We Won’t Be Free Until Our Minds Are Free

Posted on October 8, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

There’s a quote from an ancient Buddhist text called the Dhammapada that’s often translated as, “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.”

In other words our mental habits shape our personality and determine how that personality will behave, and that behavior contributes to the shaping of the world.

We see a similar line in the Upanishads of Hinduism: “As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.”

These are two different ways of expressing the same timeless observation we see pop up in various forms throughout philosophical traditions around the world: that our actions arise from our thoughts and our thoughts arise from our conditioned mental habits, so we need to be very careful about what those mental habits are since it will ultimately determine our destiny.

But the people who pour the most energy and attention into this timeless observation as a group are not the Buddhists, nor the Hindus, nor any religious or philosophical tradition at all. Those who are the most interested in studying and acting upon this insight are the powerful people who rule this world.

The powerful understand that because people’s actions follow from their thoughts and the destiny of the world follows from people’s actions, if you can control the thoughts people think at mass scale you can control the destiny of the world.

Control the way people collectively think about things and you can control the way they act, you can control the way they organize, and you can control the way they vote. This is important because people have become more literate and better at sharing information over the years, and therefore more aware of the value of freedom and equality, so it’s gotten harder and harder to deny them freedom and equality without sparking violent revolutions and winding up with your head in a basket.

Power structures of more “enlightened” societies have addressed this dilemma by giving people the illusion of freedom snd equality while still keeping them enslaved to the agendas of their rulers via mass-scale psychological manipulation. Media institutions, online platforms and think tanks are dominated by plutocrats in coordination with secretive government agencies to ensure that the information the majority of people consume serves the social, political, military and geostrategic interests of the ruling power structure.

This is why when you watch the news on TV it always kind of feels like they are deceiving you; that’s exactly what’s happening. Information that is inconvenient for the powerful is omitted, while information that serves the powerful is amplified and twisted in the most convenient light possible.

This happens not because the media-controlling class is personally leaning over the shoulder of every news reporter and instructing them to lie, but because if you control who runs a media outlet then you control who they will hire and who they will elevate, naturally giving rise to a system wherein reporters understand that the only way for them to advance their careers is to promote narratives which serve the ruling power establishment and marginalize narratives which don’t.

Many journalists – either for self-serving reasons or due to genuine befuddlement – are completely misinterpreting Bernie's media critique. The person who explained it most clearly was Noam Chomsky in this 90-second answer to an equally confused BBC host. This will clear it up: pic.twitter.com/AgznEp3LB1
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 13, 2019

The best way to manipulate people without their knowing it is to appeal to their strongest and most unconscious impulses. In practice this means tugging at the psychological hooks of the ego, which at their base level are fear and identity. If you’ve made a strong identity out of something like belonging to a certain political party or a certain ideological or ethnic group, then it will carry a lot of egoic weight for you. If you’re in a fear state then there will be a lot of egoic contraction and you’ll consequentially take your thoughts very seriously.

If you can appeal to people’s base impulses of fear and identification it becomes very easy to insert ideas into their minds and give them new mental habits, and that’s exactly what propagandists do. You need to fear the terrorists, the Russians and the Chinese, because they’re going to harm you. You need to support the Democratic Party and everything its pundits tell you, because that’s your tribe. Those anti-vaxxers over there are your real enemy, not the nuclear-armed globe-spanning power structure that is driving our world to its doom in myriad ways. And on and on and on.

They give us the illusion of freedom, but as long as they chain our minds with propaganda we are not free. It wouldn’t matter if they gave us every personal liberty imaginable if a critical mass of us were still thinking in ways which benefit the powerful, because those thoughts would cause us to act, organize and vote in a way that benefits our rulers and not us.

If we want to free our minds from the chains of power, it’s not enough to do research and memorize a bunch of facts about what’s really going on in our nation and our world. The most important step to freeing our minds from their shackles is to remove from ourselves the psychological hooks of fear and identity to which those shackles are attached. This means freeing ourselves from the delusions of egoic consciousness, which, funny enough, brings us right back around to the central tenets of Buddhism and Hinduism again.

As long as humanity is enslaved to the ego it will remain enslaved to abusive power structures, because manipulators will always be able to use our egoic hooks to propagandize us into supporting their interests at mass scale. Until then it won’t ultimately matter how many civil liberties we gain or lose, because we’ll still be unable to move beyond the bonds of our psychological chains.

Not until humanity collectively breaks free from the gravitational pull of egoic consciousness will we truly blast off into the real potentiality of our species.

Shockingly, CDC Now Lists Vaccinated Deaths as Unvaccinated

Posted on September 29, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Source: Global Research

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, you’re not counted as fully vaccinated until a full 14 days have passed since your second injection in the case of Pfizer or Moderna, or 14 days after your first dose of Janssen, despite the fact that over 80% of deaths after the vaccines occur in this window. How convenient

Anyone who dies within the first 14 days post-injection is counted as an unvaccinated death. Not only does this inaccurately inflate the unvaccinated death toll, but it also hides the real dangers of the COVID shots, as the vast majority of deaths from these shots occur within the first two weeks

The CDC also has two different sets of testing guidelines — one for vaccinated patients and another for the unvaccinated. If you’re unvaccinated, CDC guidance says to use a cycle threshold (CT) of 40, known to result in false positives. If you’re vaccinated, they recommend using a CT of 28 or less, which minimizes the risk of false positives

The CDC also hides vaccine failures and props up the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative by only counting breakthrough cases that result in hospitalization or death

Hospitals are still also reporting non-COVID related illnesses as COVID-19

While public health officials and mainstream media claim the COVID-19 pandemic is now “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,”¹ we now know this claim is based on highly misleading statistics.

In a July 16, 2021, White House press briefing,² U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Rochelle Walensky claimed that “over 97% of people who are entering the hospital right now are unvaccinated.” A few weeks later, in an August 5, 2021, statement, she inadvertently revealed how that statistic actually came about.³

As it turns out, the CDC was looking at hospitalization and mortality data from January through June 2021 — a timeframe during which the vast majority of the U.S. population were still unvaccinated.⁴

But that’s not the case at all now. The CDC is also playing with statistics in other ways to create the false and inaccurate impression that unvaccinated people make up the bulk of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. For example, we now find out the agency is counting anyone who died within the first 14 days post-injection as unvaccinated.

Not only does this inaccurately inflate the unvaccinated death toll, but it also hides the real dangers of the COVID shots, as the vast majority of deaths from these shots occur within the first two weeks.⁵ Now their deaths are counted as unvaccinated deaths rather than being counted as deaths due to vaccine injury or COVID-19 breakthrough infections!

How CDC Counts Breakthrough Cases

According to the CDC,⁶ you’re not counted as fully vaccinated until a full 14 days have passed since your second injection in the case of Pfizer or Moderna, or 14 days after your first dose of Janssen. This is how the CDC defines a vaccine breakthrough case:

“… a vaccine breakthrough infection is defined as the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after they have completed all recommended doses of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-authorized COVID-19 vaccine.”

In other words, if you’ve received one dose of Pfizer or Moderna and develop symptomatic COVID-19, get admitted to the hospital and/or die from COVID, you’re counted as an unvaccinated case. If you’ve received two doses and get ill within 14 days, you’re still counted as an unvaccinated case.

The problem with this is that over 80% of hospitalizations and deaths appear to be occurring among those who have received the jabs, but this reality is hidden by the way cases are defined and counted. A really clever and common strategy of the CDC during the pandemic has been to change the definitions and goalposts so it supports their nefarious narrative.

For example, the CDC has quietly changed the definition of “vaccine,” apparently in an attempt to validate calling the COVID mRNA gene therapies vaccines. In an August 26, 2021, archived version⁷of vaccine, the CDC defines it as a “product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.”

But a few days later, a new definition appeared on the CDC’s website,⁸ which now says a vaccine is a “preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” The differences in the definitions are subtle but distinct: The first one defined a vaccine as something that will “produce immunity.”

But, since the COVID-19 vaccines are not designed to stop infection but, rather, to only lessen the degree of infection, it becomes obvious that the new definition was created to cover the COVID vaccines.

