Category Archives: Psy-ops

The final battle for humanity: It is ‘Now or Never’ in the long war against homo sapiens

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By Robert J. Burrowes

While elite control over human societies started to gather pace with the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago, it was rapidly accelerated with the dawn of human civilization 7,000 years later. Since that time, ‘ordinary’ human beings like you and me have fought an unending sequence of battles to defend ourselves against these ongoing efforts by elites to kill or control us and capture the bulk of Earth’s resources for their own use.

We have had to fight off elites in a vast range of contexts: Pharaohs and Emperors politically, the Popes and other Vatican officials religiously, the City of London Corporation and other financial elites economically, monarchs and political elites nationally, and now a Global Elite that exercises enormous control technologically, economically, politically, militarily and otherwise over the entire world. For a fuller explanation of this point, see ‘Why Activists Fail’.

But there is a profound difference between all of the battles in earlier eras and the one we are in now.

If we lose this battle, there will be no subsequent battle. The Long War against humanity will have been lost, once and for all.

Why? Because this battle is for everything that it means to be human – human identity, human freedom, human rights, privacy, dignity, free will and anything else that makes life worth living – and for control of the Earth and all its resources.

And while it is true that no human has any of these elements in anything like its entirety – who would claim to be fully ‘free’ in this world? – and many humans still lack all of these elements in any meaningful form, it is nevertheless true that the totalitarian nature of the program being imposed on us will transform the very concept of ‘human’ in a way that has only been conceived in the past 100 years or so and not previously attempted. Moreover, if successful, any ‘free will’ that humans might still possess will be utterly eliminated.

How is this Happening? The Deep Level

Despite the unending efforts of those people aware enough to perceive the true depth of this conflict, elites have been able to use a long series of techniques to ensure that the vast bulk of ‘ordinary’ people either do not perceive the conflict or waste their dissent by expressing it within frameworks designed and controlled by elites for that precise purpose. By doing this, it appears that dissent is ‘allowed’ and valued when, in fact, it is simply dissipated.

Thus, one key way in which elites have been able to subdue effective resistance is to convince us to believe in the delusion of ‘democracy’: to make us believe the twin delusions that we actually make choices about who will govern us and that those we elect will then represent us. See ‘Killing Democracy Once and for All: The Global Elite’s Coup d’état That Is Destroying Life as We Know It’.

A second way in which elites have been able to distract us from where the real power in society lies is by convincing us that we have ‘legal recourse’ against injustice, including against elites who kill and exploit us. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

A third way in which elites retain control over societies is by designing compulsory education systems that ensure that whatever unique emotional, intellectual, sensory and physical potential a child has at birth is either utterly eliminated within a few years of that birth or channeled to serve elite will. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

And, of course, elites control populations by using extensive propaganda – marketed variously as ‘education’, ‘entertainment’ and ‘news’ – to ensure the passive submission of the bulk of the population to elite directives.

In short, an unending sequence of violence – ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ – is used to terrorize the individual throughout childhood and adolescence into submissive obedience. This violence ensures that only a rare individual survives with any sense of ‘Self’, with the capacity to critique society and resist violence and exploitation strategically. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So here we are in 2022, deeply engaged in the final battle to defend humanity, with most of the population unaware of what is happening and the bulk of those who are aware dissipating their dissent through elite-controlled channels.

Hence, as the World Economic Forum puts it so clearly in one of its promotional videos: By 2030, ‘You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.’ See ‘8 predictions for the world in 2030’.

And that could well become true for the simple reason that key measures of the transformation taking place are shifting wealth from those with less to those who will shortly own everything, including you, as Dr Joseph Mercola points out – see ‘Who Will Eventually Own Everything, Including You?’ – and the technologies that will destroy your volition will also remove any concept of happiness.

In short, a transhuman slave needs nothing and experiences only those emotions that are programmed. A transhuman slave, whether as worker, soldier or consumer, will simply perform its programmed tasks until it is no longer functional and is ‘decommissioned’.

A human being without free will cannot resist because they do not know that they are enslaved.

How is this Happening? The Superficial Level

Well, under cover of a ‘virus’ that has never been isolated (and hence proven to exist) – see ‘COVID-19: The virus does not exist – it is confirmed!’, ‘Statement On Virus Isolation (SOVI)’ and ‘187 health/science institutions globally all failed to cite even 1 record of “SARS-COV-2” purification, by anyone, anywhere, ever’ – the Global Elite has been implementing its final ‘kill and control’ agenda via the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ which details changes to some 200 areas of human life. See ‘The Great Reset’. As a matter of interest, do you remember being consulted about whether, for example, you would prefer to eat laboratory-grown ‘meat’ and insects rather than real food?

In fact, this ‘Great Reset’ is a long-planned and complex series of actions designed to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population and leave those left alive as transhuman slaves in a technocratic world. For some detail, see ‘The Global Elite’s “Kill and Control” Agenda: Destroying Our Food Security’ and ‘Sleepwalking into Hell: The Global Elite’s Technological Coup d’état Against Humanity’.

Every day, while most people content themselves with trying to get on with living some version of the life that they experienced prior to 2020, another detail is mapped out and another measure is taken by compliant politicians in one or more countries around the world to destroy everything we have ever known. And the noose is ever-tightening.

Let me offer you just a taste of what else is happening, beyond what is ordinarily discussed as part of the ‘Great Reset’, as elements of the Global Elite’s agenda, about which you are not being consulted or even given thoughtful critiques to consider in government and corporate media.

The World Health Organization: International Health Regulations & the Pandemic Treaty

The World  Health Organization continues to promote its initiative to create a ‘Pandemic Treaty’. Using wonderful-sounding words such as ‘to build a more robust global health architecture that will protect future generations’, the Treaty sounds like something we have all been dreaming about. See ‘Global leaders unite in urgent call for international pandemic treaty’.

But like all elite initiatives of this nature, the devil is in the detail and, often enough, hidden in plain sight. Rather than offer a detailed critique here, you can consider several fine critiques by thoughtful scholars in the following articles or videos:

James Roguski: ‘These proposed amendments will cede additional sovereignty, control and legal authority over to the World Health Organization.’ See ‘WAKE UP and Smell the Burning of Our Constitution’.

Kit Knightly: The ‘Pandemic Treaty’ would ‘hand supranational powers to an unelected bureaucrat or “expert”, who could exercise them entirely at his own discretion and on completely subjective criteria. This is the very definition of technocratic globalism.’ See ‘“Pandemic Treaty” will hand WHO keys to global government’.

Tessa Lena: ‘the proposed World Health Organization pandemic treaty… can potentially eradicate national sovereignty as we know it’. See ‘WHO Pandemic Treaty and the Banality of Evil’.

Dr Joseph Mercola: ‘Make no mistake, the WHO pandemic treaty is a direct attack on the sovereignty of its member states, as well as a direct attack on your bodily autonomy.’ See ‘The WHO Pandemic Treaty. A Backdoor to Global Governance: “Stripping Away Individual Rights and Liberties”’.

Professor Anthony J. Hall: ‘The creation of such a treaty would strip away jurisdiction from national, state, and provincial governments. Elected governments would cede away the right to formulate local health care policies through democratic means in the public interest.’ See ‘“Financial Reset” and Economic Warfare against Humanity: How Global Relations Should Be Restructured to Ensure National Sovereignty’.

But it would be unwise to ascribe too much significance to these latest, ongoing encroachments on national sovereignty. As explained above, the Global Elite has long exercised control over national governments (as well as international organizations) and the ongoing formalization of this process through the various measures outlined immediately above are simply the latest (health) details in this long-standing process.

Consequently, rather than focusing our resistance on these latest details by, yet again, falling for the trap of lobbying elite agents, as suggested by organizations such as the World Council for Health – see ‘#StopTheWHO: How You Can Take a Stand Against International Health Regulation Amendments’ – it is superior strategy to focus our resistance on the entire elite agenda by undermining elite power at its source.

World Government Summit

The World Government Summit was held in Dubai on 29-30 March 2022. See ‘World Government Summit 2022’. The event was sponsored and hosted by the United Arab Emirates, that bastion of ruthless dictatorship and human rights abuses – see ‘United Arab Emirates 2021’ – and brought together ‘thought leaders, global experts and decision makers from around the globe to share and contribute to the development of tools, policies, and models that are essential in shaping future governments.’ See ‘World Government Summit 2022’.

‘The World Government Summit community is an opportunity for thought-leaders from the public and private sectors to join forces with world-renowned experts to design a better life for citizens across the world. Through Memberships and Partnerships, the Summit brings together change makers to shape a better future for humanity.’ See ‘World Government Summit: Community’.

It is reassuring to know that the WGS felt that the views of constituencies of ‘ordinary’ people – women, indigenous peoples, working people, the poor, the homeless, the unemployed, farmers, non-white peoples, religious people… – were not required and that the ‘world renowned experts’ were quite capable of designing ‘a better life for citizens across the world’ without even consulting us. Surely, after all, these high profile people fully understand the daily struggles of those who battle to survive, have a different worldview or are just simply not white, wealthy and ‘well-connected’.

In any case, as the host country’s long record reminds us, human rights are to be eviscerated in the world that is now being introduced, which is why those attending the Summit were obviously very supportive of the UAE’s ruthless approach to human rights.

As Derrick Broze noted in his thoughtful critique of this gathering: ‘Anyone with a functioning brain should… pay attention to this little known gathering of globalist Technocrats… [who] imagine a world where the tyrannical technological systems are invisible and the average person has zero recourse for preventing exclusion or punishment based on their social credit score.’ See ‘While You Were Distracted by Will Smith, the International Elitists Met at The World Government Summit’.

The Great Narrative

The Great Narrative was a forum sponsored by the World Economic Forum from 10-13 November 2021. According to the WEF: It was ‘a collaborative effort of the world’s leading thinkers to fashion longer-term perspectives and co-create a narrative that can help guide the creation of a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable vision for our collective future.’ The gathering involved ‘Top thinkers from a variety of geographies and disciplines – including futurists, scientists and philosophers – [to] contribute fresh ideas for the future.’ See ‘The Great Narrative’.

Again, perhaps like me, you find it difficult to identify with the people at this gathering. I wonder if they could see things from your perspective? Or mine?

The good news is that Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, authors of the original book on Covid-19: The Great Reset, also wrote a book about The Great Narrative: For a Better Future. So at least you can read what they are doing to you and plan to do to you. As long as you can read between the lines.

But, again, Derrick Broze has been kind enough to offer a thoughtful critique:

Authoritarians use great narratives to legitimize their own power, and they do this by claiming to have knowledge and understanding that speaks to a universal truth…. With this understanding, the WEF’s call for a ‘Great Narrative’ should be seen for what it truly is – an attempt to displace all other visions of the future of humankind by placing the WEF and their partners at the heart of a narrative which paints them as the heroes of our time. This fits perfectly with the Technocratic philosophy employed by WEF founder Klaus Schwab. He envisions a future where ‘public-private partnerships’ of government and private business and so-called philanthropies use their wealth, influence, and power to design the future they believe is best for humanity. In actuality, the Technocrat philosophy merges with a Transhumanist mindset that sees humanity as limited, flawed, and in need of augmentation by technology in order to accelerate what Schwab calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution…. Of course, for Schwab and other globalists, the 4IR also lends itself towards more central planning and top-down control. The goal is a track and trace society where all transactions are logged, every person has a digital ID that can be tracked, and social malcontents are locked out of society via social credit scores. See ‘The Great Narrative and The Metaverse, Part 1: A Dystopian Vision of the Future’.

Sound like the sort of world that will be good for you?

Defeating the Global Elite’s Agenda

As you ponder the enormity of this elite project, I hope it will encourage you to deeply consider what meaningful resistance in this context will entail. We cannot succeed if we beg elite agents, including politicians, to fix it for us. In the last 18 months, five presidents who resisted the elite-driven narrative have been assassinated to remind us of that.

A Global Elite that is criminally insane – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – is dealing with us ruthlessly and comprehensively.

So resisting it effectively and, ultimately, defeating its agenda, will require focused, strategic action that undermines the power of the Elite to implement its plan.

If you are interested in being part of this strategy, you can read how to do so on the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’website which offers further analysis, resources and a list of 29 strategic goals for doing so.

This includes campaigning to cause all sectors of society to refuse to develop and make available, or to purchase/use, technologies associated with the fourth industrial revolution and transhumanism (including 5G and 6G, military weapons, artificial intelligence [AI], big data, nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things [IoT], and quantum computing) because these technologies will subvert human identity, human freedom, human dignity, human volition and/or human privacy. See ‘Strategic Goals related to resisting the fourth industrial revolution and/or transhumanism’.

Beyond this it involves engaging with frontline personnel – ranging from police, the military (as well as veterans) and firefighters to healthcare professionals as well as emergency call-takers – to not enforce elite directives that are being implemented by governments. For just a few examples of frontline worker organizations already resisting part or all of the elite program, see Police for Freedom, Global Veterans Alliance, World Doctors Alliance, Operation Freedom of Choice, Australian Firefighters Alliance and Bravest For Choice.

In addition and more simply, you can download a one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 15 languages (Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish & Slovak) with more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.

Notably, these latter actions avoid certain problems. Because they involve actions by people dispersed throughout the population, rather than people concentrated in one location (as with rallies), they are extremely difficult to interrupt. Hence, they virtually eliminate the risk of violent repression.

If strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link available from the website).

Conclusion

The insane Global Elite has launched the final stage of a long-planned program to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population and enslave those left alive. They have agents (including international organizations such as the UN and WHO, politicians, medical personnel, government and corporate media) throughout society playing a part in implementing this program on their behalf.

If we are to defeat this program we must mobilize sufficient thoughtful and courageous people to act strategically to undermine the power of the Global Elite to inflict this program upon us. This can be done as described above.

As you ponder your involvement, remember this. If we do not fight successfully now to defend our humanity, no human being will have the opportunity to fight in future. It is ‘now or never’ for us all.

In that sense, this is the final battle.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ . His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

Biden Wanted $33B More For Ukraine. Congress Quickly Raised it to $40B. Who Benefits?

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US President Joe Biden speaks about the conflict in Ukraine during a visit to the Lockheed Martins Pike County Operations facility on May 3, 2022 (Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)

Tens of billions, soon to be much more, are flying out of U.S. coffers to Ukraine as Americans suffer, showing who runs the U.S. Government, and for whose benefit.

By Glenn Greenwald

Source: Substack

From the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the Biden White House has repeatedly announced large and seemingly random amounts of money that it intends to send to fuel the war in Ukraine. The latest such dispatch, pursuant to an initial $3.5 billion fund authorized by Congress early on, was announced on Friday; “Biden says U.S. will send $1.3 billion in additional military and economic support to Ukraine,” read the CNBC headline. This was preceded by a series of new lavish spending packages for the war, unveiled every two to three weeks, starting on the third day of the war:

  • Feb. 26: “Biden approves $350 million in military aid for Ukraine”: Reuters;
  • Mar. 16: “Biden announces $800 million in military aid for Ukraine”: The New York Times;
  • Mar. 30: “Ukraine to receive additional $500 million in aid from U.S., Biden announces”: NBC News;
  • Apr. 12: “U.S. to announce $750 million more in weapons for Ukraine, officials say”: Reuters;
  • May 6: “Biden announces new $150 million weapons package for Ukraine”: Reuters.

Those amounts by themselves are in excess of $3 billion; by the end of April, the total U.S. expenditure on the war in Ukraine was close to $14 billion, drawn from the additional $13.5 billion Congress authorized in mid-March. While some of that is earmarked for economic and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine, most of it will go into the coffers of the weapons industry — including Raytheon, on whose Board of Directors the current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, sat immediately before being chosen by Biden to run the Pentagon. As CNN put it: “about $6.5 billion, roughly half of the aid package, will go to the US Department of Defense so it can deploy troops to the region and send defense equipment to Ukraine.”

As enormous as those sums already are, they were dwarfed by the Biden administration’s announcement on April 28 that it “is asking Congress for $33 billion in funding to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more than double the $14 billion in support authorized so far.” The White House itself acknowledges that the vast majority of that new spending package will go to the purchase of weaponry and other military assets: “$20.4 billion in additional security and military assistance for Ukraine and for U.S. efforts to strengthen European security in cooperation with our NATO allies and other partners in the region.”

It is difficult to put into context how enormous these expenditures are — particularly since the war is only ten weeks old, and U.S. officials predict/hope that this war will last not months but years. That ensures that the ultimate amounts will be significantly higher still.

The amounts allocated thus far — the new Biden request of $33 billion combined with the $14 billion already spent — already exceed the average annual amount the U.S. spent for its own war in Afghanistan ($46 billion). In the twenty-year U.S. war in Afghanistan which ended just eight months ago, there was at least some pretense of a self-defense rationale given the claim that the Taliban had harbored Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda at the time of the 9/11 attack. Now the U.S. will spend more than that annual average after just ten weeks of a war in Ukraine that nobody claims has any remote connection to American self-defense.

Even more amazingly, the total amount spent by the U.S. on the Russia/Ukraine war in less than three months is close to Russia’s total military budget for the entire year ($65.9 billion). While Washington depicts Russia as some sort of grave and existential menace to the U.S., the reality is that the U.S. spends more than ten times on its military what Russia spends on its military each year; indeed, the U.S. spends three times more than the second-highest military spender, China, and more than the next twelve countries combined.

But as gargantuan as Biden’s already-spent and newly requested sums are — for a ten-week war in which the U.S. claims not to be a belligerent — it was apparently woefully inadequate in the eyes of the bipartisan establishment in Congress, who is ostensibly elected to serve the needs and interests of American citizens, not Ukrainians. Leaders of both parties instantly decreed that Biden’s $33 billion request was not enough. They thus raised it to $40 billion — a more than 20% increase over the White House’s request — and are now working together to create an accelerated procedure to ensure immediate passage and disbursement of these weapons and funds to the war zone in Ukraine. “Time is of the essence – and we cannot afford to wait,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a letter to House members, adding: “This package, which builds on the robust support already secured by Congress, will be pivotal in helping Ukraine defend not only its nation but democracy for the world.” (See update below).

We have long ago left the realm of debating why it is in the interest of American citizens to pour our country’s resources into this war, to say nothing of risking a direct war and possibly catastrophic nuclear escalation with Russia, the country with the largest nuclear stockpile, with the US close behind. Indeed, one could argue that the U.S. government entered this war and rapidly escalated its involvement without this critical question — which should be fundamental to any policy decision of the U.S. government — being asked at all.

This omission — a failure to address how the interests of ordinary Americans are served by the U.S. government’s escalating role in this conflict — is particularly glaring given the steadfast and oft-stated view of former President Barack Obama that Ukraine is and always will be of vital interest to Russia, but is not of vital interest to the U.S. For that reason, Obama repeatedly resisted bipartisan demands that he send lethal arms to Ukraine, a step he was deeply reluctant to take due to his belief that the U.S. should not provoke Moscow over an interest as remote as Ukraine (ironically, Trump — who was accused by the U.S. media for years of being a Kremlin asset, controlled by Putin through blackmail — did send lethal arms to Ukraine despite how provocative doing so was to Russia).

