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Race war or bust? MSM smothers racial unity over police killing of Minneapolis man by reminding blacks & whites to hate each other

By Helen Buyniski | RT | May 27, 2020

The brutal police murder of an unarmed black man in Minneapolis united all races and political stripes in shocked outrage. So why is MSM invoking every racially-divisive incident they can to set society at each other’s throats?

Liberals and conservatives alike were horrified on Monday by a widely-circulated Facebook video showing a white police officer choking an unarmed, handcuffed black man to death by kneeling on his neck for upwards of seven minutes, ignoring his increasingly feeble cries for help until he went limp. Regardless of their race, viewers demanded the officer – Minneapolis Police Department’s Derek Chauvin – be charged with murder and cheered at the news he and three colleagues present during the Memorial Day incident had been suspended from the force.

Given the country’s oft-lamented polarization, it’s rare to see such broad agreement on something as controversial as a police killing. But the sight of George Floyd struggling to wheeze out “I can’t breathe” while Chauvin mocked the anguished cries of onlookers convinced many to put aside their ideological feuds and get outraged. Seeing the life slowly choked out of the 46-year-old for nothing more than allegedly “resisting arrest” over supposedly forging a check at a supermarket was beyond the pale.

Mainstream media’s narrative managers were determined to shatter that unity, however.

Thousands of protesters marched on Minneapolis’ third police precinct headquarters on Tuesday, carrying banners demanding justice for Floyd and his family. While a small group broke windows and sprayed graffiti en route, the riot-gear-clad cops met the entire racially-heterogeneous group as if it were an invading army, hurling stun grenades and firing rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd. At least one woman was shot in the head.

Journalists and politicians on social media reacted to this appalling show of excessive force not by unilaterally condemning police violence – that would risk cementing the dreaded “unity” – but by contrasting the crackdown with last month’s docile police response to a “Liberate Minnesota” protest against the state’s Covid-19 lockdown. Hundreds of mostly-white protesters, many strapped with guns, had surrounded the Governor’s Residence of Democrat Tim Walz, demanding an end to the pandemic-inspired stay-at-home order.

The anti-lockdown protesters were largely left alone by the cops, liberals complained, implying police refusal to meet the flag-waving “extremists” with a hail of rubber (or real!) bullets was due to racism rather than the firepower the anti-lockdown protesters were packing.

That the divisive narrative was fundamentally flawed – the Minneapolis crowd protesting Floyd’s murder was as white as it was black – didn’t matter. Nor was it deemed necessary to point out that the unarmed Minneapolis protesters were not a threat to the riot-gear-clad cops, who’d have had to be suicidal to fire rubber bullets into a crowd of AR-15-packing wannabe-militiamen the previous month. It was too late – the spell of unity had been broken, and the conversation had degenerated into bickering over the morality of property damage and whether molotov cocktails were justified in the face of murder.

American police’s legendary itchy trigger fingers may seem incompatible with the American people’s love of firearms. However, the cops’ choice of prey is instructive: police-involved shootings are much more common in cities with strict gun-control laws: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. The majority of US police departments – including members of the Minneapolis force – train in Israel, learning to shoot first and ask questions later while testing out their new skills on real live occupied Palestinians. This training follows them home, where too often poor black populations become the favored target. But the core psychology is that of a bully, unwilling to pick on someone their own size, armed with their own weapons.

The MSM narrative-managers poured it on thick in their effort to muddy the waters, dragging in months’ worth of racial controversies. Anything was fair game, as long as it could be used to guide conservatives and liberals, blacks and whites back to their proper positions at each other’s throats.

From the “Central Park Karen” who called the cops on a black man for asking her to put her dog on a leash, to Ahmaud Arbery, the young black man shot by a father-and-son team while jogging in Georgia, supposedly because they suspected him of a burglary, nothing was too off-topic.

The last thing the media establishment needs is for Americans to realize their country doesn’t have a race problem, so much as a class problem – and the media is on one side of the divide, encouraging those on the other side to fight among themselves for its amusement.

Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23

May 27, 2020 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture | , | 15 Comments

Did Trump Just Cancel a Potential Double-War?

The Saker • Unz Review • May 27, 2020

At this time of writing, it is too early to declare the danger over, but at least three out of five Iranian tankers have made it safely to Venezuela (confirmation from TeleSur and PressTV). Furthermore, while we should never say “never”, it appears exceedingly unlikely that the US would let three tankers pass only to then try to impede the arrival of the other two. So it ain’t over until its over, but as of right now things look way better than last week.

Besides, this is mostly a symbolic issue. While these 5 tankers will make a difference, it won’t be a huge one, especially considering the devastating consequences which the US sanctions, sabotage and subversion have inflicted on Venezuela.

Still, symbols are important, if only because they create a precedent. In fact, I would argue that the latest climbdown by Trump is no different than all his other climbdowns: Trump has had a very consistent record of threatening fire and brimstone before quietly deflating and walking away. And since he did that many times now, we have to wonder whether this strategy is effective or not?

One could argue that this strategy could be described by saying that you put the maximum pressure on the other side in the hope that the bluff will entice the adversary to fold. This could be a semi-credible argument were it not for a very simple but crucial problem: so far the other guys have never folded. In other words, Trump’s bluff has been called over and over again, and each time Trump had to quietly deflate.

Some will say that this only proves that Trump is truly a peace-loving President who, unlike his predecessors, does not want to go to war. But then, what about the cruise missile strikes on Syria? What about the murder of Soleimani?

Truth be told, the kindest thing we can say about this strategy (assuming that it is a strategy to begin with, not the evidence of a total lack of one) is that it is tantamount to yelling “fire!” in a crowded movie theater: the fact that Trump did not set any movie theater ablaze hardly justifies his yelling “fire” in such a dangerous environment. The perfect example of this kind of irresponsible behavior is the murder of General Soleimani which truly brought the US and Iran a millimeter away from a real, full-scale war.

Furthermore, while I salute Trump’s climbing down following the Iranian strikes, I also believe that in doing so he hurt the international image of the US. Why? Think about this: this is the first time ever (if I am not mistaken) that the US was the object of a major military strike coming from another state-actor and did not retaliate. In the past and until this Spring, the US always held the view that if anybody dares to mess with it this would result in very serious consequences. Thus the US upheld a world order in which some where a lot more equal than others. Specifically, “others” had to meekly accept US strikes and shut up whereas Uncle Shmuel could strike left and right and expect no retaliation.

By “accepting” the Iranian counter-strike, Trump did essentially place an “equal” sign between Iran and the US. He probably never understood that, but in the region this was understood by all.

Just as Hezbollah destroyed the myth of Israeli impunity, Iran destroyed the myth of US impunity.

Still, I will always prefer the politician who does not start a war (for whatever reason) to one who would. I also have no doubt whatsoever that Hillary would have started one, or even several, wars. But the fact that Hillary would have been even worse than Trump is hardly a reason to start fawning about Trump’s brilliant “5D chess” genius or peace-loving policies…

Trump reminds of a guy pointing a gun a people in the street only to later say “but it was a toy gun, I never meant to really shoot anybody.” This is definitely better than shooting people with a real gun, but this is hardly a sign of maturity or intelligence.

The other problem with this “strategy” (let’s assume for argument’s sake that this is a strategy of some kind): each time the “indispensable nation” and “sole hyperpower” has to climb down, it increasingly looks like a paper tiger. Not looking like such a paper tiger is probably the main reason behind Michael Ledeen’s famous words “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” In a strictly evil and imperialistic sense, Ledeen’s strategy makes a lot more sense than what Trump has been doing.

As Marx famously said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The outcome of what some now call the “Battle of Macuto Bay” is a perfect example of this: if the Bay of Pigs was the “root case” then the disaster in Grenada was the tragedy and the Battle of Macuto Bay the real farce.

Humor can be a devastating weapon and anybody who has studied the late Soviet Union (in the late Brezhnev years and after) knows how the Russian people ridiculed the Soviet leaders with literally thousands of jokes.

A real imperialist would much rather be hated than ridiculed, and while Trump himself probably does not realize that he is the laughingstock of the planet, his aides and deep state bosses most definitely do and that is very, very dangerous.

Why?

Because the pressure to, once again, “pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall” increases with each climbdown (see my article “Each “Click” Brings Us One Step Closer to the “Bang!” for a fuller discussion of this).

Besides, finding an even smaller and weaker country than Venezuela will be hard (maybe the Island of Saba? or Grenada again? who knows?). And potentially very dangerous.

The other problem is predictability. Any international system requires that its most powerful actors be predictable. In contrast, when a major international actors acts in what appears to be unpredictable, irrational or irresponsible manner, this puts the entire stability of the system at risk.

This, by the way, is also why it is so disastrous that the US has withdrawn from so many international organizations or treaties: the participation in international organizations and treaties indicate that the US is willing to play by the same rules as everybody else. The fact that the US is ditching so many of its former international obligations only shows that the US has gone rogue and is from now on totally unpredictable.

Finally, there are also lessons for Moscow here, the main one being that when confronted with a determined adversary, the Empire tries to bluff, but eventually folds. True, Moscow has to be much more careful than Tehran simply because the consequences of a US-Russian war would be dramatically worse than even a major conflict in the Middle-East. Yet it is also true that over the past years the Russian armed forces did have the time to prepare for such a conflict and that now Russia is ready for pretty much anything the US could try to throw at her, at least in purely military terms.

In contrast to the military posture of Russia, the political environment in Russia has changed for the worse: there is now a potentially very dangerous “hardline” opposition to Putin which I have christened the “6th column”, as opposed to the liberal and pro-western 5th column. What these two “columns” have in common is that they both will categorically oppose pretty much anything and everything Putin does. The 6th column, in particular, has a seething hatred for Putin which is even more rabid than what the liberal 5th column usually express. Check out this excellent video by Ruslan Ostashko, who prefers the term “emo-Marxists” and who very accurately describes these folks. Whether we think of them as 6th-columnists or emo-Marxists does not matter, what matters is that these folks are eager to act like a soundboard for any and all anti-Putin rumors and fakes. While Putin certainly has his flaws, and while the economic policies of the Medvedev, and now Mishustin, government are a far cry from what most Russians would want, it is also true that these two “columns” are objectively doing the bidding of the Empire, which could present a real problem if the current pandemic-induced economic crisis in Russia is not tackled more effectively by the government.

I have always said that Iran, while being much weaker than Russia, has consistently shown much more courage in its dealings with the Empire than Russia. Furthermore, Iran’s policies are primarily dictated by moral and spiritual considerations (as in the case of Iran’s principled stance on occupied Palestine) while Russian policies are much more “pragmatic” (which is really a euphemism for self-serving). But then, Iran is an Islamic Republic whereas Russia still has to develop some kind of unifying and original worldview.

Conclusion:

For all his innumerable negative character traits and other flaws, it remains true that Trump has not launched a major war (so far). Yes, he has brought the world to the brink several times, but so far he has not plunged the world into a major conflict. How much of the credit for this truly should go personally to him is very debatable (maybe cooler heads in the military prevailed, I think of folks like General Mattis who, reportedly, was the one who stopped the US from seriously attacking Syria and settled for a symbolic strike). Some Russian analysts (Andrei Sidorov) even believe that the US is in no condition to fight any war, no matter how small. Furthermore, most (all?) Russian analysts also believe that the US is fully committed to a full-spectrum information and economic war to try to economically strangle both Russia and China. I think that it would be fair to say that nobody in Russia believes that the relationship with Trump’s US can, or will, improve. The tone in China is also changing, especially since the US has now launched a major anti-China strategic PSYOP. In other words, the US is merrily continuing down its current road which leads it to a simultaneous confrontation with not one, or even two, countries, but with a list of countries which seems to grow every day. So while it is true that in this case Trump appears to have canceled two wars, we should not assume that he won’t soon start one, if only to deflect the blame for his total mismanagement of the COVID19 crisis. Should that happen, we can only hope that all the “resistance countries” and movement will provide as much support as possible to whomever the Empire attacks next.

May 27, 2020 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | 4 Comments

Military intelligence

Climate Discussion Nexus | May 27, 2020

One of our recent videos reviewed the predictions from a high-powered US military report on climate change published nearly 20 years ago. Laughable hardly describes it. But here they come again, this time according to a Thomson Reuters Foundation story in the person of one Kate Guy, a senior research fellow at the U.S.-based Center for Climate and Security. According to the story, “Recent research she did with military officials on climate scenarios over different time horizons found ‘near-term impacts are much more severe than we thought they would be’ – something already seen in worsening wildfires, storms and other disasters.” Things that haven’t yet happened are far worse than expected, as seen in other things that exist in slogans but not reality. Welcome to the new era of military planning.

“From collapsing supply chains to power grabs by populist leaders, the coronavirus pandemic has revealed how a crisis can swiftly ramp up wider security risks – a clear warning as climate change looms large, security experts warned”. Funny we’ve lived with climate change for over a century and it looked nothing like the pandemic, but now one self-described expert you never heard of before told an online event you weren’t at that climate risks are “the next big thing – the longer-term, more intense form of this (coronavirus) crisis”. We had no idea global warming would soon require a lockdown and vaccinations. But then, we’re not experts.

In this case the one person whose say-so is that of an expert says she draws her conclusion from the fact that little research has been done on the subject. Which is OK, we suppose, given that with climate change the customary procedure is verdict first, trial afterwards. (Hence Facebook restricted PragerU for saying polar bears were not vanishing without worrying about whether, oh, you know, polar bears were vanishing) It saves time, and time is apparently a luxury we don’t possess.

The story also warns of a crisis in the Amazon as the water dries up and the trees die off. And as usual it’s a downward spiral as climate change causes security threats like organized crime and organized crime causes climate change. But on the plus side, “In the United States, framing climate change as a security issue has helped draw interest from conservative lawmakers”. So there’s an opportunity to twist the issue so we can use psychology to bypass rational discussion. And who wouldn’t jump at that opportunity?

May 27, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | 3 Comments

Twitter & media know this isn’t about mail-in ballots or fraud, but about who gets to define truth; Trump does too

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | May 27, 2020

Twitter opened a new battlefront in the 2020 US election by ‘fact-checking’ posts by President Donald Trump to say he was wrong about voter fraud. That would normally be the end of the story – except nothing about this is normal.

On Tuesday, Twitter took the unprecedented step of posting a link under the two tweets – made by the president on his personal account – listing a bunch of mainstream media articles to assert that “fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud,” and therefore Trump’s opinion about the matter is factually wrong.

The move followed a campaign by mainstream media and Democrats to censor Trump over other tweets, insinuating that the intern for former congressman and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough may not have died accidentally, which culminated in a demand for Twitter to “cleanse the Trump stain” in a New York Times op-ed earlier on Tuesday.

Try as they might, Twitter couldn’t find any violation of their ever-shifting rules to pin on Trump, so they did the next best thing and “fact-checked” him. No doubt, whoever came up with this figured it was a really clever way to appease the outrage mob. Sure, the Trump 2020 campaign would protest the bias – and reveal in the process that they pulled advertisements from Twitter months ago – but they can be brushed off, unlike the chorus of his critics.

Then the White House Press Secretary fired off a thread filled with recent stories about mail-in ballot problems – forms being mailed to the dead or people who’d long since moved away, a Philadelphia judge just convicted for stuffing the ballot box, etc. – clearly showing the Twitter “fact checkers” had some explaining to do.

That should not come as a surprise to anyone. After all, these are the same outlets that have peddled the Russiagate conspiracy theory with impunity for the past four years, and even racked up prestigious awards for the blatantly fraudulent coverage. Mainstream media archives are littered with “bombshells” designed to first prevent Trump’s election, then inauguration, then get him impeached or otherwise removed from office. Every single one turned out to be a dud.

“But Trump lies! Constantly!” scream in unison the people used to being not just gatekeepers of “respectable discourse” but the tone police of Washington, the arbiters of the acceptable, the people who believe their pen shapes the very fabric of reality. People who headline their stories with “what you should know” and “how you should think.”

When challenged, they form ranks and scream they are being unjustly attacked and “delegitimized” – but only if it’s one of their mainstream colleagues called out for their excesses. Anyone else, from Julian Assange to alternative outlets, can rot because the precious First Amendment doesn’t apply to them, supposedly.

CNN had to settle a lawsuit after defaming a teenager from Covington, Kentucky. To avoid a similar fate, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow argued that when she says “literally” that’s not news but humorous hyperbole, essentially dismissing her entire show as fake news.

It’s telling that this very phrase – fake news – has become synonymous with Trump’s criticism of the media, even though it was originally used by Hillary Clinton as an excuse for losing the 2016 election. You know, the election the mainstream media gave her 98 percent chances of winning almost to the very end, and openly endorsed her at the same rate?

If you thought Clinton took that loss hard, though, you clearly haven’t been paying attention to the media. Trump’s victory was an existential crisis for them, the moment their power to dictate the shape of reality itself was exposed as a mirage.

This is why they’ve spent the past four years lobbing Russiagate and other ‘bombshells’ at him. This is why they have led the outrage mobs, not just against Trump or the millions of “deplorables” that voted for him, but also against the social media platforms he used to bypass them in 2016, so he wouldn’t be able to do that again this November. Don’t think for a second any of this is about mail-in ballots, which – much like immigration and other issues – Democrats themselves once used to be against.

When they wrote freedom of speech into the Constitution, America’s founders may not have imagined that a president would be an unlikely champion of it, while the “free press” would be clamoring for censorship to preserve its power. Yet here we are.

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic

May 27, 2020 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | 2 Comments

Real reason Michael Moore’s film axed from YouTube is climate wrongthink, not copyright

By Helen Buyniski | RT | May 27, 2020

Michael Moore’s popular yet controversial exposé of the “green” movement’s corruption has finally been knocked off YouTube by a tactic that’s as cowardly as it is underhanded. Nothing upsets a cult like a successful apostate.

“Planet of the Humans,” posted to YouTube for free viewing on Earth Day, to the horror of the climate-change industrial complex, was removed from the platform on Monday, after a British environmental photographer filed a copyright claim. The deplatforming represents a triumph for the deep-pocketed “green” superstars who’ve been tearing their hair out over the film for the past month, livid over the unflattering portrayal of their crusade by the once-beloved liberal filmmaker, but unable to shut him up.

Photographer Toby Smith claimed the film – which had been viewed more than 8.3 million times before its removal – used “several seconds” of footage he’d shot of rare earth elements being mined without his permission. Unlike previous attempts to get the film taken down – which targeted its distributor with claims the film was packed with falsehoods and “fossil fuel industry talking points” – this angle of attack was successful, concealing the iron fist of censorship within the velvet glove of copyright law.

Smith could have gone directly to the filmmakers and complained, rather than running directly to YouTube. But the photographer made no secret of his true intentions. “I wasn’t interested in negotiation,” he told the Guardian on Tuesday, sniffing that he didn’t “agree with its message” and condemning “the misleading use of facts in its narrative.”

Heaven forbid facts be used to support a narrative one disagrees with! That’s “disinformation,” in the Orwellian Newspeak parlance of centrist-liberal orthodoxy. Indeed, Smith and the rest of the film’s critics have tried every disingenuous trick in the book to get Moore’s film taken down, from guilt by association (it’s “endorsed by climate skeptics and right-wing think tanks!”) to shaming celebrity pile-ons. Documentary-maker Josh Fox even briefly convinced the film’s distributor to pull it by claiming it was “dangerous, misleading and destructive to decades of progress in environmental policy, science and engineering” – only to see it reinstated so as not to trigger the Streisand Effect (in which the backlash to censorship sees the offending work skyrocket in popularity as people flock to see what the controversy is about).

However, a copyright claim lets the haters memory-hole the film while maintaining plausible deniability around the censorship issue, allowing YouTube to dodge the thorny issue of deplatforming an Oscar-winning documentarian.

Never mind that Smith, like his climate-bigwig fellow critics Bill McKibben and Michael Mann, has an ideological motivation for silencing Moore. The film eviscerates the hypocrisy of the green movement, depicting the self-styled saviors of the planet as money-grubbing opportunists in bed with the same Big Oil interests they claim to oppose. The “renewable energy” that’s supposed to solve the climate crisis is revealed to be as environmentally devastating as the fossil fuels we’ve been taught to revile. Copyright lets YouTube claim they’re “just following orders.”

Jeff Gibbs, director of “Planet of the Humans,” recognized the spurious copyright takedown as an “act of censorship by political critics,” calling it a “misuse of copyright law to shut down a film that has opened a serious conversation” about “green capitalism” and Wall Street profiteering within the environmental movement. “This is just another attempt by the film’s opponents to subvert the right to free speech,” he told the Guardian, adding that he was working with YouTube to get the film back up.

But Big Climate doesn’t want a serious conversation. They’re accustomed to knocking heretics off social media – or at least marginalizing them – with minimal effort. Well-funded online activism group Avaaz has been engaged in a full-frontal assault on “climate misinformation” on YouTube for months, implicitly threatening both the video platform and the brands whose ads appear on climate-skeptical videos with the wrath of millions of armchair inactivists if they don’t suppress the offending content. Just last week, Facebook’s fact-checkers squelched a PragerU video debunking the “climate change is killing the polar bears” meme, even though it was backed by expert science.

But convincing platforms to take down a one-time liberal darling – especially one with an Academy Award under his belt – is a tall order. Now that the “wrongthink” voices of climate skeptics have been silenced and “climate-change denialism” equated to Holocaust denial in the popular imagination, thanks to a full-bore media demonization campaign of all who question climate orthodoxy, the environmental movement has turned to seeking infidels in its midst.

Given his one-time status in the movement, Moore can’t be dismissed as just another Koch brothers shill, no matter how loud his detractors shout that “right-wingers” have embraced his latest film. But they won’t hesitate to resort to underhanded tactics to take him down. Whether this film escapes censorship under false pretenses remains to be seen, but other liberal celebrities should watch out – they might be next.

Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23

Watch the full documentary on Bitchute.

May 27, 2020 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | | 2 Comments

Dr. Shelton, Prevention better than cure

Dr. John Campbell | May 26, 2020

See also:

Dr Shelton Reports on Vitamin D, Parts 1 and 2

Dr. John Campbell | May 21, 2020

Thank you very much Matt, for you excellent insights and knowledge.

Somalia and Sweden

https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m…

Elderly Vit D

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c…

https://www.change.org/p/1-in-5-in-th…

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11…

Vit D

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11…

https://www.gov.scot/publications/vit…

Prevalence and correlates of vitamin D deficiency in US adults About 42% of the US population is vitamin D deficient. However, this rate rises to 82% in black people and 70% in Hispanics

Vit D in Indonesia

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c…

Vit D

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32252…

Vit D and COVID

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3…

Vit D deficiency in Ireland

https://tilda.tcd.ie/publications/rep…

Prevalence and correlates of vitamin D deficiency in US adults

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2…

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/…

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/…

Vit D and COVID

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3…

https://www.researchsquare.com/articl…

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti…

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti…

May 27, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment