a Senate appropriations subcommittee on April 12, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Source: PAUL MORIGI/WIREIMAGE)
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Sucharit Bhakdi, MD and Arne Burkhardt, MD show 14 of 15 autopsied victims (93 %) who died after being inoculated with a Covid “vaccine” were killed by the “vaccine”
The “vaccine” was implicated in 93% of the deaths in the patients they examined. What’s troubling is the government-connected coroner didn’t implicate the vaccine in any of those deaths.
The vaccines are bad news. Fifteen bodies were examined (all died from 7 days to 6 months after vaccination; ages 28 to 95). The coroner or the public prosecutor didn’t associate the vaccine as the cause of death in any of the cases. However, further examination revealed that the vaccine was implicated in the deaths of 14 of the 15 cases. The most attacked organ was the heart (in all of the people who died), but other organs were attacked as well. The implications are potentially enormous resulting in millions of deaths. The vaccines should be immediately halted.
No need to worry. It is doubtful that anything will happen because the work wasn’t published in a peer-reviewed journal so will be ignored by the scientific community. That’s just the way it works.
I got an email recently from Mike Yeadon, former VP of Pfizer, who urged me to check out this video. He wrote me this email on 12/24/21:
“Mass covid19 vaccination is leading to mass murder.
“Mike”
The video references this paper, posted on December 10, 2021, On COVID vaccines: why they cannot work, and irrefutable evidence of their causative role in deaths after vaccination by Sucharit Bhakdi, MD and Arne Burkhardt, MD. It has been getting a lot of attention lately.
Check out the number of likes and retweets… just in the first 3 hours!
The authors did an autopsy in 15 patients who died (from 7 days to 6 months) after receiving the COVID vaccine.
These were all cases where the coroner ruled as NOT being caused by the vaccine.
They discovered that in 14 of the 15 patients there was widespread evidence of the body attacking itself, something that is never seen before. The heart was attacked in all 14 cases.
A number of salient aspects dominated in all affected tissues of all cases:
1. inflammatory events in small blood vessels (endotheliitis), characterized by an abundance of T-lymphocytes and sequestered, dead endothelial cells within the vessel lumen;
2. the extensive perivascular accumulation of T-lymphocytes;
3. a massive lymphocytic infiltration of surrounding non-lymphatic organs or tissue with T-lymphocytes.
Lymphocytic infiltration occasionally occurred in combination with intense lymphocytic activation and follicle formation. Where these were present, they were usually accompanied by tissue destruction.
Here’s the video presentation of the results.
VAERS as well as other independent studies (e.g., see this vaccine injury paper) shows the vaccines are killing people and that cardiac events were highly elevated. This study is consistent with those results.
This work independently validates the analysis of Peter Schimacher who showed a minimum of 30% to 40% of the deaths after vaccine were caused by the vaccine.
Reactions from a level-headed scientist (name withheld to protect him from attack):
If the autopsy findings are confirmed by other pathologists with additional samples, and if they are combined with the findings of Dr. Hoffe (>60% inoculant recipients have elevated D-dimer tests and evidence of clotting) and Dr. Cole (increase in cancers after inoculation, including twenty-fold increase in uterine cancer), we are seeing a disaster of unimaginable proportions. The conclusion (if supported by further data) is that essentially EVERY inoculant recipient suffers damage, with more damage after each shot. Given the seriousness of the types of damage (autoimmune diseases, cancer, re-emergent dormant infections, clotting/strokes, cardiac damage, etc.), these effects will translate into lifespan reduction, which should be counted as deaths from the inoculations. So, in the USA, where ~200M people have been fully inoculated, the number of deaths will not be the 10,000 or so reported in VAERS, or the 150,000+ scaled-up deaths from VAERS, but could be closer to tens of millions when the inoculation effects play out!
What the above three findings (Burkhart, Hoffe, Cole, and I suspect many others who have not yet come forward) show is that the post-inoculation effects are not rare events (as reported by the media-gov’t), but are in actuality frequent events. They may be, in fact, universal, with the severity and damage different for each recipient.
