Yearly Archives: 2022

Is it already too late to say goodbye?

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By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

It seems we may have reached the moment when it is time to say goodbye. It has been fun, educational and sometimes cathartic – for me at least. I hope you got something from our time together too.

I am not going anywhere, of course. Not for now at least. I love to write. For as long as I feasibly can, I will continue to rail against injustice, call out corporate power and its abuses, and demand a fairer and more open society.

But I have to be realistic. I have to recognise that a growing number of you will not be joining me here on this page for much longer. And it feels rude after so much time together not to bid you a fond farewell before it is too late. I will miss you.

Many of you may have assumed it wouldn’t end this way. You probably imagined that I would get banned by Facebook or Twitter. You would be able to rally round, send in complaints worded in the strongest possible terms, and lobby for my reinstatement. Maybe even sign a petition.

But it isn’t going to end like that. There will be no bang. I have been too careful for that to be my fate. I have avoided rude and crude words. I have steered clear of insults (apologies if my responses have sometimes been a little caustic). I have not defamed anyone. I have avoided “fake news” – except to critique it. I have not peddled “conspiracy theories”, unless quoting the British Medical Journal on Covid now counts as misinformation (yes, I know for a few of you it does).

But none of that has helped. My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares. Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. “Going viral” is a distant memory.

No, I won’t be banned. I will fade incrementally, like a small star in the night sky – one among millions – gradually eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice.

Which is why I am saying my goodbyes now while I can still reach you, my most obstinate followers.

But this isn’t really about one small light being snuffed out. This isn’t just about our relationship coming to an end. Something bigger, and more disturbing, is taking place.

Journalists like me are part of an experiment – in a new, more democratised media landscape. We have developed new reader-funded models so that we can break free of the media corporations, which until now ensured billionaires and the state controlled the flow of information in one direction only: to speak down to us.

The corporate media need corporate advertising – or their owners’ deep pockets – to survive. They don’t need you, except as a captive audience. You’re both their prisoner and their product.

But the lifeblood of a reader-funded journalist, as the name suggests, are readers. The more of you we attract, the better chance there is that we can generate donations and income and make the model sustainable. Our Achilles’ heel is our dependence on social media to find you, to keep reaching you, to offer you an alternative from the corporate media.

If Facebook (sorry, the Meta universe) and Twitter stop independent writers from growing their readerships by manipulating the algorithms, by ghosting and shadow-banning them, and by all the other trickery we do not yet understand, then new voices cannot grow their funding base and break free of corporate control.

And equally, for those like me who are already established and have significant numbers of readers, these tech giants can whittle them away one by one. Ostensibly, I have many tens of thousands of followers, but for several years now I have been reaching fewer and fewer of you. I am starved of connection. The danger, already only too obvious, is that my readership, and funding model, will slowly start to shrivel and die.

Joe Rogan, Russell Brand and a handful of titans of the new media age are so big they can probably weather it out. But the rest of us will not be so lucky.

Readers will lose sight of us, as our light slowly fades, and then we will be gone completely. Vanished.

I have lost count of the followers who – because, god knows, an algorithm slipped up? – tell me they have received a social media post many months after they last saw one from me. In the cacophony of media noise, they had not noticed that I had unexpectedly gone quiet until that reminder arrived or else they assumed I had given up writing.

Which is why, if you want to keep seeing posts from me and writers like me, if this is not soon to be a final goodbye, if you think it important to read non-corporate analysis and commentary, then you need to act. You should be bookmarking your favourite writers and visiting their sites regularly – not just when you are prompted to by Mark Zuckerberg.

You need to be an active consumer of news – not a passive one, as you were raised to be when the choice was between three TV channels and a dozen print newspapers.

You need to search out and maintain those connections before they are gone entirely and the window has closed. Because those voices you prize now will wither and decay like autumn leaves if they have no audience. If you leave it too long, even when you finally remember to go search for them, you may find they are no longer there to be discovered. You will have missed the chance to say goodbye.

So let us say it now, while we still can: Farewell.

UPDATE:

Writing is a solitary activity, and it can be easy to imagine that what was obvious inside your head will be clear to others when that idea takes its place in the outside world. But a proportion of early readers of this post have mistaken it for an actual goodbye, rather than as a cautionary tale of what has been happening and what is still to come. So let me reassure you: I am going to continue writing and you can continue reading me, so long as either Twitter and Facebook direct you to me or you make the effort to find me.

Here’s hoping that my goodbye will prove unnecessary.

Vaccines That Don’t Stop Transmission Can Create Conditions For More Virulent Variants To Spread

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By Arjun Walia

Source: The Pulse

Penn State biologist David Kennedy PhD, published a paper in PLOS BIOLOGY in 2015 titled, “Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens.” In it, he explains how the transmission of viruses and more severe strains by infected vaccinees could provide an opportunity for more virulent variants to spread.

The article described an experiment with a herpes virus that causes Marek disease in chickens. Vaccines against Marek disease are described as “leaky” because, although they protect chickens from getting sick, they don’t prevent them from becoming infected and transmitting the virus to unvaccinated chickens. That allows the most virulent strains that normally would die along with an infected chicken to survive and infect and kill unvaccinated chickens.

Vaccines that keep hosts alive, but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population…Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.

Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens

In other words, the vaccinated and unvaccinated can still spread the disease, and the vaccinated are protected from severe disease and symptoms. But what happens if vaccines don’t protect against severe disease and symptoms of these new variants? This means that conditions can be created that cause more severe disease in the vaccinated as well.

We’ve seen this with seasonal flu, where vaccines have to constantly be updated because of changes in the virus, and we’re currently witnessing it with COVID vaccines. COVID vaccines will most likely be tweaked as new variants continue to emerge, and shots may be encouraged once or twice a year. Who knows?

Many people have already received a third dose and in some countries, like Israel and Canada, a fourth dose is being offered to the elderly and immunocompromised patients. This is something people aren’t used to, so many jabs in such a short period of time, along with mandates as well.

We now know that COVID vaccines don’t stop the transmission of COVID, and that variants like Omicron and Delta are able to escape the protection that COVID vaccines provide. This is why the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises that even after they’re fully vaccinated, people should continue to mask up and socially distance in public places in part because they could still unknowingly become infected and transmit COVID to people who have and haven’t yet received their shots.

But do COVID vaccines help reduce the transmission? And does that mean they aren’t considered “leaky” vaccines? We will get to this discussion later.

An argument can be made that COVID vaccines protect people from severe symptoms and chances of hospitalization, but how much protection can they really provide for most people under the age of 70 who have a very high chance of survival? Furthermore, we musn’t forget that COVID added to an already existing problem of hospital capacity issues. Is COVID the issue or is an inadequate healthcare system?

And why hasn’t the science behind natural immunity been included in health policy? According to CDC statistics, for example, 95 percent of people who have died with or from COVID have an average of four other causes (comorbidities) listed on their death certificate. Furthermore, it’s not entirely clear how many people are ending up in hospitals with COVID, or because of COVID.

There are multiple real world examples showing that COVID vaccines fail to prevent transmission, including exponential outbreaks in the most highly vaccinated populations on the planet. This is why of the top five counties that have the highest percentage of population fully vaccinated (99.9–84.3%), the CDC identifies four of them as “high” transmission counties. This fact comes from a paper published in the European Journal of Epidemiology titled, “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States.”

Right now, COVID cases are surging in the five most vaccinated states.

According to a study published in October, infected vaccinated and unvaccinated people can also carry the same viral load. Viral load is a good proxy for infectiousness.

Another study was conducted with positive samples from asymptomatic testing at UC Davis for Healthy Yolo Together and at the Unidos en Salud walk-up testing site in the Mission District of San Francisco.

The researchers looked at 869 positive samples, 500 from Healthy Yolo Together and 369 from Unidos en Salud. All the Healthy Yolo Together samples were from people who were asymptomatic at the time of positive test result, and three-quarters were from unvaccinated individuals. The Unidos en Salud samples included both asymptomatic and symptomatic cases. Just over half (198) of the Unidos en Salud samples were unvaccinated.

A press release from UC Davis Explains,

When they analyzed the data, the researchers found wide variations in viral load within both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, but not between them. There was no significant difference in viral load between vaccinated and unvaccinated, or between asymptomatic and symptomatic groups.

The idea that vaccines that are not successful in stopping the transmission of a virus can facilitate the emergence of variants has been written about by academics throughout and before this pandemic. This is evident by Kennedy’s 2015 paper cited above.

Saad O. Omais, a PhD candidate in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the American University of Beirut wrote a response to an article published by Karam Abassi, Editor in Chief of the British Medical Journal. In it he explains how COVID vaccines may not only allow the circulation of existing VOCs but can even facilitate the rise of new ones.

According to Eric T. Payne, MD, PMH, Pediatric Neurocritical Care & Epilepsy, Alberta Children’s Hospital Assistant Professor of Pediatrics & Neurology, the University of Calgary,

With widespread dissemination of COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, we are placing enormous evolutionary pressure on SARS-CoV-2 to continue mutating to evade our immune system, gain cell entry, replicate, and possibly cause illness. And, we are now using very “leaky” vaccines, making viral evasion from our antibodies that much easier. Only the fit will survive. Consider the reasonable analogy of antibiotic resistance – this is driven by the widespread and inappropriate use of antibiotics, not by people avoiding antibiotics.

RE: Mandatory mRNA vaccine mandate for Alberta physicians

In November, Dr. Günter Kampf, consultant hospital epidemiologist and Associate Professor for hygiene and environmental medicine at the University Medicine Greifswald, Germany published an article The Lancet explaining,

There is increasing evidence that vaccinated individuals continue to have a relevant role in transmission. In Massachusetts, USA, a total of 469 new COVID-19 cases were detected during various events in July, 2021, and 346 (74%) of these cases were in people who were fully or partly vaccinated, 274 (79%) of whom were symptomatic.

Cycle threshold values were similarly low between people who were fully vaccinated (median 22·8) and people who were unvaccinated, not fully vaccinated, or whose vaccination status was unknown (median 21·5), indicating a high viral load even among people who were fully vaccinated.2

In the USA, a total of 10 262 COVID-19 cases were reported in vaccinated people by April 30, 2021, of whom 2725 (26·6%) were asymptomatic, 995 (9·7%) were hospitalised, and 160 (1·6%) died.3 In Germany, 55·4% of symptomatic COVID-19 cases in patients aged 60 years or older were in fully vaccinated individuals,4 and this proportion is increasing each week.

