Yearly Archives: 2020

Yes, Election Fraud is Real. And its a Longstanding Tradition on Both Sides of the Aisle

Posted on by
Reply

As allegations of election fraud continue to swirl almost two weeks since the 2020 election, the contours of a galvanized bipartisan ruling class in America are beginning to emerge in the wake of democracy’s demise

By Raul Diego

Source: Mint Press News

American democracy is in limbo after the long-anticipated, contested election has finally come to pass. More than a week removed from November 3, Democrats and Republicans peddle their own version of events as a corporate media blitzkrieg tries to manufacture consent for Joe Biden as president-elect in true Guaidó style. Trump plays the villain, ensconced in the Oval Office while his cabinet officials pitch weak legal challenges that fail to address substantive issues of electoral fraud and serve to simply prolong the stalemate and build up the tension for the grand finale.

Despite evidence of fatal vulnerabilities underlying the electronic voting infrastructure of the United States that leave the systems at the very heart of the democratic process open to election rigging on a massive scale, much of the American public is unaware of the extent of the problem and how easily election results can be manipulated without leaving a trace.

The bumbling incompetence of the Trump administration provides cover for the machinations of the U.S. establishment, which more nuanced independent coverage has revealed in great detail. Taking the deliberate preparations made for this particular eventuality into consideration, complete with table-top exercises and the creation of new federal agencies and programs since the start of the 2016 presidential race, it is clear that the 2020 Election was targeted as an opportunity to fundamentally transform the American political juggernaut, in tandem with the ongoing worldwide economic reset.

A statement released last Thursday by the director of one of the newest agencies, in charge of overseeing cybersecurity infrastructure in the United States, claimed that there was “no evidence […] any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Chris Krebs, the head of the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), directly contradicted the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), who last week told the conservative outlet Newsmax that voter fraud was definitely taking place.

Cyberbullies

Part of the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency’s mission centers on assuring compliance with DHS dictates surrounding election security protocols. The standalone federal agency with oversight from the Department of Homeland Security was formed two years after an embarrassing incident involving DHS occurred during the 2016 general election, when Georgia’s then secretary of state,­ – now governor – Brian Kemp, announced that cyberattacks on its voting systems had been traced to the federal law enforcement agency.

In 2020 with CISA firmly in place, DHS’ cybersecurity division implemented a “24/7 war room” to ostensibly guard against election hacking. CISA’s Krebs, a former cybersecurity policy director at Microsoft, led the effort to “monitor a network of every state’s election system simultaneously until every vote is counted,” according to News Nation, which was allowed to bring a camera crew into the operation in Fort Meade, Maryland.

In the lead up to the 2020 election, warnings about Russian and Iranian cyberwarriors running roughshod over the electoral contest were everywhere in U.S. media. Dire warnings of an existential threat to democracy by foreign actors that never materialized were leveraged to implement new security measures in partnership with the private sector. Krebs floated the excuse for a conspicuously absent horde of Eurasian hackers, that America’s enemies chose to “sit out this election” in a recent New York Times article.

The fact is that neither Russia nor Iran have anywhere near the level of access to America’s election system as the handful of private companies who are part of an electronic voting machine cartel, which currently controls over 92% of the elections market in the United States.

You Don’t Really HAVA Choice

In a prolific time for draconian government overreach, one of the lesser-known pieces of legislation proposed by the Bush administration was the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed by a Republican-controlled House and a unanimous vote by a Democrat-led Senate in December 2001. The bill was signed into law 11 months later and “greatly accelerated the full computerization of U.S. elections,” according to Jonathan Simon, an election integrity advocate and author of “Code Red, Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century,” in an interview with MintPress.

Simon describes the legislation’s carrot-and-stick approach to goad states into adopting technologies like touchscreen voting systems known as DREs, which were later replaced with barcode systems or BMDs, which were “entirely lacking in cyber-security provisions to protect the increasingly concealed process it promoted.” Among the bill’s authors is none other than the current Senate leader and Republican kingmaker, Mitch McConnell, who has defended Trump’s right to challenge the election results without committing to a particular outcome.

“If, as was claimed,” Simon continues, “HAVA would make voting easier and thus increase turnout, as we can see clearly today, that was decidedly not a GOP goal, certainly not of a tactician like McConnell.” The partisan motivations Simon ascribes to HAVA are clear enough, and, as he points out, should have been clear to Democrats as well. But, the argument that the American liberal establishment had no inkling of the ramifications fails to account for the Democrats’ own forays into the closely held universe of electronic voting systems.

A week ago, FOX Anchor Maria Bartiromo casually let slip on air that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s chief of staff, Sidney Powell, had become a lobbyist for Dominion Voting Systems – one of a handful of companies that maintain a close-knit cartel of electronic voting systems, which together control 92% of the election marketplace. Nevertheless, Dominion’s market share is dwarfed by ES&S; the largest election voting machine company in the United States and whose “subcontractors that [do] the actual programming, maintenance, and distribution” are controlled by GOP political allies, according to Simon.

The wrangling these firms engage in to steal electoral markets from each other, and the inseparable political problems such dynamics can cause, was on full display in Louisiana just before the 2018 midterm elections when its Democrat governor, John Bel Edwards, canceled a $95 million dollar contract that had been awarded to Dominion after competitor ES&S filed a complaint about the contracting process. Edwards was accused by his Republican secretary of state of siding “with his political buddies over election security,” which contradicts the prevailing notions of a pure partisan split along this issue.

Fatal Vulnerabilities

Experts on both sides of the political divide concede that both voter fraud and election fraud occur with considerable frequency since the advent of electronic voting machines. In addition to Dominion and ES&S, only five other companies dominate this space: Tenex, SGO/Smartmatic, Hart InterCivic, Demtech, and Premier (formerly Diebold).

Virtually all have been accused of vote count manipulation or other irregularities associated with their systems. Hart, for instance, was accused of vote flipping (the practice of switching the votes from one candidate to their opponent) in Texas. Dominion also ran into issues in the Lone Star state when its systems failed certification over accessibility problems.

“Much of the equipment being used to record and count votes,” explains Jonathan Simon, “is either modem-equipped, which leaves it highly vulnerable to remote interference, or programmed with the use of other computers than are internet-connected, allowing the alteration of memory cards and code running in either precinct-level machines (like BMDs, DREs, or Optical Scanners) or central tabulators.”

Examples of these dangerous weaknesses were explored in a recent video published by a self-styled national security professional, L. Todd Wood, where conservative elections security expert, Russ Ramsland, breaks down his findings from a forensic analysis of a 1000+ page voter log taken out of Dallas County’s central tabulation center in the aftermath of the 2018 midterm elections.

Ramsland identified instances of votes being replaced in 96 precincts, an inordinate number of database “updates” and other serious irregularities that point to vote-count manipulation and amount to election fraud. His most explosive allegation centered around claims of real-time vote-swapping in the 2019 gubernatorial election in Kentucky, where Ramsland asserts that thousands of votes originally given for the Republican candidate were swapped live on a CNN broadcast and added to the tally of the Democratic candidate, Andy Beshear, who would end up winning the election.

Ramsland also alleged that the election data of that race was being stored in a server in Frankfurt, Germany before being cycled through the central tabulation database, which syncs automatically with the numbers shown to television viewers. This server has been pounced on by Trump supporters in recent days and repeated by Rudy Giuliani in his podcast on Friday when he also purported to have direct evidence of election fraud.

While it is practically impossible for the layman to unravel the complexities underlying the encryption and cloud technologies underlying the present-day election system in the United States, few can doubt that moving towards a digital voting system removes whatever last vestiges of control the regular American citizen had in a once participatory exercise of democracy.

Asked if democracy can even exist under such conditions, Simon refers to a prediction he made in “CODE RED,” in which he augurs “an inexorable progression to where we are now: public trust eroded, the losers making wild allegations, no one able to prove anything, [and] everyone kind of waking up to the realization that our concealed computerized vote-counting process does not yield evidence-based results.”

Spook Charade

Giuliani’s promises of whistleblowers coming forward to save the day for the MAGA crowd and call the election off aren’t likely to produce anything of consequence as this charade only serves to further pave the way for the ruling classes, who are consolidating their grip on power and wealth at mind-boggling speeds thanks to the peculiar advantages bestowed upon them by the pandemic protocols. Real evidence of election fakery is too widespread to confront as part of a national discussion, as that would threaten the position of the politicians who depend on a rigged system and the powerful interests that control them.

With the extremes of the American political spectrum lighting up in deep reds and blues, whatever emerges out of the ashes won’t resemble much that came before it, and regardless of the election results, America’s inexorable march towards techno-fascism is moving right along.

Actual voter and election fraud takes place in every national American election and is just as prevalent in state and municipal elections, as well. From vote splitting to voter suppression tactics to direct manipulation of election results, both political parties have usurped the electoral processes to lie and cheat their way into power more than once.

But with the advent of digital voting systems, even the scandals we always seem to hear about far too late will vanish from sight, as well. The most straightforward aspect of democracy – voting – is disappearing behind a curtain of ones and zeros that only technocratic lackeys will be able to pull back. Trump, who was plucked from the reality TV screen like Jeff Daniels in “The Purple Rose of Cairo” and inserted into the national contest for the highest office in the land, will do nothing to change that.

Publically available FBI documents show the sitting president has been an FBI informant since the early eighties and his rise to the highest office in the land was not the case of a brash, independent billionaire who decided to run for president to “Make America Great Again.” After all, Donald Trump’s long-standing ties with the very “deep state” many of his staunchest supporters are convinced he is dismantling, actually reveals a factional war among the ruling class behind the scenes.

With a president who is as deep state as it gets, if there’s something we can take away from the last four years and these last few days since the election, it’s that the American establishment’s over-the-top partisanship has been a ruse undertaken to hide the fact that they are united in waging a class war like never before.

Biden state media appointee advocated using propaganda against Americans and ‘rethinking’ First Amendment

Posted on by
3

The head of the Joe Biden transition team for the US Agency for Global Media, Richard Stengel, has branded himself the “chief propagandist,” urged the government to use propaganda against its “own population,” and called to “rethink” the First Amendment.

By Ben Norton

Source: The GrayZone

Richard Stengel, the top state media appointee for US President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, has enthusiastically defended the use of propaganda against Americans.

“My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist,” Stengel said in 2018. “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”

Richard “Rick” Stengel was the longest serving under-secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in US history.

At the State Department under President Barack Obama, Stengel boasted that he “started the only entity in government, non-classified entity, that combated Russian disinformation.” That institution was known as the Global Engagement Center, and it amounted to a massive vehicle for advancing US government propaganda around the world.

A committed crusader in what he openly describes as a global “information war,” Stengel has proudly proclaimed his dedication to the carefully management of the public’s access to information.

Stengel outlined his worldview in a book he published this June, entitled “Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It.”

Stengel has proposed “rethinking” the First Amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech and press. In 2018, he stated, “Having once been almost a First Amendment absolutist, I have really moved my position on it, because I just think for practical reasons in society, we have to kind of rethink some of those things.”

The Biden transition team’s selection of a censorial infowarrior for its top state media position comes as a concerted suppression campaign takes hold on social media. The wave of online censorship has been overseen by US intelligence agencies, the State Department, and Silicon Valley corporations that maintain multibillion-dollar contracts with the US government.

As the state-backed censorship dragnet expands, independent media outlets increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs. In the past year, social media platforms have purged hundreds of accounts of foreign news publications, journalists, activists, and government officials from countries targeted by the United States for regime change.

Stengel’s appointment appears to be the clearest signal of a coming escalation by the Biden administration of the censorship and suppression of online media that is seen to threaten US imperatives abroad.

From Obama admin’s “chief propagandist” to Russiagate-peddling MSNBC pundit

Before being appointed as the US State Department’s “chief propagandist” in 2013, Richard Stengel was a managing editor of TIME Magazine.

In the Obama administration, Stengel not only created the Global Engagement Center propaganda vehicle; he also boasted that he “led the creation of English for All, a government-wide effort to promote the teaching of English around the world.”

After leaving the State Department in 2016, Stengel became a strategic advisor to Snap Inc., the company that runs the social media apps Snapchat and Bitmoji.

Stengel also found time for a fellowship at the Atlantic Council, a think tank closely linked to NATO and the Biden camp which has received funding from the US government, Britain, the European Union, and NATO itself, along with a host of Western weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel corporations, Gulf monarchies, and Big Tech juggernauts.

Stengel worked closely with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a dubious organization that has fueled efforts to censor independent media outlets in the name of fighting “disinformation.”

But Stengel is perhaps most well known as a regular political analyst on MSNBC in the Donald Trump era. On the network, he fueled Russiagate conspiracy theories, portraying the Republican president as a useful idiot of Russia and claiming Trump had a “one-sided bromance” with Vladimir Putin.

Stengel left MSNBC this November to join Biden’s presidential transition. The campaign announced that he was tapped to lead the Biden-Harris agency review team for the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

USAGM is a state media propaganda organization that has its origins in a Cold War vehicle created by the CIA to spread disinformation against the Soviet Union and communist China. (The agency was previously called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG, until it rebranded in 2018.)

USAGM states on its website that its most important mission is to “Be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States.”

An agency shakeup this year produced revelations that USAGM provided clandestine assistance to separatist activists during the protests that consumed Hong Kong in 2019. The program earmarked secure communications assistance for protesters and $2 million in “rapid response” payouts for anti-China activists.

Richard Stengel’s “obsessive” crusade against Russian “disinformation”

When Richard Stengel referred to himself as the State Department’s “chief propagandist,” advocated the use of propaganda against the American people, and proposed to “rethink” the First Amendment, he was participating in a May 3, 2018 panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

 

During the CFR event, titled “Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News,” Stengel hyped up the threat of supposed “Russian disinformation,” a vague term that is increasingly used as an empty signifier for any narrative that offends the sensibilities of Washington’s foreign policy establishment.

Stengel stated that he was “obsessed with” fighting “disinformation,” and made it clear he has a particular obsession with Moscow, accusing “the Russians” of engaging in “full spectrum” disinformation.

Joining him on stage was political scientist Kelly M. Greenhill, who mourned that alternative media platforms publish “things that seem like they could be true… that’s the sphere where it’s particularly difficult to debunk them… it’s this gray region, this gray zone, where it’s not traditional disinformation, but a combination of misinformation and play on rumors, conspiracy theories, sort of gray propaganda, that’s where I think the nub or the crux of the problem lies.”

Stengel approved, adding, “By the way those terms, the gray zone, are all from Russian active measures, that they’ve been doing for a million years.”

The panelists made no effort to hide their disdain for independent and foreign media outlets. Stengel stated clearly that a “news cartel” of mainstream corporate media outlets had long dominated US society, but he bemoaned that those “cartels don’t have hegemony like they used to.”

Stengel made it clear that his mission is to counter the alternative perspectives given a voice by foreign media platforms that challenge the US-dominated media landscape.

“The bad actors use journalistic objectivity against us. And the Russians in particular are smart about this,” Stengel grumbled.

He singled out Russia’s state-funded media network, RT, lamenting that “Vladimir Putin, when they launched Russia Today, said it was an antidote to the American English hegemony over the world media system. That’s how people saw it.”

Ben Decker, a research fellow at the Misinformation Project at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, lamented that “RT is invading every weekly finance media space.”

But Decker was cheered by the proliferation of US oligarchs committed to retaking control of the narrative. “In America and across the world,” he stated, “the donor community is very eager to address this problem, and very eager to work with communities of researchers, academics, journalists, etc. to target this problem.”

“I think that there is an appetite to solve this from the top down,” he continued, urging the many academics in the audience “to apply for grant money” in order to fight this Russian “disinformation.”

The CFR panel culminated with an African audience member rising from the crowd and confronting Stengel: “Because what is happening in America is what the United States flipped on the Global South and in the Third World, which we lived with, for many, many years, in terms of a master narrative that was and still is propaganda,” the man declared.

Rather than respond, Stengel rudely ignored the question and made his way hurriedly for the exit: “You know what, I hate last questions. Don’t you? I never, I usually just want to end something before the last question.”

The video of the revealing confrontation caused such a furor that CFR’s YouTube account disabled comments and made the video unlisted. It cannot be found in a search on Google or YouTube; it can only be found with the direct link.

The video of the full discussion is embedded below:

As Millions Face Eviction, Senate Proposes Nearly $700 Billion for Pentagon

Posted on by
Reply

By John Vibes

Source: Activist Post

As millions face eviction and line up at food banks throughout the country, waiting for another stimulus payment that will seemingly never come, the Senate Appropriations Committee is proposing a $696 billion Pentagon spending bill for the upcoming fiscal year.

According to The Hill, The Senate’s version of the fiscal 2021 Pentagon spending bill was released Tuesday along with 11 other annual appropriations bills.

Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have said they want to pass an omnibus spending bill, and they will likely agree on the military budget, as Democrats overwhelmingly vote in favor of military spending when they have the opportunity, just as Republicans do.

In July, the House passed a $694.6 billion bill for Pentagon spending in July. The Senate version released this week includes $627.2 billion for the base defense budget and $68.7 billion for a war fund known as the Overseas Contingency Operations account, and also includes a 3% pay raise for troops.

However, the final Senate version of the bill left out a few causes that were championed by progressive Democrats, including the renaming of military bases that are named after Confederate leaders, and measures that were intended to block defense funds from being used on the border wall.

The Senate’s bill would also fund 96 F-35 fighter jets, which is an increase over the original bill and over the administration’s initial request. In addition to the fighter jets, the bill also gives the Pentagon $21.35 billion to build nine new battle force ships.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans are unemployed and many are now starting to get evicted. According to the most recent numbers there are 6.8 million, and this only accounts for the people officially collecting unemployment, this does not include the number of people who are not qualified for unemployment, or people who have been out of the work force for an extended length of time. The unemployment rate dropped slightly over the past two months, but is still at record highs.

According to estimates by the Princeton University Eviction Lab, 3.6 million people face eviction cases in a typical year. This year, up to 8 million people could be facing eviction, according to a tracking tool developed by the global advisory firm Stout Risius and Ross, which works with the nonprofit National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel.

It is also estimated that up to $32 billion in back rent will be due for tenants across the US once bans on evictions are lifted. Despite bans on evictions, many landlords in the US are still kicking people out of their homes, and in some cases, they have even challenged the eviction bans in court.

The people who are struggling financially in the US can’t count on much help from the government. Even the prospects of a new stimulus check are uncertain, and a payment will not be coming until next year at the very earliest, if it comes at all. Yet, the Pentagon is still able to claim nearly $700 billion in taxpayer money.

 

“Watch this!”

Posted on by
Reply

By Dmitry Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

There are times in my career as a collapse observer and systematizer when my running commentary can quite reasonably be pared down to just two words: “Watch this!” The current severe stage of the financial and economic collapse sequence that was initiated in 2008, which is being artificially masked (no pun intended) by the fake Covid “pandemic,” and now a hung and fraudulent US election on top of it is just such an occasion: why not just sit back and watch the world burn? But I happen to be in a particularly good and sprightly mood today, and when I get that way few things can hold me back from holding forth and bloviating prophetically.

Let’s start with a quick jaunt down memory lane. I first realized that the USA was going to follow the general trajectory of the USSR back in 1995. I also immediately realized that the USSR was rather well prepared for collapse whereas the USA was about to be blindsided by it, and so, as a public service, I thought I should warn people. “And a fat lot of good that did!” some of you might immediately exclaim. But you would be wrong: lots of people have written to me to say how much better adjusted they are psychologically now that they have heard and accepted my message, for now they are ready to accept collapse with equanimity and poise. This is sure to make their company less tedious moving forward.

And so I had my “Eureka!” moment in 1995, and a decade later, in 2005, I went public with my observations. I got a surprisingly sympathetic response from some particularly enlightened people (even if they said so themselves). And now, a quarter of a century after my initial insight, as the US enters national bankruptcy and institutional collapse, the whole world is being treated to an end-of-empire spectacular election extravaganza starring none other than the consummate showman and impresario extraordinaire Donald Trump. He used to run beauty pageants, while this one is more of an ugliness pageant, but then beauty is rare and always fades while ugliness is commonplace and usually just gets uglier, making it a much safer bet. And so let’s accept it as a parting present to the world from a vanishing nation that gave us horror flicks, reality television and three-ring circuses with sideshow freaks.

Within the sweeping panoramic tableau of the 2020 election, Trump (our hero) appears bathed in a golden sunset glow of nostalgia for lost American greatness which he forever promises to rekindle. Rest assured, Trump or no Trump, America will never be great again. But Trump’s magic halo extends out from his resplendent orange cranial plumage and enfolds all those who pine for the lost Pax Americana and fear and loathe what America is fast becoming—which is, to put it bluntly, a holding tank for degenerates of every stripe presided over by a freak show. They pine for a time when men were manly and women womanly, when secretaries were flattered when their bosses took time away from their busy schedules to rub up against them, and when everyone was either a WASP, or worked hard on trying to look and act like one, or kept to their assigned station in life and knew better than to get too uppity. They want to believe that the ethnic melting pot can still produce noble alloys, preferably Corinthian bronze, and certainly not clinker or slag.

Arrayed against our fearless orange-hued leader, who at 74 is no spring chicken himself, is a ghoulish gaggle of geriatric gerontocrats. There is Joe Biden, 77, whose brain ran away and joined a circus some years ago but who imagines himself to be president-elect, or senator, or vice-president, or something. Having spent eight years lurking in the shadows as Obama’s VP, Biden is as fit to lead as a pig is kosher after rubbing its side against a corner of a synagogue. To assist Biden in his dodderings there is his party-appointed nanny, Kamala Harris, a mere slip of a girl at 56.

Also haunting the balcony of the American mausoleum is Nancy Pelosi, 80, who still runs the House of Representatives even though proper employment for her at this point would be up on a pole keeping the birds off the corn. There is also Bernie Sanders, 79, a sad pagliaccio whose permanent role in the political Commedia dell’Arte that the Democratic Party stages every four years is to simulate democracy by cheerleading crowds of young imbeciles in Act I, to feign death after falling off his pogo stick in Act II, and to stagger to his feet, wave and smile for the curtain call.

Last but not least, there is the horrid harpy Hillary Clinton, who is relatively young at 73 but whose putrid smell and cadaverous, ghastly visage are not longer fit for public display except in most delicately contrived circumstances. Hidden even further backstage is the suppurating cadaver of George Soros who, at 90, is still pulling the strings and wreaking havoc in the US and around the world. (His minions had recently spread color revolution to Armenia, in turn causing it to “elect” Pashinyan, a choice imbecile and a traitor, who then lost a big chunk of Armenian territory to Azerbaijan.) I could mention quite a few other financial corpses and oligarchic cadavers, but will refrain, to avoid giving you nightmares. Nobody lives forever, not even Henry Kissinger, 97, and so all we have to do is wait.

In healthy societies, older leaders age out and make room for younger leaders who take over for them after a lengthy period of study and apprenticeship. In sick societies, older leaders cling to power with no one competent there to replace them and once they die are replaced by traitors and criminals. The USSR and the USA are two such examples. The late Soviet serial gerontocracy of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, who for a time haunted the balcony of the Lenin mausoleum and, once dispatched to the netherworld, were swiftly replaced by the traitorous duo of blabbermouth Mikhail Gorbachëv and Drunk President Boris Yeltsin, was a tragedy for Russia. The resulting die-off was of the same order of magnitude as the losses incurred during World War II. In accordance with the worn-out cliché about history repeating, the current American gerontocracy is more of a farce than a tragedy, but its results are likely to be no less lethal for the population.

To complete this ghastly tableau, in the ongoing US presidential election, an almost-dead candidate and his charming assistant have been voted for by an army of the undead: voters that have mailed in their ballots in spite of being deceased. I have spot-checked a bit of the incriminating evidence myself, and I am pretty sure that there were over 11,000 such voters in a single Michigan county alone. But this is by no means a local scam: among many other vote-counting shenanigans, it appears that there was a nationwide effort to order mail-in ballots for dead people, fill them out for Biden, and mail them in. You might say that this is a human rights issue: why deprive dead people of their right to vote? Isn’t it about time to stop discriminating against the dead? Perhaps LGBTQ should be amended to LGBTQD for “Dead.” But why stop there? Why not also add a “U” for the unborn and stop this unpardonable discrimination against abortions?

In any case, dead voters for Biden turn out to be just the tip of an entire iceberg of election fraud. There are also the over 1.8 million nonexistent yet registered voters discovered by Judicial Watch back in September. Add to that the faulty voting system, creepily named “Dominion,” which miscounted votes to favor Biden. Add to that the undeservedly kid-gloved and fawning press coverage afforded to Biden and the US mass media’s overwhelmingly hostile attitude toward Trump. Add to that the fraudulent poll data which, just as prior to the 2016 election, was contrived to make a fraudulent Biden victory seem plausible. Add to that the amply funded organizations such as BLM and Antifa (in which the “Anti-” prefix is gratuitous, this organization in fact being very much “Fa…”) which have been ordered to protest, loot and riot in many major US cities, moving their mercenaries from location to location, where they then recruit useful idiots among the locals. What this adds up to is a vast, brazen, carelessly self-incriminating conspiracy to overthrow a sitting president through election fraud.

If you believe even for a moment that I am scandalized, disgusted and outraged by this trampling of the sacred principles of democracy, then pardon me while I shake my head sardonically while quietly chuckling to myself. No, I am not the least bit upset. In fact, this development fills me with optimism for the future. I believe that this ghastly institutional failure is a wonderful development that offers great hope to the rest of the world, and perhaps even to the US itself, although the political environment in the US appears to be rather hopeless irrespective of how horribly or wonderfully its ridiculous electoral system can be made to function.

In any case, it would be futile to try to give the US some semblance of a democratic election system. It would be like trying to clean up a beach by picking up empty beer cans around a beached whale. The presidency, after four years of ham-handed efforts to unseat a president using false evidence, is a failed institution. Congress, which now nonchalantly overspends federal revenue by a factor of three, is a fiscal zombie. The Federal Reserve, which is now a pure pyramid scheme, is a financial zombie. And then there is the rest of the ridiculously bloated US economy, which is waiting for a stiff gust of wind to cause ephemeral wealth to flood out of stocks and bonds and into cash, much of it evaporating in the process and the rest causing a tsunami of consumer price inflation.

In the course of this spectacle, the false image of the US as a shining city on a hill, a beacon for huddled masses yearning to breathe free and a beneficent global policeman safeguarding “universal human rights,” enforcing “universal human values” and spreading “freedom and democracy” around the world is being stomped into the dirt, having excrement poured all over it, and being stomped into the dirt some more. As the curtain descends on this final act of Pax Americana, the image of the orange enfant terrible and the senile puppet with his child-nurse in tow playing on the teeter-totter of electoral dysfunction on the playground of second childhood will forever remain etched into the retinas of the whole world. The whole world will then be able to move on and look for worthier role models and for less corrupt policemen. And that’s progress!

The collapse of the USA will make the collapse of the USSR look like a stroll through a leafy park and a boat ride on a placid pond. I’ve been saying this for 15 years now. My message is still there, for all those who wish to understand what’s been happening and to keep their sanity.

RUDOLF STEINER DESCRIBES THE HOSTILE SPIRITUAL BEINGS WHO FEED OFF YOUR FEAR AND ANXIETY

Posted on by
2

By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

Anxiety, depression, and fear ravage so many today, but few pause to consider that in addition to the material influences in our lives, we may be also under the influence of beings which exist in dimensions outside of our ordinary perception.

But there is much more to reality than what we can see. feel, hear, taste and touch. In fact, an accounting of the matter that makes up the universe reveals that some 73% of it is made up of dark energy, and another 23% is made up of dark matter, neither of which can we see, nor understand. Furthermore, the human eye is only capable of seeing around .0035% of the entire spectrum of electromagnetic (EM) radiation. When we look into the heavens, 96% of it is invisible to us. Include in this the spiritual realms and there is an entire universe of possibilities which exists beyond our five senses.

Very few scientists today are willing to explore metaphysics to examine life beyond ordinary perception in order to make a connection between the seen and the unseen.

Rudolf Steiner, though, one of the most prolific and gifted scientists, philosophers, and esotericists of his time, devoted much of his work to the task of peering behind the veil, sharing his insight into the deeper nature of life and of the world beyond.

Regarding anxiety and depression, Steiner spoke of hostile beings in the spiritual world which influence and feed off of human emotion; a concept flatly rejected by most today. Yet this also analysis holds true for shamans and others who access the spiritual dimensions in order to alleviate mental suffering for their patients.

Many are familiar with the notion of energy vampires, or people who suck your energy and feed off your negative emotions. On the existence of similar entities which exist in other dimensions, Steiner wrote:

“There are beings in the spiritual realms for whom anxiety and fear emanating from human beings offer welcome food. When humans have no anxiety and fear, then these creatures starve. People not yet sufficiently convinced of this statement could understand it to be meant comparatively only. But for those who are familiar with this phenomenon, it is a reality. If fear and anxiety radiates from people and they break out in panic, then these creatures find welcome nutrition and they become more and more powerful. These beings are hostile towards humanity.

Everything that feeds on negative feelings, on anxiety, fear and superstition, despair or doubt, are in reality hostile forces in supersensible worlds, launching cruel attacks on human beings, while they are being fed. Therefore, it is above all necessary to begin with that the person who enters the spiritual world overcomes fear, feelings of helplessness, despair and anxiety. But these are exactly the feelings that belong to contemporary culture and materialism; because it estranges people from the spiritual world, it is especially suited to evoke hopelessness and fear of the unknown in people, thereby calling up the above mentioned hostile forces against them.” ~Rudolf Steiner

Negative emotions are food for inimical spirits. 

A concept such as this isn’t readily accepted into the everyday conversation steered by rigid skepticism and scientific materialism. The traditions of today have sought to expel ancient metaphysical wisdom and its practical application from our lives, and though scientific inquiry is exceptionally valuable, spiritual perception has always been a part of our experience.

“And yet, despite the cynical skepticism, all of the ancient mystery schools, true shamanic insights, and esoteric teachings (much of which have been suppressed and/or distorted over thousands of years for obvious reasons) have conveyed this truth for ‘the ones with eyes to see and ears to hear’, using their own language and symbolism, be it “The General Law” (Esoteric Christianity), Archons (Gnostics), “Lords of Destiny” (Hermeticism), Predator/Fliers – “The topic of all topics” (Shamanism, Castaneda), “The Evil Magician” (Gurdjieff), The Shaitans (Sufism), The Jinn (Arabian mythology), Wetiko (Native American Spirituality), Occult Hostile Forces (Sri Aurobindo & The Mother, The Integral Yoga), etc.” ~Bernhard Guenther

Dealings with extra-sensory or hyper-dimensional beings have long been a part of our history, and are directly accessible to any of us when proper practice and attention is given to the matter. I know this to be true from my experiences with plant medicine shamanism where it is entirely possible to enter into states of consciousness where entire cosmologies of life exist and are available to interact with.

Finding oneself in the rut of spiraling negative self-talk, depression, crippling anxiety, or uncontrollable, irrational fear, is a sign, as Steiner points out, of a disconnection from our true spiritual nature, exacerbated by beings who operate in the spiritual realms. This is why some consider disorders like this to be spiritual illnesses, and until the rift is healed with proper attention given to the development of spirit, the feelings tend to exacerbate and drive one further into distress.

“When humans have no anxiety and fear, then these creatures starve.” ~Rudolph Steiner

Saturday Matinee: Death Laid an Egg

Posted on by
Reply

Synopsis by Robert Firsching

Source: AllMovie

This is a deliriously strange thriller about a scientist (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who is breeding headless, boneless chickens at a high-tech farm. He’s having an affair with Ewa Aulin, who is plotting with him to kill his wife (Gina Lollobrigida)…and she’s plotting with Aulin to kill him…and he and Lollobrigida are plotting…oh, it’s too confusing, but extremely memorable. The bizarre, only semi-linear editing and trippy cinematographic techniques are artifacts of the psychedelic era and combine with the twisted story to make any Euro-cultist’s dreams come true. A film that defies easy categorization, it veers uneasily between giallo, drug film, and science-fiction, with heavy doses of romance and Antonioni-like weirdness. Some parts are even reminiscent of David Lynch‘s Eraserhead. Aulin was in the even stranger Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion a few years later. A must-see for genre fans.

 

Watch the full film on Kanopy.

Everybody Knows the Fight was Fixed

Posted on by
2

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Yeah, like [in] a church. Church of the Good Hustler.”

– Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) in The Hustler

At the end of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play, A Doll’s House, Nora, the aggrieved wife, leaves her husband’s house and all the illusions that sustained its marriage of lies. She chooses freedom over fantasy.  She will no longer be played with like a doll but will try to become a free woman – a singular one.  “There is another task I must undertake first. I must try and educate myself,” she tells her husband Torvald, a man completely incapable of understanding the social programming that has made him society’s slave.

When Nora closes the doll’s house door behind her, the sound is like a hammer blow of freedom. For anyone who has seen the play, even when knowing the outcome in advance, that sound is profound. It keeps echoing. It interrogates one’s conscience.

The echo asks: Do you live inside America’s doll house where a vast tapestry of lies, bad faith, and cheap grace keep you caged in comfort, as you repeat the habits that have been drilled into you?

In this doll’s house of propaganda into which America has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.

Americans who voted for either Trump or Biden in the 2020 election are like Torvald clones.  They refuse to open that door so they might close it behind them.  They live in the doll’s house – all 146+ million of them. Like Torvald, they are comforted. They are programmed and propagandized, embracing the illusion that the electoral system is not structured and controlled to make sure no significant change can occur, no matter who is president. It is a sad reality promoted as democracy.

They will prattle on and give all sorts of reasons why they voted, and for whom, and how if you don’t vote you have no right to bitch, and how it’s this sacred right to vote that makes democracy great, blah blah blah. It’s all sheer nonsense. For the U.S.A. is not a democracy; it is an oligarchy run by the wealthy for the wealthy.

This is not a big secret.  Everybody knows this is true; knows the electoral system is sheer show business with the presidential extravaganza drawing the big money from corporate lobbyists, investment bankers, credit card companies, lawyers, business and hedge fund executives, Silicon Valley honchos, think tanks, Wall Street gamblers, millionaires, billionaires, et. al.  Biden and Trump spent over 3 billion dollars on the election. They are owned by the money people.

Both are old men with long, shameful  histories. A quick inquiry will show how the rich have profited immensely from their tenures in office.  There is not one hint that they could change and have a miraculous conversion while in future office, like JFK.  Neither has the guts or the intelligence.  They are nowhere men who fear the fate that John Kennedy faced squarely when he turned against the CIA and the war machine.  They join the craven company of Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama.  They all got the message that was sent from the streets of Dallas in 1963: You don’t want to die, do you?

Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, its vast intelligence apparatus, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites? The answer is obvious.

It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, or Jimmy Carter. The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why.

All the while, the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful. It is now essentially an electronic prison that is being “Built Back Better.” The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population through their corporate mass-media stenographers. Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other.

Only those backed by the wealthy power brokers get elected in the U.S.A. Then when elected, it’s payback time.  Palms are greased.  Everybody knows this is true. It’s called corruption.  So why would anyone, who opposes a corrupt political oligarchy, vote, unless they were casting a vote of conscience for a doomed third-party candidate?

Leonard Cohen told it true with “Everybody Knows”:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

And yet everybody who voted for the two men backed by the super-rich owners of the country knew what they were doing, unless they live under a rock and come out every four years to vote.  Perhaps they were out buying stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey, so they can give thanks for the farce (stuffing: Latin: farcire ).

They have their reasons.  Now the Biden people celebrate, just as Trump’s supporters did in 2016.  I can hear fireworks going off as I write here in a town where 90% + voted for Biden and hate Trump with a passion more intense than what they ever could work up for a spurned lover or spouse.  This is mass psychosis. It’s almost funny.

At least we have gotten rid of Trump, they say.  No one can be worse. They think this is logic.  Like Torvald, they cannot begin to understand why anyone would want to leave the doll’s house, how anyone could refuse to play a game in which the dice are loaded.  They will deny they are in the doll’s house while knowing the dice are loaded and still roll the die, not caring that their choice – whether it’s Tweedledee or Tweedledum – will result in the death and impoverishment of so many, that being the end result of oligarchic rule at home and imperialism abroad.

Orwell called this Doublethink:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.

And while in Nineteen Eighty-Four Doublethink is learned by all the Party members “and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox,” today in the U.S.A., it has been mastered even by the so-called unintelligent.

To live in the U.S.A. is to live in the Church of the Good Hustler.

People often ask: What can we do to make the country better?  What is your alternative?

A child could answer that one: Don’t vote if you know that both contenders are backed by the super-rich elites, what some call the Deep State.  Which of course they are.  Everybody knows.

The so-called left and right argue constantly about whom to support.  It’s a pseudo-debate constructed to allow people to think their vote counts; that the game isn’t rigged. It’s hammered into kids’ heads from an early age. Be grateful, give thanks that you live in a democracy where voting is allowed and your choice is as important as a billionaire’s such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Charles Koch. In the voting booth we are all equal.

Myths die hard.  This one never does:

“Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams, will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way.” [i]

“With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. It’s time for America to unite. And to heal.” [ii]

“Above all else, the time has come for us to renew our faith in ourselves and in America.  In recent years, that faith has been challenged.” [iii]

Your voice – our faith – it’s time to unite and heal.

Ask the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Afghanis, the Libyans, the Palestinians, et al.  They sing a different tune, one not heard In the Church of the Good Hustler.

After campaigning hard for the losing presidential candidate in 1972, I nearly  choked when I heard Richard Nixon’s inaugural address in January 1973. Clinging to the American myth the previous year, I had campaigned for a genuine anti-war Democrat, Senator George McGovern. The war against Vietnam was still raging and Nixon, who had been first elected in 1968 as a “peace candidate,” succeeding the previous “peace candidate” Lyndon Baines Johnson, was nevertheless overwhelmingly elected, despite Watergate allegations appearing in the months preceding the election.  Nixon won forty-nine states to McGovern’s one – Massachusetts, where I lived.  It was a landslide. I felt sick, woke up, got up, and left the doll’s house.

“Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness,” wrote the French sociologist Jacques Ellul in 1965 in Propaganda:

It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness…. It also corresponds to deep and constant needs, more developed today, perhaps, than ever before: the need to believe and obey, to create and hear fables, to communicate in the language of myths.

In a country where loneliness is widespread, the will to believe and the power of positive thinking are far more powerful than the will to truth.  Unlike Nora, who knew that when she left the doll’s house she was choosing the loneliness of the solitary soul, Americans prefer myths that induce them to act out of habit so they can lose themselves in the group.

This is so despite the fact that In the Church of the Good Hustler, when you play the game, you lose.  We are all Americans and your vote counts and George Washington never told a lie.

[i] Donald Trump

[ii] Joseph Biden

[iii] Richard Nixon