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Do the Pfizer “data dumps” really mean anything?

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | May 5, 2022

The latest batch of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine files just dropped. 80,000 pages of patient files and “trial data” and so and so on.

You can read them all here.

The question is, do they really tell us anything we don’t already know?

The big revelation doing the rounds at the minute is that the vaccines were never trialled with, and were specifically not recommended for, pregnant women.

But is this new information?

When governments started “recommending” the Covid vaccine to pregnant women in the Summer of 2021, everybody who had been paying attention knew that position was not backed up by any data at all.

OffG got temporarily banned from twitter for pointing this out.

More broadly speaking: Of course the vaccines were never tested on pregnant women, they were never properly tested on anybody.

It takes 10 years to safely produce and trial a vaccine, not 18 months. And what “trials” they claim to have done in that year and a half were a complete sham.

In a way, the “not recommended for pregnant women” disclosure is actually good for Pfizer.

Behind a facade of being legally mandated to publish these files, it’s now become public knowledge that Pfizer (allegedly) told people not to give the vaccine to pregnant women, but many countries did it anyway.

This shifts the blame (and potential legal liability) away from Pfizer and onto the governments in question.

A good example of how “forced disclosure” can be used to reinforce and direct a narrative, through a pretence of reluctance.

Going further, shouldn’t we be asking: Can we trust anything in these documents at all?

Just because Pfizer has been (apparently) legally “forced” to release them doesn’t mean they are important, relevant or even real. Who’s verifying the documents? Who’s auditing Pfizer to make sure they release everything? The US government? Some other government or agency?

Do you trust them?

The real damning documents – if such ever existed – have likely been shredded, burned and buried in 20 feet of concrete by now…and that doesn’t matter, because we already know everything we will ever need to know about these Covid “vaccines”:

  1. They were not subject to proper long-term testing.
  2. They have totally unknown long-term side effects.
  3. They allegedly “treat” a “disease” with a 99.85% survival rate.
  4. They don’t prevent infection.
  5. They don’t prevent transmission.
  6. The manufacturers are legally protected from being sued in the event they kill you.

Pfizer can release all the documents they want, nothing will change these facts…only distract from them.

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Is the West at war with disinformation or dissent?

By Rachel Marsden | Samizdat | May 5, 2022

When US President Joe Biden announced on April 27 that a new Disinformation Governance Board would serve the Department of Homeland Security, it was just the latest turn of the screw on freedom. This time, it’s an affront to citizens’ right to a diversity of information.

It’s one thing to correct inaccurate information, but this new entity seems more oriented towards narrative-policing that cracks down on the interpretation of information rather than the accuracy of it. Headed by a former communications advisor to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, Nina Jankowicz, one of the board’s first responsibilities will be to address “disinformation coming from Russia as well as misleading messages about the US-Mexico border,” according to CBS News. Interesting that these two issues – immigration and foreign conflicts – are currently viewed as two of Washington’s most significant failures, which have given rise to populist dissent. Make no mistake, it’s the dissent that’s the ultimate target.

The fact that a former Ukraine government spin doctor was viewed as the best person to head up the new initiative tells you everything you need to know about its true purpose. Jankowicz published a book in 2020 whose title suggests that she believes the West to be in an online war with Russia. ‘How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict,’ portrays Western narratives as truthful and Russian narratives as “fake news.” Doing so obscures the fact that the mainstream Western media has not been immune to propagating narratives peddled by the state that could retroactively be considered fake news or war propaganda. Meanwhile, Russian media has often provided a platform for those seeking to express – or access – dissenting analysis or information that falls outside of the Western media bubble. Clearly, there are some ‘democracies’ that are bothered by this.

The appetite of Western nations to ensure that their citizens are only fed information that they control through their own highly concentrated government or corporate subsidized media isn’t new. It’s just getting more voracious. Perhaps it’s because the more authoritarian their agenda becomes, the more populist sentiment increases and gives rise to events such as Brexit or the election of Donald Trump, as well as trends such as opposition to US-backed conflicts, the rise in popularity of various populist political parties in Europe, and demonstrations against pandemic mandates, which just happen to be associated with government-issued QR codes.

Dissent is the enemy of authoritarian ambition. Supposedly free countries have manipulated their citizens into believing that censorship of certain views is for people’s own safety and security – hence why the military in Canada, the UK, and France, and now Homeland Security in the US, are involved in narrative policing. In reality, their efforts seem to be more about ensuring citizens’ compliance with their own agenda.

The fusion of domestic security and disinformation came to light as early as 2016, when the European Parliament grotesquely conflated Islamic terrorist propaganda with Russian media, in what seemed to be itself a propaganda effort to undermine the Russian media by equating these two totally unrelated things. But one by one, Western governments have placed free speech under national security control.