The question in my mind is whether it is possible to reverse these inoculation-based adverse events. Can the innate immune system be fully restored? Can the micro clotting be reversed? Can the autoimmunity be reversed? I have seen a wide spectrum of opinions on whether this is possible, none of which is overly convincing.
Are we headed for the situation where the ~30% un-vaxxed will be devoting their lives to operating whatever is left of the economic infrastructure and serving as caretakers for the vaxxed?
I realize the above sounds extreme, and maybe when more data are gathered from myriad credible sources the results and conclusions may change, but right now the above data seem to synchronize with the demonstrated underlying mechanisms of damage. Additionally, we seem to be doubling down on inoculations, with fourth booster being proposed for Israel, and UK suggesting quarterly boosters.
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Our thanks to Dr. Gary G. Kohls for bringing this to our attention.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin at his End of the Year Press Conference, Dec. 23, 2021, speaking to 500 domestic and international journalists, said the following:
“We have made it clear that any further movement of NATO to the East is unacceptable. Is there anything unclear about this? Are we deploying missiles near the U.S. border? No, we are not. It is the United States that has come to our home with its missiles and is already standing at our doorstep. Is it going too far to demand that no strike systems be placed near our home? What is so unusual about this?”
This statement makes it clear who the aggressor is in the latest and continuing confrontation between Russia and U.S. imperialism. Yet the U.S. corporate media reported it as bellicose, threatening, unreasonable, an ominous warning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. President Joe Biden promised “serious consequences.”
As U.S. policy grows more reckless, the corporate media perceives threats everywhere. After Putin and Biden spoke by zoom, Putin and President Xi Jinping of China had a New Year’s exchange Dec. 15. This conversation was headlined by The Hill as “‘Allies’ China and Russia Are Ganging Up on America.”
Yet NATO expansion is in direct violation of U.S. agreements with the then-USSR, agreements that the U.S.-commanded and dominated military alliance would move “not one inch eastward.” U.S. Secretary of State James Baker in 1990 pledged this to former president of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev, promising that a reunified German state in the heart of Europe would present no threat to the Soviet Union.
Putin’s statement above summarizes the Russian government’s position leading up to scheduled Jan. 10 talks in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss Russian demands to stop U.S./NATO expansion to its borders. Meanwhile, the U.S. corporate media reports Russia’s troops within Russia as a buildup on the border with Ukraine.
What President Putin is addressing is the further expansion of NATO through Ukraine’s absorption into an aggressive, U.S.-dominated military alliance.
NATO keeps expanding
Since 1990, U.S. and West European — especially German — imperialism have shared a policy toward formerly socialist Eastern Europe: They aimed to consolidate capitalist property relations under Western economic domination. For this to succeed they began organizing the state itself, its police and military, under U.S. military command. To lock in place this transfer of property, they insisted on NATO membership for each country.
Beyond the imperialist reconquest of Eastern Europe was the effort to totally dominate and loot Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the separation of former Soviet republics into small, dysfunctional “independent” countries whetted U.S. imperialist appetites.
During the years Boris Yeltsin was president of Russia, 1991-99, the corrupt bureaucrats and criminals who had seized control of the formerly nationalized industries became oligarchs. These new rulers sold entire industries for scrap metal to curry favor in the West and enrich themselves. They expected to be welcomed as equals into the imperialist bloc.
No way.
Putin blocks looting
What Putin has attempted, especially in the past decade, is to stabilize and consolidate capitalist property relations in Russia, ending the wild looting and economic chaos of the Yeltsin years. He has not sought to reestablish socialist property relations but to defend Russian nationalist interests.
Outside Russia, the Putin government provided air cover and vital military aid to Syria that halted the imperialist attempt to overthrow the Syrian government. Russian missiles shipped to Venezuela have provided that government with some needed air cover. These steps outraged imperialist forces determined to reassert their domination of oil-rich Western Asia and to control all of South America.