Different Testing Guidelines for Vaxxed and Unvaxxed

It’s not just the CDC’s definition of a breakthrough case that skews the data. Even more egregious and illogical is the fact that the CDC even has two different sets of testing guidelines — one for vaccinated patients and another for the unvaccinated.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC has recommended a PCR test cycle threshold (CT) of 40.⁹ This flies in the face of scientific consensus, which has long been that a CT over 35 will produce 97% false positives,¹⁰ essentially rendering the test useless.^11,12,13

In mid-May 2021, the CDC finally lowered its recommended CT count, but only for patients who have received one or more COVID shots.¹⁴ So, if you have received a COVID injection, the CDC’s guidelines call for your PCR test to be run at a CT of 28 or less. If you are unvaccinated, your PCR test is to be run at a CT of 40, which grossly overestimates the true prevalence of infection.

The end result is that unvaccinated individuals who get tested are FAR more prone to get false positives, while those who have received the jab are more likely to get an accurate diagnosis of infection.

Only Hospitalization and Death Count if You’re COVID Jabbed

Even that’s not all. The CDC also hides vaccine failures and props up the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative by only counting breakthrough cases that result in hospitalization or death.

In other words, if you got your second COVID shot more than 14 days ago and you develop symptoms, you do not count as a breakthrough case unless you’re admitted to the hospital and/or die from COVID-19 in the hospital, even if you test positive. So, to summarize, COVID breakthrough cases count only if all of the following apply:

The patient received the second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna shot at least 14 days ago (or one dose in case of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose injection)
The patient tests positive for SARS-CoV-2 using a CT of 28 or less, which avoids false positives
The patient is admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 and/or dies in the hospital

Vaccinated Probably Make Up Bulk of Hospitalizations

If vaccinated and unvaccinated were not treated with such varying standards, we’d probably find that the vaccinated now make up the bulk of hospitalizations, making the COVID pandemic one of the vaccinated. An August 30, 2021, exposé by The Epoch Times reveals what’s really happening on the front lines:¹⁵

“After a battery of testing, my friend was diagnosed with pancreatitis. But it was easier for the hospital bureaucracy to register the admission as a COVID case … The mainstream media is reporting that severe COVID cases are mainly among unvaccinated people … Is that what’s really going on?

It’s certainly not the case in Israel, the first country to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens against the virus. Now it has one of the highest daily infection rates and the majority of people catching the virus (77 percent to 83 percent, depending on age) are already vaccinated, according to data collected by the Israeli government …

After admission, I spoke to the nurse on the COVID ward … The nurse told me that she had gotten both vaccines but she was feeling worried: ‘Two thirds of my patients are fully vaccinated,’ she said. How can there be such a disconnect between what the COVID ward nurse told me and the mainstream media reports?”

The heart of the problem is that the U.S. is not even trying to achieve an accurate count. As noted by The Epoch Times, “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have publicly acknowledged that they do not have accurate data.”

So, when you hear that cases are rising, and that most of them are unvaccinated, you need to ask: “Are these people who have had one vaccine and gotten sick, two vaccines and gotten sick, or no vaccines at all? Without more details, it is impossible to know what is really going on,” The Epoch Times says.¹⁶

All we do know, according to one doctor who spoke with The Epoch Times, is “the vaccines are not as effective as public health officials told us they would be. ‘This is a product that’s not doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to stop transmission of this virus and it’s not doing that.’”

Counting Non-COVID Illness as COVID Cases

On top of all of that, hospitals are still also reporting non-COVID related illnesses as COVID. As reported by The Epoch Times:¹⁷

“Health authorities around the world have been doing this since the beginning of the COVID crisis. For example, a young man in Orange County, Florida who died in a motorcycle crash last summer was originally considered a COVID death by state health officials …

And a middle-aged construction worker fell off a ladder in Croatia and was also counted as a death from COVID … To muddy the waters further, even people who test negative for COVID are sometimes counted as COVID deaths.

Consider the case of 26-year-old Matthew Irvin, a father of three from Yamhill County, Oregon. As reported by KGW8 News, Irvin went to the ER with stomach pain, nausea, and diarrhea on July 5, 2020. But instead of admitting him to the hospital, the doctors sent him home.

Five days later, on July 10, 2020, Irvin died. Though his COVID test came back negative two days after his death and his family told reporters and public health officials that no one Irvin had been around had any COVID symptoms, the medical examiner allegedly told the family that an autopsy was not necessary, listing his death as a coronavirus case. It took the Oregon Health Authority two and a half months to correct the mistake.

In an even more striking example of overcounting COVID deaths, a nursing home in New Jersey that only has 90 beds was wrongly reported as having 753 deaths from COVID. According to a spokesman, they had fewer than twenty deaths. In other words, the number of deaths was over-reported by 3,700 percent.”

No Need to Fear the Delta Variant if You’re Unvaccinated

In a June 29, 2021, interview,¹⁸ Fauci called the Delta variant “a game-changer” for unvaccinated people, warning it will devastate the unvaccinated population while vaccinated individuals are protected against it. Alas, in the real world, the converse is turning out to be true, as the Delta variant is running wild primarily among those who got the COVID jab.The Delta variant contains three different mutations, all in the spike protein. This allows this variant to evade the immune responses in those who have received the COVID jabs, but not those who have natural immunity, which is much broader.

In a June 30, 2021, appearance on Fox News (video above), epidemiologist and cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough pointed out that “It is very clear from the U.K. Technical Briefing¹⁹ that was published June 18 that the vaccine provides no protection against the Delta variant.”²⁰

The reason for this is because the Delta variant contains three different mutations, all in the spike protein. This allows this variant to evade the immune responses in those who have received the COVID jabs, but not those who have natural immunity, which is much broader.

Even so, the Delta variant is far milder than previous variants, according to the U.K.’s June 18, 2021, Technical Briefing.²¹ In it, they present data showing the Delta variant is more contagious but far less deadly and easier to treat. As McCullough told Fox News:

“Whether you get the vaccine or not, patients will get some very mild symptoms like a cold and they can be easily managed … Patients who have severe symptoms or at high risk, we can use simple drug combinations at home and get them through the illness. So, there’s no reason now to push vaccinations.”

Contrast that with the following statement made by President Biden during a CNN town hall meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, in late July 2021:²²

“We have a pandemic for those who haven’t gotten a vaccination. It’s that basic, that simple. If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, not going to the ICU unit, and not going to die. You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

However, Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency doctor and visiting professor of health policy and management at George Washington University’s Milken School of Public Health in Washington, D.C., contradicted the president, saying he had led the American astray by telling them you don’t need a mask if you’re vaccinated, or that you can’t get it or transmit it. As reported by CNN Health:²³

“In particular, Wen took issue with Biden’s incorrect claims that you cannot contract Covid-19 or the Delta variant if you are vaccinated. ‘I was actually disappointed,’ Wen said. ‘I actually thought he was answering questions as if it were a month ago. He’s not really meeting the realities of what’s happening on the ground. I think he may have led people astray.’”

CNN added that Wen had told their political commentator Anderson Cooper that “many unknown answers remain related to Covid-19, and that it is still not known how well protected vaccinated individuals are from mild illness … [or] if you’re vaccinated, could you still be contagious to other people.”

Vaccinated Patients Flood Hospitals Around the World

The U.K. data showing the Delta variant is far milder than previous SARS-CoV-2 viruses deflates the claim that avoiding severe illness is a sign that the shots are working. Since the Delta variant typically doesn’t cause severe illness in the first place, it doesn’t make sense to attribute milder illness to the shot.

But if Delta is the mildest coronavirus variant yet, why are so many “vaccinated” people ending up in the hospital? While we still do not have clear confirmation, this could be a sign that antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) is at work. Alternatively, it could be that vaccine injuries are being misreported as breakthrough cases.

Whatever the case may be, real-world data from areas with high COVID jab rates show a disturbing trend. For example, August 1, 2021, the director of Israel’s Public Health Services, Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, announced half of all COVID-19 infections were among the fully vaccinated.²⁴ Signs of more serious disease among fully vaccinated are also emerging, she said, particularly in those over the age of 60.

