In a Dark Wood

By James Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

Behold the photo (above) showing President “Joe Biden” getting his booster shot of the Covid-19 “vaccine,” with the news media clustered to the left of what is apparently a stage-set built in a larger chamber. Do you possibly ask yourself: why bother to build a set for this event in or under the White House somewhere — including even fake daylit windows — when there are any number of actual rooms in the White House perfectly suited to holding this grand event in real daylight? What is going on here?

And, by the way, how do we know that “JB” is getting an actual mRNA booster?  Or is it just 10 CCs of saline solution? Is not the syringe, after all, just another prop in the show? The video of this event was broadcast on cable TV channels and corporate media websites everywhere. None of them commented on the strange artificiality of the staging. And so, the mystery abides….

It only reinforces the creeping suspicion that absolutely everything about the “Joe Biden” regime is fake. And malevolently so. How else could it be that so many bad things are happening at the same time in this country if there was not some faction seeking to destroy it?

For instance, the vaccine mandates for medical personnel. In upstate New York, WNYT-TV reported yesterday that 200 employees of Albany Med, a large, regional teaching hospital, are placed on seven day’s unpaid leave prior to getting fired for refusing the vaccine. Andrew Cuomo’s replacement, new Governor Kathy Hochul, has blocked unemployment benefits for fired nurses and technicians if they persist in evading the vax. Doctors are included in the mix, too.

Of course, large numbers of health care workers getting kicked out of their jobs will only make it more difficult to care for patients — with Covid or any other health problem — so how does this policy help anyone? (Unless you consider that, with fewer staff on-duty, fewer Covid in-patients will be subjected to the medical malpractice of being placed on ventilators and treated with the killer drug Remdesivir.) Not only has effective early treatment with other drugs been banned from the official medical standards-of-practice across the USA, but mere talk about it has been banned, notably by Google’s YouTube app.

This coercion of health care workers is going on all over the country, of course, not just in New York state. These nurses and techs have been working around Covid patients for going on two years, and many of them have gotten the disease, with symptoms or without, conferring natural immunity. So, what is the point of forcing the vaxes on them? It is also a fact that vaccinated people are susceptible to catching the disease, and that, in any case, the vaccinated carry heavier viral loads than the un-vaxed, making them more efficient spreaders. It is also a fact that mass vaccination in the midst of a pandemic promotes the mutation of new variant viruses that increasingly are not affected by the vaccines.

Thursday night, CNN ran a segment with its house doctor, Sanjay Gupta, hectoring one Andrea Babinski, a La Crosse, Wisconsin, nurse who is quitting her job at Gundersen Hospital there rather than take the vax shot. Dr. Gupta, acting all perplexed, asked her why. Ms. Babinski said she was concerned about blood-clotting. Dr. Gupta dismissed her concern, saying, “If you’ve got a clotting disorder, you should get the vaccine.” Really…?

After the segment, Dr. Gupta and Anderson Cooper shook their heads in amused puzzlement over the nurse’s obdurate foolishness. They are apparently uninformed that the spike protein produced by the vaccine is known to bind onto the endothelial lining of blood vessels and promote blood clots, leading to a range of lethal events such as myocardial infarction and cerebral hemorrhage — heart attack and stroke — plus a broad array of organ damage and neurological disorders.

The Medicare Tracking System states that 48,465 people have died within 14 days of receiving a vax shot. Many had co-morbidities, of course, so not all the deaths can be directly attributed to the vaccines, but the public health authorities are averse to autopsies that might establish the truth of the matter. Anyway, the CDC has ruled recently that they will only count people more than 14 days out from a shot as being considered officially vaccinated — so none of those aforementioned deaths would have counted as vaccinated persons under the rule. Do you see how they are gaming the statistics to keep Americans as misinformed as possible?

Despite all the efforts to bamboozle the public, the “Joe Biden” regime has about run out the string on Covid paranoia, and wrung all of the political usefulness out of it. Going forward, it will only backfire on them. Do they think that wrecking hospital services while depriving thousands of health care workers of their incomes is a winning strategy? These are existential threats to US citizens.

