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The Military Must be De-Funded Along with the Police

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By Dan Kovalik

Source: CounterPuch

As Vijay Prashad explains in his book, Red Star Over The Third World, domestic fascism in the West has reflected the West’s pre-existing colonial practices abroad. Citing Martinique communist Aimé Césaire, Prashad explains: “What had come to define fascism inside Europe through the experience of the Nazis – the jackboots and the gas chambers – were familiar already in the colonies. . . . [F]ascism was a political form of bourgeois rule in times when democracy threatened capitalism; colonialism, on the other hand, was naked power justified by racism to seize resources from people who were not willing to hand them over. Their form was different but their manners were identical.”

As Prashad and Césaire teach us, the fascist tactics used by our Western governments in the Global South will inevitably be brought home to be used against us. In the case of the US, these tactics have surely been introduced here, and we are now seeing this clearly as our police, sometimes backed by the military itself, are battling protestors in the streets in the same manner that a military force does as a foreign occupying power. Indeed, as a number of commentators have pointed out, the very tactic which killed George Floyd – the knee on the neck – was imported by the Israeli Defense Forces (themselves bankrolled by the US) who use this tactic against the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories and who are now training US police units, including the Minneapolis police force, to use it as well.

Moreover, the police are using not only the cruel military tactics used to oppress people abroad, they are also using the military’s very equipment to do so.

Democratic President Bill Clinton opened the door wide for this police militarization in the 1990s with the National Defense Authorization Act which created a program, the 1033 program, through which police departments are given surplus military equipment. As recently explained by Michael Shank in an article in The New York Review of Books, entitled “How Police Became Paramilitaries,” pursuant to this program, “local law enforcement began to adopt the type of military equipment more frequently used in a war zone: everything from armored personnel carriers and tanks, with 360-degree rotating machine gun turrets, to grenade launchers, drones, assault weapons, and more. Today, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment—most used, some new—has been transferred to civilian police departments.”

And, once the police receive this equipment, they must use it. As Shank explains, the 1033 program “requires that law enforcement agencies make use of such equipment within a year of acquisition, effectively mandating that police put it into practice in the public space.”  In other words, the police are actually required to turn the military’s high-tech guns against their own people.

The militarization of the police, moreover, can be seen as a by-product of the US’s over-reliance on the use of military force and war to solve all of its problems, to the near exclusion of all other alternatives. Indeed, the US has given up on trying to lead the world through economic and technological prowess, or through moral suasion. Instead, our leaders have decided that brute military force alone will allow the US to dominate the planet, and our nation’s coffers are being looted to the tune of over $1 trillion a year to do so. The result is the starving of our educational system, our social safety net and our nation’s vital infrastructure. This, of course, then leads to mass deprivation and despair which then leads to mass unrest. And, just as it deals with the rest of the world, our rulers have decided to deal with the unrest at home, not by solving the social ills plaguing this nation, or by fixing a few bridges or dams, but by beating us down with military-style violence.

Military force, indeed, has become the only instrument in our government’s toolbox, as quite starkly illustrated recently by the White House’s decision to give our valuable medical workers military flyovers costing $60,000 an hour instead of providing these workers with the protective equipment they have been desperately demanding. As with all things, our government has money and resources for instruments of violence, but none for human needs. This is literally killing us, just as surely as it is killing hundreds of thousands of people – nearly all people of color, not coincidentally – in foreign lands. The fight against police brutality and racism must therefore be linked to the fight to de-fund our military and to the broader fight to de-militarize our very society and culture.

Are we about to see a Colour Revolution in the United States?

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The familiar tropes are out in force, Trump may not weather this storm.

By Kit Knightly

Source: Off-Guardian

It started with peaceful protests. It always does. Oppressed, poor or otherwise desperate people take to the streets because they don’t know what else to do. Because their neighbours are doing it. Because the world is unfair to so many people. Because attention should be paid.

The reasons don’t matter. The peacefulness does.

Nobody who is marching for justice and change really wants to burn down a bakery or steal some trainers from a Nike store.

But then it starts happening.

Windows are broken. Bricks are thrown. Civilians are sprayed with mace. Bystanders are caught up in the throng. People get hurt.

It doesn’t need to happen, but it does.

Sometimes police panic in the face of intimidating crowds. Sometimes protesters let their anger boil over. A small minority of people just enjoy violence and chaos. Others stand to benefit from it, they stoke conflict and spread blame.

Then the molotov cocktails are flying and the snipers are shooting people on both sides. There’s blood in the streets and barricades are going up and the whole thing has its own momentum.

And, through all this, the media is churning out the noise. Partisan and dehumanising. “criminals” on one side “Fascists” on the other. Both sides are called thugs. Fox News and CNN tell the same stories with reversed points of view, slashing society down the centre.

And the chaos builds. The President has to do something, so he calls in the army.

Now the press are calling him a fascist and a dictator. They say he’s violated his office and he has to resign or be removed or be arrested.

I’m not talking about the United States.

I’m talking about Ukraine in 2014. Or Egypt and Syria in 2011. Or Libya in 2010. Or Bolivia just last winter. Or Venezuela every year for decades.

If the events currently unfolding in cities across the United States were happening in any other country in the world, a lot of us would already have said that the US Deep State was behind it. All the hallmarks are there.

The constructed narratives. The handy props. The agents provocateur. The hysterical media. The stench of agenda.

Consider, for a moment, that what is happening in Minneapolis and New York and Los Angeles has been happening in Paris and a host of other French cities for nearly two years.

The Guardian never called Macron a fascist. CNN never had a live stream about that.

Compare the coverage of the Gilets Jaunes to Black Lives Matter, and then to the Maidan protests.

The rubber bullets and tear gas are the same. The headlines are not.

CNN has one host calling Trump a “thug” who’s “hiding in his bunker”, and another saying “Trump declared war on Americans”. Robert Reich, writing in the Guardian, says:

[Trump] is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better.

The Washington Post has an op-ed headlined:

Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers.

Slate magazine:

Remove Trump Now

The corporations are all on board. Every one of them releasing statements of solidarity and heartfelt Instagram posts and sending money to all the right places. Nike had their famous ad.

Because the same companies paying slave-wages to 10-year-old Indonesian kids in vast sweatshops just hate racism and inequality, honest.

We’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Doesn’t this look like a play for an exchange of power? A colour revolution in the offing?

I suppose we should ask “why now?” Trump is up for re-election in just five months after all. Biden doesn’t really stand a chance, but they could have him suffer “ill health” and pull out, replace him with a Harris or a Warren or Michelle Obama. Hell, they could just rig it. They’ve done it before.

But then maybe it’s not about Trump per se, maybe it’s about the process of elections and the office of President in general. Maybe it’s about getting martial law in place well before the Covid19 backlash kicks in. Maybe there’s something else coming down the pipe that will make it clearer.

Supposing the plan is to get rid of Trump, what happens next?

Well, maybe one of a few things.

Firstly, it’s possible it all just dies down. But if 2020 has taught us anything it’s that the Deep State doesn’t fold a bad hand, they just up the ante and hope to bluff it out.

Second, there’s the possibility Trump introduces full-on martial law and becomes a quasi-dictator. While I’m sure he has no moral compunctions about that, it’s hard to see he would have the (vital) support of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies in that endeavour. They’ve shown their colours throughout the last four years. However useful Trump has been, he is not an insider and he is entirely disposable.

