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US politicians urge Biden to send cluster bombs to Kiev

By Lucas Leiroz | March 28, 2023

Once again, American politicians are pushing for new escalations in the Ukrainian conflict. Now, lawmakers want the Biden regime to supply cluster munitions to the Ukrainian armed forces. This type of measure would be seen as a serious provocation by Russia and would certainly have strong impacts on the battlefield and in the current diplomatic crisis.

Recently, some Republican senators formally asked the government to “not hesitate” to send cluster arms to Ukraine. James Risch and Roger Wickers, both from Mississippi, led the Congress campaign, and were also supported by Michael McCaul, from Texas, and Mike Rogers, from Alabama. According to them, Washington should ship such bombs as quickly as possible to Kiev, ignoring what they think to be “vague concerns about the reaction of allies and partners and unfounded fears of ‘escalation'”.

The pressure comes amid a context of “despair” on the part of the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev and the more pro-war groups of American domestic politics. Faced with the Ukrainian military failure and the imminent Russian victory, despite the systematic sending of weapons by NATO, the only solution seems to be to resort to the use of “non-conventional” arms. In this sense, the use of cluster bombs would be one of the “alternatives”, which is why Ukrainian politicians have asked US congressmen to increase the pressure for the government to allow the export of such equipment.

Cluster bombs are banned in at least 110 countries by a 2008 UN-brokered treaty. These arms are notorious for their fragmentation power. Cluster munitions include countless small projectiles inside. When launched, these bombs explode ejecting projectiles that injure a much greater number of victims than conventional weapons. The most dangerous thing is that many of these small projectiles do not detonate immediately after being ejected, and can remain inactive for a long time, which is why civilians can be mutilated or killed by bomblets that explode long after a conflict ends.

In addition to the absolutely anti-humanitarian aspect of these arms, it is necessary to emphasize that American law prohibits their export in any situation. For the US government to authorize the shipment of cluster munitions to Ukraine, it would be necessary to change national legislation – or simply act illegally. Also, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby had already made it clear that there was no possibility of sending these arms to Kiev, stating that “according to our own policy, we have concerns about the use of those kinds of munitions”.

However, for warmongers, no limits should be respected. Failing to convince the US government directly, the Ukrainians appealed to parliamentarians, who then used their power of political mobilization to form pro-war coalitions and encourage the violation of the country’s laws. Parliamentary pressure is one of the most frequently used mechanisms by Western powers to promote institutional changes in other countries. Now, the US government itself is under pressure from Congress, which echoes the interests of pro-war elites.

On the part of Ukrainians, there is no interest in respecting any humanitarian limits. There are already several reports stating that the Ukrainian armed forces used Soviet-era cluster weapons in civilian residential areas in Donbass since 2014. In March last year, for example, a Tochka-U missile containing cluster munitions killed more than 20 people and injured dozens of civilians in Donetsk. Faced with the collapse of the Ukrainian arsenals, what interests the neo-Nazi regime now is to obtain cluster arms from American stockpiles.

It is important to emphasize that the pressure in Washington comes in parallel with the British decision to send depleted uranium radioactive weapons to Kiev. This reinforces that Western pro-war elites are interested in raising the level of aid to Kiev, openly promoting the shipment of illegal weapons banned by international treaties. The practical result of this will obviously be an unprecedented escalation.

Commenting on the case at a recent press conference, Russia’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Ryabkov, said that American lawmakers do not seem aware of the tragic consequences that sending such armaments would generate. According to him, the very security of NATO countries would be threatened if such a measure were taken – since international tensions would escalate to a point of no return. Ryabkov also warned that this would block any possibility of normalization of relations between Moscow and Washington.

Obviously, Moscow will not remain inert while citizens in the special military operation zone are exposed to attacks with illegal weapons with high destructive power. In order to defend the inhabitants of territories reintegrated into the Russian Federation, extraordinary military measures will certainly be taken, which will have high impacts on the battlefield.

Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.

You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

March 28, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

SURPRISE! JORDAN PETERSON’S “ARC” WAS BUILT FOR (AND BY) BILLIONAIRES

Amazing Polly | March 20, 2023

There is a new Global Council fronted by Jordan Peterson that promises to save us all from the Woke Dystopian Future. But who is behind it? Can you support this work? To do so, visit: https://amazingpolly.net/contact-support.php

Thank you!

March 28, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Moscow calls out US’ rules-based order in Europe

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | MARCH 27, 2023 

Baroness Goldie is an experienced Scottish politician and life peer who served as Leader of the Scottish Conservative Party from 2005 to 2011 and as the UK’s Minister of State for Defence since 2019. She is anything but a party girl like Liz Truss who often had to swallow her indiscreet words betraying ignorance. 

Certainly, Baroness Goldie understood perfectly well the implications of what she put down in a written statement at the House of Lords on March 20 in her answer to Lord Hylton’s seemingly innocuous question: “To ask His Majesty’s Government whether any of the ammunition currently being supplied to Ukraine contains depleted uranium.” (By the way, Lord Hylton is one of 92 hereditary peers elected to remain in the House of Lords; he is currently the longest-serving Crossbench member of the House of Lords, since 1968, and is a dynamic campaigner for peace and the interests of the vulnerable and the marginalised.) 

It is a fair guess that the UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace kept 10 Downing Street informed — and even more important, had prior consultations and concurrence with his US counterpart, Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin — before Baroness Goldie made the statement. 

Both Wallace and Austin are military people and understand why ammunition tipped with “depleted uranium” is needed in the current stage of the proxy war in Ukraine if at all Kiev is to launch a “credible counter-offensive” in spring when the tide of the war has distinctly turned in Russia’s favour. 

