Saturday Matinee: Aze Avora Short Double Feature

By Aze Avora

Source: YouTube

Observers: An AI Short Horror Film. Deep within the 12th dimension dwells observers of inconceivable complexity, silently manipulating our lives. An ode to my love for cosmic horror. Inspired by the dark side of psychedelics.

Prompted, Written & Directed by: Aze Avora

Visuals By: Midjourney & GEN 2

Capitol of Conformity: Welcome to the future! Where the pursuit of unending joy comes with hidden costs. This retro futuristic metropolis has many hidden wonders you won’t want to miss out on!

Patreon:   / azeavora  

Prompted, Written & Directed by: Aze Avora

Visuals Assisted By: Midjourney, @Pika_Labs & GEN 2

SOCIALS –https://X.com/AzeAvora  / aze.avora  

MUSIC:

Thais Meditation – Mischa Elman

You Didn’t Want Me When You Had Me – Henry Burr

What lies behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s lies and Hamas’s evasions

On September 22, 2023, 16 days before the attack by the Palestinian Resistance, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the United Nations in New York. He brandished a map of the “New Middle East” on which Israel had absorbed the Palestinian Territories.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: Voltairenet.org

We are reacting to the attack on Israel on October 7 and the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza on the basis of the information available to us. However, we feel that the official version of the Israeli government and Hamas is a lie.

Seven major questions remain unanswered:

1. How did Hamas manage to dig and build 500 kilometers of tunnels at a depth of 30 meters without arousing suspicion?

 Tunnel-drilling equipment is considered to have both civilian and military uses. It is not manufactured in Gaza and cannot be brought in under any circumstances, unless there is complicity within the Israeli administration.

 The excavated earth (1 million m3) was not detected by aerial surveillance. Even supposing it had been scattered in many different places and mixed in with the soil from other construction sites, it is impossible for the Israeli intelligence services not to have detected anything for twenty years.

 Tunnel ventilation equipment is not considered to be for military use. It is possible to bring it into Gaza, but the quantity required should have attracted attention.

 The reinforced concrete needed to solidify the walls is not manufactured in Gaza. It too is not considered military equipment, but the quantity required should have attracted attention.

2. How could Hamas stockpile such an arsenal?

 Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has large quantities of rockets and handguns at its disposal. Hamas may have manufactured parts of the rockets itself, but it has managed to import thousands of handguns into Gaza, mainly from the Ukraine, despite high-performance scanners. This seems impossible without complicity within the Israeli administration.

3. Why did Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed all those who warned him?

 Egypt’s Minister of Intelligence, Kamel Abbas, personally phoned him to warn of a major Hamas attack.

 His friend, Colonel Yigal Carmon, Director of Memri, personally warned him of a major Hamas attack.

 The CIA sent Israel two intelligence reports warning of a major Hamas attack.

 Defense Minister Yoav Galland was fired in July because he warned the government of the “perfect storm” prepared by Hamas.

4. Why did Benjamin Netanyahu demobilize the security forces on the evening of October 6?

 The Prime Minister had authorized the Security Forces to stand down for the holidays of Sim’hat Torah and Shemini Atzeret. At the time of the attack, therefore, there were no personnel available to monitor the security fence around Gaza.

5. Why did security officials remain locked up at Shin Bet headquarters that morning?

 The Director of Counterintelligence (Shin Bet), Ronen Bar, had called a meeting of the heads of all the security services for 8 a.m. on October 7, to examine the second CIA report warning of a major Hamas operation in preparation.

However, the attack began at 6.30 a.m. on the same day. Security officials didn’t react until 11am. What did they do during this interminable meeting?

6. Who triggered the “Hannibal directive” in this way, and why?

 When the Security Forces began to react, the IDF was ordered to apply the “Hannibal directive”. This stipulates that enemies must not be allowed to take Israeli soldiers hostage, even if it means killing them. An Israeli police investigation confirms that the Israeli air force bombed the crowd fleeing the Supernova Rave Party. A significant proportion of those killed on October 7 were therefore not victims of Hamas, but of Israeli strategy.

 In theory, the “Hannibal directive” only applies to soldiers. Who decided to bomb a crowd of Israeli civilians, and why?
It is not possible today to determine with any certainty which Israelis were killed by the attackers and which were killed by their own army.

7. Why are Western forces threatening Israel?

 The Pentagon has deployed two naval groups, around the USS Gerald Ford and the USS Eisenhower, and a cruise missile submarine, the USS FloridaHaaretz even mentioned a third aircraft carrier. America’s allies (Saudi Arabia, Canada, Spain, France, Italy) have installed fighter-bombers in the region.

These forces are not installed to threaten Turkey, Qatar or Iran, which the Western press accuses of being involved in the Hamas attack, but off the coast of Israel, in Beirut and Hamat. They are encircling Israel. And Israel alone.

WHAT LIES BEHIND THESE MYSTERIES?

Obviously the version defended by both Hamas and Israel is false. We must consider other possible explanations so as not to be manipulated by either one or the other.

Let’s formulate a hypothesis. There is nothing to say whether it is the correct one, but it is compatible with the factual elements, which is not the case with the version shared today by everyone. So it’s better than that one. It is obviously extremely shocking, but only those who are able to answer the previous 7 questions can dismiss it.

This interpretation is based on an analysis of the complex structure of Hamas, whose rank-and-file fighters are unaware of what their leaders are up to. There it is :

The entire operation of Hamas and Israel is led by Americans, perhaps under the direction of the Straussian Eliott Abrams [1] and his Vandenberg Coalition (Think Tank which succeeded the Project for a New American Century). The Muslim Brotherhood and the Revisionist Zionists, who apparently are waging a cruel war, are in reality accomplices at the expense of the rank-and-file Hamas fighters, the Palestinian people and Israeli soldiers. Here is their plan: Hamas is presented as the only effective resistance force to the oppression of the Palestinians, but it lets Israel liquidate the hope of a Palestinian state, while the Muslim Brotherhood, crowned with the sacrifice of the Palestinians, takes power in the Arab world.

