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Magical Thinking

By Karen Kwiatkowski | LewRockwell | February 13, 2024

In 2005, Joan Didion published “The Year of Magical Thinking” that about grieving the loss of her husband, the unavoidable instant reduction of a rich marriage to aimless solitude.

Beyond the obvious arena of modern imperial foreign policy, magical thinking is a well-known psychological concept. It is “the belief that wishes can impose their own order on the material world.” It is driven by human goals of fulfillment “without consideration of the constraints of the external world.”

We’ve been reminded of this concept in many different ways over the past few weeks. The befuddled fumbling old man in the White House insulting reporters who ask him about his memory lapses, then demonstrating his disability several times later in the press conference.

He wishes to remain President, yet he is incapable of being President. He wants that particular fulfillment regardless of its fundamental impossibility.

We see the same in many modern political leaders, no doubt Canada’s Trudeau, who was upset that Putin, in a wide ranging interview last week, mentioned the Canadian Parliament’s celebration of World War II Ukrainian Nazi Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old surviving member of the Waffen SS Galicia Division. Zelensky had just spoken, and all present sincerely wished that killing Russians was great Western tradition, habitual and just. Instead we saw the impossibility of wishes making their own reality, their own order; the impossibility of changing fact to fantasy, and fantasy to fact.

Access to the most casual and shallow history of World War II should have revealed to any one of the hundreds of educated and cosmopolitan MPs, and the media covering the event, that those killing Russians in WWII were either part of Nazi Germany, or allied with Nazi Germany. It is modern Russian intolerance for Nazis that we find to be traditional, habitual and just. The propagandized West seeks a better world through magical thinking, not through the embrace of reality.

We see magical thinking in Kiev, but somehow I suspect Ukrainians have a far better understanding of reality than do Zelensky’s American and British advisors – who seem permanently afflicted with lies becoming truth if only we all wished for it hard enough. The best example of this is our puppet in Kiev who insists on no negotiations with Russia until the popular and extremely rational “history buff” President Putin, steps down to face the Ukrainian music for his war crimes.

Yet when Tucker Carlson asked Putin what it was all about – we found simply that the protection of Russia and Russian people are a cause for which Putin is willing to fight. It is a concept that shocks the Western empire circa 2024.

We also learned that years of western actions, like withdrawing from nuclear treaties and pursuing first strike capabilities, drove Russian development of hypersonic missiles and a whole range of capabilities to survive and defeat such extreme threats coming from an increasingly unpredictable West. Meanwhile, US and NATO naval capability is underwhelming, recruitment abysmal, technology plateaued and inappropriate for offense or defense, and funds are dwindling.

We learned that while politicians and academics continue to push for ever more massive sanctions against Russia – new markets materialized and Russia’s economy adapted and thrived, as the economy of the western allies shrank and struggled.

We learned that western cultural fetishes of magic energy replacing hydrocarbons, 72 genders, modern monetary theory and unlimited immigration without cultural integration have all been rejected – rationally and straightforwardly – by Russia. The former Communist empire has become a sanctuary for Orthodox Christianity, while the West bans and abandons Christian churches and principles in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Europe and in America. It sounds unbelievable, unpredictable, a rabbit from a hat and a lady cut in half all in one show  – but it’s true.

A key advisor to Zelensky on US-UK-EU proxy war, and former UK PM Boris Johnson is an exemplar of magical thinking. He was outraged that Putin explained with evidence how the last 18 months of war in Ukraine could have been prevented, and ended peacefully, as peace talks in Turkey produced a draft treaty acceptable to both Ukrainian and Russian teams. This was abruptly canned after Boris rushed to Kiev, where he demanded the Ukrainians reject the nascent agreement. Boris, bobbing in the flotsam of magical thinking, is a liar, and yet, one marvels at the power of believing that your desires and wishes can create a new world order.

We see this in the US, in both its obsession with Julian Assange despite the utter irrationality of its pursuit of a man who exposed US lawbreaking and evil – something top politicians in the US should always be eager to correct in the name of American heroism and honor.

We see this in the continued fantasy of electoral honesty in the US, in the imperial two-tiered system of law, in the incomprehensible funding and moral support provided to Israel as it directly and systematically exterminates 2 million people, destroys their homes, hospitals, schools, and businesses, and takes their land. We see it in Israel, as it imagines what it is doing will save rather than destroy her. Magical thinking.

Joan Didion popularized the term, documenting her grief at the sudden end of a life, marriage, meaning, and purpose. Magical thinking may be part of a process by which people and institutions cope with the innate realization of irretrievable loss.

The US government, and its very federalism, is undergoing an imperial metamorphosis from rapacious caterpillar, to life in a rapidly decaying cocoon, to something entirely different and unrecognizable – life in the air, with little baggage, free, vulnerable and alive. It will own nothing and be happy. Dissolution and death of empire is a story told many times, a pattern of nature, and it cannot be stopped. Magical thinking is simultaneously necessary and futile, and Washington and many of the European capitols are deeply engaged in this phase. They are ending, ungracefully, ungratefully, undeniably.

But for the people, who live with feet on the ground, and eyes wide open, who bear the costs of the magical thinking of their governments, and the lies of their propagandists, and the waste of their wars, and the contamination of everything that was good – for us the only value is seeing the reality of things. Recognizing reality, acting upon it, rejecting even the most subtle suggestions of magical thinking and fantasy and imaginations of world orders – in this way imperial error can be stopped, and reversed.

Peace, transparency, prosperity, exchanges of goods, ideas, and many charming conversations with partners and friends around the planet – none of this is fantasy, and it doesn’t require magic. Let’s get on with it.

Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, farmer and aspiring anarcho-capitalist. She ran for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district in 2012, is a Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, and an Associated Scholar of the Mises Institute.

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Copyright © Karen Kwiatkowski

February 13, 2024 Posted by | Deception | , , , , | Leave a comment

Tucker Slayed the Mainstream Media Dragon

By Ron Paul | February 12, 2024

There has been much written and said about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week. As of this writing the video on Twitter alone has been viewed nearly 200 million times, making it likely the most-viewed news event in history.

Many millions of viewers who may not have had access to the other side of the story were informed that the Russia/Ukraine military conflict did not begin in 2022, as the mainstream media continuously reports, but in fact began eight years earlier with a US-backed coup in Ukraine. The US media does not report this because they don’t want Americans to begin questioning our interventionist foreign policy. They don’t want Americans to see that our government meddling in the affairs of other countries – whether by “color revolution,” sanctions, or bombs – has real and deadly consequences to those on the receiving end of our foreign policy.

To me, however, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin was the US mainstream media reaction. As Putin himself said during the interview, “in the world of propaganda, it’s very difficult to defeat the United States.” Even a casual look at the US mainstream media’s reporting before and after the interview would show how correct he is about that. In the days and weeks before the interview, the US media was filled with stories about how horrible it was that Tucker Carlson was interviewing the Russian president. There was the danger, they all said, that Putin might spread “disinformation.”

That Putin might say something to put his country in a better light was, they were saying, reason enough to not interview him. With that logic, why have journalism at all? Everyone interviewed by journalists – certainly every world leader – will attempt to paint a rosy picture. The job of a journalist in a free society should be to do the reporting and let the people decide. But somehow that has been lost. These days the mainstream media tells you what to think and you better not dispute it or you will be cancelled!

