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The National Security Establishment Is In Charge

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 11, 2020

In the debate over whether a recently retired military man, Gen. Lloyd Austin, should be secretary of defense, the New York Times published an editorial yesterday emphasizing the importance of “civilian control” over the military.

How quaint! Never mind that Times, by its own admission, endorsed President Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Gen. James Mattis. The Times now says that two times in a row would be too much because civilian control of the military is so vitally important in America.

What nonsense. The fact is that the national-security establishment, which consists of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, has long been in charge of the levers of power within the federal government. Anybody who becomes secretary of defense, military or civilian, is going to be taking orders, not giving them.

But we have to cling to our myths and lies — you know, like the one that holds that American servicemen died in America’s many foreign wars to protect our “freedom.” As long as we cling to such falsehoods, myths, and unrealities, everything will be fine, or so the argument goes.

But everything isn’t fine. Just look around. Look at the ever-increasing numbers of young people committing suicide. Is that normal? That’s the surest sign yet of what clinging to lies and myths and selling them as reality can do to a nation. Add to those suicides the suicides of veterans and the massive drug addition, alcoholism, and other self-destructive behavior and all the irrational killings and other acts of violence that pervade American society.

Yep, just look around. It’s not hard to see that America is a very unhealthy society.

There is one book that captures perfectly what has happened to the United States: National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon. Glennon’s thesis is a simple one: It is the national-security establishment that is in charge of the federal government.

Oh, yes, I know, everyone thinks that the other parts of the federal government — the president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court are in charge. That’s because they are inculcated with that notion in their public school civics classes or at the state-supported colleges they attended. As Glennon points out, that notion is false. The real power and control lies with the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. They permit the other parts of the federal government to maintain the veneer of power. That doesn’t matter to them. What matters is that they are in charge and that the other three branches defer to them on critical matters, such as who is going to be secretary of defense,

And just in case you’re wondering, Glennon is not some sort of crackpot author, which makes his book so dangerous to the national-security establishment. Since 2002, he has been a professor of law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He also served three years as counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He also was a professor of law at the University of California and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International School for Scholars. Glennon is an author to be reckoned with.

Recall that when Trump was running for president, he was making bold statements against the deep state and its “forever wars.” This was one of the big reasons so many people voted for him. Not since Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy had a president stood up to the “military industrial complex.”

And then look at what happened, almost immediately. Look at what the national-security establishment did to Donald Trump. At the very start of his administration, they defanged him and rendered him impotent. Trump surrounded himself with generals. He even appointed one to be his secretary of defense. Now nearing the the end of his four year term, he failed to end his “forever wars,” as he promised to do. Just as bad, he tried his best to start new ones, like in Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Somalia.

One of the biggest signs that Trump caved was with respect to the long-secret JFK records of the national-security establishment. Just think — almost 60 years of secrecy based on the ridiculous notion of “national security.” Early on, Trump declared openly that he was gong to release the records, as mandated by Congress 25 years before in the JFK Records Act. And then at the last minute, Trump surrendered to the will of the CIA, agreeing to its demands for more years of secrecy.

Moreover, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, the mainstream press didn’t issue a peep of protest over the continue secrecy of the records. Continued secrecy of decades-old records relating to the supposed lone-nut assassination of a president is treated as something completely normal. It’s just one more example of the weird dysfunction that pervades American life, not to mention the control that the national-security establishment wields over the mainstream press, especially when it comes to the Kennedy assassination.

Why did Donald Trump cave on the JFK records, the forever wars, and the deep state, knowing that he was inevitably going to disappoint his millions of supporters? I don’t think we can eliminate the possibility that Trump got “Hooverized” — that is, that the national-security establishment may have employed the same tactic mastered by former FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover — use secrets of a person’s personal life to acquire mastery of his public life.

With Joe Biden, they don’t need to do that. Given Biden’s lifetime of public subservience to the Washington, D.C. establishment, he’s going to bow to whatever the national-security establishment wants. In fact, I don’t think we can eliminate the idea that the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA rejected Biden’s choice for secretary of defense, another deep state lackey named Michèle Flournoy, and chose Gen. Austin instead. But hey, at least Austin’s appointment would reflect the reality of who’s in charge of the federal government.

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education.

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Time magazine celebrates medical authoritarianism, naming Fauci ‘guardian of the year’

By Helen Buyniski | RT | December 11, 2020

Time magazine has designated US coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci as a ‘guardian of the year,’ a new category that emphasizes his dystopian doomsday pronouncements. The message? Sit down, muzzle up, and fear what you’re told to fear.

Since the first reports of the novel coronavirus on American shores, Fauci has been front and center, scaring the life out of Americans with apocalyptic predictions of millions of deaths that – while they haven’t come to pass – have triggered devastating economic shutdowns. A recent survey found nearly two out of five US families planned to spend the next year in “survival mode,” having no choice but to put aside long-term goals in order to do whatever they can to make ends meet as the economy circles the drain.

It’s no coincidence that Fauci’s directives to “hunker down” for the much-hyped “dark winter” came ahead of the Christmas shopping season, when most retail businesses earn their way back into the black in order to make it through the following year. Fauci and his colleagues in the US health bureaucracy are facilitating the asset-stripping of America, whether or not they’re aware of it.