Equally, both must be well aware that the legality of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia is still an open issue. In response to NATO’s bombing campaign, former Yugoslavia instituted proceedings before the International Court of Justice on April 29, 1999, against the ten NATO members directly involved in the attack — Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and the US — citing a series of violations of the law of nations (which included the obligation not to use prohibited weapons.) 

Although the ICJ rejected Belgrade’s request for provisional measures, it, nonetheless, declared itself profoundly concerned with the use of force in Yugoslavia, which “under the present circumstances … raises very serious issues of international law.” Suffice to say, the cases brought by Yugoslavia against the NATO respondents still remain on the ICJ’s docket although the petitioner got dismembered. 

Make no mistake, Washington and London are consciously repeating the war crime in the former Yugoslavia. The Anglo-Saxon clique’s  core objective is a calculated escalation of the proxy war that is certain to draw forth a robust reaction by Moscow, as predictable as night follows day. 

Indeed, that is precisely what happened when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Saturday that Russia will deploy its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Putin linked this to a request from Belarus in reaction to Baroness Goldie’s statement in London a week ago. 

More importantly, Putin also drew the analogy of the US placing its tactical nuclear weapons on the territories of the allied NATO countries for decades. 

The EU and NATO went ballistic after Putin’s disclosure. EU’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell said on Sunday called out Moscow’s decision  as “an irresponsible escalation and threat to European security.” He threatened to impose “further sanctions” against Belarus! 

A NATO spokeswoman called Moscow’s decision “dangerous and irresponsible.” Interestingly, though, the Biden administration neatly side-stepped the issue, focusing instead that the US has not seen any signs that Russia has moved nuclear weapons to Belarus or anywhere else! 

In good measure, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby added, “We’ve in fact seen no indication he (Putin) has any intention to use nuclear weapons, period, inside Ukraine.” 

But then, Putin also made it clear that Russia would first complete construction on a storage facility in Belarus for the tactical nuclear weapons by July 1. 

Kirby is fudging. What is the game plan? First, the Anglo-Saxon clique would hope that the issue will create further antagonism in Europe against Russia and Putin personally and would rally European countries behind the Biden administration at a time when fault lines were appearing within the transatlantic alliance over a protracted war in Ukraine that might be catastrophic for European economies. 

Washington is hard-pressed to respond to Putin’s remark that Russia is only doing something that the US has been doing for decades. The point is, a mutual commitment not to deploy nuclear weapons in third countries was one of the proposals Moscow made to Washington in December 2021, alongside a commitment that Ukraine would not join NATO. The US ignored it and precipitated the Russian special military operation in Ukraine. 

The crux of the matter is, as with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the Russian decision on tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus is retaliatory, drawing attention to the US missiles stationed close to its borders. (An estimated 100 nuclear weapons are stored in vaults in five European countries — Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey.) 

Worse still, the US practices a controversial arrangement known as “nuclear sharing”, under which it installs nuclear equipment on fighter jets of select non-nuclear NATO countries and train their pilots to carry out nuclear strike with US nuclear bombs. This is when the US, being a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has promised not to hand over nuclear weapons to other countries, and the non-nuclear countries in the NATO’s sharing arrangement have themselves promised not to receive nuclear weapons from the nuclear weapon states! 

NATO declared last year that seven NATO countries have contributed  dual-capable aircraft to the nuclear sharing mission. These countries are believed to be the US, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey and Greece. And all are signatories to the NPT! 

Welcome to the rules based order! What is perfectly permissible to the “collective West” is forbidden for Russia!

Finally, the diplomatic pirouette has yet another dimension: Britain’s decision to send depleted uranium weaponry to Ukraine is confirming its reputation as the most reckless and unscrupulous state in the whole NATO alliance.

For, there is no question that depleted uranium munitions are radioactive and toxic and their heavy use in the Yugoslavia and Iraq wars has been linked to birth defects and cancers. It has been tied to “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied” in Fallujah, the city subjected to two brutal US sieges during the invasion of Iraq. 

Ironically, the toxicity of depleted uranium munitions has been accepted by many NATO countries and the European Parliament has called for its use to be banned. So, what is Britain up to, behaving like an outlier?

The heart of the matter is that Britain is creating conditions in Europe to base nuclear-armed US bombers in Britain at Lakenheath in Suffolk (which were removed in 1991 in line with the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty.) 

At a time when the peace movement in Britain is moribund, count on the Russian retaliation to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus to trigger calls for yet another tit for tat escalation from warmongers and Russophobes. Expect the US bombers to return to Lakenheath in a near future. 

March 27, 2023 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Best Way to Protect US Troops in Syria

By Ron Paul | March 27, 2023

Last week saw a sharp increase in attacks on US troops occupying northeastern Syria, with a drone strike against a US base blamed on “pro-Iran” forces and a US counter-strike said to have killed at least 19 people. After the US retaliation, another strike by “pro-Iran” forces hit a number of US sites in Syria. It may be just a matter of time before there are more strikes against the 900 US troops based in Syria against Syria’s wishes. One US contractor was killed last time. Next time it could be many more Americans.

What’s behind the sudden escalation? Fundamental changes in the Middle East over the past month have highlighted how indefensible is the continued US occupation of Syria and Iraq.

Take, for example, the recent historic mending of relations between former arch-enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran which was brokered by Washington’s own arch-enemy, China. US policy in the Middle East has long been “divide and conquer,” dating back at least to the Iran/Iraq [“dual containment”] war in the 1980s. US switching sides in that war guaranteed that the maximum amount of blood was spilled and that the simmering hatreds would continue to prevent any kind of lasting peace.

