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The National Security Establishment Is In Charge

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 11, 2020

In the debate over whether a recently retired military man, Gen. Lloyd Austin, should be secretary of defense, the New York Times published an editorial yesterday emphasizing the importance of “civilian control” over the military.

How quaint! Never mind that Times, by its own admission, endorsed President Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Gen. James Mattis. The Times now says that two times in a row would be too much because civilian control of the military is so vitally important in America.

What nonsense. The fact is that the national-security establishment, which consists of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, has long been in charge of the levers of power within the federal government. Anybody who becomes secretary of defense, military or civilian, is going to be taking orders, not giving them.

But we have to cling to our myths and lies — you know, like the one that holds that American servicemen died in America’s many foreign wars to protect our “freedom.” As long as we cling to such falsehoods, myths, and unrealities, everything will be fine, or so the argument goes.

But everything isn’t fine. Just look around. Look at the ever-increasing numbers of young people committing suicide. Is that normal? That’s the surest sign yet of what clinging to lies and myths and selling them as reality can do to a nation. Add to those suicides the suicides of veterans and the massive drug addition, alcoholism, and other self-destructive behavior and all the irrational killings and other acts of violence that pervade American society.

Yep, just look around. It’s not hard to see that America is a very unhealthy society.

There is one book that captures perfectly what has happened to the United States: National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon. Glennon’s thesis is a simple one: It is the national-security establishment that is in charge of the federal government.

Oh, yes, I know, everyone thinks that the other parts of the federal government — the president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court are in charge. That’s because they are inculcated with that notion in their public school civics classes or at the state-supported colleges they attended. As Glennon points out, that notion is false. The real power and control lies with the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. They permit the other parts of the federal government to maintain the veneer of power. That doesn’t matter to them. What matters is that they are in charge and that the other three branches defer to them on critical matters, such as who is going to be secretary of defense,

And just in case you’re wondering, Glennon is not some sort of crackpot author, which makes his book so dangerous to the national-security establishment. Since 2002, he has been a professor of law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He also served three years as counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He also was a professor of law at the University of California and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International School for Scholars. Glennon is an author to be reckoned with.

Recall that when Trump was running for president, he was making bold statements against the deep state and its “forever wars.” This was one of the big reasons so many people voted for him. Not since Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy had a president stood up to the “military industrial complex.”

And then look at what happened, almost immediately. Look at what the national-security establishment did to Donald Trump. At the very start of his administration, they defanged him and rendered him impotent. Trump surrounded himself with generals. He even appointed one to be his secretary of defense. Now nearing the the end of his four year term, he failed to end his “forever wars,” as he promised to do. Just as bad, he tried his best to start new ones, like in Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Somalia.

One of the biggest signs that Trump caved was with respect to the long-secret JFK records of the national-security establishment. Just think — almost 60 years of secrecy based on the ridiculous notion of “national security.” Early on, Trump declared openly that he was gong to release the records, as mandated by Congress 25 years before in the JFK Records Act. And then at the last minute, Trump surrendered to the will of the CIA, agreeing to its demands for more years of secrecy.

Moreover, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, the mainstream press didn’t issue a peep of protest over the continue secrecy of the records. Continued secrecy of decades-old records relating to the supposed lone-nut assassination of a president is treated as something completely normal. It’s just one more example of the weird dysfunction that pervades American life, not to mention the control that the national-security establishment wields over the mainstream press, especially when it comes to the Kennedy assassination.

Why did Donald Trump cave on the JFK records, the forever wars, and the deep state, knowing that he was inevitably going to disappoint his millions of supporters? I don’t think we can eliminate the possibility that Trump got “Hooverized” — that is, that the national-security establishment may have employed the same tactic mastered by former FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover — use secrets of a person’s personal life to acquire mastery of his public life.

With Joe Biden, they don’t need to do that. Given Biden’s lifetime of public subservience to the Washington, D.C. establishment, he’s going to bow to whatever the national-security establishment wants. In fact, I don’t think we can eliminate the idea that the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA rejected Biden’s choice for secretary of defense, another deep state lackey named Michèle Flournoy, and chose Gen. Austin instead. But hey, at least Austin’s appointment would reflect the reality of who’s in charge of the federal government.

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education.

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Time magazine celebrates medical authoritarianism, naming Fauci ‘guardian of the year’

By Helen Buyniski | RT | December 11, 2020

Time magazine has designated US coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci as a ‘guardian of the year,’ a new category that emphasizes his dystopian doomsday pronouncements. The message? Sit down, muzzle up, and fear what you’re told to fear.

Since the first reports of the novel coronavirus on American shores, Fauci has been front and center, scaring the life out of Americans with apocalyptic predictions of millions of deaths that – while they haven’t come to pass – have triggered devastating economic shutdowns. A recent survey found nearly two out of five US families planned to spend the next year in “survival mode,” having no choice but to put aside long-term goals in order to do whatever they can to make ends meet as the economy circles the drain.

It’s no coincidence that Fauci’s directives to “hunker down” for the much-hyped “dark winter” came ahead of the Christmas shopping season, when most retail businesses earn their way back into the black in order to make it through the following year. Fauci and his colleagues in the US health bureaucracy are facilitating the asset-stripping of America, whether or not they’re aware of it.

The Covid-19 czar’s opposition to the cheap, off-patent malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, according to some expert estimates. While the World Health Organization (WHO) terminated its trial of HCQ stating it showed no improvement over standard treatments, there is evidence of success from countries that used the drug to treat early symptoms of Covid-19 – and the US, where the drug was demonized and politicized, is among the top ten in terms of coronavirus-related deaths per capita. Fauci has pooh-poohed the cheap drug in favor of Remdesivir, itself a failed (but fantastically expensive) ebola drug – which the WHO has likewise admitted has little therapeutic potential against the coronavirus.

Indeed, Fauci has gotten every single “epidemic” in his 50-year tenure wrong. From suppressing drugs that were effective in treating AIDS-related pneumonia, resulting in some 17,000 deaths, to shilling for the swine flu vaccine that spawned a narcolepsy epidemic among vaccinated children in 2009, he has been persistently on the wrong side of history. He has lied under oath regarding documented side effects of the measles vaccine and foisted highly toxic AIDS drugs on healthy people under the guise of “pre-exposure prophylaxis” (PrEP). The career medical official has gallons of American blood on his hands.

Ironically, these characteristics would make him ideally suited to Time’s ‘person of the year’ designation – which has been awarded to the likes of Adolf Hitler, Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The man has always put profits before people, a characteristic which should preclude holding public office but which is praised in the sociopathic ruling class circles that anoint America’s ‘leaders.’

Many dystopian works of literature and film use the term “guardian” to denote secret police, and the term fits Fauci perfectly. The immunologist even undermined his own fearmongering when he all but admitted the “gold standard” PCR test used to diagnose Covid-19 is essentially useless – yet gleefully uses these bogus test results to terrorize the American population.

Time is far from alone in lionizing Fauci – indeed, the entire media establishment hangs on his every word. The editor of Yale University’s book of notable quotes declared Fauci’s “wear a mask” to be quote of the year – even though the official had, just a few months before imploring Americans to mask up, declared such a precaution unnecessary, and even detrimental.

Given the utter disaster 2020 has been for the US and many other countries, perhaps it’s fitting that Fauci should be selected to epitomize it. But with the rollout of barely-tested vaccines looming in the future, and the possibility that a “don’t call it a mandate” vaccination certificate will be a requirement to participate in what passes for normal life post-Covid-19, Americans should seriously reconsider placing their trust in this avatar of medical totalitarianism.

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

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

NJ Lawmaker Wants MANDATORY Corona Shot For All Kids WITH NO EXEMPTIONS

By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 11, 2020

A State Senator in New Jersey wants the coronavirus vaccine made mandatory for all school age children, despite them being the least at risk group.

Middlesex Democrat Senator Joseph Vitale also wants to eliminate exemptions that have been used in the past to prevent their children from receiving shots.

“When it is that a vaccine is appropriate for children, I believe it ought to be included in that list of vaccines that are required for children,” Vitale told reporters.

“I’d like to incorporate it into the other vaccination bill that would require children to get vaccinated as a condition to entering school,” he added.

Vitale also says there is a separate effort underway to make the vaccine mandatory for University students in the state.

“It’s not complicated to decide whether or not to include a COVID vaccine as a condition of school,” he said, adding “The decision is going to be whether or not the vaccine is available, and if the science supports its efficacy.”

New Jersey currently mandates that children must have several vaccines in order to attend school, including MMR, polio, and chickenpox. However, thousands of children have been exempted from the shots, with parents citing religious beliefs.

There was an attempt last year by lawmakers to eliminate such exemptions and mandate the vaccinations across the board, but it failed when angry parents stormed the statehouse:

While New Jersey officials have stopped short of saying they will force everyone to get the vaccine, Governor Phil Murphy has signed an executive order that will see everyone who does get it automatically enrolled into a ‘New Jersey Immunization Information System’, a move that some have seen as a way of coercing people to take the shot.

Speaking to reporters, Sue Collins, co-founder of the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccine Choice said “Putting the cart before the horse and saying when it’s available everyone has to get it does not build trust.”

“No medical procedure should ever be mandated for anyone — especially something so new, with so many unknowns and no long-term knowledge at all,” Collins added.

Pushing back against the creep toward mandating the vaccine in the state, Republican Assemblyman Gerry Scharfenberger, has sponsored a bill to prevent it from becoming compulsory.