The Covid-19 czar’s opposition to the cheap, off-patent malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, according to some expert estimates. While the World Health Organization (WHO) terminated its trial of HCQ stating it showed no improvement over standard treatments, there is evidence of success from countries that used the drug to treat early symptoms of Covid-19 – and the US, where the drug was demonized and politicized, is among the top ten in terms of coronavirus-related deaths per capita. Fauci has pooh-poohed the cheap drug in favor of Remdesivir, itself a failed (but fantastically expensive) ebola drug – which the WHO has likewise admitted has little therapeutic potential against the coronavirus.

Indeed, Fauci has gotten every single “epidemic” in his 50-year tenure wrong. From suppressing drugs that were effective in treating AIDS-related pneumonia, resulting in some 17,000 deaths, to shilling for the swine flu vaccine that spawned a narcolepsy epidemic among vaccinated children in 2009, he has been persistently on the wrong side of history. He has lied under oath regarding documented side effects of the measles vaccine and foisted highly toxic AIDS drugs on healthy people under the guise of “pre-exposure prophylaxis” (PrEP). The career medical official has gallons of American blood on his hands.

Ironically, these characteristics would make him ideally suited to Time’s ‘person of the year’ designation – which has been awarded to the likes of Adolf Hitler, Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The man has always put profits before people, a characteristic which should preclude holding public office but which is praised in the sociopathic ruling class circles that anoint America’s ‘leaders.’

Many dystopian works of literature and film use the term “guardian” to denote secret police, and the term fits Fauci perfectly. The immunologist even undermined his own fearmongering when he all but admitted the “gold standard” PCR test used to diagnose Covid-19 is essentially useless – yet gleefully uses these bogus test results to terrorize the American population.

Time is far from alone in lionizing Fauci – indeed, the entire media establishment hangs on his every word. The editor of Yale University’s book of notable quotes declared Fauci’s “wear a mask” to be quote of the year – even though the official had, just a few months before imploring Americans to mask up, declared such a precaution unnecessary, and even detrimental.

Given the utter disaster 2020 has been for the US and many other countries, perhaps it’s fitting that Fauci should be selected to epitomize it. But with the rollout of barely-tested vaccines looming in the future, and the possibility that a “don’t call it a mandate” vaccination certificate will be a requirement to participate in what passes for normal life post-Covid-19, Americans should seriously reconsider placing their trust in this avatar of medical totalitarianism.

Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

NJ Lawmaker Wants MANDATORY Corona Shot For All Kids WITH NO EXEMPTIONS

By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 11, 2020

A State Senator in New Jersey wants the coronavirus vaccine made mandatory for all school age children, despite them being the least at risk group.

Middlesex Democrat Senator Joseph Vitale also wants to eliminate exemptions that have been used in the past to prevent their children from receiving shots.

“When it is that a vaccine is appropriate for children, I believe it ought to be included in that list of vaccines that are required for children,” Vitale told reporters.

“I’d like to incorporate it into the other vaccination bill that would require children to get vaccinated as a condition to entering school,” he added.

Vitale also says there is a separate effort underway to make the vaccine mandatory for University students in the state.

“It’s not complicated to decide whether or not to include a COVID vaccine as a condition of school,” he said, adding “The decision is going to be whether or not the vaccine is available, and if the science supports its efficacy.”

New Jersey currently mandates that children must have several vaccines in order to attend school, including MMR, polio, and chickenpox. However, thousands of children have been exempted from the shots, with parents citing religious beliefs.

There was an attempt last year by lawmakers to eliminate such exemptions and mandate the vaccinations across the board, but it failed when angry parents stormed the statehouse:

While New Jersey officials have stopped short of saying they will force everyone to get the vaccine, Governor Phil Murphy has signed an executive order that will see everyone who does get it automatically enrolled into a ‘New Jersey Immunization Information System’, a move that some have seen as a way of coercing people to take the shot.

Speaking to reporters, Sue Collins, co-founder of the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccine Choice said “Putting the cart before the horse and saying when it’s available everyone has to get it does not build trust.”

“No medical procedure should ever be mandated for anyone — especially something so new, with so many unknowns and no long-term knowledge at all,” Collins added.

Pushing back against the creep toward mandating the vaccine in the state, Republican Assemblyman Gerry Scharfenberger, has sponsored a bill to prevent it from becoming compulsory.

While he says he is not anti-vaccine, Scharfenberger says he cannot support mandating medication, and is responding to the concerns of constituents.

The developments in New Jersey come after a State Assemblymember in New York introduced legislation that would make it compulsory for residents to get vaccinated against coronavirus.

Democrat Linda Rosenthal said she introduced the bill because “there has been a “concerning uptick in dangerous anti-science, anti-vax rhetoric.”

As soon as the FDA approves the vaccine for children, there will likely be a torrent of states moving to add it to the compulsory vaccination list for school kids. Reports have suggested that Pfizer has begun conducting some tests of its vaccine on children, with Moderna also scheduling trials for tests on kids.

Currently, California, Mississippi and West Virginia are the only states that allow medical exemptions to vaccinations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

A further 30 states, including New Jersey, currently allow religious exemptions, with 17 more states still allowing exemptions for religious and personal or philosophical beliefs.

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

The Great Kary Mullis, inventor of the abused PCR test talks about Antony Fauci

Wardo Rants

Just so that people understand, Dr. Kary Mullis winds up dead just weeks before the Gates Foundation, World Economic Forum, and John Hopkins (Michael Bloomberg) School of Medicine held their “Event 201.”

