The Cradle | July 2, 2024
Ten years ago this month, the notorious terror group ISIS improbably conquered Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. In only two days of fighting, a few hundred ISIS militants captured the city, forcing thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police to flee in chaos and confusion.
The western media attributed the city’s fall to the sectarian policies of then-Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, suggesting that local Sunnis welcomed the ISIS invasion. US officials claimed they were surprised by the rapid rise of the terror organization, prompting then-US president Barack Obama to vow to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the group.
However, a close review of events surrounding the fall of Mosul and discussions with residents during The Cradle’s recent visit to the city shows the opposite.
The US and its regional allies used ISIS as a proxy to orchestrate the fall of Mosul, thereby terrorizing its Sunni Muslim inhabitants to achieve specific foreign policy goals. Says one Mosul resident speaking with The Cradle:
There was a plan to let Daesh [ISIS] take Mosul, and the USA was behind it. Everyone here knows this, but no one can say it publicly. It was a war against Sunnis.
‘Salafist principality’
As the war in Syria raged in August 2012, the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) authored a now well-known memo providing the broad outlines of the plan that would lead to Mosul’s fall.
The memo stated that the insurgency backed by the US and its regional allies to topple Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus was not led by “moderate rebels” but by extremists, including Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al-Qaeda in Iraq (Islamic State of Iraq).
The DIA memo stated further that the US and its allies, “the western powers,” welcomed the establishment of a “Salafist principality” by these extremist forces in the Sunni majority areas of eastern Syria and western Iraq. The US goal was to isolate Syria territorially from its main regional supporter, Iran.
Two years later, in June 2014, ISIS conquered Mosul, declaring it the capital of the so-called “Caliphate.”
Though the terror group was portrayed as indigenous to Iraq, ISIS only made the “Salafist principality” predicted in the DIA memo a reality with the help of weapons, training, and funding from the US and its close allies.
US and Saudi weapons
In January 2014, Reuters reported that the US Congress “secretly” approved new weapons flows to “moderate Syrian rebels” from the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA).
In subsequent months, the US Army military and Saudi Ministry of Defense purchased large quantities of weapons from Eastern European countries, which were then flown to Amman, Jordan, for further distribution to the FSA.
After an exhaustive three-year investigation, EU-funded Conflict Armament Research (CAR) found that the weapons funneled to Syria by the US and Saudi Arabia in 2014 were quickly passed on to ISIS, at times within just “days or weeks” of their purchase.
“As far as our evidence shows, the diverters [Saudi and the US] knew what was going on in terms of the risk of supplying weapons to groups in the region,” Damien Spleeters of CAR explained.
The US-supplied weapons and equipment quickly reaching ISIS included the iconic Toyota Hilux pickup trucks, which became synonymous with the ISIS brand.
The Kurdish role
Another way US and Saudi-supplied weapons reached ISIS was through Washington’s main Kurdish ally in Iraq, Masoud Barzani. Discussing the secret funding for weapons approved by the US Congress in January 2014, Reuters noted that “Kurdish groups” had been providing weapons and other aid financed by donors in Qatar to “religious extremist rebel factions.”
In the following months, reports emerged that Kurdish officials from Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) were providing weapons to ISIS, including Kornet anti-tank missiles imported from Bulgaria.
Further evidence of Barzani’s support for ISIS comes from a lawsuit currently being litigated in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of the Kurdistan Victim’s Fund.
The expansive lawsuit, led by former US Assistant Attorney James R Tate, cites testimonies from sources with “direct clandestine access” to senior ranking officials in the KDP, alleging that Barzani’s agents “purposefully made US dollar payments to terrorist intermediaries and others that were wired through the United States,” including through banks in Washington, DC. These payments “enabled ISIS to carry out terrorist attacks that killed US citizens in Syria, Iraq, and Libya.”
Further, the agents made use of “email accounts serviced by US-based email service providers to coordinate and carry out elements of their partnership with ISIS.”
It is unthinkable that Barzani regularly arranged payments to ISIS from the heart of the US capital without the knowledge and consent of US intelligence.
An explicit agreement
In the spring of 2014, reports emerged of a deal between Barzani and ISIS to divide the territory in Iraq between them.
French academic and Iraq expert Pierre-Jean Luizard of the Paris-based National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) reported there was “an explicit agreement” between Barzani and ISIS, which “aims to share a number of territories.”
According to the agreement, ISIS would take Mosul, while Barzani’s security forces, the Peshmerga, would take oil-rich Kirkuk and other “disputed territories” he desired for a future independent Kurdish state.
According to Luizard, ISIS was given the role of “routing the Iraqi army, in exchange for which the Peshmerga would not prevent ISIS from entering Mosul or capturing Tikrit.”
In an unpublished interview with prominent Lebanese security journalist and The Cradle contributor Radwan Mortada, former Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki claimed that meetings were held to plan the Mosul operation in the Iraqi Kurdistan capital, Erbil, which were attended by US military officers.
When US officials denied any involvement, Maliki responded by telling them:
These are pictures of American officers sitting in this meeting … you are partners in this operation.
The UK pipeline
A resident from Mosul speaking with The Cradle states that many of the ISIS members he encountered during the group’s three-year occupation of the city were English-speaking foreigners, in particular the ISIS commanders.
But where did these English-speaking ISIS members come from?
In 2012, UK intelligence established a pipeline to send British and Belgian citizens to fight in Syria. Young men from London and Brussels were recruited by Salafist organizations, Shariah4UK and Shariah4Belgium, established by radical preacher and UK British intelligence asset Anjam Choudary.
These recruits were then sent to Syria, where they joined an armed group, Katibat al-Muhajireen, which enjoyed support from UK intelligence. These British and Belgian fighters then joined ISIS after its official establishment in Syria in April 2013.
Among these fighters was a Londoner named Mohammed Emwazi. Later known as the infamous Jihadi John, Emwazi kidnapped US journalist James Foley in October 2012 as a member of Katibat al-Muhajireen and allegedly executed him in August 2014 as a member of ISIS.
Made in America
The commander of Katibat al-Muhajireen, Abu Omar al-Shishani, also later joined ISIS and famously led the terror group’s assault on Mosul. Before fighting in Syria and Iraq, Shishani received US training as a member of the country of Georgia’s special forces.
In August 2014, the Washington Post reported that Libyan members of ISIS had received training from French, UK, and US military and intelligence personnel while fighting in the so-called “revolution” to topple the government of Muammar al-Qaddafi in 2011.
Many of these fighters were British but of Libyan origin and traveled to Libya with the encouragement of UK intelligence to topple Qaddafi. They then traveled to Syria and soon joined ISIS or the local Al-Qaeda affiliate, the Nusra Front.
“Sometimes I joke around and say that I am a fighter made by America,” one of the fighters told the Post.
There is no indication that the relationship between these fighters and US and UK intelligence ended once they joined ISIS.
‘Maliki must go’
US support for the ISIS invasion of Mosul is evident through the actions Washington refused to take. US planners monitored the ISIS convoys traveling across the open desert from Syria to assault Mosul in June 2014 but took no action to bomb them.
As former US secretary of defense Chuck Hagel acknowledged, “It wasn’t that we were blind in that area. We had drones, we had satellites, we had intelligence monitoring these groups.”
Even after Mosul fell, and as ISIS was threatening Baghdad, Washington planners refused to help unless Maliki stepped down as prime minister.
Maliki claimed in his interview with Mortada that US officials had demanded he impose a siege on Syria to assist in toppling Assad. When Maliki refused, they accused him of sabotaging the Syria regime change operation and sought to use ISIS to topple Iraq’s government.
American sources all but confirm Maliki’s claim. The US military-funded Rand Corporation noted that the US–Iraqi relationship at this time had become strained “because of the willingness of the Maliki government to facilitate Iranian support to the Assad regime despite significant American opposition.”
As Obama’s foreign policy advisor, Philip Gordon explained:
The president was clear he didn’t want to launch that campaign [against ISIS] until there was something to defend, and that wasn’t Maliki.
New York Times journalist Michael Gordon reported that Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to Baghdad two weeks after ISIS captured Mosul to meet with Maliki. Desperate for help, Maliki asked Kerry for airstrikes against ISIS to protect Baghdad, but the latter explained that the US would not help unless the former gave up power.