Then the US invaded Iraq twenty years ago and turned Iraq into an Iranian ally. That’s neocon foreign policy for you: a 100 percent failure rate.

So this month China, which is interested in creating a regional transportation corridor that would include Iran, came in and instead of bombing, invading, and occupying – Washington’s modus operandi – actually brokered the restoration of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Republicans and Democrats in the US both love to attack China, but China has achieved what the US has resisted for years: peace in the region. Should we be surprised that the continued US occupation is not welcome in the Middle East?

The United States occupies that huge chunk of Syria where the oil and agriculture is located and the goal appears to be producing profits for US multinational corporations from stolen natural resources and preventing the natural wealth of Syria to be used to rebuild that country. Is it any wonder why the US is so unpopular in the Middle East?

How hypocritical is it that the Biden Administration has spent $100 billion of our dollars to expel Russia from occupying proportionally less territory in Ukraine that Washington occupies in Syria? And Washington claims to stand for the “international rules-based order,” while they decimated an Iraq and Afghanistan that did not attack us, and before that a Serbia that could not have threatened us if it wanted to.

The end of the US occupation of the Middle East is upon us and the sooner we realize that the better. We have no business meddling in their politics, occupying their territory, and stealing their resources. Americans joined the US Military to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, yet they have been manipulated by corrupt DC officials into occupying foreign lands and stealing their oil. Maybe this is why the US military cannot meet its recruitment goals?

Here’s an easy way to protect US forces in Syria from further “Iran-allied” attacks: Bring them home. Tomorrow. Do not wait another day!


Copyright © 2023 by RonPaul Institute.

March 27, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Compensation Claims for Nord Stream Blast After Identifying Responsible Justified: Kremlin

RT | March 27, 2023

Moscow may insist on compensation for the blasts that ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines last autumn, Dmitry Birichevsky, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s department for economic cooperation, said on Monday.

Speaking to RIA Novosti, the diplomat said that Russia did not rule out “the possibility of later raising the issue of compensatory damages over the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines,” which directly connected Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea.

Birichevsky did not say from whom Russia would be demanding payment, nor did he specify in what form or amount it should be.

He noted that after veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh released his bombshell report last month pinning the blame on the US for the sabotage – a claim dismissed in Washington – Russia prepared a resolution urging the UN Security Council to launch an independent international investigation into the matter.

However, Birichevsky claimed that “Western countries are actively sabotaging the work on the draft resolution, claiming that the international investigation lacks ‘added value’.”

Despite this opposition, Russia would continue to push for a “comprehensive and open international investigation,” he said, stressing that Moscow’s representatives should absolutely take part in the process.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov supported a possible push for compensation. He described the claim as “justified,” arguing that the available data “indicate that… such a terrorist attack against critical infrastructure could not have been staged without the involvement of the state and intelligence services.”

In an interview on Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he “fully agrees” with Hersh’s conclusions on who orchestrated the blasts. The American journalist alleged that US President Joe Biden ordered the attack because he did not like the German government’s reluctance to send more military support to Ukraine.

Western media, however, has presented another version of events. Earlier this month, the New York Times claimed, citing sources, that a “pro-Ukrainian group” may have been behind the attack on the pipelines while German media reported that a yacht allegedly used in the sabotage belonged to a Polish-based company owned by two Ukrainians.

Kremlin Press Secretary Peskov has dismissed those reports as “a coordinated hoax” meant to divert attention from the real culprits behind the blasts.

March 27, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

TANTURA (2022)

Video Link

By Syed Zafar Mehdi | Press TV | March 25, 2023

The ‘Butcher of Tantura’, who often bragged about murdering unarmed Palestinians after invading their small hamlet on the Mediterranean coast in the summer of 1948, is dead. He was 96.

Amitzur Cohen was groomed as part of the Zionist terrorist group Lehi and went on to carry out some of the most horrendous crimes against humanity, including the Tantura massacre.

After the illegitimate Zionist entity came into existence in May 1948 as part of the British project to colonize Palestine, hundreds of Palestinian villages and cities were ethnically cleansed and destroyed.

On the intervening night of May 22-23, the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura with a population of around 1,500 was among the last to be ambushed and occupied by the Israeli army’s Alexandroni Brigade, leaving behind a trail of death and destruction.

In his book ‘The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem’, historian Benny Morris writes that the occupying regime forces took the decision to “expel or subdue” native Palestinians in Tantura.

A communique issued by the Israeli military a day after the Tantura massacre brazenly boasted that “hundreds of Arabs and a large quantity of booty fell into our hands”.

As per activists and researchers, more than 200 Palestinians were killed and buried in a mass grave measuring 115 x 13 feet following the carnage carried out by the Zionist terrorist group.

Last year, Israeli media reported the discovery of a mass grave in the village, which prompted calls from Palestinian groups for an international commission to probe the series of massacres that followed the forcible expulsion of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, known popularly as the Nakba, or catastrophe.

An explosive documentary film by Alon Schwarz titled ‘Tantura’, which premiered late last year at the Sundance festival in the US, documented in detail the horrifying details of the colossal tragedy.

One of the vilest testimonies in Schwarz’s film was that of Cohen, the Zionist mass murderer who boastfully spoke about his first months as the Israeli regime soldier and how he killed for sport.

“I do not remember the number of Arabs I killed in 1948. I never counted the number, because I was a murderer, and I did not take any prisoners,” Cohen admitted, bursting into peals of laughter.

“I didn’t count. I had a machine gun with 250 bullets. I can’t say how many,” he said on being asked how many Arab Palestinians he remembered murdering in the events of May 1948.