A few days later, August 5, 2021, Dr. Kobi Haviv, director of the Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem, appeared on Channel 13 News, reporting that 95% of severely ill COVID-19 patients are fully vaccinated, and that they make up 85% to 90% of COVID-related hospitalizations overall.²⁵

In Scotland, official data on hospitalizations and deaths show 87% of those who have died from COVID-19 in the third wave that began in early July were vaccinated.²⁶

In Gibraltar, which has a 99% COVID jab compliance rate, COVID cases have risen by 2,500% since June 1, 2021,²⁷ and in Iceland, where over 82% have received the shots, 77% of new COVID cases are among the fully vaccinated.²⁸

Data from the U.K. show a similar trend among those over the age of 50. In this age group, partially and fully “vaccinated” people account for 68% of hospitalizations and 70% of COVID deaths.²⁹

A CDC investigation of an outbreak in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, between July 6, 2021, through July 25, 2021, found 74% of those who received a diagnosis of COVID19, and 80% of hospitalizations, were among the fully vaccinated.^30,31 Most, but not all, had the Delta variant.

The CDC also found that fully vaccinated individuals who contract the infection have as high a viral load in their nasal passages as unvaccinated individuals who get infected.³² The same was found in a British study, a preprint of which was posted mid-August 2021.^33,34 This means the vaccinated are just as infectious as the unvaccinated.

Interestingly, a Lancet preprint study³⁵ that examined breakthrough infections in health care workers in Vietnam who received the AstraZeneca COVID shot found the “viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with old strains detected between March-April 2020.”

What’s more, they found no correlation between vaccine-induced neutralizing antibody levels and viral loads or the development of symptoms. According to the authors:

“Breakthrough Delta variant infections are associated with high viral loads, prolonged PCR positivity, and low levels of vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies, explaining the transmission between the vaccinated people.”

Not All Vaccinated Are Confirmed Vaccinated

As if all of that weren’t enough, there’s yet one more confounder. Just because you got the COVID shot does not mean you’ve been confirmed as having gotten the shot. You’re only confirmed “vaccinated” if your COVID injection is added to your medical record, and this sometimes doesn’t happen if you’re going to a temporary vaccination clinic, a drive-through or pharmacy, for example. As reported by CNN:³⁶

“If you are among the countless people who didn’t get the doses at a primary care doctor’s office, there may not be any record of the vaccination on file with your doctor.”

To actually count as a “confirmed vaccinated” individual, you must send your vaccination card to your primary care physician’s office and have them add it to your electronic medical record. If you got the shot at a pharmacy, you’ll need to verify that they forwarded your proof of vaccination to your doctor. Primary care offices are then responsible for sharing their patients’ immunization data with the state’s immunization information system.

Patient-recorded proof of vaccination is only accepted for influenza and pneumococcal vaccines, not COVID-19 injections.³⁷ What this all means is that, say you got the shot several weeks ago at a drive-through vaccination clinic and get admitted to the hospital with COVID symptoms. Unless your COVID shot status has actually been added into the medical system, you will not count as “vaccinated.”

This too can skew the statistics, because we know the CDC ascertains vaccination status by matching SARS-CoV-2 case surveillance and CAIR2 data using person-level identifiers and algorithms.³⁸

As noted by John Zurlo, division director of infectious disease at Thomas Jefferson University, “the lack of reliable vaccine records complicates efforts to precisely understand vaccine effectiveness and determine how many local hospitalizations and deaths are resulting from COVID-19 breakthrough infections.”³⁹

We’re in the Largest Clinical Trial in Medical History

In closing, it’s worth remembering that the COVID injection campaign is part and parcel of a clinical trial. As noted Dr. Lidiya Angelova in a recent Genuine Prospect article:⁴⁰

“Many people are unaware that they are participating in the largest clinical trial test of our times. It is because World Health Organization, healthcare authorities, politicians, celebrities, and journalists promote the experimental medical treatments (wrongly called COVID-19 vaccines) as safe and efficient while in fact these treatments are in early clinical research stage.

It means that there is not enough data for such claims and that the people who participate are test subject.”

As shown in a graph on Genuine Prospect, under normal circumstances, clinical research follows a strict protocol that begins with tests on cell cultures. After that comes tests on animals, then limited human testing in four phases. In Phase 1 of human testing, up to 100 people are included and followed anywhere from one week to several months.

Phase 2 typically includes several hundred participants and lasts up to two years. In Phase 3, several hundred to 3,000 participants are tested upon for one to four years. Phase 4 typically includes several thousand individuals who are followed for at least one year or longer. After each phase, the data is examined to assess effectiveness and adverse reactions.

The timelines for these stages and phases were not followed for the COVID “vaccines.” Most Phase 3 trials concluded by the end of 2020, and everyone who got the shots since their rollout under emergency use authorization is part of a Phase 4 clinical trial, whether they realize it or not.⁴¹ And since the trials are not completed, you simply cannot make definitive claims about safety, especially long-term safety. As noted by Angelova:⁴²

“When I worked at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) … I went to the course Ethical and Regulatory Aspects of Clinical Research … The first rule we learnt was ‘Clinical research must be ethical’ … All ethical aspects of clinical research are dismissed with the COVID-19 vaccines.

People should know that nobody can require such to participate in everyday activities like using public transportation, shopping, going to school and even hospital. People should know that they should not be punished for refusing to take the experimental medical treatments.

COVID-19 vaccines mass use and COVID-19 measures are an infringe[ment] of the Articles 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 12, 13, 18, 20, 25, 27, 28 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).”

Notes

¹ The New York Times July 16, 2021

² WH.gov Press Briefing July 16, 2021

³ Fox News

⁴ Mayo Clinic COVID Vaccine Tracker

⁵ Twitter DX Foundation September 2, 2021

⁶ CDC August 25, 2021

⁷ Web Archive August 26, 2021

⁸ CDC September 1, 2021

⁹ FDA.gov CDC 2019-nCoV Real-Time RT-PCR July 13, 2020 (PDF) Page 35

¹⁰ Clinical Infectious Diseases September 28, 2020; ciaa1491

¹¹ The Vaccine Reaction September 29, 2020

¹² Jon Rappoport’s Blog November 6, 2020

¹³ YouTube TWiV 641 July 16, 2020

¹⁴ CDC.gov COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Case Investigation Guidelines (PDF)

^15, ^16, ^17, ²⁸ The Epoch Times August 30, 2021

¹⁸ PBS June 29, 2021

^19, ²¹ Public Health England, SARS-CoV-2 Variants Technical Briefing 16, June 18, 2021 (PDF)

²⁰ Covidcalltohumanity.org July 5, 2021

²² CBS 8 News July 21, 2021

²³ CNN Health July 22, 2021

²⁴ Bloomberg August 1, 2021 (Archived)

²⁵ American Faith August 8, 2021

²⁶ The Daily Expose July 29, 2021

²⁷ Big League Politics August 4, 2021

²⁹ Evening Standard August 20, 2021

³⁰ CDC MMWR July 30, 2021; 70

³¹ CNBC July 30, 2021

³² NBC News August 7, 2021

³³ Impact of Delta on Viral Burden and Vaccine Effectiveness in the UK (PDF)

³⁴ CBS News August 19, 2021

³⁵ The Lancet Preprint August 10, 2021

³⁶ CNN April 26, 2021

³⁷ Immunize.org Documenting Vaccination

³⁸ MMWR August 27, 2021; 70(34): 1170-1176

³⁹ Philadelphia Enquirer August 31, 2021

^40, ⁴² Genuine Prospect August 31, 2021

⁴¹ Red Voice Media June 22, 2021

The Incantational Bewitchment of Propaganda

Posted on September 28, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the America public believe is false.” – William Casey, CIA Director, February 1981

All propaganda succeeds because it satisfies needs that it has first created. If you follow the daily rat-a-tat mainstream news reports and react to them, you will be caught in a labyrinth that has been set to entrap you. You will keep finding that your mind will be like a bed that is already made up and your daylight hours filled with nightmares. What you assume are your real needs will be met, but you will swiftly tumble into the free-floating anxiety that the media has created to keep you on edge and confused. They will provide you with objects – Covid-19, the U.S. “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, the Russian and Chinese “threats,” the need to crack down on domestic dissidents, 9/11, etc. (an endless panoply of lies) – that you can attach your anxiety to, but they will be no help. They are not meant to; their purpose is to befuddle; to make you more anxious by wondering if currently there is any contrast between the real world and the apparent one. The corporate mainstream media serve phantasmagoria on a 24/7 basis, all shifting like quicksand. For anyone with a modicum of common sense, this should be obvious. But then again, as Thoreau put it:

The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Perhaps some health expert will soon recommend that 24 hours of sleep a day is optimal, but maybe I am dreaming or being redundant.