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Naomi Klein: Gatekeeper Extraordinaire

Veteran journalist lines up alongside the mainstream, attacking “conspiracy theorists” and “covid denialism”.

By Cat Maguire & Colleen Maguire | OffGuardian | December 11, 2020

With a title like The Great Reset Conspiracy Smoothie, it appears Naomi Klein is trying too hard to recapture her prowess at defining a meme. Her buzz-concept, “Shock Doctrine,” is spot-on and rightfully successful. But her “Screen New Deal” about Silicon Valley technocrats fizzled.

And now she puts forth “Conspiracy Smoothie,” declaring the multitudinous “conspiracies” out there are just one big bizarro mashup, an “inchoate meta-scream.” The word “smoothie” defeats her purpose, though, because smoothies are healthy, yet she wants to brand alternative thinkers as sinister and unhealthy. Ha! This feckless meme won’t catch on with anybody.

To her credit, Klein offers a very good history and analysis of The Great Reset, as long as she stays within the precincts of critiquing Empire, such as:

… [T]he Great Reset is not a serious effort to actually solve the crises it describes. On the contrary, it is an attempt to create a plausible impression that the huge winners in this system are on the verge of voluntarily setting greed aside to get serious about solving the raging crises that are radically destabilizing our world.

But once she gets near taboo topics, Naomi goes batshit mainstream. Unlike alt “researchers” (her raised-eyebrow quotes), these subjects are “inchoate” for her because, like NIST who doesn’t know there were explosives on 9/11, she hasn’t gone looking. She even admits, “I’ve been doing my best to ignore it [“conspiracies”] for months.”

Rather than go off-reservation and investigate for herself, like a typical conspiracy denier, everything under the hood is automatically deemed “off-the-wall.” Alison McDowall will surely skewer Klein again as seen during this prickly exchange they had about The Great Reset. (See video at 13:25 to 17:00)

Klein’s most damning accusation is her reference to “truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism.” Is Klein really this naive about the objectives and tactics of the Medical Industrial Complex?

Her anti-vaxx slur is a defamation against vaccine-activists, most of whom actually advocate for safe and effective vaccines — the existence of which, however, are questionable. Vaccine manufacturers have no incentive to make a safe product because they were granted legal immunity in 1986 by Congress.

Proof there exists a serious safety deficit in vaccines is the current running tab of $4.2 billion awarded to victims and their families in “Vaccine Court” from vaccine deaths and injuries.

Klein’s political bifurcation of conspiracy theories telegraphs an utter misreading of allies and issues:

And yet search for the term “global reset” and you will be bombarded with breathless “exposés” of a secret globalist cabal, headed by Schwab and Bill Gates, that is using the state of shock created by the coronavirus (which is probably itself a “hoax”) to turn the world into a high-tech dictatorship that will take away your freedom forever: a green/socialist/Venezuela/Soros/forced vaccine dictatorship if the Reset exposé is coming from the far right, and a Big Pharma/GMO/biometric implants/5G/robot dog/forced vaccine dictatorship if the exposé hails from the far left.

After channeling Cass Sunstein in the above paragraph, she asks readers if they are confused. No, Naomi, you are the one who is confused. You are the one who cannot recognize that most of these issues are not only scientifically legitimate, but many are important to and shared by global activists and professionals across the political spectrum. You are the one who is out of touch for not recognizing how and why these issues unite many diverse communities. Unlike the binary tribalism you attribute to the above players, their unity is transpartisan.

In Klein’s inventory of 2020 shock doctrines, it’s all the fault of the right side of the aisle. There is not an ounce of finger-pointing, for example, that the extreme failures of the lockdowns are almost wholly the result of diktats by petty Democratic tyrants (not to mention their over-the-top hypocrisy).

Shockingly, she fails to comment on the source of the epic silencing of anyone who questions Official Narratives. To wit, Big Tech and Big Media censors are fully aligned with Democratic agendas. As for the Left’s political-identity swamp, there is nary a mention of Mao’s Cultural Revolution USA-style that has ravaged our country.

The World According to Naomi is full of plutocrats, but they’re all right-wing. She goes on and on about workers rights and all the populist issues that Democrats traditionally stood for. Didn’t she get the memo that there’s been a tectonic shift? Doesn’t she realize that the entire force of the 1% has arrayed itself with the Democrats, a party that has now disgracefully abandoned what had been their deplorables base for decades.

If Bernie progressives, we-the-people patriots, the Yellow Vests, indigenous peoples, and all the rest of the world’s 99% would just join hands, we could create a powerful transpartisan movement to abort The Great Reset’s dystopian agenda. But this can’t happen by staying within the Democrats’ Big Tent as Klein does, which likewise ultimately aligns her with the Establishment no matter how much she critiques them from her influential, mainstream-left perch.

Invoking an ever-reliable inference to Trump Derangement Syndrome, she writes:

Is it all a plan, another kind of elaborate conspiracy? Nothing so elegant. As Steve Bannon kindly told us, the informational strategy of the Trump era has always been to “flood the zone with shit.” Four years later, we can see what this looks like in practice. It looks like far-left and far-right conspiracists sitting down over a tray of information-shit sandwiches to talk about how the Great Reset is Gates’s plan to use the DNA from our Covid-19 tests to turn the United States into Venezuela.

“It makes no sense,” she concludes. Yep, Naomi, if you don’t investigate beyond ad hominem analysis and if you seemingly strive for a token social-responsibility seat at the Davos table, your current worldview will only ever perceive genuine opposition to The Great Reset as an indigestible smoothie.

Cat McGuire and Colleen McGuire are twin sisters who are activists and writers. Cat lives in New York City where she works with Break The Spell, a public outreach group raising awareness about the Covid plandemic and the Great Reset. Colleen practiced law in New York City for 16 years and now lives in Greece.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Professor Harvey Risch Interview – Part 2

HCQ TRUTH BOMBS

This is the second part of our interview with the esteemed Professor Harvey Risch from Yale University. The interview, which covers a range of aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, took place on October 20. You are also invited to watch the first part, which was put online on October 24.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

America’s Life of the Lie

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 10, 2020

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, I visited Luray, Virginia, a beautiful little town nestled in the Shenandoah Valley. Walking by the county courthouse, I noticed a plaque out in front, whose inscription exemplifies a root cause of the dysfunctional nature of American society. The plaque reads:

Page County Veterans Memorial

Those who have long enjoyed such freedoms as we enjoy forget in time that man has died to win them.

Dedicated to those who served their country in times of war and peace especially dedicated to those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in order that all mankind may live free.

We all gave some and some gave all.

The plaque lists the names of American military personnel from Page County, Virginia, who died in four of America’s foreign wars: World War I, World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War.

Of course, this type of plaque is not unique to Luray. Variations of it can be found in front of government buildings all across America.

If you want to understand one of the big reasons why the United States is riddled with massive drug addiction and alcoholism, irrational acts of violence, and ever-rising suicide rates, especially among young people and veterans, just read that plaque in front of the Page County, Virginia, courthouse.

Talk to any psychologist or psychiatrist or just read a few self-help books about living a life that denies reality. They will all tell you that when a person lives that type of life, it will inevitably lead to severe psychosis, especially if the person doesn’t realize that anything is wrong with him and instead believes that everything is fine with him.

It’s only when a person achieves a “breakthrough” as to his condition that he is able to start the long road to recovery. The first step toward recovery and health, as Alcoholics Anonymous points out, is for a person to acknowledge that he has a problem.

That’s the problem with America, or, to be more precise, with a large segment of the American populace. They are living what can be called the life of the lie and have been for their entire lives. It is a lie that holds that American soldiers have died for freedom in America’s foreign wars.

Nothing could be further from the truth. But all too many Americans simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the lie they are living. It’s just too comfortable living the life of the lie, which, over time, manifests itself in a massively dysfunctional society, one in which the dysfunctionality becomes increasingly worse the longer the lie persists.

World War I. No American soldier, including those from Page County, Virginia, died in World War I defending the freedom of the American people or, for that matter, anyone’s else’s freedom. The freedom of the American people was never at stake or at risk. President Wilson’s war aims were (1) to “make the world safe for democracy,” which, of course, is not the same thing as freedom and (2) to make this the war that would end war forever.

Wilson’s war aims were a crock. It didn’t take Americans long to realize that Wilson had sacrificed the lives of American soldiers for nothing. No, not for freedom, but rather for nothing. Even worse, he had destroyed freedom by conscripting — i.e. forcing — men to go thousands of miles away to be sacrificed for nothing. Moreover, there was the destruction of liberty here at home, including the jailing of American citizens who dared to criticize Wilson’s deadly folly.

World War II. Germany never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. Hitler’s aim was always to establish dominance on the European continent and to move eastward against the Soviet Union and communism. After the fiasco of World War I, Americans wanted no part of another European war. But President Roosevelt, unwilling to let the American people have the final say, provoked the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, especially through a very effective oil embargo, in order to give him a “back door” to getting the U.S. into the war against Germany. At no time did Japan threaten the freedom of the American people. Its war aim was limited to trying to knock out the U.S. fleet so that Japan would have a free hand in invading the Dutch East Indies to secure the oil to fund its war machine in China.

Moreover, at the end of the war, half of Germany and all of Eastern Europe were under communist control, which wasn’t any better than Nazi control. Communism, like Nazism, is the opposite of freedom. The aftermath of the war also led to the conversion of the U.S. government to a national-security state with omnipotent, dark-side powers that are antithetical to the principles of a free society. It also led to the Cold War, which brought massive infringement on the liberties and privacy of the American people.

Korean War and Vietnam War. These were nothing more than civil wars that were no business of the U.S. government. At no time did North Korea or North Vietnam threaten the freedom of the American people. The U.S. interventions into these civil wars actually destroyed freedom at home through conscription and destruction of civil liberties.

Maybe nobody from Page County has been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, given that those two forever wars aren’t listed on the plaque. But the same principle applies there as well: Soldiers who have died in those two foreign escapades did not die for freedom, given that the freedom of the American people was never being threatened by either the Afghan regime or the Iraqi regime. American soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq have died for the same thing that American soldiers died for in other foreign escapades: they have died for nothing.

