Bulletin N° 1085

 

 

 

Subject: Dogs bark, pigs squeal, snakes hiss, and donkeys bray: a signal is sent, but no message is received.

 

 

 

Grenoble

January 25, 2022

 

 

 Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,

 

The serendipitous discovery recently in a local secondhand store of a book that I once owned years ago - but had lost before reading - has led me belatedly to a more thorough appreciation of Chinese culture and a better understanding of the limitations of the peasant revolution of 1949. Jung Chang’s award-winning book, Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China (1993), is best classified  as a historical novel whose characters include the author’s great grandmother, Er-ya-tou (literally, “Number Two Girl”) (1888-1955); her grandmother, Yu-fang (1909-1969); her mother, BoaQin/De-hong (b.1931); and herself, Jung Chang (b.1952).

 

This book has been described as containing “mesmerizing stories of survival, no matter what tragedies and horrors are encountered along the way.” The poetic license for ascribing emotions and thoughts to people living under totalitarian conditions in a controlled environment is used liberally by the author, who was born in 1952. She occasionally shares her impressions from her early adolescent years, but the verisimilitude to contemporary patterns of mass conformity in late monopoly-capitalist political systems - used to govern western nations today - lends credibility to this “historic” account of China, which extends from 1909 to 1978.

 

Of particular interest is Chang’s account of Mao Zedong, at the time of The Great Leap Forward. In chapter 12, titled “Capable Women Can Make a Meal without Food (1958-1962)” the author recounts experiences in these years of almost unbelievable hardship.

 

In the summer of 1958, when I was six, I started going to a primary school about twenty minutes’ walk from home, mostly along muddy cobbled back alleys. Every day on my way to and from school, I screwed up my eyes to search every inch of ground for broken nails, rusty cogs, and any other metal objects that had been trodden into the mud between the cobbles. These were for feeding into furnaces to produce steel, which was my major occupation. Yes, at the age of six, I was involved in steel production, and had to compete with my schoolmates at handing in the most scrap iron. All around me uplifting music blared from loudspeakers, and there were banners, posters, and huge slogans painted on the walls proclaiming ‘Long Live the Great Leap Forward!’ and ‘Everybody, Make Steel!’(p.291)

 

. . .

     It was at this time that Mao gave full vent to his half-baked dreams of turning China into a first-class modern power. He called steel the ‘Marshal’ of industry, and ordered steel output to be doubled in one year – from 5.35 million tons in 1957 to 10.7 million in 1958. But instead of trying to expand the proper steel industry with skilled workers, he decided to get the whole population to take part. There was a steel quota for every unit, and for months people stopped their normal work in order to meet it. The country’s economic development was reduced to a simplistic question of how many tons of steel could be produced, and the entire nation was thrown into this single act. It was officially estimated that nearly 100 million peasants were pulled out of agricultural work and into steel production. They had been the labor force producing much of the country’s food. Mountains were stripped bare of trees for fuel. But the output of this mass production amounted only to what people called ‘cattle droppings’ (niu-shi-ge-da), meaning useless turds.

 

     This absurd situation reflected not only Mao’s ignorance of how an economy worked, but also an almost metaphysical disregard for reality, which might have been interesting in a poet, but in a political leader with absolute power was quite another matter. One of its main components was a deep-seated contempt of human life.

 

. . .

     Mao’s voluntarism had been fueled by his recent experience in Russia. Increasingly disillusioned with Khrushchev after his denunciation of Stalin in 1956, Mao went to Moscow in late 1957 to attend a world Communist summit. He returned convinced that Russia and its allies were abandoning socialism and turning ‘revisionist.’ He saw China as the only true believer. It had to blaze a new path. Megalomania and voluntarism meshed easily in Mao’s mind.

 

     Mao’s fixation on steel went largely unquestioned, as did his other obsessions.

 

. . .

     There were also fantastic economic goals. Mao claimed that China’s industrial output could overtake that of the United States and Britain within fifteen years. For the Chinese, these countries represented the capitalist world. Overtaking them would be seen as a triumph over their enemies. This appealed to people’s pride, and boosted their enthusiasm enormously. They had felt humiliated by the refusal of the United States and most major Western countries to grant diplomatic recognition, and were so keen to show the world that they could make it on their own that they wanted to believe in miracles. Mao provided the inspiration. The energy of the population had been eager to find an outlet. And here it was. The gung-ho spirit overrode caution, as ignorance triumphed over reason.(p.293-294)

 

. . .

That summer, all of China was organized into these new units (called people’s communes’), each containing between 2,000 and 20,000 households. One of the forerunners of this drive was an area called Xushui, in Hebei province in North China, to which Mao took a shine. In his eagerness to prove that they deserved Mao’s attention, the local boss there claimed they were going to produce over ten times as much grain as before. Mao smiled broadly and responded: ‘What are you going to do with all that food? On second thought, it’s not too bad to have too much food, really.  The state doesn’t want it. Everybody else has plenty of their own. But the farmers here can just eat and eat. You can eat five meals a day!’ Mao was intoxicated, indulging in the eternal dream of the Chinese peasants – surplus food. After these remarks, the villagers further stoked the desires of the Great Leader by claiming that they were producing more than a million pounds of potatoes per mu (one mu is one-sixth of an acre), over 130,000 pounds of wheat per mu, and cabbages weighing 500 pounds each.

 

     It was a time when telling fantasies to oneself as well as others, and believing them, was practiced to an incredible degree. Peasants moved crops from several plots of land to one plot to show Party officials that they had produced a miracle harvest. Similar ‘Potemkin fields’ were shown off to gullible – or self-blinded – agricultural scientists, reports, visitors from other regions, and foreigners. Although these crops generally died within a few days because of untimely transplantation and harmful density, the visitors did not know that, or did  not want to know. A large part of the population was swept into this confused crazy world. ‘Self-deception while deceiving others’ (zi-qi-zi-ren) gripped the nation. Many people –including agricultural scientists and senior Party leaders – said they saw the miracles themselves. Those who failed to match other people’s fantastic claims began to doubt and blame themselves. Under a dictatorship like Mao’s, where information was withheld and fabricated, it was very difficult for ordinary people to have confidence in their own experience or knowledge. Not to mention that they were now facing a national wide tidal wave of fervor which promised to swamp any individual coolheadedness. It was easy to start ignoring reality and simply put one’s faith in Mao. To go along with the frenzy was by far the easiest course. To pause and think and be circumspect meant trouble.

 

     An official cartoon portrayed a mouselike scientist whining, ‘A stove like yours can only boil water to make tea.’ Next to him stood a giant worker, lifting a huge sluice gate releasing q flood of molten steel, who retorted, ‘How much can you drink?’ Most who saw the absurdity of the situation were too frightened to speak their minds, particularly after the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. Those who did voice doubts were immediately silenced, or sacked, which also meant discrimination against their family and a bleak prospect for their children.

 

In many places, people who refused to boast of massive increases in output were beaten up until they gave in. In Yigin, some leaders of production units were trussed up with their arms behind their backs in the village square while questions were hurled at them:

 

‘How much wheat can you produce per mu?’

‘Four hundred jin’ (about 450 pounds – a realistic amount).

Then, beating him: ‘How much wheat can you produce per mu?’

‘Eight hundred jin.’

 

Even this impossible figure was not enough. The unfortunate man would

be beaten, or simply left hanging, until he finally said: ‘Ten thousand

jin.’ Sometimes the man died hanging there because he refused to

increase the figure, or simply before he could raise the figure high

enough.

         

Many grass-roots officials and peasants involved in scenes like this did not believe in the ridiculous boasting, but fear of being accused themselves drove them on. They were carrying out the orders of the Party, and they were safe as long as they followed Mao. The totalitarian system in which they had been immersed had sapped and warped their sense of responsibility. Even doctors would boast about miraculously healing incurable diseases.

 

     Trucks used to turn up at our compound carrying grinning peasants coming to report on some fantastic, record-breaking achievement. One day it was a monster cucumber half as long as the truck. Another time it was a tomato carried with difficulty by two children. On another occasions there was a giant pig squeezed into a truck. The peasants claimed they had bred an actual pig this size. The pig was only made of paper-maché, but as a child I imagined that it was real. Maybe I was confused by the adults around me, who behaved as though all this were true? People had leaned to defy reason and to live with acting.

 

     The whole nation slid into doublespeak. Words became divorced from reality, responsibility, and people’s real thoughts. Lies were told with ease because words had lost their meanings – and had ceased to be taken seriously by others.

 

     This was entrenched by the further regimentation of society. When he first set up the communes, Mao said the main advantage was that ‘they are easy to control,’ because the peasants would now be in an organized system rather than being, to a certain extent, left alone. They were given detailed orders from the very top about how to till their land. Mao summed up the whole of agriculture in eight characters: ‘soil, fertilizer, water, seeds, dense planting, protection, tending, and technology.’ The Party central Committee in Peking was handing out two-page instructions on how peasants all over China should improve their fields, another page on how to use fertilizers, another on planting crops densely. Their incredibly simplistic instructions had to be strictly followed: the peasants were ordered to replant their corps more densely in one mini-campaign after another.(pp.295-298)

 

. . .

Agriculture was also neglected because of the priority given to steel. Many of the peasants were exhausted from having to spend long hours finding fuel, scrap iron, and iron ore and keeping the furnaces going. The fields were often left to the women and children, who had to do everything by hand, as the animals were busy making their contribution to steel production. When harvest time came in autumn 1958, few people were in the fields.

 

     The failure to get in the harvest in 1958 flashed a warning that a food shortage was on its way, even though official statistics showed a double-digit increase in agricultural output. It was officially announced that in 1958 China’s wheat output had overtaken that of the United States. The Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, started a discussion on the topic ‘How do we cope with the problem of producing too much food?’

 

     My father’s department was in charge of the press in Sichuan, which printed outlandish claims, as did every publication in China.  The press was the voice of the Party, and when it came to party policies, neither my father nor anyone else in the media had any say. They were part of a huge conveyor belt. My father watched the turn of events with alarm. His only option was to appeal to the top leaders.

 

     At the end of 1958 he wrote a letter to the Central Committee in Peking stating that producing steel like this was pointless and a waste of resources; the peasants were exhausted, their labor was being squandered, and there was a food shortage. He appealed for urgent action. He gave the letter to the governor to pass on. The governor, Lee Da-zhang, was the number-two man in the province. He had given my father his first job when he had come to Chengdu for Yibin, and treated him like a friend.

 

     Governor Lee told my father he was not going to forward the letter. Nothing in it was new, he said. ‘The Party knows everything. Have faith in it.’ Mao had said that under no circumstances must the people’s morale be dampened. The Great Leap Forward had changed the psychological attitude of the Chinese from passivity to a can-do, get-up-and-go spirit, he said, which must not be imperiled.

 

     Governor Lee also told my father that he had been given the dangerous nickname ‘Opposition’ among the provincial leaders, to whom he had voiced disagreements. It was only because of his other qualities, his absolute loyalty to the Party and his stern sense of discipline, that my father was still all right. ‘The good thing,’ the governor said, ‘is that you only voiced your doubts to the Party, and not to the public.’ He warned my father he could get into serious trouble if he insisted on raising these concerns, as could his family and ‘others,’ clearly meaning himself, my father’s friend. My father did not insist. He was half convinced by the argument, and the stakes were too high. He had reached a stage where he was not insusceptible to compromise.

 

     But my father and the people working in the departments of Public Affairs collected a great number of complaints, as part of their jobs, and forwarded them to Peking. There was general discontent among the people and officials alike. In fact, the Great Leap Forward triggered off the most serious split in the leadership since the communists had taken power a decade before. Mao had to step down from the less important of his two main posts, president of the state, in favor of Liu Shaoqi. Liu became the number-two man in China, but his prestige was only a fraction of that of Mao, who kept his key post as chairman of the Party.

 

The voices of dissent grew so strong that the Party had to convene a special conference, which was held at the end of June 1959 in the mountain resort of Lushan, in central China. At the conference the defense minister, Marshal Peng Dehuai, wrote a letter to Mao criticizing what had happened in the great Leap Forward and recommending a realistic approach to the economy.

 

. . .

     Mao had had to scheme hard to preserve his power. In this he was a supreme master. His favorite reading, which he recommended to other Party leaders, was a classic multi-volume collection about courtly power and intrigues. In fact, Mao’s rule was best understood in terms of a medieval court, in which he exercised spellbinding power over his courtiers and subjects.  He was also a maestro at ‘divide and rule,’ and at manipulating men’s inclination to throw others to the wolves. In the end, few top officials stood up for Marshal Peng, in spite of their private disenchantment with Mao’s policies.(pp.299-302)

 

. . .

     The purge of ‘rightist opportunists’ rocked the Party once again, as a great many officials agreed with Peng. The lesson was that Mao’s authority was unchallengeable – even though he” was clearly in the wrong. Officials could see that no matter how high up you were – Peng after all was the defense minister – and no matter what your standing – Peng had reputedly been Mao’s favorite – if you offended Mao you would fall into disgrace. They also knew that you could not speak your mind and resign, or even resign quietly: resignation was seen as an unacceptable protest. There was no opting out. The mouths of the Party as well as the people were now tightly sealed. After this, the Great Leap Forward went into further, madder excesses. More impossible economic goals were imposed from on high.

 

     More peasants were mobilized to make steel. And more arbitrary orders rained down, causing chaos in the countryside.(pp.303-304)

 

As the sixties began, a great famine spread across the whole of China.

 

               In Chengdu, the monthly food ration for each adult was reduced to 19 pounds of rice, 3.5 ounces of cooking oil, and 3.5 ounces of meat, when there was any. Scarcely anything else was available, not even cabbage. Many people were afflicted by edema, a condition in which fluid accumulated under the skin because of malnutrition. The patient turns yellow and swells up. The most popular remedy was eating chlorella, which was supposed to be rich in protein. Chlorella fed on human urine, so people stopped going to the toilet and peed into spittoons instead, then dropped the chlorella seeds in; they grew into something looking like green fish roe in a couple of days, and were scooped out of the urine, washed, and cooked with rice. They were truly disgusting to eat, but did reduce the swelling.

 

     Like everybody else, my father was entitled only to a limited food ration. But as a senior official he had some privileges. In our compound there were two canteens, a small one for departmental directors and their wives and children, and a big one for everyone else, which included my grandmother, my aunt Jun-ying, and the maid. Most of the time we collected pour food at the canteens and took it home to eat. There was more food in the canteens than on the streets. The provincial government had its own farm, and there were also ‘presents’ from country governments. These valuable supplies were divided between the canteens, and the small one got preferential treatment.

 

     As Party officials, my parents also had special food coupons. I used to go with my grandmother to a special store outside the compound to buy food with them. My mother’s coupons were blue. She was entitled to five eggs, almost an ounce of soybeans, and the same amount of sugar per month. My father’s coupons were yellow. He was entitled to twice as much as my mother because of his higher rank. My family pooled the food from the canteens and the other sources and ate together. The adults always gave the children more, so I did not go hungry. But the adults all suffered from malnutrition, and my grandmother developed edema. She grew chlorella at home, and I was aware that the adults were eating it, although they would not tell me what it was for. Once I tried a little, and immediately spat it out as it tasted revolting. I never had it again.

 

     I had little idea that famine was raging all around me. One day on my way to school, as I was eating a small steamed roll, someone rushed up and snatched it from my hands. As I was recovering from the shock; I caught a glimpse of a very thin, dark back in shorts and bare feet running down the mud alley with his hand to his mouth, devouring the roll. When I told my parents what had happened, my father’s eyes grew terribly sad. He stroked my head and said, ‘You are lucky. Other children like you are starving.’

 

     I often had to visit the hospital for my teeth at the time. Whenever I went there I had an attack of nausea at the horrible sight of dozens of people with shiny, almost transparent swollen limbs, as big as barrels. The patients were carried to the hospital on flat carts, there were so many of them. When I asked my dentist what was wrong with them, she said with a sigh, ‘Edema.’ I asked her what that meant, and she mumbled something which I vaguely linked with food.

 

     These people with edema were mostly peasants. Starvation was much worse in the countryside because there were no guaranteed rations. Government policy was to provide food for the cities first, and commune officials were having to seize grain from the peasants by force. In many areas, peasants who tried to hide food were arrested or beaten and tortured. Commune officials who were reluctant to take food from the hungry peasants were themselves dismissed, and some were physically maltreated. As a result, the peasants who had actually grown the food died in the millions all over China.

 

     I learned later that several of my relatives from Sichuan to Manchuria had died in this famine. Among them was my father’s retarded brother. His mother had died in 1958, and when the famine struck he was unable to cope as he would not listen to anyone else’s advice.  Rations were allotted on a monthly basis, and he ate his within days, leaving nothing for the rest of the month. He soon starved to death. My grandmother’s sister, Lan, and her husband ‘Loyalty’ Pei-o, who had been sent to the inhospitable countryside in the far north of Manchuria because of his old connections with Kuomintang intelligence, both died too. As food began to run out, the village authorities allocated supplies according to their own, unwritten priorities. Pei-o’s outcast status meant that he and his wife were among the first to be denied food. Their children survived because their parents gave their food to them. The father of Yu-lin’s wife also died. At the end, he had eaten stuffing in the pillow and the braids of garlic plants.

 

. . .

     In 1989 an official who had been working in famine relief told me that he believed that the total number of people who had died in Sichuan was seven million. This would be 10 percent of the entire population of a rich province. An accepted estimate of the death toll for the whole country is around thirty million.

 

     On day in 1960, the three-year-old daughter of my aunt Jun-ying’s next-door neighbor in Yibin went missing. A few weeks later the neighbor saw a young girl playing in the street wearing a dress that looked like her daughter’s. She went up and examined it: it had a mark which identified it as her daughter’s. She reported this to the police. It turned out that the parents of the young girl were selling wind-dried meat. They had abducted and murdered a number of babies and sold them as rabbit meat at exorbitant prices. The couple was executed and the case was hushed up, but it was widely known that baby killing did go on at the time.

 

     Years later I met an old colleague of my father’s, a very kind and capable man, not given to exaggeration. He told me with great emotion what he had seen during the famine in one particular commune. Thirty-five percent of the peasants had died, in an area where the harvest had been good – although little was collected, since the men had been pulled out to produce steel, and the commune canteen had wasted a large proportion of what there was. One day a peasant burst into his room and threw himself on the floor, screaming that he had committed a terrible crime and begging to be punished. Eventually it came out that he had killed his own baby and eaten it. Hunger had been like an uncontrollable force driving him to take up the knife. With tears rolling down his cheeks, the official ordered the peasant to be arrested. Later he was shot as a warning to baby killers.  

 

     One official explanation for the famine was that Khrushchev had suddenly forced China to pay back a large debt it had incurred during the Korean War in order to come to the aid of North Korea. The regime played on the experience of much of the population, who had been landless peasants and could remember being hounded by heartless creditors to pay rent and reimburse loans. By identifying the Soviet Union, Mao also created an external enemy to take the blame and to rally the population.

