The Empire Does Not Forgive

The Americans, like the British and the Soviets before them, dug their own graveyard in Afghanistan.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost.com

The Carthaginian general Hannibal, who came close to defeating the Roman Republic in the Second Punic War, committed suicide in 181 BC in exile as Roman soldiers closed in on his residence in the Bithynian village of Libyssa, now modern-day Turkey. It had been more than thirty years since he led his army across the alps and annihilated Roman legions at the Battle of Trebia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae, considered one of the most brilliant tactical victories in warfare which centuries later inspired the plans of the German Army Command in World War I when they invaded Belgium and France. Rome was only able to finally save itself from defeat by replicating Hannibal’s military tactics. 

It did not matter in 181 BC that there had been over 20 Roman emperors since Hannibal’s invasion. It did not matter that Hannibal had been hunted for decades and forced to perpetually flee, always just beyond the reach of Roman authorities. He had humiliated Rome. He had punctured its myth of omnipotence. And he would pay. With his life. Years after Hannibal was gone, the Romans were still not satisfied. They finished their work of apocalyptic vengeance in 146 BC by razing Carthage to the ground and selling its remaining population into slavery. Cato the Censor summed up the sentiments of empire: Carthāgō dēlenda est (Carthage must be destroyed). Nothing about empire, from then until now, has changed.

Imperial powers do not forgive those who expose their weaknesses or make public the sordid and immoral inner workings of empire. Empires are fragile constructions. Their power is as much one of perception as of military strength. The virtues they claim to uphold and defend, usually in the name of their superior civilization, are a mask for pillage, the exploitation of cheap labor, indiscriminate violence, and state terror.

The current American empire, damaged and humiliated by the troves of internal documents published by WikiLeaks, will, for this reason, persecute Julian Assange for the rest of his life. It does not matter who is president or which political party is in power. Imperialists speak with one voice. The killing of thirteen U.S. troops by a suicide bomber at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday evoked from Joe Biden the full-throated cry of all imperialists: “To those who carried out this attack … we will not forgive, we will not forget, we will hunt you down and make you pay.” This was swiftly followed by two drone strikes in Kabul against suspected members of the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K), which took credit for the suicide bombing that left some 170 dead, including 28 members of the Taliban.

The Taliban, which defeated U.S. and coalition forces in a 20-year war, is about to be confronted with the wrath of a wounded empire. The Cuban, Vietnamese, Iranian, Venezuelan and Haitian governments know what comes next. The ghosts of Toussaint Louverture, Emilio Aguinaldo, Mohammad Mossadegh, Jacobo Arbenz, Omar Torrijos, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Juan Velasco, Salvador Allende, Andreas Papandreou, Juan Bosh, Patrice Lumumba, and Hugo Chavez know what comes next. It isn’t pretty. It will be paid for by the poorest and most vulnerable Afghans. 

The faux pity for the Afghan people, which has defined the coverage of the desperate collaborators with the U.S. and coalition occupying forces and educated elites fleeing to the Kabul airport, begins and ends with the plight of the evacuees. There were few tears shed for the families routinely terrorized by coalition forces or the some 70,000 civilians who were obliterated by U.S. air strikes, drone attacks, missiles, and artillery, or gunned down by nervous occupying forces who saw every Afghan, with some justification, as the enemy during the war. And there will be few tears for the humanitarian catastrophe the empire is orchestrating on the 38 million Afghans, who live in one of the poorest and most aid-dependent countries in the world.

Since the 2001 invasion the United States deployed about 775,000 military personnel to subdue Afghanistan and poured $143 billion into the country, with 60 percent of the money going to prop up the corrupt Afghan military and the rest devoted to funding economic development projects, aid programs and anti-drug initiatives, with the bulk of those funds being siphoned off by foreign aid groups, private contractors, and outside consultants.

Grants from the United States and other countries accounted for 75 percent of the Afghan government budget. That assistance has evaporated. Afghanistan’s reserves and other financial accounts have been frozen, meaning the new government cannot access some $9.5 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank. Shipments of cash to Afghanistan have been stopped. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced that Afghanistan will no longer be able to access the lender’s resources.

Things are already dire. There are some 14 million Afghans, one in three, who lack sufficient food. There are two million Afghan children who are malnourished. There are 3.5 million people in Afghanistan who have been displaced from their homes. The war has wrecked infrastructure. A drought destroyed 40 percent of the nation’s crops last year. The assault on the Afghan economy is already seeing food prices skyrocket. The sanctions and severance of aid will force civil servants to go without salaries and the health service, already chronically short of medicine and equipment, will collapse. The suffering orchestrated by the empire will be of Biblical proportions. And this is what the empire wants.

UNICEF estimates that 500,000 children were killed as a direct result of sanctions on Iraq.  Expect child deaths in Afghanistan to soar above that horrifying figure. And expect the same imperial heartlessness Madeline Albright, then the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, exhibited when she told “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children because of the sanctions was “worth it.” Or the heartlessness of Hillary Clinton who joked “We came, we saw, he died,” when informed of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s brutal death. Or the demand by Democratic Senator Zell Miller of Georgia who after the attacks of 9/11 declared, “I say, bomb the hell out of them. If there’s collateral damage, so be it.” No matter that the empire has since turned Libya along with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen into cauldrons of violence, chaos, and misery. The power to destroy is an intoxicating drug that is its own justification.

Like Cato the Censor, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies are, if history is any guide, at this moment planning to destabilize Afghanistan by funding, arming, and backing any militia, warlord or terrorist organization willing to strike at the Taliban. The CIA, which should exclusively gather intelligence, is a rogue paramilitary organization that oversees secret kidnappings, interrogation at black sites, torture, manhunts, and targeted assassinations across the globe. It carried out commando raids in Afghanistan that killed a large number of Afghan civilians, which repeatedly sent enraged family members and villagers into the arms of the Taliban. It is, I expect, reaching out to Amrullah Saleh, who was Ashraf Ghani’s vice president and who has declared himself “the legitimate caretaker president” of Afghanistan. Saleh is holed up in the Panjashir Valley.  He, along with warlords Afgand Massoud, Mohammad Atta Noor and Abdul Rashid Dostum, are clamoring to be armed and supported to perpetuate conflict in Afghanistan.

“I write from the Panjshir Valley today, ready to follow in my father’s footsteps, with mujahideen fighters who are prepared to once again take on the Taliban,” Ahmad Massoud wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post. “The United States and its allies have left the battlefield, but America can still be a ‘great arsenal of democracy,’ as Franklin D. Roosevelt said when coming to the aid of the beleaguered British before the U.S. entry into World War II,” he went on, adding that he and his fighters need “more weapons, more ammunition and more supplies.”

These warlords have done the bidding of the Americans before. They will do the bidding of the Americans again. And since the hubris of empire is unaffected by reality, the empire will continue to sow dragon’s teeth in Afghanistan as it has since it spent $9 billion—some estimates double that figure—to back the mujahedeen that fought the Soviets, leading to a bloody civil war between rival warlords once the Soviets withdrew in 1989 and the ascendancy in 1996 of the Taliban.

The cynicism of arming and funding the mujahedeen against the Soviets exposes the lie of America’s humanitarian concerns in Afghanistan. One million Afghan civilians were killed in the nine-year conflict with the Soviets, along with 90,000 mujahedeen fighters, 18,000 Afghan troops, and 14,500 Soviet soldiers.  But these deaths, along with the destruction of Afghanistan, were “worth it” to cripple the Soviets.

Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, along with the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, oversaw the arming of the most radical Islamic mujahedeen groups fighting the Soviet occupation forces, leading to the extinguishing of the secular, democratic Afghan opposition. Brzezinski detailed the strategy, designed as he said to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam, taken by the Carter administration following the 1979 Soviet invasion to prop up the Marxist regime of Hafizullah Amin in Kabul:

We immediately launched a twofold process when we heard that the Soviets had entered Afghanistan. The first involved direct reactions and sanctions focused on the Soviet   Union, and both the State Department and the National Security Agency prepared long lists of sanctions to be adopted, of steps to be taken to increase the international costs to the Soviet Union of their actions. And the second course of action led to my going to Pakistan a month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for the purpose of coordinating with the Pakistanis a joint response, the purpose of which would be to   make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible; and we engaged in that effort in a collaborative sense with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the British, the Chinese, and we started providing weapons to the Mujaheddin, from various sources again — for example, some Soviet arms from the Egyptians and the Chinese. We even got Soviet arms from the Czechoslovak communist government, since it was obviously susceptible to material incentives; and at some point we started buying arms for the Mujahedeen from the Soviet army in Afghanistan, because that army was increasingly corrupt.