For many decades, the corporate mainstream media and the CIA have been synonymous. They were married down in hell and now daily do the devil’s work up above. Now that news is conveyed primarily through digital media via the internet, their power to induce electronic trances has increased exponentially. Linguistic and visual mind control is their raison d’être. Fear is their favorite tactic. And since the fear and anxiety of death is the archetypal source of all anxiety, death becomes a core element in their fear-mongering.

In a recent powerful article, Canadian independent journalist Eva Bartlett, a brave and free war correspondent who has reported from inside Syria and Gaza, has shown how the ongoing Covid-19 “fear porn” spewed out by the media has dramatically increased people’s anxiety levels and thrown so many into a perpetual state of near panic. This, of course, is not an accident.

Fear immobilizes people and drives them into a cataleptic state where clear thinking is impossible. They become hypnotized in a “private” space that is actually social, an instantaneous identification with the media news reports that are addressed to millions but feel personal and greatly exacerbate the great loneliness that lies at the core of high-tech society.

As I have said before, the new digital order is the world of teleconferencing and the online life, existence shorn of physical space and time and people. A world where shaking hands is a dissident act. A haunted world of masked specters, distorted words and images that can appear and disappear in a nanosecond. A magic show. A place where, in the words of Charles Manson, you can “get the fear,” where fear is king. A locus where, as you stare at the screens, you are no longer there since you are spellbound.

In a high-tech society, loneliness is far more prevalent than in the past. The technology has imprisoned people behind their screens and now the controlling forces are intent on closing this mechanistic circle if they can. They call it The Great Reset.

They have spent decades using technology to invade and pare down people’s inner private space where freedom to think and decide resides.

They have repeated ad nauseam the materialistic mantra that freedom is an illusion and that we are amazing machines determined by our genes and social forces.

They have reiterated that the spiritual and transcendent realms are illusions.

And they have pushed their transhuman agenda to assert more and more power and control.

This is the essence of the corona crisis and the push to vaccinate everyone.

Drip by drip, year by year, they have cultivated the necessary preconditions and predispositions for this technological fascism with its nihilistic underpinnings to succeed.

When the inner dimension of existence is lost, there is no way to critique the outer world, its politics, and social structure. Dissent becomes a useless passion when people instantly identify with the social. Human nature doesn’t change but social structures and technology do and they can be used to try to destroy people’s humanity. Herbert Marcuse put it clearly long before the latest digital technology:

This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new ‘immediacy,’ however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking – the critical power of Reason – is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition.

Once upon a time, people sat together and talked. They even touched and shared their thoughts and feelings. They conspired in a most natural way apart from the prying eyes and ears of the electronic spies. Now so many sit and check their cell phones. They “connect,” thinking they are with it while not knowing they have been lured into another dimension where frenetic passivity reigns and trance states are the rule.

“Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness,” said Jacques Ellul in his masterpiece, Propaganda. He was being simultaneously accurate and facetious. For propaganda provides a doorway to pseudo-community, a place to lose oneself in the group, to satisfy the need to believe and obey in mass technological society where emotional emptiness and lack of meaning are widespread and the need to fill up the empty self is dutifully met by propaganda, which is a drug by any other name, indeed the primary drug. The empty-self craves ful-fillment, anything to consume to fill the void that a consumer culture dangles everywhere. Think alike, buy alike, dress alike – and you will be one big happy community. It is all abstract of course, even as its rational character is irrational, but that doesn’t matter a whit since the fear of “not going along” and appearing dissident plagues people.

Now we have endless digital propaganda that is the “remedy” for loneliness. Ah, all the lonely people, keeping their masks in a jar by the side of the door together with Eleanor Rigby. They think they know what their masks are for but don’t know why they are lonely or that they have been played with. Masks upon masks are donned to ward off the fear that is pumped out through the electronic airwaves. It is doubtful that many ever heard of William Casey or can imagine the breadth and depth of the propaganda that he and his current protégés in the intelligence agencies and corporate media dispense daily.

“When everything the American people believes is false.” Casey must be smiling in hell.

A grim submissiveness has settled over the lives of millions of hypnotized people in so many countries. Grim, grim, grim, as Charles Dickens wrote of his 1842 visit to the puritanical Shaker religious sect in western Massachusetts. He said:

I so abhor, and from my soul detest, that bad spirit, no matter by what class or sect it may be entertained, which would strip life of its healthful, graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path to the grave….

And yet, the fundamental things still do apply, as time goes by. Love, glory, loneliness, beauty, fear, faith, and courage. Lovers and true artists, fighters both, resist this machine tyranny and its endless lies because they smell a rat intent on destroying their passionate love of the daring adventure that is life. They feel life is an agon, an arena for struggle, “a fight for love and glory,” a case of do-and-die. They have bull-shit detectors and see through the elites’ propaganda that is used to literally kill millions around the world and to kill the spirit of rebellion in so many others. And they know that it is in the inner sanctuary of every individual soul where resistance to evil is born and fear is defeated. They know too that the art and love must be shared and this is how social solidarity movements are created.

Listen. The fight is on. “This Has Gotta Stop.”

The media’s addiction to Covid-19 ‘fear porn’ is perpetuating an ever-worsening cycle of societal damage across the world

Posted on September 24, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Eva K Bartlett

Source: In Gaza and Beyond

Over the past year and a half, hysterical media reporting on matters Covid-19 has reduced some people to a fearful state of unquestioning compliance – including a great number of otherwise critically-thinking journalists.

With screaming headlines in bold and large font such as, ‘Will this nightmare ever end?’ and ‘Mutant virus skyrockets…’ and ‘Fear grows across the country: VIRUS PANIC’, and ‘Coronavirus horror: Social media footage shows infected Wuhan residents ‘act like zombies’, it is no wonder many people are in a state of panic.

In times when many are suffering mentally and physically under unnecessary and prolonged lockdowns, the incessant fear porn is causing excessive anxiety, which in turn will affect the health & mental well-being of some, if not many.

In government documents from the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) dated from March 2020 advice was given saying: “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging… This could potentially be done by trained community support volunteers, by targeted media campaigns, social media”

I’d say the UK media campaigns certainly did the job, and other Western nations got similar directives. The UK government also became the nation’s biggest advertiser in 2020, make what you will of the potential ramifications that could have on cash-strapped newspapers and their supposed ‘independence’.

Having myself been deeply focused on exposing war propaganda and other media lies around Syria, Palestine, Venezuela, and elsewhere over the years, my default position has become one of deep cynicism on mass media reporting. Yes, you can find nuggets of truth, or even excellent journalists in mainstream publications, honestly challenging the narratives.

But those are few and far between, generally you find copy-paste propaganda emanating largely from the bowels of the USA and the UK.

A study by Swiss Propaganda Research (SPR) noted, “most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.”

Those agencies are AP, Reuters, and AFP. SPR notes:

“The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.”

Given all of this, I’ve come to believe that with regard to media reporting on Covid-19, my cynicism is well-deserved.

Covid-19 reporting has increasingly been utterly absurd, with stories of people dropping dead in the streets, ice rink morgues to cope with the mountains of bodies, footage of an overcrowded New York hospital (that just happened to be of an Italian hospital), claims of animals testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, and more recently reports of people dying post-jab but we are told ‘it could have been worse!’

This campaign of fear caused the public to massively overestimate the lethality of Covid-19, which as un-alarmist voices note has a survival rate of over 99%.

When months into the outbreak it became apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was far less lethal than first predicted, the media and talking heads moved from talking about ‘Covid deaths’ to ‘positive cases’.

Although relatively early on a goat and pawpaw tested positive for Covid-19, instead of then scrutinizing the accuracy of the PCR test as a means of ‘detecting Covid-19’, the media continued to hype the rise in Covid ‘cases’.

In lockstep, ‘Covid testing’ was increased dramatically using the PCR test (recently revoked by the CDC). This inevitably pumped up the number of ‘cases’, which mass media have in turn promoted non-stop, this in turn gave ammunition to those enforcing lockdowns and vaccines.

By now hundreds of vocal doctors, nurses, virologists, immunologists, and other professionals actually worth listening to, whose data and experience counter the hype pumped out in media have very quickly disappeared from social media, or otherwise deemed quacks, and are thus largely silenced. This leaves the general public mainly getting their information via hyped-up media.

Alongside this, there have been relentless ad hominem attacks on journalists who pose legitimate questions and uncomfortable truths about the official narratives around Covid-19.

For offering perspectives which contradict the standard narratives around Covid-19, journalists have been deemed conspiracy theorists, pandemic-deniers, right-wingers, selfish… I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few slurs.

When it comes to matters Covid-19, it is suddenly unacceptable to question ‘The Science’, question the authorities, or question the same media that sold us WMDs in Iraq and chemical attacks in Syria.

Media are the drivers of Covid hysteria, and it is the daily bombardment of fear porn that confuses average people and enables tyrannical powers to be brought in, largely unchallenged.

As it is the responsibility of journalists to expose lies around wars of aggression, it is also the duty of journalists to do so around Covid-19. For some journalists who have stubbornly refused to hold power to account, instead toeing the line on all things Covid, it appears their fear is of losing an audience and not of a virus.

Whether or not you agree with dissenting voices’ questions and criticisms, we have the right to ask and make them. We do so, knowing that remaining silent in the face of the brutal Covid measures is a guaranteed path to tyranny.

Which Is Worse, the Tech Giant Censors or the Stuff You Want Censored?

Posted on September 16, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By David Swanson

Source: War is a Crime

The communications system we live in is highly complex, mostly driven by greed and profit, in part semi-public, full of filth I know we’d be better off without, and increasingly openly censored and monitored by defenders of accepted good thinking.

Fascist nutcases are spreading dangerous nonsense, while billionaire monopolists are virtually disappearing critics and protesters. It’s easy to get confused about what ought to be done. It’s difficult to find any recommendation that isn’t confused. Different people want different outrages censored and censored by different entities; what they all have in common is a failure to think through the threats they are creating to the things they don’t want censored.

A 1975 Canadian government commission recommended censoring “libel, obscenity, breach of the Official Secrets Act, matters affecting the defense of Canada, treason, sedition, or promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence.” This is a typical muddle. Half of those things were almost certainly already banned, as suggested by their identification through legal terminology. A few of those things probably should be banned, such as incitement of violence (though not promulgating information that “leads” to incitement of any crime or violence). Of course I would include as incitement of violence a speech by the Prime Minister advocating the shipping of Canadian “Peace Keepers” to Africa, but the Prime Minister (who would have more say than I) would no doubt have just identified me as commenting on a matter affecting the defense of Canada — plus, if he or she were in the mood, I’ve probably just promulgated something that will lead to inciting some crime or other, even if it’s just the crime of more people speaking on matters affecting the “defense” of Canada. (And it shouldn’t matter that I’m not Canadian, since Julian Assange is not from the United States.)

Well, what’s the solution? A simplistic and surprisingly popular one is to blame philosophers. Those idiot postmodernists said there was no such thing as truth, which allowed that great student of philosophy Donald Trump to declare news about him “fake” — which he never could have thought of doing without a bunch of leftist academics inspiring him; and the endless blatant lies about wars and economies and environmental collapse and straight-faced reporting of campaign promises can’t have anything at all to do with the ease people have in distrusting news reporting. So, now we need to swing the pendulum back in the direction of tattooing the Ten Commandments on our foreheads before morality perishes at the hands of the monster relativism. We can’t do that without censoring the numbskulls, regrettably of course.

This line of thinking is dependent on failing to appreciate the point of postmodern criticism. That the greater level of consensus that exists on chemistry or physics as opposed to on what should be banned as “obscenity” is a matter of degree, not of essential or metaphysical substance, is an interesting point for philosophy students, and a correct one, but not a guide to life for politicians or school teachers. That there is no possible basis for declaring some law of physics permanent and incapable of being replaced by a better one is not a reason for treating a law of physics as a matter of opinion or susceptible to alteration via fairy dust. If Isaac Newton not being God, and God also not being God, disturbs you and you’re mad at philosophers for saying it, you should notice what follows from it: the need for everyone to support your right to try to persuade them of their error. And what does not follow from it: the elimination of chemistry or physics because some nitwit claims he can fly or kill a hurricane with his gun. If that idiot has 100,000 followers on social media, your concern is not with philosophy but with stupidity.

The tech-giant censors’ concern is — in part — also with stupidity, but it’s not clear they have the tools to address it. For one thing, they just cannot help themselves. They have other concerns too. They are concerned with their profits. They are concerned with any challenges to power — their power and the power of those who empower them. They are concerned, therefore, with the demands and national bigotry of national governments. They are concerned — whether they know it or not — with creative thinking. Every time they censor an idea they believe crazy, they risk censoring one of those ideas that proves superior to existing ones. Their combination of interests appears to be self-defeating. Rather than persuade people of the benefits of their censorship, they persuade more and more people of the rightness of what was censored and of the arbitrary power-interests of those doing the censoring.

Our problem is not too many voices on the internet. It is too much concentration of wealth and power in too few media outlets that are too narrowly restricted to too few voices, relegating other voices to marginal and ghettoized corners of the internet. Nobody gets to find out they’re mistaken through respectful discourse. Nobody gets to show someone else they’re right. We need to prioritize that sort of exchange, before a flood of misguided good intentions drowns us all.

The “promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence” bit of that proposed law seems to have had a surprisingly good intention, namely benevolent parental concern with all the “action-filled” (violence-filled) children’s entertainment on television, the violence-normalizing enter/info-tainment programming for all ages that studies and commonsense suggest increase violence. But can we ban all that garbage, or do we have to empower people who actually give a damn to produce and select programming, and empower families to turn it all off, and schools to be more engaging than cartoons?

The difficulty of censoring such content should be clear from the fact that discussions of it tend to stray into numerous unrelated topics, including the supposed need to censor wars for the protection of, not children, but weapons dealers. Once you allow a corporation to censor damaging news — poof! — there go all negative reports on its products. Once you tell it to put warning labels over recommendations to drink bleach as medicine, it starts putting warning labels on anything related to climate collapse or originating outside the United States of Goddamn Righteousness. You can imagine whether that ends up helping or hurting the supposed target, stupidity.

Censoring news, and labeling news as “factual,” seems to me a cheap fix that doesn’t fix. It’s a bit like legalizing bribery and gerrymandering and limited ballot access and corporate airwaves domination and then declaring that you’ll institute term limits so that every rotten candidate has to be quickly replaced by an even more rotten one. It’s a lovely sounding solution until you try it. Look at the “fact-checker” sections of corporate media outlets. They’re as wrong and inconsistent as any other sections; they’re just labeled differently.

The solutions that will work are not easy, and I’m no expert on them, but they’re not new or mysterious either. We should democratize and legitimize government. We should use government to break up media monopolies. We should publicly and privately facilitate and support numerous independent media outlets. We should invest in publicly funded but independent media dedicated to allowing a wide range of people to discuss issues without the overarching control of the profit interest or the immediate interests of the government.

We should not be simplistic about banning or allowing censorship, but highly wary of opening up any new types of censorship and imagining they won’t be abused. We should stick to what is already illegal outside of communications (such as violence) and censor communications only when it is actually directly a part of those crimes (such as instigating particular violence). We should be open to some limits on the forces empowered by our choice through our public dollars to shape our communications; I’d be happy to ban militaries from having any role in producing movies and video games (if they’re going to bomb children in the name of “democracy,” well, then, that’s my vote for the use of my dollars).

At the same time, we need — through schools and outside of them — radically better education that includes education in the skills of media consumption, BS-spotting, propaganda deciphering, fact-verification, respect, civility, decency, and honesty. I hardly think it’s entirely the fault of youtube that kids get less of their education from their classrooms — part of the fault lies with the classrooms. But I hardly think the eternal project of learning, and of learning how to learn, can be restricted to classrooms.