In July 2014, ISIS fighters were moving captured US artillery and armored vehicles back to Syria across the open desert. Gordon reports further that the ISIS convoys were “easy pickings for American airpower.”
However, when US Major General Dana Pittard requested authorization to conduct the airstrikes to destroy the convoys, the White House refused, saying the “political prerequisites” had not been met. In other words, Maliki was still prime minister.
Geopolitical gains
While claiming to be enemies of ISIS, the US planners and their allies deliberately facilitated the terror group’s rise, including its capture of Mosul.
ISIS relied on US and UK-trained fighters, US and Saudi-purchased weapons, and Kurdish-supplied US dollars – rather than popular support from the city’s Sunni residents – to conquer Mosul.
When self-proclaimed caliph and leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced the establishment of the so-called Caliphate at the city’s historic Nuri Mosque, he set up the very Salafist principality outlined in the DIA document by US intelligence heads.
This orchestrated rise of ISIS not only destabilized the region but also served the geopolitical interests of those who claim to be combating terrorism.
Al Mayadeen | July 2, 2024
In response to ongoing allegations by the US regarding Chinese military bases in Cuba, the Chinese Embassy in Washington vehemently refuted these claims, labeling them as slanderous and malicious.
The remarks come after US think-tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published a report using satellite imagery to identify four alleged Chinese listening stations in Cuba, including one located near Guantanamo Bay.
“The US side has repeatedly hyped up China’s establishment of spy bases or conducting surveillance activities in Cuba. Such claims are nothing but slander. The Cuban side has already made a clarification,” Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu told Sputnik on Tuesday.
Liu stressed the need for the US to halt its ongoing effort to make malicious accusations against China without delay.
Additionally, Liu highlighted that the US maintains a leading role in global surveillance operations, which encompass monitoring its allies as well.
Sputnik – 02.07.2024
South Korea carried out live-fire drills near the border with North for the first time in six years following the dissolution of an inter-Korean tension reduction pact which banned such exercises, the South Korean army said on Tuesday.
“The firing drills, the first such exercise to be conducted on land after exercises were normalized following the government’s complete suspension of the September 19 Military Agreement, focused on bolstering artillery readiness and response capabilities in the event of enemy provocations,” the army was quoted by Yonhap, as saying.
The drills took place at front-line ranges in the South Korean provinces of Gyeonggi and Gangwon in a 3-mile distance from Military Demarcation Line within the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, Yonhap reported, citing the country’s military authorities.
The South Korean military reportedly fired 140 rounds using the K9 and K105A1 self-propelled howitzers in the course of the drills.
In early June, North Korea said it had sent 3,500 air balloons carrying 15 tonnes of trash south in response to a hike in cases of South Korean activists sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets into the North. In response, the South Korean government approved a motion to suspend the 2018 inter-Korean military pact, which allows Seoul to resume military exercises near the military demarcation line, propaganda broadcasting towards North Korean territory as well as other actions described as hostile in the pact.
The inter-Korean military agreement was signed at the summit between the leaders of the two countries in September 2018 with the aim of preventing military confrontation in the Korean Peninsula and establishing buffer zones along the Military Demarcation Line on land and the Northern Limit Line at sea.
By Joseph Solis-Mullen | The Libertarian Institute | July 2, 2024
The narrative that America is “sleepwalking” toward war with China is a dangerously misleading myth. Far from a somnambulant stumble, the United States is being deliberately led by national security and military elites into a conflict with China, with Congress eagerly tripping over itself to out-hawk each other. The motivation? A toxic blend of defense industry contributions and a misguided sense of geopolitical dominance.
Since becoming president, Joe Biden’s pronouncements have starkly reversed the longstanding U.S. policy of “Strategic Ambiguity” concerning Taiwan. Historically, this policy served to keep both China and Taiwan guessing about American intentions, thus maintaining a precarious balance and deterring rash actions from either side. However, Biden’s statements have ushered in an era of “Strategic Clarity,” unequivocally asserting that the United States would intervene militarily if China were to invade Taiwan. This stance is a profound shift, especially given that the U.S. has no treaty obligation to defend Taiwan, and Congress has not granted the president the authority to engage militarily in such a conflict—at least not yet.
Moreover, the presence of U.S. military personnel on Taiwan and on the Kinmen islands, the latter a mere few miles from the Chinese mainland, underscores this aggressive posture. This deployment is not a defensive measure but a provocative act, practically begging for a confrontation. It signals to China that the United States is not merely interested in protecting Taiwan’s sovereignty but is actively preparing for potential hostilities.
Escalated arms sales to Taiwan further exacerbate the situation. Washington’s increased military aid and sophisticated weaponry to Taipei are perceived by Beijing as an unmistakable threat, pushing the region closer to the brink of war. These actions are complemented by Washington’s broader strategy of economic warfare against China, including tariffs, sanctions, and efforts to decouple the two economies. This economic aggression, designed to weaken China’s global standing, only serves to heighten tensions and fuel the fire of conflict.
Washington’s belligerence extends beyond Taiwan, with the United States promising to intervene in various territorial disputes between China and its neighbors. The South China Sea is a hotbed of such conflicts, with the Philippines’ claims over certain shoals leading to live clashes in recent months. The U.S. backing of these claims, regardless of their merit, is a clear signal of its intent to challenge China’s regional influence aggressively.
Adding to this volatile mix, Kurt Campbell, the architect of Obama’s “Pivot to East Asia” policy, recently declared that the era of positive engagement with China is over. This “Pivot” was always a transparent move to begin containing China, but Campbell’s recent statements mark a shift toward outright confrontation. Both the former and current heads of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command have also in the past year bluntly stated that they are preparing for an immediate war with China, further illustrating the calculated and deliberate nature of Washington’s actions.
This orchestrated march toward conflict is not driven by some irrational fear or a defensive need to protect American interests. Instead, it is a strategic choice made by the U.S. leadership to assert dominance in the Asia-Pacific region. This approach disregards the catastrophic potential of such a conflict, which could easily escalate into a global disaster, if not total annihilation.
It is crucial to understand that this is not a one-sided issue where China is the sole aggressor. Unlike the U.S., China is not conducting military exercises in the Gulf of Mexico or deploying troops near American borders. Instead, it is the United States that is aggressively poking around the South China Sea and positioning itself as a hegemonic force in a region far from its shores.
Media portrayal of the situation as a sleepwalk toward war is not just inaccurate but dangerous. It obscures the calculated and provocative actions of the United States, misleading the public into believing that conflict is an inadvertent outcome rather than a deliberate strategy. The reality is that Washington is not passively drifting into war but sprinting headlong into it, driven by a blend of military ambition and geopolitical strategy.
In conclusion, the responsibility for the escalating tensions and the imminent threat of conflict with China lies squarely with Washington. The U.S. is actively choosing a path of confrontation, one that threatens not just regional stability but global peace—in a recent visit Xi Jinping said as much to the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, saying he felt Washington was trying to “goad” China into starting a war over Taiwan; it being a serious red line for Beijing, that may just be what happens (see: Ukraine).
It is imperative that Washington’s aggressive stance is recognized for what it is by the American public: a reckless and potentially world-destroying gamble that serves the interests of a few at the expense of many. Only by acknowledging this can we hope to steer away from the brink of disaster and seek a more peaceful and sustainable approach to international relations.
By Ron Paul | July 1, 2024
There were plenty of surprises in last week’s presidential debate. For one, Americans who rely on the mainstream media for their news learned that they had been lied to for the past three years about President Biden’s capability to do the job he was elected to do.
The realization that the media has been lying for years about Biden is a positive development, as, hopefully, thoughtful Americans might begin wondering what else the media has been lying about. For example, they will find out that the media has been lying to them for years about Russia and Ukraine and about the Middle East and elsewhere. They will find out that our hyper-interventionist foreign policy does not make us safer and more free, but the opposite.
Unfortunately for most Americans, foreign policy is something that happens “over there,” with few direct effects back home. Dumping nearly $200 billion into the lost cause called “Ukraine” may at most seem like an annoyance to many Americans, but it’s not like they are being snatched up by gangs of military recruiters and sent to the front line as is happening to Ukrainian men.
However, $200 billion is real money and the effect on our economy is also real. The bill will be paid by each American family indirectly through the inflation “tax.” Each dollar created out of thin air and spent on the Ukraine debacle devalues the rest of the dollars in circulation.