France, for example, handed off responsibility for online information arbitration to its domestic intelligence agency (the DGSI) and has reportedly considered involving defense-funded startups in the effort.

Canada has also turned to its security apparatus to shape Canadians’ information landscape – at least twice. The Communications Security Establishment, the country’s electronic spying agency, has been tweeting its own interpretations of disputed events occurring in the fog of the conflict in Ukraine as indisputable fact, while routinely denouncing Russia’s interpretation as invalid.

But Canada’s security establishment isn’t at its first rodeo in attempting to prevent citizens’ thinking from deviating from the state’s messaging. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the country’s armed forces deployed a months-long, military-grade propaganda campaign, which employed tactics honed during the war in Afghanistan, to mind-bend unsuspecting Canadians towards Trudeau’s Covid narrative, CBC News reported last year.

Not to be outdone, the psychological warfare specialists of the 77th brigade of Britain’s armed forces have also worked to shape messaging both in favor of the government’s Covid policies and against anything contrary out of Russia. “One current priority is combating the spread of harmful, false and misleading narratives through disinformation. To bolster this effort, the British Army will be deploying two experts in countering disinformation. They will advise and support NATO in ensuring its citizens have the right information to protect themselves and its democracies are protected from malicious disinformation operations used by adversaries,” Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said last year.

The fact that public safety and disinformation have suddenly become routinely conflated should be worrisome to defenders of whatever remnants of democracy that we still have left. Terrorism, health and now disinformation have all served as pretexts for the rapid erosion of our freedoms – all under the guise of protecting us from bad actors. But are we really safer? Or are we just increasingly less free?

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Popular Ukrainian Zelensky critic arrested in Spain

Samizdat | May 5, 2022

Prominent blogger and critic of the Ukrainian government, Anatoly Shariy, has been detained by Spanish police as part of an international operation, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) announced on Thursday.

Shariy was arrested on Wednesday in a joint operation by Spanish and Ukrainian cops, as well as international “partners”, the SBU said in a statement.

The agency, Kiev’s successor to the Soviet KGB, said that the opposition figure is wanted on charges of treason by Kiev, among other things. Shariy has been infringing Ukraine’s national security through his activities in the media realm, while allegedly acting on behalf of “foreign” forces, it insisted. The case against the YouTuber with almost 3 million subscribers was launched in February 2021.

Shariy’s arrest “is more proof that every traitor of Ukraine will sooner or later receive his well-deserved punishment. It is inevitable,” the SBU claimed.

The Ukrainian announcement was confirmed by the Spanish police, who told RIA-Novosti that Shariy was detained in the coastal city of Tarragona on May 4 on an international arrest warrant.

Shariy had been granted political asylum in the EU by Lithuania back in 2012. Back then, he said that he was fleeing persecution by the government of Viktor Yanukovich, whom the Western media branded pro-Russian.

Yanukovich was deposed after the Maidan coup in 2014, but the blogger remained a harsh critic of authorities in Ukraine, be it President Petro Poroshenko or his successor Volodymyr Zelensky.

He condemned Russia’s military operation in Ukraine after it was launched in late February but kept pointing out what he saw as flaws in Kiev’s conduct during the ongoing conflict.

The blogger’s political asylum was cancelled by Lithuania in January this year.

Shariy was absent from social media on Wednesday, but on Thursday he took to Telegram to share a photo of his wife feeding parrots in Barcelona, accompanying it with a comment reading: “This really is a comedy.”

According to media reports, the blogger was released from Spanish custody and placed under travel restrictions. He’s to remain in Barcelona where he has a home pending a decision on his extradition to Ukraine.

President Zelensky’s representative at the Constitutional Court has already expressed confidence that Shariy will “face a Ukrainian court and will be held liable in line with Ukrainian laws.”

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

US invasion threats over Solomon Islands deal expose Western hypocrisy in Ukraine

By Drago Bosnic | May 5, 2022

When Ukraine announced it will join NATO after the CIA-orchestrated Orange Revolution in 2004, it prompted Russia to respond by voicing its strong condemnation, which later culminated in Vladimir Putin’s historical 2007 Munich Security Conference speech. Still, just a year later, Ukraine was invited to join NATO. The former Soviet republic officially applied to integrate within a framework of a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) in 2008. However, plans for NATO membership were shelved following the 2010 presidential election in which Viktor Yanukovych triumphed, coming back to power after spending over half a decade in the political opposition.

Before the 2010 election, Russia’s concerns were completely ignored and every time Russia stated Ukraine’s NATO ascension would severely undermine and weaken its security, leading members such as the US and the UK stated that it’s Ukraine’s “sovereign right” to choose which alliances it wants to join and that Ukraine’s NATO membership wasn’t aimed against Russia. These claims were put to the test after the 2010 election, because Yanukovych preferred to keep the country non-aligned. A little over 4 years into his presidency, he was ousted in yet another CIA-orchestrated coup, this time the infamous Maidan Revolution, also known as the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” in recent years. So much for Ukraine’s “sovereign right” to choose alliances or worse yet in this case, to stay neutral.

