If there is major stumbling block to Syrian unification and normalisation back to the pre-war years, it is the continuing presence of foreign forces inside Syria and the support they continue to provide to jihadi elements and militias that continue to seek to overthrow Assad’s government. Their presence, therefore, not only dovetails pretty closely with the underlying logic of the US and Turkish military interventions in Syria, but they continue to be the main instruments of a geo-political game the interventionist force, being led by the US, are playing in Syria against Syria and its principal allies, Iran and Russia. This was recently confirmed by a former US ambassador and special representative for Syria engagement, James Jeffrey, in an interview given to the US government’s Public Service Broadcasting (PBS) channel, where he was quoted to have said that militant and jihadi outfits like Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham remain an “asset” for America’s overall Syria strategy, currently territorially focused on Idlib, against Iran and Russia.
“They are the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East,” Jeffrey said in an interview on March 8.
It is also a well known fact that Turkey has been supporting such elements in Syria with the sole objective of denying Assad regaining complete control of his country.
Nicholas Heras, Senior Analyst and Program Head for Authoritarianism at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy recently said in an interview that “HTS cannot survive without Turkish support, it’s that simple,” adding that “Turkey’s significant military investment to protect Idlib is the key factor that protects that region from collapsing back into the control of Assad and his allies.” Accordingly, were Idlib to fall back to Assad, this will fundamentally shake Turkish position in Syria, and further curtail the US ability to use its military forces to control parts of Syrian territory.
To avoid this eventuality, the US continues to send reinforcements and fully loaded trucks with weapons to the Syrian region of Jazirah in northeast. That these weapons could be used to strengthen jihadi outfits is entirely possible, given that the US continues, as mentioned above, to treat groups like HTS as “assets.”
In a separate interview given to the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the head of HTS, Abu Mohammad Jolani, confirmed how the group continues to work to overthrow Assad, and how it repeatedly engages the Syrian and the Russian forces. Jolani confirmed that his group poses no threat to the US.
The PBS report also noted that that for the last couple of years, Idlib has come under attack from Syrian, Russian and Iranian forces, with Turkey backing opposition groups, including, sometimes, Jolani’s.
Turkey’s support for HTS explains why it has so far refrained from targeting the group in a region that has been under its control for quite some time. The US calculations are crude & simple: benefits that emerge from a direct support for groups like HTS outweigh the benefits that more regular and non-radical militias like the Syrian Democratic Forces/Kurdish militias can yield. Maintaining strong ties with groups like the HTS also prevents the US-Turkey alliance from falling into hot water, since Turkey has its own reservations with respect to the presence of Kurdish militias closer to its border regions.
In addition, given the fact that the US-Turkey alliance aims to turn Syrian into a quagmire for Iran and Russia, support for such radical groups remains the key.
In other words, it remains that the Biden administration intends to stick to the erstwhile policy of weakening Damascus in favour of its “assets” based in Idlib. This is evident from the sudden flurry of US establishment media interest in the HTS and Abu Mohammed al-Jolani and the way he and his outfit are not only been appropriated, but also being presented as a “non-threatening” entity that could actually serve the US interests better than other available options.
Controlling the Economy
Whereas the US is using these “assets” to prevent Syria’s territorial unification and its return to normalisation, it also continues to control about 90 per cent of Syria’s oil and other economic resources to hurt its economic recovery as well.
The Syrian oil minister recently said that “The oil sector has been targeted chiefly because it is the main source of income for the Syrian economy.”
Continuing economic crisis, as it stands, makes it easier for outfits like the HTS to find fresh recruits from within the rank and file.
As irony would have it, Syria’s oil that was previously stolen by Daesh is now being stolen under the aegis of an occupying power, causing the Syrian state to lose billions of dollars in revenue.
By controlling 90 per cent of Syria’s oil production, the US not only aims to keep the war-torn country impoverished, but also prevent Russia from stepping into the oil exploration industry in Syria and thus establish itself firmly in the Middle East. Last year in September 2020, Syria’s parliament approved contracts for oil exploration with two Russian companies in an effort to boost production hit industry and generate revenue for post war reconstruction.
However, the fact that the US forces in combination with Kurdish militias continue to control most of the oil means that Syria’s post war recovery through locally generated, albeit scant, resources cannot be possible.
In many ways, therefore, the US & its allies continue to play the same sinister “regime change” game that had actually caused the war to start in Syria in 2011.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs.
April 16, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Middle East, Syria, Turkey, United States |
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Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world. Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The New York Times on the so-called “Bountygate” story the outlet broke in June of last year about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan.
“One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed ‘intelligence officials’) say today that it was a CIA claim,” Greenwald tweeted. “So media outlets – again – repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all.”
Indeed, NYT’s original story made no mention of CIA involvement in the narrative, citing only “officials,” yet this latest article speaks as though it had been informing its readers of the story’s roots in the lying, torturing, drug-running, warmongering Central Intelligence Agency from the very beginning. The author even writes “The New York Times first reported last summer the existence of the C.I.A.’s assessment,” with the hyperlink leading to the initial article which made no mention of the CIA. It wasn’t until later that The New York Times began reporting that the CIA was looking into the Russian bounties allegations at all.
This would be the same “Russian bounties” narrative which was discredited all the way back in September when the top US military official in Afghanistan said no satisfactory evidence had surfaced for the allegations, which was further discredited today with a new article by The Daily Beast titled “U.S. Intel Walks Back Claim Russians Put Bounties on American Troops“.
The Daily Beast, which has itself uncritically published many articles promoting the CIA “Bountygate” narrative, reports the following:
It was a blockbuster story about Russia’s return to the imperial “Great Game” in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had spread money around the longtime central Asian battlefield for militants to kill remaining U.S. forces. It sparked a massive outcry from Democrats and their #resistance amplifiers about the treasonous Russian puppet in the White House whose admiration for Vladimir Putin had endangered American troops.
But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate” confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven—and possibly untrue.
So the mass media aggressively promoted a CIA narrative that none of them ever saw proof of, because there was no proof, because it was an entirely unfounded claim from the very beginning. They quite literally ran a CIA press release and disguised it as a news story.
This allowed the CIA to throw shade and inertia on Trump’s proposed troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Germany, and to continue ramping up anti-Russia sentiments on the world stage, and may well have contributed to the fact that the agency will officially be among those who are exempt from Biden’s performative Afghanistan “withdrawal”.