What is barely mentioned in all the current reporting of a Russian threat is that the U.S. is supplying $450 million additional funding in weapons to Ukraine. Together with U.S. aid to bring about the reactionary February 2014 coup in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, that adds up to $2.5 billion. There is $60 million more in small arms, ammunition and radar systems.
Britain, NATO member and U.S. junior partner, is constructing two naval ports for the pro-imperialist Ukraine regime on that country’s Black Sea shoreline. One is in the Sea of Azov, that is, between the Russian naval base on the Crimean Peninsula and the rest of Russia. London is also lending the U.S.-installed government in Kiev $1.6 billion to pay for an assortment of British-made naval vessels.
Western military officials are discussing deploying new technology, including nuclear-capable missiles, in Poland and Latvia and along Ukraine’s Russia-facing eastern front.
Background to Jan. 10
Russia’s position for the Jan. 10 meeting:
NATO should cease its efforts to expand eastward into Ukraine and Georgia;
NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missile batteries in nations bordering Russia; and
An end to NATO military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.
It is important to review this pledge today in the present crisis.
In 1990 then Soviet President Gorbachev was facing a social upheaval internally, following the opening of the Soviet Union to Western-funded programs and ending the leading role of the Communist Party. Seeking a deal with imperialism, Gorbachev allowed the annexation of the German Democratic Republic — which the Soviet Union had a legal right to veto.
Gorbachev had received assurances that NATO would not expand after he withdrew all Soviet forces from Eastern Europe, and not just from Baker. U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents declassified on Dec. 12, 2017, and posted online at George Washington University, revealed a torrent of assurances which Western leaders gave Gorbachev and other Soviet officials, throughout the process of German unification in 1990-91. They all promised Soviet security.
These documents reveal that U.S. President George H.W. Bush, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, CIA Director Robert Gates, French President Francois Mitterrand, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, British Prime Minister John Major and NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner made promises similar to Baker’s pledge of NATO expanding “not one inch.” (tinyurl.com/mr4atc3m)
The absorption of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) into the imperialist bloc, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact left NATO as a totally unopposed, aggressive military alliance. NATO first asserted its military capacity through bombing campaigns and troop deployments to carry out the breakup of the Yugoslav Socialist Federation through the 1990s.
Since then, the U.S. military has led the NATO military alliance in a series of wars, invasions, bombing campaigns and occupations, including in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria and in subversive regime-change operations throughout Eastern Europe, Western Asia and Africa.
In every former socialist country in Eastern Europe, regime changes reinstated capitalism. It was a brutal and wrenching political and economic transformation. With Washington’s assistance, reactionary monarchists, religious clerics, former Nazi collaborators and Wall Street economists flooded into the entire region.
Hundreds of social organizations, NGOs, schools and publications received billions of dollars in U.S. funding, through USAID programs, to reorganize society on a capitalist basis. They aggressively rewrote constitutions along with banking and new ownership laws, privatized and sold off major industries, dismembered social services and looted pensions.
To consolidate and protect these brutal thefts of socialized property from potential popular resistance, the imperialists turned to the NATO military alliance. The collaborators in each capitalist-reorganized country had to join NATO, in the process borrowing to pay for U.S.-made military equipment and pledging thousands of their soldiers to fight in U.S. wars.
New right-wing governments in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic applied for and were quickly accepted into the NATO alliance in 1999. The former Soviet Republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, all bordering Russia, were admitted to NATO in 2004, as were the right-wing governments in Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Albania and Croatia were admitted into the military alliance in 2009, Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.
From 16 members in 1990, NATO grew to 30 members today.
U.S. coup in Ukraine
It was the fierce political struggle over Ukraine joining NATO that led to the aggressive U.S.-orchestrated coup in 2014. The U.S. government pumped $5.1 billion into the country to carry out an enormous social engineering campaign and regime-change operation against the elected government.
A Dec. 13, 2013, speech by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland to the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation, a U.S.-funded nongovernmental agency, revealed the price tag for this Ukrainian operation.