While he says he is not anti-vaccine, Scharfenberger says he cannot support mandating medication, and is responding to the concerns of constituents.

The developments in New Jersey come after a State Assemblymember in New York introduced legislation that would make it compulsory for residents to get vaccinated against coronavirus.

Democrat Linda Rosenthal said she introduced the bill because “there has been a “concerning uptick in dangerous anti-science, anti-vax rhetoric.”

As soon as the FDA approves the vaccine for children, there will likely be a torrent of states moving to add it to the compulsory vaccination list for school kids. Reports have suggested that Pfizer has begun conducting some tests of its vaccine on children, with Moderna also scheduling trials for tests on kids.

Currently, California, Mississippi and West Virginia are the only states that allow medical exemptions to vaccinations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

A further 30 states, including New Jersey, currently allow religious exemptions, with 17 more states still allowing exemptions for religious and personal or philosophical beliefs.

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

The Great Kary Mullis, inventor of the abused PCR test talks about Antony Fauci

Wardo Rants

Just so that people understand, Dr. Kary Mullis winds up dead just weeks before the Gates Foundation, World Economic Forum, and John Hopkins (Michael Bloomberg) School of Medicine held their “Event 201.”

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Naomi Klein: Gatekeeper Extraordinaire

Veteran journalist lines up alongside the mainstream, attacking “conspiracy theorists” and “covid denialism”.

By Cat Maguire & Colleen Maguire | OffGuardian | December 11, 2020

With a title like The Great Reset Conspiracy Smoothie, it appears Naomi Klein is trying too hard to recapture her prowess at defining a meme. Her buzz-concept, “Shock Doctrine,” is spot-on and rightfully successful. But her “Screen New Deal” about Silicon Valley technocrats fizzled.

And now she puts forth “Conspiracy Smoothie,” declaring the multitudinous “conspiracies” out there are just one big bizarro mashup, an “inchoate meta-scream.” The word “smoothie” defeats her purpose, though, because smoothies are healthy, yet she wants to brand alternative thinkers as sinister and unhealthy. Ha! This feckless meme won’t catch on with anybody.

To her credit, Klein offers a very good history and analysis of The Great Reset, as long as she stays within the precincts of critiquing Empire, such as:

… [T]he Great Reset is not a serious effort to actually solve the crises it describes. On the contrary, it is an attempt to create a plausible impression that the huge winners in this system are on the verge of voluntarily setting greed aside to get serious about solving the raging crises that are radically destabilizing our world.

But once she gets near taboo topics, Naomi goes batshit mainstream. Unlike alt “researchers” (her raised-eyebrow quotes), these subjects are “inchoate” for her because, like NIST who doesn’t know there were explosives on 9/11, she hasn’t gone looking. She even admits, “I’ve been doing my best to ignore it [“conspiracies”] for months.”

Rather than go off-reservation and investigate for herself, like a typical conspiracy denier, everything under the hood is automatically deemed “off-the-wall.” Alison McDowall will surely skewer Klein again as seen during this prickly exchange they had about The Great Reset. (See video at 13:25 to 17:00)

Klein’s most damning accusation is her reference to “truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism.” Is Klein really this naive about the objectives and tactics of the Medical Industrial Complex?

Her anti-vaxx slur is a defamation against vaccine-activists, most of whom actually advocate for safe and effective vaccines — the existence of which, however, are questionable. Vaccine manufacturers have no incentive to make a safe product because they were granted legal immunity in 1986 by Congress.

Proof there exists a serious safety deficit in vaccines is the current running tab of $4.2 billion awarded to victims and their families in “Vaccine Court” from vaccine deaths and injuries.

Klein’s political bifurcation of conspiracy theories telegraphs an utter misreading of allies and issues:

And yet search for the term “global reset” and you will be bombarded with breathless “exposés” of a secret globalist cabal, headed by Schwab and Bill Gates, that is using the state of shock created by the coronavirus (which is probably itself a “hoax”) to turn the world into a high-tech dictatorship that will take away your freedom forever: a green/socialist/Venezuela/Soros/forced vaccine dictatorship if the Reset exposé is coming from the far right, and a Big Pharma/GMO/biometric implants/5G/robot dog/forced vaccine dictatorship if the exposé hails from the far left.

After channeling Cass Sunstein in the above paragraph, she asks readers if they are confused. No, Naomi, you are the one who is confused. You are the one who cannot recognize that most of these issues are not only scientifically legitimate, but many are important to and shared by global activists and professionals across the political spectrum. You are the one who is out of touch for not recognizing how and why these issues unite many diverse communities. Unlike the binary tribalism you attribute to the above players, their unity is transpartisan.

In Klein’s inventory of 2020 shock doctrines, it’s all the fault of the right side of the aisle. There is not an ounce of finger-pointing, for example, that the extreme failures of the lockdowns are almost wholly the result of diktats by petty Democratic tyrants (not to mention their over-the-top hypocrisy).

Shockingly, she fails to comment on the source of the epic silencing of anyone who questions Official Narratives. To wit, Big Tech and Big Media censors are fully aligned with Democratic agendas. As for the Left’s political-identity swamp, there is nary a mention of Mao’s Cultural Revolution USA-style that has ravaged our country.

The World According to Naomi is full of plutocrats, but they’re all right-wing. She goes on and on about workers rights and all the populist issues that Democrats traditionally stood for. Didn’t she get the memo that there’s been a tectonic shift? Doesn’t she realize that the entire force of the 1% has arrayed itself with the Democrats, a party that has now disgracefully abandoned what had been their deplorables base for decades.

If Bernie progressives, we-the-people patriots, the Yellow Vests, indigenous peoples, and all the rest of the world’s 99% would just join hands, we could create a powerful transpartisan movement to abort The Great Reset’s dystopian agenda. But this can’t happen by staying within the Democrats’ Big Tent as Klein does, which likewise ultimately aligns her with the Establishment no matter how much she critiques them from her influential, mainstream-left perch.

Invoking an ever-reliable inference to Trump Derangement Syndrome, she writes:

Is it all a plan, another kind of elaborate conspiracy? Nothing so elegant. As Steve Bannon kindly told us, the informational strategy of the Trump era has always been to “flood the zone with shit.” Four years later, we can see what this looks like in practice. It looks like far-left and far-right conspiracists sitting down over a tray of information-shit sandwiches to talk about how the Great Reset is Gates’s plan to use the DNA from our Covid-19 tests to turn the United States into Venezuela.

“It makes no sense,” she concludes. Yep, Naomi, if you don’t investigate beyond ad hominem analysis and if you seemingly strive for a token social-responsibility seat at the Davos table, your current worldview will only ever perceive genuine opposition to The Great Reset as an indigestible smoothie.

Cat McGuire and Colleen McGuire are twin sisters who are activists and writers. Cat lives in New York City where she works with Break The Spell, a public outreach group raising awareness about the Covid plandemic and the Great Reset. Colleen practiced law in New York City for 16 years and now lives in Greece.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Professor Harvey Risch Interview – Part 2

HCQ TRUTH BOMBS

This is the second part of our interview with the esteemed Professor Harvey Risch from Yale University. The interview, which covers a range of aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, took place on October 20. You are also invited to watch the first part, which was put online on October 24.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Flawed paper behind Covid-19 testing faces being retracted, after scientists expose its ten fatal problems

By Peter Andrews | RT | December 9, 2020

A publisher admitted it is urgently re-investigating research, following revelations that the PCR test it extols is defective, giving too many false-positives. The news comes as a new group plans a legal challenge over the checks.

Last week I reported on an astonishing review conducted by a group of senior scientists on a paper on which most Covid testing is based. It comprehensively debunked the science behind the Corman-Drosten paper, which described a protocol for using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique to detect Covid, finding 10 fatal flaws, including major failings in the operating procedure and potential conflicts of interest among its authors.

The team behind the review demanded that Eurosurveillance, the journal that published the original research, retract it at once, as in their view it clearly failed to meet proper standards. This is of vital importance because the Corman-Drosten paper laid the path for mass PCR testing as the main source of data on the coronavirus. Almost all case numbers, infection rates and even deaths attributed to Covid are based on PCR tests (and all the attendant lockdowns and restrictions on people), and a huge amount of them use the method set out in the Corman-Drosten paper.

But now, the organisation Retraction Watch have reported that Eurosurveillance is considering retracting the paper. In a statement, Eurosurveillance said that they were “seeking further expert advice and discussing the current correspondence in detail. We will, according to our existing procedures, evaluate the claims and make a decision as soon as we have investigated in full.’’ So no retraction yet, but it would not be surprising if one came soon.

Call up Guinness World Records

One of the 10 fatal flaws in the original Corman-Drosten paper was that it was unclear whether it had ever been subjected to proper peer review – before, that is, the panel of experts took it upon themselves to do so. The paper had been submitted on January 22 and published the very next day. Peer review, when it takes place, is normally a long, drawn out process with plenty of back-and-forth, even when it is being rushed as much as possible. That it could be done in a single day beggars belief.

But that is what the authors are asking us to believe, as they are still claiming that their article was “peer-reviewed by two experts on whose recommendation the decision to publish was made.’’ Eurosurveillance may want to consider submitting this feat to Guinness World Records as the fastest peer review of all time  – it may not be too late to get into the 2021 edition.

Taking the government to court

It is clear that the wars over PCR tests are hotting up, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. A new organisation in the UK, calling itself PCR Claims, has been set up to challenge in the courts the British government’s handling of PCR testing for Covid-19.

The organisation describes itself as a pro bono network of lawyers, life scientists, and business advisers led by Jo Rogers, a lawyer who runs Navistar Legal.

Rogers told RT.com: “The intention is to expose the controversy of the inappropriate use of PCR in the context of pillar 2 community testing and private sector lighthouse labs.

“PCR was not designed for mass testing because of the sensitivity and risk of contamination. There are serious flaws in many of the protocols employed, which were hurriedly put together, some without peer review. The operational false positive rate is unknown and therefore every positive test could be false, unless accompanied by clinical examination.”

As an example of errors with PCR, the group points to a recent case from Cambridge University. “Our first priority is to gather evidence of the harms from restrictions to life whose policies were driven by PCR test modelling and/or ‘case’ results,” Rogers said. “We believe the cases are a pseudo epidemic, as seen in other places around the world using PCR testing.

“Legal action is progressing and further instances will follow as we receive the evidence of harms. The gathering of that evidence is ongoing nationwide, as well as our raising awareness of errors and negligence.”

As someone who shares their deep concerns over these PCR tests, this is good news. At last, there is somewhere to go for expert legal counsel on the government’s persecution of free-born citizens. And thank heavens also for the stellar work of the entire peer review team for holding this bad science to account. If indeed it is retracted, it will be a major victory for those of us who can see through what Dr Mike Yeadon, one of the paper’s debunkers, rightly calls a “false positive pseudo-epidemic.”

Peter Andrews is an Irish science journalist and writer based in London. He has a background in the life sciences, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in genetics.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Companies linked to Gov. Newsom received nearly $3 million in PPP loans

By Annaliese Levy | Sara Carter | December 10, 2020

At least eight companies affiliated with California Gov. Gavin Newsom collectively received millions of dollars from the coronavirus-related Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), according to reports released by the US government and analyzed by ABC7.

In 1992, Newsom founded the company “PlumpJack,” and under his leadership, the PlumpJack Management Group LLC grew to include five restaurants and bars, four Napa Valley wineries, a ski resort and retail establishments, according to PlumpJackWinery.com.

The newly-released reports indicate that the PlumpJack companies received $2.9 million dollars through the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program.

According to reports by the SBA, one company received a loan for $918,720 on April 14, 2020. The SBA requires at least 60% of the loan be used to cover employee wages. This company had 14 employees. Hypothetically, if divided equally, each employee would received around $40,000 to cover their salary over a three month period – that would amount to an annual salary of around $160,000 per employee.

Sean Moulton, a senior policy analyst with Project on Government Oversight specializes in tracking PPP funds.

“It’s unexpected for a 14 employee organization to get nearly $1 million,” he said. “The purpose behind this program was to save entry-level jobs, people going in and working on that paycheck. That was what we put this out there for, to stop unemployment.”

On average, the small business loan for California companies with 14 employees was around $128,000. A PlumpJack company that also had 14 employees received more than seven times that amount at $918,720.

The PlumpJack Managment Group released a statement to ABC7, “”Like many other companies facing extreme financial duress during the pandemic, we used loan monies to protect our workers and keep them employed. Our staff members and their loved ones have depended on these programs for their livelihoods. Gavin Newsom is not affiliated with the operation of the companies in any way. Any suggestion otherwise is unequivocally false,” said Jeff Nead, spokesperson for the PlumpJack Management Group.

Newsom put his business holdings into a blind trust before he took office last year and is not affiliated with the operations of the companies, however, he is listed as the founder on the website and his sister, Hilary Newsom, is listed as the company’s President and Partner.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Corruption | | Leave a comment

America’s Life of the Lie

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 10, 2020

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, I visited Luray, Virginia, a beautiful little town nestled in the Shenandoah Valley. Walking by the county courthouse, I noticed a plaque out in front, whose inscription exemplifies a root cause of the dysfunctional nature of American society. The plaque reads:

Page County Veterans Memorial

Those who have long enjoyed such freedoms as we enjoy forget in time that man has died to win them.

Dedicated to those who served their country in times of war and peace especially dedicated to those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in order that all mankind may live free.

We all gave some and some gave all.

The plaque lists the names of American military personnel from Page County, Virginia, who died in four of America’s foreign wars: World War I, World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War.

Of course, this type of plaque is not unique to Luray. Variations of it can be found in front of government buildings all across America.

If you want to understand one of the big reasons why the United States is riddled with massive drug addiction and alcoholism, irrational acts of violence, and ever-rising suicide rates, especially among young people and veterans, just read that plaque in front of the Page County, Virginia, courthouse.

Talk to any psychologist or psychiatrist or just read a few self-help books about living a life that denies reality. They will all tell you that when a person lives that type of life, it will inevitably lead to severe psychosis, especially if the person doesn’t realize that anything is wrong with him and instead believes that everything is fine with him.