 

     Another cause mentioned was ‘unprecedented natural calamities.’ China is a vast country, and bad weather causes food shortage somewhere every year. No one but the highest leaders had access to nationwide information about the weather. In fact, given the immobility of the population; few knew what happened in the next region, or even over the next mountain. Many thought then and still think today, that the famine was caused by natural disasters. I have no full picture, but of all the people I have talked to from different parts of China, few knew of nature calamities in their regions. They only have stories to tell about deaths from starvation.

 

     At a conference for 7,000 top-ranking officials at the beginning of 1962, Mao said that the famine was caused 70 percent by natural disasters and 30 percent by human error. President Liu Shaoqi chipped in, apparently on the spur of the moment, that it was caused 30 percent by natural disaster and 70 percent by human error. My father was at the conference, and when he returned he said to my mother: ‘I fear Comrade Shaoqi is going to be in  trouble.’

 

     When the speeches were relayed to lower-rank officials like my mother, President Liu’s assessment was cut out. The population at large was not even told about Mao’s figures. This concealing of information did help keep the people quiet, and there were no audible complaints against the Communist Party. Quite apart from the fact that most dissenters had been killed off or otherwise suppressed in the past few years, whether the Communist Party was to blame was far from clear to the general population. There was no corruption in the sense of officials hoarding grain. Party officials were only marginally better off than the ordinary people. In fact, in some villages they themselves starved first – and died first. The famine was worse than anything under the Kuomintang, but it looked different: in the Kuomintang days, starvation took place alongside blatant unchecked extravagance.

 

     Before the famine, many Communist officials from landlords’ families had brought their parents to stay with them in the cities. When the famine hit, the Party gave orders for the elderly men and women to be sent back to their villages to share the hard life – meaning starvation – with the local peasants. The idea was that Communist officials should not be seen to be using their privileges to benefit their ‘class-enemy’ parents. Some grandparents of friends of mine had to leave Chengdu and died in the famine.

 

     Most peasants lived in a world where they did not look much beyond the boundary of the village, and they blamed the famine on their immediate bosses for giving them all the catastrophic orders. There were popular rhymes to the effect that the Party leadership was good, only the grass-roots officials were rotten.

 

     The Great Leap Forward and the appalling famine shook my parents deeply. Although they did not have the full picture, they did not believe that ‘natural calamities’ were the explanation. But their overwhelming feeling was one of guilt. Working in the field of propaganda, they were right in the center of the misinformation machine. To salve his conscience and to avoid the dishonest daily routine my father volunteered to help with famine relief in the communes. This meant staying –and starving – with the peasants. In doing so, he was ‘sharing weal and woe with the masses,’ in line with Mao’s instructions, but it was resented by his staff. They had to take turns going with him, which they hated, because it meant going hungry.

 

     From late 1959 to 1961, in the worst period of the famine, I seldom saw my father. In the countryside he ate the leaves of sweet potatoes, herbs, and tree bark like the peasants. One day he was walking along a bank between the paddy fields when he saw a skeletal peasant moving extremely slowly, and with obvious difficulty, in the distance. Then the man suddenly disappeared. When my father rushed over, he was lying in the field, dead of starvation.

 

     Every day my father was devastated by what he saw, although he hardly saw the worst, because in the customary manner local officials surrounded him everywhere he went. But he suffered bad hepatomegaly and edema – and deep depression. Several times when he came back from his trips he went straight into the hospital. In the summer of 1961, he stayed there for months. He had changed. He was no longer the assured puritan of yesteryear. The Party was not pleased with him. He was criticized for ‘letting his revolutionary will wane’ and ordered out of the hospital.(pp.306-313)

 

. . .

     By the beginning of 1961, tens of millions of deaths had finally forced Mao to give up his economic policies. Reluctantly, he allowed the pragmatic President Liu and Deng Xiaoping, general secretary of the Party, more control over the country. Mao was forced to make self-criticisms, but they were full of self-pity, and were carrying the cross of incompetent officials all over China. He further magnanimously instructed the Party to ‘draw lessons’ from the disastrous experience, but what the lessons were was not left to the judgment of the lowly officials: Mao told them they had become divorced from the people, and had made decisions which did not reflect ordinary people’s feelings.  Starting from Mao, the endless self-criticisms masked the real responsibility, which no one pursued.

 

     Nevertheless, things began to improve. The pragmatists put through a succession of major reforms. It was in this context that Den Xiaoping made the remark: ‘It doesn’t matter whether the cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.’ There was to be no more mass production of steel. A stop was put to crazy economic goals, and realistic policies were introduced. Public canteens were abolished, and peasants’ income was now related to their work.

 

. . .

     While all this was going on I lived in a cocoon behind the high walls of the government compound. I had no direct contact with tragedy. It was with these ‘noises off’ that I embarked on my teens.(p.316-317)


 

Jung Chang’s 700-page historical novel, Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China, stands as an historical achievement, an attempt to recreate the atmosphere in which a 20th-century social revolution was achieved, for better and for worse.

She has posted her warnings are on the proverbial wall!

 

 

The 24+ items below include selected articles and essays from the alternative Anglophone social media, which contain controversial views on current events which will no doubt have major historical consequences in these turbulent times of capitalist collapse. The question posed by the sheer weight of events has never been more clearly framed: dictatorship or democracy, and with what results?

 

 

 

Sincerely,

Francis McCollum Feeley

___

Professeur honoraire de l'Université Grenoble-Alpes
Ancien Directeur des Researches
Université de Paris-Nanterre
Director of The Center for the Advanced Study
of American Institutions and Social Movements
(CEIMSA-in-Exile)
The University of California-San Diego
http://www.ceimsa.org

 

 

 

a.

What is the Future of Food?

https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/what-is-the-future-of-food

by James Corbett

 

+

Who is Behind the Great Food Reset?

https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/who-is-behind-the-great-food-reset?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

by James Corbett

 

===========

 

b.

Economists Radhika Desai & Michael Hudson explain multipolarity, decline of US hegemony

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6adqdNCSVhU

with Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson

(57:35)

 

+

The End of the World Is Back: Frida Berrigan on Nuclear Abolitionism

https://www.globalresearch.ca/end-world-back-frida-berrigan-nuclear-abolitionism/5805163

by Frida Berrigan

“As long as there are nuclear weapons, they are—like Chekhov’s gun—waiting to go off.”

The tit-for-tat coded rhetorical threats would sound fantastical and John le Carré-esque if they weren’t so real. In September 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin cited U.S. ​“precedent” in using nuclear weapons in Japan and said Russia would ​“use all the means” at its disposal to ​“defend” itself in its war against Ukraine. About two weeks later, President Joe Biden said on CNN that the Pentagon did not need to be directed to prepare for a nuclear confrontation and warned that even accidental nuclear war could ​“end in Armageddon.”

The U.S. military also took the unusual step, in October, of publicly disclosing the locations of its Ohio class submarines in the Arabian Sea and the Atlantic — within range of Russia. Each can unleash 192 nuclear missiles in one minute.

The Pentagon and the Kremlin rattling rusty old nuclear-tipped sabers is scary enough; these two powers possess more than 90% of all nuclear weapons between their two arsenals. But the new phase of this three-quarter-of-a-century-old rivalry includes Russian missile tests in April and October 2022, and a reported foray by the nuclear-capable submarine USS Rhode Island into the Mediterranean in November.

How likely is the use of nuclear weapons in the Russia-Ukraine conflict? Matthew Bunn, an analyst at Harvard, puts it at 10% to 20%, based on Putin’s public statements and increasing desperation after Russia’s military setbacks. Usually, those might be pretty safe odds, but in the context of weapons far more powerful than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki 77 years ago and killed tens of thousands of people in flashes of light, those odds are not nearly slim enough.

 

+

Russia Demands Tribunal for Merkel and Hollande, Who Conspired to Undermine the 2015 Minsk Agreement

https://www.globalresearch.ca/russia-demands-tribunal-merkel-hollande/5805245

by Kurt Nimmo

In the West, a plot to start WWIII barely made the news.

«Such confessions made by the representative of the Kyiv regime and former leaders of Germany and France should be used as an evidence base for an international military tribunal»

 

+

Guido Goldman, the CFR and the German Marshall Fund

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2023/01/investigative-reports/guido-goldman-the-cfr-and-the-german-marshall-fund/

by Johnny Vedmore

As Kissinger’s International Seminar was revealed to be a CIA-funded program, the elites of the CFR hatched a plan to create a new organization to train young global leaders. The Harvard-based German Marshall Fund was created by a CIA-linked Kissinger protégé named Guido Goldman. Their goal: The total capitulation of Russia.

Guido Goldman, the founder and driving force behind the German Marshall Fund, was the son of Nahum Goldmann, one of the most influential Zionist leaders in history who was central to the creation of the modern state of Israel. While Guido Goldman took great pains to distance himself publicly from his father’s legacy, throughout the late-60s, events in the Middle-East and Eastern Europe led to Goldman retreading in his father’s historical footsteps, helping to significantly influence major geopolitical events. The German Marshall Fund (GMF), as well as other powerful organizations Goldman has helped found, continue to wield considerable power and influence on the global stage.

In this article, we will investigate Guido Goldman’s German Marshall Fund and discover how one group of Establishment men, almost all of them high ranking members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), created leadership programs, funded political propaganda for broadcast on various forms of mainstream media, and infiltrated positions within government.

 

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US Announces Massive $2.5 Billion Weapons Package for Ukraine

https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-announces-massive-2-5-billion-weapons-package-ukraine/5805316

by Dave DeCamp

The US on Thursday announced a new massive $2.5 billion arms package for Ukraine that includes Stryker armored combat vehicles for the first time.

The tranche of weapons includes 90 Strykers and 55 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, which the US first pledged to send to Ukraine as part of an over $3 billion arms package that was announced earlier this month.

The package also includes munitions for the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS), Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (MRAPs), and other equipment.

The Strykers are made by General Dynamics and are designed to transport troops with extra protection, similar to the Bradleys. The Stryker is lighter and faster than the Bradleys and is on wheels as opposed to tracks.

See, also: US Pledges New $600 Million Weapons Package for Ukraine

 

+

‘Extremely Dangerous’: Russia Reacts to US Plans to Help Attack Crimea

https://www.globalresearch.ca/extremely-dangerous-russia-reacts-us-plans-help-attack-crimea/5805322

by Dave DeCamp

Russian officials on Thursday reacted to a report from The New York Times that said the US was warming to the idea of helping Ukraine strike Crimea despite the risk of a Russian escalation.

When asked about the report on Wednesday, State Department spokesman Ned Price didn’t deny its contents and said, “Crimea is Ukraine,” as the US hasn’t recognized Crimea as Russian since Russia took control of it in 2014.

Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to the US, responded to Price’s comments and the reports, likening the plans to potential “terrorist attacks” and warning of escalation.

See, also:Russia Orders Troops to Target Ukraine’s Western-Provided Long-Range Weapons

 

+

Russia Accused Of "Supporting & Financing" Ukraine's Nazi Problem That Moments Ago Did Not Exist

https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/russia-accused-of-supporting-financing-ukraines-nazi-problem-that-moments-ago-did-not-exist/

with Ryan Cristián

(1:34:26)

 

+

The U.S. Is Already Preparing for the Next War

https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-already-preparing-next-war/5805301

by Danny Haiphong

Russia’s military operation in Ukraine is approaching its first birthday. Top military brass in Russia have long declared that the conflict is not between Russia and Ukraine, but rather Russia and NATO. Simply put, Ukraine is a pawn in another U.S. war. Europe’s economy and military have been sacrificed on the altar of U.S. warmongering toward Russia. Winter is here and Ukraine’s prospects for getting out of the conflict with anything resembling “victory” have dissipated, if they ever really existed at all.

Such has been admitted by two of the foreign policy establishment’s most criminal members: Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. In an op-ed with the Washington Post, Rice and Gates argue that time is not on Ukraine’s side. The U.S. must act fast or watch Ukraine suffer eventual defeat. Of course, for neocon hawks like Rice and Gates, a negotiated settlement is simply out of the question. The only option for the U.S. political and military establishment is to fortify Ukraine with the heaviest military equipment such as armored tanks to ensure victory on the battlefield.

As geopolitical analyst Brian Berletic notes, a major problem stands in the way of Rice and Gates’s demand: NATO is running out of weapons. The U.S. produces about 30,000 rounds per year for its 155 mm Howitzer long-range systems, a number that Ukraine uses in just two weeks of fighting Russia on the front lines. Russian missile strikes have made quick work of heavier equipment such as the vaunted HIMARS systems. Only larger NATO states like the U.S. and Germany have anything left to provide. So when Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky came to Congress begging for more weapons, he was likely disappointed in Joe Biden’s remark that the U.S. was not going to make promises to arm Ukraine with anything that could possibly lead to a World War III scenario between NATO and Russia.

 

+

Here's the big deal with the German-made Leopard tanks and why Ukraine desperately wants them

https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-ukraine-wants-german-made-leopard-tanks-so-badly-2023-1?r=US&IR=T

by Jake Epstein

Kyiv has pressed NATO and other European partners for more heavy armor, including fighting vehicles and tanks. A lot is on the way, but a couple of requests have hit roadblocks.

Ukraine is getting many of the items on its wish list, but it hasn't been able to get its hands on the German-made Leopard tanks it wants. And for the time being, that doesn't seem likely to change.

Some countries with Leopards have offered to send these tanks, but the problem is that sending them technically requires Germany's approval. And despite mounting pressure on Berlin to provide its own Leopards or at the very least allow others to send them, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has not budged.

Poland, one NATO country that has Leopards, indicated on Thursday that it could go rogue and take matters into its own hands if Germany didn't authorize anything. The country's president previously said he wanted to send the tanks to Ukraine as part of an "international coalition." 

 

===========

 

c.

Veterans Understand Martin Luther King Jr's Powerful Demand for Peace

https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/16/veterans-understand-martin-luther-king-jrs-powerful-demand-for-peace/

by James Rothenberg

 

+

Lucid Summations When Tomorrow Is Today and MLK Day

https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/16/lucid-summations-when-tomorrow-is-today-and-mlk-day/

by Edward Curtin

“What they [regular people] need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves….what may be called the sociological imagination.”


--C. Wright Mills, 
The Sociological Imagination

+

Beyond Vietnam to Ukraine

https://www.globalresearch.ca/beyond-vietnam-ukraine/5804736

by Rick Sterling

In April 1967,  Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an eloquent and stirring denunciation of the Vietnam war and US militarism. The speech titled “Beyond Vietnam” is relevant to today’s war in Ukraine. 

In the speech at Riverside Church, King talked about how the US had supported France in trying to re-colonize Vietnam. He noted, “Before the end of the war we were meeting 80% of the French war costs.”

 

+

“It's over!” - NATO is making Ukraine “weaker” by the minute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so8N8dHfIdw&feature=youtu.be

with Clayton Morris and Scott Ritter

(18:48)

 

+

Weapon addiction as Zelensky claims Putin chroma key

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya0eWw3rvak&feature=youtu.be

with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris

(31:40)

 

+

What the West is getting wrong about Ukraine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDjPMMD8qwA

with Marc Steiner and Lia Tarachansky

(34:00)

While Ukrainians are suffering from the hell of war that has followed the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, debates have raged in the West over how the war started and who is responsible. But if people in the US specifically and the West in general insist on putting themselves at the center of this conflict—whether as the chief instigators or the necessary saviors—they will continue to misunderstand what this war is about and what its outcome will mean for Ukraine, Russia, and the larger geopolitical realignment that is unfolding in real time. In this urgent, unscheduled segment of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with journalist, activist, and documentary filmmaker Lia Tarachansky about the West’s failure to see Russian imperialism for what it is and to comprehend the reality of a world moving beyond the bounds of Western hegemony.

 

Lia Tarachansky, born in Ukraine when it was still part of the Soviet Union, is an Israeli-Canadian journalist, documentary filmmaker, and multimedia artist. Tarachansky is TRNN’s former Israel/Palestine correspondent and has directed a number of award-winning feature films and shorts, including On the Side of the Road, Ethnocracy: Israel’s African Refugees, and Ocean.

 

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Ten Inconvenient Truths About Ukraine Largely Ignored by the Media

https://www.globalresearch.ca/ten-inconvenient-truths-about-ukraine-largely-ignored-by-msm/5804973

by Dan Fournier

 

+

Watch "How will they spin Soledar?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48x7ZPo6uB4&feature=youtu.be

with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris

(30:17)

 

+

The Chris Hedges Report: Ukraine and the crisis of media censorship

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0H7PIJcEP0

with Chris Hedges and Patrick Lawrence

(36:00)

Throughout the Ukraine war, Western news outlets have mindlessly parroted the opinions of a ruling elite and overseen a public discourse that is often unhinged from the real world.  

 

+

Ukraine's Donbass defense system collapsing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HolYxZ6s4tY

with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris

(36:32)

 

+

“Ukraine is throwing in troops to face certain death defending Bakhmut”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts-BVW6ujT8

with George Galloway

(28:02)

 

+

Lavrov, “War with west no longer hybrid, but almost real”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCBcbEA09vQ

with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris

 (32:08)

 

===========

 

d.

Pharma Spends More Money Increasing Shareholder Wealth Than It Does on Research and Development

https://www.globalresearch.ca/pharma-spends-more-money-increasing-shareholder-wealth-than-it-does-research-development/5805296

by Paul Anthony Taylor

Ringing in the New Year with price rises on more than 350 drugs they market in the United States, senior pharma industry executives will have been busy rehearsing their well-worn claim that such increases are necessary to support research and development costs. Lowering drug prices, they argue, would reduce profits and stifle product innovation. If we examine the evidence, however, the truth turns out to be rather different. A recent study shows that between 2012 and 2021, major pharma companies in the United States spent more money on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends than they did on research and development.

Authored by economists William Lazonick, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, and Öner Tulum, a researcher at Brown University on Rhode Island, the study describes how evidence strongly contradicts the pharma industry’s assertion that it is necessary for drug prices to be unregulated in order to generate profits for reinvestment in innovative new medicines. In reality, rather than using profits to increase investment, pharma companies focus instead on maintaining high drug prices so that, by making massive distributions to shareholders, they can boost the yields on their publicly traded shares.

See, also: Criticism of the Pharma Cartel and Its ‘Business with Disease’ Is Becoming Mainstream

 

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CDC Hides COVID Jab Stroke Risk (And The Rest) & BBC Inadvertently Admits The #PandemicOfTheInjected

https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/cdc-hides-covid-jab-stroke-risk-bbc-inadvertently-admits-pandemic-of-injected/

with Ryan Cristián

(2:56:17)

 

+

Program Created to Help Those Hurt by Pandemic Treatments — but Not Many Want to Talk About It

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/covid-nw-program-help-hurt-treatments-not-many-talk/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=ce82eb85-7bd8-4a9b-bfe7-b9d9736464e1

by The Defender Staff

It seems very few people want to talk about the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program or CICP. It’s a federal program to compensate people hurt by a medicine or medical device used to fight a pandemic.

For Allen Storey, and for more than half of the people who have filed claims with the CICP, that countermeasure is the COVID-19 vaccine. “I was glad to get it,” recalled Allen Storey about the vaccine. But then came an acute brain stem stroke and a series of confusing medical diagnoses that left them financially and emotionally dazed and confused.

Days after Allen received his first vaccine dose, doctors thought he was experiencing vertigo. His condition grew worse. He became non-responsive. His only way to communicate was by squeezing his wife Beverly’s hand.

But instead of helping, the CICP became one more challenge. Nearly two years later, Beverly still hadn’t heard from anyone at the CICP. “You don’t get any answers. Nobody calls back, nobody has sent anything in the mail,” Beverly told 11Alive exasperated.

Wisconsin Supreme Court to Rule on Court-Ordered Ivermectin for COVID

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported:

 

 

+

Who is running the world?

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/wef-meeting-davos-klaus-gates/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=e88f8790-6fc9-4345-9029-1d7f106be75f

by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.

As the World Economic Forum (WEF) today wrapped up its weeklong annual meeting of nearly 3,000 political, business, media and academic elites, mainstream media largely continued to sing the meeting’s praises, while independent media outlets took aim at the WEF’s agenda and its promoters.

The Associated Press (AP) described the meetings in Davos, Switzerland, as taking on the “pressing global issues” while simultaneously being the “target of bizarre claims from a growing chorus who believe it involves a group of elites manipulating events for their own benefit.”

Among those critics was Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk, who responded to a tweet: “WEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want.”

Musk posted an online poll — that generated 2.42 million votes — where he asked whether “The World Economic Forum should control the world.” Eighty-six percent of respondents said “no.”

The Defender on Wednesday reported on the first few days of meetings. This article lists eight key takeaways from Davos — and why they matter.

 

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The Davos "Debate" on "Disinformation": The “Most Existential Problem” Facing the Planet Today

https://www.globalresearch.ca/sulzberger-disinformation-most-existential-problem-facing-planet-today/5805338

by Jonathan Turley

There has been much coverage over the resurfacing of former CNN host Brian Stelter as the host for a panel at the World Economic Forum on alleged disinformation and “hate speech.” Stelter previously called for censorship under a “harm reduction model” and led a panel at a conference where Democrats discussed how to shape the news. He was confronted over his own dissemination for false stories targeting Republicans on CNN. Yet, I was most struck by a statement from New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger who described “disinformation” as the “most existential” problem the world is facing today. Sulzberger insisted that disinformation is the reason why there is a loss of “trust” today. He ignores his own history in eroding that trust in the media through flagrantly biased decisions at the New York Times.

Former  NYT editor Jill Abramson also slammed the participation of Sulzberger and the New York Times at Davos, denouncing it as a “corrupt circle-jerk” between media and business. She said that “the coverage was a sweetener to flatter the CEOs by seeing their names in the NYT.”

The panel was titled, “Clear & Present Danger of Disinformation” included panelists: New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, Vice-President of the European Commission Vera Jourová, CEO of Internews Jeanne Bourgault, and Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass. The entire conference was notable in its omission of free speech advocates while inviting long advocates for censorship like Stelter.

Stelter asked his panel, “How does this discussion of disinformation relate to everything else happening today in Davos?”

Sulzberger responded:

“Well, first, thanks for having me is as part of this conversation. As you can imagine, this is something I really care deeply about. So, I think if you look at this question of disinformation, I think it maps basically to every other major challenge that we are grappling with as a society, and particularly the most existential among them. So, disinformation and in the broader set of misinformation, conspiracy, propaganda, clickbait, you know, the broader mix of bad information that’s corrupting information ecosystem, what it attacks is trust. And once you see, trust decline, what you then see is a society start to fracture, and so you see people fracture along tribal lines and, you know, that immediately undermines pluralism. And the undermining of pluralism is probably the most dangerous thing that can happen to a democracy. So I really — I think if if you’re spending this week thinking about the health of democracies and democratic erosion, I think it’s really import to work your way back up to where this starts.”

It was a telling statement. Sulzberger suggested that allowing some opposing views undermines “trust.” Indeed, allowing opposing views on Covid or election or global warming does erode trust in the media and the government. Society would be so less “fractured” if information is controlled and consistent.

See, also: The West’s War on Free Speech

 

+

“Oh SH*T, something BIG is happening at Davos as WEF blocks the media” – Jan. 15, 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-boSpxmNUw

with Clayton Morris and Natali Morris

(28:27)

Unelected global leaders are gathering in Davos, Switzerland this week to discuss how to control and create the world around us. Great! What will they be talking about? Well, brain transparency for one. Sounds a lot like mind control, doesn't it? And what about a new world order? No, the term for that is re-globalization. And pandemics? Oh yes, they think that they can do a vaccine in 100 days. What do you think about these topics? Is this appropriate skepticism or paranoia?

 

+

“A New System” – Inside the Davos Summit 2023

https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/15/a-new-system-inside-the-davos-summit-2023/

by OffGardian

WEF conference looks set to focus on what the globalist elite can learn from the failures of their “pandemic” narrative.

 

+

Pfizer CEO CONFRONTED On The Streets Of Davos!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igBNjOimmFc

with Jimmy Dore

(6:54)

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla is used to giving friendly interviews where he’s justified in expecting he’ll receive little to no pushback against his assertions about the company’s vaccines, profits, sales practices, political donations, etc. So it must have been quite the surprise when two non-credentialed journalists approached him on the streets of Davos during this year’s World Economic Forum and grilled him about vaccine efficacy, Pfizer’s profits, and his personal culpability in spreading misinformation about vaccines.

 

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DIVIDE & RULE - THE PLAN OF THE 1% TO MAKE YOU DISPOSABLE

https://www.bitchute.com/video/K9WjrnuoVTpW/

with Vandana Shiva

(12:01)

Story at-a-glance

The world's top 0.001% — the ultra-wealthy— and the modern empires they control — Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Ag — are not only responsible for destroying the planet and sending most of humanity into financial and health crises, they're intent on attaining ultimate control. If and when that happens, 99% of people will become disposable.

Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., founder of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in India, details how globalists are exploiting the masses in her book, "Oneness Vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom." In the video above by After Skool, she expands on how the 0.001% intend to "divide and rule" in order to achieve their exploitative goals.1

A Lesson From Quantum Theory

Shiva is trained as a physicist and initially planned to study atomic energy. But as she grasped the devastation it had caused worldwide, she gave up her idea of being a nuclear physicist and instead went looking for knowledge as a whole. She studied on her own, finding quantum theory,2 which formed the basis of her life's work:3

"The way you design the world in your mind is the way you relate to it. When you design it as dead matter just to be exploited, you will exploit it. When you design it without any understanding of limits, you will violate the planetary limits.

When you design it with deep recognition of interconnectedness, you will nurture those relationships. And this basic recognition is what I drew from my learnings in quantum theory — that nonlocality, nonseparation, interconnectedness … is the nature of reality."

However, she explains, within the paradigm of mechanistic thought, there's a design that didn't evolve. As such, mechanistic thought is based on the following assumptions:4

But in the quantum world, Shiva explains, "There is no separability. My thesis was on nonlocality in quantum theory. Everything is interconnected. There are no fixed essentialized qualities that have been built into the way people are looked at, nature is looked at. Potential is the defining quality in the quantum world, and because it's about potential, it's also about uncertainty."5

Shiva states that the mechanistic world is based on a false illusion of determinateness, or a quality of being highly predictable. "In the quantum world, we know we cannot get rid of uncertainty," she says, citing the uncertainty principle created by German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927.

Referring to atoms and subatomic particles, the uncertainty principle maintains that the position and velocity of an object cannot be measured at the same time. "The very concepts of exact position and exact velocity together, in fact, have no meaning in nature," Britannica notes.6

Further, while in the mechanistic world things are either/or — "you can either be a wave or a particle," Shiva says — "in the quantum world, you have potential to be both and they're complementary." She continues, "When you realize that the world is one interconnected whole you also realize that what appears different is actually different expressions of an interconnected reality."7

Billionaires' Technology Has Become the New 'Mission'

We're at an unprecedented point in history when the "civilizing mission for humanity" is technology — technology owned by the 1%. It's an illusion, however, that technology companies are "creating" or inventing these systems that will supposedly make our world a better place.

"They extract," Shiva says, "They don't create anything … software programmers create the platforms that they use. Even Bill Gates didn't really write his basic program. It was two math professors in Dartmouth College."8

She uses Gates' Ag One9 as an example, which is basically the idea to make one type of agriculture for the whole world, which will be owned and controlled by Gates from the top down. It's headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, where Monsanto, acquired by Bayer in 2018,10 Bayer is also headquartered.

This includes digital farming, in which farmers are surveilled and mined for their agricultural data, which is then repackaged and sold back to them. There are parallels throughout society. Shiva explains:11

"We watched what's going on in India and we pieced it together. So basically he's financing a lot of data mining from farmers, which will then be packaged as Big Data and sold back to farmers. This is exactly what happened in your 2016 elections. Facebook sold data to Cambridge Analytica.

So when you think of, 'What are the kind of leaders that we have getting created?' it's very important to remember that in these 25 years of corporate deregulation of commerce you basically have a lot of money in the hands of very few people.

And they then are the ones investing in all the companies. The companies are not independent companies anymore. They're basically billionaire money managed by the investment funds like Blackrock and Vanguard."

Divide and Rule Is the Plan

Protests and unrest are increasing throughout the world as people grow tired of being controlled and downtrodden by the 1%. Demands for change are surging, so the 1% has rolled out a plan to overcome it — divide and rule.

Shiva believes the East India Company in 1857 set the historic precedence. A revolt occurred that year against oppressive company rule, and the company was taken over by the British state. Up until that point, Hindus and Muslims in India had stood together to defend their land, livelihoods and freedoms.

They identified primarily with their occupations and communities; religion was secondary. But when the crown took over, Shiva says, "They established a policy called divide and rule … it took from about 1857 to about 1920" to essentially divide the population against each other based on their religion. She explains:12

"That partition is still being played out. It's an incomplete project. So, divide and rule becomes a necessity for the 0.001% to continue to hold on to power. What are the economic policies being pushed while people are divided? Because that's really the agenda."

The Duty of Truth

The refusal to cooperate with unjust law was termed a duty of truth by Gandhi. Shiva describes apartheid in 1906, when the British attempted to turn Indians in South Africa into second-class citizens. Indians had to register their race and carry identification. Police officers could enter homes and demand papers, and people were restricted from local trade and certain professions based on their race. "The people said we would rather die," Shiva says.

Others inspired by Gandhi and the duty of truth include Martin Luther King. "But … when King started to take up economic justice and economic equality issues, that's when he was assassinated," Shiva says, "because … you can talk in very sweet ways about civil liberties but you don't touch economic justice and the economy."13

The word economy comes from oeconomia, or the art of living. But when this got changed into the art of money-making, it brought on violence. "When you turn the art of living into the art of money-making, which Aristotle called chrematistics, then you have to practice violence against the Earth and violence against others — destroy their livelihoods, destroy their freedoms, take away their resources."14

Sowing the Seeds of Earth Democracy

With the convergence of Big Tech and artificial intelligence, Shiva fears mechanical work, from radiography to law, will be made redundant, and 99% of people will become disposable. The solution lies in activating our sense of oneness or interconnectedness with all life and sowing the seeds of what Shiva calls Earth democracy:15

"You can either share this beautiful planet with love and abundance and sustainability, or say it's all mine — every bit of land, every seed, every mind. Because what's being mined is our mind now, and if we don't defend the freedoms of all species and the freedoms of all human beings we could see, within 20 to 30 years, a level of disposability built into the structures that humanity will not be able to respond to."

Currently, democracy has shifted to being "of the corporations by the corporations for the corporations." Earth democracy calls for a restoration of democracy "of the people by the people for the people," not only for humans but also for nature.16 According to the ancient Vedas, the universe is divine, and everything therein — even the smallest grass — is an expression of the divine.

The universe exists for the well-being of all, but her gifts must be enjoyed without greed. Taking more than your share is theft, and will only backfire. The solution to true sustainability doesn't lie with new technology but in relying on the natural "technology" that is the universe.17 Shiva says:18

"This is the time to make oneness and interconnectedness, as one humanity on one planet, the political project of our time. We have to remember we are one humanity. We are part of one Earth, and whatever we do we will not let this basic recognition divide us, either from the Earth or from each other … together we are strong."

+

Hiding Wealth the Walton and Getty Family Way

https://inequality.org/great-divide/getty-walton-dodge-taxes/

by Chuck Collins

Much of what we know about the global hidden wealth system comes from leaks from within the wealth defense industry, the wealth managers and tax attorneys that facilitate the wealth vanishing act for their billionaire clients. As I wrote in my book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, this enabling class has helped sequester trillions of dollars in trusts, anonymous shell companies, and offshore tax havens.

The 2016 Panama Papers and the 2021 Pandora Papers were both the result of massive data leaks from inside wealth management firms, reported by the courageous global journalists connected to the International Consortium of investigative journalists. And now, a new blockbuster investigation from The New Yorker traces the decision of a whistleblower — “a disgruntled wealth manager” — to expose how the descendants of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty use Nevada trusts to avoid California taxes.

The Getty disclosure stems from a wrongful termination lawsuit, which along with divorce is one way light occasionally shines onto this shadowy world. Wealth advisor Marlena Sonn worked for several members of the Getty family for eight years, advising them on socially responsible strategies for their investments. But she was troubled by the Getty family’s use of Nevada-based trusts and a Reno-based family office, to maintain the fiction that family members did not live in higher-tax California. When she suggested they pay their California tax obligations, she was fired. The full family gossip is well chronicled in The New Yorker piece.

 

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Video: End Governance by Secrecy. How to Take Down the Billionaires

https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-end-governance-secrecy-how-take-down-billionaires/5805140

by Emanuel Pastreich

The takeover of our society by the billionaires and their lackeys cannot be understood unless we grasp how a veil of secrecy has been spread over most of the government and over corporations for the last twenty years that makes it impossible for people to even speak about the horrific crimes that are destroying our nation. It has become common sense for most people in the upper middle class to simply assume that there is a set of issues which are simply taboo, which cannot be brought up in any context, ever.

President John F. Kennedy addressed this crisis of governance by secrecy at the beginning in a brave speech he delivered in April of 1961.

President Kennedy spoke,

“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings.

We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.

Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.”

A massive increase in secrecy in the United States started after President Kennedy’s assassination in1963, a blatant attempt by global finance to intimate all politicians that was complemented by the expansion of classified status to cover any document that revealed criminality in government. This move was combined with a purging of committed and responsible individuals from the Department of Defense and from intelligence.

That trend towards secrecy went into an exponential upwards curve after the 9/11 attacks. Those attacks involved massive conspiracies to destroy the functionality of government, to mislead the public about fundamental policy decisions, and to threaten, or suppress, opposition while launching endless foreign wars. Laws were set in place, many of which remain illegal to even mention, that set stiff punishments for the disclosure of the truth in any format, for any reason.

To this day, although the contours of the fraudulent attacks on the World Trade Center are known to many, the actual internal process by which it was planned, coordinated, and implemented remains obscure.

There are three main approaches to making secret the corruption and criminality that has spread across government and corporations, and to punishing anyone so foolish as to search for the truth: 1) the use of classifications (secret and top secret), 2) the use of secret law, and 3) the use of non-disclosure agreements.

Rendering corporate and government documents detailing institutional criminality as “secret” and “top secret” and punishing anyone who refers to the criminal actions with massive fines and jail terms for violating the conditions for security clearance, is an old trick that has been radically expanded over the last decade. Numerous whistle blowers have gone to jail and have been driven into bankruptcy, for simply speaking the truth for the good of the nation. Many are subject to courts agreements, to keep them out of jail, that bar them from even discussing what was done to them illegally.

See, also: Video: The Key to Ending COVID-19 Is Buried in the WTC Wreckage

 

+

Watch: “Real world leaders avoid Davos WEF”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UUKKGgVbEU&feature=youtu.be

with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris

(15:53)

+

“COVID-19 Blunder”

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/01/21/joe-rogan-bret-weinstein-covid-19-blunder.aspx

or

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/01/21/joe-rogan-and-bret-weinstein-covid-19-blunder/

with Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein

(1:59:09)

Story at-a-glance

·         Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary theorist, discussed some of the most heavily censored topics today on “The Joe Rogan Experience”

·         From the initial allowance of gain-of-function research to the botched pandemic response, Weinstein believes the COVID-19 pandemic is the largest blunder in human history

·         Research published in Science Immunology reveals a “mind blowing” finding that after three doses of mRNA COVID-19 shots, your immune system may be triggered not to fight

·         As SARS-CoV-2 spread through the population, fear was used to make the population compliant

·         Weinstein explores the possibility that a select group may have had advance notice of the impending pandemic and used that knowledge to position themselves for a financial windfall

 

+

WATCH: “Truth Finds A Way”

https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/17/watch-truth-finds-a-way-solutionswatch/

with James Corbett

(14:41)

 

+

Cardiac Arrest and Death after COVID-19 Vaccination:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/cardiac-arrest-death-after-covid-19-vaccination/5805344

by Dr. Peter McCullough

Virtually every day in the news we hear about a young person, perfectly healthy, with no antecedent illness drop dead without explanation. As the cases roll in it has been my general observation that if the cardiac arrest is witnessed and there is prompt defibrillation, as in the case with Demar Hamlin, then neurologic and overall survival is possible.

Out of guilt, remorse, shame and in the stupor of a COVID-19 vaccination trance, the victim and the family usually make no statement about vaccination status—something that would have been a proud point of a selfie or a tweet a few years ago. In a recent paper by Li et al, the cellular basis for the wide range of mechanisms the lead to cardiac arrest in a COVID-19 vaccinated person are described. I was alarmed that the authors considered cardiac arrest and death “common” as listed in Table 2.

 

+

Watch: “CDC Warns Of Stroke Danger From New Bivalent COVID Booster!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ba171iTeY0

with Jimmy Dore

(4:17)

 

===========

 

e.

“Something Is Going To Happen Soon” – Stella Assange on Julian Assange's Imprisonment

https://www.mintpressnews.com/something-going-happen-soon-stella-assange-julian-assanges-imprisonment/283279/

with Lee Camp

(52:25)

 

+

Stand-Up For Assange

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/18/watch-live-stand-up-for-assange-maurizi-book-event-tribute-to-fritzi-cohen/

with Stefania Maurizi

(3:43:20)

Live from the Tabard Inn in Washington at 6 pm EST Thursday, an evening of music and comedy in tribute to the late Tabard founder, Fritzi Cohen; preceded by a book presentation by Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, author of Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies, in conversation with philosopher Srecko Horvat. With Anya Parampil, Max Blumenthal, John Kiriakou, Sam Husseini, Jesslyn Radack, Jaffer Khan, John F. O’Donnell, Naomi Karavani and Margaret Kuntsler.  MC: Randy Credico.  

 

 

+

The Belmarsh Tribunal D.C. — The Case of Julian Assange

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_QqpYATupw

with Amy Goodman and Srecko Horvat

(2:39:05)

On January 20, 2023, Democracy Now! is livestreaming the Belmarsh Tribunal from Washington, D.C. The event will feature expert testimony from journalists, whistleblowers, lawyers, publishers and parliamentarians on assaults to press freedom and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman and Srecko Horvat, the co-founder of DiEM25, will chair the tribunal, which is being organized by Progressive International and the Wau Holland Foundation.

 

Members of the tribunal include: Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Noam Chomsky, linguist and activist Jeremy Corbyn, member of U.K. Parliament and founder of the Peace and Justice Project Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent Kevin Gosztola, managing editor of Shadowproof Margaret Kunstler, civil rights attorney Stefania Maurizi, investigative journalist, Il Fatto Quotidiano Jesselyn Radack, national security and human rights attorney Ben Wizner, lead attorney at ACLU of Edward Snowden Renata Ávila, human rights lawyer, technology and society expert Jeffrey Sterling, lawyer and former CIA employee Steven Donziger, human rights attorney Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief, WikiLeaks Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher, The Nation Selay Ghaffar, spokesperson, Solidarity Party of Afghanistan Betty Medsger, investigative reporter Suchitra Vijayan, writer, photrapher & activist

 

 

+

“Free Julian Assange: Noam Chomsky, Dan Ellsberg & Jeremy Corbyn Lead Call at Belmarsh Tribunal”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRUyBv3LyYk

with Daniel Ellsberg, Jeremy Corbyn, and Noam Chomsky

(46:52)

Former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, famed linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky and others gave testimony Friday at the Belmarsh Tribunal in Washington, D.C., calling on President Biden to drop charges against Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder has been languishing for close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States. If convicted in the United States, Julian Assange could face up to 175 years in jail for violating the U.S. Espionage Act for publishing documents that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Friday's event was held at the National Press Club and co-chaired by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman. We spend the hour featuring compelling excerpts from the proceedings.

 

+

Julian Assange and the war on whistleblowers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOC-c0QdfEo

with Chris Hedges and Kevin Gosztola

(32:36)

 

+

Saving Assange, Saving US Face

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/16/watch-cn-live-saving-assange-saving-us-face/

with Joe Lauria and Elizabeth Vos

(audio, 1:01:41)

Will Julian Assange be released in two months, as an Australian Broadcasting Corporation senior correspondent has predicted? CN Live! asks Greg Barns SC, an Assange campaign counsel for 11 years, and former Australian Senator Christine Milne at noon EST Monday.

As Julian Assange awaits a decision by the High Court in London whether it will accept his appeal against the home secretary’s decision to extradite him to the United States, the focus of the story has shifted here to his native Australia, where the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has said for the first time that he has discussed with the United States bringing Assange’s ordeal to a close.

A prominent television journalist here, John Lyons, of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., shortly afterward said he understood that Assange would be back home in Australia within two months.

CN Live! traveled to Hobart, the capital of the state of Tasmania, to discuss the latest developments in the Assange case with Christine Milne, a former Senator in the federal parliament and head of the Australian Green Party, who has been a vocal advocate for the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher. And with Greg Barns, a senior counsel and advisor to the Assange campaign. Interviewer: Joe Lauria. Producer: Cathy Vogan.

 

 

 

+

“Dimming the Lights”

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/09/patrick-lawrence-dimming-the-lights/

by Patrick Lawrence

Somewhere along the line, the thought seems to have taken hold among the cliques who rule America that an ignorant populace is more easily governed. Good old Bertie Russell made this general point with an eloquence almost too piercing to take in “Free Thought and Official Propaganda,” a lecture he delivered in London 101 years ago:

“But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically; it is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative problems.”

You see the consequences of this perverse belief every day in the mainstream press and among the corporate-owned broadcasters. You can read headlines such as “10 Ways to Be Happy in the New Year” or “Where Did All the Bargain Bourbon Go?”

But you are not going to learn much from these media about the world in which you live. Your intelligence will not be enhanced or elevated; insult is the norm.

But mass media are merely mirrors reflecting the established ethos of the polity in which they operate. They do their best to keep Americans ignorant, certainly. If the ruling cliques wanted America to boast an intelligent populace, the press and broadcasters would do their part — as Jefferson understood this part to be — to inform them.

No, even a press critic as severe as your columnist must look further down in the factory to understand where the process of manufacturing American ignorance truly begins. It begins in our schools and universities, with the administrators, teachers, and professors who run them.

 

+

Psychology of a Klansman

https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/22/the-chris-hedges-report-psychology-of-a-klansman/

by Chris Hedges

 

+

Record Police Killings in 2022 Show Need to Continue Organizing for Abolition

https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/17/record-police-killings-in-2022-show-need-to-continue-organizing-for-abolition/

by Austin McCoy

 

+

What Price Is 'Defense?': America's Costly, Dysfunctional Approach to Security Is Making Us Ever Less Safe

https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/17/what-price-is-defense-americas-costly-dysfunctional-approach-to-security-is-making-us-ever-less-safe/

by William D. Hartuhng

Late last month, President Biden signed a bill that clears the way for $858 billion in Pentagon spending and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy in 2023.  That’s far more than Washington anted up for military purposes at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or even during the peak years of the Cold War. In fact, the $80 billion increase from the 2022 Pentagon budget is in itself more than the military budgets of any country other than China. Meanwhile, a full accounting of all spending justified in the name of national security, including for homeland security, veterans’ care, and more, will certainly exceed $1.4 trillion. And mind you, those figures don’t even include the more than $50 billion in military aid Washington has already dispatched to Ukraine, as well as to frontline NATO allies, in response to the Russian invasion of that country.

The assumption is that when it comes to spending on the military and related activities, more is always better. 

There’s certainly no question that one group will benefit in a major way from the new spending surge: the weapons industry. If recent experience is any guide, more than half of that $858 billion will likely go to private firms. The top five contractors alone — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — will split between $150 billion and $200 billion in Pentagon contracts. Meanwhile, they’ll pay their CEOs, on average, more than $20 million a year and engage in billions of dollars in stock buybacks designed to boost their share prices. 

Such “investments” are perfectly designed to line the pockets of arms-industry executives and their shareholders. However, they do little or nothing to help defend this country or its allies.

 

 

f.

Stop them before they “save the planet!

https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/stop-them-before-they-save-the-planet?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

by Mark Crispin Miller

Grandiose much? John Kerry hails the crowd at Davos---"a select group of human beings"---for their high altruism, calling it "almost extraterrestrial"

 

+

 Global Parasites' New Climate Scam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9FrMBwyV0E

with RJ Eskow and Richard Wolff

(35:19)

 

+

WHY IS NO ONE STOPPING THIS?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r05jhBs1ICE

with Russell Brand

The Canadian government looks to be redefining economic impact as “violence” to justify freezing protesters’ bank accounts. Is this part of a wider trend of the powerful to reinterpret laws and limit our freedoms?

 

+

Science! Blessed be Thy Name The Vanishing Value of Religious Freedom

https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/16/science-blessed-be-thy-name/

byJordan Henderson

Freedom of Religion can no longer bring about the freedom that it could have in past ages had it actually been implemented; only a Freedom of Belief System could do that today. The reason for this is straightforward; Freedom of Religion would have been a big deal back when the dominant belief system was a religion; Freedom of Religion would have meant the freedom not to have the dominant belief system imposed upon you.

But Freedom of Religion can no longer shield you from having the dominant belief system imposed upon you because today the dominant belief system is The Science as dictated by the state. The Science now serves the same role for rationalizing political power that the church used to do.

I want to first illustrate our new reality, through two written examples. The first example under the subheading “A Little Chat About the Good News,” presents the dogmas of The Science in satire through religious terminology.

The second example under the subheading “Proof of Baptism Required,” is the reverse and asks us to imagine what it would look like if governments were forcing religious dogmas and rituals upon the population in place of scientific dogmas and rituals.

In other words the first example asks us to imagine religious dogma swapped with science dogma. The second example asks us to imagine the opposite scenario: science rituals and dogma swapped with religious rituals and dogma.

 

+

Four Studies Add to Evidence of Wireless Technology-Related Electromagnetic Radiation in Humans

https://www.globalresearch.ca/four-studies-add-evidence-wireless-technology-related-electromagnetic-radiation-humans/5805214

by Dr. Suzanne Burdick

New studies from Sweden, China, Australia and the U.K. shed light on human exposure to electromagnetic radiation from wireless technologies, but the authors of one study alleged industry tried to censor their research, and in another case, critics accused researchers of having conflicts of interest with the telecom industry.

In the first example, an international peer-reviewed journal — Annals of Case Reports — on Jan. 10 published a Swedish case report showing 5G radiation causes symptoms indicative of “microwave syndrome.”

The report initially was censored by the telecom industry, the study authors said.

Dr. Lennart Hardell, Ph.D, retired professor of oncology at the Örebro University Hospital in Sweden, and Mona Nilsson, managing director of the Swedish Radiation Protection Foundation, co-authored the report.

Nilsson told The Defender, “The telecom companies tried to censor the article” in spring 2022 after the study initially appeared in a Swedish medical magazine.

“A representative of the Ericsson company — the world leading 5G infrastructure provider — and the umbrella organization for 1,200 tech companies, all the major telecom companies in Sweden, wrote to the editor of the Swedish magazine and asked him to withdraw the article,” she explained.

“This is the first case report of the microwave syndrome caused by 5G,” Hardell told The Defender, adding that “historically, many risk factors for human health have first been identified by clinical observations.”

According to Nilsson, the study — which examined the change in physical symptoms experienced by a 63-year-old man and a 62-year-old woman when a 5G cellular tower was installed on the top of their apartment building — “confirms the concerns raised for several years by hundreds of scientists and physicians about the dangers of the 5G rollout.”

Nilsson pointed out that 5G was rolled out “without any previous studies showing that 5G is safe for humans or the environment.”

Nilsson continued:

“It is a scandal that this industry, in spite of the complete lack of evidence showing that 5G is safe, has obtained the right to expose people without their consent, in their own homes to massively increasing levels of pulsed microwave radiation that have the capacity to rapidly destroy their health.”

“The telecom industry knows about the effects on people’s health, but are doing all they can to cover up the harms.”

Numerous people, she said, contacted the Swedish Radiation Protection Foundation with reports of their health being destroyed by 5G equipment installed in their neighborhoods.

“Based on the measurements of massively increased radiation from 5G and what we know this far,” Nilsson said, “we can conclude that 5G is very dangerous and must be halted.”

Cellphone use linked to brain cancer, Chinese study concludes . . . .

 

===========

 

g.

Ukraine is collapsing under the weight of Russian Offensives

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5UQPjjRR-0&feature=youtu.be

with Douglas Macgregor

(20:11)

 

+

“2023 Outlook for Ukraine”

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/11/scott-ritter-2023-outlook-for-ukraine/

by Scott Ritter

Given the duplicitous history of the Minsk Accords, it is unlikely Russia can be diplomatically dissuaded from its military offensive. As such, 2023 appears to be shaping up as a year of continued violent confrontation.

 

+

Watch: “Russia's next move, keeps collective west guessing”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMHdyf1dq8g

with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Merouris

(36:29)

 

+

Russia deploys secret weapon in war for financial sovereignty: “Central banking”

“Financial sovereignty”: It’s what friendly banker-lady Christine Lagarde and Bank of Russia high priestess Elvira Nabiullina crave!

https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/russia-deploys-secret-weapon-in-war?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

by Edward Slavsquat

 Russian President Vladimir Putin has unveiled his ingenious plan for securing Russia’s financial sovereignty. source: URA.ru “It is necessary to strengthen the financial sovereignty of the country, I count on the work of the Central Bank,” Putin said during a meeting with government officials on Wednesday.

 

===========

 

h.

Book Review: “Cause Unknown,” by Ed Dowd

https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/good-news-for-those-still-capable?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

by Mark Crispin Miller

A book that tells the awful truth, and nothing but—and does it so compellingly that "our free press" is, with few exceptions, NOT attacking it!

 

+

Shedding Innocence

https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/shedding-innocence?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

by Robert W Malone MD, MS

(audio, 23:44)

Propaganda and censorship in the garden of good and evil

As we move through January 2023, and additional details about the lies our governments have told us are revealed daily, I keep getting questioned about how it feels to be vindicated. I wrote about this last year, at a time when the approved narrative appeared to be failing, and my deep ambivalence remains. To my surprise, governments, the World Health Organization (WHO), and various non-governmental organizations (WEF, BMGF etc.) have managed to keep the COVIDcrisis alive and weaponized to justify policies which do not advance public health objectives, but which they use to advance their own political and financial interests. Like tossing offal over the transom, “Never let a good crisis go to waste” seems to have provoked a shark feeding frenzy which humanity may require decades to recover from.

Assuming we ever do.

The apple of knowledge about the depths of what the US government, the Uniparty, the “Administrative state” will do has been well and truly bitten into now. None who are “awake” to the damage done (to individuals, families, and communities) in the name of public health will ever be able to return to what (in retrospect) seems like the Eden of our prior innocence.

Now we are finally seeing the patient council of Augustine of Hippo come to pass — ‘The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.’ Like so many others, I had naively assumed that this process would require months, not years.

Just to make the point yet again, the COVIDcrisis was never really a crisis in the way it was portrayed. It was always a house of cards built upon (USA and CCP) government propaganda as well as grossly overstated risk modeling and projections from the Imperial College, London developed by the Neil Ferguson research group.

Layers and layers of propaganda. Deep, harmonized, simultaneous collusion, enticement, censorship, malicious defamation and gaslighting across all western political organizations and their paid toadies in corporate and social media- propagated and coordinated by the UN, WHO, EU, USA, former “British Empire” governments and the new wannabe corporatist world government body known as the “World Economic Forum” (WEF).

A comprehensive, global “shock and awe” fifth generation warfare action the likes of which the world has never seen before. All justified as necessary to protect us from a pathogen which was never a threat in the sense of Ebola (for example) or even the fentanyl flooding across the US southern border.

A pathogen which (current information suggests) many of these governments had a hand in creating. A pre-planned (Event 201) authoritarian totalitarian response resulting in a massive upwards transfer of wealth largely to those who funded the planning (that being the WEF and Bill Gates). Was the over-reaction and authoritarian mismanagement a psychological projection of their guilt about having created and loosed this slouching beast on all of us? Or was the virus just a strategy to enable a broader agenda? Or one of many possible strategies developed and waiting to be deployed? I suspect that Dr. Anthony Fauci would plead a failure of memory if asked to testify to those questions under oath.

Or perhaps (just as internet haters are going to hate), authoritarians and monopolists when given an opportunity will enable Totalitarian states and Corporate monopolies.

It has been over three years now during which we have all been banished to inhabit dark crevices and cracks in the garden of good and evil. Forced into our homes and the fringes of society while psychopathic devils who normally inhabit Dante’s nine circles of hell openly danced a global bacchanal of death, destruction, and greed. And as they danced, they steadily advanced their long anticipated “Great Reset”.   (con’d). . . .

 

+

Watch "The TRUTH about the Gates Family"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Q7mdbuu5Y

with ReallyGraceful

(1:34:37)

 

+

McCarthy Brought TO HIS KNEES As GOP Holdouts Win Major Concessions!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHlhH7sVWCM&feature=youtu.be

with Aaron Maté

(23:52)

 

+

FBI & CIA To Be INVESTIGATED By Republican Congress!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cULjn0bDiuY

with Aaron Maté

(20:46)

 

+

Sam Pollard: The FBI’s Crusade Against MLK Was Darker Than You Think

“Do Not Cross.” Artwork by Mr. Fish.

https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/15/rewind-sam-pollard-the-fbis-crusade-against-mlk-was-darker-than-you-think/

by Robert Sheer

“You are done. There is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” That’s the shocking ending to the infamous letter Civil Rights hero Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. received in 1964 essentially urging him to commit suicide.  The letter and accompanying package containing blackmail were sent by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as King quickly caught on. While the full, unredacted letter was finally published by the New York Times in 2014, the audio recordings of an extensive FBI wiretapping operation targeting King have been sealed until 2027. With just a few years left before they come to light, director Sam Pollard did a deep dive into the FBI’s surveillance of MLK under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover in his documentary “MLK / FBI,” released by IFC Films earlier this month. 

 

+

GOP Has Not Created a New Church Committee

https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/18/john-kiriakou-gop-has-not-created-a-new-church-committee/

by John Kiriakou

House Republicans last week announced that they would quickly create a special committee that they referred to as the Church Committee II.  Formally, they named it the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.  The subcommittee was created on a straight party-line vote:  All 221 Republicans voted in favor while all 211 Democrats were opposed.

It will be chaired by far-right Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, the former wrestling coach at Ohio State University whom six former wrestlers accused of doing nothing to help them, despite the fact that he knew they were being molested by the team doctor.  Jordan is also the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee; in one of life’s ironies, despite graduating from an obscure law school in central Ohio, he never bothered to take the bar exam.

House Republicans, upon creation of the subcommittee, said that it would be responsible for a “wide-ranging investigation into federal law enforcement and national security agencies.”  But in private conversations, these same Republicans said that they would “use their new power in Congress to scrutinize what they said was a concerted effort by the government to silence and punish conservatives at all levels, from protestors at school board meetings to former President Donald J. Trump,” according to The New York Times. 

 

+

How the war machine took over the Democrats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b079rbpYIzU

with Chris Hedges and Dennis Kucinich

(33:56)

There was once a wing of the Democratic Party that stood up to the war industry. J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire, and, of course, Dennis Kucinich. But that was largely decades ago. The new Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America, but the arms industry. The massive military budget, $858 billion in military spending allocated for fiscal year 2023, is an increase of $45 billion over the Biden administration's budget request, and nearly $80 billion more than the amount appropriated by Congress for the current fiscal year.

 

What happened to the Democratic Party? Why has it become impossible to question war and the massive expenditures on arms? Why is such questioning political suicide? Why can't a Democrat ask, especially at a time of economic hardship and huge deficits, how much we are going to divert to the war in Ukraine, which has already consumed some $60 billion? Former presidential candidate and eight-term Congressperson Dennis Kucinich joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the past half century of the Democrats, and how the war machine conquered the party.

 

+

Watch “I’ll NEVER Cross The Democratic Party!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmxexCixlrc&feature=youtu.be

with Jimmy Dore

(25:15)

During a recent Instagram Live chat, New York Congresswoman and “Squad” member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explained why she and her colleagues refused to “Force the Vote” when Democrats took control of the House in 2021, unlike what the Freedom Caucus did earlier this month. Her response was enlightening, underscoring how AOC has become a complete Democratic Party insider and wholly abandoned the “bring the ruckus” persona that helped sweep her into office as an ostensible threat to the Democratic Party power structure.

 

+

Meta gave the CDC de facto power to police Covid “misinfo”

https://reclaimthenet.org/meta-gave-the-cdc-de-facto-power-to-police-covid-misinfo/

by Didi Rankovic

More email revelations.

 

+

“Right or Wrong, I am Sticking with What I Believe”

https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/14/right-or-wrong-i-am-sticking-with-what-i-believe/

by Todd Hayen

What is it with this oddly stoic response from the “sheep side” of this debate? I am hearing more and more sentiments such as: “I don’t care if you are right, I am sticking with my stance.” What is that all about?

Like a captain of a ship, defeated in battle, ship sinking, standing at the bridge, sword drawn, “damn you bastards! I am going down with my ship!” And sure enough he does. Shark food.

Everyone is a sore loser these days.

There used to be a time when defeat was part of life and a person learned from their mistakes or failures. Now everyone gets a prize just for participating. The jabbed want their prize, and damned if they are going to back down until they get it. “I was loyal to the cause all the way to the end!”

Down they will go in their arrogance, ignorance, and stubbornness. Too bad. As cliché as it is to say, we are indeed in this together. The sheep are not the enemy. They may have had weaknesses that make them responsible for this shite show, but they didn’t create it, and they got nothing for being loyal to their puppet masters, that’s for sure.

These poor folks are our brothers and our sisters. We are ready to welcome them back to the human race with open arms, but that is impossible if they continue to swear their allegiance to the enemy.

They have to put their swords down at some point. It doesn’t seem like they are all that willing to do that. At this point in the game we have just been enjoying the halftime show. I think as the deeper winter sets in, the real game will continue.

What is this odd sheep-psychology, though? —“I’m not giving up no matter what.”

 

+

FBI Wants to Put Me On Trial for Fighting for Black Freedom: Instead Put the Colonizer State on Trial!

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/01/21/fbi-wants-to-put-me-on-trial-for-fighting-for-black-freedom-instead-put-the-colonizer-state-on-trial/?mc_cid=11404b86e1&mc_eid=7ddd08c64d

by Omali Yeshitela

 

+

Jose Maria Sison, Revolutionary Internationalist and Founder of ILPS

https://www.asia-pacificresearch.com/jose-maria-sison-revolutionary-internationalist-founder-ilps/5631481

by Antonio Tujan Jr

We all mourn the passing of Jose Maria Sison, Chairman Emeritus of the International League of Struggle since 2016.  He is the great leader and driving force in building a worldwide anti-imperialist front led by the revolutionary proletarians to build socialism. He is ILPS personified because he conceptualized, mobilized and organized the ILPS in 2000 and was its indefatigable chairman for ten years.

In the midst of US imperialist triumphalism with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1994 and the end of the Cold War, imperialism launched a political-ideological offensive exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of capitalism’s victory as the ‘end of history’ – that class struggle is passe replaced by identity politics, that communism and militant struggle by the masses are passe.

Joma heralded the fightback, releasing the article “Stand for socialism against modern revisionism” clarifying that the path of the onward march for socialism has never been clearer with capitalist restoration as a result of revisionism while the worldwide crisis of monopoly capitalism further deepened.  Amidst the ensuing debate amongst revolutionary proletarian parties and organizations he pushed many of them to take the forward path of anti-imperialist and democratic struggle in their countries, and build international coordination of militant mass struggles.

But launching ILPS was not an easy task as the visionary goal of starting with the formation of ILPS as a formation of mass movements and peoples’ organizations separate from political parties met with another round of two years of debate.  Its founding in 2000 has proven the timely but difficult work of struggling against the US empire.  But it has grown into the largest, most active and militant international movement against imperialism and reaction worldwide.

As a Marxist, Joma has always underscored the revolutionary cause and interest of the proletariat and the masses of the people.  Beyond the theoretical and ideological debates in the international communist movement, Joma never lost sight of the focus of the people’s struggles, the need to arouse, mobilize and organize the masses in their millions to fight and end imperialism.  ILPS has the urgent and critical role to mobilize the mass struggles of the proletarian and semi-proletarian masses, along with other middle forces of the peoples across the world, especially in the semi-feudal and semi-colonial countries of the imperialist periphery.

ILPS is key in building a broad international anti-imperialist united front where mass organizations not only express international solidarity to fight imperialism within different countries but also collaborate internationally in different projects.  ILPS develops activities and programs for education and training to raise the capacity of mass organizations in different countries, and advancing them to develop and build their own proletarian revolutionary parties.

Joma has always been a hands-on revolutionary.  In ILPS he took charge in the whole process of founding ILPS, seeing through the launch and first assembly, became chairman when Ka Crispin Beltran took ill, and continued performing part of its work as Chairman Emeritus in 2016.  He was indefatigable – producing more than 200 statements per year, directed the preparation of meetings, monitored the conduct and run of campaigns and ensured the trouble-shooting when problems cropped up.

Of course, Joma is much more than ILPS. Jose Maria Sison provided comprehensive leadership to the national democratic revolution in the Philippines – the people’s war, the democratic mass movement both rural and urban, the broad united front and the elections, the peace talks, and the revolutionary movement of the overseas Filipinos. Joma also was also heavily involved in the building of the international solidarity movement overseas from inception, besides building proletarian internationalist coordination leading to the formation of the ILPS and the broad international antiimperialist united front. We all miss him – his leadership, wisdom, his masterly grasp and wielding of the power of Marxism.  He is unbelievable and unparalleled in these times.

 

+

Don’t Trust the Government with Your Privacy, Property or Your Freedoms

https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/18/dont-trust-the-government-with-your-privacy-property-or-your-freedoms/

by John Whitehead

How do you trust a government that continuously sidesteps the Constitution and undermines our rights? You can’t.

When you consider all the ways “we the people” are being bullied, beaten, bamboozled, targeted, tracked, repressed, robbed, impoverished, imprisoned and killed by the government, one can only conclude that you shouldn’t trust the government with your privacy, your property, your life, or your freedoms.

Consider for yourself.

 

+

“What’s in store for 2023”

https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/14/audio-kit-knightly-jesse-zurawell-on-whats-in-store-for-2023/

with Jesse Zurawell and Kit Knightly

(audio, 55:15)

 

 

 

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i.

The Media: An Interview With James Corbett

https://www.bitchute.com/video/OIKJsfgxDehk/

by Truthovercomfort

(1:03:50)

 

+

“Hate Inc., Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG1qJeDI9Ok&feature=youtu.be

with Matt Taibbi

(1:06:05)

 

+

Our Birthright: Freedom

https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/our-birthright-freedom?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

by Robert W Malone MD, MS

(6:50)

Another example of how Fifth Generation Warfare methods are often used against us

 

+

The FBI and Personal Liberty

https://www.globalresearch.ca/fbi-personal-liberty/5805173

by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

Among the lesser-known holes in the U.S Constitution cut by the Patriot Act of 2001 was the destruction of the “wall” between federal law enforcement and federal spies. The wall was erected in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which statutorily limited all federal domestic spying to that which was authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The wall was intended to prevent law enforcement from accessing and using data gathered by America’s domestic spying agencies.

Those of us who monitor the government’s destruction of personal liberties have been warning for a generation that government spying is rampant in the U.S., and the feds regularly engage in it as part of law enforcement’s well-known antipathy to the Fourth Amendment. Last week, the FBI admitted as much.

Here is the backstory . . . .

 

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j.

Kyiv Shows Signs of Desperation

Alexei Danilov with map of potential demilitarized zone. [Source: johnhelmer.net]

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/01/13/kyiv-shows-signs-of-desperation/

by John Helmer

A leading Ukrainian government official has admitted that a demilitarized zone to divide the battlefield, protect the Russian east of the country from the U.S. and NATO long-range assault, and partition Ukraine is in negotiation.

“’We are currently being offered the Korean scenario,” Alexei Danilov announced on January 8.

Danilov, a native of Lugansk, is the deputy chairman of the National Security and Defence Council, and second in rank to President Vladimir Zelensky. “[This is] the so-called conditional ’38th parallel,’” he told local reporters. “Here are Ukrainians, but there Ukrainians are not like that. The Russians will now invent anything. I know for sure that one of the options they can offer us is the ’38th parallel.’”

Danilov claimed one of the sources for the proposal is Dmitry Kozak. Officially, he is a deputy head of the presidential staff. In 2020-21 he was the Kremlin’s chief negotiator on the Minsk accords with the Kyiv regime and in the Normandy format with Germany and France; for Kozak’s detailed record of those negotiations, read this.

Danilov now says Kozak “meets with former politicians in Europe and conveys through them the message that the Russians are ready to make concessions in order to fix the current status quo and force Ukraine to a truce.”

Danilov did not say that he, Zelensky and the Ukrainian-U.S. general staff have rejected the idea.

Instead, he claimed the Korean DMZ has proven to be a mistake: “Danilov said that during a recent meeting, Korean representatives noted that establishing the division of the Korean peninsula into two parts along the 38th parallel was a mistake as the concessions made in the 1950s after the end of the war between North Korea and South Korea are currently leading to problems.”

It is unclear what meeting Danilov was referring to, if any. U.S. press reporting has identified the mistake of Vice President Kamala Harris last September in misnaming the “Republic of North Korea.”

Moscow sources suspect Danilov is attempting to relieve the pressure now growing on the Ukrainian generals from the U.S. and the NATO command to consider an armistice before the Russians launch their anticipated general winter offensive.

By exposing and trying to sandbag the Americans, Danilov’s remark is a signal that the real U.S. assessment is that a much bigger loss of military capacity, territory and viable economy will be the outcome of the Russian offensive—unless the Ukrainians buy time with a ceasefire and protracted armistice talks to commence.

 

 

 

 

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k.

Poszar Was Right: Saudis Confirm Non-Dollar Oil Trade Plans In Davos

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/poszar-was-right-saudis-admit-non-dollar-oil-trade-plans-davos

by Tyler Durden

Earlier this month, former NY Fed repo guru Zoltan Pozsar wrote one of his most important reports of 2022, in which he described how Putin could unleash hell on the Western financial system by demanding that instead of dollars, Russian oil exporters are paid in gold, effectively pegging oil to gold and launching Petrogold.

 

+

Saudi Arabia continues to move away from petrodollar"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYwVDwrkpJ8&feature=youtu.be

with Alex Christofrou and Alexander Mercouris

(8:44)

 

+

US Treasury Hits Debt Ceiling, Begins Using "Extraordinary Measures", Yellen Tells Congress

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/treasury-begins-using-extraordinary-measures-debt-ceiling-hit-yellen-tells-congress

by Tyler Durden

One week ago we correct predicted that the Treasury would hit its debt ceiling today, and as expected, in a letter to House speaker Kevin McCarthy, Yellen today wrote that "beginning on January 19, the outstanding debt of the United States was projected to reach the statutory limit" and that the "Treasury began using extraordinary measures" today. Some more details from the letter:

 

+

More Austerity Means More Protests in 2023

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/17/more-austerity-means-more-protests-in-2023/

by Isabel Ortiz and Sara Burke

World leaders have begun meeting in Davos to discuss cooperation to address multiple crises, from Covid-19 and escalating inflation to slowing economic growth, debt distress and climate shocks.

Three months earlier, finance ministers gathered in Washington, D.C. for the same reason. The mood was grim. The need for ambitious actions could not be greater; however, there were no agreements, evidencing the fragility of multilateralism and international cooperation.

Worse, policy makers — advised by the International Monetary Fund — are resorting to old, failed and regressive policies, such as austerity (now called “fiscal restraint” or “fiscal consolidation”), instead of much needed corporate/wealth taxation and debt reduction initiatives, to ensure an equitable recovery for all.

A recent global report alerts of the dangers of a post-pandemic wave of austerity, far more premature and severe than the one that followed the global financial crisis a decade ago.

While governments started cutting public expenditures in 2021, a tsunami of budget cuts is expected in 143 countries in 2023, which will impact more than 6.7 billion people or 85 percent of the world population.

Proven Harm

Analysis of the austerity measures considered or already implemented by governments worldwide shows their significant negative impacts on people, harming women in particular.

 

+

Economic Update: “What's Wrong with Capitalism?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg28P1uOrWU

with Richard Wolff

(29:25)

 

+

“What Is Wrong With Globalization?” | Economics for People with Ha-Joon Chang

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVGJDwEWIrI

with Ha-Joon Chang

(34:24)

Across the world we’re seeing governments and popular movements come to power that are opposed to globalization. Why? In this third lecture in INET’s “Economics For People” series, Ha-Joon Chang explains the backlash to globalization.

 

+

Conceptualizing the Individual | Economics for People with Ha-Joon Chang

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYnFbzcWcGQ

with Ha-Joon Chang

(33:35)

 

+

Solving the Debt Crisis the American Way

https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/18/ellen-brown-solving-the-debt-crisis-the-american-way/

by Ellen Brown

Our forefathers turned their debts into currency. That Constitutional approach could work today.

 

+

Inflation, Europe's energy crisis, and the Fed with Richard Wolff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I43uC1mfHKc&feature=youtu.be

with Chris Hedges and Richard Wolff

(34:00)

 

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Mass Protests Across France Condemn Macron Attack on Pension System

https://www.commondreams.org/news/protests-france-macron-pensions

by Jake Johnson

"If there is no positive response from the government, today is a first step, and there will be a second step," said one union leader.

 

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France Grinds To Halt Over Nationwide Pension Strikes

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/france-grinds-halt-over-nationwide-pension-strikes

by Tyler Durden                                                                                                                           

French refinery workers, teachers, train drivers, and other critical industry employees walked off their jobs in a nationwide day of strikes against President Emmanuel Macron's plan to increase the retirement age by two years to 64. AP News reported the strikes are "halting high-speed trains, disrupting electricity supplies," and bringing major transportation networks to a screeching halt. 

Protests are underway in major French metro areas, including Paris, Marseille, Toulouse, Nantes, and Nice. Transportation networks have ground to a halt. Many workers who hit the street in protest of Macron's planned increase to the minimum retirement are in sectors including railways, schools, hospitals, and air-traffic controllers. 

France's eight largest labor unions coordinated today's massive labor action. The CGT union and the head of the Communist party are expected to have at least a million workers protest today. 

 

 

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l.

Oxford Fights Climate Lockdowns

https://www.corbettreport.com/nwnw507/

with James Corbett

(26:15)

 

+

Tony Blair calls for WEF and WTO to introduce “digital infrastructure” that monitors vaccination status

https://reclaimthenet.org/tony-blair-wef-wto-digital-infrastructure-vaccination-status/

by Tom Parker

"You need the data. You need to know who's been vaccinated and who hasn't been."

 

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Fear Is Pfizer's Financial Fertilizer

https://www.globalresearch.ca/fear-pfizer-financial-fertilizer/5805080

by Dr. Joseph Mercola

 

+

Lessons from China and Africa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHIXuW4gxMY&feature=youtu.be

with Dr. John Campbell

(16:09)

 

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Interesting long form interview with Neil Oliver

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVh1oPV5hjc

with Dr. John Campbell and Neil Oliver

(1:18:16)

 

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Increased risk of stroke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YswaUoFEs8E

with Dr. John Campbell

(15:31)

 

+

Excess deaths in young adults, 2022 data

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD0na_NZaLM

with Dr. John Campbell

(14:15)

 

+

In memory of the David Crosby who once was, before "the virus" ate his brain

https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/in-memory-of-the-david-crosby-who?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

by Mark Crispin Miller

The aged rockers who have leapt aboard the "vaccine" cattle cars, and jeered those who hung back, were often very different people back before their hearts and minds were steeped in deadly propaganda

 

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In memory of those who "died suddenly" in the United States and worldwide, January 9-January 16, 2023

https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/in-memory-of-those-who-died-suddenly-80f?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

by Mark Crispîn Miller

Musicians in the US (2), Canada (2), Colombia, UK, Ireland, Germany, Thailand & Australia; politicians in the US, Canada, Bahamas, UK, France (2) & Malaysia; 10 fatal vaxxidents; & more

 

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In memory of those who “died suddenly” in Kazakhstan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, January 9-January 16, 2023

https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/in-memory-of-those-who-died-suddenly-17b?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Indian cricketer Sidharth Sharma (& a boy, 10, died in class); Thai singer Bai Khwan Ratchaya; Singaporean actor Timothy Nga; Filipino journalist Elias Baquero; Australian singer Renee Geyer; & more

 

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m.

CovertAction Bulletin: Protesters Massacred in Peru After Far-Right Legislative Coup

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/01/11/covertaction-bulletin-protesters-massacred-in-peru-after-far-right-legislative-coup/?mc_cid=fb3d2d4a3e&mc_eid=7ddd08c64d

by Rachel Hu and Chris Garaffa

(audio, 50:22)

Peru has been in a period of crisis since December 7, when the Peruvian far right used their position in the country’s Parliament to illegally dismiss the government of President Pedro Castillo. Since then, tens of thousands of people from indigenous and peasant communities have taken to the streets to reject the new government of Dina Boluarte and demand the democratically elected Castillo be reinstated.

On Monday, January 9, at least 17 protesters were killed by Peruvian security forces while they brutally repressed an anti-government protest in Juliaca, and at least 68 others were severely injured. The massacres have continued into Tuesday, January 10th, now reaching a total of 46 dead.

To discuss the growing violence and resistance in the streets we are joined by Tatiana Bejar of Peru Libre.

 

+

Brazil divided. “Lula faces tough road ahead as president”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5_N6vJ6JYI

with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris

(21:04)

 

+

Will Lula Go the Way of Peru’s Ousted Left Wing President Pedro Castillo?

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/01/19/will-lula-go-the-way-of-perus-ousted-left-wing-president-pedro-castillo/?mc_cid=8e05be5c46&mc_eid=7ddd08c64d

by Julian Cola

Danger lurks with election of large number of pro-Bolsonaro governors and radicalization of Bolsonaro’s supporters who refuse to accept election results.

 

 

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n.

Night Raids: Victims of CIA-Backed Afghan Death Squads Known as “Zero Units” Demand Accountability

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8B8dDXfP-8

with Amy Goodman

(19:02)

We speak with journalist Lynzy Billing, whose investigation for ProPublica details how CIA-backed death squads, known as Zero Units, have yet to be held accountable for killing hundreds of civilians during the U.S. War in Afghanistan. The Afghan units, which were routinely accompanied by U.S. soldiers, became feared throughout rural Afghanistan for their brutal night raids, often descending upon villagers from helicopters and carrying out summary executions before disappearing. Families of victims continue to demand answers, but since the operations were directed by the CIA rather than the military, there is almost no oversight or disclosure when things go wrong. “Many people I spoke to feel that these operations … were counterproductive and actually had turned their families against the U.S.-backed government in Kabul and against the U.S.,” says Billing.

 

+

Tracking CIA-Backed ‘Zero Units’ in Afghanistan

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/12/tracking-cia-backed-zero-units-in-afghanistan/

by ProPublica 

In 2019, reporter Lynzy Billing returned to Afghanistan to research the murders of her mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier. Instead, in the country’s remote reaches, she stumbled upon the C.I.A.-backed Zero Units, who conducted night raids — quick, brutal operations designed to have resounding psychological impacts while ostensibly removing high-priority enemy targets.

So, Billing attempted to catalog the scale of civilian deaths left behind by just one of four Zero Units, known as the 02, over a four year period. The resulting report represents an effort no one else has done or will ever be able to do again. Here is what she found:

 

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o.

Netanyahu’s Claim of Jewish Exclusivity in Palestine Must be Challenged

https://www.globalresearch.ca/netanyahu-claim-jewish-exclusivity-palestine-must-be-challenged/5805198

by Iqbal Jassat

The defiant declaration by Benjamin Netanyahu that he is going to press ahead and complete Israel’s colonial project in Palestine must be challenged by the world. Regardless of international law and conventions, his government is going to continue to defy them.

Knowing full well that Israel has America’s backing, and that western capitals are far too scared to call him out, Netanyahu made the following brazen statement:

“These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”

This leaves no room for ambiguity. He has set out the outcome of his pact agreed with the small far-right parties in what has been described as the “most extreme” right-wing regime in Israeli history. The implications of this for the Palestinians are dire; Netanyahu and his ghastly regime intend to ethnically cleanse them.

His categoric statement implies that Palestinians either do not exist or, if they do, they have no right to continue living in Palestine, to which “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas”. Netanyahu, of course, uses the term “the Land of Israel”, but in case some apologists for apartheid Israel try to play down the enormity of Netanyahu’s declaration by suggesting that he is referring to the 1949 Armistice (“Green”) Line, do not be misled.

 

+

The “Brewing” Israeli Civil War – Does The US Have A Hand In Creating It?

https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/the-brewing-israeli-civil-war-does-the-us-have-a-hand-in-creating-it/

by Robert Inlakesh

As Israel’s far-right fascist government ushers in a new era of hardship for the Palestinian people, it’s also causing massive divisions in both Israel’s Jewish society and the regime’s political & military leaderships. Such is the state of Israeli politics that former minister of war, Benny Gantz, has warned of civil war.

An ongoing feud between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and both the Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid and former war minister, Benny Gantz, is leading to concerns amongst Israelis that a civil-war of words, could escalate into a real civil war between Israeli citizens in the streets.

From the outset, Israeli PM Netanyahu has faced significant pushback on two primary aspects of his extremist government; first, his intention to overhaul the Israeli high court and introduce sweeping legislative reforms; second, the issue of who is in control of Israeli “security”. In response to the Israeli PM’s unapologetic rhetoric surrounding goals to push through legal changes to the system and unsubstantiated claims of seeking to gather a broad consensus for them, Benny Gantz said to Netanyahu that

 

“If you continue on the path you are on, the responsibility for starting the civil war brewing in Israeli society will be on you.”

 

Israel’s former military chief, Aviv Kochavi, stated that the Israeli coalition will not be able to achieve getting the Israeli military to listen to extremist Religious Zionism party politicians. The two leading figures of Religious Zionism; Bezalel Smotrich, the new finance minister, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, have been granted special oversight into West Bank policy. Ben-Gvir specifically has been granted partial control over the Israeli border police. The Israeli Knesset voted on a special bill which gave him this authority and Smotrich was given authority to appoint generals as the “hybrid civil-military Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT)”, specifically designed to deal with West Bank policy.

It is clear that a segment of the Israeli political and military elite are genuinely unhappy with the strategy of the extremists in Netanyahu’s government, which threatens provoking a third Palestinian Intifada (uprising) in the West Bank. Former Israeli PM, Yair Lapid, has even threatened that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich could end up causing harm to the seemingly unbreakable US-Israeli relationship, even on the security level he stressed. Although the US Biden administration maintains a strong bond with Benjamin Netanyahu, it is clear that Lapid was their favorite in the lead up to Israel’s November election.

Just under half of Israel’s population are allegedly worried that what they call their “democracy” is in grave danger, due to the Netanyahu government’s new hardline coalition and its policies. Coupled with this reported worry has been a number of protests, one which numbered in the tens of thousands just last week. In the demonstrations, it is notable that the protesters were largely from the center right and center, politically speaking, in addition to fringe groups from the Zionist left who participated, albeit in smaller numbers. In response to a small number of these protesters having raised Palestinian flags, they were condemned by the Israeli far-right and now the Israeli national security minister has issued an order completely banning the Palestinian flag as an alleged “terrorist symbol”. Itamar Ben-Gvir also warned that anti-government protesters would be combated by water cannons, signaling that heavy handed tactics will begin to be used for their peaceful street protests.

Both sides of the aisle in Israeli politics argue that they are fighting for Israeli democracy, which, according to both narratives, is being threatened by the other side that seeks to undertake a coup. The pro-government camp states that the people have spoken and that the opposition wants to use protests to overthrow the democratic vote. On the opposition side they are arguing that the dramatic legal reforms threaten to upend Israeli democracy and that they must go to the streets to stop the government from performing a coup to change the nature of Israeli liberal democracy. It is hard to miss the overlaps with the current US political dynamic.

The opposition camp, however, seem to have the backing of the United States government in its approach. It was clear when former PM Yair Lapid was in office that he was growing closer with the Biden administration, even speaking before the UN General Assembly and mentioning the two-state solution as a possibility for the first time in around a decade. Although there is no evidence on the record, regarding any US role in backing the Yair Lapid-Benny Gantz alliance, it is clear that the White House is uncomfortable with the trajectory of the new Israeli government and that the Gantz-Lapid opposition aligns perfectly with the traditional US policy positions on Palestine-Israel. Washington never truly stands up to Tel Aviv when it violates US policy — such is the case when illegal settlements are expanded or warcrimes are committed — but it seeks the veneer of respectability with which a Gantz or Lapid covers their crimes.

 

+

Taking apartheid to new extremes

Israeli settlers, chanting against Palestinians, march through Damascus gate into the Muslim quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem during the an annual Flag March, 29 May 2022. (Oren Ziv ActiveStills)

https://electronicintifada.net/content/taking-apartheid-new-extremes/36986

by Maureen Clare Murphy

There is much liberal hand-wringing over the new Israeli government’s shock-and-awe assault on the state’s judiciary and other laws and mechanisms that safeguard democracy in the country, even if that democracy was always for Jews only.

But for those who already know that Israel’s democracy is a violent lie, and that it’s been a settler colony enterprise maintained through apartheid and military rule from the beginning, there is still plenty to be concerned about. Most obviously for Palestinians, whose removal from their homeland so they may be replaced with foreign Jewish settlers has always been the top priority for the state.

The previous government was dissolved, after all, in order to prevent the expiration of a temporary measure in place since 1967 applying Israeli civil law to Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

By calling for new elections, those emergency regulations were automatically extended, preserving the system of apartheid. And in the fifth election in the space of three years, in November Israelis elected their most openly fascist and right-wing government yet.

The current Israeli government’s coalition agreements amount to a declaration of intent to commit crimes under international law, according to Adalah, a Palestinian human rights group.

The guiding principles of the new government begin with the assertion that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right over all areas of the land of Israel.”

Adalah, which advocates for the rights of Palestinians in Israel, says that the government’s intent is “to deepen Jewish supremacy and racial segregation as the underlying principles of the Israeli regime.”

The group is calling for urgent intervention by the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice and the reconstitution of the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid.

In a new position paper, Adalah lays out how the Israeli government’s guiding principles and coalition agreements explicitly deny the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

The initiatives and policies of the government will result in more brutality against Palestinians with even less judicial oversight and no pretense of accountability.

 

+

New Democrats in Congress are enemies of Palestine cause

John Fetterman, a new US senator, has admitted that he is not progressive on the question of Palestine. (Archie Carpenter UPI)

https://electronicintifada.net/content/new-democrats-congress-are-enemies-palestine-cause/36996

by Michael Veronda Hazou

 

+

World Cup Racism, The Israel Lobby, and Jordan Peterson, with Smile 2 Jannah and David Miller

https://www.mintpressnews.com/world-cup-racism-israel-lobby-jordan-peterson-smile-2-jannah-david-miller/283313/

with Lowkey

(1:01:25)

The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.

In this week’s episode of “The Watchdog,” Lowkey begins discussing how the mainstream media silences academics, musicians to award-winning filmmakers, such as Ken Loach, for their outspoken stance on Palestinian rights.

Lowkey is joined by Professor David Miller, formerly of Bristol University and Zeeshan Ali, who runs the successful YouTube channel, Smile2Jannah. David, who was subjected to a coordinated three-year campaign by the Zionist lobby, is a leading British scholarly critic of Israel.

 

+

Revealed: The Former Israeli Spies Working in Top Jobs at Google, Facebook and Microsoft

https://www.mintpressnews.com/revealed-former-israeli-spies-working-top-jobs-google-facebook-amazon/282413/

by Alan Macleod

A MintPress study has found that hundreds of former agents of the notorious Israeli spying organization, Unit 8200, have attained positions of influence in many of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon.

The Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) Unit 8200 is infamous for surveilling the indigenous Palestinian population, amassing kompromat on individuals for the purposes of blackmail and extortion. Spying on the world’s rich and famous, Unit 8200 hit the headlines last year, after the Pegasus scandal broke. Former Unit 8200 officers designed and implemented software that spied on tens of thousands of politicians and likely aided in the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

 

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EU distorts history of how it helped weaponize anti-Semitism

Prominent EU official Katharina von Schnurbein has made misleading comments about her work on anti-Semitism. (European Commission)

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/david-cronin/eu-distorts-history-how-it-helped-weaponize-anti-semitism

by David Cronin

Is it possible to disown your work yet still promote it at every available opportunity?

A European Union body is attempting such a balancing act.

The main weapon used by Israel against the Palestine solidarity movement in recent years has been a highly politicized definition of anti-Semitism.

It was originally drawn up as part of an EU-sponsored exercise before eventually being approved by a wider grouping of governments called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

Yet the history of the IHRA definition has actually been rewritten in a most dishonest fashion.

A document obtained via a freedom of information request shows that the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency prepared answers in 2018 to what it called “critical questions.”

One of those questions notes that the Fundamental Rights Agency now views the endorsement of the IHRA as positive. So why, the question continued, had the same agency “infamously deleted that definition from its website”?

The prepared reply – see below – reads that the IHRA definition was “adopted in May 2016 and it was never deleted” from the agency’s website.

The Fundamental Rights Agency is using the truth sparingly.

A nearly identical version of the same definition was indeed erased from the agency’s website a few years earlier.

The IHRA definition did not appear out of nowhere in May 2016. The definition was originally contained in a 2005 paper from the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, which is today called the Fundamental Rights Agency.

The 2005 paper resulted from discussions between the EU, the American Jewish Committee and some other pro-Israel lobby groups. Rather than focusing on bigotry against Jews based on their religion or ethnicity, it contended that denouncing Israel’s foundation as a “racist endeavor” was an example of anti-Semitism.

Misleading

Despite trying to distance itself from the IHRA definition, the Fundamental Rights Agency’s own work is guided by that definition.

The agency has connived in efforts to conflate anti-Jewish bigotry with denunciations of Israeli apartheid.

That can be seen from a report it has published on so-called anti-Semitic incidents from 2011 to 2021.

The section for Belgium claims that “ideological anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic incidents on the internet have accounted for the largest proportions of reported incidents in most years.” Citing a Belgian website, the report claims, too, that “ideological anti-Semitism often translates into the expression of sentiments against Israel.”

Katharina von Schnurbein, the EU’s coordinator against anti-Semitism, is an especially zealous promoter of the IHRA definition.

During November, she was involved in a public dispute about the definition with Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special reporter for the occupied West Bank and Gaza and a staunch defender of the right to criticize Israel.

When Albanese asked on Twitter if the EU had scrutinized the potential impact that the definition could have on human rights, von Schnurbein replied “yes, we assessed.”

 

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How Carrefour profits from Israel's war crimes

Labour unions and human rights groups are urging France-based global retailer Carrefour to end its complicity in Israeli war crimes. (Sipa via AP Images)

https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-carrefour-profits-israels-war-crimes/36961

by Ali Abunimah

 

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New Report Charges Major Corporations as Complicit in Israel's Water Apartheid

https://www.mintpressnews.com/new-report-major-corporations-complicit-israel-water-apartheid/283271/

by Jessica Buxbaum

In December, the Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Haq, released a report accusing major corporations of maintaining Israel’s water apartheid on Palestinians living in the occupied territories.

According to Al-Haq, businesses are instrumental in helping Israel restrict water access to Palestinians and destroy Palestinian water infrastructure. Additionally, foreign companies profit from Israel’s system of water discrimination.

Al-Haq’s paper named both Israeli and international companies as:

Complicit in the violation of the Palestinian right to self-determination and permanent sovereignty over natural resources, as well as the war crime of pillage and inhumane acts of expropriation of natural resources amounting to the crime of apartheid.”

The report detailed the actions of Israeli water companies Mekorot and Hagihon but also included outside firms TAHAL Group International B.V., Hyundai, Caterpillar Inc., JC Bamford Excavators Ltd. (JCB), and Volvo Car Group.

 

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Geopolitical Games in the Asia-Pacific Will Not be Allowed, Warns China

https://www.asia-pacificresearch.com/geopolitical-games-asia-pacific-will-not-allowed-warns-china/5631468

by Countercurrents.org

China will not let the Asia-Pacific region turn into a hotspot for geopolitical conflict, and will defend its own sovereignty and integrity, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson declared on Monday.

Media reports said:

Speaking at a press briefing, Wang Wenbin responded to the news of a 10-member German delegation arriving on the self-governing island of Taiwan. He stressed that “the Taiwan question is at the very core of China’s interests” and urged Berlin to respect the One China Principle, acknowledging that Taiwan is an inalienable part of the nation.

China considers any treatment of the island as a sovereign nation, including formal visits by foreign officials, as a direct affront to its sovereignty.

Wang said the “root cause” of the historic tensions between Taiwan and China were “the law of the jungle, hegemonism, colonialism and militarism” which had inflicted “deep suffering” on China for many years.

“The Chinese people have been committed to fighting imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism and upholding our sovereignty, territorial integrity and national dignity. We will never allow any force to turn the Asia-Pacific into an arena of geopolitical games once again to maintain their dominance,” the diplomat warned.

Taiwan has never formally declared independence from Beijing, but has been self-governed since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, when nationalists fighting under the Kuomintang were defeated by communist forces and fled to the island.

While relations between Beijing and Taipei have always been strained, tensions boiled over following the visit of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the island in August.

China has repeatedly warned that it will use whatever means necessary to establish full control over the island, but has insisted it will search for a diplomatic solution.

Beijing Deploys Troops Near Taiwan

Another media report said:

China has announced a military exercise near Taiwan on the eve of visits by German and Lithuanian lawmakers to the self-governed island. The drill has been described as countering “separatist forces.”

The training exercise was announced on Sunday by Colonel Shi Yi, the spokesman for the Eastern Theater Command of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). He said it would involve sea and airspace maneuvers around Taiwan, focusing on land strikes and amphibious assault action.

The exercise was “designed to test the joint combat capabilities of the troops and resolutely counteract the provocative actions of external forces and ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists,” a statement said.

 

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Taiwan Defense Ministry Reveals Rare Cooperation with NATO

https://www.asia-pacificresearch.com/taiwan-defense-ministry-reveals-rare-cooperation-nato/5631477

by Dave DeCamp

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry revealed on Wednesday that it has sent some of its military officers to a NATO war college in Italy, acknowledging cooperation with the Western military alliance that is sure to anger China.

One Taiwanese air force officer, Lt. Col. Wu Bong-yeng, told reporters that he went to the NATO Defense College in Rome in 2021 for a six-month course and insisted the cooperation was purely academic.

“This was an academic exchange, not a military exchange,” he said. “Of course, they were very curious about Taiwan,” Wu said he studied the same curriculum as officers from NATO countries did, and the Taiwanese Defense Ministry said other officers had been sent to the college.

Taiwan is known to cooperate with the US military, but interactions with other foreign militaries are much more rare. The revelation comes after NATO said China poses “systemic challenges” to the alliance in its new Strategic Concept document that was issued in 2022.

NATO first made clear it had its eye on China in 2020 and said at the time the alliance would work to build stronger partnerships in the Indo-Pacific. Since then, some NATO countries have joined the US in sending warships into sensitive waters near China, including France, Germany, and Britain.

The US and its allies have been taking steps to increase ties with Taiwan in recent years, which Beijing views as an affront to the one-China policy. These policies have provoked an increase in Chinese military activity around the island. This week, a group of German lawmakers visited Taiwan, and a US trade delegation is due to arrive on the island on Saturday.

 

 

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Is New Zealand a Beta Test for Western Governments Micromanaging the Populace?

https://www.globalresearch.ca/new-zealand-beta-test-western-governments-micromanaging-populace/5805186

by Zero Hedge

In the wake of the covid pandemic lockdowns and mandates, many western nations and states in the US witnessed a new eye opening level of government intrusion into the daily lives of citizens.  Some, however, dealt with worse scenarios than others.

New Zealand in particular has popped up time and time again over the past couple of years with some of the most draconian restrictions on the public, and sadly the trend has not stopped just because the pandemic lockdowns stopped.  The island nation seems to be intent on setting the standard for authoritarian policies and government micromanagement, and a series of recent laws are driving home the reality that they do not intend to relent.

Flashback: In 2018, New Zealand banned all offshore oil drilling exploration in the name of instituting a “carbon neutral future”, meaning tight energy restrictions are forthcoming in NZ as the decade progresses.

In 2019, NZ banned all semi-automatic weapons after the Christchurch mosque shootings, punishing millions of law abiding citizens for the crimes of one man.  Video evidence of the Christchurch shootings is suspiciously illegal in NZ, and anyone caught viewing or downloading the event can be prosecuted.  The gun bans were enforced just in time for the pandemic lockdowns.

In 2020, the government introduced internet censorship legislation which would give them the power to selectively filter “dangerous content.”  Most of the provisions were ultimately scrapped after a public backlash, but future censorship remains a priority for the government.

In 2021, New Zealand Prime Minister and associate of the World Economic Forum, Jacinda Ardern, openly admitted to constructing a two tier society in which the vaccinated enjoy normal access to the economy, travel and social interaction while the unvaccinated would be deliberately choked with restrictions until they “chose” to comply and accept the mRNA jab.

 

 

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From "Goldilocks" To "Dreadlocks": 2023 Has Its Own Surprises For Us

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/goldilocks-dreadlocks-2023-has-its-own-surprises-us

by Michael Every

Surprise! New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinta Ardern just quit. She “no longer has enough left in the tank to do the job,” apparently, and will be gone after 7 February. There was no immediate reaction in the NZD, and the Kiwis are hardly the mighty All Blacks on the global stage, but it does show that 2023 can contain real surprises.

 

 

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Andrew Cuomo BLACKMAILING Biden Over Classified Documents Scandal!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm79yEO7-Hk&feature=youtu.be

with Jimmy Dore

(8:09)

 

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Hunter Biden Lived In Classified Doc House While Raking In Millions Through Chinese Intelligence Ties

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hunter-biden-lived-classified-doc-house-while-raking-millions-through-chinese

by Tyler Durden

National security concerns over Joe Biden's classified document scandal just got worse, as two reports have emerged which place Hunter Biden at the Bidens' Wilmington, Delaware residence while he was raking in millions of dollars from CCP-linked business dealings.

 

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Report on the Biden Laptop (644 pages)

https://bidenlaptopreport.marcopolousa.org/report_viewer/index.html#p=1

by Marco Polo

Marco Polo is a nonprofit research group exposing corruption and blackmail to drive an American renaissance. Given the explicit nature of the content on the Biden Laptop, this Report is for an adult readership. Errors are the fault of the authors alone and, if identified, will be amended immediately. Please send all inquiries and/or corrections to info@marcopolousa.org ISBN: 978-1-7371866-4-9

© 2022 by ICU, LLC EIN: 61-1999941

 

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The Keynes vs von Hayek Debate: A False Dualism with Malthusian Characteristics

https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/keynes-vs-von-hayek-debate-false-dualism-with-malthusian-characteristics/

by Matthew Ehret

In my recent article ‘Steve Bannon and China’s Deep State’, readers were introduced to several operatives who are serving as controlled opposition with the intention of corralling the conservative groups of the USA and Europe into a weaponized anti-Chinese mob. This study took us into the corridors of the power within forces of the black nobility representing ancient power structures that gave rise to the Crusades, the synthetic cult known as the Jesuits and neo feudalist aspirations for global governance.

Just as the anti-religious Bolshevik left vs Catholic fascists of the Coudenhove-Kalergi Pan Europa right was orchestrated a century ago by oligarchical grand strategists yearning to corral humankind into a neo-feudal order, the same formula was used during the 20th century to create a false dualism in the economic field which has served to undermine any authentic anti imperial resistance to transhumanism – especially since World War II.

I am here referring to the pervasive influence of a polarization launched in 1932 as a “debate” between two London-based Malthusian economists.

One extreme that deeply sculpted the minds of “leftists” of the Trans Atlantic world was top-down economist named John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) while the other extreme which went on to mold the thinking of the “conservative right” during the Cold War was found in the “bottom up” advocate of personal liberty, Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992).

. . .

The constants among both apparent opponents (who remained friends throughout their lives) were that 1) neither believed that INTENTION or MIND should govern economic policy (Keynes believed in arbitrary “make work” which could not differentiate between the qualitative difference of a $100 paycheck to a digger of random holes vs $100 paycheck to an engineer building a dam), and 2) both believed equally in the universal validity of Malthus’ population theories, and of Bernard Mandeville’s satanic belief that personal vice creates public virtue. Both theories have underpinned British/Hapsburg imperial grand strategy for over two centuries.

. . .

It is also important to hold in mind that the 1932 Keynes vs Hayek debate emerged at a time that the world government agenda driven by the Bank of England and League of Nations were on the ascendency. This operation, in which both Keynes and von Hayek were thoroughly enmeshed, demanded fascist regimes control the world under a “scientifically managed” bankers’ dictatorship.

One month after the London Times October 17, 1932 publication began to print arguments from proponents of both schools of thought on how to best end the depression, Franklin Roosevelt was elected to the U.S. presidency.

As I outlined in How to Crush a Bankers’ Dictatorship, with Roosevelt’s presidential victory, a specific form of political economy was restored in the United States that had nothing to do with either school of Keynes or Hayek and everything to do with something uniquely embedded in the U.S. Constitutional traditions that petrified the hereditary empires of Europe’s old nobility.

In the years leading up to his victory, FDR had worked closely with a grouping of bipartisan American congressmen and senators to revive a form of political economy which involved the paradoxical coexistence of increased government involvement together with massive increase in entrepreneurism, and private sector growth[1]. The fact that FDR is attacked by communists for being a capitalist shill while being simultaneously attacked by capitalists for being a communist shill to this very day is a sign of this ongoing confusion and a testament to the effectiveness of British intelligence propaganda.

The systemic inability for modern Americans to resolve the ‘FDR paradox’ today is due entirely to a sleight of hand pulled by the very same imperial power that has never forgiven the USA for declaring its independence in 1776.

Contradicting the popular mythology that “FDR was a Keynesian”, US Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins recorded a 1934 interaction between the two men when Roosevelt told her[2]:

“I saw your friend Keynes. He left a whole rigmarole of figures. He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.” In response Keynes, who was then trying to co-opt the intellectual narrative of the New Deal stated he had “supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking.”

Keynes the Fabian Eugenicist . . . .

 

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Is the United States on the Verge of Civil War II?

https://www.commondreams.org/author/robert-c-koehler

by Robert C. Koehler

“Folks keep talking about another civil war. One side has about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.”

The words — actually a 2019 Facebook post — are those of then-Iowa Republican congressman Steve King, loosing a puerile smirk as he stirred the pot of violence on the American political right. The politics of stupid has intensified since then, as white supremacy and fear of the Great Replacement Theory take over the GOP.

Are we truly on the brink of a civil war? What, indeed, is a civil war? When does violence move from being random and individual — psychological — to strategic and political, which is to say, militarized? Can this happen without a quasi-governmental entity emerging, officially declaring “war” on the political establishment whose decisions it hates? Or is having 8 trillion bullets enough?

Resorting to violence — indeed, celebrating and honoring its use for just and moral purposes — requires a surrender to the temptation of force. No matter how disempowered you are, intellectually and spiritually, force is always available as a means of making your presence felt, if not actually getting your way. Force is a lost soul’s last resort. It often turns into the first resort.

Say you’re a Republican and you lose an election. What a nuisance! Consider the troubles faced by MAGA-T-shirt-wearing, would-be state rep Solomon Peńa, who ran for a New Mexico House seat in November, Yeah, he lost, garnering only 26 percent of the vote, but refused to concede and challenged the legitimacy of the election. That accomplished nothing, so . . . what choice did he have? He allegedly hired some guys who drove past at least four houses of local politicians — two state legislators and two county commissioners — and fired bullets into walls and doors. He was arrested a few days ago and charged in the shootings.

There was a time when this would have been seen, in most respectable circles, as insanity. Now I fear it’s just one more example of Republican fun and games, as the party members come to grips with their (is it possible?) permanent minority status. Voter suppression is no longer adequate to ensure victories. Donald Trump has given losing GOP candidates their mantra du jour: The election was rigged.

And thus, as Stephen Marche wrote recently in The Guardian: “The United States is a textbook example of a country headed towards civil war. The trends increasingly point one way, and while nobody knows the future, little — if anything — is being done, by anyone, to try to prevent the collapse of the republic. Belief in democracy is ebbing. The legitimacy of institutions is declining. America increasingly is entering a state where its citizens don’t want to belong to the same country. These are conditions ripe for political violence.”

The iconic specter of mainstream GOP violence was, of course, the Jan. 6 insurgency, as thousands of angry white people, egged on by their dear leader, broke into the capital as Congress was in the process of transitioning to the Biden presidency, shouting things like “Hang Mike Pence!”

Since then, Republican outrage has morphed into such actions as the break-in last October at Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home. “Where’s Nancy?” the intruder shouted — alas, she wasn’t there — eventually attacking her 82-year-old husband, Paul, with a hammer, fracturing his skull.

“But on the right, support for violence is no longer a fringe position,” Rachel Kleinfeld points out at Politico. “. . . This is not a marginal movement: It is people who see violence as a means to defend their values, an extension of their political activity.”

 

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The Supreme Court Is About to Eviscerate the Right to Strike

https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/16/the-supreme-court-is-about-to-eviscerate-the-right-to-strike/

by Marjorie Cohn

The court will likely rule in “Glacier Northwest” that the union’s strike activity isn’t protected by federal labor law.

 

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Russell Banks, John Brown and the American Soul

https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/16/russell-banks-john-brown-and-the-american-soul/

by Chris Hedges

There are few contemporary novelists who have explored the dark undercurrents of American society with more insight and pathos than Russell Banks, who died earlier this month.

 

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The War at Home

https://www.blackagendareport.com/paper-war-home-dc-scar-1991

by Black Agenda Review

Revisiting a 1991 statement against war from the D.C. Student Coalition against Apartheid and Racism.

The grim anniversary of yet another U.S. apocalypse has passed by with little notice and less mourning. January 16th, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, is the day that unleashed hell on Iraq. Operation Desert Storm began on that day in 1991. Sold as a just war for freedom, for democracy, and for the liberation of Kuwait, it was soon revealed to be a cynical and bloody offensive for oil and empire abroad, and against Black, Brown, and working-class people at home.

A 1991 position paper from the D.C. Student Coalition against Apartheid and Racism (DC SCAR) makes that clear. DC SCAR was made up of student organizers and organizations from Howard University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, John Hopkins University, and the University of Maryland at College Park, who came together in the early 1980s to mobilize against Apartheid in Southern Africa. From the mid- to -late 1980s, their activism also focused on questions of racism, women’s and gay and lesbian rights, AIDS, the question of Palestine, and the CIA and US policies in Central America. With the announcement of war, of a US offensive against Iraq in 1991, DC SCAR used the solidarity network they had built up over the past decade to mobilize part of national and international protests against Desert Storm. Their position paper, titled “The War is at Home,” is a succinct assessment of the political economy of militarism. Their pointed critique, “The government claims it must cut back on social programs, yet somewhere it will find the estimated $162 billion necessary to fuel this war…” is just as applicable for today, with the US spending more than $110 billion to fuel the proxy war in Ukraine.

The paper is also clear in denouncing the US war machine’s racist and class-based forms. It is a lucid and still-relevant call for student protest for peace abroad, and for justice at home. We reproduce DC SCAR’s “The War at Home” below.

 

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The Liberal Contempt for Martin Luther King’s Final Year

https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/15/the-liberal-contempt-for-martin-luther-kings-final-year/

by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

The MLK tributes are sure to pour on the anniversary of the civil rights hero's death, but don't expect them to acknowledge his anti-militarist ideals.

 

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University of Illinois Chicago Faculty Strike After Contract Negotiations Fail

https://www.commondreams.org/news/uic-strike

by Brett Wilkins

Hundreds of University of Illinois Chicago faculty members went on strike Tuesday after nine months of deadlocked contract negotiations over pay and student mental health resources.

The approximately 900 members of the UIC United Faculty union have been working without contracts since August. In November, 97% of the 77% of faculty who voted opted to strike. The union announced late Monday that its members would walk off the job the following day after a marathon 12-hour negotiation session failed to produce a deal.

“We started bargaining this contract back in April, and we've made some progress since then. But we have not won yet," UIC United Faculty president Aaron Krall toldBlock Club Chicago.

 

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What nurses and teachers won by withholding their 'feminized labor'

https://therealnews.com/what-nurses-and-teachers-won-by-withholding-their-feminized-labor

by Amie Stager

Nurses at Children's Minnesota and United Hospital in St. Paul were among some 15,000 nurses at 16 hospitals in the Twin Cities and Twin Ports region who walked off the job Monday, Sept. 12, 2022. John Autey/MediaNews Group/St. Paul Pioneer Press via Getty Images

 

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BAR Book Forum: Stacy J. Lettman’s Book, “The Slave Sublime”

https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-stacy-j-lettmans-book-slave-sublime

by Robertp Sirvant

 

 

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u.

Social Media Is Filled With Spooks!

https://www.mintpressnews.com/social-media-is-filled-with-spooks-with-mike-papantonio/283323/

with Lee Camp and Mike Papantonio

(46:45)

 

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Students Need Emotional and Community Support, Not Cops in Schools

https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/18/students-need-emotional-and-community-support-not-cops-in-schools/

by Eleanor Bader

Some schools that removed police on campus following the 2020 uprisings are now asking for them to be reinstated.

 

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The Ukrainian Solidarity Network: The Highest Stage of White Western Social Imperialism

https://www.blackagendareport.com/ukrainian-solidarity-network-highest-stage-white-western-social-imperialism

by Ajamu Baraka

The Ukraine conflict was caused by the U.S. backed right wing coup in 2014 and the duplicity of Europeans who claimed to be working for peace. Anyone who supports these actions but claims leftist credentials must be challenged. 

“It is urgent to end this war as soon as possible. This can only be achieved through the success of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion. Ukraine is fighting a legitimate war of self-defense, indeed a war for its survival as a nation. Calling for “peace” in the abstract is meaningless in these circumstances.”(Ukrainian Solidarity Network )

“Social-imperialists,’ that is, socialists in words and imperialists in deeds ( V.I. Lenin) 

“The Western social-imperialist left that is still addicted to its material privileges and illusions of being a part of something called the “West” has a choice that it must make: either you abandon privilege and whiteness and join as class combatants against your bourgeoisie, or you will be considered part of the enemy.” (A.Baraka, The Western Imperial Left’s Collaboration with the Western Bourgeoisie )

The clear implication from this statement issued by the newly formed Ukrainian Solidarity Network is that military victory is the only solution for resolving the conflict in Ukraine. The fact that many of the individuals supporting this network self-identify as leftists, represents a new, perhaps higher form of collaboration with Western and U.S. imperialism that may have ever developed since the end of the second imperialist war in 1945.  I issued an excerpt of my statement in response to the emergence of this network that caused a stir.

Here is my statement in full.  . . .

 

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How Elon Musk Is Aiding the US Empire's Regime Change Operation in Iran

https://www.mintpressnews.com/elon-musk-starlink-helping-us-iran-regime-change-operation/283293/

by Alan Macleod

Elon Musk has announced that he is helping to smuggle hundreds of Starlink satellite communications devices into Iran. The South African-born billionaire made the admission on December 26, replying to a tweet lauding female Iranian protesters for refusing to cover their hair. “Approaching 100 Starlinks active in Iran”, he tweeted, clearly implying a political motivation to his work.

That Musk is involved in Washington’s attempts to weaken or overthrow the administration in Tehran has been clear for some months now. In September – at the height of the demonstrations following the suspicious death of 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini – Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the U.S. was “taking action” “to advance Internet freedom and the free flow of information for the Iranian people” and “to counter the Iranian government’s censorship,” to which Musk replied, “Activating Starlink…”

 

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Keith Davis, Jr. and Black Political Corruption

https://www.blackagendareport.com/keith-davis-jr-and-black-political-corruption

by Margaret Kimberley

Baltimore police continued to falsely accuse an innocent man when they shot and nearly killed him after the Freddie Gray uprisings. Prosecutors as always helped to carry out the dirty deeds. Having Black officials in place does the people of Baltimore very little good when corruption is rampant.

Keith Davis, Jr. is free after an ordeal which began when he was shot by Baltimore, Maryland police on June 7, 2015. The police claimed to be looking for a robbery suspect and chased Davis into a garage where they fired 44 shots, three of which struck him. The robbery victim testified that Davis was not the perpetrator who attacked him, but the police charged Davis with another crime, a murder which took place in a different part of the city. They did this despite evidence showing he was also innocent of that charge as well. Five trials resulted in either hung juries or judges overturning verdicts. Davis was scheduled to be tried yet again but newly elected State Attorney Ivan Bates dropped all charges against him on January 13, 2023.

No one knows how many Black men are like Davis, charged and most often convicted wrongfully due to police and prosecutorial misconduct. They languish in jail for years, sometimes dying in jail while only a few such cases ever garner public attention.

 

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Negroes Speak of War, Langston Hughes, 1933

https://www.blackagendareport.com/essay-negroes-speak-war-langston-hughes-1933

by Black Agenda Review

What benefits do Black folk get by endorsing or participating in the white man’s war? Revisiting an anti-war statement by Langston Hughes.

The legendary African-American poet and novelist Langston Hughes was a radical. Despite oftentimes bizarre attempts to lock him into a Black bourgeois liberal-imperialist project , Hughes sided with the Black sufferers, the global working classes , and the marginalized and dispossessed masses of any and every race. A socialist and an internationalist , Hughes wrote odes to Lenin , to the Russian Revolution, and to the great Haitian marxist Jacques Roumain . He wrote on the frame-up of the Scottsboro Boys and penned chants for May Day . Hughes’s verse advocated for the Republican struggle in the Spanish Civil War and celebrated anti-fascist resistance across Asia and Europe. He wrote against class hierarchy in the United States and the imperialist expansion of Wall Street into the Caribbean. And, in “Negroes Speaks of War,” Hughes wrote against war and militarism and provided us with a remarkable Black call for peace.

A short piece that is half essay, half poetic meditation, Hughes’ “Negroes Speaks of War” was published in November, 1933. It appeared in the premier issue of Fight Against War and Fascism , the monthly journal of the American League Against War and Fascism , a coalition of radicals organized “as a weapon in the struggle against the ruling class and their efforts to involve the world in another slaughter match.” It was later reproduced in August, 1934 in  The Negro Worker , the journal of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. The breezy, whimsical tone of “Negroes Speak of War” contrasts starkly with casual stunning, savage  imagery of white violence and imperial conflict. Its message? In short, Hughes asks his readers: what benefits do Black folk get by endorsing or participating in the white man’s war? It is a message as relevant now as it was in 1933, and a question that has the same answer now as in 1933: that is, none.

We reproduce Langston Hughes’s “Negroes Speak of War” below.  . . .

 

 

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Global Research, Selected Articles – January 18, 2023

https://www.globalresearch.ca/selected-articles-third-intifada-last-war-palestine-global-south/5805011

 

“A Third Intifada and the Last War. Palestine and the Global South”

https://www.globalresearch.ca/third-intifada-last-war/5804728

by Timothy Alexander Guzman

In 1969, Golda Meir, the first woman to become the Prime Minister of Israel who oversaw a major conflict in the Yum Kippur War of 1973 once proclaimed that

“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, it is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country.  They didn’t exist.” 

Today, many Israelis believe what Golda Meir had said, including Israel’s top cabinet member Itamar Ben-Gvir, a known far-right extremist who basically wants to annex the rest of what was once known as Palestine and expel the remaining Palestinians once and for all.  It should not be a surprise that the new government of Benjamin Netanyahu is provoking another war against the Palestinian people when he allowed his Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir to pay a visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount which has created increased tensions with the real possibility that a Third Intifada can be initiated by the Palestinian resistance including Hamas, Fatah and others because this provocation has not only angered the Palestinians, but it has angered all Muslims from around the world.    

According to a Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) article based on comments made by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah titled, ‘Hezbollah chief: Middle East could ‘explode,’ it reported that Nasrallah said that

“The desecration of the Muslim and Christian sanctities in Palestine will not only explode the situation…but could actually cause an explosion in the whole region,” and that “Our people will not accept such a violation.”

He also called on Western countries to stop “crazy extremist Israelis” if they do not want another war in the region.” Nasrallah continued “We are awake, alert, and ready. We will not allow any change to the rules of deterrence in Lebanon.” Haaretz published ‘Hamas Retaliation for Ben-Gvir’s Al-Aqsa Visit ‘Will Be the Last War,’ Far-right MK Vows’ on the disturbing comment by a far-right Israeli lawmaker by the name of Zvika Fogel who said that “Israel would “respond as I think we should, and yes it would be worth it because this will be the last war and after that we can sit and raise doves and all the other beautiful birds that exist.”  Hamas has called Itamar Ben-Gvirs provocations a “crime” and that Jerusalem’s Temple Mount “will remain Palestinian, Arab, Islamic.” On January 3rd, 2023, Hamas Spokesperson Hazem Qassem said the following:

The extremist minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard this morning is a crime that comes in the context of the occupation’s continued aggression against the city of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque with the aim of Judaizing it.  This provocative behavior by the right-wing government will open the door wide for real waves of escalation, all of which will have repercussions for the entire region because Al-Aqsa Mosque has its place among the Arab and Islamic peoples, our Palestinian people and the resistance behind it will continue to defend the sanctities and will never allow the occupation to pass the plan to Judaize Jerusalem or the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque

See, also: A World at War? Biden Lashes Out Against “Enemies” as Our Country Declines

 

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Consortium News Archives – January 2023

https://consortiumnews.com/

 

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 “Emotional Independence”

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/12/emotional-independence/

by Consortium News

We live in a chilling era of herd politics and media driven by emotional attachments to political party and nation.  

 

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Corbett Report Archives – January 2023

https://www.corbettreport.com/category/videos/

 

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FLASHBACK: The 5th Annual Fake News Awards! (2022)

https://www.corbettreport.com/flashback-fakenews5/

with James Corbett

(1:00:38)

 

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Friday Funnies

“Oink, Oink: Fatback synonym - University of Pennsylvania”

https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/friday-funnies-oink-oink?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

by Robert W Malone MD, MS

 

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Sunday Strip

“People who Pay Attention ... are dying at lower rates.

https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/sunday-strip-people-who-pay-attention?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

by Robert W Malone MD, MS

 

 

===========

 

x.

From: Cat McGuire <cat@catmcguire.com>
Date: Jan 22, 2023
Subject: WARNING - The State is using a harsh blacklist tool - the "Registry"

 

It would behoove people to listen to Tucker Carlson’s scary interview with Brandon Straka (4:26 min) about a ruthless “Registry” blacklist tool that effectively cripples a person’s ability to participate in society. It’s like a personal lockdown on steroids.
(4:26 min; backup link)

Straka was viciously witch-hunted by the government for the 8 minutes he peacefully stood outside the Capitol on January 6. Any citizen who is not in compliance (on anything really) risks being put in the state’s “Registry” crosshairs. First they came for the J6ers . . . .

 

BONUS – Hot off the press
Helen Buynisky, one of the best analysts around, wrote a superb commentary about the “Registry.” She has not yet published it to her Helen of desTroy substack, but she authorized me to share her draft version with my network (SEE BELOW). Also, do yourself a favor: read everything by Helen you can get your hands on.

___________
HELEN BUYNISKI COMMENTS ON THE “REGISTRY”
1/22/23

NOTE
This op-ed piece is a DRAFT by Helen Buyniski. She authorized me to share it with my network. Helen will soon be posting a polished final version on her substack page. https://helenofdestroy.substack.com/
Thanks, Cat McGuire

 

The Justice Department’s new “January 6th registry” should horrify anyone with a pulse. rather than prosecute any of the crimes that go down daily in the Capitol itself, they’re ramping up their crusade against dissent a bunch of nonviolent protesters whose brief disorderly interlude 2 years ago has already been milked to death by a war criminal’s daughter & an estrogen casualty with a cartoon dog fetish in Congress. it’s not enough to merely threaten them with steeper sentences than most people get for child pornography or rape - they’ll now be put on a REGISTRY to make it easier to cancel them completely.

Ever the handmaiden to atrocity, Google is helping elevate the registry to the top of search results for your name. forget about renting an apartment, getting a mortgage, or even keeping your PayPal account. doesn’t matter if you weren’t convicted of anything, or even if the government admitted it got too excited & dumped a bunch of bogus charges on you back in 2021 - an “insurrectionist” smear is forever, & they want to make sure you regret thinking for a second that this country was actually run by the people, for the people.

The primary aim of this terror campaign - because it is economic terrorism - is to dissuade anyone who might have been thinking of joining such a protest, or even making a public statement in defense of the January 6 defendants, from doing so. once permanent, easily searchable registries get involved, the reputational stakes of supporting a cause increase dramatically. those who were on the fence will think of their careers, their families, their rent - & there’s nothing dishonorable about those instincts - & quietly back away from taking a stand, perhaps even deleting tweets or pulling down blog posts to cover their tracks while the victims of this witch hunt are left flapping in the breeze.

We cannot hope to take back civilization from the ruling class if we can’t at least stick together in the face of baseless demonization campaigns like this. the idea of a registry to stop a bunch of people who put their feet up on congressmen’s desks when the Capitol was left unguarded from engaging in the basic acts of commerce underlying American society would be laughable if it wasn’t actually happening, and the official narrative in which the Stop the Steal protest & subsequent riot at the Capitol was some kind of Armed Insurrection™ remains a total farce. the majority of the people at the Capitol that day probably owned at least one gun of some sort - they must have felt so embarrassed they forgot to bring their arms to the armed rebellion! - & footage from that day shows that aside from a few Ray Eppses sent from the FBI/DHS/etc, the crowd was surprisingly docile for a bunch of people who believed American democracy was being snatched from their grasp (a belief the Biden administration has spent the last two years proving right).

For those who think the 2020 election was totally cool & normal, or wonder why they should care about a bunch of Trump voters, please don’t make me go all Niemoller on your ass. a) Not everyone there was a Trump voter b) We’ve had rampant election fraud at least as long as I’ve been voting, why would this one be different? c) Most of the January 6 defendants did nothing more than protest peacefully. do you really want that not only criminalized, but cause for un-personing? the spiral of silence effect this will have on other public shows of dissent will be incalculably huge. speak now or forever hold your pieces together.

 

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Tribunal in Washington Calls on President Biden to End Prosecution of Julian Assange and to Defend Rights of Journalists and Whistleblowers
https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/wl1.jpg?resize=696%2C389&ssl=1
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/01/24/tribunal-in-washington-calls-on-president-biden-to-end-prosecution-of-julian-assange-and-to-defend-rights-of-journalists-and-whistleblowers/?mc_cid=9cea993763&mc_eid=7ddd08c64d
by Chris Garaffa

 

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Rage Against the War Machine - #SolutionsWatch
https://www.corbettreport.com/solutionswatch-rageagainstwar/
with James Corbett
(28:35)

 

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Mind Blowing: "CDC Forced to Tell How Deadly the COVID Jab Is"
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/01/23/cdc-aware-of-hundreds-of-safety-signals-for-covid-jab/comment-page-1/
by Dr. Joseph Mercol
a

Story at-a-glance

 

In September 2022, The Epoch Times asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining results. PRR1 measures how common an adverse event is for a specific drug compared to all the other drugs in the database.

According to the standard operating procedures2,3 for the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is run jointly by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC is required to perform these data mining analyses.
Not only did the CDC refuse to release the data, but it also provided false information — twice — in response to The Epoch Times' questions about the monitoring being performed. As reported by The Epoch Times back in September 2022,4 the CDC initially claimed PRR analyses were "outside the agency's purview" and that no monitoring was being done by them.

Eventually, the agency admitted it was doing PRRs, starting in February 2021, only to later claim they didn't perform any PRRs until March 2022. The Epoch Times also cited several papers in which the FDA and/or CDC claimed their data mining efforts had come up empty handed.5 Now, we find that was all a pack of lies.

CDC Monitoring Reveals Hundreds of Safety Signals
In reality, the CDC's PRR monitoring reveals HUNDREDS of safety signals, including Bell's palsy, blood clots, pulmonary embolism and death — all of which, according to the rules, require thorough investigation to either confirm or rule out a possible link to the shots. As reported by The Epoch Times in early January 2023:6

 

"The CDC analysis was conducted on adverse events reported from Dec. 14, 2020, to July 29, 2022. The Epoch Times obtained the results through a Freedom of Information Act request after the CDC refused to make the results public …
PRR involves comparing the incidence of a specific adverse event after a specific vaccine to the incidence after all other vaccines. A signal is triggered when three thresholds are met, according to the CDC: a PRR of at least 2, a chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and three or more cases of the event following receipt of the vaccine being analyzed. Chi-squared tests are a form of statistical analysis used to examine data.


The results obtained by The Epoch Times show that there are hundreds of adverse events (AEs) that meet the definition, including serious conditions such as blood clotting in the lungs, intermenstrual bleeding, a lack of oxygen to the heart, and even death. The high numbers, particularly the chi-squared figures, concerned experts.


For many of the events, 'the chi-squared is so high that, from a Bayesian perspective, the probability that the true rate of the AE of the COVID vaccines is not higher than that of the non-COVID vaccines is essentially zero,' Norman Fenton, a professor of risk management at Queen Mary University of London, told The Epoch Times in an email after running the numbers through a Bayesian model that provides probabilities based on available information."

Myopericarditis Is Far From the Only Problem
One of the few side effects of the COVID jabs that the CDC has actually acknowledged is myocarditis (heart inflammation), and a related condition called pericarditis (inflammation of the heart sack). Alas, the PRR monitoring results reveal there are more than 500 other adverse events that have stronger warning signals than either of those conditions.

The proportions of reported deaths was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines.
Josh Guetzkow, an Israeli professor trained in statistics at Princeton University told The Epoch Times:7

"We know that the signal for myocarditis is associated with something that is caused by the mRNA vaccines, so it's more than reasonable to say that anything with a signal larger than myocarditis/pericarditis should be taken seriously and investigated."

Guetzkow expanded on his commentary in a January 4, 2023, Substack article.8 Below is a summary list of some of the key findings from the

CDC's PRR analysis. Guetzkow goes deeper in his article, so for more details, I suggest reading it in its entirety.
For even more analyses and commentary, see Fenton's Substack article, "The CDC's Data on COVID Vaccine Safety Signals."9 If you want to investigate the PRR data for yourself, you can download them from The Epoch Times' January 3, 2023, article.10 You can also find them here.11

 


In individuals aged 18 and older, there are safety signals for 770 different adverse events, and two-thirds of them (more than 500) have a stronger safety signal than myocarditis and pericarditis. Of those 770 signals, 12 are brand-new conditions that have not been reported following other vaccines.

Topping the list of safety signals are cardiovascular conditions, followed by neurological conditions. In third and fourth place are thromboembolic conditions and pulmonary conditions. Death is sixth on the list and cancer is 11th. Considering the uptick we've seen in aggressive cancers, the fact that death tops cancer really says something.

 

The number of serious adverse events reported between mid-December 2020 and the end of July 2022 (just over 19 months) for the COVID jabs is 5.5 times greater than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the U.S. over the last 13 years (approximately 73,000 versus 13,000).

 

Twice as many COVID jab reports were classified as serious compared to all other vaccines given to adults (11% vs. 5.5%), which meets the definition of a safety signal.

 

The proportions of reported deaths, which was only provided for the 18+ age group, was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines. As noted by Fenton,12 "If the CDC wish [sic] to claim that the probability a COVID vaccine adverse event results in death is not significantly higher than that of other vaccines the onus is on them to come up with some other causal explanation for this difference."

 

In the 12- to 17-year-old age group, there are 96 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, Bell's Palsy, genital ulcerations, high blood pressure, menstrual irregularities, cardiac valve incompetency, pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrhythmia, thrombosis, pericardial and pleural effusion, appendicitis and perforated appendix, immune thrombocytopenia, chest pain and increased troponin levels (indicative of heart damage).

 

In the 5- to 11-year-old group, there are 66 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction, cardiac valve incompetency, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis and appendectomies, Kawasaki's disease, menstrual irregularities and vitiligo.

 

It's worth noting that the CDC didn't perform its first safety signal analysis until March 25, 2022 — 15 months after the shots were rolled out. Why the long wait — especially since the CDC had announced it would begin monitoring in early 2021? Just consider, for a moment, how many lives have been lost because the CDC failed to properly monitor safety, and still drags its feet when it comes to warning people about the risks involved.

FDA Still Refuses to Share Safety Data
The FDA is also required to perform safety monitoring using another technique called Empirical Bayesian data mining. The Epoch Times first asked the FDA to release its monitoring results back in July 2022,13,14 but like the CDC, the FDA refused and insisted the data showed no evidence of serious adverse effects. In other words, "Just trust us. We're experts."

 

According to the FDA, the only potential signal they'd found through April 16, 2021, was for raised body temperature.15 Then, in mid-December 2022 — just four months after The Epoch Times tried to get these data — the FDA announced that pulmonary embolism (blood clots that block blood flow in the lungs) had met the threshold for a statistical signal, and continued to meet the criteria after in-depth evaluation, but it was only linked to the Pfizer jab.16

As noted by The Epoch Times,17 pulmonary embolism is also identified as a signal in the CDC's PRR analysis for individuals as young as 12, which really ought to strengthen concerns.

The FDA also admitted it had already evaluated three other warning signals: lack of oxygen to the heart, immune thrombocytopenia (a blood platelet disorder) and intravascular coagulation (a type of blood clotting), but none of these continued to meet the threshold after analysis.
If the FDA was evaluating four warning signals, why did they tell The Epoch Times there was no evidence of ill effects, and why did they claim the only potential signal they'd found was slight fever? Are we to believe they discovered these signals after The Epoch Times asked for the monitoring results and then completed four in-depth investigations in four months?

Whatever the truth, it's clear that both the CDC and FDA are not being transparent. Worse, they've hidden data, knowing it could mean the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands of people.

CDC Has Ignored Clear 'Death' Signal
The CDC ignoring a clear signal for death is probably the most egregious example of its failures as a public health institution. As early as July 2021, Matthew Crawford published a three-part series18,19,20 detailing how the CDC was hiding safety signals by using a flawed formula. In August that year, Steve Kirsch informed the agency of these problems, but was ignored.

Then, in an October 3, 2022, article,21 Kirsch went on to show how "death" should have triggered a signal even when using the CDC's flawed formula (which is described in its VAERS standard operating procedures manual22). Here's an excerpt:23

"The formula the CDC uses for generating safety signals is fundamentally flawed; a 'bad' vaccine with lots of adverse events will 'mask' large numbers of important safety signals … Let me summarize the key points for you in a nutshell: PRR [proportional reporting ratio] is defined on page 16 in the CDC document24 as follows …

A 'safety signal' is defined on page 16 in the CDC document as a PRR of at least 2, chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and 3 or more cases of the AE [adverse event] following receipt of the specific vaccine of interest. This is the famous 'and clause.' Here it is from the document:
Only someone who is incompetent or is deliberately trying to make the vaccines look safe would use the word 'and' in the definition of a safety signal.

Using 'and' means that if any one of the conditions isn't satisfied, no safety signal will be generated. As noted below, the PRR will rarely trigger which virtually guarantees that most events generated by an unsafe vaccine will never get flagged.
The PRR value for the COVID vaccines will rarely exceed 1 because there are so many adverse events from the COVID vaccine because it is so dangerous (i.e., B in the formula is a huge number) so the numerator is always near zero. Hence, the 'safety signal' is rarely triggered because the vaccine is so dangerous."

A Fictitious Example
Using a fictitious vaccine as the example, Kirsch explained how an exceptionally dangerous vaccine will fly under the radar and not get flagged, thanks to this flawed formula:25

"Suppose we have the world's most dangerous vaccine that causes adverse events in everyone who gets it and generates 25,000 different adverse events, and each adverse event has 1,000 instances.

That means that the numerator is 1,000/25,000,000 which is just 40 events per million reported events. Now let's look at actuals for something like deaths. For all other vaccines, there are 6,200 deaths and 1 million adverse events total.
Since 40 per million is less than 6,200 deaths per million, we are not even close to generating a safety signal for deaths from our hypothetical vaccine which killed 1,000 people in a year … The point is that a dangerous vaccine can look very 'safe' using the PRR formula."

Calculating Death Signal for the COVID Jab
Next, Kirsch calculates the PRR for death for the COVID jab — using VAERS data and the CDC's definitions and formula. As of December 31, 2019, there were 6,157 deaths and 918,717 adverse events total for all vaccines other than the COVID shot. As of September 23, 2022, there were 31,214 deaths and 1.4 million adverse events total for the COVID jabs. Here's the formula as explained by Kirsch:26
"PRR = (31,214/1.4e6) / (6,157/918,717) = 3.32, which exceeds the required threshold of 2. In other words, the COVID vaccine is so deadly that even with all the adverse events generated by the vaccine, the death signal did not get drowned out!

But there is still the chi-square test. Chi-square test results were 18,549 for 'death,' which greatly exceeds the required threshold of 4. The CDC chi-square test is clearly satisfied for the COVID vaccine. Because the death signal is so huge, it even survived the PRR test.

This means that even using the CDCs own erroneous … formula, all three criteria were satisfied:

1. PRR>2 [PRR greater than 2]: It was 3.32
2. Chi-square>2 [Chi-square greater than 2]: It was 18,549
3. 3 or more reports: There were over 31,214 death reports received by VAERS … which is more than 3

A safety signal should have been generated but wasn't. Why not? … Hundreds of thousands of American lives have been lost due to the inability of the CDC to deploy their own flawed safety signal analysis … It's been known since at least 2004 that using reporting odds ratio (ROR) is a better estimate of relative risk than PRR.27 I don't know why the CDC doesn't use it."

The CDC is also hiding the severity of side effects in other ways. As explained by Fenton,28 the way side effects are categorized by the CDC help obfuscate the scale of certain problems. For example, "cardiac failure acute," "cardiac failure," "infarction," "myocardial strain" and "myocardial fibrosis" are listed as separate categories, even though in real life they're all potential effects of myocarditis.

By separating them, you end up with fewer frequency counts per category, thereby giving you an underpowered chi-square test so that a warning signal is not triggered. If related categories were merged, far stronger safety signals would likely emerge.

CDC Has No Reasonable Defense
The CDC is responsible for monitoring both VAERS and V-Safe, and between these two databases, there's no possible way they could ever say they didn't know the shots were harming and killing millions of Americans.

The CDC also has access to other databases, including the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), which (before it was intentionally altered29) showed massive increases in debilitating and lethal conditions, including a tripling of cancer cases.30

The findings in these databases have never been brought forward during any of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meetings or the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meetings, at which members have repeatedly voted to authorize the jabs to people of all ages, including infants and pregnant women.

They even added these toxic shots to the childhood vaccine schedule — which allows states to mandate them for school attendance — without addressing any of the 66 safety signals found in the CDC's PRR analysis. The fact of the matter is that the CDC has known about these risks all along, and there's no excuse for not sharing and acting on these data.

Help Spread the Word
Mainstream media are ignoring all of this, so help spread the word. Everyone needs to know what the CDC's safety data reveal. To that end, here are a few suggestions for how you can help:

 

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They have oligarchs. We have socially responsible entrepreneurs

“We’re not oligarchs. We’re good, hard-working, socially responsible entrepreneurs who
take care of the country and earn money doing responsible business.”
https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/they-have-oligarchs-we-have-socially?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
by Edward Slavsquat

Thomas Röper's "war of the systems" seems a bit fishy