What the US mainstream media was really worried about was that the “other side of the story” might start to ring true with the public. So they attacked the messenger.

The CNN reporting on Tucker’s interview pretty much sums up the reaction across the board of the US mainstream media. Their headline read, “Tucker Carlson is in Russia to interview Putin. He’s already doing the bidding of the Kremlin.”

By merely doing what used to be called “journalism” – interviewing and reporting on people and events, whether good or bad – one is “doing the bidding” of the subject of the interview or report?

No wonder fellow journalist Julian Assange has been locked away in a gulag for so many years. He dared to assume that in a free society, being a journalist means reporting the good, the bad, and the ugly even if it puts those in power in a bad light.

In the end, the massive success of the Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin demonstrates once and for all that the American people are sick to death of their mainstream media propagandists and liars. They are looking not for government narratives, but for truth. That’s the really good news about this interview.

February 13, 2024 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Tucker Carlson reviews Putin interview and reveals what ‘radicalized’ him

RT | February 12, 2024

Following his two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, US journalist Tucker Carlson opened up about his experience at the World Government Summit in Dubai.

In an hour-long interview with TV presenter Emad Eldin Adeeb, Carlson addressed why the conversation with Putin did not touch on certain topics, how the US political establishment had reacted to it, and why Washington has failed to understand Moscow, among other things.

Putin the diplomat

Carlson claimed that he had an off-the-record conversation with Putin after their interview, but would not reveal what was discussed, however.

Carlson did say that Putin seemed willing to negotiate with the West about both the end of the Ukraine conflict and a new balance of power in the world. Diplomacy is the art of compromise, and almost everyone “other than maybe the United States during the unipolar period” understands this, Carlson said. But while Putin wants the conflict to end, his position will only harden the longer it goes on, he added.

NATO and Russia

One of the major revelations in the interview for Carlson was that Russia had asked to join NATO – and while then-US President Bill Clinton seemed receptive, his aides pushed against the idea and it ultimately failed.

Since the entire point of NATO was to keep the Soviet Union out of Western Europe, Carlson said in Dubai, “if the Russians ask to join the alliance, that would suggest you have solved the problem and you can move on to do something constructive with your life. But we refused.”

“Go sit in the sauna for an hour and think about what that means,” he added.

The problem with Western politicians

Politicians in the West aren’t setting themselves “achievable” goals, Carlson has argued.

“I have heard personally US government officials say well we just have to return Crimea to Ukraine,” he said. “That’s not going to happen, short of a nuclear war. That’s insane, actually.”

Even bringing up this kind of idea “shows you are a child, you don’t understand the area at all, and you have no real sense of what’s possible,” the journalist concluded.

It’s always Munich 1938

According to Carlson, one of the biggest issues in the US and the West in general is the tendency to reduce everything to the 1938 Munich conference, at which Britain and France sought to “appease” Nazi Germany by giving it a portion of Czechoslovakia.

“The American policymaker historical template is tiny – in fact there’s only one – and it’s a 2-year period in the late 1930s, and everything is based on that understanding of history and human nature. That’s insane,” Carlson said.

How Moscow ‘radicalized’ him

Carlson pointed out that he’s 54 and grew up in an America that had nice, safe and beautiful cities, “and we no longer have them.”

It was “radicalizing” to see Moscow “cleaner, safer and prettier” than American cities, he said, or be reminded of that in Dubai and Abu Dhabi – while in the US, one can’t ride the subway in New York City because it’s dirty and unsafe.

“That’s a voluntary choice,” he said. “You don’t have to have crime, actually.”

Reacting to the backlash

Asked why he hadn’t raised certain topics with Putin, Carlson said he wanted to do the interview because he was interested in how the Russian leader saw the world – and not to inject himself into the discussion.

Most journalists who interview leaders the US dislikes tend to make it about themselves, Carlson added, and since he only cared about the approval of his wife and their children, he didn’t need to virtue-signal.

Asked to comment on former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton calling him a “useful idiot” for Russia, Carlson laughed it off.

“She’s a child, I don’t listen to her,” he said. “How’s Libya doing?”

February 12, 2024 Posted by | Russophobia, Video | , | Leave a comment

Elon Musk Goes to Canossa

BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 12, 2024

Although unknown to almost all present-day Americans, Emperor Henry IV was one of the most powerful European monarchs of his day. Under his twenty year reign, the Holy Roman Empire of the High Middle Ages governed Germany, the Low Countries, much of Italy, and other important lands, with many considering him heir to the fabled Charlemagne.

With the arrogance that came from holding such enormous temporal power and commanding large armies, he challenged the authority of Pope Gregory VII, but the Pontiff quickly brought him low, excommunicating him from the Catholic Church and declaring that Henry’s powerful feudal vassal lords no longer owed him any allegiance. Faced with the very real prospect that he might lose his throne, the emperor traveled to Canossa in hopes of seeing the Holy Father and gaining his forgiveness, then waited three long days outside the castle walls despite the bitter cold, clad in an uncomfortable hair-shirt, and according to some accounts wearing no shoes in the frozen snow. The Pope finally allowed him to enter and granted him an audience, then accepted his capitulation and lifted the religious penalty that had been imposed. In the centuries since that famous incident, the phrase “going to Canossa” has meant the surrender of a proud, powerful figure who does penance and begs forgiveness, submitting to the forces that had humbled him.

Given this history, it’s hardly surprising that the phrase was widely circulated a couple of weeks ago when Elon Musk traveled to Auschwitz to offer his abject submission to Jewish power, donning a skullcap, promising to root out “antisemitism” on the platform he controlled, and even declaring that he regarded himself as “aspirationally Jewish.”

The two most powerful and influential figures in today’s world are surely Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. But I think a reasonable case can be made that Elon Musk should be placed third on that global list.

Our current Western era is dominated by oligarchic wealth and Musk has ranked as the richest man in the world for much of the last few years. The technology industry carries enormous prestige and influence, and Musk is the owner of Tesla, the pioneering electric vehicle company, whose market value is greater than that of the world’s next five car companies combined. His very innovative SpaceX rocket company has become the central pillar of the West’s entire space program, crucial for American national security, while his equally innovative Starlink satellite company has proven itself absolutely vital to Ukraine in its NATO-backed war with Russia, inspiring imitators in China and other countries. More than a year ago, Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and took the company private, giving him a media empire far greater than that of any American television network and perhaps as powerful as most of them combined. Meanwhile his own 170 million Twitter Followers provide him a personal megaphone that would be envied by any American president or top Hollywood celebrity.

What other world figure could match Musk in such global power and influence? President Joseph Biden is elderly and doddering and widely despised, very much a Brezhnevian figure from the last days of the decaying USSR and obviously someone totally controlled by his nervous aides. Although former President Donald Trump is the all-but-certain 2024 Republican Presidential nominee and stands a better than even chance of recapturing the White House, he is facing 91 felony charges in court and is detested by nearly half the American population, including an overwhelming majority of our elites; his likely victory this November would be almost entirely due to Biden’s unpopularity. Indeed, given such glaring weakness at the top of the American political hierarchy, some shrewd observers have argued that Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu probably commands greater influence in our own Congress than either Biden or Trump; but in his own country, Netanyahu’s support is at 15%, and he faces a sea of corruption charges, so he might easily end his life in a prison cell.

In our deeply-polarized society, nearly all our other politicians are admired by small devoted followings, but usually despised by many, many more, and I can’t think of any private citizen who can remotely match Musk’s wealth, technological prestige, and media reach.

Meanwhile, traditional spiritual authorities have been reduced to mere shadows of their predecessors. Some nine hundred years ago, Pope Gregory VII humbled a German emperor and even a generation or two ago, Pope John Paul II wielded great international authority, but these days our current Pope Francis only commands a tiny sliver of such influence, and no other religious leader of greater weight comes to mind. So perhaps by default, I think Musk is the most powerful figure in the Western world, and his willingness to humble himself before pro-Israel Jews at Auschwitz amidst the ongoing slaughter in Gaza provides a striking indication of the true balance of temporal and spiritual power in today’s Western world, while also demonstrating which group commands the latter.

Just a few months earlier, Musk had been riding high, having successfully dismantled Twitter’s large censorship department even as he granted an amnesty to most of the banned voices of the previous few years, notably including former President Donald Trump. Under his direction, secret documents were provided to Matt Taibbi and other investigative journalists that produced bombshell revelations of a nefarious government role in orchestrating Twitter censorship. Tucker Carlson’s new Twitter-based interview show had racked up enormous ratings, with his August Trump interview outdrawing the viewership of the official 2024 Republican Presidential debates shown on broadcast television. Musk seemed to be successfully resurrecting Twitter’s old motto that it represented “the free speech wing of the free speech party.”

Most remarkably, he’d apparently seen off the challenge of the very formidable ADL, which for decades had terrified so many of the powerful. When that widely-feared censorship organization accused him of allowing “antisemitism” and “racism” to flourish on his platform and sought to intimidate his advertisers, Musk threatened to sue them for business interference, turning that weapon of “lawfare” against one of its most prolific wielders even as a #BanTheADL hashtag went viral on Twitter. The ADL had financial assets of $500 million and enormous media influence, but for the first time its leaders realized that they faced an opponent who greatly outmatched them in such resources, and fearing the risk of a multi-billion-dollar legal judgement, its leaders quickly settled, abandoning their attacks against Musk and Twitter.

However, the sudden, unexpected Hamas attacks of October 7th changed everything. Well over a thousand Israelis died, and the anger and agitation of Jewish activists in America reached an unprecedented fever-pitch. Israel soon began a merciless bombardment of Gaza in retaliation, eventually killing tens of thousands of helpless civilians, and those horrific scenes of death and devastation reached the entire world on social media, bypassing the traditional pro-Israel gatekeepers who controlled Western broadcast television and newspapers. As a result, polls shockingly revealed that younger Americans—whose information on world events came from the Internet—were quite evenly divided between Israel and Hamas or even actually favored the latter. So Jewish and pro-Israel organizations began an all-out mobilization to suppress such “antisemitic” material.

Cities and college campuses across the Western world saw large demonstrations against Israel’s televised slaughter of women and children, with Muslim immigrants naturally becoming an important element of these, causing Jewish activists to fiercely denounce those groups as “antisemitic.” For generations, Jews had overwhelmingly supported non-European immigrants, while widely praising and promoting all attacks by non-whites against white Gentile society. Most recently they had been the primary backers of the massive 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, triggered when a black lifelong career criminal died of a drug overdose while in police custody. But with “Jewish privilege” and “Israeli privilege” now suddenly coming under such hostile criticism, Jewish groups turned on a dime and demanded total censorship and suppression. Anti-immigrant right-wingers noted this rank hypocrisy in their social media posts, and in mid-November one such Tweet caught Musk’s eye, prompting him to endorse it: “You have said the actual truth” he wrote.

Those simple six words probably took Musk merely seconds to type but they may have shifted the trajectory of American history. Almost immediately, waves of Jewish and pro-Israel activists swarmed to denounce him, and many leading corporations pulled their advertising from Twitter, threatening its financial viability. Faced with such an enormous backlash, Musk traveled abroad to meet with Israel’s president, pledging to combat “antisemitism.” On that same visit, he also posed for a photo-op with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, solemnly eyeing an empty crib, which presumably symbolized the forty Israeli babies allegedly beheaded by Hamas, one of the many outrageous atrocity-hoaxes promoted by Israel and its dishonest propagandists.

In the years following Donald Trump’s upset 2016 victory, right-wingers had been heavily censored on many social media platforms, while progressives were free to run wild, but now the latter began suffering the same fate for criticizing Israel’s massacres. Since the early years of the twentieth century, Israel’s ruling Likud party and its Irgun predecessor had always used the slogan “From the River to the Sea,” promising a Greater Israel under total Jewish control and domination. But over the last couple of decades, anti-Zionist progressives had embraced those same words, advocating a unified secular democratic state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. Musk now declared that latter phrase “genocidal” and warned that it would trigger an immediate ban from Twitter, even as Netanyahu continued publicly using it in its original Jewish-supremacist meaning.

A few weeks later, Musk traveled to Auschwitz, accompanied by his companion and guide, a young pro-Israel pundit named Ben Shapiro, whose own right-wing media empire had been lavishly funded by Zionist donors. This widely-covered quasi-religious pilgrimage seemingly marked Musk’s complete capitulation to the awesome power of Organized Jewry.

Musk was hardly the only prominent figure to bow down before the Jewish forces of Zionism, now fully mobilized by the Hamas attack and the ensuing Israel/Gaza conflict. When Musk bought Twitter in late 2022 and first began to draw fire from the ADL, another prominent public figure was also facing that organization’s wrath. As I wrote at the time:

Perhaps by coincidence, a somewhat similar controversy had recently played out in the case of a different high-profile individual, the billionaire black rapper and fashion designer Kanye West. Although I’d previously had only the vaguest impression of him, he was apparently a towering international celebrity, as well as being among the wealthiest black Americans who had ever lived, while having tens of millions of followers on Twitter and other networks.

Apparently for some reason or other, he became angry and agitated over what he saw as the overwhelming Jewish influence in the worlds of business and media, and began loudly saying so in various venues and on his social networks. As might be expected, the media reaction was swift and devastating, portraying him as a moral leper, and thereby forcing most of his business partners to cut their ties, often at enormous financial cost. Apparently 25% of the profits of footware giant Adidas came from West’s line of sneakers, but they abandoned the longtime deal at a total cost of almost $650 million when their media masters proclaimed it as a fundamental issue of morality. At the other end of the spectrum, Goodwill Industries announced that they would no longer offer their impoverished clientele the donated cast-offs associated with such a vile anti-Semite. The rapper’s longtime bank even closed his accounts and would no longer provide a haven for his money.

The immediate result of all these coordinated blows was that the bulk of West’s large fortune suddenly evaporated, while his (Jewish) personal trainer publicly declared that if he continued his bad behavior the erstwhile billionaire might end up spending the rest of his life heavily drugged and imprisoned in a mental institution. Almost none of his fellow black celebrities rallied to his side, or if they did, I didn’t hear about it. The story soon dropped from the media, perhaps permanently taking with it the once-iconic global black celebrity.