It’s only when a person achieves a “breakthrough” as to his condition that he is able to start the long road to recovery. The first step toward recovery and health, as Alcoholics Anonymous points out, is for a person to acknowledge that he has a problem.

That’s the problem with America, or, to be more precise, with a large segment of the American populace. They are living what can be called the life of the lie and have been for their entire lives. It is a lie that holds that American soldiers have died for freedom in America’s foreign wars.

Nothing could be further from the truth. But all too many Americans simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the lie they are living. It’s just too comfortable living the life of the lie, which, over time, manifests itself in a massively dysfunctional society, one in which the dysfunctionality becomes increasingly worse the longer the lie persists.

World War I. No American soldier, including those from Page County, Virginia, died in World War I defending the freedom of the American people or, for that matter, anyone’s else’s freedom. The freedom of the American people was never at stake or at risk. President Wilson’s war aims were (1) to “make the world safe for democracy,” which, of course, is not the same thing as freedom and (2) to make this the war that would end war forever.

Wilson’s war aims were a crock. It didn’t take Americans long to realize that Wilson had sacrificed the lives of American soldiers for nothing. No, not for freedom, but rather for nothing. Even worse, he had destroyed freedom by conscripting — i.e. forcing — men to go thousands of miles away to be sacrificed for nothing. Moreover, there was the destruction of liberty here at home, including the jailing of American citizens who dared to criticize Wilson’s deadly folly.

World War II. Germany never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. Hitler’s aim was always to establish dominance on the European continent and to move eastward against the Soviet Union and communism. After the fiasco of World War I, Americans wanted no part of another European war. But President Roosevelt, unwilling to let the American people have the final say, provoked the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, especially through a very effective oil embargo, in order to give him a “back door” to getting the U.S. into the war against Germany. At no time did Japan threaten the freedom of the American people. Its war aim was limited to trying to knock out the U.S. fleet so that Japan would have a free hand in invading the Dutch East Indies to secure the oil to fund its war machine in China.

Moreover, at the end of the war, half of Germany and all of Eastern Europe were under communist control, which wasn’t any better than Nazi control. Communism, like Nazism, is the opposite of freedom. The aftermath of the war also led to the conversion of the U.S. government to a national-security state with omnipotent, dark-side powers that are antithetical to the principles of a free society. It also led to the Cold War, which brought massive infringement on the liberties and privacy of the American people.

Korean War and Vietnam War. These were nothing more than civil wars that were no business of the U.S. government. At no time did North Korea or North Vietnam threaten the freedom of the American people. The U.S. interventions into these civil wars actually destroyed freedom at home through conscription and destruction of civil liberties.

Maybe nobody from Page County has been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, given that those two forever wars aren’t listed on the plaque. But the same principle applies there as well: Soldiers who have died in those two foreign escapades did not die for freedom, given that the freedom of the American people was never being threatened by either the Afghan regime or the Iraqi regime. American soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq have died for the same thing that American soldiers died for in other foreign escapades: they have died for nothing.

But Americans cannot bring themselves to face these discomforting and painful truths. They insist on continuing the life of the life — the life that defers to and, even worse, glorifies the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, the three principal components of the national-security establishment that itself has destroyed the freedom and well-being of the American people. Americans simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge reality — that American soldiers who died in these foreign escapades died not for freedom but for nothing and that many of them were forced to do so through conscription.

Until Americans come to grips with reality, the suicides will continue, especially among young people and veterans, as so will the massive drug addiction, alcoholism, and other self-destructive behavior, not to mention the many irrational acts of violence. That’s the type of dysfunctional society that the life of the lie — a life that denies reality — produces.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | | Leave a comment

China to bail out Iraq in multibillion dollar oil deal

MEMO | December 10, 2020

Iraq is currently deciding whether to go ahead with a multibillion dollar oil deal with China which will bail the country out as part of the effort to solve Baghdad’s worsening economic crisis. The deal comes after SOMO, Iraq’s state agency in charge of oil exports, welcomed bids from various oil traders and companies in a letter issued last month.

That resulted in “several offers” being made by various companies. These were then evaluated by Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, reported Bloomberg, which quoted cabinet spokesman Hassan Nadhim.

In the Iraqi government’s bid conditions, SOMO said that the successful company would purchase four million barrels of oil per month, or around 130,000 per day, with the first year’s supply being paid for up front. The deal is meant to last for five years.

In return for supplying oil to the winning bidder, Iraq will receive $2 billion for a fraction of the promised quantity of oil, with the balance paid later. The barrels of oil are effectively security for a loan.

The winning bidder turned out to be ZhenHua Oil Co., a major state-owned company in China with ties to the Chinese military. It is the latest example of China’s international lending strategy, in which state-controlled banks and trading organisations lend money to oil-rich countries struggling to keep afloat financially, such as Venezuela, Ecuador, Angola and now potentially Iraq.