Third, and final, Trump goes. Whether there’s an impeachment or a trial or an early election or a civil war…I don’t know. But it’s hard to see Trump weathering this storm.

If I had to guess, I’d say the protests and pressures mount until Trump does something stupid. If he makes any Yanukovych-style attempts at appeasement (he probably won’t), they will be ignored or minimised or the goalposts will be moved (we already saw that, when the arrest of Derek Chauvin went almost totally unnoticed).

If soldiers fire on civilians – whether Trump orders it or not, or whether mercenaries frame the army (like in Ukraine) – that will be it. The military will resign en masse, turn on Trump and he will be ousted.

From there could emerge an appointed “temporary” President, a middle-of-the-road type with support from both parties, whose job is to “unify the country” and “heal the divides”.

The emergence of a totally unelected President will, of course, be called something like “a triumph of the democratic spirit” in The Guardian.

The riots will be blamed for a constructed “second wave” of Covid19. Just in time for one of the new POTUS’ first announcements to be that “America will start taking Covid19 seriously”. Stronger lockdown rules, mandatory track-and-trace…the full Monty.

This will naturally earn him/her good-boy points all across the mainstream media, with the (totally accidental) bonus that anyone who dares protest the coup will be breaking the law, being selfish and risking lives (and probably a racist).

This is all just my supposition. I could be wrong, I hope I’m wrong. But I can see it heading in that direction. And the idea should worry everyone. Not out of any latent concern for Donald Trump, obviously. Just for the stability of the world. Coups or impeachments or other non-democratic power-changes are not good. They don’t end well.

They don’t end well for the leaders being removed, who almost universally end up exiled or hanged or poisoned or shot. Sometimes worse.

More importantly, they don’t end well for the ordinary people, who always suffer when the Deep State turns society on its head.

And, in this instance, it may not end well for the world, which suddenly has a nuclear-armed superpower in a severe state of flux to worry about.

We should all be concerned.

There’s an old joke:

Q: Why has there never been a military coup in the United States?

A: Because there’s no American Embassy there.

It looks like maybe that no longer applies.

Why America’s “Revolution” Won’t be Televised. No one is Aiming at the Empire

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Protesters jump on a street sign near a burning barricade near the White House during a demonstration against the death of George Floyd on May 31, 2020 in Washington, DC. Photo: AFP

By Pepe Escobar

Source: Global Research

The Revolution Won’t Be Televised because this is not a revolution. At least not yet. 

Burning and/or looting Target or Macy’s is a minor diversion. No one is aiming at the Pentagon (or even the shops at the Pentagon Mall). The FBI. The NY Federal Reserve. The Treasury Department. The CIA in Langley. Wall Street houses. 

The real looters – the ruling class – are comfortably surveying the show on their massive 4K Bravias, sipping single malt.

This is a class war much more than a race war and should be approached as such. Yet it was hijacked from the start to unfold as a mere color revolution.

US corporate media dropped their breathless Planet Lockdown coverage like a ton of – pre-arranged? – bricks to breathlessly cover en masse the new American “revolution.” Social distancing is not exactly conducive to a revolutionary spirit.

There’s no question the US is mired in a convoluted civil war in progress, as serious as what happened after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in Memphis in April 1968.

Yet massive cognitive dissonance is the norm across the full “strategy of tension” spectrum. Powerful factions pull no punches to control the narrative. No one is able to fully identify all the shadowplay intricacies and inconsistencies.

Hardcore agendas mingle: an attempt at color revolution/regime change (blowback is a bitch) interacts with the Boogaloo Bois – arguably tactical allies of Black Lives Matter – while white supremacist “accelerationists” attempt to provoke a race war.

To quote the Temptations: it’s a ball of confusion.

Antifa is criminalized but the Boogaloo Bois get a pass (here is how Antifa’s main conceptualizer defends his ideas). Yet another tribal war, yet another – now domestic – color revolution under the sign of divide and rule, pitting Antifa anti-fascists vs. fascist white supremacists.

Meanwhile, the policy infrastructure necessary for enacting martial law has evolved as a bipartisan project.

We are in the middle of the proverbial, total fog of war. Those defending the US Army crushing “insurrectionists” in the streets advocate at the same time a swift ending to the American empire.

Amidst so much sound and fury signifying perplexity and paralysis, we may be reaching a supreme moment of historical irony, where US homeland (in)security is being boomerang-hit not only by one of the key artifacts of its own Deep State making – a color revolution – but by combined elements of a perfect blowback trifecta:  Operation Phoenix; Operation Jakarta; and Operation Gladio.

But the targets this time won’t be millions across the Global South. They will be American citizens.

Empire come home 

Quite a few progressives contend this is a spontaneous mass uprising against police repression and system oppression – and that would necessarily lead to a revolution, like the February 1917 revolution in Russia sprouting out of the scarcity of bread in Petrograd.

So the protests against endemic police brutality would be a prelude to a Levitate the Pentagon remix – with the interregnum soon entailing a possible face-off with the US military in the streets.

But we got a problem. The insurrection, so far purely emotional, has yielded no political structure and no credible leader to articulate myriad, complex grievances. As it stands, it amounts to an inchoate insurrection, under the sign of impoverishment and perpetual debt.

Adding to the perplexity, Americans are now confronted with what it feels like to be in Vietnam, El Salvador, the Pakistani tribal areas or Sadr City in Baghdad.

Iraq came to Washington DC in full regalia, with Pentagon Blackhawks doing “show of force” passes over protestors, the tried and tested dispersal technique applied in countless counter-insurgency ops across the Global South.

And then, the Elvis moment: General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, patrolling the streets of DC. The Raytheon lobbyist now heading the Pentagon, Mark Esper, called it “dominating the battlespace.”

Well, after they got their butts kicked in Afghanistan and Iraq, and indirectly in Syria, full spectrum dominance must dominate somewhere. So why not back home?

Troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, the 10th Mountain Division and the 1st Infantry Division – who lost wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and, yes, Somalia – have been deployed to Andrews Airbase near Washington.

Super-hawk Tom Cotton even called, in a tweet, for the 82nd Airborne to do “whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters and looters.” These are certainly more amenable targets than the Russian, Chinese and Iranian militaries.

Milley’s performance reminds me of John McCain walking around in Baghdad in 2007, macho man-style, no helmet, to prove everything  was OK. Of course: he had a small army weaponized to the teeth watching his back.

And complementing the racism angle, it’s never enough to remember that both a white president and a black president signed off on drone attacks on wedding parties in the Pakistani tribal areas.

Esper spelled it out: an occupying army may soon be “dominating the battlespace” in the nation’s capital, and possibly elsewhere. What next? A Coalition Provisional Authority?

Compared to similar ops across the Global South, this will not only prevent regime change but also produce the desired effect for the ruling oligarchy: a neo-fascist turning of the screws. Proving once again that when you don’t have a Martin Luther King or a Malcolm X to fight the power, then power crushes you whatever you do.

Inverted Totalitarianism

The late, great political theorist Sheldon Wolin had already nailed it in a book first published in 2008: this is all about Inverted Totalitarianism.

Wolin showed how “the cruder forms of control – from militarized police to wholesale surveillance, as well as police serving as judge, jury and executioner, now a reality for the underclass – will become a reality for all of us should we begin to resist the continued funneling of power and wealth upward.