But Americans cannot bring themselves to face these discomforting and painful truths. They insist on continuing the life of the life — the life that defers to and, even worse, glorifies the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, the three principal components of the national-security establishment that itself has destroyed the freedom and well-being of the American people. Americans simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge reality — that American soldiers who died in these foreign escapades died not for freedom but for nothing and that many of them were forced to do so through conscription.

Until Americans come to grips with reality, the suicides will continue, especially among young people and veterans, as so will the massive drug addiction, alcoholism, and other self-destructive behavior, not to mention the many irrational acts of violence. That’s the type of dysfunctional society that the life of the lie — a life that denies reality — produces.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | | Leave a comment

The Hunter Biden Criminal Probe Bolsters a Chinese Scholar’s Claim About Beijing’s Influence With the Bidens

Professor Di Dongsheng says China’s close ties to Wall Street and its dealings with Hunter could enable it to exert more power than under Trump

By Glenn Greenwald | December 9, 2020

Hunter Biden acknowledged today that he has been notified of an active criminal investigation into his tax affairs by the U.S. Attorney for Delaware. Among the numerous prongs of the inquiry, CNN reports, investigators are examining “whether Hunter Biden and his associates violated tax and money laundering laws in business dealings in foreign countries, principally China.”

Documents relating to Hunter Biden’s exploitation of his father’s name to enrich himself and other relatives through deals with China were among the cache published in the week before the election by The New York Post — revelations censored by Twitter and Facebook and steadfastly ignored by most mainstream news outlets. That concerted repression effort by media outlets and Silicon Valley left it to right-wing outlets such as Fox News and The Daily Caller to report, which in turn meant that millions of Americans were kept in the dark before voting.

But the just-revealed federal criminal investigation in Delaware is focused on exactly the questions which corporate media outlets refused to examine for fear that doing so would help Trump: namely, whether Hunter Biden engaged in illicit behavior in China and what impact that might have on his father’s presidency.

The allegations at the heart of this investigation compel an examination of a fascinating and at-times disturbing speech at a major financial event held last week in Shanghai. In that speech, a Chinese scholar of political science and international finance, Di Donghseng, insisted that Beijing will have far more influence in Washington under a Biden administration than it did with the Trump administration.

The reason, Di said, is that China’s ability to get its way in Washington has long depended upon its numerous powerful Wall Street allies. But those allies, he said, had difficulty controlling Trump, but will exert virtually unfettered power over Biden. That China cultivated extensive financial ties to Hunter Biden, Di explained, will be crucial for bolstering Beijing’s influence even further.

Di, who in addition to his teaching positions is also Vice Dean of Beijing’s Renmin University’s School of International Relations, delivered his remarks alongside three other Chinese banking and development experts. Di’s speech at the event, entitled “Will China’s Opening up of its Financial Sector Attract Wall Street?,” was translated and posted by Jennifer Zeng, a Chinese Communist Party critic who left China years ago, citing religious persecution, and now lives in the U.S. A source fluent in Mandarin confirmed the accuracy of the translation.

The centerpiece of Di’s speech was the history he set forth of how Beijing has long successfully managed to protect its interests in the halls of American power: namely, by relying on “friends” in Wall Street and other U.S. ruling class sectors — which worked efficiently until the Trump presidency.

Referring to the Trump-era trade war between the two countries, Di posed this question: “Why did China and the U.S. use to be able to settle all kinds of issues between 1992 [when Clinton became President] and 2016 [when Obama’s left office]?” He then provided this answer:

No matter what kind of crises we encountered — be it the Yinhe incident [when the U.S. interdicted a Chinese ship in the mistaken belief it carried chemical weapons for Iran], the bombing of the embassy [the 1992 bombing by the U.S. of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade], or the crashing of the plane [the 2001 crashing of a U.S. military spy plane into a Chinese fighter jet] — things were all solved in no time, like a couple do with their quarrels starting at the bedhead but ending at the bed end. We fixed everything in two months. What is the reason? I’m going to throw out something maybe a little bit explosive here.

It’s just because we have people at the top. We have our old friends who are at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence.

Who are these “old friends” of China’s “who are at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence” and have ensured that, in his words, “for the past 30 years, 40 years, we have been utilizing the core power of the United States”? Di provided the answer: Wall Street, with whom the Chinese Community Party and Chinese industry maintain a close, multi-pronged and inter-dependent relationship.

“Since the 1970s, Wall Street had a very strong influence on the domestic and foreign affairs of the United States,” Di observed. Thus, “we had a channel to rely on.”

To illustrate the point of how helpful Wall Street has been to Chinese interests in the U.S., Di recounted a colorful story, albeit one fused with anti-Semitic tropes, of his unsuccessful efforts in 2015 to secure the preferred venue in Washington for the debut of President Xi Jinping’s book about China. No matter how much he cajoled the owner of the iconic D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose, or what he offered him, Di was told it was unavailable, already promised to a different author. So he conveyed his failure to Party leadership.

But at the last minute, Di recounts, he was told that venue had suddenly changed its mind and agreed to host Xi’s book event. This was the work, he said, of someone to whom Party leaders introduced him: “She is from a famous, leading global financial institution on Wall Street,” Di said, “the president of the Asia region of a top-level financial institution,” who speaks perfect Mandarin and has a sprawling home in Beijing.

The point — that China’s close relationship with Wall Street has given it very powerful friends in the U.S. — was so clear that it sufficed for him to coyly laugh with the audience: “Do you understand what I mean? If you do, put your hands together!” They knowingly applauded.