The clandestine campaign to destabilize the Soviet Union by making it “bleed for as much and as long as is possible” was carried out, like the arming of the contra forces in Nicaragua, largely off the books. It did not, as far as official Washington was concerned, exist, a way to avoid the unwelcome scrutiny of covert operations carried out by the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s that made public the three decades of CIA-backed coups, assassinations, blackmail, intimidation, dark propaganda, and torture. The Saudi government agreed to match the U.S. funding for the Afghan insurgents. The Saudi involvement gave rise to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, which fought with the mujahedeen. The rogue operation, led by Brzezinski, organized secret units of assassination teams and paramilitary squads that carried out lethal attacks on perceived enemies around the globe. It trained Afghan mujahedeen in Pakistan and China’s Xinjiang province. It shifted the heroin trade, used to fund the insurgency, from southeast Asia to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This pattern of behavior, which destabilized Afghanistan and the region, is reflexive in the military and the intelligence community. It will, without doubt, be repeated now in Afghanistan, with the same catastrophic results. The chaos these intelligence agencies create becomes the chaos that justifies their existence and the chaos that sees them demand more resources and ever greater levels of violence.

All empires die. The end is usually unpleasant. The American empire, humiliated in Afghanistan, as it was in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, as it was at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam, is blind to its own declining strength, ineptitude, and savagery. Its entire economy, a “military Keynesianism,” revolves around the war industry. Military spending and war are the engine behind the nation’s economic survival and identity. It does not matter that with each new debacle the United States turns larger and larger parts of the globe against it and all it claims to represent. It has no mechanism to stop itself, despite its numerous defeats, fiascos, blunders and diminishing power, from striking out irrationally like a wounded animal. The mandarins who oversee our collective suicide, despite repeated failure, doggedly insist we can reshape the world in our own image. This myopia creates the very conditions that accelerate the empire’s demise.

The Soviet Union collapsed, like all empires, because of its ossified, out-of-touch rulers, its imperial overreach, and its inability to critique and reform itself. We are not immune from these fatal diseases. We silence our most prescient critics of empire, such as Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Andrew Bacevich, Alfred McCoy, and Ralph Nader, and persecute those who expose the truths about empire, including Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Daniel Hale, and John Kiriakou. At the same time a bankrupt media, whether on MSNBC, CNN or FOX, lionizes and amplifies the voices of the inept and corrupt political, military and intelligence class including John Bolton, Leon Panetta, Karl Rove, H.R. McMaster and David Petraeus, which blindly drives the nation into the morass.

Chalmers Johnson in his trilogy on the fall of the American empire – “Blowback,” “The Sorrows of Empire” and “Nemesis” – reminds readers that the Greek goddess Nemesis is “the spirit of retribution, a corrective to the greed and stupidity that sometimes governs relations among people.” She stands for “righteous anger,” a deity who “punishes human transgression of the natural, right order of things and the arrogance that causes it.” He warns that if we continue to cling to our empire, as the Roman Republic did, “we will certainly lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates.”

“I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and, in the end, produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,” Johnson writes. “The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government – a republic – that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.”

If the empire was capable of introspection and forgiveness, it could free itself from its death spiral. If the empire disbanded, much as the British empire did, and retreated to focus on the ills that beset the United States it could free itself from its death spiral. But those who manipulate the levers of empire are unaccountable. They are hidden from public view and beyond public scrutiny. They are determined to keep playing the great game, rolling the dice with lives and national treasure. They will, I expect, preside gleefully over the deaths of even more Afghans, assuring themselves it is worth it, without realizing that the gallows they erect are for themselves.  

Shockingly, CDC Now Lists Vaccinated Deaths as Unvaccinated

By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Source: Global Research

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, you’re not counted as fully vaccinated until a full 14 days have passed since your second injection in the case of Pfizer or Moderna, or 14 days after your first dose of Janssen, despite the fact that over 80% of deaths after the vaccines occur in this window. How convenient

Anyone who dies within the first 14 days post-injection is counted as an unvaccinated death. Not only does this inaccurately inflate the unvaccinated death toll, but it also hides the real dangers of the COVID shots, as the vast majority of deaths from these shots occur within the first two weeks

The CDC also has two different sets of testing guidelines — one for vaccinated patients and another for the unvaccinated. If you’re unvaccinated, CDC guidance says to use a cycle threshold (CT) of 40, known to result in false positives. If you’re vaccinated, they recommend using a CT of 28 or less, which minimizes the risk of false positives

The CDC also hides vaccine failures and props up the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative by only counting breakthrough cases that result in hospitalization or death

Hospitals are still also reporting non-COVID related illnesses as COVID-19

*

While public health officials and mainstream media claim the COVID-19 pandemic is now “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,”1 we now know this claim is based on highly misleading statistics.

In a July 16, 2021, White House press briefing,2 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Rochelle Walensky claimed that “over 97% of people who are entering the hospital right now are unvaccinated.” A few weeks later, in an August 5, 2021, statement, she inadvertently revealed how that statistic actually came about.3

As it turns out, the CDC was looking at hospitalization and mortality data from January through June 2021 — a timeframe during which the vast majority of the U.S. population were still unvaccinated.4

But that’s not the case at all now. The CDC is also playing with statistics in other ways to create the false and inaccurate impression that unvaccinated people make up the bulk of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. For example, we now find out the agency is counting anyone who died within the first 14 days post-injection as unvaccinated.

Not only does this inaccurately inflate the unvaccinated death toll, but it also hides the real dangers of the COVID shots, as the vast majority of deaths from these shots occur within the first two weeks.5 Now their deaths are counted as unvaccinated deaths rather than being counted as deaths due to vaccine injury or COVID-19 breakthrough infections!

How CDC Counts Breakthrough Cases

According to the CDC,6 you’re not counted as fully vaccinated until a full 14 days have passed since your second injection in the case of Pfizer or Moderna, or 14 days after your first dose of Janssen. This is how the CDC defines a vaccine breakthrough case:

“… a vaccine breakthrough infection is defined as the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after they have completed all recommended doses of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-authorized COVID-19 vaccine.”

In other words, if you’ve received one dose of Pfizer or Moderna and develop symptomatic COVID-19, get admitted to the hospital and/or die from COVID, you’re counted as an unvaccinated case. If you’ve received two doses and get ill within 14 days, you’re still counted as an unvaccinated case.

The problem with this is that over 80% of hospitalizations and deaths appear to be occurring among those who have received the jabs, but this reality is hidden by the way cases are defined and counted. A really clever and common strategy of the CDC during the pandemic has been to change the definitions and goalposts so it supports their nefarious narrative.

For example, the CDC has quietly changed the definition of “vaccine,” apparently in an attempt to validate calling the COVID mRNA gene therapies vaccines. In an August 26, 2021, archived version7of vaccine, the CDC defines it as a “product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.”

But a few days later, a new definition appeared on the CDC’s website,8 which now says a vaccine is a “preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” The differences in the definitions are subtle but distinct: The first one defined a vaccine as something that will “produce immunity.”

But, since the COVID-19 vaccines are not designed to stop infection but, rather, to only lessen the degree of infection, it becomes obvious that the new definition was created to cover the COVID vaccines.

Different Testing Guidelines for Vaxxed and Unvaxxed

It’s not just the CDC’s definition of a breakthrough case that skews the data. Even more egregious and illogical is the fact that the CDC even has two different sets of testing guidelines — one for vaccinated patients and another for the unvaccinated.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC has recommended a PCR test cycle threshold (CT) of 40.9 This flies in the face of scientific consensus, which has long been that a CT over 35 will produce 97% false positives,10 essentially rendering the test useless.11,12,13

In mid-May 2021, the CDC finally lowered its recommended CT count, but only for patients who have received one or more COVID shots.14 So, if you have received a COVID injection, the CDC’s guidelines call for your PCR test to be run at a CT of 28 or less. If you are unvaccinated, your PCR test is to be run at a CT of 40, which grossly overestimates the true prevalence of infection.

