Two for Tuesday
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Situational Awareness
By James Howard Kunstler
Source: Kunstler.com
“All across the board, illness, disability, cancer, heart, autism, fertility…WeFkdUp !!!” —The Ethical Skeptic on Twitter
What if Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche is correct? The Dutch virologist said at the outset of the Covid-19 episode in 2020 that vaccinating the world in the midst of an epidemic was insane because it would train the virus to evolve more dangerously while disabling human immune systems.
Last week he issued a warning that the world was within weeks of just such a new and deadly immune escape variant outbreak that would bring on a shocking wave of sickness and death among people who received multiple Covid-19 vaccinations. This would happen on top of an already accelerating rise in latent vaccine adverse reactions manifesting as aggressive cancers, blood disorders, cardiac injury, neurological disease, and much, much more.
To this point in the Covid-19 story, Western Civ in general, and the USA in particular, have descended into an epic group psychosis as a result of the managed mind-fuckery induced by their own governments in collusion with a pharmaceutical industry metastasizing on money the way an aggressive cancer feeds on sugar in a human body. Fearful citizens swallowed all manner of unreality foisted on them by means of propaganda and censorship.
We still don’t know for sure how, who, and why, exactly, Covid-19 was set loose on the world, and the public health agencies don’t want you to know. Perhaps the worst and most baldly dishonest act was the official suppression of effective treatments with common, safe, anti-virals that could have saved millions of lives. And all just to preserve the vaccine companies’ liability shield from the Emergency Use Authorization. In fact, governments are still militating against the sale and use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which could be taken prophylactically in anticipation of a new outbreak.
So, if these populations were driven crazy by authorities ginning up their fear and preying on it, what will happen if that fear turns to anger instead? Because that’s exactly what will happen when Americans, and perhaps even Europeans, realize they’ve been subject to history’s biggest homicidal fraud. That anger is going to seek targets, and they are going to find them very easily in their own government officials and also — get this — in the medical establishment that has betrayed its patients so unconscionably.
It’s just impossible to say exactly how that will play out on-the-ground. Governments are already falling — Spain, the Netherlands — but these were parliamentary downfalls according to regular political procedure. Our country has no such procedures for changing authority in a time of crisis. Instead, we have a president up to his neck in bribery scandal and executive agency thuggery, and political parties sunk in corruption, and no way to get rid of them except elections many months away — elections which at least half the people don’t believe are honest.
This crisis of bad faith and sickness is happening at the same time that Western Civ enters an equally vicious crisis of economy and finance. America and Europe are broke. All are playing games with their conjoined banking systems and their currencies. All are de-industrializing economies strictly based on industrial production of goods no longer being produced, and pretending to replace them with economies of computer vapor-ware. That can’t work and can only end badly in collapsing standards of living.
The past few years, an apparent coalition of global elites, functioning in orgs such as the WEF, the WHO, the EU, the IMF, the central banks, and countless NGOs, along with shadowy intel units and what remains of the old news media, have promoted ever more desperate top-down control programs to prevent a breakdown into wholesale economic and political disorder. Their efforts increasingly tilt into pretense.
Try to impose digital currencies and health passports? Fuggeddabowdit. You will only get a chaos of work-arounds, non-compliance, and probably violent opposition. Keep that stupid, dishonorable, perfidious, and unnecessary war going in Ukraine and you run the risk of turning Western Civ into a matched set of ashtrays.
As you can see, there has already been enough official mischief, crime, and malfeasance to severely piss-off the population. If Dr. Vanden Bossche is correct, we are perhaps heading into the conclusive shock of an evil era. Some kind of monumental correction will be in order. The people will need some way to regain credible self-governance, either through personnel change in every locus of power, or some revision in structure and procedure. For now, there is little faith that our institutions can manage either of those options. Better maintain situational awareness as we creep into the unknown.
When Dissent Ends, Transhumanism Reigns And Digitization Rules, Humanity Will Cease To Be Human
By Gary Barnett
Source: GaryDBarnett.com
“The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.”
~ Arundhati Roy
Self-defense comes in many forms, but all defense of self begins and ends with dissent, non-compliance, disobedience, saying no to any and all rule, and never allowing aggression against mind and body; mental or physical. Without dissent, defense is not possible, because when voluntary compliance is the prevailing behavior, whether sought, desired, or not, all defense mechanisms are effectively disarmed. In other words, silence in the face of injustice, immorality, terror, or tyranny, creates a condition of weakness, submission, and irresponsibility, which are all the fodder of indifference. When you say nothing, when you do not say no, when you take no action against evil, you commit evil. By not speaking out, and by not responding, you have spoken loudly, and openly committed an act of cowardice. The ultimate blame lies not just with the aggressor in this circumstance, but also equally with he who hides and remains silent.
In “Beyond Good and Evil,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” This is an accurate description of the phenomenon of becoming what one lives, so if you live in a state of indifference, ignoring the evil around you, accepting it in order to avoid conflict and responsibility, you become the evil you have chosen to ignore. The dark abyss in this circumstance, is created by your own inaction against it.
What we face as a society, is the most tremendous threat ever perceived or active in the history of mankind. Do you scoff at this seemingly ‘bold’ pronouncement? If so, you are already fooled, and a major contributor to the vast problems rampant in our world today. Instead of the State just singularly seeking war, the continuance of the bogus Federal Reserve System, isolated government corruption, communism, fascism, or any broad-based totalitarian assault on certain segments of society, we are all being bombarded from a thousand different directions at once with all these atrocities and many more, including attacks on our freedom and sovereignty, on our minds and bodies, and on every aspect of our being. Due to the colossal advances in technology, which in many more ways than not are being used against us in order to build a literal transhuman world run by technocratic means, we are facing what could be considered a technological Armageddon, where all control over humanity will be isolated in the hands of the most powerful few. To accept this, to treat it as normal or eminent, is a most fatal error, and one that could determine our fate in perpetuity.
When humanity ceases to exist in any natural form, when male and female become one, when transhumanism and mind control are inescapable realities, when perversion is commonly accepted, the presence of life that we have all known to be magical and a wonder, will have disappeared. The world being designed is not a world of love, hope, and dreams, it is a nightmare of horror, and those pursuing this downfall of man have already lost all human characteristics. They are monsters, so we must fight and defeat them without becoming monsters ourselves.
There is a reason that the children, beginning in infancy, are targeted by State indoctrination, drugs, chemicals, bioweapon injections masquerading as ‘vaccines,’ insane propaganda, distraction, gross perversion, and are pulled away from family mentally and physically throughout their lives. This, in and of itself, if allowed to continue, will guarantee mind destruction of multiple future generations, and that will secure a fully dumbed-down, compliant, and obedient proletariat mass in the future. At that point, total control by the technocrats over humanity will have been achieved.
While technology has the capability to accomplish many great things, in the hands of these monsters who seek universal control, it can also be used to destroy us. Many refer to this technological phenomenon as ‘artificial intelligence,’ (AI) but there is no such thing. This false terminology is being used against us, as machines are not intelligent, they are programmed by intelligence, or so it is believed. When man becomes a machine, real intelligence ends, and a programmed society of slaves is the result. AI is ‘defined’ as “perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information–demonstrated by computers, as opposed to intelligence displayed by humans or other animals.” Intelligence is defined as the ability to learn, reason, and understand, so honest intelligence cannot be artificial, and machines are still machines. The transhuman digitization of man will mean the end of all traditional life as we know it.
The bulk of this society, has already succumbed to a digital world, and relies on what is falsely labeled ‘social media’ as parent, family, and friend, disregarding the natural state of personal communication, love, companionship, debate, and the grandeur of nature. At this point, the future is not owned by you, but is owned by your masters. All privacy has disappeared, and most all private and financial transactions are captured and data-based. Every aspect of life is now tracked, traced, used, surveilled, restricted, censored, taxed, and every activity imaginable requires licensure (paid permission slip) by the State. You are already a slave, whether you realize it or not.
