Author Archives: Reid Mukai

How a Missile in Kabul Connects to a Speaker in Taipei

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By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Unz Review

This is the way the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) ends, over and over again: not with a bang, but a whimper.

Two Hellfire R9-X missiles launched from a MQ9 Reaper drone on the balcony of a house in Kabul. The target was Ayman Al-Zawahiri with a $25 million bounty on his head. The once invisible leader of ‘historic’ Al-Qaeda since 2011, is finally terminated.

All of us who spent years of our lives, especially throughout the 2000s, writing about and tracking Al-Zawahiri know how US ‘intel’ played every trick in the book – and outside the book – to find him. Well, he never exposed himself on the balcony of a house, much less in Kabul.

Another disposable asset

Why now? Simple. Not useful anymore – and way past his expiration date. His fate was sealed as a tawdry foreign policy ‘victory’ – the remixed Obama ‘Osama bin Laden moment’ that won’t even register across most of the Global South. After all, a perception reigns that George W. Bush’s GWOT has long metastasized into the “rules-based,” actually “economic sanctions-based” international order.

Cue to 48 hours later, when hundreds of thousands across the west were glued to the screen of flighradar24.com (until the website was hacked), tracking “SPAR19” – the US Air Force jet carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – as it slowly crossed Kalimantan from east to west, the Celebes Sea, went northward parallel to the eastern Philippines, and then made a sharp swing westwards towards Taiwan, in a spectacular waste of jet fuel to evade the South China Sea.

No “Pearl Harbor moment”

Now compare it with hundreds of millions of Chinese who are not on Twitter but on Weibo, and a leadership in Beijing that is impervious to western-manufactured pre-war, post-modern hysteria.

Anyone who understands Chinese culture knew there would never be a “missile on a Kabul balcony” moment over Taiwanese airspace. There would never be a replay of the perennial neocon wet dream: a “Pearl Harbor moment.” That’s simply not the Chinese way.

The day after, as the narcissist Speaker, so proud of accomplishing her stunt, was awarded the Order of Auspicious Clouds for her promotion of bilateral US-Taiwan relations, the Chinese Foreign Minister issued a sobering comment: the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland is a historical inevitability.

That’s how you focus, strategically, in the long game.

What happens next had already been telegraphed, somewhat hidden in a Global Times report. Here are the two key points:

Point 1: “China will see it as a provocative action permitted by the Biden administration rather than a personal decision made by Pelosi.”

That’s exactly what President Xi Jinping had personally told the teleprompt-reading White House tenant during a tense phone call last week. And that concerns the ultimate red line.

Xi is now reaching the exact same conclusion reached by Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year: the United States is “non-agreement capable,” and there’s no point in expecting it to respect diplomacy and/or rule of law in international relations.

Point 2 concerns the consequences, reflecting a consensus among top Chinese analysts that mirrors the consensus at the Politburo: “The Russia-Ukraine crisis has just let the world see the consequence of pushing a major power into a corner… China will steadily speed up its process of reunification and declare the end of US domination of the world order.”

Chess, not checkers

The Sinophobic matrix predictably dismissed Xi’s reaction to the fact on the ground – and in the skies – in Taiwan, complete with rhetoric exposing the “provocation by American reactionaries” and the “uncivilized campaign of the imperialists.”

This may be seen as Xi playing Chairman Mao. He may have a point, but the rhetoric is pro forma. The crucial fact is that Xi was personally humiliated by Washington and so was the Communist Party of China (CPC), a major loss of face – something that in Chinese culture is unforgivable. And all that compounded with a US tactical victory.

So the response will be inevitable, and it will be classic Sun Tzu: calculated, precise, tough, long-term and strategic – not tactical. That takes time because Beijing is not ready yet in an array of mostly technological domains. Putin had to wait years for Russia to act decisively. China’s time will come.

For now, what’s clear is that as much as with Russia-US relations last February, the Rubicon has been crossed in the US-China sphere.

The price of collateral damage

The Central Bank of Afghanistan bagged a paltry $40 million in cash as ‘humanitarian aid’ soon after that missile on a balcony in Kabul.

So that was the price of the Al-Zawahiri operation, intermediated by the currently US-aligned Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). So cheap.

The MQ-9 Reaper drone carrying the two Hellfire R9X that killed Al-Zawahiri had to fly over Pakistani airspace – taking off from a US base in the Persian Gulf, traversing the Arabian Sea, and flying over Balochistan to enter Afghanistan from the south. The Americans may have also got human intelligence as a bonus.

A 2003 deal, according to which Islamabad facilitates air corridors for US military flights, may have expired with the American withdrawal debacle last August, but could always be revived.

No one should expect a deep dive investigation on what exactly the ISI – historically very close to the Taliban – gave to Washington on a silver platter.

Dodgy dealings

Cue to an intriguing phone call last week between the all-powerful Chief of Staff of the Pakistani Army, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, and US deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. Bajwa was lobbying for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to release a crucial loan at the soonest, otherwise Pakistan will default on its foreign debt.

Were deposed former Prime Minister Imran Khan still in power, he would never have allowed that phone call.

The plot thickens, as Al-Zawahiri’s Kabul digs in a posh neighborhood is owned by a close advisor to Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the “terrorist” (US-defined) Haqqani network and currently Taliban Interior Minister. The Haqqani network, needless to add, was always very cozy with the ISI.

And then, three months ago, we had the head of ISI, Lieutenant General Nadeem Anjum, meeting with Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in Washington – allegedly to get their former, joint, covert, counter-terrorism machinery back on track.

Once again, the only question revolves around the terms of the “offer you can’t refuse” – and that may be connected to IMF relief. Under these circumstances, Al-Zawahiri was just paltry collateral damage.

Sun Tzu deploys his six blades

Following Speaker Pelosi’s caper in Taiwan, collateral damage is bound to multiply like the blades of a R9-X missile.

The first stage is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) already having engaged in live fire drills, with massive shelling in the direction of the Taiwan Strait out of Fujian province.

The first sanctions are on too, against two Taiwanese funds. Export of sable to Taiwan is forbidden; sable is an essential commodity for the electronics industry – so that will ratchet up the pain dial in high-tech sectors of the global economy.

Chinese CATL, the world’s largest fuel cell and lithium-ion battery maker, is indefinitely postponing the building of a massive $5 billion, 10,000-employee factory that would manufacture batteries for electric vehicles across North America, supplying Tesla and Ford among others.

So the Sun Tzu maneuvering ahead will essentially concentrate on a progressive economic blockade of Taiwan, the imposition of a partial no-fly zone, severe restrictions of maritime traffic, cyber warfare, and the Big Prize: inflicting pain on the US economy.

The War on Eurasia

For Beijing, playing the long game means the acceleration of the process involving an array of nations across Eurasia and beyond, trading in commodities and manufactured products in their own currencies. They will be progressively testing a new system that will see the advent of a BRICS+/SCO/Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) basket of currencies, and in the near future, a new reserve currency.

The Speaker’s escapade was concomitant to the definitive burial of the “war on terror” cycle and its metastasis into the “war on Eurasia” era.

It may have unwittingly provided the last missing cog to turbo-charge the complex machinery of the Russia-China strategic partnership. That’s all there is to know about the ‘strategic’ capability of the US political ruling class. And this time no missile on a balcony will be able to erase the new era.

Inventing Diagnoses to Cover Up Vaccine Injury — a Con as Old as Vaccination Itself

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By Children’s Health Defense

Source: Global Research

People injured by COVID-19 vaccines may not realize it, but the pretense that post-vaccination injuries and deaths are just “sad coincidences” — far from being unique to the pandemic jabs — is a trick as old as vaccination itself.

So-called “fact-checkers” are having to work double-time to come up with ways to deny the undeniable fact that COVID-19 vaccines are causing injuries and deaths on a massive scale.

The shot pushers and their media enablers have taken cover-up tactics to absurd new heights by, for example, chalking up the rash of fatal heart attacks and overnight deaths in athletes and young adults to a fluky condition referred to variously as “sudden adult death syndrome” or “sudden arrhythmic death syndrome” (SADS).

What the COVID-19 vaccine-injured do not necessarily recognize, however, is the pretense that post-vaccination injuries and deaths are just “sad coincidences” — far from being unique to the pandemic jabs — is a trick as old as vaccination itself.

Facilitated by well-honed semantic and statistical flimflam, public health officials’ core strategy for perpetuating their fiction is to profess innocence — making unabashedly unsubstantiated pronouncements about vaccine safety, on the one hand, while on the other hand, declaring themselves “baffled” by ailments that emerge in the aftermath of a given vaccine’s rollout.

From 1899 to 2022 — has anything changed?

In an astonishingly frank and prescient book, “The Fallacy of Vaccination,” published in 1899, Dr. Alexander Wilder called attention to the “growing conviction” among “profounder thinkers and observers” that vaccination was not only “utterly useless as a preventive” but “actually the means of disseminating disease afresh where it is performed.”

Wilder noted, “whenever a vaccinator or corps of vaccinators set out upon a vaccinating crusade, there follows very generally a number of deaths from … maladies which have been induced by the operation. …”

Wilder also blew the whistle on the suppression and concealment of vaccine adverse events and deaths, describing a fellow physician’s urging of his “professional brethren to be slow to publish fatal cases of small-pox after vaccination” and outlining other shenanigans that sound all too familiar today:

“Occasionally … a death by vaccination is published, and immediately the effort is put forth assiduously to make it to be believed that it was from some other cause. The statistics of small-pox, purporting to distinguish between vaccinated and unvaccinated persons, are too often not quite trustworthy. Many persons who have been vaccinated are falsely reported as unvaccinated.

“Even when death occurs as the result of vaccination, the truth is concealed and the case represented as scarlet fever, measles, erysipelas [bacterial skin infection], or some ‘masked’ disease, in order to prevent too close questioning.”

The intentionality of the suppression seemed obvious to Wilder, who added, “Further argument is met by stolid silence, and by an apparent concert of purpose to exclude carefully all discussion of the matter from medical and public journals, and to denounce all who object.”

Similar sleight-of-hand was on full display during the recent Novavax-focused meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

In the ably summarized live-blog account by internist Dr. Meryl Nass — a member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee — Nass noted CDC’s faking of COVID-19 data to hide the far-greater hospitalization and death rates among the COVID-19-vaccinated as compared to the unvaccinated.

Conveniently for the CDC, Nass noted, the only charts not “up to date by the day” were those presenting vaccination status versus outcome.

However, despite CDC’s “mumbo jumbo,” Nass pointed out, the agency was unable to hide the higher rate of myocarditis in mRNA-vaccinated males within a week of dose two — 75.9 times higher for 16- to 17-year-olds and 38.9 times higher in 18- to 24-year-olds.

COVID-19 Vaccine Tested on Babies Even as Death Toll Mounts. Greatest Public Health Calamity in Modern History

Polio: another example of ‘mumbo jumbo’

With New York State recently reporting a case of “vaccine-derived polio,” and U.K. scientists declaring a “national incident” after allegedly finding “genetic sequences” of poliovirus in London sewage water, it appears public health authorities might be preparing to resurrect polio as the bogeyman du jour.

At first blush, the concession that nearly all modern paralytic polio cases are iatrogenically (medically) caused by the oral polio vaccine — shared by no less than the World Health Organization and CDC — seems unexpectedly and refreshingly candid.

However, public health authorities have no intention of conceding that the official story of poliomyelitis (where “myelitis” refers to spinal cord inflammation) is otherwise full of more holes than Swiss cheese.

There is, and always was, ample evidence to suggest that poisoning — whether by lead arsenate, DDT, or later, the toxic ingredients in polio vaccines themselves — is the most credible explanation for the paralytic symptoms and deaths that were labeled as “polio.”

In fact, early public health luminary Bernard Greenberg, founding chair of the biostatistics department at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, testified before Congress that polio vaccination had “actually increased incidents of polio” and that “misuse of statistical methods had made the opposite seem true.”

Greenberg was referring to a change in the diagnostic criteria for “paralytic poliomyelitis.” implemented in the mid-1950s, which began to require at least 60 days of paralytic symptoms to earn the diagnosis, versus previously, just 24 hours of such symptoms.

As Greenberg did not hesitate to point out, the victory claimed by the first polio vaccines, which began to be administered around the same time, was entirely undeserved.

In the present day, “acute flaccid paralysis” and “acute flaccid myelitis,” which have a clinical picture virtually identical to polio, are the diagnoses of choice for childhood paralysis cropping up all over the world, including in the U.S.

In countries like India, where tens of thousands of children have developed acute flaccid paralysis, doctors explicitly linked the condition to oral polio vaccination. But decades of published reports also associate paralysis with other childhood vaccines, such as pertussis-containing and aluminum-containing vaccines.

In fact, historical reports of spinal cord inflammation, including not just poliomyelitis but other forms of myelitis, track closely with pediatric vaccination trends, and with the concurrent rise in the practice of pediatric injection.

Earlier generations of doctors even described polio cases that followed pediatric injections as “provocation paralysis,” while more recent generations of clinicians have noted the similarity between “polio” and injection injuries dubbed “traumatic neuritis.”

On the current vaccine schedule for American children, clinical trial or post-marketing data link 17 different vaccines to “myelitis,” “encephalomyelitis,” “acute disseminated encephalomyelitis” and/or “transverse myelitis.”

Transverse myelitis also has been making an appearance with COVID-19 vaccines.

Sidestepping the obvious explanation

Since the “polio” era, there are many other examples of diagnoses intended to obfuscate rather than elucidate vaccination as a cause of illness and death — and gaslight sufferers.

These include autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Among the environmental causes put forth as plausible triggers for the neuroimmune disorders labeled as “ASD,” heavy metal poisoning — principally via vaccination — is one of the most consistent contenders.

Meticulous landmark papers published in 2004 and 2012 demonstrated strong parallels between the brain effects of mercury intoxication and ASD brain pathology. Later papers furnished similar evidence with respect to aluminum.

As for SIDS, the diagnosis first entered into vogue around the same time (in the early 1970s) that the vaccine load for children in the U.S. doubled.

Although the 1970s vaccine schedule appears restrained by today’s immoderate standards, young children of that decade not only began receiving 13 vaccines instead of seven, but also went from mostly receiving one shot at a time to often getting two at once, including five one-two punches of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) and oral polio vaccine — both subsequently taken off the U.S. market due to their troublesome adverse event profile.

SIDS deaths, which by definition affect “seemingly normal, healthy infants,” and toddler deaths categorized as “sudden unexplained deaths in childhood” typically occur “in close temporal association following vaccination,” with nine of 10 SIDS deaths occurring around the same time as two- and four-month “well-baby” visits.

Nevertheless, scientists continue to state that the unpredictable deaths “elude … scientific understanding.”

The deception continues

Sadly, vaccine-injured individuals often are enlisted in the artifice.

Desperate for help, they discover they cannot gain access to the halls of medicine unless they self-censor any discussion of vaccination as the source of their health problems and instead acquiesce to “idiopathic” or “genetic” explanations, or punt to some of the more than 70,000 codes in the International Classification of Diseases-10 (ICD-10) — while eschewing the tiny handful of codes pertaining to “adverse effect of vaccines and biological substances.”

A new ICD code relevant to “new diseases of uncertain etiology or emergency use” was designated for “COVID-19 vaccines causing adverse effects in therapeutic use, unspecified.” However, it remains to be seen whether any health professionals will be brave enough to use it.

Meanwhile, as The Exposé satirically reported on July 24, “It feels like we can’t go a single week without hearing about the re-emergence, or emergence of a disease or ailment” — including a “mysterious” outbreak of hepatitis among children, the SADS phenomenon, monkeypox and, of course, polio.

All of these outbreaks, the journalists noted, “are ‘coincidentally’ occurring after millions of people worldwide have been injected with an experimental mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.”

As the recent New York and U.K. reports of vaccine-induced polio illustrate, these threats, whether real or imagined, are likely to mobilize further hostility toward the unvaccinated — including the New York communities fiercely ostracized a few years ago for rejecting measles vaccines for religious reasons.

In addition, the specter of a polio resurgence will be used to harangue the growing number of parents who, for whatever reason, have been increasingly deferring vaccination for their children.

In short, it would be naive to expect any breakthroughs in truth-telling from official corners any time soon.

Ukraine in the time of Covid

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Can we trust “horizontal conflict” in the post-pandemic age?

By Catte Black

Source: Off-Guardian

The biggest mistake the elites made with the scamdemic was to let us see what good buddies they really are, because this instantly and inadvertently presented the 99.9% with a shocking and previously quite carefully hidden reality about the true nature of power and geopolitics.

Horizontal conflict narratives have for centuries been a major part of how elites control their populations. Catholic v Protestant, Moslem v Christian, black v white, male v female, gay v straight etc etc. It’s a tried and trusted method of channeling frustrations, shaping minds and keeping people’s minds off the real authors of their misfortunes.

Behind the facade of conflict the elites have always shared a common bond of mutual interest. Kings (mostly) knew to honor the divinity of other kings even in defeat. Even when they killed each other they did it reluctantly and in the guise of “natural causes”. They knew their own populations were the real common enemies against which they knew to make common cause.

War was just another method of achieving this as well as gratifying some degree of personal pride.

Nothing much has changed in the modern era. And a great deal of the legacy media’s energy has long been devoted to helping to conceal the reality of the “big (supranational) club” that we ain’t in.

Until, that is, the recent huge error of judgement by the world’s leaders when they chose to abandon the carefully maintained “horizontal divisions” narrative in favor of some New Age, New Normal narrative of “international solidarity and co-operation to beat the virus”.

They were clearly going for some “Independence Day” type hug-fest psychic effect. Humanity falling into each other’s arms and deciding to work together in WHO-created mutual New Normal benevolence to defeat an invisible enemy that will, of course, never be defeated.

It did not go over as planned.

They just tried to sell it too hard too fast. And they blew it.

Gordon Brown reacting to a few hundred “COVID” deaths by saying we needed a world government (not yet, Gordon, too soon!).

Goldfinger Schwab and his stupid book of “happy peasant” delusional raving.

Insane overkill on the “nothing will ever be the same” meme based on a few flu cases.

Those pix of people falling over backwards because “covid” in China.

All our lovely leaders being seen at their international junkets ignoring their own mask rules (except for the flunkies), while forcing their populations into isolation and psychological torture.

All pushing their own magically produced untested toxic concoctions, all unctuously mouthing the same lies in a hundred different languages.

They goofed and made it just too obvious how closely in sync they are.

Sure they did also seed a few “alternative” deadly virus narratives that halfheartedly muddied the waters by blaming China, or maybe the US, but it wasn’t enough to counter the truly stunning images of international elite solidarity. Most particularly east-west solidarity.

Why were the Chinese elites spearheading this lie? Why were the Russian elites promoting it?

This was a big wake up moment for many many people all over the world.

Not for the majority, of course. For the majority there was nothing but zombified lockstep, absolute obedience, bizarre levels of willing self-destruction.

But for a large and growing minority the very opposite began to happen.

This growing minority began realizing, not only that the pandemic was a massive lie, but also began to discern that most carefully hidden and most explosive truth — that the elites of the world – all the world – owe allegiance to each other above and beyond any trapping of national identity.

And that convincing us this is not true had heretofore been a huge part of retaining their power.

Faced with this awakening some people began to see they had no choice but to take control of their own destiny rather than wait for their governments to save them.

Small grass roots and spontaneous rebellions began sprouting. First it was just a very few but then more and more people began challenging the pandemic lie. There were mass marches in cities across the globe and small local “stand in the park” protests. People were speaking out, reaching out. The truckers began their convoy.

Suddenly from a place of darkness there was real hope. Not invested in some phony hero politician or some noisy celebrity populist, but in ourselves. Groups of ordinary people began realizing they could take back their lives.

And simultaneously the pandemic narrative began to falter.

Vaccine uptake was not meeting expectations. Even people who had one jab were getting reluctant to have another. Some of those who had once been compliant began to feel they’d had enough.

By autumn 2021 the New Normal – and, more importantly, the system promoting it – were actually in some trouble. The worst trouble they had known for a while.

Faced with overwhelming resistance the “Independence Day hug-fest”, and indeed the whole pandemic narrative, began to go into panic-reverse. Mask mandates began to be canceled. Quarantines abandoned. QR codes likewise.

And the elites began to recall the benefits of those good old tried and true horizontal conflict narratives.

The US began accusing Russia, China began accusing the US. Israel began bombing everyone again.

But not because they wanted to distract you from that awkward realization about how chummy they really are behind the scenes!

No. Never. Not at all.

It was because Russia suddenly got extra scary. And those Nazis in Ukraine suddenly became seriously worrying. And Israel got all worried about terrorists and Iran again. And Taiwan….yada yada.

And, obviously, those elites who can all agree to tell the same lies in the same words at the same time and produce the same “response” and promote the same “solutions” in lockstep over covid just can’t agree at all over anything else.

Because deep seated ideological and strategical differences make it impossible.

Oops.

So, the US had no option but to start provocations in the China Sea and flood Ukraine with weapons and advisors, and Russia had no option but to invade Ukraine.

It was all inevitable. Like death and taxes. Just something that wise people know had to happen.

And the fact it rescued the power structure from a dicey little moment is absolutely and totally a coincidence.

Yes, it did reinstate all the old conflict narratives and allow the media to make a lot of noise and distract people while the embarrassing “Independence Day co-operation” narrative snuck out the room.

And yes, it did rescue the New Normal and provide a lovely new reason for potential rationing, belt-tightening, forever shortages, travel restrictions and all the other things Goldfinger Schwab and his billionaire supranational globalist chums really like.

But coincidences are like that.

Coincidental. Convenient. And no need to look any further.

I mean – would your favourite world leader really start or provoke a war just for convenience or profit? Would they really sacrifice lives just to benefit themselves?

Ok, maybe the Americans would, because Imperialism.

But Russia? China? They’re more moral, right. Higher ethical plain.

I mean sure, they are all equally happy to let their citizens get injected with untested toxic sludge, and sure they just worked with the West to joint-perpetrate an unprecedented global scam that may have killed or maimed millions.

And sure there is quite a lot to be gained from “winning” in Ukraine, aside from defeating Nazis. Fat rebuilding contracts. Access to a lot of resources.

And of course the same convenient distraction equally serves West and East.

But no, come on. Sure they were all in lockstep in 2020. And, ok they still are in lockstep in 2022 – but only over the pandemic lie!

They are absolutely opposed and forced into conflict about everything else, and we need to take a side, support the good guys who are rooting for a better world.

The only alternative is to recognize that horizontal divisions benefit them not us. That neither side is good, or rooting for anything but their own advantage, and that fundamentally, as ever, the global 0.1% take care of their own interests while striving hard to deter and divert us from doing the same.

I suggest we stop being diverted and deterred, remember the lesson of 2020 and continue on the path of personal and collective awakening they are doing their best to lure us from.

Saturday Matinee: Pi

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By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

The film “Pi” is a study in madness and its partner, genius. A tortured, driven man believes (1) that mathematics is the language of the universe, (2) nature can be expressed in numbers, and (3) there are patterns everywhere in nature. If he can find the patterns, if he can find the key to the chaos, then he can predict anything–the stock market, for example. If the man is right, the mystery of existence is unlocked. If he is wrong, the inside of his brain begins to resemble a jammed stock ticker.

The movie, written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, is a study in mental obsession. His hero, named Maximillian Cohen, lives barricaded behind a triple-locked door, in a room filled with high-powered, customized computer equipment. He wants nothing to do with anybody. He writes programs, tests them, looks for the pattern, gets a 216-digit bug, stomps on his chips in a rage, and then begins to wonder about that bug. Exactly 216 digits. There is a theory among some Jewish scholars, he learns, that the name of God has 216 letters.

The movie is shot in rough, high-contrast black and white. Max, played by Sean Gullette, is balding, restless, paranoid and brilliant. He has debilitating headaches and nosebleeds. Symptoms of high blood pressure–or of the mental torment he’s putting himself through. He’s suspicious of everyone. The friendly Indian woman next door puts food by his door. He avoids her. He trusts only his old teacher, Sol (Mark Margolis). They play Go, a game deeper than chess, and Sol tells him to stop with the key to the universe business, already. He warns that he’s spinning away from science and toward numerology.

Not everybody thinks so. His phone rings with the entreaties of Marcy (Pamela Hart), who works for a high-powered Wall Street analysis firm. They want to hire him as a consultant. They think he’s onto something. He has predicted some prices correctly. At the deli, he runs into a Hasidic Jew named Lenny (Ben Shenkman), who seems casual and friendly but has a hidden mission: His group believes the Torah may be a code sent from God and may contain God’s name.

Of course if one finds the mathematical key to everything, that would include God, stock prices, the weather, history, the future, baseball scores and the response to all moves in Go. That assumes there is a key. When you’re looking for something that doesn’t exist, it makes you crazier the closer you get to it.

The seductive thing about Aronofsky’s film is that it is halfway plausible in terms of modern physics and math. What was numerology a century ago now has now been simplified into a very, very vast problem. Chaos theory looks for patterns where common sense says there are none. A computer might be able to give you the answer to anything, if (1) it is powerful enough, and (2) it has all the data. Of course, you might need a computer the size of the universe and containing everything in it, but we’re talking theory here.

“Pi” is a thriller. I am not very thrilled these days by whether the bad guys will get shot or the chase scene will end one way instead of another. You have to make a movie like that pretty skillfully before I care. But I am thrilled when a man risks his mind in the pursuit of a dangerous obsession. Max is out on a limb. There are hungry people circling him. He may be on to something. They want it, too. For both the stock market people and the Hasidic cabal, Max’s formula represents all they believe in and everything they care about.

And then there is a level at which Max may simply be insane, or physically ill. There are people who work out complicated theories involving long, impenetrable columns of numbers. Newspapers get envelopes filled with their proofs every day. And other people who sit in their rooms, wrapping themselves in the webs of chess or numbers theory, addicted to their fixes. And game players, gamblers, horseplayers–people bewitched by the mirage of a system.

The beautiful thing about mathematics is that you can’t prove it except by its own terms. There’s no way to put some math in a test tube and see if it turns purple or heats up. It sits there smugly in its own perfect cocoon, letting people like Max find anything he wants in it–or to think that he has.

The All-American Lie Factory

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Government and the media work together to promote war on Russia

By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

[This article is derived from a speech I made at the July 23rd Peace and Freedom Rally in Kingston New York]

There are some things that I believe to be true about the anarchy that purports to be US foreign policy. First, and most important, I do not believe that any voter cast a ballot for Joe Biden because he or she wanted him to relentlessly pursue a needless conflict with Russia that could easily escalate into a nuclear war with unimaginable consequences for all parties. Biden has recently declared that the US will support Ukraine “until we win” and, as there are already tens of billions of dollars of weapons going to Ukraine plus American “advisers” on the ground, it constitutes a scenario in which American and Russian soldiers will soon likely be shooting at each other. The President of Serbia and columnists like Pat Buchanan and Tulsi Gabbard believe that we are already de facto in World War 3 and one has to wonder how the White House is getting away with ignoring the War Powers mandates in the US Constitution.

Second, I believe that the Russians approached the United States and its allies with some quite reasonable requests regarding their own national security given that a hostile military alliance was about to land on its doorsteps. The issues at stake were fully negotiable but the US refused to budge on anything and Russia felt compelled to take military action. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as a good war. I categorically reject anyone invading anyone else unless there is a dire and immediate threat, but the onus on how the Ukraine situation developed the way it did is on Washington.

Third, I believe that the US and British governments in particularly have been relentlessly lying to the people and that the media in most of west is party to the dissemination of the lies to sustain the war effort against Russia in Ukraine. The lies include both the genesis and progress of the war and there has also been a sustained effort to demonize President Vladimir Putin and anything Russian, including food, drinks, the Russian language and culture and even professional athletes. The latest victim is a Tchaikovsky symphony banned in Canada. Putin is being personally blamed for inflation, food shortages and energy problems which more properly are the fault of the Washington-led ill-thought-out reaction to him. There is considerable irony in the fact that Biden is giving Ukraine $1.7 billion for healthcare, while healthcare in the US is generally considered among the poorest in the developed world.

I believe that Russia is winning the war comfortably and Ukraine will be forced to give up territory while the American taxpayer gets the bill for the reckless spending policies, currently totaling more than $60 billion, while also looking forward to runaway inflation, energy shortages, and, in a worst-case scenario, a possible collapse of the dollar.

All of the above and the politics behind it has led me to believe that the United States, assisted by some of its allies, has become addicted to war as an excuse for domestic failures as well as a replacement for diplomacy to settle international disputes. The White House hypocritically describes its role as “global leadership” or maintaining a “rules based international order” or even defending “democracy against authoritarianism.” But at the same time the Biden Administration has just completed a fiasco evacuation that ended a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan. Not having learned anything from Afghanistan, there are now US troops illegally present in Syria and Iraq and Washington is conniving to attack Iran over false claims made by Israel that the Iranians are developing a nuclear weapon. Neither Syria nor Iraq nor Iran in any way threaten the United States, just as the Russians did not threaten Americans prior to a regime change intervention in Ukraine starting in 2014, when the US arranged the overthrow of a government that was friendly to Moscow. The US has also begun to energize NATO to start looking at steps to take to confront the alleged Chinese threat.

The toll coming from constant warfare and fearmongering has also enabled a steady erosion of the liberties that Americans once enjoyed, including free speech and freedom to associate. I would like to discuss what the ordinary concerned citizen can do to cut through all the lies surrounding what is currently taking place, which might well be described as the most aggressive propaganda campaign the world has ever seen, far more extensive than the lying and dissimulation by the White House and Pentagon officials that preceded the disastrous Iraq war. It is an information plus propaganda war that sustains the actual fighting on the ground, and it is in some senses far more dangerous as it seeks to involve more countries in the carnage while also creating a global threat perception that will be used to justify further military interventions.

Part of the problem is that the US government is awash with bad information that it does not know how to manage so it makes it hard to identify anything that might actually be true. Back in my time as an intelligence officer operating overseas, there were a number of short cuts that were used to categorize and evaluate information. For example, if one were hanging out in a local bar and overheard two apparent government officials discussing something of interest that might be happening in the next week, one might report it to Washington with a source description FNU/LNU, which stood for “first name unknown” and “last name unknown.” In other words, it was unverifiable hearsay coming from two individuals who could not be identified. As such it was pretty much worthless, but it clogged up the system and invited speculation.

My personal favorite, however, was the more precise source descriptions developed by military intelligence using an alphabet letter followed by a number in a sequence running from A-1 to F-6. At the top of an intelligence report there would be an assessment of the source, or agent. A-1 meant a piece of information that was both credible and had been confirmed by other sources and that was also produced by an agent that had actual access to the information in question. At the other end of the scale, an F-6 was information that was dubious produced by a source that appeared to have no actual access to the information.

By that standard, we Americans have been fed a lot of largely fabricated F-6 “fake information” coming from both the government and the media to justify the Ukraine disaster. Here is how you can spot it. If it is a newspaper or magazine article skim all the way down the text until you reach a point towards the end where the sourcing of the information is generally hidden. If it is attributed to a named individual who indeed indisputably had direct access to the information it would at least suggest that the reporting contains a kernel of truth. But that is almost never the case, and one normally sees the source described as an “anonymous source” or a “government official” or even, in many cases, there is no source attribution at all. That generally means that the information conveyed in the reporting is completely unreliable and should be considered the product of a fabricator or a government and media propaganda mill. When a story is written by a journalist who claims to be on the scene it is also important to check out whether he or she is actually on site or working from a pool operating safely in Poland to produce the reporting. Yahoo News takes the prize in spreading propaganda as it currently reproduces press releases originating with the Ukrainian government and posts them as if they are unbiased reporting on what is taking place on the ground.

Another trick to making fake news look real is to route it through a third country. When I was in Turkey we in CIA never placed a story in the media there directly. Instead, a journalist on our payroll in France would do the story and the Turkish media would pick it up, believing that because it had appeared in Paris it must be true even though it was not. Currently, I have noted that a lot of apparently MI-6 produced fake stories on Ukraine have been appearing in the British media, most notably the Telegraph and Guardian. They are then replayed in the US media and elsewhere to validate stories that are essentially fabricated.

Television and radio media is even worse than print media as it almost never identifies the sources for the stories that it carries. So my advice is to be skeptical of what you read or hear regarding wars and rumors of wars. The war party is bipartisan in the United States and it is just itching to seize the opportunity to get a new venture going, and they are oblivious to the fact that they might in the process be about to destroy the world as we know it. We must expose their lies and unite and fight to make sure that they can’t get away with it!

China Responds to Pelosi’s Imperial Arrogance

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: StephenLendman.org

On Tuesday in response to Pelosi’s affront to Chinese sovereignty, the PLA began conducting live-fire maritime and aerial drills around Taiwan — surrounding the island.

According to China’s Global Times, they feature “J-20 stealth fighter jets and test-firing of conventional missiles…with additional important drills announced for days to come.”

Beginning moments after Pelosi arrived in Taipei, they’re ongoing in waters and airspace “north, southwest and southeast of the island…”

They include “live-fire shooting…in the Taiwan Strait and…missile test launches…east of the island.”

While ongoing for a number of days, “Taiwan will be surrounded by PLA drills in five directions.”

Drills are likely designed to develop PLA capabilities to seize the island militarily if unable to do it peacefully.

According to PLA Eastern Theater Command deputy chief of staff, Gu Zhong, as reported by GT:

Drills involve “courses like joint blockade, sea assault, land attack and air superiority seizing plus live-fire shooting of precision weapons.”

They’re “comprehensively test(ing) the performance of weapons and equipment as well as the troops’ joint operational capabilities, making preparations for all crises.”

Separately, Xinhua reported that live-fire drills are being conducted in six maritime and air space areas around Taiwan — north, northeast, east, south, southwest and northwest of the island.

Entry into areas where they’re ongoing is prohibited.

Last Sunday, China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier embarked from its Qingdao homeport to waters near Taiwan — accompanied by “a Type 075 amphibious assault ship.”

Chinese military expert, Song Zhongping, said the purpose of ongoing drills is to enhance the PLA’s military preparedness in light of Pelosi’s unacceptable visit to Taiwan.

During her meeting with Taiwan’s so-called president Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday — in a display of imperial arrogance — Pelosi assaulted China’s sovereignty again as follows, saying:

Hegemon USA’s vow to preserve (fantasy) democracy in Taiwan and around the world (is) ironclad.”

She barely stopped short of vowing to defend the island if China uses military force to reunite it with the mainland.

In cahoots with dominant Biden regime and congressional hardliners, Pelosi is pushing things recklessly for possible direct confrontation between two nuclear powers — ones able to transform cities of targeted nations into smoldering rubble.

Indeed, hostile-to-peace-and-stability Pelosi and the Biden regime are playing with fire against Russia, China and Iran —  humanity’s fate hanging in the balance.

Separately in response to Taiwan’s complicity with Pelosi’s effrontery, Beijing retaliated by suspending exports of certain food products to the island.

According to Bloomberg News, the suspension includes “some fish and fruit imports,” as well as “natural sand used in construction.”

The Financial Times said that China “suspend(ed) (imports of) 2,000 food products,” along with “suspend(ing) exports of natural sand” to Taiwan.

Beijing’s Mainland Affairs Council deputy chair, Chiu Chui-cheng, said the following:

“In the past, China hit single products from the primary sector such as specific fruit or fish.”

In “that way, (it) kept the overall macroeconomic impact on Taiwan limited but could target regions where the (ruling) Democratic Progressive party is strong.”

“But now (Beijing is) broadening this immensely as (it’s) targeting processed foods, so what’s going on is much more broad-based. 

“This is probably only the beginning.”

“We are certain that (China) will further step up (its) economic coercion measures.”

According to the FT, Beijing’s suspension “cover(s) 35 categories including fish and seafood, edible oils, citrus fruits and biscuits and cakes, hitting publicly listed companies such as instant noodle and soy sauce producer Ve Wong and Chi Mei, which makes frozen foods.”

At this time, China’s likely short-term import and export suspensions are largely shots across the bow warnings to Taiwan.

Economist Ma Tieying said the following:

“What needs to be watched is whether Beijing will broaden the trade bans into the manufacturing sector, particularly semiconductors/electronics going forward.”

China is Taiwan’s largest trade partner, bilateral volume last year totaling $328.3 billion, around 52% from the island to the mainland.

Beijing relies on imports of Taiwanese semiconductors.

The island exports about one-fifth of its agricultural products to the mainland.

Chinese media reported that the country’s General Administration of Customs suspended imports of “refrigerated large-head hair-tail and frozen Japanese horse mackerel from Taiwan.” 

Taiwan’s state-controlled CNA said that the mainland temporarily halted imports of from “over 100 Taiwanese food manufacturers, including the well-known brands I-Mei Foods, Wei Chuan and Kuai Kuai Co.”

According to Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture (COA):

Hundreds of temporarily “blacklisted companies include producers of tea leaves, dried fruits, honey, cocoa beans, and vegetables, as well as catches from around 700 fishing vessels.”

Separately, CNA said China largely, but not entirely, suspended imports of coffee beans, stuffed pasta and bread, health foods and supplements, baby food and formula, foods for medicinal purposes, plant based oil, candy, beverages, cereal-based products, seasonings and condiments.

Center for Counter Hegemonic Studies’ director, Tim Anderson, believes that Pelosi’s provocative visit was planned to trigger US confrontation with China in similar fashion to its proxy war on Russia, adding:

“Imagine if the Chinese military went into Puerto Rico or some other part of the US territories.”

“It’s unacceptable, and I can’t say that any good would come out of it.”

The Biden regime provoked Russia to launch its SMO in self-defense.

A similar strategy appears in play against China.

Predictive Programming, Revelation Of The Method & COVID-23

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By Derrick Broze

Source: The Last American Vagabond

When major events impact millions, and even billions, of people, there will, inevitably, be a wide range of opinions put forth to explain the crisis. From political explanations to religious testimony, thinkers from all walks of life seek to deconstruct those events which alter the lives of the masses.

When it comes to what I will call the “conspiracy research community”, one theory often proposed as an explanation to the chaos of our world is known as predictive programming. When searching for specific definitions of this theory you find derogatory analyses, true believers, and the curious.

According to a researcher at Ohio University:

“Predictive Programming is theory that the government or other higher-ups are using fictional movies or books as a mass mind control tool to make the population more accepting of planned future events. This was described by researcher Alan Watt who defines Predictive programming as “Predictive programming is a subtle form of psychological conditioning provided by the media to acquaint the public with planned societal changes to be implemented by our leaders. If and when these changes are put through, the public will already be familiarized with them and will accept them as natural progressions, thus lessening possible public resistance and commotion.”

Essentially, the idea is that operations being conducted by a hidden elite are shown to the public in advance via popular media such as books and films. These clues and references are meant to “soften” the public to the ideas presented. By introducing concepts that seem fantastic and then constantly reintroducing the concepts they appear more likely, or at the least, acceptable.

The belief is that the “predictive programming” in media can speak to the subconscious in a way that causes the public to passively accept the events when they unfold in real life, rather than offering resistance or opposition.

The Ohio University writer states, “I found that most commonly people believe the government creates a problem so the population will look to the government for a solution. However, because the government planned for the crisis the government will offer a solution that has been planned long before the crisis ever happened.” What they are describing is often known as “problem-reaction-solution”.

The TV show The Simpsons is often a source for such predictive programming claims. Various episodes show Donald Trump running for President, and references to September 11, 2001. For example, The Simpsons 1997 episode titled “The City of New York vs Homer Simpson” features the Simpson family visiting Manhattan where the World Trade Center factors heavily into the story. In one often touted scene, Lisa holds a brochure for a $9 bus fare with the World Trade Center shown in the background. Together the $9 and the twin towers make 9/11, a reference to the 9/11 attacks.

In 2010, Bill Oakley, an executive producer on the show at the time, told The New York Observer, “$9 was picked as a comically cheap fare,” he said. “And I will grant that it’s eerie, given that it’s on the only episode of any series ever that had an entire act of World Trade Center jokes.”

Another example of this alleged predictive programming comes from the pilot episode of “The Lone Gunmen,” a short-lived spinoff of the popular “The X-Files”. The pilot for The Lone Gunmen — which aired aired six months before the September 11th attacks — includes a plot where a hijacked plane is aimed at the World Trade Center. The terrorist attack is averted in the end and the towers are not hit.

Here is a sample of the dialogue from one scene of The Lone Gunmen pilot:

“Your saying our government plans to commit a terrorist act against a domestic airline – “

“There you go, indicting the entire government as usual. A faction, a small faction. “

“For what possible gain?”

“The Cold War is over, John, but with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms market is flat. But bring down a fully loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you’ll find a dozen tin-pot dictators all over the world just clamoring to take responsibility and begging to be smart bombed.”

The lazy response to claims of predictive programming is to dismiss them as the workings of a paranoid, tinfoil hat wearing, “conspiracy theorist”. Numerous theories have been proposed to explain predictive programming.

Some researchers dismiss the claims as simple coincidences. The Simpsons has been on air for 30 plus years now and some of their thousands of episodes are bound to reflect reality at some point, they say. Others contend that there are some eerie examples of art “predicting” reality, but they believe theorists are suffering from Pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing patterns in random stimuli. Those who are looking for patterns are more likely to see them because of this, as well as confirmation bias. 

Revelation of the Method

Another theory which has been proposed by believers of predictive programming is the idea that these so-called elites must show the public their plans for one reason or another. This theory has come to be known as “Revelation of the Method”. The first person who appears to have popularized the use of this term was researcher James Shelby Downard.

Downard’s claim to infamy came as a result of his writing the controversial essay King-Kill 33, which accuses a network of Freemasons of being involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In subsequent writings, Downard further explored his ideas around revelation of the method. In Sorcery, Sex, Assassination, and the Science of Symbolism, he writes, “acts concerning the
assassination are on ice and will be be revealed in the future in the so-called ‘Revelation of the Method.’”

He continues, “this method and process of Masonic machinations is summed up in the principle of the “Making Manifest of All That is Hidden.”

Michael A. Hoffman II, was a student and friend of Downard and continued to write about the concept. Writing in the book Apocalypse Culture, Hoffman says, “We come to the current unfoldment in “Must Be,” an alchemic term Mr. Downard translates as “the Revelation of the Method.” This alludes to the process wherein murderous deeds and hair-raising conspiracies involving wars, revolutions, decapitations and every manner of horror-show are first buried beneath a cloak of secrecy and Harpocrates’ hushed- finger, and then, when finally accomplished and secured, slowly revealed to the un- suspecting populace who watch in deep-frozen apathy as the hidden history is unveiled.”

In an interview with radio program Guns and Butter, Hoffman stated:

“The Revelation of the Method actually comes from my mentor, James Shelby Downard. I met him in Saint Petersburg, Florida in the mid-1970s and he was a very unusual man. He walked the razor edge between genius and eccentricity, but he had a mind where he was able to see and detect patterns. And also, he had an historian’s mind in terms of the research that he did, and he was the one that set me on this path of the Revelation of the Method. He also called it “Must Be” or “The Making Manifest of All that is Hidden.”

Some researchers of the so-called “Revelation of the Method” also believe there is a spiritual or religious element of the practice. They believe that by sharing clues or foreknowledge of their plans, the elitists somehow absolve themselves of wrong doing in the eyes of their Creator.

COVID-19

This bring us full circle to COVID-19 and claims of predictive programming in various media which foreshadowed the claims of a worldwide pandemic, and the subsequent authoritarian measures.

For example, the 1981 novel “The Eyes of Darkness” by Dean Koontz talks about a deadly virus used as a biological weapon named Wuhan-400. There’s also the 2011 film Contagion with a story of a deadly pandemic involving a virus originating from a bat and social distancing.

In an interview with The Washington Post, screenwriter Scott Z. Burns said, “It is sad, and it is frustrating… It is also surreal to me that people from all over the world write to me asking how I knew it would involve a bat or how I knew the term “social distancing.” I didn’t have a crystal ball — I had access to great expertise. So, if people find the movie to be accurate, it should give them confidence in the public health experts who are out there right now trying to guide us.”

Perhaps the most striking example of potential predictive programming, or a coincidence, if you prefer, is the film Songbird. The film’s IMDB description states:

“In 2024 a pandemic ravages the world and its cities. Centering on a handful of people as they navigate the obstacles currently hindering society: disease, martial law, quarantine, and vigilantes.”

The wikipedia description further outlines the similarities to what would unfold in 2020 and 2021:

“By 2024, the COVID-19 Coronavirus has been mutated into COVID-23 and the world is in its fourth Quarantine year. In the United States, the nation’s government is converted into a fascist police state and the people are required to take temperature checks on their cell phones while those infected with COVID-23 are taken from their homes against their will and forced into quarantine camps, also known as “Q-Zones” or concentration camps, where some fight back against the brutal restrictions. In these camps, the infected are left to die or forcibly get better. “

While it’s odd enough that a film came out in 2020 “inspired” by the COVID-19 event, it’s even more unnerving knowing the film included scenes of “immunity passports” using cell phones, forced quarantines and lockdowns of the vast majority of the population, and even a black market for the digital passports.

The timing of the filming is also a bit difficult to understand considering the fact that most of the world was experiencing lockdowns. The film makers claim they had their first call about the project on March 14, 2020, around the time the world was learning about the COVID-19 situation. They claim by June, major actors like Demi Moore had been cast in their roles, with production beginning in Los Angeles on July 8, 2020.

By August 3, 2020, the film wrapped, making it the first film to be shot in L.A. during lockdown. While the public was forced to stay inside, and work from home, Hollywood actors and a crew of 40 people were allowed to continue working on their film. The film was eventually released on December 11, 2020 and has received very poor reviews.

If there is any predictive programming in Songbird, it might relate to events yet to come. For example, the movie takes place in 2024, with a virus known as COVID-23 rampaging the planet.

What does this mean for our future? Should we live in fear of what might come?

In the film’s version of events, things do not end well. While the young couple in love manages to acquire blackmarket passports and escape to somewhere more free, the rest of their family and friends remain prisoners of their governments. The rest of the people shown in the film continue to live in the bio-fascist tyrannical nightmare.

Whether predictive programming is true, or simply a matter of coincidence and confirmation bias, we should not allow ourselves to live in fear. However, we should do everything in our power to make sure these fantasy worlds do not become our reality.