The heads of Hamas’s military and political branches are both subordinate to the Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, the successor to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, yet nobody talks about him. From his point of view, the Brotherhood will be the big winner of the “Flood of Al-Aqsa”, even if Gaza is razed to the ground and the Palestinians driven from their land.

Hamas is now divided into two factions. The first, under the leadership of Ismaël Haniyeh, follows the Brotherhood’s line. It seeks neither to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation, nor to found a Palestinian state, but is dedicated to building a Caliphate over all the countries of the Middle East. The second, under the leadership of Khalil Hayya, has abandoned the Brotherhood’s ideology, and is fighting to put an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israelis.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a political secret society, organized by British intelligence services on the model of the United Grand Lodge of England [2]. It was gradually taken over by the CIA to the point of being represented on the US National Security Council. After the collapse of the Islamist regimes of the Arab Spring, the Brotherhood fractured into two trends. The London Front, led by Guide Ibrahim Munir (who died a year ago), proposed a way out of the crisis by leaving the political arena and securing the release of prisoners in Egypt. The Istanbul Front, led by interim leader Mahmoud Hussein, advocates, on the contrary, changing nothing and continuing the struggle to establish a Caliphate. A third group is attempting to establish an intermediate position, putting forward the idea of abandoning politics until the prisoners have been released, only to return to it at a later date.

The Muslim Brotherhood is fighting to seize power in all Arab states, as it did in Egypt in 2012-13.
It should be remembered that, contrary to widespread opinion in the West, Mohamed Morsi was never democratically elected President of Egypt; that was General Ahmed Chafik. However, after the Brotherhood threatened to kill members of the Electoral Commission and their families, the latter, after 13 days of resistance, declared Morsi elected, despite the results of the ballot box. Subsequently, in 2013, 40 million Egyptians marched against him, calling on the army to deliver them from the Muslim Brotherhood. General Abdel Fatah Al-Sissi did just that.

Today, the Muslim Brotherhood is only in power in Tripolitania (western Libya), where it was brought to power by NATO. They are only welcome in Qatar and Turkey (which is not an Arab state). They are banned in the majority of Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia (whose monarch they tried to overthrow in 2013) and the United Arab Emirates (involving the crisis between Qatar and the other Gulf states). And above all in Syria (whose government they tried to overthrow in 1982 and to which they waged war, from 2011 to 2016, alongside Nato and Israel). They are about to do the same in Tunisia (which they ruled for a decade).

If the real objective of this massacre is not the status of Palestine, but the governance of Arab states, we can expect a wave of regime changes in the Middle East, each time to the benefit of the Brotherhood – in short, a kind of second “Arab Spring” [3].

As during the Arab Spring, the British services are responsible for the Brotherhood’s communications. We remember the way they promoted Brother Abdelhakim Belhaj in Libya [4] or the magnificent logos they designed for the host of jihadist groups in Syria. Leaks to the Foreign Office confirmed all this. This time, they created a new character, Abu Obeida, the spokesman for the fighting organization in Gaza. This man, unknown until recently, has suddenly become a star in the Muslim world, where posters of him are being snapped up. Well-trained in public speaking, he handles symbols with an ease unprecedented among Sunni leaders.

Arab governments are therefore acting cautiously, supporting the creation of a Palestinian state while keeping their distance from Hamas. While Hamas is doing everything to make the creation of a Palestinian state impossible.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

Neocons Blame Endless Wars On Those Who Oppose Endless Wars

In yet another Orwellian inversion of reality, Raytheon stooge turned Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently posited that the real problem with American foreign policy isn’t decades of imperialist aggression waged by the military industrial complex, but rather non interventionalists who promote peace.

By Ron Paul

Source: The Free Thought Project

Over the weekend Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin explained to the American people what’s really wrong with US foreign policy. Some might find his conclusions surprising.

The US standing in the world is damaged not because we spent 20 years fighting an Afghan government that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11. The problem has nothing to do with neocon lies about Iraq’s WMDs that led untold civilian deaths in another failed “democratization” mission. It’s not because over the past nearly two years Washington has taken more than $150 billion from the American people to fight a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine.

It’s not the military-industrial complex or its massive lobbying power that extends throughout Congress, the think tanks, and the media.

Speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California’s Simi Valley, Austin finally explained the real danger to the US global military empire.

It’s us.

According to Secretary Austin, non-interventionists who advocate “an American retreat from responsibility” are the ones destabilizing the world, not endless neocon wars.

Austin said the US must continue to play the role of global military hegemon – policeman of the world – because “the world will only become more dangerous if tyrants and terrorists believe that they can get away with wholesale aggression and mass slaughter.”

How’s that for reason and logic? Austin and the interventionist elites have fact-checked 30 years of foreign policy failures and concluded, “well it would have been far worse if the non-interventionists were in charge.”

This is one of the biggest problems with the neocons. They are incapable of self-reflection. Each time the US government follows their advice into another catastrophe, it’s always someone else’s fault. In this case, as Austin tells us, those at fault for US foreign policy misadventures are the people who say, “don’t do it.”

What would have happened if the people who said “don’t do it” were in charge of President Obama’s decision to prop-up al-Qaeda to overthrow Syria’s secular leader Assad? How about if the “don’t do it” people were in charge when the neocons manufactured a “human rights” justification to destroy Libya? What if the “don’t do it” people were in charge when Obama’s neocons thought it would be a great idea to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically-elected government?

Would tyrants and terrorists have gained power if Washington did NOT get involved? No. Tyrants and terrorists got the upper hand BECAUSE Washington intervened in these crises.

As Austin further explained, part of the problem with the US is democracy itself. “Our competitors don’t have to operate under continuing resolutions,” he complained. What a burden it is for him that the people, through their representatives, are in charge of war spending.

In Congress, “America first” foreign policy sentiment is on the rise among conservatives and that infuriates Austin and his ilk. He wants more billions for wars in Ukraine and Israel and he wants it now!