The plot continues to thicken, as centrally-controlled digital currencies (CBDCs) are being rolled out around the world, which will allow for most every individual to be fully contained and regulated. This will lead to mass restrictions as to what you are allowed to do, where you may travel – if at all, what food you must eat, what medical care you may or may not receive, what State stipend you will be allotted, how much energy you will be permitted to use, and on, and on. Everything in your existence will depend on behavior modification; in other words, do as you are instructed by the State technocratic rulers, or lose everything, as your entire life will be technologically sanctioned.
It is imperative to understand that everything you think you know about technology, and technological advances, is likely at a minimum, 20 years behind. Every so-called new discovery and new technology recognized as such, are not new at all. What the military has now, and is working on today, is unknown to most all except the very few at the top of the pyramid of power. To understand and grasp this concept, should strike fear in the hearts of man. The internet, and therefore, the internet of things, was not discovered and implemented by some computer geek, but was designed and created by the military through the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.” (DARPA) Getting to this terroristic time in our history was no accident, and was intentionally planned long ago. We have little time left to stop this totalitarian hell that has been created in order to destroy what we know as the human race.
Will you continue to sit on the sideline, keeping your eyes closed, your ears covered, and your mouth shut, or will you stand up and defend your freedom and life, and that of your family? The only solution, as I have often said, is through active dissent. Say no to the State, disobey, do not comply with any tyrannical order, and do so as individuals en masse. No one can do this for you, but it can and should be done by many independent freedom-minded individuals. Asking someone else for a solution for the masses as a collective, is worthless, and exposes apathy at a level that if practiced by the herd as it has been for so long, the end of humanity will surely be our destiny.
“Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.”
Why Propaganda Works
The primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives has a simple, well-documented explanation.
By Caitlin Johnstone
Source: Consortium News
It’s not really deniable that Western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes.
Mass media employees have attested to the fact that they experience constant pressure to administer narratives which are favorable to the political status quo of the U.S. empire. The managers of empire have publicly acknowledged that they have a vested interest in manipulating public thought.
Casual naked-eye observation of the way the mass media reliably support every U.S. war, rally behind the U.S. foreign policy objective of the day and display overwhelming bias against empire-targeted governments makes it abundantly obvious that this is happening when viewed with any degree of critical thought.
To deny that these mass-scale manipulations have an effect would be as absurd as denying that advertising — a near trillion-dollar industry — has an effect.
It’s just an uncomfortable fact that as much as we like to think of ourselves as free-thinking sovereign agents immune to outside influence, human minds are very hackable. Manipulators understand this, and the science of modern propaganda which has been advancing for over a century understands this with acute lucidity.
By continually hammering our minds with simple, repeated messaging about the nature of the world we live in, propagandists are able to exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.
Our indoctrination into the mainstream imperial worldview begins when we are very young, largely because schooling is intertwined with the same power structures whose information interests are served by that worldview and because powerful plutocrats such as John D. Rockefeller actively inserted themselves into the formation of modern schooling systems.
Our worldview is formed when we are young in the interests of our rulers, and from there cognitive biases take over which protect and reinforce that worldview, typically preserving them in more or less the same form for the rest of our lives.
This is what makes it so hard to convince someone that their beliefs about an issue are falsehoods born of propaganda.
I see a lot of people blame this problem on the fact that critical thinking isn’t taught in schools and I’ve seen some strains of Marxist thought arguing that Westerners choose to espouse propaganda narratives because they know it advances their own class interests.
I’m sure both of these factor into the equation exist to some extent. But the primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives actually has a much simpler, well-documented explanation.
Modern psychology tells us that people don’t just tend to hold onto their propaganda-induced belief systems; people tend to hold onto any belief system.
Belief perseverance, as the name suggests, describes the way people tend to cling to their beliefs even when presented with evidence disproving them. The theory goes that back when most humans lived in tribes that were often hostile to each other, our tribal cohesion and knowing who we can trust mattered more to our survival than taking the time to figure out what’s objectively true.
So now we’ve got these brains that tend to prioritize loyalty to our modern “tribes” like our nation, our religion, our ideological factions and our pet causes.
This tendency can take the form of motivated reasoning, where our emotional interests and “tribal” loyalties color the way we take in new information. It can also give rise to the backfire effect, where being confronted with evidence which conflicts with one’s worldview will not only fail to change their beliefs but actually strengthen them.
So the simple answer to why people cling to beliefs instilled by imperial propaganda is because that’s just how minds work. If you can consistently and forcefully indoctrinate someone from an early age and then give them a mainstream ideological “tribe” with which to identify in their indoctrination, the cognitive glitches in these newly-evolved brains of ours act as sentries protecting those implanted worldviews.
Which is exactly what modern propaganda, and our modern political systems, are set up to do.
I often see people expressing bewilderment about the way the smartest people they know subscribe to the most ridiculous propaganda narratives out there. This is why. A smart person who has been effectively indoctrinated by propaganda will just be more clever than someone of average intelligence in defending their beliefs.
Some of the most foam-brained foreign policy think pieces you’ll ever read come from PhDs and Ivy League graduates, because all their intelligence gives them is the ability to make intelligent-sounding arguments for why it would be good and smart for the U.S. military to do something evil and stupid.
The Oatmeal has a great comic about this (which someone also made into a video if you prefer). Importantly, the author correctly notes that the mind’s tendency to forcefully protect its worldview does not mean it’s impossible for someone to change beliefs in light of new evidence, only that it is more difficult than accepting beliefs which confirm biases.
It takes some work, and it takes sincerity and self-honesty, but it can be done. Which is happy news for those of us who have an interest in convincing people to abandon their propaganda-constructed worldviews for reality-based ones.
Sometimes just being patient with someone, showing empathy, treating them how we’d like to be treated, and working to establish things in common to overcome the primitive psychology which screams we’re from a hostile tribe can accomplish a lot more than just laying out tons of objective facts disproving their believed narrative about Russia or China or their own government or what have you.
And above all we can just keep telling the truth, in as many fresh, engaging and creative ways as we can come up with. The more we do this, the more opportunities there are for someone to catch a glimmer of something beyond the veil of their propaganda-installed worldview and the cognitive biases which protect it.
The more such opportunities we create, the greater a chance the truth has of getting a word in edgewise.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
Saturday Matinee: Let the Bullets Fly
By Josh Larsen
Source: Larsen on Film
Little visual gags fly as fast as the bullets in this 2010 Chinese action comedy, starring co-writer and director Jiang Wen as Pocky Zhang, a bandit leader who poses as governor of a southern outpost. One of the first things we see is a bandit leaning down to listen for an approaching train on railroad tracks—but first he ostentatiously sticks his finger in his ear to clear it out.
Mistaken identity is at the core of much of the movie’s comedy. Let the Bullets Fly opens with Zhang and his band hijacking that train, which is carrying the actual governor (Ge You) to his post in Goose Town. During his interrogation of the governor (captured in a shot-reverse-shot sequence that’s edited at light speed), Zhang decides that pretending to be the governor might be more lucrative than simply robbing him. But upon arriving in Goose Town (with the real governor in tow, disguised as Zhang’s counselor), Zhang finds that things are actually run by the local crime boss, Master Huang (Chow Yun-Fat). This leads to a series of strategic chess moves between the two men, culminating in a comic set piece where Zhang’s crew and Huang’s henchmen square off while wearing the same bandit masks with red circles on them, unable to tell who is who. It’s a face-off as farce.
With its manic comic sensibility, Let the Bullets Fly recalls the work of Hong Kong’s Stephen Chow (Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle, CJ7), whose own films seem inspired by Looney Tunes cartoons (the opening train sequence here could easily be a Wile E. Coyote short). Physics takes a back seat to fun, so that much of the film seems to be occurring in fast motion. As director, Jiang looks for every opportunity to be showy; at one point an alarm clock is thrown in the air and shot to pieces, causing a metal circle to sail over the camera like a collar.
As an actor, Jiang seems to understand that his face has a comic appeal—those big ears—that allows him to underplay the gags by keeping a straight face. He’s a delight. The legendary Chow (The Killer, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) gets a double role as the villainous Master Huang and Huang’s dim-witted body double. He’s quite a bit broader than Jiang, but equally amusing.
The disparate tones Jiang juggles can make for some uncomfortable moments. There are sudden bits of graphic violence, for instance, and a rape scene that isn’t given nearly the serious consideration it deserves. (Like much of the movie, it’s a setup for a later gag.) But as a political satire, Let the Bullets Fly is pointed and precise. “I want to make money standing tall,” Zhang says at one point, trying to explain why he’s left forest robbery behind. “Impossible,” the real governor replies, knowing bureaucratic corruption all too well. The best joke in Let the Bullets Fly might be that a bandit is the movie’s moral center.
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Watch Let the Bullets Fly on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/10088666
A State of Martial Law: America Is a Military Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy
By John & Nisha Whitehead
Source: The Rutherford Institute
“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”—Thomas Jefferson
The government is goosestepping all over our freedoms.
Case in point: America’s founders did not want a military government ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.
Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.
Most Americans seem relatively untroubled by this state of martial law.
Incredibly, when President Biden bragged about how the average citizen doesn’t stand a chance against the government’s massive arsenal of militarized firepower, it barely caused a ripple.
As Biden remarked at a fundraising event in California, “I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is—you know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16. You need something else than just an AR-15.”
The message being sent to the citizenry is clear: there is no place in our nation today for the kind of revolution our forefathers mounted against a tyrannical government.
For that matter, the government has declared an all-out war on any resistance whatsoever by the citizenry to its mandates, power grabs and abuses.
By this standard, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.
This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning.
For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.
A 2008 Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report goes on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”
Subsequent reports by the Department of Homeland Security to identify, monitor and label right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) have manifested into full-fledged pre-crime surveillance programs. Almost a decade later, after locking down the nation and spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.
Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that is colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.
The events of recent years have all been part of a master plan to shut us up and preemptively shut us down: by making peaceful revolution impossible and violent revolution inevitable.
The powers-that-be want an excuse to lockdown the nation and throw the switch to all-out martial law.
This is how it begins.
As John Lennon warned, “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”
Already, discontent is growing.
According to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, 7 out of 10 Americans believe that American democracy is “imperiled.”
Americans are worried about the state of their country, afraid of an increasingly violent and oppressive federal government, and tired of being treated like suspects and criminals.
What we’ll see more of before long is a growing dissatisfaction with the government and its heavy-handed tactics by people who are tired of being used and abused and are ready to say “enough is enough.”
This is what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent.
Our backs are against the proverbial wall.
We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.
When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Brace yourselves.
There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.
Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by political theater and public spectacle that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.
Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.
And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.
The architects of the police state have us exactly where they want us: under their stamping boot, gasping for breath, desperate for freedom, grappling for some semblance of a future that does not resemble the totalitarian prison being erected around us.
The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to express their displeasure with the government is through voting, yet that is no real recourse at all.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what is unfolding before us is not a revolution. This is an anti-revolution.
We are at our most vulnerable right now.
TWITTER FILES: Brown University’s Claire Wardle Aids Censorship
Researchers on “disinformation” have little in common with academic scholars teaching Proust or studying astrophysics.
By Paul D. Thacker
Source: The Disinformation Chronicle
The Washington Post defended campus researchers collaborating with federal agencies to censor Americans in an awkward, bumbling article last week, alleging that congressional staff demanding university documents were “harassing academics” who studied falsehoods spread by Trump. In reality, Congress is investigating campus employees who have little in common with traditional university scholars teaching Proust or studying the atmospheric chemistry of distant planets.
Just last year, one Stanford University researcher disclosed that he and other academics at Stanford and the University of Washington worked with an agency in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “to fill the gap of the things the government could not do themselves,” admitting that academics served as a cutout for federal censoring of Americans. The DHS agency campus researchers collaborated with is called the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA.
In a recent investigation, Tablet magazine noted that in 2021 CISA began determining which ideas Americans were allowed to discuss and debate during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Documents I discovered at Twitter’s headquarters further tie these censorship efforts to another researcher—Brown University’s Claire Wardle.
Who is Claire Wardle?
Largely unknown to most Americans, Wardle is a central figure in the disinformation industry and helped organize many of today’s campus disinformation groups in 2015 with funding from Google. But searching through Twitter’s files, I uncovered a government document marked “for official use only” that finds Wardle had also been chosen to brief CISA’s advisory committee.
A spokesperson for CISA emailed yesterday that he would get back to me and explain how often Wardle had briefed the agency.
Wardle has no training or background in science, yet she has long sought to define herself as an expert on vaccines. In a 2019 Twitter email that I discovered, Wardle tried to involve the company’s executives in a Ted Talk event that would define “credible sources” and “quality information around vaccines.”
That next year, Wardle emailed Twitter executives a report she had written looking into what she deemed to be antivaccine conspiracies and narratives found on social media. Wardle sent the email days after Pfizer announced initial positive findings for their COVID vaccine—results which Wardle said forced her to hurry up the report’s release.
“The dominant vaccine narrative is designed to undermine confidence in institutions and scientific sources,” Wardle alleged, in her email to Twitter. Wardle claimed in her report that vaccine mandates are “one of the prominent anti-vaccination narratives”—a narrative which, oddly enough, proved to be accurate when US companies as well as state and federal agencies began mandating COVID vaccines.
Since Wardle published her vaccine findings, one of the report’s authors joined a secretive UK government agency that investigative journalists exposed in recent weeks for censoring British citizens. Meanwhile, one of the report’s contributing researchers now works for a global PR firm that an Australian investigation found was helping that country’s government to censor its own people.
Gee, Thanks America! U.S. Sanctions Make Russian Economy Stronger and Precipitate Multipolar World
By SCF Editorial
Source: Strategic Culture Foundation
The paradoxical thing is that U.S. and European sanctions against Russia while intended to cripple the Russian economy have made the stronger.
Russia’s economy is performing strongly, according to recent forecasts from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The outcome defies earlier predictions by the United States and its European allies which held that Western sanctions would bring the Russian economy to its knees and force it to submissively “Cry Uncle”.
When the conflict in Ukraine escalated 16 months ago (after eight years of NATO-sponsored aggression using the Kiev Neo-Nazi regime), various Western politicians and pundits were relishing the prospect of the Russian economy collapsing from “Total War” launched against its international banking and trade.
Well, it didn’t turn out like that. Far from it. As the World Bank noted above, the Western sanctions have simply helped Russia boost alternative markets in China, India, and elsewhere around the globe. A principal earner for Russia is energy exports of oil and gas. Increased sales to Asia have maintained revenues despite the loss of European markets due to Western sanctions.
The paradoxical thing is that U.S. and European sanctions against Russia while intended to cripple the Russian economy have actually made the latter stronger.
Michael Hudson, an American global economics analyst, points out: “The sanctions have obliged Russia to become self-sufficient in food production, manufacturing production and consumer goods.”
Hudson also notes that the U.S. geopolitical strategy is to use sanctions in order to make its supposed European allies more dependent and subservient to Washington.
Another respected commentator, Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian geoeconomics professor, likened the use of Western sanctions to the self-destructive behavior of “self-harm”. The United States and European Union, he says, have “handed over a huge market to the rest of the world”.
Diesen also observes that 85 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that do not comply with Western sanctions against Russia. This global majority is more than ever creating new forms of trade and finance that obviate Western control. A major impetus for this positive development is the necessity bequeathed by Washington’s systematic abuse of power and privilege.
The repercussions are more far-reaching and profound than the inadvertent benefits accruing to Russia’s national economy. What the Western sanctions are also doing is accelerating the development of a multipolar world and the demise of the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency. The upshot of those two trends is the historic dwindling of American imperial power – albeit with outbursts of militarism and warmongering along the way down.
A significant illustration of the times a-changing was seen this week at the 25th summit of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). Attending the four-day event were 17,000 delegates from some 130 nations. This year’s convocation witnessed large representations from Asia, Latin America and Africa.
The bustling event not only reflected Russia’s own economic strength but the fact that – far from being “isolated” and downtrodden – Russia is viewed by the rest of the world as an engine for growth and more prosperous multipolar relations.
Indeed, from the perspective of most nations, it looks like the United States and its Western allies are the ones who are isolated and anachronistic.
One of the attendees at SPIEF was American industrial analyst Douglas Andrew Littleton who commented: “Western sanctions against Russia have backfired.” And he added: “I’m happy that Russia has been able to bypass and skirt the sanctions in so many ways with their friends and allies.”
What’s going on here is not just merely the emergence of an alternative system, but an epochal political and perhaps moral paradigm shift. The globe wants more peaceful and mutual relations of cooperation and development. Most people on this Earth want endless warmongering, militarism and unilateral bullying by self-ordained powers to be put to an end. The planet is crying out for a world based on justice and peace.
What the world is realizing more than ever is that the unilateral use of economic sanctions by Washington is nothing but warfare and state terrorism by another, more palatable name. For decades, the U.S. has tried to use economic weapons to strangle and kill other nations. North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Iraq and many other countries come to mind where U.S. imperialism has imposed conditions of economic genocide.
The world is well aware of this fiendish legacy and has had enough of American barbarism wielded with the help of its Western lackeys in NATO and the European Union.
We should here make special mention of Syria, the Arab nation struggling to recover from 12 years of war that was inflicted upon it by Washington and its NATO partners for “regime change”. Today, Syria’s recovery is cruelly hampered by economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU. How despicable is that?
There is an unerring historical sense, however, that Washington, has finally met its nemesis. By racking up sanctions against Russia and dragooning its EU lackeys to follow suit, the United States has now unleashed a historic dynamic process of its own imperial collapse.
For decades, U.S. sanctions worked to a nefarious degree on isolated, smaller nations to indeed enforce vengeful hardship.
Not anymore. Russia’s vast natural wealth and economy are too big to contain. Militarily, too, Russia will not be pushed around. Indeed, it has pushed back in Ukraine against the West’s deceptive and pernicious proxy war.
Organically and consciously, the world economy and international relations have been transformed in recent years, especially with the rise of China and Eurasia generally.
Another key development is that the Western imperialist media monopoly has also been broken. Washington and its minions in the European political class are held in contempt as liars and charlatans, even by their own populations.
By unwisely attempting to trap the Russian bear, the West has only created a scenario of revolt by the rest of the world from the West’s exploitative control. Five centuries of European and American Western parasitism have run their course.
Russia’s economic strength is galvanizing the rest of the world to shake off the chains of Western domination and subjugation. The process of dumping the dollar is gathering momentum which self-harming sanctions are precipitating. Pillars and facades are crumbling in real time.
The theme for the SPIEF event this year was “Sovereign Development – the Basis for a Just World”.
As with many other empires in the annals of history that have collapsed, arrogance and hubris often precede the fall. The American and Western elite thought they had an eternal license to wreak havoc for their own selfish gain. Their economic plunder and weaponry are now turning on their own heads. And it’s long overdue.
After the Crash 