“We are tolerated as citizens only as long as we participate in the illusion of a participatory democracy. The moment we rebel and refuse to take part in the illusion, the face of inverted totalitarianism will look like the face of past systems of totalitarianism,” he wrote.

Sinclair Lewis (who did not say that, “when fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving the cross”) actually wrote, in It Can’t Happen Here (1935), that American fascists would be those “who disowned the word ‘fascism’ and preached enslavement to capitalism under the style of constitutional and traditional native American liberty.”

So American fascism, when it happens, will walk and talk American.

George Floyd was the spark. In a Freudian twist, the return of the repressed came out swinging, laying bare multiple wounds: how the US political economy shattered the working classes; failed miserably on Covid-19; failed to provide affordable healthcare; profits a plutocracy; and thrives on a racialized labor market, a militarized police, multi-trillion-dollar imperial wars and serial bailouts of the too big to fail.

Instinctively at least, although in an inchoate manner, millions of Americans clearly see how, since Reaganism, the whole game is about an oligarchy/plutocracy weaponizing white supremacism for political power goals, with the extra bonus of a steady, massive, upwards transfer of wealth.

Slightly before the first, peaceful Minneapolis protests, I argued that the realpolitik perspectives post-lockdown were grim, privileging both restored neoliberalism – already in effect – and hybrid neofascism.

President Trump’s by now iconic Bible photo op in front of St John’s church – including a citizen tear-gassing preview – took it to a whole new level. Trump wanted to send a carefully choreographed signal to his evangelical base. Mission accomplished.

But arguably the most important (invisible) signal was the fourth man in one of the photos.

Giorgio Agamben has already proved beyond reasonable doubt that the state of siege is now totally normalized in the West. Attorney General William Barr now is aiming to institutionalize it in the US: he’s the man with the leeway to go all out for a permanent state of emergency, a Patriot Act on steroids, complete with “show of force” Blackhawk support.

The Giant Virus in the Room: Corporate Vaccine Makers Need More Pandemics, to Grow

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By Dady Chery

Source: News Junkie Post

As drug makers prepare to make a killing on supposed vaccines against COVID-19, it is important, particularly for those who consider vaccines to be a wise investment today, or those whose retirement savings might get invested in such vaccines without their knowledge, to reflect on the fact that corporations are themselves viruses that can only make money for their investors by growing. The way they will grow is by making more vaccines for yet more pandemics. The new pandemics might come of their own accord, or they might get a little nudge.

A road map from those in the shadows

The public has lately been assaulted with relentless announcements about this or that supposed vaccine going into phase I or II clinical trial and the promise that vaccines — if we would only let enough different ones get developed sufficiently rapidly and without oversight — will free us from masks and social distancing. According to an American Enterprise Institute “road map” by people that include former FDA commissioners Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan, social distancing restrictions will only be lifted when tools to mitigate the risk of disease – including a vaccine — become available. There you have it. If you should ever want to stop cowering with a mask on your face, shake hands with a new acquaintance, dance with friends and strangers, blow a kiss or flirt more outrageously with somebody, you’ll need to get a vaccination license. The people who have mandated this aren’t even currently in government. They are private individuals who have retreated to think tanks from which to issue their decrees.

The global threat to health isn’t a coronavirus

The public health departments of cities, states, or countries have not been those to call for vaccines. Instead, global public health appears to have been hijacked by a supposed non-profit foundation called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI), with the Orwellian motto, “New vaccines for a safer world.” One might well ask: “safer for whom?” CEPI was hatched in a one-hour discussion on the sidelines of Davos 2016 between Bill Gates, Wellcome Trust Foundation Director Jeremy Farrar, the CEOs of six major vaccine manufacturers (Glaxo Smith Kline, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, Takeda, and Pfizer), the Prime Minister of Norway, and supposedly 15 other individuals.

Representatives of Germany, India, and Japan are supposed to have attended that meeting, although Prime Minister Angela Merkel had declined the invitation that year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not there, nor was any Japanese head of state. The goal of this cabal, in which elected heads of states are obviously subordinate to Bill Gates and Big Pharma, is not merely to make vaccines and lots of money, but also to deregulate vaccine manufacture on a global scale and control the world by controlling global public health. In this scenario, the United Nations’ WHO, which receives 75 percent of its funds from big pharmaceutical companies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is merely the arm of CEPI that will tie vaccine adoption by developing countries to various kinds of Western aid. The WHO Director General, Tedros Adhanon, began to enjoy the Gates Foundation’s generosity when he was a Minister of Health in Ethiopia who embraced the foundation’s agenda. The WHO Assistant Director General, Bruce Aylward, who may be the real power in the organization, previously worked for Gates’ supposed polio eradication program. Make no mistake: CEPI intends to be to global health what the WTO is to global trade.

The agenda is military, and it is global

CEPI has already raised over $750 M: a sum that commands a lot of influence. It is well entwined with the militaries of various countries. For example CEPI’s CEO, Richard Hatchett, was the Director for Biodefense Policy on the White House Homeland Security Council in 2005-2006, Associate Director for Radiation Countermeasures Research and Emergency Preparedness at NIAID in 2005-2011; and Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) in 2011-2016. BARDA is a division of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. Several CEPI-financed vaccine projects enjoy support from BARDA, the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), or the U.S. Military HIV Research Program.

In January 2020, CEPI announced that it would finance three consortiums to develop vaccines against COVID-19. Its alliance with these consortiums, however, predates this announcement in several cases. For example, as far back as April 2018, CEPI provided $56 M to a company called Inovio to get vaccine candidates against the SARS-Cov-2 relative, MERS-CoV, to Phase II trials; Inovio’s main collaborator is the Chinese company, Beijing Advaccine Technology. In January 2019, CEPI provided $10.6 M to a consortium involving the University of Queensland and public/private sector partners in Australia, the US, and Asia to develop a new approach called “molecular clamp” for designing vaccines. In Dec 2019, CEPI gave $8.4 M to Imperial College London, UK, to test an RNA vaccine in animals and also get it to Phase II trials. The researchers at Imperial College boast about the fact that they began to test their vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 in animals in February 2020! Recall that the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence only became known on January 10, 2020. In this context, it is also interesting that Imperial College is the home of the fear mongering and disgraced Neil Ferguson, with the too pretty and too married social merging mistress.

The FDA’s vaccine fast track

The road to FDA approval has been smoothed for CEPI’s partners and, unsurprisingly, they have been first to move their putative vaccines to clinical trials. As a rule, the FDA has put the projects of CEPI’s pet companies on a “fast-track” designation, which allows them to be green-lighted to the next phase before they have even completed the preceding one. Consider for example the biotechnology company, Moderna. It has received an undefined sum from CEPI, plus around $483 M from BARDA, as well as funds from DARPA. The appeal of this company to pencil and paper want-to-be-scientists, like Bill Gates and various military types, is that its approach, or “platform,” for vaccine manufacturing could potentially be used to make many other vaccines. But this approach is also potentially dangerous, because it involves the introduction of viral mRNA into cells, and this alone might start an adverse immune reaction. The viral mRNA is then supposed to direct production of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein on the surface of the vaccinated person’s cells for some undefined period of time. This kind of vaccine was not even tested in animals before Moderna was allowed to begin its phase I trial in mid-March with 45 healthy human volunteers. Even more extraordinary, six weeks later the company filed for permission to go on to a phase II trial with 600 volunteers. Its application was approved, even though the phase I trial requires months of follow up that are not yet done. The company’s stock has skyrocketed as it has made one promise after another of accelerated schedules and massive scale up of its vaccine production.

