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Eighteen years ago, the American public and countries that belonged in the “coalition of the willing” were duped into a war with Iraq that led to a genocide. At least 600,000 Iraqis perished over the span of a decade as innocent men, women and children were burnt at the altar of the military-financial complex based on a discredited theory that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destructionand was intent on unleashing them against the West.

The crimes against humanity that were committed against a nation that never attacked us would not have been possible had it not been for the ever obsequious mainstream media. Instead of pushing back against talking points and doing independent validation of the lies they were being sold by George Tenet and his ilk, the supposed “free-press” parroted Bush and Blair administrations’ propaganda and crippled society with fears of mushroom clouds blanketing America, the UK and beyond.

The non-stop stories of chemical weapons being unleashed against the United States and the malicious alliterations of biological bombs unleashing hell from Tikrit to Topeka conditioned Americans to accept a war that was planned by Project for a New American Century four years before the Twin Towers fell. On the eve of the “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, what was in reality Operation Iraqi Liquidation, an astounding 72% of Americans supported a war against Iraq. At one point, George Bush’s approval rating was 90%, the highest approval ratings in the history of polls.

Not even ice cream and birthday cakes enjoy such astronomical popularity; which goes to show the mind-bending powers of media narratives.

While Americans and the rest of the world were being hoodwinked and gaslighted to endorse an invasion that would eventually lead to crimes against humanity in Iraq, dissenting voices were sounding the alarm and stating that Saddam no longer had WMDs. The UN weapons inspector Hans Blix headed a team that was tasked with verifying if Iraq actually possessed chemical, biological and/or nuclear armaments. In his report to the UN Security Council on February 14th, 2003—a month before the invasion of Iraq was launched—he stated, “so far, UNMOVIC has not found any such weapons [of mass destruction], only a small number of empty chemical munitions”.

Blix was immediately lambasted by warmongers in America, the UK and beyond and his reputation sullied because he had the decency to state the truth in the face of unyielding war propaganda. Blix was not the only one who was savaged for daring to push back against the establishment; Chris Hedges gave a speech at a college where he came out in opposition against the Iraq War. Not only did he get booed off the stage, within short order, he was drummed out of his job at the New York Times and banished to the gulag and banished from mainstream media. The Grey Lady had no need for a Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent, they were too busy echoing Bush administration and selling the Iraq War. After all, if it bleeds, it leads—there are fortunes to be made in carnage.

I cite the criminal conducts of Bush, Blair and their enablers in the press for a reason. The same actors who once fear-mongered about WMDs in Iraq are back at it again as they emotionally manipulate us in an effort to manufacture “vaccine” consent. This time around, they are denying the existence of WMDs which are the mRNA and adenovirus biological agents they are pumping into the arms of billions of people around the world. Just like the Iraq War, people who are sounding the alarm about these experimental “vaccines” are being vilified and marginalized in order to further an insane mass-“vaccination” campaign that could lead to a global genocide that will make the mass-killings that took place in Iraq look like child’s play if what we have been warning about becomes reality.

Three days ago, after I wrote about how a group of doctors with Yetena Weg were dangerously advising people to get jabbed without giving them the full picture of the risks involved with the “vaccines”. I was promptly suspended by Twitter for making factual statements about these unsafe and ineffective boosters that were based on research. One of the founders of Yetene Weg by the name of Dr. Fitsum Tilahun took to Twitter to advocate for my silencing because I had the audacity to question his “vaccine” propaganda. That type of dangerous rhetoric was perfectly acceptable during the heyday of the TPLF junta in Ethiopia, a terrorist group he supports, but it has no place in America.

Instead of responding in kind, I asked him nine questions about the safety and efficacy of the boosters he is promoting. Dr. Tilahun promptly blocked me and went back to advising men, women and children to get injected with snake oils that are causing harm and deaths to thousands of people. This imperious disposition and cavalier disregard of concerns that people have about these “vaccines” is commonplace among doctors who are promoting them. Another group of doctors called “Evidence Base” hosted a room on Clubhouse where they said that people who question the “vaccines” are exhibiting cult-like tendencies who need an intervention.

This is a tweet that @Fitse_T, an #Ethiopia|n cofounder of @YetenaW, sent & apparently later deleted. A doctor who should be focused on healing is instead advocating the silencing of journalists as he used dangerous language about @Teodrose_Fikre. Read thread below in full. https://t.co/PWcBcE1RZq pic.twitter.com/uUO9oTaVKB

— the Ghion Journal (@ghionjournal) June 30, 2021

Four years after the Iraq War was initiated, dissenters in Wall Street were warning about Credit Default Swaps and how banks were repackaging toxic mortgages. Some regulators who were not in cahoots with Wall Street were telling their higher-ups about CDS and how toxic debt could cripple the global economy. To our demise, their admonitions fell on deaf ears. In 2008, what they feared became reality as the markets imploded and wiped away the life savings of tens of millions of Americans and billions of people around the world. Demonizing dissenters is a tried and true playbook of fascists which eventually leads to blowbacks that unleash massive human suffering.

Of course, this is nothing new; Galileo and Copernicus were persecuted for going against the “settled science” that earth was the center of the universe. Every generation, people who refuse to blindly follow authority and instead question the status quo are demonized, ostracized and in some cases killed. I’m pretty sure that the first person who invented the wheel was labeled a “conspiracy theorist” because he came up with a more effective way of transporting rocks. Think of where humanity would be at this moment if it was not for dissenters who had the courage to ask “why” while everyone else was complying with “conventional wisdom”.

I write this article for all dissenters who are being berated, excommunicated by their friends and family and censored for seeking truth instead of acting like Jim Jones’s adherents. You are right to be inquisitive instead of “trusting the science”; science is not supposed to be trusted, it demands continuous inspection. We were once bashed for stating that Covid-19 was man-made, that children should not get jabbed and that the “vaccines” were far from safe. Just like Hans Blix and Chris Hedges were eventually vindicated, we too are being exonerated as more information surfaces about the origins of this the Coronavirus and as horrific news keeps dripping out about people who have been “vaccinated” dying by the droves.

There are many people who fall prey to the malicious propaganda of the establishment as they unquestioningly follow authority and repeat the malicious ad hominem that are weaponized against people who question the intentions of Big Pharma. Instead of putting the burden of proof on biotech corporations like Pfizer, that was levied one of the largest fine in human history in 2009 for medical fraud, they libel us for doubting their dubious talking points. To which I ask this one question: what if we are right? The worst that will happen if we are wrong is dealing with the status quo of a virus that has a mortality rate of 0.66%, but if we are correct in our assessments about these “vaccines”, I shudder at the thought of the implications.

I hope, for the sake of humanity, that I am eventually proven wrong about the worst-case scenario that I fear about these “vaccines”. Being proven right about the emergence of Antibody-Dependent Enhancement—a condition that wiped out the lab animals that were injected with mRNA “vaccines” in past studies—would not be vindication but a source of my greatest depression. I have family members who got jabbed; I pray for them daily and for the rest of humanity. We listened to warmongers once and that led to a genocide in Iraq, I hope for all our sakes that heeding Covid-19 fearmongers will not lead to a global holocaust.

“It’s so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.” ~ Harold Pinter

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Even the weather seemed to be obeying the script. At 9am on Thursday morning a brief thunder storm hit northern Beijing. Nothing unusual in that, it is after all the height of summer and the rainy season. But about 20 km away in central Tiananmen Square where President Xi Jinping was leading celebrations to mark the communist party’s 100^th anniversary the massed ranks remained largely dry. The storm passed. Nothing, it seemed, would get in the way of the party’s party.  

Napoleon may not have actually said it but the quote attributed to him has taken on a prophetic air. China has awakened, it has shaken the world but perhaps not in the way envisaged by the Corsican. Wherever Covid originated, the first major impact of the virus was in the Chinese city of Wuhan and since then quarantine and lockdown, either real or potential, have dominated the lives of billions. 

With more than 90 million members China’s communist party is now the world’s largest and most powerful political movement, controlling a fifth of the globe’s population and the world’s second-largest economy. For the first time the world is seeing a China setting the agenda that matters to it. It claims much of the South China Sea and has expanded internationally through the Belt and Road initiative, which has built ports, power stations, train lines and other infrastructure overseas.

The ruling party was established in secrecy in 1921, in the vacuum following the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912. It held its first session at a girl’s school in Shanghai, on Xintiandi, in the French Concession. The concessions to foreign powers in Shanghai highlighted China’s humiliation. It quickly moved from the school to a boat on a nearby lake to escape the attention of the police.

 The birthplace of Chinese communism is now deep in the heart of one of Shanghai’s brightly lit shopping and entertainment areas, selling French designer clothing and perfumes.

When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, many pundits thought that the other great communist power would be next. Understandable, but wide of the mark. President Joe Biden, at the G7 summit on June 13, stated not only that America had profound differences with China, but also that much of the world questioned “whether or not democracies can compete’’.

Under Xi the party has yet again undergone a transformation, one of many.

As Xi was preparing to take power 10 years ago, local party bosses appeared in public more like a business group, with men and women, donning sharply cut suits, shiny shoes, crisp white shirts. Expensive brandy (always French) was consumed at almost every party banquet, regardless of how modest the occasion or the surroundings. That is no longer the case. Study sessions are again mandatory where party theory and Xi Jinping Thought are discussed. Apps monitor the reading habits of cadres. Party bosses’ business suits have been replaced by blue zip-up jackets, white open shirts, no tie.

Xi places the onus on political loyalty and discipline. He can handle a slowing, even shrinking economy. What he fears most is a champagne-swilling Charleston-swinging economy where people forget or disregard party discipline. He has also made the selection for party membership more rigorous. Applicants must now undergo an investigation (neighbors and colleagues are asked about them) and take a battery of tests and interviews, before years of waiting for full membership. Previously, formalities could be concluded in a matter of weeks.

Over the decades, the party has adapted like a chameleon. It has survived and thrived after suppression and brutal conflict, vicious purges, famine and political turmoil.  Its secret? Simple; jettison ideology that was once at its core in favor of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – today’s blending of rampant capitalism and the heavy hand of the state. Even communism has been ditched in favor of a Han (the largest ethnic group not just in China but the world and they make up about 90 percent of the country’s population) nationalism.

But, and this is often overlooked, Chinese citizens feel secure. Their borders are not threatened. The streets are safe. Yes, corruption is rife, the state is intrusive, connections count, favors can be bought, courts dispense party discipline and there is huge income inequality. These problems are not unique to communism. They have plagued China for millennia. But in the sweep of Chinese history, this is the blessed generation and they know it.

But this alone will not be enough to ensure stability. The World Bank considers China an upper-middle-income country and the income required to combat poverty in this category is set at $5.50 a day. China proudly proclaims that it has abolished “absolute poverty” and it has.

But according to the World Bank, about a quarter of China’s population, by this measure, still remain in poverty.

And income inequality is widespread as Premier Li Keqiang, who was heavily criticized at the time, pointed out in May last year.

The Chinese dream much heralded in the early part of the last decade is now rarely mentioned. Social immobility and income inequality have markedly increased social friction. Economic stagnation is a real possibility. The world has seen China rise. It may not go into a sharp decline but its economic engines are stalling. Storm clouds do not always follow script.

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Tom Clifford is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Zero Hedge

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Award winning journalist Julian Assange will spend his 50^th birthday in a UK supermax prison for exposing the war crimes of American imperialism.

In early January of 2021 a UK judge, Vanessa Baraitser, blocked the US attempt to extradite Assange on humanitarian grounds. In her judgement she agreed with all of the American claims against Assange. She agreed the central claim that Assange was a hacker who conspired with Chelsea Manning to steal American intelligence documents.

In 2017 the US Department of Justice (DOJ) decided to apply for the extradition of Julian Assange who at that time was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. They decided not to pursue Assange on the grounds of leaking documents to media outlets such as the New York Times and Guardian.

This is based on the deliberations of the DOJ during the Obama presidency. During the Obama presidency the Department of Justice reached the conclusion that media outlets which published documents given to them by WikiLeaks were protected under the 1^stamendment. Therefore they decided not to pursue an extradition application for Assange.

William Barr, Attorney General under Trump, decided that the extradition case against Assange had to be based on other grounds. The central charge against Assange was to be the claim that he conspired with Chelsea Manning to hack US military computers to illegally obtain classified documents.

This claim that Julian Assange conspired with Manning to hack US military systems was supported by the claims made by Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson. Thordarson’s claims formed a key part of the second superseding indictment against Assange that the US Department of Justice presented last summer to Judge Baraitser.

Stundin journalists Bjartmar Oddur Þeyr Alexandersson and Gunnar Hrafn Jónsson have written an article that deals a huge blow to the American case against the WikiLeaks publisher. They note that the second superseding indictment from the DOJ purported to:

“… show that Assange instructed Thordarson to commit computer intrusions or hacking in Iceland.

The aim of this addition to the indictment was apparently to shore up and support the conspiracy charge against Assange in relation to his interactions with Chelsea Manning. Those occurred around the same time he resided in Iceland and the authors of the indictment felt they could strengthen their case by alleging he was involved in illegal activity there as well.’’

Alexandersson and Jónsson note the impact of Thordarson’s claims on Judge Vanessa Baraitser:

“Nonetheless, the tactics employed by US officials appear to have been successful as can be gleaned from the ruling of Magistrate Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser on January 4th of this year. Although she ruled against extradition, she did so purely on humanitarian grounds relating to Assange’s health concerns, suicide risk and the conditions he would face in confinement in US prisons. With regards to the actual accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question.’’

Thordarson, a serial criminal with convictions for child abuse and fraud, has admitted in a recent interview with Stundin that he made up the claims about Assange. Thordarson now admits that he lied about the claim that Assange instructed him to hack into the computers of Icelandic members of parliament and steal files from a bank in that country.

Thordarson who stole over $50,000 from WikiLeaks while working as a volunteer, spent several hours with the journalists from Stundin where he admitted to numerous crimes. Thordarson tells the story of how the FBI offered him an immunity deal in May 2019 in return for his testimony against Assange.

Alexandersson and Jónsson state that:

“The deal, seen in writing by Stundin, also guarantees that the Do J would not share any such information to other prosecutorial or law enforcement agencies. That would include Icelandic ones, meaning that the Americans will not share information on crimes he might have committed threatening Icelandic security interests – and the Americans apparently had plenty of those but had over the years failed to share them with their Icelandic counterparts.’’

These journalists from Stundin have revealed how Thordarson has continued committing financial crimes of fraud during the period of his work with the DOJ. Icelandic authorities seem oblivious to his criminal activity. It would appear that this key witness against Julian Assange was emboldened by his immunity deal. Alexandersson and Jónsson note:

“It is as if the offer of immunity, later secured and sealed in a meeting in DC, had encouraged Thordarson to take bolder steps in crime. He started to fleece individuals and companies on a grander scale than ever; usually by either acquiring or forming legal entities he then used to borrow merchandise, rent luxury cars, even order large quantities of goods from wholesalers without any intention to pay for these goods and services.’’

So there you have it. A key witness for the US case against Julian Assange has admitted that his testimony against the WikiLeaks editor was a pack of lies. It would appear that Thordarson was incentivised to lie by the promise of immunity from his many crimes.

The US case against Julian Assange has been dealt a huge blow by this revelation. However, it remains to be seen if the High Court in London will take this into consideration when it finally hears the US appeal against the decision not to extradite Assange.

All people of good conscience should step up their efforts in support of a journalist imprisoned for exposing American war crimes.

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All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version). 

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent nearly US$6 billion over the past 17 years trying to improve agriculture, mainly in Africa. This is a lot of money for an underfunded sector, and, as such, carries great weight. To better understand how the Gates Foundation is shaping the global agriculture agenda, GRAIN analysed all the food and agriculture grants the foundation has made up until 2020.

We found that, while the Foundation’s grants focus on African farmers, the vast majority of its funding goes to groups in North America and Europe. The grants are also heavily skewed to technologies developed by research centres and corporations in the North for poor farmers in the South, completely ignoring the knowledge, technologies and biodiversity that these farmers already possess.

Also, despite the Foundation’s focus on techno-fixes, much of its grants are given to groups that lobby on behalf of industrial farming and undermine alternatives. This is bad for African farmers and bad for the planet. It is time to pull the plug on the Gates’ outsized influence over global agriculture.

In 2014 GRAIN published a detailed breakdown of the grants made by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote agricultural development in Africa and other parts of the world.¹ Our main conclusion then was that the vast majority of those grants were channelled to groups in the US and Europe, not Africa nor other parts of the global South. The funding overwhelmingly went to research institutes rather than farmers. They were also mainly directed at shaping policies to support industrial farming, not smallholders.

Much has happened since then. For starters, Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce in May this year, leaving the future of the Foundation and its grant-making in doubt. The news came as Bill Gates himself came under fire for supporting Big Pharma’s patent monopoly on COVID-19 vaccines, for effectively preventing people’s access across much of the world, and for how he treats – or mistreats – women.² The Foundation’s agenda with agriculture has also been coming under increased scrutiny. A 2020 report from Tufts University concluded that its work in Africa completely failed to meet the objectives that it had set itself.³ The African Centre for Biodiversity published a string of reports denouncing the Gates Foundation for pushing GMOs and other harmful technologies onto Africa.⁴ Amongst all this, the US Right to Know collective started a “Bill Gates Food Tracker” to monitor the multiple initiatives that Gates is involved in to reshape the global food system.⁵

GRAIN wondered whether the Gates Foundation had been receptive to the criticism of its food and agriculture funding. So we set out to update our 2014 report, downloaded the Foundation’s publicly available grant records and created a database of all of the Foundation’s grants in the area of food and agriculture from 2003 to 2020 – almost two decades worth of grant-making.⁶

The results are sobering. From 2003 to 2020 the Foundation dished out a total of 1130 grants for food and agriculture, worth nearly $US6 billion of which almost US$5 billion is supposed to service Africa.

There was no shift to try and reach groups in Africa directly, no refocusing away from the narrow technological approach, and no moves to embrace a more holistic and inclusive policy agenda. Of course, the Gates Foundation is about much more than just making grants.

The Foundation’s Trust Fund, which manages the Foundation’s endowment, has big investments in food and agribusiness companies, buys up farmland, and has equity investments in many financial companies around the world.⁷ These, and other activities of Gates in the area of food and agriculture, are illustrated in the infographic that accompanies this report.⁸

Infographic by A Growing Culture . For a more in-depth look at each category, visit our Instagram page

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version). 

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The legendary Chinese success story goes hand-in-hand with the evolution of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and China’s Communist Revolution that began in 1945. The foundation of the CPC on 1 July 1921 signaled the end of some 200 years of China’s oppression by foreign powers, to western invasions and exploitation, grabbing China’s territories and especially her rich natural resources – and to gain trading advantages, including from the riches of China’s resources and crafts.

Background and History

About two centuries ago, foreign interferences were dominated by illegal Opium Trade that eventually culminated in two Opium Wars. In the 18th and 19th centuries Western countries, mostly Great Britain, exported opium grown in India to China. In turn, the Brits used the profits from opium sales largely to buy Chinese luxury goods, like porcelain, silk, and tea. These goods were in high demand in the west.

Much of this opium export was illegitimate and created widespread addiction throughout China, causing serious social and economic calamities. The wars were triggered by China’s attempting to suppress the trade, that grew tremendously from about 1820 onwards. In early 1839 the Chinese government confiscated and destroyed more than 20,000 chests of opium (chest = about 63.5 kg) — some 1,400 tons of the drug—that were warehoused at Canton (Guangzhou), Guangdong Province by British merchants. By 1838 imports had grown to some 40,000 chests annually.

In July 1839, British sailors killed a Chinese villager. The British government refused to turn the accused over to be judged in Chinese courts. The Brits did not wish its subjects to be tried in the Chinese legal system, and refused to turn the accused men over to the Chinese courts.

The East India Company iron steam ship Nemesis, commanded by Lieutenant W. H. Hall, with boats from the Sulphur, Calliope, Larne and Starling, destroying the Chinese war junks in Anson’s Bay, on 7 January 1841. (Public Domain)

This conflict prompted the first Opium War (1839 – 1842), fought between the UK and the Qing dynasty (1644 to 1912), with the British objective to legalize the opium trade. This did not happen, which led to the Second Opium war (1856 – 1860), also called the Anglo-French war. But China did not win the wars and the nefarious addiction-causing trade continued for several more decades.

China’s British forced  war-concession to the winner, was to hand over the island of Hong Kong to British administration. In addition, China had to legalize the opium trade and concede a number of trading ports to the Brits, as well as opening travel for foreigners into China and granting residencies for Wester envoys to China. And an important concession for a predominantly Buddhist country was that China had to grant freedom of movement to Christian missionaries throughout China.

The wars and the resulting multiple concession of China, prompted an era of unequal treaties between China and foreign imperialist powers, aka, the UK, France, Germany, the United States, Russia and Japan. China was forced to concede many of her territorial and sovereignty rights. These encroachments on Chinese sovereignty weakened and eventually brought down the Qing dynasty, leading to a revolution on October 10, 1911, bringing the Kuomintang (KMT) to power. They are also referred to as the Chinese National Party and founded the Republic of China on 1 January 1912.

The founder of the KMT and initial ruler of China after the 1911 revolution, Sun Yat-sen attempted to modernize China along western lines and values – which was not accepted by the Chinese people. The next couple of decades of KMT rule were rather chaotic times, during which Sun Yat-sen was unable to control China which fractured into many regions controlled by warlords. To strengthen its position and to gain back control of the country, the KMT was seeking alliance with the new fledgling Communist Party, forging the first United Front, but was still unable to control all of China. After Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) took over and became the KMT strong man.

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The creation of the Communist Party of China on 1 July 1921, was deeply marked by the preceding history. One of the CPC’s key objective was that China would never again be dominated by wester colonial powers. The CPC became a force to be reckoned with, as it grew stronger by increased solidarity forged throughout communities and regions of China which all pursued the same goal – independence from foreign colonization and exploitation and the creation of a sovereign communist China, with a sovereign socialist economy.

Site of the first CCP Congress, in the former Shanghai French Concession (CC BY-SA 3.0)

With the support of the west, notably the UK and the United States, the KMT-led government of the Republic of China (ROC) entered in 1927 into a civil war with the forces of the CPC. The war was intermittent, but basically played out in two major phases, until 1949. The first phase can be described as a war of attrition. It lasted until 1937, when due to the Japanese invasion of China, KMT-CPC hostilities were put on hold. Instead, a KMT-CPC alliance fought and defeated the Japanese. This was also called the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937–1945).

The KMT – CPC civil war resumed with the victory over the Japanese forces, and entered its second, but most violent and decisive final phase from 1945 to 1949. This phase is also called the beginning of the Chinese Communist Revolution, during which the CPC gained the upper hand and finally defeated the Kuomintang on the Chinese mainland.

The leader of KMT (1928 – 1975), Chiang Kai-shek, fled the mainland and established himself and the KMT in what was originally called by her Portuguese discoverers in 1542, Ilha Formosa (“beautiful island”), located north of the Philippines and the South China Sea, some 180 km off the Southeastern coast of China.

In 1895 Formosa became “Taiwan” meaning “foreigners” referring to the early Chinese settlers on the island. Today Taiwan is again integral part of China, since the Treaty of San Francisco (WWII Allied Forces Peace Agreement with Japan, signed on 8 September 1951), when Japan ceased its occupation of Taiwan, returning the island back to China.

Though an integral part of China, Taiwan is still occupied by the KMT Regime, calling it the Republic of China or ROC, the name taken over from KMT’s reign over mainland China until their defeat by the CPC in 1949, which also marked the beginning of the new communist People’s Republic of China (PRC).

This internationally illegal control of Taiwan by the KMT has been going on since 1949, but especially for the last 50 years, when on 25 October 1971, the United Nations General Assembly recognized the PRC, led by the CPC, as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations” and removed the representatives of the Chiang Kai-shek ROC regime of Taiwan from the United Nations. Nevertheless, today still 15 nations, including the Vatican, of the 193 UN member nations recognize Taiwan as the official China. Many of them would like to switch to the officially recognized CPC-led mainland China, but are coerced, predominantly by the US and the UK, not to do so.

Over the past several decades, the United States, the UK and other western allies have continually sought to destabilize China by interfering in Taiwan, meaning in China’s internal affairs. The latest such events include the US weapons sale for US$ 5 billion to Taiwan in December 2020, and earlier this year, the U.S. Ambassador to the Pacific Island of Palau (Palau being one of the states recognizing Taiwan), became the first US envoy to travel to Taiwan in an official capacity, since Washington cut formal ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing in 1979.

In addition, the US is promoting closer relations with Taiwan through the so-called Taipei Act, signed in April 2020, calling for strengthening trade relations and diplomatic ties between the US and Taiwan to bring Taiwan closer into “international space”, meaning politically distancing the island territory from the mainland.

This and other interferences of the US in China’s internal affairs, are attempts at disrupting peaceful co-existence with China. They include the US-provoked trade war with Beijing, during the last almost 4 years; the stationing of about 60% of the American Navy in the South China Sea; the Washington orchestrated interference in Honk Kong, seeking independence from Beijing; and wildly falsified accusation of Human Rights abuses of the Uyghurs in the officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in Northwestern China; as well as similar claims in Tibet.

Thanks to the steadfast leadership of President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China and of the Communist Party of China, these interferences are being dealt with carefully by Beijing, always trying to find diplomatic and non-belligerent solutions.

China is a master in following the paths of non-aggression, while constantly creating and moving peacefully forward – always with the goal of achieving a multipolar world, where people of different nations, regions, races, roots, cultures and believes can prosper peacefully together.

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Present – and Vision for the Future

Since the foundation of the Communist Party on 1 July 1921, China strove for total independence, and never surrendered to foreign invasions or attempts to influence China’s internal, as well as foreign relations policies. What the CPC has attained over the past 100 years is truly remarkable. It comprises not only maintaining internal solidarity, but also and foremost, people’s trust in the government, moving peacefully forward, becoming food, health and education-wise autonomous and self-sufficient and, not least, lifting 800 million people out of poverty. No other nation in the world has achieved such extraordinary objectives for their people’s well-being.

The CPC has today 91 million members. It is by far the largest single party in the world. In addition, thanks to her leadership, starting with Mao Tse Tung in 1949 and today by President Xi Jinping, China, with a population of 1.4 billion people, has become the second largest economy in the world in absolute terms, and since 2017 already the largest, assessed by the only real measure – the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). This is an indicator of how much people can buy for their money. Within a few years, China is expected to surpass the currently largest economy, the United States, also in absolute terms.

A political slogan on the wall in Longhua District, it reads: “Holding high the great banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics for the Xi Jinping Era. We should fully implement the of spirit of the 19th CPC National Congress.” (CC0)

This is, of course, representing a threat for the country that has declared itself as THE Empire of the world, controlling all vital essentials, like energy, food supply and the international monetary system – though faltering, but still dominated by the US-dollar. The self-styled empire is already crumbling. And Washington knows it. Its strongest asset, the US-dollar, is gradually being dismantled. The US-currency has been widely used throughout the world, almost exclusively, to buy vital goods and services, like energy, food and communication services, as well as for other international trade, but it is losing its weight in the international arena.

The reasons for this are both political and economic. On the economic front, the US have created by their 1913 Federal Reserve Act, a fiat currency without any backing, a currency of which the flow and money mass can be expanded at will. This allowed and still allows Washington to “print” money as per necessities, i.e. to finance extensive wars and conflicts around the globe and to accumulate debts that the US Treasury and Federal Reserve (the totally privately owned US Central Bank), will never be able to pay back.

The US-dollar has absolutely no backing whatsoever. When Washington abandoned in 1971 their self-designed so-called gold-standard (Bretton Woods Conference, 1944), the US-dollar became de facto the “new gold standard”, since the gold standard was based on the value of the US-dollar (US$35 / troy ounce, about 31 grams), instead of on a basket of currencies. Since everybody needed US dollars for their reserves, this gave the US Treasury free range to increase its money supply almost infinitely.

When the US, also at the beginning of the 1970s, negotiated with Saudi Arabia, head of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), that all hydrocarbons, petrol gas and coal, should be traded in US-dollars, it gave the US another dollar boost – printing freely dollars in abundance, because the entire world needed US-dollars to buy hydrocarbon energy. Even today about 84% of all energy consumed worldwide consists of hydrocarbons (2019 Forbes).

As a counter-measure, the US promised the House of Saud to always protect Saudi Arabia, and proceeded almost immediately building numerous military bases in Saudi Arabia, from which they are now waging different wars in the Middle East.

Due to this phenomenon of freely generating new US-dollars, creating new debt, the US is by far the most indebted country in the world, with currently US$ 49.8 trillion debt, compared with a 2020 GDP of about US$ 21 trillion (Debt – GDP ratio 2.3 = 237% debt over GDP).

There is another important component of US debt, called by the General Accounting Office (GAO), “Unfunded Liabilities”, US$ 213 trillion (all figures 16 April 2021: US Debt Clock). These exceptionally high ratios have undoubtedly also to do with incurred covid-debt.

Unfunded liabilities are debt obligations that do not have sufficient funds or assets set aside to pay them. These liabilities generally refer to the U.S. government’s debt-service (unpaid interest on debt), or pension plans and their impact on savings and investment securities, as well as  health-insurance and social support coverage for soldiers returning from wars.

These astronomical debt figures and an unbacked fiat currency are even further reducing worldwide confidence in the US-dollar. It is clear, the US debt will never be paid-off. The Federal Reserve Chair, Allan Greenspan (1987 – 2006), once answered to a journalist’s question, when will the US pay back her debt: Never. We just print new money. So, spoken, so it was and so it is.

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Today and for the last about 10 years the US-dollar has no longer a hydrocarbon trade monopoly, nor are other international contracts primarily established in US-dollars as used to be the case a couple of decades ago. China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and others have stopped using the US-dollar and are trading in local currencies and increasingly in Chinese yuan.

Why? – Countries’ treasurers around the world started realizing that the dollar is a highly volatile fiat currency, based on nothing, as shown by the above figures. Equally important for the loss of trust in the US-currency is that dollar-denominated international assets and the US banking system are frequently used by Washington to impose draconian, illegal economic sanction on countries that do not follow Washington’s dictate, including blocking countries’ foreign placed reserve assets. These economic and political realities are signaling the end of the US-dollar hegemony.

The trend of diminishing trust in the US-dollar may increase when China rolls out her digital Renminbi (RMB = people’s money) or international Yuan (the terms RMB and Yuan are used interchangeably) which may be used for international trade without touching the international US-dominated SWIFT transfer and US banking system. The Chinese currency being backed by a strong and solid Chinese economy, confidence in the Chinese currency is growing rapidly. Already today, the Chinese currency’s use as an international reserve asset is increasing quickly.

While the US Federal Reserve (FED) is also contemplating a new digital currency, it is not clear to what extent it can be detached from the current dollar and its debt burden. In any case, with US international trade waning, and Chinese trade rapidly increasing, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, for a declining empire to catch up with China.

For example, in the first quarter of 2021, Chinas foreign trade (exports and imports) soared by 29.2%, with Exports jumping 38.7% from the year before, while imports climbed 19.3 percent in yuan terms, according to the General Administration of Customs (GAC).

If anything, these developments – plus the fact that China has been highly successful in overcoming the covid-crisis – within less than 6 months – and putting her industrial apparatus back on line, are testimony for a solid CPC leadership, a sound Chinese economy and fiscal policy. China is the world’s only major economy reporting economic growth in 2020, amounting to 2.3% according to the Wall Street Journal. It is what China calls “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” – a feature demonstrating a spirit of constant creation and evolution of the CPC.

These facts will further enhance international trust in the Chinese economy, as well as in the Chinese way of seeking a more equal, more egalitarian and more just multipolar world, where nations may keep their national sovereignty over their internal and external political inclinations, their culture, national resources, monetary policies and foreign relations – and live peacefully together.

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CPC and the Chinese Vision

The New Silk Road, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is President Xi Jinping’s brilliant brainchild. It’s based on the same ancient principles as was the original Silk Road, adjusted to the 21^st Century, building bridges between peoples, exchanging goods and services, research, education, knowledge, cultural wisdom, peacefully, harmoniously and ‘win-win’ style. On 7 September 2013, President Xi presented BRI at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University. He spoke about “People-to-People Friendship and Creating a better Future”. He referred to the Ancient Silk Road of more than 2,100 years ago, that flourished during China’s Western Han Dynasty (206 BC to 24 AD).

Referring to this epoch of more than two millenniums back, President Xi pointed to the history of exchanges under the Ancient Silk Road, saying, “they had proven that countries with differences in race, belief and cultural background can absolutely share peace and development as long as they persist in unity and mutual trust, equality and mutual benefit, mutual tolerance and learning from each other, as well as cooperation and win-win outcomes.”

President Xi’s vision may be shaping the world of the 21^st Century. The Belt and Road Initiative is designed and modeled loosely according to the Ancient Silk Road. President Xi launched this ground-breaking project soon after assuming the Presidency in 2013. The endeavor’s idea is to connect the world with transport routes, infrastructure, industrial joint ventures, teaching and research institutions, cultural exchange and much more. Since 2017, enshrined in China’s Constitution, BRI has become the flagship for China’s foreign policy.

BRI is literally building bridges and connecting people of different continents and nations. The purpose of the New Silk Road is “to construct a unified large market and make full use of both international and domestic markets, through cultural exchange and integration, to enhance mutual understanding and trust of member nations, ending up in an innovative pattern with capital inflows, talent pool, and technology database”.

BRI is a global development strategy adopted by the Chinese Government. Already today BRI has investments involving more than 150 countries and international organizations – and growing – in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. Since the onset of BRI in 2013, BRI investments have exceeded US$ 5 trillion equivalent.

BRI is a long-term multi-trillion investment scheme for transport routes on land and sea, as well as construction of industrial and energy infrastructure and energy exploration – as well as trade among connected countries. Unlike WTO (World Trade Organization), BRI is encouraging nations to benefit from their comparative advantages, creating win-win situations. In essence, BRI is to develop mutual understanding and trust among member nations, allowing for free capital flows, a pool of experts and access to a BRI-based technology data base.

At present, BRI’s closing date is foreseen for 2049 which coincides with the People’s Republic of China’s 100^th Anniversary. The size and likely success of the program indicates, however, already today that it will most probably be extended way beyond that date. It is worth noting, though, that only in 2019, six years after its inception, BRI has become a news item in the West. Remarkably, for six years, the west was in denial of BRI, in the hope it may go away. But away it didn’t go. To the contrary, many European Union members have already subscribed to BRI, including Greece, Italy, France, Portugal – and more will follow, as the temptation to participate in this projected socioeconomic boom is overwhelming.

The BRI, also called Belt and Road, or One Belt One Road, is not the only initiative that will enhance China’s economy and standing in the world.

After decades of western aggressions, denigrations and belligerence towards China, in a precautionary detachment from western dependence, China is focusing trade development and cooperation on her ASEAN partners. In November 2020, after 8 years of negotiations, China signed a free trade agreement with the ten ASEAN nations, plus Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, altogether 15 countries, including China.

The so-called Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, covers some 2.2 billion people, commanding some 30% of the world’s GDP. This is a never before reached agreement in size, value and tenor.

The RCEP’s trade deals will be carried out in local currencies and in yuan – no US dollars. The RCEP is, therefore, also an instrument for dedollarizing, primarily in the Asia-Pacific Region, and gradually moving across the globe. Moving away from the dollar-based economies may be an effective way to stem against the western “sanctions culture”. China is soon rolling-out her new digital Renminbi (RMB) or yuan, internationally, as legal tender for inter-country payments and transfers. The digital RMB is primed to become also an international reserve currency, thereby further reducing demand for the US-dollar.

Orientation towards China’s internal economic development – so-called horizontal instead of vertical growth – is a strategy to develop local Chinese internal production and infrastructure to build up and enhance Chinese internal capacities and markets and bringing about wellbeing and a better equilibrium between China’s vast hinterland and China’s prosperous eastern coastal areas.

The future belongs to China

After two thousand years of western “white supremacy”, relentless exploitation, colonization, discrimination and outright enslavement of other colored people, other cultures, throughout the world, the time has come to turn the wheel – and to veer the future of mankind into a more peaceful, more just and more egalitarian world.

During the next hundred years and under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party – China will guide the East into the era of the Rising Sun – prosperity and good health for all.

This new epoch will strive for a multi-polar world, with win-win trade relations, and bringing about new environmental, social and technological challenges, but also a new awakening for a social consciousness and solidarity. A key instrument for achieving major goals for human wellbeing is the Belt and Road Initiative, providing a steady flow of new ideas, creations, cultural exchange and mutual learning. The future focus may be on:

• Renewable sources of energy, based mainly on hydro- and solar power, developed with cutting edge technologies, i.e. capturing solar power with a process of photosynthesis, producing high efficiency energy yields;
• Increasing green areas in urban centers to bring about a balance of natural CO2 absorption and Oxygen production, aiming at zero pollution;
• Protecting the world’s rain forests and water resources;
• Keeping natural resources and public services – health, education, food supply, water and sanitation services, electricity, and public transport – in the public domain;
• Promoting biological and multi-crop agriculture;
• Developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help increase production and transport efficiency and to serve humanity; and
• Adopting public banking as the primary means of socioeconomic development funding, Leading humanity to building a community with a shared future for mankind.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals. He is also the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization and a Non-resident senior fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version). 

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

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Without research evidence to suggest that plastic desk shields effectively reduce the transmission of COVID-19, many schools purchased them for their students and teachers, for all practical purposes putting the students in a plastic box

One school principal called it keeping the children “in their bubble.” However, evidence shows that air flow restriction by the shields and masks may increase the risk of acquiring COVID-19

Plastic pollution is mounting quickly as 129 billion face masks are discarded monthly and the plexiglass desk shields are moved out of schools

The CDC relied on anecdotal evidence to support the recommendation for mandatory masks and their own data showed 85% of those with confirmed COVID-19 reported they either “often” or “always” wore a face mask

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Despite a lack of evidence that plastic shields would reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission and documentation that children are at a much lower risk for COVID than adults, officials recommended masks and plastic boxes to separate and socially distance children.¹

Not long after China announced the novel coronavirus, researchers began collecting data. Within months many scientists realized that COVID-19 does not affect children at the same rate that it affects adults. There have been many theories as to why this is the case.² For one thing, children do not have the same types of comorbidities that increase the risk for adults and older adults. Their immune systems are also different.

Experts postulated that another difference was the expression of the angiotensin-converting-enzyme (ACE) 2 receptor that is necessary for the virus to infect cells. Some suggested that other viruses common to the mucosa and airways in young children may limit the growth of the virus, which reduced the rate of severe illness.

Available data³ in the early months from the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed a cohort of 44,672 confirmed cases of COVID-19 indicated 2.1% of patients were aged zero to 19 years. As more data were collected throughout 2020, researchers continued to report that children have a much lower risk of severe disease and mortality from COVID-19 than do adults.⁴

According to the CDC,⁵ since children are hospitalized significantly less often than adults, it suggests that children may have less severe illness. They also attribute the lack of transmission in children to school closures in the spring and early summer of 2020, keeping children at home. And yet, children were still exposed to adults in their home who were symptomatic for the viral illness.

The lack of severe symptoms in children infected with SARS-CoV-2 is in stark contrast to the history of significant symptoms with other respiratory viruses in children.⁶

No Evidence Portable School Desk Shields Are Effective

Dystopian: President Joe Biden visits school kids wearing masks sitting behind plastic protective shields pic.twitter.com/tmfsWzVkNd

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) May 3, 2021

In this 44-second clip, a masked President Biden is visiting a school where the children are all wearing masks behind plastic shields. It’s a disturbing sight that the mainstream media appears to take in stride as they try to convince you that this is the way we should live.

Mid-March 2021, the CDC released new guidelines, which reduced the social distance in schools to 3 feet and removed the recommendations for barriers between school desks. Greta Massetti leads the CDC’s community interventions task force and said about the plastic shields, “We don’t have a lot of evidence of their effectiveness” in preventing transmission.⁷

The new recommendations triggered a variety of responses in teachers and parents, some of whom are not comfortable sending their children to school where they may be allowed within 3 feet of another child or teacher.⁸

If you haven’t seen the plastic boxes being purchased in bulk by school systems for students at each of their desks, try imagining a three-sided transparent plexiglass shield that measures about 22 inches high⁹ and surrounds the front and two sides of the student’s desk.

Some school systems are excited by the prospect of adding another layer of distance between people. One school in Hawaii recently purchased 460 shields for students and teachers. Principal James Denight said, “Our focus is the health and safety of students and staff. We’re going to keep them in their bubble.”¹⁰

Mainstream media outlets covering the story are calling face masks and plastic shields “the new normal.”¹¹ In one school in Ohio, students and staff spend the day wearing a mask and carry a foldable plastic shield they set up on their desks.

Unfortunately, the vast fortune the school systems and retail businesses are spending on plastic is not supported by scientific evidence. In the early months, health authorities told the public that the virus was spread by large droplets. Yet, scientists and researchers like Joseph Allen from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, protested, saying the virus could travel farther, making plastic shields ineffective.¹²

Nearly one year after the novel coronavirus began infecting people, the World Health Organization and the U.S. CDC finally accepted what researchers had been arguing — the virus can spread through the air.¹³ A recently released study¹⁴ by the CDC of COVID-19 transmission in elementary schools in Georgia demonstrated that plastic barriers on desks or tables were not effective.