If Prime Minister Al-Kadhimi signs the deal, then it would not be the first time that the company has dealt with Iraq. ZhenHua Oil, which trades around 1.3 million barrels per day of oil and other products, began a joint-venture with SOMO back in 2018 in order to help market Iraqi oil in China to increase exports. That venture was later scrapped.

Iraq’s economy and oil industry suffered greatly from the oil price crash earlier this year, after Russia and Saudi Arabia triggered an oil price war in March over a dispute over oil production.

In September, Iraq’s crude oil exports fell by six per cent and last week its oil minister acknowledged that the industry is in a critical condition due to the coronavirus pandemic.

See Also:

Iraq eyes construction deals with China in return for oil sales

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

Hong Kong protest ‘hero’ Joshua Wong trained alongside the cream of Western-backed colour revolutionaries

By Kit Klarenberg | RT | December 10, 2020

On 2 December, high-profile Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong was sentenced to over a year in prison for his involvement in an unauthorised protest outside the territory’s police headquarters in June 2019.

It marks the third time the 24-year-old has been jailed for his political activities, and follows an amazingly rapid ascent to international prominence, which began in 2014, when the group he founded, Scholarism, played a pivotal role in the Occupy Central protests that year.

Wong was subsequently listed among Time magazine’s Most Influential Teens of 2014 and nominated as its Person of the Year, declared one of the “world’s greatest leaders” by Fortune the following year, and even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.

He somehow also found time to establish and lead pro-democracy political party Demosisto – which called for “self-determination” from China – until its disbandment after the implementation of the city’s highly controversial national security law in June, and was instrumental in influencing US lawmakers to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act in November 2019.

One would be hard pushed not to be awed by all Wong has achieved, or inspired by his indefatigable determination in the face of such risks to his liberty. That his campaigning efforts have captured the attention and imaginations of quite so many in the Western world is unsurprising.

However, there are strong indications that unseen forces surreptitiously helped Wong along every step of the way, and consciously groomed the young activist for many years for the position he now occupies.

“Davos for Dissidents”

In November 2014, the BBC’s Newsnight program broadcast an extraordinarily revealing report on the activities of the Oslo Freedom Foundation (OFF). The British state broadcaster dubbed it a place where “the aristocracy of activists” meet to “share ideas and learn about agitating for positive change over champagne and canapés.”

“In the basement of this four-star hotel, human-rights activists come to what feels a bit like a school for revolution,” intoned Laura Kuenssberg, then-Newsnight’s chief correspondent, now BBC News’s political editor. “This workshop? How to make sure your message – whether in Egypt, Ukraine, Hong Kong or North Korea – catches on. This may not evoke the spirit of the barricades, but the teaching here is that, to be successful, to topple a government for good, you have to be organized, and plan meticulously.”

She went on to note that activists present in the class had been involved “in organizing the current protests in Hong Kong,” strikingly revealing “their plan to put thousands on the streets of the territory was, in fact, hatched nearly two years ago.”

The report then cuts to an interview with Yang Jianli, who, in his mid-20s, was involved in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and subsequently fled to the US. On his return to China in April 2002 on a friend’s passport to monitor labor unrest, he was arbitrarily detained for four years, then for another year for refusing to leave the country following his release.

On a table next to Yang is a laptop, via which he’s conducting a conversation with none other than Joshua Wong. Kuenssberg notes Yang has been talking to student activists in Hong Kong “on a daily, almost hourly basis,” and reiterates the fact that demonstrators in the territory were “trained, long before taking to the streets, to use non-violent action as a weapon of mass destruction.”

This segues into a brief interview with Jamila Raqib, Executive Director of the Albert Einstein Institution, which “advances freedom with non-violent action,” and has received funding from, among others, US government regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

“Protesters were taught how to behave in a protest, how to keep ranks, how to speak to police, how to manage their movements, how to behave when arrested,” she says.

The report ends with clips of an ensuing bout of booze-fuelled revelry, Kuenssberg noting that “like at any good conference, the evenings see deals done over drinks.”

“Schmoozing for democracy! To say this is a strange event hardly begins to cover it,” she says without apparent irony. “There’s something deeply incongruous about North Korean defectors, Ukrainian freedom fighters, even hackers, trading information over glasses of champagne. They call it ‘Davos for Dissidents’ for a very good reason.”

Kuenssberg concludes that, while viewers will “never know” most of those in attendance at the OFF summit, “the next revolutionary, who will change their country, could just be in this room,” while members of Pussy Riot snap selfies with other attendees.

Oddly, days after broadcast,the BBC issued a clarification, stating that, while the report “may have given the impression the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests were planned by foreign activists,” in fact, “references to the demonstrations were intended to mean the planning was carried out in Hong Kong, with support from abroad.”

“Fostering awareness”

Kuenssberg’s reference to the blueprints for the Occupy Central protests being “hatched” two years prior to her report’s broadcast is conspicuous, given it was in 2012 that the aforementioned NED began funding the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Hong Kong to the tune of US$460,000 annually.

The NDI’s objective was “to foster awareness regarding political institutions and constitutional reform … and develop the capacity of citizens – particularly university students – to more effectively participate in public debate … allowing students and citizens to explore possible reforms leading to universal suffrage.”

This sounds highly relevant to the Occupy Central protests, and, in September 2016, the NDI published a report on the progress of its “democratization” efforts in Hong Kong, which made repeated references to Wong, Scholarism, and Demosisto.

In the meantime, NED grants and the organization’s involvement with activists in Hong Kong grew apace, expanding to include groups such as the Institute of Human Resource Management, Confederation of Trade Unions, Journalists Association, Civic Party, Labor Party and Democratic Party. NED funding extended to these groups exceeded US$1.8 million from 2017 to 2020 alone – a period concurrent with ever-escalating levels of protest in Hong Kong.

In 2015, the US’s Freedom House, which works closely with the NED, honoured Wong alongside Martin Lee, the founder of the Democratic Party and another noteworthy figure in the 2014 Occupy Central protests.

The NED was founded in November 1983, and then-US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Casey was at the heart of its creation. He wished to construct a public mechanism to support groups and individuals inside “enemy” countries that would engage in propaganda and political action, which the CIA had historically organized and paid for covertly, under the bogus aegis of democracy and human-rights promotion.

In 1991, senior NED official Allen Weinstein acknowledged that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

Seeing in colours

Intriguingly, the Agency also played a role in the creation of the Albert Einstein Institution,  which was briefly featured in the Newsnight report.

In 1965, its founder, Gene Sharp, was recruited to Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, known colloquially as “the CIA at Harvard”. Its founders and staff were all prominent Cold War intellectuals, with intimate ties to the US national security state, the first co-directors being Henry Kissinger and Robert Bowie, future CIA deputy chief.

It was here that Sharp, who died in 2018, created many resistance methods that have influenced protest movements the world over ever since, earning him the nickname of the “Machiavelli of nonviolence.”

Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution, through instructional writing and direct training, have helped out numerous revolutionary groups since the 1990s. They include Yugoslavia’s Otpor, which also received millions in NED funding, and whose members proceeded to found the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, which trained the various groups involved in the ‘colour revolutions’ that engulfed former Soviet states in the mid-2000s, as well as key Arab Spring activists.

“The bible of Pora has been the book of Gene Sharp … it’s called ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy’. Pora activists translated it themselves. We [wrote] to Sharp … he became very sympathetic towards our initiative, and the Institution provided funding to print over 12,000 copies of this book for free,” a member of Pora, a group central to Ukraine’s ‘orange revolution’, has said.

According to a 2006 US embassy cable published by WikiLeaks, protesters in Syria were tutored in Sharp’s writings. Another embassy cable the next year indicated Burmese officials feared Sharp was part of a “a vast internal and external alliance” that was trying to bring down the government.

The Albert Einstein Institution staffer featured in the Newsnight clip, Jamila Raqib, is a recurrent OFF speaker, to the point that she has a dedicated profile on the organization’s website. It notes she worked “closely” with Sharp and that, together, they authored ‘Self-Liberation’, which OFF states “has been used throughout the world as a practical guide for nonviolent resistance.”

If Raqib’s statements in the BBC report are accurate, she – and Sharp, whether directly or indirectly – had an intimate hand in training the Hong Kong protesters, even if remotely.

It’s unclear which other would-be insurrectionists have benefited from their collective expertise, although White Helmets chief Raed al-Saleh spoke at the Forum’s 2017 meeting, and self-avowed Belarusian president-in-waiting Svetlana Tikhanovskaya was guest-of-honour at OFF’s virtual 2020 summit.

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow Kit on Twitter @KitKlarenberg

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Hezbollah Files Lawsuit against Bahaa Hariri for Throwing False Accusations pertaining Beirut Blast

Al-Manar – December 9, 2020

Head of Hezbollah Lawyers Assembly, Hussein Hashem, on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Bahaa Al-Hariri for falsely accusing the Party of being involved in Beirut blast.

Hashem added that Al-Hariri will be accordingly summoned by the judge that is expected to inform him about the complaint.

Hasehm pointed out that during the coming days he will file a lawsuit against a new figure for the same reasons.

In the same context, Hezbollah had filed two lawsuits against the Lebanese Forces Website and the former MP Fares Souaid for throwing false accusations pertaining Beirut blast.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Deception | , | Leave a comment

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