The New Normal: One Step Closer to Dystopia. New Covid Outbreaks, People are “Living in Extreme Fear”

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

On September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks took place on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon allegedly orchestrated by Al Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden, and subsequently blamed it on Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party and then the war on Iraq began.  The Middle East became the prime target of increased Western and Israeli conflicts and interventions. Guantanamo bay, Cuba became a torture center. Surveillance of the Muslims became normalized, then so did surveillance of the entire world. That was phase 1 of Western-led global tyranny, now on to phase 2, with a new disease, the Corona Virus aka Covid-19, appeared on the world stage.  Medical bureaucrats from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) including the longtime medical bureaucrat-in-charge, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Big Tech billionaire nerd, Bill Gates along with the rest of the establishment view everyone as a potential carrier a danger, therefore, they must vaccinate everyone to fight this new disease with an emphasis on treating the situation as a national security threat so Operation Warp Speed was announced.  At the same time, the U.S. government and its allies are fighting continuous wars that they themselves start on the rest of the world and on top of everything else, the world’s global economy is on the brink of the Greatest Depression along with a collapsing global reserve currency, the U.S. dollar.

Just imagine this sometime in the near future, you wake up one morning, you brush your teeth and then you turn on the television and on the screen is the ’emergency broadcast system’ flashing in red, alerting people about new Covid infection rates spiking in your area and it’s declared a red zone. With a disarmed populace in place who has no rights to self-defense, military personnel in hazmat suits wearing masks will be making door to door visits with mandated vaccines in hand, and if you resist, well, you can paint a picture for yourself. The streets are empty and businesses you once visited are now permanently closed making it increasingly difficult to get your basic necessities. Public and private schools are open on the condition that each child is fully vaccinated under government mandates regardless of the health risks associated with the vaccines and in many cases if a child is not vaccinated, the school nurse will do it for you without your permission.  Those who have jobs will have no choice but to get vaccinated or they lose that weekly paycheck they depend for their food and other expenses.  Then you look outside your window and you see the same breadlines in government-approved centers with people wearing facemasks, patiently waiting for their next meal as long as they have their vaccination card in hand.  Crime is out of control with no police protection because a couple of years earlier, major cities and towns across the U.S. decided to defund the police.  They now have social workers and civilian patrols resembling the actions of the Nazi’s who had the useful idiots known as the brown shirts safeguarding the streets from a spread of a disease that cannot be controlled by whatever ridiculous mandates they impose, making sure that the people have facemasks and their government issued vaccination cards readily available for inspection. The internet is also heavily regulated. Depression and suicides increasing by the day, yet, no resistance by the population, just slaves under a medical dictatorship that makes Nazi Germany look like a walk in the park.  That is a dystopian future.

That same old ‘New World Order conspiracy theory that many people laughed about is now unfolding before our eyes. For decades the people were warned, yet they are still blinded by the mainstream media’s fear mongering nonsense and blatant lies that it becomes comical at times. Yet, people are living in extreme fear.  Across the globe, new Covid-19 outbreaks are rising due to false positives detected by the unreliable RT-PCR tests. Countries around the world are waking up to this fact including Portugal who according to the Off-Guardian.org reported that “an appeals court in Portugal has ruled that the PCR process is not a reliable test for Sars-Cov-2, and therefore any enforced quarantine based on those test results is unlawful.” Why? Well the article summed up what the study had found:

Most notably this study by Jaafar et al., which found that – when running PCR tests with 35 cycles or more – the accuracy dropped to 3%, meaning up to 97% of positive results could be false positives. 

The ruling goes on to conclude that, based on the science they read, any PCR test using over 25 cycles is totally unreliable. Governments and private labs have been very tight-lipped about the exact number of cycles they run when PCR testing, but it is known to sometimes be as high as 45. Even fearmonger-in-chief Anthony Fauci has publicly stated anything over 35 is totally unusable

It is well-known that high-risk groups with already life-threatening ailments are the ones at risk, even if there was a severe flu season in effect, they will still be at risk regardless.  Covid-19 lockdowns and mandatory facemasks and the possibility of forced vaccinations in various U.S. states and a number of countries is becoming part of everyday life, the “new normal” it seems.  The Hill reported that government-issued vaccine cards will be distributed to everyone in the US population ‘Details emerging on vaccine cards that will accompany inoculations.”  The report said that the federal government will hand-out cards with your name on them which will list what vaccines you have received and which ones will be due, “Everyone will be issued a written card that they can put in their wallet that will tell them what they had and when their next dose is due,” Kelly Moore, associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition, said Wednesday, according to CNN. “Let’s do the simple, easy thing first. Everyone’s going to get that.” Then clinics and hospitals will send your vaccine report to the federal agencies-in-charge which will basically track and trace individuals of all ages:

Moore added that clinics providing vaccinations will also report what vaccine is administered to state immunization registries. Numerous clinics will also give patients the option to provide their phone numbers so they can be sent a reminder to take their second dose of the vaccine 

The world we once new is dramatically changing, a coerced society that’s is constantly living on the edge of fear, facing lockdowns every few months when Covid-19 cases spike while the establishment continues its early stages of total global control over society. They already control the people through mandated facemasks and lockdowns while Big Pharma is pushing a handful of vaccines so that people can travel, buy food, or for their children to attend school under the “new normal” rules once they get their vaccines.  People are acquiescent to authority, accepting the establishment’s recommendations as law as they walk around confused with facemasks, avoiding people at length. One time I was walking down one of the main avenues while I was in New York City as a woman was trying to avoid a group of young girls without facemasks, she immediately hoped into traffic to avoid them and right behind her was a city bus narrowly missing her by an inch, this woman was obviously so fearful of contracting Covid-19, she almost got herself killed by an incoming city bus, and to be honest with you, I closed my eyes because I thought she was history.  This is the state of the world of paranoia and fear we are living in. There are even people who have not even been outside their homes since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 an international pandemic. Fights are breaking out everywhere between those who refuse facemasks versus the slaves who listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the medical establishment who claim that wearing facemasks is about protecting yourself and respecting others, so people are policing themselves and “snitching” on each other, a dream come true for those who rule.

Normalcy in society has completely changed for the worst. People are less human today because of what the establishment has pushed upon us with their absurd ideas to control the population to prevent an over-exaggerated disease from spreading.  Yet, suicides, depression and loneliness is killing more people by the day because of these unnecessary lockdowns.  The people are on the edge of insanity. The normal life already seems like a long time ago as new trends became normalized over the years before the corona virus ever existed like humans having relationships with sex robots and life-sized dolls.  Humans having sex with robots and dolls and in some cases, even marrying them seems pretty bizarre to me. I am pretty sure that both men and some women are purchasing sex robots and dolls at a higher-rate since the pandemic begun although a handful of people have been interested in this new phenomenon has been introduced to the public. In ‘The Age of Sex Robots: The pros and cons in this emerging sexual age’ by David W. Wahl, PhD in Psychology Today wrote:

Sex robots are here. It’s not just a gimmick of science fiction. Granted, the artificially intelligent sex robots of such films as “Ex Machina” and “AI” are not here yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Most sex robots now are little more than slightly animated sex dolls. Perhaps the most advanced sex robot that we know of is “Samantha.” A creation of Synthea Amatus, Samantha is designed to be capable of enjoying sex. 

But Samantha is not all about sex. She can also talk about science and philosophy. She can even tell jokes (although hopefully not while you are having sex with her). Consent is even an issue with Samantha. If you are too rough with her or she doesn’t like your behaviors, she is programmed to go into “dummy mode” and completely shut down. Currently, robotic partners can go for prices in excess of $10,000

That is incredible and frightening. What if they created another doll was created down the road where “dummy mode” can turn into violent mode, but that will probably take another generation or so. I hope most people won’t fall for these types of futuristic relationships, but the point I am trying to make here is that this is where humanity is headed and this is not normal but it falls into the hands of the establishment technically speaking since in a way can reduce population growth.

