Recent NYT article reveals how insane progressive thought has become. Critical Thinking is so yesterday. Let the fact-checkers teach you how ignorance is strength!!
Microsoft founder Bill Gates has admitted his private jet and billionaire lifestyle make him a “strange person” to advocate against climate change, but insists he’s doing his part bankrolling obscure tech years away from adoption.
While Gates acknowledged his critics had good reason to question why a man with “the biggest carbon footprint west of the Mississippi” was “preaching” to them about climate change, the software magnate-turned climate crusader insisted he was sincere about trying to shrink even his own massive consumption levels.
In a chummy discussion with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Tuesday, Gates was asked warm and fuzzy versions of some of the questions he’s gotten from the political right and left, taking the opportunity to puff up his new book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” published on Tuesday.
The tech tycoon stressed that he was moderating his own hyperconsumption by buying “green aviation fuel” and paying for “direct air capture” to stop his private jet and other costly indulgences from being such a burden on the planet. However, his protestations aren’t necessarily reflective of the wider industry – “green” fuels represented less than 0.1 percent of all aviation fuel by 2018, and just five airports regularly offered biofuel distribution by the following year, even as the industry hopes to cut carbon emissions in half (from 2005 levels) by 2050.
While Gates lacks any credentials in climate science (or indeed any academic credentials at all, not having graduated from college), his prodigious financial resources have earned him entrée into essentially any industry he takes an interest in – and the force to exert his influence over whoever works in that industry.
Thus, while Gates repeatedly stressed that the country “needed” certain “breakthroughs” – by 2050 at the latest – regarding renewable electricity in order to avoid the predicted “climate catastrophe,” he suggested that relying on government to implement these breakthroughs was a recipe for disaster. The private sector would have to take an end run around government in order to ensure any policies put in place under one party wouldn’t just be stripped out by the other party four years later, he argued.
Gates couldn’t resist hinting at his ‘prediction’ of the Covid-19 pandemic again, either, warning that if the world didn’t listen to him on climate change, countries would be caught unawares in the same manner they had been when the coronavirus epidemic hit. Solving Covid-19 was “easy” compared to fighting climate change, Gates told the BBC last week.
MSNBC began life as a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC, and while the software giant sold its 50 percent interest in the network in 2012, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation continued to make hefty donations to its parent company NBCUniversal, including $1 million that same year for “special projects,” another $1.34 million in 2013, and $2.03 million in 2010 for “global policy and advocacy.”
Bernard Beauzamy PDG chez Société de Calcul Mathématique SA (CEO at Société de Calcul Mathatique SA, Mathematical Modelling Corporation of France. )
The overall mortality data (all causes combined) for the year 2020 show that the covid epidemic did not have any particular severity.
As of 02/20/2021, there are approximately 3,300 intensive care beds occupied (all causes), for approximately 13,000 existing ones: we are very far from saturation.
There is no indication (let’s not speak of proof!) Allowing to conclude to any effectiveness of any of the decisions taken by the government since the beginning: confinement, social distancing, masks, curfew, etc. All this is entirely devoid of a rational basis and health efficiency. Already in 1910 the astronomer Camille Flammarion had advocated confinement during the arrival of Halley’s Comet.
This is the first time that we have tried to follow an epidemic in its details: how many people affected at any given moment, how many positives, how many tests, etc. If we had done this for previous epidemics, we would have references, which is not the case. The figures published every day by a press hungry for sensations serve to frighten the public.
The government, from the start, wanted to give this epidemic the most anxiety-inducing character possible, by publishing figures taken out of context and by banning existing treatments. This is not an initial error as one might have thought, but a deliberate will whose effects can still be seen today: grotesque, incoherent decisions intended to establish the authority of the government and to harm economic activity.
The various institutions responsible for limiting the powers of government (Parliament, Council of State, etc.) accepted the decisions taken, even though they were scientifically unfounded. This attitude still persists today and, except for popular revolt, we do not see how, in the near future, we could get out of the absurd “state of health emergency” in which we are today legally locked up.
The full list of our publications on these issues is available here:
Above is translated from the original French language by Google Translate.
Les données de mortalité globale (toutes causes confondues) pour l’année 2020 montrent que l’épidémie de covid n’a eu aucune sévérité particulière.
Il y a, au 20/02/2021, environ 3 300 lits de réanimation occupés (toutes causes confondues), pour environ 13 000 existants : on est très loin de la saturation.
Il n’existe aucune indication (ne parlons pas de preuve !) permettant de conclure à une quelconque efficacité de l’une quelconque des décisions prises par le gouvernement depuis le début : confinement, distanciation sociale, masques, couvre-feu, etc. Tout ceci est entièrement dépourvu de base rationnelle et d’efficacité sanitaire. Déjà en 1910 l’astronome Camille Flammarion avait prôné le confinement lors de la venue de la Comète de Halley.