Even if there was any notion of respect for the sovereignty of nations by the US and NATO before 2014, it became glaringly obvious that wasn’t the case. Soon, anti-Russian violence erupted all across the country, which was now firmly in the grip of its NATO (primarily US) overlords and openly Neo-Nazi groups which were promptly integrated into various security institutions, including the military and intelligence services. Again, Ukraine’s “sovereign right” to choose alliances was back on the table during various Russia-US security talks, including the Geneva summit in 2021. The rest is history which we are witnessing as we speak.

However, the Ukraine crisis isn’t the only one unfolding in the context of a broader “the West vs the Rest” clash. The political West doesn’t only bring “peace, stability, freedom and democracy” to Europe and Russia’s near abroad. There are many other such places. While Russia is allegedly being “aggressive” in its own backyard, so is China in the South and East CHINA sea, Iran (previously known as Persia) in the PERSIAN Gulf, etc. Because in the mind of the “indispensable” NATO planners, only other countries can be “aggressive” mere miles away from their coasts, at their borders or even inside their own sovereign territories. NATO, on the other hand, brings only “peace, stability, freedom and democracy” no matter how many thousands or even tens of thousands of kilometers away from its borders, regardless of how negatively that affects any country. And if any of the small vassal countries is to try and get the shackles of “freedom and democracy” off, the reaction is almost immediate.

The most recent such example is the tiny island country called the Solomon Islands. It’s safe to assume most people haven’t even heard of this peaceful Pacific island state, a former UK colony situated some 2000 km northeast of Australia. In late April, the Solomon Islands had the “audacity” to sign a security agreement with China, which would allow Beijing to send military and police personnel to the island country, as well as open the door to a Chinese naval presence in the South Pacific. Or at least that’s what the United States, Australia and New Zealand claim the agreement is all about. My esteemed colleague Uriel Araujo wrote an excellent analysis with a more in-depth focus on the agreement, its causes and possible consequences.

The strategic implications of this agreement might be too soon to evaluate in a precise manner, but it does expose the sheer hypocrisy of the political West, primarily its Anglo-American portion. The Solomon Islands are around 2,000 km away from the Australian coast, over 5,500 km from the US State of Hawaii and nearly 10,000 km away from the US mainland. The Pacific island country was not on the US and Australia’s radar for decades. US embassy in Honiara, the country’s capital, was closed in 1993, nearly 30 years ago. Australia seemed equally uninterested up until just a few weeks ago. And yet, both the US and Australia are now fuming over even the slightest notion that the Solomon Islands could make such an agreement with China.

“We won’t be having Chinese military naval bases in our region on our doorstep,” Australian PM Scott Morrison said, calling it a “red line” both for his government and Washington DC. A US envoy that visited the Honiara in late April said that his government would have “significant concerns and respond accordingly” to any “permanent military presence, power-projection capabilities, or a military installation” by China. After ignoring the country and its security and economic problems for decades, the increasingly belligerent AUKUS allies have now suddenly decided to renew their geopolitical interest in the Solomon Islands by openly threatening the island country.

The question is, why do the US and Australia think they have the right to interfere or even intervene in the affairs of another country which is thousands of kilometers away? Why is the US allowed to conduct so-called “freedom of navigation” naval patrols in the immediate vicinity of Chinese waters in the South China Sea, but it’s “problematic” when China signs agreements with sovereign nations which have nothing to do with the United States and its vassals? After all, isn’t this the “sovereign right” of the Solomon Islands? Why is the legitimate government of the island country being threatened and denied the actual sovereign right to choose allies, but a puppet coup regime in Kiev isn’t?

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

Slovakia rejects Russian oil ban proposal

Samizdat | May 5, 2022

Slovakia warned on Wednesday that it will not be able to agree to the European Commission’s proposal for a ban on Russian oil, and has called for more time to find alternative fuel suppliers.

The proposed embargo is part of the latest Ukraine-related sanctions against Moscow that would see crude imports from Russia phased out within six months and refined products by the end of the year. An exemption was drafted for Slovakia and Hungary, which are heavily dependent on Russia, giving them until the end of 2023 to comply.

The proposed time frame “is unfortunately not enough,” Slovakia’s deputy economy minister in charge of energy policy told internet publication Politico on Wednesday. “We are expecting at least three years,” Karol Galek added, explaining that a key refinery in the country requires heavy Russian oil and that it’s impossible to secure alternative supplies within the proposed time frame. Last year Slovakia got 96% of its oil from Russia.

Galek stressed that the current proposal “will destroy our European economy,” as it will not only hurt energy supplies in his country, but also in Austria, the Czech Republic and Ukraine.