Inovio is on a similar trajectory. The phase I trials on its putative SARS-CoV-2 vaccine started on April 3. The company is injecting people with milligram amounts of DNA and then zapping them with a proprietary device, to get the DNA into their cells. It has not defined how the DNA carrying the spike protein information will be guided to the nucleus. If the DNA stays elsewhere in the cells, where it does not belong, it might be mistaken for a virus and start an adverse immune response. If it goes to the nucleus, it may integrate into the cells’ DNA in random places, potentially causing cancers.

The mainstream takes dictation

The mainstream media, which is as lazy as it is scientifically illiterate, has contented itself with the republication of gee-whiz, oh-wow press releases, and the publication of reports sometimes explicitly written by the vaccine manufacturers or their partner foundations. Such reports also appear, not as full-length peer-reviewed articles, but as short commentaries in the summary and editorial pages of serious science journals like Science and Nature. The association of those planted reports with prestigious journals gives them, not only a veneer of credibility but also an automatic amplification by popular science magazines. The reports have generally focused on the marvelous promise of the supposed vaccines and their inevitable manufacture in massive quantities. In fact, 18 years after the original SARS-CoV, which is the closest relative of the COVID-19 agent, no vaccine has successfully been developed against that virus, and many of these so-called new vaccine efforts are actually recycled failed SARS-CoV or MERS-CoV projects.

The real state of knowledge about the immune system

What the news media do not say, and probably could not say with any confidence, is that the mammalian immune system is still poorly understood. Had most media people attended a BIO101 class, there would be great skepticism in the news about the sudden proliferation of newfangled vaccines and the massive human experiment being organized to test them.

The following is a quote from a scholarly review published in Nature Immunology in December 2014:

“The only currently licensed and generally available vaccines against respiratory viruses are for influenza virus, and even these are suboptimal. The paucity of vaccines is due in part to the only limited understanding of immune responses that can provide protection against respiratory viral infection: in many cases, even fundamental correlates of protection have yet to be accurately defined, and the most appropriate antigens to which vaccines should be targeted remain unknown. Animal models are generally imperfect guides to human disease, and the populations at highest risk of severe infections (i.e., young children and elderly adults) are the most difficult to study. In addition, vaccines are often less effective in those with immature or senescent immune systems.”

The next quote is from a commentary on a peer-reviewed article published on May 13, 2020 in Nature 581: 316.

“This discovery elevates TASL to membership of an exclusive circle of… adaptor proteins… of which the other members are TRIF, MAVS, and STING. These four proteins together control the type I interferon response induced by nucleic-acid sensing, a picture that has now been completed with the discovery of TASL as the missing… adaptor of TLR7, TLR8 and TLR9 signaling.”

My translation: only this week, one of the four major players in the early human immune response was discovered! It is a newly characterized protein called TASL that becomes activated when an infected cell senses the presence of genetic material from a virus in a cellular compartment where it should not be. This helps to explain an important part of the immune response that until now has baffled scientists.

The early fight against an infection: a situation that can escalate

A reasonable analogy to a viral infection might be a Columbine-like threat, where a band of murderous fascists take over a high school. Let us say, for good measure, that this particular group wears a specific and recognizable kind of uniform and tattoo. The high school itself is automatically set up to detect the invasion and to call 911. Cells in the lung do the equivalent with proteins called Toll Like Receptors (TLR). These proteins sound the alarm when they recognize genetic material, like DNA or viral RNA, in compartments outside of the nucleus, where it is not supposed to be: a situation that indicates presence of a pathogen. In the cells, some of these compartments are called endosomes or endolysosomes. In our high school, the first responders would be the local police. In the lungs, which do contain their own local immune cells, this would be called the interferon or antiviral response. If this response is successful, as it often is in healthy people, nothing more needs to be done: end of story.

But suppose some of the fascists manage to evade the police and take over several other schools in the same area. The police might then call in SWAT teams with snipers, machine guns, and tear gas grenades; or even police units with bomb robots. The innate, or local, immune system has the equivalent of all of these. It involves SOS signals to the adaptor proteins noted in the above quotation, and the permission from each one for the next step in the escalation. The bomb robots in this case, would be analogous to an inflammation response that destroys not only the viruses but also much of the lung. Obviously, you would want to exhaust every option before using bomb robots in schools that have a few crazies and a lot of students. But suppose the crazies manage to block the police communication to the SWAT teams, then what do you do? Coronaviruses, including the agent of COVID-19, i.e. SARS-CoV-2, can achieve an analogous block of communication during exceptionally heavy initial infections, or infections of the elderly and people with other medical conditions like diabetes, respiratory problems, or cardiovascular disease. What I have just described, with a minimum of immunology jargon, is called the initial innate immune response. In this context, innate means local, i.e. in the lungs.

Vaccines are not the answer

The serum antibodies we all know about are produced as part of a later response, called the adaptive immune response. It happens in those who manage to keep intact and functional a sophisticated route of communication during the attack. The resulting counterattack is not only broad but also specifically tailored to neutralize the invading virus. Furthermore, we maintain a memory of the response. This would be the equivalent of an FBI database with detailed descriptions of the crazies and their tattoos so that they might immediately be recognized, should they appear again in months to years. The only problem is: they can change uniforms and tattoos. All vaccines are based on inducing this later response, which is supposed to prime an individual to resist an attack. But vaccines, however sophisticated the supposed approach or platform, are almost always designed to recognize only a single feature of the invading pathogen. As if one learns to recognize a tattoo on a fascist and nothing more. But suppose the tattoo is removed or changed? In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the target is the spike protein, or sometimes a piece of it. It so happens that the spike protein is also the most variable part of the virus.

Antibody-Dependent Enhancement of disease: A bon entendeur, salut!

A massive human experiment is underway to test potential vaccines. Nearly everything that can be put into a human will be injected into those volunteers who are more terrified of COVID-19 than the vaccine makers or the military. Their menu will include: the inactivated SARS-CoV-2; mutated, or attenuated, versions of SARS-CoV-2 (intra-nasally); SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein; pieces of the spike protein, large and small; harmless bacteria that have been redesigned to make the spike protein; harmless viruses that have been redesigned to make the spike protein; virus-like particles that can present the spike protein on their surface; circular DNA that codes for the spike protein; linear DNA that codes for the spike protein or part of it; mRNA that codes for the spike protein; modified mRNAs; and even an RNA that codes for the spike protein as well as another protein that will make more of the RNA and spike protein, ad infinitum. As a rule, the manufacturers have not even disclosed which exact version of the spike protein they plan to use for the vaccination attempts. Indeed, some companies have disclosed nothing but their intent to conduct clinical trials.

One possible result of attempted vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2 that should give anyone pause is an Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) of disease. In other words, it is possible that attempted vaccinations might prime a previously healthy person for a life-threatening inflammation response on the next encounter with a coronavirus. So far, the only company that reports even having checked for ADE is Sinovac Biotech, a Chinese company that is collaborating with a US partner on an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. The phenomenon of ADE is well established as a possible outcome of attempted vaccination against viruses. A famous instance was a late 1960s vaccine trial in children using inactivated Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), which resulted, not only in a failure to protect but also in 2 deaths, and a severe respiratory disease in 80 percent of the children that required hospitalization on their subsequent exposure to the virus. ADE has been observed in mice and other animals supposedly immunized against SARS-CoV with an inactivated virus. Recall that SARS-CoV is the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, compared to the supposedly vaccinated people, it is highly possible that the unvaccinated or never previously exposed individuals will fare better in a subsequent coronavirus outbreak.

Hydroxychloroquine bites back

The new adaptor protein, called TASL, described for the first time this week, was discovered to bind to another protein called Solute Carrier 15A4 (SLC15A4). SLC15A4 has long been known to be necessary for lupus and other autoimmune diseases. Now we know that the reason for this is probably because the TASL-SLC15A4 interaction is the path that leads to inflammation. Remember the robot-bomb option in the previous section? That’s the one! As it happens, the reason hydroxychoroquine (HC) has worked for decades against lupus disease is because HC is known to interfere with inflammation, but the details were unknown. SLC15A4 is also important for maintaining the acidity of the endosome, which HC is known to de-acidify to some degree. The antibiotic azithromycin has also been reported to reduce the acidity of endosomes, thus compounding this effect of HC. As a result, when the virus goes to the endosome to develop, it finds that this compartment is insufficiently acidic; it gets stuck there and is ultimately destroyed. So hydroxychloroquine, an inexpensive and long-used drug, counters coronavirus infections in two crucial and quite general ways: it damages the virus and also keeps the immune response from going dangerously overboard. Given the connection of SLC15A4 to lupus disease, it is astonishing that the authors of the new paper did not test HC’s effect on their system containing TASL. But much is open to revision when one wants to publish in Nature. That piece of the puzzle will surely materialize. But timing is everything, and it’s no wonder that the vaccine makers are in such a rush.

For the record

The biggest populations of human subjects for vaccine trials have in the past been brown and black children from countries like India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Mexico, and Haiti. The scale of the current project is so massive, however, that even the citizens of Western countries must be preyed upon. In this regard, it certainly helps to keep everyone terrified. The biggest market for vaccines used to be the US Army, but that may change. Besides, a cowed and sick general public should be far more manageable, as climate change events exacerbate stressors like displacement and hunger. The greater the number of epidemics and vaccine-associated diseases, the greater the boon will be for pharmaceutical companies, and the faster they will grow. I write for the record. Those of you who participate in this enterprise or invest in it can no longer say that you did not know what was being done. The rest of you on the sidelines can still change this dystopian future, but the window of opportunity is narrowing fast.

Editor’s Notes: Dr. Dady Chery is an Associate Professor of Biology, Co-Editor-In-Chief of News Junkie Post, and the author of We Have Dared to Be Free: Haiti’s Struggle Against Occupation.  

 

Question Everything

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By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

Crises, like pandemics, don’t break things in and of themselves; they show you what’s already broken.

– Patrick Wyman

Big macro crises in any form are scary, massively disruptive, and in some cases, literally deadly. This is why governments and entrenched institutions always see such events as opportunities to further consolidate wealth and power.

The current global pandemic is no exception, as I detailed in last week’s piece: Power Grab. While it’s necessary to be aware of this reality — and to push back against it wherever possible — it’s equally important to recognize there’s a silver lining to all of this.

The paradigm we live under depends on us not thinking too hard about how power functions. It relies on us being so busy with the basics of survival, or distracted by superficial consumerism and endless entertainment, to contemplate how the system actually works. This method of social control has been wildly successful throughout my lifetime, but what’s interesting about moments of global crises is the mask is forced off for a period. In a desperate scramble to marshal all of the corporate-imperial state’s resources to save the interests of the oligarchy, we’re shown in full color who really matters and who doesn’t.

You do not matter. The imperial state doesn’t care about you. Oligarchs don’t care about you. Mega corporations don’t care about you. This truth is cleverly hidden from much of the public during “normal” times when the machine is humming along as intended, but it’s far more in your face during a crisis period. It’s much harder to hide the truth when the world gets turned upside down.

Aside from the grotesque spectacle of the U.S. government funneling all of its resources toward propping up Wall Street and large corporations, this crisis has exposed the rot and disfunction in another meaningful way. Our health experts, ostensibly there to help the public navigate exactly this sort of event, have failed us in spectacular fashion.

https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160

This is what political actors masquerading as experts do in a crisis. They either give bad advice, or intentionally mislead the public to hide the fact the U.S. simply doesn’t have adequate mask supply and sent its manufacturing capacity overseas. Which brings up an important topic worthy of further discussion: the crucial distinction between experts and expertise.

An “expert” in our society is someone with expertise in a particular field who’s been propped up by either the media, government or both as an authoritative source to listen to on a particular topic. This individual’s elevated stature is artificially created by an external source that’s selected this particular person as someone you should listen to. It tends to be a political appointment. This person has been chosen, not only because he or she has expertise (many others also do), but due to other attributes that appeal to those who’ve decided to prop them up. Anyone who’s worked in corporate America knows full well that many of those promoted to middle management, or higher, often end up there not because they’re particularly skilled, but because they’re good at playing politics and know the right ass to kiss. The same is true in all large organizations, and government is no exception.

In the days before the internet and social media, the public might know that government/media experts were behaving dishonestly, but didn’t have realtime access to competitive nonpolitical voices with equal or superior expertise to the government experts. What many of us discovered during this pandemic is people with expertise engaging publicly on Twitter provided far better and more timely advice than the government/media experts. This makes perfect sense because these people tend to not be political actors, but rather humans attempting to share information in an honest and selfless manner. If we’ve learned anything in the 21st century, it’s that actual track records don’t matter when it comes to media and government positions. In fact, the more catastrophically wrong you are in the interests of oligarchy, the more likely you are to be promoted and elevated.

Fortunately, I entered this crisis with a well established distrust of mass media and government, and therefore knew better than to look toward their experts for any useful guidance. Rather, I sought out the opinions of various nonpolitical individuals with relevant expertise who helped me see things for how they were very early on. Others have not been as lucky, but will no doubt emerge from this crisis with a deep distrust of established institutions and individuals, and with very good reason.

We’ve just witnessed a catastrophic failure of the centralized state in America, and the blowback will resonate within the larger culture for years if not decades. Similar to how many people were shaken to their core during the financial crisis a decade ago, I think this pandemic event will lead to an even larger wave of people awakening to how completely rotten, pernicious and corrupt the whole system is. Once you see that reality in all its glory, you can’t unsee it.

Of course, recognizing how broken things are isn’t enough. We need to have a thoughtful conversation about what we have too much of versus what we need. If we’re going to change the world, we need a vision. I have some thoughts on the matter.

Nothing is set in stone. The world as it is today is not some divine eternal paradigm beyond reproach. Humans shape the world through their choices, actions and mentality.

For additional thoughts on that and much more, check out my recent interview with Tales From the Crypt.

The Coronavirus Is Not the Plague: The Plague Is US

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Two categories of propaganda must be distinguished.  The first strives to create a permanent disposition in its objects and constantly needs to be reinforced.  Its goal is to make the masses ‘available,’ by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination.  The second category involves the creation of a sort of temporary impulsiveness in its objects.  It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movement are sometimes necessary).”  – Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus’ great 1947 novel, The Plague, is a warning to us today, but a warning in disguise.  When he died sixty years ago at the young age of forty-six, he had already written The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague, and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The outward story of The Plague revolves around a malignant disease that breaks out in a town that is quarantined when the authorities issue a state of emergency.  After first denying that they have a problem, the people gradually panic and feel painfully isolated.  Death fear runs rampant, much like today with the coronavirus. The authorities declare martial law as they warn that the situation is dire, people must be careful of associating, especially in groups, and they better obey orders or very many will die.  So the town is cordoned off.

Before this happens and the first signs that something is amiss emerge, the citizens of the town of Oran, Algeria remain oblivious, for they “work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich.”  Bored by their habits, heavily drugging themselves with drink, and watching many movies to distract themselves, they failed to grasp the significance of “the squelchy roundness of a still-warm body” of the plague-bearing rats that emerge from their underworld to die in their streets.  “It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of their secret humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails.”  To them the plague is “unthinkable,” an abstraction, until all their denials are swept aside as the truth emerges from the sewers and their neighbors and families die from the disease.

“Stupidity has a way of getting its way;” the narrator, Dr. Rieux tells us, “as we should see if we were not always so wrapped up in ourselves …. plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

The American people are wrapped up in themselves.  Nor do they recognize the true rats.  They are easily surprised; fooled would be a better word.

Camus uses a physical plague to disguise his real subject, which is the way people react when they are physically trapped by human rats who demand they obey orders and stay physically and mentally compliant as their freedom is taken from them.

The Plague is an allegorical depiction of the German occupation of France during World War II.  Camus had lived through that experience as a member of the French Resistance.  He was a writer and editor of the underground Resistance newspaper Combat, and with his artist’s touch he later made The Plague a revelatory read for today, especially for citizens of the United States, the greatest purveyor of the plague of violence in the world.

We are all infected with the soul-destroying evil that our leaders have loosed upon the world, a plague of killing that is now hidden behind the coronavirus fear that is being used to institute tight government controls that many will come to rue in the months ahead, just as happened after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Coronavirus is a perfect cover-story for the occupation of the public’s mind by a propaganda apparatus that has grown even more devious over the past 19 years.

Ask yourself: Where is the news about U.S. military operations in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, etc.?  There is none in the corporate mainstream media, and little in the alternative media as well.  Have those operations ceased?  Of course not.  It’s just that the news about them, little that it was, has disappeared.

Now it is all about us and the coronavirus panic.  It is about how many of us might die. It is about stocking toilet paper.  For the rich, it is about getting to their second or third houses where they can isolate themselves in splendor. As I write, 150 or so Americans are said to have died of Covid-19, and by the time you will read this the number will have climbed, but the number will be minuscule compared to the number of people in the U.S.A. and those numbers will be full of contradictions that few comprehend unless, rather than reacting in fear, they did some comprehensive research.

But arguments are quite useless in a time of panic when people are consumed with fear and just react.

For we live in plague time, and the plague lives in us. But to most Americans, Covid-19 is the plague, because the government and media have said it is.  Like the inhabitants of Oran, the United States is “peopled with sleep walkers,” pseudo-innocents, who are “chiefly aware of what ruffled the normal tenor of their lives or affected their interests.”  That their own government, no matter what political party is in power (both working for “deep-state,” elite interests led by the organized criminals of the CIA), is the disseminator of a world-wide plague of virulent violence, must be denied and divorced from consensus reality.

That these same forces would use the fear of disease to cow the population should be no surprise for those who have come to realize the truth of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the anthrax attacks that followed, both of which were used to justify the endless “wars on terror” that have killed so many around the world. It is a shock for so many people who can’t countenance the thought that their own government could possibly be implicated in the death of thousands of U.S. citizens and the release of the deadly anthrax, which we know came from a U.S. lab and was carried out by a group of inside government perpetrators.

When it comes to the plague-stricken deaths visited on millions around the world for decades by the American government, this must be denied by diverting attention to partisan presidential politics, and now the coronavirus that engenders fear, loathing, and a child-like tendency to believe Big Brother.  The true plague, the bedrock of a nation continually waging wars through various means – i.e. bombs and economic and medical sanctions, etc. – against the world, disappears from consciousness.  As U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albrecht said to 60 Minutes Lesley Stahl in 1996 when Stahl asked her if the U.S. sanctions on Iraq that had resulted in the death of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it: “We think the price is worth it.”

For “decent folks must be allowed to sleep at night,” says the character Tarrou sarcastically; he is a man who has lost his ability to “sleep well” since he witnessed a man’s execution where the “bullets make a hole into which you could thrust your fist.”  He awakens to the realization that he “had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people.”  He loses any peace he had and vows to resist the plague in every way he can.  “For many years I’ve been ashamed,” he says, “mortally ashamed, of having been, even with the best intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn.”

The rats are dying in the streets. They are our rats, diseased by us. They have emerged from the underworld of a nation plagued by its denial.  Unconscious evil bubbles up.  We are an infected people. Worry and irritation – “these are not feelings with which to confront plague.” But we don’t seem ashamed of our complicity in our government’s crimes around the world.  For decades we have elected leaders who have killed millions, while business went on as usual. The killing didn’t touch us. As Camus said, “We fornicated and read the papers.”  He knew better. He warned us:

It’s a wearying business being plague-stricken.  But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness.

Yet the fight against the plague must go on.  Tarrou puts it thus:

All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, as far possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can’t judge if it’s simple, but I know it’s true. You see, I’d heard such quantities of arguments, which very nearly turned my head, and turned other people’s heads enough to make them approve of murder; and I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.  So I resolved always to speak – and to act – quite clearly, as this was the only way of setting myself on the right track.

These days, I keep thinking of an incident that occurred when I was a young investigator of sexually transmitted diseases, working for the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare through the Public Health Service as an epidemiologist.  My job was to track down sexually transmitted diseases by finding links of sexual contacts. One day I went to interview and take a blood sample from a poor woman who had been named as a sexual contact.  I knocked on her door on the third or fourth floor of a walkup apartment building.  She looked through the peep hole and asked who it was and I told her my name and what government agency I represented. I could tell she was very wary, but she opened the door. She stood there naked, a very heavy woman of perhaps 300 pounds. She nonchalantly welcomed me in and I followed her as she padded down the hall where she took a housecoat off a hook and put it on.

There is, as you know, an old tale by Hans Christian Anderson called “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Although the emperor parades around naked, the adults make believe he is clothed.  Only a child sees the obvious. I was 23-years-old naïve young man at the time of this unforgettable incident, but it echoes in my mind as a reminder to myself that perhaps that woman was unconsciously teaching me a lesson in disguise.  The year was 1967, and when I went out to get into my government car with federal license plates, a white man in a white shirt in a white car in a poor black neighborhood, a hail of bricks rained down toward me and the car from the roof opposite.  I quickly jumped in and fled as the ghettos were exploding. Soon the National Guard would be called out to occupy them.

Intuition tells me that although the emperor has no clothes and a vast PSYOPS occupation is now underway, too many are too grown-up to see it.

It’s an old story continually updated.  Like The Plague.

