Category Archives: culture

The Criminalization of Dissent

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By CJ Hopkins

Source: Consent Factory

One of the hallmarks of totalitarian systems is the criminalization of dissent. Not just the stigmatization of dissent or the demonization of dissent, but the formal criminalization of dissent, and any other type of opposition to the official ideology of the totalitarian system. Global capitalism has been inching its way toward this step for quite some time, and now, apparently, it is ready to take it.

Germany has been leading the way. For over a year, anyone questioning or protesting the “Covid emergency measures” or the official Covid-19 narrative has been demonized by the government and the media, and, sadly, but not completely unexpectedly, the majority of the German public. And now such dissent is officially “extremism.”

Yes, that’s right, in “New Normal” Germany, if you dissent from the official state ideology, you are now officially a dangerous “extremist.” The German Intelligence agency (the “BfV”) has even invented a new category of “extremists” in order to allow themselves to legally monitor anyone suspected of being “anti-democratic and/or delegitimizing the state in a way that endangers security,” like … you know, non-violently protesting, or speaking out against, or criticizing, or satirizing, the so-called “New Normal.”

Naturally, I’m a little worried, as I have engaged in most of these “extremist” activities. My thoughtcrimes are just sitting there on the Internet waiting to be scrutinized by the BfV. They’re probably Google-translating this column right now, compiling a list of all the people reading it, and their Facebook friends and Twitter followers, and professional associates, and family members, and anyone any of the aforementioned people have potentially met with, or casually mentioned, who might have engaged in similar thoughtcrimes.

You probably think I’m joking, don’t you? I’m not joking. Not even slightly. The Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (“Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz”) is actively monitoring anyone questioning or challenging the official “New Normal” ideology … the “Covid Deniers,” the “conspiracy theorists,” the “anti-vaxxers,” the dreaded “Querdenkers” (i.e., people who “think outside the box”), and anyone else they feel like monitoring who has refused to join the Covidian Cult. We’re now official enemies of the state, no different than any other “terrorists” … or, OK, technically, a little different.

As The New York Times reported last week (German Intelligence Puts Coronavirus Deniers Under Surveillance), “the danger from coronavirus deniers and conspiracy theorists does not fit the mold posed by the usual politically driven groups, including those on the far left and right, or by Islamic extremists.” Still, according to the German Interior Ministry, we diabolical “Covid deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “anti-vaxxers” have “targeted the state itself, its leaders, businesses, the press, and globalism,” and have “attacked police officers” and “defied civil authorities.”

Moreover, back in August of 2020, in a dress rehearsal for the “Storming of the Capitol,” “Covid-denying” insurrectionists “scaled the steps of Parliament” (i.e., the Reichstag). Naturally, The Times neglects to mention that this so-called “Storming of the Reichstag” was performed by a small sub-group of protesters to whom the German authorities had granted a permit to assemble (apart from the main demonstration, which was massive and completely peaceful) on the steps of the Reichstag, which the German police had, for some reason, left totally unguarded. In light of the background of the person the German authorities issued this “Steps-of-the-Reichstag” protest permit to — a known former-NPD functionary, in other words, a neo-Nazi — well, the whole thing seemed a bit questionable to me … but what do I know? I’m just a “conspiracy theorist.”

According to Al Jazeera, the German Interior Ministry explained that these querdenking “extremists encourage supporters to ignore official orders and challenge the state monopoly on the use of force.” Seriously, can you imagine anything more dangerous? Mindlessly following orders and complying with the state’s monopoly on the use of force are the very cornerstones of modern democracy … or some sort of political system, anyway.

But, see, there I go, again “being anti-democratic” and “delegitimizing the state,” not to mention “relativizing the Holocaust” (also a criminal offense in Germany) by comparing one totalitarian system to another, as I have done repeatedly on social media, and in a column I published in November of 2020, when the parliament passed the “Infection Protection Act,” which bears no comparison whatsoever to the “Enabling Act of 1933.”

This isn’t just a German story, of course. As I reported in a column in February, The “New Normal” War on Domestic Terror is a global war, and it’s just getting started. According to a Department of Homeland Security “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin” (and the “liberal” corporate-media propaganda machine), “democracy” remains under imminent threat from these “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority” and other such “grievances fueled by false narratives” including “anger over Covid-19 restrictions.”

These Covid-denying “violent extremists” have apparently joined forces with the “white-supremacist, Russia-backed, Trump-loving “Putin-Nazis” that terrorized “democracy” for the past four years, and almost overthrew the US government by sauntering around inside the US Capitol Building without permission, scuffling with police, attacking furniture, and generally acting rude and unruly. No, they didn’t actually kill anyone, as the corporate media all reported they did, but trespassing in a government building and putting your feet up on politicians’ desks is pretty much exactly the same as “terrorism.”

Or whatever. It’s not like the truth actually matters, not when you are whipping up mass hysteria over imaginary “Russian assets,” “white-supremacist militias,” “Covid-denying extremists,” “anti-vax terrorists,” and “apocalyptic plagues.” When you’re rolling out a new official ideology — a pathologized-totalitarian ideology — and criminalizing all dissent, the point is not to appear to be factual. The point is just to terrorize the shit out of people.

As Hermann Goering famously explained regarding how to lead a country to war (and the principle holds true for any big transition, like the one we are experiencing currently):

“[T]he people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”

Go back and read those quotes from the German Interior Ministry and the DHS again slowly. The message they are sending is unmistakeably clear. It might not seem all that new, but it is. Yes, they have been telling us “we are being attacked” and denouncing critics, protesters, and dissidents for twenty years (i.e., since the War on Terror was launched in 2001, and for the last four years in their War on Populism), but this is a whole new level of it … a fusion of official narratives and their respective official enemies into a singular, aggregate official narrative in which dissent will no longer be permitted.

Instead, it will be criminalized, or it will be pathologized.

Seriously, go back and read those quotes again. Global capitalist governments and their corporate media mouthpieces are telling us, in no uncertain terms, that “objection to their authority” will no longer be tolerated, nor will dissent from their official narratives. Such dissent will be deemed “dangerous” and above all “false.” It will not be engaged with or rationally debated. It will be erased from public view. There will be an inviolable, official “reality.” Any deviation from official “reality” or defiance of the “civil authorities” will be labelled “extremism,” and dealt with accordingly.

This is the essence of totalitarianism, the establishment of an inviolable official ideology and the criminalization of dissent. And that is what is happening, right now. A new official ideology is being established. Not a state ideology. A global ideology. The “New Normal” is that official ideology. Technically, it is an official post-ideology, an official “reality,” an axiomatic “fact,” which only “criminals” and “psychopaths” would deny.

I’ll be digging deeper into “New Normal” ideology and “pathologized totalitarianism” in my future columns, and … sorry, they probably won’t be very funny. For now I’ll leave you with two more quotes. The emphasis is mine, as ever.

Here’s California State Senator Richard Pan, author of an op-ed in the Washington Post: “Anti-vax extremism is akin to domestic terrorism,” quoted in the Los Angeles Times:

“These extremists have not yet been held accountable, so they continue to escalate violence against the body public … We must now summon the political will to demand that domestic terrorists face consequences for their words and actions. Our democracy and our lives depend on it … They’ve been building alliances with white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and [others] on the far right …”

And here’s Peter Hotez in Nature magazine:

“The United Nations and the highest levels of governments must take direct, even confrontational, approaches with Russia, and move to dismantle anti-vaccine groups in the United States. Efforts must expand into the realm of cyber security, law enforcement, public education and international relations. A high-level inter-agency task force reporting to the UN secretary-general could assess the full impact of anti-vaccine aggression, and propose tough, balanced measures. The task force should include experts who have tackled complex global threats such as terrorism, cyber attacks and nuclear armament, because anti-science is now approaching similar levels of peril. It is becoming increasingly clear that advancing immunization requires a counter-offensive.”

We’ll be hearing a lot more rhetoric like this as this new, more totalitarian structure of global capitalism gradually develops … probably a good idea to listen carefully, and assume the New Normals mean exactly what they say.

Culture, Self and Law

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By Darren Allen

Source: Off-Guardian

This is an extract from Self and Unself, Darren Allen’s new ‘philosophy of all and everything’. Some of the terms herein — consciousness, self, ego, etc — may appear somewhat mysterious or abstract as they are explained in earlier sections of the book.

Self produces manifest culture, and then that culture shapes self. First, self is externalised as an expression — some kind of act or presentation. The expression appears as an object, a thing in the world, which is related to other objects, which are then reappropriated by man back into the self.

A band releases an album, a building company constructs a block of flats, an advertising agency puts up hoardings around town, an individual recounts a few anecdotes. The songs, the dwellings, the signs and the stories become part of a world which then shapes those within that world.

If self is unselfish this process ultimately begins “beyond” culture, with consciousness, to which the reappropriated modifications are subject to some kind of evaluation — I can reject the bullshit music, the ugly council estate, the advertising lies and the witless jibber-jabber.

If, however, self is fundamentally egoic, consciousness is given no freedom to operate, and the caddis case is formed almost entirely from without, walling up inner quality, and with it, genuine individuality.

First self speaks, then the words get set in stone, then the stone speaks to the self, writing its words back into the human heart, which speaks again.[1] If there is freedom to speak, and to be heard, and to walk away, this dialogue (or dialectic) is fruitful and serves man.

But, just as if one person screws another down and forces words into her head it is no longer a conversation, so if society (culture plus self, or selves) fills its schools and lines its streets with messages that all say the same thing, with no way of escape, then we are no longer individuals participating in a society, but stackable storage units for whomever or whatever is filling us with the things we are forced to feel, eat, look at, think about and energetically engage with; in short, build our selves with.

Culture was once built from nature, and, more intimately, from the unselfish origin of that which nature and culture have in common. This is why pre-civilised man considered nature and culture to be identical. The more culture came to be built from itself, the less it served the essence of man, until it came to compel man to accept its objective validity or suffer the consequences. Not in an overt tyrannical sense, but in the unalterable fact of its existence.

You can think away culture or pretend it doesn’t matter — ignore, say, the rules of language or pretend that they are dispensable, but you will be punished, mocked, excluded, brought back into line or killed. Likewise, if your social self is at odds with your individual self, then all kinds of problems are on their way. This does not mean that I must be something other than my social self, but that I am continually compelled to harmonise the two, and if I can’t — if I cannot be in the world who I feel I really am—then I will suffer in the world, as everyone who is honest does.

Ego keeps this suffering at bay by endlessly affirming its social self. As that most unreal and egoic of sources, the average Teevee-American has it, ‘I am a cop, it’s what I do…’ ‘I am a mother, it’s what I do…’ Or, alternatively, ‘This is my town, these are my people’.

Such a ‘self’ is not something which is invented, it is there, ‘inside me’. I look inside and see that I am the cop or mother that society takes me to be (or, for the fake outsider, that I wish society to take me to be). And I have no desire to be anything else. Not that there is anything wrong with inhabiting a role, nor with identifying with a community, nor that there aren’t always elements of self that do not fit into what is required by the social world; rather that ego hides from itself in its social representation.

Man may be psychologically and spiritually deformed by his activity within the egoic group or institution, he may work in a mechanical manner, in mediated environments, in order to produce or manage things which have no recognisable human meaning, and he may be forced to conceal his horror and disgust behind an upbeat mask of emotional management, but if there is no truth beyond a self-constructed from the group, he will defend his deformity, and consequent duplicity and misery, as truth.

All criticisms of the group are taken to be criticisms of the self — ‘I am mortally offended by your prejudice’ — and all criticisms of the self are taken to be prejudice against the group — ‘It’s not because you are repulsed by my moral deformity, it’s because you are racist/homophobic/anti-white/anti-American etc’.

The seamless unity of self and society in the egoic mind explains man’s total blindness to systemic constraints, and to the fundamental paradigms of the system. They are one with his ego, which is why, today for example, man spends so much time thinking and talking about voting, about reforming teaching, about having fairer laws, about creating cleaner motorways and so on and so forth; but not a word on how disabling democracy is, or education, or law, or transport, or the encompassing system, which is as invisible to him as water is to a fish, or anger is to a van driver.

*

The social self and its inner component, the personality, are maintained through communication, through constant confirmation (either explicit or implied) of who I am to others. When there is nobody to validate my personality, it dies, which is why solitude is so necessary to people with character — who need to periodically let their personality wither away in winter so that spring life might grow—and so terrifying to people without character, who must exist in a constant stress of forced blooming for the world.

Likewise, if a critical avenue of personality-confirming communication is permanently disrupted—if a lover leaves, or a mother dies, or self is forced to live in another country, cut off from its culture—the whole world crumbles. The egoic self, forged through the shared reality created with a partner, a family or a society, is ripped out.

This is why people stay in abusive relations and in abusive societies. Leaving the objective world of the known is to be plunged into chaos, a fate worse than death for ego, which may even choose death in preference.

Loss of self-reinforcing dialogue is not just a threat to the individual self, but to the social body, which provides all kinds of ritualised means by which the disrupted self is expected to deal with its disarray and return soothed and placated to the ‘normal’ world. A spouse torn apart by the death of a partner is fine, we can accept and sympathise; but if the grief is too noisy or outstays its welcome, then the social world will take measures to exclude it, quarantine the infection as it were, and remove conspicuous misery from the scene, so that production and consumption can smoothly proceed.[2]

For the same reason, madness, bizarre dreams and visions, psychotropic intoxication, spiritual extremism and all other exits from the system—including literally leaving it to gad off into the forest—are to be bricked up, or, if that’s not possible, managed by society, which deals with the void by projecting a screen of rationalisations onto it.[3] Your visionary dream was a message from Satan, or a repressed desire, or a random brain signal, your glorious experience of the fundamental oneness of creation was a message from Allah, or a crazed illusion, or confirmation of your status as our Mystic Cham.