The danger posed by our foreign policy seemed to escape both candidates, who each tried to convince us they were “tougher” than the other. Despite Donald Trump’s sober and accurate warning that Joe Biden has taken us to the brink of World War III, his solution to the problem is doing more of the same. His stated foreign policy seems to be that were he in office the rest of the world would not dare do anything against his will.
He would have been so tough that Russian president Vladimir Putin would never have dared to invade Ukraine, he claimed. He would have been so tough that Hamas would never have dared attack Israel on October 7th. It’s only Joe Biden’s “weakness” that leads to these disastrous foreign policy outcomes.
But the world does not work that way. Decades of US sanctions placed on any country that fails to do what Washington demands have backfired and led to the emergence of a block of countries united in their resistance to American dictates. Being “tough” on less-powerful countries may work… until it doesn’t. That’s where we are today.
Neither candidate seems to realize that the world has changed.
I have always said that real strength in foreign policy comes from restraint. To prevent these bad outcomes everywhere, stop intervening everywhere. It is not “toughness” that would have prevented Russia from taking action against Ukraine. It is restraint. Not launching a coup in Ukraine in 2014 would have prevented the disastrous war in Ukraine. Just like not stirring up trouble in the South China Sea would prevent a war with China. Not continuing to occupy and intervene in the Middle East would prevent a major regional war which might include Iran and other big players in the region.
Restraint is the real toughness. Non-intervention is the only foreign policy that will keep us safe and free. We’ve tried it the other way and it does not work. Let’s try something different.
Why Ukraine should not have the “right” to join NATO
BY GLENN DIESEN | JULY 2, 2024
Political realism is commonly and mistakenly portrayed as immoral because the principal focus is on the inescapable security competition and it thus rejects idealist efforts to transcend power politics. However, because states cannot break with security competition, morality for the realist entails acting in accordance with the balance of power logic as the foundation for stability and peace. Idealist efforts to break with power politics can then be defined as immoral by undermining the management of security competition as the foundation of peace. As Raymond Aron expressed in 1966: “The idealist, believing he has broken with power politics exaggerates its crimes”.[1]
Ukraine’s Sovereign Right to join NATO
The most appealing and dangerous idealist argument that destroyed Ukraine is that it has the right to join any military alliance it desires. It is a very attractive statement that can easily win support from the public as it affirms the freedom and sovereignty of Ukraine, and the alternative is seemingly that Russia should be allowed to dictate Ukraine’s policies.
However, arguing that Ukraine should be allowed to join any military alliance is an idealist argument as it appeals to how we would like the world to be, not how the world actually works. The principle that peace derives from expanding military alliances without taking into account the security interests of other great powers has never existed. States such as Ukraine that border a great power have every reason to express legitimate security concerns, but inviting a rival great power such as the US into its territory intensifies the security competition.
Is it moral to insist on how the world ought to be when war is the consequence of ignoring how the world actually works?
The alternative to expanding NATO is not to accept a Russian sphere of influence, which denotes a zone of exclusive influence. Peace derives from recognising a Russian sphere of interests, which is an area where Russian security interests must be recognised and incorporated rather than excluded. It did not use to be controversial to argue that Russian security interests must be taken into account when operating on its borders.
Mexico has plenty of freedoms in the international system, but it does not have the freedom to join a Chinese-led military alliance or host Chinese military bases. The idealist argument that Mexico can do as it pleases implies ignoring US security concerns, and the result would likely be the US destruction of Mexico. If Scotland secedes from the UK and then joins a Russian-led military alliance and hosts Russian missiles, would the English still champion the principle that it has no say? Idealists who sought to transcend power politics and create a more benign world would instead intensify the security competition and instigate wars.
The Morality of Opposing NATO Expansionism
To argue that NATO expansionism provoked Russia’s invasion is regularly condemned by idealists as immoral because it allegedly legitimises both power politics and the invasion. Is objective reality immoral if it contradicts the ideal world we would like to exist?
The former British ambassador to Russia, Roderic Lyne, warned in 2020 that it was a “massive mistake” to push for NATO membership for Ukraine: “If you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of doing it”.[2] Angela Merkel acknowledged that Russia would interpret the possibility of Ukrainian NATO membership as a “declaration of war”.[3] CIA Director William Burns also warned against drawing Ukraine into NATO as Russia fears encirclement and will therefore be under enormous pressure to use military force: “Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face”.[4] The advisor to former French President Sarkozy argued that the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership in November 2021 “convinced Russia that they must attack or be attacked”.[5] None of the aforementioned people sought to legitimise an invasion, rather they sought to avoid a war.
When great powers do not have a soft institutional veto, they use a hard military veto. The idealists insisting that Russia should not have a veto on NATO expansion pushed for the policies that predictably resulted in the destruction of a nation, the loss of territory, and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Why do the idealists get to present themselves as moral and “pro-Ukrainian”? Why are the realists who for more than a decade warned against NATO expansion immoral and “anti-Ukrainian”? Are these labels premised on the theoretical assumption of the idealists?
NATO as a Third Party?
Suggesting that Ukraine has the sovereign right to join NATO presents the military bloc as a passive third party that merely supports the democratic aspiration of Ukrainians. This narrative neglects that NATO did not have an obligation to offer future membership to Ukraine. Indeed, the Western countries signed several agreements with Moscow after the Cold War, such as the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, to collectively construct a Europe without dividing lines and based on indivisible security. NATO broke these agreements by pushing for expansion and refusing to offer Russia security guarantees to mitigate the security competition. By offering future membership to Ukraine, the NATO-Russia conflict became a Russia-Ukraine conflict as Russia had to prevent Ukraine from joining the military bloc and hosting the US military on its territory.
NATO’s support for Ukraine’s right to choose its own foreign policy is also dishonest as Ukraine had to be pulled into the orbit of the military bloc against its will. The Western public is rarely informed that every opinion poll between 1991 and 2014 demonstrates that only a very small minority of Ukrainians ever wanted to join the alliance. NATO recognised the lack of interest by the Ukrainian government and people as a problem to be overcome in a report from 2011: “The greatest challenge for Ukrainian-NATO relations lies in the perception of NATO among the Ukrainian people. NATO membership is not widely supported in the country, with some polls suggesting that popular support of it is less than 20%”.[6]
The solution was to push for a “democratic revolution” in 2014 that toppled the democratically elected government of Ukraine in violation of its constitution and without majority support from Ukrainians. The leaked Nuland-Pyatt phone call revealed that the US was planning a regime change, including who should be in the post-coup government, who had to stay out, and how to legitimise the coup.[7] After the coup, the US openly asserted its intrusive influence over the new government it had installed in Kiev. The general prosecutor of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, complained that since 2014, “the most shocking thing is that all the [government] appointments were made in agreement with the United States” and Washington “believed that Ukraine was their fiefdom”.[8] A conflict with Russia could be manufactured that would create a demand for NATO.
What were the first decisions of the new government hand-picked by Washington? The first decree by the new Parliament was a call for repealing Russian as a regional language. The New York Times reports that on the first day following the coup, Ukraine’s new spy chief called the CIA and MI6 to establish a partnership for covert operations against Russia that eventually resulted in 12 secret CIA bases along the Russian border.[9] The conflict intensified as Russia responded by seizing Crimea and supporting a rebellion in Donbas, and NATO sabotaged the Minsk peace agreement that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians voted to have implemented. Preserving and intensifying the conflict gave Washington a dependent Ukrainian proxy that could be used against Russia. The same New York Times article mentioned above, also revealed that the covert war against Russia after the coup was a leading reason for Russia’s invasion:
“Toward the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Mr. Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the C.I.A., together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow”.[10]
The Immorality of Peace vs Morality of War?
After Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine, the idealists insist that Ukraine must become a member of NATO as soon as the war is over. It is intended as an appealing and moral statement to ensure that Ukraine will be protected and such a tragedy will not be repeated.
Yet, what does it communicate to Russia? Whatever territory Russia does not conquer will fall into the hands of NATO, which can then be used as a frontline against Russia. The threat of NATO expansion incentivises Russia to seize as much territory as possible and ensure what remains is a deeply dysfunctional rump state. The only thing that can bring peace to Ukraine and end the carnage is to restore its neutrality, yet the idealists denounce this as deeply immoral and thus unacceptable. To repeat Raymond Aron: “The idealist, believing he has broken with power politics exaggerates its crimes”.[11]
[1] Aron, R., 1966. Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations. Doubleday, Garden City, p.584.