All of that provoked an obvious question: why did this close relationship with Wall Street not enable China to exert the same influence during the Trump years, including avoiding a costly trade war? Di explained that — aside from Wall Street’s reduced standing due to the 2008 financial crisis — everything changed when Trump ascended to the presidency; specifically, Wall Street could not control him the way it had previous presidents because of Trump’s prior conflicts with Wall Street:

But the problem is that after 2008, the status of Wall Street has declined, and more importantly, after 2016, Wall Street can’t fix Trump. It’s very awkward. Why? Trump had a previous soft default issue with Wall Street, so there was a conflict between them, but I won’t go into details, I may not have enough time.

So during the US-China trade war, [Wall Street] tried to help, and I know that my friends on the US side told me that they tried to help, but they couldn’t do much.

But as Di shifted to his discussion of the new incoming administration, his tone palpably changed, becoming far more animated, excited and optimistic. That’s because a Biden presidency means a restoration of the old order, where Wall Street exerts great influence with the White House and can thus do China’s bidding: “But now we’re seeing Biden was elected, the traditional elite, the political elite, the establishment, they’re very close to Wall Street, so you see that, right?”

And Di specifically referenced the work Beijing did to cultivate Hunter:

Trump has been saying that Biden’s son has some sort of global foundation. Have you noticed that?

Who helped [Biden’s son] build the foundations? Got it? There are a lot of deals inside all these.

Some excerpts of Di’s speech can be seen below, and the translated transcript of it here.

The claims in his speech can be seen in a new light given today’s revelations that the U.S. Attorney has resumed its active criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China and whether he accounted to the I.R.S. for the income (CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz says that “at least one of the matters investigators have examined is a 2017 gift of a 2.8-carat diamond that Hunter Biden received from CEFC [China Energy’]’s founder and former chairman Ye Jianming after a Miami business meeting.”

The pronouncements of this University Professor and administrator should not be taken as gospel, but there is substantial independent confirmation for much of what he claimed. That is even more true after today’s news about Hunter Biden.

That Hunter Biden received large sums of money from Chinese entities is not in dispute. A report from the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs earlier this year, while finding no wrongdoing by Joe Biden, documented millions in cash flow between Hunter and his relatives and Chinese interests.

Nor can it be reasonably disputed that Wall Street exerts significant influence in Democratic Party politics generally and in the world of Joe Biden specifically. Citing data from the Center for Responsive Politics, CNBC reported in the weeks before the election:

People in the securities and investment industry will finish the 2020 election cycle contributing over $74 million to back Joe Biden’s candidacy for president, a much larger sum than what President Donald Trump raised from Wall Street.

They added: “Biden also received a ton of financial support from leaders on Wall Street in the third quarter.” At the same time, said CNN, “professionals on Wall Street are shunning Trump and funneling staggering amounts of money to his opponent.” Wall Street executives, CNBC reported, specially celebrated Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate, noting that her own short-lived presidential campaign was deluged with “contributions from executives in a wide range of industries, including film, TV, real estate and finance.”

Moreover, Biden’s top appointees thus far overwhelmingly have massive ties to Wall Street and the industries which spend the most to control the U.S. government. As but one egregious example, Pine Island Investment Corp. — an investment firm in which key Biden appointees including Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief nominee Gen. Lloyd Austin have been centrally involved — “is seeing a surge in support from Wall Street players after pitching access to investors.”

Prior to the formal selection of Blinken and Austin for key Cabinet posts, The Daily Poster reported that “two former government officials who may now run President-elect Joe Biden’s national security team have been partners at a private equity firm now promising investors big profits off government business because of its ties to those officials.” The New York Times last week said “the Biden team’s links to these entities are presenting the incoming administration with its first test of transparency and ethics” and that Pine Island is an example “of how former officials leverage their expertise, connections and access on behalf of corporations and other interests, without in some cases disclosing details about their work, including the names of the clients or what they are paid.”

That China and Wall Street have an extremely close relationship has been documented for years. Financial Times — under the headline “Beijing and Wall Street deepen ties despite geopolitical rivalry” — last month reported that “Wall Street groups including BlackRock, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase have each been given approval to expand their businesses in China over recent months.”

A major Wall Street Journal story from last week, bearing the headline “China Has One Powerful Friend Left in the U.S.: Wall Street,” echoed Di’s speech by noting that “Chinese leaders have time and again turned to Wall Street for assistance in periods of trouble.” That WSJ article particularly emphasized the growing ties between China and the asset-manager giant BlackRock, a firm that already has outsized influence in the Biden administration. And Michael Bloomberg’s ties to China have been so crucial that he has regularly heaped praise on Beijing even when doing so was politically deleterious.

Even the smaller details of Di’s speech — including his anecdote about the book event he tried to arrange for Xi — check out. Contemporaneous news accounts show that exactly the book event he described was held at Politics and Prose in 2015, just as he recalled.

None of this means that Trump was some sort of stalwart enemy of Wall Street. From massive corporate tax cuts to rollbacks of regulations in numerous industries and many of their own in key positions, the financial sector benefited in all sorts of ways from the Trump presidency.

But all of their behavior indicates that they view a Biden/Harris administration as far more beneficial to their interests, and far more susceptible to their control. And that, in turn, makes Beijing far more confident that they will wield significantly more influence in Washington than they could over the last four years.

That confidence is due, says Professor Di, to Beijing’s close ties to a newly empowered Wall Street as well as their efforts to cultivate Hunter Biden, efforts we are likely to learn much more about now that Hunter’s activities in China are under active criminal investigation in Delaware. We should and could have learned about these transactions prior to the election had the bulk of the media not corruptly decided to ignore any incriminating reporting on Biden, but learning about them now is, one might say, a case of better late than never.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Remembering the Intifada and its prisoners of freedom: “Ansar III: The Camp of Slow Death”

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network | December 9, 2020

The great Palestinian popular intifada (uprising) that mobilized, organized and unified the Palestinian masses – especially inside occupied Palestine, but also in the refugee camps, in exile and in diaspora – launched in December 1987. As we recall its 33rd anniversary, we note that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – some estimates reaching up to 600,000 – were arrested, detained and imprisoned by Israeli occupation forces during the Intifada.

There, they experienced severe torture under interrogation, harsh conditions of confinement, medical neglect and abuse, collective punishment and home demolitions targeting their families, brutal beatings and mistreatment and the widespread and systematic use of administrative detention, imprisonment without charge or trial. Inside the prisons, however, despite all forms of repression, generations of Palestinian organizers developed “revolutionary schools” of politics, literature and organizing, developing powerful young activists to return to the streets embroiled in a great popular uprising.

In a failed attempt to suppress the Intifada, the Israeli occupation launched new prison camps and detention centers to hold the thousands of Palestinians detained in mass arrests throughout occupied Palestine. The following historical booklet, published in English in 1988 by ROOTS and Friends of Palestinian Prisoners, focuses on one such prison camp: Ansar III, “a barbed wire compound in the heart of the Negev desert.” At the time of the booklet’s publication, Janet Jubran of the Friends of Palestinian Prisoners noted in her introduction, “In one year, since the Intifada began, more than 25,000 Palestinians have been arrested. At this moment, nearly every family has one or more of its members in prison.”

This powerful booklet, including documentation, testimony and facts about Ansar III and its Palestinian prisoners – including many labor leaders, human rights defenders and journalists – was a part of the burgeoning organizing of Palestinian communities in exile and diaspora (in this case, in the United States) and the growing movement of international solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network is republishing this booklet today, on the 33rd anniversary of the Intifada, to bring this important historical document to new audiences, continuing to build upon this legacy of struggle, standing with the Palestinian prisoners and the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation and return. 

Download the PDF here: Download PDF

December 9, 2020 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Mouse Utopia and The Blackest Pill – #PropagandaWatch

Corbett • 12/08/2020

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

You’ve probably heard about John B. Calhoun’s mouse utopia experiment by now. Everyone’s been talking about it recently. But what does this experiment really tell us about the human experience, and can we avoid swallowing the poisoned black pill of the propagandists when covering this highly anti-human idea? Join James for this important exposé of the Malthusian eugenicists behind the great reset.

Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube or Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES

John B. Calhoun Film 7.1 [edited], (NIMH, 1970-1972)

Grand Theft World

Grand Theft World Podcast 005 | Unmasking Dystopia

John B. Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia Experiment and Reflections on the Welfare State

Mouse Utopia Experiment

Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population

Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence

Letting the rat out of the bag

Soylent Green – FLNWO #04

Why Big Oil

Meet Paul Ehrlich, Pseudoscience Charlatan

see What is Sustainable Development?

December 9, 2020 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

How long does immunity to covid last?

By Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | December 9, 2020

One of the fears of many people in relation to covid has been that the immunity that develops after infection is so short lived that the infection will just keep going around and around and re-infecting everyone (until everyone is dead, I assume).

Two pieces of evidence have been presented to support this belief. The first concerns a few cases of “re-infection” that have been broadcast widely in media, even though virtually all of these cases have been either completely asymptomatic or only very mildly symptomatic the second time around – a sure sign the the immune system still remembers covid and is doing its thing to stop it.

The second concerns the fact that antibodies fade after infection. This builds on a fundamental lack of understanding of how the immune system works. Although the actively antibody producing cells diminish after an infection, these cells (so called “plasma cells”) are not responsible for immune memory. That role is filled by special “memory B-cells”, that lie dormant in the body, waiting for the infection to reappear. When it does, they quickly spring in to action and produce massive numbers of new antibody producing clones.

Now, however, covid has been around for a while, and we’re starting to get some pretty good data on how long immunity lasts after infection. There is a pre-print up on MedRxiv about a study that sought to gain a deeper understanding of what sort of immune memory is produced after a covid infection.

Before we get in to the details of the article, let’s talk a little bit about immune memory, so everyone is on the same page. Immune memory is the ability of the immune system to remember a pathogen after a first infection (or vaccination), and thereby respond much more quickly and effectively upon re-infection. It is mediated by three main types of cell. The first is the already mentioned memory B-cell, which is basically a dormant version of the antibody producing plasma cells. The second is the “memory killer T-cell”, which is a dormant version of the regular killer T cell (a.k.a CD8+ T-cell). Killer T-cells specialize in finding virus infected cells and getting them to commit suicide in a way that prevents the virus from spreading further.

The third is the “memory helper T-cell”, which among many other functions regulates the function of the other types of immune cell. Both killer T-cells and B-cells cannot become fully activated until helper T-cells have become activated. The central function of T-helper cells is shown by AIDS (Aquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), a disease caused by the destruction of the T-helper cells by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) – without the T-helper cells, other parts of the immune system cannot become fully activated, and the immune system is not able to function effectively.

In case you’re curious, the reason B-cells are called B-cells is because they mature in the bone marrow, so the B is for Bone marrow. T-cells mature in the thymus, so the T is for Thymus.

OK, now you know enough to understand the results of the study. 185 people with confirmed covid-19 were recruited and had blood samples drawn. 92% had not required hospitalization, so only a minority had had severe disease. The ages of the participants varied from 19 to 81. The blood samples were collected from several different sites across the United States.

The results of the study were based on analysis of the participants blood. 79% of participants only provided blood at a single time point, which varied from six days post-infection to more than six months post-infection, while the remainder (21%) provided blood at multiple time points. In other words, this was not really a longitudinal study, since most participants only had their blood analyzed at a single point in time, although there was some longitudinal data. 41 participants provided blood samples at six months or longer after infection, and this is really the group we’re most interested in, since this is the group that can tell us if there is still a good level of immune memory six months after infection.

Let’s look at the results.

Among the 54 individuals measured at one month post infection, 98% had antibodies. Among the 41 individuals measured at six to eight months post infection, 90% had antibodies. As mentioned before, antibodies are produced by plasma cells, and although antibodies in the blood stream decline with time as the plasma cells start to disappear, there should still be memory B-cells present for much longer, which can quickly be activated upon re-infection. That’s why it’s actually more important to look at what’s happening with memory B-cells than with antibodies, if you want to know how long your body maintains the ability to mount an antibody response to an infection. So, what did happen with the memory B-cells?

The prevalence of memory B-cells increased at each time point measured up to five months post infection, at which point they reached a stable level. There was no sign of a decline in memory B-cells after the five month mark.

Next we have the killer T-cells. At one month post infection, 61% had detectable memory killer T-cells. At six to eight months, 50% had measurable killer T-cells. It was however only possible to test for these cells in 18 individuals at the six month mark, so the confidence interval is wide, and thus it’s really impossible to say exactly what the trajectory was between the one month and six month marks. What can be said though is that a large proportion of participants still had measurable killer T-cells at six months.

Finally we have the memory helper T-cells. 94% of those measured at one month had measurable helper T-cells. Among those measured at six to eight months, that number was 89% (again, this data is based on only 18 individuals).

So, what can we conclude?

First, it’s important to note that this study had some weaknesses. The first is that, with the exception of a minority of participants, the study was cross-sectional, not longitudinal. This means that we’re not comparing people with themselves over time, we’re comparing them with other people who happen to be at a different point in the time line. It would have been better to have longitudinal data for all participants. The second is that some of the groups studied were pretty small, which creates wide margins of error. Some of the data was based on less than twenty individuals, which is really a tiny number.

A third weakness is that this study isn’t looking at how many people get reinfected with covid after a certain amount of time, it is looking at biomarkers – in other words, it is using proxy data, which is clearly a less reliable type of information than seeing what is actually happening to people in the real world. It’s kind of like doing a statin study and looking at what happens to cholesterol levels instead of looking at how many people have died after certain time point.

Having said all that, it is clear from this study that there is significant immune memory at the six to eight month time point after infection. At six to eight months after infection, 90% of measured samples still had antibodies and T-helper cells specific for covid-19, and 50% still had measurable T-killer cells. If the decline continues linearly over time from what was seen in this study, then it is reasonable to assume that most people continue to be immune to covid after infection for at least a couple of years.

You might also be interested in my article about the number of years of life lost, on average, when someone dies of covid, or my article about whether face masks are effective against covid.

December 9, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Contrary to climate alarmism and media, reef islands are GROWING despite rising sea, says new study

RT | December 9, 2020

Against all odds, low-lying reef islands actually appear to be growing in some parts of the world, despite rising sea levels, increasing their footprint and defying doomsday predictions.

Geomorphologist Murray Ford from the University of Auckland in New Zealand led a team of researchers who examined Jeh Island, one of the 56 islands that make up the Ailinglaplap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, itself one of the most endangered nations on Earth.

Ford and his team pored over aerial and satellite imagery of the island from above and made the startling discovery that not only has Jeh increased in total land area by 13 percent since 1943, it may actually have once been four separate islands which have now morphed together due to net land-mass gains.

“Counter to predictions, popular media coverage and political proclamations, recent studies have shown the majority of reef islands studied have been stable or have increased in size since the mid-20th century,” the research team from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, led by Ford, explains.

According to the geomorphologist and his colleagues, the more dire sea-level rise predictions were based on the assumption that islands are static and unchanging and would therefore simply drown once the tides rose enough.

The research team found that the islands grew courtesy of recently generated organic material formed by the reef and not sediment washed inland by the tides.

“The coral reefs which surround these islands [are] the engine room of island growth, producing sediment which is washed up on the island shoreline,” Ford explains. “Healthy coral reefs are essential for this process to continue into the future.”

Research dating back as far as 2018 found that among 30 coral atolls, accounting for over 700 islands in total, 88.6 percent remained stable or increased in size in recent decades, while none lost land overall.

December 9, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

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