A Tool of Control: How Health Officials Weaponize Language to Manage Public Perception of COVID Vaccines

Posted on September 14, 2021 by Reid Mukai

The deployment of clever linguistic tricks has created a hostile upside-down universe, where even the vaccine-injured are tarnished as “anti-vaxxers” or liars rather than acknowledged as ex-vaxxers who took risks that turned out to be life-changing.

By Children’s Health Defense Team

Source: The Defender

Psychological and linguistic manipulation are, for those in power, proven tools for building, consolidating and maintaining dominance — a reality keenly depicted in George Orwell’s never-more-relevant novel, “1984.”

As phrased by master propagandist Edward Bernays, an approximate contemporary of Orwell’s, the mind of the people “is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion.”

Recent events surrounding COVID vaccines have shown that medicine and public health — with the help of a complicit media — are particularly skilled at “pull[ing] the wires which control the public mind.”

The clever bag of linguistic tricks deployed by the medical cartel includes seeding evocative terms such as “vaccine hesitancy” and “lockdowns” (which is prison terminology) into popular and scientific discourse, forging slippery new definitions of words with formerly fixed meanings (such as “pandemic,” “herd immunity” and “vaccine”), and circling failed products back around by giving them the positive spin of “boosters.”

Ominously, medicine’s and public health’s verbal assaults encourage shaming of, or violence against, those who ask questions, while upholding the disingenuous pretense that vaccine mandates are compatible with freedom.

In this hostile upside-down universe, even the vaccine-injured are tarnished as “anti-vaxxers” or liars rather than acknowledged as ex-vaxxers who took risks that turned out to be life-changing.

‘Much like other stressors’

One of the more insulting recent examples of linguistic weaponization involves a dubious psychiatric cover term, “functional neurological disorder” (FND), that is suddenly being trumpeted as an explanation for the tsunami of adverse events — especially severe neurological reactions — being reported all over the world in the aftermath of COVID vaccination.

Psychiatrists conveniently define FND — which they also refer to as a “psychogenic” (originating in the mind) or “conversion” disorder — as “real” nervous system symptoms that “cause significant distress or problems functioning” but are “incompatible with” or “can’t be explained by” recognized neurological diseases or other medical conditions.

Lest members of the public derive a “simplistic impression of potential links between the [COVID] vaccine and major neurological symptoms,” neurologists pushing the FND story have hastened to reassure people that the “close development of functional motor symptoms after the vaccine does not implicate the vaccine as the cause of those symptoms.”

One of these individuals is National Institutes of Health-funded neurologist Alberto Espay, who implausibly adds that COVID vaccination (which entails injection with high-risk substances and technologies) is just “a stressor or precipitant, much like any other stressor … such as a motor vehicle accident or sleep deprivation.”

Officials and the media are audaciously trotting out the FND narrative on both sides of the pond, as evidenced by a recent Daily Mail headline that read, “Videos of people ‘struggling to walk’ after getting their COVID vaccine are NOT result of jab itself but a condition triggered by stress or trauma.”

Helping with the spin, a member of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization straight-facedly attributed this “stress” to coercion, stating: “If people begin to feel they are being kind of forced against their will to do something, then in a sense that’s quite a damaging thing to do because it gives people the impression vaccination is something being imposed on them.”

Hammering home the point that “there is nothing to see here,” Kings College London physician Matthew Butler solemnly (and without evidence) agrees that FND — though “serious and debilitating” — “does not implicate any vaccine constituents and should not hamper ongoing vaccination efforts.”

Butler is the lead author of a May 2020 paper proposing FND patients’ “abnormal body-focussed attention” be treated with psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin — never mind that psychedelics themselves, admit Butler and co-authors, “sometimes produce abnormal physical and motor effects,” including seizures.

An all-too-familiar game

To past victims of vaccine injury, the “it’s all in your mind” sleight-of-hand being summoned to dismiss COVID vaccine injuries is all too familiar.

Consider autism, which psychiatrists blamed, in its earliest days, on emotionally distant “refrigerator moms.”

In more recent decades, families affected by autism have experienced the double whammy of regulatory indifference to likely culprits (including not just neurotoxic vaccines but other probable environmental triggers) alongside brazen denial of autism’s escalating prevalence.

Young people injured by human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines tell similar stories of “denial and dismissal of reported harms and deaths.” Researchers who in 2017 reviewed the serious adverse events reported during two of the largest HPV vaccine clinical trials noted that “Practically, none of the serious adverse events occurring in any arm of both studies were judged [by the manufacturers] to have been vaccine-related.”

In the face of severe symptoms such as heart-attack-like chest pain, numbness and swelling of extremities, hair loss, whole-body aches and extreme fatigue, boys and girls injured by HPV vaccines have been repeatedly subjected to medical gaslighting — told they are “crazy” and just need to “slow down.”

In one incident in Australia, after “26 girls presented to the school’s sick bay with symptoms including dizziness, syncope [fainting] and neurological complaints” within two hours of receiving HPV vaccines at school, pharma-funded researchers had the chutzpah to dismiss the safety signal and characterize the episode as a “mass psychogenic event” — which they defined as “the collective occurrence of a constellation of symptoms suggestive of organic illness but without an identified cause in a group of people with shared beliefs about the cause.”

Recognize, question and reclaim

The medical-public health-pharma cartel, the “small cabal of wealthy countries, corporations and individuals” that support it, and their media mouthpieces are supremely confident in their ability to manage public perceptions through words and narratives, whether for the purpose of “mystifying” the public about key events, securing buy-in for oppressive policies or sowing discord to divide and conquer. (As journalists Caitlin Johnstone and Glenn Greenwald also remind us, many media personalities are intelligence agency veterans or assets, and the “sole owner of the Washington Post is a CIA contractor.”)

Thus, it pays to be attentive to how health authorities use language, for “the more you know about language, the more immune you become to its effects.”

Beyond noticing the manipulation, we must also stop ceding the linguistic terrain to our would-be manipulators — for example, by eschewing weaponized vocabulary such as the pejorative term “vaccine hesitancy.”

Catholic journalist Jane Stannus points out that the term “vaccine hesitant” portrays those who decline COVID (or other) vaccines as “‘trapped by irrational fears’ in a state of inaction or ignorantly opposed to science,” with the strong suggestion “that such backward and weak-minded persons are worthy of contempt, especially compared with the enlightened, confident people who signed up for the vaccine immediately.”

The unfortunate corollary of such language is the “witch hunt on the unvaccinated” that we are already witnessing, “an act of violence against the fabric of society,” says Stannus, that is “a greater evil … than the shared suffering of disease.”

We can and urgently need to see through these shenanigans and reclaim our humanity.

Fast-moving current events are proving those who have declined COVID injections are the wise ones, with science proving them correct in just about every way.

Whether we consider the many suspected dangers of products unleashed on the public less than a year ago, or the injuries and deaths occurring on a never-before-seen scale (including in teens who had their lives ahead of them), or the clear superiority of natural immunity, or the fact that the injections don’t even do the one thing the clinical trials alleged they could do (i.e., keep more severe illness at bay), it is clear that citizens who would rather think for themselves than swallow prefabricated lies are the ones who are going to come out ahead.

As US Prepares to Ban Ivermectin for Covid-19, More Countries in Asia Begin Using It

Posted on September 8, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Nick Corbishley

Source: Naked Capitalism

The information war takes a dark turn as the corporate media transitions from misinformation and obfuscation to outright lies and fabrication.

The campaign against ivermectin is intensifying in the US. Until recently the health authorities appeared to be quite content merely to ridicule those who take or prescribe the drug in order to treat or prevent Covid-19. A couple of weeks ago, the FDA released a now-infamous advertorial on twitter with the heading “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” The subheading: “Using the drug Ivermectin to treat Covid-19 can be dangerous and even lethal. The FDA has not approved the drug for that purpose.”

It’s a subtle message that has been faithfully echoed by the corporate media: ivermectin, a tried-and-tested drug that has won its discoverers a Nobel Prize for the impact it has had on human health over the last 35 years, should only be given to animals. But now the information war is taking a darker turn, as the media transitions from misinformation and obfuscation to outright lies and fabrication.

At the end of last week, a string of American and British outlets, including The Daily Mail, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, The Independent, Newsweek, The Guardian, and Yahoo News, ran a story about how people who had “overdosed” on the “horse dewormer” were clogging up so many beds in a hospital in Sequoyah, rural Oklahoma, that doctors were having to turn away gunshot victims. The story, sourced to local Oklahoma outlet KFOR, turned out to be completely false. On Sunday, the hospital in question released a statement that the doctor behind the allegations had not worked in its ER for two months. More to the point, the hospital “had not treated any patients due to complications relating to taking ivermectin.” There were no overdoses. And it had turned no patients away.

In other words, everything about the story was false. A total fabrication. Yet many of the mainstream outlets that covered the story did not retract their article. Rolling Stone simply “updated” its piece with the new information. The Guardian inserted a note at the bottom of its article informing readers that Sequoyah NHS had released a statement asserting that the doctor behind the allegations that formed the entire basis of the story had not worked in its ER for two months. In other words, you have to read all the way to the end of the article to find out that its entire content is total bullshit. To make matters worse, The Guardian did not even mention the hospital’s categorical denials that it had treated patients for IVM overdose or that it had turned ER patients away.

The Coming Crack Down

If the goal of all this disinformation is to put people off wanting to get hold of ivermectin, it doesn’t seem to be working, which is hardly surprising given the already desperately low levels of public trust in both US health authorities and corporate media.

There are certain parallels with the furore whipped up over hydroxychloroquine last year. But the case is weaker this time, primarily because IVM is one of the safest medicines on the planet and was widely recognised as such until this pandemic.

One thing that is abundantly clear is that mocking people’s intelligence and comparing them to horses or dogs for wanting to take a certain medicine isn’t a terribly effective way of getting them to change their behaviour. All they appear to have achieved is to invoke the “Streisand effect.” More people are buying ivermectin (for human use) than ever before. In the US as a whole, prescriptions for the medicine have surged 24-fold since the pandemic began, from 3,600 a week to almost 90,000. Between mid-July and mid-August alone, they rose 400%.

In response, authorities are escalating their crack down. On September 1, the American Medical Association (AMA), American Pharmacists Association (APhA), and American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) jointly called for an outright ban on the dispensing of ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID-19 outside of a clinical trial.

We are alarmed by reports that outpatient prescribing for and dispensing of ivermectin have increased 24-fold since before the pandemic and increased exponentially over the past few months. As such, we are calling for an immediate end to the prescribing, dispensing, and use of ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 outside of a clinical trial. In addition, we are urging physicians, pharmacists, and other prescribers—trusted health care professionals in their communities—to warn patients against the use of ivermectin outside of FDA-approved indications and guidance, whether intended for use in humans or animals, as well as purchasing ivermectin from online stores. Veterinary forms of this medication are highly concentrated for large animals and pose a significant toxicity risk for humans.

Demonising a “Wonder Drug” (Not My Words)

While it is true that ivermectin was first commercialised as a product for animal health in 1981, fast becoming one of the world’s biggest selling veterinary drugs, it has been used to treat humans since 1987. But most of those humans were in poor countries. As a 2017 article in Nature noted, ivermectin, perhaps more than any other drug, “is a drug for the world’s poor. For most of this century, some 250 million people have been taking it annually to combat two of the world’s most devastating, disfiguring, debilitating and stigma-inducing diseases, Onchocerciasis and Lymphatic filariasis”

“Ivermectin was a revelation. It had a broad spectrum of activity, was highly efficacious, acting robustly at low doses against a wide variety of nematode, insect and acarine parasites. It proved to be extremely effective against most common intestinal worms (except tapeworms), could be administered orally, topically or parentally and showed no signs of cross-resistance with other commonly used anti-parasitic compounds.”

Since the late ´80s more than 3.7 billion doses have been distributed globally in mass drug administration campaigns. All 3.7 billion of those doses were provided free of charge by the medicine’s developer, Merck. The company knew it would not be able to generate profits or even cover costs by selling the drug in the poverty-stricken communities afflicted by the two parasites, so it gave it away. “As much as needed for as long as needed” was the motto. It was a remarkable — and exceptionally rare — gift of generosity from a major pharmaceutical company.

Later on, it was discovered that ivermectin had many other properties. Using the drug as a long-term preventive against onchocerciasis had reduced the prevalence of other parasitic worms known as soil-transmitted helminths, which infect up to 20% of the world’s population and are a common cause of malnutrition and growth impairment in children. It was also discovered to have potent anti-viral effects.

After being used billions of times, this (in the words of Nature magazine) “enigmatic, multifaceted wonder drug” has been shown to have “an extremely good safety profile” — again Nature‘s words — as well as potential applications against a broad spectrum of diseases, from African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) to schistosomiasis, one of the world’s most neglected tropical diseases that afflicts more than 200 million people worldwide; to asthma and epilepsy; to a host of RNA viruses including Zika, dengue, yellow fever, West Nile, chikungunya and HIV. It also appears to have potent anti-cancer properties.

Today, the FDA, with a little help from the media, is doing everything it can to destroy ivermectin’s reputation. At the same time, authorities appear to be clamping down on the importation, distribution and sales of the medicine. They are also beginning to crack down on doctors who have been prescribing the drug, regardless of how much success they’ve had with it.

A Whole Different Story Half a World Away

In Asia, the situation could not be more different. In India the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) — the most important biomedical research body in India and one of the oldest and largest medical research institutes in the world — has added ivermectin in its indication for Covid-19 to its list of essential medicines.

In June, one of three national health regulator in India, the Directorate General of Health Services, (DGHS) overhauled its COVID-19 treatment guidelines and removed almost all of the repurposed medicines it had previously recommended for treating asymptomatic and mild cases, including ivermectin. This sparked concerns that India was about to reverse its approval of ivermectin as a covid treatment. But to their credit, India’s two most important national health regulators — the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) — maintained their authorisation of ivermectin.

It’s hard to keep track of just how many states in India continue to use ivermectin as a treatment or prophylaxis against covid-19. Three states that are definitely using it are Uttar Pradesh (population: 230 million), Goa and Bihar (population: 100 million), a copy of whose home quarantine treatment program can be seen here. So, too, is New Delhi.

Though the usual caveats apply about numbers being under-reported due to inadequate testing, it’s clear that things have improved across India. Since the country began its last wave of infections, in March, no state has contained the virus as effectively as Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous region with 230 million inhabitants. If it were a country, UP would be the world’s sixth most populous, sandwiched between Pakistan (5th) and Nigeria (7th). UP has been using IVM longer than any other Indian state, including as a prophylaxis for people who come in contact with the disease. The numbers (both in terms of cases and deaths) speak for themselves. The average number of cases per day over the last seven days was just 28 — in a region with a population larger than Brazil’s! Brazil’s daily average is more than 21,000 cases.

**Graph courtesy of data scientist Juan Chamie**

It’s a similar story in New Delhi, where the number of new cases is also close to zero.

Compare that to the state of Kerala, which has stopped prescribing ivermectin and other proven therapeutics and is making exhaustive use of Gilead’s largely ineffective (yet excruciatingly expensive) antiviral, remdesivir. Not only have case numbers barely declined from their mid-May peak but they are rising faster than in any other region. Despite boasting just 3% of India’s population, having one of the most advanced health systems in the country and one of the highest vaccination rates (over 50% of the population has received at least one dose), Kerala accounted for 62% of all of India’s Covid-19 cases in early August. The BBC described the region’s stubbornly high numbers as a “mystery”.

In India, nothing is quite as simple as it might seem, says Jerri-Lynn, who knows a thing or two about the subcontinent, having visited there for long periods:

UP is a large, rural state, with a still largely agrarian economy. It’s part of the northern Indian ‘cow belt’, with low literacy rates, and a distorted sex ratio. It’s the second poorest state in India in terms of per capita income. Kerala is much richer, and has more of a service-based economy; lots of Keralites work in the Gulf states and many send remittances back home. The state has been governed by successive left-wing governments for decades, has high literacy rates, the top female sex ratio in India, and some of its best medical care, particularly on the public health side.

As I mentioned to you before, I believe Kerala recorded the first covid case in India, in a female medical student returning from China — perhaps Wuhan in Jan 2020. The state initially did a good job managing covid and was held up as an exemplar; their contact tracing system was widely praised.

The UP government is notorious for its corruption. Many would take any official UP state figures with large fistfuls of salt. This is not the case for Kerala.

Kerala has by far the highest number of cases in the country while UP has the lowest, but is that because it is testing more and being more honest about the numbers? According to many mainstream reports (including Times of India and India Today), UP is doing more testing than any other state. Can that be true or is UP’s regional government doctoring the numbers? Or is it simply doing a very good job at keeping the virus contained, just like Mexico’s poorest region, Chiapas?

In India’s last brutal wave the turnaround in Uttar Pradesh was so dramatic that even the World Health Organization (WHO) showcased its achievements. In a May 7 article titled “Going the Last Mile to Stop Covid-19” the WHO noted that aggressive population-wide health schemes, including home testing and “medicine kits”, had helped regain control of the virus. The one thing the WHO failed to mention in its on-the-ground reporting is what was in those medicine kits.

The Wonders of Early Treatment

One thing that is that is clear is that many doctors in India try to treat covid-19 as early and as aggressively as possible, whereas many doctors in Europe and North America prescribe nothing more than paracetamol during the first seven days. As I’ve learnt from recent direct experience, this is the equivalent of laying down a red carpet for the virus and telling it to make itself at home and go wherever it wants, do whatever it wants.

“When we started seeing more cases, we decided to take up a door-to-door survey,” Bagalkot District Health Officer Dr Ananth Desai told New India Express in June. “When the health officials noticed people with symptoms during the survey, they tested them immediately and provided them with home isolation kits, which had medicines like Ivermectin, calcium and zinc tablets along with paracetamol. We advised the patients to start with the medication even before their Covid-19 test results came out. With these measures, we noticed that many patients recovered faster. This helped in increasing the recovery rate”.

Besides other factors such as lockdowns, travel restrictions and increased herd immunity, ivermectin has almost certainly played a part in this. But it’s impossible to know just how large a part. The fact that case numbers and deaths have tended to fall precipitously in regions where it is used widely, such as UP, New Delhi, Goa and Bihar, and have tended to remain high in regions where it isn’t, such as Kerala or Tamil Nadu (before it readopted ivermectin in June), does not constitute proof of causation. But when the same thing occurs in so many of the disparate parts of the world where ivermectin is used, a pattern begins to form that strongly supports ivermectin’s efficacy.

That doesn’t mean that it has a perfect record. In Mexico, for example, cases and deaths began surging once again in May, despite the fact that the Institute of Social Security (IMSS), which runs many of the country’s public hospitals, has been using IVM since January, albeit in very low doses. That said, it’s all but impossible to know how many doctors, public and private, are actually using the medicine. In May the newspaper Proceso reported that IMSS had repeatedly clashed with the federal government over its use of ivermectin. In June, the Mayor of Mexico City Claudia Scheinbaum announced that the city’s widespread use of IVM had reduced hospitalisations by up to 76%.

In early August, the results of the first large randomised control trial into IVM use for Covid-19 were released. And they showed “no effect whatsoever” on the trial’s outcome goals — whether patients required extended observation in the emergency room or hospitalization. However, as we noted in a previous article, this was a trial financed by the deeply compromised Gates Foundation, which is heavily invested in the new Covid vaccines, novel treatments and their manufacturers. And the person who lead the trial, Edward Mills, is a Gates Foundation employee. And the Canadian university that performed the trial, McMaster, is also a major recipient of Gates Foundation funding.

The results of another large RCT trialsinto ivermectin — the so-called PRINCIPLE trial taking place at Oxford University — should also be released in the coming months. Perhaps they will be more flattering.

The case for IVM was also not helped by the discovery of irregularities in a trial conducted in Egypt. That, together with the findings of the Together trial, is now cited by many media outlets as proof positive that ivermectin does not work against covid. To reach that conclusion, they steadfastly ignore the impressive results of many other small trials, the on-the-ground experience of untold thousands of medical practitioners and nurses, and the exceptionally low prevalence of covid in many of the places IVM is being used widely.

Ivermectin Comes Home, to Japan

As the Delta variant has swept through Asia, causing unprecedented devastation, more and more cities, regions and countries are considering authorising the use of ivermectin. They include Tokyo, where Haruo Ozaki, chairman of the city’s Metropolitan Medical Association, has called for ivermectin and the corticosteroid dexamethasone to be used due to the authorities’ failure to distribute vaccines in time. As Lambert pointed out a couple of days ago, Ozaki’s recommendation is for off-label use under “battlefield” conditions:

[OSAKI:] I am aware that there are many papers that suggest ivermectin is effective in the prevention and treatment of corona, mainly in Central and South America and Asia. There is no effective therapeutic drug, although it is necessary to deal with patients who develop it one after another. The vaccine is not in time. At such an imminent time, there is a paper that shows ivermectin is effective for corona, so it is a natural response for clinicians to try using it. Doctor-led clinical practice. That’s why many test papers came out.

On August 13, Ivermectin was added to the Tokyo Metropolitan Medical Association’s home treatment protocol. This is not to say that the whole nation of Japan — whose soil gave birth to the unique and extraordinary microorganism that produces the avermectins (from which ivermectin is derived) — has now embraced ivermectin. Nor is it clear how may doctors in Tokyo are actually using it. But the move could be an important first step, especially if covid-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths fall.

Indonesia has also embraced ivermectin. On July 10, the Indonesian government secured the supply of COVID-19 treatment and created a website showing real time drug availability. Four days later the health regulator authorised the use of ivermectin for Covid-19. Then, on July 22, on July 22 Indonesia’s hospitals began using the drug. By the first week of August cases and deaths were falling.

Meanwhile, Back in the USA…

Pfizer and Merck have announced new trials for their experimental oral antiviral drugs for COVID-19. Merck said in June that the U.S. government has already agreed to pay about $1.2 billion for 1.7 million courses of molnupiravir — working out at $705 per course of treatment — if it is proven to work and is given the green light by regulators. Pfizer, meanwhile, said that if its trial of its “affordable” early treatment pill is successful, it will file for emergency approval between October and December this year.

If the authorisation process is anything like the process employed for Gilead’s Remdesivir, which is included in standard-of-care protocols throughout Europe and the US despite offering next to no real benefits (according to the WHO), and Pfizer’s booster vaccine, Pfizer will be raking in even more money from Covid by the year’s end.

Being able to take an oral antiviral therapeutic for SARS-CoV-2 at home would be a “game changer,” according to Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s CEO.

As I posited in a previous article, one of the main reasons why there has been such fierce opposition to ivermectin is that large pharmaceutical companies are developing their own antiviral therapies that will have to compete directly with ivermectin. Another reason is that if ivermectin were approved as a covid-19 treatment, it could threaten the emergency use authorisation granted to covid-19 vaccines and novel treatments, although the recent approval of Pfizer’s COMIRNATY vaccine may have changed that.

When financial returns are the primary priority in a health care system, this is what you get. Everything is geared to churning out brand new, barely tested experimental medicines as quickly as possible, with scant communication of what potential side effects they may produce. Throw in monopoly control of intellectual property and you have the perfect business model. Whether the new medicines work or not or do more harm than good, they will cost an arm and a leg. And their manufacturers will probably be protected from liability. The patients’ health, well being and welfare are barely an afterthought.

Bring All the Troops Home: Stop Policing the Globe and Put an End to Endless Wars

Posted on September 6, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves…. together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning.”—George S. McGovern, former Senator and presidential candidate

It’s time to bring all our troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

It’s not enough to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, America’s longest, bloodiest and most expensive war to date.

It’s time that we stop policing the globe, stop occupying other countries, and stop waging endless wars.

That’s not what’s going to happen, of course.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda, though.

America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.

In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people. The latest drone strike reportedly killed seven children, ages 2 to 10, in Afghanistan.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, there’s not much time left before we reach the zero hour.

It’s time to stop policing the globe, end these wars-without-end, and bring the troops home.

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