The end result is that unvaccinated individuals who get tested are FAR more prone to get false positives, while those who have received the jab are more likely to get an accurate diagnosis of infection.

Only Hospitalization and Death Count if You’re COVID Jabbed

Even that’s not all. The CDC also hides vaccine failures and props up the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative by only counting breakthrough cases that result in hospitalization or death.

In other words, if you got your second COVID shot more than 14 days ago and you develop symptoms, you do not count as a breakthrough case unless you’re admitted to the hospital and/or die from COVID-19 in the hospital, even if you test positive. So, to summarize, COVID breakthrough cases count only if all of the following apply:

  • The patient received the second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna shot at least 14 days ago (or one dose in case of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose injection)
  • The patient tests positive for SARS-CoV-2 using a CT of 28 or less, which avoids false positives
  • The patient is admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 and/or dies in the hospital

Vaccinated Probably Make Up Bulk of Hospitalizations

If vaccinated and unvaccinated were not treated with such varying standards, we’d probably find that the vaccinated now make up the bulk of hospitalizations, making the COVID pandemic one of the vaccinated. An August 30, 2021, exposé by The Epoch Times reveals what’s really happening on the front lines:15

“After a battery of testing, my friend was diagnosed with pancreatitis. But it was easier for the hospital bureaucracy to register the admission as a COVID case … The mainstream media is reporting that severe COVID cases are mainly among unvaccinated people … Is that what’s really going on?

It’s certainly not the case in Israel, the first country to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens against the virus. Now it has one of the highest daily infection rates and the majority of people catching the virus (77 percent to 83 percent, depending on age) are already vaccinated, according to data collected by the Israeli government …

After admission, I spoke to the nurse on the COVID ward … The nurse told me that she had gotten both vaccines but she was feeling worried: ‘Two thirds of my patients are fully vaccinated,’ she said. How can there be such a disconnect between what the COVID ward nurse told me and the mainstream media reports?”

The heart of the problem is that the U.S. is not even trying to achieve an accurate count. As noted by The Epoch Times, “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have publicly acknowledged that they do not have accurate data.”

So, when you hear that cases are rising, and that most of them are unvaccinated, you need to ask: “Are these people who have had one vaccine and gotten sick, two vaccines and gotten sick, or no vaccines at all? Without more details, it is impossible to know what is really going on,” The Epoch Times says.16

All we do know, according to one doctor who spoke with The Epoch Times, is “the vaccines are not as effective as public health officials told us they would be. ‘This is a product that’s not doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to stop transmission of this virus and it’s not doing that.’”

Counting Non-COVID Illness as COVID Cases

On top of all of that, hospitals are still also reporting non-COVID related illnesses as COVID. As reported by The Epoch Times:17

“Health authorities around the world have been doing this since the beginning of the COVID crisis. For example, a young man in Orange County, Florida who died in a motorcycle crash last summer was originally considered a COVID death by state health officials …

And a middle-aged construction worker fell off a ladder in Croatia and was also counted as a death from COVID … To muddy the waters further, even people who test negative for COVID are sometimes counted as COVID deaths.

Consider the case of 26-year-old Matthew Irvin, a father of three from Yamhill County, Oregon. As reported by KGW8 News, Irvin went to the ER with stomach pain, nausea, and diarrhea on July 5, 2020. But instead of admitting him to the hospital, the doctors sent him home.

Five days later, on July 10, 2020, Irvin died. Though his COVID test came back negative two days after his death and his family told reporters and public health officials that no one Irvin had been around had any COVID symptoms, the medical examiner allegedly told the family that an autopsy was not necessary, listing his death as a coronavirus case. It took the Oregon Health Authority two and a half months to correct the mistake.

In an even more striking example of overcounting COVID deaths, a nursing home in New Jersey that only has 90 beds was wrongly reported as having 753 deaths from COVID. According to a spokesman, they had fewer than twenty deaths. In other words, the number of deaths was over-reported by 3,700 percent.”

No Need to Fear the Delta Variant if You’re Unvaccinated

In a June 29, 2021, interview,18 Fauci called the Delta variant “a game-changer” for unvaccinated people, warning it will devastate the unvaccinated population while vaccinated individuals are protected against it. Alas, in the real world, the converse is turning out to be true, as the Delta variant is running wild primarily among those who got the COVID jab.The Delta variant contains three different mutations, all in the spike protein. This allows this variant to evade the immune responses in those who have received the COVID jabs, but not those who have natural immunity, which is much broader.

In a June 30, 2021, appearance on Fox News (video above), epidemiologist and cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough pointed out that “It is very clear from the U.K. Technical Briefing19 that was published June 18 that the vaccine provides no protection against the Delta variant.”20

The reason for this is because the Delta variant contains three different mutations, all in the spike protein. This allows this variant to evade the immune responses in those who have received the COVID jabs, but not those who have natural immunity, which is much broader.

Even so, the Delta variant is far milder than previous variants, according to the U.K.’s June 18, 2021, Technical Briefing.21 In it, they present data showing the Delta variant is more contagious but far less deadly and easier to treat. As McCullough told Fox News:

“Whether you get the vaccine or not, patients will get some very mild symptoms like a cold and they can be easily managed … Patients who have severe symptoms or at high risk, we can use simple drug combinations at home and get them through the illness. So, there’s no reason now to push vaccinations.”

Contrast that with the following statement made by President Biden during a CNN town hall meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, in late July 2021:22

“We have a pandemic for those who haven’t gotten a vaccination. It’s that basic, that simple. If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, not going to the ICU unit, and not going to die. You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

However, Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency doctor and visiting professor of health policy and management at George Washington University’s Milken School of Public Health in Washington, D.C., contradicted the president, saying he had led the American astray by telling them you don’t need a mask if you’re vaccinated, or that you can’t get it or transmit it. As reported by CNN Health:23

“In particular, Wen took issue with Biden’s incorrect claims that you cannot contract Covid-19 or the Delta variant if you are vaccinated. ‘I was actually disappointed,’ Wen said. ‘I actually thought he was answering questions as if it were a month ago. He’s not really meeting the realities of what’s happening on the ground. I think he may have led people astray.’”

CNN added that Wen had told their political commentator Anderson Cooper that “many unknown answers remain related to Covid-19, and that it is still not known how well protected vaccinated individuals are from mild illness … [or] if you’re vaccinated, could you still be contagious to other people.”

Vaccinated Patients Flood Hospitals Around the World

The U.K. data showing the Delta variant is far milder than previous SARS-CoV-2 viruses deflates the claim that avoiding severe illness is a sign that the shots are working. Since the Delta variant typically doesn’t cause severe illness in the first place, it doesn’t make sense to attribute milder illness to the shot.

But if Delta is the mildest coronavirus variant yet, why are so many “vaccinated” people ending up in the hospital? While we still do not have clear confirmation, this could be a sign that antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) is at work. Alternatively, it could be that vaccine injuries are being misreported as breakthrough cases.

Whatever the case may be, real-world data from areas with high COVID jab rates show a disturbing trend. For example, August 1, 2021, the director of Israel’s Public Health Services, Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, announced half of all COVID-19 infections were among the fully vaccinated.24 Signs of more serious disease among fully vaccinated are also emerging, she said, particularly in those over the age of 60.

A few days later, August 5, 2021, Dr. Kobi Haviv, director of the Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem, appeared on Channel 13 News, reporting that 95% of severely ill COVID-19 patients are fully vaccinated, and that they make up 85% to 90% of COVID-related hospitalizations overall.25

In Scotland, official data on hospitalizations and deaths show 87% of those who have died from COVID-19 in the third wave that began in early July were vaccinated.26

In Gibraltar, which has a 99% COVID jab compliance rate, COVID cases have risen by 2,500% since June 1, 2021,27 and in Iceland, where over 82% have received the shots, 77% of new COVID cases are among the fully vaccinated.28

Data from the U.K. show a similar trend among those over the age of 50. In this age group, partially and fully “vaccinated” people account for 68% of hospitalizations and 70% of COVID deaths.29

A CDC investigation of an outbreak in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, between July 6, 2021, through July 25, 2021, found 74% of those who received a diagnosis of COVID19, and 80% of hospitalizations, were among the fully vaccinated.30,31 Most, but not all, had the Delta variant.

The CDC also found that fully vaccinated individuals who contract the infection have as high a viral load in their nasal passages as unvaccinated individuals who get infected.32 The same was found in a British study, a preprint of which was posted mid-August 2021.33,34 This means the vaccinated are just as infectious as the unvaccinated.

Interestingly, a Lancet preprint study35 that examined breakthrough infections in health care workers in Vietnam who received the AstraZeneca COVID shot found the “viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with old strains detected between March-April 2020.”

What’s more, they found no correlation between vaccine-induced neutralizing antibody levels and viral loads or the development of symptoms. According to the authors:

“Breakthrough Delta variant infections are associated with high viral loads, prolonged PCR positivity, and low levels of vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies, explaining the transmission between the vaccinated people.”

Not All Vaccinated Are Confirmed Vaccinated

As if all of that weren’t enough, there’s yet one more confounder. Just because you got the COVID shot does not mean you’ve been confirmed as having gotten the shot. You’re only confirmed “vaccinated” if your COVID injection is added to your medical record, and this sometimes doesn’t happen if you’re going to a temporary vaccination clinic, a drive-through or pharmacy, for example. As reported by CNN:36

“If you are among the countless people who didn’t get the doses at a primary care doctor’s office, there may not be any record of the vaccination on file with your doctor.”

To actually count as a “confirmed vaccinated” individual, you must send your vaccination card to your primary care physician’s office and have them add it to your electronic medical record. If you got the shot at a pharmacy, you’ll need to verify that they forwarded your proof of vaccination to your doctor. Primary care offices are then responsible for sharing their patients’ immunization data with the state’s immunization information system.

Patient-recorded proof of vaccination is only accepted for influenza and pneumococcal vaccines, not COVID-19 injections.37 What this all means is that, say you got the shot several weeks ago at a drive-through vaccination clinic and get admitted to the hospital with COVID symptoms. Unless your COVID shot status has actually been added into the medical system, you will not count as “vaccinated.”

This too can skew the statistics, because we know the CDC ascertains vaccination status by matching SARS-CoV-2 case surveillance and CAIR2 data using person-level identifiers and algorithms.38

As noted by John Zurlo, division director of infectious disease at Thomas Jefferson University, “the lack of reliable vaccine records complicates efforts to precisely understand vaccine effectiveness and determine how many local hospitalizations and deaths are resulting from COVID-19 breakthrough infections.”39

We’re in the Largest Clinical Trial in Medical History

In closing, it’s worth remembering that the COVID injection campaign is part and parcel of a clinical trial. As noted Dr. Lidiya Angelova in a recent Genuine Prospect article:40

“Many people are unaware that they are participating in the largest clinical trial test of our times. It is because World Health Organization, healthcare authorities, politicians, celebrities, and journalists promote the experimental medical treatments (wrongly called COVID-19 vaccines) as safe and efficient while in fact these treatments are in early clinical research stage.

It means that there is not enough data for such claims and that the people who participate are test subject.”

As shown in a graph on Genuine Prospect, under normal circumstances, clinical research follows a strict protocol that begins with tests on cell cultures. After that comes tests on animals, then limited human testing in four phases. In Phase 1 of human testing, up to 100 people are included and followed anywhere from one week to several months.

Phase 2 typically includes several hundred participants and lasts up to two years. In Phase 3, several hundred to 3,000 participants are tested upon for one to four years. Phase 4 typically includes several thousand individuals who are followed for at least one year or longer. After each phase, the data is examined to assess effectiveness and adverse reactions.

The timelines for these stages and phases were not followed for the COVID “vaccines.” Most Phase 3 trials concluded by the end of 2020, and everyone who got the shots since their rollout under emergency use authorization is part of a Phase 4 clinical trial, whether they realize it or not.41 And since the trials are not completed, you simply cannot make definitive claims about safety, especially long-term safety. As noted by Angelova:42

“When I worked at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) … I went to the course Ethical and Regulatory Aspects of Clinical Research … The first rule we learnt was ‘Clinical research must be ethical’ … All ethical aspects of clinical research are dismissed with the COVID-19 vaccines.

People should know that nobody can require such to participate in everyday activities like using public transportation, shopping, going to school and even hospital. People should know that they should not be punished for refusing to take the experimental medical treatments.

COVID-19 vaccines mass use and COVID-19 measures are an infringe[ment] of the Articles 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 12, 13, 18, 20, 25, 27, 28 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).”

*

Notes

1 The New York Times July 16, 2021

2 WH.gov Press Briefing July 16, 2021

3 Fox News

4 Mayo Clinic COVID Vaccine Tracker

5 Twitter DX Foundation September 2, 2021

6 CDC August 25, 2021

7 Web Archive August 26, 2021

8 CDC September 1, 2021

9 FDA.gov CDC 2019-nCoV Real-Time RT-PCR July 13, 2020 (PDF) Page 35

10 Clinical Infectious Diseases September 28, 2020; ciaa1491

11 The Vaccine Reaction September 29, 2020

12 Jon Rappoport’s Blog November 6, 2020

13 YouTube TWiV 641 July 16, 2020

14 CDC.gov COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Case Investigation Guidelines (PDF)

15, 16, 17, 28 The Epoch Times August 30, 2021

18 PBS June 29, 2021

19, 21 Public Health England, SARS-CoV-2 Variants Technical Briefing 16, June 18, 2021 (PDF)

20 Covidcalltohumanity.org July 5, 2021

22 CBS 8 News July 21, 2021

23 CNN Health July 22, 2021

24 Bloomberg August 1, 2021 (Archived)

25 American Faith August 8, 2021

26 The Daily Expose July 29, 2021

27 Big League Politics August 4, 2021

29 Evening Standard August 20, 2021

30 CDC MMWR July 30, 2021; 70

31 CNBC July 30, 2021

32 NBC News August 7, 2021

33 Impact of Delta on Viral Burden and Vaccine Effectiveness in the UK (PDF)

34 CBS News August 19, 2021

35 The Lancet Preprint August 10, 2021

36 CNN April 26, 2021

37 Immunize.org Documenting Vaccination

38 MMWR August 27, 2021; 70(34): 1170-1176

39 Philadelphia Enquirer August 31, 2021

40, 42 Genuine Prospect August 31, 2021

41 Red Voice Media June 22, 2021

The Incantational Bewitchment of Propaganda

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the America public believe is false.”   – William Casey, CIA Director, February 1981

All propaganda succeeds because it satisfies needs that it has first created.  If you follow the daily rat-a-tat mainstream news reports and react to them, you will be caught in a labyrinth that has been set to entrap you.  You will keep finding that your mind will be like a bed that is already made up and your daylight hours filled with nightmares.  What you assume are your real needs will be met, but you will swiftly tumble into the free-floating anxiety that the media has created to keep you on edge and confused.  They will provide you with objects – Covid-19, the U.S. “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, the Russian and Chinese “threats,” the need to crack down on domestic dissidents, 9/11, etc. (an endless panoply of lies) – that you can attach your anxiety to, but they will be no help. They are not meant to; their purpose is to befuddle; to make you more anxious by wondering if currently there is any contrast between the real world and the apparent one. The corporate mainstream media serve phantasmagoria on a 24/7 basis, all shifting like quicksand.  For anyone with a modicum of common sense, this should be obvious.  But then again, as Thoreau put it:

The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Perhaps some health expert will soon recommend that 24 hours of sleep a day is optimal, but maybe I am dreaming or being redundant.

For many decades, the corporate mainstream media and the CIA have been synonymous.  They were married down in hell and now daily do the devil’s work up above.  Now that news is conveyed primarily through digital media via the internet, their power to induce electronic trances has increased exponentially.  Linguistic and visual mind control is their raison d’être.  Fear is their favorite tactic.  And since the fear and anxiety of death is the archetypal source of all anxiety, death becomes a core element in their fear-mongering.

In a recent powerful article, Canadian independent journalist Eva Bartlett, a brave and free war correspondent who has reported from inside Syria and Gaza, has shown how the ongoing Covid-19 “fear porn” spewed out by the media has dramatically increased people’s anxiety levels and thrown so many into a perpetual state of near panic.  This, of course, is not an accident.

Fear immobilizes people and drives them into a cataleptic state where clear thinking is impossible.  They become hypnotized in a “private” space that is actually social, an instantaneous identification with the media news reports that are addressed to millions but feel personal and greatly exacerbate the great loneliness that lies at the core of high-tech society.

As I have said before, the new digital order is the world of teleconferencing and the online life, existence shorn of physical space and time and people. A world where shaking hands is a dissident act. A haunted world of masked specters, distorted words and images that can appear and disappear in a nanosecond. A magic show. A place where, in the words of Charles Manson, you can “get the fear,” where fear is king. A locus where, as you stare at the screens, you are no longer there since you are spellbound.

In a high-tech society, loneliness is far more prevalent than in the past.  The technology has imprisoned people behind their screens and now the controlling forces are intent on closing this mechanistic circle if they can.  They call it The Great Reset.

They have spent decades using technology to invade and pare down people’s inner private space where freedom to think and decide resides.

They have repeated ad nauseam the materialistic mantra that freedom is an illusion and that we are amazing machines determined by our genes and social forces.

They have reiterated that the spiritual and transcendent realms are illusions.

And they have pushed their transhuman agenda to assert more and more power and control.

This is the essence of the corona crisis and the push to vaccinate everyone.

Drip by drip, year by year, they have cultivated the necessary preconditions and predispositions for this technological fascism with its nihilistic underpinnings to succeed.

When the inner dimension of existence is lost, there is no way to critique the outer world, its politics, and social structure.  Dissent becomes a useless passion when people instantly identify with the social. Human nature doesn’t change but social structures and technology do and they can be used to try to destroy people’s humanity.  Herbert Marcuse put it clearly long before the latest digital technology:

This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new ‘immediacy,’ however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking – the critical power of Reason – is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition.

Once upon a time, people sat together and talked.  They even touched and shared their thoughts and feelings. They conspired in a most natural way apart from the prying eyes and ears of the electronic spies.  Now so many sit and check their cell phones.  They “connect,” thinking they are with it while not knowing they have been lured into another dimension where frenetic passivity reigns and trance states are the rule.

“Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness,” said Jacques Ellul in his masterpiece, Propaganda.  He was being simultaneously accurate and facetious.  For propaganda provides a doorway to pseudo-community, a place to lose oneself in the group, to satisfy the need to believe and obey in mass technological society where emotional emptiness and lack of meaning are widespread and the need to fill up the empty self is dutifully met by propaganda, which is a drug by any other name, indeed the primary drug.  The empty-self craves ful-fillment, anything to consume to fill the void that a consumer culture dangles everywhere.  Think alike, buy alike, dress alike – and you will be one big happy community.  It is all abstract of course, even as its rational character is irrational, but that doesn’t matter a whit since the fear of “not going along” and appearing dissident plagues people.

Now we have endless digital propaganda that is the “remedy” for loneliness.  Ah, all the lonely people, keeping their masks in a jar by the side of the door together with Eleanor Rigby.  They think they know what their masks are for but don’t know why they are lonely or that they have been played with. Masks upon masks are donned to ward off the fear that is pumped out through the electronic airwaves.  It is doubtful that many ever heard of William Casey or can imagine the breadth and depth of the propaganda that he and his current protégés in the intelligence agencies and corporate media dispense daily.

“When everything the American people believes is false.”  Casey must be smiling in hell.

A grim submissiveness has settled over the lives of millions of hypnotized people in so many countries.  Grim, grim, grim, as Charles Dickens wrote of his 1842 visit to the puritanical Shaker religious sect in western Massachusetts.  He said:

I so abhor, and from my soul detest, that bad spirit, no matter by what class or sect it may be entertained, which would strip life of its healthful, graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path to the grave….

And yet, the fundamental things still do apply, as time goes by.  Love, glory, loneliness, beauty, fear, faith, and courage.  Lovers and true artists, fighters both, resist this machine tyranny and its endless lies because they smell a rat intent on destroying their passionate love of the daring adventure that is life.  They feel life is an agon, an arena for struggle, “a fight for love and glory,” a case of do-and-die. They have bull-shit detectors and see through the elites’ propaganda that is used to literally kill millions around the world and to kill the spirit of rebellion in so many others.  And they know that it is in the inner sanctuary of every individual soul where resistance to evil is born and fear is defeated. They know too that the art and love must be shared and this is how social solidarity movements are created.

Listen.  The fight is on.  “This Has Gotta Stop.”

The media’s addiction to Covid-19 ‘fear porn’ is perpetuating an ever-worsening cycle of societal damage across the world

By Eva K Bartlett

Source: In Gaza and Beyond

Over the past year and a half, hysterical media reporting on matters Covid-19 has reduced some people to a fearful state of unquestioning compliance – including a great number of otherwise critically-thinking journalists.

With screaming headlines in bold and large font such as, ‘Will this nightmare ever end?’ and ‘Mutant virus skyrockets…’ and ‘Fear grows across the country: VIRUS PANIC’, and ‘Coronavirus horror: Social media footage shows infected Wuhan residents ‘act like zombies’, it is no wonder many people are in a state of panic.

In times when many are suffering mentally and physically under unnecessary and prolonged lockdowns, the incessant fear porn is causing excessive anxiety, which in turn will affect the health & mental well-being of some, if not many. 

In government documents from the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) dated from March 2020 advice was given saying: “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging… This could potentially be done by trained community support volunteers, by targeted media campaigns, social media” 

I’d say the UK media campaigns certainly did the job, and other Western nations got similar directives. The UK government also became the nation’s biggest advertiser in 2020, make what you will of the potential ramifications that could have on cash-strapped newspapers and their supposed ‘independence’.

Having myself been deeply focused on exposing war propaganda and other media lies around Syria, Palestine, Venezuela, and elsewhere over the years, my default position has become one of deep cynicism on mass media reporting. Yes, you can find nuggets of truth, or even excellent journalists in mainstream publications, honestly challenging the narratives.

But those are few and far between, generally you find copy-paste propaganda emanating largely from the bowels of the USA and the UK.

A study by Swiss Propaganda Research (SPR) noted“most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.” 

Those agencies are AP, Reuters, and AFP. SPR notes:

“The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.”

Given all of this, I’ve come to believe that with regard to media reporting on Covid-19, my cynicism is well-deserved.

Covid-19 reporting has increasingly been utterly absurd, with stories of people dropping dead in the streets, ice rink morgues to cope with the mountains of bodies, footage of an overcrowded New York hospital (that just happened to be of an Italian hospital), claims of animals testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, and more recently reports of people dying post-jab but we are told ‘it could have been worse!’

This campaign of fear caused the public to massively overestimate the lethality of Covid-19, which as un-alarmist voices note has a survival rate of over 99%. 

When months into the outbreak it became apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was far less lethal than first predicted, the media and talking heads moved from talking about ‘Covid deaths’ to ‘positive cases’. 

Although relatively early on a goat and pawpaw tested positive for Covid-19, instead of then scrutinizing the accuracy of the PCR test as a means of ‘detecting Covid-19’, the media continued to hype the rise in Covid ‘cases’. 

In lockstep, ‘Covid testing’ was increased dramatically using the PCR test (recently revoked by the CDC). This inevitably pumped up the number of ‘cases’, which mass media have in turn promoted non-stop, this in turn gave ammunition to those enforcing lockdowns and vaccines.

By now hundreds of vocal doctors, nurses, virologists, immunologists, and other professionals actually worth listening to, whose data and experience counter the hype pumped out in media have very quickly disappeared from social media, or otherwise deemed quacks, and are thus largely silenced. This leaves the general public mainly getting their information via hyped-up media. 

Alongside this, there have been relentless ad hominem attacks on journalists who pose legitimate questions and uncomfortable truths about the official narratives around Covid-19. 

For offering perspectives which contradict the standard narratives around Covid-19, journalists have been deemed conspiracy theorists, pandemic-deniers, right-wingers, selfish… I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few slurs. 

When it comes to matters Covid-19, it is suddenly unacceptable to question ‘The Science’, question the authorities, or question the same media that sold us WMDs in Iraq and chemical attacks in Syria.

Media are the drivers of Covid hysteria, and it is the daily bombardment of fear porn that confuses average people and enables tyrannical powers to be brought in, largely unchallenged. 

As it is the responsibility of journalists to expose lies around wars of aggression, it is also the duty of journalists to do so around Covid-19. For some journalists who have stubbornly refused to hold power to account, instead toeing the line on all things Covid, it appears their fear is of losing an audience and not of a virus.

Whether or not you agree with dissenting voices’ questions and criticisms, we have the right to ask and make them. We do so, knowing that remaining silent in the face of the brutal Covid measures is a guaranteed path to tyranny.

Smart Dust: A Tiny Part of What They’ve Got Planned For You

By Mickey Z.

Source: Dissident Voice

Thanks to corporate media, anything outside the accepted parameters of debate (e.g. CNN vs. Fox, NY Times vs. Wall Street Journal) is considered beyond the pale. Thus, when I wish to introduce you to what the transhumanists in charge have planned for you, by default, I sound like a fringe weirdo in a tinfoil hat. This highly efficient system keeps the rabble in line by encouraging each of us to do the enforcing of such censorship. We willingly limit our own access to information — in the name of “justice” or “science,” of course.

With that in mind, I offer you a 2-minute video on “smart dust” in the hope you have enough attention span and open-mindedness to focus that long:

Keep in mind that the above video is already five years old. In tech years, that might as well be a century. As far back as 2013, MIT was talking about “How Smart Dust Could Spy On Your Brain.” Smart dust (or “neural dust”) is already here, already in use, and will soon be a daily part of your life — whether you ask for it or not. Are you okay with that?

Smart Dust is comprised of “many small wireless microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). MEMS are tiny devices that have cameras, sensors, and communication mechanisms to transmit the data to be stored and processed further. They generally range from 20 micrometers up to a millimeter in size. They are usually connected to a computer network wirelessly and are distributed over a specific area to accomplish tasks, usually sensing through RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology.”

You can probably see what they’ve been given the nickname of “dust.” In fact, they can even be distributed via tiny, unmanned aircraft that would serve as crop dusters of sorts. Without being detected, they’d spray the virtually invisible motes over a large area and collect information that way. They are so small, you’d never know they were there — perhaps gathering info on you. How small? The prototype smart dust currently measures 0.8 millimeters x 3 millimeters x 1 millimeter can be only 1 cubic millimeter or less in size — possibly as small as 100 microns per side. 

Some of you, I’m certain, are already embracing this sci-fi kind of idea as yet another fine example of  “science.” Before you get too misty-eyed about such “progress,” please allow me to remind you that smart dust was developed by (surprise, surprise) the U.S. military. More specifically, it is the brainchild of the notorious DARPA — Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. These are the same folks who brought you mind-control weapons, cyborg insects, synthetic blood, mechanical elephants, programmable shape-shifting matter, and so much more.

So, go back and re-read the details above and recognize how easily smart dust could be weaponized. Even better, accept the reality that step one (as always) was weaponizing smart dust. And now, digest the fact that those well-intentioned and good-hearted souls in the military want to implant smart dust inside you… for your own good, of course.

“Neural dust represents a radical departure from the traditional approach of using radio waves for wireless communication with implanted devices,” said Doug Weber, a DARPA program manager. “The soft tissues of our body consist mostly of saltwater. Sound waves pass freely through these tissues and can be focused with pinpoint accuracy at nerve targets deep inside our body, while radio waves cannot. Indeed, this is why sonar is used to image objects in the ocean, while radar is used to detect objects in the air. By using ultrasound to communicate with the neural dust, the sensors can be made smaller and placed deeper inside the body, by needle injection or other non-surgical approaches.”

I’ve already told you about the Internet of Bodies. And I’ve also already told you about the Pentagon’s openly-discussed plan to insert microchips inside us to “protect” us. With smart dust, they could just let the technology waft down from the sky and have you unknowingly inhale it. Why is no one talking about this? I ask you to re-visit my opening paragraph for that answer. To even talk about smart dust is to be dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist.” Once again, those in power have trained the public to do the policing for them. Somewhere, Goebbels is drooling.

All of the above has become easier to employ thanks to the pandemic. To explain that, we need to meet Klaus Schwab — the founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), and author of a book called The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Here’s how the WEF explains this concept

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.

To repeat: “a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.” This is transhumanism. It’s an ideology that proposes that technology can and must “enhance” the human mind and body and they are already working to “prove” this theory. Men like Schwab believe we must connect the physical, digital, and biological domains via steps like “implantable technologies such as smart tattoos, smart dust, smart pills, and other implantable smart functionalities.” They want to turn your heartbeat into your digital ID. Schwab and his ilk also support work going on in areas like designing human genomes, and simulating, monitoring, or even influencing brain activity, both in medical and non-medical applications. (P.S. Elon Musk is also currently setting up a company that links brains and computers.) Click here to watch Schwab telling Charlie Rose about his plans to edit your genes. 

Most people would’ve probably cast a wary side-eye at such suggestions — until Covid-19. For 18 months, the powers-that-be have successfully scared the population into believing anything they decree. They’ve also coerced and manipulated billions into allowing novel nanotechnology to be injected into them without a second thought. Never mind thinking, the masses are lining up to serve as unpaid PR people for the experimental jab.

With such widespread and enthusiastic compliance, there seems to be little to stand in the way of Schwab, the World Economic Forum, DARPA, Big Pharma, and the transhumanist agenda. They are counting on you going along without asking too many questions. But there’s the catch. You still can demand and reclaim autonomy over your mind and body. For starters, all you need to do is a little self-loving homework to see what they have planned for you and then… just say no. Unless, of course, you’d prefer having your consciousness uploaded to the cloud

Did the US Support the Growth of ISIS-K in Afghanistan?

Regional players have long accused the US of supporting the group with midnight helicopter transport into Afghanistan.

By Alexander Rubinstein

Source: Mint Press News

The list of governments, former government officials, and organizations in the region that have accused the US of supporting ISIS-K is expansive and includes the Russian government, the Iranian government, Syrian government media, Hezbollah, an Iraqi state-sponsored military outfit and even former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who called the group a “tool” of the United States as journalist Ben Norton recently noted, characterizing Karzai as “a former US puppet who later turned against the US, and knows many of its secrets.”

So what exactly is ISIS-K and what is it’s history? After ISIS’s Afghanistan variant became a household name overnight following a suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport that killed more than 170 people and wounded more than 200, the group’s history demands renewed scrutiny.

Back in May, I tweeted that “I must not be the only one expecting a so-called ‘rise of ISIS’ in Afghanistan in the near future…”

I wrote this because mass-casualty terrorist attacks are repeatedly used as justification by the United States for continuing its occupations of foreign countries: the “counterterrorism mission,” or the “terrorist threat.” And it has been a long time since the Taliban has taken credit for any such acts.

In fact, all the way back in August 2016 — a little over five years ago — Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Iranian media that “In cooperation with the nation, [the Taliban] has prevented the terrorist group from gaining a foothold in Afghanistan.”

The strongest argument in favor of a US withdrawal put forward by the Biden Administration is that the United States completed its counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan. The attack by “ISIS-K” on the Kabul airport collapses this argument, and so it benefits those who would prefer to see Afghanistan permanently occupied by the US.

It’s also not the actions of a calculating terrorist group: why commit mass violence at such a critical juncture? Why do it when all eyes are on Afghanistan and many in the Pentagon, in NATO, are looking for any excuse to invade again?

CNN’s Clarissa Ward was even able to interview a “senior ISIS-K commander” two weeks before the attack who made these points. The “commander” told CNN that the group was “lying low and waiting for its moment to strike.”

While the US-backed government was still in power in Kabul, the ISIS-K “commander” told Ward that “it’s no problem for him to get through checkpoints and come right into the capital.” He even let the CNN crew film his entrance into the city.

In the absurd interview, CNN sat in a hotel room with the supposed ISIS-K leader and protected his identity. Ward asked him comically upfront questions like “are you interested, ultimately, in carrying out international attacks?”

In response to a question about their plans for expansion in Afghanistan following a US withdrawal, the “commander” said “instead of currently operating, we have turned to recruiting only, to utilize the opportunity and to do our recruitment. But when the foreigners and people of the world leave Afghanistan, we can restart our operations.”

What changed?

This is not to say definitively that the ISIS-K attack was a false flag, but there are many holes in the narrative that demand scrutiny. It is worth noting here that the US is in charge of security at the airport until August 31, while the Taliban controls the surrounding area.

Moreover, the United States had advanced knowledge of the attack. “Because of security threats outside the gates of Kabul airport, we are advising US citizens to avoid traveling to the airport and to avoid airport gates at this time,” read an August 25 security alert on the US Embassy in Afghanistan website. “US citizens who are at the Abbey Gate, East Gate, or North Gate now should leave immediately.”

Britain and Australia issued similar warnings of a “high threat of a terrorist attack” and a “very high threat of a terrorist attack” respectively.

The following day, a suicide bomber blew himself up and killed scores of people. Additionally, US forces reportedly gunned down a large number of people as well. “Many we spoke to, including eyewitnesses, said significant numbers of those killed were shot dead by US forces in the panic after the blast,” tweeted BBC correspondent Secunder Kermani, who reported from the area.

The very next day after the attack, the United State Central Command announced that “US military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation today against an ISIS-K planner. The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan.”

In short, the US knew an attack was coming, the attack happened, and then within 24 hours the US announced that they killed the perpetrator, saying “initial indications are that we killed the target.”

Then on Saturday, US forces demolished a CIA base in the country.

These facts give us more questions than answers. Why was the US unable to prevent the attack? Giving the military and intelligence community the benefit of doubt that they didn’t know who was going to attack and therefore could not have prevented it, how did they figure it out so quickly after the attack? If it was the CIA, which is more than likely, who provided this information, why is the military destroying CIA infrastructure that could plausibly play a role in helping to figure such things out? This is an especially troubling question considering that less than a few hours before the New York Times reported that US troops destroyed a CIA base, President Biden said that military commanders informed him that another attack on the airport is “highly likely” in the next 24-26 hours.

Long Running Accusations of Support

Researcher and commentator Hadi Nasrallah noted on Friday that the leader of the Middle East resistance group Hezbollah “said that the US have been using helicopters to save ISIS terrorists from complete annihilation in Iraq and transporting them to Afghanistan to keep them as insurgents in Central Asia against Russia, China and Iran.”

Hezbollah is not the first player in the area to make the accusation of the US setting up a ratline via helicopter flights to Afghanistan for ISIS: Russia and Iran, which borders Afghanistan, have been for some time.

As Hadi Nasrallah noted, Syra and Iraq have said more or less the same, with Syrian state media SANA saying in 2017 reporting that “US helicopters transported between 40 and 75 ISIS militants from Hasakah, North Syria to an ‘unknown area.’”

As Hadi Nasrallah pointed out, “the same thing was reported for years in Iraq by the [Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces] along with reports that US helicopters dropped aid for ISIS.”

Back in 2017 and 2018, Iranian and Russian officials had questions of their own. Chief of Iranian General Staff Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri accused the US of “relocating members of the Daesh (ISIS or ISIL) terrorist group to Afghanistan after their defeats in Iraq and Syria” in early February of 2018.

“The Americans point to (the existence) of tensions in the southwest Asia region as an excuse for their presence in the region,” Major General Baqeri told reporters.

The following month, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the longtime foreign minister of Iran who departed from the post earlier this year, said “we see intelligence, as well as eyewitness accounts, that Daesh fighters, terrorists, were airlifted from battle zones, rescued from battle zones, including recently from the prison of Haska [Meyna].”

Iran and Russia have “consistently allege[d]” that unmarked helicopters were flying into regions of Afghanistan where ISIS had a foothold. But as Javad Zarif pointed out in March 2018, “this time, it wasn’t unmarked helicopters. They were American helicopters, taking Daesh out of Haska prison. Where did they take them? Now, we don’t know where they took them, but we see the outcome. We see more and more violence in Pakistan, more and more violence in Afghanistan, taking a sectarian flavor.”

As the US government propaganda outlet Voice of America wrote at the time in 2018, “the terrorist group uses Nangarhar as its main base to launch attacks elsewhere in Afghanistan.” This is the same province the US struck with an unmanned drone the day following the attack on the airport.

As Voice of America noted, the National Security Advisor of the recently-collapsed Afghanistan government offered Russian and Iranian delegates “joint investigations into allegations of unmarked helicopters flying IS[IS] fighters to battle zones in the country.”

In February 2018, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov implored the US to answer the question.

“We still expecting from our American colleagues an answer to the repeatedly raised questions, questions that arose on the basis of public statements made by the leaders of some Afghan provinces, that unidentified helicopters, most likely helicopters to which NATO in one way or another is related, fly to the areas where the insurgents are based, and no one has been able to explain the reasons for these flights yet,” Lavrov said. “In general [the United States] tries to avoid answers to these legitimate questions.”

Later that month, Lavrov had more to say on the issue: “According to our data, the IS[IS] presence in northern and eastern Afghanistan is rather serious. There are already thousands of gunmen.”

“We are alarmed as, unfortunately, the US and NATO military in Afghanistan makes every effort to silence and deny [ISIS’s presence in Afghanistan],” he added.

These mysterious dead-of-night helicopter flights even raised the eyebrows of the fallen US puppet government. All the way back in May 2017, a local official in the Sar-e-Pul province said two military helicopters landed in the dead of night.

“According to the report we have received from the 2nd Battalion of the Afghan National Army, which fights on the first line of the battle in Sar-e-Pul, two military helicopters landed in a stronghold of the enemy at 8pm last Thursday,” Mohammad Zahir Wahdat, the governor of the province, told Afghan media.

Following Lavrov’s comments in 2018, General John Nicholson, the commander of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, said that Russia was exaggerating the threat of ISIS in Afghanistan. “We see a narrative that’s being used that grossly exaggerates the number of Isis [Islamic State group] fighters here,” Gen. Nicholson told the BBC. “This narrative then is used as a justification for the Russians to legitimize the actions of the Taliban.

This talking point was reinforced by Navy Captain Tom Gresbeck, the public affairs director of NATO’s Afghanistan mission, who said that US forces have “no evidence of any significant migration of IS-K foreign fighters. We see local fighters who switch allegiances to join ISIS for various reasons, but the Russian narrative grossly exaggerates the numbers of ISIS fighters that are in the country.”

It appears that this week, the United States may be forced to eat its words.

Australia Continues Its Plunge Into Authoritarianism And Military Brinkmanship

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Australia has joined the US and UK in an “enhanced trilateral security partnership” called AUKUS with the unspoken-yet-obvious goal of coordinating escalations against China. Antiwar reports:

President Biden and the leaders of Australia and the UK announced a new military agreement on Wednesday aimed at countering China. The pact, known as AUKUS, will focus on the sharing of sensitive military technologies, and the first initiative will focus on getting Australia nuclear-powered submarines.

US officials speaking to CNN described the effort to share nuclear propulsion with another country as an “exceedingly rare step” due to the sensitivity of the technology. “This technology is extremely sensitive. This is, frankly, an exception to our policy in many respects,” one unnamed official said.

This deal will replace a planned $90 billion program to obtain twelve submarines designed by France, an obnoxious expenditure either way when a quarter of Australians are struggling to make ends meet during a pandemic that is four times more likely to kill Australians who are struggling financially. This is just the latest in Canberra’s continually expanding policy of feeding vast fortunes into Washington’s standoff with Beijing at the expense of its own people.

If readers are curious why Australia would simultaneously subvert its own economic interests by turning against its primary trading partner and its own security interests by feeding into dangerous and unnecessary provocations, I will refer them once again to the jarringly honest explanation by American political analyst John Mearsheimer at a debate hosted by the Australian think tank Center for Independent Studies in 2019. Mearsheimer told his audience that the US is going to do everything it can to halt China’s rise and prevent it from becoming the regional hegemon in the East, and that Australia should align with the US in that battle or else it would face the wrath of Washington.

“The question that’s on the table is what should Australia’s foreign policy be in light of the rise of China,” Mearsheimer said. “I’ll tell you what I would suggest if I were an Australian.”

Mearsheimer claimed that China is going to continue to grow economically and will convert this economic power into military power to dominate Asia “the way the US dominates the Western Hemisphere”, and explained why he thinks the US and its allies have every ability to prevent that from happening.

“Now the question is what does this all mean for Australia?” Mearsheimer said. “Well, you’re in a quandary for sure. Everybody knows what the quandary is. And by the way you’re not the only country in East Asia that’s in this quandary. You trade a lot with China, and that trade is very important for your prosperity, no question about that. Security-wise you really want to go with us. It makes just a lot more sense, right? And you understand that security is more important than prosperity, because if you don’t survive, you’re not gonna prosper.”

“Now some people say there’s an alternative: you can go with China,” said Mearsheimer. “Right you have a choice here: you can go with China rather the United States. There’s two things I’ll say about that. Number one, if you go with China you want to understand you are our enemy. You are then deciding to become an enemy of the United States. Because again, we’re talking about an intense security competition.”

“You’re either with us or against us,” he continued. “And if you’re trading extensively with China, and you’re friendly with China, you’re undermining the United States in this security competition. You’re feeding the beast, from our perspective. And that is not going to make us happy. And when we are not happy you do not want to underestimate how nasty we can be. Just ask Fidel Castro.”

Nervous laughter from the Australian think tank audience punctuated Mearsheimer’s more incendiary observations. The CIA is known to have made numerous attempts to assassinate Castro.

So there you have it. Australia is not aligned with the US to protect itself from China. Australia is aligned with the US to protect itself from the US.

This new move happens as Northern Territory Chief Minister Michael Gunner announces his government’s policy for Covid-19 restrictions once the territory’s population is 80 percent vaccinated which will include “lockouts” during outbreaks wherein people will only be allowed to work and move freely in society if they verify that they are vaccinated using check-in measures which Gunner literally calls a “freedom pass”.

“I’ll say it again and again. If you want your life to continue close to normal, get your jab,” Gunner said. “For vaccinated people, the check-in app will basically be your freedom pass. For people who make the choice to not get vaccinated, no vax means no freedom pass. We’re working with other governments now to get this technology ready.”

This is in alignment with what we’ve been told to expect as the rest of Australia prepares to roll out the use of vaccine passports.

And we continue to see other authoritarian escalations in Australia which have nothing to do with Covid as well. Authorities have been proposing new legal provisions which will allow Australian visas to be cancelled and citizenship revoked in entirely secret proceedings based on information provided by secretive government agencies. The horrifying Identify and Disrupt bill which allows Australian police to hack people’s devices, collect, delete and alter their information and log onto their social media was passed through Parliament at jaw-dropping speed last month. Neither of these escalations are Covid-related.

People who just started paying attention to Australian authoritarianism during Covid often get the impression that it’s entirely about the virus, but as we discussed previously the actual fundamental problem is that Australia is the only so-called democracy without any kind of statute or bill of rights to protect the citizenry from these kinds of abuses. This is why Australia is looked upon as so freakish by the rest of the western world right now: because, in this sense, it is. People call it a “free country”, but there has never been any reason to do so.

Covid has certainly played a major role in the exacerbation of Australian authoritarianism, but it’s a problem that was well underway long before the outbreak. Back in 2019 the CIVICUS Monitor had already downgraded Australia from an “open” country to one where civil space has “narrowed”, citing new laws to expand government surveillanceprosecution of whistleblowers, and raids on media organizations.

This slide into military brinkmanship and authoritarian dystopia shows no signs of stopping. The abuses of the powerful will continue to grow more egregious until the people open their eyes to what’s going on and begin taking action to steer us away from the existential dangers we are hurtling toward on multiple fronts. If there is any good news to be had here, it’s that if such a miracle ever occurs it will then be possible to immediately course correct and start building a healthy society together.

THEY ARE CREATING THE BIGGEST WITCH HUNT IN AMERICAN HISTORY

By Michael Snyder

Source: Waking Times

Prior to this pandemic, if you wanted to weed out all of the “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” from our society, how would you have done it?

I suppose that sending everyone a questionnaire asking them what they believe would be one way to do it, but of course a lot of people would give false answers and many others would simply ignore the questionnaire.  Social media profiles contain a wealth of information, but many “non-conformists” are not even on social media and digging through all of that data would take an extraordinary amount of time, money and energy.  Up until just recently, there just hasn’t been an easy and efficient way to identify those that are not eager servants of the system.

But now the COVID vaccines have changed everything.  These injections are the perfect litmus test, because “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” are pretty much the only ones that are refusing the shots at this point.  This makes it exceptionally easy to divide American citizens into two categories, and it also gives authorities a perfect excuse to push all of those “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” to the fringes of society.

As I discussed yesterday, I was literally sick to my stomach as I pondered the implications of Biden’s tyrannical new decrees.  Originally, Biden and other Democratic leaders were against any sort of vaccine mandates, but now I think that they have realized that mandates are a tool that they can use to fundamentally reshape our society.

If you don’t understand where I am going with this, just keep reading, because it will become extremely clear by the end of this article.

Biden’s new decrees cover almost every major institution in our society.  Just think about it.  Any “major institution” is almost certainly going to be employing more than 100 people, and all such organizations are covered by Biden’s mandates.

In addition to businesses of various sizes, we are also talking about colleges, schools, churches, non-profits, political entities, sports teams and charitable organizations.

Millions of Americans that are employed by such institutions could be forced to leave their positions if they refuse to comply with what Biden is demanding.

And the rules that the Biden administration is coming up with will require the institutions to be the enforcers of these draconian new measures.

Your bosses will be forced to make sure that you are submitting to the new rules, because if not they could be hit with massive fines.

In my last article I used the word “sickening” to describe what Biden is trying to do to all of us, but the truth is that word is not nearly strong enough.

What we are facing is a complete and total national nightmare, and it isn’t going to end any time soon.

Biden’s new mandates are even stricter for employees of the federal government.  Previously, employees of the federal government were at least given the option to undergo regular testing if they didn’t want to be vaccinated, but now that option is being taken away.

So now millions of federal employees will have to choose between their principles and their careers.

And considering the fact that so many of these people are barely providing for their families right now, a lot of really heartbreaking choices are going to have to be made.

Earlier today, I posted a video from a woman that works for the U.S. Treasury Department.  After all these years, she publicly announced on social media that she is going to leave her job because of Biden’s new mandates.

And countless others will follow her out the door.

Biden’s new decrees will also force nearly everyone in the entire healthcare industry to either get vaccinated or give up their careers.

What a horribly cruel thing to do.

Biden is essentially putting a gun to the heads of these people.  So many of them spent an enormous amount of time, energy and money to get their educations, and now Biden is telling them that they have to sacrifice everything that they have worked for if they will not comply with his demands.

As I pointed out yesterday, healthcare workers won’t just be forced out of their current jobs.  Because virtually every health care provider in the entire country accepts Medicaid and Medicare, those that refuse to comply will essentially be banned from the entire industry.

At a time when a shortage of qualified workers is causing chaos throughout our economy, Biden’s tyrannical orders could force millions of Americans to suddenly lose their jobs.  This is an incredibly foolish thing to do, and it could have very serious ramifications in the years ahead.

Sadly, it won’t just be a few people quitting their jobs.  A poll that was just conducted discovered that 72 percent of unvaccinated Americans said that they would quit their current jobs rather than be vaccinated…

Many making this argument have cited a Washington Post-ABC News poll released over the weekend. It showed that just 18 percent unvaccinated people whose employers don’t currently have mandates said they would likely get vaccinated if their employer required it. About 7 in 10 (72 percent) said that, if they couldn’t get a medical or religious exemption, they would probably quit rather than submit to the requirement.

I don’t know what is going on behind the scenes, but it is my opinion that Kamala Harris has had a lot of influence in the recent decisions that Biden has been making.

She has always had authoritarian tendencies, and if she ever becomes president that will truly be a catastrophic scenario.

Needless to say, Biden’s new mandates are going to cause great anxiety for millions upon millions of people, and a recent CNN poll found that the mood of the country was already heading in a very negative direction

The new poll finds 69% of Americans say things in the country today are going badly, below the pandemic-era high of 77% reached in January just before President Joe Biden took office but well above the 60% who felt that way in a March CNN poll.

And 62% say that economic conditions in the US are poor, up from 45% in April and nearly as high as the pandemic-era peak of 65% reached in May 2020.

My hope is that Republican governors will fight Biden’s new decrees with everything that they have got.

Because the truth is that this is one of the most critical moments in U.S. history.

Our most basic liberties and freedoms are under full assault, and we really are descending into full-blown tyranny.

If Biden’s new mandates are not overturned by the courts, millions of Americans that love liberty and freedom could be forced from their jobs.

It would truly be a witch hunt of unprecedented size and scope, and it would represent the greatest purge of “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” that any of us have ever witnessed.