While Musk overcame his ADL challengers, West had quickly abandoned the fight and disappeared from public attention. But the black rapper now had a new album ready for release, so he and his advisors apparently decided that only the most abject sort of public surrender to Jewish power could safeguard his music sales. Even as Israel was clearly committing the greatest televised massacre of defenseless women and children in the history of the world, outraging much of his youthful rap following, West declared his boundless love and admiration for Jews and the Jewish State, recording a 40-minute video apologizing for his past antisemitic statements and Tweeting out a shorter, similar message written in Hebrew.

Back in late 2022 I’d expressed considerable skepticism that either Musk or West would succeed in their separate challenges to Jewish power, and readers can judge for themselves the extent to which my predictions proved correct.

Although Musk has now bent his knee to the broader Zionist coalition, I’ll have to admit that he actually did surprising well against his initial ADL tormentors, even without utilizing the secret history of that nefarious organization that I’d offered him during his battle.

The capitulations of Musk and West hardly surprised me. But far more noteworthy has been the case of independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose total surrender to Zionism over the last several months has deeply disappointed so many of his erstwhile admirers, certainly including myself.

Although I’d only been very vaguely aware of Kennedy until 2021 and remained deeply skeptical of much of his notorious anti-vaxxing advocacy, I’d greatly admired his vocal positions on many other important issues, especially including our disastrous Ukraine proxy-war against Russia and therefore expected to give him my vote in November.

I was particularly impressed by his remarkable courage on certain historical matters of a personal nature. Several years ago, he had publicly declared that Sirhan Sirhan, the alleged assassin of his father, was innocent of the crime and should be released after more than a half-century in prison, and he further proclaimed that his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, had also died at the hands of a conspiracy. I noted that although the mainstream media ferociously vilified him on numerous other grounds, they tended to carefully avoid these sorts of “great unmentionables” because the facts were so strongly on Kennedy’s side.

And once anyone recognized that Sirhan had not fired the fatal shot, I argued that important elements of the conspiracy would have immediately suggested the true culprits behind the crime:

David Talbot’s influential 2007 book Brothers revealed that Robert F. Kennedy had been convinced almost from the first that his brother had been struck down in a conspiracy, but he held his tongue, telling his circle of friends that he stood little chance of tracking down and punishing the guilty parties until he himself reached the White House. By June 1968, he seemed on the threshold of achieving that goal, but was felled by an assassin’s bullet just moments after winning the crucial California presidential primary. The logical assumption is that his death was engineered by the same elements as that of his elder brother, who were now acting to protect themselves from the consequences of their earlier crime.

A young Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan had fired a pistol at the scene and was quickly arrested and convicted for the murder. But Talbot emphasizes that the coroner’s report revealed that the fatal bullet came from a completely different direction, while the acoustical record proves that far more shots were fired than the capacity of the alleged killer’s gun. Such hard evidence demonstrates a conspiracy.

Sirhan himself seemed dazed and confused, later claiming to have no memory of events, and Talbot mentions that various assassination researchers have long argued that he was merely a convenient patsy in the plot, perhaps acting under some form of hypnosis or conditioning. Nearly all these writers are usually reluctant to note that the selection of a Palestinian as scapegoat in the killing points in a certain obvious direction, but Bergman’s recent book also includes a major new revelation. At exactly the same moment that Sirhan was being wrestled to the floor of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles, another young Palestinian was undergoing intensive rounds of hypnotic conditioning at the hands of Mossad in Israel, being programmed to assassinate PLO leader Yasir Arafat; and although that effort ultimately failed, such a coincidence seems to stretch the bounds of plausibility.

Kennedy seemed like an intelligent, thoughtful individual, and if he had concluded years ago that Sirhan was innocent, I assumed that the remainder of this chain of reasoning would have fallen into place, producing a high-profile Presidential candidate willing to stand up for American interests against those of Israel. But instead Kennedy recently moved in exactly the opposite direction, becoming the most egregiously pro-Zionist candidate in the race and heavily relying upon his ultra-Zionist advisors Morton Klein and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. In a recent public interview, he shockingly declared that the Palestinians were “the most pampered people in the world” even as hundreds of thousands of them were currently facing death by starvation at Israel’s hands.

Kennedy’s apparent willingness to betray his principles—and the memories of his martyred father and uncle—was hugely disheartening to me. Moreover, with both Biden and Trump known as fervent supporters of Israel, a contrary position emphasizing a ceasefire and sympathy towards the suffering Palestinians might have provided a political home for the substantial minority of voters and activists taking that position, certainly attracting huge support among college students and other youthful Americans. But it was not to be. Imagine if Sen. Robert F. Kennedy had run in 1968 as the fiercest Vietnam War hawk in the race.

Unfortunately, the total political submission of Musk, West, and Kennedy to the massed power of Jews and Zionism is hardly a new development. Indeed, they constitute merely the latest examples in a long series of such Gentile defeats and surrenders, as I had noted at the beginning of my original 2018 article on the ADL:

Mel Gibson had long been one of the most popular stars in Hollywood and his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ became among the most profitable in world history, yet the ADL and its allies destroyed his career, and he eventually donated millions of dollars to Jewish groups in desperate hopes of regaining some of his public standing. When the ADL criticized a cartoon that had appeared in one of his newspapers, media titan Rupert Murdoch provided his personal apology to that organization, and the editors of The Economist quickly retracted a different cartoon once it came under ADL fire. Billionaire Tom Perkins, a famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, was forced to issue a heartfelt apology after coming under ADL criticism for his choice of words in a Wall Street Journal column. These were all proud, powerful individuals, and they must have deeply resented being forced to seek such abject public forgiveness, but they did so nonetheless. The total list of ADL supplicants over the years is a very long one.

Musk certainly stands as the greatest of these unfortunate recent examples, but almost exactly one hundred years before his submission, a rather similar historical case occurred involving another world-famous industrialist tycoon who also sought to challenge Jewish power but ultimately apologized and abandoned the fight.

Although the name of Henry Ford remains well-known to most Americans, I doubt that more than a small fraction are fully aware of the immense global stature he had enjoyed during the early decades of the twentieth century. The assembly-line mass production techniques he pioneered at his Ford Motor Company were responsible for transforming the automobile from a mere plaything of the rich into a reasonably-priced product owned by most Americans, so his achievements completely reshaped our society and the rest of the world as a consequence. His business success established him as one of the wealthiest men in the world—one of his later biographies was entitled The Last Billionaire—but by doubling the basic wages of his ordinary workers, he also created the American middle class and became a worldwide legend.

According to some accounts, an ailing President Woodrow Wilson sought to enlist the apolitical Ford as his Democratic successor in the White House. By the early 1920s Adolf Hitler ranked Ford as one of his greatest personal heroes, but Vladimir Lenin felt much the same way, and the Bolsheviks called their Soviet industrial policy “Fordizm.” In Aldous Huxley’s famous 1931 novel Brave New World“Fordism” had become the world’s secular religion, with the population celebrating “Ford Day,” swearing oaths “By Ford!” and displaying Christian crosses truncated into a symbol representing the Ford Model T.

