Canada to Russia: Interference Is Okay If It Destabilizes You but Not the Other Way Around
By Matthew EHRET | Strategic Culture Foundation | 15.04.2019
In the midst of one of the most de-stabilizing scandals to rock Canada in years, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland announced on April 5 that the threat of “Foreign interference” going into the October 2019 elections was at an all-time high.
Sitting beside her UK counterpart at a G7 meeting in France, Freeland stated: “Interference is very likely and we think there have already been efforts by malign foreign actors to disrupt our democracy”. Her warning was echoed by an embattled puppet Prime Minister in Ottawa who stated it is “very clearly that countries like Russia are behind a lot of the divisive campaigns … that have turned our politics even more divisive and more anger-filled than they have been in the past.”
The Measures to Defend the British Deep State
In order to counteract this “foreign threat”, several Canadian mechanisms have been announced to “keep democracy safe” in alignment with the G7, Five Eyes and NATO. These mechanisms are:
The creation of an “Incident Public Protection Panel” run by five Privy Council bureaucrats under the Clerk of the Privy Council which will exist outside of the authority of the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada, whose job is to maintain the integrity of elections. In defense of this mysterious group, Canada’s Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould stated that “it won’t be one person who will decide what Canadians will be allowed to know”(apparently having five people decide is more democratic). The new Clerk of the Privy Council is Ian Stugart, who served as former deputy minister to Chrystia Freeland until just a few weeks ago.
A Security and Intelligence Election Threats Task Force which will incorporate all of Canada’s intelligence agencies such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the RCMP, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and Freeland’s Global Affairs Canada. All of these agencies are Privy Council organizations.
The Rapid Response Mechanism of the G7 created in June 2018 and headquartered in Ottawa Canada in Freeland’s Global Affairs Office and Privy Council Office.
While Russia is being set up as the scapegoat of the collapsing western liberal establishment, this most recent red alarm by Freeland and Canada’s response to the “danger” is useful for two reasons:
First and foremost, Freeland’s shameless warnings over “foreign interference” have become so loud that an irony has become unavoidable. She has after all been caught red handed behind the destabilization of both Ukraine and Venezuela. Secondly, by reviewing the mechanisms being created by Canada to counteract this “threat”, a clear insight is provided into the inner workings of the actual foreign influences which infiltrated Canada many decades ago.
Chrystia Freeland: Regime Change Princess of Ukraine and Venezuela
On the first point, Freeland’s role as a co-architect of the nazi-fueled overthrow of a pro-Russian government in February 2014 is now well known. Aside from her family’s Nazi connections going back to her grandfather Michael Chomiak’s leading role as a Nazi collaborator in WWII, and her own mother’s role in helping to draft Ukraine’s neo-liberal constitution, Freeland herself not only befriended leading neo-Nazi collaborators such as Canadian Ukrainian Congress’ president Paul Grod and but has also promoted NATO’s anti-Russian expansion across eastern Europe.
Less well known but equally important is Freeland’s leading role in planning for the Venezuelan coup attempt which has been recently halted thanks to Russia’s March 23rd intervention.
Working alongside fellow Oxford operative Ben Rowswell (now head of the Canadian International Council/ Chatham House of Canada) during his three year tenure as Ambassador to Venezuela (2014-2017), Freeland set up a program for regime change which involved a two-part formula of 1) mobilizing mass direct support for the overthrow of a government, and 2) gaining international support for said overthrow.
Rowswell’s on-the-ground work was designed to achieve the former as he himself admitted in a 2017 interview saying “We became one of the most vocal embassies in speaking out on human rights issues and encouraging Venezuelans to speak out”. Before leaving his post to become the head of the Chatham House of Canada, he tweeted “I don’t think they (anti-Maduro forces) have anything to worry about because Minister Freeland has Venezuela way at the top of her priority list”.
Working on fulfilling the 2nd part of the formula, Freeland directed the creation of the “Lima Group”. A Global News article of January 24 described the group in the following terms: “Playing a key role behind the scenes was Lima Group member Canada, whose Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke to Guaido the night before Maduro’s swearing-in ceremony to offer her government’s support should he confront the socialist leader”.
It shouldn’t be too surprising in our day and age that a nation with such a high reputation as “polite Canada” is in actuality, an active agency for regime change and global governance. Canada’s very Prime Minister did assert in 2016 that “Canada is the world’s first post national-state nation”. What may surprise some readers is that Canada itself was infiltrated by a foreign player many years ago and what we will briefly see is that Canada can only be called the “world’s first post national-state nation” because it never really became a genuine nation in the first place, but was always manipulated by a foreign power… although not the one you think.
The “Foreign Influence” Controlling Canada
While a longer presentation is needed to do this story justice, it is enough to note for now that neither Freeland, nor Rowswell are operating on behalf of Canada’s interests, but are rather both operatives run by an entity that took over Canada many decades ago and are currently directed by two interlocking organizations: The Privy Council Office and the Rhodes-Milner Round Table Group.
The Privy Council Office
The Privy Council office was set up in 1867 in order to act as the British hand guiding its newly formed confederacy (Canada nearly became a part of Lincoln’s America in the wake of the Civil War. The only thing stopping that outcome was Britain’s creation of a confederation. The full story is told in the Imperial Myth of Canada’s National Policy). While its power was always great, there was still room for independent policy making by nationalistic elected officials when the international conditions were favorable.
This was nearly entirely destroyed during the reign of technocratic golden boy Pierre Elliott Trudeau during his 1968-1973 reform of the Federal Government under the guidance of the OECD’s Sir Alexander King. It was during this time Sir King’s Club of Rome (Ottawa branch) was set up in Ottawa under the guidance of Trudeau and his clerk of the Privy Council Michael Pitfield, and other neo-Malthusian technocrats such as Privy Council President Michel Lamontagne, Maurice Strong, and Governor General Roland Mitchener. It was from this control point in Ottawa in 1971 that the work later to become known as Limits to Growth was funded by tax payers and which became the bible for the new Malthusianism and blueprint for the “post-industrial society”. It is from this cybernetics central node that the web of governance both in Canada and also across other British infiltrated territories in the Trans-Atlantic system is coordinated under the directives of London.
Sir Alexander King, working through the Club of Rome advanced the Malthusian revival known as “Carrying Capacity” which presupposed a world of fixed resources and discounted the parameter of human creativity
The current President of the Privy Council is Justin Trudeau’s childhood friend Dominic Leblanc, son of former Governor General (i.e.: Head of State of Canada) and co-controller of the Canada 2020 think tank which created Justin as an Obama-modelled puppet in 2006. Following in the footsteps of Pierre Trudeau’s Limits to Growth, it is this very network which is at the heart of the Green New Deal now being pushed internationally. Another leading member of Canada2020 is Facebook Canada’s Kevin Chan who will be working closely with the Freeland’s Security and Intelligence Election Threats Task Force.
The oath of every member of the Privy Council member (which includes both private individuals and also every cabinet minister of government) is: “I, [name], do solemnly and sincerely swear that I shall be a true and faithful servant to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, as a member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council for Canada.” Additionally to becoming a Privy Councillor, the Prime Minister must additionally give another oath stating: “I, [name] do swear (declare) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors.