The Western media reported the coup as a democratic renewal. But the Euro-Maidan Uprising, in Kiev, was led by Right Sektor and neo-Nazi militias. After months of street protests, these forces literally overran government buildings on Feb. 22, 2014, forcing elected President Viktor Yanukovych and many of his officials to flee for their lives.
Nuland and European officials immediately declared the new regime “legitimate.”
Protesting the illegitimate overthrow of their elected president, mass movements in the more industrialized Donbass in Eastern Ukraine and in Crimea held referendums, seeking separation from this right-wing seizure of power in western Ukraine. Russian forces moved into Crimea to secure Russia’s only warm water port on the Black Sea.
This impasse has continued since 2014.
The U.S. and European Union imposed harsh sanctions on Russia for resisting NATO’s military expansion. The economic sanctions are especially focused on rupturing Russia’s ability to sell oil and gas to Germany by blocking the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. Tying Europe’s energy needs to fracked natural gas from the U.S. increases U.S. imperialist leverage against its EU allies, which are also capitalist competitors.
U.S. always violates agreements
The U.S. government violates treaties at will. This is imperialist diplomacy, confirmed by hundreds of broken treaties with Indigenous nations within the U.S.
Along with violating its promises regarding NATO expansion, Washington violated two publicly signed international agreements of great importance. The U.S. broke the nuclear agreement (JCPOA) signed in 2015 along with Iran and Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia and the U.N. Security Council.
Washington is now flagrantly violating the 1979 agreement recognizing the People’s Republic of China as the sole legitimate government of all China including Taiwan.
Breaking these treaties may have unforeseen consequences, causing U.S. targets to forge alliances. In his 1997 book, “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives,” imperialist strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski warned:
“Potentially, the most dangerous scenario [for U.S. domination] would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.”
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This article was originally published on Workers World.
Sara Flounders is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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New findings on Covid vaccines discussed by lawyer Reiner Fuellmich, Dr Wolfgang Wodarg and Dr Sam White during their #85 Corona Investigation Committee session on 31st Dec 2021.
“As a lawyer, that’s inescapable proof of premeditation. And once you have premeditation, there’s no immunity for anyone, not even in the United States.”
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Since the beginning of the health crisis, the French government has claimed that early treatment was ineffective. It has imposed major restrictions on our freedoms, in particular on doctors’ prescriptions.
Geopolitical commentator Clint Ehrlich has reported while on the ground in Moscow that “the situation in Kazakhstan is a much bigger deal than Western media is letting on.” He further argues that the mayhem unleashed this past week and ongoing violent destabilization significantly increases the risk of NATO-Russia conflict.
The World has been in a state crisis for almost two years and now formal statements by both the WHO and the CDC (with the usual innuendos) confirm that the RT-PCR test (used to justify every single policy mandate including lockdowns, social distancing, the mask, confinement of the labor force, closure of economic activity, etc.) is flawed and invalid.
While many vaccines have a questionable safety profile, especially when combined, data from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) suggest there’s never been a vaccine as dangerous as the experimental mRNA gene transfer injections for COVID.
Shankara Chetty could be called a second Zelenko. He is a medical doctor, a general practitioner in South Africa who has treated more than 7000 Covid patients successfully, without the need for extra oxygen or hospitalization.
Davison was one of several business leaders who spoke during the virtual news conference on Dec. 30 that was organized by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths, Davison said.
The Pentagon has finally published its first Airpower Summary since President Biden took office nearly a year ago. These monthly reports have been published since 2007 to document the number of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S.-led air forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria since 2004.
Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews also stated that all arrivals in Australia had to “provide acceptable proof that they cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons”. Absent that, Djokovic “won’t be treated any different to anyone else and he’ll be on the next plane home.”
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Shankara Chetty could be called a second Zelenko. He is a medical doctor, a general practitioner in South Africa who has treated more than 7000 Covid patients successfully, without the need for extra oxygen or hospitalization. Through meticulous observation he was able to discern the nature of Covid-19 as a two-phase illness with a respiratory and an allergic phase, and to develop a treatment protocol which he describes in the first part of the interview.