COVID-19 and the CIA’s Biological Warfare on Cuba

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Maybe it was a plan that went horribly wrong, something they could no longer control. Was the Corona virus or COVID-19 spread intentionally? What if this virus was used against China as a weapon of choice to destabilize China’s economy and push back against China’s growing influence? We don’t know for sure, but it is possible. Investigations are ongoing. Nothing has not been confirmed. But what has been confirmed is what history has taught us given the facts on how the use of biological warfare for various purposes, against many peoples and nations has been happening for some time. One of the most well-known incidents of biological warfare occurred in 1763, the British Empire had planned and successfully managed to spread smallpox virus to the Native Americans during the Pontiac Rebellion in Pennsylvania. Chief Pontiac of the Ottowa launched an attack on Fort Detroit, a British military base. Other nations joined the rebellion including the Senecas, the Hurons, Delawares, and Miamis. As the war raged, an Indian delegation asked the British to surrender, but they refused, however, the British offered gifts including food, alcohol and material items that included two blankets and a handkerchief from people who had smallpox. Although the American Indians had experienced the disease in the past, the idea was to spread the disease among the Native American populations in an attempt to push back the rebellion or to defeat it once and for all. Another example of biological warfare was when Imperial Japan before and during World War II had a bio-weapons program that managed to drop numerous bombs on a number of Chinese cities from airplanes killing an estimated 580,000 Chinese people with bombs that were made of infected fleas, some even contained cholera and shigella during the Sino-Japanese war between the 1930′s and 1940′s.

In 1981, the CIA with help from U.S. military had launched an operation against Cuba by unleashing a strain of Dengue Fever also known as “hemorrhagic fever’ effecting more than 273,000 people killing 158 including 101 children. On September 6, 1981, The New York Times reported on Fidel Castro’s comments regarding the U.S. government in particularly, blaming the CIA for the outbreak when he said that ”we urge the United States Government to define its policy in this field, to say whether the C.I.A. will or will not be authorized again- or has already been authorized – to organize attacks against leaders of the revolution and to use plagues against our plants, our animals and our people.” The report said that the “epidemic of dengue fever that has made 340,000 people ill and has killed about 150″ but the State Department under-then President Ronald Reagan stated that “Mr. Castro’s charges of possible United States involvement in the epidemic were ”totally without foundation.” The State department quickly blamed the Castro’s revolution as a failure:

The Cuban Government has always tried to blame the United States for its failures and its internal problems,” the department said. ”The Cuban revolution is a failure, and it is obviously easier to blame external forces like the United States than to admit those failures

Dr, Ronald St. John, chief of communicable diseases for the Pan American Health Organization was interviewed by the New York Times said that “for the first time, so-called dengue-2 spread to Cuba.” Dr. St. John claimed that it is common in Southeast Asia and that it produces “the same symptoms as the other three” and that ”if you get a wave of dengue-1, dengue-3 or dengue-4 and then another wave of type 2, this is a bad combination.” Dengue-2 causes you too loose body fluids causing shocks that can lead to eventually death. Convenient for the CIA who saw it as an opportunity to cause panic on Cuba which is located in one of the most hot and humid regions in the world. However, The New York Times managed to downplay Cuba’s accusation’s by ending the story by blaming the spread of the disease on returning Cuban troops from Africa and other people from other parts of the Caribbean who might have brought Dengue fever into Cuba:

Some State Department officials believe the introduction of dengue-2 into Cuba is a result of the return to Cuba of troops who had been stationed in Angola or elsewhere in Africa, where the strain is found. But Dr. St. John said dengue-2 had been found in other parts of the Caribbean and might have been carried to Cuba from there or elsewhere overseas

Reports suggested that Cuba had a very small number of cases in 1944, and again in 1977. The 1981 outbreak was blamed on covert flyover operations conducted by the CIA with military owned airplanes, you know, the same airplanes that were most probably used against Nicaragua’s Sandinistas to transport weapons and other materials to the Contras around the same time. Since the 20th century, the U.S. has been the leader in developing various biological and chemical weapons through the U.S. Army’s Biological Warfare Laboratories based at Fort Detrick, Maryland since the late 1940′s, around the start of the Cold War. The U.S. biological warfare program that supposedly ended in 1969 developed a handful of biological weapons ready for use including anthrax, Q-fever and botulism and conducted research in hopes of weaponizing diseases including smallpox, Hantavirus, Lassa fever, yellow fever, typhus, dengue fever and the bird flu among them. An article from August 6, 2019 on Fort Detrick from the UK’s ‘The Independent’ titled ‘Research into deadly viruses and biological weapons at US army lab shut down over fears they could escape’ last August. Ironically, Secretary of State and Neocon Mike Pompeo called it the “Wuhan virus” since they blame China for the outbreak, but it seems that the U.S. had its own problems when it comes to their own labs who conduct research with the most deadly viruses:

America’s main biological warfare lab has been ordered to stop all research into the deadliest viruses and pathogens over fears contaminated waste could leak out of the facility. Fort Detrick, in Maryland, has been the epicentre of the US Army’s bioweapons research since the beginning of the Cold War. But last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – the government’s public health body – stripped the base of its license to handle highly restricted “select agents”, which includes Ebola, smallpox and anthrax

The story was basically about the CDC who inspected Fort Detrick and found problems with new procedures used to decontaminate waste water. The article says that Fort Detrick continued its research for defensive purposes to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” although the U.S. declared that it abandoned their biological weapons program since 1969:

Although the United States officially abandoned its biological weapons programme in 1969, Fort Detrick has continued defensive research into deadly pathogens on the list of “select agents”, including the Ebola virus, the organisms that cause the plague, and the highly toxic poison ricin. The army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, based at Fort Detrick, says its primary mission today is to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” but its scientists also investigate outbreaks of disease among civilians and other threats to public health. In recent years it has been involved in testing possible vaccines for Ebola, after several epidemics of the deadly virus in Africa 

Sooner or later, the truth will come out. I believe that the U.S. government knows how COVID-19 began and where it was going. The U.S. government and major corporate arms manufacturers and the rest of the Military-Industrial Complex is no stranger to biological weapons adding to their arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons at their disposal which makes them, much more dangerous. The truth about COVID-19 will eventually come out. In the meantime, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, a war against Russia, China, Iran or Venezuela is in the works and a coming economic crisis with an election coming this November seems like 2020 will be the year of a perfect storm.

David Ray Griffin’s The Christian Gospel for Americans: A Systematic Theology

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

A Review  

There are very few writers who have done more to try to open the public’s mind to the evil nature of the American empire than David Ray Griffin.  His series of books on the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001 will endure for a long time, and they will one day, when it is safe to do so, be recognized as seminal texts exposing the traitorous conspiracy of elements within the Unites States’ government to launch the endless so-called war on terror.  That many now know, and many more will, that those so-called “terrorist” attacks were carried out by terrorists in the highest reach of the U.S. government will be due to his extraordinary work.

What many do not know is that David Ray Griffin is a Christian theologian with impeccable credentials and a scholarly oeuvre of dozens of theological books. And that long before his conscience led him to devote himself to exposing the U.S. government’s lies about the September 11 attacks, he was committed to proclaiming the radical Christian gospel of a living Christ, who was executed by the Roman state for opposing its grotesque and violent empire.

The Christian Gospel for Americans is his crowning achievement, a rare marriage of spiritual contemplation and social analysis that brings to life Jesus and the Hebrew prophets for contemporary Americans.  It is an accessible systematic theology of freedom and creativity that will inspire hope in all caring souls to resist the demonic American Empire. It is an intellectual tour de force, a kaleidoscopic “constructive postmodern” example of process theology at its finest, drawing on the work of Alfred North Whitehead, John Cobb, and Henri Bergson, among others.  Rarely does such a book come along to roil the waters of religious and social complacency.

