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The Final Addiction
By Russ Bangs
Source: Volatility
A few statements from evolutionary biologists: “Immunization is also making once-rare or non-existent genetic variants of pathogens more prevalent ….…the vaccine quietly alters the genetic profile of the pathogen population ….the scientific community is becoming increasingly aware that vaccine resistance is a real risk….”
I used to be suspicious of vaccines produced by corporations on a profit-seeking basis but was agnostic toward the idea of vaccination in principle. I hadn’t done deep research on the question.
But since the Covidian assault forced me to research these most novel injections, the more I’ve learned the more I’m understanding vaccination as such to be part of the counterproductive idiocy of technocratic medicine. As everywhere else, the right path is to uphold and support natural health systems and balance them amid maximal natural biodiversity. As everywhere else, the Covidian terror-lockdown onslaught works to eradicate all natural balances in favor of stupid reductive violent technological interventions.
Throughout its “Covid” assault the system has kept in place all its assaults on public health and biodiversity while maintaining its hostility to all reform. It continues with its commitment to the wholesale poisoning of the air, water, food and general environment with industrial and agricultural poisons. It continues with its systematic poisoning of our bodies and defacement of our genomes. With its factory farms, pesticides and genetic engineering processes it continues its relentless drive to wipe out antibiotics as a medically effective treatment. It continues its deliberate drive to maximize cancer and heart disease.
The globalist system continues its ecocidal drives of deforestation, eradication of agroecology in favor of industrial agriculture, eradication of natural biodiversity, industrial mining, global heating and climate chaos, all toward the goal of discovering every novel pathogen still hidden amid the last crevices of wilderness and distributing it as globally as possible as fast as possible while also expanding the ranges and virulence of known pathogens.
The system continues to force the most physically and psychologically unhealthy and disease-inducing mode of existence on all people, from the cosseted Western upper classes to the masses of the global South, always touting its nightmare vision of “life” as good and anyway unavoidable. It does all it can to generate maximum stress and anxiety. The criminals of the Covid regime often have openly confessed their goal of driving maximum irrational fear and stress in order to obtain compliance with lockdown decrees, superstitious rituals like face diapers, the medically worthless and counterproductive gene-altering injections.
This exact same government-media system continues to reject with extreme hostility even such a modest reform as Medicare for All (in the US), while Western countries that have versions of national health systems are working to gut and abolish them. Meanwhile the most immediately murderous effect of the Covidian terror-lockdown assault has been to stampede and induce and force all health care systems to abdicate their rightful mission completely and surrender to chaos and misdirection of all their resources to their own version “Covid” hysteria and lunacy. Even the basic doctor-patient relationship, already fraught under the existing adverse conditions, is now subject to a whole new course of hoops and obstacles.
The propaganda and lockdowns in themselves have been forced upon the people with the deliberate intent to depress immune functioning and demolish natural immune system health. Forced sedentary incarceration amid the worse polluted indoor air, the drive to exaggerate stress and anxiety, the evil agenda to keep people out of the wholesome outdoors, this ulterior agenda being highly evident from day one (“Stay at Home”), all these have none but bad psychological and physical results. The Covidian propaganda and lockdowns never could have had any effect but to depress immune functioning. This policy-induced demolition of our natural immune systems evolved over millions of years was always the intended goal of the entire fake pandemic campaign. Now the purpose of the injection campaign is to complete this immune destruction and render us physically addicted to artificial injections to prevent our becoming sick.
The term “addiction” is not just metaphorical but clinically precise: Physically addictive drugs destroy natural systems and replace them with the drug’s own functioning so that in the absence of the drug the body becomes ill. In the same way the Covidian terror-lockdown-injection assault wants to destroy the human immune system and replace it with the injected gene-altering agent so that in the absence of regular injections we become sick and die.
Even most critics of the MRNA mass experiment still are capable of thinking only in terms of massive violent interventions by institutions and remain in a state of contempt for the natural immune system in spite of the lip service they pay to it.
(In the same way, mainstream climate-industrial activists are capable of reacting to the specter of intervention-driven climate change only with ever more radical, extreme, violent interventions like geoengineering, artificial carbon sequestration based on extreme-energy-extreme-maintenance technology, converting small portions of the industrial electricity maw to fake “renewables” like industrial wind, industrial solar, river-murdering hydroelectric, nukes and anything seeking artificially to “lower” global concentrations and temperatures. Any sane person concerned about the climate crisis knows there’s no question of lowering temperatures – several more degrees rise already is locked in. Rather, we think only in terms of not adding to the damage, not making it worse. So we say only – abolish emissions and stop destroying sinks. As for lowering the concentration, the only way this can be done which is not ecocidal in itself is to stop assaulting the ocean (the greatest sink of all) and let natural sinks – forests, wetlands, grasslands – resume their natural ranges.
It’s no coincidence that all mainstream “environmentalists” are ardent Covidians, while many among the Covidian propagandists also are crusaders for technocratic climate interventions including the specter of “climate lockdowns”. Just as how lockdowns are designed to destroy human health while imposing totalitarian control and coercion, so they also would impose coercion and control while corporate and governmental ecocide continues unabated.
Always, technocrats are technocrats are technocrats, and their only goal always is maximum ecocide and genocide. Any other goal their propaganda touts is never more than a pretext for mass murder.)
Since the interventionist onslaught for which the original (objectively mild) “Covid” phenomenon was the pretext has proven to be such a total counterproductive disaster from any human point of view, what kind of omnicidal maniac does one have to be to call for doubling down on interventions to deal with escalated harms and dangers which have been caused 100% by the interventions themselves? All who are involved in the propaganda and administration of the injection assault are disease vectors in the same way rats are vectors of the fleas which are vectors of plague. Humanity must purge ourselves of such infinite psychopaths.
In the end all technocrats are the same fanatical builders of the Tower of Babel, however much they squabble among themselves. The Tower itself has to be knocked down.
Pure, Unalloyed Evil
By Mike Whitney
Source: The Unz Review
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Mike Yeadon is a soft-spoken microbiologist and a former Vice President of Allergy and Respiratory Research at Pfizer. He spent 32 years working for large pharmaceutical companies and is a leading expert on viral respiratory infections. He is also a man on a mission, and his mission is to inform as many people as possible about the elite powerbrokers that are using the pandemic as a smokescreen to conceal their real objectives. Here’s Yeadon in a recent interview:
“If you wanted to depopulate a significant portion of the world, and to do it in a way that wouldn’t require destruction of the environment with nuclear weapons, or poisoning everyone with anthrax or something, And you wanted plausible deniability, whilst you had a multi-year infectious disease crisis; I don’t think you could come up with a better plan of work than what seems to be in from of me. I can’t say that’s what they’re going to do, but I cannot think of a benign explanation for why they are doing it.” (“Interview with Dr Mike Yeadon“, The Delingpole Podcast; Minute 44: 25)
“Depopulation”? Who said anything about depopulation? Isn’t it a bit of a stretch to go from a mass vaccination campaign to allegations of a conspiracy to “depopulate a significant portion of the world”?
Indeed, it is, but Yeadon has done extensive research on the matter and provides compelling evidence that such a diabolical objective may, in fact, be the goal. Moreover, it is not for lack of proof that people are not persuaded that Yeadon is right, but something more fundamental; the inability to grasp that men are capable of almost-unimaginable viciousness and cruelty. Here’s Yeadon again:
“It’s become absolutely clear to me, even when I talk to intelligent people, friends, acquaintances … and they can tell I’m telling them something important, but they get to the point [where I say] ‘your government is lying to you in a way that could lead to your death and that of your children,’ and they can’t begin to engage with it. And I think maybe 10% of them understand what I said, and 90% of those blank their understanding of it because it is too difficult. And my concern is, we are going to lose this, because people will not deal with the possibility that anyone is so evil…
“But I remind you of what happened in Russia in the 20th Century, what happened in 1933 to 1945, what happened in, you know, Southeast Asia in some of the most awful times in the post-war era. And, what happened in China with Mao and so on….
“We’ve only got to look back two or three generations. All around us there are people who are as bad as the people doing this. They’re all around us. So, I say to folks, the only thing that really marks this one out, is its scale.
“But actually, this is probably less bloody, it’s less personal, isn’t it? The people who are steering this … it’s going to be much easier for them. They don’t have to shoot anyone in the face. They don’t have to beat someone to death with a baseball bat, or freeze them, starve them, make them work until they die. All of those things did happen two or three generations back… That’s how close we are.