The Milner-Rhodes Trust Group
Coordinating closely with the Privy Council office for over 100 years is an organization known as the Round Table Group (c.1902) which was created with funds from South Africa’s “race patriot” and diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes who wished to use his wealth in order to advance a “church for the extension of the British Empire” and “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire.”
Upon Rhodes’ death in 1902, Lord Alfred Milner directed Rhodes’ trust and created the Round Table Movement across all British Territories. The trust was also directed towards the creation of the Rhodes Scholarship system designed to indoctrinate talented young minds around the world in Oxford before deploying them back into their countries of origin in order to infiltrate all public and private fields of influence. The Roundtable groups (dubbed the Council on Foreign Relations upon its creation in the United States in 1921), changed its name several times and today is known as the Royal Institute for International Affairs/Chatham House in the UK and the Canadian International Council (CIC) in Ottawa*.
Regime Change disciple Ben Rowswell’s presidency as head of the CIC and Chrystia Freeland’s status as an Oxford Rhodes Scholar (having been brought into Liberal politics via Rhodes Scholar/Canada2020 controller Bob Rae in 2013) should give any thinker a moment of grave pause.
The Strategic Issue at Hand
As ugly as this picture may appear to some, it should not cause sadness or even anger.
Only pity mixed with a dose of hope are appropriate, since we are in fact witnessing the desperate death rattle of a Monarchical system of empire which has too long poisoned the well of human civilization and which must now give way for something better. Although this imperial system may be deploying every asset and dirty trick it has in opposition to the new paradigm now emerging under the guiding leadership of Russia and China, it is becoming increasingly clear that this empire cannot win. Its regime change plans have failed, its Green New Deals are failing and even the irrational aesthetical traditions underlying this system of post-modernism are giving way to an optimistic artistic sensibility that seeks to re-unite beauty with truth evidenced by the renewed interest in classical art and music during the recent Belt and Road Musical Festival on March 24, 2019.
Russia and China’s leadership have not only consolidated a partnership of nations across Eurasia and Africa around this new paradigm, but they have also found what no one thought was possible just a few years ago: a potential ally in an America which is returning to its nationalist sensibilities under the surprising leadership of Donald Trump.
During Trump’s two first years as President, the long British infiltration of America has finally begun to fall apart with the collapse of the Mueller investigation and the exposure of the British-run deep state that Mueller was a part of.
The question now remains: With the impending meltdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system, and olive branch of cooperation which China has offered to the west via the Belt and Road Initiative and the World Landbridge which can bring this system of development into the Americas and Africa, will America join hands as an ally and will Canada follow suit in order to become a true sovereign nation freed of all foreign imperial influence once and for all?
* Original research on the Roundtable/Rhodes Trust infiltration of North America can be found in the Canadian Patriot #18 (British Roots of the Deep State Exposed), Canadian Patriot #19 (Green New Deal vs New Silk Road) and volumes 2-4 of the Untold History of Canada.
Canada’s Carbon Tax Will Kill People
‘Winter mortality is lower when the price of heating is lower’: new research report.
source: page 33 of this 2009 UK govt report
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | April 8, 2019
Last month, the National Bureau of Economic Research released a dramatic working paper. Its conclusion: when US home heating costs fell, fewer people died.
In the authors’ words, we’ve known for decades that “mortality peaks in winter and that cold weather is associated with higher mortality.” When home heating gets expensive, many people – especially the poorest members of our community – turn down the thermostat. But lower indoor temperatures are associated with an uptick in fatal strokes, heart attacks, and infections.
After collecting reams of data, and performing careful calculations, the researchers conclude that US heating bills declined noticeably between 2005 and 2010 “due to the boom in shale production of natural gas.”
That price decline, they write, “caused a 1.6% decrease in the winter mortality rate for households using natural gas for heating.”
Only 58% of American households heat with natural gas, so the drop in the death rate for the US population as a whole over a full calendar year works out to about half a percentage point. The bottom line: lower energy prices saved 11,000 lives annually.
Which brings us to the carbon tax recently imposed on all sources of home heating here in more northerly Canada. Enbridge, the company which supplies natural gas to Ontario homes, says it needs to raise the price it charges households by 11% just to pay for this carbon tax.
If deaths drop when heating costs decline, they’ll surely increase when heating costs spike. So let’s not beat around the bush: Canada’s carbon tax is going to kill people.
Extrapolating from those US numbers, 1,100 Canadians will die unnecessarily next winter. And the winter after that. And the one after that. As the size of the carbon tax increases, the number of annual victims may well rise in tandem.
Certain categories of people are at higher risk of death-by-carbon-tax. People whose health is already compromised. People who are already struggling to pay their bills. (Seniors, of course, are over-represented amongst both groups.)
There’s nothing heroic about a policy that consigns old people to shivering in the dark. That’s an attack on our most vulnerable. That’s a betrayal.
When people die from opioid overdoses, our Prime Minister rightly calls it a ‘crisis.’ He calls it “devastating. Families ripped apart. Communities forever altered. Loved ones lost too soon.” Yet his carbon tax has set into motion a wave of similar tragedy and sorrow.
Where global carbon dioxide emissions are concerned, Canada’s 1.6% contribution is so trivial that nothing we do can possibly make a difference. We’re a rounding error, simply irrelevant to the big picture.
Which means that Canada’s carbon-tax-induced deaths won’t just be premature, they’ll be utterly meaningless.
Globalism’s Last Disgrace: The Army vs. the Yellow Vests
By Tom LUONGO | Strategic Culture Foundation | 27.03.2019
There are few people in this world more odious than French President Emmanuel Macron after his behavior this week. I’m sure there are child molesters who are worse. But as a man who is pivotal in the future of hundreds of millions of people, his decision to order the French military to quell the Yellow Vests protests with live ammunition is simply vile.
Macron outed himself as the very symbol of what animates the globalist elite he represents.
Disdain.
The disdain he holds for the people he leads is palpable. It’s as palpable for his disdain for the British who voted for Brexit. To him the EU is all, the EU is inevitable and when faced with the choice of serving France or serving the EU, he chooses the EU every time.
That is what led him to this disastrous decision to deploy the French military to the streets for the first time since 1948 with orders to shoot protestors.
And that disdain is so complete that he doesn’t realize what happens if even one of those men goes too far and takes the President at his word. Thankfully, that did not happen.
But if it did, he would have lost complete control of his country, if he hasn’t already.
The estimates for Act XIX of the Gilets Jaunes this weekend were over 125,000 across France. That many people taking to the streets risking getting shot is not something you dismiss with a wave of your hand.
It is something as a leader you need to take very seriously.
Because the real fear for Macron is not a violent demonstration that ends with protestors shot and killed. No, the real fear is the protests that are peaceful.
Because what happens, Mr. Macron, if the soldiers you deployed to suppress attendance to these demonstrations see first-hand just how much the violence reported has been overblown?
Or worse, the lack of it confirms their suspicions that the violence was committed by agent provocateurs who now didn’t show up because it’s no longer worth the €25/hour they are being paid to sow discontent?
They’ll see exactly what Macron doesn’t want them to see: angry, dispirited, desperate people with legitimate grievances expressing those feelings the only way they know how.