But in the aftermath of the First World War, Ford became very concerned about the unprecedented growth of Jewish power in America and how the entire mainstream media was increasingly intimidated from reporting the associated crimes and abuses. He had bought his local newspaper The Dearborn Independent in 1918 and within a couple of years transformed it into a national publication with enormous circulation, seeking to rectify this situation, as I discussed in a 2018 article:

As for The Dearborn Independent, Ford had apparently launched his newspaper on a national basis not long after the end of the war, intending to focus on controversial topics, especially those related to Jewish misbehavior, whose discussion he believed was being ignored or suppressed by nearly all mainstream media outlets. I had been aware that he had long been one of the wealthiest and most highly-regarded individuals in America, but I was still astonished to discover that his weekly newspaper, previously almost unknown to me, had reached a total national circulation of 900,000 by 1925, ranking it as the second largest in the country and by far the biggest with a national distribution. I found no easy means of examining the contents of a typical issue, but apparently the anti-Jewish articles of the first couple of years had been collected and published as short books, together constituting the four volumes of The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a notoriously anti-Semitic work occasionally mentioned in my history textbooks. Eventually my curiosity got the best of me, so I clicked a few buttons on Amazon.com, bought the set, and wondered what I would discover.

Based on all my pre-suppositions, I expected to read some foaming-at-the-mouth screed, and doubted I would be able to get past the first dozen pages before losing interest and consigning the volumes to gather dust on my shelves. But what I actually encountered was something entirely different.

Over the last couple of decades, the enormous growth in the power of Jewish and pro-Israel groups in America has occasionally led writers to cautiously raise certain facts regarding the untoward influence of those organizations and activists, while always carefully emphasizing that the vast majority of ordinary Jews do not benefit from these policies and actually might be harmed by them, even leaving aside the possible risk of eventually provoking an anti-Jewish backlash. To my considerable surprise, I found that the material in Ford’s 300,000 word series seemed to follow this exact same pattern and tone.

Although I somehow managed to plow through all four volumes of The International Jew, the unrelenting drum-beat of Jewish intrigue and misbehavior became somewhat soporific after a while, especially since so many of the examples provided may have loomed quite large in 1920 or 1921 but were almost totally forgotten today. Most of the content was a collection of rather monotonous complaints regarding Jewish malfeasance, scandals, or clannishness, the sort of mundane matters which might have normally appeared in the pages of an ordinary newspaper or magazine, let alone one of the muckraking type.

However, I cannot fault the publication for having such a narrow focus. A consistent theme was that because of the intimidating fear of Jewish activists and influence, virtually all of America’s regular media outlets avoided discussion of any of these important matters, and since this new publication was intended to fill that void, it necessarily provided coverage overwhelmingly skewed toward that particular subject. The articles were also aimed at gradually expanding the window of public debate and eventually shaming other periodicals into discussing Jewish misbehavior. When leading magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and Century Magazine began running such articles, this result was hailed as a major success.

Another important goal was to make ordinary Jews more aware of the very problematical behavior of many of their community leaders. Occasionally, the publication received a letter of praise from a self-proclaimed “proud American Jew” commending the series and sometimes including a check to purchase subscriptions for other members of his community, and this achievement might become the subject of an extended discussion.

And although the details of these individual stories differed considerably from those of today, the pattern of behavior being criticized seemed remarkably similar. Change a few facts, adjust the society for a century of progress, and many of the stories might be exactly the same ones that well-meaning people concerned about the future of our country are quietly discussing today. Most remarkably, there were even a couple of columns about the troubled relationship between the earliest Zionist settlers in Palestine and the surrounding native Palestinians, and deep complaints that under Jewish pressure the media often totally misreported or hid some of the outrages suffered by the latter group.

As might be expected, Jewish organizations were ferociously hostile to Ford’s media project and they launched a fierce lobbying campaign to force him to cease his critical coverage, employing consumer boycotts, widespread vilification, and damaging lawsuits. Meanwhile, few if any prominent Americans publicly joined Ford’s efforts so several years of such relentless Jewish attacks eventually proved successful. By 1924, Ford had ended his series of articles on Jewish activities and the billionaire industrialist finally shuttered his newspaper in 1927, while also sending an apologetic public letter to the president of the ADL recanting his “antisemitic” views. Just like today’s Elon Musk, America’s greatest industrialist of the early twentieth century took his own painful trip to Canossa. Although heavily slanted against Ford, the basic facts of this story and Ford’s capitulation are provided in a lengthy section of his Wikipedia article.

By the early 1930s, Christianity had been the dominant religion of the West for nearly two thousand years and seemed so strongly rooted in American society as to be unassailable. Therefore, Huxley’s futuristic novel suggesting that it would be replaced by the secular religion of Fordism must surely have seemed an absurd possibility at the time, perhaps even constituting deliberate satire. But over the last three generations, a somewhat similar religious replacement has indeed occurred, though the doctrine elevated would surely have shocked and dismayed both Huxley and Ford.

Under the inexorable ideological pressure of heavily-Jewish Hollywood and our mainstream media organs, the traditional Christianity of the West has been steadily deconstructed and pushed aside, often replaced by the quasi-religion of Holocaustianity, which features an entirely different set of martyrs, sacred texts, and holy places. The central shrine of Holocaustianity is Auschwitz, a former Nazi concentration camp, so Musk demonstrated his complete submission to this reigning spiritual doctrine and its tenets by undertaking a pilgrimage to that hallowed ground.

In 2018, I discussed how this remarkable shift in the beliefs of the Western world, noting that even the top spiritual leaders of other global religions apparently recognized Holocaustianity as their own uber-faith, far more important in its central elements than their own.

According to Finkelstein, Hollywood produced some 180 Holocaust films just during the years 1989-2004. Even the very partial subset of Holocaust films listed on Wikipedia has grown enormously long, but fortunately the Movie Database has winnowed down the catalog by providing a list of the 50 Most Moving Holocaust Films.

Some 2% of Americans have a Jewish background, while perhaps 95% possess Christian roots, but the Wikipedia list of Christian films seems rather scanty and rudimentary by comparison. Very few of those films were ever widely released, and the selection is stretched to even include The Chronicles of Narnia, which contains no mention of Christianity whatsoever. One of the very few prominent exceptions on the list is Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ, which he was forced to personally self-fund. And despite the enormous financial success of that movie, one of the most highly profitable domestic releases of all time, the project rendered Gibson a hugely vilified pariah in the industry over which he had once reigned as its biggest star, especially after word got around that his own father was a Holocaust Denier.

In many respects, Hollywood and the broader entertainment media today provide the unifying spiritual basis of our deeply secular society, and the overwhelming predominance of Holocaust-themed films over Christian ones has obvious implications. Meanwhile, in our globalized world, the American entertainment-media complex totally dominates Europe and the rest of the West, so that the ideas generated here effectively shape the minds of many hundreds of millions of people living elsewhere, whether or not they fully recognize that fact.

In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI sought to heal the long-standing Vatican II rift within the Catholic Church and reconcile with the breakaway Society of St. Pius X faction. But this became a major media controversy when it was discovered that Bishop Richard Williamson, one of the leading members of that latter organization, had long been a Holocaust Denier and also believed that Jews should convert to Christianity. Although the many other differences in Catholic doctrinal faith were fully negotiable, apparently refusing to accept the reality of the Holocaust was not, and Williamson remained estranged from the Catholic Church. Soon afterward he was even prosecuted for heresy by the German government.

Just as the Popes of the Middle Ages deployed the sacred power of Christ and Christianity to humble even the most powerful of earthly monarchs and force them to submit, Jews and Zionists today use the power of the Holocaust and Holocaustianity in much the same way, with even the mightiest of Western figures such as Elon Musk helpless before it.

For generations, Hollywood and the media steadily nibbled away at the legitimacy of traditional Christianity, while academic scholars boldly questioned its truth and emphasized historical doubts. As a consequence, neither Musk nor any other prominent Westerner today trembles before Christian symbols nor bows down to the anointed representatives of that faith. But instead it is the Holocaust that has become inviolate, with the harshest social and economic sanctions visited upon those who question its elements or dispute its claims. Across much of the West, any such challenges are subject to severe legal penalties, including lengthy prison sentences, the present-day equivalent of once-common blasphemy laws. And that sweeping, transcendent doctrine has therefore become powerful enough to overawe Elon Musk or any other public figure. This situation has important real-world consequences.

Critics of the events now unfolding in the Middle East must recognize that the Jewish Holocaust of World War II stands as the central justification for the existence of the Jewish state and also as the universal excuse for any of its international crimes, including those currently being committed. Gaza and the Holocaust are so closely connected that they constitute two sides of the same coin.

Related Reading:

February 12, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

The World’s Gyre

By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 12, 2024

The U.S. is edging closer to war with Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces, a state security agency composed of armed groups, some of which are close to Iran, but which for the main are Iraqi nationalists. The U.S. carried out a drone strike in Baghdad, Wednesday that killed three members of the Kataeb Hizbullah forces, including a senior commander. One of the assassinated, al-Saadi, is the most senior figure to have been assassinated in Iraq since the 2020 drone strike that killed senior Iraqi Commander al-Muhandis and Qassem Soleimani.

The target is puzzling as Kataeb more than a week ago suspended its military operations against the U.S. (at the request of the Iraqi government). The stand down was widely published. So why was this senior figure assassinated?

Tectonic twitches often are sparked by a single egregious action: the one final grain of sand which – on top of the others – triggers the slide, capsizing the sandpile. Iraqis are angry. They feel that the U.S. wantonly violates their sovereignty – showing contempt and disdain for Iraq, a once great civilisation, now brought low in the wake of U.S. wars. Swift and collective retaliation has been promised.

One act, and a gyre can begin. The Iraqi government may not be able to hold the line.

The U.S. tries to separate and compartmentalise issues: AnsarAllah’s Red Sea blockade is ‘one thing’; attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, an unrelated ‘another’. But all know that such separateness is artificial – the ‘red’ thread woven through all these ‘issues’ is Gaza. The White House (and Israel) however, insists the connecting thread instead to be Iran.

Did the White House think this through properly, or was its latest assassination viewed as a ‘sacrifice’ to appease the ‘gods of war’ in the Beltway, clamouring to bomb Iran?

Whatever the motive, the Gyre turns. Other dynamics are running that will be fuelled by the attack.

The Cradle highlights one significant shift:

“by successfully obstructing Israeli vessels from traversing the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the Ansarallah-led Sanaa government has emerged as a powerful symbol of resistance in defence of the Palestinian people – a cause deeply popular across Yemen’s many demographics. Sanaa’s position stands in stark contrast to that of the Saudi and Emirati-backed government in Aden, which, to the horror of Yemenis, welcomed attacks by U.S. and British forces on 12 January”.

“The U.S.–UK airstrikes have prompted some heavyweight internal defections … a number of Yemeni militias previously aligned with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, consequently switched allegiance to Ansarallah … Disillusionment with the coalition will have profound political and military implications for Yemen, reshaping alliances, and casting the UAE and Saudi Arabia as national adversaries. Palestine continues to serve as a revealing litmus test throughout West Asia – and now in Yemen too – exposing those who only-rhetorically claim the mantle of justice and Arab solidarity”.

Yemen military defections – How does this matter?

Well, the Houthis and AnsarAllah have become heroes across the Islamic World. Look at social media. The Houthis are now the ‘stuff of myth’: Standing up for Palestinians whilst others don’t. A following is taking hold. AnsarAllah’s ‘heroic’ stance may lead to the ousting of western proxies, and so to dominate that ‘rest of Yemen’ they presently do not control. It seizes too, the Islamic world’s imagination (to the concern of the Arab Establishment).

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination of al-Saadi, Iraqis took to the streets of Baghdad chanting: “God is Great, America is the Great Satan”.

Do not imagine this ‘turn’ is lost on others – on the Iraqi Hashd al-Sha’abi, for example; or on the (Palestinians) of Jordan; or on the mass foot-soldiers of the Egyptian army; or indeed in the Gulf. There are 5 billion smartphones extant today. The ruling class do watch the Arabic channels, and view (nervously) social media. They worry that anger against the western flouting of international law may boil over, and they will be unable to contain it: What price the ‘Rules Order’ now since the International Court of Justice upended the notion of a moral content to western culture?

The wrongheadedness of U.S. policy is astonishing – and now has claimed the most central tenet in the ‘Biden strategy’ for resolving the crisis in Gaza. The ‘dangle’ of Saudi normalisation with Israel was viewed in the West as the pivot – around which Netanyahu would either be forced to give up on his maximalist security control from the River to the Sea mantra, or see himself pushed aside by a rival for whom the ‘normalisation bait’ held the allure of likely victory in the next Israeli elections.

Biden’s spokesperson was flagrant in this respect:

“[We] … are having discussions with Israel and Saudi Arabia … about trying to move forward with a normalization arrangement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. So those discussions are ongoing as well. We certainly received positive feedback from both sides that they’re willing to continue to have those discussions”.

The Saudi Government – possibly angry at the U.S. recourse to such deceptive language – duly kicked the plank out from beneath the Biden platform: It issued a written statement confirming unequivocally that: “there will be no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognized on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and that the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip stops – and all Israeli occupation forces are withdraw from the Gaza Strip”. The Kingdom stands by the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, in other words.

Of course, no Israeli could campaign on that platform in Israeli elections!

Recall how Tom Friedman set out how the ‘Biden Doctrine’ was supposed to fit together as a interlinked whole: First, through taking a “strong and resolute stand on Iran” the U.S. would signal to “our Arab and Muslim allies, that it needs to take on Iran in a more aggressive manner … that we can no longer allow Iran to try to drive us out of the region; Israel into extinction and our Arab allies into intimidation by acting through proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq — while Tehran blithely sits back and pays no price”.

The second strand was the Saudi dangle that would inevitably pave the path into the (third) element which was the “building of a credible legitimate Palestinian Authority as … a good neighbour to Israel …”. This “bold U.S. commitment to a Palestinian state would give us [Team Biden] legitimacy to act against Iran”, Friedman foresaw.