In the second part he is talking about how he sees the pandemic, long Covid, the virus and its variants, the whack scenes, and the development of a new medicine, to treat the negative effects from the spike proteins.
I offer here a one-hour essentials edit of Chetty’s 1hr 50min testimony before the German Corona Inquiry Committee (session 82, Dec 10th, 2021). Get the full interview from their official channel.
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Six months after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq: Michel Chossudovsky’s September 2003 presentation at McMaster University, Ontario.
Selected Excerpts from the Lecture
The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq are part of a broader military agenda, which was launched at the end of the Cold War. The ongoing war agenda is a continuation of the 1991 Gulf War and the NATO led wars on Yugoslavia (1991-2001).
There is a roadmap, a sequence of wars.
The war on Iraq has been in the planning stages at least since the mid-1990s.
A 1995 National Security document of the Clinton administration stated quite clearly that the objective of the war is oil. “to protect the United States’ uninterrupted, secure U.S. access to oil.
In September 2000, a few months before the accession of George W. Bush to the White House, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) published its blueprint for global domination under the title: “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.”
The PNAC is a neo-conservative think tank linked to the Defense-Intelligence establishment, the Republican Party and the powerful Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) which plays a behind-the-scenes role in the formulation of US foreign policy.
The PNAC’s declared objective is quite simple – to:
“Fight and decisively win in multiple, simultaneous theater wars”.
This statement indicates that the US plans to be involved simultaneously in several war theaters in different regions of the World.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney had commissioned the PNAC blueprint prior to the presidential elections.
The PNAC outlines a roadmap of conquest. It calls for
“the direct imposition of U.S. “forward bases” throughout Central Asia and the Middle East “with a view to ensuring economic domination of the world, while strangling any potential “rival” or any viable alternative to America’s vision of a ‘free market’ economy” (See Chris Floyd, Bush’s Crusade for empire, Global Outlook, No. 6, 2003)
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Like the West, the Philippines is going down the road to discriminating the unvaccinated by disallowing them to go outside due to a marching order from President Rodrigo R. Duterte to all village chiefs, which is to “restrain” the unvaxxed and detain them in their homes.
COVID-19 has taken another unpredictable turn with the surge of cases all over the world because of the appearance of the Omicron variant. Lockdowns have been imposed in many nations around the globe since 2020 hoping that this could hamper the rise of cases with foreseeable consequences of crippling the economy worldwide and worsening the poverty situation everywhere. Vaccines were seen as panacea to the pandemic, which was proven to be wrong later. Governments all over have been implementing vaccine mandates forcing whole populations into vaccination. This is a grave and clear violation of the freedom of choice by citizens.
The Philippines had been following the lead of Western nations in resolving its own healthcare crisis due to COVID-19. Vaccination is thought of as cure-all to the problem when it should not be but pills and other drug therapies. First, its Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID) planned to implement vaccination by prioritizing risk groups to achieve its inoculation target of 50 million Filipinos. Later, however, it changed its target to 70 million for the year 2021. But the slow pace of vaccination aggravated by the delays in the arrival of the vaccines made the administration to push the attainment of its target to February this year, 2022. As of 4 January 2022, only 50,627,482 have been fully vaccinated or 46 percent of the total population of 109.6 million, which brings us to the situation now in the Philippines with Duterte depriving the rights of the unvaxxed to move.
On January 4, 2022, in a taped public address, Duterte ordered:
“Barangay captains, you’re put on notice and the order for you is to find out the persons who are not compliant with the laws, or their refusal to have the vaccines. You can actually prevent [them] from leaving the house”.
He was irrationally equating those who haven’t been vaccinated with those who are not compliant with the laws, which they were not. What law did the unvaxxed violate? If they insist on going out, Duterte said that they should be shepherded by authorities adding that
“If you force the issue, I said, because the barangay captain is a person of authority, he can place you [the unvaxxed] under arrest and dalhin ka sa istasyon (bring you to the station)”.