The current blueprint for a ban on Russian oil has to be unanimously approved by the bloc’s 27 member states to come into force. Hungary has expressed reservations, saying the European Union has so far failed to give Budapest guarantees regarding its energy security.

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

DON’T VOTE “#GREATRESET”

By Olly Connelly | Daily Chaos | May 5, 2022

It’s local election day in the UK and, as you’ll be aware, elections are underway also in France and in the US.

Local, constituency or national level, if you vote for someone who is not talking about defeating the #GreatReset, then you are voting for Klaus Schwab, you are voting “to own nothing”, for communism directed by fascists, you are voting for tyranny, for censorship, for more fake pandemics and more fraudulent war, you are voting for divide-rule on an epic scale that is destroying families, communities and societies from within despite the farcical topics such as “how to define a woman” for crying out loud, you are voting for the normalisation of Satanism and paedophilia as can increasingly be seen in Biden’s America, you are voting for genocidal war criminals like Tony Blair to never be brought to account while being BBC-platformed to lecture you on using experimental drugs on your innocent children, you are voting to condone yet more phony elections, for Martial law in Western societies as we saw in Ottawa, for the hundreds of thousands in death toll in places like Yemen while the globalists distract with Ukraine, you are voting for CCP-style oppression and their model social credit score to keep you in check, you are voting for the last of our liberty ie an end to cash, for Google’s bloodstream nanobots and Musk’s brain chip, for Gates’ quaxxines and the final cull of the Mama-Papas defeated by the Bezos drones.

DON’T VOTE FOR SLAVERY.

Don’t vote for the Great Reset. DON’T VOTE FOR ANYONE WHO IS NOT ACTIVELY WARNING AGAINST THE GREAT RESET, THEY ARE A FRAUD, A DECEIT…

… At this stage in the game, I tell you, ANYONE in politics or journalism who is not warning of the dangers of the Great Reset is somewhere between fraudulent and downright evil.

If in doubt, if in any doubt, do not vote. In most cases this is almost certainly the best option, to help de-power the them-us elitism, to deny a mandate and to create a window to be able to say, “WE DID NOT ELECT YOU.”

We should have seen, by now, the vile outcome by supporting cheats and liars. We should have seen that voting for the lesser of the evils DOES NOT HELP. Do not make things worse by voting yet again for PROVEN cheats and liars.

Do not mindlessly vote. And yes, at this stage in the game where practically everyone on the global stage is either bought or blackmailed, A VOTE “NOT TO VOTE”, an abstention from the Big Lie, is in no way dishonourable. A vote for more of what we have in power now, on the other hand, is downright moronic.

Here’s to us, and bugger plutocracy!

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

With no missile host in Pacific, new US strategy seeks to arm Japan against China

Press TV – May 4, 2022

The United States is struggling to find allies in the Indo-Pacific region who would be willing to host its intermediate-range missiles (IRBM), a new report has found.

The report by US-based think tank RAND Corporation, close to the Pentagon, looks at the likelihood of Pacific countries agreeing to host US IRBMs, the benefits and drawbacks of potential alternatives, and the most feasible alternative.

The report finds that the US strategy that relies on an ally agreeing to permanently host these ground-based IRBMs is bound to fail because of its inability to find a willing partner in the Pacific region.

The author of the report concludes that in the absence of any willing hosts, Washington should encourage Japan to develop a missile arsenal of its own to threaten Chinese ships, thus using Japan as a pawn in its no-holds-barred war against China.

After the US pulled out from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019, it sought to develop and deploy ground-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km.

That immediately sparked a debate on where the US will deploy those missiles. Since China was not a signatory of the INF and had developed missiles of its own, Americans eyed the Indo-Pacific region.

The author of the report looks at the likelihood of US allies in the Indo-Pacific region—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Republic of Korea, and Thailand—hosting its IRBMs to counter the Chinese threat, but finds all of them unwilling.

He also examines alternatives to permanently basing US missiles on allies’ territories, but finds drawbacks with each alternative and thus recommends Japan develop an arsenal of ground-based anti-ship standoff missile capabilities at the behest of the US.

In the report published on Monday, the author argues that “the likely receptivity to hosting such systems is very low as long as current domestic political conditions and regional security trends hold,” referring to Thailand, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, and Japan.

As long as Thailand “continues to have a military-backed government that pursues closer ties with China”, the US “would not want Thailand to host GBIRMs”, it notes.

In the Philippines, as long as a president “continues policies toward the United States and China similar to those of President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines is “extremely unlikely to accept US GBIRMs.”

The government of South Korea shares ties with China, so Seoul also is “highly unlikely” to agree to host US missiles amid “a general deterioration of US-ROK relations.”

Australia’s historical ties with the US mean that the possibility cannot be ruled out, but “its historical reluctance to host permanent foreign bases and its distance from continental Asia make this unlikely.”