All of these validations are gratefully taken up by the ego, which cannot bear to be cut off, alone (or alone with unself), and prefers to masochistically submit itself to The Worldview — or, on behalf of that world, to sadistically control others — rather than have to face any kind of reality beyond the boundaries of the social known.

Just as society is threatened by loss of face and loss of reason, so it must also deal with the danger of men and women rebelling against their internalised role; finding, for example, that being a nice obedient little wife, or the upwardly-mobile manager of a car-rental firm, is something of a burden, and that they’d rather be members of a non-stop erotic cabaret or hunting-and-gathering in Botswana.

It’s fine for a man to masturbate to high-budget porn, or for a woman to spend a month on safari, but to actually do something about their dreams, particularly the genuinely wild ones, is out of the question, and again, if substitutes are not functioning, the machinery of social meaning must step in to make sure such desires are suppressed or channelled into something ‘productive’, or at least that the dreamer is reminded that if they are not, he can expect to pay an horrendously high price to realise them.

*

The most potent and pervasive threat to selfish society is not in this or that criticism, loss or disruption, but in consciousness itself; which is everywhere and at all times. Consciousness must therefore be continually suppressed, and man’s relation to it, to ever-present unselfish quality, continually managed.

This is largely done, on a social level, through laws, legitimations, taboos and totems. These are the rules of society — the ‘walls’ of cliched thought, feeling, sensation and activity — which range from everyday non-verbal norms of behaviour (we greet in such and such a way, we react to bad news in such and such a way), through more explicit linguistic formulations of what is right and proper (the shared ethics of society, encoded in its wisdom, its maxims, its proverbs and even its jokes), through the art, myths and folk tales of a culture (by which we learn what is appropriate or tasteful, and what is to be condemned), through the explicit legal codes of a civilisation or of its various institutions, up to, finally, the various sacred justifications or secular theories which explain, in the most abstract sense, why things are as they are.

Although all these legitimations are constantly in conflict, they work as a whole to order men and women’s responses to their own conscious impulses and the context they find themselves in. In a selfless society, these ‘orders’ are soft guidelines (or, if you prefer, flexible human laws) — useful and necessary, but fluid, and at the service of the individual.

In an egoic society, the individual must serve the laws, legitimations and taboos. If he breaks them — if he smiles when he should frown, does what the gods say never to do, questions evolution, utters the magical ‘n’ word or sends a magnet in the post — he’ll be punished.

Note that men and women must be continually reminded of these justifications and continually enjoined to affirm their commitment to them, just as communities of belief must be continually reinforced and protected. Human beings are never far away from their original nature, and easily forget what has been programmed into them from without.

This is why ritualised laws of defilement, containment of outsiders (physical or ideological), and, above all, walling off experiences of unreality (dream, madness, apostatic transcendence, death and love; even taking a shit puts one outside the bounds of history and religion and must be legitimately dealt with) play such an important, ongoing role in all ideological systems.

Today, in the West, continual reinforcement takes the form of constant affirmations of the goodness and rightness of a highly invasive, technocratic, global market-economy and of constant reminders that without the various ideological totems required to engage in it—tolerance, respect, pacifistic acceptance, keeping two meters apart from one’s fellows and keeping your trousers on in the supermarket—everything would fall apart and we’d all drown in a flood of anarcho-fascism, or die of a medieval lurgy, or be overwhelmed by the Beast.

If it looks like these reminders aren’t taking hold, then their intensity is stepped up and penalties for contravention escalate and intensify until you get your mind right.

Laws, legitimations, taboos and totems, being self-justifying and self-created, are entirely causal. The notion of law is coterminous with the notion of causality; a non-causal law is a contradiction in terms. In reality there are, ultimately, no laws in nature, in consciousness or in human affairs, because there is, ultimately, no causality in them; the world today was no more caused by the world yesterday than the morning was caused by the night before.

The laws we find in history (e.g. Hegel’s or Marx’s), or in nature (e.g. Aristotle’s or Newton’s), or in society (e.g. Confucius’ or Comte’s), or in consciousness (e.g. Leibniz’s or Freud’s), are products of self, and therefore only applicable to self; occasionally useful, as facts and causes are, but with zero qualitative truth.

The truth of an individual or society moving through ‘time’, like that of a tree, like the meaning of an act or the essence of reality, are invisible to causal consideration, which can only perceive a tumult of interrelated bits and pieces, slices and sections, and shrink-wrapped events, never the whole; which means it can never give an appropriate response to the whole (except by accident) which becomes impossible as soon as laws are set, and [directly or indirectly] enforced.

This is why people without direct experience of reality, isolated from it by money, power, fame, technology or drugs, rely on laws and legitimations, and give them the same existential status as experience. When it comes to right or wrong, for example, they cannot trust their experience, because they do not have experience, and so they cleave to factual-casual calculation.

Property is inviolable, therefore stealing is wrong; a man steals an apple, therefore he must be punished, no matter how wealthy the supermarket he steals from. Context — the history of the supermarket, the functioning of the market, the state of society — and consciousness — compassion for the man, empathic understanding of his life — cannot be allowed into consideration. To do so would disrupt one’s entire life.

The brutal inflexibility of the law-abider is sometimes seen as a ‘lack of imagination’, but imagination is part of the abstract schema that the law-maker appeals to, the series of ideas codified as The Law; it is wrong to lie, it is wrong to kill, it is wrong to steal.

When these ideas harden into eternal truths — when, in the management phase of civilisation, they are codified or written down, in holy texts or in statute books, or in the consciences of men and women — they serve, and can only serve, that which is incapable of abandoning facticity and causality, the inherently dishonest, selfish and violent ego. This is why you can’t trust a law-abider.

Self and Unself is available in the usual places, and on Darren Allen’s bookshop.

Notes:-

[1] Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality.[back]

[2] Ernest Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.[back]

[3] Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy.[back]

Saturday Matinee: Killing Gaza

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Killing Gaza: Dan Cohen & Max Blumenthal’s documentary shows life under Israel’s bombs and siege

Filmed behind the walls of the Gaza Strip in the middle of Israel’s 2014 military assault, Killing Gaza presents a harrowing vision of siege and highlights a dispossessed people’s undying will to resist

By Max Blumenthal

Source: The Grayzone

In Killing Gaza, independent journalists Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen documented Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza and its devastating aftermath.

Yet this film is much more than a documentary about Palestinian resilience and suffering. It is a chilling visual document of war crimes committed by the Israeli military, featuring direct testimony and evidence from the survivors.

James North of Mondoweiss wrote, “If documentary films like ‘Killing Gaza’ appeared regularly on American television, public opinion would start turning against Israel overnight. The film, just released by Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal, is inspiring and sickening.”

Vaccine hustlers can’t keep their story straight; evangelicals, black people, Trumpers; who’s “hesitating?”

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By Jon Rappoport

Source: Jon Rappoport’s Blog

First, let’s get this straight. The term “hesitancy” would apply to your pasty-faced nephew, who plays video games 19 hours a day, who’s dragged to the beach one summer afternoon, and is reluctant to stick his toe in the water as he stands near the last little gasp of foam breaking on the sand.

Most of the people who aren’t taking the COVID vaccine aren’t hesitant at all. They’re determined to reject the shot.

Most of the people who don’t want the COVID vaccine are quite sure they want to forego genetic damage, blood clots, and death.

So…who are the “hesitant” ones the vaccine hustlers are going after?

According to an old desiccated man who could play a mortician in an Abbott and Costello movie without a minute of rehearsal, and who happens to be the director of the largest medical research facility in the world—the US National Institutes of Health—Dr. Francis Collins…

According to Collins, the prime target of pro-vaccine propaganda is the dastardly evangelical/Trumper crowd.

Last week, Collins spoke with NBC’s Chuck (aging-wonder-boy) Todd, who made his original journalistic bones deftly pointing a wand at maps of voting districts on Election Night.

Collins intoned, in the manner of a funeral home director expressing condolences to customers over the accident that took the life of their beloved family member, who was driving while drunk and steered his car over a cliff:

“Particularly white evangelicals seem to be resistant to the idea that vaccines are something they want to take advantage of.”

“…certainly Republican men in particular seem to less likely to be interested in the vaccine.”

But wait. NIH head Collins—playing politics—forgot to mention that, according to a recent Harris poll, a whopping 42% of black Americans don’t want the vaccine.

Oops.

Well, no doubt “systemic racism” must be the reason black people are failing to see how glorious the vaccine is. They’re being kept in ignorance by white people.

Actually, that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. A COVID Collaborative poll discovered black Americans have shockingly low levels of trust in the FDA (29%) and drug companies (19%). I’d say those numbers reveal acute intelligence, not ignorance, on medical issues.

Any group that distrusts the FDA at the rate of 71% is medically on the ball.

On the other hand, white Americans are the victims of systemic “safe and effective” lying by The New York Times, CNN, NBC, etc.

White Republicans are also being lied to by Donald Trump, Mr. Warp Speed, who is pushing the COVID vaccine like a lifeboat on the Titanic.

Trump is fronting for the COVID shot with a fervor matched only by Biden and Fauci and Bill Gates.

In an April 16 mass email to his followers (no doubt written by an aide), Trump, a major propaganda whore for Pharma, states:

Vaccine resistance is “deranged pseudo-science.”

“The federal pause on the J&J shot makes no sense. Why is the Biden White House letting insanely risk-averse bureaucrats run the show?”

It’s “sheer lunacy” for Biden “to delay millions of vaccinations and feed fears among the vax-resistant.”

“Indeed, this moronic move is a gift to the anti-vax movement.”

I spoke with a born-again Christian the other day. I asked him whether God had told him not to take the vaccine. He laughed. He said, “God told me to trust my research.”

“When did He say that?”

“I like to think it was just before I wrote to Trump telling him to wake up.”

We’re seeing hustlers on all points of the political spectrum pushing the COVID vaccine—the gene therapy that was designed, in clinical trials, to prevent nothing more than a cough, or chills and fever.

The gene therapy that has never been launched on the public before. The genetic injection that has only gained FDA certification for emergency use—a far lower and looser classification than full approval.

These criminal vaccine promoters deploy outrage and sob stories—whatever they think will play well—as they target various demographics.

Thousands of serious adverse effects from the shot are being reported. You can multiply those figures by 10 or 100 to gain a truer estimate of what is happening; and there are NO data on long-term effects.

You bet your ass people are “hesitant.” Medical authorities are telling them to accept an genetic injection that causes their cells to manufacture a protein they would never make under ordinary conditions.

Speaking of gene therapy, Dr. Francis Collins, the head of NIH, made his career on the back of discovering “genes associated with various diseases.”

In all the years of NIH’s existence, with a total budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars, show me ONE genetic cure for ANY disease across the board.

Just one.

I’m waiting.

It turns out that the history of genetics reveals the following: they can ALTER humans with it, but they can’t CURE humans.

Israel, the Big Lie

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Smoke rises following Israeli airstrikes on a building in Gaza City, Thursday, May 13, 2021. Weary Palestinians are somberly marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, as Hamas and Israel traded more rockets and airstrikes and Jewish-Arab violence raged across Israel. [AP Photo/Hatem Moussa]

Israel is not exercising “the right to defend itself” in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder, aided and abetted by the U.S.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost

Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie.  Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime. 

Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.” The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage. 

I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror.  And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.

The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia.  Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.  

The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” 

This is the truth.  Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.

Israel’s once vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy.  Saudi Arabia, a country that  produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and groups such as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.  

Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Adbul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges.  The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel’s cynicism and hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of protecting democracy and fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions. 

Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either second class citizens or live under brutal military occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people.  From the 7th century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land.  The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.  Israel is not defending the rule of law.  Israel is not a democracy.  It is an apartheid state. 

That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites–there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crimes by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz–and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects, and this is true in the United States, always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia to legitimize themselves. 

The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our Constitutional right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that “demonize” Israel; statements that apply “double standards” for Israel; statements that “delegitimize” the state of Israel. This definition of anti-Semitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses. The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights–including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.  

The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country.  The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series “The Lobby.” Israel managed to block “The Lobby” from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy that is available on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use massive cash donations to buy politicians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured the unconstitutional invitation by then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement.  Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year $38 billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli interests.  

The investment by Israel and its backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has also spent over $ 6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East.  These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel’s interests, not ours.   

The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and outside Israel.  This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are anti-Semites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of anti-Semitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real anti-Semites. 

Racism, including anti-Semitism, is dangerous.  It is not only bad for the Jews.  It is bad for everyone.  It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred on the extremes.  Netanyahu’s racist government has built alliances with far-right leaders in Hungary, India, and Brazil, and was closely allied with Donald Trump. Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, feed off of each other.  They divide societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that only speak in the language of violence.  The radical jihadists need Israel to justify their violence, just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to justify its violence.  These extremists are ideological twins.  

This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized society.  It permits the ruling elites in Israel, as in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties in the name of national security.  Israel runs training programs for militarized police, including from the United States.  It is a global player in the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing against China and the United States.

It oversees hundreds of cybersurveillance startups whose espionage innovations, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized abroad “to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens critical of their governments, and even fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don’t maintain formal relations with Israel.” 

Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—endure constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion. They are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia, far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means “flame” and is the acronym for “Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land.” Mobs of these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the Palestinians who live there “Death to the Arabs,” which is also a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.

Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ‘suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” Israel’s educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims.  This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military. 

There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States.  The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21rst century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies.  The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society.  We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down.  It will be devastating for the Palestinians.  It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street.    

America’s Worthless Values

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The disproportionate deaths among Palestinians speak of a one-sided slaughter. Over 200 have been killed – almost a quarter of them children – during the past week of violence.

It’s a sickening pattern that is seen every time there is an eruption of conflict.

The horrific death toll will likely escalate as Israeli leaders ignore international appeals for a truce, vowing to continue airstrikes “as long as necessary”. The Israelis call it “mowing the grass”. How abominable and twisted is this modern-day Warsaw Ghetto scenario.

Meanwhile, the number of Israelis killed from Palestinian rockets stands at 10, including two children. A 20-fold difference in casualties reflects an outrageous use of indiscriminate and excessive lethal force by the Israelis.

At yet for the third time in the past week, the Biden administration has vetoed international efforts at the United Nations Security Council to call a ceasefire. This is while whole families are being obliterated in airstrikes carried out by hundreds of Israeli fighter jets bombing homes with tonnes of explosives in the densely populated Gaza Strip.

Both President Joe Biden and his top diplomat Antony Blinken refuse to condemn Israel’s slaughter, repeating their mealy-mouthed support for Israel’s “right to self-defense”. What’s so right about killing children in their beds? Or relentless airstrikes preventing even rescue teams from retrieving bodies from under rubble? Or bombing a media tower housing international news services? The latter apparent war crime appears to have been carried out to prevent media from reporting on other war crimes.

America stands isolated in its shameless support for Israeli crimes. The Biden administration in particular is busted over its rank hypocrisy and virtue-signaling.

Since coming to office four months ago, President Biden and his team have waxed lyrical about “rules-based international order” and “democratic values”. They talk about the world being in a historic struggle between “democracy and autocracy” with the Americans being the presumed virtuous ones, of course. Biden and Blinken lecture Russia and China about human rights.

The nebulous virtue-signaling and rhetoric about values are always in the abstract and are laid on with heaps of media propaganda. For example, we’re supposed to believe China is committing genocide against its Uighur Muslim population. No evidence is provided and the so-called American information is really disinformation sourced from dodgy ideological think thanks, as documented by independent journalists at the commendable Grayzone.

Yet, by contrast, here we have a real-life situation in which the U.S.-supplied Israeli military is inflicting an onslaught against Muslims (and Christians) crowded together in the open-air concentration camp known as Gaza. And the Americans are busted for the abject frauds they are.

One phone call from Biden telling Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu that Washington is going to cut off its annual $3.8 billion aid would put an end to the blitzkrieg. But that’s not going to happen because Biden and Blinken are ardently pro-Israel. But not just Biden and Blinken. Washington’s imperial power projection in the Middle East relies on Israel. The Israelis can thus do whatever they like knowing that American administrations will turn a blind eye to crimes of illegal occupation and ongoing eviction of Palestinians from their homeland.

After Israeli warplanes bombed the media tower in Gaza at the weekend, Antony Blinken spoke with an executive of the AP agency which was among those news services attacked. Blinken offered  “his unwavering support for independent journalists and media organizations around the world and noted the indispensability of their reporting in conflict zones.”

How’s that for cynical virtue-signaling and empty values? Unwavering support for journalism? Just like Blinken’s “unwavering support for Israel’s right to self-defense”?

On Monday, while the carnage and dead bodies in Gaza are mounting, the Biden administration issued a statement marking the “International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia”. The State Department said, “the United States has endeavored to reaffirm the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all persons, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons.” It added, “Everyone deserves to live in dignity.”

Everyone? How about Palestinians?

Later this week, Antony Blinken is to meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov for their first face-to-face meeting during the Arctic Council summit. No doubt, the conceited American will try to lecture Lavrov about “rules-based order” and Western “values”. No doubt, too, the seasoned Russian diplomat will give Boy Blinken a bit of schooling, and should tell him to go stick his worthless values on the warheads Israeli fighter jets are unleashing on Palestinian homes.

Is It Still Unconstitutional If the Govt. OUTSOURCES Spying on Citizens? After All, They’re Only Surveilling “Extremists.”

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Brian Stauffer

By Robert Wheeler

Source: The Organic Prepper

In 2021, there is no denying that the United States is a full-on surveillance state. The Biden Administration attempts to remove all pretense of privacy with its new consideration to use outside firms to track “extremist” chatter by American citizens online. But what exactly is an “extremist?” According to Tulsi Gabbard, recent efforts essentially criminalize half the country:

“It’s so dangerous as you guys have been talking about, this is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don’t have to guess about where this goes or how this ends,” Gabbard said.

She continued: “When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he’s spoken with or heard from appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types of movements similar to the insurgencies they’ve seen overseas, that in his words, he says make up this unholy alliance of religious extremists, racists, bigots, he lists a few others and at the end, even libertarians.” (source)

(So basically, if you’re reading this website, you’re probably an “extremist” in someone’s point of view.)

New efforts to spy on Americans

Their effort would expand the ability of intelligence agencies to gather information (spy) on American citizens.

Currently, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is limited on how it can monitor citizens online. For example, it is banned from assuming false identities to gain access to private messaging apps used by citizens without justification.

Instead, according to the law (but not necessarily in practice), federal agencies can only browse through unprotected information on social media sites. A source familiar with Biden’s effort said it is not about decrypting data. Instead, it is about using outside entities to access these private groups legally to gather large amounts of information that would help DHS identify “key narratives as they emerge.”

Note: Some of these outside entities are used by what the administration considers “extremists.” (Such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.) 

The Department of Homeland Security claims they are doing no such thing

According to multiple sources cited by CNN, the plan would allow the DHS to make an end-run around those limits. In response to CNN, DHS said it “is not partnering with private firms to surveil suspected domestic terrorists online” and “it is blatantly false” to suggest that it would do so.

“All of our work to address the threat of domestic terrorism is done consistent with the Constitution and other applicable law, and in close coordination with our privacy and civil liberties experts,” the DHS statement added.

But the department has considered partnering with research firms that have more visibility and reach in this area. However, it has not done so yet, according to the sources. And do recall that they recently wanted to outlaw encrypted apps.

Suppose that does happen (and we have every reason to suspect it already has). In that case, DHS could produce information that would be helpful to it and the FBI, CIA, and NSA in its ability to spy on American citizens not committing any crimes.

“Narratives” that might lead to violence justify domestic spying?

CNN unintentionally explains the reason for the Biden Admin’s new focus on these messaging platforms when it writes:

Much of the planning for the Capitol Hill riot appeared out in the open on social media platforms and encrypted apps available to anyone with an internet connection. The DHS is trying to get a better sense of “narratives” that might lead to violence as they emerge across those channels, according to two DHS officials.

But tracking those narratives, particularly in the wake of January 6, increasingly requires access to private groups on encrypted apps as extremist groups migrate from more forward-facing sites like Facebook.

By the time narratives appear on Facebook, it is usually too late, one DHS official told CNN.

“Domestic violent extremists are adaptive and innovative. We see them not only moving to encrypted platforms but obviously couching their language so they don’t trigger any kind of red flag on any platforms,” the official added.

Outsourcing some information gathering to outside firms would give DHS the benefit of tactics that it isn’t legally able to do in-house, such as using false personas to gain access to private groups used by suspected extremists, sources say. Of course, China is already spying on millions of Americans.

Isn’t domestic spying a violation of our Constitutional Rights?

CNN continues by writing:

The department is also working on expanding its ability to collect information from public-facing social media sites where users’ posts offered clear warning signs about potential violence ahead of the January 6 attack, but were either ignored or underestimated by security officials prior to that date.

But any effort by the intelligence community to wade into the murky area of domestic spying is fraught with political risks, current and former officials say.

Gathering information on US citizens — no matter how abhorrent their beliefs — raises instant constitutional and legal challenges. Civil liberties advocates and privacy hawks have long criticized any efforts to collect even publicly available information on Americans in bulk as a violation of Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment rights.

The growing surveillance state and expanding government spying is the ultimate issue

Notice what is being considered “extreme” by the administration and DHS. It is not BLM or Antifa who have been tearing apart and burning American cities to the ground but right-leaning and even “Constitutionalist” groups targeted.

In the hands of the radical left, the US government is moving once again against one side in the American culture war, empowering the opposing side. (The same side that terrorized innocent Americans.)

For those on the left who support the crackdown on the right-wing and what they see as white supremacy, they need only wait until they have outlived their usefulness. Or until a right-wing administration takes over. When one gets purged it leads the way for others to be purged. Then they will come to realize why government overreach is a danger to everyone and not a force to be wielded lightly. 

How much more intense do you expect the spying to become?

Do you think we’re just at the tip of the iceberg for government surveillance? What do you think they’re doing that we don’t yet know about? Are you taking any steps to protect yourself from being spied upon? Let’s talk about it in the comments.