What has society morphed into?

Now a Great Reset is upon us and make no mistake, it is real despite what The New York Times has falsely claimed that it does not in an absurd article they published titled ‘The Baseless Great Reset’ Conspiracy Theory Rises Again’, it’s real and we need to ask ourselves, will we except this insane idea? The World Economic Forum (WEF) is pushing ‘The Great Reset’ agenda since last May with calls to rebuild the global economy, social engineer society and enforce environmental sustainability rules and regulations to improve capitalism for basically major corporations, bankers and the ruling establishment. The corporate-technological alliance will be controlled by a powerful consortium of the pharmaceutical, financial, communications, defense industries and other major corporations with the government enforcing their dirty deeds with help from the mainstream-media continuing their propaganda. The Great Reset is being promoted by the United Kingdom’s very own, Prince Charles and WEF’s founder and executive chairman, Klaus Schwab who reminds me of Dr. Evil from Austin Powers who is also a former member of the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group which is behind the many changes the ruling establishment has envisioned for society. Life for humanity seems like it will never be the same. The Great Reset is a plan to foment corporate control over the entire economic and social landscape. They want control of the world’s natural resources and to expand their world government’s surveillance grid to unprecedented levels that fascist dictators from the past including Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet could have only dreamed about.

What is happening to society has been predicted for a long time by many, including one of the most famous names in science fiction, George Orwell, the 1984 author who wrote and predicted a future dystopian police state. Orwell’s dire predictions of what we face in the near future was an early warning to all of humanity. However, I believe that many people are not simply going to accept this way of life as the new normal, some will, but many will refuse to obey such absurd demands from the establishment and this is the start of a revolution, a revolution of the mind and the establishment is afraid of that.  The masses will rise and will demand its freedoms it once had. People around the world already disobey lockdowns, face mask mandates, oppose continuous wars, oppose government tyranny and every other human rights abuses they face.  We are not, and I repeat, we are not at the point of no return, there is hope.

This lockdown madness will destroy people’s livelihoods and in some cases, will kill more people than the disease itself.  How far can the establishment push us?  We are at a time where we need to make a critical decision that will change our lives forever because a group of powerful and politically connected people who are government bureaucrats, or people who are closely associated with Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Tech, the Military-Industrial Complex, bankers, Wall street, the elite families and so on, you know, the ones we have been warning about called the establishment or the ruling elite for some time are trying to change the structure of society, to control human nature. The year 2020 has been turbulent to say the least, 2021 will be chaotic and that is guaranteed. What is happening now is what George Orwell’s 1984 warned us about more than 70 years ago.  At this point in time, it will be up to all of us to resist, because that’s what it will take, and when that happens, people like George Orwell will finally rest in peace without rolling in his grave knowing that the world’s human spirit is alive and well, after all, that’s what he ultimately hoped for.

 

Lies, “Yellow Journalism” and the Death of the Mainstream Media

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

During the era of Yellow Journalism in the U.S. which defined the type of journalism that existed before the start of Spanish-American War in 1898. The term, ‘Yellow Journalism’ was associated with various major newspapers that held no journalistic principals or truth, “sensationalism” or “eye-catching headlines” was the only truth that mattered for newspaper owners that exaggerated stories to sell newspapers and fill their pockets with profits. Today they sell you lies to support the agendas of major corporations and the Military-Industrial Complex because corporate interests pays the MSM handsomely to sell their wars, drugs and propaganda.

The accelerated downfall of the mainstream media (MSM) occurred since the election of Donald Trump. It’s apparent that the MSM has caught TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome. I don’t know what you feel or sense when you are watching the MSM, whether it’s CNN, MSNBC who are obviously liberal networks or FOX News who is aligned with the Republicans party, it’s almost like watching the twilight zone.  Journalistic integrity has been absolutely flushed down the toilet. For the record, the MSM has been losing its reputation as a reliable news source way before Trump became US president, he just added TDS to the so-called “television journalists” on CNN and MSNBC. However, that did not stop CNN’s president Jeff Zucker to propose a weekly show with the US President on a call with Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen according to The Hill, “I have all these proposals for him,” Zucker reportedly told Cohen “I want to do a weekly show with him and all this stuff.” Despite the fact that anti-Trumpism is alive and well in the MSM, it’s hypocritical. CNN and MSNBC will surely miss Trump if Joe Biden officially steals the election because low-ratings will collapse both networks and even FOX news will suffer to a point without Trump being showcased regularly on television networks and that’s probably why Jeff Zucker, had reportedly called Trump “the boss” if he would have signed a contract with CNN.

The print media is also guilty for publishing numerous false claims, accusations and lies that has led to wars and regime change in various countries for decades. One recent example is the case with The New York Times who published an article with the worst possible title ‘The baseless ‘Great Reset’ conspiracy theory rises again’ yet, on November 1st, Time magazine published a cover story that read ‘The Great Reset’ on its front page. The media must think the people are that stupid, it clearly shows how they view its target audience.  There are many reasons why liberal networks with the possibility of FOX news following in the same direction will collapse due to low-viewership ratings.  CNN, MSNBC and FOX employs a long list of liars and state propagandists who were in previous administrations that offer their one-sided analysis and reports in domestic and foreign issues presented to the viewer.  In an important note, all of the MSM networks are on board and all agree that no matter who is president, they know who their foreign enemies are when it comes to war because they all obviously work for the same US war machine.  Remember when liberal media host on MSNBC, Brian Williams and his comment on U.S. missiles hitting Syrian airfields with Trump’s approval in 2017 as “beautiful”?  I guess he thought Trump wasn’t so bad after all.  The MSM is a propaganda organ of the Democratic party and to the Republican party if we include FOX news.  All of US viewers are beholden to the US war machine that includes all special interest groups and major corporate powers that dictate to the MSM what to report and say to the public. Since 2016, the MSM has stooped to its lowest level of lies and deceit.  Its journalistic principles have evolved into a joke, a laughing stock in the world of news.  Here is a short list out of many lies by the MSM:

The Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax: 3 Years Worth of Conspiracy Theories

The Trump-Russia Collusion scandal was proof in itself that CNN and MSNBC are conspiracy theorists with no actual facts. Conspiracy theorists is defined as those who create “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators” Well there is a group of “powerful conspirators” that does explain a set of fake circumstances surrounding Trump’s collusion with Russia which in under the definition of a conspiracy theorist.  It took 3 years of this non-stop nonsense about Trump and Russia colluding 24 hours a day which was way over the top for anyone, even for some democrats who turned into republicans because of the MSM lies. The nearly $32 million spent on the Trump-Russia Collusion report turned out to be a devastating blow to the Democratic party.

A letter that was addressed to Senator Lindsey Graham that was signed by John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence (NIA) for the Trump administration requested information on the FBI’s behalf concerning their Investigation. Ratcliffe declassified the information which exposed the scandal and as many of us knew from the start, it was a hoax.  It all turned out to be a major humiliation for the MSM after the dossier was exposed as a Hillary Clinton smear campaign against President Trump. Hillary Clinton was on board with a plan to link candidate Trump in 2016 to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “In late July 2o16, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by typing him to Putin and the Russians’ in hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”  It also stated the following:

According to handwritten noted, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the ‘alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services 

The letter also included that “On 07 September 2016, U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding ‘U.S. President candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” The MSM including MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow (who cried on air) after the hoax was exposed was humiliated. The MSM has lost time, money and whatever they had left of their credentials based on Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia lie, at this point they should be all crying themselves to sleep at night.