Everything else under “Joe Biden’s” watch looks like a pyromaniac seeking to burn down the country. Over 10,000 Haitian interlopers have been surreptitiously dispersed from Del Rio, Texas, to nether regions of the USA. The government made no effort to vaccinate them — what does that tell you? Over 100,000 more invading opportunists from all over the world are reportedly heading to the southern border. A month after the fall of Afghanistan, and after this week’s hearings in both the House and the Senate, still nobody knows who gave the insane order to surrender Bagram Air Force Base outside Kabul. The Democrats’ dishonest “infrastructure” bill is wilting in Congress. Food and energy prices are rising fast, with shortages on the horizon. The capital markets are wobbling. And Special Counsel John Durham is back on the scene with more actions against Hillary Clinton’s favorite law firm, Perkins Coie, facilitators of the seditious RussiaGate campaign. Put it all together and you have a mechanism that looks like a “Joe Biden” toaster.

Off in a far corner of the News-O-Sphere, someone affecting to be John McAfee dwells on a Telegram channel labeled “OfficialMcAfee.” John McAfee, for those who don’t know, was the wealthy inventor of antivirus computer software who found himself at odds with the US government, went rogue, and supposedly committed suicide in Spain last June. Now, he has apparently turned up on this social media app in a series of videos and cryptic info drops. Whether he is actually still alive, or perhaps recorded these videos before taking his life, is not known. But he had threatened to release terabytes of digital evidence against his antagonists, including video of sexual misconduct among well-known political figures connected to the late Jeffrey Epstein, as well as incriminating documents from the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign files from 2016. Those info dumps have commenced and the figure who appears to be John McAfee in the Telegram videos says that the dumps will contain incrementally more shocking material for weeks to come.

All of this activity is obviously weird to an extreme never before seen in national affairs prior to the deep fake era — to the degree that reality is almost impossible to establish for now. We are a people lost in a dark wood. When you are lost, the first thing you must do is stop your useless, self-defeating locomotion, hunker down in place, and carefully assess what’s around you. Even if everything else is murky and perplexing, one thing is known: there is a way out of these dark woods. Remain calm and alert and it will reveal itself.

Who got to CNN? Network pulls scheduled interview with Donald Sterling’s beat-up mistress

By Daniel Hopsicker

Source: Mad Cow Morning News

Donald Sterling has unsavory links with the owner of the New York City boutique hotel where his former mistress was beaten up Sunday night.

Four developments during the past few days in New York City offer dramatic evidence that questions recently raised here (and elsewhere) about the links to organized crime of real estate mogul, sexual sleazeball, casual racist, and soon-to-to-ex LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling are both serious and well-founded.

The first thing that occurred has already received lots of coverage. The woman who blew the whistle on Sterling’s casual racism, his former mistress V Stiviano, was badly beaten Sunday night by two white thugs in hoodies at a swank boutique hotel  in New York City.

Dom-V

The second development involves the venue where the beatdown occurred, whose significance remains largely unknown.  The Hotel Gansevoort, outside whose doors Stiviano was assaulted, belongs to one William Achenbaum.

Until just three weeks before being busted, Hotelier Achenbaum had “owned”— as a straw front man for the CIA—a Gulfstream II luxury jet (N987SA) that was caught carrying 4 tons of cocaine in the Yucatan as part of the same operation.

During the time  the two men controlled the plane, it made numerous trips to the U.S. base in Guantanamo, the McClatchy Newspapers group reported,  flying extraordinary renditions for the CIA. 

Achenbaum’s partner in the hotel, Arik Kislin of Long Island, whose family is repeatedly linked to the Russian Mob in published reports,  also owned the Long Beach CA air charter company, Air Rutter Intern’l, offered the Gulfstream II for charter. 

Unsavory links to the global drug trade

Are these facts at all relevant to the current tawdry Donald Sterling saga? Absolutely. Because Donald Sterling and William Achenbaum both share an unsavory link to an expatriate Saudi named Ramy El Batrawi, a longtime lieutenant of notorious CIA fixer Adnan Khashoggi. 

El Batrawi and Achenbaum both owned airplanes used in a drug trafficking enterprise in Florida between 2005-2008 that top DEA officials in Miami called an out of control “rogue operation” of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Tampa.

For his part, El Batrawi has made “fronting” for the CIA, with planes and even airlines, into a career. During Iran Contra,  he posed as the owner and president of an airline in Miami called Jetborne that secretly flew Oliver North’s TOW missiles to the mullahs in Iran.

Later court testimony, during bankruptcy proceedings, revealed that Jetborne had all along been a CIA proprietary airline.

“Closest thing to a real scandal we’re like to see hereabouts, nowadays”

In July 2003, the drug trafficking operation that DEA officials say was being protected by federal agents in the Tampa ICE Office received a second DC-9 (N12ONE), “sold” or “transferred”  or just ‘passed along” to  the operation by Ramy El Batrawi.

The operation, called Operation Mayan Jaguar, would soon blow up into the closest thing to a real scandal that anyone is likely to see in America for a long time.

It resulted in the forced sale of America’s 4th largest bank, Wachovia, after that bank was discovered to be laundering drug money from Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel used to purchase a fleet of 50 American aircraft to be used as drug planes.

Links between recent owners of the two drug planes, first discovered during an examination of FAA registration records, suggested a long-running and continuing criminal conspiracy to engage in massive drug trafficking.

Before the Gulfstream II business  was “parked” in the name of New York real estate developer Achenbaum and his partner Kislin with ties to the Russian Mob, the plane had passed through the hands of a secretive Midwestern media baron named Stephen Adams, also a Republican fund-raiser extraordinaire (he was one of the ‘elite’ Bush’s Rangers), who was personally buying over $1 million of billboard ads for George W. Bush for his 2000 Presidential election bid.

Scammers, fraudsters, grifters & bunco artists of the national security state

Adams had another business partner, Michael Farkas, whose company SkyWay owned a DC-9 (N900SA) which became the first drug plane the Tampa operation lost to a big bust in the Yucatan. 

SkyWay, the company whose DC-9 was busted in April 2006 in the Yucatan with 5.5 tons of cocaine, for example, had been founded the year before by a slippery Miami  attorney named Michael Farkas. 

According to SEC filings,  Stephen Adams and Michael Farkas jointly control Holiday RV Superstores, Inc.,  used by mastermind Adnan Khashoggi in the complicated securities fraud which stole as much as $300 million from investors and taxpayers. 

Companies Farkas controlled, like Holiday RV and Imperial Credit, were full partners in the stock manipulation scheme, along with Stephen Adams’ company, which passed on the Gulfstream II luxury jet to William Achenbaum.

In an example of extremely sloppy tradecraft, Khashoggi and El Batrawi’s partners in the massive fraud were men who’d provided planes to the drug trafficking operation, making “plausible deniability” something of a sticky wicket. 

“The complex sale of the Gulfstream II jet and its end in the Mexican jungle highlight the increasingly complicated illicit drug trade,” read the McClatchy Newspapers’ account on September 29, 2007.

From ‘whack-a-mole’ to ‘hide the pea,’ its still a sordid business

The ‘players” were an ecumenical cast of international characters:  Republican fund-raiser Adams, Saudi arms dealer Khashoggi, oligarchs in the Russian Mob,  elements of American military and civilian intelligence who populated the executive ranks at SkyWay, and a large but dirty San Diego defense contractor called Titan Corp. that would soon get even larger when it was merged into L3, one of today’s behemoth defense contractors. 

What this means, should any courageous federal prosecutor take note, is that the drug plane’s rapid series of ownership changes are nothing more than sham transactions, part of the CIA’s traditionally sophisticated game of “hide the pea” designed to conceal the aircraft’s true owners. From what we’ve begun to learn of Sterling, he appears to fit right in.

Just knowing unsavory characters who are also acquainted is hardly a crime. What involvement does Donald Sterling have in the sordid business?  

The answer comes several months after the SEC charges Ramy El-Batrawi and his boss Adnan Khashoggi, in April 2006, with masterminding a massive financial fraud that resulted in investor and taxpayer losses of more than $100 million (The figure later doubled.) 

The two Saudis were the lead actors in a massive financial fraud that earned the name Stockwalk, that complemented the drug trafficking operation by using stock from the same companies—led by Khashoggi and El Batrawi’s company, GenesisIntermedia—that had been supplying drug planes.

The ‘other’ Donald issues a bizarre press release

Donald Sterling enters the action just as the two Saudis are being hammered by bad publicity from their recent indictment, which gets so bad that both men consider going on the lam to avoid the police. Khashoggi eventually will, living quite comfortably, according to a source in Palm Beach Florida, in a guest cottage on the grounds of Donald Trump’s Mar a Largo Mansion.

At this crucial moment Sterling steps in to help stem the tide of bad publicity swamping Khashoggi and El Batrawi’s efforts to move on to another scam. Sterling, of course, has considerable public relations clout. He  regularly buys full-page ads touting his charitable achievements in the Los Angeles Times.

In early August Donald Sterling  names Ramy El Batrawi the winner of Sterling’s non-existent “Humanitarian of the Year Award” for El Batrawi’s (also non-existent) efforts to solve the problem of the homeless on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

No one was more surprised at being named “Humanitarian of the Year” than Ramy El-Batrawi himself, judging by his reaction. He freely admits to the LA Times that he’s made no contribution of money or time to helping the homeless.

But it’s what happened in the aftermath of  the Sterling mistress beat-down that provides the biggest shock. 

Did CNN cave before the bell?

Sterling’s  former mistress V Stiviano was in New York to appear in an hour-long interview scheduled with Anderson Cooper on CNN Monday night. 

After the beating, her camp leaks to the press that Sterling’s former mistress “started getting death threats almost immediately after Sterling’s racist rants — which she recorded — were made public,” said a well-placed source to Radar Online, which was consistently out in front of the pack on the story.

“Most of the threats were made on social media, “the source continued, “and this is one of the reasons why she has scaled back her activity. It has been very scary for V, and she also hired a bodyguard.” 

But plucky Ms V is undeterred, her attorney tells reporters late Sunday night.  “Stiviano will still be on Anderson Cooper’s show Monday night. No one will intimidate her.”

Maybe no one will intimidate Stiviano. But somebody sure did get to CNN.

 A story nobody is talking about…yet

Just hours before the scheduled sit-down, and with no explanation, CNN removed Anderson Cooper from the broadcast.  Producers notified Stiviano that Cooper was unavailable, and that Chris Cuomo would now be conducting the interview. 

Stiviano immediately backed out. Thanks but no thanks, the former mistress’ replied. Nothing against Cuomo, her attorney explained. “But Anderson had previously met with V and Donald Sterling several weeks ago when he flew out to Los Angeles. Her camp has a relationship with  Anderson.” 

Makes sense.  What doesn’t make sense: Who kept Anderson Cooper from doing an interview he’d already prepared for? And why?

To put it bluntly: Who got to CNN? 

Police Commissioner comes down with virulent case of hoof in mouth

What happened next, the 4th development, is possibly the most revealing. On Monday night NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton weighs in with gratuitous comments about his feelings towards Sterling’s former mistress.  

Asked about V Stiviano’s lawyer’s claim that she was punched out by a pair of N-word-spewing punks outside a Meatpacking District hot spot on Sunday night, Bratton said he wished Donald Sterling’s infamous ex had never shown up in the Big Apple. 

“I wasn’t even aware she was in town,” he stated. “We would have hoped that she would stay on the West Coast.”

A follow-up question to Bratton I’d have loved to hear someone ask: “Commissioner Bratton, who do you mean by ‘we’?”

Up for the lead in “Vile little Man”

Don’t all victimized citizens deserve to be treated with respect by the police? Apparently, if you’ve offended someone as “connected” as Sterling, the answer is probably no.

Given Sterling’s unsavory links with William Achenbaum, owner of the New York City boutique hotel where V Stiviano was beaten up,  makes Bratton’s comments seem particularly menacing and gratuitous.   

The FBI has long touted its success in critically weakening the forces of organized crime through its efforts to break up the Mafia in New York City. 

But they clearly remain powerful enough to pull strings at CNN.