Author Archives: Reid Mukai

Saturday Matinee: Mandy

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By Brian Tallerico

Source: RogerEbert.com

More than most movies, it’s hard to know where to begin with an appreciation or critique of Panos Cosmatos’ “Mandy.” It’s a really difficult film to capture tonally and even narratively in a review, largely because it is such a stylish, visceral experience that it demands you give yourself over to it actively instead of passively analyzing it. On the one hand, it’s a thriller, of sorts, a vengeance piece about a man killing those who destroyed his life. But, man, does that not really capture the experience of this movie. Some have compared it to an ‘80s heavy metal album cover sprung to life, but that’s only part of “Mandy,” and doesn’t convey the emotional depth that saturates every frame. And then there’s the fact that “Mandy” is kind of two movies in one, a slow-burn journey into hell in the first hour and a blood-soaked climb out of it in the second. Did I mention the chainsaw fight yet?

Nicolas Cage stars in “Mandy” as Red Miller, a lumberjack who lives a quiet life in the woods with his girlfriend Mandy, played by Andrea Riseborough. One day, Mandy catches the eye of a cult leader named Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache), who proceeds to conjure motorcycle-riding demons to steal the girl and make her one of their own. In the process, Red is tortured and nearly killed. The first half of “Mandy” is filled with long, color-saturated takes of impending doom. Even casual behavior like quiet scenes between Mandy and Red have a foreboding nature, and then the film peaks in the middle with a waking nightmare as Red sees something no one should ever see happen to the love of his life. Deeply traumatized, Red is destroyed, and there’s a sequence in which Cage drinks an entire bottle of booze (well he ingests the stuff that isn’t poured on his wounds) while in his underwear, howling like an injured animal. It’s going to be GIF-ed and mocked, but it’s actually a great bit of acting, conveying a man not just mourning or in grief but literally destroyed.

Like a character in a Queensrÿche concept album, Red emerges from this destruction with his plans for vengeance. With a title card that divides the film in half, “Mandy” then becomes the movie that most people will remember in that it’s about Red working his way through both the demons that Jeremiah conjured and, inevitably, the gang itself. The heavy metal comparison is apt not just because the genre often included figures like the nightmarish creations that Jeremiah brought to life but in the very structure of “Mandy,” which unfolds in a very untraditional manner in both halves. Scenes play out like songs on an album, episodically cast in extreme color palettes that amplify the trippy, surreal natures of the entire experience. “Mandy” is a fascinating genre exercise in that it is as untraditional a horror movie as you’ll see this year but also relies on so many classics of the form. It is, at its core, a downright biblical tale of evil and vengeance.

It’s also pretty bad-ass when it comes to stand-out moments, particularly an already-acclaimed fight with two men wielding chainsaws like they’re swords. It’s a perfect blend of the old and new in “Mandy” and a distillation of what the film does well in how it takes a familiar good vs. evil sequence and twists it to fit Cosmatos’ vision.

Having said that, there are times when I felt the length of said vision. “Mandy” runs over two hours, and a little of its style goes a long way. I think there’s a masterful version of this movie that runs notably shorter, but that doesn’t mean there’s not an unforgettable one the way it is right now. 

One more thing before you go on this journey with Nicolas Cage: the incredible Johann Johannsson (“Sicario,” “Arrival“) does the best of his career in this, his final film composition. The score here is another character, a series of screeching, violent noises that add to the tone of the film in ways that can’t be overstated. The film simply doesn’t work without it. And, as much as I like other parts of the movie, Johannson’s work alone justifies a viewing. It reminds us how much we lost by his early passing.

Watch Mandy on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/12253438

Justin and the Nazis

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His former PM father granted safe haven to Nazi war criminals.

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics

Poor Justin Trudeau. The Canadian PM has egg on his face after it was revealed his government gave former Waffen-SS Nazi Yaroslav Hunka a standing ovation in Canada’s House of Commons.

It looks like Canada’s “House of Commons” (where there are few real commoners) is all gaa-gaa over Ukrainian Nazis. Of course, this is a major faux pas, as slavering over unrepentant Nazis is, to say the least, in bad taste, especially for “woke” leaders such as Trudeau.

How is it possible Canada’s “leaders” are unaware the SS Galicia Division where Hunka “served” was involved in the 1943 mass murder of Poles, Jews, Roma, and communists? How is possible for a man involved in genocide (directed primarily against women and children) to receive a standing ovation?

It’s rather amusing, in a sardonic sort of way, to watch as the Canadian government melts down over this embarrassing incident.

It looks like House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota will be thrown under the bus. He called Hunka a “hero” during the staged event that revealed the Canadian government’s apparent affinity for SS Waffen Nazis.

The pathetic face-saving blame game was dropped on Rota like 900 pounds of manure. There are demands he resign his post immediately. No doubt he will spend the rest of his now miserable life in shame.

Meanwhile, Trudeau declared his innocence. He insisted it was “extremely upsetting that this happened… This is something that is deeply embarrassing to the parliament of Canada and by extension to all Canadians.”

Justin’s father, Pierre Trudeau, the former Canadian PM (it’s a family affair), “was complicit in the granting of safe haven to thousands of known Nazis who had ‘killed Jews with their own hands,’” tweets Chay Bowes.

I know it’s popular now to consider just about everything posted on Elon Musk’s X-Twitter as a far-right conspiracy theory. However, Mr. Bowes includes a clip from a 1997 episode of Sixty Minutes. Needless to say, CBS ain’t what it used to be.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service revealed in 2019 that a secret file on the scandalous dealings of the elder Trudeau was dispatched to the memory hole. His “fascination with communism, fascism, socialism and religion drove Trudeau to the far reaches of the political world,” writes Robert Morley for The Trumpet.