Cohen eerily and unapologetically acknowledged that if a group of Arabs was standing in front of him, with their hands raised in a show of surrender, he would still shoot them dead.

The testimonies in the documentary film, including that of Cohen, were collected by Teddy Katz, who interviewed 135 people and collected 140 hours as part of his thesis at the University of Haifa in the late 1990s. Katz was later harassed by the Israeli regime for letting skeletons out of the closet.

Cohen, who was a member of the Zionist terrorist group Lehi that eventually took the shape of Israeli military force, had earned notoriety for carrying out complex terrorist operations, including derailing passenger trains and planting landmines on the tracks, as mentioned on the Lehi website.

“Amitzur took part in Lehi operations, such as derailing trains by laying mines on the tracks and blowing up the large railway bridge by Hotel HaCarmel,” the website states, referring to the railway line that linked the coastal Palestinian city of Haifa and Cairo at the time.

According to a report, Cohen joined the Lehi group “to resist and exterminate the Arabs in 1946” although his father and brother were members of the armed Zionist “Haganah” gangs.

“I was looking for work when I was captured by the Zionist underground ideology,” he was quoted as saying in the report. “I was ready for that, to kill without worrying (for consequences).”

On Saturday, the “butcher of Tantura” died at the age of 96 in the Binyamina settlement that he founded in 1922, named after French banker and supporter of Zionism, Benjamin de Rothschild.

Syed Zafar Mehdi is a Tehran-based journalist, political commentator and author. He has reported for more than 13 years from India, Afghanistan, Kashmir and West Asia for leading publications worldwide.

March 27, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

The Cult of the Climate Apocalypse

GLASGOW, SCOTLAND – NOVEMBER 08: Red Rebels join protesters from Extinction Rebellion for a “die in” outside the offices of American asset management firm Mercer on November 08, 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland. As World Leaders meet to discuss climate change at the COP26 Summit, many climate action groups have taken to the streets to protest for real progress to be made by governments to reduce carbon emissions, clean up the oceans, reduce fossil fuel use and other issues relating to global heating. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

BY NICK DIXON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | MARCH 26, 2023

Michael Crowley has written a very interesting piece for Spiked about climate alarmism. I don’t necessarily go along with all the claims about Christianity, but I think we can all agree that Extinction Rebellion is “effectively an apocalyptic cult”. Here’s an excerpt:

Apocalypticism may have developed hand-in-hand with religion and Christianity in particular. But it has persisted as a mode of thinking among certain sections of society, even as Christianity’s influence has waned. Indeed, as societies have become more secular, so apocalyptic thinking has become more secular, too.

We see this today, above all, in the case of environmentalism. For it’s there that apocalyptic projections and predictions are now most at home. Greenism shares with its Biblical precursor an obsession with days of judgement, with vengeance upon the wicked and the dream of a redeemed world. But there’s a vital difference between the Biblical apocalypse and its green iteration. Those to be judged today are not a portion of sinful humanity. No, they are all of humanity. And the redeemed world dreamt of by climate activists is not the kingdom of God promised by earlier apocalyptic narratives. Instead, it is a kingdom of nature, and it is distinctly opposed to humanity. In short, the green End Times amount to a very anti-human apocalypse.

At the forefront of the arms race in catastrophic prophecies is Extinction Rebellion. Every page on its website itemises the scale of the climate crisis, and the dire impact that human development supposedly has on life on Earth. The extinction referred to in the movement’s title does not just include wildlife, but humanity itself. Activists claim that our extinction is just a generation away.

Here is a literally hopeless creed. XR and its apocalyptic ilk do not seem interested in climate change as a practical challenge – as something that can be addressed with technological and material development, as environmental problems have been mitigated in the past. Instead, they see climate change as a form of necessary punishment. As XR co-founder Roger Hallam puts it in one blog post, XR members must “understand that redemption only comes through suffering and the only honourable life is to move into that suffering in an act of faith that there will be another side to come out of, into a state of grace”.

As these words show, XR is effectively an apocalyptic cult. That’s why XR’s propaganda has more than a touch of the Book of Revelation about it. A 2021 XR video is titled ‘Advice to Young People as they face Annihilation’. One blogpost by Hallam begins “In these End Times…”. Another exclaims: “Only when we admit the utter destitution of our souls at this time of utter annihilation will we begin a journey we can be proud of, regardless of the outcome.” These are not the words of a political campaigner. They are the words of a self-styled prophet.

Climate change poses a challenge to humanity. But green apocalypticism does not help anyone. It inspires panic in those who buy into it, especially young people. They then see it as their job to wake us all up, to make us see what they see, to reveal the coming Armageddon. As far as they are concerned, this righteous mission trumps everything else. And it culminates in ill-thought-out, knee-jerk actions, such as climbing the gantries on the M25 to bring traffic to a halt. After all, we must be made to see the error of our ways. And if we don’t, we deserve the punishment that is surely coming.

March 26, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

The Cell Phone Is a Pair of Red High Heels

By Edward curtin | OffGuardian | March 26, 2023

It is comical how easily one can be ignored for pointing out that new technology is dangerous and fetishistic. So-called “smart” cell phones are a prime example. For years I have been pointing out their dangers on many levels. To say most people are devoted to them is an understatement. Maybe it is an exaggeration to say they revere them, but if asked, they will say they couldn’t live without them. It’s sort of like saying I don’t revere my partner but couldn’t live without her or him. Ah love!

But what’s love got to do with it? Love and romance are out of date. Sex is just a quick fill-in when there’s a break in the technological action. Creative and erotic energy is pissed away on trivia. Being lost and confused and having no time is in. But only the latter can be admitted.