In Münster, Germany, new cases of COVID-19 occurred in at least 85 (22%) of 380 people who were fully vaccinated or who had recovered from COVID-19 and who attended a nightclub.5 People who are vaccinated have a lower risk of severe disease but are still a relevant part of the pandemic.

It is therefore wrong and dangerous to speak of a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Historically, both the USA and Germany have engendered negative experiences by stigmatising parts of the population for their skin colour or religion. I call on high-level officials and scientists to stop the inappropriate stigmatisation of unvaccinated people, who include our patients, colleagues, and other fellow citizens, and to put extra effort into bringing society together.

COVID-19: stigmatising the unvaccinated is not justified

Fact Checkers and The World Health Organization Weigh In

The discussion of the possibility of vaccines creating conditions for new variants to emerge more easily started several months ago, and was quickly shut down by third party Facebook fact-checkers and the World Health Organization. Yes, COVID vaccines don’t completely stop the transmission of the virus, but arguments can be made that they at least help in reducing the transmission. But, is that enough to stop what Kennedy is talking about in his paper? Does this still mean that these vaccines are “leaky”?

For example, in May 2021 Euronews reported the following,

The World Health Organization (WHO) has rejected claims that COVID-19 vaccines are causing new variants of the virus. Reports have circulated online in France saying that vaccinated people are “more likely” to infect others with “super-strains” of the coronavirus. But the WHO and other immunologists have said that these claims are unfounded and have no scientific basis. “There is no evidence of this,” a WHO spokesperson Euronews. “Vaccination is part of the solution for suppressing transmission along with existing public health measures.”

An article published in Nature in February 2021 makes a case for COVID vaccines and their ability to reduce transmission, but also explains how this may not be the case. It does present some evidence showing that viral load is less in vaccinated individuals, but the studies cited are small compared to the ones mentioned earlier in the article.

And given the fact that we are now in 2022, there is much more data available showing cases in highly vaccinated populations and people as emphasized earlier. Breakthrough infections are happening all over the world among the vaccinated, this is no secret. Case counts are high in vaccinated people, but this is to be expected given the fact that in most regions, the majority of people are vaccinated.

But an article published by Harvard Health explains that people who are vaccinated for SARS-CoV-2 but get breakthrough infections may be less likely to spread the virus because they shed it for a shorter period than unvaccinated people who are infected, according a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. If this is true, it would reduce transmission rate but is this reduction significant? And again, it may contribute to reducing transmission, but it doesn’t stop it. Given the outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations, transmission reduction doesn’t seem to be significant.

A recent paper was published emphasizing the number of unvaccinated people that need to be excluded from a setting to prevent one COVID transmission is extremely high and negligible. The study didn’t even take into account the immunity that’s already been built up in a large amount of the population.

The authors explain,

While SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are beneficial, the high NNEs suggest that excluding unvaccinated people has negligible benefits for reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmissions in many jurisdictions across the globe. This is because unvaccinated people are likely not at significant risk – in absolute terms – of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to others in most types of settings (as of mid-to-end November 2021). This is why so many unvaccinated people likely need to be excluded to prevent one transmission event.

Evaluating the number of unvaccinated people needed to exclude to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmissions

This topic really got the attention of Facebook fact checkers on March 6, 2021, when Geert Vanden Bossche, an independent consultant who previously worked in vaccine development, published an open letter to the World Health Organization on Twitter. In it, Vanden Bossche claimed that COVID-19 vaccines “should not be used amid an epidemic” and called for a halt to mass vaccination campaigns. Vanden Bossche claimed that global COVID-19 vaccination campaigns would accelerate the emergence of dangerous variants, which will escape vaccine-induced immunity and cause severe disease

Fact checker Health Feedback responded, stating that,

Vanden Bossche’s claim is based on two assumptions. The first is that COVID-19 vaccines “don’t prevent infection, they protect against disease”. The second is that vaccination doesn’t reduce transmission. These assumptions are unsupported.

COVID-19 vaccines are critical for controlling the pandemic; vaccines still offer partial protection against new variants of the virus

When claims made are marked as false by fact checkers like Health Feedback, and others, the claims are completely censored on social media platforms. Any outlets that share them are punished with reduced page distribution. Fact-checkers have a tremendous amount of power to limit the spread of information, be it factual, false, or even opinion based, and they’ve been criticized for being incorrect multiple times.

For example, the editor-in-chief of The British Medical Journal (BMJ), Fiona Godlee, alongside Kamran Abbasi, an executive editor of the BMJ who succeeded Godlee on January 1st 2022, published a piece in the journal criticizing Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook fact checkers, calling them incompetent. The piece was published on Nov 2, 2021.

In it, Godlee and Abbasi criticize Facebook for putting a “fake news” label on an article published in the BMJ by award winning investigative journalist Paul Thacker regarding fraud and the manipulation of data during Pfizer’s COVID vaccine clinical trials.

Here are three examples where it’s happened to us where fact checkers were forced to retract their ratings, but it’s happened many more times than this and the labels are often not removed unless you bend to the will of the fact checker.

The point is, how trustworthy are fact checkers?

Data To Support Whatever You Want To Believe

At the end of the day, although I believe it’s clear that COVID vaccines do not stop transmission or help reduce transmission in a significant manner, data and science can be used to oppose this belief. If you dive deep into the science, sometimes it’s hard to know what to believe. These days, data can be shared to confirm what you want to believe.

What doesn’t sit well, however, is that discussions that oppose what’s often presented by government health authorities is never really acknowledged within the mainstream. For example, like the idea that vaccines do not stop the transmission of the virus, and that breakthrough infections are rare. Why are we seeing so much censorship of evidence and opinion from experts in the field?

Yes, breakthrough COVID-19 cases happen in people who are fully vaccinated, and they are happening more frequently now that the Omicron variant is circulating widely and immunity from may vaccines may be waning.

Kennedy makes it clear that “imperfect vaccination” that does not stop transmission “can enhance the transmission of highly virulent pathogens.” Even if COVID vaccines do help slow down the transmission of COVID, which many would argue they clearly don’t, does this mean COVID vaccines would be considered “imperfect” by Kennedy’s definition? And does this mean that mass vaccinations are facilitating the development of more variants, for which more vaccines will be created that don’t stop transmission, thus creating the neverending development of COVID vaccines? Big pharma would certainly like that.

The Real Noam Chomsky

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By Raul Fernandez Berriozabal

Source: The Wall Will Fall

This will not be a popular post, simply because of the cult of personality of mythical dimensions built around the figure of Professor Noam Chomsky, regardless, I am posting at the insistence of a friend of mine who encouraged me to publish my critiques highlighting some of the most problematic inconsistencies of Chomksy that ironically enough, have served to “manufacture consent” for the corrupt and criminal establishment that he claims to oppose.

I admit it, for years I admired Professor Chomsky’s work, in spite of his tedious monotone, he comes across as most clever and articulate, yet there is much more to this controversial character that many of his loyal followers perceive as a guru or cult figure and his critics as a faux progressive or a gatekeeper at best and a collaborator at worst.

Here are some of the inconsistencies that I have observed (and documented) during the last few years:

• In spite of the occasional criticism towards Israeli leadership, Chomsky ultimately supports the existence of the belligerent apartheid state of Israel.

• Chomsky opposes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, a global non-violent campaign that uses economic and political pressure on Israel to end of Israeli occupation and colonization of Palestinian land, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, respect for the right of return of Palestinian refugees and recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination.

• Chomsky was a propagandist of the US/NATO aggression against the former Yugoslav Federation, enabling the criminal policy that broke the Yugoslav Federation into six unstable, impoverished micro-states after carrying out a 78-day bombing campaign in which US/NATO dropped over 3,000 bombs killing thousands of civilians.

• Chomsky said that the Western military intervention was the only way to prevent genocide in Libya, advocated for the ‘no fly zone’ and subsequent destruction of Libya. Every word he uttered turned out to be completely false. The allegations of abuses by the Libyan government were total war propaganda fabrications and look what happened to Libya, once the most prosperous nation in the African continent under Qaddafi who offered, public housing, free healthcare, free education, and many other public benefits to Libyans is now a failed state, a territory disputed by al-Qaeda, Daesh and other Wahhabi takfiri groups rival groups, where organ trafficking is prevalent, where, thousands of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean after paying human traffickers to take them to Europe in tiny, overloaded boats, where sub-Saharan Africans are openly sold as slaves for as little as $200 and where human life is worth not more than infected yeast.

What is Chomsky saying about Libya these days?

Has he assumed any responsibility for his role in manufacturing consent?

No, not at all, Professor Chomsky remains invested in openly advocating for regime change in Syria.

• Chomsky routinely parrots the corporate media lines by referring to Bashar Al Assad an autocrat who needs to be forcibly removed and seems to justify with the continuous bombing of the great Syrian nation to achieve regime change. As of today, he remains a strong advocate for the U.S. occupation forces to remain illegally occupying Syrian territory.

• Chomsky supported the U.S. led coup in Ukraine which successfully installed Europe’s first Nazi government since Adolph Hitler and his Third Reich.• Chomsky acknowledges the one-party corporate oligarchy, and then urges everyone to vote for the “lesser evil”. He did in 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, He publicly supported the candidacy of war criminals, Barak Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton “Butcher of Libya, Syria and Honduras” in 2016 and Crime Bill’s author, Joe Biden in 2020 just to maintain the status quo and hence a system of injustice that he claims to oppose.

• Chomsky is perfectly kosher with W Bush government’s official narrative of 9/11 – he went as far as to say, “who cares?” about who might be the real culprits of this historical event.

• Chomsky was academically formed by and works for MIT, an elitist university with close ties with the Military Industrial Complex and the CIA.

• Chomsky defines himself as an “anarcho-syndicalist” yet he defends the existence of the Federal Reserve – while Chomsky bemoans the widespread poverty in America and the Third World, he has never spoken publicly on the role of the Federal Reserve. Therefore, most leftist activists influenced by Chomsky remain unaware of the role played by this privately owned banking cartel which basically prints worthless flat currency out of thin air.

• Chomsky opposes the Right of Return of the Palestinian diaspora – which in essence is opposing international law, since the Right of Return is an inalienable and basic human right.

• These days, Chomsky has turned full-blown fascist as he called for the isolation of the unvaccinated from society even if that means their starvation. Chomsky’s most inflammatory comment came when he was asked how this isolated class he is proposing would receive food. He remarked that this was a problem for the unvaccinated. The solution then, according to Chomsky, is to appeal to moral capacity and then claim that those who do not understand should live in an isolated existence with food uncertainty. Please keep in mind that in his authoritarian views, Chomsky is oblivious to clinical data that shows that Covid vaccines do not prevent neither infection nor transmission, in fact, early data shows that the variant, Omicron is infecting those who are “fully vaccinated” at a much higher rate than the unvaccinated and American authorities also revealed the 79% of the country’s infection cases were vaccinated.

• In addition, Chomsky belittles the importance of Medicare for All in the midst of a global pandemic and cynically refers to it as “candy” to be pursued, but never achieved.In essence, Chomsky has made a career talking from both sides of his mouth while perfecting the art of manufacturing consent.

Chomsky talks like an anarchist during off years, then tucks tail and comes slinking back to the establishment during election years – that is why many refer to him as “controlled opposition” or “left gatekeeper”, this is why I have no use for Chomsky, and why it baffles me when people speak of him in tones of reverence and awe.

Another Nail in the U.S. Empire’s Coffin… Biden Signs $770 Billion War Budget

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

As this year ends, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law military spending of $770 billion. That’s just for the next year alone. The scale of wastefulness and bloated corruption is eye-watering. It eclipses what the United States is willing to invest for overhauling its badly neglected civilian infrastructure and for combating the coronavirus pandemic that has killed far more people in the U.S. than in any other nation.

If there is one thing that portends a historic collapse of U.S. global power it is its pathological addiction to militarism that is hemorrhaging vital resources.

What is also amazing is how this gargantuan deformity in economic planning is presented as somehow rational and normal by the Western media.

Three decades after the Cold War officially ended, the U.S. is setting a new record high for annual expenditure on its armed forces.

Biden’s budget – his first as president – exceeds the record set by the previous Trump administration for military largesse of $740 billion.

So much for wishing humanity peace and prosperity – as is the international tradition at this time of year – when the U.S. allocates such a grotesque amount of resources to the means of war and annihilation.

This obscene expenditure is not in any way conceivably a “defense budget” as it is termed in Orwellian newspeak. It is a dreadful and despicable war budget.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 11 top nations combined. Compared with China ($250bn) the U.S. budget is nearly three times bigger. The U.S. spends over 12 times more than Russia ($60bn) on its armed forces.

Those figures alone tell beyond any doubt which nation is the ultimate aggressor. Yet, farcically, the Western corporate media in Orwellian fashion portray China and Russia as the aggressors against whom the United States is “defending’ the rest of the world.

Biden’s 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), as it is formally titled, devotes billions more to devising new nuclear weapons and to provoke China and Russia. Camouflaged with Orwellian rhetoric, there is some $7 billion for the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” and $4 billion for the “European Defense Initiative”.

The Biden administration has committed a further $300 million in military support for Ukraine over the next year. This is on top of the $2.5 billion in arms that Washington has plowed into Ukraine since the CIA-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 which brought to power a Russophobic regime.

Next week, U.S. and Russian officials are to hold negotiations in Geneva to deescalate tensions over Ukraine and Europe generally. It is blindingly obvious that the crisis over security has been created by the United States pushing a policy of militarizing Europe against Russia in the form of expanding the NATO alliance all the way to Russia’s borders.

With twisted logic, Moscow is accused of “threatening” Ukraine and European security even though its troops are on Russian soil and it is American weapons that are encroaching on Russia’s territory.

The inordinate military spending by the United States year after year is proof of the source of international tensions.

When the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991 following the demise of the Soviet Union, there was a reasonable expectation around the world for a “peace dividend” to ensue. That is, whereby Cold War militarism would at last give way to peaceful economic development and cooperation. How lamentable the disappointment!

The inescapable fact is that the U.S. economy is a war-driven system. The military-industrial complex at the heart of American capitalism is dependent on massive taxpayer-funded financial subvention. If an economy is driven for war, then it follows that conflicts and wars are inevitable. This is why, 30 years after the supposed end of the Cold War, the United States is closer to starting a war with Russia and China than ever before.

In an insightful interview this week, former United Nations diplomat Alfred Maurice de Zayas condemned what he called the “universal provocation” of the US “war budget”. De Zayas points out that the United States is preeminently guilty of undermining global peace and security. Its relentless militarism compels other nations to spend excessively on defense in order to counter the threat posed by the United States. Both China and Russia have long-proposed multilateralism and “win-win” cooperation. Neither of these nations has threatened the United States. It is always the U.S. with its mixture of paranoia and hubris that constantly portrays others as enemies and existential dangers. Again, that is due to the need for justifying the abomination of American military orgy year after year.

The truth is the United States has been at war against the rest of the world since at least the end of the Second World War. For most of that period, the Cold War, Washington cited the threat of Soviet and Chinese communism. It waged wars in dozens of countries on every continent killing tens of millions of people purportedly in the “defense of democracy and the free world”. How godawful ridiculous is that?

The Cold War was supposed to have ended, yet the U.S. continues its remorseless warmongering. It retreated from Afghanistan this year after two decades of futile war, only to now wind up tensions with Russia and China. The pretexts and excuses change over the decades, but the fundamental story remains the same: the United States is at war with the rest of the world in the vain ambition of exerting hegemonic domination. Arguably, that’s an essential definition of fascism.

But it’s not just against the rest of the world that the U.S. rulers are waging war. They are waging war against their own American citizens. The Washington elite of both parties (comprising the de facto War Party) whistle through a military budget funded by taxpayers that dwarves anything the federal government is prepared to spend on societal infrastructure and decent human development.

Far above any other nation, the U.S. has a pandemic killing nearly 850,000 people so far and there is no end in sight. U.S. rulers refuse to allocate more financial help to the population to defeat the pandemic yet they are planning to spend billions on offensive weapons systems to threaten Russia and China.

The hideously perverse priorities of the United States as demonstrated by its wanton militarism are a portent and ultimate cause of its historic failure. It is a vile disgrace that the apparent solution to its inherent contradictions is to start a catastrophic war. Fortunately, Russia and China are strong enough militarily to not let that happen. And so the outcome we will witness more of over the coming year will be the United States cratering from its own internal corruption.

Orwell was Right: Control the Language, Control the World

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By Bill Rice Jr.

Source: American Thinker

Of all the elements of today’s “New Normal,” the most ominous is the “reform” that effectively changed the meanings of previously accepted words or terms. The following glossary illustrates how changes to our vocabulary played a central role in making the world a more dangerous and frightening place.

New Normal – “Normal” is something that has long been the norm and is accepted as the norm. The key point is that the “old” normal no longer applies. This change in thinking provided authority figures the license to enact reforms that would not have been widely accepted in the past. 

In the old normal, a citizen might not have complied with authoritarian mandates, but in the New Normal, most will… that is, if one accepts the premise that we now have a New Normal, a premise most people now accept.

Vaccine — Previously a vaccine was an injection that provided “immunity” or prevented diseases, as well as the spread of diseases. Today, at least as it involves the COVID “vaccines,” vaccines simply (and allegedly) reduce the probability someone will develop a severe case of this disease or die from this disease.

Safe — An activity that is not dangerous or does not cause harm. 

According to public health officials and almost all doctors, COVID vaccines are “safe and effective.” According to VAERS, approximately one million Americans believe they have suffered adverse medical reactions to COVID vaccines, with approximately 20,000 deaths possibly caused by the vaccines. Several studies have concluded that VAERS captures only a small fraction of such adverse events.

Effective — Certainly today “effective” does not mean COVID vaccines prevent infection or virus spread. In many heavily vaccinated countries, the vaccinated comprise a greater percentage of new COVID cases than the unvaccinated.

Harm — Something that injures, perhaps even kills, or causes someone pain or discomfort. The key change here is that “harm” can now be caused by speech. The nexus that would definitively trace any alleged harm to any piece of speech is nebulous and impossible to prove.

Still, a person who composes words determined to include “misinformation” or “disinformation” is held guilty of causing potential harm to people who might read these words. Such a person can be censored, maligned, lose their jobs, or even be prosecuted. In our Old Normal, this rarely happened. In our New Normal, it happens daily.

Misinformation or Disinformation — In its simplest terms, this would be information that is provably false.

In our “New Normal,” misinformation or disinformation is simply any information that challenges the veracity of pronouncements made by authorized experts or authorities. That is, Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s leading public health authority, cannot be charged with producing “disinformation,” but skeptic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can and should be.

Also, in today’s New Normal, many people censor their own thoughts as they know “free speech” can result in personal or professional harm. By now, the censors don’t even have to censor everyone.  People do it themselves.

Science and “The science” — A theory largely accepted by the scientific community and public. 

“Science” used to be the process of testing a hypothesis and was almost never “settled.” In the past, a skeptic who examined or challenged the conclusions of peers was himself engaging in science. Today, “The Science” is what the authorized scientists and officials at public health bureaucracies say it is, and cannot or should not be challenged by other “scientists…” who perhaps should not even be called scientists and should now be labeled as “science deniers.” Or as…

Anti-vaxxer — Technically, this would be a person who opposes all vaccines. In Newspeak, it means anyone who is against mandatory COVID vaccines. In practice, this term is used as a slur to denigrate anyone who questions the pronouncements of authorities.  If you oppose mandatory COVID vaccines for whatever reason, you are a “science denier” or “anti-science…” and, as such can and should be punished or censored because you could be causing “harm” to the public. 

Free or freedom — In “the land of the free” the definition of freedom has also been radically changed.

Today, some Americans are “free” to keep their jobs or go to a restaurant or see a play if they can prove they have received at least two injections of an experimental vaccine (a vaccine where the vaccinated waive their right to sue if they later suffer harm). Americans may be allowed to engage in “free speech” on social media… if they say the right things.

It’s not just “COVID” topics that are now being regulated by speech monitors. If you publish “extremist” speech or politically incorrect speech that can be labeled as “harmful” or “dangerous,” you also can lose your job or speech privileges. 

With the precedent established that speech can cause “harm” and that the primary role of government is to protect people from harm, the harm of being “offended” by speech is now a sanctionable offense. 

Patriotism or patriot — In the past, a “patriot” was one who stood up to tyrannical governments and/or displayed a great love for their country. Today, for many Americans, a patriot is one who complies with the edicts of their government and helps attack or embarrasses those who challenge governmental authority.

Just this week, President Biden proclaimed that Americans who get vaccinated are doing their patriotic duty. This statement builds on the “us-against-them” theme, the good American vs. bad American narrative.

Public health — This term once meant the state of overall health in hundreds of millions of people who comprise “the public.” In the last two years, it’s come to mean the “health” of people who may or may not have COVID-19.

Today, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, mental health, obesity – all the conditions that kill and harm people — are afterthoughts when compared to “COVID health.” 

All of the above was made possible by changes in accepted language. George Orwell was right. If you want to control people, first control the language.

COVID, a virus that poses no significant health risk to 98 percent of the population, has given us a “New Normal” where “vaccines” are not vaccines, where “freedom” is now a privilege granted to those who obey, and where unelected public health officials have made billions of dollars for pharmaceutical companies.

Saturday Matinee: Capricorn One

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By Ken Zurski

Source: Unremembered

In 1976, a controversial new book was released that contended the Apollo 11 moon mission never happened. We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Million Dollar Swindle was written by Bill Kaysing, a Navy midshipman and rocket specialist, who claimed to have inside knowledge of a government conspiracy to fake the moon landing.

Kaysing believes NASA couldn’t safely put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960’s (a promise made by President Kennedy) so they staged it instead. Kaysing’s theories were technical and persuasive and soon a movement of nonbelievers, inspired by the book, was born.

Whether you believed Kaysing or not was a moot point for American screenwriter and director Peter Hyams.  A former TV news anchor, Hyams was more interested in how such a thing could actually be pulled off?

“I grew up in the generation where my parents basically believed if it was in the newspaper it was true,” Hyams said in an interview with a film trade magazine.  For him, he admits, it was the same with television. “I wondered what would happen if someone faked a whole story.”

So he wrote a story based on the concept.

That was in 1972, four years before Kaysing’s book was released. Hyams shopped the script around but got no takers.  Then something unexpected happened. Watergate broke and America was thrown into a government scandal at its highest levels. Interest in a story like a fake moon landing (in the movie’s case, the first manned mission to Mars) had appeal. In 1976, Hyams was given the green light to make his movie as part of deal with ITC Entertainment to produce films with a conspiracy bent.

“Capricorn One” was released in the Summer of 1977. “Would you be shocked to find out the greatest moment of our recent history may not have happened at all?” the movie posters read.

Reviews were mixed. Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel called it “a surprisingly good thriller” while another critic Harry Themal said it was a “somewhat feeble effort at an adventure film.” Variety was even less complimentary calling it “underdeveloped” and the cast “scattershot.”

In the movie, Sam Waterston, James Brolin and O.J. Simpson play the three astronauts. Elliott Gould, Hal Holbrook, Telly Savalas, Brenda Vaccaro and Karen Black round out the cast. While Brolin was known mostly for his television role as Dr, Steven Kiley on Marcus Welby, M.D. Simpson was a celebrity athlete whose acting career was just beginning.

In hindsight the cast was impressive, but the actors weren’t as important as the story.

After the landing is staged and broadcast as real, the nation is told the three astronauts died instantly in a failed reentry.  But Gould, as journalist Robert Caulfield, is suspicious. The astronauts, who are harbored, realize they have no recourse but to escape or be killed. “If we go along with you and lie our asses off, the world of truth and ideals is, er, protected,” say’s Waterston’s Lt Col. Peter Willis. “But if we don’t want to take part in some giant rip-off of yours then somehow or other we’re managing to ruin the country.”

From there its a cat and mouse game between the good guys and bad. A dramatic helicopter chase scene ensues. In the end, Caulfield with the help from Brolin’s character exposes the conspiracy.

The movie’s tag-line accentuated the drama:

The mission was a sham. The murders were real.

“In a successful movie, the audience, almost before they see it, know they’re going to like it,” remarked Hyams. “I remember standing in the back of the theater and crying because I knew that something had changed in my life.”

The film’s final chase scenes were pure escapism. “People were clapping and cheering at the end,” Brolin relayed to a reporter shortly after the film’s release.

Today, the film’s legacy may be in the conspiracy only.  It’s impact may also have been diminished by the negative attitudes towards O.J. Simpson who in 1994 was charged and acquitted in the brutal murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown.

Even Hyams concedes to his own bizarre trivia: “I’ve made films with two leading men who were subsequently tried for the first degree murder of their wives,” he said referring to Simpson in Capricorn One and Robert Blake in his first film Busting (1974).  

Fifty years later, on the 2019 anniversary date of July 20, 1969, the moon landing is still celebrated as one of man’s greatest achievements. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” President Kennedy prophetically said in 1962.

For some, apparently, that was just too hard to believe.

Several years after it happened, a movie showed how it could be done…Hollywood style.

They are making an example of Novak Djokovic. Here’s why.

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By Kit Knightly

Source: Off-Guardian

Tennis star Novak Djokovic is being deported from Australia, after losing his final appeal the WTA’s top-ranked player will not be allowed to defend his Australian Open title.

It was reported this morning that an Australian court had refused Djokovic’s appeal against the cancellation of his visa, and as such he’s being put on a plane and flown out of the country.

To be clear: This is all because he’s not “vaccinated” against Covid19, and vocally speaks out against the practice. The government have clearly and publicly admitted as much…but we’ll get to that.

The rejection of Djokovic’s medical exemption and subsequent deportation has been accompanied by a wave of vitriol in the press the likes of which we have rarely seen.

One Australian sports presenter was “accidentally” recorded calling him a “lying, sneaky arsehole” in a video that was later “leaked” to the press.

The Spectator has one piece which is nothing more than a slew of ad hominem and mockery, against not just Djokovic but all “anti-vaxxers” and “conspiracy theorists”, calling the Serbian a “conspiracy super-spreader”. They have another blaming his “arrogance for his downfall”.

The Daily Mail ran a story headlined: “Welcome to the Wacky World of Novak Djokovic… and meet his equally wacky wife!”, and two more opinion pieces claiming his arrogance has “trashed his reputation” and calling him “a loser”.

The Guardian‘s Australian Political Correspondent Sarah Martin defends the decision and jokingly refers to it as a “no dickheads” immigration policy, attacking Djokovic’s “anti-science god complex” and calling him an “all-round jerk”.

The childish name-calling just doesn’t end. Even his fellow players are sticking the boot in.

Stefanos Tsitsipas attacked Djokovic for attempting to “play by his own rules”, adding “A very small minority chose to follow their own way. It makes the majority look like they are all fools”, which is at least true, but not in the way he means it.

Spanish star Rafael Nadal said Djokovic should just follow the rules like everyone else, perhaps flashing the kind of attitude which allowed a fascist dictator to stay in power in his country for 40 years.

Some players, at least, have come to Djokovic’s defense, including Australia’s own Nick Kyrgios, who has said he is “ashamed” of the way Australia has handled the situation and chastised other players for not showing solidarity with Djokovic.

But why is this happening? Why are they trying to punish such a public figure, and why now?

Well, firstly, I’m not sure it is about punishing Djokovic, and not just because getting to leave Australia is an odd thing to be considered any kind of punishment these days.

Rather, it’s about the performance of punishing him. It’s about making an example of him. Not so much preventing him from playing, as much as denying him a platform.

The Australian government basically admits that in their legal justification for cancelling the visa.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Djokovic had been barred from entry for “breaching the rules…it’s as simple as that.” But he is either mistaken or lying, as he directly contradicts the case presented to the appeal court by the government.

Yes, the visa was first cancelled on a technicality about incorrect information but, a judge overruled that decision, allowing Djokovic to enter the country.

That’s when Immigration Minister Alex Hawke stepped in to personally revoke the visa under section 133 of the Immigration Act 1958.

Under this (worryingly vague) legislation, the Immigration Minister is granted the power to cancel any visa at all, if:

the Minister is satisfied that it would be in the public interest to cancel the visa.

This was the argument put to the appeals court, that the minister can expel anyone, for anything, if he believes it to be in the best interests of the public.

That’s public interest, NOT public health.

Hawke admits in his written statement that Djokovic presents a “negligible risk of Covid19 infection” to those around him. So it’s nothing to do with protecting people from infection or stopping the spread of the virus.

Public statements from officials suggest that they consider any “anti-vaxxer” to be a threat to the public interest by undermining the vaccination programme. Thus they can justify barring entry to Djokovic (or, it should be said, any other “anti-vaxxer”) under the guise of “public interest”.

It’s about control, it almost always is.

In short, the government are scared that Djokovic’s very presence in the country is a threat to their neo-fascist lockdown.

If you look closely at the media messaging, there’s more than a little fear behind the wall of abuse and mockery.

Article after article is at pains to point out that “the majority of normal Australians want the Joker gone”, or some variation on that sentiment. Somewhat desperately selling the line that nobody agrees with, or supports, Djokovic’s position.

A statement which is given the lie by the regular huge protests taking place all across Australia’s major cities (like this one, just this weekend, in Sydney).

The Australian government are worried they’ve turned their country into a powder keg of public resentment, and that the slightest social spark could set it off. Increasing the size of the (already huge) protests against the lockdowns and vaccine mandates, maybe even tipping the country into full-blown chaos.

One of the Spectator articles mentions that Australians have been living in a “police state” for two years, and then vaguely references the subsequent public anger, even whilst attempting to downplay it, misrepresent its cause, and turn it against the unvaccinated.

Australia has fallen. Peace, prosperity and freedom have been sacrificed on the altar of “safety”, and Covid “vaccination” has become a quasi-religious rite in their country, even more so than the rest of the world.

As such, the unvaccinated are slandered, punished, threatened and othered at every turn. Locked down, locked up and locked out.

Can you only imagine what could happen if people found out it was all for nothing? Or that the heaven-sent vaccines aren’t the magical solution to all that ails us?

In this kind of political climate they simply can’t afford to have an “anti-vaxxer” on national television, healthy and athletic and winning championships against a field of vaccinated rivals.

Especially when three vaccinated players have already dropped out with “breathing difficulties”

Before anyone accuses me of a surfeit of cynicism, let’s review the actual words of Alex Hawke from the appeal procedure [our emphasis]:

I consider that Mr Djokovic’s ongoing presence in Australia may lead to an increase in anti-vaccination sentiment generated in the Australian community, potentially leading to an increase in civil unrest of the kind previously experienced in Australia

Elsewhere Djokovic is described as a “talisman of a community of anti-vaccine sentiment”.

This kind of brutal treatment of publicly unvaccinated famous faces will likely only intensify. It’s already spreading from country to country, with France announcing Djokovic will not be allowed to defend his French Open title unless he gets vaccinated.

It seems pretty clear that the public shaming of Djokovic is a power-play to secure what they perceive as their own tenuous grip on the narrative, one that could have far-reaching consequences moving forward.

Consider, Djokovic is not barred from entry just for being unvaccinated, but also because he has publicly spoken out against vaccination.

Australia is now not only requiring you be “fully vaccinated” to enter the country, but has barred someone for even expressing anti-vaccine sentiment.

It’s no longer enough to conform by action, you must now conform by speech.

Next is thought, but even they would never try to legislate against that…right?