Times change.  Once in the United States of America, theologians were fêted as important social critics and considered worth heeding.  Two of the most famous in the mid-to-late twentieth century were Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.  Both appeared on the cover of Henry Luce’s Time Magazine, and Barack Obama was later fond of referring to Niebuhr to justify his violent policies to extend the American empire.  Obama knew his audience, for Niebuhr was noted for a neo-orthodox theological perspective that encouraged “political realism,” popular among the elites who had created and extended the American empire.  He was a friend of the rich and famous ruling establishment.  His critiques of immoral government practices were always offered within the parameters of official acceptance, conservative and liberal.  He was the establishment’s theologian, lionized by the empire-touting Time magazine as the theologian who really understood politics and how God figured into the necessary realism of American foreign policy.

To his great credit, David Ray Griffin is a brave theologian who will never appear on the cover of Time magazine, for his message is more in keeping with the Biblical prophets who warned the people that their government’s behavior is an abomination in the eyes of God, and if they do not dissent and reject such policies, they will be rejecting the God they say they worship.  In true prophetic style, he connects the dots to say: look at what you are doing, slaughtering innocents everywhere as you worship your golden calf. When the Hebrew prophets “indict Israel or Judah,” he writes, “the indictments are not directed against the people in general, but against the elites who were responsible for creating and maintaining the structures of domination and exploitation.’”

The American elites surely do not wish to publicize a man who says such things; better to ignore him or have their mouthpieces call him a “conspiracy nut,” which of course they have.

Griffin’s book is rooted in the basic fact that “Christian theology is necessarily at once theological and political” since Jesus was a radical rebel leader who opposed the demonic power of the Roman Empire and was executed for that reason.  This is so fundamental, yet it has been papered over, especially since the age of Constantine in the fourth century.  Griffin says:

For one thing, the complete opposition of Jesus and his followers to the imperialism of their day has been largely hidden to readers of the gospels.  The main reason for this hiddenness is that the authors of the gospels, seeking to present the message of Jesus so as to serve the needs of the Christian movement 40 or more years after the death of Jesus, sought to make it appear that Jesus’ message was directed against, and evoked opposition from, ‘the Jews,’ rather than the Roman Empire and those who collaborated with it….This failure of later Christians to understand the beginnings of their religion has contributed to what is arguably the most fateful reversal in history: Christianity, in origin probably the most explicitly anti-imperial religious movement ever, has since the fourth century provided the religious foundation for the growth of empires even more extensive than Rome’s….He [Jesus] was crucified by the Roman Empire – not by ‘the Jews’ – because he was perceived as a threat by Roman authorities.  Given the nature of Jesus’ life and his death, American Christians today should be anti-imperialistic, rather than basking in the pleasures of Empire, as did the Roman populace two thousand years ago – ignoring the terror and poverty brought to other provinces by Roman rule.

This is the foundation upon which Griffin builds his gospel for Americans.

His theological method is liberal, while his content is conservative.  This means that to establish truth by appealing to authority is rejected as a method.  It is only evidence and reason that he relies on to establish the truth of various doctrines.  Therefore science and modern scholarship are important and must always be considered.  To claim something is true because of a deposit of divine revelation that you can read in the Bible is an old way of doing theology and Griffin rejects that method.  In fact, his understanding of revelation is an ongoing process, insight as part of the creative and spontaneous freedom of living in openness to God’s spirit.

His theology is conservative in content because it rests upon certain primary doctrines of the Christian gospel (good news) “such as God’s creation of the world, God as actively present in it, and divinely-given life after death.”

For those unfamiliar with modern theological thinking that is not bound by a particular church’s teachings and respects science, Griffin’s method might at first seem unusual.  As one trained in theology and philosophy, I can assure you it is not.  His process of reasoning accords with the best scholarship in those disciplines, but one has to take the time to enter into its postmodern worldview that positions many of the conundrums of traditional religious thinking within a new framework, one that Griffin calls postmodern naturalism where “divine influence must be understood as part of the normal cause-effect relations, not an exception to them.”

Griffin takes on many of the great issues that have perplexed inquiring minds: the problem of evil, creation, truth, human freedom, God’s so-called omnipotence, miracles, life after death, out-of-body experiences, etc. Whether you end up agreeing with all his reasoning or not, you will be challenged to assess your thinking.  I find his systematic theological analyses to be brilliant and always intriguing.

But the point of his systematic theology is to bring us to his analysis of the demonic nature of the American Empire and the need for Christians and people of all faiths to resist it.  In my opinion, his argument for the demonic as a real power in the world, and that the United States is in its grip, is true.  He says:

Can we look at the past century of our world without thinking that the human race must be under the influence of such a power?  The twentieth century was by far the bloodiest century in history, with unprecedented slaughter and genocide, and yet we have taken no steps to overcome the war-system of settling disputes.  Americans created nuclear weapons and then, when we learned how deadly they are, built thousands more, until we had the world wired to be destroyed many times over.  After we learned that a relatively modest exchange of nuclear weapons could initiate a “nuclear winter,” leading to the death of human civilization and other higher forms of life, we still did not abolish them.

He gives the historical background to the American belief in its divine mission, the idea of Manifest Destiny, and the city on the hill nonsense about America being God’s country whose mission was to spread democracy around the world.  He quotes George W. Bush saying, in his state-of-the-union address two months before laying waste to Iraq based on lies, “The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to humanity.”

Melville couldn’t have said it better through the mouth of mad Ahab.  Mad Ahab, mad Bill Clinton, mad George, mad Lyndon Johnson, the list goes on and on.  Madmen all, God’s men in their minds, or perhaps just lying madmen playing with our minds, God be damned.

Griffin lays it all out – Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Vietnam 1954-73, Indonesia 1965, etc.  – all the blood, the massacres, the evil empire doing its nonstop handiwork across the world.

He does, however, omit a crucial element of the demonic at work here in the U.S., as if something is blocking him from recognizing it, some shadow blocking his sight.  It is a strange omission.  It is as if his vision is focused outward on all the evil the American government inflicts on the world, but here in his own house, he cannot see the demonic at work.

He nowhere mentions the American government’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK, all martyrs to the unspeakable truth that this country is in the grip of evil killers who will stop at nothing to silence the voices of genuine peacemakers who have opposed the American Empire. Their deaths opened the door to hell on earth for millions of others around the world.

He correctly catalogues the long list of U. S. atrocities, false flag attacks, coup d’états, immoral and endless wars; gives dates; draws a damning picture of a country in the grip of demonic forces intent on savagely killing innocents wherever it can find them.  He shows conclusively that the United States is the Roman Empire updated and outfitted to kill millions with sophisticated weapons and to spread its imperialistic power with evil intent.

He makes an open and shut case that if one wishes to follow the Christian Gospel, one must act in opposition to this evil empire.  But he forgets that the crucifixion is also a domestic affair, and the homegrown rebels must be eliminated first.

Even the wisest of men, such as the David Ray Griffin, have their Achilles heels.

But despite that omission, or maybe because of it since it shows us how flawed we all are, The Christian Gospel for Americans is a brilliant clarion call to action.

Read it.  It will rock your world.  It is gospel.