In totalitarian dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In free democracies, the government spy agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!” and the news media unquestioningly publish it.
In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “The CIA and the Media” reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird. It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media is meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.
Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and people are too propagandized to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits. The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor, and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on US intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.
This isn’t Operation Mockingbird. It’s so much worse. Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now is the CIA openly acting as the media. Any separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even any pretence of separation, has been dropped.
This is bad. This is very, very bad. Democracy has no meaningful existence if people’s votes aren’t being cast with a clear understanding of what’s happening in their nation and their world, and if their understanding is being shaped to suit the agendas of the very government they’re meant to be influencing with their votes, what you have is the most powerful military and economic force in the history of civilization with no accountability to the electorate whatsoever. It’s just an immense globe-spanning power structure, doing whatever it wants to whoever it wants. A totalitarian dictatorship in disguise.
And the CIA is the very worst institution that could possibly be spearheading the movements of that dictatorship. A little research into the many, many horrific things the CIA has done over the years will quickly show you that this is true; hell, just a glance at what the CIA was up to with the Phoenix Program in Vietnam will.
There’s a common delusion in our society that depraved government agencies who are known to have done evil things in the past have simply stopped doing evil things for some reason. This belief is backed by zero evidence, and is contradicted by mountains of evidence to the contrary. It’s believed because it is comfortable, and for literally no other reason.
The CIA should not exist at all, let alone control the news media, much less the movements of the US empire. May we one day know a humanity that is entirely free from the rule of psychopaths, from our total planetary behavior as a collective, all the way down to the thoughts we think in our own heads.
May we extract their horrible fingers from every aspect of our being.
April 16, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | CIA, New York Times, United States |
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Behind the cover-up and spin, the stark reality.
The doctor who wrote it isn’t an “anti-vaxxer” (whatever that is exactly), a “conspiracy theorist” or “Covid denyer” or any of other other puerile labels hastily attached by the Vaccine Faction to anyone with the guts to speak out.
He is a conscientious medical doctor working on the front lines and observing at first hand what is happening to people who take the experimental vaccines and pseudo vaccines being recklessly pushed on them by the government.
As he rightly points out, if so many serious adverse reactions are already occurring in the short term, what lies in store for the vaccinated in the long term?
We would point out also that if so many, varied and extremely serious adverse reactions are occurring in the immediate-term that were not predicted and of which we were not forewarned, how sloppy has been the research and trials that preceded the release of these biochemical agents?
As the long term tests and trials were not done, nobody knows what is going to happen in the long term.
It is usual to do the trials and tests before releasing a medicine for general use. That way, if the research is done properly, we have a reasonable idea of how great are the risks and likelihood of adverse events.
An understanding of the true extent of the risks can then be assessed against how great are the risks of the disease.
The third factor is an understanding of whether the vax actually works in terms of doing what is claimed for other jabs (polio, measles, meningitis etc etc) and that is RENDERING YOU IMMUNE to the disease. By immune it is generally understood to mean what it says in Dictionary.com:
- protected from a disease or the like, as by inoculation.
- of or relating to the production of antibodies or lymphocytes that can react with a specific antigen.
- exempt or protected.
- not responsive or susceptible.
In the case of the Covid vaccines and pseudo vaccines, we get the following:
True extent of the risks:
Short-, medium- and long-term adverse effects not known. We simply cannot evaluate how much of a risk we are taking when we get the jab. A crude analogy is that of playing Russian Roulette without knowing how many bullets are in the chamber (one, two, four, none etc).
How dangerous is the disease being vaccinated against:
The government spin tries to paint the bug as deadly even though for the vast majority it isn’t. Untreated, however, it can be deadly for the elderly and already very ill and so forth, although the “with COVID” fatality stats issued by the government are clearly designed to mislead as had been covered by no end of commentators.
However, this second factor is where probably the greatest deceit lies: the painting of Covid19 as deadly.
Treatments for Covid have been know from the outset but suppressed or steadfastly ignored in every government ad, pronouncement or briefing so as to create the myth that the vaxes are “our only chance” or “our only way out of this”.
This is simply a calculated, cynical bare-faced lie. Known remedies, had they not been withheld ,would have reduced to near zero the risk of fatality from this very treatable bug. The best analogy I can think of is hiding or secretly destroying ninety percent of the food supply then declaring a famine and convincing everybody how great is their personal risk of dying of starvation.
So if the known, safe and effective treatments (that have been getting very effective results where conscientious frontline doctors have used them) had not been suppressed, we would not have had a situation in which we would be deciding whether to be vaxed because the bug would have been routinely dealt with using known medications that have been around for decades and have in all that time had no safety issues. The serious illnesses would have been at least eighty percent fewer and fatalities almost zero.
We would in, other words, have been making an informed choice as to whether to use an unproven vaccine still in the experimental stage and only authorised for emergency use and thus of uncertain risk levels (yet producing enough adverse events to cry out for caution) against the almost zero risk from a routinely treatable bug.
In fact there would have been no emergency to justify the use of experimental vaccines recklessly rushed into the marketplace.
In other words, this entire emergency with its rushed and highly suspicious vaccines, lockdowns, illnesses, fear relentlessly drummed into us by the media, fatalities, economic destruction, and so forth ad nauseam, this whole scenario derives not from the alleged pandemic but from the government’s negligence or malice aforethought in keeping the highly workable, effective and safe remedies away from the public.
The government alleges that 120,000 people have been killed by this bug. Well, if those numbers are to be believed, then around 90,000 (80 percent) or more of those would not have died had the remedies been made available and backed by the same investment of money, resources and energy as that devoted to the vax roll out, the test and trace and the propaganda blitz designed to terrify the people.
Thus the government has killed around 90,000 people through its own wilful negligence and when the full effects of the booby-trapped vaccines make themselves felt over the next few years, God-alone-knows how many more.
And bear in mind too, as if the above mentioned ineptitude and homicidal skulduggery were not enough, there is STILL a third factor to be taken into account, uncertainty as to whether the unneeded vaxes even work in terms of rendering you immune to the bug.
But our conjecture is all very well, so let’s hear what a medical doctor working with this fiasco on the front lines has to say. And as you read this bear in mind the pressure that is put on medical staff to keep quiet, so much so that any doctor or nurse speaking out knows they are doing do so at considerable personal risk. It speaks volumes both of their heroism and of the seriousness of what they are witnessing.
Rapid Response:
Re: Do doctors have to have the covid-19 vaccine?
Important editorial notice for readers: This is a rapid response (online comment by a third party) and not an article in The BMJ. It is attributed in a misleading way on certain websites and social media. The Editor, 08/04/2021.
I have had more vaccines in my life than most people and come from a place of significant personal and professional experience in relation to this pandemic, having managed a service during the first 2 waves and all the contingencies that go with that.
Nevertheless, what I am currently struggling with is the failure to report the reality of the morbidity caused by our current vaccination program within the health service and staff population. The levels of sickness after vaccination is unprecedented and staff are getting very sick and some with neurological symptoms which is having a huge impact on the health service function. Even the young and healthy are off for days, some for weeks, and some requiring medical treatment. Whole teams are being taken out as they went to get vaccinated together.
Mandatory vaccination in this instance is stupid, unethical and irresponsible when it comes to protecting our staff and public health. We are in the voluntary phase of vaccination, and encouraging staff to take an unlicensed product that is impacting on their immediate health, and I have direct experience of staff contracting Covid AFTER vaccination and probably transmitting it. In fact, it is clearly stated that these vaccine products do not offer immunity or stop transmission. In which case why are we doing it?
There is no longitudinal safety data (a couple of months of trial data at best) available and these products are only under emergency licensing. What is to say that there are no longitudinal adverse effects that we may face that may put the entire health sector at risk?
Flu is a massive annual killer, it inundates the health system, it kills young people, the old the comorbid, and yet people can chose whether or not they have that vaccine (which had been around for a long time). And you can list a whole number of other examples of vaccines that are not mandatory and yet they protect against diseases of higher consequence.
Coercion and mandating medical treatments on our staff, of members of the public especially when treatments are still in the experimental phase, are firmly in the realms of a totalitarian Nazi dystopia and fall far outside of our ethical values as the guardians of health.
I and my entire family have had COVID. This as well as most of my friends, relatives and colleagues. I have recently lost a relatively young family member with comorbidities to heart failure, resulting from the pneumonia caused by Covid.
Despite this, I would never debase myself and agree, that we should abandon our liberal principles and the international stance on bodily sovereignty, free informed choice and human rights and support unprecedented coercion of professionals, patients and people to have experimental treatments with limited safety data. This and the policies that go with this are more of a danger to our society than anything else we have faced over the last year.
What has happened to “my body my choice?” What has happened to scientific and open debate? If I don’t prescribe an antibiotic to a patient who doesn’t need it as they are healthy, am I anti-antibiotics? Or an antibiotic-denier? Is it not time that people truly thought about what is happening to us and where all of this is taking us?
April 16, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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New Project Veritas video filmed undercover catches a top CNN executive admitting everything rigged to fool the public into compliance.
Snippets from the confession: “Listen to the way we ask questions… we tell the interviewee what to say” Regarding Covid-19: Why don’t you guys cover Covid-19 recovery rates?: ‘Recovery rates? Big pause as he’s unsure what that is.
April 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | CNN, Covid-19 |
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‘All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.’ – Frank Herbert, Dune
Many of us want to be led. As children we look to our parents to protect us, to soothe our fears, to relieve us of responsibility. As adults we seek the same protection – we want powerful leaders, leaders who appear fearless and resilient.
Our narcissistic culture also demands that our leaders are charismatic, self-assured, and eloquent – we want leaders who can perform on the world stage.
And so trustingly, time after time, we relinquish our power to those grandiose individuals who covet high office, unaware that their determination – their sheer, dogged, winner-takes-all ambition, their superficial charm and seductiveness – may suggest that many are psychologically unsuited to these roles.
These individuals form a psychologically distinct minority group; although their numbers are limited, their reach is extensive, and the destruction they can cause is immeasurable.
Yet while their lies and manipulations, their recklessness and their lack of remorse can make them appear insane, most are not; the more highly functioning thrive in professions and corporations that value the opportunistic and the ruthless. Their ‘madness’ – such as it is – lies in their lack of conscience; their absolute freedom from ethical constraints. These disturbed and disturbing souls are more fittingly characterised as morally insane.
Take heed. The global influence of many of these high-profile individuals is growing. Together they have been forming grandiose plans. They will vaccinate the entire world. They will block out the sun. They will Build Back Better.
We don’t imagine that psychopaths might be politicians.
So, we blind ourselves, as many abused children do, to the reality of what our leaders are asking of us. When they separate us from our loved ones, suffocate us with masks, inject us with experimental vaccines, remove our civil liberties, crash our economy, close our schools, harm our children and lock us up ‘for our own good’, we justify their behaviour; we accept their lies and their attempts to control us. We reassure ourselves that they are keeping us safe.
We also look to the media for reassurance – to journalists and ‘public health experts’ to inform and guide us, to put our nascent feelings into words, to do our thinking for us. We may suspend our critical judgement in our desire for ‘news’ and reliable ‘facts’. And so we overlook the scandals, the cover-ups, diversions and corruption; we absorb their distortions and propaganda; the artfully conceived scapegoats that keep our hatreds focused elsewhere and our society divided. We may fail to notice the relentless construction of a world that benefits the predator class.
We don’t imagine that psychopaths might be journalists.
So, we heed their warnings about the virus, which accord with those of our leaders. Though they might confuse us with their reporting of ‘cases’ and ‘positive tests’ and ‘hospitalisations’ – with their graphs and statistics and relative risks – we are reassured that the message is a simple one: that the jab will be our route to freedom; that our vaccine rollout is the fastest; that our NHS is the finest in the world: clap clap clap clap clap!
And we probably believe, if we give it any thought at all, that the pharmaceutical industry develops products that relieve suffering and save lives. We are unaware of the institutional corruption; the crimes that have led to millions of deaths and adverse reactions, the billions paid in health fraud settlements; the flagrant distortions of the medical literature; the falsified trials, the targeting of whistle blowers.
We don’t imagine that psychopaths produce vaccines.
For we dare not imagine that we have been entrapped by an unaccountable psychopathic elite who have subverted our democracies; have captured and undermined our institutions; have caused economic devastation the world over; have spawned a global mental health crisis which will reverberate for generations.
We dare not imagine. And so terrorised by fear and shame and relentless propaganda, we fall back on the protection of our psychopathic programmers: far easier to accept their virus narrative, to play the game, to submit, than to acknowledge our protectors’ abuse.
Closing ranks against outsiders we huddle together in our virtual pens; we relinquish our autonomy, we disregard our intuition – our primitive, essential wisdom – and accept the increasingly infantilised role that the pathocracy has created for us. We visit our doctor and accept our jab and we are rewarded with a sticker.
And although others warn us that the testing regime is flawed; that the deaths are misreported; that the vaccine is unsafe; they cannot penetrate our defences. How they enrage us when they disturb our illusions! When they try to force open our blinded eyes! ‘Wake up’ they plead, but we are not sleeping; ‘think!’ they cry, as if we cannot hear.
They don’t know – nor yet do we – that we are shielding ourselves from an existential threat more overwhelming to us than any virus, using the only weapon we have in our wretched armoury: denial.
Because deep down, deep deep down, we do know, we do know and we’ve known all along about the danger we are in, but we ignored the warnings of our inner compass, we ignored the red flags and the brutality and the glaring inconsistencies.
We shielded ourselves from the horror of acknowledging that we are powerless and vulnerable and totally alone in an indifferent Universe. And because a life of servitude seemed preferable to one of existential terror, we collaborated with our oppressors.
We stayed safe.
Andrea Halewood isa Chartered psychologist/psychodynamic psychotherapist and a former lecturer & researcher in counselling psychology.
April 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
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One of the most powerful lawyers in Germany, currently building a legal case against the WHO for this fraudulent pandemic.
April 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19 |
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It’s easy to laugh when middle-class greenies write about their eco-anxiety, under headlines like ‘Can you drink milk and stay ethical?’, but there’s a deadly serious side to this that threatens to curtail our freedoms.
The world of the eco-warrior is a gloomy one indeed. Just as the rest of us are starting to enjoy the first loosening of government-imposed lockdown and pondering the post-Covid-19 world, they, while drinking their barista-quality oat milk lattes, are preoccupied with highly moral dilemmas most of us don’t have the time or money to think about.
What follows is not made up, but is a shortened version of Guardian columnist Emma Beddington’s moral dilemmas facing the post-Covid-19 world.
While anxious to minimise her part in transforming the Earth “into a flaming wasteland,” she has a major dilemma with milk, well, multiple problems. Why? Because milk is apparently, “bad news for the planet: three times worse in greenhouse emission terms than any plant milk.” (We’ll come back to the moronic concept of ‘plant milk’ below). But her dilemma is that while knowing this for “ages” she has pretended it is not. And why? “Because tea is horrible with oat milk.” Who would have thought? (We’ll come back to this equally moronic concept below too).
According to Beddington, the horror of this complex dilemma is earth-shattering, or scorching, depending on where you place your carbon footprint. Her solution is to seek out what she terms “the least bad dairy”: she gets her milk from “cows fed on seaweed, which reduces bovine belching.” Apparently, research has recently found this can cut methane emissions by up to 82%.
But before you can breathe a sigh of relief (while perhaps pondering whether feeding cows seaweed does not constitute abuse and animal cruelty), it gets even worse. Her ‘good’ dairy comes in plastic bottles, not glass ones, which makes it bad. Because her household finishes two pints of seaweed milk precisely six days after the weekly delivery, ordering another two-pint bottle, would mean “most of it would end up down the sink” – obviously a no-no for sustainability. So, her instinct is to hold out. But this results in an even greater moral dilemma because it means imposing her “eco-guilt” on her younger son, who, bless him, “has the smallest carbon footprint of any of us, and just wants milk on his cereal.” The result? She ends up buying a pint of “Bad Milk from the corner shop.” (The horror!).
At the very least, this suggests her son has something she lacks: namely, the ability to recognise that Bad Milk tastes good while Good Milk is, in her own words, “horrible.”
But who would have thought that living ethically was so complex and difficult? Milk is just the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. Every consumer decision is laden with moral dilemmas: how to shop without contributing to “flat-pack landfill waste.” What’s the point in recycling “like a demon, sorting, flattening, rinsing and parsing the council’s opaque and inadequate recycling policy” when no-one “will take plastic takeaway boxes” (an admission that Beddington and her fellow eco-warriors have spent lockdown dealing with their eco-dilemmas while eating takeaway food delivered by people who, in all likelihood, are relying on food banks for their survival, not struggling with the pros and cons of seaweed-fed bovines).
But for the virtual signalling eco-middle class every choice is bad and carries a heavy burden. The weight of having to balance “one harm against another” is causing them mental health problems. So, what is her solution? Well, she says, “as in so much of life…I just want someone authoritative to tell me what to do.”
This is where eco-anxiety ceases to be a source of comedic brilliance and where virtue signalling becomes a serious political issue.
What Beddington and the Guardian are advocating, in reality, is that we should all succumb to the dictatorship of experts – but only the experts that accept misanthropic eco-anxiety, not those who might question it.
The concepts they use, like ‘plant milk’ already indicate the type of conformity they expect and demand. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘milk’ as “a whitish fluid, rich in fat and protein, secreted by the mammary glands of female mammals (including humans) for the nourishment of their young, and taken from cows, sheep, etc., as an article of the human diet.” As such, it reflects human ingenuity and how mankind has transformed nature to meet human ends. This is precisely what nonsensical misnomers like ‘oat milk’ seek to undermine.
The assault on language is just the thin edge of the wedge. ‘Tell me what to do’ is the political rallying cry of the middle class. They have really loved Covid-19 and the lockdown that was imposed by the state on the word of politically unaccountable experts who apparently knew what’s best for the rest of us. And they’re expert at that.
The moral complexity of eco-anxiety, expressed so comically by Beddington, should not lull us into a false sense of security. As bonkers as it is, it serves to strengthen the idea of the need for expert diktat.
This has been the message of the high priest of environmentalism, Greta Thunberg, throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. She has not tired from drawing out the lessons that acting on the advice of scientists “should be applied to the climate crisis.”
As we move haltingly towards freedom in the post-Covid-19 era, eco-anxiety is set to fill the authoritarian expert gap that will follow. The battle over the next global emergency – the environment – will make the Covid-19 battle for debate, contestation and anti-state authoritarianism look like a walk in the park.
But it is not all bleak. As one reader, ‘Donercard’, humorously referring to the ‘Ian Rush Accrington Stanley’ milk advert by the Milk Marketing Board in the 1980s, puts it: “You (Beddington) can drink milk and be ethical but you will never play for Accrington Stanley.”
Exactly!
April 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights |
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Over time, I have had many posts on the scientific method, most recently in January 2021 here. You posit a falsifiable hypothesis. Then you collect and examine the evidence. If the evidence contradicts your hypothesis you must abandon it and move on. Really, that’s the whole thing.
Then there is woke “science,” most visible these days in the arenas of response to the Covid-19 virus and of climate change. Here the principles are a little different. In woke “science” there is no falsifiable hypothesis. In place of that, we have the official orthodox consensus view. The official orthodox consensus view has been arrived at by all the smartest people, because it just seems like it must be right. The official orthodox consensus view must not be contradicted, particularly by the little people like you. Based on the official orthodox consensus view, those in power can take away all your freedom (Covid) and/or transform the entire economy (climate). After all, it’s the “science.”
But what if evidence seems to contradict the official orthodox consensus view? I’m sorry, but as I said the official orthodox consensus view must not be contradicted. Today’s news brings a couple of extreme examples of that, one on the virus front, and the other relating to climate. Both of these are from Europe, so you may not have seen them.
On the virus front, we consider the case of Germany. For some reason, Germany has been relatively lightly hit by the virus, at least so far. According to the latest from Worldometers, Germany has had 940 deaths per million population to date. This compares, for example to 2,593 deaths per million in Czechia (worst of all countries), 1,864 in the UK, and 1,732 in the U.S. But starting in about mid-March, Germany has seen a renewed “surge” of cases. Why? Some might say that the virus is just going to get you sooner or later. But on March 23 German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a new three-week “lockdown” of the strictest variety, which included the forced closing of most stores from April 1 – 5. And with that three-week period about to expire, the website No Tricks Zone reports today that even further extensions are under consideration:
The German government is looking to impose even stricter lockdown measures. Liberty has been suspended indefinitely in Europe.
The problem here is that if the proposition that lockdowns work were a falsifiable hypothesis, it would have been falsified by now. The most striking data come from here in the U.S., where strict lockdown states like New York (2642 deaths per million as of today), New Jersey (2800), Illinois (1878) and Michigan (1759) continue to get shown up by wide open places like Florida (1584) and Texas (1705). Try to find any actual data for the efficacy of lockdowns, and you can’t. That is, except for their efficacy in generating an unemployment rate of 13% in New York City versus 4.8% in Florida.
But Germany, like the blue U.S. states, operates by the alternative principles of woke “science.” After all, data or no data, all the smartest people know that lockdowns must work. No Tricks Zone reports today on a news conference that took place on Friday (April 9) in Germany. An independent journalist named Boris Reitschuster got a chance to pose a question to Oliver Ewald, a spokesman for the German Ministry of Health. Here is the question (translation from NTZ ):
Herr Ewald, [a journalist] at the WZ wrote in a report that the German government has no proof of the effectiveness of lockdowns. So my question is: what scientific studies do you have? Thank you.”
And here is the initial response, plus some further back and forth:
Ewald: Herr Reitschuster, you know that as a fundamental rule, we do not assess comments from journalists, and so here I will stick to that.”
Reitschuster: There’s a misunderstanding, Herr Ewald, I only brought up a quote and then followed it up with a stand-alone question, and this question has nothing to do with the quote. I’ll gladly repeat the question once again; what scientific study…”
Ewald: When you read one sentence from this comment here and request an assessment without, so to speak, providing further context or basis, I can’t say anything on that.”
Reitschuster: Completely without the sentence, for the third time, what scientific study does the German government have? Thank you.”
Ewald: I’ve said what I have to say say on that!”
NTZ comments: “We all know there is no study that supports lockdowns, and so spokesman Ewald is clearly trapped.” However, you should expect the lockdown to continue in Germany.
Over to the subject of climate change. As you may have read, last week brought record-breaking cold to much of Europe which, given that we are well into April, caused substantial damage to crops in their early stages of Spring growth. Actually, it’s likely that you didn’t read about that at all. That’s because the U.S. mainstream media mostly only report on record warmth, not record cold. As an example, I can’t find any mention of the subject of Europe’s cold snap in the New York Times (although I do find an article in the Washington Post ).
But, particularly given the extensive crop damage, let alone the readership personally experiencing the bitter cold temperatures, the European press can’t avoid reporting on the subject. Doesn’t this extreme cold kind of undermine the official orthodox consensus view that the climate is rapidly getting warmer?
Here is the story from France’s Le Figaro, April 9 (my translation):
A bout of severe frost struck numerous crops this week in France. Temperatures plummeted, in some places, below 0 degrees C (32 F) at a speed never seen since 1947 for the month of April.
Quick, somebody needs to explain how that is consistent with “global warming.” Le Figaro calls in one Thierry Castel, identified as a “climatology researcher.” Here’s his explanation:
This is well linked [to global warming]. The differences in temperatures between the polar zones and the mid-latitudes are decreasing. That process modulates the undulations of the jet stream (the fast winds over the North Atlantic that play a big role in atmospheric circulation). Because of that, we are faced with the descent of cold Arctic air, and the more important northward movement of warm air.
Sure, Thierry. Meanwhile, the UAH guys report another substantial drop in world atmospheric temperature in March 2021. The global temperature anomaly for the month is -0.01 deg C (as against the 30 year average of 1991-2020). That brings us back down to about the same temperature we had back in 1988. Needless to say, Le Figaro was way too polite to confront M. Castel with this information.
Here is the latest UAH chart of global temperatures, going back to 1979:
April 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
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In recent years, Mongolia has received increasing attention in a comprehensive and multifaceted US strategy aimed at dominating the Eurasian continent. To a certain extent, this is due to the colossal amounts of natural resources and economic opportunities the country has, which are of undoubted interest for American industrial and business circles. However, this is even more connected with Washington’s intentions to use the “ancestral home of Genghis Khan” to oppose Russia and the PRC, with an emphasis on the “separation” of the Mongolian people, taking into account the presence in China of Inner Mongolia a very extensive autonomous region bordering with it and with Russia.
Experts have reported that the Americans are clearly striving to establish bilateral ties with Ulaanbaatar and include Mongolia in its closest allies (along with Singapore, Taiwan and New Zealand) in the Indo-Pacific region. Analysts think that the idea of cooperating with Ulaanbaatar has become especially relevant for the United States in light of its tense relations with both Russia and China in recent years.
In terms of the total volume of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Mongolia, the United States ranks 6th (3.3%), behind China and Japan, but ahead of Russia. To a large extent, US investors are showing interest in the Mongolian mining industry, in particular in the development of the largest coal deposit, Tavan Tolgoi. Although American investors consider Mongolia one of the most promising markets in East Asia, their investment activities in this country are hampered by a cumbersome and ineffective bureaucracy, high levels of corruption and recurring financial conflicts caused by the Mongolian “resource nationalism”.
Recently, in the speeches of American politicians, one can hear more and more “about the pride of the United States that it is Mongolia’s third neighbor”. On the subject, the United States refers to a concept that appeared in the vocabulary of Mongolian politicians after the revolution of the early 1990s. Geographically, Mongolia shares borders with only two countries, Russia and China, but Ulaanbaatar has already repeatedly declared that today it does not intend to close all its military-political and economic contacts on these two states alone. That is why Mongolia is considered a third neighbor to those countries with which the republic maintains its closest relations, naming, in particular, the United States, Japan, South Korea, Australia and the EU countries, with which Mongolia expects to balance the Russian and Chinese influence in region.
The vector of Washington’s expansion of it’s spheres of influence in Asia has been visible for a long time. Back in 2011, Democratic Party representative Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, announced that the presence of the United States in Asia is a prerequisite for maintaining American global leadership, since it is in Asia that “the bulk of 21st century history will be written.” The key adversary of Washington in the region today remains China, which appears in the doctrinal documents of the United States as one of the key threats.
In the US national security document “Strategic Framework for Engineering and Technology” recently declassified by the White House and adopted in 2018, Mongolia is considered, along with Japan, the Republic of Korea and Taiwan, among the main partners in containing China’s “economic aggression” by engaging in various American projects. One of the expressions of this policy was the allocation of $ 350 million to Ulaanbaatar to modernize the capital’s water supply system, which became the largest one-time US investment in the region. Meanwhile, Washington systematically seeks to emphasize that the gratuitous nature of American aid supposedly compares favorably with China’s infrastructure programs, which, as a rule, imply the development of connected loans.
In order to increase America’s presence in Mongolia in 2019, the USAID resumed its work, which in early 2021 announced the financing of two programs to promote agricultural development in the amount of $ 4.3 million.
With the active participation of the USAID, there has recently been an active expansion of activities in Mongolia by numerous NGOs, many of which were created in various directions to “expand democracy.” So, according to the Ministry of Justice and Internal Affairs of Mongolia, in 2019 more than 20 thousand NGOs were officially registered in this country (and this is for 3 million of the population!), Most of which are financed from abroad. For example, activists of the Mongolian Youth Union NGO are implementing a project according to which Mongolian politicians are included in the black or white list according to the degree of their corruption. But at the same time, it turns out that the MSM coordinates these lists with the leadership of such American structures as the Peace Corps and USAID! Now it is clear why those Mongolian politicians who are considered to be “pro-Russian” are mainly included in the so-called “black” list. Being put on such a “black” list, it is already unlikely that you will be included in the number of deputies of the Mongolian parliament…
Another example is the active work in Mongolia with local politicians (mainly with parliamentarians) and their electorate of another NGO, the International Republican Institute (IRI), which in 2016 was banned in Russia due to gross interference in internal affairs countries. This NGO regularly organizes trips for Mongolian legislators and other prominent Mongolian political leaders to the United States, which can reasonably be regarded as bribery.
In addition, with the active support of the US Embassy in Mongolia, the Soros Foundation, such a religious sect as the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, banned in Russia, and a number of others, are operating today. Judging by the financial statements, money is not spared for Mongolia, especially American structures disguised as NGOs and acting to promote “American-style democracy.” Taking into account their significant number for a modest 3 million population, Mongolia should have long ago become a “world stronghold of democracy and prosperity,” which, however, is clearly not visible… the goals and objectives set for them, primarily in the confrontation between Russia and China.
In order to avoid becoming completely controlled by foreign influence, for Mongolia it is long overdue to adopt a law “on foreign agents”, as, incidentally, did the United States itself, having adopted the FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) law back in 1938. By the way, not only in the United States, but also in many other countries, such activities with foreign participation are strictly controlled, in particular, in Great Britain, Israel, India, Germany and other countries that responsibly approach their security and political sovereignty.
In 2018, the military was added to the political and economic aspect of American policy towards Mongolia. Ulaanbaatar has come to be regarded as one of the leading regional partners of the Global Peace Operation Initiative to support peacekeeping operations, and US-Mongolian cooperation is being built up through UN peacekeeping in Africa and NATO in Afghanistan.
Within the framework of the American State Partnership Program, the engineering and technical staff intensified cooperation between the Alaska Guard and the armed forces of Mongolia, in particular, at the international exercises “In Search of Khan” and “Gobi Wolf” held annually in Mongolia.
Washington’s increased attention to Mongolia and its relations with its two natural neighbors, Russia and China, demonstrates what happened in January this year, expansion of the staff of the US Embassy in Ulaanbaatar by 12 diplomats at once, 4 of whom are specialists in Russia and China. Two more USAID employees arrived in Mongolia last summer.
Therefore, the residents of Mongolia should not relax in the coming months, especially on the eve of the upcoming presidential elections in the country in the summer, in which the United States has already begun to actively prepare for intervention, and not only through the already tested option of using controlled NGOs and the media.
April 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Timeless or most popular | China, Mongolia, Russia, Soros Foundation, United States, USAID |
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The Arctic tends not to get a lot of headlines. But here in Canada, it’s a big deal. Or at least it is rhetorically speaking. Canadians like to think of themselves as a wintery, northern people – as Gilles Vigneault sang: ‘Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver.’ We get all emotional about the north, and pump ourselves up with stirring speeches about defending our sovereignty. After which, we then do nothing – at least until the next time somebody else does something we don’t like in the Arctic. At that point, we make some more stirring speeches, before slinking off back to our local Timmy’s in Toronto or some other place as far from the Arctic as we can get without actually ending up in the United States.
And so it is that the Canadian press was none too happy this week when the Russian Federation deposited its latest submission to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to advance its claim to a large portion of the Arctic Ocean seabed. ‘That’s our Arctic Ocean seabed, you wretched Russians! How dare you?”
The Commission in question is a product of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), that gives states the right to exclusive exploitation of the seabed up to 200 nautical miles from their continental shelf. To claim such a right, however, states have to provide the Commission with scientific evidence of where the continental shelf extends under the sea. If they can satisfactorily show where the shelf goes, then the UN will approve the claim. If they can’t, then the UN won’t.
This is a well-recognized procedure under UNCLOS, and Arctic nations have been spending the past few years busily surveying the Arctic seabed in order to promote the case that their own continental shelf extends outwards far from the coastline – the further the better, because the further the shelf goes, the more of the seabed can be claimed.
Particularly important is the status of the Lomonosov Ridge, a massive formation that stretches across the Arctic from Russian waters to Canadian ones. Russia, Canada, and Denmark (Greenland) are all seeking to prove that the Ridge is an extension of their own continental shelf. Whoever wins the argument gets the grand prize – control over a huge chunk of the Arctic Ocean.
Russia submitted its first claim to the UN Commission back in 2001, but was told to go away and do more research. Having done so, it submitted its new evidence in 2015, and has now further updated its submission, all backed up with new scientific evidence. The latest Russian bid has some Canadians fuming, as it expands Russia’s claim over Arctic waters by about 750,000 square kilometers compared to the original submission.
“This is a maximalist submission. You cannot claim any more,” complains Robert Huebert, an Arctic expert at the University of Calgary. “In effect, they’re claiming the entire Arctic Ocean as their continental shelf … they’re claiming the entire Canadian and Danish continental shelf as their continental shelf,” adds Huebert.
This is true in the sense that Russia is clearly pushing its claim as far as it thinks the science will allow. But it’s hardly alone in doing so. In 2014, for instance, Denmark submitted a claim to the UN Commission that has been described as “an unexpectedly massive demand … [that] stretch the demand as much as legally possible all to the way to Russia’s exclusive economic zone.”
Canada in turn presented its submission to the UN in 2019. Adam Lajeunesse of St Francis Xavier University noted in response that, “There was [some conjecture] that we would sort of do a quid pro quo and stop our claim at about the pole as a means of facilitating a political settlement. But like the Danes, we’ve gone well over the North Pole and are claiming an enormous chunk of the Arctic continental shelf.”
Russia, therefore, is only following where others have already gone. Furthermore, it seems pretty confident in the validity of the scientific evidence it has amassed. That, though, will be a matter for the Commission to determine. In the meantime, what’s interesting about all this is the manner in which Russia has operated.
For as Whitney Lackenbauer, a circumpolar expert at Trent University, notes, ‘Russia is playing by the rules. And for those of us who are concerned about Russia’s flouting of the rules-based order, I actually take a great deal of comfort in seeking Russia go through the established process in this particular case. … I’m not worried about Russia’s action as an Arctic coastal state seeking to determine the outermost limits of its extended continental shelf.”
Lackenbauer hits the nail on the head. Western leaders regularly accuse Russia of wanting to destroy the international order. But reality is rather different. On occasion, when vital interests are at stake, the Russian Federation flouts the rules, just as other powers do. But most of the time, it operates within them. The Arctic is a case in point. Google ‘Russia, Arctic, aggression’, and you get all sorts of headlines, such as ‘What is behind Russia’s aggressive Arctic strategy?’, ‘Meeting Russia’s Arctic aggression’, ‘Arctic aggression: Russia is better prepared for a North Pole conflict than America is’, and so on. Yet, in practice, the Russian Federation has entirely respected the ‘rules-based international order’ as far as the Arctic is concerned. It’s an example that should give pundits pause to thought.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has declared that Arctic territorial issues ‘can be tackled solely on the basis of international law, the International Convention on the Law of the Sea, and in the framework of the mechanisms that have in accordance with it been created for determining the borders of states which have a continental shelf.’ This is what is happening. It’s an illustration that, for all the talk of the collapse of the international order, international law continues to operate and most states respect it most of the time. Instead of focusing on the few cases when the opposite happens, international affairs analysts might usefully pay a bit more attention to the instances when things work the way they should. If they did, their analyses might be less alarmist, and also rather more realistic.
April 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Canada, Russia |
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Customers wait in line to purchase limited-edition Air Jordan 1 on July 25, 2019, in Yichang, Hubei Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
The British spy agency GCHQ is so aggressive, extreme and unconstrained by law or ethics that the NSA — not exactly world renowned for its restraint — often farms out spying activities too scandalous or illegal for the NSA to their eager British counterparts. There is, as the Snowden reporting demonstrated, virtually nothing too deceitful or invasive for the GCHQ. They spy on entire populations, deliberately disseminate fake news, exploit psychological research to control behavior and manipulate public perception, and destroy the reputations, including through the use of sex traps, of anyone deemed adversarial to the British government.
But they want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”
Official publication of the British surveillance agency GCHQ, May 17, 2015
Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.
Similar agencies of deceit, militarism and imperialism now robustly use this same branding tactic. The CIA — in between military coups, domestic disinformation campaigns, planting false stories with their journalist-partners, and drone-assassinating U.S. citizens without due process — joyously celebrates Women’s Day, promotes what it calls The Agency Network of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Officers (ANGLE), hosts activities for Pride Month, and organizes events to commemorate Black History Month. The FBI does the same.
It’s so sweet that one is tempted to forget about, or at least be more understanding of, all the bombing campaigns and all the dictatorships they install and prop up that repress and kill the very people that they purport to honor and cherish. Like the GCHQ, how menacing can an intelligence agency be when it is so deeply and sincerely supportive of the rights of the people they routinely spy on, repress and kill?
Again, this does not make the CIA perfect — sure, they make some mistakes and engage in some actions that are worthy of criticism — but to combat real evil, you do not go protest at Langley. They are engaged in important work combating homophobia, racism and misogyny. Thus, real warriors against evil look not to them but instead go searching online for the Boogaloo Boys and boomers on Facebook who post Q-Anon and other problematic memes. That is where your focus should remain if you want to root out the real threats.
Large corporations have obviously witnessed the success of this tactic — to prettify the face of militarism and imperialism with the costumes of social justice — and are now weaponizing it for themselves. As a result, they are becoming increasingly aggressive in their involvement in partisan and highly politicized debates, always on the side of the same causes of social justice which entities of imperialism and militarism have so effectively co-opted.
Corporations have always sought to control the legislative process and executive branch, usually with much success. They purchase politicians and their powerful aides by hiring them as lobbyists and consultants when they leave government, and those bought-and-paid-for influence-peddlers then proceed to exploit their connections in Washington or state capitals to ensure that laws are written and regulations enforced (or not enforced) to benefit the corporations’ profit interests. These large corporations achieve the same goal by filling the campaign coffers of politicians from both parties. This is standard, age-old K Street sleaze that allows large corporations to control American democracy at the expense of those who cannot afford to buy this influence.
But they are now going far beyond clandestine corporatist control of the government for their own interests. They are now becoming increasingly powerful participants in highly polarizing and democratic debates. In the wake of the George Floyd killing last summer, it became virtually obligatory for every large corporation to proclaim support for the #BlackLivesMatter agenda even though many, if not most, had never previously evinced the slightest interest in questions of racial justice or policing.
One of the very few companies that refused to do so was the Silicon Valley-based cryptocurrency exchange platform called Coinbase — which announced that it would remain apolitical and not involve itself in partisan debates or causes of social justice unrelated to its core business mission. When announcing that policy of political neutrality, the company’s co-founder Brian Armstrong explained that “the reason is that while I think these efforts are well intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division.” That once-anodyne announcement — to stay out of politics as a corporate entity — produced instant backlash. And exactly two months after, the notoriously censorious and politicized “tech reporters” of The New York Times punished the company for its heresy of neutrality with a lengthy article depicting Coinbase as a bastion of racism and toxic bigotry (the company was also savaged by journalists because of its audacity to reveal and respond to the NYT’s allegations in advance of the paper’s decision to publish).
Ever since, large corporations are diving into numerous other political debates with great vigor and force — provided that their views are in alignment with affluent liberal culture and prevailing social justice pieties (though, like NBA officials and stars, they confine themselves to easy domestic causes and scripted liberal platitudes while they steadfastly avoid commenting on any injustices that may implicate their business interests, such as debates over labor abuses in China or Amazon’s abuse of its workers). The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported that “dozens of chief executives and other senior leaders gathered on Zoom this weekend to plot what several said big businesses should do next about new voting laws under way in Texas and other states.” The campaign against these laws includes not just corporate giants but also the nation’s largest and richest corporate law firms.
Part of the motive may be self-serving strategy. With Democrats controlling both houses of Congress as well as the Executive Branch — all of the instruments that can legislate and regulate their businesses — they may be calculating that using their massive weight to serve the Democratic Party’s political agenda is wise. Doing so could curry favor with powerful lawmakers and regulators and result in rewards or, conversely, allow them to avoid punishment and recrimination for the crime of refusing to engage in activism. That motive at least partially explains why they have been so generous with their donations to Democratic candidates. “Wall Street is putting its money behind Democrat Barack Obama for president,” reported Reuters in 2008, while they did the same overwhelmingly in 2020 to support Biden over Trump (just as Democrats have increasingly become the party of affluent suburbanites, they are also increasingly supported by the wealthiest corporate and tech power centers).
The farcical nature of all of this is obvious. Just as it is laughable that the CIA and GCHQ care about social justice, feminism, and racial diversity as they bomb and subvert the rest of the world in ways that contradict all of those professed values, the idea that corporate giants who use sweatshops, slave labor, mass layoffs and abuse of their workforce care about any of these causes would make any rational person suffocate on the stench of their insincerity.
New York Times, Nov. 20, 2020
But whatever the motives, the dangers of growing corporate involvement in U.S. political debates are manifest. In its healthiest form, the way democracy would function is that citizens vote for the representatives they believe will best serve their interests, and those representatives then enact laws they believe their constituents favor. But when giant corporations use their unparalleled economic power to override that process — by forcing state and local governments to rescind or reject laws they would otherwise support due to fear of corporate punishment — then the system, by definition, far more resembles an oligarchy than a democracy. Rod Dreher, writing on Monday in The American Conservative, advanced arguments and concerns that were once the province of the left:
This is progressive oligarchy. Woke Capitalism is a threat to democracy. As I write about in Live Not By Lies, these same people are eventually going to eagerly collaborate with government to create the Social Credit System necessary to make this country controllable.
When is it going to occur to people on the Left that Big Business is doing all this because it knows that if it makes the right moves on cultural issues that matter to the Woke, it will be able to do whatever it wants to workers? It has never had to worry about Republicans. That may be changing soon, if we elect a crop of populists who know how to do more than tweet and make belligerent but empty speeches. I’d like to see Republicans like this get elected, and get active to remind Big Business of its proper place. . . .
Big Business is already quite powerful in our society. Do we really want a society in which Big Business reserves to itself the right to tell polities what their laws and policies are going to be, at the risk of punishing that polity economically if it resists? Does this sound like the kind of country you want to live in? If you are pro-choice, imagine that Big Business decided to threaten your state’s legislature with economic consequences if it doesn’t pass pro-life legislation. One expects the business lobby to engage itself on legislative questions pertaining to its own sphere, but beyond it? Big Business already has a lot of power over our lives — and now it wants more. The only force powerful enough to reign it in is the State. Whatever else you might say about the State, at least it is democratically accountable — unlike Big Business.
Residing beyond the dangers of even greater corporatist control over our lives and politics is the deceitful branding and distractions that this exploitation of social causes, by design, engender. If large corporations are crusading for voting rights, why would anyone regard them as a menace? The contrary is true: we should be grateful for their noble activism.
When it comes time to identify the root causes of social pathologies, we will look elsewhere. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the corporate class and the ways they abuse and eliminate labor, control government, and destroy the working and middle classes will be impossible to see, as we are all blinded by the glare of their virtuous Instagram posts about racial justice and their unified campaigns against voter suppression. In an instant of swooning over their benevolent devotion to social justice, we will forget what they actually exist to do. When we work to harness their power to support our own political causes, we forget about how out of control and menacing that power is, and what it is most often used for. And that is exactly the way they want it.
April 14, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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Joining us today is Pfizer’s former Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy and Respiratory, Michael Yeadon, here to discuss his expert opinion on the topics of COVID-19, mRNA vaccine technology, as well as suppression and outright censorship of medical and scientific experts.
(https://www.rokfin.com/TLAVagabond)
(https://odysee.com/@TLAVagabond:5)
(https://www.bitchute.com/channel/24yVcta8zEjY/)
Video Source Links:
https://lockdownsceptics.org/2021/03/13/how-worried-should-we-be-about-the-new-variants/
https://doctors4covidethics.medium.com
Doctors & Scientists Write to European Medicines Agency Warning of COVID-19 Vaccine Dangers
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/exclusive-former-pfizer-vp-your-government-is-lying-to-you-in-a-way-that-could-lead-to-your-death
April 13, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
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