[2] R. Lyne, ‘The UC Interview Series: Sir Roderic Lyne by Nikita Gryazin’, Oxford University Consortium, 18 December 2020.
[3] A. Walsh, ‘Angela Merkel opens up on Ukraine, Putin and her legacy’, Deutsche Welle, 7 June 2022.
[4] W.J. Burns, ‘Nyet means nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines’, Wikileaks, 1 February 2008.
[5] C. Caldwell, ‘The War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame’, The New York Times, 31 May 2022.
[6] NATO, ‘‘Post-Orange Ukraine’: Internal dynamics and foreign policy priorities’, NATO Parliamentary Assembly, October 2011, p.11.
[7] BBC, ‘Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call’, BBC, 7 February 2014.
[8] M.M. Abrahms, ‘Does Ukraine Have Kompromat on Joe Biden?’, Newsweek, 8 August 2023.
[9] A. Entous and M. Schwirtz, 2024. ‘The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin’, The New York Times, 25 February 2024.
[10] A. Entous and M. Schwirtz, 2024. ‘The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin’, The New York Times, 25 February 2024.
[11] Aron, R., 1966. Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations. Doubleday, Garden City, p.584.
By Bill Buppert | The Libertarian Institute | July 2, 2024
There is nothing new here but the corruption is deep at Boeing:
“It comes after an unnamed parts supplier uncovered small holes in the material from corrosion, The New York Slimes reported. The FAA is looking into both the long and short-term implications for the aircraft equipped with the faulty parts. It’s not clear how many planes have used components made from the fake titanium.”
Metal behaves differently at altitude and underwater.
Fake metallurgy.
No maintenance workers at the airline that received these fake airplanes verified and validated metallurgy.
The chaos avalanche of the competency crisis continues.
If it’s a Boeing product: fire the CEO for cause, ground all aircraft and require all maintenance crew to wear a body-cam.
Does anyone remember a manufacturer of metals for submarines who was found to have faked testing for 32 years?
32 years.
The culprit, Elaine Marie Thomas, was sentenced to two and a half years and $50,000 in fines.
Two and a half years.
And no one checked her work. No one in quality control verified and validated her findings, even occasionally.
32 years.
This is not a serious nation.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
RT | July 2, 2024
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has urged Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky to halt military operations against Russia in order to reach a peace deal with Moscow. Orban has long maintained that the Ukraine conflict could spiral into a continent-wide war, and that restoring peace is his government’s foreign policy priority.
Orban arrived in Kiev on Tuesday for a surprise meeting with Zelensky, in his first visit to Ukraine in more than a decade. Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Orban said he had asked Zelensky “to think about whether it would be possible to take a break… to reach a ceasefire and start negotiations [with Russia], since a quick ceasefire could speed up these negotiations.”
Orban said that he was “very grateful to Zelensky for his honest answer in this regard.”
The Hungarian prime minister did not reveal Zelensky’s answer, although it is unlikely that the Ukrainian leader shared his enthusiasm for a truce. Despite mounting battlefield losses and protestations from some of his own aides, Zelensky has insisted since 2022 that he will return Ukraine’s former territories – including Crimea – by military force.
However, while Zelensky has not abandoned these goals, he stated last month that Ukraine “does not want to prolong the war,” and will “put a settlement plan on the table within a few months.” In follow-up comments last week, he said intermediaries such as Türkiye or the UN could help broker talks with Moscow.
Orban has pushed for such a plan since the outset of the conflict. Under his leadership, Hungary has refused to supply Kiev with weapons or allow Western arms into Ukraine via its soil. Budapest has also threatened to veto several of the EU’s 14 packages of sanctions on Moscow, agreeing to these measures only after securing concessions from Brussels, including a partial exemption from the EU’s bloc-wide oil embargo and a guarantee that its nuclear sector won’t be affected by future packages.
These positions have placed Orban at loggerheads with Zelensky and the EU leadership in Brussels. “The Brussels bureaucrats want this war, they see it as their own, and they want to defeat Russia,” he wrote in the Magyar Nemzet newspaper on Saturday.
Orban traveled to Kiev a day after Hungary assumed the European Council’s rotating presidency. “The goal of the Hungarian presidency is to contribute to solving the challenges facing the European Union. My first trip therefore led to Kiev,” Orban said in a statement on his Facebook page on Tuesday.
Aside from pushing Zelensky toward a ceasefire, Orban said he used the face-to-face meeting to lobby for the rights of Ukraine’s Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia, whom Budapest argues are treated as second-class citizens by Kiev. The pair also discussed trade, energy, and infrastructure cooperation.
“We are trying to close all previous disputes and focus on the future. We want to improve relations between our countries,” Orban told reporters.
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 02.07.2024
NATO allies intend to discuss speeding up the procurement of weapons at their upcoming summit in Washington, reported Semafor.
“Critical gaps” in the alliance’s military readiness need to be addressed, it quoted three European officials as saying, as the bloc continues to funnel weapons to the Kiev regime.
As NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine grinds on, there’ve been growing reports that sending existing equipment to Kiev had “reduced” stockpiles in Europe itself. This prompted the alliance’s latest defense plan, that calls for measures to boost air and missile defense systems’ quantity and readiness, officials told the FT earlier.
Action is expected to be taken on a plan put forward by the NATO’s three Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, which have been at the forefront of anti-Russian hysteria throughout the Ukrainian crisis, along with Poland.
The Allied Capability Delivery Commitment (ACDC) was presented at a May meeting in Palanga, Lithuania, by the defense ministers of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. At the time, speaking at a press conference with Latvia’s Andris Spruds and Lithuania’s Laurynas Kasciunas, Estonia’s Minister of Defense Hanno Pevkur said the initiative required extra funds, and the 2 percent minimum spending level agreed at the 2023 summit was no longer “sufficient”.
In line with the five-year plan, the alliance would boost efforts to procure “air defense, long range fires, and ammunition,” Tuuli Duneton, Undersecretary for Defense Policy at the Estonian Ministry of Defense, told the outlet.
“Delivering these [weapons] faster than originally planned would require additional resources to be invested,” one European official was quoted as acknowledging.
He added that the plan had been agreed upon in principle at a June meeting of NATO’s defense ministers in Brussels.
As far as Washington is concerned, it “supports the intent of the proposal and is working with allies on how to incorporate it in summit deliverables,” a US State Department official was cited as saying. The underlying ideas of the proposal will be “embedded” in the Defense Industrial Pledge expected to be signed at the summit, a Latvian spokesperson told the publication.
The NATO summit in Washington D.C. will take place from July 9-11. It will commemorate the landmark 75th anniversary of the alliance, which was founded in 1949. The summit’s title is “Ukraine and transatlantic security.” NATO will not extend a formal invitation to Ukraine for membership during the gathering.
More defense spending and costly procurement face NATO allies as supporting the regime in Kiev continues to bleed their own stockpiles dry. The bloc’s European allies have only a small fraction of the air defense capabilities they would need if the proxy conflict in Ukraine expanded into a direct Russia-NATO confrontation, officials were cited as saying by the Financial Times.
At the same time, the Ukraine conflict has become a great boon for America’s own leading defense contractors, sending their stocks up and boosting their profits. However, as the US and Europe keep squandering taxpayer money on arms for Ukraine, Russia continues to effectively destroy this weaponry.
Russia has persistently cautioned Western countries against furnishing weapons to the Kiev regime, stating that this sort of assistance would only serve to prolong the conflict in Ukraine.
Furthermore, Moscow has repeatedly rejected Western claims about an alleged Russian threat as unsubstantiated. Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier this year that the West’s allegations about Moscow’s plans to unleash a war with NATO are “simply rubbish.” He also slammed reports about Russia planning to attack Europe after the end of a special military operation in Ukraine as “complete nonsense and intimidation of Europeans to squeeze money out of them [for defense-related] purposes.”
RT | July 2, 2024
BBC presenter David Aaronovitch has called for the “murder” of former US President Donald Trump in a post on X (formerly Twitter). Aaronovitch later deleted his message following a backlash, claiming it had been “satire.”
Aaronovitch, the voice behind the British state broadcaster’s Radio 4 program ‘The Briefing Room’, tweeted on Monday: “If I was Biden I’d hurry up and have Trump murdered on the basis that he is a threat to America’s security.”
The post was accompanied by the hashtag #SCOTUS, indicating that the comment had been triggered by Monday’s confirmation from the US Supreme Court that former presidents have “absolute immunity” from prosecution for their official actions.
Aaronovitch was forced delete the post after an online backlash, and claimed in a follow-up message that he had been accused of inciting violence by “a far right pile.” The presenter insisted his tweet was “plainly a satire.”
On Monday, the highest US court ruled that under “our system of separated powers, the President may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for his official acts.”
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Trump touted the verdict on presidential immunity as a “big win for our Constitution and for democracy.”
President Biden attacked the Supreme Court ruling, urging citizens to “dissent” against the verdict.
US federal prosecutors have charged Trump with four criminal counts related to the 2020 presidential election, alleging that he “conspired” to overturn the results.
The Supreme Court verdict still grants lower courts the right to hold evidentiary hearings to determine whether the actions are official or unofficial. Unofficial acts by the president are not covered by immunity from prosecution.
Trump has repeatedly called his prosecution politically motivated, describing it as a “witch hunt” launched by Biden and his administration.
A Midwestern Doctor | The Forgotten Side of Medicine | June 29, 2024
Story at a Glance:
• One of the most common side effects of the COVID-19 vaccination we’ve observed is cognitive impairment. This can range from brain fog to dementia, and frequently we see a rapid acceleration of pre-existing cognitive decline into Alzheimer’s disease.
• Recently large data sets have emerged which support our observations and indicate millions of people are being affected by the adverse neurological effects of the vaccines. Those datasets are summarized here.
• After Joe Biden became president, he had a rapid decline in cognitive function, leading many to say he is not the same man who assumed the presidency four years ago. Since that decline paralleled his vaccination uptake, the pertinent medical information about his case is provided here so you can assess if the two were indeed linked.
• Many other prominent Democrats have had significant vaccination injuries, including 8% of the Democratic Senators. Each of their brain injuries (3 strokes and encephalitis) and their link to vaccination are discussed here. This article particularly focuses on Dianne Feinstein’s case, because like Biden, she had pre-existing cognitive impairment which rapidly progressed after the COVID vaccines (which she forced on America) hit the market and rather than admit it, she did everything she could to cover it up until she died.
Throughout my life, I have had the experience of being able to clearly see something, and have everyone around me, including a lot of “experts,” insist that what I’m seeing does not exist, and then a few years later have my observation become generally accepted as true. This for example describes my experience with the COVID vaccines, as within a month of them being on the market, I had seen so many significant or severe injuries (and deaths) it was clear to me the shots were much more toxic than a typical pharmaceutical. Nonetheless, regardless of what I said, most of my colleagues (except those who were injured by the vaccines) would not listen to me, and it’s only now that mainstream doctors (or left-wing individuals) are beginning to accept that the vaccines were a mistake.
Similarly, throughout Biden’s presidency, it’s been very clear to me that Biden has progressively increasing cognitive impairment, yet with most of the left-wing individuals I am close to, every piece of evidence I’ve presented to substantiate this allegation is either written off as right-wing propaganda I am being hypnotized by or met with a bizarre excuse to account for Biden’s behavior. Likewise, many of my friends have had similar experiences when discussing this issue within their circle (e.g., to family members).
Yesterday, Biden shocked the world by having a debate performance which made it clear even to ardent Democrats that he was suffering from cognitive impairment. I, in turn, watched the entire left-wing media implicitly or overtly state that Biden was cognitively impaired and that there was panic throughout the Democrat party of him running in November, as it was both clear Biden could not win and that many other Democrats would also lose because many of their voters would not want to show up to vote for Biden and hence would not vote for the rest of the ticket.
This in turn suggests two distinct possibilities:
The first is that this debate was used to swap Biden out of the nomination after the primaries were completed (so an insider the public would never vote for could be appointed to the presidency).
The second is that most of the Democratic party (and much of the mass media) genuinely believed Biden’s cognitive issues were a “right wing conspiracy” and their responses last night were that of a state of genuine shock.
In this article, I am going to focus on the second possibility as I feel it also ties into the broader issue of vaccine injuries that has swept the Democrat party.
The Vaccine Mass Formation
Whenever you observe groups, you will often observe people defaulting to mimicking the behaviors of the group so that they can fit in and be accepted. In time, this often evolves to there being a very characteristic linguistic style and set of behaviors that emerges—which in many cases seems to be prioritized over the actual substance of what the group is about (e.g., I meet many people who claim to align with “the science” who copy the same phrases and chains of logic prominent scientists like Anthony Fauci use but simultaneously don’t understand any of the scientific points they are discussing).
Many examples of this mimicry occur. For example, I know numerous men who came out of the closest and then rapidly adopted an identical lispy and flamboyant style of speech, while in the New Age field, I’ve noticed the underlying thread they all share in common is a very distinctive style of speech which emphasizes a profound jubilation over a variety of inconsequential things they encounter. What’s remarkable about this mimicry is that you can often provide non-sensical examples of it that are fully embraced by the group (e.g., I periodically send my New Age friends random nonsense created by a New Age language generator which matches the cadence of the New Age field and frequently receive accolades from my friends). Likewise, in academia, it’s been repeatedly shown that if one produces incoherent nonsense that is written in the postmodernist style, it will often make it to publication (and likewise I’ve had a lot of fun over the years with essays from a nonsensical postmodernist language generator many take as being legitimate scholarly writings).
In turn, I’ve noticed that in some groups, this repetition or desire to belong to the group will magnify, and before long reinforce itself into cult-like behaviors that seem completely insane to an outside observer—a process which is particularly likely to happen if a nefarious individual deliberately manipulates the group to create this behavior (e.g., a shrewd marketing team, a talented dictator, or a sociopathic cult leader).
Note: while modern marketing has become remarkably effective at inducing this hypnosis (especially since marketers have the ability to broadcast the hypnotic message throughout the mass media so everyone feels pressured to conform to it), the most powerful manipulation (which is still not possible to standardize) occurs from individuals who figured out how to spiritually manipulate others. In turn, since I’ve seen those people do horrible stuff throughout my lifetime, I previously wrote an article explaining how to recognize spiritual manipulation and not be susceptible to it or the dangerous spiritual practices which accompany it.
Recently, Matthias Desmet brought the world’s attention to the mass formation hypothesis, which is essentially what happens when the concept I just described (individuals wanting to belong to a group and copying its non-verbal behaviors) becomes magnified to the point that they do completely irrational things, hallucinate things at odds with reality (e.g., seeing a face on the moon), and become willing to engage in truly horrific behavior (e.g., genociding another race or sacrificing their children to the state).
Desmet’s hypothesis became popular as it provided a potential explanation for why our leaders chose to enact a series of horrific COVID-19 policies, and continued to double-down on them regardless of how much evidence emerged showing the policies were a terrible idea. Conversely, it attracted a lot of animosity as many interpreted it as removing the responsibility from those who were clearly at fault for inflicting all of these horrors upon us (which I believe to be a misinterpretation of what Desmet argued).
In turn with the COVID vaccines, like many, I noticed there was a hypnotic fixation on them which led to the believers wanting to vaccinate as many people as possible (regardless of the human rights violations that required) and no amount of evidence being sufficient to convince them the vaccines weren’t a good idea.
One of the things I believe was the strongest proof for this was the fact that as the Democrat leadership continued to promote vaccination mandates, they also repeatedly vaccinated themselves despite numerous severe vaccine injuries occurring within their party.
Note: I also observed this with many medical professionals who continued to zealously promote vaccination despite being confronted with injuries in their patients.
Senate Vaccine Injuries
Many large surveys have found that a continually increasing portion of the country believes the vaccines are causing widespread social harms (e.g., a recent poll found a third of Americans believe the vaccines are killing people) and that a large number of people were harmed by them (e.g., one poll found 7% of Americans believe they suffered a major side effect from the vaccines and 34% believe they suffered a minor one). Because of this, in theory, if a large sample of vaccinated individuals could be identified, there should have been a number of significant injuries in them.