CNN Claimed Ecuador’s Embassy in London is a ‘Russian Hacking Hub’

Another case of pure MSM propaganda was against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange who at the time was in exile in Ecuador’s embassy in London. The former President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa criticized the MSM’s side of the story on Ecuador’s Embassy in London as a ‘Russian Hacking Hub.’ Correa was interviewed by RT.com and this is what he said about CNN and other US media sources:

We never approved interference in the internal affairs of other countries, we respect every nation, that is why when we saw that Julian Assange was publishing the data of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election campaign, we warned him two or three times, and on the third or fourth time we acted, we cut the internet. The story that CNN wants to build, that in the embassy there was a center for espionage operations with Russian support, that we knew about it and approved it. That’s how they want it to appear. what they want to sell to the world. What CNN and other media are saying is rubbish, but were use to it. They are prepping for the show. The reason is, when they extradite Assange to the US and sentence him to life, they want the honest backing of the public, they are setting the stage

What CNN reported on December 9, 2017, was that Donald Trump, Jr. was offered “advanced access” to the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks before those emails were made public. MSNBC also jumped on the band wagon and “independently confirmed” CNN’s evidence about the collaboration between the Trump team and WikiLeaks over the hacked DNC emails. It all turned out to be false information. The email which Donald Trump, Jr. received was a link that was published online and open to the public. If that is not reckless and irresponsible journalism on a grand scale or just plain spiteful propaganda to paint Trump’s team as Russian assets, I don’t know what is.

The Pentagon with Help from the MSM is Pushing Regime Change in Venezuela

The MSM’s Commitment to the Pentagon’s agenda of regime change in Venezuela has been steady as well with CNN has been following Trump’s Line on Venezuela who falsely claimed in the SOTU address last February when Trump declared Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s true and legitimate president. CNN claimed that the voters wanted Maduro to step down since the elections in January 2019, but there’s one problem with that statement, Venezuela’s presidential election was actually held on May 20, 2018. CNN’s story ‘Military helicopter crashes in Venezuela, killing 7, amid protests’ first reported on a helicopter crash that killed seven military officers then redirects the story to the political scene mentioning Juan Guaido, the unpopular political figure who was unpopular among the opposition he’s part of. Washington chose Guaido as the best puppet they can manage as it’s “acting President.” After all, Uncle Sam still makes important decisions for the Venezuelan elite and the rest of its Latin American puppet states. CNN said that “pressure is mounting on Maduro to step down, following elections in January in which voters chose opposition leader Juan Guaido over him for president.” Current president Nicolas Maduro won that election by more than 67% of the vote as Juan Guaido and his followers decided not to participate in the elections as a way of protest against the Maduro government.

Eventually Big Tech Will Collapse, And The Alternative Media Will Rise

I feel sorry for the MSM’s faithful viewers, frying their brains with absolute propaganda from their preferred sources of information. They could have done more productive things with their lives. Just imagine, decades of endless lies by the MSM.  It’s hard to wrap my head around what and how the MSM reports to its target audience who accept what is reported as the truth. The media has used propaganda and flat out lies to manipulate the public into believing whatever they said to further Washington’s agenda at all costs, even if it means losing viewership and they still get paid no matter what.  Real journalism has died a long time ago in the US and that’s why the alternative media has grown significantly to challenge MSM’s narrative.

Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are trying to suppress the alternative media and the truth it reveals to the public by way of censorship, but guess what?  There will be alternative platforms that will compete and outperform Big Tech in the future. We already have numerous platforms where alternative voices are heard such as http://www.bitchute.com, http://www.minds.com, ise.media, Global Research.ca, Information Clearinghouse, The Corbett Report, The Gray Zone, rt.com, sometimes even Al Jazeera can be truthful when it wants to be and many others that will rise to the occasion of telling or spreading the truth on various platforms.  The MSM has embarrassed themselves to the point of no return. They are dead in its tracks and the world is waking up to that fact.

Biden Appointee Spread Russian Hacker Conspiracy

Neera Tanden, who President-elect Joe Biden nominated to serve as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, speaks at The Queen theater, Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020, in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

How can Democrats oppose unhinged conspiracy theories while empowering its worst purveyors?

By Glenn Greenwald

Source: Scheerpost

The announcement that Joe Biden intends to nominate Neera Tanden as his Director of the Office of Management and Budget — a critical position overseeing U.S. economic and regulatory policy — triggered a wide range of mockery, indignation and disgust from both the left and the right. That should not be surprising: though a thoroughly mediocre and ordinary D.C. swamp creature from the perspective of both ideology and competence, Tanden’s uniquely unhinged, venomous, corrupt and pathologically dishonest conduct as a Clinton Family and DNC apparatchik and President of the corporatist-and-despot-funded Center for American Progress (CAP) has earned her a list of enemies far longer and more impressive than her accomplishments.

When news of her appointment broke, many of the journalists and activists she has spent years abusing, slandering, and lying about instantly stepped forward to compile just some of her worst political and behavioral lowlights. And some preliminary signs emerged that she might encounter difficulty in obtaining the Senate confirmation needed for her to assume this position. The Communications Director for GOP Senator John Cornyn of Texas announced that “Tanden stands zero chance of being confirmed” by the Senate.

Former Sanders campaign aide David Sirota hypothesized that “it is not a coincidence that they are putting Neera Tanden — the single biggest, most aggressive Bernie Sanders critic in the United States of America — specifically at OMB while Sanders is Senate Budget Committee ranking/chair.” Sirota’s statement suggests Biden’s nomination of Tanden was intended as yet more humiliation doled out to the Democratic-loyal Sanders left by cucking the Vermont Senator even further by forcing him to shepherd the confirmation of one of his most vicious and amoral attackers (who Sanders himself in 2019 vehemently denounced). But Sirota’s point also raises the prospect that Tanden’s nomination could even encounter trouble from that side of the aisle as well (given Sanders’ compliant and disciplined conduct over the last six months, it’s more likely we will see him roll out a literal red carpet for Tanden to walk on, gently toss red roses on it before she passes, and then serve her a glass of Chardonnay rather than meaningfully obstruct her confirmation).

The list of sociopathic and even monstrous acts from Tanden is too long to list comprehensively. She punched one of her own employees, a reporter for CAP’s now-abolished blog ThinkProgress, after he had the temerity to ask Hillary Clinton in 2008 about her support for the Iraq War (Tanden claimed she “merely” had “pushed,” not punched, her undeferential reporter). In 2011, as the Obama administration was participating in the NATO bombing of Libya, Tanden suggested in internal CAP discussions that the U.S. steal Libya’s oil as a way of reducing the U.S. deficit (a story I was able to report only because Tanden had abused and alienated so many of her employees that they worked together to leak her incriminating emails to me).

During her tenure as CAP’s President, Tanden accepted millions of dollars from the regime of the United Arab Emirates, which built Dubai and Abu Dhabi using slave labor, along with massive donations from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, J.P. Morgan, the Walton Family and Michael Bloomberg, while hiding the identity of some of her think tank’s largest donors. A huge chapter on the NYPD’s abusive policies toward Muslims under Mayor Michael Bloomberg was removed from a CAP report after Boomberg donated more than $1 million to Tanden’s organization, and he continued to donate even more after that courteous gesture.

She ordered the supposedly independent journalists of the ThinkProgress blog, including Muslim writers, to stop writing critically about Israel after key CAP donors, including Barney Frank’s sister Ann Lewis and long-time Clinton advisor Howard Wolfson, complained. She and Wolfson plotted in 2016 how to weaponize female journalists and people of color against Hillary’s critics as well to use their identity to stigmatize and thus stop undesirable coverage from The New York Times. In 2018, she outed a CAP employee at a staff-wide meeting who had filed an anonymous complaint of sexual harassment and retaliation against one of Tanden’s male allies. Secure with her UAE-and-corporate-funded large salary, she has long urged cuts to Social Security. The list goes on and on.

Edward Snowden On Big Tech Companies, Like Facebook, Censoring & Controlling Information

By Arjun Walia

Source: Collective Evolution

Glenn Greenwald is no stranger to censorship, he’s the journalist who worked with Edward Snowden (NSA mass surveillance whistleblower)  to put together his story and release it to the world while working for the Guardian. He eventually left the Guardian and co-founded his own media company, The Intercept, an organization that would be free from censorship and free to report on government corruption and wrong-doings of powerful people and corporations. He recently resigned from The Intercept as well due to the fact that they’ve now censored him, and is now completely independent. You can find his work here.Glenn Greenwald is no stranger to censorship, he’s the journalist who worked with Edward Snowden (NSA mass surveillance whistleblower)  to put together his story and release it to the world while working for the Guardian. He eventually left the Guardian and co-founded his own media company, The Intercept, an organization that would be free from censorship and free to report on government corruption and wrong-doings of powerful people and corporations. He recently resigned from The Intercept as well due to the fact that they’ve now censored him, and is now completely independent. You can find his work here.Glenn Greenwald is no stranger to censorship, he’s the journalist who worked with Edward Snowden (NSA mass surveillance whistleblower)  to put together his story and release it to the world while working for the Guardian. He eventually left the Guardian and co-founded his own media company, The Intercept, an organization that would be free from censorship and free to report on government corruption and wrong-doings of powerful people and corporations. He recently resigned from The Intercept as well due to the fact that they’ve now censored him, and is now completely independent. You can find his work here.

Anybody who reports on or sheds a bright light onto immoral and unethical actions taken by governments and the powerful corporations they work with has been subjected to extreme censorship. In the case of Edward Snowden, he’s been exiled, and Julian Assange of Wikileaks is currently clinging to his life for exposing war crimes and other unethical actions by multiple governments and corporations. There are many other examples. What does it say about our civilization when we prosecute those who expose harm, corruption, immoral/unethical actions by governments and war crimes?

Greenwald recently interviewed Snowden about internet censorship and the role big tech companies and governments are playing. Greenwald explains that in one of his earliest meetings with Snowden, he (Snowden) explained that he was driven in large part by the vital role the early internet played in his life, “one that was free of corporate and state control, that permitted anonymity and exploration free of monitoring, and, most of all, fostered unrestrained communication and dissemination of information by and among citizens of the world without corporate and state overlords regulating and controlling what they were saying.

This is what he and Snowden go into in the interview posted below. Prior to that I provide a brief summary of Snowden’s key thoughts.

Snowden starts off by mentioning government surveillance programs and the companies they contracted to do this work and compares them to modern day Big Tech giants censoring information on a wide range of topics. We see this today with elections/politics, to medical information dealing with coronavirus and vaccines, for example.

“In secret, these companies had all agreed to work with the U.S. Government far beyond what the law required of them, and that’s what we’re seeing with this new censorship push is really a new direction in the same dynamic. These companies are not obligated by the law to do almost any of what they’re actually doing but they’re going above and beyond, to, in many cases, to increase the depth of their relationship (with the government) and the government’s willingness to avoid trying to regulate them in the context of their desired activities, which is ultimately to dominate the conversation and information space of global society in different ways…They’re trying to make you change your behaviour… – Snowden

So basically, these Big Tech companies have become slaves, if you will, to the governments will, or at least powerful people situated in high places within the government. Snowden brings up the fact that many of these companies are hiring people from the CIA, who come from the Pentagon, who come from the NSA, who have top secret clearances…The government is a customer of all the major cloud service providers. They are also a major regulator of these companies, which gives these companies the incentive to do whatever they want.

This is quite clear if you look at Facebook, Google and Amazon employees. There are many who have come from very high positions within the Department of Defense.

In no case is this more clear than Amazon – Snowden

Amazon appointed Keith Alexander, director of the NSA under Barack Obama.

He was one of the senior architects of the mass surveillance program that courts have repeatedly now declared to be unlawful and unconstitutional….When you have this kind of incentive from a private industry to maintain the warmest possible relationship with the people in government, who not just buy from you but also have the possibility to end your business or change the way you do business…You now see this kind of soft corruption that happens in a constant way. – Snowden

Snowden goes on to explain how people get upset when government, especially the Trump government, tries to set the boundaries of what appropriate speech is by attempting to stop big tech censorship, he then says,

If you’re not comfortable letting the government determine the boundaries of appropriate political speech, why are you begging Mark Zuckerberg to do it?

I think the reality here is…it’s not really about freedom of speech, and it’s not really about protecting people from harm…I think what you see is the internet has become the de facto means of mass communication. That represents influence which represents power, and what we see is we see a whole number of different tribes basically squabbling to try to gain control over this instrument of power.

What we see is an increasing tendency to silence journalists who say things that are in the minority.

You can watch the full conversation between Greenwald and Snowden below, the conversation is about 40 minutes long.

Closing Comments: This kind of information almost begs the question, are we ready as a society to truly create and disseminate journalism that is honest, integral and bi-partisan? Why is it that these types of organizations fail or struggle? How do some media companies fail? Well, they no longer stay true to their mission. They fall to the pressure of politics and fall into ideology. How many other times did ideology change what media outlets reported? Yes, it’s almost impossible to have zero bias, but how close can we get to zero? How can we achieve this when media outlets who do not fit within the accepted framework and disseminate information that challenges the popular opinion are constantly being punished for simply putting out information?

As Snowden mentioned above, these Big Tech companies in collusion with governments are literally attempting to not only censor information, but change the behaviour of people as well, especially journalists. When you take away one’s business or livelihood as a result of non-compliance, you are in a way forcing them to comply and do/say things you they way you want them done/said. We’ve experienced massive amounts of censorship and demonetization here at Collective Evolution, but we haven’t changed as a results of it. We simply created CETV, a platform that helps support our work as a result of censorship.

How Israel deployed an intelligence deception to justify killing scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh

By Gareth Porter

Source: The Grayzone

Israel’s Mossad has spent years on a propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the world Iran possessed a nuclear weapons program – and legitimizing its assassinations of Iranian academics.

The Israeli assassination of Iranian defense official Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is being treated as a triumph of Israeli intelligence, with ubiquitous references in the New York Times and other major media outlets to the killing of “Iran’s top nuclear scientist”. In fact, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency eliminated Fakhrizadeh, a defense official, despite the knowledge that its public depiction of him as the key architect of an Iranian nuclear weapons program was a deception.

For years, US media outlets have portrayed Fakhrizadeh as Iran’s equivalent to J. Robert Oppenheimer, marketing him to the public as the mastermind behind an Iranian version of the Manhattan Project. This image was developed primarily through a carefully constructed Israeli disinformation operation based on documents that displayed signs of fabrication.

Birth of a Mossad propaganda operation

The origin of the Mossad propaganda operation on Fakhrizadeh lies in the early 1990’s, when the US and Israel first developed suspicions of Iranian ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon. U.S., British, German and Israeli intelligence analysts had intercepted telexes from Sharif University about various “dual use” technologies — those that could be exploited in a nuclear program but also be applied for non-nuclear use.

Many of the telexes contained the number of an organization called Physics Research Center that operated under the watch of Iran’s Defense Ministry. The CIA and its allied intelligence agencies interpreted those intercepts as evidence that the Iranian military was running its own nuclear program, and thus that Iran was covertly seeking a nuclear weapons capability.

During the first term of the George W. Bush administration, the notorious militarist and Likud ally John Bolton took charge of Iran policy, prompting the CIA to issue an estimate concluding for the first time that Iran had initiated a nuclear weapons program. Israel’s Mossad apparently saw Washington’s new posture as a green light to set into motion a black propaganda campaign to dramatize and personalize the secret Iranian nuclear weapons program that was presumed to exist.

Between 2003 and 2004, Mossad produced a large cache of alleged Iranian documents depicting efforts to mate a nuclear weapon with Iran’s Shahab-3 missile and a bench system to convert uranium.

The Mossad files contained multiple tell-tale signs of forgery. For example, the reentry vehicle depicted in the drawings had already been abandoned by 2002 – before these drawings were supposedly created, according to the documents themselves – in favor of a design that looked entirely different and which was first shown in an August 2004 test. So whoever was responsible for the drawings was clearly unaware of the single most important Defense Ministry decision affecting the future of Iran’s missile deterrent.

The CIA never revealed who spirited the documents out of Iran or how. However, former senior German Foreign Office official Karsten Voigt explained to this reporter in 2013 that the German intelligence agency, the BND, had been furnished with the collection by an occasional source whom the intel chiefs considered less than credible.

And who was this source? According to Voigt, he belonged to the Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK), the exile Iranian cult which had fought for Saddam’s Iraqi forces against Iran during the eight-year war and by the early 1990s was passing information and propaganda that Mossad did not want to have attributed to itself.

Painting Fakrhizadeh as nuclear mastermind

Those Mossad documents identified Mohsen Fakhrizadeh as the manager of a supposedly top-secret Iranian project called the “AMAD Plan.” In reality, Fakhrizadeh was an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer and official in the Ministry of Defense Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL), who also taught Physics at Imam Hussein University in Tehran.

To implicate him as a nuclear project mastermind, the collection of Mossad documents featured a directive supposedly signed by Fakhrizadeh. But since no one outside Iran had ever seen the previously obscure official’s signature, and given the lack of effort to show any official government markings on the documents, there was little to prevent Mossad from forging it.

In their 2012 history of Israel’s intelligence service, “Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service”, Michael Bar-Zohar and Nisham Mishal pointed to Mossad as the culprit behind the appearance of the supposed Iranian nuclear documents. The writers recounted how Mossad gathered the personal information on Fakhrizadeh that was later released to the public through the MEK, including his passport number and his home telephone number.

“This abundance of detail and means of transmission,” Bar-Zohar and Mishal wrote, “leads one to believe that… ‘a certain secret service’ ever suspected by the West of pursuing its own agenda, painstakingly collected these facts and figures about the Iranian scientist and passed them on to the Iranian resistance [MEK].”

The documents also fingered Fakhrizadeh as the former head of the Physics Research Centre, thus deceptively linking him to the procurement efforts for “dual use” nuclear items in 1990-91 that were well known to CIA and other intelligence agencies. That accusation was reflected in the 2006 United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747 listing Iranian officials responsible for nuclear and missile proliferation in Iran. In the UN resolution, Fakhrizadeh was identified as a “[s]enior MODAFL scientist and former head of the Physics Research Centre (PHRC).”

But the Israeli identification of Fakhrizadeh as the head of the PHRC was proven to be a lie. Iran turned over extensive documentation to the IAEA in late 2004 or early 2005 on the PHRC and the procurement telexes, and the documents — which the IAEA did not challenge — showing that a professor at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran named Sayyed Abbas Shahmoradi-Zavari had headed the PHRC from its inception in 1989 until it closed in 1998.

Further, the documents provided to the IAEA revealed that the dual-use technology that Shahmoradi-Zavari helped the university procure through his PHRC connections was actually intended for the university faculty’s own teaching and research. In at least one case, the IAEA personnel found one “dual-use” item had been procured by the university.

These facts should have put an end to the Mossad-created myth of Fakrizadeh as the head of a vast underground nuclear weapons program. But the IAEA never revealed Shamoradi-Zavari’s name, and therefore avoided having to acknowledge that the documents the agency had embraced as genuine had misled the world about Fakhrizadeh.

It was not until 2012 that David Albright, the director of Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, acknowledged that Shahmoradi-Zavari — not Fakhrizadeh — had been the head of the Physics Research Center – although he avoided admitting that the IAEA had relied on documents that turned out be false.

Revving up the propaganda 

The Mossad got busy again after the CIA’s November 2007 assessment that Iran had ceased work on nuclear weapons. Determined to neutralize the political impact of that finding, the Israelis apparently began work on a new batch of Iranian top secret documents. This time, however, the Israelis provided the documents directly to the IAEA in late 2009, as then-IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei revealed in his memoirs.

The documents supposedly revealed Iranian defense ministry activities related to nuclear weapons after the cessation of such work that the CIA. One of those documents, leaked to the London Times in December 2009, purported to be a 2007 letter from Fakhrizadeh as the chairman of an organization presiding over nuclear weapons work. But as ElBaradei recalled, the IAEA’s technical experts “raised numerous questions about the documents’ authenticity….”

Even the CIA and some European intelligence analysts were skeptical about the authenticity of the Fakhrizadeh document. Although it had been circulating among the intelligence agencies for months, even the normally unquestioning New York Times reported that the CIA had not authenticated it.  Former CIA counterterrorism official Philip Giraldi, who had maintained contacts with active agency personnel, told this reporter CIA analysts regarded the document as a forgery.

A pattern of assassinations justified by disinformation

The killing of Fakhrizadeh was not the first time Mossad bumped off an Iranian it had baselessly accused of playing a leading role in a weapons program. In July 2011, someone working for Mossad — apparently an MEK member — gunned down a 35-year old engineering student named Darioush Rezaeinejad and wounded his wife in front of a kindergarten in Tehran.

The young man was targeted on the basis of nothing more than the research he had conducted on high-voltage switches and his publication of a scholarly paper about his scholarship. The abstract of the professional paper Rezaienejad had published made it clear that his work involved what is called “explosive pulsed power” involved in high-power lasers, high-power microwave sources and other commercial applications.

A few days after the assassination of Rezaienejad, however, an official of an unnamed “member state” provided Associated Press reporter George Jahn the abstract of Rezaienejad’s paper, successfully persuading Jahn that it “appeared to back” the claim that he had been “working on a key component in setting off the explosives needed to trigger a nuclear warhead.”

Then, in September 2011, the Israelis provided Jahn with an “intelligence summary” advancing the ludicrous claim that Rezaeinejad was not an electrical engineering specialist at all, but rather a “physicist” who had worked for the Ministry of Defense on various aspects of nuclear weapons.

The deployment of absurd assertions backed by paper-thin evidence to justify the cold-blooded murder of a young electrical engineer with no record of nuclear weapons involvement illuminated a Mossad modus operandi that has reappeared in the case of Fakhrizadeh: Israeli intelligence simply gins up a narrative centered around fictional ties to a nonexistent nuclear weapons program. It then watches as the Western press uncritically disseminates the propaganda to the public, establishing the political space for cold-blooded assassinations in broad daylight.

A Killing in Iran: Who Gains From Yet Another Assassination?

By Philip Giraldi

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

It is not often that one can agree with the pronouncements made by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan, but his tweeted comment on the killing of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh suggesting that the incident “…was a criminal act & highly reckless. It risks lethal retaliation & a new round of regional conflict. Iranian leaders would be wise to wait for the return of responsible American leadership on the global stage & to resist the urge to respond against perceived culprits” was both restrained and reasonable. Or it was at least so until sentence two, which was clearly intended to attack Donald Trump and praise the incoming Joe Biden administration, which Brennan just might be seeking to join.

Bearing in mind that John Brennan was the guiding hand behind President Barack Obama’s kill lists of Americans who were marked for death by drone it is difficult to understand what moral high ground he seeks to occupy in the slaying of Fakhrizadeh. Brennan, who was a leading critic of Trump and who may have led the clandestine effort to undermine his election and term in office, subsequently found himself in an exchange of tweets with Republican Senator from Texas Ted Cruz which degenerated into a trading of insults. Cruz responded “It’s bizarre to see a former head of the CIA consistently side with Iranian zealots who chant ‘Death to America.’ And reflexively condemn Israel. Does Joe Biden agree?” This produced a riposte by Brennan that “It is typical for you to mischaracterize my comment. Your lawless attitude & simple-minded approach to serious national security matters demonstrate that you are unworthy to represent the good people of Texas.”

The assassination of Fakhrizadeh, the “father of Iran’s nuclear program,” took place on a road near the town of Absard to the east of Tehran. According to initial accounts, the Iranian scientist, who has long been targeted by name and in public fora by Israel, was traveling in an SUV together with his wife plus bodyguards and a driver. Initial reports suggested that there was a Nissan truck parked on the opposite side of the road loaded with what appeared to be wood, though it may have turned out that the wood was concealing a bomb which may have been triggered by a signal from a surveillance satellite. The bomb was detonated to disable Fakhrizadeh’s vehicle before an attack on the car by five or six gunmen with automatic weapons who had emerged from a vehicle following the SUV began, again according to initial reports, including reporting by eye witnesses. The Iranian official news agency FARS is now claiming, however, that the attack was carried out by a remote controlled machine gun concealed on the truck, which subsequently exploded, and no human attackers were involved. It is presumed that the bodyguards and driver were killed in the exchange. Fakhrizadeh was badly wounded and died in hospital shortly thereafter. Photos of the SUV reveal shattered windows, blood streaks, and numerous bullet holes as well as other damage from what may have been the bomb.

Iranian news agencies are now reporting that at least one of the attackers has been arrested, and if that is true he will surely be made to talk regarding what he knows. They are also reporting that two of the assailants were killed in the exchange with the bodyguards, which, if true, means they will possibly be identified. Clearly, the attack was well planned, was able to employ considerable resources, and was based on intelligence that would be very hard to obtain, particularly as the Iranian government was taking steps to protect Fakhrizadeh, to include details of his travels.

The killing comes just two weeks after intelligence officials confirmed that Al Qaeda’s second-highest leader Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah was shot dead together with his daughter by alleged Israeli supplied assassins on a motorcycle on August 7th. The hit was reportedly carried out at the request of the United States based on Abdullah’s claimed involvement in the 1998 deadly attacks on two U.S. Embassies in East Africa. The claim that Iran has been harboring al-Qaeda is already being used by the Trump White House to justify increased pressure on Iran and it might possibly even serve as part of a casus belli.

The two assassinations are not linked except perhaps in terms of sending a message to high level Iranians that they are not safe even in their own country even when they are given bodyguards. The claim that Fakhrizadeh was in charge of a secret Iranian weapons program, made regularly by Israel and the U.S., is not generally believed by most authorities. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which nuclear armed Israel is not, and its facilities are subject to regular unannounced inspections.

Likewise, the killing of Qods Force commander General Qassem Soleimani in January in a U.S. drone attack was intended more regarding sending a message concerning possible consequences of reckless behavior than it was about actually killing one man. Whatever programs Fakrizadeh and Soleimani were involved in will continue without them. Nevertheless, assassination of Iranians linked to the country’s former and current nuclear program has been Israeli policy since 2010. As many as a dozen Iranian scientists and technicians reportedly have been killed. So-called “targeted killings” have been a regular feature of Israel’s “national defense” strategy. In addition to the Iranians, at least seventy Palestinians have been assassinated.

Though Israel has clearly ordered the assassinations, it is generally believed that the actual preparation for the attacks have been carried out by Mojahedin e Khalq or MEK, a Marxist cult that came into prominence at the time of the Iranian revolution against the Shah. It is generally regarded as a terrorist group that once was virulently anti-American and killed a number of U.S. officials. MEK is a curious hybrid creature in any event in that it pretends to be an alternative government option for Iran even though it is despised by nearly all Iranians. At the same time, it is greatly loved by the Washington Establishment which would like to see the Mullahs deposed and replaced by something more amenable to western and Israeli worldviews.

MEK is run like a cult by its leader Maryam Rajavi, with a number of rules that restrict and control the behavior of its members. One commentary likens membership in MEK to a modern-day equivalent of slavery. The group currently operates out of a secretive, heavily guarded 84-acre compound in Albania that is covertly supported by the United States, as well as through a “political wing” front office in Paris, where it refers to itself as the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

MEK, which is financially supported by Saudi Arabia, stages events in the United States in Europe where it generously pays politicians like John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani and Elaine Chao to make fifteen-minute speeches praising the organization and everything it does. It’s paying of inside the Beltway power brokers proved so successful that it was removed from the State Department terrorist list in 2012 by Hillary Clinton even though it had killed Americans in the 1970s. MEK also finds favor in Washington because it is used by Israel as a resource for anti-Iranian terrorism acts currently, including assassinations carried out in Tehran. Israel, in fact, directs most terrorist acts carried out by MEK inside Iran.

So those are the players and, at first glance, one might reasonably come to the Ockham’s razor conclusion, i.e. that Israel ordered MEK to kill Fakhrizadeh, an order which was then executed. But that would be to ignore some of the politics currently playing out in Washington. First of all, Israel would not have carried out the high-level assassination without the consent of the White House. Indeed, U.S. intelligence resources might well have played a key role in locating the Iranian scientist. Second, the Trump Administration has clearly adopted a policy of “maximum pressure” against Iran, which has included strangling the country’s economy through sanctions, condoning Israeli attacks in Syria and elsewhere, and destabilizing moves, to include assassinations, designed to make the nation’s leadership both vulnerable and nervous. It is the application of an Israeli strategic doctrine referred to as “Campaigns Between Wars,” meaning constant aggression to erode an enemy’s ability to fight without actually crossing a line that would start a shooting war.

A direct role by the Trump Administration in the assassination should not be ruled out as it is clearly seeking to harden Iranian antipathy towards any new comprehensive arms control or nuclear agreement with the incoming Biden team. Trump himself reportedly raised the possibility of bombing Iran earlier this month, though he was talked out of it by his national security team, but the Israeli Army meanwhile is on alert in case of an American attack. There are confirmed reports that B-52 bombers, capable of deploying the 30,000 pound penetrator bombs that can destroy targets deep underground, have been sent to the Middle East, presumably to Qatar where the U.S. has its principal airbase in the region. They would presumably be used against Iran’s main nuclear development site at Natanz.

Israel is in a strong position right now. Iran has significant military resources to respond to the killing, including the drones and missiles it developed and used in September 2019 to devastate the state-owned Saudi Aramco oil processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in eastern Saudi Arabia. But if it does react robustly to the assassination and sparks a conflict that inevitably would include the United States, it would be a war that Bibi Netanyahu has long sought, destroying Iran at what he hopes would be minimal cost to Israel. If Iran does not respond, Israel will no doubt push the White House to be even more aggressive in its remaining time in office while hardliners within Iran will also demand an end to any agreements with western powers. Taken together, that would make sure that any attempt by the Biden administration to engage diplomatically with Iran would fail. The ultimate provocation by the United States would, of course, be to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Unthinkable? Perhaps, but perhaps not. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz is already reporting that “U.S. President Donald Trump has more than a month before he leaves the White House, and on his way out he could set the world on fire. In starting this conflagration, it seems as though he plans to strike every match in the box. Standing beside him, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be more than happy to lend him a lighter.”

Are Americans Rational?

By Dmitry Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

I’ve been holding back on commenting on current events because they are far too silly. At this point it is safe to say that the elections in the US have been thoroughly botched and that, no matter who is ultimately chosen as president for the next four years, enough questions will remain in the minds of enough people to thoroughly delegitimize the national leadership in the eyes of at least half the country.

Just this morning I got a missive from Paul Craig Roberts containing the following bullet points:

• Joe Biden’s Twitter account has 20 million followers. Trump’s Twitter account has 88.8 million followers.

• Joe Biden’s Facebook account has 7.78 million followers. Trump’s Facebook account has 34.72 million followers. How likely is it that a person with four to five times the following of his rival lost the election?

• Joe Biden, declared by the biased presstitutes to be president by landslide, gave a Thanksgiving Day message and only 1,000 people watched his live statement. Where is the enthusiasm?

• Trump’s campaign appearances were heavily attended and that Biden’s were avoided. Somehow a candidate who could not draw supporters to his campaign appearances won the presidency.

• Despite Biden’s total failure to animate voters during the presidential campaign, he received 15 million more votes than Barack Obama did in his 2012 re-election.

• Biden won despite underperforming Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vote in every urban US county, but outperformed Clinton in Democrat-controlled Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, the precise cities where the most obvious and most blatant electoral fraud was committed.

• Biden won despite receiving a record low share of the Democrat primary vote compared to Trump’s share of the Republican primary vote.

• Biden won despite Trump bettering his 2016 vote by ten million votes and Trump’s record support from minority voters.

• Biden won despite losing the bellwether counties that have always predicted the election outcome and the bellwether states of Ohio and Florida.

• Biden won in Georgia, a completely red state with a red governor and legislature both House and Senate. Somehow a red state voted for a blue president.

• Biden won despite the Democrats losing representation in the House.

• In Pennsylvania 47 memory cards containing more than 50,000 votes are missing.

• Pennsylvania 1.8 million ballots were mailed out to voters, but 2.5 million mail-in ballots were counted.

Roberts is a Republican and therefore believes that the Democrats stole the election. A Democrat, once it turns out that Trump won after all, would believe the opposite. But that makes no difference because, as I keep repeating, the US is not a democracy and it doesn’t matter who is its president.

It is not a democracy because the vast majority of votes—all Democratic votes in Republican states and all Republican votes in Democratic states—are simply thrown away. That’s roughly half the electorate who have no chance of making their vote count in the state where they live. Of course, they could move to a different state, in which case their vote would be thrown away for the opposite reason—lost as part of a superfluously large majority.

This is easy enough to explain to any rational person—but not to the vast majority of Americans, for whom such logic goes in one ear and comes out the other. In short, they are not rational. Worse than that, their leaders are not rational either. This brings us to the second point—that it doesn’t matter who is president.

Trump keeps talking about making America great—by bringing manufacturing back from China. Except that the opposite has happened over the past four years: China’s industrial production has continued to grow (although more slowly than before) while in the US it has continued to decline. Nor is is there any reason at all to think that this is going to change over the next four years.

Biden keeps talking about America continuing as the leader of the free world—except that America is no longer the leader of much of anything and there is no reason to think that anything can be done to reverse this slide. Thus, no matter who becomes (or remains) president, the US administration will continue to wallow in nostalgia while steadfastly refusing to admit defeat.

This defeat has multiple elements. First, the shale oil gamble is over. Drilling rates have collapsed, many shale oil companies are bankrupt, and US oil production is set to plummet from over 12 million barrels per day at its peak to around 5 million by next June (according to Art Berman, whose opinion I trust). After that point the US will once again become a major oil importer, and since no other swing producers are available this will drive up oil prices, perhaps beyond the previous all-time record of $150/barrel, resulting in a US oil import bill of half a trillion dollars a year. But it is doubtful whether that much extra oil can be produced at almost any price.

Second, national bankruptcy is looming ever closer. The federal government now overspends its revenues by a factor of two or more, meaning that for every dollar of federal revenue it borrows and spends at least two. Previously, despite its already ridiculous size and exponential growth rate, US federal debt could be given an appearance of legitimacy because enough foreign buyers could be found for it; but this is no longer the case. And so this debt is looking less and less legitimate because it is being monetized—simply printed into existence—as the Federal Reserve degenerates into a pure pyramid scheme.

Third, the US dollar (along with some other currencies to which it is tied) is poised on the edge of a hyperinflationary wipe-out. In an effort to shore up the economy a great deal of money has been unleashed into the economy and it went chasing after stocks, keeping it from triggering hyperinflation. Thus we have the truly bizarre combination of a record-high stock market along with record-high bankruptcies, foreclosures and evictions. At some point confidence in the stock market will evaporate and all of this notional money will go chasing after anything that isn’t made of paper (with the possible exception of toilet paper). Much of this notional money will evaporate as people liquidate their stock holdings, but enough will remain to result in hoarding and hyperinflation. The US dollar will devalue internationally and the US will lose access to imports.

Fourth, the US has lost its lead militarily, definitely to Russia and possibly to China and Iran. Its major military asset is its aircraft carrier fleet, which is by now completely useless because it can be destroyed using conventional weapons from a safe stand-off distance which is greater than the reach of its aircraft. Consequently, it cannot be deployed close enough to an enemy shore to make its aircraft useful. US military bases, hundreds of which are scattered all over the globe, but mostly clustered along Russia’s and China’s borders, are also useless militarily, as demonstrated by Iran’s rocket attacks against two of them in Iraq. In short, the entire US military is by now more of a liability than an asset—likely to draw the US into a military confrontation which it cannot win.

Now, do you hear these points discussed in the national media, in the course of the election campaign or otherwise? Do these points come up at all in conversations with colleagues, neighbors, friends and family? Are these topics of discussion in high school civics classes? (Wait, what high school civics classes?) No? And yet they are real, and their consequences are at this point unavoidable, and refusing to acknowledge them will only exacerbate their effects.

Collapse is bad enough when you and everyone around you can acknowledge it. But if everyone from the president (pick either one) to the lowliest convenience store clerk is incapable of accepting it as real and thinking through some of the immediate consequences, that makes it much, much worse. I refuse to accept any of the responsibility for this dreadful state of affairs; I’ve been doing all I can to warn people for a decade and a half now. It is now pointless for me to issue any more warnings. All I can do now is watch the inevitable unfold.

Power Is An Illusion, Control Is A Facade

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

This past year in numerous countries the public is being bombarded with lessons in power and control that have been forgotten for generations. I think the majority of westerners in particular have long believed themselves “safe” from totalitarian government, from collectivist micro-management and from communistic cultism. They thought we had moved beyond the nightmares of the 20th century. They thought that the “new world” was going to be more Utopian, and that freedom would grace us naturally along with technological progress.

Sure, in the back of everyone’s subconscious there is the fear that the good times are an illusion and that dystopia is just behind a thin veneer of economic stability and false optimism, but most people do not really think such catastrophes will happen in their lifetime. We are now in the midst of a deliberately over-hyped pandemic, strict national lockdowns, civil unrest, riots, aggressive tech censorship, intrusive government censorship, unprecedented corporate and treasury debt, stagflationary central bank stimulus and the collapse of massive financial bubbles. Yet, I still don’t get the impression that many in the public really grasp the extent of the danger; they still believe that the situation is going to heal itself without any effort or much sacrifice on their part.

This is the first lesson of power: Entire societies can be easily influenced when they suffer from delusions that the bad times will be fleeting, and that governments will keep them safe no matter what.

It is a historically proven pattern that governments tend to CREATE problems instead of solving them, and this is because the power dynamic of government never changes. The politicians we “vote” for are not in control, rather, the elites who fund their campaigns and who permeate their cabinets are in control. Political representatives come and go, but the establishment elites never leave. Therefore, the problems our society faces will remain; they are a direct result of the subversive and perpetual power structure that serves the interest of a select minority rather than the public. The decline of our society into tyranny will not stop until this power structure and the people behind it are erased.

This would actually be a simple thing to achieve if enough people were to accept the truth and take action. The elites, the globalists, the establishment, the “new world order”, whatever you want to call this organization of power mongers, is but a collection of mostly weak and feeble psychopaths and parasites. They are completely out in the open; they proudly proclaim their affiliations and intentions on a regular basis through their host institutions, from the Council on Foreign Relations to Tavistock to Bilderberg to the World Economic Forum, the IMF, the Bank for International Settlements, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, etc. There is very little that is hidden about these people anymore.

But, it is also a sad reality that most people have to hit rock bottom before they embrace the idea that they cannot rely on the corrupt system to save them from harm. And as long as they continue to have blind faith that the system will self correct, they will never act. The elites operate in the open with impunity because they know that human beings are more likely to seek out help from the system than they are to fix a problem for themselves. If someone was to switch off that single mass fantasy, the elites would be gone tomorrow.

The second lesson of power is that perception of consent creates legitimate consent. To put it another way – When people believe that their peers and neighbors have accepted a certain level of tyranny, they too will often accept it so that they don’t stand out or draw attention to themselves as “aberrant”. People seeking power only need to create the illusion of mass consent. Even when the majority of people are against them, the perception of compliance can sometimes overwhelm logic.

Control is usually achieved passively without force. Sometimes you don’t even need the threat of force; sometimes you only need to inspire a fear of standing out among the crowd.

For example, the pandemic has been used the past six months as a tool for creating such a narrative. Mask wearing “rules” are particularly insidious as they conjure illusions of compliance and submission. “Everyone” is wearing a mask, therefore everyone must support medical tyranny. Mask wearing is a complete farce when it comes to the actual science of virology and viral spread. The CDC still does not recommend cloth masks to their own employees and only allows them to use N95 filtered masks. A recent and censored Danish study confirms the reality that masks are mostly useless.

Strictly enforced cloth mask rules have done nothing to stop renewed spikes in infections in multiple countries and US states. The fact that in many places masks are required OUTDOORS despite endless scientific evidence showing that UV light and open air kills microorganisms including viruses shows that the lockdown response has nothing to do with science or saving lives. It is about control.

We can take all logical factors into account, but, for a lot of people, if they see others wearing masks they too will wear a mask simply because they are afraid to be judged by what they perceive to be the majority. The reality is that a majority of people are wearing the masks grudgingly, and they would take them off tomorrow if they knew other people would do the same.

This is why the mainstream media pushes mask wearing propaganda everyday, 24/7. News journalists stand on street corners or in open air parks and wear masks on camera. Politicians wear masks even when on camera in their own homes. Celebrities and companies try to sell the idea that mask wearing is “cool”. Hey, if you don’t wear a mask you could be putting hundreds or thousands of other people at risk and killing their grandmas, right?

The masks do nothing. They achieve nothing in terms of stopping the virus spread or saving lives. This is a fact made obvious by the very infection numbers the establishment holds up as a rationale for the masks. But if the establishment elites through propaganda can convince you to wear a mask everyday, then this opens the door to them dictating many other aspects of your life. The masks are just a gateway into more destructive mandates.

The solution to this type of tyranny is to stop caring what other people think, especially when the facts are on your side. In the town where I live, the vast majority of people have said no to the mask restrictions. If someone wants to wear a mask because they believe it will protect them, that’s fine. But, no one is going to tell us we have to wear them “for our own good”. That said, even if I was the ONLY person not wearing a mask around town, I would not care if it bothered others. Your credo has to be “try and force me to wear a mask, and watch what happens…”

The third lesson of power is that force only leads to control if you respond with submission. A group of people can beat you or even kill you, but they can’t force you to comply if you do not fear for your own life.

I find that the use of force by tyrants is predicated on the assumption that the people they are seeking to control will not fight back effectively. As soon as people do fight back effectively, the tyrant is shocked. Most tyrants rise to power, not because they have won multiple battles and subdued their opponents, but because they never had to fight in the first place. Or, they win a handful of easy battles, often staged to look more victorious than they really were, and then use those mediocre wins as a means to terrify all future opposition into not fighting. The tyrants start to believe their own lies and presume their own invincibility.

Predators do not seek out hard targets, they seek out weak targets. The solution to tyrants is for the hard targets to seek them out and strike them in the midst of their confidence. When predators get hit back they have a habit of running away.

But, this requires people who do not live in fear of what might happen when they fight back. The concept of sacrificing comfort (or much worse) can’t be an issue. Fear fades away when a person fights for something more than himself. It’s not always about personal survival, sometimes it’s about the survival of future generations, or the survival of a set of principles. As that fear disappears, so does the illusion of control that tyrants rely on.

The fourth lesson of power is that ideals either stem from human conscience, or they do not. And if they do not, then they are not ideals worth adopting or fighting over. The conscience of the average person is not as ambiguous and changeable as the establishment would like you to believe. A lion’s share of human beings operate on a certain set of inherent morals and principles that are universally shared; they do not need to be taught these principles, they are born knowing them. If these rules were not ingrained into our psyches our species would have self destructed thousands of years ago.

Establishment elites would like you to believe that all ideals are a product of environment, and that those who control the environment control the morals of the people by extension. This is a lie. Values such as freedom exist even in the most oppressive environments, and people seek it out even when the risk is overwhelming. Empathy is also inherent for most of us, but a certain percentage of people are born without the capacity for it. The REAL fight in the middle of any power struggle is the fight between those who are born with conscience, values and empathy, and those who are born without these grounding characteristics.

Psychopathic tyrants desperately want to prove that all other people are just as devoid of humanity and soul as they are. They want to prove that the voice of conscience that guides us is a mask we wear to pretend that we are not evil at our core. Control comes from the fallacy that we are dependent on our environments to tell us who we are as individuals. Control comes from the notion that morals are relative, and that principles are social constructs.

Conscience is inherent, but it is also a choice. You have the free will to listen to it, or ignore it. If a tyrant can convince you to ignore the voice of your own conscience then the only other guide in life is your environment. And, if that tyrant dominates every aspect of your environment, then he now has the power to rewrite your moral code, at least temporarily. You can be made to do terrible things you would not otherwise do, or support destructive causes and ideologies you would not otherwise support.

The ultimate totalitarian power is the power to make people forget their own inner voice. The ultimate tool against evil is to listen to that voice and to not be afraid of the supposed consequences.

The question of the facade of power is about to become the defining question of our epoch as the elitist establishment accelerates their agenda for greater centralized control of our lives. The truth they do not want you to understand is that they have no power. They have nothing. We could defy their mandates anytime we wish. We could do away with them tomorrow if we wanted. They are of no use to humanity, they serve no valuable purpose. They only seek to feed like vampires on the masses and fulfill their deranged fantasies of conquest. Sooner or later they will have to be dealt with – The sooner the better.