And our economic problems? That is our fault too. Those who “try to pull up the drawbridge,” Austin said, undermine the security that has led to decades of prosperity. Prosperity? Has he looked at the national debt? Inflation? Destruction of the dollar?

There is a silver lining here. The fact that Austin and the neocons are attacking us non-interventionists means that we are gaining ground. They are worried about us. This is our chance to really raise our voices!

Israel’s War on Hospitals

Israel is carrying out a campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable. This campaign includes destroying all of Gaza’s hospitals. The message Israel is sending is clear – Nowhere is safe. If you stay you die.

By Chris Hedges

Source: Scheer Post

Israel is not attacking hospitals in Gaza because they are “Hamas command centers.” Israel is systematically and deliberately destroying Gaza’s medical infrastructure as part of a scorched earth campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable and escalate a humanitarian crisis. It intends to force 2.3 million Palestinians over the border into Egypt where they will never return. 

Israel has destroyed and nearly emptied the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia is next. Israel is deploying tanks and armored personnel carriers around the hospital and has fired rounds into the building, killing twelve people. 

The playbook is familiar. Flyers are dropped by Israel over a hospital telling people to leave because the hospital is a base for “Hamas terrorist activities.” Tanks and artillery shells rip away parts of the hospital walls. Ambulances are blown up by Israeli missiles. Power and water is cut. Medical supplies are blocked. There are no painkillers, antibiotics and oxygen. The most vulnerable, premature babies in incubators and the gravely ill, die. Israeli soldiers raid the hospital and force everyone out at gunpoint. 

This is what happened at Al Shifa hospital. This is what happened at Al Rantisi Children’s Hospital. This is what happened at Gaza’s main psychiatric hospital. This is what happened at Nasser Hospital. This is what happened at the other hospitals that Israel has destroyed. And this is what will happen at the few hospitals that remain. 

Israel has shut down 21 of Gaza’s 35 hospitals, including Gaza’s only cancer hospital. The hospitals still operating have severe shortages of basic medicine and supplies. One by one the hospitals are being picked off. Soon there will be no health facilities left. This is by design.

Tens of thousands of terrified Palestinians, forced to evacuate by Israel, their homes blasted into rubble, seek refuge from the relentless bombing by camping out in and around Gaza’s hospitals. They hope the medical centers will not be targeted by Israel. If Israel abided by the Geneva Conventions they would be correct. But Israel is not carrying out a war. It is carrying out a genocide. And in a genocide, a population, and all that sustains a population, is obliterated. 

In an ominous sign that Israel will turn on the Palestinians in the West Bank once it is done flattening Gaza, armored vehicles have surrounded at least four West Bank hospitals. The Ibn Sina Hospital has been raided by Israeli soldiers along with the East Jerusalem Hospital.

Israel’s settler colonial state was founded on lies. It is sustained by lies. And now, when it is grimly determined to carry out the worst slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba, or “catastrophe,” that saw 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed and some 50 massacres by Jewish militias, it spits out one grotesque absurdity after another. It speaks of Palestinians as a dehumanized mass. There are no mothers, fathers, children, teachers, doctors, lawyers, cooks, poets, taxi drivers or shopkeepers. Palestinians, in the Israeli lexicon, are a single contagion that must be eradicated. 

Watch this video of Israeli school children singing, “We Will Annihilate Everyone” in Gaza. 

Hitler Youth used to sing songs like this about Jews.

Those who embark upon projects of mass killing lie to avoid demoralizing their own populations, lull the victims into believing they will not all be exterminated and stop outside forces from intervening. The Nazis claimed that Jews packed on trains and sent to extermination camps were on work details and had good medical care and adequate food. As for the infirm and elderly, they were cared for in rest centers. The Nazis even created a mock camp for the “resettlement” of Jews “to the East,” – Theresienstadt – where international bodies such as the Red Cross could see how humanely the Jews were treated, even as millions were being exterminated. 

At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million Armenians were massacred or died of exposure, disease and starvation during the genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire from the spring of 1915 to the autumn of 1916. The Armenian genocide was as public as the genocide in Gaza. European and U.S. consular missions provided detailed accounts of the campaign to cleanse modern day Türkiye of Armenians. 

The Ottoman government, in an attempt to hide the genocide, banned foreigners from taking photographs of Armenian refugees or the corpses that lined the roads. Israel too has blocked the foreign press from Gaza, carrying out only a handful of brief and carefully staged visits arranged by the Israeli military. Israel periodically cuts off internet and phone services. At least 43 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel since the Hamas incursion into Israel on Oct. 7, many undoubtedly targeted by Israeli forces. 

Armenians, like Palestinians, were forced from their homes, gunned down and denied food and water. Armenian deportees were sent on death marches to the Syrian Desert where tens of thousands were shot or died from starvation, cholera, malaria, dysentery and influenza. Israel is forcing 1.1 million Palestinians into the southern tip of Gaza and bombing them as they flee. These refugees, like the Armenians, lack food, water, fuel and sanitation. They too will soon succumb to epidemics of infectious diseases. 

Talat Pasha, the de facto leader of the Ottoman Empire, told the United States ambassador, Henry Morgenthau Sr., in words that replicate Israel’s stance, on Aug. 2, 1915, “that our Armenian policy is absolutely fixed and that nothing can change it. We will not have the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert but nowhere else.” 

The longer the genocide continues the more absurd the lies become. 

There are big Israeli lies. The obliteration of Gaza and wanton killing of thousands of Palestinians, Israel insists, is a targeted effort to get rid of Hamas rather than a campaign to reduce Gaza to a pile of rubble, carry out mass murder and ethnically cleanse Palestinians. 

There are small Israeli lies. Forty beheaded babies. Al Shifa Hospital is a “Hamas command center.” A calendar in Arabic on the wall of a hospital, according to IDF Spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, is “a guardian [guard] list, where every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift guarding the people that were here.” An Israeli actor dressed up as a nurse and speaking heavily accented Arabic claims to be Palestinian doctor and to have seen Hamas use civilians as human shields. She says members of Hamas “attacked Al Shifa Hospital” and stole “the fuel and medicine.” Palestinian militants, rather than Israeli tanks, Israel says, are responsible for shelling Al Shifa Hospital. Israel struck a car full of “terrorists” in southern Lebanon, “terrorists” who turned out to be three girls, their mother and grandmother. The explosion at the Al Ahli Hospital was the result of an errant rocket fired by the Palestinians, a claim questioned by The New York Times when it discredited the video based on analysis of its time stamp. Israel said it “responded to the request of the director of Shifa Hospital to allow Gazan citizens who were sheltering in the hospital and who wish to evacuate from Shifa Hospital towards the humanitarian crossing in the Gaza Strip via a secure axis,” a statement Mohammed Zaqout, director general of hospitals in Gaza, said was “false,” adding “we were forced to leave by gunpoint.” Israeli Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, in a video pilloried by the BBC, shows viewers a meager stash of automatic weapons in a promotional video that magically increases once foreign reporters arrive for a guided tour. The IDF later deleted it.

The lies will be written into the Israeli school books. The lies will be repeated by Israeli politicians, historians and journalists. The lies will be told on Israeli television and in Israeli films and books. Israelis are eternal victims. Palestinians are absolute evil. There was no genocide. Türkiye, a century later, still denies what happened to the Armenians.

In wartime people believe what they want to believe. The lies fill a hunger within the Israeli public that sees the conflict as a binary struggle between “the children of light and the children of darkness.” The lies are a defense against accountability, for if Israel refuses to acknowledge reality, it is not forced to respond to reality. The lies create cognitive dissonance, where fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes truth. The lies make any discussion of genocide, or reconciliation, impossible.  

Israel, with the backing of the Biden administration, will continue to snuff out all systems that sustain life in Gaza. Hospitals. Schools. Power plants. Water treatment facilities. Factories. Farms. Apartment blocks. Houses. Then Israel will pretend, like the killers in past genocides, it never happened. 

The lies used by Israel to absolve itself of responsibility will eat away at Israeli society. They will corrode its moral, religious, civic, intellectual and political life. The lies will elevate war criminals to heroic status and demonize those with a conscience. Israel’s genocide, as with the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia, will be mythologized, an epic battle against the forces of evil and barbarity, just as we mythologized the genocide of Native Americans and turned our settlers and murderous cavalry units into heroes. The killers in the Indonesian war against communism are cheered at rallies as saviors. They are interviewed about the “heroic” battles they fought nearly six decades ago. Israel will do the same. It will deform itself. It will celebrate its crimes. It will turn evil into good. It will exist within a self-constructed myth. The truth, as in all despotisms, will be banished. Israel, a monster to the Palestinians, will be a monster to itself.

The Costs and Casualties of Government’s Information Total War

By Emily Burns

Source: Brownstone Institute

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,”

This phrase, misattributed to Voltaire, has largely come to dominate—and confuse—our understanding of the importance of free speech in a free society. That misunderstanding seems to be at the heart of the very lukewarm response elicited by the exposure of “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history” unearthed through discovery in Missouri v. Biden now before the Supreme Court.  

The trouble with this framing of free speech is that it focuses on hateful speech, framing the imperative to defend the utterance of hateful speech as a form of polite, reciprocal tolerance, necessary for the smooth functioning of a liberal society. If ever there were a framing that caused one to miss the forest for the trees, this is it.

The primacy free speech enjoys here in the US has nothing whatever to do with some dewy-eyed ideal of tolerance. Rather, it owes its primacy to pragmatism. Freedom of speech is the best tool we have to ascertain the truth of any given matter. Like a sculptor transforming a shapeless piece of marble into a work of art, free and open debate chisels away at the falsehoods and misapprehensions in which the truth lays embedded. Restrict debate, and the gradual emergence of that truth will be delayed or deformed, with the result imperfect at times to the point of monstrosity.

The reason we must “defend to the death” the right to utter “intolerable speech,” is that failure to do so results in the swift and certain condemnation as “intolerable” all speech that diminishes the power or legitimacy of those in power. More succinctly, we must defend the pariah’s right to speak or everyone who crosses the regime, conveniently becomes a pariah. You either do as the ACLU did in 1978, defend the Nazi’s right to speak, or you have an explosion of government-designated “Nazis.” You may perhaps have noticed an exponential rise in the prevalence of “Nazis” and an ever-expanding panoply of -ists since our country’s commitment to free speech faltered? Yeah, me too.

No matter the political leanings or the content of the criticism, all those who have dared to critique the diktats of those in power for the last several years have been swiftly moved outside the pale, designated often times literal Nazis. It is this that explains the awesome scope of the censorship exposed in Missouri v. Biden, now before the Supreme Court.

We’re experiencing an information total war, resulting in blanket shutdown of any and all debate on each and every topic the government would prefer not to discuss. The cost to truth from this censorship carpet-bombing has been enormous. Lacking the refinement that comes from criticism and debate, the policies issuing from this informational hellscape are brutal and barbaric.

This information total war has been largely successful. Regime critics have been swiftly censored, defamed, and marginalized. The result is that most of the population continues to believe that the criticisms of government policies and actions over the past several years were levied by a bunch of cranks whose objections were largely based on gut level assumptions, political affiliation, or knee-jerk reactions. That many of those criticisms and warnings ended up being accurate is attributed to dumb luck. Thus, the public has little sympathy for the targets of government censorship, precisely because of the success of the censorship, and its complement, the propaganda generated to fill the vacuum left by the disappearance of truth. However, the public itself is harmed in myriad ways by this censorship, and not in any abstract fashion.

First and foremost, this censorship regime has harmed the public because the suppression of dissenting views resulted in the creation and deployment of a `whole` host of truly awful policies. Certain of its omniscience the government repeatedly censored, defamed and marginalized those who raised objections to its policies. Contrary to the propaganda narrative used to justify its censorship, the arguments against various strands of the government policies were based on sound reason, science, and data, the opponents often highly credentialed in the relevant field.

How many people know that one of the first critics of our maximalist approach to COVID was one of the most well-respected, frequently-cited scientists in the world, Stanford’s John Ioannidis? Or that his criticisms mirrored the guidance of the US’s actual extant pandemic plans?

How many people know that even from the very first, the opposition to masking was in fact based on its known futility, citing research from the CDC itself, published in May of 2020 (and recently vindicated by another systemic review by Cochrane)? Or that the most vocal opposition came from industrial hygienists (123) and others whose explicit job is to create specifications for safe work environments, including PPE? 

Source: U.S. CDC, Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings—Personal Protective and Environmental Measures. May 2020

How many people know that the opposition to the hysteria around hospital capacity was based on acknowledgement by hospital executives that 30 percent of COVID patients were in the hospital with COVID, versus for COVID? Or that this inflationary mis-characterization was incentivized by government payouts? Or that they were using HHS’s own data showing hospital capacity to have been no issue whatsoever in the US except in extremely localized areas and for extremely short periods—and hence easily remediable.

How many people know that the opposition to vaccine mandates, beyond being based on the obvious, and perfectly reasonable objection that there was no long-term data on their safety, was also based on published research showing no relationship between vaccination rates and disease transmission

Source: European Journal of Epidemiology, September, 2021 Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States

Or the concern that “original antigenic sin” could lead to mass vaccination resulting in negative efficacy, and that early published researched was demonstrating exactly that trend? Or that one of those who opposed vaccine mandates on ethical grounds was the director of medical ethics at one of the largest UC campuses?

The answer to all of these questions is, far too few. The sole reason for this widespread ignorance is government censorship. We have censorship to thank for the creation and implementation of divisive, harmful, and unjust policies. Lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports all find their origins in the truth-starved, debate-deprived offices of our behemoth bureaucracies. Their continuance well after their futility was demonstrated empirically, and the harms they would cause already beginning to manifest can likewise be attributed to the same benighted bedfellows.

In addition to being harmed by the content of these censorship-protected policies, the public was further harmed by the division they created. Because these policies were propped up by censoring dissent and defaming dissenters, the debate was no such thing. Instead, framing it in Manichean terms of good and evil, the censors cast large groups of the population as enemies of the people, effectively engaging in a government-executed hate crime targeting tens of millions of people.

This censorship-fueled division didn’t just tear the country apart, it cut straight through the center of families, yielding countless divorces, and many millions of families estranging loved ones–all due to government-promoted lies. The polarization that has so demoralized us was a feature, not a bug, of the policies implemented by our politicians and bureaucrats.

Through the pervasive action of this wide-ranging government censorship/propaganda effort, vast swathes of the American people have been and continue to be weaponized against their fellow Americans. The faith these people had in institutions has been perverted to serve the institutions, not the people. This credulity-weaponization encompasses not just Joe Schmoe on the street, but extends all the way to the Supreme Court, where in oral arguments last year, several justices made claims whose easily verifiable falseness would have made them blush, if they weren’t so wholly taken in by the censorship and propaganda operations of the broader US government.

By acting as the witting or unwitting dupes of this vast censorship/propaganda operation, the credibility of virtually every civic institution in the US has been eroded possibly to the point of no return. Those whose credibility can be salvaged will be decades in the doing. Unfortunately, many, if not most, of our institutions and their denizens remain the censor’s reliable handmaidens, now seeming to hope the censors might somehow hide the gushing efflux of their credibility.

Among the harms that have been visited upon the American people through this censorship operation, vaccine injuries must also be counted. Our government not only censored questions and concerns, it acted as the marketing department for the vaccine manufacturers. However, there was one very important difference—if the manufacturers had been doing their own marketing, each ad would have had the long list of potential side effects and counter-indications that is required of all other pharmaceuticals. These risks were simply not communicated, except at the time of injection in the form of a long list of contra-indicated conditions.

However, if at that time one were to realize that one had one of the contra-indicated conditions, in many parts of the country, one would still have had no choice but to get the shot. Doctors who granted medical exemptions were threatened by the state to such a degree as to make exemptions virtually inaccessible, regardless of a doctor’s medical judgement. Vaccine mandates made getting the shot a requirement for engagement in public life and countenanced no exceptions.

This coercion effectively nullified informed consent for the entire American public, and thus, any adverse reaction ought to be considered fair game for redress. But it is the young and those who had already had COVID who present a picture of unalloyed harm. For these groups, the vaccines provided no benefit—only risk. Thus, every single adverse event incurred in these groups must be viewed as direct, personal harms caused by a government-sponsored censorship operation. That this particular strain of censorship benefited private companies at the same time that it harmed the American people adds grievous injury to the ongoing insult.

It is particularly demoralizing to realize that the polarization deliberately fomented by our government seems likely to protect its perpetrators from accountability. Everywhere, we see polls and articles about how fatigued people are by politics. And yet we have no other recourse to address this vast “censorship leviathan.” It is now the go-to tool with which our government effects policy.

The only way to change it is to remove from power those people who support this censorship regime and to dismantle the regime’s complex apparatus. Ultimately, government censorship reduces our society to just two groups of people: the censors and the censored. While it remains in place, the ranks of the censored will be ever-expanding as the censors require ever more censorship to ensure people continue to disbelieve their lying eyes.

Israel’s leadership urge Netanyahu to Ignore “international demands” and exterminate the Gazans.

By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

Increasingly, Netanyahu’s own cabinet and advisors are urging genocide there against Gazans. (Actually, this viewpoint has long been popular among Netanyahu’s voters — well prior to the October 7th Hamas attack.)

The legal basis for such a solution comes from many decades of apartheid laws there:

As Jonathan Cook, a great independent journalist on Palestinian affairs, observed:

In today’s United States or Europe, any argument that citizenship privileges should be assigned to a group because of its ethnicity or religion would be considered overtly racist. That nonetheless is precisely the position of all the Jewish parties in the Israeli parliament – without exception.

All of them believe, for example, that it is essential that Israel has two differentiated citizenship tracks. One, the Law of Return of 1950, allows all Jews in the world to automatically immigrate to Israel. The other, the Citizenship Law of 1952, bars almost all Palestinians from ever returning to their homes in what is now Israel. It also denies Israel’s 1.8 million Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the population, a basic human right: to marry a Palestinian non-citizen and live with them in Israel.

And that’s actually putting it mildly, because right from the start, Israel was based upon ethnic cleansing to get rid of the existing population; or, as Ben-Gurion said in 1937, “We must expel the Arabs and take their place” because (mythologically but definitely not historically) God gave that land to “the Jews.” In other words: Ben-Gurion was saying that what he thought of as “our tribe” owns that land because that tribe’s myth says it does. And acting on that ethnocentric instead of humanistic basis, progressive-minded Jews such as Albert Einstein condemned as “fascists” Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and other leaders of the settler movement who carried out Ben-Gurion’s racist-fascist plan, and so those racist-fascists (or ideological nazis) produced Israel. They were smart enough to lie constantly about what their intentions actually were, but in recent times the surviving documents that Israel’s Government hadn’t yet been able to destroy totally, have become ‘resurrected’ to point the finger of blame clearly at the Government of Israel as the aggressor in this war. Christians had started Hitler’s war against all Jews, but racist-fascist Jews then went to Palestine and created their own racist-fascist Israel, based, at its very start, and clearly now even until the present, on a final solution to Israel’s Arab problem. The only difference between Europe’s Nazis and Israel’s nazis is that it’s by a different tribe and against a different tribe. The actors are different, but the play is the same.

On November 20th, Jonathan Ofir headlined at mondoweiss.net, “Influential Israeli national security leader makes the case for genocide in Gaza”, and he reported:

——

Since October 7, there has been no shortage of genocidal calls from Israeli leaders, as well as clear plans, also at ministerial level, for the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And while the usage of biblical euphemisms like Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “Amalek” reference may appear too vague for some, even if the story suggests killing infants, on Sunday retired Major General Giora Eiland, former head of the National Security Council and current advisor to the Defense Minister, decided to spell out genocide more explicitly.

In a Hebrew article [published November 19th] on the printed edition of the centrist Yedioth Ahronoth titled “Let’s not be intimidated by the world,” Eiland clarified that the whole Gazan civilian population was a legitimate target and that even “severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer.” His bottom line leaves no doubt as to his view:

“They are not only Hamas fighters with weapons, but also all the ‘civilian’ officials, including hospital administrators and school administrators, and also the entire Gaza population that enthusiastically supported Hamas and cheered on its atrocities on October 7th.”

Eiland speaks against humanitarian concern and the whole principle of distinction:

“Israel is not fighting a terrorist organization but against the State of Gaza.”

Therefore, per Eiland, “Israel must not provide the other side with any capability that prolongs its life.”

Eiland mocks the idea of “poor women” as the representation of uninvolved civilians:

“Who are the ‘poor’ women of Gaza? They are all the mothers, sisters or wives of Hamas murderers”.

The formulation is reminiscent of the far-right former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who, during the 2014 onslaught, suggested that Israel’s enemy was the entire Palestinian people:

“Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

Eiland speaks against surrendering to American sensibilities. Humanitarian pressure (that is, cutting off all basic life necessities) is a legitimate means of war, he claims:

“The Israeli cabinet must take a harder line with the Americans, and at least have the ability to say the following: as long as all the hostages are not returned to Israel, do not talk to us about the humanitarian aspects”.

Also, the rest of the international community, with its humanitarian concern, must be resisted – even the spread of severe epidemics is a legitimate means of warfare:

“The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers” 

Eiland’s outrageously genocidal piece was endorsed by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who tweeted the full article and said he “agreed with every word.” Smotrich is known for, among other things, calling to “wipe out Huwwara” in the West Bank, so it should come as no surprise that he would now endorse Eiland’s call to do the same in Gaza.

A concentration camp

Eiland has a long history of being surprisingly forthright about his view on the state of the Gaza Strip. In 2004, then as head of the National Security Council, he regarded the Gaza Strip as “a huge concentration camp” as he advocated for the U.S. to force Palestinians into the Sinai desert as part of a “two-state solution.”

As per a U.S. diplomatic cable leaked to Wikileaks here:

Repeating a personal view that he had previously expressed to other USG visitors, NSC Director Eiland laid out for Ambassador Djerejian a different end-game solution than that which is commonly envisioned as the two-state solution. Eiland’s view, he said, was prefaced on the assumption that demographic and other considerations make the prospect for a two-state solution between the Jordan and the Mediterranean unviable. …

——

Ofir’s article closes by presenting an English translation of Eiland’s piece, “Let’s Not be Intimidated by the World.”

That 31 March 2004 WikiLeaked cable, which Ofir linked to, also said:

There are 11 million people in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip, and that number will increase to 36 million in 50 years.  The area between Beer Sheva and the northern tip of Israel (including the West Bank and Gaza) has the highest population density in the world. Gaza alone, he said, is already “a huge concentration camp” with 1.3 million Palestinians.  Moreover, the land is surrounded on three sides by deserts.  Palestinians need more land and Israel can ill-afford to cede it.  The solution, he argued, lies in the Sinai desert.

13. (C) Specifically, Eiland proposed that Egypt be persuaded to contribute a 600 square kilometer parcel of land that would be annexed to a future Palestinian state as compensation for the 11 percent of the West Bank that Israel would seek to annex in a final status agreement.  This Sinai block, 20 kms of which would be along the Mediterranean coast, would be adjacent to the Gaza Strip.  A land corridor would be constructed connecting Egypt and this block to Jordan. (Note:  Presumably under Egyptian sovereignty.  End Note.)  In addition, Israel would provide Egypt a 200 square km block of land from further south in the Negev.  Eiland laid out the following advantages to his proposed solution:

— For the Palestinians:  The additional land would make Gaza viable.  It would be big enough to support a new port and airport, and to allow for the construction of a new city, all of which would help make Gaza economically viable.  It would provide sufficient space to support the return of Palestinian refugees.  In addition, the 20 km along the sea would increase fishing rights and would allow for the exploration of natural gas reserves.  Eiland argued that the benefits offered by this parcel of land are far more favorable to the Palestinians than would be parcels Israel could offer from the land-locked Negev.

Consequently: whereas back in 2004, Eiland was NOT urging that “The Israeli cabinet must take a harder line with the Americans,” but was INSTEAD advising to take into account “the Americans” (who at that time would not have favored Israel’s extermination of Gazans), he now DOES urge Netanyahu to go all the way to — like was Hitler’s goal regarding Jews — exterminate Gazans (even to use biological warfare to kill them off).

Apparently, during the 19-year interim between 2004 and now, the U.S. body-politic has moved in step along with Israel’s, toward Hitler’s views (but against different extermination-targets than his), so that Netanyahu now is being advised to go all the way to a final solution, regardless of what “The international community” will say about it.

Americans spend annually $3.8 billion in tax-dollars (that’s paid to Israel’s Government each and every year — and Biden now wants $14B added to that for Israel this year immediately) being donated to Israel’s Government, at least $3.3 billion of it each and every year to be paid then by Israel’s Government to purchase from Lockheed Martin and other U.S. weapons-makers the tools to carry out Israel’s invasions, up to and including genocide (because how those weapons are to be used is under the control of Israel’s Government, not of America’s). American voters are being offered as prospective future public officials to vote for, only candidates who are neoconservative; i.e., who represent and vote for the interests of the investors who control and profit from America’s weapons-manufacturers — the firms that sell to the U.S. Government instead of to the public. Rather than the weapons-makers serving the Government, the Government serves the weapons-makers; i.e., it serves their owners. So, those people (the individuals who control those firms) share with Israel’s Government the guilt for this extermination that’s now occurring in Gaza. And Americans who vote in national elections find these candidates acceptable to vote for. This is not Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s America; it is Harry Truman’s, and it has produced a string of atrocious U.S. Presidents uninterrupted except possibly for JFK whom they got assassinated (so the fear in any decent person running for America’s top political office needs to be recognized). It’s by now clear that America’s billionaires won’t go down without a fight. Politics is hardball — like being played with depleted uranium ‘balls’. It is war by other means. And this is NOT democracy.

Rebalancing The Masculine & The Feminine For A New Paradigm

In a time of collapse, witnessing the consciousness and paradigm driving our current moment is paramount. A rebalancing of consciousness may be a solution.

By Anne Baring

Source: The Pulse

When the masculine and the feminine are in balance, there is fluidity, relationship, a flow of energy, unity, totality. This fluidity and balance is perhaps best illustrated by the Taoist image of the indissoluble relationship and complementarity of Yin and Yang.

In the broadest terms, the feminine is a containing pattern of energy: receptive, connecting, holding things in relationship to each other; the masculine is an expanding pattern of energy: seeking extension, expansion towards what is beyond.

More specifically, the feminine reflects the instinctual matrix and the feeling (heart) values of consciousness; the masculine reflects the questing, goal-defining, ordering, and discriminating qualities of consciousness, generally associated with the mind or intellect.

For millennia women have lived closer to the first pattern; men to the second. But now, there is a deep impulse to balance these within ourselves and in our culture. There is an urgent need to temper the present over-emphasis on masculine value with a conscious effort to integrate the feminine one.

In the ancient world the feminine principle in the image of the goddess stood for relationship – the hidden connection of all things to each other. Secondly, it stood for justice, wisdom and compassion. Thirdly, and most importantly, it was identified with the unseen dimension beyond the known world – a dimension that may be imagined as a matrix connecting invisible spirit with visible nature.

The word used then to name this matrix was goddess; later it was soul. The feminine principle offered an image of the oneness, sacredness and inviolability of all life; the phenomenal world (nature, matter, body) was regarded as sacred because it was a theopany or manifestation of invisible spirit.

The greatest flaw in civilisation has been the over-emphasis on the masculine archetype (identified with spirit) and the devaluation of the feminine one (identified with nature). This has been reflected in the fact that the god-head has no feminine dimension.

The history of the last 4000 years has been forged by masculine traits – principally the goals of conquest and control. (this is in no sense intended as a criticism; in the context of prevailing belief systems and general level of consciousness, things could not have been different).

However, religion and science – all our cultural ideas and patterns of behaviour – have developed from this unbalanced foundation. Throughout this time, everything designated as “feminine” (nature, body, woman) was devalued and repressed, including the rich diversity of the Pagan legacy of the ancient world.

In the domain of religion, heretics were eliminated; diverse ways of relating directly to the transcendent were lost. Naturally, this has created a deep imbalance in the culture and in the human psyche. It has led finally to the tyrannies of this century where the lives of some 200 million people have been sacrificed to totalitarian regimes.

The modern tyrant is the extreme reflection of a deeply-rooted pathology derived from a long-standing cultural imbalance between the masculine and feminine archetypes.

Where there is no relationship and balance between the masculine and feminine principles, the masculine principle becomes pathologically exaggerated, inflated; the feminine pathologically diminished, inarticulate, ineffective. The symptoms of a pathological masculine are rigidity, dogmatic inflexibility, omnipotence, and an obsession with or addiction to power and control.

There will be a clear definition of goals but no receptivity to ideas and values that conflict with these goals. The horizon of the human imagination will be restricted by an overt or subtle censorship. We can see this pathology reflected today in the ruthless values that govern the media, politics, and the technological drive of the modern world.

We can see the predatory impulse to acquire or to conquer new territory in the drive for global control of world markets, in the ideology of growth, in new technologies such as the genetic modification of food. We see exaggerated competitiveness – the drive to go further, grow faster, achieve more, acquire more, elevated to the status of a cult.

There is contempt for the feeling values grounded in the experience of relationship with others and with the environment. There is a predatory and compulsive sexuality in both men and women who increasingly lose the capacity for relationship. There is continuous expansion in a linear sense but no expansion in depth, in insight. The pressure of things to do constantly accelerates.

What is the result? Exhaustion, anxiety, depression, illness which afflict more and more people.

There is no time or place for human relationships. Above all, there is no time for relationship with the dimension of spirit. The water of life no longer flows. Men and women and, above all, children, become the victims of this harsh, competitive, uncaring ethos: women, in their disorientation, and because the feminine value has no clear definition or recognition in our culture, are drawn to copy the pathological image of the masculine which itself incorporates fear of the feminine.

Because to a large extent, this whole situation arises unconsciously, not much can be done about it until catastrophe intervenes.

Evolutionary Pressure Emerges

I feel we are living in a time of kairos – a mythic time of choice – a time of stupendous scientific discoveries which are enlarging our vision of the universe, shattering the vessel of our old concepts about the nature of reality.

Yet the delicate organism of life on our planet and the survival of our species are threatened as never before by technologies driven by an ethos of the conquest and control of nature, technologies which are applied with an utter disregard for the perils of our interference with the complex web of relationships upon which the life of our planet depends.

The choice is between clinging to an outworn and unbalanced ethos and maturing beyond it towards a more responsible and sensitive capacity for relationship. If we are unable to develop this empathic capacity to relate, we will surely destroy ourselves and the environment that sustains our life.

Bringing Balance

So how could we help to redress the balance between the masculine and feminine in ourselves and in our culture?

First of all, where are we, as individuals out of balance? Where are we driven by the unbalanced cultural ethos of achieving power and control, ignoring our feelings of depression, anxiety or symptoms of the body’s distress?

Are we allowing ourselves enough time for reflection, for relationships, for connection with a deeper dimension of reality?

The priority as I see it is to make the fact of this pathology a matter of public discussion. Shift the emphasis from achieving power to achieving balance.

Secondly, here are some suggestions for strengthening the feminine principle in our society.

  • Free the Imagination from the stranglehold exercised by a controlling minority which excludes the non-rational from inclusion in our understanding of life.
  • Formulate a new image of spirit as the totality of all that is – both seen and unseen. Recover the lost and devalued feminine aspects of spirit: restore nature, matter and the physical body (including sexuality) to the realm of the sacred.
  • Imagine the Soul as a cosmic internet. We belong to an immense field or matrix of relationships. We could imagine the soul in this new way as something we belong to and can develop a relationship with.
  • Religion – Relinquish the dogmatic formulations of the past: Monotheism as Mytheism. (Ravi Ravindra) Recognise the negative effects of deeply rooted beliefs – such as the belief in original sin – on our interpretation of life and its meaning. Welcome the idea of direct individual experience of the sacred and the numinous.
  • Science – Integrate the principle of empathic relationship with what is studied in scientific teaching and practice. In education give children an empathic understanding of their own bodies and of nature rather than the image of the body and the universe as a machine. Help them to become aware of their environment as a great chain of relationships in which their lives are embedded. Nourish their sense of wonder.
  • The psyche: Heal the split between mind and soul. Recognise that feeling is a valid mode of perceiving reality and must be integrated with thinking. The main problem in our society is emotional immaturity.
  • Politics: develop a forum beyond national and international politics where the true problems of the planet can be articulated and addressed. Recognise grandiosity, standardisation, the drive for control, the proliferation of bureaucracy as symptoms of the pathology of an inflated and unrelated masculine principle.
  • Medicine: integrate alternative (complementary) methods of healing with orthodox ones as a deliberate policy. Focus on preventive medicine. The modern GP has no time for an empathic relationship with his or her patient. The pressure of numbers is simply too great. However, in some surgeries and hospitals alternative practises are being integrated with orthodox ones. This integration could be expanded.
  • Agriculture: Focus on increasing the production of organic food. Removal of pesticides, antibiotics and toxins from our food and water.
  • Care of Children: A much higher level of prenatal care. Compared with the rest of Europe, we are way behind (Sweden is the most advanced). Attention to quality of children’s diet and to nourishing the imagination as well as the intellect.
  • Educate Women to be aware of their own specific value and the importance of their contribution to the culture. Articulating feeling values without fear or shame.
  • Educate Adolescents in awareness of the responsibilities of relationships and of the parent towards the child. Teach them the psychology of the child; its dependency; its sensitivity, its potential for emotional growth. Teach them about the complexities of neuroscience so they understand how their emotions affect their bodies and vice-versa. Ask them to invent ways of caring for the environment.
  • Teaching Methods: integrate right-hemispheric consciousness with the linear consciousness of the left hemisphere – opening to the creative power of the image. Balance in the curriculum between developing the capacity for logical thought and creative imagining and participation. This poem by a 12 year old boy at school in Southampton shows how a teacher can provide the environment in which a child can dare to express his true feelings:

I hear my inner voice talking to me,
Explaining, encouraging,
Opening the part of me that I thought was lost.
In this world of cruelty and fear little lights are burning.
Everyone has a flame inside their hearts,
If only they had the courage to find it.
The light can trickle out through a hole in your mind.
When the inside is out
You are transformed and revealed.
There is no need to be afraid,
But be curious
As you will probably never know
where the force is coming from.
 – Daniel Webster

Each of us is called to focus on rebalancing the masculine and feminine in ourselves and in our culture. This could affect a profound alchemy in our lives. Women and men could both participate in a process of transformation which could bring into being a new cultural focus whose emphasis is no longer on power and control but on relationship, balance and connectedness.

The phrase “the conquest of nature” could be replaced by the awareness that humanity and nature participate in a deeper and still unknown reality that embraces them both.

Millions of people have no choice. Those of us who do have a measure of choice could rise to the immense challenge of defining and living a new and responsible role in relation to each other and our planetary home.