According to a Free Republic book review of the biography Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919-1944, authored by Max and Monique Nemni, Trudeau was “not in the usual iconographic way… the sacrosanct icon of the progressive new Canada but as an anti-Semitic admirer of Hitler and Mussolini.”

Like father, like son?

It should also be noted that Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Chrystia Freeland, who arranged a Canadian training mission with Ukraine’s “integral nationalists” in 2017, has a rather ugly skeleton in her closet. Freeland’s Ukrainian grandfather Michael Chomiak (Mykhailo Khomiak) was a Nazi collaborator. He edited Krakivs’ki Visti, a “vehemently antisemitic” newspaper.

Before the insanity of Ukraine, the corporate media on occasion told the truth about Nazis. Now, according to the state and its corporate media megaphone, the real Nazis are in America—no, not the Operation Paperclip imports by the CIA, but a tiny marginalized homegrown fringe of skinheads and other deluded racist miscreants.

Canada’s “conservatives” are exploiting this incident to the hilt. In this regard, they are little different than their American counterparts, the supposed “conservatives” that want endless war with Russia, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and China. These are the “conservatives” that want to kill Julian Assange and run a former Gitmo JAG officer as president, they are colleagues of neocon “conservatives” like the psychopaths Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley.

Finally, to demonstrate the rank historical ignorance of Canada’s parliament, Hunka was described as fighting against the Soviets in World War 2.

I’m not sure what history books these ignoramuses are reading (if any at all). The Soviet Union, the UK, and the US were allies during the war.

I’ll bet Trudeau, Freeland, and at least a few MPs understand Ukraine’s Nazis were on the side of the real Nazis, not the Allies. However, it appears Canada, the US, and Germany required the ideology of authoritarian fascism in order to control their respective countries, and that’s why war criminal Nazis were shipped in under the wire.

Countering NATO’s Efforts to Destroy China

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NATO’s efforts to destroy Russia’s Black Sea fleet is a practice run to destroy China’s, Declan Hayes writes.

By Declan Hayes

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

NATO’s efforts to destroy Russia’s Black Sea fleet is a practice run to destroy China’s. Although some of the soldiers guiding those air and sea drones towards Crimea may be Ukrainians, most of them are undoubtedly British and American. As, of course, are the spy planes pinpointing their Russian targets.

Although Russia has adopted a softly softly approach to all this unprecedented aggression, our focus is on the longer game where NATO is trying to contain the Russian navy and coral the Russian army and air force. To NATO, Ukrainian sovereignty is of no account one way or the other. The main objective is to herd Russia’s Armed Forces into a strategic stockade from which they have no way to drive forward. That seems to be working a charm in this NATO naval guerilla campaign against Sevastopol where NATO has exploited the grain deal corridors in much the same way that the Israeli air force hides behind civilian planes to bomb civilian Syrian targets.

Having steadied their Russian front, NATO can then turn their attention to the Chinese front which they hope will play out in a similar fashion. Because the Chinese Army has no need to cross the Russian border, it is redundant to external calculations unless it once again crosses the Yalu River.

Should a token force of 100,000 crack CPLA advisors, with Pyongyang’s blessing, sweep southwards towards the 38th Parallel, that would considerably complicate matters for China’s American friends as more maritime waters than they could presently handle would then be in play. Given that North Korea has thrown its weight behind Russia, Pyongyang would undoubtedly welcome such military help as China could provide in upgrading their missile and related technologies.

As the war against China will undoubtedly be primarily a maritime war, the Korean peninsula may not be quite in the eye of the storm, which will zero in on breaking China’s main shipping routes. As things currently stand, North Korea is just a card China can keep in reserve until it is time to play it.

Josh Kozlov, the leader of the U.S. Army’s 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, and the British Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) are amongst the NATO worthies who have opined on the crucial role advanced electronic warfare is playing in the Black Sea and will play in the South China Sea. Given that Hansard has British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace on record calling Ukraine a “battle lab”, a good try out for the best of British hardware and software, no doubt Wallace will enjoy a good stress test against Blighty’s North Korean and Chinese electronic warfare peers.

Unelected European Union dictator Ursula von der Leyen, meanwhile, is complaining that China produces cheap electric cars. Those Chinese cads! How dare they copy Japan’s economic growth tactics.

Japan, remember Japan, when the U.S. Occupation troops used to buy their imitation watches and battery radios as a joke during the Korean war. Seiko, Mitsubishi, Toshiba and Panasonic had the last laugh there.

As will the Chinese, unless von der Leyen’s American bosses implement a naval blockade on China and thereby cut China off from her shipping routes to protect obsolete European competitors and “the rules based order”.

Although the Yanks have proposed the alternative India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) with the backing of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan, the world and his mother know that is all hot air to pretend that NATO has a viable alternative to China’s various economic infrastructural initiatives and that all this shadow boxing is a repeat of the prelude to The Great War when the rise of the German Navy’s dreadnoughts and the proposed Berlin Baghdad railway were seen as fatal threats to the Royal Navy’s maritime dominance.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the CIA hub of Jordan, which are all signed up to Team BRIICS, can expect plenty of NATO threats to come their way if they do not play ball and abandon the Chinese and, in Saudi’s case, the Indians as well, who would also want to send cargo through Saudi waters as part of China’s BRI initiative.

And though therailroad infrastructure linking Greece with Central Europe is a part of the BRI and Pakistan’s Gwadar Port is part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), NATO would feel itself entitled to hijack them as part of their mercurial “rules-based order” just as, for the same Nordstream related reasons, the oil and gas pipes beneath the Black Sea are prime targets for NATO’s Ukrainian proxies.

This is no conjecture. Senator Tom Cotton’s report spells out in great detail that NATO need to decouple from China and the Cato Institute, the Bipartisan Policy Center and Australian nut job Dr Ross Babbage have all kindly informed us how this war with China will play out more or less as we previously outlined.

Writing for AsiaNikkei, Admiral James Stavridis, who was formerly the 16th Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, tells us that that, as in Ukraine, NATO’s key advantage is in its allies, in its Filipino, Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese cannon fodder, in other words, and Forbes tells us that the key to success would be, as we said, a naval blockade.

Assuming, of course, China was not bullied into making the same mistakes Admiral Yamamoto’s Imperial Japanese Navy were forced to make when they attacked Pearl Harbor and the American colony of the Philippines. All American bluster about their god-like omnipotence aside, the Chinese High Command has a full and comprehensive appreciation of the capabilities of America’s military industrial complex and how it has progressed since China defanged it during the Korean war.

But let’s also not forget the Indo China wars where the Viêt Minh had their HQ in a Hanoi ice cream bar and the Viêt Cong had their HQ in a Saigon noodle shop and where the great British travel writer Norman Lewis made some very pertinent comments about the Chinese, the Cambodians, the Laotians and particularly the Vietnamese when he documented his experiences in French Indo China at the start of the Second IndoChina war.

Advantage at Sea—Prevailing With Integrated All-Domain Naval Power spells out how the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard will, like Britannia before Yamamoto showed up, rule the waves. Because NATO is making contingency plans to lace “the straits of Hormuz, Suez, Gibraltar, Malacca, Panama, and Dover” with mines to disrupt supply chains, so must China.

But, if we leave such primitively effective sabotage operations to one side, we can expect NATO to target the digital infrastructure which underwrites the movement of some six million containers transported in approximately 61,000 ships that comprise the world’s trade outside of oil, gas and raw materials. American puppet von der Leyen, as indicated above, has already hinted at that tactic which, given China’s disproportionate power over the infrastructure through which international trade flows, makes sense from the Pentagon’s viewpoint. As they have already run many such pilot programs in insurance and banking against Russia over Ukraine, such efforts must also be factored into China’s calculus which, given China’s geographic and economic size, will be monumentally global in nature.

But then, because all politics is local, China must entice rather than coerce North Korea and Vietnam into its orbit, leaving the Vietnamese in particular with as much ambiguity as those inscrutable masters of intrigue need to defend their own interests in the East (South China) Sea. And, after Vietnam comes the Philippines, which has suffered as much from the Americans as have the Vietnamese. As with Hanoi, so also must China quietly make major diplomatic and economic inroads with Manila, whilst going easy on the jingoism. More carrot, less stick, in other words.

As regards Taiwan, all major players know there is no Chinese hurry there and that it is America and America alone which is using Taiwan as a casus belli. Finally, as regards the long-suffering people of Okinawa and all of Japan Yamamoto, in case they have not heard, is dead, assassinated by the Yanks in 1943. Not only can Japan, with or without another Yamamoto, not prevail in another war but there is no need for Japan to engage in such adventurism as there are much easier ways to commit hara-kiri than picking an unwinnable war with China to the south and Russia to the north.

The Japanese, like the Chinese, should hone their diplomatic skills, perhaps with the help of their good friends in Hanoi and Bangkok and the good people of Taiwan, where Japan and the Japanese are both much admired.

The governments of China, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and those close to them have much more important things to attend to than killing each other to enhance the bottom lines of Lockheed Martin, Northrop, and BAE Systems and ensure further kickbacks for the Capitol Hill war hawks those gangsters bribe. The way forward for all of them is to work together for mutual and mutually respectful economic development, to enhance their military capabilities as needed and to ignore, as much as they can, the tone deaf war drums the Yanks and their toadies are never done beating to death.

Canada, Ukraine, and Nazis

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Yaroslav Hunka, center front row, with his Waffen SS unit. Volodomyr Zelensky and Justin Trudeau applaud him in Canada’s parliament. (Image: Zero Hedge)

By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

The Canadian government turned what should have been an ordinary photo opportunity with Ukraine’s president into a political debacle when a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator was honored in parliament. Now Canada’s history of admitting Ukrainian SS volunteers is facing new scrutiny as Russia gains the upper hand in the proxy war with the west. 

There is something especially satisfying when one’s opponents help make a case for something they have denied. Recently the Canadian government did just that. Their effort to prop up the failing Ukraine proxy war instead exposed that country’s Nazi past and present.

Ukraine has been a divided nation ever since its founding as a state after World War I. Its population is divided by language with Ukrainian and Russian speakers, with some favoring its status as a Soviet republic while others were vehemently opposed. So strong was that faction that there were many Ukrainians who actively collaborated with German occupation forces during World War II.

That history is well documented and is only denied by rank political cynicism which seeks to justify a proxy war which is trending in Russia’s favor.  Unfortunately the U.S. and its happy vassal allies, like Canada, are trying to keep up the charade as long as possible, no matter the cost to the people they claim to be helping.

Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky’s recent visits to the U.S. and Canada were replete with calls to never give up and to defeat Vladimir Putin and to give Ukraine an endless supply of weapons and money. The Canadians were so eager to impress that they revealed a truth they had been denying.

It should have been enough to have Zelensky address their parliament, but they couldn’t leave well enough alone. They somehow felt compelled to add a special guest, 98-year old Yaroslav Hunka, who was introduced as “…a Ukrainian Canadian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians…”

An important part of the war propaganda surrounding Ukraine has been to deny that people such as Hunka even exist or that they fought alongside the Germans we are otherwise told to revile. For Canada that also means denying that they brought those forces to emigrate after the war.

Instead of just introducing Zelensky and swearing to defend him no matter what, the Canadian parliament gave Hunka two standing ovations. It was later reported that Hunka served with the  First Ukrainian Division, also known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, or the SS 14th Waffen Division, a voluntary unit that was under German command. We are told that these units embody the worst evils committed in modern history. Of course, Germany didn’t have a monopoly on evil or genocide but the narrative of a uniquely evil nation is deeply embedded in western consciousness and the fallout from the incident was both funny and sad.

After Hunka’s history was revealed the amateurish nature of Canadian and all western foreign policy couldn’t be hidden either. The Speaker of the parliament apologized profusely and then resigned. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau admitted to being embarrassed although he felt compelled to add nonsensical warnings against Russian propaganda when his government’s farce was one of its own doing.

Canada is happy to be a U.S. partner in crime. If they’re told to recognize a fake president of Venezuela they do it. If they’re told to arrest the Chief Financial Officer of Huawei and create an international incident they will do that too. If the U.S. decides on another occupation of Haiti then Canada is on board with that too.

As for honoring a Ukrainian who served the Nazis, they are more than willing because that is what they’ve been doing since 1945. There is a large Ukrainian population in Canada who were welcomed with open arms, just as Hunka was. The Canadian government admitted more than 2,000 members of the Galician Waffen SS. In fact, showing an SS tattoo was a means of entry to Canada as it was eager to enhance its anti-left bona fides. some of these men were recruited to work in mining and undermine left wing union activity. Canada’s Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, is the grand-daughter of Ukrainian collaborator and propagandist Michael Chomiak.

Of course Canada shares the US history of being a white supremacist colonial state. So much so that they sometimes slip up and ruin their fine tuned image as a nicer version of the U.S. and end up showing their true colors.

The entire incident is an indication that the war they pledge to win isn’t going their way. The U.S., Canada and the rest of the collective west are now caught in a trap of their own making. They have stuffed blue and yellow flags down our throats, taken billions of dollars and euros and pounds that their people need, censored countless individuals and platforms, and even blown up the Nordstream pipeline. But now the game is up and they don’t know how to face their defeat. Instead they found an old Nazi and gave him applause, a sure sign of panic.

But they have done something even worse. Some Ukrainians, like Zelensky’s grandfather, defended the USSR and fought with the Red Army. Any Ukrainian on the other side was a German collaborator. Canada forgot that millions of people haven’t been fooled by heavy handed propaganda that seeks to change historical memory. The Soviet Union played the biggest role in Germany’s defeat, a simple fact which is ignored or disappeared or in the case of the proxy war turned into a perverse retelling of history which requires a willingness to take part in a shameful lie.

The backpedaling and apologizing is undeniably enjoyable to watch. Yet Canada revealed another frightening truth. The collective west is desperate and may do more than sabotage a pipeline. Russia is in no mood to back down after having been lied to about the Minsk Accords and a tentative peace plan early in this conflict. A public relations debacle is not the worst thing they can do. Canada and the U.S. and their friends may convince themselves that escalation is their way out. Foreign policy amateurism may lead to something far worse for humanity.

Resisting Genetically Mutilated Food & the Eco-Modern Nightmare: Together, ‘Just You and Me’  

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: OffGuardian

This image is symbolic of everything that is wrong with modern society.

A gas leak from Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal in 1984 resulted in around 560,000 injured (respiratory problems, eye irritation, etc.), 4,000 severely disabled and 20,000 dead.

Not only that, but the pesticides produced at the factory and the model of farming promoted has caused well-documented misery for farmers, harm to soil, water sources and the health of the population and a radical transformation of social relations in rural communities. And these issues apply not only to India but also to other countries.

That old advertising brochure dating from around the early 1960s encapsulates the arrogance of billionaires and their companies that think they are the hand of God, that they are the truth and the science, and that we should all be in awe of the technology they produce.

Facilitated by the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they uproot highly productive traditional agriculture, saying it is deficient. They poison the soil, the food, the waterways and people. But that’s not enough. They pirate, own and genetically engineer the seeds. The chemicals and engineering do not result in more or better food. Quite the opposite. Diets have become narrower, and the nutritional content of many food items has progressively diminished (see McCance and Widdowson’s the Mineral Depletion of Foods). Moreover, food secure regions have become food insecure.

But it goes beyond this.

Consider the amount of killer-chemicals that the likes of Union Carbide’s promised techno-utopian consumer society (Union Carbide produced numerous other similar brochures to the one presented above, promoting the role of science and technology across all sectors) has gifted to humanity in everyday products from shampoos to toys, pans, packaging, sofas and tins.

It is notable that glyphosate, the world’s most used agricultural herbicide, began life as an industrial chelator of minerals in metal pipes to prevent blockages and deterioration. It now ensures mineral depletion/nutrient deficiencies in the human body. Glyphosate affects human soil – the gut microbiome – which directly feeds the major organs. Little wonder we witness a proliferation of illness and disease.

But forget about what has become modernism’s spiralling public health crisis – don’t forget to take that money-spinning experimental booster jab because, remember, they said that they really care about you and your health.

Meanwhile, bioscience parks across the world expand and promise an even more marvellous techno-dystopia than the one already created. They are working on injecting you with nanotechnology to ‘cure’ you of all the diseases that the modernist type of thinking, products and technology created in the first place – or on manipulating your DNA-physiology to hook you up to the internet (of things). The patents are there – this is not speculation.