If a police is around, then the barangay captain can ask the policeman to bring the unvaxxed to the police station. If there’s no police, as a person in authority the barangay captain can use in Duterte’s words, “reasonable force” with the unvaxxed.
In the same address, Duterte also said in Tagalog, which revealed that he is a total pro-vax:
“Kung mamamatay ka, bahala ka sa sarili mo (If you die, you’re on your own)…Ngayon kung hihingi kayo ng tulong sa akin, sabihin ko hindi ako tulong sayo. Kasi hindi ka nagpabakuna. Kung nagpabakuna ka wala na akong problema at saka wala ka ng problema (Now, if you ask help from me, I will say I will not help you. Because you didn’t get vaccinated. If you got vaccinated, I do not have a problem and you do not have a problem).”
And he thinks only vaccine can save the life of a COVID-19-stricken patient, saying
“No offense sa inyo, pero, which is the reality ever present in the situation in the environment, malaki ang tsansa na kapag mahawa ka, talagang mamatay ka (No offense to you… but there is a big chance that if you get infected you will die)”.
Next, the Metro Manila Council passed consistently a resolution asking local government units (LGUs) to enact local ordinances restricting the movements of the unvaxxed. On January 5, some LGUs in Metro Manila like Quezon City etc. approved ordinances to this effect limiting the entry to establishments of the unvaxxed and providing penalties for the violation. Inbound travelers to Manila or at border checkpoints must now present vaccination cards.
Why should the unvaxxed bear the brunt of the vaccine hesitancy of the Filipino populace when the vaccines themselves are not safe? As of October 17, 2021, there were 1,122 fatal events that were received by Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) of the Philippines’ Department of Health (DOH). The report was evasive that the deaths was not caused by the vaccine but pointed to “underlying conditions or pre-existing medical conditions”. Majority or 70.14% (787) of the fatal cases came from ages 60 years and above, 21.21 % (238) from ages 40-59 years, 7.40% (83) from ages 18-39 years and 1.25% from unidentified ages. As of the same date, the same FDA received 68,690 suspected adverse reaction reports and 3,004 suspected serious adverse reaction reports out of 52,303,905 doses administered.
Banning the unvaxxed from going out of their homes infringes on the bill of rights enshrined in the Philippine constitution particularly the right to due process and the right to travel. What crime did they commit? Is refusal to get vaccinated a crime? Restraining them to stay at home so that they are pressured to get vaccinated is like coercing them, which violates their right to freedom of choice. The right to travel shall not be impaired “except in the interest of national security, public safety, or public health, as may be provided by law”. The Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights (CHR), through its spokesperson, rightly and timely intervened saying,
“Presently, there is no law that makes being unvaccinated a crime, nor is there any law that would satisfy the Constitutional provision on curtailing freedom of movement. Any arrest made on these grounds may be illegal; thus, violative of the Constitution and our guaranteed human rights”.
Duterte who flaunts of being a good lawyer must know this but must have become rusty through the years. In fact, Duterte’s order should be challenged in the Philippine Supreme Court.
The option to get vaccinated or not rests on the choice of each individual citizen. It should not be legislated. Rejecting to be inoculated should not be criminalized. Nor vaccination should only be made available as the solution to the pandemic. Drug therapies to cure COVID-19 should be accessible to the public because the illness is curable or treatable when it is promptly diagnosed and treated.
Restricting the movement of the unvaxxed is only a kneejerk reaction to the uptick of COVID-19 cases in the early days of this month. Mass testing of COVID-19 should be focused on. Instead of vaccination cards as a requirement for all comings and goings to establishments or places since getting vaccinated does not guarantee that one does not get infected, negative PCR tests and rapid lateral flow tests should be obligatory to all those visiting the malls, markets, shops or any other institutions. Those who tested positive should be encouraged to self-isolate and stay at home.
Better for Duterte to jettison this imprudent policy of dragooning the unvaxxed in their homes, center on mass testing the population and use of drug therapies for the cure of COVID-19 instead of mass vaccination, and opening the economy widely rather than lockdown for normalcy to come back the soonest possible time.
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