Japan is willing to “bolster its own defense capabilities vis-à-vis China,” but is reluctant to accept any increase in the US military presence or “deploying weapons that are explicitly offensive in nature”, the report says.

The report suggests that to continue to pursue GBIRMs for the Indo-Pacific, the strategy most likely to succeed would be “helping Japan develop an arsenal of ground-based, anti-ship missile capabilities”.

“This would be the first step in a longer-term US strategy to encourage Japan to procure similar missiles with longer ranges,” it states.

Meanwhile, the foreign affairs chief of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) said on Tuesday that the country should deploy surface-launched intermediate-range missiles in the northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido to deter missile attacks from China, Russia and North Korea.

Masahisa Sato, the head of the LDP Foreign Affairs Division, made the remarks at an event in Washington organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think tank.

Washington has in recent years made strenuous efforts to make inroads into the strategic Indo-Pacific region, with singular aim of countering the rise of Chinese dragon. The attempts, however, have produced no results.

In a bid to ramp up its diplomatic engagement with Pacific countries, the Biden administration is set to host leaders from the region later this year, a senior US government official said on Monday.

Kurt Campbell, who serves as coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the US National Security Council, made the announcement at a US-New Zealand business summit, amid rising tensions with China.

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Nigerian Minister Says Russian Investors Interested in Financing African Gas Mega-Pipeline

Samizdat | May 4, 2022

The EU has been wooing Nigeria in recent weeks as one of the nations whose natural gas could help replace Russian supplies amid the bloc’s spat with Moscow over Ukraine. The charm offensive comes after years of efforts by the West to starve Sub-Saharan Africa of financing for gas projects.

Russian investors have expressed an interest in financing a massive gas pipeline from Nigeria to Morocco, Nigerian Minister of Petroleum Resources Timipre Sylva has announced.

“The Russians were with me in the office last week. They are very desirous to invest in this project and there are lots of other people who are also desirous to invest in the project,” Sylva said, speaking to reporters in Abuja, Nigeria on Monday.

The prospective 5,600 km+ long pipeline project, agreed to by Nigeria and Morocco in 2016, would run along the west coast of Africa, connecting to the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea-Bassau, Gambia, Senegal, and Mauritania along the way and serve as a major potential catalyst for regional economic development. It could also be used to pipe Nigerian gas to Europe via Spain. Six years after being agreed, the project still lacks the necessary financing for implementation.

The infrastructure would extend an existing pipeline pumping gas from southern Nigeria to neighbouring Benin, Togo and Ghana. “We want to continue that same pipeline all the way to Morocco down the coast. Right now, we are still at the level of studies and of course, we are at the level of securing funding for this project and a lot of people are indicating interest,” the oil minister said.

Sylva did not provide any further details on the eager Russian investors, or the project’s total expected cost, but said Abuja has yet to identify the “investors that we want to go with” for the ambitious infrastructure scheme.

Russia’s reported interest in the gas mega-pipeline is unclear, given that it could theoretically provide the same European countries threatening to halt the purchase of Russian natural gas and oil with a cost-effective Sub-Saharan African alternate.

European officials have flocked to Nigeria – the world’s 12th largest producer of natural gas, and 15th largest producer of oil, in recent weeks to try to secure additional energy from the African nation amid unprecedented tensions with Moscow over Ukraine. Last month, ambassadors from the European Union, Portugal, Spain, Italy and France met with Nigerian National Petroleum Company officials to discuss a “strengthened partnership” in the energy sector. No agreements were announced at the conclusion of the meeting.

On Monday, Bloomberg reported on an EU energy plan document which mentioned Nigeria, Senegal and Angola as nations with ‘largely untapped potential for liquefied natural gas’.

Nigeria has over 206 trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves valued at hundreds of trillions of dollars, but has long been starved of capital for developing these resources amid a raft of problems ranging from corruption and inter-ethnic strife to pipeline vandalism.

On top of that, before the Ukraine crisis began, Europe largely ignored Nigeria’s gas potential. Last year, Nigerian environment minister Mohammad Mahmood Abubakar blasted developed countries for what he said was their deliberate policy of defunding African national gas projects.

“Many [wealthier nations] are now limiting financing to gas projects for domestic use in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region responsible for 0.55% of global carbon emissions that still needs to industrialize and grow. The defunding of gas projects by most financing organizations is a threat to achieving a global energy transition that is equitable, inclusive, just, leaving no one behind,” Abubakar said, speaking at a virtual ministerial event hosted by the United Nations last June.

The European Investment Bank stopped financing fossil fuels projects at the end of 2021. The same year, the Western cash-dominated World Bank indicated that it would shift resources to “combating climate change,” and limit assistance for natural gas projects except for rare exceptions.

Despite its vast wealth in energy resources, about 43 percent of Nigeria itself still lacks access to grid electricity.

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

Former NATO Commander Disguises War Propaganda as Novel

By Patrick Macfarlane | The Libertarian Institute | April 26, 2022

On March 9, 2021, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Admiral James Stavridis, co-authored a fiction novel with Elliott Ackerman, another former U.S. military officer. The book, entitled 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, imagines a kinetic war between the United States and China.

Given the pedigree of its authorship, the novel provides a compelling window into the psychology of NATO’s military leadership and, correspondingly, the foreign policy establishment behind it. To those familiar with said psychology, the events of the novel will not be surprising.

It begins with a Chinese ambush of a U.S. vessel in the South China Sea; an Iranian capture of a U.S. pilot; a full scale naval battle between the U.S. and China (resulting in a total U.S. defeat); and a Russian invasion of Poland. The novel concludes with a limited nuclear exchange between the U.S. and China.

Given the last few decades’ hawkish hand wringing about Chinese and Russian cyber capabilities, the tactics employed in the novel are similarly unsurprising. A Chinese cyberattack disables U.S. hardware, allowing the naval rout. The Iranians, as allies of Russia and China, similarly disable U.S. aircraft. For their part, the Russians slice underwater communications cables leading to a complete internet blackout in the West.

To an uncritical reader, the novel appears to be a “cautionary tale” and a “warning” against global conflict. The novel’s dust jacket states:

Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors’ years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid.

Mainstream outlets were as successful in their attempts to paint 2034 as a “warning” as their reviews were cringeworthy.

Wired, which ran a series of exclusive pre-print excerpts, had this to say:

WIRED HAS ALWAYS been a publication about the future—about the forces shaping it, and the shape we’d like it to take. Sometimes, for us, that means being wild-eyed optimists, envisioning the scenarios that excite us most. And sometimes that means taking pains to envision futures that we really, really want to avoid.

By giving clarity and definition to those nightmare trajectories, the hope is that we can give people the ability to recognize and divert from them. Almost, say, the way a vaccine teaches an immune system what to ward off. And that’s what this issue of WIRED is trying to do…

Consider this another vaccine against disaster. Fortunately, this dose won’t cause a temporary fever—and it happens to be a rippingly good read. Turns out that even cautionary tales can be exciting, when the future we’re most excited about is the one where they never come true.

The Washington Post’s review was almost worse.

This crisply written and well-paced book reads like an all-caps warning to a world shackled to the machines we carry in our pockets and place in our laps, while only vaguely understanding how the information stored in and shared by those devices can be exploited. We have grown numb to the latest data breach—was it a pollical campaign (Hillary Clinton’s), or one of the country’s biggest credit-rating firms (Equifax), or a hotel behemoth (Marriott), or a casual-sex hookup site (Adult Friend Finder), or government departments updating their networks with the SolarWinds system (U.S. Treasury and Commerce)?

In “2034,” it’s as if Ackerman and Stavridis want to grab us by our lapels, give us a slap or two, and scream: Pay attention! George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, “Nineteen Eighty-four: A Novel” was published 35 years before 1984. Ackerman’s and Stavridis’s book takes place in the not-so-distant future when today’s high school military recruits will just be turning 30.

Between Wired’s ham-handed COVID-19 vaccine analogy and the CIA Washington Post’s ironic Orwell reference, the mainstream marketing campaign clearly attempts to portray the novel as a cautionary tale.

It is impossible to gaze into the hearts of men, but we do have some clues. Those clues suggest that the co-authors really do seek to warn against war with China. However, in doing so, they advocate for it. Indeed, their warning is not against the folly of empire, but against a rising China.

Ultimately the co-authors’ MacBethian premonition of conflict necessitates escalatory U.S. policy.

On March 18, 2021, the pair were interviewed by NPR. Stavridis had this to say:

… a subtext in all of this [the novel] is to strike a warning bell about the rise of China and the propensity in human history going back 2,500 years almost any time a [sic] established power is challenged by a rising power, it leads to war. It’s a dangerous moment. And 15 years from now, I think, will be a moment of maximum danger because China will have advanced in its military capability and technology. Therefore, our military deterrent will somewhat decline. We’re standing in the danger, as we say in the Navy.

Ackerman embraces this view:

…and we’re not only sounding the alarm bell, but the book is also trying to situate where America is in this moment of 2034.

Further, the pair assert they do not believe in the American decline.

Interviewer (to both): “…do you believe this, that America will be the author of its own destruction?”

Stavridis: “I believe there are many in the world who do believe that. I personally do not… there are many in the world who believe our best days are somehow behind us. They would be miscalculating, in my view, to believe that.”