C’est la première fois que l’on s’efforce de suivre une épidémie dans ses détails : combien de personnes atteintes à chaque instant, combien de positifs, combien de tests, etc. Si on l’avait fait pour les épidémies précédentes, on disposerait de références, ce qui n’est pas le cas. Les chiffres publiés chaque jour par une presse avide de sensations servent à effrayer le public.
Le gouvernement, depuis le début, a voulu donner à cette épidémie le caractère le plus anxiogène possible, en publiant des chiffres sortis de leur contexte et en interdisant les traitements existants. Il s’agit là, non pas d’une erreur initiale comme on a pu le croire, mais d’une volonté délibérée dont on constate les effets aujourd’hui encore : décisions grotesques, incohérentes, destinées à asseoir l’autorité du gouvernement et à nuire à l’activité économique.
Les différentes institutions qui sont chargées de limiter les pouvoirs du gouvernement (Parlement, Conseil d’Etat, etc.) ont accepté les décisions prises, quand bien même elles étaient scientifiquement dépourvues de fondement. Cette attitude persiste encore aujourd’hui et, sauf révolte populaire, on ne voit pas comment, dans un futur proche, nous pourrions sortir de l’absurde “état d’urgence sanitaire” où nous sommes aujourd’hui légalement enfermés.
La liste complète de nos publications sur ces questions est disponible ici :
A Palestinian court has declared as invalid the Balfour Declaration, a document issued by the British government in 1917 that paved the way for the creation of Israel, as it violates the rules of international law.
The Court of First Instance in the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank on Sunday also held Britain legally responsible for the consequences of the Balfour Declaration, demanding an apology to the Palestinians.
The Balfour Declaration came in the form of a letter from Britain’s then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a figurehead of the British Jewish community. It was published on November 2, 1917.
The declaration was made during World War I (1914-1918), and included in the terms of the British Mandate for Palestine after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
It is widely seen as the precursor to the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, when Zionist armed paramilitary groups, who were trained and created to fight side by side with the British in World War II, forcibly expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, captured huge swathes of the Arab land, and proclaimed existence of Israel.
The lawsuit was filed by Palestinian lawyers in October last year on behalf of the National Assembly of Independents, the International Foundation for the Follow-up of the Rights of the Palestinian People, and the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, against the British government.
“Britain and its foreign minister at the time, Arthur James Balfour, from whom the ‘Balfour Declaration’ was issued at the time, neither owned Palestine nor did they have the right to determine the fate of its people,” the court ruled Sunday.
Britain’s acts violate “the rules of international law, local laws, international norms and the decisions of the United Nations League and the United Nations during the period of its occupation of the Palestinian territories throughout the period of the British Mandate, including its implementation of the Balfour Declaration,” it said.
The ruling said the declaration deprived “the Palestinian people of their legal, human and political rights, and prevented them from their right to self-determination on their Palestinian lands”.
The court’s decision was welcomed by the Palestinians, with the head of the Supreme Islamic Authority, the preacher of the al-Aqsa Mosque, Ikrimah Sabri, saying it “came to expose the crimes of the occupation”.
The head of the National Assembly of Independents, Munib al-Masri, also described the ruling as “historic”, saying it was a fair trial.
He noted that the next step would be bringing the case to the British courts.
Deputy governor of Nablus Anan al-Atire said, “What we are witnessing in terms of legal battle confirms that our people will not forget the historical injustice, and we will not forgive those who put us under this colonial occupation.”
Palestinians, she said, “will only accept independence, an independent state with Jerusalem al-Quds as its capital, the return of refugees, and the expulsion of these colonists from our land.”
“We will continue the battle of struggle and resistance in all its forms.”
New evidence about the assassination of prominent US civil rights leader Malcolm X has shown that the New York Police Department participated in a conspiracy with the FBI that led to the 1965 killing of the Muslim leader.
Members of Malcolm X’s family made public a letter written by a deceased New York police officer stating that the New York Police Department and FBI were behind the killing of the famed Black activist.
The cousin of former undercover NYPD officer Raymond Wood said his late cousin had confessed to him that he had been pressured by his NYPD supervisors to lure members of Malcolm X’s security detail into committing crimes that resulted in their arrest just days before the assassination of Malcolm X in New York Harlem.
“Under the direction of my handlers, I was told to encourage leaders and members of the civil rights groups to commit felonious acts,” read the letter composed by Wood in 2011.
“It was my assignment to draw the two men into a felonious federal crime so that they could be arrested by the FBI and kept away from managing Malcolm X’s Audubon Ballroom door security on February 21st, 1965,” the letter stated.
On February 21, 1965, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, Malcolm X’s Muslim name, without the two bodyguards, was gunned down as he prepared to give a speech at a theater in Harlem, in the north of Manhattan.
An estimated 30,000 mourners attended Malcolm X’s funeral in Harlem.
Wood did not want his testimony to become public until after his death and maintained that the New York police department and the FBI kept certain aspects of the case secret.
The FBI has not made any comment yet about the new revelations.
Malcolm X’s daughters have called to reopen an investigation into the murder of prominent Black activist following the new testimony that implicates the FBI and the New York police.
“Any evidence that provides greatest insight into the truth behind that terrible tragedy should be thoroughly investigated,” said Ilyasah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s six daughters.
She said she had always lived with uncertainty around the circumstances of her father’s death.
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance’s office told in a statement its “review of this matter is active and ongoing.”
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office announced last February that it would review the convictions of two of members of Malcolm X’s group who were held responsible for the 1965 killing.
Considered alongside Martin Luther King Jr as one the most influential African Americans in history, Malcolm X was an outspoken Muslim advocate of Black rights.
Malcolm X helped define the struggle for racial equality in the 1960s, and was a powerful orator who rose to prominence as the spokesman of the Nation of Islam, an African-American Muslim group.
Ten years ago this month, the Middle East and North Africa were convulsed by uprisings and subterfuges. The Arab Spring is generally thought of as a single wave of pro-democracy movements that swept the vast region. Far from it, however, the events were a mixed bag in which Western powers were not on the right side of history, as Western media would portray. Indeed, these powers played a nefarious role to ensure that the Arab Spring was kneecapped in order to cripple any progressive potential.
A look at the contemporaneous events in Bahrain, Libya and Syria shows the baleful role that the United States, Britain and other European NATO powers actually played. The Arab Spring certainly encompassed many more nations, but the specific events in those three mentioned Arab countries highlight the pernicious agenda of the Western powers which has left an ongoing legacy of misery, failure, conflict and terrorism for the entire Middle East and North Africa region.
As reported in a previous commentary, the American and British governments played an instrumental role in suppressing a popular revolution in Bahrain, which began on February 14, 2011, against a despotic but pro-Western monarchy – the Khalifa regime – which is also a surrogate for the richer and more powerful House of Saud regime in neighboring Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were given a green light by the Americans and British to invade the Persian Gulf island on March 14, 2011, to brutally put down a month-long uprising by a majority of Bahrainis who were demanding free and fair elections, human rights and independent rule of law.
The irony is that Washington and London were claiming to support these same democratic values in other Arab countries which were undergoing unrest.
On March 15, 2011, Western governments and media hailed what they called was the beginning of a “pro-democracy” uprising in Syria against the government of President Bashar al Assad. Then on March 19, the United States, Britain and other NATO powers began a military intervention in Libya said to be in the name of “protecting human rights” from the armed forces under control of the head of that state Muammar Gaddafi.
The Americans and British were compelled to move quickly to suppress the Bahraini revolt because it potentially threatened the entire chain of absolute Gulf Arab monarchies. If democracy were to emerge in Bahrain that would be destabilizing for the other oil-rich Gulf states whose authoritarian rule is vital for sustaining the global petrodollar system and Western imperial interests in the Middle East, not least of all lucrative military exports. Sacrificing Bahrain’s democratic aspirations was the price that Washington and London were all too willing to pay, without a qualm.
To this day, Bahrain’s democratic aspirations are violently repressed by the monarchy in league with Saudi rulers, as well as American and British complicity, including media silence.
When the Saudis received the green light for invading Bahrain on March 14, 2011, the quid quo pro, according to Pepe Escobar, was that American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got assurance from the Gulf monarchies that they would ensure no objection among the 22-nation Arab League for the imminent NATO military intervention in Libya. Thus the suppression in Bahrain paved the way five days later for the NATO blitzkrieg on Libya, a relentless eight-month aerial bombing campaign that culminated in the overthrow and murder of Gaddafi on October 20.
Subsequently, Libya would precipitously descend from the foremost developed nation in Africa into a war-torn failed state riven by civil war, jihadist warlords and human trafficking which has plagued Europe to this day. It is grotesque that the Americans, British and other NATO powers justified their criminal aggression on Libya in the name of protecting human rights and promoting democracy as part of the Arab Spring events.
What’s even more reprehensible, the failed state of Libya would soon become a supply route for the CIA and British MI6 to deploy jihadist mercenaries and weaponry for the NATO and Arab sponsored regime-change operation unfolding in Syria.
On March 15, 2011, one day after the Anglo-American sponsored operation to kill the democracy movement in Bahrain, events took on a sinister development in Syria. In the southern Syrian city Daraa on the border with Jordan, rooftop snipers killed security forces and anti-government protesters. The Western media immediately hailed the beginning of a pro-democracy movement in Syria against the central Assad government in Damascus. But scarcely reported then or since was that the snipers were covertly deployed by NATO powers in what would ignite a regime-change war. That war, which lasted for nearly 10 years and continues to destabilize Syria’s northern border, was cynically and disingenuously portrayed by Western media as a pro-democracy uprising when in reality it was a covert war of aggression by NATO powers, financed by Gulf Arab regimes and involving jihadist mercenaries recruited from dozens of countries.