Busy busy busy! Beep beep beep as the eyes go down to the screens. Thumbs athumbing or voices talking to the gadgets, while the busy beavers forget who is under whose thumbs.

Eros is replaced by Chaos while Aphrodite weeps in the woods, but no one hears.

Pass the remote. The silence stings.

We are children of Greece but we forget its truths in our time of digital dementia, if we ever knew them. Beauty is banished for ugliness and technology is worshipped as a god. Art has become meaningless unless it’s falsely connected to celebrities and entertainment culture. There are no limits; everything is permitted. Hubris reigns. Even the thought that Digital IDs, Central Bank Digital Currencies, and vaccination passports are on the agenda does not dissuade the lovers.

It’s a game of control abetted by radical stupidity, and it is not a mistake, as Dylan, contrary to his public posturing and corporate imaging, let’s his artist’s soul sing:

There are no mistakes in life some people say
It is true sometimes you can see it that way
But people don’t live or die, people just float

Floating in a void of gibberish and double-talk, heads barely above the water, alienated from reality while fixated on the Spectacle, while sometimes when panicky looking for a life preserver but never to the right source, this is where technology and capitalism  have taken us. On any issue – the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, the facts about the US proxy-war against Russia in Ukraine, Covid-19, the economy, etc. –  the mainstream media daily pumps out contradictory stories to confuse the public whose attention span has been reduced to a scrolling few seconds.

Sustained attention and the ability to dissect the endless propaganda is a thing of the past and receding faster than the computer jargon of milliseconds and nanoseconds. Planned chaos is the proper name for the daily news reports.

Fetishism, in all its forms, rules.

What else is the cell phone but a pair of red high heels?

What else are all those phone photos millions are constantly taking as their antique reality to store in their mausoleums of loss?

What about the constant messaging, the being in touch that never touches?

Despite the fact that everything digital is extremely ephemeral, the smart phone itself seems god-like, a way to transcend reality while entering it. “My phone is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.”

A toehold on “reality.” A machine in hand that saves nine – million abstractions. And prevents boredom from overwhelming minds intent on floating, because, as Walter Benjamin wrote in “The Storyteller,” “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.” Vibrating and dinging phones will suffice to disturb that dream bird of creative silence that is the only antidote to floating in the void of noise.

But fetishes come in many forms because the need for false gods is so attractive. To think you have a way to control reality is addictive.

I recently saw an article about an auction sale at Sotheby’s in New York of the movie stars Paul Newman’s and Joanne Woodward’s personal effects. These include Woodward’s (who is still alive and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease) wedding ring and dress, the shackles Newman wore in the film “Cool Hand Luke,” a suit from his racing car days, etc. – over three hundred items in all. According to a Sotheby spokesperson, the Newman-Woodward family, who will receive the proceeds, are doing this to “continue telling the stories of their parents.” Don’t laugh. The article mentions that one of Paul’s watches sold at auction a few years ago for $17.8 million dollars and another for $5.4.

So I ask: what are the wealthy purchasers of these objects really buying? And the answer is quite obvious. They are buying fetishes or transference objects that they think will grant them a piece of the immortal stars’ magic. They are buying idols, Oscars, illusions to worship and to touch in place of reality. Ways to enter the cultural hero system.

Ernest Becker put it this way in The Denial of Death: “The fetish object represents the magical means for transforming animality into something transcendent and thereby assuring a liberation of the personality from the standard bland and earthbound flesh.” If one can possess a piece of the demi-god’s power – an autograph, a watch, a ring – one will somehow live forever. It’s not about “trusting the science” but about believing in the magic.

Newman’s daughters who have pushed this sale, as well as a new documentary, The Last Movie Stars, and the memoir Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man – compiled from their father’s transcripts of conversations with his friend, Stewart Stern, over thirty years ago – have done something supremely ironic.

On one hand, they are selling their father’s and mother’s memorabilia, allegedly to tell their stories, through things that are fetishes for those desperate for holy secular relics, while at the same time publishing a book in which Paul honestly knocks himself off the pedestal and says he was always an insecure guy, numbed by his childhood and the false face Hollywood created for him. In other words, an ordinary man with talent who was very successful in Hollywood’s dream factory, where illusions are the norm.

“I was my mother’s Pinocchio, the one that went wrong,” he tells us right away, leading us to the revelations of his human, all-too-human reality. His was a life of facades and dead emotions, false faces, and his struggles to become who he really was.  He tells us he wasn’t his film roles, not Hud or Brick or Fast Eddie or Cool Hand Luke, but he wasn’t really the guy playing them either. He was a double enigma, an actor playing an actor. He says:

I’ve always had a sense of being an observer of my own life… I have a sense of watching something, but not of living something. It’s like looking at a photograph that’s out of focus… It’s spacey; I guess I always feel spaced out.

His courageous honesty reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche’s final work, Ecce Homo (Behold the Man), not because Paul waxes philosophical but because he’s brutally honest. If a movie star’s truths strike you as not comparable to those of a great philosopher, I would suggest considering that Nietzsche’s key concern was the theater and how we are all actors, a few genuine and most false. In The Twilight of the Idols he asked, “Are you genuine? Or merely an actor? A representative? Or that which is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy of an actor.”

Paul Newman lived for 17 years after speaking to his friend Stewart Stern. I like to think those conversations helped him break through to becoming who he really was. From what I know of the man, he was generous to a fault and did much to ease others’ pains, especially to bring joy to children with cancer. I think he changed. While his things that are on the auction block now serve as illusionary fetishes for those looking for crutches, I believe he finally threw away the mental crutches he used when playing Brick in Cat on A Hot Tin Roof. Perhaps the wooden ones will be in the auction and some desperado will bid on them.

We know that with the planned chaos being used to shock people into submission through fear, there has been a drastic rise in depression and mental distress of all kinds, especially since the Covid-19 propaganda rollout with its lockdowns and deadly jabs. The magic anti-depression pellets dispensed for decades by the criminal pharmaceutical cartels can not begin to contain this sense of helplessness that continues to spread. They too are fetishes and ways to divert people’s attention from the social and spiritual sources of their anguish.

There is something very chilling in the way the reality of flesh and blood humans living in a natural world has been replaced by all types of fetishes – drugs, objects, celebrities, machines, etc. While all are connected, the cell phone is key because of its growing centrality to the elites’ push for a digitized world. No matter how many articles and news reports about Artificial Intelligence (AI) that appear, it is all just a gloss on a long-developing problem that goes back many years – machine worship.

“Smart” cell phones are the current apotheotic control mechanism promoted as liberation. They are a form of slavery promoted by the World Economic Forum, their bosses, and their minions. As Alastair Crooke puts it, “It is that a majority of the people are so numbed and passive – and so in lockstep – as the state inches them through a series of repeating emergencies towards a new kind of authoritarianism, that they don’t fuss greatly, or even notice much.” Freedom is slavery.

Here is Ernest Becker again:

Boss [Medard Boss, Swiss psychanalyst and psychiatrist] says that the terrible guilt feelings of the depressed person are existential, that is, they represent failure to live one’s own life, to fulfill one’s own potential because of the twisting and turning to be ‘good’ in the eyes of the other.

The other calls the tune to one’s eligibility for immortality, and so the other takes up one’s unlived life…In short, even if one is a very guilty hero he is at least a hero in the same hero-system [personal and cultural].

The depressed person uses guilt to hold onto his objects and to keep his situation unchanged. Otherwise he would have to analyze it or be able to move out of it and transcend it… Better guilt and self-punishment when you cannot punish the other – when you cannot even dare to accuse him [the social system], as he represents the immortality ideology with which you have identified. If your god is discredited, you yourself die; the evil must be in yourself and not in your god, so that you may live.

I wonder if I should bid on the shackles Paul Newman wore as the prisoner in Cool Hand Luke. They are probably the cheapest item on the auction menu. I think they will remind me that the Captain was wrong when he said to Luke, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

March 26, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Hospital admissions double – and it’s got to be down to the vaccines

By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | March 24, 2023

Data from the New Zealand Ministry of Health has revealed a massive 103 per cent increase in hospitalisations among 12 disease categories measured in 2021 following the mRNA rollout. This calls into serious question the safety of medical interventions such as mRNA vaccines which penetrate the cell wall and re-program activity in the cell cytoplasm.

NZ had very few cases of Covid in 2021 due to draconian restrictions. Therefore the only reasonable cause of the disease increase is mRNA vaccination.

There were 38,178 extra hospitalisations in 2021 across the 12 categories compared with 2019 figures. The Ministry of Health tracks 37 disease categories, and figures for the remaining 25, including cancer, have not yet been released. These figures alone mean that New Zealanders had greater than a 1 in 90 chance of hospitalisation within one year of Covid vaccination. You can read a longer discussion of the figures here.

Similar disastrous figures have surfaced in official data from Western Australia (greater than 1 in 100 chance of serious injury).

Last week in the UK, MP Andrew Bridgen again attempted to capture the attention of the House of Commons about severe injury and death following Covid vaccination, but almost all MPs walked out before he had even started his speech. Undeterred, he gave a brilliant, succinct summary of the dangers and huge costs of Covid vaccination as revealed by the UK Government’s own statistics. In essence he explained how Covid vaccines make roughly a thousand people ill enough to send them to hospital in order to prevent one hospitalisation from Covid. In passing he revealed that the members of the committee approving vaccines in the UK own a billion pounds’ worth of vaccine company shares between them. (Please watch him speak here and share).

YouTube kicked off by deleting the video, but public outrage ensured they had to back down. This underlined the fact that we are not engaged in a rational or fair argument. Hundreds of concerned scientists around the world are analysing data and raising questions about Covid vaccine safety, but like Andrew Bridgen we are all speaking to an empty room.

In contrast, vaccine proponents are still speaking freely to a full house, courtesy of a compliant and well-funded media, who seem not only incapable of sorting truth from falsehood, but woefully ignorant about the fundamentals of genetics.

On Sunday we were subjected to a long piece on NZ’s 1News entitled The Gene Genie. The presenter misinformed the nation that right now we are ending disease in New Zealand with a little snip to our DNA. No doubt this news wowed the audience, but the impression it gave was entirely false and misleading.

The programme did not cover the ending of all disease as the presenter appeared to imply. The real story turned out to be a phase one trial of a novel form of RNA gene therapy designed to tackle amyloidosis, a deadly disease that affects some members of families who inherit a single faulty gene (possibly up to around 60 people in NZ). The trial aims to identify whether a novel approach to amyloidosis gene therapy is safe and effective. It will take years to complete.

Just how monumentally ignorant and naive the programme’s producers were was revealed when the interviewer asked the study’s supervisor, Auckland liver specialist Dr Ed Gane, ‘Should we be able to select for height or intelligence when we do gene editing?’ The interviewer was parroting a false idea, planted in the public imagination by commercial hype, that genetic manipulation could cure all diseases and develop desirable looks and abilities. In fact, more than 300,000 genes play a role in a person’s height, not one, and the idea that there are a few specific genes which could increase intelligence is just fantasy.

To understand just how misleading these ideas are, we need to consider some basic concepts of cellular biology. This will enable us to assess just how much and in how many ways vaccine injury might ultimately affect us.

In 1953, when Watson and Crick unravelled the double helical structure of DNA, the world was dazzled by the discovery. Not only did this promise to solve the mysteries of heredity but it was also heralded as the key to understanding the origin of life itself. The whole focus of biology underwent a seismic shift. Henceforth, work on DNA, its code and its functions, would come to dominate biological research and ultimately medicine. Genetic essentialism had been born – the imaginative idea that just about everything concerning life could be reduced to the operation of genes.

Gradually over the last few years, research on epigenetics began to eat away at the edges of the edifice of genetic essentialism. Traits acquired by parents during their lifetime can be inherited by their offspring. Cellular and physiological factors directly influence how DNA expresses itself. In other words, the wider environment of DNA is intimately involved in its operation.

Genetic code is a part of a cellular system. DNA is not the sole source of life. The popular rush to regard DNA as an almost stand-alone reference point for life misses the established scientific reality.

Cells form the building blocks of life: DNA does not function on its own. By implication the whole cell is the source of heredity, not solely DNA.

Human cells are enormously complex; each contains approximately 100trillion atoms which make up more than 42million proteins.

Cellular functions are protected by a cell wall or membrane. Cells are connected to form a single conscious identity. The mRNA vaccines are designed to pierce the protective cell membrane and co-opt functions in order to redirect cellular activity. As such they are in fact parasitic and ultimately damage the functions of the host cell. They disrupt the whole cell and therefore disrupt multiple characteristics of human life, including physiological stability, adaptability, immunity, and possibly even our mental acuity.

Interventions carrying novel genetic instructions which cross the cell membrane put health and consciousness, body and mind at risk of degradation.

Hospitalisation rates have doubled, all-cause deaths are at record levels, and there is an unexplained total disregard on the part of governments.

The full extent of how much mRNA vaccines will ultimately influence mental and physical health remains unknown.

GLOBE is promoting a campaign for Global Legislation Outlawing Biotechnology Experimentation.

The writer is in New Zealand.

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Covid, imaginary pandemic of the brainwashed

By James Delingpole | TCW Defending Freedom | March 24, 2023

Tell me about your personal experiences of Covid 19. Actually, wait, don’t. I think I may have heard it already, about a million times. You lost all sense of smell or taste – and just how weird was that? It floored you for days. It gave you a funny dry cough, the dryness and ticklishness of which was unprecedented in your entire coughing career. You’ve had flu a couple of times and, boy, when you’ve got real flu do you know it. But this definitely wasn’t flu. It was so completely different from anything you’ve ever known, why you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it had been bioengineered in a lab with all manner of spike proteins and gain-of-function additives, perhaps even up to and including fragments of the Aids virus . . .

Yeah, right. Forgive me for treading on the sacred, personal domain of your lived experience. But might I cautiously suggest that none of what you went through necessarily validates lab-leak theory. Rather what it may demonstrate is the power of susceptibility, brainwashing and an overactive imagination. You lived – we all did – through a two-year period in which health-suffering anecdotes became valuable currency. Whereas in the years before the ‘pandemic’, no one had been much interested in the gory details of your nasty cold, suddenly everyone wanted to compare notes to see whether they’d had it as bad as you – or, preferably, for the sake of oneupmanship, even worse. This in turn created a self-reinforcing mechanism of Covid panic escalation: the more everyone talked about it, the more inconvertible the ‘pandemic’ became.

Meanwhile, in the real world, hard evidence – as opposed to anecdotal evidence – for this ‘pandemic’ remained stubbornly non-existent. The clincher for me was a landmark article published in January 2021 by Simon Elmer at his website Architects For Social Housing. It was titled ‘Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis’.

In it Elmer asked the question every journalist should have asked but which almost none did: is this ‘pandemic’ really as serious as all the experts, and government ministers and media outlets and medics are telling us it is? The answer was a very obvious No. As the Office for National Statistics data cited by Elmer clearly showed, 2020 – Year Zero for supposedly the biggest public health threat since ‘Spanish Flu’ a century earlier – was one of the milder years for death in the lives of most people.

Let’s be clear about this point, because something you often hear people on the sceptical side of the argument say is, ‘Of course, no one is suggesting that Covid didn’t cause a horrific number of deaths.’ But that’s exactly what they should be suggesting: because it’s true. Elmer was quoting the Age Standardised Mortality statistics for England and Wales dating back to 1941. What these show is that in every year up to and including 2008, more people died per head of population than in the deadly Covid outbreak year of 2020. Of the previous 79 years, 2020 had the 12th lowest mortality rate.

Covid, in other words, was a pandemic of the imagination, of anecdote, of emotion rather than of measured ill-health and death. Yet even now, when I draw someone’s attention to that ONS data, I find that the most common response I get is one of denial. That is, when presented with the clearest, most untainted (this was before ONS got politicised and began cooking the books), impossible-to-refute evidence that there was NO Covid pandemic in 2020, most people, even intelligent ones, still choose to go with their feelings rather with the hard data.

This natural tendency many of us have to choose emotive narratives over cool evidence makes us ripe for exploitation by the cynical and unscrupulous. We saw this during the pandemic when the majority fell for the exciting but mendacious story that they were living through a new Great Plague, and that only by observing bizarre rituals – putting strips of cloth over one’s face, dancing round one another in supermarkets, injecting unknown substances into one’s body – could one hope to save oneself and granny. And we’re seeing it now, in a slightly different variant, in which lots of people – even many who ought to know better – are falling for some similarly thrilling but erroneous nonsense about lab-leaked viruses.

It’s such a sexy story that I fell for it myself. In those early days when all the papers were still dutifully trotting out World Health Organisation-approved propaganda about pangolins and bats and the apparently notorious wet market (whatever the hell that is) in Wuhan, I was already well ahead of the game. I knew, I just knew, as all the edgy, fearless seekers of truth did that it was a lab leak wot done it. If you knew where to dig, there was a clear evidence trail to support it.

We edgy, fearless truth seekers knew all the names and facts. Dodgy Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was in it up to the neck; so too, obviously, was the loathsomely chipper and smugly deceitful Anthony Fauci. We knew that all this crazy, Frankenvirus research had initially been conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but had been outsourced to China after President Obama changed the regulations and it became too much of a hot potato for US-based labs. And let’s not forget Ukraine – all those secret bio-research labs run on behalf of the US Deep State, but then exposed as the Russians unhelpfully overran territory such as Mariupol.

And it all made perfect sense because it accorded with everything else we knew about the ‘pandemic’: that it was planned, orchestrated and manipulated at a high level by some of the most devious and evil people on the planet. Also, lots of our fellow sceptics and anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine crusaders in the fields of vaccinology and epidemiology confirmed that this was so, with all manner of abstruse technical detail which we absorbed and became almost-expert on. We learned such terms as ‘gain of function’, ‘cytokine storm’, ‘spike protein’, ‘viral load’ and ‘shedding’. Why, we almost became virologists ourselves!

So why do I no longer believe in lab leak theory? Why do I now share the suspicions of Mike Yeadon that there never was a Covid virus? Well, for me the most obvious clue is that the lab-leak theory is currently being pushed heavily by the very same mainstream media which has been lying to us relentlessly about mask efficacy, vaccine safety, Net Zero, climate change, Ukraine, CBDCs, 15 Minute Cities and the now very obvious threat posed by the New World Order. Sure, it’s theoretically possible that they might suddenly have alighted on a topic where they are not going to push the nefarious agenda of their sinister paymasters. But if they did it would be a first.

Like Patrick Henningsen – more details on our recent podcast – I take the view that if lab-leak is now the officially endorsed conspiracy theory of the US government then we should all be suspicious that there is an underlying agenda. Promoting lab-leak serves a number of purposes: it distracts from the more pressing issue of vaccine injury; it promotes the notion that the world is potentially swarming with rogue, bio-engineered viruses which require urgent defensive measures by supranational bodies such as the World Health Organisation, including compulsory vaccination against new viral strains; it fingers China as an even bigger enemy than it really is, justifying higher defence spending, escalated economic warfare and potential military action, and it creates further division within the sceptical community.

I notice plenty of evidence of the latter in the comments section below Mike Yeadon’s latest piece at TCW, headlined ‘Why I don’t believe there ever was a Covid virus’. Commenters who were previously united in the – correct – view that the ‘pandemic’ was a massive scam and that the ‘vaccines’ are a monstrous and unnecessary assault on public health are now bickering furiously over whether or not they believe in the Covid virus or in viruses generally.

Most of those defending the existence of the Covid virus do so on the basis of the personal health experiences I invoked at the beginning. I’m not disputing that they may have felt all the exotic and unpleasant symptoms they describe, nor even that these were quite unlike any they had had before. What I am questioning is the logical leap which leads them all to infer that these were definitely the result of a novel virus. How could they possibly know? There are any number of other potential causes for these symptoms: radiation or chemical poisoning; the effects of 5G; a fairly routine brand of flu rebadged as Covid – and escalated in their imagination through groupthink into something much worse; terrain theory . . .

I remain open-minded on the cause of those symptoms, as I do on ‘virus theory’ versus ‘terrain theory’, or whether maybe it’s a mixture of both. But it seems evident to me that certain facts about the supposed pandemic of 2020 are now beyond dispute: it was a ‘pandemic’ only because the WHO changed its definition of the word; mortality rates were not above normal; the PCR tests were fraudulent; SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated; the pandemic was wargamed in 2019 at Event 201, and heavily promoted by vested interests (most funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) in the media, academe, the bio-medical establishment and client governments. Given the scale of the dishonesty surrounding this fake crisis, it would hardly constitute an extravagant leap to infer that the ‘virus’, like everything else, was just another fabricated part of the psyop.

And you don’t need to plump fully for terrain theory for this to be the case. Nor are you required to believe that China is a force for integrity and goodness, nor that Fauci and Daszak are stand-up guys, nor that there aren’t lots of black-budget-funded labs experimenting with pathogens. All you need to do is accept that the weight of evidence thus far shows that Mike Yeadon, and brave souls like him, are justified in their scepticism about the existence of a novel, possibly man-made virus called SARS-CoV-2. And the fact that in 2020 you had a nasty dose of flu-like symptoms is really neither here nor there.

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

No Guilt, No Shame: Western Leaders’ Excuses for NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia

Sputnik – March 24, 2023

Air attacks by NATO forces on Yugoslavia began this day 24 years ago. Between 1,200 and 2,500 people died within two months, and many more saw their lives crumbling into pieces when the US-led coalition unleashed war and destruction in the midst of Europe.

The decision to bomb Yugoslavia was made without the approval of the UN Security Council, and the order was issued to the commander of the allied forces, US General Wesley Clark, by NATO Secretary General Javier Solana.

Politicians, generals, and journalists from Europe and America engaged in an abominable competition, trying to justify the massacre and sugar-coat the violation of international laws.

The claims of the then-leaders of Western countries are displayed in this Sputnik gallery – alongside the results of the alliance’s brutal operation.

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment