Category Archives: State Crime

THE PANIC PANDEMIC

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By John Tierney

Source: Waking Times

The United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half. The first was a viral pandemic that killed about one in 500 Americans—typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions. The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions.

Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom—and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.

If, as seems increasingly plausible, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, it is the costliest blunder ever committed by scientists. Whatever the pandemic’s origin, the response to it is the worst mistake in the history of the public-health profession. We still have no convincing evidence that the lockdowns saved lives, but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself.

One in three people worldwide lost a job or a business during the lockdowns, and half saw their earnings drop, according to a Gallup poll. Children, never at risk from the virus, in many places essentially lost a year of school. The economic and health consequences were felt most acutely among the less affluent in America and in the rest of the world, where the World Bank estimates that more than 100 million have been pushed into extreme poverty.

The leaders responsible for these disasters continue to pretend that their policies worked and assume that they can keep fooling the public. They’ve promised to deploy these strategies again in the future, and they might even succeed in doing so—unless we begin to understand what went wrong.

The panic was started, as usual, by journalists. As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images: the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse.

The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that—unless drastic measures were taken—intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer. The British researchers announced that the “only viable strategy” was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.

This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the “consensus” among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, endorsed it and became the unassailable authority for those purporting to “follow the science.” What had originally been a limited lockdown—“15 days to slow the spread”—became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world. A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?

The most prominent early critic was John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford, who published an essay for STAT headlined “A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data.” While a short-term lockdown made sense, he argued, an extended lockdown could prove worse than the disease, and scientists needed to do more intensive testing to determine the risk. The article offered common-sense advice from one of the world’s most frequently cited authorities on the credibility of medical research, but it provoked a furious backlash on Twitter from scientists and journalists.

The fury intensified in April 2020, when Ioannidis followed his own advice by joining with Jay Bhattacharya and other colleagues from Stanford to gauge the spread of Covid in the surrounding area, Santa Clara County. After testing for Covid antibodies in the blood of several thousand volunteers, they estimated that the fatality rate among the infected in the county was about 0.2 percent, twice as high as for the flu but considerably lower than the assumptions of public-health officials and computer modelers. The researchers acknowledged that the fatality rate could be substantially higher in other places where the virus spread extensively in nursing homes (which hadn’t yet occurred in the Santa Clara area). But merely by reporting data that didn’t fit the official panic narrative, they became targets.

Other scientists lambasted the researchers and claimed that methodological weaknesses in the study made the results meaningless. A statistician at Columbia wrote that the researchers “owe us all an apology.” A biologist at the University of North Carolina said that the study was “horrible science.” A Rutgers chemist called Ioannidis a “mediocrity” who “cannot even formulate a simulacrum of a coherent, rational argument.” A year later, Ioannidis still marvels at the attacks on the study (which was eventually published in a leading epidemiology journal). “Scientists whom I respect started acting like warriors who had to subvert the enemy,” he says. “Every paper I’ve written has errors—I’m a scientist, not the pope—but the main conclusions of this one were correct and have withstood the criticism.”

Mainstream journalists piled on with hit pieces quoting critics and accusing the researchers of endangering lives by questioning lockdowns. The Nation called the research a “black mark” for Stanford. The cheapest shots came from BuzzFeed, which devoted thousands of words to a series of trivial objections and baseless accusations. The article that got the most attention was BuzzFeed’s breathless revelation that an airline executive opposed to lockdowns had contributed $5,000—yes, five thousand dollars!—to an anonymized fund at Stanford that had helped finance the Santa Clara fieldwork.

The notion that a team of prominent academics, who were not paid for their work in the study, would risk their reputations by skewing results for the sake of a $5,000 donation was absurd on its face—and even more ludicrous, given that Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, and the lead investigator, Eran Bendavid, said that they weren’t even aware of the donation while conducting the study. But Stanford University was so cowed by the online uproar that it subjected the researchers to a two-month fact-finding inquiry by an outside legal firm. The inquiry found no evidence of conflict of interest, but the smear campaign succeeded in sending a clear message to scientists everywhere: Don’t question the lockdown narrative.

In a brief interlude of journalistic competence, two veteran science writers, Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee, published an article in Scientific American decrying the politicization of Covid research. They defended the integrity and methodology of the Stanford researchers, noting that some subsequent studies had found similar rates of fatality among the infected. (In his latest review of the literature, Ioannidis now estimates that the average fatality rate in Europe and the Americas is 0.3 to 0.4 percent and about 0.2 percent among people not living in institutions.) Lenzer and Brownlee lamented that the unjust criticism and ad hominem vitriol had suppressed a legitimate debate by intimidating the scientific community. Their editors then proceeded to prove their point. Responding to more online fury, Scientific American repented by publishing an editor’s note that essentially repudiated its own article. The editors printed BuzzFeed’s accusations as the final word on the matter, refusing to publish a rebuttal from the article’s authors or a supporting letter from Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School. Scientific American, long the most venerable publication in its field, now bowed to the scientific authority of BuzzFeed.

Editors of research journals fell into line, too. When Thomas Benfield, one of the researchers in Denmark conducting the first large randomized controlled trial of mask efficacy against Covid, was asked why they were taking so long to publish the much-anticipated findings, he promised them as “as soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.” After being rejected by The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, the study finally appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the reason for the editors’ reluctance became clear: the study showed that a mask did not protect the wearer, which contradicted claims by the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities.

Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with 350 publications to his name, submitted a critique of lockdowns to more than ten journals and finally gave up—the “first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,” he said. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard, had a similar experience with his article, early in the pandemic, arguing that resources should be focused on protecting the elderly. “Just as in war,” Kulldorff wrote, “we must exploit the characteristics of the enemy in order to defeat it with the minimum number of casualties. Since Covid-19 operates in a highly age specific manner, mandated counter measures must also be age specific. If not, lives will be unnecessarily lost.” It was a tragically accurate prophecy from one of the leading experts on infectious disease, but Kulldorff couldn’t find a scientific journal or media outlet to accept the article, so he ended up posting it on his own LinkedIn page. “There’s always a certain amount of herd thinking in science,” Kulldorff says, “but I’ve never seen it reach this level. Most of the epidemiologists and other scientists I’ve spoken to in private are against lockdowns, but they’re afraid to speak up.”

To break the silence, Kulldorff joined with Stanford’s Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford to issue a plea for “focused protection,” called the Great Barrington Declaration. They urged officials to divert more resources to shield the elderly, such as doing more tests of the staff at nursing homes and hospitals, while reopening business and schools for younger people, which would ultimately protect the vulnerable as herd immunity grew among the low-risk population.

They managed to attract attention but not the kind they hoped for. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly “let it rip” strategy and an “ethical nightmare” from “Covid deniers” and “agents of misinformation.” Google initially shadow-banned it so that the first page of search results for “Great Barrington Declaration” showed only criticism of it (like an article calling it “the work of a climate denial network”) but not the declaration itself. Facebook shut down the scientists’ page for a week for violating unspecified “community standards.”

The most reviled heretic was Scott Atlas, a medical doctor and health-policy analyst at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He, too, urged focused protection on nursing homes and calculated that the medical, social, and economic disruptions of the lockdowns would cost more years of life than the coronavirus. When he joined the White House coronavirus task force, Bill Gates derided him as “this Stanford guy with no background” promoting “crackpot theories.” Nearly 100 members of Stanford’s faculty signed a letter denouncing his “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science,” and an editorial in the Stanford Daily urged the university to sever its ties to Hoover.

The Stanford faculty senate overwhelmingly voted to condemn Atlas’s actions as “anathema to our community, our values and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.” Several professors from Stanford’s medical school demanded further punishment in a JAMA article, “When Physicians Engage in Practices That Threaten the Nation’s Health.” The article, which misrepresented Atlas’s views as well as the evidence on the efficacy of lockdowns, urged professional medical societies and medical-licensing boards to take action against Atlas on the grounds that it was “ethically inappropriate for physicians to publicly recommend behaviors or interventions that are not scientifically well grounded.”

But if it was unethical to recommend “interventions that are not scientifically well grounded,” how could anyone condone the lockdowns? “It was utterly immoral to conduct this society-wide intervention without the evidence to justify it,” Bhattacharya says. “The immediate results have been disastrous, especially for the poor, and the long-term effect will be to fundamentally undermine trust in public health and science.” The traditional strategy for dealing with pandemics was to isolate the infected and protect the most vulnerable, just as Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists recommended. The CDC’s pre-pandemic planning scenarios didn’t recommend extended school closures or any shutdown of businesses even during a plague as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu. Yet Fauci dismissed the focused-protection strategy as “total nonsense” to “anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases,” and his verdict became “the science” to leaders in America and elsewhere.

Fortunately, a few leaders followed the science in a different way. Instead of blindly trusting Fauci, they listened to his critics and adopted the focused-protection strategy—most notably, in Florida. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, began to doubt the public-health establishment early in the pandemic, when computer models projected that Covid patients would greatly outnumber hospital beds in many states. Governors in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were so alarmed and so determined to free up hospital beds that they directed nursing homes and other facilities to admit or readmit Covid patients—with deadly results.

But DeSantis was skeptical of the hospital projections—for good reason, as no state actually ran out of beds—and more worried about the risk of Covid spreading in nursing homes. He forbade long-term-care centers to admit anyone infected with Covid and ordered frequent testing of the staff at senior-care centers. After locking down last spring, he reopened businesses, schools, and restaurants early, rejected mask mandates, and ignored protests from the press and the state’s Democratic leaders. Fauci warned that Florida was “asking for trouble,” but DeSantis went on seeking and heeding advice from Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists, who were astonished to speak with a politician already familiar with just about every study they mentioned to him.

“DeSantis was an incredible outlier,” Atlas says. “He dug up the data and read the scientific papers and analyzed it all himself. In our discussions, he’d bounce ideas off me, but he was already on top of the details of everything. He always had the perspective to see the larger harms of lockdowns and the need to concentrate testing and other resources on the elderly. And he has been proven correct.”

If Florida had simply done no worse than the rest of the country during the pandemic, that would have been enough to discredit the lockdown strategy. The state effectively served as the control group in a natural experiment, and no medical treatment with dangerous side effects would be approved if the control group fared no differently from the treatment group. But the outcome of this experiment was even more damning.

Florida’s mortality rate from Covid is lower than the national average among those over 65 and also among younger people, so that the state’s age-adjusted Covid mortality rate is lower than that of all but ten other states. And by the most important measure, the overall rate of “excess mortality” (the number of deaths above normal), Florida has also done better than the national average. Its rate of excess mortality is significantly lower than that of the most restrictive state, California, particularly among younger adults, many of whom died not from Covid but from causes related to the lockdowns: cancer screenings and treatments were delayed, and there were sharp increases in deaths from drug overdoses and from heart attacks not treated promptly.

Chart by Jamie Meggas

If the treatment group in a clinical trial were dying off faster than the control group, an ethical researcher would halt the experiment. But the lockdown proponents were undeterred by the numbers in Florida, or by similar results elsewhere, including a comparable natural experiment involving European countries with the least restrictive policies. Sweden, Finland, and Norway rejected mask mandates and extended lockdowns, and they have each suffered significantly less excess mortality than most other European countries during the pandemic.

A nationwide analysis in Sweden showed that keeping schools open throughout the pandemic, without masks or social distancing, had little effect on the spread of Covid, but school closures and mask mandates for students continued elsewhere. Another Swedish researcher, Jonas Ludvigsson, reported that not a single schoolchild in the country died from Covid in Sweden and that their teachers’ risk of serious illness was lower than for the rest of the workforce—but these findings provoked so many online attacks and threats that Ludvigsson decided to stop researching or discussing Covid.

Social-media platforms continued censoring scientists and journalists who questioned lockdowns and mask mandates. YouTube removed a video discussion between DeSantis and the Great Barrington scientists, on the grounds that it “contradicts the consensus” on the efficacy of masks, and also took down the Hoover Institution’s interview with Atlas. Twitter locked out Atlas and Kulldorff for scientifically accurate challenges to mask orthodoxy. A peer-reviewed German study reporting harms to children from mask-wearing was suppressed on Facebook (which labeled my City Journal article “Partly False” because it cited the study) and also at ResearchGate, one of the most widely used websites for scientists to post their papers. ResearchGate refused to explain the censorship to the German scientists, telling them only that the paper was removed from the website in response to “reports from the community about the subject-matter.”

The social-media censors and scientific establishment, aided by the Chinese government, succeeded for a year in suppressing the lab-leak theory, depriving vaccine developers of potentially valuable insights into the virus’s evolution. It’s understandable, if deplorable, that the researchers and officials involved in supporting the Wuhan lab research would cover up the possibility that they’d unleashed a Frankenstein on the world. What’s harder to explain is why journalists and the rest of the scientific community so eagerly bought that story, along with the rest of the Covid narrative.

Why the elite panic? Why did so many go so wrong for so long? When journalists and scientists finally faced up to their mistake in ruling out the lab-leak theory, they blamed their favorite villain: Donald Trump. He had espoused the theory, so they assumed it must be wrong. And since he disagreed at times with Fauci about the danger of the virus and the need for lockdowns, then Fauci must be right, and this was such a deadly plague that the norms of journalism and science must be suspended. Millions would die unless Fauci was obeyed and dissenters were silenced.

But neither the plague nor Trump explains the panic. Yes, the virus was deadly, and Trump’s erratic pronouncements contributed to the confusion and partisanship, but the panic was due to two preexisting pathologies that afflicted other countries, too. The first is what I have called the Crisis Crisis, the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians. It’s a longstanding problem—humanity was supposedly doomed in the last century by the “population crisis” and the “energy crisis”—that has dramatically worsened with the cable and digital competition for ratings, clicks, and retweets. To keep audiences frightened around the clock, journalists seek out Cassandras with their own incentives for fearmongering: politicians, bureaucrats, activists, academics, and assorted experts who gain publicity, prestige, funding, and power during a crisis.

Unlike many proclaimed crises, an epidemic is a genuine threat, but the crisis industry can’t resist exaggerating the danger, and doomsaying is rarely penalized. Early in the 1980s AIDS epidemic, the New York Times reported the terrifying possibility that the virus could spread to children through “routine close contact”—quoting from a study by Anthony Fauci. Life magazine wildly exaggerated the number of infections in a cover story, headlined “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS.” It cited a study by Robert Redfield, the future leader of the CDC during the Covid pandemic, predicting that AIDS would soon spread as rapidly among heterosexuals as among homosexuals. Both scientists were absolutely wrong, of course, but the false alarms didn’t harm their careers or their credibility.

Journalists and politicians extend professional courtesy to fellow crisis-mongers by ignoring their mistakes, such as the previous predictions by Neil Ferguson. His team at Imperial College projected up to 65,000 deaths in the United Kingdom from swine flu and 200 million deaths worldwide from bird flu. The death toll each time was in the hundreds, but never mind: when Ferguson’s team projected millions of American deaths from Covid, that was considered reason enough to follow its recommendation for extended lockdowns. And when the modelers’ assumption about the fatality rate proved too high, that mistake was ignored, too.

Journalists kept highlighting the most alarming warnings, presented without context. They needed to keep their audience scared, and they succeeded. For Americans under 70, the probability of surviving a Covid infection was about 99.9 percent, but fear of the virus was higher among the young than among the elderly, and polls showed that people of all ages vastly overestimated the risk of being hospitalized or dying.

The second pathology underlying the elite’s Covid panic is the politicization of research—what I have termed the Left’s war on science, another long-standing problem that has gotten much worse. Just as the progressives a century ago yearned for a nation directed by “expert social engineers”—scientific high priests unconstrained by voters and public opinion—today’s progressives want sweeping new powers for politicians and bureaucrats who “believe in science,” meaning that they use the Left’s version of science to justify their edicts. Now that so many elite institutions are political monocultures, progressives have more power than ever to enforce groupthink and suppress debate. Well before the pandemic, they had mastered the tactics for demonizing and silencing scientists whose findings challenged progressive orthodoxy on issues such as IQ, sex differences, race, family structure, transgenderism, and climate change.

And then along came Covid—“God’s gift to the Left,” in Jane Fonda’s words. Exaggerating the danger and deflecting blame from China to Trump offered not only short-term political benefits, damaging his reelection prospects, but also an extraordinary opportunity to empower social engineers in Washington and state capitals. Early in the pandemic, Fauci expressed doubt that it was politically possible to lock down American cities, but he underestimated the effectiveness of the crisis industry’s scaremongering. Americans were so frightened that they surrendered their freedoms to work, study, worship, dine, play, socialize, or even leave their homes. Progressives celebrated this “paradigm shift,” calling it a “blueprint” for dealing with climate change.

This experience should be a lesson in what not to do, and whom not to trust. Do not assume that the media’s version of a crisis resembles reality. Do not count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Do not expect those who follow “the science” to know what they’re talking about. Science is a process of discovery and debate, not a faith to profess or a dogma to live by. It provides a description of the world, not a prescription for public policy, and specialists in one discipline do not have the knowledge or perspective to guide society. They’re biased by their own narrow focus and self-interest. Fauci and Deborah Birx, the physician who allied with him against Atlas on the White House task force, had to answer for the daily Covid death toll—that ever-present chyron at the bottom of the television screen—so they focused on one disease instead of the collateral damage of their panic-driven policies.

“The Fauci-Birx lockdowns were a sinful, unconscionable, heinous mistake, and they will never admit they were wrong,” Atlas says. Neither will the journalists and politicians who panicked along with them. They’re still portraying lockdowns as not just a success but also a precedent—proof that Americans can sacrifice for the common good when directed by wise scientists and benevolent autocrats. But the sacrifice did far more harm than good, and the burden was not shared equally. The brunt was borne by the most vulnerable in America and the poorest countries of the world. Students from disadvantaged families suffered the most from school closures, and children everywhere spent a year wearing masks solely to assuage the neurotic fears of adults. The less educated lost jobs so that professionals at minimal risk could feel safer as they kept working at home on their laptops. Silicon Valley (and its censors) prospered from lockdowns that bankrupted local businesses.

Luminaries united on Zoom and YouTube to assure the public that “we’re all in this together.” But we weren’t. When the panic infected the nation’s elite—the modern gentry who profess such concern for the downtrodden—it turned out that they weren’t so different from aristocrats of the past. They were in it for themselves.

Taking Control by Destroying Cash: Beware Cyber Polygon as Part of the Elite Coup

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By Robert J. Burrowes

For many people desperate to see a return to a life that is more familiar, it is still easy to believe that the upheavals we have experienced since March 2020 and the changes that have been wrought in their train are ‘temporary’, even if they are starting to ‘drag on’ somewhat longer than hoped.

However, anyone who is paying attention to what is taking place in the background is well aware that the life we knew before 2020 has already ended and what is being systematically put in its place as the World Economic Forum (WEF) implements its ‘Great Reset’ will bear no comparison to any period prior to last year. See ‘Killing Democracy Once and for All: The Global Elite’s Coup d’état That Is Destroying Life as We Know It’.

Of course, those of us who qualify as ‘ordinary people’ have had no say in the shape of what is being implemented: that shaping has been the prerogative of the criminal global elite which is now implementing a plan that has been decades in the making and built on hundreds of years of steady consolidation of elite power.

Also, of course, there is nothing about this shaping that is good for us. In simple terms, it is reshaping the human ‘individual’ so that previously fundamental concepts such as human identity, human liberty, human rights (such as freedom of speech, assembly and movement), human privacy and human volition are not just notions of the past but are beyond the comprehension of the typical ‘transhuman’. At the same time, the global elite is restructuring human society into a technocratic dystopia which is a nightmarish cross between ‘Brave New World’, ‘1984’ and the Dark Age. See ‘Strategically Resisting the New Dark Age: The 7 Days Campaign to Resist The Great Reset’.

The only question remaining is this: ‘Can we mobilize adequate strategic resistance – that is, resistance that systematically undermines the power of the global elite to conduct this coup and restores power to ordinary people – to defeat this coup?’

But before I answer that question, I wish to highlight just one element of the elite coup that is taking place and outline the profound changes that are being left in its wake unless we stop them.

These changes are essentially related to the capacities of computerized technologies to deprive us of what little we have left of our financial autonomy, including because any notion of privacy is rapidly vanishing.

Vanishing Money

One reason for highlighting the issue of money is because while it is good to see increasing critical attention being paid to the ‘injectables’ program, with its devastating consequences for humanity, far too little attention is being paid to the profoundly important transformation being wrought under cover of the elite-driven narrative which has virtually all people’s attention distracted from this deeper agenda. And while this deeper agenda entails a great many aspects, one subset of these is related to the way in which the global financial system is being re-engineered to play its role in fully controlling the human population.

In a series of reports issued in early 2020, the Deutsche Bank claimed that ‘cash will be around for a long time’. See the three reports accessible from ‘Transition to digital payments could “rebalance global economic power”’.

However, these reports are contradicted by other research and the ongoing evidence that cash is vanishing. Most importantly, there is no doubt about the elite intention in this regard. They want cash gone.

The digitization of money has been occurring for decades and it is now being accelerated dramatically.

Moreover, the World Economic Forum and other elite organizations have been actively working towards achieving a cashless economy for years. To get a sense of this trend, see ‘Why we need a “less-cash society”’ and ‘The US should get rid of cash and move to a digital currency, says this Nobel Laureate economist’.

Notably, in this respect, the ‘Better Than Cash Alliance’ has 78 members ‘committed to digitizing payments.’ If you think that this is a grassroots initiative set up by people like you and me, you will be surprised to read that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a ‘Resource Partner’ to the initiative along with some UN agencies, many national governments and corporations such as Mastercard and Visa.

So while the trend toward a cashless society has been progressing steadily for some decades, with countries like Denmark, Norway and Sweden already virtually cashless and India rapidly moving in that direction – see ‘India’s PM Modi defends cash ban, announces incentives’ – the so-called ‘Covid-19 pandemic’ was contrived partly to provide a pretext for further accelerating the move from cash to cards and apps, with increasing numbers of people using the digital methods, even for small sums, partly because some people were scared into believing that the ‘virus’ could be transmitted by bills and coins.

But there is more. In addition to measures not mentioned here, other plans include the use of a facial scan that records your entry to a store and is linked to artificial intelligence that identifies you and your credit rating. This then enables, or otherwise, your ability to pay for goods and services based on this facial scan.

‘Does all of this matter’, you might ask. Well the convenience of cards and apps has two significant costs: your privacy and your freedom. You lose both simply because while paying with cash is anonymous, paying by card or app leaves a digital trail that is as difficult to follow as an elephant whose tail you are already holding. And this digital trail forms a vital part of the surveillance grid that enables all of those who are tracking and documenting your movement, your payments and your behaviour to do so without leaving the comfort of their chairs. For more detail on this, watch ‘Cash or card – will COVID-19 kill cash?’ which is embedded in the article ‘Cash or Card –  Will COVID-19 Kill Cash? Leaving a Digital Footprint With Every Payment’.

But it goes beyond this. As touched on above in relation to privacy and explained at some length by Whitney Webb, ‘there is a related push by WEF partners to “tackle cybercrime” that seeks to end privacy and the potential for anonymity on the internet in general, by linking government-issued IDs to internet access. Such a policy would allow governments to surveil every piece of online content accessed as well as every post or comment authored by each citizen, supposedly to ensure that no citizen can engage in “criminal” activity online.

‘Notably, the WEF Partnership against Cybercrime employs a very broad definition of what constitutes a “cybercriminal” as they apply this label readily to those who post or host content deemed to be “disinformation” that represents a threat to “democratic” governments. The WEF’s interest in criminalizing and censoring online content has been made evident by its recent creation of a new Global Coalition for Digital Safety to facilitate the increased regulation of online speech by both the public and private sectors.’ See ‘Ending Anonymity: Why the WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime Threatens the Future of Privacy’.

But to get back to cash: Unfortunately for us, the global elite does not intend to leave the abolition of cash to our ‘preference for the convenience of cards’ and other moves to entice us to switch to digital payment. It fully intends to force us to accept digital methods as the only means of payment.

In part, this is because electronic payments are extremely lucrative for banks and payment service providers, while the data broker industry is also making huge revenues. See ‘Cash or Card –  Will COVID-19 Kill Cash? Leaving a Digital Footprint With Every Payment’.

And in some ways, ‘killing cash’ is simple. Two obvious ways of doing so are by removing ATMs (including from shopping centres) and closing local bank branches so that cash is simply unavailable. As has been happening for some time. See ‘Why Are ATMs Disappearing at an Alarming Rate after a Wave of Branch Closures?’ and ‘Australian bank branches and ATMs are vanishing’.

But, in this instance, even profitability is at the trivial end of the elite motivation spectrum.

Cash is being forced out of existence because it undermines the elite agenda to take all power from ordinary people.

So, in parallel with other regressions over the past 18 months as the elite coup to take complete control of our lives has continued to unfold, there have been ‘warnings’ from various institutions – including the World Economic Forum and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – about the possibility of an ‘allegedly imminent cyber attack that will collapse the existing financial system’.

Following a simulation in 2020, in which the World Economic Forum along with the Russian government and global banks conducted a high-profile cyberattack simulation that targeted the financial industry, another simulation was held on 9 July 2021 involving the World Economic Forum and the Russian government-owned Sberbank as well as other key financial agents. See ‘Cyber Polygon’ and ‘Cyber Polygon 2021’. In reality, of course, such a collapse of the financial system would constitute ‘the final yet necessary step’ to implement the World Economic Forum’s desired outcome of forcing a widespread shift ‘to digital currency and increased global governance of the international economy’.

If this financial collapse happens, the ‘solution’ suggested by key agencies – ‘to unite the national security apparatus and the finance industry first, and then use that as a model to do the same with other sectors of the economy’ – will ensure that we lose what little control is left in our lives, not just in relation to our financial resources but in all other domains as well. For a full explanation, see ‘WEF Warns of Cyber Attack Leading to Systemic Collapse of the Global Financial System’.

And for another account of the deeper agenda and its financial impacts already, including its ‘economic genocide’, as well as what is yet to happen, watch this interview of Catherine Austin Fitts: ‘Globalist Central Banking New World Order Reset Plan’.

Beyond this, if you want some insight into another key threat in the cybercrime realm, check out this video by the Ice Age Farmer in relation to the cyber threat to the power grid. See ‘“Next Crisis Bigger than COVID” – Power Grid/Finance Down – WEF’s Cyber Polygon’.

So How Can We Resist?

Fortunately, there is some resistance already.

In response to concerns in the United States that businesses that refuse cash will disadvantage communities with poor access to traditional banking systems, there are signs that ‘a national movement protecting consumers’ ability to pay in cash may be emerging’ with a number of states and cities already outlawing cashless outlets. See ‘Cash or Credit? State and City Bans on Cashless Retailers Are on the Rise’.

Realistically, however, given what is at stake, considerable elite pressure will be applied to reverse these decisions in time. So we need our defense to be more rigorous and less reliant on agents who are unlikely to be tough enough to defend our interests or will be sidelined or killed for doing so, as at least two national presidents who resisted the elite intention last year have since been killed. See ‘Coronavirus and Regime Change: Burundi’s Covid Coup’ and ‘John Magufuli: Death of an African Freedom Fighter’.

Moreover, given the likelihood that the financial system will be deliberately crashed at some point – and possibly soon – we need to employ a variety of tactics, that build resilience into our resistance, to defeat this initiative.

Hence, storing and paying with cash, moving your accounts to local community banks or credit unions (and away from the large corporate banks) and making the effort to become more self-reliant, particularly in food production, will increase your resilience, as will participating in local trading schemes, whether involving local currencies or goods and services directly.

As with all elements of the defense we implement, it will need to be multi-layered and integrated into the overall defense strategy. The elite intends to kill off many of us – as the depopulation measures within the coup, including the destruction of the global economy throwing 500,000,000 people out of work and killing millions as a result, as well as the ‘injectables’ program already killing tens of thousands, make perfectly clear – and enslave the rest.

For an integrated strategy to defeat the elite coup, see the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign, which has 29 strategic goals for defeating the coup including meaningful engagement with police and military forces to assist them to understand and resist, rather than support, the elite agenda.

But for a simpler presentation, see the 7 Days Campaign to Resist The Great Reset. The Telegram group is here.

Conclusion

One of the interesting challenges about the current ‘Covid-19 Crisis’ is that it continues to very successfully distract most people from awareness of the deeper agenda: the Global Elite’s ‘Great Reset’ and related initiatives, such as that discussed above in relation to money.

Hence, apart from the perennial problem of raising awareness and mobilizing resistance among those still believing the elite-driven propaganda, we face two key strategic hazards.

The first hazard is a longstanding one: while virtually all people believe that elite agents – in this case, governments – are controlling events, much ‘resistance’ will focus on begging governments, through such things as petitions and protest demonstrations, to ‘fix it’ for us. The elite has long dissipated our dissent by having us direct it at one or other of its agents. This case is no different. And while we are not using our occasional large rallies to inform people how to resist powerfully every day of their life, these rallies are a waste of time whatever solidarity they build in the short term. History is categorically instructive on that point.

A second strategic hazard we face is that resistance to the ‘vaccine’ and the ‘vaccine’ passport might be ‘successful’ (in the sense that concerted actions stall some government implementation of some measures in relation to these two initiatives) and leave most people believing that they have ‘won’, while the deeper agenda remains in the shadows with virtually no-one resisting.

It is important, therefore, that those who are aware of the deeper agenda continue to provide opportunities for others to become aware of this too and the fundamental threat it poses to us all while also sharing how we can resist its key dimensions in a way that makes a difference. It is not enough to complain about elite agents, such as governments, the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and the corporate media.

We must strategically resist the elite coup itself with actions such as those in the 7 Days Campaign to Resist The Great Reset before we find ourselves locked in a technocratic prison without the free-willed minds necessary to analyze, critique, plan and act.

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 here.

Have We Reached “Peak Self-Glorifying Billionaire”?

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Perhaps we should update Marie Antoinette’s famous quip of cluelessness to: “Let them eat space tourism.”

As billionaires squander immense resources on self-glorifying space flights, the corporate media is nothing short of worshipful. Millions of average citizens, on the other hand, wish the self-glorifying billionaires had taken themselves and all the other parasitic, tax-avoiding, predatory billionaires with them on a one-way trip into space.

Have we reached Peak Self-Glorifying Billionaire? If so, where does the downhill slide take us? Let’s start with a bit of history. Correspondent Jim B. summarized historian Arnold Toynbee’s study of the rise and fall of civilizations thusly: “Civilizations fail when their elites change from an admired dynamic creative class to a despised Establishment of corrupt rentiers, an entrenched governing class unfit to govern.”

Despised, check. Corrupt, check. Entrenched, check.

The 2013 book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty discusses the differences between failed states and successful states, and concludes that the failed states are fundamentally kleptocracies that answer to a self-serving elite while successful states are answerable to the broad populace.

To summarize: When the few benefit at the expense of the many, the resulting kleptocracy ends up a failed state. When states maintain meaningful, transparent ways of responding to public needs and demands, the result is a successful state.

This is of course a simplification. The perverse effects of colonialism linger, the development of civic organizations public institutions, values and identities that make up what I call the social ontology are not pre-ordained, and nations with low-cost surplus energy can be quite successful kleptocracies until their energy surplus runs out.

But in the main, the question remains: How did previously successful political, social and economic systems change such that they no longer generated beneficial synergies but slid into fatal synergies?

From the point of view of how systems fail to maintain dynamic stability, three factors pop out:

1. Elites become too successful in sluicing the nation’s income, wealth and political power into their own hands.

2. Since the system continues to thrive despite their dominance, then there is obviously no need to change anything–especially if it reduces their share of the nation’s wealth and political power.

3. The elites ignore the intangible decay of leadership, the real-world dynamics of scarcity and over-estimate their own capabilities and the resilience of the system.

I recently described the feedback loop that occurs when a wealthy elite can purchase political power:“as a result of their campaign contributions and lobbying, the elites’ wealth continues expanding, enhancing their political power to further expand their wealth, and so on.”

In a healthy system, there are mechanisms that limit elite ownership of wealth and political power to what the system can bear. Over time, the feedback I described increases elite wealth and power to a point where the limits are crushed and the elite feedback gathers momentum.

With institutional limits no longer in the way, the elite reaches the point where the political system no longer responds to the broad public at all, and the vast majority of income-producing wealth is already in the hands of the elite.

The U.S. is already at this final stage: Wealth/Power Inequality and the Slide Into Disorder.

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens: “Contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.”

This dominance throws the system out of balance such that, as David Parsons recently put it: (Elite-dominated) “Capitalism makes everyone homeless and then makes award-winning movies about how resilient people are for living in their cars.”

The apparent success of the system even as it grows ever more imbalanced generates a self-serving confidence in the Elites that their dominance is not only benign but permanent.

But this self-serving view is illusory. Beneath the surface, major subsystems are attempting to re-establish stability, but the instability is so extreme that the measures being deployed are also extreme.

These policy extremes only push the system further out of balance in other directions, creating fatal synergies as mutually reinforcing imbalances pile up.

See the chart below of money supply as one example of many.

But the elite is blinded by their confidence and greed to these accelerating imbalances. They reckon that managing the narratives (a.k.a. propaganda), minor policy tweaks and creating more currency and credit are all that’s needed to maintain what they consider the optimal form of stability: they own 99% of political power and 97% of all the income from capital.

Monopoly Versus Democracy: How to End a Gilded Age: “Ten percent of Americans now control 97 percent of all capital income in the country. Nearly half of the new income generated since the global financial crisis of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens. The richest three Americans collectively have more wealth than the poorest 160 million Americans.”

I’ve often noted that the wealth of Rome’s political and economic elite went from being 20 times the wealth of a landowning farmer or craftsman to 200,000 times the commoners’ wealth at the end of the Western Empire. Now that three individuals own more wealth than half the American populace, and the top 0.1% hold more wealth than the bottom 80%, I think we can safely declare we’ve reached the same extreme.

The first tranche of American presidents left office less wealthy than when they entered because serving in public office was understood as a noble and valued sacrifice of time and wealth. Now presidents leave office far wealthier than when they entered public service.

Per #3, the elite no longer sees any compelling reason to sacrifice their income, wealth and power to stabilize the system or benefit the common good. In the view of the billionaires, if any sacrifices are necessary, then they should be borne by the bottom 95%, or failing that, the bottom 99.5%.

Given their dominance, their willingness to use their wealth and power to protect their dominance dooms the system to destabilization and collapse, as the resources and value system required to successfully navigate eras of instability and scarcity are no longer available to the state or public.

In effect, the elite uses its power not to restabilize the system but to maintain its extreme dominance and protect it from any political threats.

A once vibrant ecosystem has become a monoculture whose stability is far more precarious than it appears on the surface, as the resilience of monocultures is entirely artificial.

Two recent books illuminate corners of this destabilizing inequality:

Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West

‘Jackpot’ Looks at How Inequality Is Experienced by the Very, Very Rich

We are in the final stages of this accelerating destabilization: the refusal of the elite to sacrifice any meaningful share of their wealth and power to save the system from fatal synergies guarantees collapse.

Perhaps we should update Marie Antoinette’s famous quip of cluelessness to: “Let them eat space tourism.” We all know where this cluelessness ultimately leads.

Drone warfare whistleblower sentenced to 45 months in prison for telling the American people the truth.

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Drone warfare whistleblower sentenced to 45 months in prison for telling the American people the truth.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost.com

Daniel Hale, a former intelligence analyst in the drone program for the Air Force who as a private contractor in 2013 leaked some 17 classified documents about drone strikes to the press, was sentenced today [7/27/21] to 45 months in prison.

The documents, published by The Intercept on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”

The Justice Department coerced Hale, who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public government lies and crimes. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to “retention and transmission of national security information” and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison. 

Hale, in a handwritten letter to Judge Liam O’Grady on July 18, explained why he leaked classified information, writing that the drone attacks and the war in Afghanistan “had little to do with preventing terror from coming into the United States and a lot more to do with protecting the profits of weapons manufacturers and so-called defense contractors.”

At the top of the ten-page letter Hale quoted US Navy Admiral Gene LaRocque, speaking to a reporter in 1995: “We now kill people without ever seeing them. Now you push a button thousands of miles away … Since it’s all done by remote control, there’s no remorse … and then we come home in triumph.”

“In my capacity as a signals intelligence analyst stationed at Bagram Airbase, I was made to track down the geographic location of handset cellphone devices believed to be in the possession of so-called enemy combatants,” Hale explained to the judge. “To accomplish this mission required access to a complex chain of globe-spanning satellites capable of maintaining an unbroken connection with remotely piloted aircraft, commonly referred to as drones. Once a steady connection is made and a targeted cell phone device is acquired, an imagery analyst in the U.S., in coordination with a drone pilot and camera operator, would take over using information I provided to surveil everything that occurred within the drone’s field of vision. This was done, most often, to document the day-to-day lives of suspected militants. Sometimes, under the right conditions, an attempt at capture would be made. Other times, a decision to strike and kill them where they stood would be weighed.”

He recalled the first time he witnessed a drone strike, a few days after he arrived in Afghanistan.

“Early that morning, before dawn, a group of men had gathered together in the mountain ranges of Patika province around a campfire carrying weapons and brewing tea,” he wrote. “That they carried weapons with them would not have been considered out of the ordinary in the place I grew up, much less within the virtually lawless tribal territories outside the control of the Afghan authorities. Except that among them was a suspected member of the Taliban, given away by the targeted cell phone device in his pocket. As for the remaining individuals, to be armed, of military age, and sitting in the presence of an alleged enemy combatant was enough evidence to place them under suspicion as well. Despite having peacefully assembled, posing no threat, the fate of the now tea drinking men had all but been fulfilled. I could only look on as I sat by and watched through a computer monitor when a sudden, terrifying flurry of hellfire missiles came crashing down, splattering, purple-colored crystal guts on the side of the morning mountain.”

This was his first experience with “scenes of graphic violence carried out from the cold comfort of a computer chair.” There would be many more.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t question the justification for my actions,” he wrote. “By the rules of engagement, it may have been permissible for me to have helped to kill those men — whose language I did not speak, customs I did not understand, and crimes I could not identify — in the gruesome manner that I did. Watch them die. But how could it be considered honorable of me to continuously have laid in wait for the next opportunity to kill unsuspecting persons, who, more often than not, are posing no danger to me or any other person at the time. Never mind honorable, how could it be that any thinking person continued to believe that it was necessary for the protection of the United States of America to be in Afghanistan and killing people, not one of whom present was responsible for the September 11th attacks on our nation. Notwithstanding, in 2012, a full year after the demise of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I was a part of killing misguided young men who were but mere children on the day of 9/11.” 

He and other service members were confronted with the privatization of war where “contract mercenaries outnumbered uniform wearing soldiers 2 to 1 and earned as much as 10 times their salary.”

“Meanwhile, it did not matter whether it was, as I had seen, an Afghan farmer blown in half, yet miraculously conscious and pointlessly trying to scoop his insides off the ground, or whether it was an American flag-draped coffin lowered into Arlington National Cemetery to the sound of a 21-gun salute,” he wrote. “Bang, bang, bang. Both served to justify the easy flow of capital at the cost of blood — theirs and ours. When I think about this, I am grief-stricken and ashamed of myself for the things I’ve done to support it.”

He described to the judge “the most harrowing day of my life” that took place a few months into his deployment “when a routine surveillance mission turned into disaster.” 

“For weeks we had been tracking the movements of a ring of car bomb manufacturers living around Jalalabad,” he wrote. “Car bombs directed at US bases had become an increasingly frequent and deadly problem that summer, so much effort was put into stopping them. It was a windy and clouded afternoon when one of the suspects had been discovered headed eastbound, driving at a high rate of speed. This alarmed my superiors who believe he might be attempting to escape across the border into Pakistan.”

Now, whenever I encounter an individual who thinks that drone warfare is justified and reliably keeps America safe, I remember that time and ask myself how could I possibly continue to believe that I am a good person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness.

— Daniel Hale, of learning about children killed by indiscriminate US drone attacks he participated in.

“A drone strike was our only chance and already it began lining up to take the shot,” he continued. “But the less advanced predator drone found it difficult to see through clouds and compete against strong headwinds. The single payload MQ-1 failed to connect with its target, instead missing by a few meters. The vehicle, damaged, but still driveable, continued on ahead after narrowly avoiding destruction. Eventually, once the concern of another incoming missile subsided, the driver stopped, got out of the car, and checked himself as though he could not believe he was still alive. Out of the passenger side came a woman wearing an unmistakable burka. As astounding as it was to have just learned there had been a woman, possibly his wife, there with the man we intended to kill moments ago, I did not have the chance to see what happened next before the drone diverted its camera when she began frantically to pull out something from the back of the car.”

He learned a few days later from his commanding officer what next took place. 

“There indeed had been the suspect’s wife with him in the car,” he wrote. “And in the back were their two young daughters, ages 5 and 3 years old. A cadre of Afghan soldiers were sent to investigate where the car had stopped the following day. It was there they found them placed in the dumpster nearby. The eldest was found dead due to unspecified wounds caused by shrapnel that pierced her body. Her younger sister was alive but severely dehydrated. As my commanding officer relayed this information to us, she seemed to express disgust, not for the fact that we had errantly fired on a man and his family, having killed one of his daughters; but for the suspected bomb maker having ordered his wife to dump the bodies of their daughters in the trash, so that the two of them could more quickly escape across the border. Now, whenever I encounter an individual who thinks that drone warfare is justified and reliably keeps America safe, I remember that time and ask myself how could I possibly continue to believe that I am a good person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness.”

“One year later, at a farewell gathering for those of us who would soon be leaving military service, I sat alone, transfixed by the television, while others reminisced together,” he continued. “On television was breaking news of the president giving his first public remarks about the policy surrounding the use of drone technology in warfare. His remarks were made to reassure the public of reports scrutinizing the death of civilians in drone strikes and the targeting of American citizens. The president said that a high standard of ‘near certainty’ needed to be met in order to ensure that no civilians were present. But from what I knew, of the instances where civilians plausibly could have been present, those killed were nearly always designated enemies killed in action unless proven otherwise. Nonetheless, I continued to heed his words as the president went on to explain how a drone could be used to eliminate someone who posed an ‘imminent threat’ to the United States. Using the analogy of taking out a sniper, with his sights set on an unassuming crowd of people, the president likened the use of drones to prevent a would-be terrorist from carrying out his evil plot. But, as I understood it to be, the unassuming crowd had been those who lived in fear and the terror of drones in their skies and the sniper in this scenario had been me. I came to believe that the policy of drone assassination was being used to mislead the public that it keeps us safe, and when I finally left the military, still processing what I’d been a part of, I began to speak out, believing my participation in the drone program to have been deeply wrong.”

Hale threw himself into anti-war activism when he left the military, speaking out about the indiscriminate killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of noncombatants, including children in drone strikes. He took part in a peace conference held in Washington, D.C. in November 2013. The Yemeni Fazil bin Ali Jaber spoke at the conference about the drone strike that killed his brother, Salem bin Ali Jaber, and their cousin Waleed. Waleed was a policeman. Salem was an Imam who was an outspoken critic of the armed attacks carried out by radical jihadists.

“One day in August 2012, local members of Al Qaeda traveling through Fazil’s village in a car spotted Salem in the shade, pulled up towards him, and beckoned him to come over and speak to them,” Hale wrote. “Not one to miss an opportunity to evangelize to the youth, Salem proceeded cautiously with Waleed by his side. Fazil and other villagers began looking on from afar. Farther still was an ever present reaper drone looking too.”

“As Fazil recounted what happened next, I felt myself transported back in time to where I had been on that day, 2012,” Hale told the judge. “Unbeknownst to Fazil and those of his village at the time was that they had not been the only watching Salem approach the jihadist in the car. From Afghanistan, I and everyone on duty paused their work to witness the carnage that was about to unfold. At the press of a button from thousands of miles away, two hellfire missiles screeched out of the sky, followed by two more. Showing no signs of remorse, I, and those around me, clapped and cheered triumphantly. In front of a speechless auditorium, Fazil wept.”

A week after the conference Hale was offered a job as a government contractor.  Desperate for money and steady employment, hoping to go to college, he took the job, which paid $ 80,000 a year.  But by then he was disgusted by the drone program.

“For a long time, I was uncomfortable with myself over the thought of taking advantage of my military background to land a cushy desk job,” he wrote. “During that time, I was still processing what I had been through, and I was starting to wonder if I was contributing again to the problem of money and war by accepting to return as a defense contractor. Worse was my growing apprehension that everyone around me was also taking part in a collective delusion and denial that was used to justify our exorbitant salaries, for comparatively easy labor. The thing I feared most at the time was the temptation not to question it.”

“Then it came to be that one day after work I stuck around to socialize with a pair of co-workers whose talented work I had come to greatly admire,” he wrote. “They made me feel welcomed, and I was happy to have earned their approval. But then, to my dismay, our brand-new friendship took an unexpectedly dark turn. They elected that we should take a moment and view together some archived footage of past drone strikes. Such bonding ceremonies around a computer to watch so-called “war porn” had not been new to me. I partook in them all the time while deployed to Afghanistan. But on that day, years after the fact, my new friends gaped and sneered, just as my old one’s had, at the sight of faceless men in the final moments of their lives. I sat by watching too; said nothing and felt my heart breaking into pieces.”

“Your Honor,” Hale wrote to the judge, “the truest truism that I’ve come to understand about the nature of war is that war is trauma. I believe that any person either called-upon or coerced to participate in war against their fellow man is promised to be exposed to some form of trauma. In that way, no soldier blessed to have returned home from war does so uninjured. The crux of PTSD is that it is a moral conundrum that afflicts invisible wounds on the psyche of a person made to burden the weight of experience after surviving a traumatic event. How PTSD manifests depends on the circumstances of the event. So how is the drone operator to process this? The victorious rifleman, unquestioningly remorseful, at least keeps his honor intact by having faced off against his enemy on the battlefield. The determined fighter pilot has the luxury of not having to witness the gruesome aftermath. But what possibly could I have done to cope with the undeniable cruelties that I perpetuated?”

“My conscience, once held at bay, came roaring back to life,” he wrote. “At first, I tried to ignore it. Wishing instead that someone, better placed than I, should come along to take this cup from me. But this too was folly. Left to decide whether to act, I only could do that which I ought to do before God and my own conscience. The answer came to me, that to stop the cycle of violence, I ought to sacrifice my own life and not that of another person. So, I contacted an investigative reporter, with whom I had had an established prior relationship, and told him that I had something the American people needed to know.”

Hale, who has admitted to being suicidal and depressed, said in the letter he, like many veterans, struggles with the crippling effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, aggravated by an impoverished and turbulent childhood.

“Depression is a constant,” he told the judge. “Though stress, particularly stress caused by war, can manifest itself at different times and in different ways. The tell-tale signs of a person afflicted by PTSD and depression can often be outwardly observed and are practically universally recognizable. Hard lines about the face and jaw. Eyes, once bright and wide, now deep-set, and fearful. And an inexplicably sudden loss of interest in things that used to spark joy. These are the noticeable changes in my demeanor marked by those who knew me before and after military service. To say that the period of my life spent serving in the United States Air Force had an impression on me would be an understatement. It is more accurate to say that it irreversibly transformed my identity as an American. Having forever altered the thread of my life’s story, weaved into the fabric of our nation’s history.”

How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice.

The misconception that collapse is an all or nothing phenomenon is common: Either the system rights itself with a bit of money-printing and rah-rah or it collapses into post-industrial ruin and gangs are battling over the last stash of canned beans.

Neither scenario considers the fragility and resilience of the socio-economic system as a whole. It is both far more fragile than the believers in the permanence of the waste is growth model grasp and more resilient than the complete collapse prognosticators grasp.

The recent relatively mild logjams in global supply chains of essentials are mere glimpses of precariously fragile delivery-supply systems. These can be understood as bottlenecks that only insiders see, or as unstable nodes through which all the economy’s connections run. Put another way, the economy’s as a network appears decentralized and robust, but this illusion vanishes when we consider how the entire economy rests on a few unstable nodes.

One such node is the delivery of gasoline and fuels. It’s such an efficient and reliable system that 99.9% of us take it for granted: there will always be plenty of gasoline at every station, the tanks of jet fuel will always be topped off, and so on.

The 0.1% know that this system, once disrupted, would knock over dominoes all through the economy.

Hyper-efficiency and hyper-globalization has reduced the number of producers of essentials to the point that disruptions cannot be overcome with redundant sources. We see this everywhere in the global economy: a handful of plants and companies (sometimes a single source of essential components) process or manufacture essential components in much larger systems.

This is how you end up with thousands of newly manufactured vehicles parked in lots awaiting one critical part that is in short supply.

Another key weakness is the entire system’s reliance on debt, leverage and speculation. Few seem to understand that physical production and delivery systems can grind to a halt for financial reasons–for example, lines of credit being pulled, a counterparty to some arcane commodity swap goes under, taking the presumably solvent corporation down with it, and so on.

The more debt that’s been piled up, the greater the instability of the entire system. Risk always appears low until the system destabilizes, and then all the hedges fail and risk breaks out, flooding through the entire financial system.

Leverage is great fun on the way up, as it magnifies gains. Since the Federal Reserve implicitly guarantees that “buy the dip” will generate massive gains, why not ramp up leverage ten-fold to maximize those Fed-guaranteed gains?

Leverage is less fun on the way down. When the underlying collateral has shrunk to 20% of the leveraged bets being made, a 21% decline in the asset wipes out all the collateral holding up the palace of leveraged debt.

The Fed can print money but it can’t create collateral, nor can it make insolvent entities solvent. All the Fed can do is increase the debt and leverage, which is not the solution, it’s the problem.

Speculation is also inherently unstable, as the euphoric herd, once startled, turns in panic and stampeded in fear. Markets which appeared liquid–i.e., sellers could count on someone buying as many millions of shares as they desired to sell–become illiquid, as buyers vanish like mist in Death Valley. With buyers gone, prices plummet to levels the herd reckoned “impossible” just days before.

The Fed’s entire strategy in the 21st century has been to inflate asset bubbles that generate the illusion of wealth–the so-called wealth effect which is presumed to inspire voracious borrowing and spending.

Unfortunately for the Fed, most of the gains flowed to the top 0.1%, and an economy based on a handful of billionaires buying super-yachts and spaceships is a line of dominoes awaiting the inevitable “accident.” So there are two systemic problems with relying on asset bubbles to generate “wealth”: 1) since 90% of the assets are owned by a thin slice of the populace, bubbles increase destabilizing inequality, and 2) bubbles are intrinsically unstable. So the U.S. economy, dependent on the Fed for the “juice” of monetary stimulus, is now dependent on incredibly unstable bubbles in assets, debt and leverage, bubbles which have generated extremes of wealth/income inequality that are destabilizing the social and political orders.

As the three charts below illustrate, the fragility and instability are well hidden until it’s too late: bubbles, debt, leverage, budgets and revenues can only click higher because the system breaks down if there is any sustained decline (the rising wedge model of breakdown). Once the subsystems fail, there’s no putting the eggshell back together.

The second chart depicts how buffers thin beneath the surface, masking the systemic fragility. The loss of redundancy, the decay of maintenance, the loss of experienced workers–all of these are hidden from public view until the system breaks down.

The third chart tracks the S-curve of expansion, confidence, complacency, delusion and collapse followed by human systems, from nations to empires to corporations: as the buffers thin and the rising wedge reaches an apex of vulnerability, the leadership evinces a delusional confidence in the permanence and stability of increasingly fragile, unstable systems.

Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice.

This is how breakdowns in apparently stable subsystems triggers the fall of dominoes throughout the larger system, leading to a collapse that was widely viewed as “impossible.” Such is the power of complacency and delusion.

“We’ve Got To Fight Disinformation,” Says Empire Made Entirely Of Disinformation

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The weirdest thing about the Biden administration tasking itself with the censorship of “disinformation” on social media is that the United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is built upon a foundation of disinformation, maintained by disinformation, and facilitated by disinformation.

If the propaganda engine of the US-centralized empire ceased actively deceiving the public about the world, it would collapse immediately. There would be mass unrest at home and abroad, status quo politics would be abandoned, alliances and coalitions would crumble, leaders official and unofficial would be ousted, and US unipolar hegemony would end.

The only thing keeping this from happening is the vast amounts of wealth and energy which are poured into continuously deceiving the people of America and its allies about what’s really going on in their nations and political systems, and in the world as a whole.

Getting people believing they live in separate, sovereign nations which function independently from one another, instead of member states within a single undeclared empire which moves as one unit on the international stage.

Getting people believing they control the fate of their nation via the democratic process, when in reality all large-scale politics are scripted puppet shows controlled by a plutocratic class who owns both the politicians and the media outlets which report on them.

Getting people believing they are part of a virtuous rules-based international order which opposes totalitarian regimes to spread freedom and democracy, instead of a tyrannical empire that works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates.

And above all, manufacturing the illusion that the oppressive, exploitative imperialist status quo is normal.

It’s not the big, famous lies like those which preceded the invasion of Iraq that make up the bulk of the adhesive holding the empire together, it’s the small, mundane lies we’re fed every single day by the plutocratic media. The ones which distort our worldview by half-truths, spins and omissions designed to normalize a status quo of murder, theft and ecocide.

This normalization happens in the way pundits and politicians treat any attempt to end wars or redress income inequality as freakish extremism and unrealistic fantasy, when in reality it’s the most sane and normal thing in the world and the only thing unrealistic about it is the fact that attempts to advance those agendas are always sabotaged by those same pundits and politicians.

The normalization also happens in the way endless wars, starvation deaths by US sanctions, the looming threat of total extinction via climate collapse or nuclear war, rapidly exacerbating income inequality and increasing tyranny at home and abroad are not treated as newsworthy stories, while celebrity gossip and partisan bickering between AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene makes headline news. Every day the news media fail to report on the greatest horrors that the empire has unleashed on our world while focusing on vapid trivialities, they help normalize the horrors.

If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the US-backed genocide in Yemen would be front-page news every day instead of something which gets a marginal mention once every few weeks. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.

If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the fact that Americans are getting poorer and poorer while billionaires multiply their wealth during the pandemic would be brought front and center to everyone’s attention. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.

If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the fact that the US military just spent trillions of dollars on a decades-long occupation of Afghanistan that accomplished nothing besides making horrible people rich would have been a national scandal. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.

But the mass media do not exist to share important information about the world. They exist to share important disinformation about the world. If they did not do this, the same US empire which is decrying the spread of disinformation today would collapse into its own footprint.

The US empire is without exception the single most corrupt and destructive force on this planet, and it’s not even close. It is the very last institution on earth that should be in charge of deciding what online content is true and what is “disinformation”. Absolute dead last, without exaggeration.

Depraved institutions which lie constantly and have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century should not be the Ministry of Truth for the world’s online communication systems. This should be extremely obvious to everyone.

U.S. Takes Down Israeli Spy Software Company

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Source: Moon of Alabama

A number of international papers report today on the Israeli hacking company NSO which sells snooping software to various regimes. The software is then used to hijack the phones of regime enemies, political competition or obnoxious journalists. All of that was already well known but the story has new legs as several hundreds of people who were spied on can now be named.

How that came to pass is of interest:

The phones appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers that are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of the Israeli firm, NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry, the investigation found.

The list does not identify who put the numbers on it, or why, and it is unknown how many of the phones were targeted or surveilled. But forensic analysis of the 37 smartphones shows that many display a tight correlation between time stamps associated with a number on the list and the initiation of surveillance, in some cases as brief as a few seconds.

Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based journalism nonprofit, and Amnesty International, a human rights group, had access to the list and shared it with the news organizations, which did further research and analysis. Amnesty’s Security Lab did the forensic analyses on the smartphones.

The numbers on the list are unattributed, but reporters were able to identify more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents.

Who might have made such a list and who would give it to Amnesty and Forbidden Stories?

NSO is one of the Israeli companies that is used to monetize the work of the Israel’s military intelligence unit 8200. ‘Former’ members of 8200 move to NSO to produce spy tools which are then sold to foreign governments. The license price is $7 to 8 million per 50 phones to be snooped at. It is a shady but lucrative business for the company and for the state of Israel.

NSO denies the allegations that its software is used for harmful proposes with a lot of bullshittery:

The report by Forbidden Stories is full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories that raise serious doubts about the reliability and interests of the sources. It seems like the “unidentified sources” have supplied information that has no factual basis and are far from reality.

After checking their claims, we firmly deny the false allegations made in their report. Their sources have supplied them with information which has no factual basis, as evident by the lack of supporting documentation for many of their claims. In fact, these allegations are so outrageous and far from reality, that NSO is considering a defamation lawsuit.

The reports make, for example, the claim that the Indian government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has used the NSO software to spy on the leader of the opposition party Rahul Gandhi.

How could NSO deny that allegation? It can’t.

Further down in the NSO’s statement the company contradicts itself on the issues:

As NSO has previously stated, our technology was not associated in any way with the heinous murder of Jamal Khashoggi. We can confirm that our technology was not used to listen, monitor, track, or collect information regarding him or his family members mentioned in the inquiry. We previously investigated this claim, which again, is being made without validation.

We would like to emphasize that NSO sells it technologies solely to law enforcement and intelligence agencies of vetted governments for the sole purpose of saving lives through preventing crime and terror acts. NSO does not operate the system and has no visibility to the data.

How can NSO deny that the Saudi government, one its known customers, used its software for spying on the then murdered Jamal Khashoggi when it ‘does not operate the system’ and ‘has no visibility to the data’?

You can’t claim both a. assure knowledge and b. to have no way to have gained it.

But back to the real issue:

  • Who has the capacity to make a list of 50,000 phone numbers that include at least 1,000 who were spied on with NSO’s software?
  • Who can ‘leak’ such a list to some NGO and make sure that lots of ‘western’ media jump onto it?
  • Who has an interest in shutting NSO down or to at least make its business more difficult?

The competition I’d say. And the only real one in that field is the National Security Agency of the United States.

The U.S. often uses ‘intelligence’ as a kind of diplomatic currency that keeps other countries dependent on it. If the Saudis have to ask the U.S. for snooping on someone it is much easier to have influence over them. NSO is disturbing that business. There is also the problem that the first class spying software NSO is selling to somewhat shady customers might well fall into the hands of some big U.S. adversary.

The ‘leak’ to Amnesty and Forbidden Stories is thus an instrument to keep some monopolistic control over client regimes and over spying technology. (The Panama Papers were a similar kind of U.S. sponsored ‘leak’, only in the financial field.)

Edward Snowden, who once was committed NSA supporter but leaked NSA documents because he wanted it to stick to the law, is supporting this campaign:

Edward Snowden @Snowden – 16:28 UTC · Jul 18, 2021
Stop what you’re doing and read this. This leak is going to be the story of the year: https://theguardian.com/world/2021/…

—

Edward Snowden @Snowden – 15:23 UTC · Jul 19, 2021
There are certain industries, certain sectors, from which there is no protection. We don’t allow a commercial market in nuclear weapons. If you want to protect yourself you have to change the game, and the way we do that is by ending this trade.
Guardian: Edward Snowden calls for spyware trade ban amid Pegasus revelations

Snowden seems to say that NSO, which sells it software only to governments, should stop doing so but that the NSA should continue the use of such spying instrument:

Speaking in an interview with the Guardian, Snowden said the consortium’s findings illustrated how commercial malware had made it possible for repressive regimes to place vastly more people under the most invasive types of surveillance.

Snowden’s opinion on this is kind of strange:

chinahand @chinahand – 17:28 UTC · Jul 19, 2021
fascinating how Mr “US state surveillance is the greatest threat to humanity” gets worked up about the fact that a bit of state surveillance is apparently outsourced to a private contractor by mid and low tier state actors.

Edward Snowden @Snowden – 17:06 UTC · Jul 19, 2021
Read about the Biden, Trump, and Obama officials who accepted blood money from the NSO group to bury any efforts at accountability — even *after* their involvement in the death and detention of journalists and rights defenders around the world!
WaPo: How Washington power brokers gained from NSO’s spyware ambitions

The uproar in the the media created by the NSO revelation is already having the desired effect:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has shut down infrastructure and accounts linked to Israeli surveillance vendor NSO Group, Amazon said in a statement.

The move comes as a group of media outlets and activist organizations published new research into NSO’s malware and phone numbers potentially selected for targeting by NSO’s government clients.

“When we learned of this activity, we acted quickly to shut down the relevant infrastructure and accounts,” an AWS spokesperson told Motherboard in an email.

AWs has for years known about NSO’s activities. NSO has been using CloudFront, a content delivering network owned by Amazon:

CloudFront infrastructure was used in deployments of NSO’s malware against targets, including on the phone of a French human rights lawyer, according to Amnesty’s report. The move to CloudFront also protects NSO somewhat from researchers or other third parties trying to unearth the company’s infrastructure.

“The use of cloud services protects NSO Group from some Internet scanning techniques,” Amnesty’s report added.

That protection is no longer valid. NSO will have quite some problems to replace such a convenient service.

Israel will whine about it but it seems to me that the U.S. has decided to shut NSO down.

For you and me that will only marginally lower the risk of being spied on.

Freedom Rider: How the billionaires rule

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Predatory capitalism has driven down wages and created a dystopia for workers.

By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Intrepid Report

President Calvin Coolidge said, “The business of America is business.” The expression is memorable because it always rang true. But nearly 100 years later an old trite saying has taken on an ever more terrifying meaning.

The ruling class wield their power more blatantly than ever. There is little effort to conceal their determination to rule over the people and to control the politicians who are now little more than their personal minions.

When the people get a little help, as happened with additional stimulus funds for the unemployed, politicians across the country took up arms for the ruling class and turned down free money just to stay in the good graces of their bosses.

Currently 25 states out of 50 have rejected additional help for the unemployed. The money came from the federal government and didn’t impact state budgets, but politicians know who calls the shots. When called upon to help struggling people they chose to do just the opposite. They helped their exploiters and, in the process, made a mockery of what passes for democracy.

There is no labor shortage in this country. Instead, there is a shortage of jobs that pay a living wage and that is because of the power of capitalists. They have grown richer precisely because they have forced workers to live in a constant state of precarity, and now it is quite literally better to stay home than to work for a pittance.

Of course, the richest man in the world, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is a master at coming up with new ways to subjugate workers. Any reports of job growth should be viewed with a very jaundiced eye as predatory capitalism has driven down wages and created a dystopia for workers. Bezos has mastered squeezing the most and giving the least.

Amazon warehouse workers suffer from injuries at higher rates than other employees in similar jobs but the injuries are part of the cost of doing business. It is expected that the grueling working conditions will create high turnover which is exactly what Amazon wants. A revolving door of employees serves their needs quite nicely. Bezos made a big deal about a $15 per hour starting salary but he could certainly afford to pay a lot more, a real living wage. The tight-fisted billionaire who could potentially become a trillionaire got rich the old fashioned way. He cheats workers.

Bezos also comes up with new and ingenious ways to spread the suffering. Amazon Flex delivery drivers are hired by apps and fired by algorithms. They have no interaction with human resources or any humans at all and they must pay a $200 fee to contest terminations that are rarely decided in their favor.

Even when American workers lose their jobs they are still at the mercy of corporate giants. ID.me contracts with states to provide public access to web sites such as those used for unemployment claims. Their facial recognition software doesn’t verify everyone properly and desperate people wait days and weeks for their unemployment payments to arrive. As with Amazon there is no one to speak to for help. But state governments turn over millions of dollars to ID.me in order to cheat people out of benefits they have earned. Currently 30 states contract with ID.me to make sure that the most vulnerable are kicked while they are down.

The algorithm hirings and firings and the facial recognition technology problems are not bugs in the system. They are features. They are doing precisely what they are intended to do, keep workers poor, desperate, and at the mercy of capitalists. Cruelty is the point.

One might ask who speaks for the people. Workers in several states had their unemployment saved by court decisions but those are few and far between. Politicians are as blatant as their corporate bosses and openly side with them against their constituents.

There is no way to reform this system. Democrats and republicans are equally eager to act at the behest of corporate interests. The people either vote in hopes of change that never comes or are apathetic because they see that the odds are against them.

The workers who refuse low pay under dangerous conditions are moving in the right direction. Whether they know it or not they are potentially building a new movement. A general strike is what the country needs. Of course that is why the hammer fell in an attempt to nip any resistance in the bud and get the cogs back into the machine. But the direction we must move in is clear. There is no salvation from a Biden or a Harris or any other name being floated. The people will have to move in a different direction if they are to save themselves.