Libya was a key link in the CIA and MI6 operation know as Timber Sycamore which funneled terrorist fighters and weapons to Syria to propagate the secret NATO war to overthrow President Assad. That operation eventually failed largely because of the military intervention in late 2015 by Russia in support of the Syrian government. Support from Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah was also vital in defeating the Western powers’ regime-change plan.
The legacy from events a decade ago still reverberate to this day. Several members of the current Biden administration bear responsibility for the destruction, including the present Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Libya is a divided nation racked by economic collapse despite its vast oil wealth. Syria is war-torn with a death toll of perhaps 500,000 and struggling with reconstruction because of American and European sanctions against the Assad government. The terrorism that was spawned in those countries for the Western objective of regime change continues to haunt the Middle East and beyond.
And, as for Bahrain, a long-suffering people who simply demanded democracy were and continue to be brutally suppressed by despotic Arab regimes at the behest of the United States and Britain – two nations that claim to be exemplars to the rest of the world for democracy, human right and rule of law.
Effect of calcifediol treatment and best available therapy versus best available therapy on intensive care unit admission and mortality among patients hospitalized for COVID-19: A pilot randomized clinical study (October 2020)
I always had a problem with Greg Palast. Apparently this critic of Bush and Blair, an opponent of the war in Iraq, who wrote for the Guardian and the Observer is a man on our side, a good left-wing guy. He is apparently against the corporations, against the neoliberal setup; some of his ideas are surely good. He is considered “Chomsky for Dummies” [“more accessible than Chomsky”, his publisher-suggested quote from a newspaper] and he has a good class attitude, for instance: “The world’s three hundred richest people are worth more than the world’s poorest three billion. The market’s up, but who is the market? The Gilded One Percent own 4/5th of the nation’s stocks and bonds.” His philippics against Bush (“an evil sonovabitch”) are as fiery as those of a preacher in a mosque in my neighbourhood, and this is not a fault in my eyes. He is equally outspoken against the war in Iraq. What else could one ask from a guy?
But at the second sight, there were small alarums. He was against Bush and passionately – for Gore and Kerry. As if Gore and Kerry would keep the US troops out of Iraq. As if Gore and Kerry would pass the spoils of three hundred richest men to the poorest three billion. He claimed that Bush administration covered up… “Saudi financing of terror”. This smacked of a familiar claim – that the US made a mistake to attack Iraq – instead of Saudi Arabia, or Iran. He disliked America, his native land, with too strong a passion. “Antisemite is one who dislikes Jews too much”, quipped Yael Lotan, an Israeli writer. The same goes about America: it’s quite all right to dislike the superpower, but do not dislike it too much, it’s bad for your karma.
Palast wrote: “The United States is ugly. [It is] a numbing repetitive vortex of sprawled Pizza Huts, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, the Gap, Jiffy Lubes, Kentucky Fried Chickens, Starbucks and McDonald’s up to and leaning over the Canyon wall.” In my view, this is too much. Even if your mother – and one’s native land should be as important as your mother – is ugly, you do not say it, not even think it.
Palast’s unequivocal support for unlimited immigration was not inspired by his compassion to les miserables of the Third World (also an erroneous position, in my view, but still comprehensible), but by his profound disdain of the ordinary local indigenous native. Characteristically, in his Best Democracy Money Can Buy Palast argues with a London cockney cabby, whether England should accept millions of refugees and asylum seekers. The cabby was horrified by his multiculturalist attitude, by his indifference to local culture and tradition. But Palast pooh-poohed “the cabby’s fear of losing his English identity. Face it, Shakespeare’s dead. England’s cultural exports are now limited to soccer hooligans, Princess Di knickknacks and Hugh Grant.” Face it, Palast, “England’s cultural exports are now limited to soccer hooligans” because England’s cultural imports were limited to Greg Palast and others of your ilk. A new Shakespeare may be alive in England, as well as a new Melville in the US, but you won’t recognise him for he won’t fit your ideas. For you, ordinary people are “brown-shirted antiforeign electoral mobs”, for us – the sovereign people.
Palast is obsessed with money, as evident from his title Best Democracy Money Can Buy. He is not even aware of other motives, whether noble or vile. For him, “the number one question on the minds of Americans was not, “Does Saddam really have the bomb?” but “What’s this little war going to cost us?”
I have no idea of Palast’s ethnic background, but ideologically, nobody can be more Judaic than this man, who worships money, despises the native and wishes to bomb some place in the Middle East. These are classic Judaic attitudes, so I was not surprised when Palast emerged as an apologist for the Jews and an accuser of greedy WASPs and Arabs. In his Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy? essay published in the Jewish ‘progressive’ magazine Tikkun, Pallast pulls usual ropes; for him, whoever thinks that the Jewish establishment pushed for the war on Iraq (including Mearsheimer and Walt, apparently) must adhere to the Elders of Zion and Christ-killers paradigm. He writes: “after killing Jesus, did the Elders of Zion manipulate the government of the United States into invading Babylon as part of a scheme to abet the expansion of Greater Israel?” Not surprisingly, he finds the Jews “not guilty”. The bad guys are “a devout Christian, Norquist [who] channeled a million dollars to the Christian Coalition”, and “the Houston-Riyadh Big Oil axis”. The Jews? Forget it: “Wolfowitz and his neo-con clique— bookish, foolish, vainglorious—had their asses kicked utterly […] A half-dozen confused Jews, armed only with Leo Strauss’ silly aphorisms, were no match for Texas oil majors and OPEC potentates.”
This is not the place to repeat the discussion of the Jewish Lobby. This was done by many people, including Mearsheimer and Walt (their recent response to Lobby’s attacks is on http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3506 ), by Philip Weiss (whose blog makes more and more sense – actually, this man grew a lot since his triumphalist pieces of 2001, and I read him with great interest), by our friend Jeff Blankfort, whose emailing list scans much of American and British media, and even by my humble self.
The conclusions we reached are only fortified by the massive apology for the Lobby coming from various Trots, from Socialist Viewpoint, from Greg Palast and others. The Jewish Lobby is like a Stealth jet, and these guys provide it with invisibility. Palast will have to live many more years if he wants to see us weeping over the “neo-con leader of the pack Wolfowitz being cast out of the Pentagon war room and tossed into the World Bank”. We know of worse fate. And he will have to live as long as Methuselah to see us feeling sorry for General Jay Garner, the first Gauleiter of occupied Iraq sacked by his superiors –see item 4.
In short, we went part of the way with Mr. Palast, but what’s enough, enough. Let him prefer General Jay Garner to Paul Bremer III, Kerry to Bush, Jews to Texans and Saudi Arabia to Iraq as a good place to bomb. Coprophagi may choose between various kinds of excrements, but we are free from this worry.
P.S. After the first publication of the article, our friend Ian Buckley wrote: According to this, Greg Palast is indeed ‘a Jewish leftie’ : http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.08.15/faces.html . He is often funny and has an agreeable habit of getting up the noses of some of the powerful, but the above article illustrates his deficiencies… The article in the Jewish newspaper Forward makes it clear:
[In his eyes] his fans are too conspiracy-theory-minded. Too anti-American. Too antisemitic. “A large part of my European readership I wouldn’t urinate on,” Palast told the Forward. Some Europeans aren’t so wild about him, either. Unlike some of his fellow Jewish lefties, Palast is not ready to dismiss antisemitism when he sees it. “The members of the Jewish left — and I certainly am one of them — are very glib about antisemitism and the dangers out there,” he said. “The British left is infused with the worst elements of antisemitism.”
He even sees antisemitism in the pages of his own newspaper.
“When the Hebrew teachers in Tehran, in Iran, were put on trial as spies for Israel — which was beyond unlikely — my paper had an editorial by some fool saying, well, we shouldn’t attack Iran — there’s very good evidence, and we shouldn’t vilify everyone George Bush says is our enemy,” he said. “They want Israel to release people who are admitted child killers, but the Hebrew teachers should rightly be in jail.”
Never one to compromise his opinions, when the Arab news channel Al-Jazeera offered Palast a job, he turned it down cold; he refers to the station as TNN, Terrorist News Network.”
Thus an opinion of Mr Palast about the Lobby is as valid as that of Abe Foxman and Daniel Pipes.
P.P.S. To my great regret, our wonderful Cynthia McKinney accepted Greg Palast’s help in her electoral campaign, and she wrote:
From: “Cynthia McKinney” Subject: Free!! Blog with Greg Palast and me 7:00 this evening!
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:12:47 -0400
If you’d like to blog directly with Greg Palast and me, please join us by following the directions sent to me below by Christy in Palast’s office. It’s free and hopefully, will be loads of fun!
Probably we shall witness erosion of her position vs. Israel very soon. She is not to be blamed: no politician in the US can do without a pipeline to the Lobby.
Here is a response of Jeff Blankfort:
This is an interesting article by investigative journalist Greg Palast who has, in the past, has avoided any mention of Israel or the Israel lobby even in his book, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,” when, if he really wanted to know who the biggest buyers were, he could have readily found them in the internet among the Mother Jones 400, and the big donors from the Communications and Finance industries on the Center for Public Integrity site, and they are not oil men. Of the 400 top donors to the 2000 election cycle, 7 of the top 10, 12 of the top 20 and at least 125 of the top 250 were Jewish. Haim Saban, an Israeli-American, and a big backer of AIPAC, gave to the Democrats in 2002, $12.3 million, which is two million more than Ken Lay and Exxon gave to the Republicans over a 10 year period but strangely, it didn’t get the same media attention.
On the other hand, this article of his bears out what I have been saying for the three years, that the neo-con notion to take over and privatize Iraqi oil was nonsense and flied in the face of how the oil industry operates, that the neo-cons were no longer running the show, but what Palast doesn’t deal with is the initial opposition to the war on the part of Bush Sr., as well as James Baker, and oil company executives including Phillip Carroll of Shell, nor does he, once again, mention that not only were the neo-cons the main tub thumpers for the war, it was also supported by the major organizations of the Israel lobby, led by AIPAC and the parade of pro-Israel Jewish columnists who are nationally syndicated and led by Tom Freedman, William Safire (since replaced by David Brooks), Charles Krauthammer, Jeff Jacoby, and all the publications of Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman. The war was also called for by the major principals of both Likud and Labor in Israel, Sharon, Netanyahu and Peres, as well as Chef of Staff Shall Mofaz who said that after taking care of Iraq, the US should do the same with Syria and Iran.
If Palast was not so intent on shielding Israel and its American supporters from scrutiny, he would have acknowledged that the reason that the Democrats joined the Bush administration in supporting the war was that the majority of their funding comes from pro-Israel lobbyists which makes the Party, as Prof. Francis Boyle recently said, “a front for AIPAC.” Now that the war has taken out Saddam and literally destroyed the country, the Democrats are allowed to criticize the conduct of the war, but not so directly the war itself, and will be ready to serve the lobby’s call when it comes to taking on Iran. They have already overwhelmingly approved the Iran Freedom Act, the latest AIPAC war-mongering effort.
It is a shame that Palast has not employed his excellent investigative skills to examine this aspect of American society and instead has allowed them to play second fiddle to his attachment to Israel. Otherwise, he would not also be trying to convince us that both Bolton and Wolfowitz have important roles still to play for the Bush regime.
The Biden administration’s position that Iran must return to “full compliance” with the 2015 nuclear deal before the United States would consider removing the economic sanctions is “nothing short of preposterous,” says an American political analyst, adding that sanctions relief is the “only plausible starting point” in any attempt to revive the landmark accord.
“Removing the sanctions imposed after the US repudiated the accord is the only plausible starting point for negotiations intended to revive the JCPOA. This is the only logical starting point. There absolutely cannot be any other,” foreign affairs journalist Patrick Lawrence told Press TV in an interview, referring by abbreviation to the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Sunday that [proclaimed] US President Joe Biden has spurned predecessor Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure policy” against Iran only in words, but has so far pursued the same course of action in practice.
“Nothing has changed. Biden claims that Trump’s policy of maximum pressure was maximum failure… But for all practical purposes, they are pursuing the same policy,” the top diplomat said in an exclusive interview with Press TV.
Lawrence said that Biden administration officials have acknowledged that the maximum pressure policy has been a failure, yet they are making demands they know Iran would never accept.
“Maximum pressure has proven a failure, as anyone who knows Iran and Iranians could have predicted. It has accomplished nothing other than to cause very many Iranians to suffer, and Iranians will never give into it,” the journalist said.
“The Biden administration is now trying to cover past US mistakes by announcing it wishes to recertify the JCPOA, but on conditions it knows very well Iran cannot accept. This is sheer posturing. As to what will happen next, in my view the answer is, ‘Nothing,’” he continued.
President Biden, who condemned Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA on the campaign trail, has signaled his intention to bring the United States back to the multilateral agreement, which was clinched when he was vice president under former president Barack Obama.
However, since taking office on January 20, Biden and his foreign policy team have been demanding to see changes from Tehran before Washington would consider lifting the sanctions. The Islamic Republic says as the party that has abandoned its international obligations, the US should make the first move by removing the sanctions in a verifiable manner and then rejoining the JCPOA.
In his remarks to Press TV, Foreign Minister Zarif reminded that Paragraph 36 of the JCPOA enables Iran to take “remedial action” against failure by other sides to implement their obligations.
Following the US withdrawal from the JCPOA, Iran waited for an entire year for the European signatories to hold up their end of their bargain and secure Iranian business interests, guaranteed by the deal, in the face of US sanctions. However, as the Europeans failed to deliver under US pressure, Tehran began to scale back its commitments in several phases in retaliation.
“At the very least, Washington must, as Minister Zarif frequently states, remove the sanctions imposed after the Trump administration withdrew from the accord,” Lawrence said.
In a symbolic gesture that US officials framed as a major step toward reviving the JCPOA, the Biden administration told the UN Security Council on Thursday that the United States was rescinding a Trump administration assertion that all UN sanctions had been reimposed on Iran in September– a claim that was repudiated by Tehran, the European signatories of the deal and the Security Council.
They argued at the time that the United States was in no position to invoke a provision in the 2015 Security Council resolution endorsing the JCPOA that allowed the “snapback” of international sanctions because it was no longer a party to the deal.
“The US position on the JCPOA is nothing short of preposterous at this point,” Lawrence said. “Secretary of State Pompeo, in his last year in office, tried at the United Nations to argue that the US still had standing to impose demands on Iran even though it had withdrawn from the agreement. Now Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, says, ‘The ball is in Iran’s court.’ This is patently ridiculous.”
Zarif said that the so-called snapback mechanism was an American distortion that was not at all incorporated in the text of the JCPOA.
As to why the Biden administration is making unreasonable demands concerning the JCPOA, Lawrence said, “Biden and his national security people are entirely beholden to Israel, and Israel has made it perfectly clear it opposes any attempt to revive the nuclear accord.”
“This will turn out the way numerous other Biden policies have already done: A statement of good purpose, no action whatsoever to follow it,” he regretted.
The Biden administration is expected to break the Trump-negotiated deal with the Taliban and keep NATO troops in Afghanistan, according to media reports, and this is supposedly the right thing to do.
The agreement signed in Doha in late February 2020 sets May 1 as the deadline for a full withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan. The Pentagon currently has 2,500 service personnel deployed in the country, with NATO allies fielding some 7,000 more. Under the agreement, the Taliban pledged to make sure the territory under its control is not used by international terrorist groups to launch attacks on the US and to negotiate a peace deal with the US-propped government in Kabul.
While the Taliban did deliver on the promise it gave a year ago not to attack foreign troops, any hope of a reduction in violence in Afghanistan has faltered in the year since. The Biden administration has therefore ordered a review of the agreement, and “the overwhelming consensus among Afghan leaders, foreign diplomats and Western army officers” is that “the US will abandon the deadline,” according to the Sunday Times.
The prediction in the British newspaper comes from veteran war correspondent Anthony Loyd and follows a slew of other news reports outlining Biden’s Afghanistan conundrum and opinion pieces that rationalize breaking the deal.
The Democratic president has inherited a “mess” from Trump and has no good options, according to CNN, which said NATO allies are “growing increasingly concerned” about the situation. If he does withdraw, he would share some of the blame “if there is a collapse of the elected Afghan government,” the New York Timessaid. And a Taliban takeover would be disastrous for human rights, especially for the rights of women, Deutsche Wellewarned.
Keeping Trump’s word and leaving now “would carry a reputational risk for the United States,” because it would “embolden jihadists and perhaps rejuvenate their movement, which has been in retreat,” columnist David Ignatius said. “And there would be an unmeasurable cost to American credibility.” So, of course Biden should listen to his head, not his heart, and keep “a small but sustainable force in Afghanistan,” which would cost relatively little and give the benefit of “checking terrorists, supporting NATO allies, and giving the Kabul government a fighting chance.”
The nudging press stops short of calling the Doha agreement “the worst deal ever made” the way Trump did with the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran, but they might just as well have done so. The accord with Tehran was scrapped by Trump, but Biden is reluctant to simply deliver on the commitments made by Obama, even if it was one of the crowning achievements of his former boss’ diplomacy. With the Doha deal, history may repeat itself.
But if Biden follows the advice and reneges on the terms agreed to by his predecessor, how will it be read by the Taliban? Or Tehran, or Pyongyang, or Beijing, or Moscow? Probably as the latest proof that a deal with Washington is not worth the paper it’s written on.
The pattern of the US back-pedaling on its promises once there’s a change of leadership in the White House existed long before Trump. This was the case with assurances made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe after the reunification of Germany, for example.
The same thing happened with the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea. It was meant to prevent Pyongyang from going nuclear, and thus offered it some concessions, such as building proliferation-proof nuclear power plants. But the George W Bush administration eagerly scrapped it, courtesy of one John Bolton.
Even if given to an ally, Washington’s word is not necessarily solid. Pakistan, for instance, was famously denied the right to purchase F-16 fighter jets after the Soviet withdrawal from neighboring Afghanistan in 1989 made Islamabad a less crucial partner for the US.
Proponents of US global dominance, such as Robert Kagan, say the US is indispensable as a custodian of liberal world order and lament the fact that many Americans are not willing to embrace this role. That they “refer to the relatively low-cost military involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq as ‘forever wars’ is just the latest example of their intolerance for the messy and unending business of preserving a general peace and acting to forestall threats,” the neoconservative commentator and spouse of Victoria Nuland, the Biden-nominated under-secretary of state for political affairs, said in a recent opinion piece.
The ‘low cost’ in Afghanistan was 3,500 dead coalition troops and over $2 trillion dollars in direct and indirect spending. So, what does the US have to show for it? The longest-lasting war in its history that nevertheless failed to produce a self-sustaining government in Kabul. Withdrawal may be perceived as the US losing the war to the Taliban, but what a victory is supposed to look like remains a mystery.
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In March 2020, the CDC changed the way COVID-19 deaths are reported on death certificates, resulting in a dramatic — and possibly illegal — inflation of fatalities that drove restrictive public health policies threatening health freedom
Only 6% of COVID-19 deaths include only COVID-19 as the cause on the death certificate, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This means for the other 94%, additional causes are listed, with an average of 2.9 additional conditions or causes of death included.[i]
“This is the most important statistical revelation of this crisis,” according to a study by the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK), as it reveals that many “COVID-19 deaths” may have been due to other causes. In fact, the CDC published new guidelines on March 24, 2020, which alter the way deaths are recorded exclusively in cases of COVID-19.
The guidelines were published without peer-review or opportunity for public comment, and resulted in a dramatic and misleading inflation in “COVID-19” deaths, which would have been deemed due to other causes using the CDC’s longstanding system of data collection and reporting established in 2003. As IPAK’s report questioned:[ii]
“Why would the CDC decide against using a system of data collection & reporting they authored, and which has been in use nationwide for 17 years without incident, in favor of an untested & unproven system exclusively for COVID-19 without discussion and peer-review?”
CDC Changed Death Certificate Recording Rules for COVID-19 Only
IPAK’s report reveals a historical timeline of events showing how a number of incidents conspired to inflate COVID-19 fatality data and, in turn, justify restrictive public health policies like lockdowns, quarantines, business closures and social distancing. One key issue has to do with the way cause of death is recorded in the case of comorbidities.
In 2003, the CDC published the “Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration and Fetal Death Reporting” and “Physicians’ Handbook on Medical Certification of Death.” Part I of a death certificate includes the immediate cause of death, listed in order from the official cause of death (a) down to underlying causes that contributed to death (in descending order of importance, as b, c, d).
Part II of the death certificate includes other significant conditions that are not related to the underlying causes in Part I. According to the report:[iii]
“Comorbid conditions have been listed on Part I of death certificates as causes of death per the CDC Handbook since 2003 to ensure accurate reporting can be developed. Comorbidities are seldom placed in Part II. Part II is typically the section where coroners and medical examiners can list recent infections as underlying, initiating factors.
Prior to the CDC’s March 24th decision, any co-morbidities would have been listed in Part I rather than Part II and initiating factors such as infections including the SARS-COV-2 virus, would have been listed on the last line in Part I or more commonly in Part II.”
After the March 2020 guideline change, however, comorbidities were to be listed in Part II, which meant COVID-19 could be listed exclusively in Part I:[iv]
“This has had a significant impact on data collection accuracy and integrity. It has resulted in the potential false inflation of COVID-19 fatality data and is a potential breach of federal laws governing information quality.”
New CDC Guidelines Inflate COVID-19 Deaths by at Least 16.7-Fold
The report examined COVID-19 fatalities through August 23, 2020 and compared them using the CDC’s guidelines that had been in place since 2003 and those put into place in March 2020 for COVID-19. You can see the results in their figure below, which shows, “Had the CDC used the 2003 guidelines, the total COVID-19 [fatalities would] be approximately 16.7 times lower than is currently being reported.”[v]
Image source: IPAK PHPI, COVID-19 Data Collection, Comorbidity & Federal Law: A Historical Perspective October 12, 2020, Figure 9
‘This Leaves Me Speechless’
On Twitter, investigative health journalist Nicolas Pineault wrote, “If this is accurate, this leaves me speechless.”[vi] Indeed, not only did the CDC leave no records as to how it made the decision to change how deaths are reported, but some estimates suggest they may have resulted in an inflation of COVID-19 fatalities of over 90%, while violating U.S. law:[vii]
“Previous reports detailed the substantial changes on how causes of death were forcibly modified by the CDC through the NVSS, and how together, both federal agencies inflated the actual number of COVID-19 fatalities by approximately 90.2% through July 12th, 2020.
We believe this deliberate decision by the CDC and NVSS [National Vital Statistics System] to deemphasize pre-existing comorbidities, in favor of emphasizing COVID-19 as a cause of death, is in violation of 44 U.S. Code 3504 (e)(1)(b), which states the activities of the Federal statistical system shall ensure ‘the integrity, objectivity, impartiality, utility, and confidentiality of information collected for statistical purposes.'”
The public health implications of an artificial inflation of COVID-19 deaths are immense, as rates of anxiety, depression[viii]and suicidal thoughts[ix] are on the rise — a direct result of restrictive COVID-19 health policies.
Only with accurate data can individuals and health officials make decisions to truly protect health, and as the report noted, “It is concerning that the CDC may have willfully failed to collect, analyze, and publish accurate data used by elected officials to develop public health policy for a nation in crisis.”[x] It’s also one more reason why now is more important than ever to take a stand for health freedom.
The ruthless businessman who financed coups in Central America and shaped Israeli statehood
José Niño Unfiltered | May 7, 2026
Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
Few figures in American business history wielded power as ruthlessly or as secretly as Zemurray. Born Schmiel Zmurri on January 18, 1877, to a poor Jewish family in Imperial Russia, this teenage immigrant would rise from peddling rotting bananas off railroad cars in Alabama to become the controlling force behind the United Fruit Company, the most powerful agricultural corporation on earth. Along the way he overthrew governments, bribed presidents, hired mercenaries, and played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in the creation of the State of Israel. … continue
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Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
Aletho News
Aletho News 