While it is extremely difficult to isolate any benefit to ordinary American citizens from all of this, it requires no effort to see that there is a tiny group of Americans who do benefit greatly from this massive expenditure of funds. That is the industry of weapons manufacturers. So fortunate are they that the White House has met with them on several occasions to urge them to expand their capacity to produce sophisticated weapons so that the U.S. government can buy them in massive quantities:

Top U.S. defense officials will meet with the chief executives of the eight largest U.S. defense contractors to discuss industry’s capacity to meet Ukraine’s weapons needs if the war with Russia continues for years.

Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told reporters Tuesday she plans to participate in a classified roundtable with defense CEOs on Wednesday to discuss “what can we do to help them, what do they need to generate supply”….

“We will discuss industry proposals to accelerate production of existing systems and develop new, modernized capabilities critical to the Department’s ongoing security assistance to Ukraine and long-term readiness of U.S. and ally/partner forces,” the official added.

On May 3, Biden visited a Lockheed Martin facility (see lead photo) and “praised the… plant that manufactures Javelin anti-tank missiles, saying their work was critical to the Ukrainian war effort and to the defense of democracy itself.”

Indeed, by transferring so much military equipment to Ukraine, the U.S. has depleted its own stockpiles, necessitating their replenishment with mass government purchases. One need not be a conspiracy theorist to marvel at the great fortune of this industry, having lost their primary weapons market just eight months ago when the U.S. war in Afghanistan finally ended, only to now be gifted with an even greater and more lucrative opportunity to sell their weapons by virtue of the protracted and always-escalating U.S. role in Ukraine. Raytheon, the primary manufacturer of Javelins along with Lockheed, has been particularly fortunate that its large stockpile, no longer needed for Afghanistan, is now being ordered in larger-than-ever quantities by its former Board member, now running the Pentagon, for shipment to Ukraine. Their stock prices have bulged nicely since the start of the war:

But how does any of this benefit the vast majority of Americans? Does that even matter? As of 2020, almost 30 million Americans are without any health insurance. Over the weekend, USA Today warned of “the ongoing infant formula shortage,” in which “nearly 40% of popular baby formula brands were sold out at retailers across the U.S. during the week starting April 24.” So many Americans are unable to afford college for their children that close to a majority are delaying plans or eliminating them all together. Meanwhile, “monthly poverty remained elevated in February 2022, with a 14.4 percent poverty rate for the total US population….Overall, 6 million more individuals were in poverty in February relative to December.” The latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau found that “approximately 42.5 million Americans [are] living below the poverty line.” Americans with diabetes often struggle to buy life-saving insulin. And on and on and on.

Now, if the U.S. were invaded or otherwise attacked by another country, or its vital interests were directly threatened, one would of course expect the U.S. government to expend large sums in order to protect and defend the national security of the country and its citizens. But can anyone advance a cogent argument, let alone a persuasive one, that Americans are somehow endangered by the war in Ukraine? Clearly, they are far more endangered by the U.S. response to the war in Ukraine than the war itself; after all, a nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Russia has long been ranked by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as one of the two greatest threats facing humanity.

One would usually expect the American left, or whatever passes it for these days, to be indignant about the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars for weapons while ordinary Americans suffer. But the American left, such that it exists, is barely visible when it comes to debates over the war in Ukraine, while American liberals stand in virtual unity with the establishment wing of the Republican Party behind the Biden administration in support for the escalating U.S. role in the war in Ukraine. A few stray voices (such as Noam Chomsky) have joined large parts of the international left in urging a diplomatic solution in lieu of war and criticizing Biden for insufficient efforts to forge one, but the U.S. left and American liberals are almost entirely silent if not supportive.

That has left the traditionally left-wing argument about war opposition to the populist right. “You can’t find baby formula in the United States right now but Congress is voting today to send $40 billion to Ukraine,” said Donald Trump, Jr. on Tuesday, echoing what one would expect to hear from the 2016 version of Bernie Sanders or the pre-victory AOC. “In the America LAST $40 BILLION Ukraine FIRST bill that we are voting on tonight, there is authorization for funds to be given to the CIA for who knows what and who knows how much? But NO BABY FORMULA for American mothers!” explained Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Christian Walker, the conservative influencer and son of GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker in Georgia, today observed: “Biden should go apply to be the President of Ukraine since he clearly cares more about them than the U.S.” Chomsky himself caused controversy last week when he said that there is only one statesman of any stature in the West urging a diplomatic solution “and his name is Donald J. Trump.”

Meanwhile, the only place where dissent is heard over the Biden administration’s war policy is on the 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. programs on Fox News, hosted, respectively, by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, who routinely demand to know how ordinary Americans are benefiting from this increasing U.S. involvement. On CNN, NBC, and in the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, there is virtually lockstep unity in favor of the U.S. role in this war; the only question that is permitted, as usual, is whether the U.S. is doing enough or whether it should do more.

That the U.S. has no legitimate role to play in this war, or that its escalating involvement comes at the expense of American citizens, the people they are supposed to be serving, provokes immediate accusations that one is spreading Russian propaganda and is a Kremlin agent. That is therefore an anti-war view that is all but prohibited in those corporate liberal media venues. Meanwhile, mainstream Democratic House members, such as Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), are now openly talking about the war in Ukraine as if it is the U.S.’s own:

Whatever else is true, the claim with which we are bombarded by the corporate press — the two parties agree on nothing; they are constantly at each other’s throats; they have radically different views of the world — is patently untrue, at least when it comes time for the U.S. to join in new wars. Typically, what we see in such situations is what we are seeing now: the establishment wings of both parties are in complete lockstep unity, always breathlessly supporting the new proposed U.S. role in any new war, eager to empty the coffers of the U.S. Treasury and transfer it to the weapons industry while their constituents suffer.

One can believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is profoundly unjust and has produced horrific outcomes while still questioning what legitimate interests the U.S. has in participating in this war to this extent. Even if one fervently believes that helping Ukrainians fight Russia is a moral good, surely the U.S. government should be prioritizing the ability of its own citizens to live above the poverty line, have health insurance, send their kids to college, and buy insulin and baby formula.

There are always horrific wars raging, typically with a clear aggressor, but that does not mean that the U.S. can or should assume responsibility for the war absent its own vital interests and the interests of its citizens being directly at stake. In what conceivable sense are American citizens benefiting from this enormous expenditure of their resources and the increasing energy and attention being devoted by their leaders to Ukraine rather than to their lives and the multi-pronged deprivations that define them?

CORRECTION (May 10, 2022, 20:47 pm ET): This article was edited shortly after publication to reflect that Russia’s total annual military budget is $65.9 billion, not $65.9 million.

UPDATE (May 10, 2022, 22:39 pm ET): Shortly after publication of this article, the $40 billion package for the war in Ukraine passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 368-57. According to CNN: “All 57 votes in opposition were from Republicans.”

US – UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War on Independent Media

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British and American state intelligence agencies are “weaponizing truth” to quash vaccine hesitancy as both nations prepare for mass inoculations, in a recently announced “cyber war” to be commanded by AI-powered arbiters of truth against information sources that challenge official narratives.

By Whitney Webb

Source: Unlimited Hangout

In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 “war on terror” are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting “vaccine hesitancy” and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives. 

A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda” that raises concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved. 

Similar efforts are underway in the United States, with the US military recently funding a CIA-backed firm—stuffed with former counterterrorism officials who were behind the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State—to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis and the US military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed.

Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s end. 

Pfizer’s history of being fined billions for illegal marketing and for bribing government officials to help them cover up an illegal drug trial that killed eleven children (among other crimes) has gone unmentioned by most mass media outlets, which instead have celebrated the apparently imminent approval of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine without questioning the company’s history or that the mRNA technology used in the vaccine has sped through normal safety trial protocols and has never been approved for human use. Also unmentioned is that the head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is the former Pfizer vice president for product safety who covered up the connection of one of its products to birth defects.

Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the US and UK national-security states, which themselves are intimately involved in the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor. 

UK Intelligence’s New Cyberwar Targeting “Anti-Vaccine Propaganda”

On Monday, the UK newspaper The Times reported that the UK’s GCHQ “has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states” and “is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State” to do so. In addition, the UK government has ordered the British military’s 77th Brigade, which specializes in “information warfare,” to launch an online campaign to counter “deceptive narratives” about Covid-19 vaccine candidates.

The newly announced GCHQ “cyber war” will not only take down “anti-vaccine propaganda” but will also seek to “disrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.”  The effort will also involve GCHQ reaching out to other countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance (US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to alert their partner agencies in those countries to target such “propaganda” sites hosted within their borders.

The Times stated that “the government regards tackling false information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to approval.

It seems that, from the perspective of the UK national-security state, those who question corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and its possible impact on the leading experimental Covid-19 vaccine candidates (all of which use experimental vaccine technologies that have never before been approved for human use) should be targeted with tools originally designed to combat terrorist propaganda. 

While The Times asserted that the effort would target content “that originated only from state adversaries” and would not target the sites of “ordinary citizens,” the newspaper suggested that the effort would rely on the US government for determining whether or not a site is part of a “foreign disinformation” operation. 

This is highly troubling given that the US recently seized the domains of many sites, including the American Herald Tribune, which it erroneously labeled as “Iranian propaganda,” despite its editor in chief, Anthony Hall, being based in Canada. The US government made this claim about the American Herald Tribune after the cybersecurity firm FireEye, a US government contractor, stated that it had “moderate confidence” that the site had been “founded in Iran.” 

In addition, the fact that GCHQ has alleged that most of the sites it plans to target are “linked to Moscow” gives further cause for concern given that the UK government was caught funding the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative, which falsely labeled critics of the UK government’s actions as well as its narratives with respect to the Syria conflict as being related to “Russian disinformation” campaigns.

Given this precedent, it is certainly plausible that GCHQ could take the word of either an allied government, a government contractor, or perhaps even an allied media organization such as Bellingcat or the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab that a given site is “foreign propaganda” in order to launch a cyber offensive against it. Such concerns are only amplified when one of the main government sources for The Times article bluntly stated that “GCHQ has been told to take out antivaxers [sic] online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda,” which suggests that the targets of GCHQ’s new cyber war will, in fact, be determined by the content itself rather than their suspected “foreign” origin. The “foreign” aspect instead appears to be a means of evading the prohibition in GCHQ’s operational mandate on targeting the speech or websites of ordinary citizens.

This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism. 

Ahmed told the UK newspaper The Independent in July that “I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism,” thereby implying that “anti-vaxxers” might engage in acts of violent extremism. Among the websites cited by Ahmed’s organization as promoting such “extremism” that poses a “national security risk” were Children’s Health Defense, the National Vaccine Information Center, Informed Consent Action Network, and Mercola.com, among others.

Similarly, a think tank tied to US intelligence—whose GCHQ equivalent, the National Security Agency, will take part in the newly announced “cyber war”—argued in a research paper published just months before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis that “the US ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement would pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic with a novel organism.’”

InfraGard, “a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and members of the private sector,” warned in the paper published last June that “the US anti-vaccine movement would also be connected with ‘social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns’ orchestrated by the Russian government,” as cited by The Guardian. The InfraGard paper further claimed that prominent “anti-vaxxers” are aligned “with other conspiracy movements including the far right . . . and social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns by many foreign and domestic actors. Included among these actors is the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government–aligned organization.”

An article published just last month by the Washington Post argued that “vaccine hesitancy is mixing with coronavirus denial and merging with far-right American conspiracy theories, including Qanon,” which the FBI named a potential domestic terror threat last year. The article quoted Peter Hotez, dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, as saying “The US anti-vaccination movement is globalizing and it’s going toward more-extremist tendencies.”

It is worth pointing out that many so-called “anti-vaxxers” are actually critics of the pharmaceutical industry and are not necessarily opposed to vaccines in and of themselves, making the labels “anti-vaxxer” and “anti-vaccine” misleading. Given that many pharmaceutical giants involved in making Covid-19 vaccines donate heavily to politiciansin both countries and have been involved in numerous safety scandals, using state intelligence agencies to wage cyber war against sites that investigate such concerns is not only troubling for the future of journalism but it suggests that the UK is taking a dangerous leap toward becoming a country that uses its state powers to treat the enemies of corporations as enemies of the state.

The CIA-Backed Firm “Weaponizing Truth” with AI

In early October, the US Air Force and US Special Operations Command announced that they had awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to the US-based “machine intelligence” company Primer. Per the press release, “Primer will develop the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation [emphasis added]. Primer will also enhance its natural language processing platform to automatically analyze tactical events to provide commanders with unprecedented insight as events unfold in near real-time.”

According to Primer, the company “builds software machines that read and write in English, Russian, and Chinese to automatically unearth trends and patterns across large volumes of data,” and their work “supports the mission of the intelligence community and broader DOD by automating reading and research tasks to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making.” In other words, Primer is developing an algorithm that would allow the national-security state to outsource many military and intelligence analyst positions to AI. In fact, the company openly admits this, stating that their current effort “will automate the work typically done by dozens of analysts in a security operations center to ingest all of the data relevant to an event as it happens and funnel it into a unified user interface.”

Primer’s ultimate goal is to use their AI to entirely automate the shaping of public perceptions and become the arbiter of “truth,” as defined by the state. Primer’s founder, Sean Gourley, who previously created AI programs for the military to track “insurgency” in post-invasion Iraq, asserted in an April blog post that “computational warfare and disinformation campaigns will, in 2020, become a more serious threat than physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we deploy to fight them.” 

In that same post, Gourley argued for the creation of a “Manhattan Project for truth” that would create a publicly available Wikipedia-style database built off of “knowledge bases [that] already exist inside many countries’ intelligence agencies for national security purposes.” Gourley then wrote that “this effort would be ultimately about building and enhancing our collective intelligence and establishing a baseline for what’s true or not” as established by intelligence agencies. He concludes his blog post by stating that “in 2020, we will begin to weaponize truth.”

Notably, on November 9, the same day that GCHQ announced its plans to target “anti-vaccine propaganda,” the US website NextGov reported that Primer’s Pentagon-funded effort had turned its attention specifically to “Covid-19 related disinformation.” According to Primer’s director of science, John Bohannon, “Primer will be integrating bot detection, synthetic text detection and unstructured textual claims analysis capabilities into our existing artificial intelligence platform currently in use with DOD. . . . This will create the first unified mission-ready platform to effectively counter Covid-19-related disinformation in near-real time.”

Bohannon, who previously worked as a mainstream journalist embedded with NATO forces in Afghanistan, also told NextGov that Primer’s new Covid-19–focused effort “automatically classifies documents into one of 10 categories to enable the detection of the impact of COVID” on areas such as “business, science and technology, employment, the global economy, and elections.” The final product is expected to be delivered to the Pentagon in the second quarter of next year.

Though a so-called private company, Primer is deeply linked to the national-security state it is designed to protect by “weaponizing truth.” Primer proudly promotes itself as having more than 15 percent of its staff hailing from the US intelligence community or military. The director of the company’s National Security Group is Brian Raymond, a former CIA intelligence officer who served as the Director for Iraq on the US National Security Council after leaving the agency. 

The company also recently added several prominent national-security officials to its board including:

  • Gen. Raymond Thomas (ret.), who led the command of all US and NATO Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and is the former commander of both US Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
  • Lt. Gen. VeraLinn Jamieson (ret.), the former deputy chief of staff for Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance who led the Air Force’s intelligence and cyber forces. She also personally developed “strategic partnerships” between the Air Force and Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM in order “to accelerate the Air Force’s digital transformation.”
  • Brett McGurk, one of the “chief architects” of the Iraq War “surge,” alongside the notorious Kagan family, as NSC Director for Iraq, and then as special assistant to the president and senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration. Under Obama and during part of the Trump administration, McGurk was the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the State Department, helping to manage the “dirty war” waged by the US, the UK, and other allies against Syria.

In addition to those recent board hires, Primer brought on Sue Gordon, the former principal deputy director of National Intelligence, as a strategic adviser. Gordon previously “drove partnerships within the US Intelligence Community and provided advice to the National Security Council in her role as deputy director of national intelligence” and had a twenty-seven-year career at the CIA. The deep links are unsurprising, given that Primer is financially backed by the CIA’s venture-capital arm In-Q-Tel and the venture-capital arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg, Bloomberg Beta.

Operation Warp Speed’s Disinformation Blitzkrieg   

The rapid increase in interest by the US and UK national-security states toward Covid-19 “disinformation,” particularly as it relates to upcoming Covid-19 vaccination campaigns, is intimately related to the media-engagement strategy of the US government’s Operation Warp Speed. 

Officially a “public-private partnership,” Operation Warp Speed, which has the goal of vaccinating 300 million Americans by next January, is dominated by the US military and also involves several US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as intelligence-linked tech giants Google, Oracle, and Palantir. Several reports published in The Last American Vagabondby this author and journalist Derrick Broze have revealed the extreme secrecy of the operation, its numerous conflicts of interest, and its deep ties to Silicon Valley and Orwellian technocratic initiatives. 

Warp Speed’s official guidance discusses at length its phased plan for engaging the public and addressing issues of “vaccine hesitancy.” According to the Warp Speed document entitled “From the Factory to the Frontlines,” “strategic communications and public messaging are critical to ensure maximum acceptance of vaccines, requiring a saturation of messaging across the national media.” It also states that “working with established partners—especially those that are trusted sources for target audiences—is critical to advancing public understanding of, access to, and acceptance of eventual vaccines” and that “identifying the right messages to promote vaccine confidence, countering misinformation, and targeting outreach to vulnerable and at-risk populations will be necessary to achieve high coverage.”

The document also notes that Warp Speed will employ the CDC’s three-pronged strategic framework for its communications effort. The third pillar of that strategy is entitled “Stop Myths” and has as a main focus “establish[ing] partnerships to contain the spread of misinformation” as well as “work[ing] with local partners and trusted messengers to improve confidence in vaccines.”

Though that particular Warp Speed document is short on specifics, the CDC’s Covid-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook contains additional information. It states that Operation Warp Speed will “engage and use a wide range of partners, collaborations, and communication and news media channels to achieve communication goals, understanding that channel preferences and credible sources vary among audiences and people at higher risk for severe illness and critical populations, and channels vary in their capacity to achieve different communication objectives.” It states that it will focus its efforts in this regard on “traditional media channels” (print, radio, and TV) as well as “digital media” (internet, social media, and text messaging). 

The CDC document further reveals that the “public messaging” campaign to “promote vaccine uptake” and address “vaccine hesitancy” is divided into four phases and adds that the overall communication strategy of Warp Speed “should be timely and applicable for the current phase of the Covid-19 Vaccination program.” 

Those phases are:

  • Before a vaccine is available
  • The vaccine is available in limited supply for certain populations of early focus
  • The vaccine is increasingly available for other critical populations and the general public
  • The vaccine is widely available

Given that the Covid-19 vaccine candidate produced by Pfizer is expected to be approved by the end of November, it appears that the US national-security state, which is essentially running Operation Warp Speed, along with “trusted messengers” in mass media, is preparing to enter the second phase of its communications strategy, one in which news organizations and journalists who raise legitimate concerns about Warp Speed will be de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.

What the Media Still Isn’t Telling You About Russiagate

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By Ray McGovern

Source: AntiWar.com

Two years ago last Saturday (May 7, 2020) Adam Schiff (D, California), Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, was forced to perform what Nixon co-conspirator John Ehrlichman famously called a “modified limited hangout.”

On that day, Schiff released sworn testimony that there was zero technical evidence that Russia – or anyone else – hacked those DNC emails so prejudicial to Hillary Clinton (later published by WikiLeaks).

Now, please, before you put me in Putin’s or Trump’s pocket, read on: The testifier was Shawn Henry, the head of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. For reasons former FBI Director James Comey would never really explain, he deferred to CrowdStrike to do the forensic work on the DNC computers that were supposedly “hacked.” Comey told Congress that CrowdStrike “would share with us what they saw.”

In June 2019, it was revealed that CrowdStrike never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, according to the Justice Department.

Are you starting to smell a rat? What about the “modified limited hangout”?

Well, if some or all of this is news to you, it is because the NY Times and other major media have deep-sixed it for exactly two years now, and counting. It gets worse – much worse.

What Did Schiff Know and When Did He Know It?

Fasten your seatbelts: It was on December 5, 2017 that Shawn Henry gave sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee – see the official transcript. Henry testified that there was no technical evidence that Russia, or any other entity, hacked the DNC emails that were published by WikiLeaks just before the Democratic Convention in July 2016. (The emails showed how the deck had been stacked against Bernie Sanders – in the primaries, for example.)

Shawn Henry is a longtime protégé of former FBI Director Robert Mueller and headed Mueller’s FBI cyber investigation unit. After retiring from the FBI in 2012, he took a senior position at CrowdStrike. At his testimony on Dec. 5, 2017, he had Graham M. Wilson, a partner at Perkins Coie, as well as David C. Lashway of Baker & McKenzie in support.

Falling Silently in the Forest

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, relying on (1) the extensive expertise and professional experience of two members who happened to have been Technical Directors at NSA, (2) the revelations of Edward Snowden, and (3) the immutable principles of physics, had already concluded that the accusation of that Russian hack on the DNC was phony. (That Brennan’s CIA “believed” it to be credible helped not a whit.)

Below is how we began “Allegations of Hacking are Baseless,” our Memorandum of December 12, 2016 (a year before Shawn Henry was forced to choose between telling the truth or perjuring himself). We wrote:

A New York Times report on Monday alluding to “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” leading the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin “deployed computer hackers with the goal of tipping the election to Donald J. Trump” is, sadly, evidence-free. This is no surprise, because harder evidence of a technical nature points to an inside leak, not hacking – by Russians or anyone else. (See: “US Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims.”)

We even included a brief tutorial on the difference between a “hack” and a leak, but we were already, in Dec. 2016 going up against deeply encrusted popular “belief” based on intelligence-corporate media connivance.

‘Modified Limited Hangout’

Schiff was able to hide Shawn Henry’s testimony for two and a half years. Under considerable pressure from a new Director of National Intelligence, who threatened to release the testimony himself, Schiff finally relented and released it (as mentioned above) on May 7, 2020. As for Establishment media, the transcript of Henry’s testimony fell like the proverbial tree in the forest with no one around to hear it.

Did the NY Times, et al. get “The Memo” ordering all to avoid Henry’s testimony like the plague? Actually, in this particular case, corporate media had quite enough incentive of their own to hide from media consumers the fact that “Russian hacking,” the cornerstone of Russia-gate, was a crock, and that viewers and listeners had been had.

When I wrote about the released – well, sort of released – Shawn Henry transcript the following day, there was a wealth of background information to provide context to this sordid affair. I included a four-minute discussion I had had with Schiff just five days after Trump took office, a reminder that the Dems were well into “Russian hacking” as the centerpiece of Russia-gate from the very start. (That clip, and lots else, is embedded here)

So Schiff knew on Dec. 5, 2017 that “Russian hacking” of those DNC emails was bogus. I was recently asked, why do you suppose he did not tell Robert Mueller, the “Inspector Javert” in hot pursuit of “Russian election interference,” whose $32-million investigation of Russia-gate lasted from May 2017 till March 2019? Good question. Did Shawn Henry misplace the telephone number of Mueller, his old boss and mentor? Or did Mueller know, and despite knowing, continued his Javert-like chase until after the mid-terms in November 2018. (That worked for the Democrats; and, not incidentally, Schiff took back the reins of the Intelligence Committee.)

Most of Americans have no idea how they’ve been had on Russia-gate. And the NYTimes, et al. have every reason to keep them in the dark about “Russian hacking.” Most people have little idea as to how the steady drumming on Russian perfidy has conditioned them not only to distrust “the Russians,” but to hate them. (What, after all, could be more hateful than for being responsible for giving us four years of Trump?) Sadly – and admittedly – it cannot be considered unreasonable to be convinced that everything out of Trump’s mouth is a lie and that he would never ever tell the truth about Russia – given what Obama and others call his “bromance” with Putin.

There are, of course, dangerous implications in all this for what Americans may be asked in terms of confronting Russia on Ukraine.

On wider Russia-gate issues over the past five years and my tree-falling-in-forest attempts to expose the malfeasance of our corporate-captive media, readers may wish to review this.

As Food Shortages Loom, US Kids Starve, Biden to Send $33 Billion MORE to Ukraine to Keep War Going

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

In 2019, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was elected to president of Ukraine after running on a platform of ending the conflict in the Donbass region and making peace with Russia. Unfortunately, however, these goals were not in synch with the US hegemony and instead of pushing for peace, the US supported the far right neo-Nazis who promised to kill Zelensky if he sought peace. 

Over the next two years, the United States continued to funnel weapons, money, and training into Ukraine, ensuring a future conflict with Russia by instigating military conflict directly on their border. In February of this year, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that a line had been crossed and he then invaded Ukraine, kicking off a violent and deadly war.

Just a few weeks into the war, Russia offered concessions as spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced that Moscow will end the invasion immediately if Ukraine amends its constitution to ensure it stays neutral and doesn’t join NATO, it acknowledges Crimea as Russian territory, and recognizes the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states.

Since then, the United States has recommended that Ukraine not accept a peace deal and instead continue to allow their people to be used as cannon fodder while US taxpayers are fleeced for billions to fight a proxy war with Russia.

Since the war began in February, Biden has authorized more than $14 billion in your tax dollars to arm literal Nazis in the region. This week, because very few people have spoken out against this war, that request more than doubled and Biden asked Congress for a whopping $33 billion more. 

While encouraging Ukraine to take the deal offered by Russia would be far more effective than US tax dollars at ending the suffering and helping Ukrainians, the military industrial complex is uninterested in such a move.

It is no surprise that the stock market associated with the military industrial complex is booming as the rest of the market plummets.

What’s more, as the politically elite send billions to the other side of the world, 3.7 million children have been pushed into poverty here at home.

According to a recently released Columbia University report, by late January 3.7 million U.S. children were plunged back into poverty, as the government ended the child tax credit.

What’s more, the elite have been publicly warning the world of massive food shortages and supply chain issues — yet here we are sending billions Nazis to prevent Ukraine from seeking peace.

Just last month, the extremely creepy yet exceedingly influential Klaus Schwab warned that “History is truly at a turning point. We do not yet know the full extent and the systemic and structural changes which will happen” but he said that “we do know the global energy systems, food systems, and supply chains will be deeply affected.”

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1509246112934289421

It’s not just the real-life version of Dr. Evil making these warnings either. As we reported at the time, the president of the ominously connected multi-trillion-dollar asset fund, BlackRock, Rob Kapito told oil and gas executives the same week that “entitled” Americans are about to deal with shortages of food and other goods, and should prepare accordingly.

“For the first time, this generation is going to go into a store and not be able to get what they want,” Kapito told a meeting of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association. “And we have a very entitled generation that has never had to sacrifice.”

“I would put on your seat belts because this is something that we haven’t seen,” Kapito added, warning that Americans will soon face “scarcity inflation” – or rising prices compounded by shortages of everything from food and consumer goods to oil and gas.

President Joe Biden has been telling Americans for months now that they have to foot the bill for the war in Ukraine and “do their part” by sending billions to Zelensky and paying high prices for oil. Around the same time Schwab and Kapito made their warnings, Biden took his position to a whole new level, telling Americans that food shortages are “gonna be real.”

This week, Goya Foods CEO Bob Unanue has issued a similar warning: “We are on the precipice of a global food crisis.”

In a Wednesday interview, Unanue told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, “Americans will have to tighten their belts and consume less,” in response to her question about a potential food shortage crisis.

Though the government has been telling us these higher prices and supply chain issues are Russia’s fault, those who have been paying attention have warned since last year that Biden’s policies – which involved spending more in his first eight months than former President Donald Trump did in 2018 and 2019 combined, and throttling domestic energy production – would trigger price spikes and supply chain disruptions for ordinary Americans.

Trump definitely played a role as well by printing nearly 7 trillion in his last year in office. This is why inflation was already at a 40-year high, before the war began and as spending increases, hard times are seemingly inevitable. The Ukraine invasion is most assuredly playing a role in this debacle but it will be the straw that broke the camels back, not the main driver.

Whatever actually sets off this shortage, rest assured that the people warning us about it will be the last to suffer from it. It will be the poor and middle class who suffer the most from these issues.

As Max Blumenthal reminds us, “200,000 small businesses were wrecked and millions left jobless and alone in the name of public health. Now gas and food prices must surge to protect freedom and stand for Ukraine. You will own nothing and be happy and if you don’t like it, you might be a Russian conspiracist.”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Global Pandemic

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By Cindy Sheehan

Source: Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox

“I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

Now that it appears that (for at least the time being) grossly profiting from the coronavirus issue is on the decline (except if anyone buys the “4th booster for Pfizer”) and gross war profiting is once again taking the lead, I want to reflect on MY experience with the Global Pandemic™.

I am a huge fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG) universe that was conceived and written by the brilliant Douglas Adams who died (years ago) at a too young age from unrelated coronavirus/vax heart disease.

In reflecting on the past two years, the closest match I came up with is I felt like one of the HHGTTG’s main characters, Arthur Dent.

As written, Arthur was a mild-mannered employee of the BBC who is wrenched out of bed when a construction crew comes to his home to demolish it for a highway overpass. He rushes out of his house and lies down in front of a bulldozer in his “dressing gown.” During this scene, his best friend Ford Prefect comes to “hitchhike” him off of planet Earth which is about to be demolished by the Vogon Construction Fleet aliens who are making a way for an intergalactic bypass. In both instances of demolition, the “plans” were available for view and comment in planning offices and it was too late to change anything.

Arthur goes through most of the five books in the series in a bewildered and befuddled state of mind in his dressing gown. I felt like this during much of the past two years, myself: I spent much of the time in lounging clothes, even when I went out. What was the use of getting dressed up to head to a grocery store just to put a mask on and be in disguise?

To be clear, I wasn’t in an Arthur Dent state because I had a loss of mental, or physical capacity, it was because the propaganda for the Global Pandemic™ (let’s shorten it to GloPan for the remainder of this piece) was SO obviously conflated mis/disinformation and that those around me seemed to be capitulating to it.. I was confused by the compliance, to say the least. For example, if we were told by the GloPan Chief-operating-officer (COO) Dr. Anthony Falsie, that “masks don’t work,” the GloPanBots didn’t wear a mask; When Falsie changed to “masks are mandatory and cloth masks are fine,” that’s what the GloPanBots did. Then it was “wear a surgical mask and a cloth mask over it,” “add a face-shield.” Every seamlessly told lie was shamefully obeyed by the masses without a hint of irony, or question.

To be honest, after the “two-weeks to flatten the curve” period was over and masks were being pushed hardcore in businesses that GloPanCorp allowed to remain open, I would wear a mask into grocery stores—which was the only place I went. However, I NEVER wore one outside, in my home, or in a car. Bollocks to that. Every time I passed a Masked Wonder on the street, they would do a panicked swerve and a few almost fell over trying to avoid me. I would always ask them, “Why did you do that, I am obviously NOT sick?” One woman even retorted “How do you know?” If I had more time to respond because she was already 1/2 block away from me in her rush to avoid proximity to any human not covering their breathing holes, I would have replied, “I think I would know if I were ill—and if I were ill, I’d be home bingeing Netflix.”

DON’T PANIC

In the series, the HHGTTG is an actual, constantly updated book that gives Galactic Hitchhikers information about dining, drinking, avoiding monsters, and backgrounds on each planet. In fact, Ford Prefect, Arthur’s alien best-friend was on Earth working on Earth’s entry in the Guide. However, the only thing written in the Guide under the entry “Earth” says is, “Mostly harmless.” Printed on the cover of each HHGTTG is the advice “Don’t Panic.”

I feel like most of the human race just erased the word “Don’t” and panicked like crazy over a “Mostly harmless” pathogen. Now, don’t stop reading at this point, I will explain myself using science, not $cience.

Sars-CoV-2

“If there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

A real life pandemic has the potential to be VERY frightening—with so many dying, it would be impossible to count them, let alone bury them. There would also be very little immunity to the disease that would have the ability wipe out human-life on our planet. Even though the grossly inflated Cov-19 numbers were purposely significant so you would line up for an untested inoculation, the virus never got to the level of GloPan, nor does it deserve the hysteria and profound destruction that surrounded it.

We also don’t know, and may never know, the origins of Cov-19. Was it a U.S./China lab leak from Wuhan? Did it come from a wet market there? There was early speculation that the U.S. military brought it to China during a sporting event there in late 2019.

Was it intentionally, or unintentionally loosed on the world?

I am not in any of the above camps, but with the revelation of more than two-dozen U.S. bioweapon labs in Ukraine, the plot thickens, doesn’t it?

Coronaviruses have been with us for a long time. The disinfectant Lysol proclaims on its can that it kills 99% of coronaviruses (even before GloPan). As humans, most of us have built natural immunity to corona, but every now and then, a mutant comes to infect us. As observed with Cov-19, most of us develop mild symptoms that have the potential to be dangerous to the elderly and more vulnerable populations: Just like every flu-type pathogen that we’ve previously experienced.

Back in early 2020 when we started hearing about Cov-19, I wasn’t worried about the virus, because I had the attitude that even if I did contract it, I would more than likely be okay. I had a trip to commemorate International Working Women’s Day to several communities on the East Coast planned for early March, but I started to hear talk of quarantines (I don’t think we called it a “lockdown” yet, but prison-talk would gradually start to reveal itself) and I didn’t want to be blocked from returning home if I ventured outside of California. I mean, they forbade cruise ships from docking for days—we knew someone on one of them in the San Francisco Bay—and, then flights started to get cancelled, so I cancelled by activities and we were all hoping to reschedule soon.

“Soon,” became as long as “two-weeks to flatten the curve.” In March, 2020, I was sure that I would be able to travel for May Day; then it was the 4th of July—-Maybe Labor Day would work? It soon became apparent that 2020 was going to be a wash, but perhaps we could schedule some IWWD events for March 2021? Well, at the writing of this it’s April 2022 and I still haven’t been able to leave for the East Coast. Even though travel restrictions have loosened and it’s easier to travel, at this point, the issue for me is masking for half of a day—-I can barely wear one for 10-minutes, let alone 12-15 hours. Being fully un-jabbed is also a problem for some people and groups that I have worked with in the past.

How did my attitude develop towards Cov-19?

Why did I remain adamantly resistant to the agitprop? Why was I inherently immune to both Cov-19 and the coronaprop?

The answer is quite easy and evident: the same people/institutions that have lied and caused enormous harm to the people of this failed-state AND the world were telling me to panic. Literally. I never believed their bullshit about Global Terrorism (GloTerr), so why would I believe this (to me) obvious B.S. of GloPan?

Besides, who knows if I had Cov-19, or not? According to Dr. John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine (Stanford Prevention Research), of Epidemiology and Population Health, over 70% (in cross-age demographics) who were tested positive for Cov-19 had zero, or mild symptoms. The alarming numbers came from comparing test numbers to deaths, instead of using IFR (infection fatality rate) which would have dropped the numbers dramatically. Also, the powers-that-be, have adjusting their ghoulish-death rate down and admitted that those who died had an average of over THREE co-morbidities. Not saying I am happy, nor am I minimizing the pain these deaths caused, but, it seems most people who died of Cov-19 were well on their way to meeting the Grim Reaper, anyway. Some people (like me) work diligently to make our bodies hostile to pathogenic invaders, while most Americans create a very welcoming environment for disease and chronic conditions. This circumstance can be changed, but it takes effort, where taking drugs is practically effortless (if you can afford them).

Most people listened to the $cience of those who were paid to come up with supporting $cience and feed it to the public through the stenographer media class. One of the most egregious examples of this is when the current director of the CDC Rachel Walensky said: “I first heard of the efficacy of the Covid vaccine from CNN.” What!? Part of her job is to literally investigate the safety and efficacy of medicines and they operate the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS).

Pfizer spends millions of dollars sponsoring the legacy media and people like Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Falsie have carte blanche to promote the propaganda that brings them fame and fortune. The $cience has become a cult of devotees called $cientism. Dr. Anthony (“If you attack me, you’re attacking science”) Falsie is the Pope of this new religion that still has a lot of fanatical adherents who pay a steep tithe for their fake sense of safety with their health and freedoms.

Recently, Pope Falsie has made another infallible (until it’s not) proclamation that the adherents of $cientism, and we heretics, now have to evaluate our own risk to viruses and proceed with our lives. Just like other religions who believe that with fear, sin can be eliminated, the High Priests of $cientism believe that viruses can also be wiped out. Neither view is healthy or productive.

I listened to the science of epidemiologists, MDs, virologists, and other researchers that not only didn’t profit from their truth-spreading, but got banned from social media, ridiculed by the profiteers, and, in some cases lost their jobs or their licenses to practice medicine. If you know the way propaganda works, you know that the voices of those who lie are most often elevated and the ones that go against those lies are silenced.

9/11 and GloPan

Were four buildings (three WTC and one Pentagon) hit by airplanes on 9/11/2001?

There are many narrative discrepancies with the official story that day. In the midst of the terror, confusion and manufactured nationalism, the Bush regime was already busy with its ultimate goal of invading Iraq (for the oil), by way of Afghanistan. Of course, neither country/leader had anything to do with the awful events of that day, but that didn’t matter to the oil-garchy. One ironic difference between the GloTerr response and GloPan was that Bush told us to travel and shop until we drop. During GloPan we could buy groceries, but all of our other purchases needed to come from Amazon, or other online options. So, while Bezos was hoarding enormous wealth and building space rockets during that time period, Main Street businesses struggled and a couple hundred-thousand of them were collateral damage.

Despite how Cov-19 came to the world and no matter what you believe: Deadly pandemic, or mostly bullshit, I think most of us can recognize that the PTB used it to deliver unbelievable and unconscionable profits to a very few. As the diminutive Rahm Emanuel famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” We can argue “Made it happen,” or “Let it happen” all day for the rest of our lives, but the bottom line is, whether we speak about 9/11 or GloPan, anyone with two-eyes can see that the response was destructive to the majority, and profitable for the few.

The Effects of GloPan on Children

The initial decision to close schools came as a not unwelcome measure to my grandchildren who were happy for a break. If they, and most other students, had known that the closures would extend to over a year and that the horrors of Zoom “learning” would be in their future, I am not sure they would have been so happy.

From the beginning of this “pandemic” we were hearing that Cov-19 did not affect children the same way that it was affecting adults. However, as the closures extended, we were hearing from studies in places like Sweden that decided to take a more measured (and more successful) response to Cov-19, that even if children tested positive, they were not ill, nor were they infecting other children or adults. In fact, the children acted like a sponge, soaking up the virus without it going anywhere else. If things were done naturally here, the students could have put a brake on infection rates.

Yet, the lockdowns and school closures dragged on, month after month. It seemed to my grandchildren and other students that no one in the government, or at their schools, cared much for their mental or physical health. Suicides and attempted suicides skyrocketed in this time period to a level which was a legitimate health emergency.

Recently, a survey delivered the sad news that 44% of teenagers report being depressed, or hopeless. If this stat doesn’t damn the management of GloPan straight to the burning depths of hell, I don’t know what does (maybe the Eldercide).

Milestone activities like prom, graduations, and sports were also taken away from the unlucky ones who happened to be of that age. Playgrounds were illogically and tragically roped off and beaches were closed. Anything that could actually enhance the natural immunity of children (and others) like fresh air, sunshine, sand, salt water, sports, and socialization were taken away. Instead of prescribing more vitamin C, zinc, and vitamin D, we were told to isolate and quarantine. Here in California, to the credit of some Democratic lawmakers, they forced the lockdown fascist Newsom to reopen playgrounds making the correct claim that lower-income families and children suffered most from this misguided policy.

One thing the diseased ruling-class knows, and WE need to understand is that life is more than about avoiding germs (which is a ridiculous notion, anyway), but it’s about connections and health. The health of our children was negatively impacted by the Stasi-like measures that never made any sense from a logical or even public health standpoint.

Take two neighboring countries that took two different approaches, Sweden and Finland.

Sweden did not close schools, and Finland did. The infection rate of children 1-19 years of age were exactly the same: 0.005% The closures had zero affect on the children of either country.

The Hidden Tragedy of Eldercide

“They claimed it was for the sake of their grandparents and grandchildren, but it was of course for the sake of their grandparent’s grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandparents.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

As stated above, the justification for the flatten the curve bullshit was also put on the backs of the elders.

Andrew Cuomo of New York was one of the first governors to institute a policy of putting ill people in nursing homes, after first absolving said nursing homes from any legal liability if anything went wrong. Of course, this was for a price and an already greedy and shady businesses agreed to take in sick people to further put their elders at risk.

Cuomo is in some hot water now for hiding the nursing home deaths in his state. As of this writing over 15, 000 residents of nursing homes have allegedly died of C19, many due to Cuomo’s policies. But how awful it must be to die alone gasping for breath while no family members are allowed to visit? What? Sick people could be admitted to your family member’s room, but you can’t go visit your grandma?

Cuomo was not the only governor/health officer that took the “crisis” of GloPan to kill its elderly citizens. We identified at least a dirty-half dozen that did so: Newsolini of my state, California; and the governors of: Pennsylvania; New Jersey; Minnesota; and the liberal Republican in Massachusetts. Interestingly, DeSantis of Florida refused to do this and he is under fire for having a more measured response to GloPan.

Who or what were really “killing Meemaw?” Obviously, the policies of the lockdown regime, not your family members. There are many state governors, public health officials and random bureaucrats that need to be tried, convicted, and punished for crimes against humanity!

Alternate Realities

“Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

In about June of 2020, I began to see a very disturbing trend among my anti-capitalist/empire colleagues, friends, and comrades: they were uncritically following and promoting the establishment lockdown policies and propaganda. Not only were they mesmerized by propaganda, many of them began to attack people who had legitimate questions.

Even though I have had heaps of shit piled on me for not supporting the criminal likes of Obama, Clinton, or Biden, I was surprised by the vitriol heaped on me when I started to question the obvious lies and contradictions of the Cov-19 narrative. I thought that if someone was a friend of mine by the GloPan, they would have more trust in me. I went from being a principled critic of US Empire to being a “Qanon, proud-boy, Trumper.” It was hurtful because I thought my remaining friends were more high-quality than to become uncritical supporters of the media and government.

“The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

Suddenly, I (and many like me) were ridiculed and even being wished death from the GloPan. These virtue-signaling, do-gooders were all about no one dying from Cov-19, but it was apparently fine and dandy for people to die from being incarcerated in a nursing home with ill patients, or from having other health conditions deferred or denied. For two years (before “I Stand With Ukraine” became THE thing), “Covid” deaths were the only deaths that literally counted: EVERY DAMN DAY by the ghouls in the media and governments.

Professor Christian Parenti stated it much better in his article (original link), How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy

The socialist left, which wants to use state power to discipline capital has instead accepted the negative image of its goal: state power used to bully, harass, and discipline workers. The left’s embrace of Covid hysteria makes a mockery of the left’s goals of planning, industrial policy, economic redistribution, worker empowerment, and environmental sustainability. This leftwing self-harm will have deleterious consequences for years to come. Indeed, the situation is worse than a mere political fumble. The left is now actively helping its own enemies. In its unwavering support for mandates, passports, punitive lockdowns, and censorship, the organized left has sided with technocratic elites, the one percent, and the repressive state apparatus everywhere. 

The Aftermath

Children are suffering the most of the policies of a government that have never given any shits about your health—or the well-being of its children. We can’t let our guard down now because this episode was just too profitable, even though it seems like we are getting back to “normal.” You know, that normal where gas is almost $6/gallon and you have to get a payday loan to buy groceries—FYI, despite what CNN and MSNBC say, this is not Putin’s doing, it’s the hyper-inflation from lockdowns and creating trillions in “wealth” backed up by nothing.

The future is bleak, but we are still here. Whether we are jabbed, or not; whether we bought the BS, or not; we are all in the same boat; and that boat is sinking.

The Future

There is a moment in ever dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

My dream would be for people to never forget that the establishment is always at war with the working-class: their wars and pandemics and distractions are designed to divide us so we fight each other and not them. Why would anyone figuratively sign up to do the bidding of diseased capital? Especially those who understood this before GloPan?

Big pHARMa (reaping tens of billions of dollars in profit) and the Imperialists do not need your uncritical support when that support is detrimental to life on this planet.

For Bob’s sake, DON’T PANIC!

Never again!

Hedges: The Pimps of War

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Whores of War, original illustration by Mr. Fish.

The coterie of neocons and liberal interventionists who orchestrated two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East and who have never been held to account are now stoking a suicidal war with Russia.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost.com

The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war, and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence. 

They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institution. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any empire, including ours, leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next.

I spent  20 years as a foreign correspondent reporting on the suffering, misery, and murderous rampages these shills for war engineered and funded. My first encounter with them was in Central America. Elliot Abrams — convicted of providing misleading testimony to Congress on the Iran-Contra Affair and later  pardoned by President George H.W. Bush so he could return to government to sell us the Iraq War — and Robert Kagan, director of the State Department’s public diplomacy office for Latin America — were propagandists for the brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as the rapists and homicidal thugs that made up the rogue Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which they illegally funded. Their job was to discredit our reporting.

They, and their coterie of fellow war lovers, went on to push for the expansion of NATO in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, violating an agreement not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany and recklessly antagonizing Russia. They were and are cheerleaders for the apartheid state of Israel, justifying its war crimes against Palestinians and myopically conflating Israel’s interests with our own. They advocated for air strikes in Serbia, calling for the US to “take out” Slobodan Milosevic. They were the authors of the policy to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, with their typical cluelessness, wrote in April 2002 that “the road that leads to real security and peace” is “the road that runs through Baghdad.”

We saw how that worked out. That road led to the dissolution of Iraq, the destruction of its civilian infrastructure, including the obliteration of 18 of 20 electricity-generating plants and nearly all the water-pumping and sanitation systems during a 43-day period when 90,000 tons of bombs were rained down on the country, the rise of radical jihadist groups throughout the region, and failed states. The war in Iraq, along with the humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, shredded the illusion of US military and global hegemony. It also inflicted on Iraqis, who had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11, the widespread killing of civilians, the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, and the ascendancy of Iran as the preeminent power in the region. They continue to call for a war with Iran, with Fred Kagan stating that “there is nothing we can do short of attacking to force Iran to give up its nuclear weapons.” They pushed for the overthrow of President Nicholas Maduro, after trying to do the same to Hugo Chavez, in Venezuela. They have targeted Daniel Ortega, their old nemesis in Nicaragua.

They embrace a purblind nationalism that prohibits them from seeing the world from any perspective other than their own. They know nothing about the machinery of war, its consequences, or its inevitable blowback. They know nothing about the peoples and cultures they target for violent regeneration. They believe in their divine right to impose their “values” on others by force. Fiasco after fiasco. Now they are stoking a war with Russia.

“The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus,” Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš observed. “Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that’s to say national, that’s to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell — it’s other people (other nations, another tribe). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own images — as nationalists.”

The Biden administration is filled with these ignoramuses, including Joe Biden. Victoria Nuland, the wife of Robert Kagan, serves as Biden’s undersecretary of state for political affairs. Antony Blinken is secretary of state. Jake Sullivan is national security advisor. They come from this cabal of moral and intellectual trolls that includes Kimberly Kagan, the wife of Fred Kagan, who founded The Institute for the Study of War, William Kristol, Max Boot, John Podhoretz, Gary Schmitt, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Frum, and others. Many were once staunch Republicans or, like Nuland, served in Republican and Democratic administrations. Nuland was the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. 

They are united by the demand for larger and larger defense budgets and an ever expanding military. Julian Benda called these courtiers to power “the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia.”

They once railed against liberal weakness and appeasement. But they swiftly migrated to the Democratic Party rather than support Donald Trump, who showed no desire to start a conflict with Russia and who called the invasion of Iraq a “big, fat mistake.” Besides, as they correctly pointed out, Hillary Clinton was a fellow neocon. And liberals wonder why nearly half the electorate, who revile these arrogant unelected power brokers, as they should, voted for Trump.

These ideologues did not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including children. Every dead body I stood over in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Gaza, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, their intellectual dishonesty, and their sick bloodlust.  They did not serve in the military. Their children do not serve in the military. But they eagerly ship young American men and women off to fight and die for their self-delusional dreams of empire and American hegemony. Or, as in Ukraine, they provide hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry and logistical support to sustain long and bloody proxy wars.

Historical time stopped for them with the end of World War II. The overthrow of democratically elected governments by the US during the Cold War in Indonesia, Guatemala, the Congo, Iran and Chile (where the CIA oversaw the assassination of the commander-in-chief of the army, General René Schneider, and President Salvador Allende), the Bay of Pigs, the atrocities and war crimes that defined the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, even the disasters they manufactured in the Middle East, have disappeared into the black hole of their collective historical amnesia. American global domination, they claim, is benign, a force for good, “benevolent hegemony.” The world, Charles Krauthammer insisted, welcomes “our power.” All enemies, from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, are the new Hitler. All US interventions are a fight for freedom that make the world a safer place. All refusals to bomb and occupy another country are a 1938 Munich moment, a pathetic retreat from confronting evil by the new Neville Chamberlain. We do have enemies abroad. But our most dangerous enemy is within.

The warmongers build a campaign against a country such as Iraq or Russia and then wait for a crisis — they call it the next Pearl Harbor — to justify the unjustifiable. In 1998, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, along with a dozen other prominent neoconservatives, wrote an open letter to President Bill Clinton denouncing his policy of containment of Iraq as a failure and demanding that he go to war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. To continue the “course of weakness and drift,” they warned, was to “put our interests and our future at risk.” Huge majorities in Congress, Republican and Democrat, rushed to pass the Iraq Liberation Act. Few Democrats or Republicans dared be seen as soft on national security. The act stated that the United States government would work to “remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein” and authorized $99 million towards that goal, some of it being used to fund Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress that would become instrumental in disseminating the fabrications and lies used to justify the Iraq war during the administration of George W. Bush.

The attacks of 9/11 gave the war party its opening, first with Afghanistan, then Iraq. Krauthammer, who knows nothing about the Muslim world, wrote that “the way to tame the Arab street is not with appeasement and sweet sensitivity but with raw power and victory…The elementary truth that seems to elude the experts again and again…is that power is its own reward. Victory changes everything, psychologically above all. The psychology in the [Middle East] is now one of fear and deep respect for American power. Now is the time to use it.” Removing Saddam Hussein from power, Kristol crowed, would “transform the political landscape of the Middle East.”  

It did, of course, but not in ways that benefited the US.

They lust for apocalyptic global war. Fred Kagan, the brother of Robert, a military historian, wrote in 1999 that “America must be able to fight Iraq and North Korea, and also be able to fight genocide in the Balkans and elsewhere without compromising its ability to fight two major regional conflicts. And it must be able to contemplate war with China or Russia some considerable (but not infinite) time from now [author’s emphasis].”

They believe violence magically solves all disputes, even the Israeli-Palestinian morass. In a bizarre interview immediately after 9/11, Donald Kagan, the Yale classicist and rightwing ideologue who was the father of Robert and Fred, called, along with his son Fred, for the deployment of US troops in Gaza so we could “take the war to these people.” They have long demanded the stationing of NATO troops in Ukraine, with Robert Kagan saying that “we need to not worry that the problem is our encirclement rather than Russian ambitions.”  His wife, Victoria Nuland, was outed in a leaked phone conversation in 2014 with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, disparaging the EU and plotting to remove the lawfully elected President Viktor Yanukovych and install compliant Ukrainian politicians in power, most of whom did eventually take power. They lobbied for US troops to be sent to Syria to assist “moderate” rebels seeking to overthrow Basha al-Assad. Instead, the intervention spawned the Caliphate. The US ended up bombing the very forces they had armed, becoming Assad’s de facto air force.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the attacks of 9/11, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Putin, like everyone else they target, only understands force. We can, they assure us, militarily bend Russia to our will.

“It is true that acting firmly in 2008 or 2014 would have meant risking conflict,” Robert Kagan wrote in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, lamenting our refusal to militarily confront Russia earlier. “But Washington is risking conflict now; Russia’s ambitions have created an inherently dangerous situation. It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it has always been extraordinarily small: Putin was never going to obtain his objectives by destroying himself and his country, along with much of the rest of the world.”

In short, don’t worry about going to war with Russia, Putin won’t use the bomb.

I do not know if these people are stupid or cynical or both. They are lavishly funded by the war industry. They are never dropped from the networks for their repeated idiocy. They rotate in and out of power, parked in places like The Council on Foreign Relations or The Brookings Institution, before being called back into government. They are as welcome in the Obama or Biden White House as the Bush White House. The Cold War, for them, never ended. The world remains binary, us and them, good and evil. They are never held accountable. When one military intervention goes up in flames, they are ready to promote the next. These Dr. Strangeloves, if we don’t stop them, will terminate life as we know it on the planet.

The Inflation Crisis Of 2022 Is Now Worse Than Anything That We Experienced During The 1970s

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By Michael Snyder

Source: Activist Post

Most Americans don’t realize this, but we truly have entered historic territory.  As you will see below, the inflation crisis of 2022 has now escalated to a level that is beyond anything that we experienced during the horrible Jimmy Carter era of the 1970s.  If you are old enough to have been alive back then, you probably remember the constant headlines about inflation.  And you also probably remember that it seemed like the impotent administration in power in Washington was powerless to do anything about it.  In other words, it was a lot like what we are going through today.  Unfortunately for us, this new economic crisis is still only in the very early chapters.

Of course the mainstream media would like us to believe that what we are experiencing today is not even close to what Americans went through in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  According to CNN, the U.S. inflation rate hit a peak of 14.6 percent in the first half of 1980…

The inflation rate hit a record high of 14.6% in March and April of 1980. It helped to lead to Carter’s defeat in that fall’s election. It also led to some significant changes in the US economy.

Compared to that, the numbers we have been given in early 2022 seem rather tame.  On Tuesday, we learned that the official rate of inflation in the U.S. hit 8.5 percent in the month of March…

Prices that consumers pay for everyday items surged in March to their highest levels since the early days of the Reagan administration, according to Labor Department data released Tuesday.

The consumer price index, which measures a wide-ranging basket of goods and services, jumped 8.5% from a year ago on an unadjusted basis, above even the already elevated Dow Jones estimate for 8.4%.

8.5 percent is much lower than 14.6 percent, and so to most people it would seem logical to conclude that we are still a long way from the kind of nightmarish crisis that our nation endured during the waning days of the Carter administration.

But is that the truth?

In reality, we can’t make a straight comparison between the official rate of inflation in 2022 and the official rate of inflation in 1980.  The way that the inflation rate is calculated has been changed more than 20 times since 1980, and every time it was changed the goal was to make the official rate of inflation appear to be lower.

What we really need is an apples-to-apples comparison; fortunately, John Williams over at shadowstats.com has done the math for us.

According to Williams, if the inflation rate was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, the official rate of inflation would be somewhere around 17 percent right now.

17 percent!

That means that the inflation that we are seeing now is even worse than anything that Americans went through during the Jimmy Carter era.

And government figures for individual categories seem to confirm that inflation is now wildly out of control.  For example, the price of gasoline has risen by 48 percent over the past year…

The price of gasoline rose by 48.0 percent from March 2021 to March 2022, according to numbers released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In just one month—from February to March—the seasonally adjusted price of gasoline went up 18.3 percent.

Vehicle prices have escalated to absurd levels as well.  If you can believe it, the average retail selling price of a used vehicle at CarMax has risen by 39.7 percent in just 12 months…

CarMax experienced a slowdown in fourth-quarter used car sales volume as its average retail selling price jumped 39.7% year-over-year to $29,312, an increase of approximately $8,300 per unit.

And I discussed yesterday, home prices in the United States have jumped 32.6 percent over the past two years.

We have entered a full-blown inflationary nightmare, and the Biden administration is trying to blame Vladimir Putin for it.

Needless to say, that is extremely disingenuous of Biden, because prices were already skyrocketing even before the war in Ukraine started.

But it is true that the war is making economic problems even worse all over the globe, and that isn’t going to end any time soon.

A couple of weeks ago there was a bit of optimism that some sort of a ceasefire agreement could be reached, but now there appears to be no hope that there will be one any time soon.

On Tuesday, Putin told the press that peace talks have reached “a dead end”…

Talks with Ukraine have reached “a dead end,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in fresh Tuesday remarks. “We will not stop military operations in Ukraine until they succeed.” He explained that Ukraine has “deviated” from agreements and any possible prior progress reached during the Istanbul meetings, according to state-run RIA.

The strong remarks aimed at both Kiev and the West were given during a joint presser with his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko. He further hailed that the military operations is still going “according to plan,” Bloomberg reports, however while admitting to the domestic population that “Russian logistics and payment systems remain a weakness and the long-term impact of western measures could be more painful.” But he also said the county has withstood the economic “blitzkrieg” from the West.

And Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now saying that the return of Crimea is a “red line” for him…

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky named recognition of the annexation of the Crimea region as one of his red lines for Moscow in any potential peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end war between the two countries.

Russia annexed the southern region of Crimea in 2014. Russian-backed separatists and forces, as well Ukrainian soldiers, have since been fighting in the eastern region of Ukraine.

Russia will never, ever willingly give Crimea back to Ukraine.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply being delusional.

So unless someone changes their tune, this war between Russia and Ukraine is going to keep going until someone achieves total victory.

And that could take a really long time.

Meanwhile, global food supplies will get tighter and tighter, and global economic conditions will continue to rapidly deteriorate.

In other words, the kind of nightmare scenario that I have been warning about for years is now upon us.

And so what happens if another “black swan event” or two hits us later in 2022?

We are so vulnerable right now, and it wouldn’t take much at all to push us over the edge and into an unprecedented worldwide crisis of epic proportions.