Ackerman: “I would add I am by no way a believer in the decline of America. And I am very much committed to the idea of the American ideal. That being said, looking back throughout our entire history, the greatest threat is us turning inward and destroying that ideal. Lincoln himself said – I’m paraphrasing, but basically said that if America is going to destroy itself, we will be the author and the finisher. And I think he says, a nation of free men will live forever or die by suicide. And I don’t think that’s Lincoln being a declinist about the United States. But I think it’s him recognizing that our divisiveness can oftentimes be the greatest threat and what leaves us the most unable to respond to challenges from outside the country.”

Indeed, a reader would be hard pressed to find any point where the co-authors suggest any strategy short of increasing military confrontation with China.

Instead, they warn that America must be more united against an outside threat. It must, by implication, build up its military force, and, oddly enough, confront Chinese technological advances with less reliance on our own technology.

Stavridis expanded on his China policy prescriptions in a June 2021 interview:

The South China Sea is a vital entry point for the United States today. It’s a massive body of water full of oil and gas as well as fisheries, and about 40 percent of global trade passes through it.

So, there are strong strategic reasons, as the United States values its alliances in Asia, to push back against Chinese claims.

It is not just the South China Sea but also the East China Sea, where the Senkaku Islands lie, that are vital to American interests as long as our allies operate there and trade flows through there.

And above all we simply as an international community cannot acquiesce to China’s preposterous claims, which have been rejected by international law.

Indeed, a number one red line would be an attack against our allies.

For example, if China attacked and tried to forcibly take the Senkaku Islands, that would be a red line for the United States. Or an attack against the Philippines, another treaty ally of the United States. An attack against any treaty allies would be the number one red line.

A second red line would be trying to attack U.S. military personnel operating in the South China Sea.

We conduct what we call “freedom of navigation patrols.” These are our warships sailing through international waters such as the South China Sea.

If China were to attack a U.S. ship to attempt to demonstrate their view that they own the South China Sea, that would be a red line. In fact, the book “2034” opens with an attack involving U.S. military personnel being killed in the South China Sea.

Stavridis believes that the U.S. must continue to devote itself to entangling alliances, against which the founding fathers warned. The U.S. must also continue to press its presence in the South China Sea.

Despite resolutely warning against a war against China, Stavridis commits the U.S. to myriad tripwires that would ignite it.

These China policy positions parallel Stavridis’ positions on Ukraine. It’s always more, more, more.

More funding, arming, and training Ukrainians, more U.S. commitment to NATO, more U.S. weaponization of Big Tech, more money to the U.S. State Department, more interagency cooperation, and more silencing dissent. These positions are escalatory. At the very least, they flirt with making Washington a direct party to the War in Ukraine. They may give Russia reason to attack U.S. and NATO forces.

Given Russia’s nuclear footing, these policies pose an existential threat to humanity itself.

Indeed, it will always be a mystery how the hawks convinced the American public that the path to peace leads through war. Perhaps those of us who survive the inevitable result of this mantra can ponder the answer while painting on the cave walls.

Patrick MacFarlane is the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute where he advocates a noninterventionist foreign policy. He is a Wisconsin attorney in private practice. He is the host of the Liberty Weekly Podcast at www.libertyweekly.net, where he seeks to expose establishment narratives with well researched documentary-style content and insightful guest interviews. His work has appeared on antiwar.com and Zerohedge. He may be reached at patrick.macfarlane@libertyweekly.net

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

YouTube CEO announces “misinformation research and initiatives” partnership with Latino rights group

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | May 4, 2022

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has revealed that the platform will be partnering with the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States, UnidosUS, on “misinformation research and initiatives.”

While Wojcicki didn’t reveal any further details of this partnership, she reiterated that YouTube is “working every day to fight misinformation.”

Wojcicki previously described tackling misinformation as one of her top priorities and YouTube has deleted more than a million videos for containing what it deems to be “COVID misinformation.”

UnidosUS President and CEO Janet Murguía echoed Wojcicki’s enthusiasm for targeting online misinformation in a tweet about the partnership.

“Eager as well to move forward on the key issue of addressing disinfo & misinformation in English & Spanish,” Murguía tweeted.

Murguía added that she’s united with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) on UnidosUS’s efforts.

Wojcicki met with members of the CHC last week to discuss Spanish-language misinformation. After the meeting, the CHC said that addressing Spanish-language “dis/misinformation” is an “urgent priority.”

Although the specifics of YouTube and UnidosUS’s partnership have yet to be disclosed, UnidosUS has previously pressured Big Tech platforms to “address” misinformation.

Last October, the group cut ties with Facebook after former employee Frances Haugen’s shared internal documents that suggested the tech giant was aware of the platform having a negative impact on some users.

“We have called attention repeatedly to concerns about the negative impact that the proliferation of hate and misinformation on the platform has had on the Latino community,” Murguía stated at the time. “We know now that Facebook’s failure to adequately address those concerns was deliberate and resulted in even greater levels of hate and misinformation on the site.”

Last December, Murguía lamented that Congress has never held a hearing dedicated to Facebook’s “failure to address Spanish-language misinformation” and demanded that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “tell Congress why Facebook perpetuates Spanish-language misinformation.”

Related: 🛡 How the term “misinformation” was weaponized as an online censorship tool amid the coronavirus pandemic

May 4, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

PBS agitates to have Tucker Carlson taken off the air

By Russell Cook | American Thinker | May 4, 2022

The taxpayer-funded national network PBS is pushing for less viewpoint diversity, no doubt intended to accelerate the growing push for Tucker and Fox News to be taken off the air. From the PBS Newshour, May 2, 2022: “Tucker Carlson’s influence and his increasingly extreme views” (Amna Nawaz interviews New York Times’ Nick Confessore, who wrote the 4/30 “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable“).

Excerpts (emphases added):

Nick Confessore: … He’s the highest rated cable show host in history. And it’s also the most racist show in history. … Every night, that show teaches fear and loathing. He may claim to be a person who opposes racism and prejudice, but what the show tells you every night is to be afraid, to be afraid of people who are in the street asking for police officers to not shoot Black people, be afraid of Afghan refugees who helped us in the war who are coming over here now, to be afraid of Dr. Fauci, and to be afraid of immigration in general, which he posits is part of a cabal, a plot to destroy Western civilization … it’s not just the anti-white racism kind of rhetoric on the show. He’s literally taking ideas that began on the very far right, on arcane corners of the Internet, on neo-Nazi sites …

… Amna Nawaz: Nick, he’s also aggressively defended January 6 insurrectionists and played down how violent that day actually was. … he’s very much in line with the Republican Party and their message. What did your reporting find about that relationship between the GOP and Tucker Carlson?

Nick Confessore: Look, I would say he is the high priest of Trumpism.

“Amy Walter and Annie Linskey on primary election season, Tucker Carlson’s role in the GOP”

Excerpts:

Judy Woodruff: … Amy, let’s start with what we just heard Amna talking to Nick Confessore about … Clarify for us, what is Tucker Carlson’s role in the Republican Party, in American politics?

Amy Walter: … Nick Confessore put it really well when he said that he’s filling the void that had been left by Donald Trump‘s voice being off of social media … He’s also being talked about as a potential 2024 candidate for president. And that’s not idle discussion. I think his name will be very seriously floated, and we may see more to come of a Tucker Carlson trial balloon in 2024.

… Judy Woodruff: And, Annie, what — the darker side of this, which we heard in that conversation, about race… and about the role of the threat that many white Americans feel, what does that say about our politics right now?

Annie Linskey: … I think that was one of the most stunning takeaways, for me at least, from the New York Times reporting, which was just so incredible, is just the extent to which they really documented the ways in which Carlson is normalizing discussions of race that I think would not be considered — are not considered appropriate in many parts of the country. … But Carlson’s show is moving through the window to where they’re becoming more appropriate. And I think that’s what many groups on the left worry about. And I think that is what The Times is reporting is kind of showing us, really the danger that Tucker Carlson and his show presents, is making it more OK to have those kinds of grievances voiced out loud…

According to the PBS NewsHour and the NYT, neither of which seems to have people who’ve watched Tucker’s show at any depth, Tucker espouses Bull Connor–style racism and enables people like you and me to freely advocate talk that escalates toward genocide. His show should therefore be silenced, he should be jailed for insurrectionist incitement before he announces his presidential run, and you and I need to be leery of saying anything against… well, anything. Obey.

May 4, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

UK intensifies crackdown against Russian media

Samizdat | May 4, 2022

The UK is forcing social media, internet service providers and app stores to block content from state-sponsored Russian media outlets – RT and Sputnik news agency. “For too long RT and Sputnik have churned out dangerous nonsense dressed up as serious news to justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” Tech and Digital Economy Minister Chris Philp said on Wednesday.

“These outlets have already been booted off the airwaves in Britain and we’ve barred anyone from doing business with them. Now we’ve moved to pull the plug on their websites, social media accounts and apps to further stop the spread of their lies.”

In March, Britain’s media regulator, Ofcom, revoked RT’s broadcasting license. The EU decided to ban RT from broadcasting the same month. RT Deputy Editor-in-Chief Anna Belkina said at the time that Ofcom revoked the license for “purely political reasons tied directly to the situation in Ukraine.” She said that the regulator “falsely judged RT to not be ‘fit and proper’ and in doing so robbed the UK public of access to information.”

The UK also blacklisted the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK), which operates Russia-1 and Russia-24 TV channels, among others. The UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) accused the broadcaster of playing “a key role in justifying Putin’s aggression against Ukraine.”

Sanctions were also imposed on InfoRos and the SouthFront news websites. The FCDO accused them of spreading “destabilizing disinformation.”

May 4, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

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