As it so happened, the US Senate provided that sample, as we saw numerous unusual and severe diseases emerge in the Democrats there at a far higher rate than had ever happened in the past, and more importantly, those diseases were things strongly linked to the COVID vaccines. Furthermore, those injuries only occurred in Senators who had zealously promoted the vaccines.
Note: it is likely far more injuries than those I listed here occurred within the Senate as due to the political implications of acknowledging a vaccine injury, I would not expect the Senators to publicize them. Those I have listed are simply the ones which were too overt to cover up.
John Fetterman:
John Fetterman, a freshman Pennsylvania Democratic Senator (then aged 52) on May 17, 2022, less than a month after strongly endorsing the vaccine, suffered an ischemic stroke two days before the state primary for his Senate seat. Despite significant signs of cognitive impairment since his stroke, Fetterman somehow won the primary and then the general election. Since becoming elected, Fetterman has had prolonged periods of absence from the U.S. Senate due to needing specialized medical care:
Fetterman was hospitalized for syncope (lightheadedness) for two days beginning on February 10, 2023. Two days after his release he was hospitalized again, for a severe case of major depression. For about two months, Fetterman lived and worked at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As part of his daily schedule at the hospital, his chief of staff arrived at 10 a.m. on weekdays with newspaper clips, statements for Fetterman to approve, and legislation to review. During his hospitalization, Fetterman co-sponsored a bipartisan rail safety bill, introduced after the derailment of a chemical-carrying train in East Palestine, Ohio, close to the border with Pennsylvania; the regulation aimed to strengthen freight-rail safety regulations to prevent future derailments.
On April 17, 2023, Fetterman returned to the Senate to chair the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry subcommittee on food and nutrition, specialty crops, organics and research. The Washington Post said that Fetterman’s “voice stumbled at times while reading from prepared notes” during the subcommittee hearing, but “he appeared in good spirits” and communicated a message about the importance of fighting hunger.
Since that time, Fetterman has had a variety of unusual incidents suggestive of cognitive impairment (e.g., earlier this month he was speeding and crashed into someone).
Ben Luján
Ben Ray Luján is a freshman New Mexico Democratic Senator who repeatedly promoted the COVID-19 vaccines.
On January 27, 2022, Luján (then 49) was hospitalized in Santa Fe after feeling fatigued and dizzy. He was found to have had a hemorrhagic stroke from a torn vertebral artery affecting his cerebellum and was transferred to the University of New Mexico Hospital for treatment, which included a decompressive craniectomy. A statement from his office said that “he is expected to make a full recovery”. Luján returned to work at the Senate on March 3 and stated by April 21 that he was 90% recovered.
Chris Van Hollen
Chris Van Hollen is a freshmen Maryland Democrat Senator who repeatedly promoted the COVID vaccines and tackling COVID-19 “disinformation.”
On May 15, 2022, while giving a speech, he experienced a hemorrhagic stroke in the back of his head. After a hospitalization, he returned to the Senate. At the time of this injury, he was 64.
Note: while ischemic strokes are more common, we have seen cases of major blood vessels rupturing after COVID vaccinations (e.g., one of our vaccinated colleagues almost died from a ruptured aorta). We believe this is due to the the COVID vaccine damaging the lining of the blood vessels, as on autopsies, significant damage to the blood vessels is often observed (and likewise in our colleague’s case, the tissue changes observed in his aorta during the emergency repair were highly unusual). Furthermore, this damage appears to increase with time, which likely explains the roughly one year delay between vaccination and rupture in both the Senators and our colleague.
As there are 50 Democrats in the Senate, these 3 incidents represent a 6% rate of strokes occurring within roughly a year of vaccination (as the vaccines became available in early 2021). As you can see, that is much higher than the 0.083%-0.146% rate you would expect to see for these strokes but congruent with the observed vaccine injury rate.
Conversely, the only other Senator I know of who had a stroke while in office was Republican Mark Kirk, who in 2012, at the age of 54, a year after assuming office, had a stroke which required a year of rehabilitation.
Dianne Feinstein
Dianne Feinstein was another aggressive promoter of COVID vaccination (e.g., she introduced a ridiculous bill to require vaccination or a negative COVID test to fly on domestic airlines). In March of 2023, Feinstein was diagnosed with shingles and hospitalized. While her office initially insisted she would be fine, it was later revealed her shingles had progressed to Ramsey Hunt Syndrome (paralysis of the face) and encephalitis (brain inflammation). As as a result, it took 10 weeks for her to return to the Senate, at which point she was clearly disabled, and her office was gradually forced to admit Feinstein had experienced some disability.
Once there, it was evident she was both physically and cognitively impaired, but she nonetheless refused to resign. A few months later, in July she ceded her power of attorney to her daughter, then in August she was hospitalized after falling in her home, and finally at the end of September she died of “natural causes,” making her one of the only Senators (and the first female one) to die while in office.
Note: her death was immediately followed by California governor Newsom appointing a replacement for her in the Senate.
What is noteworthy about her experience was how rare her conditions were. Specifically, Ramsay Hunt syndrome is estimated to affect 1 in 20,000 people per year (with it typically being seen in immunocompromised individuals), while shingles encephalitis is typically seen in 1 out of every 33,000-50,000 cases of shingles (with it again being more frequently seen in immunocompromised individuals).
Note: for individuals over 65, between 3.9 to 11.8 per 1000 experience shingles each year (which means around 1 in 500,000 develop shingles encephalitis), while less than 100 Americans die each year from it.
Conversely, from the start, shingles was one of the most common injuries linked to COVID vaccination and likewise, its more severe complications have been strongly linked to vaccination (due to the immunosuppressive effects of the vaccine). The following table is from the most comprehensive article I was able to find on the subject:
Note: Justin Bieber also recently attracted widespread public attention after he developed Ramsay Hunt Syndrome, a condition which was extraordinarily rare for his age (he had approximately a 27/1,000,000 chance of developing this condition).
As you might expect, in the same way the COVID vaccines continually failed to work (which is why they kept on requiring more and more boosters) these injuries had no effect on the Democrats’ zeal for the vaccines. One of the saddest cases happened when Representative Castin’s 17 year old vaccinated daughter (who aggressively promoted the COVID vaccines) died suddenly and unexpectedly in her sleep from a sudden cardiac arrhythmia on June 12, 2022.
In addition to this being a cause of death linked to the vaccines (sudden cardiac death almost never happens in children), a reader calculated that (prior to the vaccines), a US Representative would be expected to have a child under 18 die once every 200 years). However, while Casten repeatedly publicly expressed his grief over his daughter’s death, that did not shake his faith in the vaccines. For example, this is something he said a year after she died:
Cognitive Impairment
Since the vaccines hit the market, we have noticed one of the most common consequences of them has either been cognitive impairment, worsening of existing cognitive impairment, or an elderly patient with cognitive impairment rapidly progressing into dementia (which is typically labeled as Alzheimer’s disease). Additionally, when we’ve looked for it, we’ve found a variety of signs of subtle neurologic injury in a large number of vaccinated adults who do not believe they have suffered complications from the vaccination.
If we take Senator Feinstein for example, at the end of 2020, the New Yorker reported that Feinstein’s colleagues and staffers were concerned Feinstein was beginning to show signs of cognitive decline which were getting harder to cover up (although others who worked with her denied this). Two years later in 2022 (after the vaccines had come out), the New York Times also covered her cognitive decline but were more explicit in acknowledging it, presumably because it had become significantly worse:
At 88, Ms. Feinstein sometimes struggles to recall the names of colleagues, frequently has little recollection of meetings or telephone conversations, and at times walks around in a state of befuddlement — including about why she is increasingly dogged by questions about whether she is fit to serve in the Senate representing the 40 million residents of California, according to half a dozen lawmakers and aides who spoke about the situation on the condition of anonymity.
On Capitol Hill, it is widely — though always privately — acknowledged that Ms. Feinstein suffers from acute short-term memory issues that on some days are ignorable, but on others raise concern among those who interact with her.
Ms. Feinstein is often engaged during meetings and phone conversations, usually coming prepared and taking notes. But hours later, she will often have forgotten those interactions, said the people familiar with the situation, who insisted that they not be named because they did not want to be quoted disparaging a figure they respect.
Some of them said they did not expect her to serve out her term ending in 2024 under the circumstances, even though she refuses to engage in conversations about stepping down.
This cognitive decline further worsened after her hospitalization. For example, shortly after she returned, when asked about her 3 month absence, she insisted she was completely fine, seemed to believe she had been working at the Senate the whole time (e.g., voting) and became confrontational when a reported suggested otherwise. To put this in context, two months later, she ceded power of attorney to her daughter, and after another two months, died.
Sadly, I do not believe Feinstein’s case is an outlier, and for that reason, I recently attempted to compile all the evidence showing vaccine cognitive decline is a very real thing. The key points I raised in that article were:
1. Friends have complained to me about cognitive impairment following vaccination, and in a few cases, shared that impairment worsened after subsequent vaccinations. Likewise, I’ve seen many signs (others have as well) that these effects are widespread in society (e.g., drivers became worse after the vaccination campaign).
2. Numerous friends reported to me that their relatives in nursing homes developed rapidly progressing dementia after vaccination and then died shortly later—something which many readers here have since shared with me also happened to their parents or spouses.
3. Both I and colleagues have noticed a variety of neurological deficits in the vaccinated. This is best demonstrated by the fact the most common symptom Pierre Kory’s vaccine injured patients come to him for is brain fog.
4. A variety of datasets support these contentions. Those include:
• The rate of motor vehicle accidents increased after the vaccination campaign.
• The Dutch detected a 18-40% increase (averaging out to 24%) in the number of adults seeing their primary doctor for memory and concentration problems following the vaccination rollout.
• A significant increase in disability has been seen throughout the Western world since the COVID vaccines came out, some of which is cognitive in nature.
• VAERS had a massive spike in cognitive disorders being reported after vaccination which was seen after the COVID vaccines hit the market.
• An Israeli survey found that 4.5% of those who received a booster developed anxiety or depression, and 26.4% who already had either then experienced an exacerbation of their condition.
• A study of 2,027,353 Koreans published three weeks ago in Nature found that vaccination resulted in a 68% increase in depression, a 44% increase in anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders.
• A more recent study of 558,017 Koreans over 65 found vaccination increased the risk of cognitive impairment by 138% and the risk of Alzheimer’s by 23%, and that this risk increased with time.
The key point with these datasets is that those increases are massive, to the point they cannot be explained by chance.
Joe Biden
During Biden’s presidency, he has aggressively promoted the mandates, and has done a variety of things which go far outside what the president typically does. These include:
• Accusing social media companies of “killing people” because they did not make a sufficiently aggressive effort to censor vaccine misinformation (which in turn his administration used to censor free speech and violate the First Amendment).
• (Erroneously) forecasting a winter of illness and death for the unvaccinated.
• Illegally mandating the vaccines on America’s workers.
• Pressuring the FDA to rapidly approve questionable COVID vaccinations, to the point its chief (and very pro-vaccine) vaccine scientists did not feel what the White House was requesting was appropriate to do—which ultimately resulted in those scientists being forced out of the approval process and the vaccines approved.
Given how strong the evidence against the COVID vaccinations actually is, I interpreted that to mean Biden genuinely believes in the vaccines, something demonstrated by the fact he’s repeatedly publicly shown himself receiving the vaccine and reported having at least three boosters.
As best as I can tell, like his colleague Feinstein, Biden’s successive vaccination appears to be correlated with a rapid cognitive decline which he nonetheless has refused to acknowledge.
To elaborate, at the time Biden ran in 2020, many including Donald Trump accused Biden of being cognitively impaired, and cited a variety of examples suggesting he may not be fit to be president (e.g., Biden rarely campaigned publicly, whenever asked aggressively refused to take a test assessing his cognitive function, and would make odd confrontational outbursts at voters who challenged him). Likewise, doctors identified reasons why Biden was potentially at higher risk for cognitive impairment (e.g., he had history of a brain aneurysm and repair in 1988, and had atrial fibrillation).
Note: one of the most common side effects of COVID vaccination is inflammation at the site of a pre-existing injury (e.g., a brain surgery). Likewise, the vaccines commonly damaged the heart and triggered conditions like atrial fibrillation.
Nonetheless, Biden was able to perform well enough during the campaign to effectively debate Trump during the 2020 presidential debate and earn a sizable portion of the vote. In contrast, one of the most common talking points I heard when I reviewed the post debate coverage was that “Biden was a very different person there and not the man who ran in 2020.”
Likewise, during Biden’s Presidency, as time has moved forward I have noticed an increasing number of gaffes. This include him mumbling words incoherently and nonsensically (something which again has worsened as time moved forward), Biden staring into space and being frozen in place while those around him move (also seen here and here), and him needing to be guided and led away by his assistants. Most importantly, when he was interviewed by a special counsel this year, they acknowledged Biden had repeated mental lapses during the interview.
Additionally, it has been my impression that his cognitive lucidity is highly variable, something demonstrated both by the fact he is sometimes relatively coherent in his speeches, but other times he is not, and that fact that he is continuously absent-minded, particularly later in the day or at night (when these sorts of issues are well known to be worse—with the medical term for it being sundowning).
Note: earlier in the Biden presidency a White House doctor shared with a close colleague that Biden had significant cognitive impairment and displayed overt dementia at night.
As a result of this, many individuals who work with the elderly and those with cognitive impairment have recognized many of the same things they’ve seen in their patients in Biden and hence feel the fact that Biden is being continually brought before the public and forced to give speeches to equate to elder abuse.
After the debates, I in turn spoke with a gifted neurologist who has a talent for diagnosing these types of conditions with limited information (e.g., no access to an MRI). They were of the opinion that Biden’s clinical picture was consistent with vascular dementia (which Biden was at risk for due to his existing medical conditions and likewise something the COVID vaccine worsens).
One point my colleague emphasized was that Biden had a stuttering disorder which has significantly worsened during his presidency and that one of the most common types of strokes frequently damage the part of the brain responsible for speech (which in turn can create a stuttering disorder) but that a progressive loss of cerebral blood flow (e.g., that seen in vascular dementia), can also cause this, especially if there is pre-existing brain damage (e.g., Biden’s existing stuttering disorder). Furthermore, in the same way that an increasing loss of blood flow can exacerbate existing brain damage, a loss of sleep (which is extremely common in a stressful job like the presidency) can as well.
Biden’s Debate
I believe Biden’s poor performance was due to him both having had his cognitive impairment continue to progress and the fact that the nighttime schedule of the debate made it impossible for his team to chose a period of high lucidity for Biden to speak to the public.
During the debate, the following jumped out at me (and many others).
1. Biden repeated overt falsehoods with certainty.
For example, early in the debate he asserted that Trump had told people to inject bleach into themselves, when Trump had in fact discussed ultraviolet light—and most of media has now acknowledged Trump never said this. In my eyes, the most important thing about this was that Biden appeared to sincerely believe most of what he said.
2. Biden repeatedly showed his disgust for both Trump and his supporters (e.g., those present on January 6th). I found this concerning because history is rife with cognitively impaired tyrants who treated their subjects unfairly due to their own (often petty) delusions.
3. Biden rarely blinked.
4. Biden’s face appeared to be mostly frozen. This is a classic symptom of Parkinson’s and also something which can resulted from a vaccine injury where a series of microstrokes can damage the facial nerve (which was corroborated by his face being asymmetrical and his smile being extremely asymmetrical).
5. Biden often seemed to stare into space for long periods of time, and in numerous cases struggled to come up with a coherent answer when it was his turn to speak (e.g., you could see on his face he was making an effort to think, or halfway through something he said he would close his eyes and pause for a while).
6. Biden missed many important points he needed to raise for his base (e.g., when talking about abortion, rather than hit the important points, he talked about the epidemic of sister-on-sister rape).
7. He had very limited mobility in his hands (e.g., he slowly raised them to make a point and then rarely moved them while he was doing so).
8. When the debate ended, he needed to have his wife help him walk off stage.
More than anything else however, he seemed to be in pain, unhealthy and really struggling through the debate. This seemed to be the primary takeaway people from both political parties took from the debate (e.g., Democrats panicked and felt demoralized, liberal pundits were in shock, and many moderates said this debate felt like elder abuse).
My own takeaway was that prior to the debates, many pundits had relentlessly promoted the message Biden was not cognitively impaired to the point that rather than them simply lying, it seemed as though they had developed a mass formation where they genuinely believed this. Because of this, there were many instances of individuals appearing to panic as their hypnosis broke and they realized that was all hogwash. In turn, the primary reason I watched the post-debate coverage is because it’s fairly rare to see a mass red-pill like this occur and the shock which coincides with it.
Note: because of how unhealthy our culture is, it’s fairly unusual for individuals over 70, let alone 80, to have normal cognitive function. In turn, since so much responsibility is placed on our leaders for positions (which require a high degree of cognitive aptitude) many have argued for putting age or term limits on our leaders—especially since people should not be making policies that will not affect them (as they will be dead once they go into effect).
Pfizer’s Fraud
Once people become strongly committed to an idea, it is remarkably difficult to get them to admit they are wrong — especially since as time progresses, they continually build upon the mental investment within their minds to their position and create mental construct after construct which is dependent upon the position being true.
In turn, I typically see one of the following break their hypnosis:
• Clear and unambiguous evidence that they were wrong being broadcast to everyone (e.g., what happened last night with the debate).
• Them directly being harmed by the lie (e.g., a pro-vax doctor getting vaccine injured). Curiously, in many cases I’ve seen people still hold onto their lie when their children are victimized by it (e.g., in addition to Representative Casten losing his daughter, I’ve seen pro-vax doctors who had multiple members of their family suffer severe vaccine injuries but still insist the COVID vaccines are necessary for their patients).
• Them realizing they were a victim of fraud. I believe the fraud angle is persuasive because it shifts the burden from them to the fraudster and hence protects their ego. Because of this, I’ve repeatedly focused on trying to prove that Pfizer committed overt fraud, as I believe once individuals become aware of it, it will make them willing to change their position (e.g., previously I discussed how Pfizer faked the data it sent to the drug regulators which indicated their vaccine was producing the proteins it was supposed to create within the body — which was a major challenge facing this experimental gene therapy).
Recently the Kansas Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Pfizer alleging that they repeatedly and systematically committed fraud with the vaccines. The key points from it were as follows:
1. Pfizer used its confidentiality agreements with the U.S. Government and others to conceal, suppress, and omit material facts relating to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, including the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.
2. Pfizer used an extended study timeline to conceal critical data – the study was repeatedly delayed, including a delay from January 2023 to February 2024 because of a late vaccination of a single study participant (out of 44,000 participants). Likewise, Pfizer promised to make its data available to researchers but never did so.
3. The FDA did not immediately make the safety and efficacy data for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine available, claiming it would take 55 years, but a federal judge forced them to release 55,000 pages per month rather than 500.
4. Pfizer destroyed the vaccine control group once the FDA approved emergency use authorization in December 2020 (ultimately only 7% of the placebo group did not receive a vaccine).
Note: destroying the placebo group is a very common tactic used to conceal a high rate of injuries in a research trial.
5. In its press release announcing the emergency use authorization (EUA), Pfizer did not disclose that it had excluded immunocompromised individuals from its COVID-19 vaccine trials (whereas they later relentlessly pushed the vaccine on them).
6. Pfizer knew its COVID-19 vaccine was connected to serious adverse events, including myocarditis and pericarditis.
7. By March 2021, the United States military and Israel’s Ministry of Health (which was working hand in hand with Pfizer) detected a safety signal for myocarditis the public was never notified about. Nonetheless, Pfizer’s CEO denied a link existed.
8. In August 2021, after Pfizer obtained FDA approval through an EUA to provide its COVID-19 vaccine to 12 to 15-year-olds, Pfizer decided to study “how often” its vaccine may cause myocarditis or pericarditis in children by testing 5-16-year-olds for troponin I. Once a safety signal was detected, Pfizer’s CEO nonetheless denied it.
9. Pfizer also detected a safety signal relating to strokes. The FDA’s and CDC’s “surveillance system flagged a possible link between the new Pfizer-BioNTech bivalent COVID-19 vaccine and strokes in people aged 65 and over,” while an FDA study found that individuals 85 years or older who received both a flu vaccine and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine “saw a 20% increase in the risk of ischemic stroke.”
Note: one of the original names for the vaccine was the “clot shot.”
10. Pfizer did not release the data within its adverse event database—which as of February 2021 included 158,893 adverse events and 1,223 deaths. Furthermore, Pfizer was so overwhelmed with the adverse events, they had to hire hundreds (if not thousands) of staffers to process logging those adverse events (and nonetheless had a massive backlog). Despite this, Pfizer determined no causality existed between the vaccine and any of those injuries.
11. Pfizer only tested the booster shot on 12 trial participants who were in the 65- to 85-year-old age range and did not test it on any participant older than 85.
Note: Biden is 81.
12. Pfizer did not publicly release adverse event data from its database. By February 28, 2021, Pfizer’s adverse events database contained 158,893 adverse events from 42,086 case reports, including 1,223 fatalities, although Pfizer again did not make causality findings. Pfizer was receiving so many adverse events reports that it had to hire 600 additional full-time staff and expected to hire more than 1,800 additional resources by June 2021. Pfizer had such a backlog of adverse events that it might take 90 days to code “nonserious cases” that pfizer did not know the magnitude of under-reporting.
13. Pfizer announced a study on pregnant women but omitted the fact that more than one in ten women (52) who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine during their pregnancy reported a miscarriage, many within days of vaccination. Six women who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine during their pregnancy reported premature deliveries; several babies died.
14. Pfizer’s February 18th 2021, press release also did not disclose other adverse effects on the reproductive systems of women who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. By April 2022, Pfizer knew of tens of thousands of adverse events connected to its COVID-19 vaccine, including heavy menstrual bleeding (27,685), menstrual disorders (22,145), irregular periods (15,083), delayed periods (13,989), absence of periods (11,363) and other reproductive system effects.
15. Pfizer failed to recruit 83% of the women they had sought to study for their 4000 woman pregnancy trial, then destroyed the placebo group for the study, and still has not completed the quality control review process for it.
16. Pfizer misrepresented and concealed material facts relating to the durability of protection provided by its COVID-19 vaccine (until it was time to sell boosters).
17. Pfizer repeatedly said its COVID-19 vaccine would prevent transmission even though Pfizer knew it had never studied the effect of its vaccine on transmission. This point is important because Pfizer repeatedly gave very heavy-handed statements based on this lie (e.g., that you would kill your grandmother or endanger your community if you didn’t vaccinate) which in turn were used to justify Biden’s abhorrent mandates. Likewise, once clear evidence emerged the vaccine did not prevent transmission, Pfizer and the Biden administration continued to assert this lie to promote their product.
18. Pfizer aggressively utilized back channels to censor speech on social media that was critical of their vaccines—and likely did so in collusion with the Biden administration. The vast extent of this abhorrent conduct is contained within Alito’s dissent on the recent Supreme Court ruling relating to government censorship.
Note: the above summaries were sourced from Carl Henegahn and Kanekoa and then further modified by me.
Many learning of these points are understandably outraged. Sadly, as things like this are fairly common within the pharmaceutical industry, many of us assumed Pfizer’s talking points were lies from the start and hence are less shocked by these revelations.
Conclusion
Our country has been in an accelerating decline for decades, and I view the COVID-19 disaster as being a symptom of that decline rather than an isolated event. In turn, my hope is that as more and more shocking events happen, it can at last motivate the public and political class to begin taking things seriously and working together to fix the situation we are in rather than becoming even more polarized and simply doubling down on blaming the other side for everything that is going awry.
In the case of last night’s debate, the fact that we clearly had a cognitively impaired man struggling to lead the world’s greatest super power, beyond making waves within the United States, sends an even stronger message to the rest of the world that something is seriously wrong with America and it should no longer be treated as the sole superpower. My hope is thus that this sends a message to America’s political class that the current course we are going on is unacceptable and needs to change.
Likewise, my sincere hope is that members of the Democrat party will begin to be able to tie Biden’s “inexplicable” cognitive decline to the COVID vaccines, as many who have worked with him have noticed he is simply not the same person who assumed office four years ago, and more and more difficult to ignore signs are emerging that the Democrats made a huge mistake pushing the vaccines.
Because of this, if you have the ability to share this point within your social circle—particularly that the exact same thing happened to Dianne Feinstein (who liked Biden refused to acknowledge her impairment and instead had her staffers create a facade until she died), that would be greatly appreciated. The Democratic party is in a state of shock right now (which is when people are the most mutable), so I believe this is the best time to get that message to them.
or go to
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