“And all I’m saying is, some shifts like that are happening again, but now they are using molecular biology.” (“Former Pfizer VP: ‘Your government is lying to you in a way that could lead to your death.“, LifeSite News)
He’s right, isn’t he? Whereas, a great many people know that the government, the media and the public health officials have been lying to them about everything from the efficacy of masks, social distancing and lockdowns, to the life-threatening dangers of experimental vaccines, they still refuse to believe that the people orchestrating this operation, might be pushing them inexorably towards infertility or an early death. They cannot imagine anything so demonic, so they stick their heads in the sand and pretend not to see what is going on right beneath their noses. It’s called “denial” and it is only strengthening the position of the puppetmasters that are operating behind the scenes. Here’s more from Yeadon:
“…In the last year I have realized that my government and its advisers are lying in the faces of the British people about everything to do with this coronavirus. Absolutely everything. It’s a fallacy this idea of asymptomatic transmission and that you don’t have symptoms, but you are a source of a virus. That lockdowns work, that masks have a protective value obviously for you or someone else, and that variants are scary things and we even need to close international borders in case some of these nasty foreign variants get in.” (“Former Pfizer VP: ‘Your government is lying to you in a way that could lead to your death”, Lifesite News)
Many readers may have noticed that this interview appeared on a small Christian website, called “Lifesite News”. Why is that? Shouldn’t the informed observations of a former Pfizer vice president appear on the front pages of the New York Times or Washington Post? Wouldn’t you expect the big cable news channels to run a hot-button interview like this as their headline story?
Of course, not. No one expects that, because everyone knows that the media honchos reflexively quash any story that doesn’t support the “official narrative”, that is, that Covid is the most contagious and lethal virus of all time which requires a new authoritarian political structure and the wholesale evisceration of civil liberties. Isn’t that the underlying storyline of the last year? Covid skeptics and naysayers, like Yeadon, are not allowed to refute the official propaganda or debate the issue on a public forum. They’re effectively banned from the MSM and consigned to the outer reaches of the Internet where only a scattered few will what they have to say. Here’s more:
“Everything I have told you, every single one of those things is demonstrably false. But our entire national policy is based on these all being broadly right, but they are all wrong.”
“But what I would like to do is talk about immune escape because I think that’s probably going to be the end game for this whole event, which I think is probably a conspiracy. Last year I thought it was what I called ‘convergent opportunism,’ that is a bunch of different stakeholder groups have managed to pounce on a world in chaos to push us in a particular direction. So, it looked like it was kind of linked, but I was prepared to say it was just convergence.”
“I [now] think that’s naïve. There is no question in my mind that very significant powerbrokers around the world have either planned to take advantage of the next pandemic or created the pandemic. One of those two things is true because the reason it must be true is that dozens and dozens of governments are all saying the same lies and doing the same inefficacious things that demonstrably cost lives.
“And they are talking the same sort of future script which is, ‘We don’t want you to move around because of these pesky… “variants”… they are all saying ‘don’t worry, there will be “top-up” vaccines that will cope with the potential escapees.’ They’re all saying this when it is obviously nonsense.” (“Former Pfizer VP: ‘Your government is lying to you in a way that could lead to your death”, Lifesite News)
Let’s pause for a minute, and ask ourselves why a modest, self-effacing microbiologist who operated in the shadows for his entire professional career, has thrust himself into the limelight when he knows, for certain, he will either be ridiculed, smeared, discredited, dragged through the mud or killed. In fact, he openly admits that he fears for his safety and assumes that he could be “removed” (‘assassinated’) by his enemies. So, why is he doing this? Why is he risking life and limb to get the word out about vaccines?
It’s because he feels a moral obligation to warn people about the danger they face. Yeadon is not an attention-seeking narcissist, in fact, he’d rather vanish from public-life altogether. But he’s not going to do that because he’s selflessly committed to doing his duty by sounding the alarm about a malign strategy that may well lead to the suffering and death of literally tens of millions of people. That’s why he’s doing it, because he’s an honorable man with a strong sense of decency. Remember decency?. . Here’s more:
“You can see that I am desperately trying not to say that it is a conspiracy, because I have no direct evidence that it is a conspiracy. Personally, all my instincts are shouting that it’s a conspiracy as a human being, but as a scientist, I can’t point to the smoking gun that says they made this up on purpose.” (“Yeadon Interview, Delingpod, minute 41:25)
Many of us who have followed events closely for the last year and have searched the internet for alternate points of view, are equally convinced that it is a conspiracy, just as Russiagate was a conspiracy. And while we might not have conclusive, rock-solid proof of criminal activity, there is voluminous circumstantial evidence to support the claim. By definition, a “conspiracy” is “an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons.” (Dictionary.com) What is taking place presently across the western world, meets that basic definition. Just as the contents of this article meets the basic definition of a “Conspiracy theory“, which is: “an attempt to explain harmful or tragic events as the result of the actions of a small powerful group. Such explanations reject the accepted narrative surrounding those events; indeed, the official version may be seen as further proof of the conspiracy.” (Britannica)
We make no attempt to deny that this is a conspiracy theory, any more than we deny that senior-level officials at the FBI, CIA, DOJ and US State Department were involved in a covert operation aimed at convincing the American people that Donald Trump was a Russian agent. That was a conspiracy theory that was later proven to be a fact. We expect that the facts about the Covid operation will eventually emerge acquitting us on that account as well. Here’s more from Yeadon:
“I think the end game is going to be, ‘everyone receives a vaccine’… Everyone on the planet is going to find themselves persuaded, cajoled, not quite mandated, hemmed-in to take a jab.
“When they do that every single individual on the planet will have a name, or unique digital ID and a health status flag which will be ‘vaccinated,’ or not … and whoever possesses that, sort of single database, operable centrally, applicable everywhere to control, to provide as it were, a privilege, you can either cross this particular threshold or conduct this particular transaction or not depending on [what] the controllers of that one human population database decide. And I think that’s what this is all about because once you’ve got that, we become playthings and the world can be as the controllers of that database want it.” (LifeSite)
So mass vaccination is actually the pathway to absolute social control by a technocratic elites accountable to no one? Are we there yet?
Pretty close, I’d say. Here’s more:
“And they are talking the same sort of future script which is, ‘We don’t want you to move around because of these pesky “variants”’— (but) ‘don’t worry, there will be “top-up” vaccines that will cope with the potential escapees.’ They’re all saying this when it is obviously nonsense.”
Is he right? Is the variant hobgoblin now being invoked to prolong the restrictions, intensify the paranoia and pave the way for endless rounds of mass vaccination?
Judge for yourself, but here’s a sampling of articles that appeared in today’s news that will help you decide:
1– Reuters, South African variant can ‘break through’ Pfizer vaccine, Israeli study says
“The coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa can “break through” Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to some extent, a real-world data study in Israel found, though its prevalence in the country is low and the research has not been peer reviewed….
“We found a disproportionately higher rate of the South African variant among people vaccinated with a second dose, compared to the unvaccinated group. This means that the South African variant is able, to some extent, to break through the vaccine’s protection,” said Tel Aviv University’s Adi Stern. (So, according to the article– the vaccine doesn’t work.)
2– The New York Times: Rise of Variants in Europe Shows How Dangerous the Virus Can Be
“Europe, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic last spring, has once again swelled with new cases, which are inundating some local hospitals and driving a worrisome global surge of Covid-19.
But this time, the threat is different: The rise in new cases is being propelled by a coronavirus variant first seen in Britain and known as B.1.1.7. The variant is not only more contagious than last year’s virus, but also deadlier.
The variant is now spreading in at least 114 countries. Nowhere, though, are its devastating effects as visible as in Europe, where thousands are dying each day and countries’ already-battered economies are once again being hit by new restrictions on daily life….
Vaccines will eventually defeat the variants, scientists say. (So, they don’t work now??) And stringent restrictions can drive down cases of B.1.1.7. (So, don’t leave your home.)..
“We’ve seen in so many countries how quickly it can become dominant,” said Lone Simonsen, a professor and director of the PandemiX Center at Roskilde University in Denmark. “And when it dominates, it takes so much more effort to maintain epidemic control than was needed with the old variant.” (In other words, we are effectively dealing with a different pathogen that requires a different antidote. It’s an admission that the current crop of vaccines doesn’t work.)
3– SARS-CoV-2 variants B.1.351 and P.1escape from neutralizing antibodies, cell.com
“….our findings indicate that the B.1.351and P.1 variants might be able to spread in convalescent patients or BNT162b2-vaccinated individuals and thus constitute an elevated threat to human health. Containment of these variants by non-pharmaceutic interventions is an important task.” (Note– In other words, the new vaccines don’t work against the new Covid strains, so we might need to preserve the onerous lockdown restrictions forever.)
How can people read this fearmongering bunkum and not see that it is designed to terrify and manipulate the masses into sheeplike compliance?
There’s no denying that the variant is being used to fuel the Covid hysteria and perpetuate the repressive social restrictions. So, the question we should be asking ourselves is whether we can trust what we are being told by the media and the public health officials?
And the answer is “No”, we cannot trust them. They have repeatedly misled the public on all manner of topics including masks, asymptomatic transmission, immunity, Infection Fatality Rate, social distancing and now variants. According to Sunetra Gupta, who is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellow:
“...some of these variants could be more transmissible, but the truth is… even with a marginal increase in transmissibility… that does not have much of a material effect or difference in how we deal with the virus. In other words, the surge of the virus cannot be ascribed to a new variant….
The other question is are these variants more virulent, and the truth is we don’t know, but it is unlikely because the data don’t seem to say so despite the scary headlines…Pathogens tend to evolve towards lower virulence….because that maximizes their transmissibility…It is much more probable that these strains will not be materially so different that we would have to alter our policies.” (Sunetra Gupta: Are these new variants more transmissible?” You Tube)
So, according to Gupta, even if the new strains of Covid are more transmissible, it is highly-unlikely that they are more lethal.
Here’s more on the topic from Diagnostic pathologist, Dr Claire Craig who provides a more technical explanation:
“SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence has ~30,000 letters. Alterations in a handful of letters will not change it’s shape much – if it did it wouldn’t function properly anyway. Fear mongering about immune escape is not needed and is irresponsible especially when no evidence to support the claims.” (Claire Craig)
In essence, Craig is saying the same thing we said earlier, that the slight mutations to the infection will not impact the immune reaction of people who already had the virus. Thus, the current crop of “variants” should not be a cause for alarm. If you have already had Covid or if you already have prior-immunity due to previous exposure to similar infections, (SARS, for example) the new strain should not be a problem. It should also not be a problem if the new vaccines provide the type of broad-based immunity that one should expect of them. Again, the mutations represent only the slightest change in the composition of the pathogen (less than 1%), which means that –if the vaccines don’t work– they are, in effect, useless.
Here’s a longer explanation that some readers might find overly technical and perhaps tedious, but it’s worth wading through in order to see that the media is deliberately misstating the science to terrify the public. This excerpt is from an article by Yeadon. Here’s what he said:
“The idea is planted in people’s mind that this virus is mutating in such a way as to evade prior immunity. This is completely unfounded, certainly as regards immunity..(that is) gained naturally, after repelling the virus ….
It’s important to appreciate that upon infection, the human immune system cuts up an infectious agent into short pieces. Each of these short pieces of protein are presented to other cells in the immune system, like an identity parade. …These have a range of functions. Some make antibodies & others are programmed to kill cells infected by the virus, recognized by displaying on their surface signals that tell the body that they’ve been invaded.
In almost all cases,… this smart adaptive system overcomes the infection. Crucially… this event leaves you with many different kinds of long-lived ‘memory’ cells which, if you’re infected again, rapidly wipe out any attempt at reinfection. So, you won’t again be made ill by the same virus, and because the virus is simply not permitted to replicate, you are also no longer able to participate in transmission….
The general ‘direction of travel’ (for viruses) is to become less injurious but easier to transmit, eventually joining the other 40 or so viruses which cause what we collectively term ‘the common cold”.
What generally doesn’t happen is for mutants to become more lethal to the hosts (us). But the key point I wanted to get across is just how large SARS-COV-2 is. I recall it’s of the order of 30,000 letters of genetic code which, when translated, make around 10,000 amino acids in several viral proteins. Now you can see that the kinds of numbers of changes in the letters of the genetic code are truly tiny in comparison with the whole. 30 letter changes might be roughly 0.1% of the virus’s code. In other words, 99.9% of that code is not different from the so-called Wuhan strain. Similarly, the changes in the protein translated from those letter code alterations are overwhelmed by the vast majority of the unchanged protein sequences. So your immune system, recognizing as it does perhaps dozens of short pieces…. will not be fooled by a couple of small changes to a tiny fraction of these. No: your immune system knows immediately that this is an invader it’s seen before, and has no difficulty whatsoever in dealing with it swiftly & without symptoms. So, it’s a scientifically invalid…
… even if mutations did change a couple of these, the majority of the pieces…. of the mutated virus will still be unchanged & recognized by the vaccine-immune system or the virus-infected immune system & a prompt, vigorous response will still protect you.” (“Variants, Covid”, Michael Yeadon, My Thread Reader)
Let’s summarize:
We have presented the informed views of three reputable scientists all of who explicitly refute the idea that the so called “variants”:
- Are more lethal
- Have the potential to reinfect people who have already had Covid
- Have mutated enough to reinfect people who have already been vaccinated (unless, of course) the vaccine does not provide broad-based immunity to begin with. (which is possible since Phase 3 long-term trials were never conducted.)
So, why are the public health officials and the media lying about this matter which is fairly clear-cut and uncontroversial? That is the question.
Yeadon concludes that there is something flagrantly diabolical about their denial. He thinks they are lying in order to dupe more people into getting injected with a substance that will either render them infertile, cause them great bodily harm or kill them outright. Take your pick. Here’s more:
“The eugenicists have got hold of the levers of power and this is a really artful way of getting you to line-up and receive some unspecified thing that will damage you. I have no idea what it will actually be, but it won’t be a vaccine because you don’t need one. And it won’t kill you on the end of the needle because you would spot that.
“It could be something that will produce normal pathology, it will be at various times between vaccination and the event, it will be plausibly deniable because there will be something else going on in the world at that time, in the context of which your demise, or that of your children will look normal.
“That’s what I would do if I wanted to get rid of 90 or 95% of the world’s population. And I think that’s what they’re doing.” (LifeSite)
“The eugenicists have got hold of the levers of power”?
Has Yeadon gone mad? Has the pressure of the global pandemic pushed him off the deep end or is he ‘on to something’ big, something that no one even dares to even think about; a plan so dark and sinister that its implementation would constitute the most grievous and coldblooded crime against humanity of all time; the injection of billions of people with a toxic elixir whose spike protein dramatically compromises their immune systems clearing the way for agonizing widespread suffering followed by mountains of carnage?
There are others, however, who see a connection between the current vaccination campaign and “the eugenicists”, in fact, Dr. Joseph Mercola points to the link between the lead developer of the AstraZeneca vaccine, Adrian Hill, and the Eugenics movement. According to Mercola:
“Hill gave a lecture at the Galton Institute (which was known as the U.K. Eugenics Society) in 2008 for its 100-year anniversary. As noted in Webb’s article:8
“Arguably most troubling of all is the direct link of the vaccine’s lead developers to the Wellcome Trust and, in the case of Adrian Hill, the Galton Institute, two groups with longstanding ties to the UK eugenics movement.
The latter organization, named for the ‘father of eugenics’ Francis Galton, is the renamed U.K. Eugenics Society, a group notorious for over a century for its promotion of racist pseudoscience and efforts to ‘improve racial stock’ by reducing the population of those deemed inferior.
The ties of Adrian Hill to the Galton Institute should raise obvious concerns given the push to make the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine he developed with [Sarah] Gilbert the vaccine of choice for the developing world, particularly countries in Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, the very areas where the Galton Institute’s past members have called for reducing population growth …
Emeritus professor of molecular genetics at the Galton Institute and one of its officers is none other than David J. Galton, whose work includes ‘Eugenics: The Future of Human Life in the 21st Century.’
David Galton has written that the Human Genome Mapping Project… had ‘enormously increased … the scope for eugenics … because of the development of a very powerful technology for the manipulation of DNA.’
This new ‘wider definition of eugenics,’ Galton has said, ‘would cover methods of regulating population numbers as well as improving genome quality by selective artificial insemination by donor, gene therapy or gene manipulation of germ-line cells.’ In expanding on this new definition, Galton is neutral as to ‘whether some methods should be made compulsory by the state, or left entirely to the personal choice of the individual….
“The Wellcome Centre regularly cofunds the research and development of vaccines and birth control methods with …. a foundation (name withheld) that actively and admittedly engages in population and reproductive control in Africa and South Asia by, among other things, prioritizing the widespread distribution of injectable long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs).
The Wellcome Trust has also directly funded studies that sought to develop methods to ‘improve uptake’ of LARCs in places such as rural Rwanda….’ LARCs afford women in the Global South ‘the least choice possible short of actual sterilization.’
Some LARCs can render women infertile for as long as five years, and, as Levich argues, they ‘leave far more control in the hands of providers, and less in the hands of women, than condoms, oral contraceptives, or traditional methods.’…
Slightly modified and rebranded as Jadelle, the dangerous drug was promoted in Africa… Formerly named the Sterilization League for Human Betterment, EngenderHealth’s original mission, inspired by racial eugenics, was to ‘improve the biological stock of the human race.’” (“Exploring the Oxford-AstraZeneca Eugenics Links”, Mercola.com)
So, how does “eugenics” factor into the creation and distribution of the mRNA vaccine? Is there a link or are we grasping at straws?
We can’t answer that question, but a recent article by Mathew Ehret at The Off-Guardian provides a few interesting clues. Here’s what he said:
“The fact that the organizations promoting the rise of this eugenics policy throughout Nazi Germany and North America included such powerhouses as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Human Sterilization League for Human Betterment… which have all taken leading roles in the World Health Organization over recent decades is more than a little concerning.
The fact that these eugenics organizations simply re-branded themselves after WWII and are now implicated in modern RNA vaccine development alongside the Galton Institute (formerly British Eugenics Association), Oxford’s AstraZeneca, Pfizer and the…. Foundation should give any serious thinker pause as we consider what patterns of history we are willing to tolerate repeating in our presently precarious age.” (“Nazi Healthcare Revived Across the Five Eyes: Killing Useless Eaters and Biden’s COVID Relief Bill”, The Off-Guardian)
We’ll end this piece with an excerpt from a 2010 article by Andrew Gavin Marshall at Global Research who presciently noted that:
“Eugenics is about the social organization and control of humanity…. (particularly) population control….
The ideas of Malthus, and later Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin were remolded into branding an elite ideology of “Social Darwinism”, which was “the notion that in the struggle to survive in a harsh world, many humans were not only less worthy, many were actually destined to wither away as a rite of progress. To preserve the weak and the needy was, in essence, an unnatural act.” This theory simply justified the immense wealth, power and domination of a small elite over the rest of humanity, as that elite saw themselves as the only truly intelligent beings worthy of holding such power and privilege.
Francis Galton later coined the term “eugenics” to describe this emerging field. His followers believed that the ‘genetically unfit’ “would have to be wiped away,” using tactics such as, “segregation, deportation, castration, marriage prohibition, compulsory sterilization, passive euthanasia – and ultimately extermination.”… Sir Julian Huxley was also a life trustee of the British Eugenics Society from 1925, and its President from 1959-62. … “Huxley believed that eugenics would one day be seen as the way forward for the human race,” and that, “A catastrophic event may be needed for evolution to move at an accelerated pace.”…. It is much the same with ideas whose time has not yet come; they must survive periods when they are not generally welcome.”
The 21st-century technologies are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them…. I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.
…. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite….
A horrifying vision indeed; but one which builds upon the ideas of Huxley, Russell and Brzezinski, who envisioned a people who – through biological and psychological means – are made to love their own servitude. Huxley saw the emergence of a world in which humanity, still a wild animal, is domesticated; where only the elite remain wild and have freedom to make decisions, while the masses are domesticated like pets. Huxley opined that, “Men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.” (“New Eugenics and the Rise of the Global Scientific Dictatorship”, Andrew Gavin Marshall, Global Research)
We must ask ourselves whether the current mass vaccination campaign is a science-based effort to relieve sickness and disease or a fasttrack to a dark and frightening dystopia conjured up by evil men seeking to tighten their grip on all humanity?
False Spirituality Is The Friend Of Corrupt Power. True Spirituality Is Its Enemy.
By Caitlin Johnstone
Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com
“Leveraging Mindful Practices To Maximize Productivity”, reads a Forbes headline from last week.
“Using mindfulness to overcome financial stress”, reads another headline published a few days ago by Financy.
“The impact of mindfulness on businesses in the work from home era”, reads another by Business Review from last week.
Over the last few years we’ve seen a surge in the forceful mainstreaming of so-called mindfulness practices, a westernized iteration of various eastern meditative traditions emphasizing non-judgemental present-moment awareness which can, as a side effect, reduce stress levels. If you look at the headlines above, it’s not hard to see toward what end these practices are being promoted.
The way mindfulness is being so aggressively prescribed as a means to relieve the soul-crushing stress of meaningless labor under a meaningless system has been discussed at length in Ronald Purser’s 2019 book “McMindfulness“, which critiques the way “mindfulness has become a banal form of capitalist spirituality that mindlessly avoids social and political transformation, reinforcing the neoliberal status quo.” Are you experiencing financial stress from being ruthlessly exploited by your unfathomably wealthy employer? Mindfulness it away! Are you having trouble coping with the demands of empty gear-turning in an amoral corporate machine which benefits humanity in no discernible way? McMindfulness, baby!
The sticking point here is that mindfulness, like literally every other spiritual practice that has ever existed, can be used to psychologically compartmentalize away from certain aspects of reality. Bringing awareness to the present moment can indeed take mental energy away from stress-inducing impotent thought patterns, but it can also take attention away from real problems which should in fact be dealt with at some point: the fact that you are in an abusive marriage. The fact that you are in an abusive workplace. The fact that the working class is in an abusive relationship with the ruling class.
Hang out in spiritual circles long enough and you’ll realize that most of the people who frequent them are using spirituality to run away from themselves. Using spirituality as stress management instead of addressing the inherently stressful living situation they’ve found themselves in. Using spirituality to give themselves a few nice feelings here and there to escape from the unpleasant reality that all their close interpersonal relationships since birth have been with malignant narcissists. Using spirituality to give themselves a nice story about going to Heaven when they die to comfort themselves through the suffering caused by early childhood trauma.
This is false spirituality, and it comprises the overwhelming majority of what’s out there, whether you’re talking about personal spirituality, New Age/spiritual-but-not-religious spirituality, or organized religion. Probably ninety-nine percent of spirituality as it actually exists in our world is just glorified escapism. Nice stories, feel-good conceptual re-frames, practices to help you bliss out on the surface instead of addressing the deep sources of profound suffering underneath. Devices for reality avoidance, no different from drugs, overeating, compulsive sexual behavior, video games or Netflix binging.
False spirituality serves corrupt power. It always has: from the minute the local strongman discovered he can manipulate his subjects with fairy tales about invisible deities who only speak to him, to the Roman empire promoting a religion which promotes meekness, poverty, obedience and “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”, all the way to mindfulness practices being promoted at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
False spirituality serves corrupt power because it draws awareness away from a clear perception of reality, and therefore away from a clear perception of corrupt power. True spirituality does the exact opposite.
True spirituality means expanding consciousness of what’s true and real, both within and without. It means bringing consciousness to the subconscious dynamics within us which generate our suffering, rather than using feel-good spiritual practices or religious narratives to sedate ourselves through that suffering. It means becoming conscious of our true nature, of the way self, experience and perception are really happening as opposed to how the mind tells us they are happening. It means bringing consciousness to the unconscious aspects of our lives, our community, our society, and our species. It means shining the light of truth on all the injustice and depravity the powerful work so hard to keep anyone from looking at.
True spirituality isn’t pretty. It isn’t cutesy. It isn’t comfortable for the ego. It means getting absolutely, uncompromisingly real with yourself and calling the truth out into the light, regardless of how ugly or embarrassing it might be to realize. It means getting absolutely, uncompromisingly real about the contradictions and sources of dissonance in your personal life, no matter how inconvenient or downright terrifying it can be when you have to eliminate them. It means getting absolutely, uncompromisingly real about what’s going on in the world, even if it means flushing your old worldview and the psychological comfort it gave you right down the toilet.
Corrupt power relies on keeping things hidden and endarkened. That’s why government secrecy is a thing. That’s why mass media propaganda is a thing. That’s why the persecution of Julian Assange is a thing. That’s why internet censorship is a thing. Corrupt power structures cannot thrive in the light, because if people could see clearly how badly they’re being robbed and exploited and by whom they would immediately use the their vast numbers to overhaul that system. Corrupt power and false spirituality have therefore always had a symbiotic relationship, while corrupt power and true spirituality have always been natural enemies.
For this reason, it’s unsurprising that so much of what passes for spirituality in our world today is false. No matter what the age and no matter where the location, those with the ability to dominate culture the most successfully have been those with the most power. Healthy impulses to shed the light of truth in all directions would at best receive no platform and at worst get people burned at the stake, while unhealthy power-serving belief systems would be widely promoted by the powerful.
This remains as true as ever today. Colonialism, capitalism, consumerism and imperialism have left us so disconnected from ourselves, from our roots, from the land we live on and from any sense of depth that the majority of us end up turning in desperation to power-serving belief systems, not realizing what they are. We let old power-serving religions give us our spirituality. We let the news man tell us what’s good and what’s true. We let Hollywood tell us what’s meaningful, what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for.
And it never satisfies. It never can. Trying to fill that hole we’re trying to fill with what mainstream culture offers us is like trying to quench your thirst with seawater.
Only truth can satiate us. Only by shining the light of truth inwardly and bringing our endarkened aspects into consciousness can we extend our roots downward in the way our spirit craves. Only by shining the light of truth outward to the reality of our current circumstances in this world can our branches extend upward and let our spirit soar.
The one advantage true spirituality has going for it that it didn’t have in ages past, if you can call it an advantage, is the fact that we as a species appear to have trolled ourselves into an evolve-or-die predicament, leaving ourselves in check on the chessboard where the only way to escape the checkmate of extinction via climate collapse or nuclear war is to collectively awaken to reality.
Humanity will not survive if we don’t all start getting very, very real with ourselves very, very soon, both inwardly and outwardly. We survive by purging ourselves of inner falseness and outer falseness, thereby reaching the level of maturity needed to shift to a collaboration-based planetary civilization where we work in harmony with each other and with our ecosystem for the common good.
We will either make the jump or we will not. Whether we do or don’t will have a lot to do with how courageous we are; whether we are brave enough to desire the truth come what may, or whether we succumb to the inertia of fear and fail.
The good news is we can all help building momentum for that jump right now, by doing everything we can to expand human consciousness both inwardly within ourselves and outwardly in the world. Sing the truth loudly, wake up as many people as you can to as much truth as you can, and wake yourself up to as much truth as possible by bringing consciousness to your inner dynamics.
Shine bright, and shine in all directions, and we just might win this thing.
Saturday Matinee: Harold and Maude
Review by Brian Eggert
Source: Deep Focus Review
Harold and Maude is the most positive expression of counter-culturalism to come out of Hal Ashby’s career. Unlike Ashby’s other pictures released during his zenith in the 1970s, it does not concentrate its message against flawed American institutions or oppositional forces such as the military, government power, the Vietnam War, or institutional racism. Instead, the film builds up an audience of outsiders, misfits, disaffected youths, and even senior citizens who grew up on the margins, stifled by a world built on the establishments and conventions of a dominant culture. Through its unorthodox romance between the death-obsessed youth, Harold, and the vivacious, indomitable Maude, who, approaching eighty, preaches the gospel of living life to the fullest, it blithely celebrates nonconformity and independence. “If you want to be free, be free,” sings Maude, quoting the film’s essential songs by Cat Stevens, marking herself as an aged symbol of the how the counterculture movement of the 1960s had, in many ways, grown old by the film’s release in 1971. Nevertheless, Harold and Maude resists becoming an adversarial political statement or dialectical argument designed to reignite a movement. Its strength resides in a philosophy rooted in self-exploration through personal fulfillment, bodily acceptance and exploration, artistic creation, and spontaneity, endearingly represented through its eccentric humor and a love affair for the ages.
Ashby had one of the best careers of any filmmaker in the 1970s. However, everything after Harold and Maude, his second film, became more cynical and confronting, even his comedies. The Last Detail (1973) exposed the senselessness of the Vietnam War and inhumanity of military law, offering a portrait of male bonding and innocence lost. The downfall of Warren Beatty’s womanizing hairdresser in Shampoo takes place against the backdrop of Richard Nixon’s presidential election in 1968, a parallel no viewer of the 1975 film could miss after Nixon’s resignation. Bound for Glory, the director’s Woody Guthrie biopic from 1976, explored the folk musician’s life singing about freedom and humanism in the Dust Bowl, while protesting the exploitation of workers. Ashby’s searing drama Coming Home (1978) considered once more the soul-crushing effect of the military and the human toll of Vietnam, concentrating this time on a paraplegic veteran and the moral awakening of an army wife. His last great film, Being There(1979), condemned American politics, mass media, white elitists, and one-percenters in what might be Ashby’s most outraged and funniest work. And whereas these other films adopt a confrontational and polemical perspective against a well-defined mainstream system, which usually overcomes the individual and remains at odds with the sympathetic view, Harold and Maude offers a rare glimmer of hope and happiness from Ashby.
The pale-faced Harold (Bud Cort), lives in an elaborate estate with his grating, English-accented, conservative mother (Vivian Pickles). They have an unspoken agreement: She ignores him and almost willfully refuses to see him as a person, and he responds in a series of faked, symbolic suicides that seem to say, “You’re killing me.” The film opens as Harold prepares to hang himself, a scene played as tragic until his mother enters the room and, rather than call 911, she arranges her evening’s dinner party. Suspended there on a rope, presumably tied around his torso, Harold’s mouth spews drool and his eyes fill with pressure tears. His mother pays him no mind, leaving her son’s behavior for the psychiatrist (George Wood) to figure out. Harold, who drives a hearse, also attends funerals just for fun, and that’s where he sees Maude (Ruth Gordon), a woman approaching eighty with a vibrant attitude toward life. But she’s also the resident Earth Mother who teaches Harold life’s many joys: she compels him to create music, disobey pointless rules, enjoy olfactory sensations, not feel reserved in his own body, and even steal the occasional car. Maude practices what she preaches—she poses nude for an ice sculpture and lives in an old train car, transitory symbols of impermanence and movement that capture her way of looking at life. And as Harold and Maude spend time together, color seems to return to Harold’s face.
Harold’s mother, who knows nothing about the budding romance between the two, fills out computer-dating forms for her son, though she answers the questions as she would respond. “‘Do you think the sexual revolution has gone too far?’” she reads aloud from the questionnaire. “It certainly seems to have,” she responds to herself. A few feet away, Harold loads a gun and, after pointing it at his mother, he turns it on himself until—BAM!—he’s dead. Except, Harold is some kind of magician, capable of faking his death with a series of tricks, usually accomplished between cuts. His fake suicides are less cries for help than a plea for someone to meet him on his terms. They’re also among the funniest moments in the film, a detail that sets Harold and Maude’s sense of humor on another plane from other, more mainstream films. After he seemingly sets himself ablaze to bring an abrupt end to a date his mother has arranged, Harold turns to the camera and smiles—but not a perceptible grin, just a hint at something comically sinister that the knowing audience will recognize. It’s a playful touch, like a secret between the audience and Harold that demands we take his side. In any case, Harold’s mother’s efforts to marry her son are pointless. From the moment Maude invited Harold to “stroke, caress, explore” the curvy wooden sculpture in her traincar, which looks like a deconstructed vagina, he lusts after her. Before long, their love for one another is consummated. Harold goes from staging his own death to somersaults and singing. Then Maude turns eighty, marking a self-imposed end date that she has been hinting at all along. But the film acknowledges that, despite death’s inevitability, life persists if we embrace it.
Although far warmer and less defeated than Ashby’s other films, Harold and Maude does not aim itself at a particular target; however, its portraits of authority figures such as Harold’s mother have a mocking, sardonic quality to them. Contenting herself with Liberace records and social gatherings, Harold’s mother believes he will find adulthood after she thrusts him into a marriage; to that end, she values the computer dating service for screening out “fat and ugly” candidates, and she gives her son a Jaguar sports car to attract women and replace his less appealing hearse. Elsewhere, Harold’s military-devoted Uncle Victor (Charles Tyner), once the “right-hand man” to General MacArthur, has no right hand—but he has a picture of Nixon hung on the wall behind his desk and remains able to salute the flag thanks to a ridiculous pull string solution. Harold’s mother plans to have him enlisted with the help of Uncle Victor, but Harold and Maude finds humor in a sequence where Harold fakes psychopathy and murder to escape military service. Also, the traffic cop (an uncredited Tom Skerritt) who stops Harold and Maude for speeding is shown to be powerless, while the local priest (Eric Christmas) is bedeviled by notions of sexual idealism. Still, these counter-culture jabs feel more in service of a positive story about nonconformity, anti-establishment, and free-spiritedness—all terms that could be used to describe the soul-searching quality of a director known as “Hashby” for his omnipresent marijuana use. Indeed, Ashby wrote friend Sue Mengers that he had spent “the better part of my life just wondering where I am, or even if I am.” Harold and Maude is a searching film by a searching director.
Perhaps it’s surprising, then, that Ashby was initially uncertain about whether Harold and Maude should be his second feature. He had just released his debut, The Landlord from 1970, starring Beau Bridges as a privileged white man who takes over a tenement building in a predominantly African American neighborhood. Its representation of the culture clash between races aligned with the types of films that interested Ashby at the time. He had spent more than a decade editing pictures in Hollywood for some of the finest directors of the 1950s and 1960s—William Wyler, Franklin J. Schaffner, George Stevens—learning the craft of filmmaking from a dark editing room. But his friend, mentor, and closest collaborator during this period was Norman Jewison, the socially conscious director of In the Heat of the Night (1967), who made civil rights either an outward theme or an undercurrent in his films. Ashby had earned an Oscar for Best Editing on In the Heat of the Night, after which he voiced a desire to direct. Jewison, who was originally slated to direct The Landlord but passed to make Fiddler on the Roof (1971), agreed to produce Ashby’s first feature as a director. The film’s notoriously bad marketing campaign, with its poster of a finger about to ring two doorbells that resemble breasts, confused audiences, resulting in a box-office disappointment. Still, those who saw The Landlord were impressed.
Ashby had started to receive scripts for his next project, and among them was Harold and Maude, which Paramount executive Peter Bart thought would be perfect for the budding director. The material originated as a screenplay by Colin Higgins, written as his Master’s thesis for UCLA that, in 1971, he published as a book. Higgins worked as a pool boy for a producer at Paramount, who got the script in front of Bart and studio head Robert Evans. They had bought the script after agreeing to allow the writer to direct his screenplay, but Higgins’ test footage demonstrated he wasn’t ready to helm a major motion picture. Ashby then read the script and enjoyed it, but he was concerned about whether its laughs would translate to the screen. He also worried about resentment from Higgins, so he asked Paramount to give the screenwriter a shot. Paramount refused, saying it would be Ashby or someone else, but not Higgins. Ashby agreed to direct and overcame the Higgins hurdle by making him a producer, which would allow Higgins to observe and learn. Higgins would eventually get his chance at the director’s chair. After some additional work as a screenwriter on Silver Streak (1976), which proved he could write a hit, Higgins directed the comedies Foul Play (1978), 9 to 5 (1980), and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982).
Casting Harold and Maude presented a particular challenge for Ashby, given the nature of the story and the images it projected. An offbeat romance between a twentysomething, suicide-obsessed boy who befriends an energetic, uncontainable woman about to turn eighty, certainly would not appeal to marquee names, regardless of its message about the value of unrestrained and unconventional lifestyles. Paramount’s modest budget also prevented any major stars from joining the cast. For Maude, Ashby had a long list of mostly British performers in mind, and he planned a trip to London to meet many of them, even though Paramount pushed for the 75-year-old New York native Ruth Gordon, who had just earned an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in the studio’s 1968 hit, Rosemary’s Baby. Gordon was the obvious choice, and many of the actors he interviewed suggested Gordon over themselves. But Ashby was notorious for floundering around big decisions and met them with anxiety and self-doubt. He described the decision of casting Maude as “one of the most taxing in my lifetime.” To be sure, Ashby had a tendency to dramatize the stress he felt during the preproduction process. When he couldn’t secure cinematographer Gordon Willis, who had shot The Landlord for him, Ashby wrote Evans and Paramount and threatened to pull out of the production, claiming, “I feel I could make this film about as funny as the Viet Nam war.” Then again, Ashby biographer Nick Dawson suggests that Ashby’s letter was designed to give the director some wiggle room, as Evans convinced him to remain on the picture by increasing the budget from $800,000 to $1.25 million.
For Harold, Higgins had written the part for little-known actor John Rubenstein, but Ashby wanted then-unknowns such as Bob Balaban, Richard Dreyfuss, and John Savage. Bud Cort, who had just appeared in Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud and MASH, both in 1970, was another option. After casting Gordon, Ashby shot screen tests of his various Harolds, and the baby-faced Cort was the choice. A former stand-up comedian, the young actor had an improvisational style that suited him on the free-wheeling Altman sets, but it clashed with Gordon’s commitment to the screenplay. Gordon was a Hollywood veteran, a “careerist” as she told The New York Times. She had been in the business since the age of four, posing in advertisements before graduating to small roles in silent films and a few supporting roles throughout the 1940s. Much of her career was spent alongside her husband, Garson Kanin, as part of the writing duo responsible for A Double Life (1947), Adam’s Rib (1947), and Pat and Mike (1952)—all of which earned Gordon and Kanin Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay. And so when Cort attempted to improvise on Higgins’ script during the Harold and Maude shoot, Ashby had to support both acting styles while preserving the peace. Cort spoke at Ashby’s memorial service and remembered the experience: “Hal was so sympathetic, so understanding. And I think back on it now, I must have driven him crazy, but he never ever complained.”
Whatever anxieties Ashby had during the preproduction phase usually dissolved by the time cameras were rolling. Harold and Maude shot in a perpetually overcast Northern California over two months, using locations in San Mateo County such as the Rosecourt Mansion, the sprawling mansion that served as Harold’s home. Much to the relief of Ashby, the location shooting meant his crew of hippies and introverts would be left to their creative devices, as their director wanted nothing more than autonomy from Paramount’s executives (Ashby’s brief appearance in the film shows the director at his shaggiest). However, after a month into production, Ashby was behind schedule and had to contend with Bart arriving on set with a ticket back to Los Angeles, along with a warning that he would be replaced if the production was not back on schedule. Despite a few delays due to weather and a motorcycle accident involving a stuntman, Harold and Maude proceeded smoothly, even if Cort occasionally caused a row among the crew for his performative commitment to the role. The young actor wanted to fool the crew with his character’s fake suicides and nearly strangled himself in the process. He also told Leticia Kent of The New York Times that he planned to have actual sex with Gordon—a remark believed to be a stunt until he told Ashby the same thing. Reportedly, Cort and Gordon did not have sex for the film.
Ashby originally wanted Elton John to write the music for Harold and Maude; in fact, the pop star was one of the director’s first choices to play Harold. John couldn’t commit to either, but he recommended Cat Stevens for the music. The director didn’t reach out to Stevens straightaway; instead, he began playing Stevens’ songs over the dailies for the first several weeks of the shoot, using songs from the albums Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman, both released in 1970. Ashby eventually reached out to Stevens and made a deal to use the performer’s music in the film. But after the production had wrapped and Ashby entered the editing phase, Stevens claimed he was too busy to be involved or write any additional songs. Ashby, whose controlling tendencies and experience as an editor led to his taking over control from the editing team of Bill Sawyer and Edward Warschilka, had already shot and had been cutting Harold and Maude to the tempo and tenor of Stevens’ songs. Without Stevens, the film simply wouldn’t work. He resolved to fly to Paris to convince Stevens to use existing songs and write additional music for the film. Stevens eventually agreed to allow the production to use existing music from his albums, including two additional songs, “Don’t Be Shy” and “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out”—which have the most imperative lyrics to the film’s themes. Anyone who has seen Harold and Maude knows it is inextricably linked to Stevens’ music, as his solo acoustic performances echo its gentle optimism with an air of solitude that accompanies both of the film’s main characters.
By the time Ashby had prepared Harold and Maude for preview screenings, it had become a stabilizing project in his life. During the production, he had divorced his wife, and his brother died, making Ashby particularly sensitive to the success or failure of his endearing romance. Fortunately, the preview screenings were wildly positive, complete with standing ovations and enthusiastic crowds of youngsters. Everyone was sure they had a hit, and Paramount resolved to release the film around Christmastime. Then the reviews came in. Amid a few positive notices were scathing indictments of the film’s theme and subject matter. In the infamous Variety review, the critic wrote, “Harold and Maude has all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage,” then continued to spurn Maude as “an offensive eccentric” who engages in “specious philosophizing.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby called the characters “creepy and off-putting,” while Roger Ebert compared the experience to attending a funeral: “all the movie lacks is a lot of day-old gardenias and lilies and roses in the lobby.” Harold and Maude opened not long after The French Connection and Fiddler on the Roof, in the same month as A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, The Last Picture Show, and Diamonds Are Forever, and was almost destined to be ignored and misunderstood.
Unlike most critics, Ashby found the single sex scene between Harold and Maude to be a beautiful testament to flesh, both regardless of age and in the juxtaposition between the young and old—something his crowd, the hippies, counterculture groups, and liberal-minded types, would appreciate. Paramount’s executives didn’t agree. Ally MacGraw, then married to Robert Evans, complained after a preview screening that the scene was disgusting and should be cut. Evans backed his wife and demanded that the scene be removed. Ashby got around this by sneakily inserting some of the footage into the film’s original trailer. This was long before the contemporary norm of trailers containing footage, from alternate takes to entire scenes, that never make it into the final film. If the footage was in Harold and Maude’s trailer, it had to be in the film, and so it was—albeit in truncated form. Whereas Ashby shot scenes of Cort and Gordon kissing, the studio demanded that Ashby cut around the actual lovemaking, revealing only a shot of the lovers in bed together the next morning. Paramount’s marketing department also downplayed the nature of the relationship between Harold and Maude after the negative press. The studio released a new poster that gave no allusions to Harold’s penchant for faking suicides or the fact that Harold’s so-called girlfriend was a much older woman. Rather, the new poster was entirely white and comprised only of text, black for the credits, while “Harold” and “Bud Cort” appeared in purple and “Maude” and “Ruth Gordon” appeared in a burgundy. No images, taglines, or accompanying critical praises donned the poster, just the facts, which was guaranteed to generate little interest.
Despite a slowly growing crowd of enthusiasts, Harold and Maude was out of most theaters in a few weeks. The right people had seen it, though, and they assured its future. It started to appear at film societies, midnight screenings, and repertory theaters around the country. Paramount had seen so many rentals of existing prints that they resolved to re-release the film into theaters in 1974 and again 1978, this time with posters that played up the morbid angles of the film. “His hangups are Hilarious,” proclaimed one poster, featuring a cartoon of Bud Cort yanking at his neck with a tie. Higgins grasped onto the phenomenon by adapting his screenplay for the stage in a short-lived Broadway production in 1980; it closed after four performances, but the play has since been revived by many community theaters around the country. As the years continued to pass, the film became a cult object to be monumentalized in underground circles before finally being accepted by both audiences and the film community as a cherished work. In the early 2000s, Harold and Maude appeared on several of the American Film Institute’s “100 Years…” lists, such as its “Laughs,” “Cheers,” and “Passions” lists. Whether people had gotten over the hangups that prevented them from embracing the film in 1971, however, remains in question.
If Paramount executives and the film’s harshest critics took issue with Harold and Maude’s portrait of a May-December romance separated by over fifty years, general sentiments about such relationships and the issues of bodily acceptance they raise have not been resolved since the film’s release. One might argue that the film has become accepted because it feels somewhat anachronistic, a product of a bygone era that seems distant from today’s pressing sociopolitical and cultural imperatives. It has been all but remade with younger, more attractive stars, such as the comparatively tame Anton Yelchin and Kat Dennings vehicle Charlie Bartlett (2008). It has also inspired other romances, as in 1999’s Fight Club, which riffs on the meet-cute of Harold and Maude attending funerals for fun when two interlopers find each other at a testicular cancer group. And it’s worth investigating whether the film’s idiosyncrasies have become just that—something watched as a lark, as opposed to a series of lessons in support of a worldview. Certainly, in American culture and Hollywood cinema, the nude elderly body remains stigmatized and unseen on film outside of grotesque situations, whereas the few exceptions, such as Kathy Bates’ disrobing in About Schmidt (2002), have been a source of laughter and derision. Harold and Maude treats its subject with humor but does not deny its characters humanity in their sexual relationship, which, by the final scenes after Maude has taken the pills that mean her death (“I should be gone by midnight,” she explains with relief, much to Harold’s terror), has emotional consequence for the viewer.
Rather, Harold and Maude forces the viewer to consider the inevitabilities of time’s influence on the body and, ultimately, the body’s death. Instead of feeling revulsion and fear about these points, it views the commonplace attitude toward death as morbid. For all the film’s glimpses at Gordon’s body or hints at the amazing sex had by Harold and Maude, there’s nothing more revolting than the brief sight of a coffin branded “Permaseal”—a sign of our culture’s desperate attempts to prevent natural changes, the withering and decomposition of the body, even after death. Maude considers herself “a general reminder” of how people are “here today and gone tomorrow.” It’s why she steals any car she wants, even the priest’s Volkswagen Beetle, and drives like a bat out of hell, ignoring road signs or toll booths. “What sense in borders and nations and patriotism,” she wonders. Maude has accepted that her time on earn is limited, and much of human culture is comprised of meaningless social constructs. From a critical and analytical perspective, it might be redundant to observe that Maude is a symbol of life, Harold is a symbol of death, and together they represent the circle of life—and moreover, an appreciation of the entire experience within the circle, even if that experience is death.
These are grand and life-affirming ideas, but they come from a film that does not sacrifice its sense of character in the broadcasting of its worldview. Harold and Maude catches the viewer off-guard more than once in its intimate scenes between the two lovers. The source of Harold’s preoccupation with death, for example, could be just another cliché of an angst-ridden young adult, except the origin of his penchant for faking suicides stems from his mother’s shallow reaction when she thought Harold had genuinely died in a chemistry accident. Gordon’s dialogue only slows from its cheery, fast-paced delivery when she gives vague allusions to Maude’s past in moments touched with melancholy and remembrance. Maude hints at her political activism and her attendance at a royal party for a king in Vienna, but then there’s also Maude’s tattoo, a number stenciled on her inner forearm at a concentration camp. All at once, the image, onscreen for just a flash, shows us what must be the source of Maude’s intrepid spirit and urgent reverence of life itself. In some way, only Maude’s philosophy toward life matters; in another way, her background enriches her perspective and boundless humanism. During subsequent viewings, after our imagination has filled in the blank spots of Maude’s past, her consideration of human dimension, regardless of appearances, feels even more meaningful. On a picnic, she observes daisies as she might faces in a crowd: “Some are smaller, some are fatter, some grow to the left, some to the right, some even have lost some petals. All kinds of observable differences.”
Harold and Maude contains a sophistication in its simple ideas about love for one’s fellow human beings. “I feel that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this,” says Maude, pointing to a single daisy, “yet let themselves be treated like that,” gesturing toward a field of dailies. Doubtless, it’s a way of thinking ingrained by Maude’s treatment as subhuman during the Holocaust, and it’s a lesson that she hopes to spread, in her way, to prevent such atrocity from ever happening again. Ashby’s films, which can feel delightful and accessible even when they take aim at a particular target or mourn the cruel realities of our systems, never contain the same quality of Harold and Maude’s tribute to life’s beauty. In his personal life and career in Hollywood, Ashby had found oppositions everywhere, even those of his own making, and he rallied against them in his 1970s output. Harold and Maude was the only film to articulate its message through positive means, whereas most other examples of Ashby’s work lean toward an antithetical mentality that captures the essence of counterculturalism. Maude’s ultimate and most hopeful lesson asks that Harold continue onward and ignore the illusory conflicts, a notion punctuated by her enduring last words: “Go and love som’more.”
Watch Harold and Maude on Pluto TV here: https://pluto.tv/on-demand/movies/harold-and-maude-1971-1-1
West’s Information War Continues
By Gunnar Ulson
Source: Land Destroyer
YouTube has recently deleted the latest channel used by Iranian state media’s PressTV. The move follows attacks on the Iranian media outlet by US-based social media giant Facebook earlier this year.
PressTV’s own take on the deletion in its article, “Google renews attack on YouTube account of Iran’s Press TV,” would note:
Google has for the seventh time targeted Iranian broadcaster Press TV, blocking the English-language news network’s access to its official YouTube account without any prior notice.
The US tech giant shut YouTube accounts of Press TV late on Tuesday, citing “violations of community guidelines.”
Iranian state media is only the most recent target of US censorship and information warfare, with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter having also recently de-platformed government accounts in Myanmar as well as a concerted effort by these same networks to either de-platform or undermine the credibility of Russian and Chinese state media.
The use of ambiguous justifications like “violations of community guidelines” which themselves can be ambiguous and open to interpretation, helps demonstrate the political nature of what is clearly a campaign of censorship.
YouTube and other US-based social media platforms, still dominating the global social media industry, attempt to portray targets of what is clearly politically-motivated censorship as “fake news” or somehow engaged in dangerous “disinformation,” while the accounts of Western-based media organizations actually involved in very real disinformation, often times in promotion of sanctions and warfare having a direct impact on millions of lives, remain online and in good standing.
Western Monopoly Challenged
Beyond social media, the UK had recently ousted Chinese state media, CGTN, which was met by Beijing in turn shutting down BBC broadcasts in China.
More recently, China-based BBC reporter John Sudworth would flee to Taiwan, fearing legal actions for his outrageous, one-sided propaganda regarding Xinjiang.
The BBC’s own article, “BBC China correspondent John Sudworth moves to Taiwan after threats,” deliberately attempts to portray Sudworth as a victim of “threats” rather than a foreign agent involved in political interference under the guise of journalism finally facing legitimate legal actions. The BBC article laments:
The number of international media organisations reporting from China is shrinking. Last year China expelled correspondents for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, among others.
And in September 2020, the last two reporters working in China for Australian media flew home after a five-day diplomatic standoff.
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) of China says foreign journalists are “being caught up in diplomatic rows out of their control”.
In reality, these foreign “journalists” aren’t being “caught up in diplomatic rows,” they are the primary actors helping drive these rows.
It’s worth mentioning leaked documents revealing the BBC, among others including Reuters, signing secret contracts with the British Foreign Office to carry out influence operations both inside Russia and along Russia’s peripheries in Eastern Europe.
It is without doubt that the BBC engages in similar activities inside and along China’s borders as well, with Sudworth’s own work clearly aimed at advancing Western foreign policy, not investigating or reporting actual news.
Years ago, the notion of Western nations fearing alternative media enough to engage in sweeping, transparent censorship against outlets like PressTV or CGTN, or the Western media fleeing or backpedalling in countries they’ve maintained offices in for years, would seem unthinkable.
The information war waged by Western nations is indeed heating up, but it is not the one-sided exercise of monopoly it used to be.
Today, alternative media, both state-sponsored and independent, poses a serious challenge to the West’s monopoly over the creation and flow of global information. Only through the West’s control over a relatively new form of media, social media, is the West’s edge maintained.
For Iranian, Chinese, Russian and the media of many other nations seeking to introduce balance to the global conversation, the West’s hitherto control over social media remains a serious hurdle.
US-based social media networks have been key to advancing Western foreign policy objectives, and perhaps especially in the realm of promoting and executing so-called “color revolutions.”
Russia and China’s recent pledge to work closer together to counter Western-sponsored “color revolution” and “disinformation” might benefit from a multipolar alternative to US-based social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
While Russia and China both have their own domestic alternatives which have proved an effective measure to protect their own respective information space, the creation of a wider-appealing platform for nations along their peripheries, targeted by Western disinformation, could help give state-sponsored and independent alternative media the space it needs to finally balance out the lopsided advantage the West artificially maintains through censorship across its own networks.
The creation of both sovereign information space within nations and shared space between nations but outside of the control of Western censorship would be infinitely useful. When long-standing media organizations like PressTV struggle to reach audiences for a lack of alternatives to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the utility of such space becomes clearer still.
The Number Of Billionaires In America Has Absolutely Exploded During The Pandemic
By Michael Snyder
Source: Investment Watch Blog
For the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy, happy days are here again. Even though we have just been through one of the most difficult 12 months in our history, the number of billionaires has increased dramatically during this pandemic. That seems rather odd, but there is no denying that the rich have gotten even richer during this crisis. In fact, Forbes revealed this week that the number of billionaires has risen by about 30 percent over the past year…
The number of newly minted and reissued billionaires soared last year, Forbes reported Tuesday in its annual ranking, a staggering accumulation of personal wealth that stands in sharp contrast with the widespread economic struggles unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic.
The number of billionaires on Forbes’ 35th annual ranking swelled by 660 to 2,755 — a roughly 30 percent jump from a year ago — and 493 of them are first-timers. Seven of eight are richer than they were before the pandemic. Forbes calculates net worth by using stock prices and exchange rates from March 5.
Of course thanks to the reckless policies of our leaders, a billion dollars does not go nearly as far as it once did.
But still, a billion dollars is a whole lot of money.
Needless to say, the biggest reason why the number of billionaires has exploded is because we have been witnessing one of the greatest stock market rallies in history.
A year ago, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was sitting at about 23,000.
Today, it is above 33,000, and some analysts expect it to shoot quite a bit higher throughout the rest of 2021.
Stock prices have never been more detached from economic reality as they have been over the past 12 months, and they have only risen so high because of unprecedented intervention by the Federal Reserve and because of extremely wild spending by the federal government.
Many have warned that the party will inevitably come to a crashing end at some point, but it hasn’t happened yet.
So for now, the market optimists look like champions.
And now that Joe Biden is in the White House, the corporate media is telling us that we are on the verge of a grand new era of American prosperity. The corporate media insists that the pandemic will soon be behind us thanks to the vaccines, and the talking heads on television envision a return to the good old days very quickly.
In fact, Barron’s is already declaring that the “U.S. economy might be stronger than it’s ever been”.
And CNN is trying to convince us that “America’s economy could be heading for a golden era of growth”.
Really?
If the U.S. economy is actually improving, then why are new claims for unemployment benefits going up?…
The number of Americans filing first-time unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week, according to the Labor Department.
Data released Thursday showed 744,000 Americans filed first-time jobless claims in the week ended April 3. Analysts surveyed by Refinitiv were expecting 680,000 filings. The previous week’s total was revised higher by 9,000 to 728,000.
If economic conditions were getting better, that number should be going the other way.
Even I didn’t expect a number this bad.
Prior to 2020, the all-time record high for new unemployment claims in a single week was 695,000. That record was established in October 1982, and it stood all the way until the COVID pandemic hit the U.S. early last year.
Sadly, we have been above 695,000 almost every single week since then.
The numbers compiled by the states tell us that nearly three-quarters of a million Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week. That is an absolutely catastrophic number. Nobody should be talking about a “golden era of growth” or claiming that the “economy might be stronger than it’s ever been” until we get that number back down to pre-pandemic levels.
And right now, we are at a level that is about three times as high as pre-pandemic levels.
Look, the truth is that anyone that tells you that unemployment is low in the United States is lying to you.
According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if honest numbers were being used the unemployment rate in the United States would be 25.7 percent right now.
That is the sort of number that we would expect to see during an economic depression, and the truth is that we are in an economic depression.
Over the past year, more than 70 million new claims for unemployment benefits have been filed, and approximately 4 million U.S. businesses have gone out of existence permanently.
But don’t worry, the stock market is hovering near all-time record highs and the corporate media is telling you that everything is going to be wonderful now that Joe Biden is in control.
Come on man!
You can’t really believe that stuff that they are shoveling.
With each passing day, more Americans are losing their jobs, more Americans are falling out of the middle class, and the cost of living just keeps going up even higher.
In fact, we just learned that global food prices have now gone up for 10 months in a row…
The global food-price rally that’s stoking inflation worries and hitting consumers around the world shows little sign of slowing.
Even with grain prices taking a breather on good crop prospects, a United Nations gauge of global food costs rose for a 10th month in March to the highest since 2014. Last month’s advance was driven by a surge in vegetable oils amid stronger demand and tight inventories, according to Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
I am going to continue to watch global food prices very carefully, because I believe that it will be a very important trend in the months and years ahead.
But for now, the good news is that at least economic conditions are relatively stable.
Yes, things are not nearly as good as they were before the pandemic, but at least they are not getting a whole lot worse.
So even though things are not great, we should enjoy this period of relative stability while we still can, because it definitely will not last.
Jeff Bezos Embodies the Cruel Autocracy of Neoliberal Capitalism
Amazon CEO and richest-man-in-the-world Jeff Bezos wants you to work as much as he does—for one millionth of the pay
By Branko Marcetic
Source: In These Times
“Is Jeff Bezos a horrible boss and is that good?” That was the question posed by Forbes magazine in 2013, a sentiment that helps explain why Amazon’s founder and CEO is detested by the Left for his oligarchic ambitions, while simultaneously admired by America’s capitalist class for his business success. Ironically, Bezos is also loathed by former President Donald Trump, while celebrated by many liberals for so-called resistance.
But with Bezos and his $115 billion fortune laying claim to the title of richest man on Earth, and with Amazon playing an increasingly influential role in public life, it is worth asking: What does Jeff Bezos stand for?
A gifted child born to a teen mom, Bezos grew up not knowing his biological father, who was once one of the top-rated unicyclists in Albuquerque, N.M. Instead, Bezos was raised by the man his mother soon married: Miguel Bezos, who had fled Cuba and the Communist revolution, which had shuttered the elite private Jesuit school he attended, as well as his family’s lumberyard.
Journalists have speculated whether Bezos’ near-pathological competitiveness is a product of his early abandonment, similar to that of fellow tech overlord Steve Jobs. No doubt equally formative was Bezos’ adoptive father, who told Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, that their home life was “permeated” by complaints about totalitarian governments of both the Right and the Left.
Bezos envisioned the concept of an “everything store” while working for a Wall Street hedge fund in the 1990s. He opened Amazon in 1994 as an online bookshop, a pragmatic starting point. Bezos gave the company his own $10,000 cash injection, took out interest-free loans, and received $245,000 from his parents and family trust.
Many of Amazon’s controversial labor practices can be traced to these early years as a plucky start-up. Amazon’s small team ran on tireless ambition to live up to the company’s customer-focused promise — key to its eventual market domination. Stone reports that, to meet Bezos’ “get big fast” directive, employees devoted themselves completely, working long, unusual, frenzied hours. One early warehouse worker who biked to work simply forgot about his improperly parked car, eventually discovering it had been ticketed, towed and sold at auction.
Such a relentless pace is one thing for a small group of true believers but is quite another when applied to low-wage workers just making ends meet. By 2011, Amazon’s workplace culture became known through a series of headline-grabbing reports that have come to define its public image: badly paid, ceaselessly surveilled, overworked workers, struggling to maintain a breakneck pace.
Bezos created a culture in which everyone from the lowest peon to the highest-ranking executive is expected to match his own devotion, an approach that resulted in spectacular levels of staff turnover by the early 2000s. A declared enemy of “social cohesion,” Bezos pushed his underlings to reject compromise and instead fiercely debate and criticize colleagues when they disagreed. One former employee described it as “purposeful Darwinism.” Known for withering put-downs — “Are you lazy or just incompetent?” “Did I take my stupid pills today?”—Bezos also isn’t above pulling out his phone or, in some cases, simply leaving the room when an employee fails to impress.
The flipside of Bezos’ intellect is a cold, clinical approach to human relations. Bezos described himself as a “professional dater” during his Wall Street days, trying to improve what he called his “women flow” — a riff on the Wall Street term “deal flow.”
“He was not warm,” one person who knew Bezos during his Wall Street days told the East Bay Express in 2014. “It was like he could be a Martian for all I knew.”
Bezos’ pitiless leadership style bled out beyond the Amazon boardroom as he used the company’s growing market share to bully book publishers into his terms. The company launched the “Gazelle Project”—as in, go after publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle” — allowing Amazon to undercut its competition at the cost of little to no profit for smaller publishers.
As Amazon inched closer to Bezos’ original vision, it began lobbying efforts in 2000 and became more transparently political by 2011, spending millions to defeat an internet sales tax and playing hardball with state governments, threatening to shutter Amazon facilities if its wishes went unfulfilled. In 2013, Amazon began lobbying Congress to cut corporate taxes.
The same year, Bezos bought the Washington Post, invested in Business Insider and donated to the publisher of the libertarian magazine Reason. Though Bezos argues his purchase of the Post was motivated by “a love affair [with] the printed word” and a desire to support American democracy, others suspect Bezos’ interest in media is related to bad press following a scathing Lehman Brothers report in 2000, which sent Amazon’s stock price tumbling.
Leading up to the Post purchase, Bezos was increasingly displaying what early Amazon investor Nick Hanauer called his “libertarian politics.” In addition to spending $100,000 in 2010 on a campaign to defeat a proposed Washington state tax on high-income earners, Bezos put hundreds of thousands of dollars toward boosting charter schools and other neoliberal education reforms.
Bezos’ political involvement reached a new apogee in 2019 during the re-election bid of Seattle’s socialist city councilwoman, Kshama Sawant, who called Bezos “our enemy” and tried to pass a head tax to fund housing for those displaced by Amazon’s Seattle footprint. Amazon spent $1.5 million against Sawant and other progressive candidates, a record at the local level, with more than a dozen of the company’s executives contributing to Sawant’s opponent. (Sawant won re-election anyway.)
As for Bezos’ endgame? A Trekkie since childhood, he has long dreamed of funding space exploration, a mission pursued by other superrich moguls (such as Elon Musk) in the face of the climate emergency. Opening the doors of his secretive Blue Origin aerospace company to journalists for the first time in 2016, Bezos told the New York Times he envisioned a future of “millions of people living and working in space,” exploiting the natural resources of surrounding planets and rezoning Earth “as light industrial and residential.”
Ironically, as Bezos pours the wealth he wrung out of exhausted, low-wage Amazon workers into space exploration, Amazon is busy hastening the very planetary collapse Bezos claims he’s trying to prevent — by silencing workers who speak out against Amazon’s assistance to oil and gas companies.
Let’s imagine, however, that Bezos, who accumulates $9 million an hour, lived in a world with Bernie Sanders’ 8% wealth tax (just on fortunes over $10 billion). A single year would see $9 billion flow from Bezos’ treasure trove into government coffers, more than enough to cover the 10-year cost of Elizabeth Warren’s universal child care plan ($1.7 billion) and maintain safe drinking water under Sanders’ plan ($6 billion).
Bezos’ career is a testament to the cruel autocracy and senseless misallocation of resources that our neoliberal capitalist system enables. But his opulence also reveals that the wealth exists to build a fairer and more equitable society — if redistributed. Bezos may loathe social cohesion, but in a world organized around democracy rather than the whims of space-billionaires, it’s something we may well be able to achieve.
After the Crash 