Building scientist Marwa Zaatari spoke with a reporter from Bloomberg about plastic desk shields, saying they create¹⁵ “a false sense of security. Especially when we use it in offices or in schools specifically, plexiglass does not help. If you have plexiglass, you’re still breathing the same shared air of another person.”

One study published in the journal Science¹⁶ has suggested desk shields used in multiple school systems across the U.S. “are associated with lower risk reductions (or even risk increases).”

A preprint paper¹⁷ released from Japan investigated the effect plastic shields would have in areas with poor ventilation. They found the plexiglass blocked the air flow and may increase the risk for infection. The CDC study concluded that the results:¹⁸

“… highlighted the importance of masking and ventilation for preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission in elementary schools and revealed important opportunities for increasing their use among schools.”

Yet, the published data do not support their statement supporting masking. It’s important to note that the incidence of COVID-19 in the schools evaluated was extremely low. Among students and staff members, there were only 3.08 COVID-19 cases per 500 enrolled students during the study period.

The analysis of the numbers showed the incidence of COVID was 37% lower in schools where teachers and staff used masks and 39% lower where ventilation was improved, as compared to schools that did not use these strategies. However, in absolute numbers, a 37% reduction is only about one case in the school — hardly a supportive statistic for requiring schoolchildren to wear masks all day long.

Especially interesting is that the statistic was for teachers and staff and not for students. When the researchers looked at masking students they found, “The 21% lower incidence in schools that required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional.”¹⁹

The data suggest that masks are not as effective as government health experts would like you to believe, even though viral experts have been outspoken about the dangers of wearing face masks. Virus expert Judy Mikovits is one of those who have posted on social media. According to Weblyf.com, Mikovits wrote:²⁰

“Do you not know how unhealthy it is to keep inhaling your carbon dioxide and restricting proper oxygen flow? … The body requires AMPLE amounts of oxygen for optimal immune health. Proper oxygenation of your cells and blood is ESSENTIAL for the body to function as it needs to in order to fight off any illness. Masks will hamper oxygen intake.”

Mikovits is joined by Dr. Jenny Harries, England’s deputy chief medical officer. According to News-Medical.Net, she warned the public against wearing face masks “as the virus can get trapped in the material and cause infection when the wearer breathes in.”²¹ Nationally recognized board-certified neurosurgeon Dr. Russell Blaylock also believes face masks may cause serious harm:²²

“Now that we have established that there is no scientific evidence necessitating the wearing of a face mask for prevention, are there dangers to wearing a face mask, especially for long periods? Several studies have indeed found significant problems with wearing such a mask.

This can vary from headaches, to increased airway resistance, carbon dioxide accumulation, to hypoxia, all the way to serious life-threatening complications … By wearing a mask, the exhaled viruses will not be able to escape and will concentrate in the nasal passages, enter the olfactory nerves and travel into the brain.”

Where Will All the Plastic Go?

Interestingly, the sale of plexiglass has roughly tripled since the beginning of 2020, rising to roughly $750 million in the U.S.²³ Sales were fueled by offices, restaurants and retail stores that scrambled to put up plastic shields after being told it would reduce the spread of the virus.

Tufts Medical Center epidemiologist Shira Doron supports the use of plastic shields but acknowledges “there’s no research” to support plexiglass barriers against coronavirus spread. She spoke with a reporter from Bloomberg, saying: “We don’t know a lot.” However, she believes that it comes down to, “If it might help, and it makes sense, and it doesn’t hurt, then do it.”²⁴

Unfortunately, it doesn’t make sense and, ultimately, it may trigger mental health issues for children and adds to the growing plastic problem. Zaatari and Allen believe that plastic shields may make sense in certain settings, such as in front of cashiers if it doesn’t impede airflow. However, money would have been better spent on improving ventilation and air filtration in the school systems.

Craig Saunders, president of the International Association of Plastics Distribution, spoke with a reporter from Bloomberg about the future of those plexiglass shields when they are no longer used. He said, “It’s 100% recyclable thermoplastic. [It] just comes down to the logistics.”²⁵

Yet, the logistics of recycling plastic are not a societal strong suit as has been demonstrated in the past 30 years. This begs the question of whether the additional plastic garbage from discarded plexiglass shields will join the trillions of pieces of plastic that litter the oceans and beaches.²⁶

The planet is also facing a new plastic crisis brought on by discarded face masks. Each month there’s an estimated 129 billion face masks being used,²⁷ most of which are disposable, made from plastic microfibers. Before wearing a mask became a daily habit, more than 300 million tons of plastic were already produced globally each year.

Most of it has ended up as waste, which led researchers from the University of Southern Denmark and Princeton University to warn that masks could quickly become “the next plastic problem.”²⁸Bottled water containers have been a leading source of environmental plastic pollution, but will likely be outpaced by disposable masks.

While about 25% of plastic bottles are recycled, “there is no official guidance on mask recycle, making it more likely to be disposed of as solid waste,”²⁹ the researchers stated. “With increasing reports on inappropriate disposal of masks, it is urgent to recognize this potential environmental threat.”³⁰

No matter what the ultimate goal was in pushing the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears that ensuring the safety of the Earth on which we live was not a priority. It is essential we protect the ecosystem, and therefore our food supply.

Mindless Mask Mandates Likely Ineffective and Harmful

The evidence that masks do not work to prevent the spread of viruses has been demonstrated using influenza and COVID-19. The first COVID-19 specific randomized controlled surgical mask trial was published in November 2020,³¹ and it confirmed previous, conflicting³² findings showing that:

• Masks may reduce your risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection by as much as 46%, or it may increase your risk by 23%
• The vast majority — 97.9% of those who didn’t wear masks, and 98.2% of those who did — remained infection-free

Despite scientific evidence, the CDC has relied on anecdotal stories about hair stylists and retrospective reports to prop up their recommendation for universal mask-wearing to prevent the spread of infection.³³ In addition to this, their own data^34,35,36 also show 70.6% of patients with confirmed COVID-19 reported always wearing a cloth mask or face covering in the 14 days preceding their illness and 14.4% wore it often.

This means a total of 85% of people who had confirmed cases of COVID-19 either “often” or “always” wore a face mask. For a discussion of more science-based evidence about face masks, see “Mindless Mask Mandates Likely Do More Harm Than Good.”

Denight’s focus on keeping children “in their bubble” is not far from what’s happening across the world. Data from a study³⁷ using Germany’s first registry recorded the experiences of children wearing masks. It shows there are physical, behavioral and psychological harms³⁸ being perpetrated on children in the name of science.

Data from 25,930 children found the average child was wearing a mask 270 minutes each day and parents, doctors and others reported 24 health issues associated with that mask wearing. These problems:³⁹

“… included irritability (60%), headache (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), less happiness (49%), reluctance to go to school/kindergarten (44%), malaise (42%), impaired learning (38%) and drowsiness or fatigue (37%).”

Added to these concerning symptoms, they also found 29.7% reported feeling short of breath, 26.4% being dizzy and 17.9% were unwilling to move or play.⁴⁰ Hundreds more experienced “accelerated respiration, tightness in chest, weakness and short-term impairment of consciousness.”⁴¹

Push Back Against Tyranny

Measurements of anxiety or depressive disorder have also jumped dramatically for adults. Data from the CDC⁴² show the percentage of adults reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder and/or depressive disorder was 11% in the first quarter of 2019 but jumped dramatically to 41.1%⁴³ across the U.S. by January 2021.

This jump in anxiety and depression in adults is significant for children since there is a positive relationship between a child’s behavioral problems and mental health with maternal mental health⁴⁴and parental mental health.⁴⁵

This means that independent of their own stress and psychological harm from mask-wearing, lockdowns and plastic shields, children also respond negatively to the rising rate of anxiety and depression exhibited by adults. Thus, the impact on a child’s mental health is the result of both their own stress and that of their parents.

March 20, 2021, marked the 1-year anniversary of the first COVID-19 lockdown. On that day, people in more than 40 countries took to the streets to peacefully demonstrate against the lies and tyrannical measures being taken by governmental agencies and experts in the name of a viral pandemic.

Chances are you didn’t hear about this global rallying cry for freedom since the mainstream media have near-universally censored any news of it. However, this information is vital to understanding how your freedoms are being stripped and what you can do to protect your rights.

Our children and our children’s children are depending on us to ensure they have the freedom and the right to make decisions for themselves about their health, wellness and finances. Read more at “Global Pushback Against Tyranny Has Begun.”

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Notes

¹ New Hampshire, Department of Health and Human Services, June 4, 2021

² Acta Pediatrica, 2020; doi.org/10.1111/apa.15271

³ Journal of Microbiology, Immunology and Infection, 2020;53(3)

⁴ The Lancet, 2021; doi.org/10.1016/S2352-4642(21)00066-3

⁵ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, December 30, 2020

⁶ Archives of Disease in Childhood, 2021;106:429

^7, 8 ABC News, March 19, 2021

⁹ School Outlet, Portable School Desk Sneeze Shield

¹⁰ Hawaii Tribune Herald, August 5, 2020

¹¹ Oxford Observer, March 12, 2021

^{12, 23, 24, 25} Bloomberg, June 8, 2021

¹³ Bloomberg, May 16, 2021

^14, 18, 19 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 2021;70(21)

¹⁵ Bloomberg, June 8, 2021 para 6

¹⁶ Science, June 4, 2021

¹⁷ medRxiv, 2021; doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.22.21257321

²⁰ Weblyf.com April 26, 2020

²¹ News-Medical.Net March 15, 2020

²² Technocracy May 11, 2020

²⁶ Condor Ferries, Shocking Ocean Plastic Statistics

²⁷ Frontiers in Environmental Science and Engineering, 2021;15(6) para 1

^28, 29, 30 Frontiers in Environmental Science and Engineering, 2021;15(6)

³¹ Annals of Internal Medicine November 18, 2020 DOI: 10.7326/M20-6817

³² Spectator November 19, 2020

³³ CDC.gov Human Studies of Masking and SARS-CoV-2 Transmission

³⁴ CDC.gov MMWR September 11, 2020; 69(36)

³⁵ CDC MMWR September 11, 2020; 69(38): 1380

³⁶ Breitbart October 14, 2020

^37, 39 Research Square, 2021; doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-124394/v2

^38, 40, 41 Montana Daily Gazette, January 25, 2021

⁴² National Center for Health Statistics

⁴³ Statista March 16, 2021

⁴⁴ Pars Journal of Medical Sciences, 2012;10(1)

⁴⁵ JAMA Pediatrics, 2004;158(8)

Featured image is from Mercola

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version). 

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

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Who We Are and a Call to Action

We are a group of doctors, dentists and scientists who are concerned about the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine to the general population, along with the implication from the Medical Council of New Zealand and the Dental Council of New Zealand of incompetence if we do not fully support the COVID-19 vaccination program, or indeed get vaccinated ourselves.

Read full declaration here.

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Featured image is from Natural News

First published on June 4, 2020

In a recent paper entitled ‘Tomorrow’s Arctic: Theatre of War or Cooperation?’ I introduced readers to the US-Russian grand design which shaped not only the sale of Alaska in October 1867 to the USA for $7.5 million, but also Russia’s involvement in the American Civil War as Czar Alexander II arranged the deployment of Russian military fleets to San Francisco and New York.

Even though President Lincoln and Czar Alexander II were both known as great reformers and emancipators for their common commitment to free slaves and serfs, both leaders were assassinated before their grand visions could come to fruition.

In this article, I would like to present another chapter of this forgotten history: The creation of modern Canada as a confederation designed explicitly to prevent the inevitable construction of a Russian-American rail connection through the Bering Strait in the wake of the Civil War.

The Strategic Value of the Bering Strait Tunnel in History

For those who are not aware, the Bering Strait Rail tunnel project is a 150 year idea which was formulated by allies of Lincoln and Alexander II after America’s Civil War.

The original grand design was driven by a plan to connect telegraph lines between continents, followed soon thereafter by a connection of the Trans Siberian Railway and America’s Trans Continental Railways through British Columbia, Alaska and into Eurasia, as laid out spectacularly by former Colorado Governor William Gilpin in his 1890 book the Cosmopolitan Railway.

Echoing today’s Belt and Road Initiative which is quickly growing to become a world land bridge, Gilpin  described what this new paradigm of human civilization was destined to look like:

“The weapons of mutual slaughter are hurled away; the sanguinary passions find a check, a majority of the human family is found to accept the essential teachings of Christianity IN PRACTICE… Room is discovered for industrial virtue and industrial power. The civilized masses of the world meet; they are mutually enlightened, and fraternize to reconstitute human relations in harmony with nature and with God. The world ceases to be a military camp, incubated only by the military principles of arbitrary force and abject submission. A new and grand order in human affairs inaugurates itself out of these immense concurrent discoveries and events” [Cosmopolitan Railway p. 213]

The idea of the Bering Strait tunnel was supported by Czar Nicholas II who, in 1906 hired a team of American engineers to conduct feasibility studies on the initiative which then had an estimated cost of $350 million.

Sadly a couple of World Wars and disastrous revolution kept this project from blossoming as it was intended.

This idea was revived again by FDR’s great Vice President Henry Wallace who discussed the project at length with Russia’s Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942. In this meeting Wallace declared that “It would mean much to the peace of the future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East.”

Again, the Cold War derailed this project and it was only in 2007 that the Russian Government revived it once again with Putin even offering to pay 2/3 of the $65 billion estimated cost to construct the 100 km tunnel across the Bering Strait. This project was offered to the west more loudly in 2011 and in May 2014, China unofficially gave their backing to the initiative. Sadly, unipolar technocrats and neocons controlling NATO foreign policy had not the eyes to see what benefits such projects offered those who joined in its construction, and instead continued onto their zero-sum game plan for full spectrum dominance.

With the 2018 unveiling of the Polar Silk Road extending the east-west development corridors into the Arctic, which have merged increasingly with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and Putin’s Northern Vision, the Bering Strait connection has again been given new life. If nations of the west find the courage to let go of the Titanic before the hellish chaos of the oncoming financial meltdown erupts, then the projects animating the new multi polar paradigm will undoubtedly look a lot like the World Land bridge concept illustrated by the Schiller Institute below.

Arctic development remains one of the best strategic points of alliance and cooperation needed to re-organize the collapsing world economic order around firm principles of multipolar cooperation and value and as such is not too different from the dynamic shaping the world when Lincoln took office in 1860.

The 19^th century Clash of Two Systems

Lincoln’s economic advisor and leader of the international export of the American System of Political economy, Henry C. Carey, described this clash between two systems in his 1851 Harmony of Interests:

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

Carey, just like the British Empire’s Lord Palmerston, clearly recognized that America had not completed “the mission of 1776” since not one but TWO Americas existed within Washington: One positive America representing the anti-slavery/anti-colonial principles of the 1789 constitution vs. another hypocritical slave power that never believed that “all men were created equal”. Just as two antithetical impulses existed within America, so too did two opposing views of “Manifest Destiny” co-evolve since 1776: One hellish version driven by the ‘principle’ of spreading slavery and suppressing the weak while the other more noble impulse was represented by the spirits of Lincoln, Carey and Gilpin illustrated above.

This fatal contradiction within the republic was exploited fervently by Anglo-American intelligence for 80 years before the inevitable civil war finally broke out in 1861.

President Lincoln defined the terms of this contradiction and immanent war in an 1858 debate with the Slave Power’s champion Stephen Douglas saying:

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.“

This quote is important as it addresses the fact that Lincoln recognized correctly the inextricable connection between the institution of slavery (even when it masqueraded under a republican veneer) and monarchical principles of colonialism which saw mankind’s right to rule defined not by morality, or merit but rather by “principles” of hereditary right.

The Stage is Set for a Forgotten Battle

By now most informed people are aware of Russia’s 1863 intervention into the Civil War as a turning point that blocked British and French imperialist forces from entering the war militarily on the side of the Southern rebels. What is not so well established is how Russian and American grand strategy to connect the continents by rail did not occur as it was intended after the sale of Alaska.

There are several convergent factors at play during the 1865-1867 period which presented a major challenge to the weakening British Empire strategists:

• The need to confederate British territories in North America as possession of the Empire instead of allowing them to either become independent nations or annexing to Lincoln’s republic.
• If this first task could be done by ousting pro-Lincoln forces in Canadian political power and killing Lincoln, then the next task involved transferring the vast private territories owned by the Hudson Bay Company separating eastern colonies from the lone western outpost of British Columbia on the Pacific. The majority of Canada during this pre-1867 period was private Hudson Bay land as it had been since it was chartered in 1670 by Prince Rupert.
• If this transfer of Hudson Bay possessions into federal hands could be affected, then it would still be necessary to somehow persuade the fiercely independent British Columbian subjects to join Confederation. This was not a simple task as the vast majority were in favor of annexing to the USA due to the economic despair of their colony caused by the collapse of the Gold rush bubbles in 1858 and total isolation from the other British American colonies.

The Anti Union Confederacy That Succeeded

On July 1, 1867, the British North America Act was enacted consolidating Britain’s “other” anti-American confederacy operation under a new constitution dedicating the new federation’s existence to be conducive“to the Welfare of the Provinces and promote the interests of the British Empire”.

It should be kept in mind that the project to confederate actually began during the Civil War in the form of a week-long booze-soaked orgy of the Charlottetown convention of 1864 which hammered out the resolutions later put into law in 1867.

Some have wondered why just days before the July 1, 1867 enactment, would-be confederate President Jefferson Davis gave a speech to cheering crowds in Lennoxville Quebec stating:

“I hope that you will hold fast to [your] British principles and that you may ever strive to cultivate close and affectionate connections with the mother country”.

This pro-British gushing from a confederate traitor in Quebec shouldn’t be surprising at all if we take into account the fact that Montreal and Toronto served as Southern confederacy bases of operations used with the full support of the British Empire to run terrorist operations, raids, espionage and financing of the war against Lincoln’s forces from the North (while Canada “officially” maintained an air of neutrality). Even Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Boothe was discovered to have been deployed from Montreal to kill Lincoln, with union officers discovering a $500 cheque amidst his possessions signed directly by none other than Ontario Bank President Henry Starnes (who would later become Mayor of Montreal).

As Barry Sheehy pointed out in Montreal: City of Secrets, during the Civil War, “the largest Confederate Secret Service base outside Richmond was located in Montreal” under the direct control of confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin- himself an asset of British Intelligence.

Much like the exiled Russian and Hong Kong oligarchs and traitors of the modern day, Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin and many other confederate rebels lived out their days in comfort in both Canada and Britain (Benjamin becoming an English Barrister in London from 1865 until his death in 1884).

The Sale of Alaska and the Rush for British Columbia

On October 1867, the British Empire was caught off guard with the news that Russia’s Alaskan possessions had been sold to America for $7.2 million in a secretive diplomatic maneuver which Secretary of State William Seward described as the most important deal of his life.

The sale had suddenly made the isolated colony of British Columbia very hot real estate. During this 1867 purchase, Lincoln’s Trans Continental Railway, begun in 1863 at the height of the Civil War was a mere two years from completion, linking the Pacific to Atlantic for the first time in history and thus destroying the British monopoly over maritime shipping routes.

With students of Lincoln’s program to be found among the intelligentsia of Russia, led by Count Sergei Witte and Dimitri Mendeleyev, the American modeled (and largely American-built) Trans-Siberian Railway’s construction was not far away, and the linking of rail across the two continents was discussed as a real possibility by republican visionaries the world over.

The chances that British Columbia would join confederation were minute at this time as the broken colony had no ties of commerce to Britain or the east coast confederacy 3500 km away. In fact, on July 2, 1867 the first of several petitions was sent to Queen Victoria requesting that either the colony’s debt burdens and economic woes be alleviated by the Mother country or that the queen grant them permission to annex to the USA!

At this time, American consul to Victoria Allen Francis, wrote a letter to the president stating:

“Even the colonists claiming most loyalty to the queen,  are now urging with great unanimity annexation to the United States as their only salvation- as the only means of retrieving the colonies from their present embarrassment and decline.”

BC’s Colonialist Newspaper described the situation in the following terms:

“Since no change would be for the worse, they (British Columbians) would welcome annexation to the United States to continuing in a state of poverty and wretchedness. In writing this we know we speak the mind of 9 out of every 10 men in the colony… the sentiment is heard at every gathering street corner- at social gatherings, in business circles- in all places”

On July 18, 1868 the Hudson Bay territories (aka: Rupert’s Land) were sold to Ottawa under an operation led by Sir Georges Etienne Cartier who stated “in this country we must have a distinct form of government in which the monarchical spirit will be found.”

Cartier’s monarchical spirit was reflected in Canada’s leading fathers of confederation such as Sir John A. Macdonald who famously stated “a Britisher I was born and a Britisher I will die”and who looked to the vast wilderness west of Toronto saying in 1867:  “I would be quite willing, personally to leave the whole country a wilderness for the next half century, but I fear if Englishmen do not go there the Yankees will.”

On May 22, 1867, Father of Confederation Sir Alexander Galt stated British policy for western expansion (to block the connection between Russia and the USA) saying: “If the United States desire to outflank us on the west, we must accept the situation and lay our hand on British Columbia and the Pacific Ocean. This country cannot be surrounded by the Unites States- We are gone if we allow it… ‘From the Atlantic to the Pacific’ must be the cry in British America as much as it has ever been in the United States”

The last serious effort by British Columbians to join America was made with the Annexation petition of 1869listing BC’s desperate grievances with the empire and appealing to President Grant:

“The only remedy for the evils which beset us, we believe to be in a close union with the adjoining States and Territories, we are already bound to them by a unity of object and interest; nearly all our commercial relations are with them; They furnish the Chief Markets we have for the products of our mines, lands and waters; They supply the Colony with most of the necessities of life; They furnish us the only means of communication with the outer world… For these reasons we earnestly desire the ACQUISITION of this Colony by the United States.”

The Alabama Claims

The last great hope for extending Lincoln’s rail through BC into Alaska at this time arose amidst the 1869-1871 Alabama Claims affair which saw the world’s first international trial in Geneva address the matter of Britain’s military support for the confederacy during the Civil War (reflecting the irony of America’s recent covert support for Syrian rebels). Britain’s air of neutrality was betrayed by her construction of Confederate war ships that unleashed havoc on Lincoln’s Navy. The court ruled in favor of America and soon Britain came close to loosing it’s Canadian possessions as payment for their sin (Senator Charles Sumner and Secretary Seward both advocated this course), although weaker figures in America ended up agreeing to a measly $15 million settlement in 1872 while all wrongs were forgotten.

With these failures to capture the pregnant moment, the effort to assimilate BC into London’s northern confederacy was accelerated.

Ottawa negotiations began on June 7, 1870 and within weeks nearly all resolutions and clauses were agreed upon. The two biggest impediments to B.C.’s entry into the Confederacy were dealt with by the payment of all of the colony’s debts by Ottawa and the promise made by Sir Macdonald to construct a rail line linking the new province with Montreal and Quebec “within ten years”. This promised rail line was necessary in order to sabotage the intention of the American Manifest Destiny policy.

With these arrangements agreed upon (paralleling similar arrangements in the former Red River Settlement in today’s Manitoba), British Columbia was admitted into Confederation as the 6th Canadian Province. Within the coming decades, as Canada was opened up to form a British-controlled Northern Confederacy blockade against the civilizing progress of the sovereign nation state intention of the United States, Saskatchewan and Alberta were formed as provinces where there had formerly been only Hudson’s Bay land. The lack of progress on Canada’s rail by 1878 had resulted in renewed disenchantment on the part of British Columbians who demanded once more for annexation into the USA resulting in Sir John A. Macdonald’s “National Policy of 1878-1885” which forced the construction of Canada’s own trans continental rail (with the inaugural train cars arriving in BC’s Port Moody from Montreal on the 4^thof July, 1885).

By the time of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the American System of Political Economy had resulted in the greatest explosion of wealth in the United States and became a model for the whole civilized world seeking to break free of British colonial hegemony.

Converts to the American System were made by all lovers of progress from around the world who came to the Convention. Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck vigorously applied American System practices of high protective tariffs and vast internal improvements under his Zollverein. Czars Alexander II and III and their close circle of Russian advisors applied the American model for the vast modernization of Russia vectored around the Trans-Siberian Rail. Even Japan under the Meiji Restoration applied the American model to escape feudalism and enter the modern age.

Sadly, an age of London-financed revolutions, assassinations and wars mis-shaped the 1880s, 1890s, and 20^thcentury, preventing this system of win-win cooperation from evolving as it was destined.

Today the world is again pulled by two opposing systems represented by Lincoln’s international allies on the one hand and British Intelligence on the other… although today’s champions of the multi polar world of cooperation have names like Xi Jinping and Putin. These Eurasian statesmen have ushered in a new system of credit, diplomacy, security, economic and science policy governed by the best principles displayed by the American System of the 19^thcentury and occasionally revived albeit only briefly under such 20^thcentury leaders like Franklin Rooseveltand John F. Kennedy.

Whether the western nations have the moral fitness to recover their lost traditions and join in this new paradigm or not yet remains to be seen…

The author delivered a lecture on this topic which can be viewed here:

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First published on February 5, 2021

Bill Gates has quietly made himself the largest owner of farmland in the United States. For a man obsessed with monopoly control, the opportunity to also dominate food production must seem irresistible.

“Gates has a Napoleonic concept of himself, an appetite that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses.” — Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, presiding judge in the Gates/Microsoft antitrust-fraud case

The global lockdowns that Bill Gates helped orchestrate and cheerlead have bankrupted more than 100,000 businesses in the U.S. alone and plunged a billion people into poverty and deadly food insecurity that, among other devastating harms, kill 10,000 African children monthly — while increasing Gates’ wealth by $20 billion. His $133 billion fortune makes him the world’s fourth wealthiest man.

Gates has been using that newfound cash to expand his power over global populations by buying devalued assets at fire-sale prices and maneuvering for monopoly control over public health, privatizing prisons, online education and global communications while promoting digital currencies, high tech surveillance, data harvesting systems and artificial intelligence.

For a man obsessed with monopoly control, the opportunity to also dominate food production must seem irresistible.

According to the newest issue of The Land Report, Gates has quietly made himself the largest owner of farmland in the United States. Gates’ portfolio now comprises about 242,000 acres of American farmland and nearly 27,000 acres of other land across Louisiana, Arkansas, Nebraska, Arizona, Florida, Washington and 18 other states.

Thomas Jefferson believed that the success of America’s exemplary struggle to supplant the yoke of European feudalism with a noble experiment in self-governance depended on the perpetual control of the nation’s land base by tens of thousands of independent farmers, each with a stake in our democracy.

So at best, Gates’ campaign to scarf up America’s agricultural real estate is a signal that feudalism may again be in vogue. At worst, his buying spree is a harbinger of something far more alarming — the control of global food supplies by a power-hungry megalomaniac with a Napoleon complex.

Let’s explore the context of Gates’ stealth purchases as part of his long-term strategy of mastery over agriculture and food production globally.

Beginning in 1994, Gates launched an international biopiracy campaign to achieve vertically integrated dominion over global agricultural production. His empire now includes vast agricultural lands and hefty investments in GMO crops, seed patents, synthetic foods, artificial intelligence including robotic farm workers, and commanding positions in food behemoths including Coca-Cola, Unilever, Philip Morris (Kraft, General Foods), Kellogg’s, Procter & Gamble and Amazon (Whole Foods), and in multinationals like Monsanto and Bayer that market chemical pesticides and petrochemical fertilizers.

As usual, Gates coordinates these personal investments with taxpayer-subsidized grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the richest and most powerful organization in all of international aid, his financial partnerships with Big Ag, Big Chemical, and Big Food, and his control of international agencies — including some of his own creation — with awesome power to create captive markets for his products.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a protégé and partner to David Rockefeller, observed that, “Who controls the food supply controls the people.” In 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations launched the $424 million Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) promising to double crop productivity and boost incomes for 30 million small farmers by 2020 while cutting food insecurity in half.

Characteristically, Gates’ approach to global problems put technology and his chemical, pharmaceutical and oil industry partners at the center of every solution. As it turned out, Gates’ “innovative strategy” for food production was to force America’s failed system of GMO, chemical and fossil fuel-based agriculture on poor African farmers.

African agricultural practices have evolved from the land over 10,000 years in forms that promote crop diversity, decentralization, sustainability, private property, self-organization and local control of seeds. The personal freedom inherent in these localized systems leaves farm families making their own decisions: the masters on their lands, the sovereigns of their destinies. Continuous innovation by millions of small farmers maximized sustainable yields and biodiversity.

In his ruthless reinvention of colonialism, Gates spent $4.9 billion dollars to dismantle this ancient system and replace it with high-tech corporatized and industrialized agriculture, chemically dependent monocultures, extreme centralization and top-down control. He forced small African farms to transition to imported commercial seeds, petroleum fertilizers and pesticides.

Gates built the supply chain infrastructure for chemicals and seeds and pressured African governments to spend huge sums on subsidies and to use draconian penalties and authoritarian control to force farmers to buy his expensive inputs and comply with his diktats. Gates made farmers replace traditional nutritious subsistence crops like sorghum, millet, sweet potato and cassava with high-yield industrial cash crops, like soy and corn, which benefit elite commodity traders but leave poor Africans with little to eat. Both nutrition and productivity plummeted. Soils grew more acidic with every application of petrochemical fertilizers.

As with Gates’ African vaccine enterprise, there was neither internal evaluation nor public accountability. The 2020 study “False Promises: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)” is the report card on the Gates’ cartel’s 14-year effort. The investigation concludes that the number of Africans suffering extreme hunger has increased by 30 percent in the 18 countries that Gates targeted. Rural poverty has metastasized dramatically, and the number of hungry people in these nations has risen to 131 million.

Under Gates’ plantation system, Africa’s rural populations have become slaves on their own land to a tyrannical serfdom of high-tech inputs, mechanization, rigid schedules, burdensome conditionalities, credits and subsidies that are the defining features of Bill Gates’ “Green Revolution.”

The only entities benefiting from Gates’ program are his international corporate partners — and particularly Monsanto, in which the Gates Foundation Trust purchased 500,000 shares worth $23 million in 2010 (but later divested those shares after pressure from civil society groups). Gates himself even filmed commercials for Monsanto’s GMOs, touting them as the “solution” to world hunger.

In a typical example of Gates’ strange largess, his foundation apparently made his taxpayer-subsidized “charitable” grants amounting to $10 million to the Big Ag behemoth, Cargill, to build his supply chains for GMO soy in South Africa. Africans call Gates’ program “Neocolonialism” or “Corporate Colonialism.”

The AGRA Watch initiative of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice follows Gates’ agricultural and food policies. According to Heather Day, an AGRA Watch spokesperson, AGRA is a trojan horse for corporate kleptocracy.

“The Gates Foundation and AGRA claim to be ‘pro-farmer,’ ‘pro-poor’ and ‘pro-environment,’” Day told me. “But their approach is closely aligned with transnational corporations, like Monsanto, and foreign policy actors like USAID [United States Agency for International Development]. They take advantage of food and global climate crises to promote high-tech, centralized, industrial agriculture that generate profits for Gates’ corporate partners while degrading the environment and disempowering farmers. Their programs are a dark form of philanthrocapitalism based on biopiracy and corporate biopiracy.”

Gates’ climate activism (A memo to my environmental colleagues)

To cloak his dystopian plans for humanity in benign intentions, Gates has expropriated the rhetoric of “sustainability,” “biodiversity,” “good stewardship” and “climate.” These causes are all grim realities that pose existential threats to our children and require urgent attention. However, Gates’ record exposes his benevolent intentions as masquerades for his agenda to maximize personal profit and control.

It’s baffling to me how so many of my friends in the environmental movement have swallowed Gates’ chicanery. In my 40 years as a climate activist, I saw zero evidence of Gates’ funding of genuine climate advocacy; the Gates Foundation is AWOL in the climate wars.

The leading climate groups, National Resource Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Waterkeepers, etc., receive virtually nothing from the world’s largest philanthropy. His investment history suggests that the climate crisis, for Gates and his cronies, is no more than an alibi for intrusive social control, “Great Reset”-scale surveillance, and massive science fiction geoengineering boondoggles, including his demented and terrifying vanity projects to spray the stratosphere with calcium chloride or seawater to slow warming, to deploy giant balloons to saturate our atmosphere with reflective particles to blot out the sun, or his perilous gambit of releasing millions of genetically modified mosquitoes in South Florida.

When we place these nightmare schemes in context alongside the battery of experimental vaccines he forces on 161 million African children annually, it’s pretty clear that Gates regards us all as his lab rats.

Gates has also heeded Kissinger’s advice, “Control oil and you control nations;” his energy holdings nowhere reflect his expressed antipathy for greenhouse gases. Gates’ personal investments in hydrocarbons include massive stakes in all the oil majors: Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell. He owns the world’s largest private jet company. His outsized commitment to coal includes giant investments in the dirtiest coal-generating fleets including the Canadian National Railway and CSX Richmond which is the largest coal transporter east of the Mississippi River. Gates is betting big on the future of carbon.

Gates’ energy-hungry data harvesting, processing and analytics centers are among the world’s fastest-growing sources of exploding energy demand. And, of course, Gates’ chemical/industrial agriculture enterprises are the antithesis of climate-friendly. His GMO corn requires heavy applications of fertilizers, pesticides, agro-chemicals made from natural gas and other fossil-fuel inputs. He effectively forced Africans, in Michael Pollan’s words, to “eat oil.” African farmers call Gates’ program “climate-stupid agriculture.”

Gates has learned to fatten himself on global crises, whether it’s pandemics, climate, famine or mass extinction. Climate change has given Gates an excuse to create monopolies over seed, food and agriculture.

In 2008, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced $306 million in grants to promote high-yield sustainable agriculture among smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The foundation’s plans included creation, through genetic manipulation, of high-production, drought-resistant dairy cows, and the development and proliferation of super crops resistant to climate change.

In other words, climate change was the guise for more mischievous geoengineering. Meanwhile, Gates’ ag policies are destroying our planet’s climate systems, pushing millions of species to extinction, desertifying the soil, destroying water systems and enriching the Poison Cartel.

So, a note to my fellow environmental leaders: Bill Gates is not our amigo! Furthermore, Gates has put climate reform in malodour with millions of Americans, who see his climate pretenses in context of his ambitions to control humanity and put an end to economic activity and personal freedom.

It’s largely Gates’ doing that half of America sees climate change as either a “Great Reset” flimflam to shift wealth upward, or a geoengineering boondoggle. It’s on them that they don’t recognize the serious peril of climate change. It’s on us that we seem deliberately blinded to the peril of Bill Gates.

Gates profits from all this confusion; the polarization of the climate debate paralyzes reform efforts thereby preserving the value of his carbon stakes. We all need to recognize who is really behind that Green mask!

Biopiracy

“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s letter to all state governors, February 1937

Long experience and research have shown that agroecology based on biodiversity, Seed Freedom and Food Freedom is essential not just to civil liberties and democracy, but to the future of food and farming.

For thousands of years, farmers’ innovation and biodiversity evolved together to create the most efficient practices for sustainable food production and biodiversity. The United Nations’ seminal 2009 study by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) documents the incontrovertible evidence demonstrating the abject failure of the Gates/Rockefeller “Green Revolution” to improve on traditional agriculture.

IAASTD deployed a team of 900 leading scientists, agronomists, and researchers to study the issue of world hunger. Their comprehensive and definitive report showed that GMO crops are not the answer to food shortfalls or rural poverty. That report definitively concludes that neither Gates’ Green Revolution nor his GMOs can feed the world and at the same time protect the planet.

IAASTD’s comprehensive analysis demonstrates that the Green Revolution that the Rockefeller Foundation launched in India and Mexico in the 1960s was a catastrophe; the chemical path of monocultures has undermined Earth’s capacity to support life and food production by destroying biodiversity, soil and water, as well as contributing to climate change.

Green Revolution policies subvert food and nutritional security, and dispossess small farmers through debt for external inputs. IAASTD and numerous other studies show that Seed Sovereignty, Food Sovereignty and Knowledge Sovereignty are the only viable future for food and farming. The United Nations and the world’s top agricultural scientists have admitted that GMOs cannot fight hunger as effectively as traditional farming.

Bill Gates has opted to ignore this reality, dismissing science-based evidence in favor of his messianic faith that he is ordained by God to save the world with technology. According to Dr. Gates, M.D., good health only comes in a syringe (he is the world’s biggest vaccine producer).

Likewise, Farmer Bill preaches that good food only comes from monocultures, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, GMO crops and patented seeds that he happens to own. In constructing his agriculture empire, Gates has repeatedly shown himself willing to ignore the voices of scientists and farmers, and to trample laws, treaties, traditions, civil rights, science, and sensibilities.

Stealing seeds

Since the onset of the Neolithic Revolution some 10,000 years ago, farmers and communities have worked to improve yield, taste, nutrition, robust seed qualities that enhance peculiar growth, medicinal and nutritional attributes, and the genetic resilience that allows certain seeds to flourish in particular soil and water conditions or resist predators.

These vigorous, ingenious genetics are the products of a miraculous collaboration between humans, nature and their Creator during humanity’s 1,000 generations of intense agricultural innovation. The free exchange of knowledge and seeds among farmers has been the basis for maintaining biodiversity and food security.

Since 1979, under World Bank auspices, a consortium of agricultural research centers known as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has been collecting these premier seeds from small farmers across the globe and preserving them in 15 independent Public Seed Banks stationed in different countries. That venture sought to archive a complete inventory of heritage seed stocks for the benefit of all humanity so as to preserve crop diversity for the millennia.

In the last 17 years, Gates has successfully maneuvered to gain control of those collections — comprising 768,578 seeds — and to assert monopoly ownership of the world’s premier seed inventories.

Beginning in 2003, working in coordination with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pumped $720 million into CGIAR’s Seed Bank project. As the largest funder of the CGIAR, Gates used his financial leverage to force the merger of the CGIAR’s 15 legally independent centers into one legal entity, a sinister initiative that he calls “Gates Ag One.” He then moved to orchestrate the transfer of research and seeds from scientific research institutions to commodity-based corporations like Bayer and Cargill with which he partners. In this way he is raiding, plundering and privatizing the seed stockpile for the most promising seeds from indigenous farmers around the world.

Gates Ag One’s director, Joe Cornelius, is a former executive at Bayer Crop Science. Prior to that, he was Monsanto’s Director of International Development. Working with Cornelius, Gates has perfected the techniques Monsanto pioneered in the 1980s when it led the push to propagate GMOs, and to patent seeds. Gates has made himself the Commanding General in Big Data’s pirate war to plunder and monopolize the common genomic data of millions of plants bred by peasants over the millennia.

Gates funds Diversity Seek (DivSeek), a global project he launched in 2015 to map the genomes and genome sequences of the peasant seed stocks held in seed banks. DivSeek and Gates Ag One are the tips of his spears, “mining” seed data to “censor” out the commons. In other words — to terminate the public’s ownership claims.

Using artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies, Gates’ minions at DivSeek and Gates AG One scan these seeds and categorize their genetic data to map, patent and pilfer humanity’s global seedstock heritage. Gates bolsters his patent rationale by using CRISPR technology to selectively edit the heritage seed genomes, making changes sufficient to withstand patent challenges.

Gates’ principal objective is to breed Green Revolution varieties engineered to respond to chemical inputs produced by Gates’ “Poison Cartel” partners: Monsanto, Bayer, Dow/DuPont, CropLife, BASF, Syngenta, Corteva, etc. In short, Gates deliberately robs the seed of its integrity and diversity, erasing evolutionary history and its links to the soil, reducing it all to a simple “code.” In this way, Gates captures our planet’s genetic diversity, rewrites it, patents its code, steals the seeds from humanity and marries them off to the chemical conglomerates.

By centralizing the Seed Banks and manipulating intellectual property laws, Gates has launched a campaign of “genetic colonialism” to rob the world’s peasants and indigenous farmers of their hard-earned seeds and knowledge.

“Gates Ag One’s aim is to take control over the genetic diversity of this planet,” agricultural freedom activist Dr. Vandana Shiva told me. According to Shiva, Gates “continues to subvert and sabotage both farmers’ seed sovereignty and the seed sovereignty of countries. ‘Gates Ag One’ is a clear declaration of his intent to create an empire over life and biodiversity, over food and farming, and over our sustenance.” In the process, says Shiva, “Gates is financing infernal Frankenstein experiments that defile God’s creation.”

Citizens, governments and farm organizations have written many laws and governments have adopted international treaties on biodiversity protection, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol to the CBD. By conning government officials, manipulating intellectual property law and rewriting seed regulations, Gates has been able to bypass or trample these statutes and treaties, and to evade the multilateral governance structures that governments put in place to prevent global corporations from hijacking the planet’s biodiversity and the seed commonwealth of peasants and farmers.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs)

Gates’ missionary faith in technology as the solution for every human ill, from food insecurity and disease to climate health, explains his obsessive promotion of GMOs. Gates’ zealous GMOs idolatry and gene-editing technologies leave him deaf to the mountains of peer-reviewed scientific evidence and warnings by agronomists, nutritionists, toxicologists and other scientists who question their safety.

GMO vaccines and medicines are mainstays of his public health enterprise, and Gates finances research, development and proliferation of GMOs as the fix for every agricultural problem. He funded, for example, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the two CRISPR chemists who won 2020 Nobel prizes for gene editing.

Gates was also one of the largest shareholders of Monsanto — the world’s most aggressive promoter of GMOs and pesticides. The central mission of Gates Ag One is to fly into the face of virtually every independent science and safety assessment in a blind rush to impose Gates’ untested GMOs, patented seeds, synthetic foods and experimental medicines on humanity.

One might expect his Monsanto stake and his partnerships with processed food, chemical and oil companies to discredit Gates’ pretensions as a public health advocate. But Gates’ massive investments in media journalism (a March 2020 Nation magazine exposé reveals the Gates Foundation has bought Gates guarantees of favorable coverage with $250 million in grants to media outlets including NBC/Universal, BBC, NPR, The Guardian, Le Mond, Al Jazeera, and others “to influence the news”) have insulated him from the scrutiny and skepticism the media historically applied to fiendish profiteering schemes and rank hypocrisy by power-mad billionaires.

Money talks, and the billions that Gates and his pharma allies annually pour into public and commercial journalism have instead made Gates the media’s chief darling. He uses his biweekly “satellite tours” of leading cable and network news shows to showcase his mesmerizing power to command softball questioning and fawning deference from obsequious hosts (with the exception of Norah O’Donnell) including Anderson Cooper (CNN), David Muir (ABC), Ari Melber (MSNBC), and Chuck Todd (NBC), who gratefully entertain his lofty prognostication on topics ranging from public health to the economy and agriculture policy.

Evading government regulation

Gates’ wealth and power also allow him to evade government efforts to regulate GMO proliferation. In 2011, when India introduced a moratorium on Gates’ genetically modified Bt Cotton and Roundup Ready crops, Gates shifted his operations to Bangladesh. When the European Court of Justice ruled that gene-edited organisms and GMOs must be heavily regulated to protect public health, Gates launched a lobbying campaign for deregulation across the European community.

Gates is currently deploying his billions to orchestrate attacks against GMO and gene editing laws in many of the countries that have imposed safety standards. When scientists and regulators plead that time is essential to accurately assess the safety of gene editing and GMOs, Gates declares that “Time is the enemy!”

In 2017, a German human rights group, Heinrich Böll Stiftung (HBS), published evidence of a Gates’ secretive campaign to evade democratically imposed restraints on his high-risk gene manipulation experiments. HBS released more than 1,200 emails the group obtained under U.S. Freedom of Information laws. Those documents show that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hired a shady Big Ag/Biotech spy and propaganda outfit to mount an undercover espionage attack aimed at corrupting United Nations officials and sabotaging international efforts to ban a diabolical new technology called “gene drive.”

Gene drives are at the cutting edge of genetic engineering, synthetic biology and gene editing. They are the tools of choice for eugenicists and for those seeking to build the technocratic “transhuman future” championed by Gates and his Silicon Valley cronies.

Scientists use CRISPR technology to edit genes into an organism’s chromosomes to reprogram DNA to switch off the normal rules of genetic inheritance and “drive” the artificially introduced trait through an entire population and spread it to all future generations. Their capacity to permanently alter the genome of an entire species makes gene drives the biological instrument of ultimate power.

Gene-editing technology could facilitate Gates’ schemes to create and patent new-and-improved species of plants and animals, or to exterminate species of which he disapproves. One of his aims is to use gene drives to insert “suicide genes” to eradicate entire mosquito species that spread Zika or malaria — a goal of the Target Malaria Project, in which the Gates Foundation has invested$40 million. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a long-time protégé and partner of Gates and an enthusiastic cheerleader for gene drive, told StatNews, “Getting rid of them would be a blessing.”

Critics argue that gene drives pose an existential biosecurity risk to humanity due to their capacity to change or eliminate entire species and to catastrophically alter ecosystems. They are, also, the ultimate biological weapon; the most satanic minds in various military and intelligence agencies covet gene drives to breed supersoldiers or to mint “apocalypse genes.” Critics fear that nations might one day use “genocide genes” to eradicate certain races or undesirable traits.

HBS’s Gene Drive Files expose the leading role of the U.S. military in the development of gene drive technology. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has spent approximately $100 million researching gene drives. The other primary Gene Drive investors are Dr. Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has invested $75 million in researching suicide and anti-fertility genes.

At the 2016 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 13) in Cancun, 179 international organizations, including the Heinrich Böll Foundation, voted for the UN to impose a global moratorium on gene drives. The opponents of this technology also circulated a letter, “A Call for Conservation with a Conscience: No Place for Gene Drives in Conservation.” Environmentalists worry about unintended consequences if suicide or extinction genes leap species.

The Gene Drive emails reveal that in reaction to the COP 13 resolution, the Gates Foundation hired “Emerging Ag,” a sketchy espionage concern with its own sinister entanglements with Big Pharma and Big Ag, to sabotage and shut down the diverse and unified international coalition opposing gene drive.

The Gates Foundation gave Emerging Ag $1.6 million to “recruit a covert coalition of academics to manipulate the UN decision-making process over gene drives.” The emails reveal that the Gates’ campaign was part of the billionaire’s plan to “fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents.” Emerging Ag secretly mobilized some 65 allegedly “independent scientists” for hire — “Biostitutes,” in the industry vernacular — and public officials to an online expert group, the UN CBD Online Forum on Synthetic Biology. A senior executive of the Gates Foundation provided these crooked operatives with daily instructions on how to sabotage regulations, undermine the science, discredit advocates, corrupt the process, and subvert democracy.

In furtherance of its campaign, Gates simultaneously funded a 2016 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences endorsing gene driving. The DARPA co-funded the whitewash report with the Gates Foundation. As The Guardian noted after the release of the NAS report:

“The same US defense research agency (DARPA) who paid for the NAS study have made it known that they are going all-in on gene drive research and development of ‘robust’ synthetic organisms. There is good reason to be worried.”

As Jim Thomas of the ETC Group observed: “The fact that gene drive development is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises alarming questions about this entire field.”

In furtherance of its coordinated campaign with Emerging Ag, the Gates Foundation manipulated three members, who were under Gates’ control, of the relevant UN expert committee known as AHTEG (Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group) on Synthetic Biology. Gates and Emerging Ag were successful and the UN shot down the moratorium.

The Gates Foundation’s role, exposed by the Gene Drives files, in subverting the environmental movement’s campaign against this dangerous technology confirms Gates and his foundation as a rogue outlaw cartel with contempt for process, for democracy, for science, law, public opinion, public health and the safety of humanity.

Chemical warfare on human health

Mounting evidence points to the kind of industrially grown and processed foods that Gates favors as leading culprits in the chronic disease epidemics that are devastating human health and debilitating children across the globe.

The world’s most popular GMOs function to facilitate aerial spraying of pesticides. Monsanto’s technique of inserting genes to make agricultural crops resistant to weed-killing poisons allows Big Ag to fire ground-based farm workers, replacing them with airplanes (or drones) that saturate landscapes (and food) with aerosolized toxins like glyphosate and neonicotinoids.

Since the proliferation of chemical pesticides in the 1940s, more than half of American songbirds have disappeared, most of the world’s bee and insect populations have collapsed and chronic disease rates in America have risen to 54% in lockstep with increased pesticide use.

As Vandana Shiva pointed out, “Gates has declared chemical warfare not just on nature but on our body’s metabolic systems and the symbiosis in the gut microbiome with his pesticides and herbicides obsession, and his campaign to switch humanity to GMOs.”

Synthetic foods: soylent ‘Gates’

“Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.” — CIA propagandist Bertrand Russell, an advocate of one world government, dictatorship, and top-down control of the masses by a privileged oligarchal class (1952).

Gates’ power, profit and control agenda appears to drive his commitment to synthesize so-called “transhuman” laboratory foods and his massive investments in processed food manufacturing.

Gates calls synthetic meat “the future of food.” He holds investments in companies that make plant-based chicken, eggs and others that make food from bugs. Gates owns patents or has patents pending for over 100 animal proxies, from chicken to fish. He is invested heavily in Motif FoodWorks, a company that makes a variety of synthesized laboratory foods and ingredients. He co-founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 with his billionaire buddies Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Mark Zuckerberg — the so-called “Pandemic Profiteers Club.” (U.S. billionaires have increased their wealth by $1.1 trillion since the lockdown began, while the number of impoverished Americans grew by 8 million.)

That collaboration has large stakes in Beyond Meat, which they co-own with Tyson Foods and Cargill. Beyond Meat makes plant-based GMO and pesticide-laden chicken tacos. Gates and his Billionaire Boys Club also have big positions in Impossible Foods, which uses heat and pressure to produce synthetic burgers and bratwurst from GMO soy. Lab results show the company’s imitation meat contained glyphosate levels 11 times higher than its closest competitor. Seth Itzkan from Soil4Climate wrote:

“Impossible Foods should really be called ‘Impossible Patents.’ It’s not food; it’s software, intellectual property — 14 patents, in fact, in each bite of Impossible Burger. It’s IFood, the next killer app. Just download your flavor. This is its likely appeal to Bill Gates, their über investor.”

Another of Breakthrough’s ventures is Memphis Meats, which formulates an engineered meat-like tissue on a substrate of calf’s blood. A bullish Bloomberg predicts that synthetic meat revenues will reach $3.5 billion by 2026.

In June 2020, the “Breakthrough Bros” invested $3.5 million in Biomilq, a company that produces synthetic breast milk from “cultured human mammary glands and epithelial cells.” Gates has not explained whether the milk will contain the maternal antibodies — present in authentic mother’s milk — that function to protect infants from infectious diseases, or whether the coming generations of Biomilq kids will need to rely, instead, on additional batteries of Gates’ GMO vaccines.

Unimpressed, Vandana Shiva observes that Bill Gates “wants to deprive us of good, healthy proteins and fats and get us hooked on his synthetic lab-grown trash.”

Gates is the creator and largest donor to the United Nations’ subsidiary, GAVI, a faux governmental agency that he created to push his diabolical chemical, medical and food concoctions, and conduct villainous vaccine experiments on Africans and Indians. Since 2014, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, funded by the Gates Foundation in the amount of almost $850K has aggressively pushed the use of insect protein — particularly for the poor. GAVI characterizes wasps, beetles, crickets and other insects as “underutilized” food sources.

Following Gates’ lead, GAVI is optimistic that bugs will soon be an important food supplement for impoverished and undernourished children.

Perhaps in anticipation of that happy day, the Gates Foundation has invested in a South African company that makes edible protein from cultivated maggots. The company’s factory houses a billion flies and produces 22 tons of maggots daily that graze on slaughterhouse, municipal and household waste. Since markets are still immature for maggots as human food, Gates sells his maggot-meal to factory meat operations like those owned by Gates’ partner, Tyson Foods, to feed battery-caged chickens, and to large-scale fish farms, like those owned by Unilever, a $58 billion multinational, which is both a business partner to Gates and a grant beneficiary of his peculiar public charity.

As usual, Gates has also mobilized the international agencies that he controls and the large corporations with which he partners to drive his fake food agenda including, most notably, The Gates-funded World Economic Forum (WEF), which assembles the world’s billionaires in Davos each year to plan and plot out humanity’s political and economic future.

WEF’s Chairman, Klaus Schwab, is the author of the influential book, “COVID-19: The Great Reset”, which WEF has apparently mailed to most of the world’s elected officials, down to provincial executives.

Schwab makes the case that powerful people should use the COVID crisis to impose authoritarian controls, pervasive surveillance, oppressive new economic models and one-world government on a beleaguered, terrified and compliant humanity. The Great Reset is WEF’s plan to rebuild a new controlled economy systematically after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Schwab and Prince Charles unveiled “The Great Reset” at a WEF summit in May 2020. It is a vision for transferring the world into a totalitarian and authoritarian surveillance state manipulated by technocrats to manage traumatized populations, to shift wealth upward, and serve the interests of elite billionaire oligarchs. To “reset” global food policies, the WEF has promoted and partnered with an organization called EAT Forum, which describes itself as the “Davos for food.”

EAT’s co-founder is Wellcome Trust, an organization founded, funded by and strategically linked to vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline, in which Gates is heavily invested. EAT’s biggest initiative is called FReSH, which the organization describes as an effort to drive the transformation of the food system. The project’s partners include Bayer, Cargill, Syngenta, Unilever, and tech giant Google.

The EAT Forum works with these companies to “add value to business and industry” and “set the political agenda.” To further this profit-making enterprise, EAT collaborates with nearly 40 city governments in Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, South America and Australia. The organization also assists the Gates-funded United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the “creation of new dietary guidelines” and sustainable development initiatives.

According to Frederic Leroy, a food science and biotechnology professor at University of Brussels, EAT network is working closely with some of the biggest imitation meat companies, including Impossible Foods and other biotech companies, to replace wholesome nutritious foods with Gates’ genetically modified lab concoctions.

“They frame it as healthy and sustainable, which of course it is neither,” Leroy told The Defender.

Dr. Shiva also scoffs at Gates’ perennial propaganda claims that his GMO meats are about feeding kids and derailing climate change:

“Lab-processed fake food is really about patenting our food, not about feeding people or saving the climate, as Gates and his fellow biotech friends pretend. EAT’s proposed diet is not about nutrition at all, it’s about big business and it’s about a corporate takeover of the food system.”

Leroy added:

“Companies like Unilever and Bayer and other pharmaceutical companies are already chemical processors, so many of these companies are very well positioned to profit off of this new food business which revolves around processing chemicals and extracts needed to produce these lab-made foods on a global scale.”

Fortified foods

Synthetic and GMO foods tend to be low in the vital micronutrients that support human health. Glyphosate, for example, functions as a chelator. It kills weeds by leaching out the mineral building blocks of life. Farm crops exposed to glyphosate have far less nutritional value than natural foods.

People eating Gates’ processed, synthetic and GMO foods may have full stomachs, while being clinically malnourished. Gates is rushing to solve this problem by buying technologies and partnering with companies like Roche and Kraft that fortify foods artificially with minerals and vitamins. He is simultaneously promoting laws in developing nations to mandate food fortification. Those laws benefit pesticide and processed food companies to the disadvantage of traditional and organic farmers. Since U.S. companies, like Roche, Kraft, General Foods and Philip Morris already fortify their processed cheese and cereals, they are Gates’ enthusiastic partners in this grift.

I saw this hustle perpetrated by another Big Food swindler earlier in my career. In 2003, I was representing thousands of small-plot Polish farmers in the battle to keep Smithfield Foods’ industrial pork factories out of Poland. Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister, Andrzej Lepper, told me that Smithfield officials offered him a $1 million bribe to support a law requiring slaughterhouses to install high tech hygiene technology including laser-operated restroom faucets. Smithfield knew the law would have the effect of shuttering the 2,600 family operated abattoirs that made Poland’s signature kielbasa sausage. As the only entity that could afford the lasers, Smithfield would thereby gain monopoly control of Poland’s slaughter capacity and 100% of its lucrative kielbasa exports.

Gates took his food fortification laws from Smithfield’s playbook. By mandating that all foods be fortified, Kraft products like Cheez Whiz and American Singles, and its vitamin-fortified Kool-Aid and Tang, are positioned to displace locally produced goat cheese and goat milk in village markets and put small African farmers out of business.

To promote his mandatory fortified foods agenda, Gates created another of his useful quasi-governmental organizations, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) to assist multinational food companies (Gates’ business partners) in lobbying for favorable tariffs and tax rates for processed and fortified foods, and speedier regulatory review of new products in targeted countries. Gates’ GAIN consortium also gives local governments money to stimulate demand for fortified foods through large-scale public relations campaigns or by offering governmental “seals of approval” for corporate food products.

Gates, GAVI and GAIN

Gates modeled his GAIN project after his billion-dollar global vaccine program (GAVI). By masquerading as a public health agency, GAVI has successfully mobilized public agencies and private industry to profitably dump untested, experimental or discredited, and often deadly vaccines to inoculate poor children in developing nations.

Following the GAVI model, Gates launched his $70 million GAIN program at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children. His collaboration includes the UN agencies Gates controls, such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and the Big Processed Food companies like Philip Morris and Kraft, in which he has investments.

According to Vandana Shiva, GAIN’s objective is to “coordinate campaigns that pressure African and Asian countries to give obscene subsidies, tax breaks and tariff exemptions and other preferences for processed foods.”

Some experts are troubled by the idea of Bill Gates and multinational food companies teaming up to colonize food systems in underdeveloped countries, and hawking processed foods under a public health banner.

Dr. Mark Hyman, the New York Times bestselling author and Head of Strategy and Innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, told me:

“ … despite occasionally being fortified with vitamins and minerals processed foods are loaded with sugar, starch, processed oils, artificial colors, preservatives, pesticides and sodium which contribute to the double burden of obesity and malnutrition, and the chronic disease epidemic. Globally 11 million die every year from an excess of ultra-processed foods and lack of protective whole foods, making processed food the number one killer in the world.”

Dr. Hyman calls those foods “the opposite” of nutrition. Shiva agrees. “The GAIN program,” says Shiva, “is less about solving malnutrition than a heavy-handed way to force poor nations to open access to their markets, to obliterate local producers.”

“Fortified foods are illusory technical solutions to complex socioeconomic problems. Social and economic solutions would work better in the long run,” argues Professor Marion Nestle. Nestle is the revered food and nutrition icon who occupies the Paulette Goddard Chair of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. Nestle, the author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, told me:

“With one exception, iodized salt, fortified foods cost too much, fail to reach their intended targets, or are too limited in scope to do what they are intended to do. I see these laws as solving a problem for the companies that make these products, not addressing nutrient and calorie deficiencies. I’m not a fan of fortified foods. I want a wide variety of real foods made more available and less expensive, and locally produced. So I would agree with the critics. I wish the Gates Foundation would invest in projects to promote small, local food production.”

Artificial intelligence: ridding the world of farmers

Gates says he wants to revive farm economies by transforming agriculture with super-efficient, high tech AI to create “farms of the future.” According to Gates:

“We used to all have to go out and farm. We barely got enough food, when the weather was bad people would starve. Now through better seeds, fertilizer, lots of things, most people are not farmers. And so AI will bring us immense new productivity.”

Above all, he wants it to work fast. Gates’ “computational acceleration” will hasten the adoption of these beneficial innovations to achieve his ambitious schemes to deliver scientific breakthroughs to small farmers before climate change destroys their yields.

But Shiva warns American farmers, already drowning in debt, to be wary of Gates’ promises to throw them a line:

“When Bill Gates forced his devilish ‘rescue’ technologies on Indian farmers, the only one to benefit was Gates and his multinational partners. He gave money to the government and a company called Digital Green and made extravagant promises to digitally transform Indian agriculture. Then with the cooperation of his purchased government officials.

“Bill Gates put cameras and electronic sensors in the homes and fields of Indian farmers. He used their cell phones, which he gave them for free, and his fiber optic and 5G installations — which he persuaded the Indian Telecom Company to finance — to catalog, study, and steal farmers’ crop data, indigenous practices, and agricultural knowledge for free. Then he sold it back to them as new data. Instead of digitally transforming farms as he promised, he transformed Indian farmers into digital information. He privatized their seeds and harvested the work of the public system. He ripped out their knowledge assets and heirloom genetics, and installed GMO seeds and other ridiculous practices.” Shiva adds, “His clear agenda was to drive small farmers from the land and eventually mechanize and privatize food production.”

Christian Westbrook, an agricultural researcher and the founder of the online podcast, “Ice Age Farmer,” takes comfort that American farmers know Gates’ history in India and Africa: “We know who Bill Gates is, and we know the mischief he made for small farmers in Mexico, Africa and India. We know that his recent land purchases here are just the start of the Green Revolution 3.0. He wants to suck out the democratic essence of America’s pastoral landscapes and our farm families — to steal our livelihoods, our knowledge, our seeds, and our land.”

Westbrook takes note of the fact that like all chiselers, Gates is always in a rush:

“His strategy is to keep everyone moving so fast they can’t see the scam. He’s always telling us that climate change can’t wait, that we need to accelerate access to these products and adoption of his technologies, that research isn’t happening fast enough.”

Westbrook told me that Gates’ endless talk about “accelerating the process” and his extravagant promises of miraculous new technologies, of “investment,” and of “public-private” partnerships, are all part of his con. “He keeps telling everyone we need to ‘accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.’”

Many farmers say they don’t care to be rescued by Gates. Westbrook says he thinks Gates intends his baronial U.S. spreads to serve as flagships — showcases for his retinue of digital technologies for American farmers. “He’s doing it for the same reasons he brought his technology to Indian farms — to steal their knowledge, and move them off the land.”

Trent Loos, a sixth-generation Midwestern rancher and farm activist, told me that farmers have a knee-jerk reaction against billionaires “playing Monopoly” with American farmland:

“It makes it difficult for young farmers or even those who have farmed for generations, to compete with such deep pockets. It certainly creates a barrier for them. When people with this type of wealth start to buy farms, it makes us wonder what they are really up to. Nobody wants to rent land from Bill Gates, or work as his sharecropper.”

Westbrook says he believes Gates is pursuing a darker agenda. Like Shiva, Westbrook believes that Gates and the other robber barons are using the pretexts of climate, biodiversity, and the zoonotic pandemic threat to get human beings out of the ag business and off the farm. And there is evidence to support him. The Gates Foundation is significantly invested in Alphabet, Google’sparent company. Alphabet has invented “crop sniffing” robots, designed to replace farmers and ranchers, as part of its “Mineral” project. Its “Moonshot” project is “developing and testing a range of software and hardware prototypes based on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, simulation, sensors, robotics, and more.”

Within a year of purchasing Whole Foods, Jeff Bezos — Gates has a considerable investment in Amazon — also invested heavily in robot-controlled vertical farms that also minimize human involvement with farming.

Says Westbrook, “He wants to get the people off of the farms, get the animals off, and get us all eating his plant-based meats and bug protein.”

“Gates talks about farming as an archaic, quaint, dirty, dangerous, inefficient, barbarous relic from the past that threatens us by increasing the menace of climate change and the risks of global pandemics by putting humans in dangerous contact with microbes,” says Howard Vlieger, an Iowa farmer who has worked as a crop and livestock consultant in the U.S. and Canada since 1992.

Vlieger is an expert on the impacts of pesticides and GMOs on food products and soils. “Gates’ objective is to move the world “away from sustainable and humane animal agriculture that celebrates our contact with the soil and finds good health in our respectful interactions with nature — and toward artificial cows and a grim chemical paradigm that are all features of top-down dystopia. His vision is one of contaminated and unsavory foods and separation of man from nature.”

“Gates seems to have no concept of the joy that ordinary people — people like our family — take in farming,” Nicolette Niman told me. Niman is a California rancher and farmer, and the author of the books “Righteous Porkchop” and “Defending Beef.” Her husband Bill is the founder of Niman Ranch, a co-op of hundreds of small sustainable U.S. cattle and hog growers who market high-quality organic beef and pork from sustainable grass-fed operations.

“Regenerative farming and ranching immeasurably enriches human lives. It’s challenging work, based upon our intimate contact with the earth. At its best, good farming is a quest to understand and follow nature’s models,” Niman said. Niman says that Gates seems to have little interest in nature’s wisdom:

“He doesn’t seem to understand that our engagement with the soil, and joy we get from our contact with the earth, our complex relationship with our animals, even with all the hardships and difficulties, are sources of our freedom and our pride, and happiness at being masters of our destinies.”

“We need to build a world that respects individual self-determination, the humane treatment of animals, and good stewardship of our soils. We need to understand that a wholesome relationship with nature is not only vital to our health and climate, it’s the source of dignity, liberty, and enrichment in our post-industrial era.”

Using wide-ranging technologies, all of these activists from various continents expressed their discomfort with Gates’ tendency to look at population, rather than people, and to see the management of population as a problem in urgent need of his technological solutions.

“Gates sees the forest, not the trees,” Vlieger observes. “And even when he looks at the forest, he only seems to see board feet of lumber — how he can leverage the landscapes for cash and commoditize people.” Vlieger continues:

“Gates’ habit of seeing every human difficulty through the lens of some technological solution from which he can profit is beyond myopic. It’s pathology — sociopathology, really. Gates is a dangerously powerful sociopath with $137 billion and a vision for a top-down technocracy. Does that worry anybody?”

Westbrook says Gates, Cargill and Tyson are a powerful cartel on a mission to end animal agriculture and drive human beings from farms. “It is ‘replacement agriculture,’” says Westbrook. “They even use that word, ‘alternative agriculture.’”

Westbrook’s view of the dystopian future of technocratic totalitarianism envisioned by Bill Gates sounds like a baseless conspiracy theory if one ignores all the evidence supporting him. He predicts that we will very soon — in months, not years — see engineered food shortages and pressures to empty and “improve” the rural landscapes by idling farmland and replacing farm jobs with robots and artificial intelligence.

Westbrook predicts government efforts to push populations toward mega cities and smart cities where businesses are closed, jobs are scarce, and most of us will rely on universal basic income paid in digital currencies — revocable, of course, in cases of noncompliance and disobedience. Westbrook predicts a scenario “where the human cattle are completely dependent on the government for money and food, and all the folks are in one place in the smart cities and they’re easily monitored by the technocrats of Gates’ Great Reset.” Westbrook continued:

“They’re shutting down food production and actually more, more broadly, they’re shutting down all economic activity, all human activity, corralling us into their smart cities. It’s pretty appalling. And now that we’ve got these pandemics, we had to implement medical martial law, and since it’s all a health crisis, we’re also going to have to take over all of your food productions and your nutritional needs. They’ve married these two things.”

Time will tell us if Westbrook’s nightmare is merely a paranoid conspiracy theory — I hope so.

Food Systems Summit

In 2009, Bill Gates, an unelected billionaire with no governmental office or diplomatic portfolio, kicked off his global vaccine enterprise with a speech to the United Nations. He announced the $10 billion donation and declared the launch of his “Decade of Vaccines.” His scheme unfolded like clockwork. Gates’ contributions secured him ironclad control over WHO. As Foreign Affairs has reported, “Few policy initiatives or normative standards set by the World Health Organization are announced before they have been casually, unofficially vetted by Gates Foundation staff.”

Gates created and funded powerful faux-governmental agencies like PATH, GAVI, CEPI, and the Brighton Collaboration, to push vaccines in developing countries, to consolidate his control over public health, and to prepare the groundwork for the global vaccine putsch he had pre-scheduled for 2020.

In January 2019, the WHO dutifully declared — citing no specific evidence — that “vaccine hesitancy” was one of the principal threats to global health. The Gates’ Medical Cartel followed that statement with orchestrated campaigns in every U.S. state and in countries around the globe by pharma-financed politicians introducing laws to mandate vaccines and end exemptions.

Two months later, the powerful House Intelligence Committee chair, Adam Schiff — yet another of Gates’ financial beneficiaries — demanded social media and media companies begin censoring “vaccine misinformation” — a euphemism for any assertion that departs from official pharma and government pronouncements. Gates has giant stakes in Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. Those companies all began enthusiastically censoring criticism of vaccines.

A year later, the COVID-19 outbreak provided an opportunity of convenience for Gates and his vaccine cartel to consolidate their control of humanity. A May 2020 article by Derrick Broze in The Last American Vagabond observed that, “By tracing the Foundation’s investments and Gates’ relationships we can see that nearly every person involved in the fight against COVID-19 is tied to Gates or his Foundation by two degrees or less.” Their relationship gave Bill Gates and his Foundation an unchallenged influence over the response to the pandemic.

Gates repeatedly declared, in appearances on virtually every network and cable show and on every media platform, that all economic activity must cease until all 7 billion humans were vaccinated and possessed immunization passports. His ten-year Decade of Vaccines that began with his UN appearance had gone off without a hitch. Under the leadership of Gates’ old protégé and loyalist, Fauci, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services arranged immunity from liability for COVID vaccines and committed $48 billion in taxpayer money to buy and distribute a retinue of new experimental vaccines, many of them owned by Gates.

Gates’ control of the process has been complete. His execution of his vaccine prediction was elegant and flawless. And now Gates’ surrogates are rolling out the same playbook to push through his totalitarian food agenda.

During the October 14 -18 plenary of the 46th Session of the UN Committee on World Food Security, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, announced the convening of a UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. Guterres acknowledged that the Summit had been jointly requested by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Economic Forum (WEF). Bill Gates and his foundation generously fund and control all four organizations.

The UN Food Systems Summit effectively announced a parallel agenda to the one launched by the WEF when it hosted its Great Reset conference in June, 2020. In their research into the UN Food Systems Summit, AGRA Watch (the grassroots advocacy group that follows Gates and his foundation’s failed Green Revolution in Africa) found that of the 12 individuals involved in the Summit, 11 have strong connections to the Gates Foundation.

According to Heather Day of AGRA Watch, in some instances, these organizations were directly funded by the Gates Foundation and others Gates-funded specific programs that had major roles: “So his fingers aren’t just in it; almost every single one of the participants is working for Bill Gates. These are the authors of the UN food systems summit.” The Food Systems Summit is a 100% Gates project.

It gets worse: The coordinator of Gates’ “Decade of Food Security” is Dr. Agnes Kalibata. Kalibata is the President of Gates/Rockefeller’s AGRA program that orchestrated Gates’ notorious failed Green Revolution in Africa. Kalibata is the perfect leader to bring AGRA to the world. The Summit, she predicts, will bring together all the major stakeholders in a public-private partnership “to make food systems inclusive, climate adapted and resilient, and support sustainable peace.”

Kalibata reminded Food Systems Summit participants of the urgency. They had, she said, only 10 years left to accelerate the transformation of our food systems to meet Sustainable Development Goals for climate, nutrition and pandemic response.

The UN Food Systems Summit will lay out Gates’ “Decade of Food” blueprint for the global food agenda to be completed by 2030. We can only pray that Gates’ next new health plan for humanity won’t involve the same level of traumatic violence to our civil rights, to our global economy, to the traditions of our civilization, to the idealism of democracies, and to our self-determination, that accompanied his 2020 “Decade of Vaccines.”

Day is pessimistic: “Gates’ plan will be a roadmap of how to replace everything that is good about farming with the technocrats’ own systems for jobless farming, chemical food and bug protein,” predicts Day.

Conclusion

The Gates Foundation is not conventional philanthropy. It gives miniscule, if any, support to popular causes like the Wounded Warrior Foundation, ASPCA, environmental, or voting rights or civil rights groups.

It is a weaponized philanthropy that Gates launched in 1994 to resuscitate his reputation after the Microsoft antitrust case exposed him as a lying, cheating, thieving, manipulator intent on felonious monopoly control of global information conduits.

Gates has since invested $36 billion into the Gates Foundation, which has a value of $46.9 billionover which he and his wife exercise total control. The foundation has given away only $23.6 billionin charitable grants, and these “gifts” include billions in tax-deductible donations to companies in which Gates is invested, like Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Sanofi.

Gates’ brilliant mind devised this scheme to form a foundation that shelters his income, and allows him to leverage taxpayer dollars by investing the foundation’s earnings in projects that multiply his wealth and expand his power and public prestige, while avoiding taxes.

Using this structure, he can give tax-deductible donations to companies he partly owns and reap personal and foundation profits while avoiding taxes — and allowing him to hide his money in myriad ways. It’s a win-win! Gates has deployed his foundation as the embodiment of his base instincts for monopoly and control — a vehicle for ruthless philanthrocapitalism that hijacks public access and blurs the lines between corporate and public interests, cloaks private profit agendas with lofty public-spirited rhetoric and gives himself monopoly control over public health, our planet’s life support systems, our economics and people.

Gates has made his foundation a tool for consolidating the efforts of his fellow billionaires, captured regulators, and his business partners from Big Pharma, Dirty Energy, GMO food, Telecom and Big Data, and the bought and brain-dead journalists who collectively profit from the multiplying miseries of the dystopian world they have arranged for the rest of us. Gates and his cronies, toadies and minions pump up fear of pandemics, climate change, mass extinction — and offer his vision of new technologies as the salvation, which only he possesses the genius to deploy.

Even as he consolidates control over our health and food systems, Gates is promoting digitalized currencies, calling these systems a “global humanitarian priority.” (Kissinger’s final adjuration is, “Who controls money can control the world”), and in funding ground and space-based and 5G infrastructures, city-sized analytics centers, and biometric chips to mine and harvest our data and biodata and as mechanisms of surveillance, profit, and control.

Gates is planning a satellite fleet that will be able to survey every square inch of the planet 24 hours per day. Such systems will no doubt be useful should populations become restless with political and economic structures that strip citizens of power, shift wealth ever upward, and doom most of humanity to meaningless, hopeless survival.

Democracy and farm freedom advocate Dr. Vandana Shiva says that Gates’ philanthrocapitalism is a “destructive force with the potential to push the future of our planet towards extinction and ecological collapse.” Shiva accuses Gates of using philanthropic capitalism to accelerate the corporate takeover of our seed, agriculture, food, knowledge and global health systems. “He funds the manipulation of information and promotes the erosion of democracy — all in pursuit of personal power and profits.”

Shiva says the Gates Foundation has powered an “unholy alliance” between big capital, science and technology institutions and governments to establish a global empire over life, through monocultures, patents and monopolies designed to destroy the natural world of diversity, self-organization and freedom.

“You have seen the wickedness they can do with vaccines in the name of public health,” Shiva told me. “Well, now he controls the land. He controls the seed. He controls the food. He has the ultimate power to starve us all to death.”

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s reputation as a resolute defender of the environment stems from a litany of successful legal actions.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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Hundreds of unmarked graves have been discovered on the premises of another former ‘Indian residential school’ in Canada, throwing further light on the extent of the genocide of indigenous children. On Thursday, June 24, the Cowessess First Nation said in the press conference at least 600 unmarked graves have been discovered on the grounds of what used to be the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan.

Cowessess chief Cadmus Delorme also stated that the radar search had indicated 751 graves in the ground, adding that the ground-penetrating radar system used to discover these graves has an error rate of 10% to 15%. This would translate to at least 600 graves on the grounds. The news comes barely a month after 215 unmarked graves of children were discovered on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.

In the press conference, Delorme also stated that the graves are being treated as “unmarked graves” rather than “mass graves” as of now. Much like the Kamloops schools, the Marieval school was also operated by the Roman Catholic Church between 1886 and 1970. The Church controlled more than two-thirds of all the so-called Indian residential schools in Canada.

“In 1960, there may have been marks on these graves. The Catholic Church representatives removed these headstones and today they are unmarked graves,” stated Delorme. Removing grave marks or gravestones is a criminal act as per Canadian law, and chief Delorme added that the ground will be treated as a crime scene.

He also noted that it is yet to be ascertained whether the graves discovered are all that of children. “We cannot confirm they are all children. But there are oral stories that there are adults in this gravesite, as well,” Delorme added. The discovery has attracted further outrage across Canada, which is reeling from the discovery of the Kamloops graves.

A joint statement released by the Cowessess First Nation and the Federation of Sovereign Indian Nations (FSIN) stated that “our community is in mourning and our families are in pain. Every one of our Cowessess members has a family member buried there. The pain we are feeling is real.”

FSIN chief Bobby Cameron, who had earlier called the discovery a proof of genocide in the country, emphasized that sadly “this is just the beginning.” He pointed out that thousands of children have died in these residential schools for the better part of the 19th and 20th century.

“There are thousands of families across our Treaty territories that have been waiting for their children to come home. Saskatchewan had the highest number of residential schools and highest number of survivors. There will be hundreds more,” he added.

The province of Saskatchewan in central Canada has a large indigenous population, constituting over 16% of the total population – much higher than the national average of less than 5%. The province also had the last of the operational Indian residential schools in the country, Gordon’s Indian Residential School in Punnichy, which was closed only in 1996.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), in its final report released in 2015, had documented 566 deaths in the school in its nearly nine decades of operation. The TRC stated that these confirmed deaths are still only a partial record and that the actual numbers could be much higher.

Indigenous leaders and TRC officials have often called for a nationwide search and discovery of all unmarked graves, to identify the victims of the residential schools and allow proper burials as a step towards justice for a historical crime. Over 6,000 students are estimated to have died in these schools that operated for nearly a century or even longer across Canada.

“This horrific truth can no longer be ignored,” said Stephanie Scott, executive director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). “The least governments and churches must do now is to provide access to the necessary records to identify the locations of all the children and allow communities to honor them with the traditional ceremonies and protocols they were denied.”

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Featured image: The grounds of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, where Cowessess leaders discovered hundreds of graves. (Photo: Cowessess First Nation/Facebook)

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NATO began its annual Dynamnic Mongoose anti-submarine warfare exercise on June 28 off the coast of Norway in what the military bloc deems the High North: the Arctic region, which it has identified as its domain since 2009. (As it has the Mediterranean Sea, Baltic Sea and Black Sea.)

The code name for the war games may seem puzzling; there’s a noticeable incongruity with the name of an animal primarily associated with South Asia and Africa used for maneuvers on the top of the world. It’s less baffling when one recalls the mongoose is used to kill snakes. Russian submarines are the snakes.

This year’s iteration includes warships, warplanes and submarines from NATO member states Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Norway and the U.S. Five of those states – Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and the U.S. – are Arctic coastal nations. The others are Finland and Sweden, both NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partners, and Russia. Isolated Russia. Targeted Russia.

Two submarines, six military vessels and eight aircraft are involved.

The Russian submarine fleet is that part of its nuclear triad of delivery systems least vulnerable to a first-strike attack. Missile silos and aircraft on the ground could be destroyed within hours of such an attack. Submarines, then, are Russia’s last line of defense, the only retaliatory force left and as such its main deterrent force.

Neutralizing Russia’s submarines, first or soon in a first strike, would render the nation defenseless in a strategic context. NATO knows that. That’s why it conducts Dynamic Mongoose annually.

NATO’s Allied Command Operations web site quotes the commander of Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 describing the exercise:

“By exercising and validating our anti-submarine warfare capabilities, tactics, techniques and procedures during Dynamic Mongoose 21, NATO will be better prepared to counter, and if necessary, defeat a subsurface threat during an emerging crisis or conflict….I am confident that collectively we will be able to operate effectively in a sub-surface threat environment, where joint warfighting proficiency with submarines, maritime helicopters and maritime patrol aircraft is essential to mission success.”

Shorn of the excess verbiage, the commander was talking about anti-submarine warfare. Nothing else.

The deputy commander of NATO’s Allied Maritime Command added to the above the assertion that “the airbases provided by three Allied Nations [Britain, Iceland and Norway] this year will let us showcase how capable NATO is, in terms of conducting large scale anti-submarine warfare operations in the North Atlantic….”

The NATO press release on the drills also speaks of strengthening NATO interoperability and of submarines taking turns “hunting and being hunted, closely coordinating their efforts with the air and surface participants.”

The Arctic Ocean, especially under the polar ice cap, used to be the final redoubt of Russian strategic capabilities. NATO is determined to eliminate that remaining refuge.

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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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***

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”— George Orwell, 1984

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell (Jun. 25, 1903-Jan. 21, 1950) has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm—depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.

Who could have predicted that so many years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”—George Orwell

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”―George Orwell

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

Our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”―George Orwell

The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.

What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.

In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.

Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.

Orwell understood what many Americans are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs.

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” ― George Orwell

Even our ability to speak and think freely is being regulated.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons.

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.

In my debut novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the dystopian future that George Orwell predicted for 1984 has finally arrived, 100 years late and ten times as brutal. In this post-apocalyptic world where everyone marches to the beat of the same drummer and words like “freedom” are taboo, Erik Blair—Orwell’s descendant and unwitting heir to his legacy—isn’t volunteering to be anyone’s hero. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always go according to plan. To save all that he loves, Orwell will have to travel between his future self and the past.

And in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” Orwell’s Big Brother relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

This is the final link in the police state chain.

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.

We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.

“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell

Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the government.

The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.

In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” ― George Orwell

Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.

Say hello to the new Thought Police.

Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA has been working on an artificial intelligence system designed to anticipate your every move. Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence) has been designed to detect patterns and predict behavior.

No information is sacred or spared.

Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS.

What we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.

So where does that leave us?

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.

It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.

Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw. Just look at what happened to Julian Assange.

So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?

We’re running out of options.

Whether you’re dealing with fact or fiction, as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.

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Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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***

After only five months in office, President Joe Biden has already become notorious for his verbal gaffes and mis-spokes, so much so that an admittedly Republican-partisan physician has suggested that he be tested to determine his cognitive abilities. That said, however, there is one June 16th tweet that he is responsible for that is quite straightforward that outdoes everything else for sheer mendacity. It appeared shortly after the summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and was apparently intended to be rhetorical, at least insofar as Biden understands the term. It went: “How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country.”

There have been various estimates of just exactly how many elections the United States has interfered in since the Second World War, the numbers usually falling somewhere between 80 and 100, but that does not take into account the frequent interventions of various kinds that took place largely in Latin America between the Spanish-American War and 1946. One recalls how the most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps Major General Smedley Butler declared that “War is a racket” in 1935. He confessed to having “…helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”

And there have been since 1900 other regime change and interventionist actions, both using military force and also brought about by corrupting local politicians with money and other inducements. And don’t forget the American trained death squads active in Latin America. Some would also include in the list the possibly as many as 50 Central Intelligence Agency and Special Ops political assassinations that have been documented, though admittedly sometimes based on thin evidence.

That Joe Biden, who has been at a reasonably high level in the federal government for over forty years, including as Vice President for eight years and now President should appear to be ignorant of what his own government has done and quite plausibly continues to do is astonishing. After all, Biden was VP when Victoria Nuland worked for the Obama Administration as the driving force behind efforts in 2013-2014 to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who is the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square accompanied by Senator John McCain to encourage the protesters.

A Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protégé who is married to leading neocon Robert Kagan, Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. As Biden’s tweet even recognized in a backhanded way, it is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a $5 billion budget, but Washington has long believed in a global double standard for evaluating its own behavior. Biden clearly is part of that and also clearly does not understand what he is doing or saying.

Nuland is most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create. The Obama and Biden Administration’s replacement of the government in Kiev was the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea. That point of conflict has continued to this day, with a U.S. warships in the Black Sea engaging in exercises with the Ukrainian navy.

Biden was also with the Obamas when they chose to destabilize and destroy Libya. Nor should Russia itself be forgotten. Boris Yeltsin was re-elected president of Russia in 1996 after the Clinton Administration pumped billions of dollars into his campaign, enabling him to win a close oligarch-backed victory that had been paid for and managed by Washington. Joe Biden was a Senator at the time.

And then there is Iran, where democratically elected Mohammed Mossadeq was deposed by the CIA in 1953 and replaced by the Shah. The Shah was replaced by the Islamic Republic in turn in 1979 and the poisoned relationship between Washington and Tehran has constituted a tit-for-tat quasi-cold war ever since, marked by assassinations and sabotage.

And who can forget Chile where Salvador Allende was removed by the CIA in 1973 and replaced by Augusto Pinochet? Or Cuba and the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 where the CIA failed to bring about regime change in Havana? Can it be that Joe Biden cannot recall any of those “interventions,” which were heavily covered in the international media at the time?

And to make up the numbers, Joe can possibly consider the multiple “interferences in elections,” which is more precisely what he was referring to. As a CIA officer stationed in Europe and the Middle East in and 1970s through the early 1990s, I can assure him that I personally know about nearly continuous interference in elections in places like France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, all of which had prominent communist parties, some of which were on the verge of government entry. Bags of money went to conservative parties, politicians were bribed and journalists bought. In fact, during that time period I would dare to say there was hardly an election that the United States did not somehow get involved in.

Does it still go on? The U.S. has been seeking regime change in Syria since 2004 and is currently occupying part of the country. And of course, Russia is on the receiving end of a delegitimization process through a controlled western media that is seeking to get rid of Putin by exploiting a CIA and western intelligence funded opposition. China has no real opposition or open elections, nor can its regime plausibly be changed, but it is constantly being challenged by depicting it and its behavior in the most negative fashion possible.

Joe Biden really should read up on the history of American political and military interventions, regime changes and electoral interference worldwide. He just might learn something. The most important point might, however, elude him. All of the intervention and all of the deaths have turned out badly both for the U.S. and for the people and countries being targeted. Biden has taken a bold step to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, though it now appears that that decision might be in part reversed. Much better to complete the process and also do the same thing in places like Iraq, Somalia and Syria. The whole world will be a better place for it.

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]

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***

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi on Wednesday expressed his anger over President Biden’s recent airstrikes in Iraq and Syria during a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

Even though Biden’s airstrikes targeted an Iraqi militia and killed civilians, the US said the bombing was a “message” to Iran. Kadhimi told Stoltenberg that the US-led coalition in Iraq should not use the country as a theater to attack other countries.

Kadhimi’s office shared a readout of the meeting between the Iraqi leader and Stoltenberg with Newsweek. The readout said that Kadhimi “indicated the importance of developing relations between Iraq and NATO for the interests of the Iraqi people and the stability of the region and the world, as he stressed the importance of Iraq not being an arena for settling conflicts, or a springboard for aggression against any of its neighbors.”

Iraq has found itself in the middle of Washington’s campaign against Iran before. In January 2020, the US assassinated Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. Soleimani was killed alongside Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was the leader of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a group of mostly Shia state-sponsored militias that was formed in 2014 to fight ISIS.

The killing of Muhandis and Soleimani enraged many in Iraq, and the country’s parliament voted unanimously to expel US troops. But the US refuses to leave and continues to bomb PMF fighters, enraging the Iraqi government.

The militias Biden targeted fall under the umbrella of the PMF, and the group’s new leader is warning if the US continues to attack them, PMF fighters will take revenge on US troops. Biden’s airstrikes have already caused attacks on US troops in Syria.

On Monday, a spokesman for Iraq’s armed forces released a statementcondemning Biden’s airstrikes. “We condemn the US air attack that targeted a site last night on the Iraqi-Syrian border, which represents a blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security in accordance with all international conventions,” the statement said.

*

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

Featured image is from the public domain

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

Vaccine Choice Canada: Open Letter to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC

By Ted Kuntz, June 30, 2021

The recent statement issued by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC (CPSBC) [1] is a clear violation of the mission of the CPSBC to “act first and foremost in the interest of the public.” [2] The CPSBC fails in this duty by stifling genuine inquiry into what is best for patients and threatening to sanction any doctor who dares to question the merits of the prevailing measures.

FDA Reverses Itself: Rejects COVID Antibody Test Results; Insanity Reigns

By Jon Rappoport, June 30, 2021

Even a robot programmed to “follow the science” would throw up his hands in despair while reading the latest FDA COVID pronouncement. After untold numbers of people have been given antibody tests to determine their COVID status, the FDA now states, “Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a safety communication informing the public that results from SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests should not be used to evaluate immunity or protection from COVID-19 at any time, and especially after the person received a COVID-19 vaccination.”

The Configuration of Sensation: Paul Cézanne’s Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art

By Prof. Sam Ben-Meir, June 30, 2021

New York’s Museum of Modern Art is currently presenting an exhibition devoted to an in-depth review of Paul Cézanne’s drawings. If there is any criticism to be made of this extraordinary show, it is that it is frankly overwhelming: with roughly 280 pencil, ink and gouache drawings and watercolors (and even a handful of oil paintings), there is so much to take in that two or three visits to the exhibition may be required to do it justice.

Atlantic Stormwind in the Black Sea

By Manlio Dinucci, June 30, 2021

The large aeronaval maneuver Sea Breeze, officially “co-hosted by the United States and Ukraine” in the Black Sea, began yesterday. The United States planned and command it, it is, therefore, the host in this sea close to Russian territory.  Sea Breeze takes place from June 28 to July 10. It is led by US Naval Forces Europe-Africa / Sixth Fleet with headquarters in Naples. It includes naval, submarine, amphibious, land, and air warfare exercises.

Why Children Should Not Receive the COVID Shot

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, June 30, 2021

While benefits were rare and short-lived, side effects were common and long-term effects are completely unknown. In the 12-to-15 age group, 75.5% experienced headache, along with a long list of other transient side effects. However, more serious systemic adverse events also occurred in 2.4% of the trial subjects receiving the actual mRNA shot.

Ivermectin’s Success in Battling COVID-19

By David Heller, June 30, 2021

A recently published study in this month’s American Journal of Therapeutics, took an in-depth look at 18 randomized controlled studies on the use of Ivermectin to control COVID-19. The study concludes that the use of Ivermectin “significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19” and “found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance.”

Netanyahu Is Out but Nothing Has Changed

By James J. Zogby, June 30, 2021

One month after the end of the last hostilities between Israel and Hamas, events on the ground demonstrate that little has changed. And once again the US media is ignoring Israel’s creeping annexation of Palestinian lands and their brutally aggressive behaviors toward the Palestinian people.

How Real Science Became Fake News

By Josh Mitteldorf, June 30, 2021

Thirty years ago, the man who taught me quantum mechanics at Harvard wrote that the suppression of debate will be the “death of science”. Perhaps he saw the shape of things to come. Today, science is being perverted for political ends to an unprecedented extent. To look for an appropriate analogy, we would have to go back to the authority of the Church in medieval Europe.

FBI Fabrication Against Assange Falls Apart

By Craig Murray, June 30, 2021

On the final day of the Assange extradition hearing, magistrate Vanessa Baraitser refused to accept an affidavit from Assange’s solicitor Gareth Peirce, on the grounds it was out of time. The affidavit explained that the defence had been unable to respond to the new accusations in the United States government’s second superseding indictment, because these wholly new matters had been sprung on them just six weeks before the hearing resumed on 8 September 2020.

4,115 Fully Vaccinated Have Been Hospitalized or Died with Breakthrough COVID Infections, CDC Says

By Megan Redshaw, June 30, 2021

As of June 21, nearly half (49%) of cases occurred in females and 76% were aged 65 years and older. There were a total of 3,907 hospitalizations and 750 deaths among those who had breakthrough infections, although not all of the hospitalizations may have been due primarily to COVID, Forbes reported.

Losing the Plot on COVID. Health Issue Flagrantly Politicized

By Daniel Rabil, June 30, 2021

What happens when a population of introverts, hypochondriacs, and obsessive-compulsives is continuously bombarded with messages to seclude and disinfect themselves, for fear that COVID-19 prickle-balls lurk everywhere, waiting to attack?

Vaccine Choice Canada VCC Wednesday Zoom

Guest: Professor Michel Chossudovsky 

.

June 30, 2021 7:00pm  (EDT), 4.00pm (PT)

Click to Register

EDT Register in advance. 

The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset”

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***

The recent statement issued by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC (CPSBC) [1] is a clear violation of the mission of the CPSBC to “act first and foremost in the interest of the public.” [2] The CPSBC fails in this duty by stifling genuine inquiry into what is best for patients and threatening to sanction any doctor who dares to question the merits of the prevailing measures.

Health Canada, and also the federal and provincial governments, have imposed measures that have never been utilized before and are not in alignment with standard pandemic procedures. This includes indiscriminate lockdowns, physical distancing, extensive use of face coverings, closure of schools, businesses, and places of worship, and emergency use authorization of unapproved genetic treatments that have not completed standard clinical trials.

Instead of recognizing that these measures do not appear to be working, and that other governments globally have ended these same measures, governments across Canada insist on doing more of the same regardless of the negative consequences. To date, our BC government and public health authorities have failed to provide appropriate scientific and medical evidence to support these measures in spite of numerous requests and legal proceedings filed against them. Public Health officials have also refused to participate in open and transparent debate on their measures with both the public and their own medical professionals.

In July 2020, Vaccine Choice Canada filed legal action against the Government of Canada, Government of Ontario, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Teresa Tam and others.[3] The defendants have failed to submit a Statement of Defence. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the various governments have not filed a statement of defence because they are unable to defend the use of the imposed measures.

There is a growing body of expert opinion globally which recognizes that these measures are doing more harm than good. The Great Barrington Declaration, which strongly advocates for an end to indiscriminate lockdowns, has been signed by more than 45,000 health care professionals globally. For the CPSBC to imply that the science is settled and that anyone who disagrees with the measures, or reports the harm caused by the measures is spreading ‘misinformation’, is unethical and immoral and cannot be tolerated.

The unfortunate reality is that the CPSBC is not alone in acting against physicians in this way. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) has similarly attempted to bully and censor its physicians.[4] The public is rapidly losing trust in a medical system that rigidly follows policy dictates, disregards the patient’s experience, acts without reliable scientific data, denies the ethical and legal right to informed consent, and attempts to silence our frontline health care professionals.

Vaccine Choice Canada honours doctors as Dr. Stephen Malthouse and Dr. Charles Hoffe for their courage, integrity, and commitment to the health of their patients. This is what ethical doctors do. The muzzling of debate and silencing of frontline experts not only harms patients, it undermines the credibility of the CPSBC in the eyes of the public. The consequences of this loss of trust will be far reaching.

We strongly advise the CPSBC to withdraw their statement and instead issue a statement in support of BC physicians that “act first and foremost in the interest of their patients.”

I look forward to your considered response.

Sincerely,

Ted Kuntz, President

Vaccine Choice Canada

*

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Notes

[1] https://www.cpsbc.ca/files/pdf/Joint-Statement-on-Misleading-COVID-19-Information-2021-05-06.pdf

[2] https://www.cpsbc.ca/about-us/mission

[3] https://www.constitutionalrightscentre.ca/20CRC16/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/vcc-statement-of-claim-2020-redacted.pdf

[4] https://www.cpso.on.ca/News/Key-Updates/Key-Updates/COVID-misinformation

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***

Addis Ababa‘s unexpected decision to implement a unilateral ceasefire in its rebellious Tigray Region following eight months of war there was influenced by its opponents’ unconventional military advantage fighting on their mountainous home turf, neighboring Eritrea’s military withdrawal from the conflict following international criticism of its activities, and the immense Western pressure put upon the aspiring Horn of Africa hegemon to prevent what the US predicted might become the world’s worst famine there.

Observers were shocked by Monday’s announcement that the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) withdrew from the capital of the country’s rebellious Tigray Region and implemented a unilateral ceasefire until the end of the planting season there that’s usually sometime in September. Addis Ababa had presented its actions there as a law enforcement operation against separatists led by the previously leading force of the former ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which was later designated as terrorists. Government accounts claimed that the ENDF was winning though these assertions couldn’t be independently verified the entire time due to the difficulty that independent journalists had in accessing the war-torn region. The protracted conflict there also led to accusations of human rights abuses by all sides, and the US recently warned that Tigray risked suffering from the world’s worst famine if the conflict didn’t end soon.

There are several possible explanations for this dramatic turn of events. The first is that the TPLF commanded an unconventional military advantage by fighting on their mountainous home turf. The allegations of human rights abuses by the ENDF might have also inspired a massive recruitment drive among the locals if they began to view the conflict through a national liberation lense, thereby making it impossible for the military to indefinitely control the region. Neighboring Eritrea, which also militarily intervened in the region, earlier accused the US of supporting the TPLF so it’s possible that some degree of foreign backing was responsible for the militants regrouping in recent months and thus being able to more effectively launch their latest counteroffensive that coincided with the country’s long-delayed elections last week. Regardless of however they came to be so strong, the outcome is still the same, and it’s that the ENDF were just defeated by the TPLF.

The second explanation concerns Eritrea’s withdrawal from the conflict zone under international pressure. This former Ethiopian region recently emerged as the Horn of Africa’s most influential country after its decisive intervention in Tigray at least temporarily prevented its neighbor’s “Balkanization” which could have been disastrous for the region since it’s Africa’s second most populous country. Eritrea was also accused of human rights abuses and still largely remains a “pariah” state. It could have been the case that its leadership concluded that it might not be able to withstand any more international pressure so it decided to pull out of the conflict for now. Whatever its strategic calculations may have been, its departure from Tigray seems to have directly affected the ENDF’s ability to retain control of the region. This could explain the military’s unexpected defeat at the hands of the TPLF, which if truly the case, would then show how much stronger Eritrea is than Ethiopia.

The third explanation concerns the US’ dire warning that up to 900,000 of the region’s approximately 6 million people faced the threat of what it predicted might become the world’s worst famine if the conflict continues to drag on. This placed tremendous pressure upon the aspiring Horn of Africa hegemon and especially its leader Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who received the Nobel Peace Prize two years ago for peacefully ending Ethiopia’s nearly two-decade-long conflict with Eritrea. Just like its neighbor, Ethiopia was quickly on the path to becoming a “pariah” state in Western eyes and would have arguably been the world’s largest one had that scenario come to pass, which it still might. PM Abiy earlier claimed that foreign aid might be exploited as a front to arm the TPLF so his volte face speaks volumes about how desperate the military and also possibly the international political situation had become that he’d order the ENDF’s withdrawal in spite of that.

With these three interconnected reasons in mind for explaining Ethiopia’s stunning military reversal in Tigray, it’s now time to consider the strategic consequences of this development. The TPLF will likely consolidate and become stronger than ever, including as a result of foreign support that’ll enter the region disguised as aid. Addis Ababa won’t have much if any influence over this de facto independent region of the country, but a continuation war might break out after the planting season ends sometime in September if the ENDF also successfully regroup by then. It also might not, though, especially if a large part of the reason for the ENDF’s withdrawal was to reduce international pressure resulting from the US’ dire warning of the world’s worst impending famine. PM Abiy might not have the political will to risk the Western political and economic (sanctions) response to restarting the conflict under those conditions.

Unlike during the (first?) Ethiopian Civil War, the TPLF is unlikely to make a run on the capital but it might pursue hostile forces a bit beyond Tigray. That’s because the people of the neighboring Amhara Region and Eritrea will fight to the death to stop the TPLF’s invasion. Ethno-regional animosity is at an all-time high and Amhara militias have also reportedly been active in Tigray during the recent conflict in order to reclaim territory that they believe is theirs. It’s extremely unlikely that they’d roll over and let the TPLF sweep through their region en route to Addis Ababa in order to overthrow the same Prime Minister who’s emboldened them and their claims on parts of Tigray. This state of affairs suggests that the conflict might remain frozen for the indefinite future, thus creating a prime opportunity for foreign meddling. In addition, the TPLF might activate its nationwide network of agents to stage attacks behind enemy lines and incite rebellion in other regions.

The conflict between PM Abiy and the TPLF is of an existential nature. Each regards the other as illegitimate and a threat to Ethiopia. PM Abiy sees the TPLF as a terrorist group that’ll do anything to return to power even if this includes provoking another civil war while they believe that he’s the one that’s ruining the country through his ambitious socio-economic reforms that risk opening up the same Pandora’s Box that they tried so hard to keep closed during their rule. In other words, they blame one another for “Balkanizing” Ethiopia, and this worst-case scenario might actually happen whether in full or in part if the conflict isn’t politically resolved as soon as possible. Regrettably, no such peaceful resolution appears possible since neither side is willing to compromise on their maximalist aims: PM Abiy wants to wipe out the TPLF while they want to overthrow him. This creates the ideal space for foreign meddling, which will certainly exacerbate the conflict.

*

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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***

Even a robot programmed to “follow the science” would throw up his hands in despair while reading the latest FDA COVID pronouncement.

After untold numbers of people have been given antibody tests to determine their COVID status, the FDA now states:

“Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a safety communication informing the public that results from SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests should not be used to evaluate immunity or protection from COVID-19 at any time, and especially after the person received a COVID-19 vaccination.”

Boom.

I’m imagining just a small sample of people—perhaps 5000—marching in unison into a hospital, saying, “We tested positive for COVID on an antibody test…and then we had to isolate, and some of us were treated with toxic drugs…and NOW we learn that the antibody test is useless…”

The FDA document, dated May 19, 2021, is titled: “FDA In Brief: FDA Advises Against Use of SARS-CoV-2 Antibody Test Results to Evaluate Immunity or Protection From COVID-19, Including After Vaccination”. [1] [1a]

Digging a little deeper in the document, we have a statement referring to the COVID vaccine:

“The authorized vaccines for prevention of COVID-19 induce antibodies to specific viral protein targets; post-vaccination antibody test results will be negative in individuals without a history of previous natural infection if the test used does not detect the type of antibodies induced by the vaccine.”

In other words, the FDA is saying, “Look, the vaccine creates specific antibodies against the spike protein, not the virus. If you take the standard antibody test after vaccination, it’ll be useless, because the test isn’t meant to detect antibodies against the spike protein. It only detects antibodies against the virus [2].”

This raises several serious questions. One of them is: Since developing antibody tests is as easy as pie, why hasn’t the FDA developed one that detects antibodies against the spike protein?

And the answer to that question is obvious. If the FDA did develop such a test, then—in terms of conventional vaccine theory—it would be easy to see how well the vaccine is working, or not working.

And THAT is not a goal public health officials want to achieve. That is not a risk worth taking. Suppose, after testing 20,000 vaccinated people, it turns out that only 800 have produced antibodies against the spike protein?

Another (unanswered) question: Are specific antibodies against the spike protein, conferred by the vaccine, sufficient to neutralize, disable, destroy the actual virus if it drops down out of a cloud and tries to infect a vaccinated person?

Of course, as my readers know, I’ve spent a year demonstrating that no one has proved the SARS-CoV-2 virus exists. However, I make many forays into the insane world where people believe the virus is real; and I show that even within that world, the experts contradict themselves and compound their egregious fallacies like rabbits spawning babies.

This latest foray shows the FDA is both criminal and insane.

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Notes

[1] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-brief-fda-advises-against-use-sars-cov-2-antibody-test-results-evaluate-immunity-or-protection

[1a] https://web.archive.org/web/20210519213535/https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-brief-fda-advises-against-use-sars-cov-2-antibody-test-results-evaluate-immunity-or-protection

[2] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/04/05/covid-here-come-the-antibody-tests-quick-easy-and-insane/

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***

New York’s Museum of Modern Art is currently presenting an exhibition devoted to an in-depth review of Paul Cézanne’s drawings. If there is any criticism to be made of this extraordinary show, it is that it is frankly overwhelming: with roughly 280 pencil, ink and gouache drawings and watercolors (and even a handful of oil paintings), there is so much to take in that two or three visits to the exhibition may be required to do it justice.

Given the exhibition’s scale, all we can endeavor to do here is mention a handful of its highlights and curiosities. Consider, for example, Studies of a Rower (1867-69), sketched in Cézanne’s late twenties. Three images of a solitary oarsman move steadily across the page with the central figure being the most complete. Which is to say that we may take the series to be three distinct studies of a rower, or – what is perhaps more interesting to consider – we may take the series as a whole, almost as if we are watching the still frames of a film. The young artist in that case may be striving to convey something significant about our experience of motion and time and how they are interrelated.  Already with this ostensibly simple page we seem to be observing the gestation of a modern sensibility – which is to say, the seeing of the artist is not the interrogation of an in-itself world, but a vision which occurs in him, and is configured by him: “Drawing is only a configuration of what you see,” as Cézanne would state.

The fundamental insight of modern epistemic thought is that we can never ignore the constitutive role of the knower, or in this case the artist. We may appreciate this also in the context of Cézanne’s preoccupation with time and death. Cézanne would return many times to the image of the human skull – the classic memento mori. “There is no line” Cézanne is to have said. In the Study of a Skull (1902-04), for example, we find several outlines being offered, such that the boundary between the skull and its background is hardly definitive. What Cézanne recognized was that the contour of an object is never given to us as a simple line delineating the shape of the thing but is rather the “ideal limit towards which the sides of the [object] recede in depth,” as the philosopher Merleau-Ponty observes. This is why we find Cézanne consistently presenting multiple curves when tracing the shape of an object, be it a skull, an apple or the human figure.

If we are going to be true to the visible world then we cannot be satisfied with a “bloodless contour” encircling the object before us. As his friend Joachim Gasquet recalled, Cézanne observed that “objects never cease to be alive.” Nature is alive everywhere – “she is nowhere dead nor silent,” as Goethe would state in the preface to his Theory of Colours (1840). Objects “oscillate within [their] prescribed limits” – just as we find in Cézanne’s Still Life with Green Melon (1902-06): the melon’s circumference appears almost to be vibrating with multiple, broken, anxious and restless lines. The world and everything in it is alive; and nothing that is living is completely still or utterly without motion – everywhere we look the world is charged with movement, vitality and dynamism.

Milk Can and Apples (1879-80) Source: MoMA

Cézanne was obsessed with the fidelity to truth – being true to the object, which is also to say being true to the sensations which the artist experiences in his encounter with the object: “Sensation is the basis of everything, for a painter,” Cézanne would say. Being true was decidedly not about being faithful to some self-sufficient world existing independently and in-itself. “The landscape thinks itself in me.” Cézanne is suggesting that the painter is in a sense performing a vital ontological function with respect to the object. The painter allows the object to realize its inner essence in and through the coming-to-itself of the visible which the painter carefully, painstakingly traces.

There was also a darker side to Cézanne’s work, which the exhibition thankfully does not overlook. Especially in his early years we find a certain preoccupation with violence, murder and brutality. What was Cézanne’s attraction to scenes of grizzly violence? Why does he return again and again to depictions of murder and rape? To be sure, terrible physical violence is a theme running through much of Western art, although we certainly cannot suppose that artists were drawn to these subjects for all the same reasons. For Francisco Goya – who was immensely popular with Cézanne and his contemporaries (the exhibition in fact includes a small but immediately recognizable sketch of Goya’s self-portrait) – depictions of violence often functioned as an indictment, a judgment on the harsh reality of war, the reality of evil and the inhumanity of man.

Cézanne’s examination of violence is found in this exhibition among a number of small but extraordinarily intense pieces. The Murder (1874-75) is a watercolor depicting the moment just before an assailant is about to plunge his knife into a hapless victim. The brightness and serenity of the very real landscape (located in southern France) presents a sharp contrast to the grizzly scene in the lower forefront.

Another notable watercolor is The Abduction (1867), combining themes of violence and eroticism, and most likely representing the abduction of Proserpine by Pluto (as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses), a scene that Cézanne would execute in a much-discussed oil painting that same year. There is a notable messiness to the brushwork of the watercolor, absent in the comparatively polished technique of the oil painting, which is arguably more appropriate to the impulsiveness of the action we witness. Whatever else was driving Cézanne to create these intense depictions of brutality and violence, one way we may begin to understand them is as a critical assessment of the modernist notion of progress based in a frank investigation of our primal nature and the instinctual urges by which it is characterized.

The Bathers, large plate (Les baigneurs, grand planche) 1896-97, Source: MoMA

Cézanne used watercolor throughout most of his career – and the medium was for him anything but a minor genre. As with virtually all his materials, Cézanne would prove to be radically innovative when it came to watercolor as well. In his earlier work, Cézanne would apply watercolor more thickly and generally cover the paper completely. But over time his method evolved: his watercolors were thinned to the point of transparency and applied almost like delicate veils or screens of color. No less significant was Cézanne’s readiness to leave parts of the paper blank; and to apply graphite markings between, under and over the various layers of paint. These were features which would eventually come to characterize his mature paintings as well – including the use of bare canvas, as well as a more translucent palette.

One of the exhibition’s many notable watercolors is Cézanne’s Three Pears (1888-90), which was also displayed at his first solo exhibition in 1895. It is a fascinating composition and given the arrangement of the pears – especially the two in the foreground – also perhaps a somewhat erotic one. The fruits rest on a white dish surrounded by a freely painted arabesque of black and grey. This rather wild background motif seems to turn, twist and writhe almost as though it were animate. We may be hardly surprised to learn that both Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir each wanted this work for themselves, and ultimately had to draw lots to determine which of them could have it (Degas won).

The exhibition also includes a significant sampling of Cézanne’s landscapes executed en plein air – his exploration and study of “the diversity of the scene offered by nature” as he put it. These are works that would be accomplished through a slow, deliberative process based in the rigorous and attentive observation of the natural world. “Nature is on the inside,” Cézanne would state – so that the real question becomes, how does the natural world make itself seen by the painter? Forest Path (1904-06), a watercolor and graphite on cream wove paper, is characteristic of Cézanne’s late work, using methods which his friend and fellow artist Émile Bernard would describe as “singular… and excessively complicated.” In the upper half we find a kind of arched canopy, achieved in part by a long, penciled branch stretching from right to center; while on the left are diamond-shaped, prismatic patches of color which together serve to form a scene at once delicate, and sure, luminously aglow, yet maintaining the density of the foliage and mossy forest floor.

There is much more to this exhibition than I have touched on here: the self-portraiture, the numerous sketches of his wife and son, the oil paintings, and the list goes on. Cézanne was clearly interested in capturing the world in all its plenitude and diversity. The singular achievement of this exhibition is that it allows us to enter into Cézanne’s process of giving shape and substance to not simply what he sees, but how he sees. Cézanne is in many ways the quintessential modern artist, “the father of us all,” as Picasso would remark. And we can see from this remarkable exhibition why this is so – if to be modern is ultimately to recognize that the mind is always active, always organizing our sensations, and our experience; forming a world that without our constitutive activity would remain a mass of confusion and chaos. In a sense the artist is doing what we all are doing all the time – how could it be otherwise? But unlike the rest of humanity, the artist is giving substance and solidity to that process whereby we (re)configure the world, by tracing – with loving patience and laser-like focus – the world’s very coming-to-appearance in and through every movement of the pencil or brush.

*

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Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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The large aeronaval maneuver Sea Breeze, officially “co-hosted by the United States and Ukraine” in the Black Sea, began yesterday. The United States planned and command it, it is, therefore, the host in this sea close to Russian territory.  Sea Breeze takes place from June 28 to July 10. It is led by US Naval Forces Europe-Africa / Sixth Fleet with headquarters in Naples. It includes naval, submarine, amphibious, land, and air warfare exercises.

Since this series of annual maneuvers in the Black Sea began in 1997, the 2021 edition sees the largest number of participants: 32 countries from six continents with 5,000 soldiers, 18 special forces teams, 32 ships, and 40 war airplanes. Not only NATO member countries – Italy, Great Britain, France, Spain, Greece, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, the three Baltic republics, Turkey and Canada – participate in it, but partner countries like Georgia, Moldova, Sweden, Israel, and above all Ukraine. Other nations sent their military forces to the Black Sea: Australia, Japan, South Korea and Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Senegal, and Brazil. The fact that military forces are deployed in the Black Sea, even from Australia and Brazil for this great maneuver under US command directed against Russia, is in line with what Joe Biden promised: “As president I will immediately take steps to renew the alliances of the United States, and make America, once again, lead the world”. The war maneuver in the Black Sea, the largest to date, demonstrates that President Biden’s steps go in the direction of a growing escalation against Russia and at the same time against China.

Sea Breeze 2021 actually began on June 23, when the British warship HMS Defender sailing from Ukraine to Georgia entered Crimea’s territorial waters. A deliberate provocative act claimed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who declared that Great Britain can again send its warships to those waters since it does not recognize the “annexation of Ukrainian Crimea by Russia“. This hostile action, certainly concerted with the United States, was implemented just a week after the Biden-Putin Summit, defined by the US president “good, positive“; a week after Russian President Putin warned in the press conference in Geneva: “We conduct military exercises within our territory, we do not bring our equipment and personnel close to the borders of the United States of America, as the US and its partners are doing now near our borders”.  This hostile action was implemented by Great Britain just two weeks after the signing of the New Atlantic Charter with the United States, in which their Allies are assured that they will always be able to rely on “our nuclear deterrents” and that “NATO will remain a nuclear alliance”.

The deliberate violation of Crimean territorial waters made the war maneuver in the Black Sea even more dangerous. This act, if repeated, may have the aim of provoking a Russian military response possibly with some dead or wounded, to accuse Moscow of aggression. It is not a coincidence that some architects of the   Maidan Square putsch in 2014 hold important posts in the Biden administration, such as the current Undersecretary of State for political affairs Victoria Nuland. The putsch set in motion a sequence of events, the bloody offensive against the Russians of Ukraine pushed the inhabitants of Crimea – Russian territory passed to Ukraine in Soviet times in 1954 – to decide the secession from Kyiv and the reannexation to Russia with 97% of votes in a popular referendum.  NATO and the EU accused Russia of having illegally annexed Crimea and subjected it to sanctions. Now, they want to move from political to military confrontation. They play with fire, even with the nuclear one.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image: The Royal Navy Type 45 Destroyer, HMS Defender. (OGL v1.0)

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In the early 70s the Rolling Stones sized it up for we working stiffs in their song ‘Working for the Company’: 

I want a real fine car, fly Miami too
All the rum, I want to drink it, all the whiskey too
My woman need a new dress, my daughter got to go to school
I’m working so hard, I’m working for the company
I’m working so hard to keep you in the luxury

You can’t call me lazy on a seven day a week
Make a million for the Texans, twenty dollar me
Yes, I want a gold ring, riding in a limousine
I’m working so hard, I’m working for the company
I’m working so hard to keep you in the luxury

Now listen, I’m a proud man, not a beggar walking on the street
I’m working so hard, to keep you from the poverty
I’m working so hard to keep you in the luxury, oh yeah
(I’m working so hard, I’m working so hard)
Harder, harder, working, working, working

I think it’s such a strange thing, giving me concern
Half the world it got nothing the other half got money to burn
My woman need a new dress, my daughter got to go to school
I’m working so hard, I’m working for the company, oh, yeah
I’m working so hard, oh, yeah

Working on a Sunday in refinery
Make a million for the Texans, twenty dollar me
All the rum, I want to drink it, I got responsibility
I’m working so hard to keep you from the poverty, oh, yeah
I’m working so hard, I’m working for the company, oh, yeah
I’m working so hard, oh, yeah

Sadly, nothing has changed for those of us who work for ‘The Man’ or ‘The Corporation’. Wherever one may look one will see that there are really NO leaders, from either of the ‘One Party/Two Party’ scheme, to look out for us.

Why? As this writer alludes to by the title of our website, It’s the empire… stupid! George Orwell referred to it as ‘Big Brother’ in his tremendous novel 1984. The ‘Man’ or ‘The Corporation’ or ‘The Company’ (from Jagger and Richards) translates into the same mush.

It’s the Super Rich, meaning those within a fraction of the 1% of us, who pull the strings of this horrendous puppet system.

How cunning they have always been to offer us Serfs the appearance of democracy.

You hear it from all the talking heads from both sides of the aisle in government, along with their counterparts in the mainstream or corporate run media. They all trumpet this facade of true representative government… a LIE!

As with Jim Morrison’s famous rant from one of his hit songs, The Soft Parade:

When I was back there in seminary school
There was a person there
Who put forth the proposition
That you can petition the Lord with prayer
Petition the lord with prayer
Petition the lord with prayer
You cannot petition the lord with prayer!

If we wish to have the change needed inside of this empire, beginning with election of our representatives, we need to take ALL PRIVATE MONEY OUT OF POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS!

The 1976 Supreme Court ruling in Buckley vs. Valeo, saying that ‘Money is Free Speech’, opened the door, or rather kept the door closed, on electoral fairness.

So long as the Super Rich can pull the purse strings on elections, we will never see the best people (from us working stiffs AKA 99+ % of the populace) being able to both run for office and win those offices… PERIOD! As Morrison used the analogy of prayer, so it is with us working stiffs petitioning our government to heed us.

It is, as many say, a game. Violence will never be the answer, because it begets more violence and usually places the wrong people as replacements to lead. Once more of us who work and strain under this empire see it for what it is….

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Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on the It’s the Empire… stupid website. He is also frequently posted on Nation of Change, and Countercurrents.org. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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While Pfizer claims its vaccine is 95% effective, this is the relative risk reduction. The absolute risk reduction — which is far more relevant for public health measures — is actually less than 1%

While benefits from COVID “vaccination” in children between the ages of 12 and 15 are rare and short-lived, side effects are common and long-term effects are completely unknown

In the 12-to-15 age group, 75.5% experienced headache, along with a long list of other transient side effects. Serious systemic adverse events occurred in 2.4% of the trial subjects receiving Pfizer’s mRNA shot

While Pfizer boasted a 100% efficacy rate in 12- to 15-year-olds, this conclusion is a statistical trick. Fewer than 2% of fully vaccinated children avoided COVID-19; 98% of them would not have gotten COVID anyway. So, the benefit is small

Even if vaccinating children were found to reduce infection among adults, it would be unethical and against regulations to do so, because the FDA can only authorize the use of a medical product in a given population if the benefit outweighs the risk in that same population, and in children the benefits do not outweigh the risks

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Many scientists and medical experts have warned that vaccinating children against COVID-19 is both unnecessary and risky in the extreme. The video above features comments by Peter Doshi, Ph.D., made during a June 10, 2021, public hearing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

Doshi is an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and the senior editor of The BMJ. He has previously pointed out that while Pfizer claims its vaccine is 95% effective, this is the relative risk reduction. The absolute risk reduction — which is far more relevant for public health measures — is actually less than 1%.¹ As such, the COVID-19 vaccine is of dubious benefit, to say the least.

If you choose to watch the video above I must warn you to stop after Doshi finishes and not view the presentation by Dr. Jacqueline Miller. She’s a paediatrician and the head of development for infectious diseases at Moderna. The reason I advise this caution is because if you understand reality, you will be shocked at how easily a physician can sell out and sacrifice even her own children in the delusional belief that Moderna’s shot provides any benefit to children.

Meanwhile, largely because of irresponsible beliefs and comments like Miller’s, harms are rapidly mounting, which skews the risk-benefit ratio even further. Considering the potential for harm, children should not get the COVID-19 vaccine, Doshi says, citing trial evidence from Pfizer — the very same evidence used to support its emergency use authorization application for 12- to 15-year-olds. In this trial, harms clearly outweighed the benefits.

Risk-Benefit Analysis

While benefits were rare and short-lived, side effects were common and long-term effects are completely unknown. In the 12-to-15 age group, 75.5% experienced headache, along with a long list of other transient side effects. However, more serious systemic adverse events also occurred in 2.4% of the trial subjects receiving the actual mRNA shot.

Now, Pfizer boasted a 100% efficacy rate in this age group. This, Doshi explains, was based on 16 cases occurring in the placebo group, while no cases were recorded in the vaccine group. However, since there were about 1,000 placebo recipients, fewer than 2% of the placebo group actually tested positive for COVID-19.

“Put another way, 2% of the fully vaccinated avoided COVID,” Doshi says, adding “98% of the vaccinated wouldn’t have gotten COVID anyway … So, the benefit is small.”

One of the reasons for why children reap so little benefit from this jab is because a significant portion of American children are already immune and aren’t at risk of infection to begin with. Doshi cites Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data showing an estimated 23% of children under the age of 4 and 42% of those age 5 through 17 have already had a SARS-CoV-2 infection and now have robust and long-lasting immunity.

While most side effects in children have been short-lived, at least seven deaths among 12- to 17-year-olds had been reported as of June 11, 2021, as well as 271 events rated “serious.”² In the long term, there’s really no telling what might happen, and that’s a really important point.

As noted by Doshi, during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, narcolepsy didn’t become apparent until nine months after vaccination with the Pandemrix vaccine, and it wasn’t until four months into Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign that heart damage was recognized as a side effect in young men and boys.

Doshi goes on to explain why vaccinating children will not likely benefit adults, as claimed. This practice, sometimes referred to as “cocooning,” has never actually been proven. Doshi cites a 2021 BMJ editorial³ in which the authors stressed that vaccinating children against COVID-19 is “hard to justify right now,” seeing how children experience only mild disease and transmission by children is limited, while the possibility of unintended consequences is high.

“Should childhood infection (and re-exposures in adults) continue to be typically mild, childhood vaccination will not be necessary to halt the pandemic,” the authors state.⁴

“The marginal benefits should therefore be considered in the context of local healthcare resources, equitable distribution of vaccines globally, and a more nuanced understanding of the differences between vaccine and infection induced immunity.

Once most adults are vaccinated, circulation of SARS-CoV-2 may in fact be desirable, as it is likely to lead to primary infection early in life when disease is mild, followed by booster re-exposures throughout adulthood as transmission blocking immunity wanes but disease blocking immunity remains high. This would keep reinfections mild and immunity up to date.”

Doshi points out that even if you believe that a small benefit is better than nothing, you must remember that this is an unproven hypothetical benefit. We would need a proper randomized controlled trial to ascertain whether vaccinating children might actually benefit adults. “We need confirmatory evidence, not just assumptions,” Doshi says.

Vaccinating Children to Benefit Adults Is Unethical

However, even if vaccinating children were found to reduce infection among adults, we may still not be able to do so. Why? Because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration can only authorize the use of a medical product in a given population if the benefit outweighs the risk in that same population.

This means that even if adults were to benefit, if children don’t benefit from it themselves, then we cannot authorize the vaccine for children. So, if children reap no benefit, then whether or not vaccinating them might benefit adults is a moot argument. You cannot authorize a drug for use in a population that reaps no benefit.

In conclusion, Doshi points out that the FDA has no basis on which to grant COVID-19 vaccines emergency use authorization for children in the first place, as COVID-19 is not an emergency in children. The threat this infection poses to children is negligible and no more serious than that of the common cold or flu.

Since demonstrated risks far outweigh demonstrated benefits in children, the vaccines also fail to meet the biologics license application required for ultimate market approval.

Already, healthy children have died shortly after the jabs, dozens of cases of heart inflammation have been reported, and Pfizer’s own biodistribution study raises serious questions about the shot’s potential to cause infertility. Last but not least, since there’s no “unmet need,” there’s also no need to rush to approve these injections for children.

To be clear, the only way they can even try to justify vaccinating children is by sacrificing them as shields to protect the elderly, which is completely unethical. Children are not harmed by COVID-19 itself, yet they keep using the slogan that “Nobody is safe until everyone is vaccinated,” which simply isn’t true.

Carefully Consider the Many Risks

While long-term effects are unknown, there’s reason to suspect they may be severe. A Pfizer biodistribution study^5,6 demonstrates the synthetic mRNA does not stay near the injection site as initially assumed. It is, in fact, widely disseminated in your body within hours of injection.

It enters your bloodstream and accumulates in a variety of organs, primarily your spleen, bone marrow, liver, adrenal glands and, in women, the ovaries. The spike protein — which we now know is pathogenic and causes disease in and of itself — also travel to your heart, brain and lungs. Once in your blood circulation, the spike protein binds to platelet receptors and the cells that line your blood vessels. When that happens, one of several things can occur:

1. It can cause platelets to clump together — Platelets, aka thrombocytes, are specialized cells in your blood that stop bleeding. When there’s blood vessel damage, they clump together to form a blood clot. This is why we’ve been seeing clotting disorders associated with both COVID-19 and the vaccines
2. It can cause abnormal bleeding
3. In your heart, it can cause heart problems
4. In your brain, it can cause neurological damage
5. In your blood vessels, it can cause vasculitis, including Kawasaki disease, antiphospholipid syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma and Sjogren’s disease.⁷ These conditions significantly increase your risk of death, in some cases raising mortality by 50 times compared to people who do not have these conditions

Regardless of the tissue, the spike protein can also impair your mitochondrial function, which is imperative for good health, innate immunity and disease prevention of all kinds.

When the spike protein interacts with the ACE2 receptor, it can disrupt mitochondrial signaling, thereby inducing the production of reactive oxygen species and oxidative stress. If the damage is serious enough, uncontrolled cell death can occur, which in turn leaks mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) into your bloodstream.⁸

Aside from being detected in cases involving acute tissue injury, heart attack and sepsis, freely circulating mtDNA has also been shown to contribute to a number of chronic diseases, including systemic inflammatory response syndrome or SIRS, heart disease, liver failure, HIV infection, rheumatoid arthritis and certain cancers.⁹

The spike protein is also expelled in breast milk, which could be lethal for babies. You are not transferring antibodies. You are transferring the vaccine itself, as well as the spike protein, which could result in bleeding and/or blood clots in your child. All of this suggests that for individuals who are at low risk for COVID-19, children and teens in particular, the risks of these vaccines outweigh the benefits by a significant margin.

How Spike Protein Harms Your Health

I’ve written several articles detailing the mechanisms by which the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein can decimate your health. For a refresher, see my interview with Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., and Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., featured in “The Many Ways in Which COVID Vaccines May Harm Your Health.”

I recently came across yet another paper that describes a very important mechanism that, to my knowledge, is not widely known, despite being published in July 2020. The paper, “Genetic Polymorphisms Complicate COVID-19 Therapy: Pivotal Role of HO-1 in Cytokine Storm,”¹⁰ explains that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein has a far higher affinity for porphyrin molecules in the cell membrane than ACE-2.

Porphyrins are molecules with optical properties. Their ability to absorb light accounts for many of the beneficial health effects of sunlight.¹¹ Porphyrins are also the building blocks of heme, the precursor to hemoglobin, which is necessary to bind oxygen in your blood.

According to this paper, porphyrins not only facilitate SARS-CoV-2 invasion into the cell, but they also allow the virus to bind functional hemoprotein within the cell, thereby increasing oxidative stress.

When the spike protein bind to porphyrins, it upregulates free heme and iron, which causes oxidation and fuels inflammation. It also increases reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation, while decreasing levels of heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) enzymes. HO enzymes degrade heme into free iron, bilirubin (which has antioxidant effects) and carbon monoxide (which is antiapoptotic). As such, the HO system plays a crucial role in cellular defense.

The spike protein essentially overwhelms the anti-inflammatory cytoprotection normally offered by HO-1. As dysfunctional porphyrin are no longer capable of making heme, more hemoprotein becomes available for SARS-CoV-2 to bind to, which results in the release of more free iron. As the cycle continues, inflammation builds. Iron released by dying cells also has toxic effects. All of this has devastating consequences for your mitochondria, and, as noted in this paper:¹²

“If insufficient mitochondria in cells are evident, such as in white adipose cells, these cells are unable to accommodate the severe ROS formed leading to overwhelming inflammation. Brown adipose cells are better at handling ROS due to higher concentrations of mitochondria.”

This explains why obese individuals are at much higher risk. Because their fat cells have fewer mitochondria, they’re less able to counteract the ROS and therefore end up with higher levels of inflammation. The unprecedented outpouring of toxic iron into the body may also help explain why some end up with “long-hauler syndrome” after recovering from COVID-19.

Worst of all, since all of this is related to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, the COVID shots may also end up promoting cancer, as excess iron is tightly associated with tumorigenesis in multiple human cancer types through a variety of mechanisms, including catalyzing the formation of mutagenic hydroxyl radicals, regulating DNA replication, repair and cell cycle progression, affecting signal transduction in cancer cells, and acting as an essential nutrient for proliferating tumor cells.

Do You Have Vaccine Regret?

If you’ve already had one or two COVID shots and are now having second thoughts, first, be sure to never have another vaccination again, with any vaccine of any kind. Even if you’re not having discernible symptoms as of yet, you’d be wise to start building your innate immune system. To do that, you need to become metabolically flexible and optimize your diet.

I interviewed Dr. Vladimir Zelenko June 23, 2021, and that interview should go live July 4, 2021. We discussed what Dr. Mike Yeadon — a former chief scientist at Pfizer, which is one of the primary manufacturers of COVID shots — believes, which is that those who are vaccinated are already condemned to certain and agonizing deaths.

He believes those who have received the injection will die prematurely and three years is a generous estimate for how long they can expect to remain alive.

If Yeadon’s projections are true, it changes EVERYTHING. There is no way to know if it is accurate or not, but Yeadon is someone who has serious insights as Pfizer’s former chief scientist. I was a Boy Scout and their motto is to “Be prepared.” Clearly, this is one contingency that needs to be planned for. Zelenko happens to share this belief. We discuss in great detail the strategies that can be used to lower the risk of Yeadon’s predictions coming true.

Use time-restricted eating and eat all your meals for the day within a six- to eight-hour window. Avoid all vegetable oils and processed foods. Focus on certified-organic foods to minimize your glyphosate exposure, and include plenty of sulfur-rich foods to keep your mitochondria and lysosomes healthy. Both are important for the clearing of cellular debris, including these spike proteins. You can also boost your sulfate by taking Epsom salt baths.

You’ll also want to make sure your vitamin D level is optimized to between 60 ng/mL and 80 ng/mL (100 nmol/L to 150 nmol/L), ideally through sensible sun exposure. Sunlight also has other benefits besides making vitamin D.

To combat the toxicity of the spike protein, you’ll want to optimize autophagy, which may help digest and remove the spike proteins. Time-restricted eating will upregulate autophagy, while sauna therapy, which upregulates heat shock proteins, will help refold misfolded proteins and also tag damaged proteins and target them for removal. It is important that your sauna is hot enough (around 170 degrees Fahrenheit) and does not have high magnetic or electric fields.

Other remedies that might be helpful if you’re experiencing side effects from your COVID shot(s) include:

• Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin treatments. Ivermectin appears particularly promising as it actually binds to the spike protein. To learn more, please listen to the interview that Brett Weinstein did with Dr. Pierre Kory,¹³ one of Dr. Paul Marik’s collaborators
• Low-dose antiretroviral therapy to reeducate your immune system
• Low-dose interferons such as Paximune, developed by interferon researcher Dr. Joe Cummins, to stimulate your immune system
• Peptide T (an HIV entry inhibitor derived from the HIV envelope protein gp120; it blocks binding and infection of viruses that use the CCR5 receptor to infect cells)
• Cannabis, to strengthen Type I interferon pathways
• Dimethylglycine or betaine (trimethylglycine) to enhance methylation, thereby suppressing latent viruses
• Silymarin or milk thistle to help cleanse your liver

The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) recently posted more than 50 video presentations from the pay-for-view Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination held online October 16 to 18, 2020, and made them available to everyone for free.

The conference’s theme was “Protecting Health and Autonomy in the 21st Century” and it featured physicians, scientists and other health professionals, human rights activists, faith community leaders, constitutional and civil rights attorneys, authors and parents of vaccine injured children talking about vaccine science, policy, law and ethics and infectious diseases, including coronavirus and COVID-19 vaccines.

In December 2020, a U.K. company published false and misleading information about NVIC and its conference, which prompted NVIC to open up the whole conference for free viewing. The conference has everything you need to educate yourself and protect your personal freedoms and liberties with respect to your health.

Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity. I was a speaker at this empowering conference and urge you to watch these video presentations before they’re censored and taken away by the technocratic elite.

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Notes

¹ The BMJ Opinion November 26, 2020

² The Defender June 18, 2021

^3, 4 The BMJ 2021; 373: n1197

⁵ SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine BNT162 Biodistribution Study

⁶ Trialsitenews May 28, 2021

⁷ drmalcolmkendrick.org June 3, 2021

^8, 9 F1000 Research 2017; 6: 169

¹⁰ Antioxidants July 18, 2020; 9(7): 636

¹¹ Curiosity Shots May 7, 2021

¹² Antioxidants July 18, 2020; 9(7): 636, Figure 6

¹³ BitChute Bret Weinsten interviews Dr. Pierre Kory June 1, 2021

Featured image is from GMWatch

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In a recent article, “Critical Race Theory [CRT] is Worse than Marxism, the social thinker and author, Prof. Paul Gottfried, breaks ranks from his Alt-Right compatriots to argue that CRT “has nothing to do with traditional Marxism.”  “The swear words “Marxist” and “revolutionary,” Gottfried writes, “are thrown around by conservatives, such as those at Heritage, the New York Post and Fox News, with the same abandon with which the left speaks about “human rights”…” Rather than being truly revolutionary, based upon the history of past revolutionary movements, CRT “is an instrument of repression brandished by those in power against those whom it is feared might resist them.”  Yet most important, to label CRT as Marxist desecrates good ol’ Marx’s tomb.

In fact, at the time Critical Theory emerged from the German Frankfurt School in the 1930s, its most adamant opponents were the traditional card-carrying Marxists and Communists. The School’s intention was to actually re-write classical Marxism and to prolong the internal fallacies launched during the Enlightenment era. Perhaps its most redeeming value is its efforts to define and explain the phenomenology of social power and aggression. Its primary early proponents, such as Max Horkheimer, were also harsh critics of the rise of metaphysical realism and scientific dogmatism that today has turned modern science, especially the biological sciences and medicine, into a fundamentalist ideology or religion. But this is where Critical Theory’s contributions end. Critical theory has more in common with Freudian sexual repression and psychoanalysis than Marx. One of the 20^th century’s great philosophers Karl Popper criticized the Frankfurt School for offering no viable and realistic pathway to improve society.  Unlike Marx, who reasonably condemned capitalist society’s unfairness, he did offer a vision for a better future. On the other hand, Critical Theory for Popper, was “vacuous and irresponsible” for omitting a promised future altogether. Remarkably, modern Critical Theory’s leading spokespersons, such as Robin DiAngelo, are exemplars of the very manifestation of dysfunctional biases that Critical Theory rebukes. This may be a reason why those who embrace tribal wokeness are simply angry, maladjusted adolescents in adult bodies.

The 21^st century woke generations appear to have entered a coma.  Its characteristic qualia of ADHD would likely prevent them from getting through 20 pages of Das Capital let alone making any sense from it. The most recent incarnation of wokeness is not an awakening of either conscientiousness or a higher conscious awareness that directly experiences the sacredness of all life, other humans, and the animal and plant kingdoms. It veered from its origins within the Black community in the 20^th century when it was used to refer to a social and political awareness for racial and social injustices. In fact its first modern expression might be traced back to a 1962 New York Times article by the Black author William Melvin Kelly in referring to being “well informed, up to date.”  To be authentically woke requires critical thought and discernment, and also an intuitive knowing to distinguish the cobra from the rope when groping in the dark. Now the term has been adopted by two entire generations, regardless of race, and politically weaponized with almost an ontological unease to conquer and divide. Hence to be woke is anti-woke.

Througout human history there have been those who have held hierarchical power to control those who are subject and dependent upon that power, such as the rule of kings, emperors and authoritarian tyrants. And for having our daily needs met and securing financial ease there are the landowners, merchants and bankers. In all of these power relationships, equity is always on the side of those who hold power. At this moment our nation has reached an impasse where only a tiny group of individuals control and govern the dictates of the lives of the many.

The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote, “In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.”  What McLuhan was suggesting is that the masses have the tendency to focus on what is most obvious and consequently miss or ignore the deeper and more subtle changes happening over a period of time.  In other words, what may seem to be correct and just on the surface eventually brings forth deleterious or “unintended” consequences. McLuhan was writing long before the internet. Now, presidential campaigns and federal laws, public health policies, the mainstream media and the films and music are the conduits for how we define ourselves and establish the options of dogmatic beliefs that we ultimately identify with. But all of these narratives are controlled by a handful of power players, including the social media platforms such as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia. Succumbing to the siren’s call of this illusion is being woke with closed eyes.

There is a saying that if you do not know the product being advertised you are the product; and this is certainly true for how millions of Americans are persuaded to purchase junk they have no need for, including the honor of wearing a “woke” badge. Our personal realities thereby are reduced to millions of bits of algorithmic data that know more about us than we know about ourselves.  We are sold on the promises of 5G technology despite the media never mentioning its serious dangers to human health and the environment. The risks of genetically modified foods and the lack vaccine science to prove their safety and efficacy are censored from public discourse. Federal agencies that started small and were believed to be temporary, such as Homeland Security, became permanent and unstoppable leviathans that encroach into every corner of our lives.

At this moment, we are being lectured like children to get vaccinated against the SARS-2 virus so life can return to normal. In principle, this sounds reasonable. However, to accomplish this there lurks under this message’s surface the hidden intention to bypass or trash essential regulatory protective measures to assure the safety of these products.  If you get vaccinated, you are now “woke.” If you remain cautious or hesitant because nobody has even a vague idea about the Covid-19 vaccine’s long-term adverse effects, you should be hermetically sealed away from the society, branded, canceled and censored.

Conventional medical voices who refuse to be misled by Biden’s, Anthony Fauci’s and Bill Gate’ Ministry of Truth are also being canceled and censored from society by Silicon Valley and social media. So too are professors who have spoken out against student demands for personal entitlement and the anti-woke White Fragility diatribe that condemns genetic whiteness as racist. Students would prefer college to be sanitized of critical thought, a pleasant, non-intrusive and safe environment filled with teddy bears and psychologists next door to drug their episodes of existential angst and purposelessness in life.

As the pandemic hijacks our attention, global warming increases. But federal experts tell us we have time. Biden tells us the economy is recovering and flourishing and a herd of lemmings believe this message despite 20 percent of Americans who will go to sleep hungry tonight. Those with cancer, heart disease, diabetes and dementia are told to just hang on a bit longer; a big pharmaceutical cure is just around the corner.  But for decades, this carrot has been dangled before us and has yet to come to fruition.

Everything today is its opposite. The blue and red pills have been pulverized together. Only a purple pill laced with the strychnine of lies and half-truths is offered by an unduly legislative system run by technocrats and their private financial handlers. Woke and anti-woke are indistinguishable since both are born from similarly delusional worldviews isolated from reality. Neither is capable of observing the preciousness and fragility of human life. What should be a condemnation of the class and economic struggle against the elites’ persecution of everyone else has degenerated into hate-filled identity war, both on the Left and the Right. It is only the rare authentic progressive who has transcended this divide and can observe wisely the battlefields orchestrated by politically motivated ideologues, aristocrats and the media.

As the US spins further into a controlled dystopia, it is difficult to imagine that the trajectory towards social decay can be easily reversed. Arthur Miller said, “an era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.”  Therefore, we still have a long way to go and it may require a full system-failure at all economic and social levels before a viable and realistic effort can restore what has been lost from the ethical wasteland left in its wake. It took Rome several centuries to collapse but we are on course to accomplish this feat within a decade. To remain optimistic, therefore, requires a rejection of the dominant Social Darwinism and the specter of what Thomas Huxley called the Church Scientific that now informs both parties and that has shackled us into a fatalist purgatory or worse Dante’s hedonic hells of lust, gluttony and greed. The evangelical Christian Right, as science’s counterrevolutionary reactive response, is equally a major contributor to the dumbing down of the nation’s sanity with fairy tales and superstition.

Our indoctrination into scientific materialism, our surrendering our autonomy and divine freedoms to political and corporate regimes, and the clashes over political correctness, that disempower us from believing we can change our conditions, has resulted in a sense of hopelessness in life and growing existential despair. It is contributing to the unbridled frenzy of anger in the streets, again from both the Left and Right.  Ideological beliefs become dogmas founded upon our mental afflictions, which in turn hold rule over our emotions, fears and hatreds and reactions. No wonder that pessimism is on the rise and optimism is in decline.

Only a personal encounter with a deeper purpose and meaning in life, which cuts through the tyranny of our false sense of the self or ego, can ultimately guide us to rise above the turmoil and crises facing us. This does not imply a detached disinterest, an ascetic renunciation, from the plights of our neighbors and humanity. In fact, only by discovering authentic kindness and compassion through a personal introspective inquiry into ourselves and our connection with the others can an authentic sense of well-being and genuine happiness emerge.  It is a commitment to finding our interconnection, in fact our interdependence, with others in the spirit of selflessness and service.

Yet to be left alone with only your own mind to keep you company terrifies the vast majority of people, including those who might be characterized as “normal.” This was observed in literally “shocking” experiments. In a University of Virginia study, hundreds of student participants would sit alone in an empty lab room for 15 minutes. No mobile phones, books, paper or anything was permitted. Just themselves and the cacophony of static in their own minds. However, there was a button they could push if they felt so inclined that would give a moderately painful electric shock. The results? Sixty-seven percent of men and 25 percent of women chose to find amusement to occupy their minds by shocking themselves rather than sit quietly and have peaceful time for self-reflection. This was despite all of the participants stating prior to the experiment that they would pay money to avoid being shocked with electricity.

So if modern American society relies solely upon mental and emotional distraction to survive, clearly there is no hope for constructive solutions to emerge to confront climate change, racism, identity politics, inequality, etc. Nor will society evolve beyond that of primates if we can only function from our reptilian and limbic brains. Obviously not everyone will discover the same purpose to his or her life’s meaning. It is an individual quest that is largely entwined with each of our unique gifts, skills, passions and talents that we have brought into this incarnation. Those who disagree that one can discover meaning in life are the dogmatists of materialism and should be shunned as deranged scientific fanatics. Logic and reason alone will not satisfy this discovery, although developing skills in critical thought and discernment is more often than not necessary. It is only the rare person who has immediate intuitive knowledge about herself and the world around her.

For the remainder of us, we need to reeducate ourselves to create a roadmap, develop a discerning eye, and engage in deep introspection into ourselves to find a genuine well-being that transcends power player’s board game to manufacture social strife, division and hatred. It is an individual journey that begins deep within ourselves and ends by embracing others in community despite all differences. However this is not an exercise in reason, but a direct experience within the depths of ourselves. When we touch on that space that can only be reached by subjective introspection new horizons of opportunities and possibilities open up. Then we can understand the words of the great jazz artist John Coltrane, “I know that there are bad forces, forces that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good.” In that honoring of our inherent goodness, genuine well-being and happiness is found and only then can our illusions and dogmatic beliefs be broken down.

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Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD direct Progressive Radio Network. They are frequent contributors to Global Research.

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***

What happens when a population of introverts, hypochondriacs, and obsessive-compulsives is continuously bombarded with messages to seclude and disinfect themselves, for fear that COVID-19 prickle-balls lurk everywhere, waiting to attack?

What happens is that emotionally damaged people start driving bad politics and bad policy.

“Fifteen days to flatten the curve.”  That phrase is surely now banned by corporate media, for it reminds us how the supposedly acute health threat of March 2020 was repeatedly re-packaged to keep populations off-balance and out of business not for 15 days, but for 15 months.

Never in modern times has a health issue been so flagrantly politicized, nor wielded as a club, as the Wuhan virus has been.  Outside a few rational locales, almost every nation drank the COVID Kool-Aid, competing to see who could enforce the stupidest rules.

Naturally, academia would lead the way:

Among Americans aged 15–24, a total of 587 died of COVID in 2020, according to the CDC, representing about 0.16%, or about 1 in 642, of COVID deaths.  If you are young, you have essentially no chance of dying of COVID.  The low youth mortality impact from COVID was known by April 2020.

Yet many universities now require these low-risk young people to inject the experimental vaccine or be banished from campus.  Did you already catch the WuFlu and have antibodies?  Too bad.  The great pulsating brains of academia cannot differentiate.

Young people who want to serve their country are also targets: the passive-aggressive command at West Point compels the unvaccinated to sacrifice a week’s vacation to quarantine and then to wear masks in the most ridiculous circumstances imaginable — to harass them and make them look like fools.  Military leaders do not care whether the experimental vaccines might do more harm than good, especially on a previously COVID-exposed youth.  Take the jab and shut up, cadet; Colonel Suckup needs to PowerPoint his 100% compliance success.

Famed baseball pitcher Anthony Fauci claims that he is Science personified, yet anyone can make simple deductions that have eluded the doctor: there is effectively no difference in COVID rates between regions that went full Stalin on COVID rules and those areas that took a more holistic or decentralized approach to the virus.

Great Britain, with its multiple draconian lockdowns, has a COVID case rate of 6.76% of the population, while Sweden, which mostly left schools and businesses open and went soft-touch on mask mandates, has a case rate of 10.7%.  But Sweden’s death rate is 20% lower than the U.K.’s, so what was the point of Britain’s lockdown hysteria?

Similarly, some U.S. schools were closed for up to a year, and kids as young as two were required to wear masks in a sickening display of fear-psychosis.  Yet in Switzerland, schools reopened permanently about 4–5 weeks after the initial virus panic in the spring of 2020, and children under 12 were never required to wear masks at any time.  Switzerland’s COVID case and death rates are both lower than the U.S.’s.  On the other hand, in Washington, D.C., where self-righteous residents wear masks even while jogging in the woods, restaurants were already open in March 2021, while in Switzerland, restaurants were closed from December until late May, in the apparent hope of destroying every last small eatery.  There’s no science in any of this posturing.

And none of this jumping through hoops made any difference in the progression of the virus: lockdown-crazy Michigan has a higher COVID death rate than libertarian Florida (despite its large elderly population).

Lost in all of this seems to be the simple fact that the COVID virus is not that deadly.  True, about 12% of the 4.7-million total U.S. deaths recorded between January 2020 and June 2021 were credited to COVID.  About 1.7% of positive cases end in death.  But 80% of COVID deaths occurred in the over-65 population, which always has a much higher death rate from infectious diseases, such as pneumonia.  If you are under 65 and test positive for COVID, you have a 0.25% chance of death (1/400), which is probably about the same as if you caught a bad flu and suffered complications from it.  It’s also logical that we will see periods of below-average death rates in the next year or two, in the same way that there are bad flu years and not-bad flu years.

Self-serving politicians locked down free citizens (and, ironically, released prisoners), destroyed businesses, marred kids’ psyches, and harassed people with mask and testing mandates, all for a coronavirus that in the end was not that novel.  And they did it with the connivance of corporate media, which censored and slandered anyone who asked the most basic questions about the virus’ origins and treatments.

In a future sane world, people will view the orchestrated panic of the COVID era with the same bemused condescension we might view the supposed War of the Worlds radio invasion scare of 1938, or the bygone use of leeches for seemingly every ailment.

Yes, grandson, back in 2020, the whole world went batty.

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Former Marine Daniel Rabil grew up in Washington, D.C. and lives in Switzerland.

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***

More than 4,100 people have been hospitalized or died with COVID in the U.S. despite having been fully vaccinated, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

As of June 21, nearly half (49%) of cases occurred in females and 76% were aged 65 years and older. There were a total of 3,907 hospitalizations and 750 deaths among those who had breakthrough infections, although not all of the hospitalizations may have been due primarily to COVID, Forbes reported.

A breakthrough case is recorded if a person tests positive for SARS-Cov-2 two weeks after receiving the single-dose Johnson & Johnson (J&J) shot or completing the two-dose Moderna or Pfizer vaccination.

According to the CDC’s website, the number of COVID vaccine breakthrough infections are likely an undercount of all SARS-CoV-2 infections among fully vaccinated persons due to passive and voluntary reporting.

“These surveillance data are a snapshot and help identify patterns and look for signals among vaccine breakthrough cases,” the agency stated. “No unexpected patterns have been identified in the reported breakthrough infections.”

On May 1, the CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to only reporting cases resulting in hospitalization or death, a move the agency was criticized for by health experts.

Although the CDC stated the shift in reporting will “help maximize quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance,” the change in reporting results in a lower overall number of reports of breakthrough cases in the U.S.

According to CDC data, a total of 10,262 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections had been reported from 46 U.S. states and territories as of April 30, including 995 hospitalizations and 160 deaths.

Almost half of adults in Israel and UK infected with Delta COVID variant were fully vaccinated

According to The Wall Street Journal, almost half of adults infected in an outbreak of the Delta variant of COVID in Israel were fully vaccinated with Pfizer’s vaccine.

Fully vaccinated people who’ve come into contact with the Delta variant will have to quarantine, Chezy Levy, the director-general of Israel’s health ministry said in a statement June 23.

Levy told the state broadcaster Kan Bet that about 40% to 50% of new cases appeared in people who had been vaccinated, Haaretz reported.

“Even though the numbers are low, the fact that this is reaching vaccinated people means … that we are still checking how many vaccinated people have also been infected,” Levy said.

On Monday, Levy said a third of the new daily cases were in people who had been vaccinated. Though they are preliminary, the figures show the Delta variant may spread even in places like Israel where large portions of the population have been vaccinated.

Earlier this month, The Daily Mail reported that a new study in the UK showed 12 (or 29%) of 42 fully vaccinated people died after catching the Delta variant. In Public Health England’s technical briefing on June 25, that figure had risen to 43% (50 of 117), with the majority (60%) having received at least one dose.

High profile breakthrough cases

As The Defender reported in May, Bill Maher was fully vaccinated when he tested positive for COVID, prompting HBO to reschedule the taping of two of his shows.

That same month, eight people from the Yankees franchise tested positive for COVID, including coaches, staff members and two-time All-Star shortstop Gleyber Torres. At least 85% of the team had been vaccinated.

On June 10, two fully-vaccinated passengers aboard a Celebrity cruise ship tested positive for COVID and had to be isolated, according to the Royal Caribbean Group. The ship was billed as the first fully-vaccinated cruise in North America, The New York Times reported.

The ship’s 650 crew members and 600 passengers were required to be vaccinated before boarding and had to show proof of a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of sailing.

Two passengers on a Mediterranean cruise operated by MSC Cruises also tested positive.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

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***

So, Matt Hancock has resigned as Britain’s health secretary. A line has now been drawn under a scandal that gave the British press the ‘public interest’ licence to splash photos of a cabinet minister locking lips with his aide. Nothing more to see here.

This, at least, is what the government wants us to think. On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday morning, justice secretary minister Robert Buckland insisted any queries about Hancock were either prurient or irrelevant since “Matt has resigned”. Move along, folks.

But the Hancock affair is about much more than a senior minister breaking his own COVID rules with his adviser, Gina Coladangelo. The whole episode highlights – once again – the gaping hole in the middle of Boris Johnson’s government where transparency, probity and honesty should be.

Forgot about how the footage of Hancock and Coladangelo leaked into the media, the real question to ask is how did the minister’s paramour end up with a paid government job in the first place?

We know that the pair met as students – in Oxford, of course – and that last March, just as the pandemic was breaking, Hancock brought Coladangelo in as an unpaid communications adviser. Six months later, Hancock made her a non-executive director in his health department, for which she netted £1,000 a day before expenses.

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***

Thirty years ago, the man who taught me quantum mechanics at Harvard wrote that the suppression of debate will be the “death of science”. Perhaps he saw the shape of things to come.

Today, science is being perverted for political ends to an unprecedented extent. To look for an appropriate analogy, we would have to go back to the authority of the Church in medieval Europe.

“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” — Anthony Fauci

So G-d speaks through the mouth of the Pope, and maybe the Prophet Elijah and Charles Manson. But the Good Doctor of NIAID is the one with a direct line to Science.

My point is not that Fauci has grown too big for his britches, but that science is not religion. The whole reason that we trust science is that it’s a society of open debate. Dr Fauci aspires to be the high priest of epidemiology. But if science carries more weight than the Church, it’s not because its priests are smarter or better qualified, it’s because science has no priests.

Science means arguing the case on its merits, and arguing on the merits is exactly what they are trying to avoid by calling anyone who disagrees with them, “anti-science”.

A real scientist said,

Science is not a set of beliefs. Scientists don’t believe anything… You always have to be ready to have your favorite theory proven wrong, and if you’re not, you shouldn’t be doing science.  [Video]

Eight months ago, I wrote about the hijacking of the imprimatur of “science” for political ends. Of course, politicization of science is much older than eight months. Perhaps it’s as old as The Enlightenment, but certainly as old as Social Darwinism and the Fabian Society. But the current wave of censorship began five years ago, with a gradual but persistent movement in the mainstream press to legitimize censorship.

Protecting the public from “fake news”

“Fake news” wasn’t a thing until five years ago. The lies of Donald Trump were deemed more dangerous than other lies, and the Beltway think tanks decided that the Public needed protection. For the 227 years before this, we Americans generally agreed that freedom of the press held  the highest value for the viability of democracy. Deciding what is true and forbidding the publication of falsehoods sounds like a good idea only for the first millisecond, until you ask, “who decides what is true?”. Stalin knew well the power of Pravda. Hitler had his Völkischer Beobachter. Do you remember the origin of the phrase “memory hole”? George Orwell described in detail the way in which totalitarian governments must continually rewrite history to support a constantly-changing agenda.

Donald Trump was dangerous to the Establishment not because his lies were more pernicious or more convincing than other lies, but because occasionally, the rambling, self-serving monologue that continually streamed from his lips included some inconvenient truths. He charged that software in voting machines was rigged. He talked about the CIA’s blackmail racket, based on entrapment with child sex slaves. He proposed a new, independent inquiry into 9/11. He promised to declassify millions of pages of military documents on UFOs. The Establishment needed to silence Trump, not to protect the Public, but to protect the Establishment.

Lately, it is fashionable to smugly dismiss the deranged beliefs of “right-wing kooks” rather than endure the inconvenience of documenting just why these beliefs are “right-wing” and why they are wrong. This recent propaganda piece from University of Southern California exploits fear of The Deadly Virus to promote an idea that is far more deadly: legitimizing government surveillance of people with opinions at odds with the prevailing narrative. Need I remind you that the Fourth Amendment forbids the government from spying on citizens unless a judge has issued a search warrant, based on evidence that law enforcement agencies need this information to investigate a crime that has already been committed.

“Crime prevention” is an idea I can endorse with full conscience when it involves anti-poverty measures, drug rehab services, and housing for the homeless. But arresting people before they commit crimes is a practice absolutely forbidden by a millennium of British and American common law, and for the best of reasons: It has historically been used to jail the political opposition and hide the machinations of the powerful. It’s probably true that AI can make statistical predictions about who will commit a crime based on videos, and certainly true that the potential for abuse of this technology is a red flag.

Research behind the USC piece associates conservative political views with doubts about vaccination. The unstated implication is that vaccines are so obviously and universally safe that the only reason even to study their safety would be an anti-science bias which, incidentally, is common among fanatics of the Far Right.

Why do some people decline the COVID vaccine? According to the NYTimes, It must be that their thinking is deranged. It can’t possibly be because vaccines are less safe and less effective as a COVID preventive than traditional, well-tested measures such as vitamin D, zinc, ivermectin, and hydroxychloroquine. It can’t have anything to do with the fact that twice as many people have died from the COVID vaccines compared to the sum total of all other vaccines in the history of the VAERS reporting system. [This simple numerical statement has been fact-checked by all the usual suspects and ruled “false”. What does this say about the fact-checkers?]

This month, the cover story of Harvard Magazine was written by a young staff writer with no scientific background. The title poses the question, “Can Disinformation be Stopped?”, while ignoring important preliminary questions, “Should disinformation be stopped?” and “How can we tell disinformation from information?” and “Whom can we trust with the awesome responsibility of discerning truth from falsehood?” The three examples of “disinformation” cited on the cover are nothing of the sort, and in fact are topics where questioning points to deep sources of corruption, which  the Powers that Be are most desperate to suppress. 1. “Election in question: were votes stolen?” 2. “Hydroxychloroquine is the cure for COVID-19” 3. “5G Networks Spread Coronavirus” 

1. “Election in question: were votes stolen?” America has a sordid but largely hidden history of election theft. But the Help America Vote Act of 2001 has opened the floodgates for election theft on an unprecedented scale. Elections are so much easier to steal because vote tabulation is accomplished with black-box software that has been ruled a “trade secret” by our highest court. I have been a statistical consultant to election integrity activists since the 2004 election was stolen in Ohio on behalf of George W. Bush. We have used exit polls as the best available check on election results, and we have seen a growing rightward shift in the reported Federal results compared to exit polls. But in 2020, there were no exit polls for the first time in modern American history. So many people mailed their ballots that the people who showed up at the polls could not be considered a fair sample. In short, 2020 was the most opaque election in American history. There is no reason to trust the reported election results. At a time when America desperately needs a system of tabulation that the average voter can trust, all questioning of vote tabulations is ridiculed as the paranoid fantasies of right-wing partisans. [No, I’m not saying that “Trump really won”; I’m saying that I have no idea who really won, and that questioning our election machinery is not only legitimate but essential for the future of democracy.]
2. “Hydroxychloroquine is the cure for COVID-19” The American CDC and NIH have been criminally culpable in suppressing effective preventives and cures for COVID since the beginning of the pandemic. Exhibit A is a super-sized observational study of 100,000 COVID patients on 3 continents that was rushed through peer review last year and published prominently in Britain’s most prestigious medical journal. But there was no data to back up this study. It was retracted. It was an obvious and scandalous scientific fraud, used to discredit the most effective available treatment, keeping alive the fear of COVID until a vaccine could be released. In combination with zinc, chloroquine is a safe and effective preventative or early treatment. But doctors have been fired for prescribing it, and pharmacists have been ordered not to fill prescriptions. Later, Ivermectin, an even more effective treatment for COVID, useful at all stages, has been demonstrated. Dr Pierre Kory and Dr Peter McCullough each testified before Congress about the extraordinary effectiveness of their treatment protocols, but to no avail. Is Ivermectin a right-wing drug? America’s most popular expert on natural medicine received death threats when he posted evidence on his blog that vitamin D lessens the severity of COVID. Treatments are still being suppressed by government, by social media, and by medical authorities. This has cost millions of lives worldwide. It is being done to keep fear of COVID alive, and to make sure that vaccines are the only game in town. If I may offer my expert opinion as a biostatistician: Many more people have died of COVID in the last year than if the world’s governments had done nothing at all, imposed no restrictions on commerce or culture, and allowed the medical system to operate without interference as it has in the past.
3. “5G Networks Spread Coronavirus” There are thousands of credible studies associating radio frequency radiation with anxiety, depression, insomnia, inability to concentrate, and even cancer. There are known mechanisms by which such non-ionizing radiation affects electrochemical cell signaling. Still, there are physicists and engineers who deny the possibility of biological effects from cell phone radiation on theoretical grounds. For 30 years, the telecom industry has stonewalled, denying that further regulation is necessary, publishing bogus studies that report “no significant evidence” of risk. (Let me wear my statistician’s hat again, to tell you that it is very easy to design a study that fails to produce evidence of associations that are real, but much harder to design a study that demonstrates associations when none realy exist.) Last week, I was on a panel of engineers discussing safety standards for a new generation of cell phone technology. Most members were inclined to impose the burden of proof on those of us claiming a danger. In other words, unless we could clearly prove that 5G technology caused disease and we could explain a physical mechanism of harm, they thought that implementation of 5G should continue without safety standards. This is opposite to the attitude that American safety regulators have taken in every other field of technology. Why are health standards being determined by electrical engineers with no background in health sciences? And yes, there is legitimate and disturbing science associating higher COVID death rates in cities where 5G has been adopted early.

Make no mistake about it: The “fake news” campaign is not about protecting the public from lies; rather it is about establishing a state-sanctioned news network, which has been a central pillar for the stability of every totalitarian regime in history. Despotic leaders can only remain in power by hiding the truth of what they are doing from the people they govern. Conversely, there can be no meaningful democracy if there is only one source of centrally-managed information.

Other examples, past and present

For decades, UFO sightings were fake news. Now we’re supposed to believe that UFOs are real, but that the tens of millions of Americans who believed in them before that belief was sanctioned are ignorant, gullible thrill-seekers. None of the investigative reporters who have covered UFOs in the past are welcome when the self-important talking heads discuss UFOs as a new phenomenon.

Last year, the idea that COVID arose in a laboratory was fake news. Now it’s mainstream science, so long as you blame COVID on lax safety standards at Chinese laboratories. Questioning the bioweapons research at Fort Detrick and nine other American Biosafety Level 4 labs is still verboten in the public discourse.  Moreover, the idea that COVID might have been deliberately released is nowhere mentioned, despite all the simulations and preparedness exercises that seemed to foretell the future with their focus on Coronaviruses of Chinese origin.

Twenty years ago, on September 11, the Twin Towers and a third tower not struck by aircraft all fell straight down in free fall, indicating there was zero resistance from the steel structure underneath. In one moment, the steel is holding up a 110-storey building; in the next moment there is nothing inhibiting its collapse. It doesn’t happen in nature that all the supporting members just happen to melt at exactly the same moment. This requires precision engineering and precisely-timed explosive charges. And yet, if you search for “9/11 building collapse”, Google will lead you to the retracted Federal NIST report claiming, absurdly, that collapses of all three buildings were the natural and expected results of localized fires. You can find the realistic science that proves all three buildings were wired for demolition if you search through DuckDuckGo. Science professors have lost their careers for telling the truth about 9/11.

58 years ago, John Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas. The Warren Commission report concluded that a single bullet passed up and down and in and out of Kennedy’s body, subsequently breaking the arm of John Connally, then Governor of Texas, and falling out of his body onto the gurney, unscarred, where it could be conveniently discovered by hospital personnel. Despite the fact that the Warren Report is physically implausible, and despite the fact that a Congressional committee in 1979 concluded that Kennedy was “probably” killed by a conspiracy rather than a lone gunman, scientific challenges to the official narrative are banned from Wikipedia and social media. There are many good books, and you can preview some of the truth on Wikipedia’s page for conspiracy theories.

But the story of vaccines is in a class by itself, by far the most successful corporate propaganda campaign in history. In every other field, we define pathological fanaticism by its extreme dogma, taking an absolute position, with no recognition of subtlety and no regard to evidence. This is the attitude of the religious zealot. But in the case of vaccines, the propaganda narrative has turned this common sense on its head. All vaccines are safe. All vaccines are effective. This is the “scientific position”. Anyone who questions a particular vaccine, or identifies a side-effect, or claims that getting the disease provides better protection than taking the vaccine, is an “anti-vaxxer”, a science-denier, a menace to the universal social good of herd immunity. BTW, the term, “herd immunity” used to be defined in the world of public health as a condition of a population which had been through the disease, and so was resistant to future epidemics. In the age of COVID, “herd immunity” has been re-defined by WHO as a benefit that can only be conferred by vaccines.

Epilogue

My mentor at Harvard (first paragraph) was Julian Schwinger, one of the most brilliant physicists of the 20th Century, who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize with Richard Feynman for (independently) formulating relativistic quantum field theory. His physics papers had been prized by the scientific community and were published in top-tier physics journals ever since, as an 18-year-old wunderkind working under J Robert Oppenheimer, he conducted pioneering research in nuclear physics. But after the cold fusion controversy of 1989, Schwinger became interested in the phenomenon, and suggested some deep theoretical insights. He was told by the world’s foremost physics journal that they would not consider a paper on cold fusion because the editors didn’t believe it was real. This is what prompted Schwinger’s warning about the future of physics. He resigned from the American Physical Society in protest.

I first discovered the cold fusion story in 2012. Over the ensuing two years, I attended two conferences and visited five cold fusion laboratories. I can attest from talking to the experimental scientists and reviewing their data that cold fusion is real. Of course, the potential for solving the world’s energy problems and for learning fundamentally new principles of physics are both monumentally exciting. Despite many replications of cold fusion worldwide and several companies pursuing it as a new energy source, this remains a topic that mainstream physics journals refuse to touch.

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Josh Mitteldorf is best known for contributions to the biology of aging. He has written two books based on his evolutionary theory of aging [Popular, Academic], and blogs for ScienceBlog.com about aging and related matters. DataBETA is his present scientific project, a survey of thousands of individuals who are early adopters in anti-aging medicine, together with technology that will determine which (if any) of their pills and diets are effective. Most of his academic papers are available from ReserachGate. He maintains a page of health and diet recommendations for a longer life at AgingAdvice.org.

He is a writer in genres besides science: poetry, political commentary, and a bit of fiction.  His “anti-blog” called Daily Inspiration has been posted continually since 2005. He was formerly an editor at OpEdNews. As “Doctor Math”, he contributed more than 5,000 responses to questions submitted at the MathForum in the 1990s.

Politically, he has been an advocate for peace, for democracy, for environmental sanity, and for public health. He was treasurer of the Delaware Valley Clean Air Council and president of the Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Pennsylvania in the 1990s. Since 2005, he has been a statistical consultant and writer for the election integrity movement, which seeks transparency in the way our votes are counted.

Mitteldorf grew up in New York City and suburbs, graduated from the Harvard College Physics Department (1970), and continued to a PhD in astrophysics from University of Pennsylvania (1987).

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In what sounds like a plot turn in one of those Britbox crime-thriller series, a tranche of soggy Ministry of Defence documents ranging from “Official Sensitive” to “Secret UK Eyes Only” were found behind a bus stop in Kent Tuesday morning, according to a breaking story by the BBC today.

The 50-page bundle of doc provides an unbelievably candid insight into a “wide range of important areas.”

“This is a major embarrassment for the Ministry of Defence, which is currently carrying out a detailed investigation into how the papers came to be lying on a street corner, in the rain, in the early hours of Tuesday morning,” writes BBC diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams, who does not say how they were found or what tipped the news service off, since the finding was several days ago.

But the find is an explosive one. Not only to the docs reveal that the Brits knew very well that the Russians would respond aggressively (and they did, the extent to which is in dispute) when they sailed the HMS Defender 12 miles off the coast of Crimea in the Black Sea this week, they did it deliberately — a case that British officials have been acknowledging in the last few days.

According to the “Official Sensitive” documents, the case was made to avoid confrontation by taking an alternative route through non-contested waters but that would run the risk of looking “scared/running away.” The Russians said they fired warning shots and dropped bombs in reaction to their “freedom of navigation” operation, a detail the Brits deny.

But to U.S. readers the most important information taken from this tranche is the most sensitive “Secret UK Eyes Only” one. It details that Washington has asked the UK to leave their own special operations forces behind after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. This signals what analysts have been anticipating — that the Biden Administration has not made a definitive decision on how to deal with counterterrorism issues beyond Sept. 11, and that one of the options still open is leaving a presence behind. Apparently that might include other foreign forces.

The papers do not say whether the Brits will comply (though the BBC article notes that the idea of leaving troops behind after withdrawal has been discussed in media reports); in fact they look dubious at the prospect.

Adams quotes the papers, saying that any UK footprint “that persists…is assessed to be vulnerable to targeting by a complex network of actors,” and that “the option to withdraw completely remains.”

What the heck were these papers doing behind a bus stop and were they meant for the BBC and if so, why? For our purposes, it is clear that the UK seems right in line with Washington, not only in “poking the Russian bear,” but it may be open to staying in Afghanistan for a longer haul than the people (American and British) want. It may also be worth asking whether these “special operators” the U.S. is asking for would be covertly placed in Afghanistan or not.

This is good, but depressing information.

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On the final day of the Assange extradition hearing, magistrate Vanessa Baraitser refused to accept an affidavit from Assange’s solicitor Gareth Peirce, on the grounds it was out of time. The affidavit explained that the defence had been unable to respond to the new accusations in the United States government’s second superseding indictment, because these wholly new matters had been sprung on them just six weeks before the hearing resumed on 8 September 2020.

The defence had not only to gather evidence from Iceland, but had virtually no access to Assange to take his evidence and instructions, as he was effectively in solitary confinement in Belmarsh. The defence had requested an adjournment to give them time to address the new accusations, but this adjournment had been refused by Baraitser.

She now refused to accept Gareth Peirce’s affidavit setting out these facts.

What had happened was this. The hearings on the Assange extradition in January 2020 did not seem to be going well for the US government. The arguments that political extradition is specifically banned by the UK/US extradition treaty, and that the publisher was not responsible for Chelsea Manning’s whistleblowing on war crimes, appeared to be strong. The US Justice Department had decided that it therefore needed a new tack and to discover some “crimes” by Assange that seemed less noble than the Manning revelations.

To achieve this, the FBI turned to an informant in Iceland, Sigi Thordarson, who was willing to testify that Assange had been involved with him in, inter alia, hacking private banking information and tracking Icelandic police vehicles. This was of course much easier to portray as crime, as opposed to journalism, so the second superseding indictment was produced based on Thordarson’s story, which was elaborated with Thordarson by an FBI team.

The difficulty was that Thordarson was hardly a reliable witness. He had already been convicted in Iceland for stealing approximately $50,000 from Wikileaks and with impersonating Julian Assange online, not to mention the inconvenient fact he is a registered sex offender for online activities with under-age boys. The FBI team was in fact expelled from Iceland by the Icelandic government, who viewed what the FBI was doing with Thordarson as wholly illegitimate.

Notwithstanding all of that, in June 2020 we had the extraordinary position of the US government, 18 months since the start of extradition proceedings and six months after opening arguments had been heard by the court, being permitted completely to change the charges and alleged crimes which were the grounds for extradition, in the second superseding indictment.

On 8 September 2020 I was in court to report Mark Summers QC addressing the question of these new superseding charges:

The court resumed with a new defence application, led by Mark Summers QC, about the new charges from the US governments new superseding indictment. Summers took the court back over the history of this extradition hearing. The first indictment had been drawn up in March of 2018. In January 2019 a provisional request for extradition had been made, which had been implemented in April of 2019 on Assange’s removal from the Embassy. In June 2019 this was replaced by the full request with a new, second indictment which had been the basis of these proceedings before today. A whole series of hearings had taken place on the basis of that second indictment.

The new superseding indictment dated from 20 June 2020. In February and May 2020 the US government had allowed hearings to go ahead on the basis of the second indictment, giving no warning, even though they must by that stage have known the new superseding indictment was coming. They had given neither explanation nor apology for this.

The defence had not been properly informed of the superseding indictment, and indeed had learnt of its existence only through a US government press release on 20 June. It had not finally been officially served in these proceedings until 29 July, just six weeks ago. At first, it had not been clear how the superseding indictment would affect the charges, as the US government was briefing it made no difference but just gave additional detail. But on 21 August 2020, not before, it finally became clear in new US government submissions that the charges themselves had been changed.

There were now new charges that were standalone and did not depend on the earlier allegations. Even if the 18 Manning related charges were rejected, these new allegations could still form grounds for extradition. These new allegations included encouraging the stealing of data from a bank and from the government of Iceland, passing information on tracking police vehicles, and hacking the computers both of individuals and of a security company.

“How much of this newly alleged material is criminal is anybody’s guess”, stated Summers, going on to explain that it was not at all clear that an Australian giving advice from outwith Iceland to someone in Iceland on how to crack a code, was actually criminal if it occurred in the UK. This was even without considering the test of dual criminality in the US also, which had to be passed before the conduct was subject to extradition.

It was unthinkable that allegations of this magnitude would be the subject of a Part 2 extradition hearing within six weeks if they were submitted as a new case. Plainly that did not give the defence time to prepare, or to line up witnesses to these new charges. Among the issues relating to these new charges the defence would wish to address, were that some were not criminal, some were out of time limitation, some had already been charged in other fora (including Southwark Crown Court and courts in the USA).

There were also important questions to be asked about the origins of some of these charges and the dubious nature of the witnesses. In particular the witness identified as “teenager” was the same person identified as “Iceland 1” in the previous indictment. That indictment had contained a “health warning” over this witness given by the US Department of Justice. This new indictment removed that warning. But the fact was, this witness is Sigurdur Thordarson, who had been convicted in Iceland in relation to these events of fraud, theft, stealing Wikileaks money and material and impersonating Julian Assange.

The indictment did not state that the FBI had been “kicked out of Iceland for trying to use Thordarson to frame Assange”, stated Summers baldly.

Summers said all these matters should be ventilated in these hearings if the new charges were to be heard, but the defence simply did not have time to prepare its answers or its witnesses in the brief six weeks it had since receiving them, even setting aside the extreme problems of contact with Assange in the conditions in which he was being held in Belmarsh prison.

The defence would plainly need time to prepare answers to these new charges, but it would plainly be unfair to keep Assange in jail for the months that would take. The defence therefore suggested that these new charges should be excised from the conduct to be considered by the court, and they should go ahead with the evidence on criminal behaviour confined to what conduct had previously been alleged.

Summers argued it was “entirely unfair” to add what were in law new and separate criminal allegations, at short notice and “entirely without warning and not giving the defence time to respond to it. What is happening here is abnormal, unfair and liable to create real injustice if allowed to continue.”

The arguments submitted by the prosecution now rested on these brand new allegations. For example, the prosecution now countered the arguments on the rights of whistleblowers and the necessity of revealing war crimes by stating that there can have been no such necessity to hack into a bank in Iceland.

Summers concluded that the “case should be confined to that conduct which the American government had seen fit to allege in the eighteen months of the case” before their second new indictment.

Baraitser refused to rule out the new charges, and then did rule out the immediate defence request for an adjournment to give them time to respond to the new charges. At the end of the hearings she refused to accept the Peirce affidavit explaining why the defence was unable to respond. The court had by then spent nearly a month listening to witnesses refuting the first superseding indictment, as prepared by the defence, but nothing addressing the second superseding indictment.

Summers was absolutely furious when Baraitser refused to accept Peirce’s affidavit on the subject, to the extent he was still explosive in the street outside after the hearings had concluded.

While Baraitser’s eventual decision barred extradition on the grounds of Assange’s health and US inhumane prison conditions, the second superseding indictment and Thordarson’s accusations were accepted as a valid basis for extradition.

Thordarson has now told Icelandic magazine Stundin that his allegations against Assange contained in the indictment are untrue, and that Assange had not solicited the hacking of bank or police details. This is hardly a shock, though Thordarson’s motives for coming clean now are obscure; he is plainly a deeply troubled and often malicious individual.
Thordarson was always the most unreliable of witnesses, and I find it impossible to believe that the FBI cooperation with him was ever any more than deliberate fabrication of evidence by the FBI.

Edward Snowden has tweeted that Thordarson recanting will end the case against Julian Assange. Most certainly it should end it, but I fear it will not.

Many things should have ended the case against Assange. The First Amendment, the ban on political extradition in the US/UK Extradition Treaty, the CIA spying on the preparations of Assange’s defence counsel, all of these should have stopped the case dead in its tracks.

It is now five months since extradition was refused, no US government appeal against that decision has yet been accepted by the High Court, and yet Julian remains confined to the UK’s highest security prison. The revelation that Thordarson’s allegations are fabricated – which everyone knew already, Baraitser just pretended she didn’t – is just one more illegality that the Establishment will shimmy over in its continued persecution of Assange.

Assange democratised information and gave real power to the people for a while, worldwide. He revealed US war crimes. For that his life is destroyed. Neither law nor truth have anything to do with it.

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***

It was a humid June on the east coast 50 years ago when the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers. The anniversary is worth marking, for reasons sweeping and grand, and for reasons deeply personal.

In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret U.S. government history of the Vietnam War, to the Times. No one had ever published such classified documents before, and reporters feared prosecution under the Espionage Act. A federal court ordered the Times to cease publication after an initial flurry of excerpts were printed, the first time in U.S. history a federal judge had invoked prior restraint and shattered the 1A.

In a legal battle too important to have been written first as a novel, the NYT fought back. The Supreme Court on June 30, 1971 handed down a victory for the First Amendment in New York Times Company v. United States, and the Times won the Pulitzer Prize. The Papers helped convince Americans the Vietnam War was wrong, their government could not be trusted, and The People informed by a free press could still have a say in things. This 20 year anniversary rightfully marks all that.

Today, journalists expect a Pulitzer for a snarky tweet that mocks Trump. In our current shameful state where the MSM serves as an organ of the Deep State, the anniversary of the Papers also serves as a reminder to millennials OnlyFansing as journalists that there were once people in their jobs who valued truth and righteousness. Perhaps this may inspire some MSM propagandist to realize he might still run with lions instead of slinking home to feed his cats.

The 50th anniversary of the Papers is also a chance to remember how fragile the victory in 1971 was. The Supreme Court left the door open for prosecution of journalists who publish classified documents by focusing narrowly on prohibiting the government from prior restraint. Politics and public opinion, not law, have kept the feds exercising discretion in not prosecuting the press, a delicate dance around an 800-pound gorilla loose in the halls of democracy. The government, particularly under Obama, hasmeanwhile aggressively used the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers who leak to those same journalists.

There is also a very personal side to this anniversary. When my book, We Meant Well, turned me into a State Department whistleblower and set off a wall of the bad brown falling on me, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg sent me two of his books, unannounced, in the mail.

He wrote a personal message inside each one, explaining to me what I was doing was hard, scary, and above all, a duty. It changed me and my understanding of what was happening to me. I wasn’t arguing procedure with the State Department and grubbing for my pension, I was defending the First Amendment itself. I wrote Dan a thank you note. Here’s some of it.

Thank you for sending me copies of your books, and thank you even more for writing “with admiration for your truth telling” inside the cover flap of one. I am humbled, because I waited my whole life to realize today I had already met you.

In 1971 I was 10 years old, living in Ohio. The Vietnam War was a part of our town’s life, same as the Fruehauf tractor-trailer plant with its 100 percent union workforce, the A&P and the Pledge of Allegiance. Nobody in my house went to war, but neighbors had gold stars in their windows and I remember one teacher at school, the one with the longer hair and the mustache, talking about Vietnam.

It meant little to me, involved with oncoming puberty, but I remember my mom bringing home from the supermarket a newsprint quickie paperback edition of the Pentagon Papers. There of course was no Internet and you could not buy the Times where I lived. Mom knew of politics and Vietnam maybe even less than I did, but the Papers were all over the news and it seemed the thing to do to spend the $1.95. When I tried to make sense of the names and foreign places it made no impact on me.

I didn’t understand then what you had done. While I was trying to learn multiplication, you were making photocopies of classified documents. As you read them, you understood the government had knowledge early on the war could not be won, and that continuing would lead to many times more casualties than was ever admitted publicly.

A lot of people inside the government had read those same Papers and understood their content, but only you decided that instead of simply going along with the lies, or privately using your new knowledge to fuel self-eating cynicism, you would try to persuade U.S. Senators Fulbright and McGovern to release the papers on the Senate floor.

When they did not have the courage, even as they knew the lies continued to kill Americans they represented, you brought the Papers to the New York Times. The Times then echoed the courage of great journalists and published the Papers, fought off the Nixon administration by calling to the First Amendment, and brought the truth about lies to America. That’s when my mom bought a copy of the Papers at the A&P.

You were considered an enemy of the United States because when you encountered something inside of government so egregious, so fundamentally wrong, you risked your own fortune, freedom, and honor to make it public. You almost went to jail, fighting off charges under the same draconian Espionage Act the government still uses today to silence others who stand in your shadow.

In 2009 I volunteered to serve in Iraq for my employer of some 23 years, the Department of State. While I was there I saw such waste in our reconstruction program, such lies put out by two administrations about what we were (not) doing in Iraq, that it seemed to me that the only thing I could do — had to do — was tell people about what I saw. In my years of government service, I experienced my share of dissonance when it came to what was said in public and what the government did behind the public’s back. In most cases, the gap was filled only with scared little men and women, and what was left unsaid hid their flaws.

What I saw in Iraq was different. There, the space between what we were doing (the waste), and what we were saying (the chant of success) was filled with numb soldiers and devastated Iraqis, not nerveless bureaucrats. It wasn’t Vietnam in scale or impact, but it was again young Americans risking their lives, believing for something greater than themselves, when instead it was just another lie. Another war started and run on lies, while again our government worked to keep the truth from the people.

I am unsure what I accomplished with my own book, absent getting retired-by-force from the State Department for telling a truth that embarrassed them. So be it; most people at State will never understand the choice of conscience over career, the root of most of State’s problems.

But Dan, what you accomplished was this. When I faced a crisis of conscience, to tell what I knew because it needed to be told, coming to realize I was risking at the least my job if not jail, I remembered that newsprint copy of the Papers from 1971 which you risked the same and more to release. I took my decision in the face of the Obama administration having already charged more people under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information than all past presidencies combined, but more importantly, I took my decision in the face of your example.

Later, whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden would do the same. I know you have encouraged them, too, through your example and with personal messages.

So thank you for the books you sent Dan. Thank you for your courage so that when I needed it, I had an example to assess myself against other than the limp men and women working now for a Department of State too scared of the truth to rise to claim even a whisper of the word courage for themselves.

Fast-forward to 2021. In these last few years the term “whistleblower” has been co-opted such that a Deep State operative was able to abuse the term to backdoor impeachment against a sitting president. The use of anonymous sources has devolved from brave individuals speaking out against a government gone wrong into a way for journalists to manufacture “proof” of anything they want, from claims the president was a Russian spy to the use of the military to create a photo op in Lafayette Park.

On this anniversary we look at individuals like Ellsberg and reporters like those at the Times and know it is possible for individuals with courage to make a difference. That is something worth remembering, and celebrating.

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Important article first published on July 27, 2012 provides a historical perspective on the Black Sea Military Buildup

With permanent access to eight air and other military bases and training facilities in Bulgaria and Romania acquired over the past seven years, and advanced interceptor missiles to be stationed in the second country in three years, the Pentagon is establishing a firm foothold in the Black Sea region from which to continue current and initiate new military operations in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Balkans and the Caucasus.

The U.S. Marines Corps’ Black Sea Rotational Force and the U.S. Army’s Task Force-East are assigned to the region on a regular basis and American warships are frequent visitors to the Black Sea, notwithstanding the 1936 Montreux Convention which limits the passage of non-littoral nations’ military vessels through the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits to the Black Sea.

Last year the flagship of the U.S.-NATO interceptor missile system, the guided missile cruiser USS Monterey, participated in the U.S.-led Sea Breeze naval exercise in the Black Sea – a NATO Partnership for Peace initiative – coordinated from Odessa, Ukraine, only 187 miles from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol.

This year’s Sea Breeze [2012], held from July 9-21, was the largest naval exercise held in the Black Sea this year and featured personnel from 17 nations, NATO members and partners (not always publicly acknowledged): The U.S., Ukraine, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Turkey, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Georgia, Israel, Moldova, Qatar, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates. Algeria, Bangladesh, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates participated for the first time. The last two states, members of the Gulf Cooperation Council and of NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative military partnership, provided NATO with warplanes for the six-month air war against Libya last year. The United Arab Emirates also has troops serving under NATO in Afghanistan.

Overlapping with the above maneuvers, another NATO Partnership for Peace exercise run by U.S. European Command, Rapid Trident 2012, was launched in Western Ukraine on July 16 and will run to July 28.

An estimated 1,400 service members from 16 countries – the U.S., Ukraine, Austria, Azerbaijan, Denmark, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Georgia, Macedonia, Moldova, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Sweden – are participating.

The Dacian Thunder 2012 exercise is being conducted by the U.S., Britain and Romania from July 10-31 in the third nation. Led by the U.S. 81st Fighter Squadron and Marines, the three NATO allies are training for, in the words of the U.S. Air Force website, “air-to-air, air-to-ground, combat search and rescue, air defense, air security, air intelligence, tactical command, and cross service logistical support and operations” in preparation for “future contingency operations.”

Earlier this month U.S. Army Europe commander Lieutenant General Mark Phillip Hertling visited Georgia, on the other end of the Black Sea, to meet with the country’s new defense minister, Dimitri Shashkin, and top military commanders.

This week Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, Deputy Director of Plans, Policy and Strategy for U.S. European Command, met with Defense Minister Shashkin to begin the implementation of this year’s agreement between U.S. President Barack Obama and Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to upgrade Georgia’s military capabilities.

This week Saakashvili’s spouse, Netherlands-born Sandra Roelofs, visited the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. to meet with six Georgian soldiers being treated there for injuries sustained in NATO’s Afghan war.

Last week Saakashvili met with Turkish Defense Minister İsmet Yılmaz in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and stated:

“You know that 2014 has been declared as the year of NATO expansion, and Georgia already has a real chance for full membership in NATO, which represents an important long-term security guarantee for us.”

The Georgian head of state added:

“Turkey is one of the major supporters in our drive to join NATO and for that we are very grateful, because it represents a historic chance for Georgia, for the region and for our good neighborly relations to [have] Georgia protected within this international organization.

“Recently it (Georgia’s NATO membership) became more realistic than it has ever been in history.”

In 2005, the year after Romania became a member of NATO, the Pentagon acquired several military installations in the nation including the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, previously employed for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The following year it gained bases in neighboring Bulgaria, including the Graf Ignatievo and Bezmer air bases. The above are the first American military bases on the territory of former members of the Warsaw Pact.

The Marine Corps’ Black Sea Rotational Force, which as of this year is spending six months in the greater Black Sea region, frequently operates from the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, as has the Task Force-East.

The Black Sea Rotational Force’s area of operations is formally the Black Sea region, the Balkans and the Caucasus, though in fact it extends into Moldova and Greece as well. That is, it has defined a geostrategically vital area of the world, the junction of Europe, Asia and the Middle East, as its purview, one which includes all the so-called frozen conflicts in former Soviet space: Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transdniester.

The Black Sea region was completely inaccessible, was terra prohibita, to the Pentagon during the Cold War era. NATO expansion, with the incorporation of new members and partners, has opened the sea to U.S. military penetration, presence and use for what are termed downrange operations – armed interventions – to the east and the south.

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For the second time in the five months since he was inaugurated, President Joe Biden on Sunday ordered a U.S. bombing raid on Syria, and for the first time, he also bombed Iraq. The rationale offered was the same as Biden’s first air attack in February: the U.S., in the words of Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, “conducted defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region.” He added that “the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense.”

Embedded in this formulaic Pentagon statement is so much propaganda and so many euphemisms that, by itself, it reveals the fraudulent nature of what was done. To begin with, how can U.S. airstrikes carried out in Iraq and Syria be “defensive” in nature? How can they be an act of “self-defense”? Nobody suggests that the targets of the bombing campaign have the intent or the capability to strike the U.S. “homeland” itself. Neither Syria nor Iraq is a U.S. colony or American property, nor does the U.S. have any legal right to be fighting wars in either country, rendering the claim that its airstrikes were “defensive” and an “act of self-defense” to be inherently deceitful.

The Pentagon’s description of the people bombed by the U.S. — “Iran-backed militias groups” — is intended to obscure the reality. Biden did not bomb Iran or order Iranians to be bombed or killed. The targets of U.S. aggression were Iraqis in their own country, and Syrians in their own country. Only the U.S. war machine and its subservient media could possibly take seriously the Biden administration’s claim that the bombs they dropped on people in their own countries were “defensive” in nature. Invocation of Iran has no purpose other than to stimulate the emotional opposition to the government of that country among many Americans in the hope that visceral dislike of Iranian leaders will override the rational faculties that would immediately recognize the deceit and illegality embedded in the Pentagon’s arguments.

Beyond the propagandistic justification is the question of legality, though even to call it a question dignifies it beyond what it merits. There is no conceivable Congressional authorization — none, zero — to Biden’s dropping of bombs in Syria. Obama’s deployment of CIA operatives to Syria and years of the use of force to overthrow Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad never had any Congressional approval of any kind, nor did Trump’s bombing of Assad’s forces (urged by Hillary Clinton, who wanted more), nor does Biden’s bombing campaign in Syria now. It was and is purely lawless, illegal. And the same is true of bombing Iraq. The 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq, which the House just last week voted to repeal, has long since ceased to provide any legal justification for ongoing U.S. troop presence and bombing campaigns in that country.

In its statement justifying the bombing raids, Biden’s Pentagon barely even bothered to pretend any of this is legal. It did not cite either the 2002 AUMF for Iraq or the 2001 AUMF authorizing the use of force against those responsible for 9/11 (a category which, manifestly, did not include Iran, Iraq or Syria). Instead, harkening back to the days of John Yoo and Dick Cheney, the Biden Defense Department claimed that “as a matter of international law, the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense,” and casually asserted that “as a matter of domestic law, the President took this action pursuant to his Article II authority to protect U.S. personnel in Iraq.”

Those claims are nothing short of a joke. Nobody seriously believes that Joe Biden has congressional authority to bomb Syria and Iraq, nor to bomb “Iranian-backed” forces of any kind. As The Daily Beast‘s long-time War on Terror reporter Spencer Ackerman put it on Sunday night, discussions of legality at this point are “parody” because when it comes to the U.S.’s Endless Wars in the name of the War on Terror, “we passed Lawful behind many many years ago. Authorization citations are just pretexts written by lawyers who need to pantomime at lawfulness. The U.S. presence in Syria is blatantly illegal. Such things never stop the U.S.”

That is exactly right. The U.S. government is a lawless entity. It violates the law, including its own Constitution, whenever it wants. The requirement that no wars be fought absent congressional authority is not some ancillary bureaucratic annoyance but was completely central to the design of the country. Article I, Section 8 could not be clearer: “The Congress shall have Power . . . to declare war.” Two months after I began writing about politics — back in December, 2005 — I wrote a long article compiling the arguments in the Federalist Papers which insisted that permitting the president unchecked powers to wage war without the approval of the public — through their representatives in Congress — was uniquely dangerous for ushering in the kind of tyranny from which they had just liberated themselves, and another article in 2007 which did the same:

The Constitution — while making the President the top General in directing how citizen-approved wars are fought — ties the use of military force to the approval of the American citizenry in multiple ways, not only by prohibiting wars in the absence of a Congressional declaration (though it does impose that much-ignored requirement), but also by requiring Congressional approval every two years merely to have an army. In Federalist 26, this is what Alexander Hamilton said in explaining the rationale behind the latter requirement (emphasis in original):

The legislature of the United States will be obliged by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter by a formal vote in the face of their constituents. They are not at liberty to vest in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence.

Public opposition is the key check on the ill-advised use of military force. In Federalist 24, Hamilton explained that the requirement of constant democratic deliberation over the American military is “a great and real security against military establishments without evident necessity”. . . .

Finding a way to impose checks on the President’s war-making abilities was a key objective of the Founders. In Federalist 4, John Jay identified as a principal threat to the Republic the fact that insufficiently restrained leaders “will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for purposes and objects merely personal, such as a thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.”

But as Ackerman says, even discussing legality at this point is meaningless, an empty gesture, a joke. It gives far too much credit to the U.S. ruling class, as it implies that they care at all about whether their posture of endless war is legal. They know that it is illegal and do not care at all. Many have forgotten that President Obama not only involved the U.S. in a devastating regime-change war in Libya without congressional approval, but so much worse, continued to do so even after the House of Representatives voted against providing him authorization to use force in Libya. Obama ignored the House vote and kept troops in Libya anyways as part of a NATO mission, claiming that NATO and U.N. authorization somehow entitled him to do this despite his own country’s Congress voting against it, reflecting overwhelming opposition among the citizenry. (The U.N. authorization — even if it could somehow supplant the U.S. Constitution — only allowed the use of force to protect civilians, not to overthrow the Libyan government, which quickly and predictably became the NATO mission, making it clearly illegal).

This is one reason I found the Trump-era discourse so suffocatingly dishonest and fraudulent. I began writing about politics in 2005 in order to document the systemic lawlessness that had become the fully bipartisan Bush/Cheney War on Terror. The executive power theories that were adopted — that the president has the right to do whatever he wants under Article II regardless of congressional laws or any other acts by courts or the citizenry, even including spying on American citizens without warrants — was the pure expression of authoritarianism and lawlessness. That lawlessness not only continued but escalated severely under the Obama administration, with the war in Libya, the claimed right to assassinate anyone in the world without due process, including U.S. citizens, and the CIA’s covert regime-change war in Syria.

Having to watch the Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden operatives who ushered in this permanent state of illegality and lawless wars prance around during the Trump years as noble defenders of the sacred rule of law — all while being celebrated and profiting greatly — was nauseating in the best of times. American elites do not care about the rule of law or the Constitution. Ignoring it is how they empower themselves at the expense of the citizenry. That is why very few will care about the fact that Biden (indulging the fiction for a moment that it was he) ordered the bombings on two countries without the slightest whiff of legal authority to do so.

While it feels frivolous even to raise questions of legality — since so few in Washington care about such matters — the real overarching question is the simplest one. Why does the U.S. continue to have a military presence in Iraq and Syria? What conceivable benefits redound to American citizens from the massive expenditures required to keep U.S. troops stationed in these two countries, the risk of those troops’ lives, the endless acquisition of bombs and other weapons to fight there, and the obvious but severe dangers from triggering escalation with powerful militaries that — unlike the U.S. — actually have a vital interest in what takes place in their bordering countries?

While the ordinary American only suffers from all of this, there are definitely some sectors of U.S. society which benefit. The corporation that Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin left in order to run the Pentagon — Raytheon — needs ongoing troop deployment and permanent warfare for its profitability. According to The New York Times, it was “Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, [who] briefed Mr. Biden on attack options early last week,” after which “Mr. Biden approved striking the three targets.” So Gen. Austin’s colleagues on the Raytheon Board of Directors, as well as his comrades on the Boards of General Dynamics and Boeing, are surely thrilled with this attack.

Indeed, anyone invested in endless war in the Middle East — including the entire U.S. intelligence community and the weapons industry which feeds off of it — must be thrilled by all of this. Each time the U.S. “retaliates” against Iran or Iraqi militias or Syrian fighters, it causes them to “retaliate” back, which in turn is cited as the reason the U.S. can never leave but must instead keep retaliating, ensuring this cycle never ends. It also creates a never-ending supply of angry people in that region who hate the U.S. for bringing death and destruction to their countries with bombs that never stop falling and therefore want to strike back: what we are all supposed to call “terrorism.” That is what endless war means: a war that is designed never to terminate, one that is as far removed as possible from actual matters of self-defense and manufactures its own internal rationale to continue it.

But what is beyond doubt is that this illegal, endless war in the Middle East does nothing but harm American citizens. As they are told that they cannot enjoy a sustainable let alone quality standard of living without working two or three dreary hourly-wage, benefits-free jobs for corporate giants, and while more Americans than ever continue to live at home and remain financially unable to start families, the U.S. continues to spend more on its military than the next thirteen countries combined. This has continued for close to two full decades now because the establishment wings of both parties support it. Neither of them believes in the Constitution or the rule of law, nor do they care in the slightest about the interests of anyone other than the large corporate sectors that fund the establishment wings of both parties. The bombs that fell on Syria and Iraq last night were for them and them alone.

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The highest official of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William Burns, arrived in Colombia to participate in a “delicate” mission in terms of security, as part of the “cooperation” between the two countries.

The Colombian ambassador in Washington, Francisco Santos, reported on the arrival of the CIA director, however Santos did not want to provide additional details about Burns’ visit to Bogotá.

“I prefer not to tell you it is a delicate mission, an important mission in terms of intelligence, that we managed to coordinate,” Santos replied obliquely when asked about the mission.

This visit comes after US President Joe Biden’s first telephone conversation with his Colombian counterpart Iván Duque. The Colombian government, following the directions of the US regime, has been trying unsuccessfully for years to overthrow the legitimate government of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, accusing it of human rights violations, when in reality it is in Colombia where human rights violations are sadly part of the everyday life of the civilian population.

The day before the visit marked two months since the beginning of Colombia’s bloody repression of the national strike and demonstrations rejecting the policies of Duque and demanding that measures be taken in the area of ​​human rights particularly, due to the violence and repression perpetrated by his government.

Santos explained that the visit of the highest CIA official to Colombia was made by through a contact, after having already held three meetings with the organization.

Jefe de la CIA visitará Colombia para dirigir "una delicada misión". 😫 pic.twitter.com/AnhAhct8aO

— Michel Caballero Palma (@MichelCaballero) June 29, 2021

Santos explained that in those meetings they had been told where they are going and what is happening, so they consider this visit as “very important.”

“That contact was made, you understand,” said Santos. “We have been working with that agency. We have had three meetings.”

William Burns became director of the CIA on March 18 of this year, as part of the changes that Biden made after his inauguration.

What’s behind the CIA visit to Colombia?

Colombia is experiencing a delicate internal situation due to the demonstrations. The strike committee and demonstrators do not intend to cease until their requests are heard by the government.

These demonstrations revealed to the world the malicious structure of Colombia’s security organizations and the repressive manner that the government responds to peaceful protests.

CIA Director William Burns just flew to Colombia for what the far-right government says are a series of "delicate and important" meetings 🤨

This CIA visit comes while the narco-regime has been massacring and disappearing anti-austerity protesters in a brutally violent crackdown https://t.co/eXZCHjKgDE

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) June 29, 2021

In addition, the visit follows the alleged attack against the Colombian president last Friday, in which his helicopter was purportedly hit by six bullets. Hours later they attempted to hold the government of Venezuela responsible.

The accusations arose after the alleged discovery of weapons bearing identifying marks of the Bolivarian National Armed Force (FANB).

Added to this is the complaint made by the Venezuelan government recently that the government of Colombia and the United States sponsor criminal gangs to commit crimes on the border with Venezuela and even in some barrios of Caracas.

“It is imperative to remind the international community that these irregular groups have the sponsorship of the Colombian government and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which is why their incursions into Venezuelan territory should be considered as an aggression sponsored by Iván Duque, since he provides them with logistical-financial support,” warned the Venezuelan Minister for Defense, Vladimir Padrino López. Violence promoted in Apure state by Colombian paramilitary narco-trafficking gangs has taken the lives of more than ten Venezuelan army officers this year and sowed panic among the Venezuelan population.

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Featured image: CIA Director William J. Burns official portrait (Public Domain)

Towards a “Fourth Wave”? Combating “D the Dangerous Delta Variant”. The “Mathematical Lockdown Model”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 29, 2021

Is a new Worldwide lockdown envisaged as a means to combating the “dangerous” Covid variant entitled “Delta”. First identified last year in India, The SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant was  “thought to have driven the deadly second wave of infections this summer in India”. According to so-called “scientific opinion” it is now said to be spreading worldwide, to some 80 countries.

FDA Adds Heart Inflammation Warning to Pfizer, Moderna COVID Vaccines as Some Experts Call for Full Approval

By Megan Redshaw, June 29, 2021

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration added a warning to fact sheets — as advised by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — for Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines indicating an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis following vaccination. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on June 25 added a warning to patient and provider fact sheets for Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines indicating an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis following vaccination.

HMS Defender versus the Russian Military: The Danger of Believing Your Own Propaganda

By Rep. Ron Paul, June 29, 2021

Less than two weeks after NATO members reaffirmed allegiance to Article 5 – that an attack on one member was an attack on all members – the UK nearly put that pledge to the test. In a shockingly provocative move, the UK’s HMS Defender purposely sailed into Crimean territorial waters on its way to Georgia.

Iraq Says Bombings Ordered by Biden a ‘Blatant and Unacceptable Violation’ of Sovereignty

By Jessica Corbett, June 29, 2021

Echoing criticism from across the globe on Monday, the Iraqi government slammed the Biden administration for overnight U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria at facilities the Pentagon says were used by Iran-backed militias.

Nicaragua Responds to “Unilateral Coercive Measures by a Hostile Foreign Power”

By Carlos Fonseca Terán, June 29, 2021

Nicaragua is in the news again. But not for being one of the countries with the greatest reduction in poverty and social inequality worldwide since 2007 (poverty by half, extreme poverty by a third, and going from being the fourth most unequal country to being the fourth least unequal in Latin America).

Presidents: Georgia, Ukraine Share Commitment to NATO Membership, “De-occupation” of Lands from Russia

By Rick Rozoff, June 29, 2021

Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili paid a two-day visit to Ukraine earlier this week (her first) and met with her opposite number President Volodymyr Zelensky. Zurabishvili first came to world notice when she emerged as part of the triumvirate that took over in Georgia following the so-called Rose Revolution in late 2003 that saw incumbent head of state Eduard Shevardnadze manhandled and divested of his powers.

A Sea Painted NATO Black

By Pepe Escobar, June 29, 2021

Welcome to the latest NATO show: Sea Breeze starts today and goes all the way to July 23. The co-hosts are the US Sixth Fleet and the Ukrainian Navy. The main protagonist is Standing NATO Maritime Group 2.  The show, in NATOspeak, is just an innocent display of “strenghtening deterrence and defense”. NATO spin tells us the exercise is “growing in popularity” and now features more than 30 nations “from six continents” deploying 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft and “18 special operations and dive teams”.

China-India: Contours of a Conflict to Come

By Bertil Lintner, June 29, 2021

India has dispatched at least 50,000 additional troops to the Chinese border where there are currently 200,000 combat-ready troops, an increase of more than 40% since the two rival powers clashed in the Himalayas in June last year, resulting in the death of 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese.

“We are Human Guinea Pigs”: Alarming Casualty Rates for mRNA Vaccines Warrant Urgent Action

By F. William Engdahl, June 29, 2021

As official government data is emerging in Europe and the USA on the alarming numbers of deaths and permanent paralysis as well as other severe side effects from the experimental mRNA vaccines, it is becoming clear that we are being asked to be human guinea pigs in an experiment that could alter the human gene structure and far worse.

57 Top Scientists and Doctors Release Shocking Study on COVID Vaccines and Demand Immediate Stop to All Vaccinations

By Dr. Roxana Bruno, Dr. Peter McCullough, and et al., June 29, 2021

A group of 57 leading scientists, doctors and policy experts has released a report calling in to question the safety and efficacy of the current COVID-19 vaccines and are now calling for an immediate end to all vaccine programs. We urge you to read and share this damning report.

Overcoming the Hypnosis of Fear: “A Culture of Fear” Imposed by “Elected Governments”

By Julian Rose, June 29, 2021

You are a Universal Being. Your body is just a vehicle for the manifestation of this Universal Being here on Earth.  As a Universal Being your ‘essence’ lives forever. Start identifying your Self as a Universal Being, merged with the source of all existence. The more you live in this Self – the Real You – during this lifetime – the more seamless is the passage onwards at the time of passing. 

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From his secure fortress of contented spite, Dominic Cummings, exiled from the power he once wielded at Number 10 as one of the chosen, must have felt a sense of satisfaction.  Biliously, the former top aide to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had scorned the now former UK Health Secretary in a performance before MPs lasting hours.  Matt Hancock, Cummings explained last month, could have been sacked for any number of things he did in responding to the pandemic. 

With history moving from its tragic gear into a farcical one, Hancock has resigned.  It had all the makings of a tabloid fix: the minister’s name (Hancock), an aide, kissing, a leaking mole and CCTV.  But the departure was not for mendacity or want of competence so much as an ill-considered moment in breach of COVID-19 regulations.  With the country still continuing a lockdown that was meant to dramatically ease on June 21, a camera recording the Health Secretary snogging his aide, Gina Coladangelo, was leaked.  The camera footage of the office incident was recorded on May 6.

Johnson was never going to sack his minister on grounds of incompetence.  The leader has set the precedent others must follow.  According to the vengeful Cummings, it took a hail of 89 texts from Johnson’s wife Carrie to lessen the support.  It was left to Hancock to fall upon his sword, which he took some time to do. 

In his resignation letter, priorities are reversed.  “The last thing I would want is for my private life to distract attention from the single-minded focus that is leading us out of this crisis.”  The actual reason comes afterwards.  “I want to reiterate my apology for breaking the guidance, and apologise to my family and loved ones for putting them through this.”  People who had “sacrificed so much in this pandemic” were owed a sense of honesty “when we have let them down as I have done by breaching this guidance.”  The Times tersely opined that such conduct suggested that “the government tolerates breaches of lockdown rules for themselves, while insisting the public adhere to higher standards.” 

With the bigger picture of Hancock’s conduct miniaturised (the breach of social distancing rules, various questionable staff appointments – the list is long), Brandon Lewis, Northern Ireland Secretary, could now focus on the important matters: finding out how CCTV footage found its way into the pages of that undyingly malicious paper of poor record, The Sun.  The culprit is said to be lurking in the corridors of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

British press outlets suggested that the leaker had made contact via Instagram to an unnamed anti-lockdown activist.  “I have some very damning CCTV footage of someone that has been classed as completely f***ing hopeless. If you would like some more information please contact me.”  The same paper supplied readers with all the details, leaving little to the imagination. Included was a crude outlay of Hancock’s office, including the positioning of the Union Jack, painting of the Queen, bookshelf, coat rack and, it transpires, the “kiss door”. 

On Sky News, Lewis made the government’s priorities clear.  “I have seen some of the reports this morning outlining how different journalists think the tape might have got out there.  That is certainly a matter I know the Department of Health will be looking into to understand exactly how that was recorded, how it got out of the system.  It’s something we need to get to the bottom of.”

In comments that can only induce smirks of derision, Lewis preferred to focus on the principle that what took place in “government departments can be sensitive, important and people need to have confidence that what is happening in a government department is something that allows the government to be focused on these core issues, and the sensitivity sometimes in the security sense of those issues.”

Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt was also busy directing attention to the things that counted – at least from a government perspective.  By leaking footage of Hancock’s intimate moment, the leaker may well have sailed close to breaching the Official Secrets Act.  Paying lip service to the “open society” and protections “for whistleblowers who find things out and release them in the public interest”, Hunt told the Andrew Marr Show what really bothered him.  “[W]e need to understand how this happened, and to make sure that ministers are secure in their offices, to be able to have conversations that they know aren’t going to be leaked to hostile powers.”

A fevered panic swept through Johnson’s cabinet, with ministers fearing they might be the next one to be Hancocked.  Justice Minister Robert Buckland revealed that sweeps were being organised to identify any filming or listening devices that had escaped detection.  “I think there is an important principle here about need for ministers and civil servants who often are handling very sensitive material and information to have a safe space within which to work.” 

The calls for investigation did not stop at the issue of a breach of ministerial confidence.  The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, wished to guide the debate back to the breach of those very regulations government ministers had insisted Britons follow. “What’s important now is for there to be proper investigations into which rules were broken in relation to use of private email, in relation to the appointment of senior staff and also in relation to the social distancing rules.” 

Hancock had certainly built himself a fortress of impropriety during the course of the pandemic.  The Sunday Times, having seen minutes of various meetings, noted that the minister had been using a private email address from March 2020 to conduct departmental correspondence, making accountability for decisions regarding the novel coronavirus slippery at best. 

The deflectors were also tapping away.  Those sympathising with Hancock within the government were aghast at the very existence of a camera in the office.  Had he been the victim of an orchestrated sting by enemies in Number 10?  Or did some meddlesome power such as China wish to cause ripples by installing a clinch catching “love bug”? 

The smug Mail on Sunday poured water on suggestions of foul play. “In fact, pictures taken in September 2017, just before Hancock moved in, show that the camera which caught the clinch is clearly visible on the ceiling of his office.”  But the Tories were also searching for another alibi that would, if not exonerate Hancock then at least provide a distraction from his conduct. 

To that end, suspicion started growing legs with commentary on the camera’s make.  While rented from a Singaporean firm, it stems from Chinese manufacturer Hikvision, a company under contract to supply surveillance equipment to the authorities in China’s Xinjiang region.  Despite being blacklisted by Washington in October 2019 for its role in conducting surveillance of Uighurs in the region’s network of “re-education camps”, US cities, counties and schools have made good use of them during the pandemic.  In Britain, city councils employ them in public spaces. 

The China Research Group, run by Tory MPs keen to drum up fears about China, fastened on Hikvision’s role in the Hancock affair in a statement.  “There are questions over whether [Hikvision cameras] are currently used in Portcullis House (where MPs have their offices) and the Palace of Westminster (where the House of Lords and the House of Commons is located).”  The group feared “the potential for Chinese intelligence agencies to tap into camera feeds in sensitive locations”. 

The nature and scope of the forthcoming inquiry is uncertain.  A full-blooded investigation, no holds barred, might well reveal a bit more than the Department of Health might want to reveal.  Investigators run the risk of lionising a potential whistleblower while uncovering a good deal of rot at the centre of the Johnson government.  And few civil servants, and certainly no government politician, would like to see that.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from Flickr

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***

A recently published study in this month’s American Journal of Therapeutics, took an in-depth look at 18 randomized controlled studies on the use of Ivermectin to control COVID-19. The study concludes that the use of Ivermectin “significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19” and “found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance.”

Ivermectin was first developed as a veterinary drug in the 1970s, however since 1988 it has been prescribed for humans to combat various parasitic infections. Was later added to the WHO’s list of essential medications and in 2015 the inventors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

With the outbreak of COVID-19, many doctors and scientists were looking for new ways to deal with the virus. At the same time, an interesting series of events occurred one nursing home in Toronto, in February 2020 (just before COVID-19 emerged in Canada the Valley View Nursing Home in Toronto, Canada had a parasitic outbreak. 170 patients at the home were given Ivermectin. The residents of the 4th floor, where the outbreak occurred, were given the highest dose; the rest of the residents were given a prophylactic dose. The staff were not given Ivermectin. Then they had a Covid-19 outbreak. The staff were infected with COVID-19 much more than the patients. Only 6 patients contracted COVID, and they all had mild cases. The patients on the 4th floor, who received the highest dose of ivermectin, had no cases of COVID. These patients were very elderly with comorbidities, and they had much contact with the staff yet only 6% were infected.

Since then, over 60 clinical trials (31 randomized controlled) conducted by 549 scientists in 18,931 patients were conducted to see what if any link Ivermectin has with preventing and treating COVID-19. The conclusions of these studies reveal dramatic positive outcomes for the use of Ivermectin. When used prophylactically patients saw an 85% reduction in hospitalization and death, early treatment was effective 76%, and even when used as a later stage treatment was effective 46% of the time.

While these studies suggested that Ivermectin was indeed a safe, cheap, and effective treatment for COVID-19, many public health policy makers refused to permit its use to treat and prevent COVID-19. The FDA in it’s statement said that the “FDA has not approved ivermectin for use in treating or preventing COVID-19” later explaining that “The FDA has not reviewed data to support use of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients to treat or to prevent COVID-19”. Many are insisting it’s time for the FDA to review the data and formally approve its use.

One such advocate for the use of Ivermectin is Dr. Pierre Kory, a founder of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). Kory, along with the other professionals at the FLCCC developed the specific protocol to prevent and treat COVID-19 using Ivermectin. While the treatment was shunned by the medical establishment and the social media banned promoting or debating the treatment, physicians, like Kory, persisted and advocated for its use. In December 2020 Dr. Kory and others gave an impassioned plea, backed by scientific research at a committee hearing in the U.S. Senate. Stating that Ivermectin “basically obliterates transmission of this virus,” the doctor continued saying “When I say miracle I do not use that term lightly[.] … [T]hat is a scientific recommendation based on mountains of data that has emerged in the last three months.”

Unfortunately, many are still uninformed of this treatment, and the medical establishment is still blocking its use. Several hospitals around the country are even refusing to administer the treatment to seriously ill patients. A number of patients had to go as far as to get a court order to force the hospital to permit them to use this life saving medication. Thankfully all of those patients received their Ivermectin and made dramatic turnarounds and subsequently recovered for COVID-19.

The hope of a safe and effective medication to prevent and treat COVID-19 appears to have been found in Ivermectin; unfortunately it continues to be deemed unacceptable by the medical establishment and undiscussable by social media.

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***

One month after the end of the last hostilities between Israel and Hamas, events on the ground demonstrate that little has changed. And once again the US media is ignoring Israel’s creeping annexation of Palestinian lands and their brutally aggressive behaviors toward the Palestinian people.

There appeared to be an awakening of the press last month, especially the extensive coverage given to Israel’s effort to evict Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah and the Israeli military’s brutal assault on Palestinians at Al Aqsa, signalling greater sensitivity to the Palestinian plight. Although these Israeli actions and the mass uprisings of Palestinian youth they precipitated were drowned out by the more familiar storyline of Israeli bombardments of Gaza in response to Hamas rocket fire, after the ceasefire, positive coverage of Palestinian suffering continued, but only for a time.

Attention was soon diverted by the drama of Netanyahu’s defeat and the formation of the new Israeli government. At this point, the Israeli hasbara industry kicked into full gear. Newly inaugurated Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a notorious hardliner, we are told, has become a pragmatist who wants to restore frayed relations with Democrats. In an appeal to the Biden administration, a senior member of the Bennett-Lapid government said that their future “rests in Biden’s hands…we hope that they will understand the constraints under which we are operating…” In other words, “Don’t look at what we do or place demands on us; what should count is that we’re not Netanyahu.”

But, as a leading Israeli peace activist noted, US attitudes toward Israel “ought to be framed by Israeli policies, not Israeli politicians, and as long as the policies continue, there is no reason to cut Israel slack for the simple fact that Israel’s not being led by Netanyahu”.

As for the policies, nothing has changed. In the aftermath of the unrest that rocked Israeli cities last month, Israeli police arrested 2,100 citizens, 91 per cent of whom were Palestinian citizens of Israel. Shortly after being inaugurated, the new government issued a permit for flag-waving extremists to march through Arab neighbourhoods chanting “Death to Arabs”, “Your villages will burn,” and other incendiary taunts. Once again, Israeli police arrested Arab counter-protesters.

In an ominous development, Israeli police set up barricades around the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood and established a checkpoint for residents. They have also established guard posts near the Damascus Gate that the Israeli press notes are frequently being used to harass and beat young Palestinians who gather at the Gate’s plaza. As I had feared, with each passing day, it appears that the Israelis are intent on repeating in Jerusalem what they did in Hebron. The Israeli press also reports that police have used brutal “crowd dispersal even when not necessary” and deployed skunk water hoses, spraying the plaza, the Old City walls, and homes in Silwan with a liquid that has a long-lasting “unbearable stench”.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the occupied lands, settlement expansion and creeping annexation continue. Just this week, the new government gave the green light to 31 new projects in settlements across the West Bank. And in Hebron, the Israelis have seized land adjacent to al Ibrahim Mosque to complete their takeover of this UNESCO-protected site.

South of Hebron, the fertile lands of Khirbet al Aida, owned by Palestinians have been subjected to settler raids, demolition activity, and expropriation. The Israeli government’s intent is to connect settlements around Hebron, cutting it off from the rest of the West Bank.

Equally ominous are the activities of settlers, protected by the Israeli military, who have established an “outpost”, Evyatar, on a hilltop to the south of Nablus, Jabal Sabih. While the military has declared this outpost “flagrantly illegal”, 60 homes have already been constructed, and soldiers have been seen assisting the settlers moving construction materials up the hill. The government has provided the outpost with water, electricity, and roads.

Palestinians, on whose land this “outpost” is being erected, have been protesting this blatant land grab. In the last six weeks, Israelis have shot and killed five young Palestinian protesters.

Like the development in Hebron, Palestinians understand that what is illegal today becomes legal tomorrow. Once completed, Evyatar will connect with other once-illegal outposts and will cut Nablus off from the rest of the West Bank.

One month after the end of the last “Gaza war”, Israeli settlers participated in 14 marches throughout the West Bank, protected by the Israeli military, demanding that the government expropriate Palestinian lands for settlement construction.

Meanwhile in Gaza, despite Hamas’ hollow boasts of victory, tens of thousands of Palestinians in that impoverished strip remain homeless, many more without water and electricity, and the entire population without hope for the future.

In the Israeli Knesset, the new government is seeking renewal of a law to ban Palestinian “family unification” (forbidding Palestinian citizens of Israel and residents of Jerusalem from bringing spouses from the West Bank, Gaza, or outside to live with them) with Defense Minister Benny Gantz arguing that passage of this law “is necessary to maintain the security of the state and its Jewish democratic character”.

The bottom line: Netanyahu may be out, but creeping annexation and oppression continue. For Palestinians, nothing has changed.

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The writer is president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute.

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***

Too many American politicians at all levels of government have come to believe that your money is their money. Federal, state and local tax rates are set annually and often arbitrarily based on the issues that elected officials and tax managers consider to be important. Input from the public is basically unwelcome except at election time but, even then, the breakdown of dollars and cents that will be coming out of one’s pocket is rarely under discussion.

It is past time to consider what the pie in the sky being proposed by the Democrats, since they are currently in power, will actually cost the American taxpayer. Bear in mind, that Democratic Party proposals that are now being floated are directed at certain constituencies that the party is seeking to weld into an unbeatable coalition that will defy all Republican attempts to recover either Congress or the Presidency. Similar activity is taking place at the state and local level. There is no consideration of the fact that government, at least theoretically, is intended to benefit all of the citizenry, not a select portion thereof that will henceforth be required to deliver the vote loyally. Politicians who manipulate the system with that in mind should be sent to jail, but alas, in the US system no one is ever punished, even if they start a war under false premises as did former President George W Bush and his apparatchiks.

Under the Democrats, the entire process whereby the spoils derived from being power are distributed is being driven by social engineering, i.e. race and gender. One of President Joe Biden’s first moves upon taking office was to propose special payments and other incentives for black farmers, who, his administration argued, had been disadvantaged because they had been systematically denied loans for many years. It should seem outrageous that federal tax dollars were to be used to support only one racial group, but not a single Democrat appeared to be disturbed. Fortunately, a federal court ruled favorably in a case brought by a white farmer claiming that racially directed government assistance is unconstitutional as it violates the “equal protection under the law” principle. The Democrats are, however, continuing to push for their program of tying blacks firmly into their coalition, even if it means creating a system that is manifestly and even transparently unfair.

One of the most bizarre news stories of the past several weeks has to be the revelation that the Defense Department will be paying for transgender surgery for those biological males in the ranks that want to become women and vice versa. One can honestly accept that there are transgender individuals in the so-called armed services and they deserve respect for what they perhaps quite genuinely are, but this goes well beyond that. In the usual squeaky-voiced pander much favored by the Biden Administration, Veteran Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough announced during “Pride Week” that the new guidelines would create a “safe and caring” environment for all veterans, while also citing the “dark history” of discrimination against gay and transgender military personnel. “Safe and caring?” Our military? Hope they never have to fight a real war.

The White House also got into the promotion, releasing a statement that “President Biden believes that gender identity should not be a bar to military service and that America’s strength is found in its diversity. This question of how to enable all qualified Americans to serve in the military is easily answered by recognizing our core values. America is stronger, at home and around the world, when it is inclusive. The military is no exception. Allowing all qualified Americans to serve their country in uniform is better for the military and better for the country because an inclusive force is a more effective force. Simply put, it’s the right thing to do and is in our national interest.”

The statement is like many, Executive Order signing statements coming out of the Biden White House, complete nonsense. The historically most effective fighting forces have had high levels of cohesion, not diversity and it is difficult to imagine what they national interest would be in having an army that can’t fight. Transgenders were, in fact, first allowed to serve, predictably, under President Barack Obama before being blocked by President Donald Trump. They are now again a cherished part of the military community under Honest Joe Biden and both active duty transgenders and veterans will soon be able to receive gender-transition surgeries, mostly through the Veterans Affairs (VA) health care coverage. It is estimated that there are now 15,000 transgender individuals on active duty while possibly as many as 135,000 more are veterans. The numbers seem impossibly large, but gender transition surgeries will now be covered by the string of military hospitals and the veteran healthcare network.

Bear in mind that transgender transformation surgery is not urgent care or even health maintenance: it is an optional procedure intended to turn G.I. Joe into G.I. Jane or the reverse. Also bear in mind that the US taxpayer submits to the burden of the enormous and growing so-called Defense budget in the belief that it exists to protect the United States, not to change genders of American citizens who might be enlisting in the military precisely to obtain that benefit. According to a recent estimate the cost of the procedure can range from $15,000 up to more than $50,000 depending on how extensive the surgery is. Multiply that by 150,000 to get some idea of what the pander to gender obsessed fanatics in the Democratic Party and among its limousine liberals base will cost the average taxpayer, who will get nothing in return from it.

The Pentagon, of course, is fully engaged in the war on extremism and is also actively promoting the racist Critical Race Theory while rooting out extremists, which means white people, who are evil supremacists both genetically and by definition. CRT is, by the way, a remarkable Marxist-based invention that blames most bad things in America on white people. And it is being forced on the public by the usual zealots with the claim that it will make everyone the beneficiary of “equity.” On the contrary it makes Americans less well educated and dependent on government for handouts.

Even counties and school districts that have had no racial issues are being forced to hire Diversity & Equity Managers and high-priced consultants to explain the new reality. As a manifestation of CRT thinking, Fred Reed observes how increasingly in American schools “Math curricula are being dumbed down because blacks do poorly at math, English grammar instruction eliminated because blacks can’t or won’t learn it, entrance exams for the elite and demanding high schools eliminated because blacks don’t pass them, SATs dropped because blacks score poorly on them, promotion exams in police departments eliminated because blacks don’t pass them. Entrance requirements at medical school are lowered because not enough blacks pass them, AP courses in high school eliminated because too few blacks get into them… White parents are forced to see their children subjected to what they regard as obscene, semiliterate, violent, stupid, a culture dominated by what seems to them, (and would to any First World country) the opposite of cultivation.”

And, to be sure, the military is leading the way to join the new world order. Seeking to promote both racial and gender diversity in its ranks, the Navy has created a task force designed to “combat discrimination,” which inter alia requires sailors to take a pledge to “acknowledge all lived experiences and intersectional identities,” whatever that is supposed to mean. The Army is also doing its bit. In a recent appearancebefore Congress Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley “defended the teaching of critical race theory at West Point and, referencing the January 6 Capitol riot, said, ‘it is important that we train and we understand … and I want to understand white rage. And I’m white.’”

Milley, who seems unaware of the “black rage” that has been burning, looting and shooting over the past year, particularly stressed the impact of the January 6^thCapitol Building “insurrection,” saying “What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that?”

It is important to seek to understand what Milley has bought into: putting the military squarely on the side of the administration in the cultural wars currently being endured while making clear who the enemy is: white America. Some cynics observed that Milley and the military-industrial-complex behind him, who collectively speaking cannot any longer fight and win a war, are chiefly concerned with the hundreds of billions of dollars that they enjoy annually. To secure that it is necessary to play nice with whatever the White House, and the woke media, are peddling. Again, it all comes down to money that is stolen from taxpayers in this country. Time for the taxpayers themselves to put an end to the nonsense.

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]

Featured image is from The Unz Review

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***

The fear campaign has once again gone into high gear.

Is a new Worldwide lockdown envisaged as a means to combating the “dangerous” Covid variant entitled “Delta”.

First identified last year in India, The SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant was  “thought to have driven the deadly second wave of infections this summer in India”.

According to so-called “scientific opinion” it is now said to be spreading worldwide, to some 80 countries.

According to the BBC: 

“Delta plus has also been found in nine other countries – USA, UK, Portugal, Switzerland, Japan, Poland, Nepal, Russia and China – compared to the original highly contagious Delta strain, which has now spread to 80 countries.”

According to the White House:

“Here’s the deal: The Delta variant is more contagious, it’s deadlier, and it’s spreading quickly around the world – leaving young, unvaccinated people more vulnerable than ever.

Joe Biden’s proposed “solution” is:

“Please, get vaccinated if you haven’t already. Let’s head off this strain before it’s too late.” (emphasis added)

Here’s the deal: The Delta variant is more contagious, it’s deadlier, and it’s spreading quickly around the world – leaving young, unvaccinated people more vulnerable than ever. Please, get vaccinated if you haven’t already. Let’s head off this strain before it’s too late. pic.twitter.com/9gBeRpvCe8

— President Biden (@POTUS) June 24, 2021

Towards a Fourth Wave?

Uk Health authorities are now claiming that the new cases of the Delta B1.617. variant, increase the risk of hospitalization by 2.7 times, (according to Public Health England).

What is the “science” behind this disinformation campaign.

In June 2021, Public Health England (PHE) issued a report entitled SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation in England, Technical Briefing 16, which provides guidelines on  how the Delta variant can be detected.

Technical Briefing 16 includes variant diagnoses made both by whole-genome sequencing and by a genotyping PCR test, including the categorisation of confirmed and probable variant results and a rules-based decision algorithm (RBDA) to identify variant and mutation (VAM) profiles from genotype assay mutation profiles. Genotyping is used to identify variants Alpha, Beta, Delta and Gamma; targets were updated in mid-May 2021 to prioritise accurate identification of Delta over Alpha.

The statement above regarding PCR genotyping PCR test is nonsensical. Confirmed by the WHO in a January 2021 statement, the PCR test is totally invalid. See also the latest PHE briefing, dated June 25, 2021

The Infamous Lockdown “Mathematical Model”

Prof. Neil Ferguson is Boris Johnson’s government trusted “advisor”. He was the architect of the infamous Imperial College “mathematical model” which was used to justify the March 11, 2020 lockdown and closure of the global economy, leading to mass unemployment, extreme poverty and despair.

Image on the right: Neil  Ferguson (Source: Financial Times)

Generously funded by the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation, his March 2020 computer model estimates and predictions border on ridicule.

The economic and social devastation of the March 2020 so-called lockdown is beyond description: 190 member states of the United Nations accepted to “close down” their national economy coupled with the face mask, social distancing and the derogation of fundamental human rights. The stated intent was to protect people against V the Virus.

The March 11, 2020 lockdown as a means to containing the alleged pandemic is a crime against humanity.

And now, the same discredited “expert” (in consultation with his colleagues of  the SAGE Committee of experts) has designed a new “mathematical model” which is being used to justify a “Fourth Wave Lockdown”.

According to the British media:

“New modelling for the government’s SAGE committee of experts [to which Ferguson belongs] has highlighted the risk of a “substantial third wave” of infections and hospitalisations, ….

A Whitehall source said it was “broadly correct” that the outlook was now more pessimistic. “Cases are obviously higher and they are growing quickly,” the source said. (Guardian)

According to Prof Neil Ferguson the simulations of the “model” point to “the risk of a surge in infections and hospitalisations”. In early June, Ferguson pointed to “The risk of a substantial third wave”

“the Delta variant of coronavirus is 30% to 100% more transmissible than the previously dominant variant”. (quoted by the Guardian).

Where does he get his data and estimates?

What Ferguson fails to mention is virus variants are always “less vigilant” and “less dangerous” in comparison to the original virus.

UK officials are nonetheless intimating to the possibility of a Fourth Wave lockdown. According to Britain’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty (who is also a member of the SAGE Committee)

The NHS needs to brace itself for another difficult winter ahead, with the possibility of a further “very significant Covid surge”,

Prof Whitty’s warning came as experts said the UK was now at the beginning of a third wave of the virus, and that the return of lockdown restrictions could not be ruled out (Independent, June 17, 2021). See June 9 Minutes of SAGE Committee.

SAGE refers to The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies  which advises the UK government on Covid related policies. Many of the members of this illustrious panel are potentially in conflict of interest.

A sub-group of SAGE is the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviour (SPI-B): Covid-19. Also of relevance is the SPI sub-group involved in modelling, as well as the Imperial College’s report to SAGE.

The statement by Prof Whitty, is based on “a new study commissioned by the government”. Professor Graham Medley – who chairs the SPI-M modelling sub-group of the government’s SAGE panel pointed to the possibility that “restrictions would have to be reintroduced.”

Prof Ferguson, who also sits on the SPI-M modelling sub-group, said the Delta variant posed a “higher risk of hospitalisations” – but said it was still unclear how deadly a third wave of infections might be. (Independent)

These announcements are frivolous. Their intent is to justify drastic policy measures (lockdown, mask, social distancing, closure of economic activity, disruption of health services) as well as the speeding up the vaccination programme.  

Moreover, these statements by British health officials (not to mention the results of the “modelling exercise”) regarding the so-called spread of “the more infectious Delta variant” are now being used to the justify the implementation of “Fourth Wave” lockdown policies in a large number of countries.

The development of  restrictive measures has unfolded in India, sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil, Malaysia, among others. In Australia, major urban areas including Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Darwin have literally been closed down.

“Fake Science” regarding D the Dangerous Delta Variant is the driving force behind these measures which are relentlessly creating social chaos and the destabilization of national economies.

In turn, the Delta variant is being used Worldwide as  a pretext to speed up of the mRNA vaccine campaign.

“Have no Fear, Pfizer is here”. Despite the wave of  mRNA “vaccine” related deaths and injuries the “solution” of Public Health England (PHE) and its SAGE and Imperial College panels of distinguished experts to these alleged “deadly variants” is “get the jab”. The Pfizer experimental mRNA vaccine –is now heralded as “88% effective against the Delta variant”.

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Foi iniciada ontem a Sea Breeze, Briza Marítima, a grande manobra aeronaval oficialmente “organizada em conjunto, no Mar Negro, pelos Estados Unidos e pela Ucrânia“. Os Estados Unidos, que a planeiam e comandam, são, portanto, os anfitriões neste mar próximo do território russo.  A Sea Breeze, que ocorre de 28 de Junho a 10 de Julho, é dirigida pelas Forças Navais USA/Africa, da qual faz parte  a Sexta Frota, com quartel general em Nápoles. Essa mesma manobra subentende exercícios de guerra naval, submarina, anfíbia, terrestre e aérea.

Desde quando, em 1997,  teve início esta série de manobras anuais no Mar Negro, a edição de 2021 conta com o maior número de participantes: 32 países de seis continentes, com 5.000 militares, 18 equipas de forças especiais, 32 navios e 40 aviões de guerra.  Participam não são só países membros da NATO – Itália, Grã-Bretanha, França, Espanha, Grécia, Noruega, Dinamarca, Polónia, Bulgária, Roménia, Albânia, as três repúblicas bálticas, Turquia e Canadá – mas também países parceiros, principalmente a Ucrânia, Geórgia, Moldávia, Suécia e Israel. Entre os outros que enviaram forças militares para o Mar Negro, estão a Austrália, o Japão, a Coreia do Sul, o Paquistão, os Emirados Árabes Unidos, o Egipto, a Tunísia, Marrocos, Senegal e o Brasil. O facto de serem destacadas forças militares no Mar Negro, provenientes da Austrália e do Brasil, para a manobra em larga escala sob o comando dos EUA dirigida contra a Rússia, está de acordo com o que Joe Biden prometeu: “Como presidente, vou tomar medidas imediatas para renovar as alianças dos Estados Unidos e fazer com que a América, mais uma vez, lidere o mundo“. A manobra de guerra do Mar Negro, a maior realizada até à data, mostra que os passos do Presidente Biden vão no sentido de uma escalada crescente contra a Rússia e, ao mesmo tempo, contra a China.

A Sea Breeze 2021, na realidade, foi iniciada a 23 de Junho, quando o navio de guerra britânico HMS Defender, navegando da Ucrânia para a Geórgia, entrou em águas territoriais da Crimeia. Um acto deliberadamente agressivo, reivindicado pelo Primeiro Ministro Boris Johnson, que declarou que a Grã-Bretanha pode novamente enviar os seus navios de guerra para essas águas, visto que não reconhece a “anexação da Crimeia Ucraniana” pela Rússia. Esta acção hostil, seguramente de acordo com os Estados Unidos, foi efectuada apenas uma semana após a Cimeira Biden-Putin, descrita pelo Presidente dos EUA como “boa e positiva“, uma semana após o Presidente da Federação russa, Vladimir Putin ter advertido na conferência de imprensa em Genebra: “Conduzimos exercícios militares dentro do nosso território, não levamos o nosso equipamento e as nossas tropas para perto das fronteiras dos Estados Unidos da América, como os EUA e os seus parceiros estão agora a fazer perto das nossas fronteiras”. Esta acção hostil foi implementada pela Grã-Bretanha somente duas semanas após a assinatura da Nova Carta do Atlântico com os Estados Unidos, na qual os Aliados têm a garantia de que podem sempre contar com “os nossos dissuasores nucleares” e que “a NATO continuará a ser uma aliança nuclear“.

A Ucrânia e os E.U.A. estão a organizar conjuntamente o exercício no Mar Negro com a participação e apoio de 32 países no total: Albânia, Austrália, Brasil, Bulgária, Canadá, Dinamarca, Egipto, Estónia, França, Geórgia, Grécia, Israel, Itália, Japão, Letónia, Lituânia, Moldávia, Marrocos, Noruega, Paquistão, Polónia, Roménia, Senegal, Espanha, Coreia do Sul, Suécia, Tunísia, Turquia, Ucrânia, Emirados Árabes Unidos, Reino Unido, e Estados Unidos.

A violação deliberada das águas territoriais da Crimeia torna ainda mais perigosa, a manobra de guerra no Mar Negro. Tal acto, se repetido, pode ter como objectivo provocar uma resposta militar russa, possivelmente com alguns mortos ou feridos, para acusar Moscovo de agressão. Não é pura coincidência que na Administração Biden ocupem cargos importantes, alguns dos arquitectos do putsch da Praça Maidan, em 2014, tais como Victoria Nuland, a actual Subsecretária de Estado para os assuntos políticos. O putsch desencadeou a sequência dos acontecimentos que, com a ofensiva sangrenta contra os russos da Ucrânia, levou os habitantes da Crimeia – território russo passado para a Ucrânia, na era soviética, em 1954 – a decidir, com 97% dos votos num referendo popular, a separar-se de Kiev e reanexar-se à Rússia. Foi acusada pela NATO e pela UE de ter anexado ilegalmente a Crimea e foi submetida a sanções. Agora querem passar do confronto político para o confronto militar. Estão a brincar com o fogo e, também, com o fogo nuclear.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

Vento di tempesta Atlantica nel Mar Nero

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

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***

You are a Universal Being. Your body is just a vehicle for the manifestation of this Universal Being here on Earth.  As a Universal Being your ‘essence’ lives forever. Start identifying your Self as a Universal Being, merged with the source of all existence. The more you live in this Self – the Real You – during this lifetime – the more seamless is the passage onwards at the time of passing. 

Say: “I am a spiritual entity and nothing can harm me, because ‘I’ am not this physical body which carries me through this third density existence experienced here on Earth. ‘I’ am soul, ether, spirit, plasma – and I chose to come back to planet Earth and to be reborn into a human body in order to perform valuable tasks and help realign Earthly existence with Cosmic existence – and thereby create harmony and balance.” 

Repeat this – and feel the fear fall away. Feel it dissolve like the sun-burned morning mist.

Fear is a state of mind. A cramped mind. Every part of it is alien to us save that useful bit that warns us not to do some crazy act – like jump over the edge of a cliff under the illusion that one will sprout wings and fly away into the blue horizon!

Yes, the ‘real you’ can fly. The ether/spirit you. But the physical you is a gravity respecting entity here on dear mother Earth. Respect this type of fear, for it is a God given preservation instinct.

So, you are not convinced? You hold onto your fear because it seems ‘real’, doesn’t it? You quite like it, a sort of drug. After all every TV, newspaper, radio and neighbour is telling you ‘to be afraid.’ It’s easier to give in than not to. There are so many things you need to fear, they say, so many that there is almost no room left for anything else to get you going in a positive direction.

We live in a culture of fear, imposed by those we elect and allow to manage our lives. Think about it – so determined are most of us to avoid taking true responsibility for our lives and the lives of other living beings that we allow our minds to say to us “OK, that’s fine, leave it to the politicians, bankers and corporate board members to run our affairs for us.” Then we turn around and curse them for introducing a despotic top-down police-state agenda that makes a misery out of our lives!

How foolish can one get?

All the while ‘the elected ones’ (by us) learn better and better how to manipulate those who elected them, so that they can hold onto the power. They are addicted to power – and use it to make us addicted to fear. So we shrink, while they expand.

How very foolish so much of mankind is. Both parties, the purveyors of fear and the fearful, bogged-down in a rail siding leading to nowhere. Both sides bogged-down in a rail siding completely terminating our natural evolutionary instinct and putting in its place a state of perpetual self-imprisonment.

“Fear not!” say I, for anyone reading this is not heading for the end of the line or the gallows; is not busy constructing a hangman’s noose to stick his/her neck in. Nobody reading this can suffer the delusion that to profit from worldly riches is superior to profiting from the flow of Divine uplift. An ecstatic state which comes from rejecting fear and ceasing to hide in the shadows of a frightened ‘little me’.

This ‘little me’ is a hypnotised being who has convinced himself/herself that one can never step forward and take responsibility for one’s destiny, or make a valuable contribution on the stage of life.

Out you go ’little me’ – and stay out. No place for you in the unfolding age of Truth. For as has been said, You are not a cipher, You are a Divine eminence – and is that a quality to hide away under a cloak of self impoverishment? Well, is it?

After what seems like an interminable pause, an answer emerges: ‘NO’

And immediately, as if shot from a cannon, the Real You bursts upon the scene – soul-burden immeasurably lightened!  Yes, I can see this Real You, right now, and I can tell you – you are an outstanding being with enough potential to single-handedly transform both yourself and your community into manifestations of an age of instant enlightenment!

Yes, my friend, I’m not talking about someone else, it’s you who is transformed. ‘Little me’, who was that? Never mind, gone forever.

Now you stand single, strong, proud, all traces of fear banished forever. Maybe for the first time, you are free, out of jail, ready to be intoxicated by the sweet scent of the wild rose, the symphonic triumph of the dawn chorus, the illustrious beauty of awakened nature calls you forth – rejoice in her and act in her defence!

Proudly step forward to defend her precious wealth of vital diversity, so cruelly sterilised by vampires wearing carefully pressed city suits and a fixed smile on their faces. They and their clan scared you once, didn’t they? But no more, you now see the fake smile for exactly what it is.

You are metamorphosed and stand shining, a ray of the living sun. Use your new gifts well, my friend, millions need the support of your awakened powers to themselves be awakened and freed from the hypnosis of fear. These are the builders of the New Society which is our imperative to create – and no one else’s.

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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***

Originally published on July 1, 2015, slightly revised on June 27, 2021

È iniziata ieri la Sea Breeze, Brezza di mare, la grande manovra aeronavale ufficialmente «co-ospitata nel Mar Nero da Stati uniti e Ucraina». Gli Stati uniti, che la pianificano e comandano, fanno quindi da padroni di casa in questo mare a ridosso del territorio russo. La Sea Breeze, che si svolge dal 28 giugno al 10 luglio, è diretta dalle Forze navali Usa/Africa, di cui fa parte la Sesta Flotta, con quartier generale a Napoli. Essa prevede esercitazioni di guerra navale, sottomarina, anfibia, terrestre e aerea.

Da quando nel 1997 è iniziata questa serie di manovre annuali nel Mar Nero, l’edizione 2021 vede il maggior numero di partecipanti: 32 paesi da sei continenti, con 5.000 militari, 18 squadre di forze speciali, 32 navi e 40 aerei da guerra. Vi partecipano non solo paesi membri della Nato – Italia, Gran Bretagna, Francia, Spagna, Grecia, Norvegia, Danimarca, Polonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, le tre repubbliche baltiche, Turchia e Canada – ma paesi partner, anzitutto Ucraina, Georgia, Moldavia, Svezia e Israele.

Tra gli altri che hanno inviato forze militari nel Mar Nero, vi sono l’Australia, il Giappone, la Corea del Sud e il Pakistan, gli Emirati Arabi Uniti, l’Egitto, la Tunisia, il Marocco e il Senegal, il Brasile. Il fatto che nel Mar Nero si schierino forze militari provenienti perfino dall’Australia e dal Brasile, per la grande manovra sotto comando Usa diretta contro la Russia, è in linea con quanto promesso da Joe Biden: «Come presidente farò immediatamente passi per rinnovare le alleanze degli Stati uniti, e far sì che l’America, ancora una volta, guidi il mondo». La manovra di guerra nel Mar Nero, la maggiore finora realizzata, dimostra che i passi del presidente Biden vanno nella direzione di una crescente escalation contro la Russia e allo stesso tempo contro la Cina.

La Sea Breeze 2021 è in realtà iniziata il 23 giugno, quando la nave da guerra britannica HMS Defender, in navigazione dall’Ucraina alla Georgia, è entrata nelle acque territoriali della Crimea. Un deliberato atto provocatorio rivendicato dal premier Boris Johnson, il quale ha dichiarato che la Gran Bretagna può nuovamente inviare sue navi di guerra in quelle acque, poiché non riconosce l’«annessione della Crimea ucraina da parte della Russia». Questa azione ostile, sicuramente concordata con gli Stati uniti, è stata attuata appena una settimana dopo il Summit Biden-Putin, definito dal presidente Usa «buono, positivo»; una settimana dopo che il presidente russo Putin aveva avvertito nella conferenza stampa a Ginevra: «Noi conduciamo le esercitazioni militari all’interno del nostro territorio, non portiamo i nostri equipaggiamenti e il nostro personale vicino ai confini degli Stati Uniti d’America, come invece stanno facendo ora vicino ai nostri confini gli Usa e i loro partner».

Questa azione ostile è stata attuata dalla Gran Bretagna appena due settimane dopo la firma della Nuova Carta Atlantica con gli Stati uniti, nella quale si assicurano gli Alleati che potranno sempre contare sui «nostri deterrenti nucleari» e che «la Nato resterà una alleanza nucleare».

L’Ucraina e gli Stati Uniti ospitano l’esercitazione nel Mar Nero con la partecipazione e il sostegno di 32 paesi in totale: Albania, Australia, Brasile, Bulgaria, Canada, Danimarca, Egitto, Estonia, Francia, Georgia, Grecia, Israele, Italia, Giappone, Lettonia, Lituania, Moldavia, Marocco, Norvegia, Pakistan, Polonia, Romania, Senegal, Spagna, Corea del Sud, Svezia, Tunisia, Turchia, Ucraina, Emirati Arabi Uniti e Regno Unito.

La deliberata violazione delle acque territoriali della Crimea rende ancora più pericolosa la manovra di guerra nel Mar Nero. Tale atto, se ripetuto, può avere come obiettivo quello di provocare una risposta militare russa, possibilmente con qualche morto o ferito, per accusare Mosca di aggressione. Non a caso nell’amministrazione Biden ricoprono importanti incarichi alcuni artefici del putsch di Piazza Maidan nel 2014, come Victoria Nuland, attuale sottosegretaria di stato per gli affari politici.

Il putsch mise in moto la sequenza di eventi che, con la sanguinosa offensiva contro i russi di Ucraina, spinse gli abitanti della Crimea – territorio russo passato all’Ucraina in periodo sovietico nel 1954 – a decidere, con il 97% dei voti in un referendum popolare, la secessione da Kiev e la riannessione alla Russia. Che è accusata daNato e Ue di aver annesso illegalmente la Crimea e per questo è sottoposta a sanzioni. Ora si vuole passare dal confronto politico a quello militare. Si gioca col fuoco, anche con quello nucleare.

Manlio Dinucci

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration added a warning to fact sheets — as advised by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — for Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines indicating an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis following vaccination.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on June 25 added a warning to patient and provider fact sheets for Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines indicating an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis following vaccination.

The warning notes reports of adverse events suggest increased risks of myocarditis and pericarditis, particularly following the second dose and with onset of symptoms within a few days after vaccination.

Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle that can lead to cardiac arrhythmia and death. According to researchers at the National Organization for Rare Disorders, myocarditis can result from infections, but “more commonly the myocarditis is a result of the body’s immune reaction to the initial heart damage.”

Pericarditis is often used interchangeably with myocarditis and refers to inflammation of the pericardium, the thin sac surrounding the heart.

The FDA’s update followed a review of information and discussion by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting on June 23 where the committee acknowledged 1,200 cases of heart inflammation in 16- to 24-year-olds and said mRNA COVID vaccines should carry a warning statement.

“The data presented at this meeting reinforced the FDA’s decision to revise the fact sheets and further informed the specific revisions,” the FDA said in a statement.

Health officials said the benefits of receiving a COVID vaccine still outweigh any risks. Physicians and other public commenters accused the CDC during the meeting of exaggerating the risk to young people of COVID, and minimizing the risk of the vaccines.

Dr. Meryl Nass, an internal medicine physician, pointed out several flaws in the data used during the ACIP’s presentation:

“As of now, two major ways the rate of myocarditis were minimized [during the presentation] was to lump people from age 39 and down — even though the highest rates [of myocarditis] are in the youngest kids. This waters down the rate. The other method was to only include a very narrow window of time after vaccinations started in the 12-15 age group, thus omitting the vast majority of second doses, which is when about 75% or more of the myocarditis cases occur. Also, the genders were sometimes mixed. And rates in girls are much lower than boys.”

During the CDC’s presentation, Dr. Megan Wallance stated the overall efficacy of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine in the 12 to 15 age group is 100% and Moderna’s was comparable. Wallace then did a risk/benefit analysis comparing myocarditis cases versus hospitalization rates for COVID in people between the ages of 12 and 29.

“The problem with her analysis is that now the myocarditis rate used is too low. But the risk from COVID is magnified,” Nass said.

Elizabeth Mumper, MD, FAAP, IFMCP and president and CEO of The RIMLAND Center, said:

“The chance of a child less than 17 years of age dying from COVID-19 is 0.0005% according to the CDC’s own numbers. Most pediatric patients have robust innate immune systems, meaning that they have strong defenses to a variety of viruses. Infections with beta coronaviruses, which kids are likely to have, induce strong and long-lasting immunity to the nucleocapsid protein that is likely to protect children from serious problems from COVID 19.”

Mumper explained:

“Healthy teen athletes have had the trajectory of their lives changed by having serious reactions to these vaccines — myocarditis, clots in the brain, postural hypotension and extreme fatigue to name but a few. I have seen alarming vaccine reactions in my practice in the short time that a small fraction of my patient population has received a novel vaccine.”

Another horrifying story! OSU student, elite athlete + member of ROTC developed severe heart complications following his second dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.

SUBSCRIBE to #TheDefender: https://t.co/zL66Edfiw5https://t.co/oXQRGDoXNK

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 21, 2021

Both the FDA and CDC are monitoring reports of heart inflammation and will follow up to assess long-term outcomes.

According to the latest data from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), there have been 1,342 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis in all age groups reported in the U.S. following COVID vaccination between Dec.14, 2020 and June 18, 2021. Of the 1,342 cases reported, 835 cases were attributed to Pfizer, 458 cases to Moderna and 45 cases to Johnson & Johnson’s COVID vaccine.

There have been 237 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis in 12- to 17-year-olds with 234 casesattributed to Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.

Calls rise for FDA to fully approve COVID vaccines

According to The Hill, calls are rising from some experts for the FDA to fully approve COVID vaccines, as some unvaccinated people view current Emergency Use Authorizations for vaccines as an indicator they are experimental and not fully tested.

Pfizer submitted data for full approval May 7, but it is unclear when the FDA will act, leading to calls to pick up the pace. Moderna applied for full approval of its vaccine on June 1.

Gigi Gronvall, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that while there should not be “political pressure” on the FDA, she would be interested in knowing what the holdup is.

“It could have a big impact on people getting [vaccinated] if it is FDA approved,” Gronvall said. “I think it’s worth asking why it hasn’t happened yet.”

Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University School of Public Health, said “Pfizer initiated request on May 7. It’s 6 weeks later. Data is in. Vaccines are safe and effective. It’s time for full approval.”

Other experts said the FDA could undermine public confidence if they cut corners.

“If they hurry it up and don’t complete their review very carefully, that will actually have the opposite effect,” said Jesse Goodman, former FDA chief scientist. “I think that would really undermine confidence.”

Nancy Allen LaPointe, faculty fellow at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, said it is important for confidence in vaccines that there not be “any perception or actuality of cutting a corner” in the FDA review for full approval.

Full approval of COVID vaccines will likely lead to more employee mandates. Boston Herald, a major hospital in Boston, announced June 24 it would require more than 80,000 Mass General Brigham employees be vaccinated against COVID once one of the three vaccines gain approval from the FDA.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the city of San Francisco announced last week it would require its 35,000 employees to get vaccinated against COVID or risk losing their jobs. Workers who refuse or fail to provide a religious or medical exemption could be terminated. The mandatory vaccination requirement goes into effect once COVID vaccines have been formally approved by the FDA, and extends to all city government employees, including police, firefighters, custodians and city hall clerks.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

Featured image is from CHD

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Less than two weeks after NATO members reaffirmed allegiance to Article 5 – that an attack on one member was an attack on all members – the UK nearly put that pledge to the test. In a shockingly provocative move, the UK’s HMS Defender purposely sailed into Crimean territorial waters on its way to Georgia.

Press reports suggest that there was a dispute between the UK defense and foreign ministries over whether to violate Russia’s claimed territorial waters with a heavily armed warship. According to reports, Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself jumped in to over-rule the more cautious Foreign Office in favor of confrontation.

As Johnson later claimed, because the UK (and the US) does not recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea, the UK was actually sailing through Ukrainian waters. It was an in-your-face move toward Russia just weeks after the US and NATO were forced to back down from a major clash with Russia in eastern Ukraine

This time, as was the case in eastern Ukraine, the Russians took a different view of the situation. Russian coast guard vessels ordered the HMS Defender to exit Russian territorial waters – an order they punctuated with rare live fire of cannon and dropping of bombs.

Having had their bluff called, the UK government did what all governments do best: it lied. The Russians did not shoot at a UK warship, they claimed. It was a previously-scheduled Russian military exercise in the area.

Unfortunately for the UK government, in its haste to create good propaganda about standing up to Russia, they had a BBC reporter on-board the Defender who spilled the beans: Yes, the Russian military did issue several warnings, yes it did buzz the HMS Defender multiple times, and yes there were shots fired in the Defender’s direction.

Similarly, in the spring, Russia rapidly deployed 75,000 troops on the border with Ukraine in response to a US-backed Ukrainian military build-up. The message was clear: Russia would no longer sit by as the US government and its allies intervened next door.

Russia now has demonstrated that it will protect Crimea, which voted in a 2014 referendum to re-join Russia. The Crimean vote was triggered by the US-backed coup in Ukraine. That is called “unintended consequences” of foreign interventionism.

The problem with the UK, the US, and their NATO allies is that they believe their own propaganda and they act accordingly. A famous 2004 quote attributed to George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove, clearly spelled out this line of thinking. Said Rove, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

These two recent near-clashes with Russia demonstrate that the “reality” created by an almost religious belief in American or NATO exceptionalism can often crash hard against the reality of 75,000 troops or the Black Sea Fleet

The anti-Russia propaganda endlessly repeated by both political parties in Washington and amplified by the anti-Trump media for more than four years has completely saturated the Beltway and beyond. Even as the Russiagate conspiracy was proven to be a lie, the propaganda it spawned lives on.

Blustering Boris Johnson almost provoked a major war over an infantile desire to continue poking and prodding Russia in its own backyard. This time the war was averted, but what about next time? Will the adults ever be in charge?

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Echoing criticism from across the globe on Monday, the Iraqi government slammed the Biden administration for overnight U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria at facilities the Pentagon says were used by Iran-backed militias.

“We condemn the U.S. air attack that targeted a site last night on the Iraqi-Syrian border, which represents a blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security in accordance with all international conventions,” said a spokesperson for the commander in chief of Iraq’s armed forces, Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi.

“Iraq renews its refusal to be an arena for settling accounts, and clings to its right to sovereignty over its lands, and to prevent it from being used as an arena for reactions and attacks,” said the Iraqi statement.

“We call for calm and to avoid escalation in all its forms, stressing that Iraq will carry out the necessary investigations, procedures, and contacts at various levels to prevent such violations,” the spokesperson added.

The strikes also led to an emergency meeting of national security officials in Iraq:

المجلس الوزاري للأمن الوطني يعقد اجتماعاً طارئاً برئاسة رئيس مجلس الوزراء، القائد العام للقوات المسلحة السيد @MAKadhimi ، خصص لمناقشة تداعيات القصف الأمريكي الذي طال موقعاً على الحدود العراقية السورية، واستهداف المجرمين والمخربين والجماعات الإرهابية محطات توليد الطاقة الكهربائية pic.twitter.com/gt1zxpD314

— يحيى رسول | Yehia Rasool (@IraqiSpoxMOD) June 28, 2021

The Popular Mobilization Forces, a coalition of Iraqi militias, reportedly said that four fighters were killed in the U.S. attack. However, the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the death toll at seven fighters and said several others wounded, according to Al Jazeera.

Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said that at the direction of President Joe Biden, the U.S. military hit “operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one location in Iraq” used by Iran-backed militia groups to engage in drone attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities in the region.

Although no Americans have been hurt, the New York Times reports that U.S. officials say that “at least five times since April, the Iranian-backed militias have used small, explosive-laden drones that divebomb and crash into their targets in late-night attacks on Iraqi bases—including those used by the CIA and U.S. Special Operations units.”

As Common Dreams reported earlier Monday, while Kirby claimed the strikes ordered by Biden were “designed to limit the risk of escalation,” Stephen Miles, executive director of U.S.-based advocacy group Win Without War, responded: “Know what would actually be deescalatory? Leaving Iraq.”

* It's worth noting that during most of the missing years here ('94, '95, '97) we were militarily engaged over Iraq enforcing no fly zones, so while not actively bombing, still militarily involved. During the '13/14 interlude we were also arming/training Iraq's military.

— Stephen Miles (@SPMiles42) June 28, 2021

The U.S. has roughly 2,500 troops in Iraq and about 900 in Syria. Biden previously authorized strikes in Syria in late February, also targeting facilities the administration said belonged to Iran-backed militia groups.

The strikes come amid negotiations to revive the Iran nuclear deal. Biden ran on a promise to return the United States to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as it is officially called, that his predecessor ditched in 2018. The Trump administration instead pursued a “maximum pressure” campaign that ramped up devastating sanctions against Iran.

“Iran—weakened by years of harsh economic sanctions—is using its proxy militias in Iraq to step up pressure on the United States and other world powers to negotiate an easing of those sanctions as part of a possible revival of the 2015 nuclear deal,” the Times reports. “Iraqi and American officials say Iran has devised the drone attacks to minimize casualties to avoid prompting U.S. retaliation.”

The U.S. strikes also follow the House of Representatives earlier this month passing legislation to repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. Now, all eyes are on the Senate for that effort.

Notably, Kirby did not cite the 2002 AUMF for the strikes. Instead, he highlighted the right of self-defense and the president’s authority under Article II of the U.S. Constitution to protect American personnel in Iraq.

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Nicaragua is in the news again. But not for being one of the countries with the greatest reduction in poverty and social inequality worldwide since 2007 (poverty by half, extreme poverty by a third, and going from being the fourth most unequal country to being the fourth least unequal in Latin America).

Nor is Nicaragua news for being the country with the highest level of direct ownership of the means of production by the working class in the Western Hemisphere (more than 50% of GDP and nearly 80% of economic units); nor for being one of the countries in the world that has most reduced illiteracy in the same period of time (from 35% to 3%); or for being one of the countries with the largest increase in per capita investment in health (from U$32 to U$70) and with the largest reduction in infant mortality (from 29 to 11.4 per 1,000 live births).

Nicaragua is not news for being the country in the world that has most reduced the gender gap (from 90th to 12th), the country with the highest presence of women in its cabinet (58.82%), as well as having the fourth highest presence of women in the legislative branch (48.4%) and being the country that most radically applies the criterion of gender equity across its social policies.

Nor is this country in the news for being among the countries that have most increased electricity coverage (from 53% to 99%) and the one that has most increased its renewable energy sources (from 2% to 90%); nor for being the safest country in Central America and one of the safest in Latin America (with a rate of 3.5 homicides per year per 100,000 inhabitants, Costa Rica being the closest with 11.2); nor is Nicaragua news for having one of the governments in the world with the highest sustained popular support for the longest period of time (with rates around 60% in the last eleven years, almost uninterruptedly).

But it is not for any of these achievements that Nicaragua has once again become newsworthy, but because it has applied its laws in a sovereign way, the most recent of these laws having been approved by an overwhelming majority of the people’s representatives in the legislature and under which the relevant authorities, using their legitimate powers and fulfilling their constitutional duty, have ordered the arrest of various individuals (nineteen at the time of writing) for one or other of the following crimes:

• Actions publicly declared and undertaken by almost all those who have been arrested, aimed at achieving the imposition against Nicaraguan institutions and citizens of unilateral coercive measures by a hostile foreign power, the United States, with the purpose of boycotting public administration and the application of State policies, including the implementation of social programs thanks to which Nicaragua has reached the indices mentioned above via its model of social transformation and improvement in the living conditions of the great majority of its citizens.
• Conspiracy to destabilize the country, in the service of that foreign power, the United States, through the implementation of terrorism and violent actions in general.
• Money laundering in the financial operations of the “Violeta Barrios de Chamorro” Foundation, which also financed journalists, “political analysts” and writers (all of them claiming to be “independent”) with money coming from agencies known for their role in destabilizing governments not aligned with the interests of the United States, some of those agencies being the US government bodies like USAID and NED, but also others like the Soros foundations, and also European agencies such as OXFAM. That funding has been acknowledged by the people concerned. It is worth noting that when Nicaragua’s Foreign Agents Law was created, which obliges those who receive donations from other countries to report them and inform about their final use, this foundation formally closed its operations to evade complying with the law, in spite of which it continued receiving funds from the foreign agencies cited above as well as others. The specific operations of this criminal network are still under investigation by the competent authorities, who will explain the results of the investigation in due course.
• Serious anomalies in the administration by a banking entity of financial resources used to support illicit activities linked to finance from the aforementioned agencies.

Nicaragua is not obliged to justify to foreigners what it does or does not do in full and legitimate exercise of its sovereignty and self-determination, and in the defense of those principles, but in the face of the campaign of lies against the country that flood the news media daily, it is right and proper to defend it, just as the Sandinista Revolution has the right and duty to defend itself in any context, including of course, the battle of ideas.

The laws being applied by the Nicaraguan authorities to the people detained and who are receiving due process in accordance with the current legal norms, are similar to those that exist in most countries whose governments, brazen in their interference, have condemned the approval and application of those laws in Nicaragua for crimes committed after their entry into force, not for crimes prior to their entry into force, but for crimes committed subsequently, in compliance with the principle of laws being non-retroactive since the illegalities and crimes committed and promoted by most of these people during the attempted coup d’état in 2018 have already been judged, and for which those convicted were subsequently granted pardon, for the sake of peace and stability of the country.

When we talk about the crimes committed in 2018, during the coup attempt, they include murder and other crimes that caused dozens of deaths of Nicaraguans, about which it is worth remembering that, of the total of something over two hundred dead caused by the coup attempt, most of them were Sandinistas, of which, in turn, the majority died as a result of cold-blooded murders, after being kidnapped and subjected to torture, many of them documented by the perpetrators themselves in videos, circulated in social media, while in contrast, all the deaths in the opposition ranks were the result of street fighting, generally provoked by them.

But that atmosphere of instability and chaos lasted just three months (from April 18th to July 18th 2018), because the country very soon recovered tranquility and peace, thanks to the massive and organized participation of the people defending their nation and their revolution, as also happened during the war of aggression imposed on Nicaragua by Ronald Reagan’s government  in the 1980s, in which the Sandinista Revolution was also victorious, although in that case only after several years of intense struggle.

Turning now to the current situation, as is well known, at different times some of those recently detained by the Nicaraguan authorities had expressed presidential aspirations in the context of the upcoming elections to be held on November 7 of this year. Specifically, of the nineteen against whom an arrest warrant has been issued and of which there are seventeen under arrest, five had expressed that they wanted to run for the presidency, and two of them had submitted requests to the political party of their choice to do so, but there are six other presidential aspirants among the extreme right wing coup plotters, who are at liberty and for whom no arrest warrant has been issued and no indictment has been initiated; of them, there are also two who have submitted requests to be considered as presidential candidates by the political party of their choice. Not to mention the other sectors of the right wing that are likely participate in the elections.

The presence of presidential aspirants among those detained has led detractors of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government to argue, abandoning all logic, that the investigative processes and the arrests made out are irrational, given that they self-evidently harm the political image of the government. That is to say, according to these “analysts”, presidential aspirations should endow impunity and even worse, that the impunity should result from the government acting out of political convenience, obstructing the relevant institutions from fulfilling their role and applying the relevant legal norms, in strict compliance with the rule of law. In one opinion article, the writer even appeared scandalized because one of those implicated as a beneficiary of funding from the aforementioned agencies, who is not under arrest and was only called to testify before the Public Prosecutor’s Office, is a winner of the Cervantes Literature Prize, as if this were a license to commit crimes.

Yes, it is indeed the case, from the electoral perspective, that the application of the law to these individuals has a political cost for Sandinismo, but the institutions of the Nicaraguan State would be very wrong to act on the basis of political criteria derived from electoral calculations, since the country’s self-determination and sovereignty are imperative and are, moreover, inalienable principles of Sandinismo. This should serve as a lesson to the demagogues who spend their lives demanding that Nicaragua respect the rule of law and the subordination of institutions to the established legal order. This is, furthermore, the best demonstration that the reason for the arrests are not because the people concerned are political opponents or because they have aspirations to the presidency of the Republic.

Moreover, in all the opinion polls, including those conducted by the opposition, none of those detained even comes close to having the popular support of Sandinismo and in particular, the level of popular support for the President of the Republic, Comandante Daniel Ortega Saavedra, thus confirming that the arrests have been made using the strictest and most transparent application of the laws that govern the Nicaraguan State. And it is worth reiterating that these laws are very similar to those in force in the very same countries whose governments have condemned Nicaragua for the arrests.

A situation of particular concern in some sectors outside Nicaragua, in certain cases due to disinformation and in others due to lack of political awareness, has been that among the nineteen individuals against whom arrest warrants have been issued of whom seventeen have been detained, six of them belong to a political group created in the nineties by former Sandinistas, and among these six are three who held high positions in the Sandinista government of the 1980s and participated in the liberation war against the Somoza dictatorship.

First of all, it should be clear that none of that history should be a reason for impunity for anyone, but in the case of the former Sandinistas, the fact that they are no longer Sandinistas is not the reason for their arrest, since it does not constitute a crime, unlike treason which is one of the crimes for which they have been arrested, as is the case with the other people under arrest, all on the strictest legal basis. But there are things that very few people know among the ranks of the international Left outside Nicaragua, and this makes some people defend the individuals mentioned here as if they were the same revolutionaries they were earlier in their careers, and nothing is further from the truth.

These former Sandinistas joined the right wing early in the 1990s, when, while still militants of the FSLN, they publicly renounced socialism, anti-imperialism, the popular struggle and the vanguard character of the FSLN. In the end, they were defeated internally in the FSLN’s Extraordinary Congress of May 1994 and they chose to abandon the FSLN and found a party in which they continued calling themselves Sandinistas, and which they also finally ended up renouncing, as was to be expected. Such that those people who continue to call them Sandinistas, if they are so fond of them, should respect them a little more and not call them something they themselves now reject. By the way, one of the individuals detained, of those who were linked to the Revolution and then took the path of the right, a while ago complained, using a good Nicaraguan term, that the name “Sandinista” caused her revulsion. So their admirers should think twice before continuing to describe them in that way.

It would take far too long and, anyway, is beyond the scope of this article to narrate here the history of this betrayal of Sandinismo. But it is worth mentioning some fundamental facts. Although these people were a minority in the FSLN Congress in 1994, since they were also a minority in the party’s rank and file, they were nevertheless a majority among those who had held senior government and party posts in the 1980s. They were also a majority among those who had been elected to the legislature in the 1990 elections, so they exploited these advantages and shortly after the defeat suffered by Sandinismo in those elections they appropriated the material patrimony of the FSLN, and then in 1995 proceeded to reform the Constitution via a pact with the right wing. As a result, they eliminated the right to free health care and education, legitimized the privatization of public services, created a second round of voting so as to prevent the FSLN from winning the elections and imposed limits on presidential re-election to prevent Comandante Daniel Ortega from running again as a candidate, and they even established the qualified vote to elect magistrates in the different institutions, with the hope that they themselves might be elected.

But after the disastrous electoral results of 1996 for the parties promoting those reforms, the only way to secure a qualified vote, a requirement imposed by those same parties to elect the positions in question, was an agreement between the two main parties of the time, the FSLN and the PLC, which the ex Sandinistas manipulated to accuse the FSLN of doing exactly what they themselves had already done when no law obliged them to do so, namely make a pact with the right wing, in their case for purposes harmful to the people’s interests. But nothing they did then compares to what the ex Sandinistas would end up doing in the elections of 2008, 2011, 2012 and 2016, when they supported candidates of Nicaragua’s most recalcitrant and fundamentalist right wing, which had the support of the United States. It is as if, for example, in Argentina, former guerrillas who had fought against the military dictatorships in that country had supported Macri in the presidential elections there, or as if in Chile they had supported Piñera, or in Brazil Bolsonaro.

The political parties that made the constitutional reforms of 1995, among them the ex Sandinistas recycled as an upstart right wing, consulted no one, not even even for the sake of appearances. In the following year’s elections, all together they did not even receive 10% of the vote, which made evident the illegitimate and spurious character of their reforms. All this in spite of the fact that by having control of the electoral power, they blocked, in a self-evidently arbitrary way, any candidate who hindered their plans in those elections, something they forget when they accuse Sandinismo of sectarian abuse of the State institutions, since from their point of view only the right wing are impartial and transparent, when it controls those institutions. A curious fact is that the ex Sandinistas in question were even allies of the FSLN as part of the National Convergence political alliance in the local elections of 2000 and 2004, and also in the national elections of 2001, until they ran again on their own account in the national elections of 2006.

But the final definitive validation of these ex Sandinistas as counterrevolutionaries with no possible redemption was the failed coup attempt in 2018, when they united with pro-imperialist forces and led the armed counterrevolutionary actions that took place between April and July of that year. These individuals, who in the 1990s had already renounced the red and black flag, in 2018 accompanied the neo-Somocista hordes that repeatedly burned that revolutionary symbol, as also happened with the desecration of monuments and even the tombs of Heroes and Martyrs of the Revolution. One more expression of the levels to which these people had already descended by then, was their participation in meetings with individuals like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Marco Rubio, from whom they received support, as the coup plotters did in general from Álvaro Uribe, with whom they proudly took pictures, and from Jair Bolsonaro, who, making a fool of himself in the way only he knows how to do, offered Brazilian territory to prosecute the Sandinistas.

The café lounge pseudo-Left, which loves to join in the declarations of the imperialist powers against the Sandinista government, has long reproached the ruling Sandinistas in Nicaragua for an alleged alliance with private business leaders and the Catholic Church. Regarding the former, in Nicaragua, since Sandinismo returned to government, the percentage of GDP produced by means of production under associative, cooperative, family and community ownership went from less than 40% to more than 50%, to the detriment of traditional private enterprise, which saw its economic importance decrease from more than 60% to less than 50% of GDP, and in the first nine of the fourteen years that Sandinismo has been in government since 2007, the minimum wage of workers increased ten times more than in the seventeen neoliberal years. This is hardly favorable to the interests of private capitalist enterprise.

When it first came to power in 1979, Sandinismo offered private enterprise a framework of understanding and consensus for the sake of the country’s stability, but since at that time solidarity with the Sandinista Revolution was in vogue, the characteristic snobbery of the café lounge Left did not allow it to accuse Sandinismo at that time of seeking alliances with business people, who in the end back then did not accept the offer of coexistence, as they did when Sandinismo returned to power in 2007. Then, for some years, big business had no other option but pragmatism. However, after some time, at the first opportunity that presented itself and as is to be expected when there are contradictions between antagonistic interests, private business lashed out against the Sandinista government and, together with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, was among the most aggressive sectors during the 2018 coup attempt, curiously enough with the support of all those people outside Nicaragua who accused Sandinismo of being allied with them.

As for the alleged alliance of the FSLN with the Catholic hierarchy, this is a kind of worldwide urban myth. There has not been a single day since Sandinismo returned to government in 2007, as there was not before, of course, in which Nicaragua’s Catholic Church leaders have not uttered all kinds of attacks against Sandinismo. The myth of this false alliance stems from the rapprochement that Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo made with Sandinismo during the last years of his life, but that rapprochement cost him precisely the support of the Vatican, so that as soon as he gave the first signs of reconciliation with Sandinismo, Cardinal Obando fell foul of Nicaragua’s Catholic Church hierarchy. There are also sectors on the Left whose problem is simply not having the infallible compass of anti-imperialism. That is to say, when one lacks direct knowledge of the situation of a country, it is enough to see which side the Empire and its disinformation media are on in order to at least have the ability to give the benefit of the doubt .

In Nicaragua the term “puchito” is popularly used as a synonym for little, and partly for that reason the coup leaders are known as “los puchos”, but the use of the term “pucho” in this case, has a connotation that is applicable beyond a quantitative sense, to allude to those who have no vocation for power, despite the fact that they have exercised it for so long. In Nicaragua, the bourgeoisie seems to have lost its instinct for power as a social class, an unusual phenomenon, but symptomatic of a true revolution.

At the world level, however, unfortunately, there is also an abundance of what one might call the “pucho Left”, that is, those self-styled Leftist sectors, which are stumbling around disoriented in the world or even in their respective national situations, without a compass to guide them, not just because they are a minority, but because they have not matured enough politically or worse, because they have started rotting away at some point in their erratic wandering. That Left which instead of denouncing imperialist interference, instead of attacking the common enemy of those who are supposed to fight for systemic change at a global level, and that in addition, despite their own impotent inaction, presume to judge who is revolutionary and who is not, or which revolution is a true one and which revolution is not, should make their own revolution so as to be able to preach by example and earn the moral authority to speak in the way they do.

But the coup right wing in Nicaragua is also puchito because it has no life of its own. It is a right wing on life-support provided by its imperialist owners. And it is not the fault of Sandinismo that the puchito right wing is led by confessed traitors to the nation, who would also be in jail in any self-respecting country. They are money launderers and even drug traffickers, like some others who were arrested some years earlier, not for the other crimes they had also committed, about which some of them even publicly boasted in messages broadcast in widely disseminated videos, and for which they had already been pardoned before, but in these other cases for common crimes very appropriate to their questionable moral condition, although now they seek to present themselves as political prisoners.

Finally, the strength of the coup-mongering right wing in Nicaragua is evident when, despite its most visible spokesmen being arrested for their misdeeds, not for their presidential aspirations or for simply being opposition, the most absolute calm prevails in the country. Life continues its course in the most serene atmosphere of peace imaginable, and not even the self same puchos interrupt their normal routine or even their recreational activities. If the arrested criminals were really political leaders, the situation would be very different. In 2018, when the coup plotters followed the orders of the interventionist imperialist agencies, they manipulated many people via psychological warfare using it as a component of the new coup d’état format designed by their imperial owners. Back then they wasted no time asking for permission to take to the streets.

But while it is easier to manipulate people than it is to convince him they are being manipulated, when they do finally become aware of the deception they have suffered then it is very difficult to manipulate them again. And that is what happens when the new psychological warfare coup formats fail. They will never again snatch from the Nicaraguan people the peace that has cost them so much nor the only true peace of social justice and freedom it makes possible.

Just as it is true that happiness can only be achieved when certain ethical values prevail and which overall in society can only predominate as the product and fundamental content of its revolutionary transformation. That kind of change is the only one from which the new Nicaragua under construction could emerge and from which it is emerging, with Sandinismo at the forefront, in permanent rebellion and victorious resistance against the world power of imperialism. And that itself is part of a long tradition of struggle dating from even before the mid-nineteenth century, when Nicaraguan and Central American forces defeated the filibuster troops sponsored by southern United States slave-owners; passing through the expulsion of the occupying US troops by General Augusto C. Sandino in the 1930’s; the overthrow in 1979 of the Somoza dictatorship imposed by the United States after the assassination of Sandino; the victory against the war of aggression imposed by the US government in the 1980s, and then against the neoliberalism imposed by electoral blackmail in the 1990s and following years, and finally against the attempted coup d’état in 2018. The tradition includes all the new victories that are being added in this struggle, one of whose fundamental objectives is, as Carlos Fonseca, whose birthday is commemorated today, declared: “A change of system, the overthrow of the exploiting classes and the victory of the exploited classes”.

In other words, the Sandinista government is popular rebellion in power, fighting from the government against the age-old system imposed by the oppressor classes; and as Ricardo Morales Avilés said, for this struggle to bear fruit “so many things must be changed … first power, property, ourselves, and then… fresh air and maize for everyone; fresh air and flowers for all”. This is what Sandinista Nicaragua is committed to achieving, today more dignified and victorious than ever.

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Carlos Fonseca Terán is Secretary of International Relations of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

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***

Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili paid a two-day visit to Ukraine earlier this week (her first) and met with her opposite number President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Zurabishvili first came to world notice when she emerged as part of the triumvirate that took over in Georgia following the so-called Rose Revolution in late 2003 that saw incumbent head of state Eduard Shevardnadze manhandled and divested of his powers. Her colleagues were Mikheil Saakashvili, who became president, and Zurab Zhvania, whose family claims he was assassinated in 2005. That event is the prototype of what have come to be called color revolutions; after Georgia the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan and the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in 2005, and a veritable host of others, successful and otherwise, in Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, the Maldives, Venezuela, Myanmar, Iran and elsewhere.

Deposed president Shevardnadze accused George Soros and his “philanthropies” of funding the coup in his nation. Shortly after Saakashvili and his allies came to power Soros’ Open Society Institute partnered with the United Nations Development Program to create a Capacity Building Fund for Georgia. The initiative was announced at a joint news conference with Saakashvili, the then-United Nations Development Program administrator and Soros at the World Economic Forum that year. Over 5,000 Georgian officials were paid out of the fund.

Later that same year the Orange Revolution occurred in Ukraine and a similar triumvirate, two men and a woman (it would be the same in Kyrgyzstan in 2005), took power.

The West, especially NATO, has always treated the two Black Sea nations as a pair. The military bloc created a NATO-Georgia Commission and a NATO-Ukraine Commission in 2008; each has been granted an Annual National Programme in those formats.

Last year they were among the first nations to become NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partners.

This week Ukraine’s Zelensky praised the strategic relations between the nations, affirming they shared a joint commitment to joining NATO and the European Union. He added they “agree regarding the future development of the Eastern Partnership,” whose association agreement demand on now deposed President Viktor Yanukovych led to the coup in 2014 and the resultant war in the Donbass. The Eastern Partnership, originally devised by Poland and Sweden, has as it mission the absorption of all remaining European and Caucasian former Soviet states into the European Union (and NATO) – except Russia.

The Ukrainian head of state also spoke of strengthening military integration in the Black Sea – against Russia, of course – particularly in regard to the Ukrainian and Georgian navies.

President Zurabishvili stated it was disappointing that the two nations “lost some time that should have been used to deepen relations,” in reference to a two-year freeze in relations after Zelensky appointed former Georgian President Saakashvili (on the run from his homeland) the chairperson of Ukraine’s Executive Reform Committee. As often occurs in such cases, Zurabishvili and Saakashvili, once coup co-plotters, soon became bitter enemies. (If she could have his head on a platter she would gleefully live up to her name.)

She, like her Ukrainian counterpart, hailed a common commitment to NATO, the EU and de-occupation, by which she evidently meant “liberating,” respectively, Abkhazia and South Ossetia and Crimea and the Donbass from Russia.

The Georgian president also denounced “daily provocations” from Russia “along the occupation line.”

Zelensky expressed confidence that Georgia would assist his government’s de-occupation of Crimea by appointing a representative for this year’s Crimean Platform founding summit, whose purpose is to wrest Crimea from Russia.

It’s no wonder that some NATO members are less than enthusiastic about bringing Georgia and Ukraine into their fold and providing them with Article 5 protection. Doing so in the context of “de-occupying” territory in the Donbass, the Caucasus and especially in Crimea would almost certainly provoke a military confrontation with Russia that wouldn’t remain a conventional one for long.

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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image: Zourabichvili listening to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell while Foreign Affairs Minister. (Public Domain)

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***

Greater Idlib is as volatile as ever, with the Syrian Arab Army, along with Russian support punishing every ceasefire violation of the al-Qaeda affiliates in the region.

It is yet unknown if the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) will begin a larger military operation anytime soon, as one has been expected for a while.

On June 27th, the SAA shelled militants’ positions in the northwestern region of Greater Idlib in response to recent ceasefire violations.

Reportedly targets were a number of towns and villages on the al-Zawiya Mountain in the southern Idlib countryside as well as in the al-Ghab Plains in the northern countryside of Hama.

The shelling led to human losses.

A militant, identified as Yusuf Firas Qassim, was killed in the town of Fatterah in the al-Zawiya Mountain area.

Later in the evening a response came – several rockets were fired from Greater Idlib at al-Qardahah, the hometown of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in the southeastern countryside of Lattakia.

Only two rockets actually reached the town.

Both rockets landed in empty farmlands.

No causalities or material losses were reported.

The attack was likely carried out by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda affiliated ruler of Idlib.

Earlier on the same day, Turkish forces carried out a combing operation along the militant-held part of the M4 highway, which links Aleppo city, Syria’s industrial hub, with the port city of Lattakia.

This is significant as Turkey is reportedly planning on improving the security of HTS and other factions that it backs in Greater Idlib by pushing towards Manbij and attempting to capture the town.

It is located northeast of Idlib and beyond Aleppo, which is under Syrian government control.

In the days leading up to these developments, on June 25, the SAA shelled three posts of the Turkish military in the northwestern region of Greater Idlib.

In the morning, the army shelled two Turkish posts in the northern outskirts of the government-held town of Saraqib in southern Idlib.

A gathering of Turkish military vehicles was hit.

A few hours later, the SAA artillery pounded a third Turkish post near the town of Qmenas, also in southern Idlib.

Neither attack resulted in any casualties.

In the last few days, Turkish-backed militants, led by the al-Qaeda-affiliated HTS, have stepped up their attacks.

Several government-held towns and villages around Greater Idlib were shelled by the militants.

The SAA has recently resumed its artillery strikes on Turkish forces in Greater Idlib in an attempt to pressure Ankara into implementing the ceasefire agreement.

It is highly unlikely, however, that Turkey will begin implementing it.

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***

The struggle to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen has run into another obstacle. This time it’s partisanship. But it isn’t Republican opposition blocking Joe Biden’s promise to end U.S. participation in the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe. It’s the president’s own hesitancy to keep his word paired with the unwillingness of Democrats in Congress to cross a president from their own party.

On February 4th, in his first major foreign policy address as president, Biden said, “we are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” In the next breath, however, the president said, “We’re going to continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people.”

Seeking clarification, a congressional letter led by Representatives Peter DeFazio, Debbie Dingell, and Ro Khanna (and signed by 41 of their colleagues) was sent to the president on February 25th, asking key questions. What’s the definition of offensive operations? What is the difference between offensive and defensive weapons? What about the blockade? They requested an answer to their questions by March 25th, the 6th anniversary of the war in Yemen. They received a non-answer, two months late.

[Source: theintercept.com]

Another opportunity for answers came at a hearing on April 21st where Special Envoy to Yemen Tim Lenderking, Biden’s diplomatic point man on the crisis, took questions from Congress. Asked by Rep. Ted Lieu whether the United States was still supporting Saudi Arabia’s offensive operations in Yemen, Lenderking couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer. He said, “I’m not totally in that information loop, congressman, so I can’t really speak to that.”

Letters led by Elizabeth Warren in the Senate and Ted Deutch in the House have encouraged the Biden’s administration to use their leverage to get Saudi Arabia to stop its blockade on Yemen. But U.S. Special Envoy Lenderking has denied the existence of a blockade to CNN investigative reporter Nima Elbagir, a claim she called, “just not true.” In fact, the Friends Committee on National Legislation reports that “No U.S. official in the new administration had explicitly publicly acknowledged the six-year-old, Saudi-imposed blockade—much less criticized it.”

President Biden was clear on the campaign trail: He said that if he were elected president he would make Saudi Arabia, “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.” Despite the promise of his February 4th announcement, he simply hasn’t done it. And Congress has not held him to his word.

During Trump’s tenure, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate voted to end U.S. participation in the Saudi war on Yemen. Every Democratic member of Congress voted for a War Powers Resolution stating that U.S. participation in the war is not authorized and must be ended. President Trump vetoed that legislation.

On January 25th of this year, Representative Ro Khanna spoke at the World Says No to War in Yemen International Day of Action, which Massachusetts Peace Action helped to organize. He said, “Senator Sanders and I will be advocating and introducing again a War Powers Resolution to stop any logistical support, any intelligence support, and military support, to the Saudis in their campaign in Yemen. That has to take place.” What is he waiting for?

The U.S. continues to provide logistical support that keeps the Saudi Royal Air Force in the sky, bombing Yemen. The Special Envoy to Yemen can’t answer basic questions about whether the U.S. still supports Saudi Arabia in Yemen. He denies the existence of the blockade, a tactic that employs starvation as a weapon.

Members of congress who championed ending the war in Yemen through privileged War Powers Resolutions, like Congressman Ro Khanna, Senators Bernie Sanders, Mike Lee, and Chris Murphy, aren’t being consistent now that Biden is President.

We must pressure them. One courageous member of Congress can force the entire legislative branch to go on record. It’s difficult to criticize your allies, but thousands of lives are at stake. The UN World Food Program says that, “around 400,000 children may die in Yemen this year without urgent intervention. That is roughly one child every 75 seconds.” They can’t wait any longer. Neither can we.

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Brian Garvey is an organizer with Massachusetts Peace Action based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image: WFP Provides Food Assistance to a Record 7 Million People In Yemen In August 2017. UN World Food Program. [Source: wfp.org]

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***

Welcome to the latest NATO show: Sea Breeze starts today and goes all the way to July 23. The co-hosts are the US Sixth Fleet and the Ukrainian Navy. The main protagonist is Standing NATO Maritime Group 2.  

The show, in NATOspeak, is just an innocent display of “strenghtening deterrence and defense”. NATO spin tells us the exercise is “growing in popularity” and now features more than 30 nations “from six continents” deploying 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft and “18 special operations and dive teams”. All committed to implement and improve that magical NATO concept: “interoperability”.

Now let’s clear the fog and get to the heart of the matter. NATO is projecting the impression that it’s taking over selected stretches of the Black Sea in the name of “peace”. NATO’s supreme articles of faith, reiterated in its latest summit, are “Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea” and “support for Ukraine sovereignty”. So for NATO, Russia is an enemy of “peace”.  Everything else is hybrid war fog.

NATO not only “does not and will not recognize Russia’s illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea” but also denounces its “temporary occupation”. This script, redacted in Washington, is recited by Kiev and virtually the whole EU.

NATO bills itself as committed to “transatlantic unity”. Geography tells us the Black Sea has not been annexed to the Atlantic. But that’s no impediment for NATO’s goodwill – which the record shows turned Libya, in northern Africa, into a wasteland run by militias. As for the intersection of Central and South Asia, NATO’s collective behind was unceremoniously kicked by a bunch of ragged Pashtuns with counterfeit Kalashnikovs.

Meet the Bucharest 9

The White House defines its NATO eastern flank allies as the Bucharest 9.

The Bucharest 9 includes the members of the Visegrad Four (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia); the Baltic trio (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania); and two Black Sea neighbors (Bulgaria and Romania). No Ukraine – at least not yet.

When the White House refers to “strengthening transatlantic relations”, this means above all “closer cooperation with our nine Allies in Central Europe and the Baltic and Black Sea regions on the full range of challenges.” Translation: “full range of challenges” means Russia.

So welcome to the return, in style, of the Intermarium – as in “between the seas”, mostly the Baltic and Black, with the Adriatic as a side show.

After WWI, the drive for what would possibly become a geopolitical entente included the three Baltics, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Belarus and Ukraine. That concoction was made in Poland.

Now, under the hegemon and its NATO weaponized arm, a revamped Baltic-Black Sea intermarium is being pushed as the new Cold War 2.0 Iron Wall against Russia. That’s why the definitive incorporation of Ukraine to NATO is so important for Washington – as it would solidify the intermarium for good.

Double O Seven does Monty Python

The prequel to Sea Breeze took place last week, via a farcical Britannia Rules The Waves stunt enacted like a Monty Python sketch – yet with potentially explosive overtones.

Imagine waiting at a bus stop somewhere in Kent and finding a soggy blob – nearly 50 pages – of secret documents in a trash bin detailing Ministry of Defense elaborations on the explicitly provocative deployment of the Defender destroyer off Sebastopol, in the Crimean coast.

Even a BBC journalist embedded with the destroyer smashed the official London spin that this was a mere “innocent passage”. Moreover, the Defender weapons were fully loaded – as it advanced two nautical miles inside Russian waters. Moscow released a video documenting the stunt.

It gets better. The soggy blob found in Kent revealed not only discussions about the possible Russian reaction to the “innocent passage”, but also digressions about the Brits, “encouraged” by the Americans, leaving commandos behind in Afghanistan after the troop pull out next 9/11.

That would qualify as extra evidence that the Anglo-American-NATO combo will not really “leave” Afghanistan.

A vague “member of the public” contacted the BBC when he innocently found the geopolitically radioactive materials. No one knows whether this was a leak, a trap or a silly mistake. If the “member of the public” were a true whistleblower he would have gone the Wikileaks way, not BBC.

The “innocent passage” happened only hours after London signed a deal with Kiev for the “enhancement of Ukrainian naval capabilities”.

On the Russian reaction front, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova summed it all up: “London has demonstrated yet another provocative action followed by a bunch of lies to cover it up. 007 agents are not what they used to be.”

Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean front, which NATO considers its Mare Nostrum, two Russian Mig-31k fighters – capable of carrying Khinzal hypersonic missiles – were redeployed last week to Syria. The Khinzal range encompasses the whole Mediterranean, east as well as east.

Across the Global South, NATO promoting “global peace” in the port of Odessa, in the Black Sea, is bound to evoke shades of Libya cum Afghanistan. Austin Powers, self-billed Agent Double Oh! Behave! would perfectly fit in the Kent trash bin “secret documents” caper. “Oh. Behave!” totally applies to Sea Breeze. Otherwise, the opportunity might arise to say hello to Mr. Kinzhal.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 will take part in Exercise Sea Breeze 21 from 28 June 2021 and run through 23 July 2021. (NATO courtesy photo by SNMG2)

Radical De-Globalization: Finding Back Our Freedom and Sovereignty: Tyrants Don’t Create Tyranny. Your Obedience Does.

By Peter Koenig, June 29, 2021

The transformation as we now know, is planned to be nothing less than a modification and digitization of the human genome, robotization of our brains – so as to gain total control over the population – those that are left of us, after the UN agenda 2021-2030 is fully implemented.

Weighing Myocarditis Cases: CDC’s ACIP Committee Failed to Balance the Harms vs Benefits of 2nd Doses

By Prof. Wesley Pegden, June 28, 2021

On June 23, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the CDC met to discuss ongoing reports of myocarditis in young people, particularly young men, after the 2nd dose of mRNA vaccines. In light of these recent reports, the committee was charged with weighing potential harms and benefits associated with 2nd doses of mRNA vaccines.

Does Paraquat Weed Killer Cause Parkinson’s Disease? U.S. Judge Sets Trial in Litigation against Syngenta

By Carey Gillam, June 28, 2021

U.S. Judge Nancy Rosenstengel of the Southern District of Illinois issued the order in an initial hearing with lawyers from multiple firms who are representing people alleging their exposure to Syngenta’s popular herbicides caused them or family members to develop and suffer from the dreaded neurological disorder.

The Crimes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Four Senators Ask Biden to Clear Oppenheimer’s Name

By Susan D’Agostino, June 28, 2021

When the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, 110,000-210,000 people were instantly killed. Japan surrendered in the days that followed. Not long after, nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project—the research and development program that produced the bomb—was awarded the highest US honor bestowed on civilians for his contribution to the war effort: a Medal of Merit.

The World Says No to the Blockade of Cuba

By Rosa Miriam Elizalde, June 28, 2021

Cuba won another diplomatic victory in the General Assembly of the United Nations this Wednesday against the government of the United States. The majority of countries (184) voted in favor of the resolution which calls for the lifting of the blockade against Cuba. The resolution has been brought to the UN every year since 1992, except in 2020 when the government of Havana was unable to present it due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lisbon Court Rules Only 0.9% of ‘Verified Cases’ Died of COVID, Numbering 152, Not 17,000 Claimed

By Mordechai Sones, June 28, 2021

Following a citizen’s petition, a Lisbon court was forced to provide verified COVID-19 mortality data, reports AndreDias.net. According to the ruling, the number of verified COVID-19 deaths from January 2020 to April 2021 is only 152, not about 17,000 as claimed by government ministries.

The US Gets Isolated by Its Cuba Blockade Policy: What Will Happen Now?

By Alejandra Garcia, June 28, 2021

Cuba’s new victory over Washington was not news in the US. No head of diplomacy or White House representatives issued any criteria regarding the fact that 184 of the 193 countries that make up the United Nations (UN) voted on Wednesday to end the blockade imposed on the island for almost 60 years.

Dispossession of the Indigenous People’s Lands, Missing Children: The Canadian Greenhouse and Genocide

By Kim Petersen, June 28, 2021

This was in response to a plurality of members of parliament in Canada condemning China for committing genocide in the country’s Xinjiang province. It was flabbergasting, given that Canada is a state erected on the territory through a dispossession of its Original Peoples by European colonial-settlers. The dispossession was — and is — genocidal.

Sadly China and Russia Remain Quiet on US Past Genocides and Ongoing Genocide in the Middle East & Africa

By Jay Janson, June 28, 2021

Let’s begin with acknowledging that officials of the United States of America, its military, its clandestine operating CIA, and personnel within its criminal media cartel have been committing crimes against humanity free of any worry or concern of prosecution.

Some Respectful Notes from Nicaragua for Mexico’s President: “AMLO Called on the Government of Nicaragua to Set Free a Group of Oligarchs and Political Operators”

By Jorge Capelan and Stephen Sefton, June 28, 2021

Last week, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called on the government of Nicaragua to set free a group of oligarchs and political operators currently being investigated for very serious crimes of treason, terrorism, fraud and corruption. According to the Mexican president, the Sandinista government is acting unlawfully using illegitimate force and may also be denying the Nicaraguan people the chance of choosing freely and democratically in our elections next November 7.