If Macron wasn’t courting civil war before this weekend, he is now.
Because an uprising against a corrupt and unresponsive government by some people is one thing. It starts with the most angry but it can spread over time only if the government doesn’t hear them.
Macron’s reactions have only made things worse at every turn.
So, while the people started this fight for the future of France it will be the military that ends it. And woe to Macron and the French political elite if the military on the ground sides with the people they were sent to shoot.
There is nothing more cowardly than a supposedly liberal, tolerant democracy sending in the military to shut down and order violence against is own people for taking to the streets. It is simply the order of tin-pot dictator with delusions of adequacy.
Prudent leadership stems from having weapons and knowing when and how to use them. The images coming from France have been horrific and no better than those captured during Mariano Rajoy’s crackdown on Catalonia during its independence referendum in 2017.
That response cost him his job. So too will it be for Macron now that he has crossed that line.
Macron is under the orders of his paymasters in The Davos Crowd to get control over France. He will not be removed from office as long as he acts in accordance with their wishes. By now they would have replaced him with someone more acceptable to defuse the situation.
There is only one problem with that. There is no one else.
Macron’s approval rating is abysmal. He’s polling behind Marine Le Pen’s National Rally who will send more members to the European Parliament than his En Marche will in May.
He was already the bait and switch candidate in 2017’s election. The globalist-in-reformer’s clothing. And now that he’s the focal point of the Gilets Jaunes’ anger nothing short of a violent put-down of their rebellion will save Macron at this point.
Because they know this and they know that he hates them.
But a violent put-down is only winning the battle to lose the war.
With the EU locked in mortal combat with Brexiteers and Italy pushing the envelope in the European Council, there’s no room to maneuver here.
So, this continues until it can’t. At which point Macron’s legitimacy will evaporate and political change will occur. But the globalists behind Macron and in French political circles will put that off for as long as possible.
That’s why the lack of violence at ACT XIX’s marches this weekend was so important. Macron’s bluff was called. And that means we’re nearing the end of his story. And it couldn’t happen to a more deserving weasel.
Merkel, you’re on deck.
A Privileged Education: The US College Admissions Scandal
By Dr. Binoy Kampmark | Global Research | March 27, 2019
The oldest idea of history; the perennial problem of station: education. Get the child as far as possible so that he or she can be propelled, as if from a trebuchet across the ramparts of life. Nasty obstacles – one being a lack of intellect – will be cleared, and the wretched genetic issue will find itself in sinecures, positions of influence and sat upon the comfortable chairs of the establishment.
Universities should be places of educational exultation. In practice, they have become creatures of the state, friends of various industrial complexes, and complicit in some of the darker tendencies of society. Go to university, and understand dankness and rot; go to university, and acquaint yourself with what foul pools of unrefined group-think looks like. (The very idea of a “school” of thinking is disturbingly boxed in nature.)
It is also clear that any institution which hands caps out in hope of filling them is bound to be influenced by the heaviest contribution, though how that contribution is assessed can be a point of conjecture. As the issue of Benjamin Franklin’s diamond snuffbox, a present from Louis XVI showed, a gift might be as troublingly influential as a bribe.
Cap filling, in other words, is beyond rebuttal as a university practice. What is significant is the form it takes. It can either be subtle, with the old blood and club ties playing a role, greased by donations and a designated background; or it can be more direct, with employees of the university taking a cut, an overt way of exploiting the process.
Yale women’s soccer coach Rudy Meredith, for instance, was of the latter persuasion, supplying what were considered by the university “fraudulent athletic endorsements” for two applicants. One failed to get in; another was admitted around January 2018, with parents paying Rick Singer, the grand poohbah of the operation, $1.2 million for the facilitation of acceptance. A good slice of $400,000 went to Meredith.
The Boston US Attorney’s Office got wind of the matter. A federal grand jury subpoenaed the Yale Office of the General Counsel on November 16, 2018 requesting information about Meredith. Full details were revealed once the charges were unsealed on March 12 this year.
Singer has made a pretty sum from such transactions in what appears to be the largest, and longest running college admissions scandal in US history, his modus operandi being the counterfeit athletic and exam profile (doctored photos and exam results, bogus special needs certificates). Other colleges, coaches and parents, have found themselves wading in the pool of accusation, though Southern California seems to be ground zero in that regard. Half of the 32 parents who found their way into the FBI affidavit filed in the US District Court in Boston are linked to USC, accused of old fashioned bribery of college entrance exam administrators, varsity coaches and administrators responsible for athletics recruitment and using “the façade of a charitable organization to conceal the nature and source of the bribe payments.”
This Monday, former coaches from the University of Southern California and Georgetown University, part of a select dozen, pleaded not guilty to charges that they had participated in the scheme. The list reads like a thick who’s who of the establishment gone south: former USC women’s soccer coaches Ali Khoroshahin and Laura Janke; former USC water polo coach Jovan Vavic, and Gordon Ernst, Georgetown’s former head tennis coach. They are said to be part of an enterprise of 50 individuals, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, part of a racketeering project worth $25 million.
As is the nature of such processes, universities retreat behind an assembled body of rules and spectral processes that are supposed to guarantee accountability. Yale’s attempt to do so in this latest college admissions scandal fails to disappoint.
“On the very rare occasion when Yale receives an allegation that a current student included false information in application,” explains the university in a statement, “Yale gives the student the opportunity to address the allegation.”
If the university deems the allegation true, “the student’s admission is rescinded, based on language in the application that requires applicants to affirm that everything in the application is true and complete.”
The university also denies, in an effort to ward off speculation on the subject, that there is “no evidence that a student admitted under this scheme has graduated.” Traditional, indirect ways of influence tend to be then norm; the recent US college admissions scheme was simply more daring, and brazen, in its implementation. It was daylight looting.
It all comes down to style and method. Daniel Golden had already shown in his 2006 publication The Price of Admission, that the wealthy in the US purchase a pathway for under-achieving offspring into elite universities via enormous, tax-deductible donations and the exertion of influence on appropriate university committees. Take a certain Charles Kushner, New Jersey real estate developer, who pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University in 1998. Son Jared, hardly jaw dropping with his SAT or GPA scores, was duly admitted, the rate of acceptance then being one out of nine.
That decision was greeted with consternation at The Frisch School in Paramus, NJ, Jared’s boyhood stomping ground.
“There was,” opined a former official of the school, “no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard.”
The backfill response, often coming from a spokesperson for Kushner Companies, has always been consistent: there was no link between Charles Kushner’s gift, and his son’s admission.
Similar principles, at a stretch, apply to Oxbridge, but the British tend to prefer the subtlety that comes with hypocrisy and class impenetrability. As UK Professor David Andress wondered when looking at the US example, “Why these people didn’t just make strategic donations, perfectly legally, to achieve the same end…” And so he tails off; thickness can only go so far. What is needed there is an additional good “blag” factor, a heftily billed private school education, and good family ties. Exaggerated sporting achievement can help.
This is the issue of corruption in universities who, like any bureaucratic institution linked with establishment values, desire money and possess a self-subsisting interest in supporting its favourites. Where education is not universally free, favours will be done, or least be seen to be done. Appropriate backs will be rubbed. Regulations written in mosaic stone will be broken if needed. In some cases, no law need ever be broken; appearances will triumph.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
EAT-Lancet Report is One-sided, Not Backed by Rigorous Science
Nutrition Coalition | January 29, 2019
[…]
Report Based on Fundamentally Weak Science
This report is disturbing on a number of fronts. Most importantly, its diet lacks the backing of any rigorous science. Indeed, it does not cite a single clinical trial to support the idea that a vegan/vegetarian diet promotes good health or fights disease. Instead EAT-Lancet relies entirely on a type of science that is weak and demonstrably unreliable, called epidemiology. This kind of science has been shown to be accurate, when tested in rigorous clinical trials, only 0-20% of the time.[1][2] One wouldn’t bet on a football team with such poor odds, so why bet on the public health this way?
Even the most recent U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which clearly favored a vegetarian diet and recommended it to the entire U.S. public, found, in their review of the scientific evidence, that the power of this diet to fight any nutrition-related disease was “limited”— the lowest rank given for available data.
In the same vein, there is no rigorous (clinical trial) data on humans to show that red meat causes any kind of disease. This data can been seen in a 2-pager that The Nutrition Coalition published last week, in tandem with the EAT-Lancet report.
A One-sided Commission and No Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest
The EAT-Lancet commission was portrayed as the product of 37 scientists from around the world. However, in reality, the authors represented a very narrow range of opinions: 31 out of the 37 (>80%) had established published records as being in favor of vegetarian/vegan or anti-meat diets. This includes seven from a Stockholm think tank (and EAT co-founder) dedicated to reducing/eliminating meat for environmental reasons. Thus, although readers are given the impression that the EAT authors have been objectively convened to comprehensively evaluate the science, the reality is that this group was one-sided from the start. Instead of grappling with the very real scientific controversies that exist on these topics, the group considered virtually none of the science that contradicts their views.
On diet and health, the lead commissioner was Walter Willett, professor at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, and his extensive, significant potential conflicts of interest are published in a separate, 8-page document here.
It is also a matter of concern that none of the authors’ potential conflicts of interest were disclosed by The Lancet, an apparent violation of its standard disclosure policies.
The EAT Diet is Nutritionally Insufficient…
The EAT-Lancet diet is not only nutritionally deficient, it has been likened by some observers to the macrobiotic fad diets popular in the 1970s that resulted in severe protein and nutritional deficiencies.
UK researcher Zoe Harcombe, Ph.D., analyzed the EAT-Lancet diet and found it to provide only 17% of retinol (needed for eye health), 5% of our Vitamin D needs, 22% of sodium, 67% of potassium, 55% of calcium, and 88% of iron. Yet low as these numbers are, they would be worse still if one were to factor in the reality that most of these nutrients are less “bio-available” to humans when consumed from plant rather than animal sources.
The EAT diet is also deficient in Vitamin B12, which can only be obtained from animal foods. EAT’s note in the table below states that animal sources of protein can equally well be replaced with “plant proteins” but does not note that doing so would make the diet far more deficient in B12, which is crucial for the healthy growth and cognitive development of children, as well as the ongoing health of adults.
Thus, this diet is fairly sure to lead to malnutrition and ill health. Read Harcombe’s blog post on the subject here.
… And Inadequate in Protein
EAT-Lancet recommends .8g protein per kilogram of body weight, but many populations, including children, the overweight/obese, and most people over age 40, need more. Thus, the EAT-Lancet diet overlooks the majority of the world’s population.
EAT-Lancet also recognizes that animal foods contain the most complete proteins, ideal for human growth and health yet does not recommend that people consume these superior proteins in significant amounts. Instead, EAT recommends incomplete plant protein sources, such as beans and nuts.
Dietician and Nutritionist Diana Rodgers, points out in a blog post that in addition to being less complete, plant sources of protein come at a high cost, namely much higher calorie counts. She writes,
“To get the same amount [30 grams] of protein in a 4oz steak (181 calories) you’d need to eat 12oz of kidney beans (almost one pound!) plus a cup of rice, which equals 638 calories, and 122g of carbs.
“What about nuts? To get the 30g of protein from almonds, you would need to consume a little over 1 cup of chopped almonds, which is over 850 calories and 75g of fat. YIKES!”
The EAT Diet
This Report is Not for Children, Teen Girls, the Aged, Malnourished, etc…And For Everyone Else, You Still Need to Buy Supplements
Georgia Ede, MD, in Psychology Today, digs into the report and uncovers a number of uncomfortable facts.
Among her findings:
—Although the report says complete proteins cause cancer, it provides no evidence for that statement.
—And:
“The authors admit that it [the report] falls short of providing proper nutrition for growing children, adolescent girls, pregnant women, aging adults, the malnourished, and the impoverished — and that even those not within these special categories will need to take supplements to meet their basic [nutritional] requirements.”
EAT Diet Recommends A Fudge Pop Tart’s Worth of Sugar/Day?
One would think from the report’s language that its recommendations are all about eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, but in fact, EAT advises:
—Only 3% of calories from vegetables. Add the “potatoes/cassava” category, and the total creeps up to 5%
—Only 5% of calories from fruit
This does not appear to be a “more fruits and vegetables” report.
Rather, EAT promotes 8 teaspoons of sugar a day, which is about the equivalent of a fudge pop tart.
It also promotes 14% of calories as “unsaturated fats” which are defined as equal amounts of “olive, soybean, rapeseed, sunflower, and peanut oil.” Other than olive oil, these are all unnatural, industrial products that only entered the food supply about a century ago. Fourteen percent of calories in vegetable oils is far more than the average American now consumes.
Mostly, EAT recommends massive amounts of grains (rice, wheat, corn, soy, etc). According to EAT, these should comprise fully one third, or 32% of daily calories. Some 51% of a person’s daily calories should be consumed as carbohydrates, says EAT, according to Harcombe’s calculations.
Thus, we have a report recommending lots of wheat, rice, corn, soy and more sugar than most national guidelines. This diet is virtually toxic to people with diabetes or pre-diabetes and dangerously high in sugars for people struggling with obesity, heart diseases, fatty liver disease and other nutrition-related conditions.
If not for the public health, then whom does this diet serve?
The Corporate Interests Behind EAT-Lancet
EAT-Lancet was launched simultaneously in 40 cities with a massive PR budget. Who funded all this? All we know is that EAT has an extensive array of corporate partnerships.
Tim Rees of Nutritional Therapy Online created a table of all the EAT-Lancet corporate funders. These include;
—Seven Big Pharma companies, with drugs for many nutrition-related diseases
—About 20 Big Food companies, including Kellogg’s, Nestle, and PepsiCo.
Note that the companies selling highly processed foods, like Nestle and Kellogg’s are essentially vegan. The vast majority of packaged foods sold on the inner aisles of supermarkets—cookies, crackers, chips (crisps), candy, cereals—are made up of the same basic ingredients: soy, corn, grains, sugars, and salt. This is vegan. These companies would presumably like nothing more than to put a big green V on their packages to give them a reason to advertise their foods as healthy.
Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies profit from selling drugs, insulin, and devices that sick people need. Would these companies be backing EAT if this diet were to genuinely improve health, reduce disease, and thus, shrink their profits? It’s hard to imagine.
Moreover, also supporting the EAT-Lancet report are:
—14 chemical companies, including BASF, the “world’s largest chemical company.”
What is the interest of these companies in supporting a report targeting animal agriculture as the main driver of global warming if not—perhaps—to displace attention away from their own polluting activities? Or perhaps they make the pesticides that grow crops.
One cannot know the answer to all these questions, but the massive level of corporate backing clearly raises serious questions about the interests behind this report, especially when there is no rigorous evidence to support the idea that this diet promotes human health and quite a bit of evidence to show that it causes harm.
The Globe-Trotting Billionaires Behind the Report
The founder and executive chair of EAT, vegan Norwegian billionaire, Gunhild Stordalen, says she has a passion for preventing climate change. Shortly after publication of EAT-Lancet, however, she was revealed to be the owner of a $26 million private jet which she and her husband regularly fly to exotic locations around the world—thus emitting vast amounts of their own greenhouse gasses (GHG) and causing some observers to wonder if Stordalen was unwittingly enacting a modern-day version of “let them eat cake.”
The Mirror UK published, “Globe-trotting billionaire behind campaign to save planet accused of blatant hypocrisy.”
On Twitter, one observer did some calculations:
Thanks to Belinda Fettke and her article for this find.
One could ask, further, about the GHG emitted by the whole EAT-Lancet project. Thirty-seven authors from 16 countries were gathered together for at least two scientific meetings, followed in 2019 by at least 5 “launch” meetings by the Commission, as well as a further massive roll-out last week in 35 sites worldwide.
A second EAT-Lancet paper, released January 27th, involved 43 authors from countries around the globe, who were gathered for 9 “workshops” and 3 meetings in various locations worldwide. How much GHG was required to enable all this travel?
Although many researchers claim that planes, trains, and automobiles do not produce as much greenhouse gases as do cows, there are contrary views on this topic. For instance, as the Food and Agriculture Organization recently pointed out, the GHG of livestock have been calculated to include both direct and indirect costs, whereas the transport sector has been analyzed looking only at direct costs. I’m not an expert in the environmental issues here, but this does seem like a worrisome oversight.
One Other Significant Funder of EAT-Lancet: The Wellcome Trust
Among the complex network of funders behind EAT, the Wellcome Trust is a principal one, for the report’s scientific component (as opposed to the worldwide PR). The trust, with $29.2 billion in assets, is funded by the Wellcome family and its pharmaceutical fortune. This family also has a three-generation history in the 7th Day Adventist Church, including a member—the father of the trust’s founder—who was a church elder. The 7th Day Adventist Church promotes vegetarianism as part of its religious beliefs and has pursued an aggressive mission to spread these beliefs and practices around the world. This raises the disturbing question of whether a religious agenda might be informing the EAT-Lancet report.
EAT-Lancet Aggressive in its Policy Recommendations: Wants Near-Vegan Diet for All
EAT-Lancet states that “the scale of change to the food system is unlikely to be successful if left to the individual or the whim of consumer choice.” [Emphasis added.] Thus, the report advocates:
“hard policy interventions include laws, fiscal measures, subsidies and penalties, trade reconfiguration, and other economic and structural measures…. [C]ountries and authorities should not restrict themselves to narrow measures or soft interventions. Too often policy remains at the soft end of the policy ladder.”
Because meat taxes seems to be the intervention of choice, stay tuned for those… and other measures intervening in our daily choices about what to eat.
There’s a Better, Evidence-based Way Forward
In all, EAT-Lancet has every indication of being the product of international industrialist interests, from processed food companies, whose products provoke nutrition-related diseases, to pharmaceutical companies, whose profits are fueled by those diseases, to the world’s chemical companies, whose interests in environmental well-being are elusive. The common cause of these industries appears now to be scapegoating meat for all environmental and health ills. And they have found willing advocates in the committed, idealistic vegans and environmentalists who deeply believe in these solutions.
We should return to the fundamentals of good science. Establishing policy based on weak science leads to unintended consequences as we’ve seen time and again—with the mistaken policies recommending hormone replacement therapy, caps on cholesterol, and more. Such policies actually ended up causing far more harm than good, as the EAT diet seems bound to do.
What does the rigorous science say about the best way to reverse the epidemics of obesity and diabetes (and more) now crippling our nations? The rigorous evidence does not support a near-vegan diet. The answer must include animal foods, since they naturally contain the nutrients needed for healthy human growth and development.
Our way forward should be to gather a group of experts who could objectively identify the rigorous clinical trial data on healthy diets, and then work together to make those diets sustainable.
Footnotes:
[1] 0%, analysis specifically of nutritional epidemiology: https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2011.00506.x
[2] 20%: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16014596
Diesel driving ban in Stuttgart provokes Yellow Vest protests
Press TV – February 3, 2019
Hundreds of Germans have donned yellow vests to match protesters in France, demonstrating in the bastion of Germany’s car industry in Stuttgart against a recent driving ban on older diesels.
The protest came after organizers asked people to hit the streets clad in the yellow high-visibility vests that have defined months of protests in France — themselves triggered by an increase in tax on diesel.
“The French are an example to us, because they dared take to the streets to protect their rights,” organizer Vasilos Topalis told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Stuttgart is home of Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler, Volkswagen subsidiary Porsche and the world’s biggest car parts supplier Bosch.
Since January 1, only diesel vehicles meeting the Euro 5 emissions standard are allowed into Stuttgart, with efforts underway to implement similar driving bans in many German cities.
Topalis said tens of thousands of people are affected by the bans and cannot afford to buy a new car. “What’s happening to people is unjust,” he added.
The protest came as France’s yellow vest protesters returned to the streets Saturday to keep up the pressure on the government and decry the number of people being injured by police during demonstrations.
Multiple protests took place in Paris and other cities to denounce President Emmanuel Macron’s economic policies, which they view as favoring the rich, for the 12th straight weekend of demonstrations.
The government says around 2,000 people have been injured in protests since the movement began Nov. 17 and 10 people have died in traffic accidents related to yellow vest actions.
The protesters paid homage to those injured since the onset of the rallies on November 17.
Protesters and rights groups have denounced the French police’s response to the yellow vests marches as “excessive,” including their use of controversial high-velocity rubber bullets.
France’s Council of State, however, ruled Friday that security forces have a right to use them for crowd control.
Meanwhile, a bill is under debate in the French parliament to strengthen measures against protesters whom they view as troublemakers. Rights groups and opposition lawmakers say the bill goes too far in restricting the right to protest.
The bill would authorize police to prevent people they see as a serious threat to public order from taking part in protests. It would also make it a crime for protesters to conceal their faces during demonstrations.
Brits and the Holocaust
Not to see that Gaza is a concentration camp is a Holocaust denial!
By Gilad Atzmon | January 29, 2019
The British and Jewish press reported yesterday that a poll released to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day found that “1 in 20 British adults does not believe the Holocaust happened and 12% think the scale of the genocide has been exaggerated.”
Nearly half of those questioned said they did not know “how many Jews were murdered by the Nazis and one in five people thought fewer than two million Jews were killed.”
This is proof, once again, that the more they dogmatically insist on trumpeting the primacy of Jewish suffering, the less people are interested in the Jewish plight. The same principle applies to anti-Semitism, the more Jewish institutions bemoan the tragedy, opposition to Jewry grows in the Kingdom and beyond.
Speaking for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, which commissioned the poll, Olivia Marks-Woldman told the BBC that: “without a basic understanding of this recent history, we are in danger of failing to learn where a lack of respect for difference and hostility to others can ultimately lead.” If Marks-Woldman is truly concerned about ‘respect for difference and hostility to others’ she may want to point out what she and the Trust have done to stop the holocaust now taking place in Palestine at the hands of no other than the Jewish State.
Karen Pollack, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said in a statement that the survey showed “the need to increase education about the genocide.” How many more hours should BBC Radio 4 dedicate to the Nazi era and Jewish suffering bearing in mind that we have only 24 each day?
The Jewish press also noted that the poll results are consistent with CNN’s recent findings that one-fifth of Europeans believe Jewish people have too much influence in finance and politics, and one-third said they knew nothing at all or “just a little” about the Holocaust. I wonder if this means that it is time that Jewish institutions examine themselves and try to figure out what is at play here. Why are Europeans ‘denying’ the Jewish past? How is it possible that the more time, effort and money are invested in ‘Holocaust education’ the ‘less educated’ people seem to be?
But here’s the twist. The Times Of Israel reported yesterday that last December “a major European report found nearly 90 percent of European Jews feel that anti-Semitism has increased in their home countries.” Apparently the most common ‘anti-Semitic’ statements Jews heard were “comparisons between Israelis and the Nazis with regard to the Palestinians.”
Perhaps the Holocaust Memorial Trust ought to be reassured by this positive finding. Not only do Europeans and Brits understand the Holocaust, they manage to apply its message in a universal manner. They are disgusted by fascism, racism, ethnic cleansing and oppression and happen to see Israel’s leadership as the Nazis of our time. I accept that this may be offensive for some Jews, but it does indicate that the most important lesson of the Holocaust, the importance of opposition to racism and oppression, is well and widely understood.
Fighting Poverty with a Hate Map?
By Eve Mykytyn | OffGuardian | January 23, 2019
The name, ‘The Southern Poverty Law Center’ (SPLC) is misleading. The SPLC does little to alleviate poverty, its own stated goals are: fighting hate, teaching tolerance and seeking justice. At the moment, the SPLC lists its top activity as attempting to remove confederate statues and symbols. This is consistent with the activity for which the SPLC is best known, its annual hate map in which it locates so-called ‘hate’ groups on a map of the United States. How is it that one of the best funded poverty law centers acts as an arbitrar of hate instead of as an advocate for the poor?
The term ‘Poverty Law’ usually refers to the more mundane practice of representing poor people who are often un or under represented. But the SPLC’s goals are more lofty, here’s how Mark Potok, a Senior Fellow at SPLC described his mission.
It’s not what most in the media think. Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes…Our criteria for a ‘hate group’… have nothing to do with criminality or violence or any kind of guess we’re making about ‘this group could be dangerous.’ It’s strictly ideological. I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them”
Each year, the SPLC advertises over 900 hate groups on its hate map. Author Laird Wilcox says the SPLC “Has specialized [in] a highly developed and ritualized form of defamation … a way of harming and isolating people by denying their humanity and trying to convert them into something that deserves to be hated and eliminated. They accuse others of this but utilize their enormous resources to practice it on a mass scale themselves.”
To begin with, the SPLC uses a very loose definition of a hate group as:
an organization that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”
They bolster this with the false claim that the FBI uses a similar definition of hate crime:
[A] criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.”
But the FBI’s words do not refer to practices or beliefs, they characterize an actual crime which may have been inspired by bias.
Without advocating hate or prejudice I find the SPLC’s categories hilarious. They are: Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazi, White Nationalist, Racist Skinhead, Christian Identity, Neo-Confederate, Black Separatist, Anti-LGBT, Anti-Muslim, General Hate (Anti-Immigrant, Hate Music, Holocaust Denial and Radical Traditional Catholicism) and Other Hate (a grab bag of ‘hateful’ ideologies). Query, if a neo-nazi gets a haircut will he become a racist skinhead or a neo-confederate?
One ‘hate’ group, Radical Traditional Catholicism, are excoriated for blaming Jews for the killing of Christ and “They also embrace extremely conservative social ideals with respect to women.” Is this a hate group? Ultra Orthodox Jews have some pretty vile thoughts about non Jews and also adhere to extremely conservative social ideals for women. Why aren’t the Lubovitches, for instance, on the list?
Holocaust denial is the only hate group defined by simply questioning authority. SPLC claims such groups “only pretend to be interested in historical research.” Instead, even the claim that Jews may have died in ways other than the gas chambers form [hate groups] because they are used simply “to rehabilitate the German Nazis’ image as part of a bid to make the ideology of national socialism more acceptable.” A number of historians investigating World War II might find this assertion surprising.
“The SPLC’s list is wildly inflated,” said Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research at the Anti-Defamation League. The National Socialist Movement, for example, was listed 49 times in the 2015 Hate Map, since the count included each of the NSM’s individual chapters. The SPLC also counts single individuals as a group or chapter. The result is a count totally at odds with Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics. Hate crimes plummeted 24% between 1998 and 2013, according to the FBI. Yet the SPLC claims the number of hate groups in the U.S. shot up by 75% during this same period.
The SPLC has so many categories of ‘hate’ and those categories are political as much as violent. So is there any actual harm from a listing on the hate map?
There was when Floyd Lee Corkins entered the Family Research Council intending to kill as many as possible because “he found us listed as a hate group on the SPLC website,” said executive vice president retired Gen. William Boykin.
We and others like us who are on this ‘hate map’ believe that this is very reckless behavior… The only thing that we have in common is that we are all conservative organizations…”
Gurnee IL is an unlikely location for a hate group. A prosperous suburb of 30,000, the town is careful with its reputation with tourists as it is home to Six Flags Great America amusement park, the Gurnee Mills indoor shopping mall and the water park, Great Wolf Lodge.
But the SPLC bestowed upon Gurnee the label that makes small-town officials sweat. Towns usually earn their reputations as harbors for hate groups in more public ways. They may be unlucky enough to be the place the Klan decides to march and someone later dies (Charlottesville) or be home to the media-trolling Westboro Baptist Church (Topeka, Kansas). But for towns like Gurnee, designation as one of the 917 locales on SPLC’s Hate Map comes without warning or explanation.
When the town asked the self appointed cartographers of hate to remedy the listing they were told, “I know it is disturbing to find hate groups in your community but I don’t think that should be seen as a reflection of what I am sure is a wonderful community.” Sorry, but the map is only updated once a year. “Call back in January.” The town protested that its police had searched and failed to find a hate group in Gurnee. SPLC Intelligence Chief Heidi Beirich would not budge. “Even though the police couldn’t locate them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”
Given the low threshold for inclusion on the list, it is not surprising that other towns were included for questionable reasons. In 2004, Olathe, Colorado earned a white hood icon when a self-proclaimed “international imperial wizard” from Indiana told a Denver newspaper that a chapter in Olathe, “a little Klan klavern,” had asked him to come and speak. Neither he nor any of the town officials could name any of the members. Olathe stayed on SPLC’s list for three years.
Amana, Iowa, was placed on the hate map when someone at the SPLC spotted a chat thread on the Daily Stormer. Someone with the screen name “Concerned Troll” proposed a neo-Nazi “book club” meeting in an Amana café. No one in Amana was able to confirm to the SPLC whether or not the meeting actually took place, but that was enough to earn the corn-carpeted state its only swastika.
But still, Beidich worries more about undercounting than over inclusion. She thinks the undercount groups hide in shadows. She does not explain why listing what are ‘un’ hate groups, by her own criteria, will cause hate groups to emerge from the shadows. In fact, it is not clear why we are not all better off if a ‘hate’ group stays hidden.
French Democracy Dead or Alive?
The Gilets Jaunes in 2019
Gilets Jaunes song performed at French traffic circle: Les Gentils et les Méchants
By Diana Johnstone | Unz Review | January 11, 2019
Paris, France – French Democracy Dead or Alive? Or perhaps one should say, buried or revived? Because for the mass of ordinary people, far from the political, financial, media centers of power in Paris, democracy is already moribund, and their movement is an effort to save it. Ever since Margaret Thatcher decreed that “there is no alternative”, Western economic policy is made by technocrats for the benefit of financial markets, claiming that such benefits will trickle down to the populace. The trickle has largely dried up, and people are tired of having their needs and wishes totally ignored by an elite who “know best”.
President Emmanuel Macron’s New Year’s Eve address to the nation made it perfectly clear that after one unconvincing stab at throwing a few crumbs to the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) protest movement, he has determined to get tough.
France is entering a period of turmoil. The situation is very complex, but here are a few points to help grasp what this is all about.
- The METHODS
The Yellow Vests gather in conspicuous places where they can be seen: the Champs-Elysées in Paris, main squares in other cities towns, and the numerous traffic circles on the edge of small towns. Unlike traditional demonstrations, the Paris marches were very loose and spontaneous, people just walking around and talking to each other, with no leaders and no speeches.
The absence of leaders is inherent in the movement. All politicians, even friendly ones, are mistrusted and no one is looking for a new leader.
People are organizing their own meetings to develop their lists of grievances and demands.
In the village of Commercy, Lorraine, a half hour drive from Domrémy where Jeanne d’Arc was born, inhabitants gather to read their proclamation. Six of them read in turns, a paragraph each, making it quite clear that they want no leaders, no special spokesperson. They sometimes stumble over a word, they are not used to speaking in public like the TV talking heads. Their “Second appeal of the Gilets Jaunes de Commercy invites others to come to Commercy on January 26-27 for an “assembly of assemblies”.
- The DEMANDS
The people who first went out in the streets wearing Yellow Vests last November 17 were ostensibly protesting against a hike in gasoline and diesel taxes that would hit people in rural France the hardest. Obsessed with favoring “world cities”, the French government has taken one measure after another at the expense of small towns and villages and the people who live there. That was just the last straw. The movement rapidly moved on to the basic issue: the right of the people to have a say in measures taken that affect their lives. Democracy, in a word.
For decades, parties of the left and of the right, whatever their campaign speeches, once in office pursue policies dictated by “the markets”. For this reason, people have lost confidence in all parties and all politicians and are demanding new ways to get their wishes heard.
The fuel tax was soon forgotten as the list of demands grew longer. Critics of the movement note that achieving so many demands is quite impossible. It’s no use paying attention to popular demands, because the silly people ask for everything and its opposite.
That objection is answered by what has quickly emerged as the single overriding demand of the movement: the Citizens’ Initiative Referendum (CIR).
- The REFERENDUM
This demand illustrates the good sense of the movement. Rather than making a “must” list, the GJ merely ask that the people be allowed to choose, and the referendum is the way to choose. The demand is for a certain number of signatories – perhaps 700,000, perhaps more – to gain the right to call a referendum on an issue of their choice. The right to a CIR exists in Switzerland, Italy and California. The idea horrifies all those whose profession it is to know best. If the people vote, they will vote for all sorts of absurd things, the better-knowers observe with a shudder.
A modest teacher in a junior college in Marseilles, Etienne Chouard, has been developing for decades ideas on how to organize direct democracy, with the referendum at its center. His hour has come with the Yellow Vests. He insists that a referendum must always be held after a long debate and time for reflection, to avoid emotional spur-of-the-moment decisions. Such a referendum requires honest, independent media which are not all owned by special interests. It requires making sure that politicians who make the laws follow the popular will expressed in the referendum. All this suggests the need for a people’s constitutional convention.
The referendum is a bitter point in France, a powerful silent underlying cause of the whole Gilets Jaunes movement. In 2005, President Chirac (unwisely from his point of view) called for a popular referendum on ratification of the proposed Constitution of the European Union, certain it would be approved. The political class, with a few exceptions, went into full rhetoric, claiming a prosperous future as a new world power under the new Constitution and warning that otherwise Europe might be plunged back into World Wars I and II. However, ordinary citizens organized an extraordinary movement of popular self-education, as groups met to pour through the daunting legalistic documents, elucidating what they meant and what they implied. On May 29, 2005, with a turnout of 68%, the French voted 55% to reject the Constitution. Only Paris voted heavily in favor.
Three years later, the National Assembly – that is, politicians off all parties – voted to adopt virtually the same text, which in 2009 became the Treaty of Lisbon.
That blow to the clearly expressed popular will produced such disillusion that many backed helplessly away from politics. Now they are coming back.
- The VIOLENCE
From the start, the government has reacted with violence, in an apparent desire to provoke responding violence in order to condemn the movement as violent.
An army of police, dressed like robots, have surrounded and blocked groups of peaceful Yellow Vests, drowning them in clouds of teargas and firing flash balls directly at protesters, seriously wounding hundreds (no official figures). A number of people have lost an eye or a hand. The government has nothing to say about this.
On the third Saturday of protest, this army of police was unable to stop – or under orders to allow – a large number of hoodlums or Black Blocs (who knows?) to infiltrate the movement and smash property, vandalize shops, set fire to trash cans and parked cars, providing the world media with images proving that the Yellow Vests are dangerously violent.
Despite all this provocation, the Gilets Jaunes have remained remarkably calm and determined. But there are bound to be a few people who lose their tempers and try to fight back.
- The BOXER
On the 8th Saturday, January 5, a squad of plexiglass-protected police were violently attacking Gilets Jaunes on a bridge over the Seine when a big guy lost his temper, emerged from the crowd and went on the attack. With his fists, he beat down one policeman and caused the others to retreat. This amazing scene was filmed. You could see Yellow Vests trying to hold him back, but Rambo was unstoppable.
It turned out that this was Christophe Dettinger, a French Rom, former light heavyweight boxing champion of France. His nickname is “the Gypsy of Massy”. He got away from the scene, but made a video before turning himself in. “I reacted badly”, he said, when he saw police attacking women and other defenseless people. He urged the movement to go ahead peacefully.
Dettinger faces seven years in prison. Within a day, his defense fund had gathered 116,433 euros. The government shut it down – on what legal pretext I don’t know. Now a petition circulates on his behalf.
- The SLANDER
In his New Year’s Eve address, Macron patronizingly scolded his people telling them that “you can’t work less and earn more” – as if they all aspired to spending their lives lounging on a yacht and watching stock prices rise and fall.
Then he issued his declaration of war:
“These days I have seen unthinkable things and heard the unacceptable.” Apparently alluding to the few opposition politicians who dare sympathize with the protesters, he chastised those who pretend to “speak for the people”, but are only the “spokesmen for a hateful mob going after elected representatives, police, journalists, Jews, foreigners and homosexuals. It is simply the negation of France.”
The Gilets Jaunes haven’t been “going after” anybody. The police have been “going after” them. People have indeed spoken up vigorously against camera crews of channels that systematically distort the movement.
Not a word has been heard from the movement against foreigners or homosexuals.
The key word is Jews.
Qui veut noyer son chien l’accuse de la rage. (French proverb).
As the French saying goes, whoever wants to drown his dog claims he has rabies. Today whoever wants to ruin a career, take vengeance on a rival, disgrace an individual or destroy a movement accuses her, him, or it of antisemitism.
So, faced with a rising democratic movement, playing the “antisemitism” card was inevitable. It was almost a sure thing statistically. In almost any random batch of hundreds of thousands of people, you might find one or two who have something negative to say about a Jew. That’ll do it. The media hawks are on the outlook. The slightest incident can be used to suggest that the real motive of the movement is to revive the Holocaust.
This gently ironic little song, performed on one of France’s traffic circles, contrasts the “nice” establishment with the “bad” ordinary folk. It is a huge hit on YouTube. It gives the tone of the movement. Les Gentils et les Méchants.
It didn’t take long for this merry number to be accused of antisemitism. Why? Because it was ironically dedicated to two of the very most virulent critics of the Gilets Jaunes: May ’68 star Daniel Cohn-Bendit and old “new philosopher” Bernard-Henri Lévy. The new generation can’t stand them. But wait, they happen to be Jewish. Aha! Anti-Semitism!
- The REPRESSION
Faced with what government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux described as “agitators” and “insurrectionists” who want to “overthrow the government”, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced a new “law to better protect the right to demonstrate”. Its main measure: heavily punish organizers of a demonstration whose time and place have not had official approval.
In fact, the police had already arrested 33-year-old truck driver Eric Drouet for organizing a small candle ceremony in honor of the movement’s casualties. There have been many other arrests, with no information coming out about them. (Incidentally, over the holidays, hoodlums in the banlieues of several cities carried out their ritual burning of parked cars, with no particular publicity or crackdown. Those were cars of working class people who need them to go to work, not the precious cars in the rich section of Paris whose destruction caused such scandal.)
On January 7, Luc Ferry, a “philosopher” and former Minister of Youth, Education and Research, gave a radio interview on the very respectable Radio Classique in which he declared: “The police are not given the means to end this violence. It’s unbearable. Listen, frankly, when you see guys kick a poor policemen when he’s down, that’s enough! Let them use their arms once and for all, basta! […] As I recall, we have the world’s fourth army, capable of putting an end to this garbage.”
Ferry called on Macron to make a coalition with the Republicans in order to push through his “reforms”.
Last month, in a column against the Citizens’ Initiative Referendum, Ferry wrote that “the current disparaging of experts and criticism of elitism is the worst calamity of our times.”
- The ANTIFA
Wherever people gather, Antifa groups may pursue their indiscriminate search to root out “fascists”. In Bordeaux last Saturday, Yellow Vests had to fight off an attack by Antifa.
It is now completely clear (as indeed it always has been) that the self-styled “Antifascists” are the watch dogs of the status quo. In their tireless search for “fascists”, the Antifa attack anything that moves. In effect, they protect stagnation. And curiously enough, Antifa violence is tolerated by the same State and the same police who insult, attack and arrest more peaceful demonstrators. In short, the Antifa are the storm troopers of the current system.
- The MEDIA
Be skeptical. At least in France, mainstream media are solidly on the side of “order”, meaning Macron, and foreign media tend to echo what national media write and say. Also, as a general rule, when it comes to France, the Anglophone media often get it wrong.
- The END
It is not in sight. This may not be a revolution, but it is a revelation of the real nature of “the system”. Power lies with a technocracy in the service of “the Markets”, meaning the power of finance capital. This technocracy aspires to remake human society, our own societies and those all over the planet, in the interests of a certain capitalism. It uses economic sanctions, overwhelming propaganda and military force (NATO) in a “globalization” project that shapes people’s lives without their consent. Macron is the very embodiment of this system. He was chosen by that famous elite to carry through the measures dictated by “the Markets”, enforced by the European Union. He cannot give in. But now that people are awake to what is going on, they won’t stop either. For all the lamented decline in the school system, the French people today are as well-educated and reasonable as any population can be expected to be. If they are incapable of democracy, then democracy is impossible.
To be continued…
Priorities? Only 14 MPs showed up to debate ‘extreme poverty’ in the UK
RT | January 9, 2019
Ending poverty doesn’t seem to be a top priority for British MPs, as only 14 of them showed up to attend a parliamentary debate on the UN report urging the government to address the burning problem.
MPs were supposed to debate the findings of a United Nations report on ‘Extreme Poverty and Human Rights in Northern Ireland’ on Monday, but the House of Commons remained almost empty as the debate got underway.
Labour MP Liz McInnes, who did show up, accused the Conservative Party government of showing disdain towards the poor and said that the United States had shown similar disinterest when the UN highlighted poverty there.
“I know that we have a special relationship with the United States, but I think it shames us all that we share that disdain,” McInnes said.
UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty Professor Philip Alston said in November that the level of poverty in the UK risked causing damage to “the fabric of British society” and accused the Conservative government of favoring policies that compounded poverty levels in one of the richest countries in the world. The report said that the level of child poverty in particular in Britain was “not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster.”
Alston said that while the British government focuses on an impending exit from the European Union, it has treated poverty as an “afterthought” — an accusation which seems to be supported by the minimal attendance at Monday’s debate.
There was no sign of Theresa May or even new Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd, who sent a junior minister in her place.
The debate was hosted by Labour’s Shadow Minister for Children, Emma Lewell-Buck MP, who said that 14 million people across the UK live in poverty — one fifth of the population — and accused the government of inflicting “degradation, shame and harm” on the poorest in society.
Conservative MP Justin Tomlinson said the government would consider the report “seriously” but added that it does “not agree with all the points” made by Alston.
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From the Archives
The New Baghdad Pact
By Dr Bouthaina Shaaban | February 23, 2017
A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.
The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue
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- Mearsheimer: Israel Owns Trump
- Mark Levin and Jonathan Pollard Push for Nuking Iran
- TCN: America Enables Israel’s Crimes
- Israel’s Next Leader Will Be Just Like Bibi – but Without the Corruption
- Born into war, raised across borders: The story of Gaza’s premature babies separated from their parents amid Israel’s genocide
- No Tricks Zone
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
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