And as these bioscience parks expand, their success is measured in annual turnover, profits and ‘growth’. They want more and more ‘talent’ to study life sciences and health subjects and to take up positions at the biotech companies. And they call for more public subsidies to facilitate this. More kids to study science so that they can be swept up into the ideology and practices of the self-sustaining paradigm of modern society.

Of course, ‘sustainability’ is the mantra. Sustainability in terms of fake-green, net-zero ideology but, more importantly, sustainable growth and profit.

Meanwhile, across the world, most notably in the Netherlands, these parks demand more land. More land for expansion and more land to house ‘global talent’ to be attracted to work. That means displacing farmers under the notion that they are the major emitters of ‘greenhouse gases’, which, in the Netherlands at least, they are clearly not. Look towards other sectors or even the US military if you require a prime example of a major polluter. But that’s not up for discussion, not least because military-related firms are often intertwined with the much-valued bioscience-business ‘ecosystems’ promoted.

And once the farmers have gone and the farmland is concreted over under the concept (in the Netherlands) of a Tristate City, do not worry – your ‘food’ will be created in a lab courtesy of biosynthetic, nanotechnological, biopharmaceutical, genetically engineered microbes and formulas created at the local bioscience park.

Any carbon-related pollution created by these labs will supposedly be ‘offset’ by a fraudulent carbon credit trading Ponzi scheme – part of which will mean buying up acres in some poor country to plant trees on the land of the newly dispossessed.

This brave new ecomodernism is to be overseen by supranational bodies like the UN and the WHO. National uniparty politicians will not be engaged in policy formation. They will be upholders of the elite-determined status quo – junior ‘stakeholders’ and technocratic overseers of an algorithm/AI-run system, ensuring any necessary tweaks are made.

Of course, not everything that happens under the banner of bioscience should be dismissed out of hand, but science is increasingly the preserve of an increasingly integrated global elite who have created the problems that they now rollout the ‘solutions’ for. It is a highly profitable growth industry – under the banner of ‘innovation’, cleaning up the mess you created.

But the disturbing trend is that the ‘science’ and the technology shall not be questioned. A wealthy financial-digital-corporate elite funds this science, determines what should be studied, how it should be studied and how the findings are disseminated and how the technology produced is to be used.

As we saw with the COVID event, this elite has the power to shut down genuine debate, prevent scrutiny of ‘the science’ and to smear and censor world-renowned scientists and others who even questioned the narrative. And it also pulls the strings of nation states so much so that former New Zealand PM Jacinda Arden said that her government is ‘the truth’. The marriage of science and politics in an Orwellian dystopia.

The prevailing thinking is that the problems of illness, hunger, malnutrition, unemployment, pollution, resource usage and so on are all to be solved down at the bioscience park by what farmer/author Chris Smaje says through technical innovation and further integration into private markets which are structured systematically by centralised power in favour of the wealthy.

The ecomodernist ideology we see embedded within the mindsets of those lobbying for more resources, land and funding have nothing much to say about how humanity got ill, infertile, poor, dispossessed, colonised, depressed, unemployed or marginalised in the first place. Driven by public funding, career progression and profit, they remain blinkered and push ahead with an ideology whose ‘solutions’ only produce more problems that call for more ‘innovation’ and more money.

At the same time, any genuine solutions are too often dismissed as being driven by ideology and ignorance that will lead us all to ruin. A classic case of projection.

As I have written previously, current hegemonic policies prioritise urbanisation, global markets, long supply chains, commodified corporate knowledge, highly processed food and market dependency at the expense of rural communities, independent enterprises and smallholder farms, local markets, short supply chains, indigenous knowledge, diverse agroecological cropping, nutrient-dense diets and food sovereignty.

And this has led us to where we are now.

Trade and agriculture policy specialist Devinder Sharma once said that we need family farms not family doctors. Imagine the reduction in illnesses and all manner of conditions. Imagine thriving local communities centred on smallholder production, nutrient-dense food and healthy people. Instead, we get sprawling bioscience parks centred on economic globalisation, sickness and the manipulation of food and human bodies.

Although a few thousand immensely powerful people are hellbent on marching humanity towards a dystopian ecomodernist future, we can, in finishing, take some inspiration from the words of John Seymour (1912-2004), a pioneer of the self-sufficiency movement.

Seymour was described as a one-man rebellion against modernism by writer and ecologist Herbert Girardet. But as a farmer himself, Seymour regarded himself a ‘crank peasant’ and offered solutions in terms of localism, small-scale economics, a return to the land and organic agriculture.

In a call to action, he stated:

The tiny amount you and I can do is hardly likely to bring the huge worldwide moloch of plundering industry down? Well, if you and I don’t do it, it will not be done, and the Age of Plunder will terminate in the Age of Chaos. We have to do it – just the two of us – just you and me. There is no ‘them’ – there is nobody else. Just you and me. On our infirm shoulders we must take up this heavy burden now… Tomorrow will be too late.”

The Government Slaughter in Lahaina: Maui Revisited!

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By Gary D. Barnett

Source: GaryDBarnett.com

“Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy.”

~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

We are in the midst of a heinous crime in what is falsely referred to as the ‘American’ State of Hawaii, so vile and evil, that it should sicken all who have any remote possibility of exhibiting mental acquaintance with truth, compassion, or empathy. The State’s attack on the people of Maui was in my studied opinion, premeditated, brutal, murderous beyond explanation, and targeted to achieve a preconceived agenda which was the total destruction of Lahaina by extreme property devastation and mass death of much of the local population. This was necessary in the mind of the State in order to steal the land and rebuild based on the World Economic Forum and U.N. plan for captured cities, as evidenced by the evil piece of garbage governor, Josh Green, who immediately claimed he wanted to acquire by theft the purposely destroyed land and property for the State, while smoldering embers still burned, and bodies had not been found.

Today, I went to the ten top mainstream news sites searching all news stories, and did not find a single story about the Lahaina fires, except one showing the slimy Biden sleeping while at a meeting with Maui victims; this after offering these victims $700 per family after they had lost everything, including many of their family members. In other words, this story has been purposely scrubbed from view, not different than what happened after the intentional chemical fire devastated East Palestine, Ohio, and left that town and many others with deadly pollutants. A tall black fence was actually built around the town of Lahaina, at taxpayer cost of course, and a no fly zone order was given to hide the gruesome murder scene from any view and scrutiny.

What is insanely troubling about the reporting concerning this horrific crime in Maui by all mainstream outlets, and even many alternative sites, is that most continue to call this a ‘wild fire,’ while the evidence of such nonsense does not exist. The anomalies and reactions to this so-called ‘natural’ event, are staggering beyond recognition, and reek of the stench of total corruption at the highest levels. This was a land grab of epoch proportion, but it was much worse than that, as high death counts were pursued by the State thugs, as they locked the residents of Lahaina inside the rings of deadly fire likely caused by directed energy and microwave attacks; creating fires that were strategically targeted, with heat that was in some cases double that of any wild fire. This was clearly evident given the melting of aluminum and steel, and also the melting of automobile windshields which requires heat at or above 2,500 degrees. Cars were melted where no evidence of a fire was even present, and the scene looked eerily similar, almost exact, as to what happened in New York on September 11, 2001. This is not coincidental, it is apparent, and telling of a pre-planned slaughter and mass destruction.

The fires in Maui that were said to have been caused ‘naturally,’ a brazen lie, were almost identical to the fires in Paradise, California as well; fires that were targeted, burning homes to white ash without burning trees or plastic, and in areas desired by the State criminals for rebuilding so-called “smart cities.” In Lahaina, homes of the very rich were magically spared, as were certain state buildings, grand hotels, and other areas of State favor. But the homes and families of the local residents were attacked head on, with absolutely no regard for the lives or property of these innocent people. The ‘crime’ supposedly committed, as seen by the State, was not bowing down, and giving up their homes and lives voluntarily, so a direct false flag action of slaughter and murder was created to complete the State’s agenda of land theft. To hell with the people and their property was the private battle cry of these State politicians and their murderous enforcers called police.

No sirens were turned on even though there were 80 active sirens on Maui. All water was turned off so fires could not be fought. Wi-fi was turned off, as was most all electric power. Roads out were closed, and police roadblocks were manned to forcibly keep all the residents inside the fire perimeter, causing purposeful mass death. Schools were shut down, so that children were home alone when these intentional fires raged through Lahaina, and many burned to death without help from any State service. The real numbers of deaths are still being hidden as far as I can tell. In addition. before and after the fire, speculators were attempting to buy these properties, and while bodies were still unfound, the government announced its intentions to buy up this land. None of these are coincidences, but the State and its complicit media would have you believe that all of these, and many, many, more impossibilities are all coincidental. How could anyone with two brain cells to rub together, buy into the propagandized narratives being presented by the evil State?

I fully realize, especially considering the nearly complete lack of any ability to think critically by the masses, that what I am presenting here will be ignored by a very large swath of the population. The long-term dumbing down of individuals, and the now digitally-manipulated population, has embraced indifference to such an extent, as to have escaped all reality. In fact, common sense, logic, and reason appear to be nearly non-existent generally speaking. It is much easier for the collective herd to believe the State narratives than to do the work necessary to ferret out fact and truth. Unfortunately, the ruling class understands this weak and apathetic trait that seems to have captured the very large percentage of dead men walking among us. How much more obvious corruption, lies, and murder at the hands of the State will have to take place before any majority comes to terms with the reality that this world is ending in favor of mass slavery and depopulation? Will the flock ever fight back?

The forced annexation of Hawaii, the staged Pearl Harbor attack, the world wars, Operation Northwoods, MK Ultra, the Cuban missile crisis, the JFK assassination, Operation Gladio, U.S. aggressive invasion after invasion, Desert Storm, 9/11, the Patriot Act, the War of Terror, the fake ‘covid pandemic,’ bogus ‘climate change, intentional chemical spills, and weather geo-engineering; these just a few of the major false flag events, and government terror operations that have taken place. Now there are deliberately set fires in Canada, all over the U.S., Hawaii, Australia, Turkey, Greece, China, and many other areas, and the sheep continue to hide their proverbial heads in the sand.

Everything happening is planned, and being done intentionally in order to achieve a particular agenda. This has been outlined, discussed openly, warned about, written about in policy journals at the WEF, WHO, U.N., and most everywhere else I might add. The big picture has been discussed for decades, and the agenda being sought is a one-world governing order, where the ‘elite’ rule all, and the rest of us are slaves of the State. This agenda is as clear as day, so why cannot the lowly collective herd see that the way to achieve this evil goal is for the State to destroy the current system in favor of a system that will allow the control of everyone? Each planned event, whether fire, weather, war, geo-engineering, bio-weapon production and use, fake ‘viruses,’ and every so-called emergency, are staged only to create fear and panic through economic devastation, property theft, (land grabs) monetary and transaction digitization, mass surveillance, and total censorship.

Will the blind ever see, will the deaf ever hear, will the dumb ever speak, or will the bulk of this dependent and lazy population, simply sit back locked inside their cell phones and ‘social media’ absurdity, waiting for the end of times?

No one should forget or ignore what happened, and is happening in Maui. Your neighborhood could be next, and what chance will you have given the advanced weapon systems being used against us by the military industrial complex, and its controllers? The government controls nothing, as all politicians and their enforcers are fully controlled themselves, and act on orders from the real ruling class. Denounce them, abandon them and eliminate them, so that the real rulers will have no cover!

“I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don’t believe anything the government tells me. Nothing. Zero.”

~ George Carlin

Chance Encounters as the Walls Close In

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“A treasure stumbled upon, suddenly; not gradually accumulated, by adding one to one. The accumulation of learning, ‘adding to the sum-total of human knowledge’; lay that burden down, that baggage, that impediment. Take nothing for your journey; travel light.”   – Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

These are “heavy” times, colloquially speaking.  Forebodings everywhere.  Everything broken.  People on edge, nervous, filled with anxiety about they know not what since it seems to be everything. The economy, politics, elections, endless propaganda, the war in Ukraine, censorship, the environment, nuclear war, Covid/vaccines, a massive world-wide collapse, the death of democratic possibilities, the loss of all innocence as a very weird and dangerous future creeps upon us, etc. Only the most anesthetized don’t feel it.

The anxiety has increased even as access to staggering amounts of knowledge – and falsehoods – has become available with the click of a button into the digital encyclopedia.  The CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control program has gone digital.  The more information, the more insubstantial the world seems, but it is not an insubstantiality that connects to hope or faith but to despair.  Across the world people are holding their breath.  What’s next?

Roberto Calasso, the late great Italian writer, wrote that we live in “the unnamable present,” which seems accurate.  Information technology, with its easily available marriage of accurate and fraudulent information, affects people at the fathomless depths of the mind and spirit.  Yet it is taken-for-granted that the more such technological information there is available, as well as the ease with which one can add one’s two-cents to it, is a good thing, even as those powerful deep-state forces that control the Internet pump out an endless stream of purposely dissembling and contradictory messages.  Delusions of omnipotence and chaos everywhere, but not in the service of humanity.  Such chaos plays in chords D and C – Depressing and Controlling.

In the midst of this unnamable present, all of us need to dream of beauty and liberation even as we temporarily rely on digital technology for news of the wider world.  For the local news we can step outside and walk and talk to people, but we can’t endlessly travel everywhere, so we rely on the Internet for reports from elsewhere.  Even as we exercise great effort to discern facts from fictions through digital’s magic emanations, we hunger for some deeper experiences than the ephemerality of this unnamable world.  Without it we are lost in a forest of abstractions.

While recently dawdling on a walk, I stopped to browse through tables of free books on the lawn of my local library.  I was looking for nothing but found something that startled me: a few descriptive words of a child’s experience.  I chanced to pick up an old (1942), small autobiography by the English historian, A. L. Rowse – A Cornish Childhood.  The flyleaf informed me that it was the story of his pre-World War I childhood in a little Cornish village in southwestern England.  The son of a china-clay worker and mother of very modest means, Rowse later went on to study at Oxford and became a well-known scholar and author of about a hundred books.  In other words, a man whose capacious mind was encyclopedic long before the Internet offered its wares of information about everything from A to Z.

Since my grandfather, the son of an Irish immigrant father and English mother, had spent his early years working in a bobbin factory in Bradford, England, a polluted mill town in the north, before sailing at age 11 from Liverpool to New York City aboard the Celtic with his four younger siblings sans parents, I had an interest in what life was like for poor children in England during that era.  How circumstances influenced them: two working-class boys, one who became an Oxford graduate and well-known author; the other who became a NYC policeman known only to family and friends.  The words Rowse wrote and I read echoed experiences that I had had when young; I wondered if my grandfather had experienced something similar.  Rowse writes this on pages 16-17 where I randomly opened the book:

A little group of thatched cottages in the middle of the village had a small orchard attached; and I remember well the peculiar purity of the blue sky seen through the white clusters of apple-blossom in spring. I remember being moon-struck looking at it one morning early on my way to school. It meant something for me; what I couldn’t say. It gave me an unease at heart, some reaching outwards toward perfection such as impels men into religion, some sense of the transcendence of things, of the fragility of our hold upon life . . . . I could not know then that it was an early taste of aesthetic sensation, a kind of revelation which has since become a secret touchstone of experience for me, an inner resource and consolation. . . . In time it became my creed – if that word can be used of a religion which has no dogma, no need of dogma; for which this ultimate aesthetic experience, this apprehension of the world and life as having value essentially in the moment of being apprehended qua beauty, I had no need of religion. . . . in that very moment it seemed that time stood still, that for a moment time was held up and one saw experience as through a rift across the flow of it, a shaft into the universe. But what gave such poignancy to the experience was that, in the very same moment that one felt time standing still, one knew at the back of the mind, or with another part of it, that it was moving inexorably on, carrying oneself and life with it. So that the acuity of the experience, the reason why it moved one so profoundly, was that at bottom it was a protest of the personality against the realization of its final extinction. Perhaps, therefore, it was bound up with, a reflex action from, the struggle for survival. I could get no further than that; and in fact have remained content with that.

I quote so many of Rowse’s words because they seem to contain two revelations that pertain to our current predicament. One a revelation that opens onto hope; the other a revelation of hopelessness. On the one hand, Rowse writes beautifully about how a patch of blue sky through apple blossoms (and his reading Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality) could open his heart and soul to deep aesthetic consolation.  Calasso, in discussing “absolute literature” and the Bhagavad Gita in Literature and the Gods, refers to this experience with the word ramaharsa or horripilation, the happiness of the hairs.  It is that feeling one has when one experiences a thrill so profound that a shiver goes down one’s spine and one experiences an epiphany.  Your hairs and other body parts stand up, whether it’s from a patch of blue, a certain spiritual or erotic/love encounter, or a line of poetry that takes your breath away.  Such a thrill often happens through a serendipitous stumbling.

For Rowse, the epiphany was bounded, like a beautiful bird with its wings clipped; it was an “aesthetic experience” that seemed to exclude something genuinely transcendent in the experiential and theological sense. Maybe it was more than that when he was young, but when this scholar described it in his 39th year, this intellectual could only say it was aesthetic.

C. S. Lewis, in the opening pages of The Abolition of Man, echoing Coleridge’s comment about two tourists at a waterfall, one who calls the waterfall pretty and the other who calls it sublime (Coleridge endorsing the later and dismissing the former with disgust), writes, “The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration.” In other words, the sublime nature of a patch of blue sky through apple blossoms in the early morn cannot be reduced to a person’s subjective feelings but is objectively true and a crack into the mystery of transcendence. To see it as a protest against one’s personal extinction and to be content to “get no further than that” is to foreclose the possibility that what the boy felt was not what the man thought; or to quote Wordsworth about what seems to have happened to Rowse: “Shades of the prison house begin to close/Upon the growing boy,” and that is that.

But we are even a longer way gone from when Rowse wrote his remembrances.  In our secular Internet age, first society and now its technology, not aesthetics or the religion of art, have replaced God for many people, who, like Rowse, have lost the ability to experience the divine.  It embarrasses them.  Something – an addiction to pseudo-knowledge? – blocks their willingness to be open to surpassing the reasoning mind.  We think we are too sophisticated to bend that low even when looking up. “The pseudomorphism between religion and society” has passed unobserved, as Calasso puts it:

It all came together not so much in Durkheim’s [French sociologist 1858-1917] claim that “the religious is the social,’ but in the fact that suddenly such a claim sounded natural. What was left in the end was naked society, but invested now with all the powers inherited, or rather burgled, from religion. The twentieth century would see its triumph. The theology of society severed every tie, renounced all dependence, and flaunted the distinguishing feature: the tautological, the self-advertising. The power and impact of totalitarian regimes cannot be explained unless we accept that the very notion of society has appropriated an unprecedented power, one previously the preserve of religion. . . . Being anti-social would become the equivalent of sinning against the Holy Ghost. . . . Society became the subject above all subjects, for whose sake everything is justified.

For someone like Rowse, the Oxford scholar and bibliophile, writing in the midst of WW II about his childhood before WW I, an exquisite aesthetic explanation suffices to explain his experience, one that he concludes was perhaps part of an evolutionary reflex action connected to the struggle for survival.  Thus this epiphany of beauty is immured in sadness rather than opening out into possible hope.  Lovely as his description is, it is caged in inevitability, as if to say: Here is your bit of beauty on your way to dusty death.  It is a denial of freedom, of spiritual reality, of what Lewis refers to for brevity’s sake as ‘the Tao,’ what the Chinese have long meant as the great thing, the correspondence between the outer and the inner, a reality beyond causality and the controlling mind.

Now even beauty has been banned behind machine experiences.  But the question of beauty is secondary to the nature of reality and our connection to it.  The fate of the world depends upon it.  When the world is too much with us and doom and gloom are everywhere, where can we turn to find a way forward to find a place to stand to fight the evils of nuclear weapons, poverty, endless propaganda, and all the other assorted demons marauding through our world?

It will not be to machines or more information, for they are the essence of too-muchness.  It will not come from concepts or knowledge, which Nietzsche said made it possible to avoid pain.  I believe it will only come from what he suggested: “To make an experiment of one’s very life – this alone is freedom of the spirit, this then became for me my philosophy.”  And before you might think, “Look where it got him, stark raving mad,” let me briefly explain.  Nietzsche may seem like an odd choice to suggest as insightful when it comes to openness to a spiritual dimension to experience since he is usually but erroneously seen as someone who “killed God.”  Someone like Gandhi might seem more appropriate with his “experiments with truth.”  And of course Gandhi is very appropriate.  But so too are Emerson, Thoreau, Jung, and many others, at least in my limited sense of what I mean by experiment.  I mean experimenting-experiencing (both derived from the same Latin word, expereri, to try or test) by assuming through an act of faith or suspension of disbelief that if we stop trying to control everything and open ourselves to serendipitous stumbling, what may seem like simply beautiful aesthetic experiences may be apertures into a spiritual energy we were unaware of.  James W. Douglass explores this possibility in his tantalizing book, Lightning East to West: Jesus, Gandhi, and the Nuclear Age, when he asks and then explores this question: “Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb?”

I like to think that my grandfather, although a man not very keen on things spiritual, might have, in his young years amidst the grime and fetid air of Bradford, chanced to look up and saw a patch of blue sky through the rising smoke and felt the “happiness of the hairs” that opened a crack in his reality to let the light in.

Roberto Calasso quotes this from Nietzsche:

That huge scaffolding and structure of concepts to which the man who must clings in order to save himself in the course of life, for the liberated intellect is merely a support and a toy for his daring devices. And should he break it, he shuffles it around and ironically reassembles it once more, connecting what is least related and separating what is closest. By doing so he shows that those needful ploys are of no use to him and that he is no longer guided by concepts but by intuitions.

I have an intuition that there are hierophanies everywhere, treasures to be stumbled upon – by chance.  If we let them be.

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
It has its inner light, even from a distance –

And changes us, even if we do not reach it,
Into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
A gesture waves us on, answering our own wave. . .
But what we feel is the wind in our faces.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, “A Walk”