Let us be plain: this trifecta of policies, rather than gel into a single doctrine, are falling like dominoes. Their collapse owes to one thing: The original decision to back Israel’s use of overwhelming violence across Gaza’s civil society – ostensibly to defeat Hamas. It has turned the region and much of the World against the U.S. and Europe.

How did this happen? Because nothing changed by way of U.S. policies. It was the same old western bromides from decades ago: financial threats, bombing and violence. And the insistence on one mandatory ‘stand with Israel’ narrative (with no discussion).

The rest of the world has grown tired of it; even defiant towards it.

So to put it bluntly: Israel has now come face-to-face with the (self-destructive) inconsistency within Zionism: How to maintain special rights for Jews on territory in which there is an approximately equal number of non-Jews? The old answer has been discredited.

The Israeli Right argues that Israel then must go for broke: All or nothing. Take the risk of wider war (in which Israel, may or may not, be ‘victorious’); tell Arabs to move elsewhere; or abandon Zionism and themselves move on.

The Biden Administration, rather than help Israel look truth in the eye, has discarded the task of obliging Israel to face up to the contradictions in Zionism, in favour of restoring the broken status quo ante. Some 75 years after the founding of the Israeli state, as former Israeli negotiator, Daniel Levy, has. noted:

‘[We are back to] “the “banal debate” between the U.S. and Israel over “whether the bantustan shall be repackaged and marketed as a ‘state’”.

Could it have been different? Probably not. The reaction comes from deep in Biden’s nature.

The trifecta of U.S. failed responses paradoxically has nonetheless facilitated Israel’s slide to the Right (as evidenced by all recent polling). And has – absent a hostage deal; absent a Saudi credible ‘dangle’; or any credible path to a Palestinian State – precisely opened the path for the Netanyahu government to pursue his maximalist exit from collapsed deterrence through securing a ‘grand victory’ over the Palestinian resistance, Hizbullah, and even – he hopes – Iran.

None of these objectives can be achieved without U.S. help. Yet, where is Biden’s limit: Support for Israel in a Hizbullah war? And were it to widen, support for Israel in an Iran war too? Where is the limit?

The incongruity, coming as it does, at a moment when the West’s Ukraine Project is imploding, suggests that Biden may see himself needing some ‘grand victory’, as much as does Netanyahu.

February 12, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Does anybody still believe in Ukrainian victory?

By Uriel Araujo | February 12, 2024

While Moscow is making major investments in defense, Ukraine has stalled (in the battlefield) and so is the American aid package, writes Foreign Policy reporter Amy Mackinnon. “Ukraine will lose – on our present trajectory”, says Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow of the Centre for European Studies, Harvard, interviewed by John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.

According to Ferguson, thus far the US-led West has given Kyiv enough weapons “not to lose, but not enough to win”. In addition, the United States’ “interest” is “clearly waning, particularly “among Republican voters and Republican politicians”, to the point that American aid to the Eastern European country “could be cut off if Donald Trump is reelected president in November 2024”. In this scenario, he says, it is hard to see how Ukraine could possibly win. Furthermore, he claims, the Ukrainians themselves admit that they have achieved a “stalemate” now, and in terms of resources it is “David versus Goliath,” with the latter being, more and more, “the likely favorite.” If Russia is, “to put it very, very modestly”, able to “retain control” of those parts of Ukraine it already does, that will be “the first big defeat of Cold War II, for the West.” Considering all the Western pro-Zelensky propaganda, all the “speeches”, “support” and “pledges” made, if Ukraine “loses”, the West’s credibility will be greatly undermined, Fergunson convincingly reasons.

Meanwhile, should an “all-out multifront assault on Israel” arise, in the Middle East, and the US fails to take meaningful action, then the expert argues, somewhat less convincingly, it would be “surprising” if Xi Jinping “didn’t take the opportunity to add Taiwan to the strategic mix” – and, in the scenario of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, it would be “rather difficult to send another major naval expedition across the Pacific” because of the risk of US-China “hostilities” in this case, which then would mean a “much larger war than anything we’ve seen so far.” What Ferguson fails to acknowledge is that tensions with Taiwan arose after a series of American provocations, and that the current crisis in the Levant and the Red Sea is largely the result of the Western resolve to keep aiding and funding its Israeli ally even in face of the latter’s disastrous and globally condemned ethnic cleansing campaign in Palestine.

Back to the Ukrainian conflict’s prospects, Mark Episkopos, Eurasia Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, writes that, at this point, there is “no magic weapon left”, and that Kyiv’s “backers” (on “both sides of the Atlantic”) have “no realistic theory of victory” accounting for “the dire conditions” faced by Ukraine and thus fail to offer “a sustainable framework for war termination on the best possible terms for Kyiv and the West.” In the same spirit, James Stavridis, former  NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe sees no future for Ukraine other than a land-for-peace deal.

Back to the aforementioned Ferguson’s interview, the Scottish–American historian concludes, from an Anglo-Western perspective, that “this is a very dangerous moment in world history”, and “we’ve stumbled into it, partly by forgetting the lessons of Cold War I”, namely that one must have “credible deterrence.” Such deterrence, he laments, has been lost. As I’ve written, the West has no such deterrence against Iran in the Middle East either.

As is often the case, notwithstanding any criticism one may have of the Russian president and of his choices pertaining to Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine, there is something missing in the conversation about the crisis, namely any mention of the Western role in at least partly bringing it about by NATO expansion or, for that matter, any mention of the Western white-washing and support for far-right paramilitary nationalism in Ukraine – which is often neo-Fascist – since the Maidan Revolution, and the role this factor played in the Donbass war (going on since 2014); not to mention the issue of the civil rights of ethnic Russians, Russian-speaking and pro-Russian people in Ukraine since the aforementioned Maidan.

In any case, it is not just into Eastern Europe that Washington has “stumbled”. It is also “stuck”, as I wrote, in the Middle East, where it acts as an undecided declining superpower, “torn”, as it is, according to a recent The Economist piece, “between leaving and staying and cannot decide what to do with the forces it still has in the region.”

In September last year, Former US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates described his country as a “divided” and “dysfunctional superpower”, unable to deter both China and Russia. “Torn”, “stuck”, “divided” – undecidedness could really be a key word with regards to the existential crisis haunting American exceptionalism: Washington seems unable to decide, for example, as Jerry Hendrix (formerly an adviser to Pentagon senior officials) puts it, whether it wishes to maintain its declining naval hegemony, as a sea power, in Mackinder’s terms, or to keep engaging in land wars in Eurasia in its struggle for the “Heartland”. It cannot decide whether to pivot away from the Middle East towards the Indo-Pacific Region (IPR) or to “stay” in the Middle East region. It seems to want it both ways always, as materialized in the different versions of the “dual containment” formula – now applied to both Beijing and Moscow simultaneously.

Thus, going beyond the issue of Ukraine, it is about time to acknowledge that the declining American superpower is currently overburdened and overstretched, in Stephen Wertheim’s words; that its policy of “dual containment” makes the world a far less stable place; and that Washington therefore must exercise restraint.

Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

February 12, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Kremlin comments on Starlink claims

RT | February 12, 2024

The Russian military never officially ordered SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet terminals and they are not certified for use in Russia, the Kremlin has said. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov made the comment shortly after Ukrainian intelligence claimed that Russian forces were using the technology amid the ongoing armed conflict between Moscow and Kiev.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk donated some 20,000 Starlink terminals to Ukraine shortly after Russia launched its offensive against the country in February 2022. Ukrainian troops are using them to operate drones along the front line. However, the billionaire said last year that he had refused Ukraine’s request to activate the Starlink service in Crimea.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Peskov noted that Starlink had never been certified in Russia, meaning that it “cannot be and is not being delivered here officially.” He added that, for this reason, the technology cannot be used in any official capacity in Russia.

The Kremlin’s representative concluded by saying that there was no point in Moscow getting involved in a “discussion between the Kiev regime and entrepreneur Musk.”

In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, Musk lamented that “a number of false news reports claim that SpaceX is selling Starlink terminals to Russia.”

“To the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia,” the SpaceX CEO added.

In a separate statement on Thursday, SpaceX insisted that it “does not do business of any kind with the Russian government or its military,” and has “never sold or marketed Starlink in Russia, nor has it shipped equipment to locations in Russia.”

Meanwhile, on Sunday, Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR) claimed to have intercepted a conversation between Russian military personnel, where one service member could be heard saying in Russian “Starlink is working, we have internet [access].”

GUR spokesman Andrey Yusov alleged that Russian troops are “systematically” using Starlink terminals.

In September, Musk said his company had refused to enable Starlink coverage over Crimea. “Now, the reason it was turned off was actually because… the United States has sanctions against Russia… and that includes Crimea,” he explained at the time. In the absence of any direct orders from the US leadership, SpaceX opted not to run afoul of the regulations despite Kiev’s request to do so, the entrepreneur noted.

Earlier, CNN reported that Musk’s decision had thwarted a Ukrainian drone attack against the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

February 12, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

“Electrify Everything” Slammed Again By Ninth Circuit

Court’s latest ruling has national implications and affirms that bans on direct use of natural gas violate federal law

By Robert Bryce | February 5, 2024

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has cranked up the heat on the “electrify everything” foolishness.

Last month, the Ninth Circuit denied the city of Berkeley’s petition to re-hear its case after the city’s ban on natural gas use in homes and businesses was ruled illegal last April. The January 2 ruling has national implications and is an enormous loss for the electrify everything movement, the lavishly funded campaign that seeks to ban natural gas stoves, water heaters, and other gas-fired appliances in the name of climate change.

Before I delve into the court ruling, it’s essential to understand the danger to our energy security posed by the electrify everything effort and the dark money groups that are pushing it.

As I have reported here, the electrify everything movement could result in enormous reductions in the affordability, reliability, and resilience of our electric grid. The campaigners want to add massive amounts of new load onto an energy network that is already cracking under existing demand. Indeed, the electrify everything jihadis are pushing for the electrification of heating, transportation, and industry at the very same time that numerous policymakers and regulators are warning about the declining reliability of the power grid.

To cite two recent examples, last May, members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission delivered stark warnings to the members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The agency’s acting chairman, Willie Phillips, told the senators, “We face unprecedented challenges to the reliability of our nation’s electric system.” FERC Commissioner Mark Christie echoed Phillips’ warning, saying the U.S. electric grid is “heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability.” His colleague, Commissioner James Danly, averred that there is a “looming reliability crisis in our electricity markets.”

Last August, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation named “changing resource mix” as a top reliability risk facing the electric grid. And for the first time, it named climate policy as one of the most significant risk factors. It said, “policy decisions can significantly affect the reliability and resilience of the [bulk power system]. Decarbonization, decentralization, and electrification have been active policy areas. Implementation of policies in these areas is accelerating, and, with changes in the resource mix, extreme weather events, and physical and cyber security challenges, reliability implications are emerging.” (Emphasis added.)

Further, the same NGOs pushing to electrify everything are also aggressively promoting policies that will make our electric grid even more reliant on weather-dependent sources like wind and solar. As the slide above shows, NERC is warning that our grid is increasingly vulnerable to “wind and solar droughts.” If climate change means we are facing more extreme weather of all types, the last thing we should do is make our grid more dependent on the weather.

The electrify everything movement is fueled by massive contributions from some of the world’s richest people, including Michael Bloomberg, John Doerr, and Laurene Powell Jobs. Numerous climate-focused NGOs, including the Sierra Club (2022 budget: $168 million) and Rocky Mountain Institute (2022 budget: $117 million), as well as dark-money entities like Climate Imperative and Rewiring America, are leading the attack against gas stoves and the direct use of gas. In 2022, Climate Imperative — headed by veteran climate activist Hal Harvey and two former Sierra Club employees, Bruce Nilles and Mary Anne Hitt — had revenue of $289 million. For comparison, the American Gas Association, which represents gas utilities, had revenue of about $37 million that year.

Jobs and Doerr were founding board members of Climate Imperative, which does not reveal the identities of its donors. Last March, in “The Dark Money Behind The Gas Bans,” I wrote about Rewiring America, which had recently hired Georgia politician Stacey Abrams. I explained that Rewiring America has about 40 employees and:

is among the most prominent members of this dark money network. The group doesn’t publish its budget or file a Form 990. Instead, it is a sponsored project of the Windward Fund, a 501c3 non-profit that does not disclose its donors. Nor does it reveal how much it is giving to Rewiring America. Although it is impossible to know exactly how much dark money is being shuffled among groups like the Windward Fund, Rewiring America, and others, my tally shows that just four of the dark money NGOs behind the gas bans have combined budgets of about $820 million.

Now, back to the Ninth Circuit. The court’s January 2 decision not to entertain a rehearing of the Berkeley case confirms that the gas bans enacted in California over the past several years are invalid. According to the Sierra Club, which has been gleefully tracking the bans, some 76 cities or counties in the state have enacted bans or restrictions on gas since Berkeley enacted its ban in 2019. On a website that tracks the restrictions, the Sierra Club makes no mention of the Ninth Circuit’s rulings. The group may want to ignore it, but the decision affects all of the states in the Ninth Circuit: Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. That means the recent bans on gas in Seattle and the statewide ban in Washington, which was adopted last year, are invalid. So, too, is the ban imposed by Eugene, Oregon, in early 2023.

The San Francisco Chronicle summarized the appeal, noting that “Berkeley, joined by the Biden administration, other cities and states, and conservation groups, then asked the full appeals court, which has 16 Democratic appointees among its 29 judges, to order a rehearing. But only 11 judges, all appointed by Democratic presidents, voted for a new hearing…the ruling will now become final unless the conservative-majority Supreme Court agrees to review it.” The article quoted Sarah Jorgensen, a lawyer for the California Restaurant Association, who said the court recognized that “energy policy was a matter of national concern and that there should be uniform national regulation.”

Berkeley’s gas ban was first ruled illegal last April, when the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the restaurant association. The January 2 decision affirmed the court’s prior ruling and noted that Congress, when it passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) of 1975, “ensured that states and localities could not prevent consumers from using covered products in their homes, kitchens, and business. EPCA thus preempts Berkeley’s building code, which prohibits natural gas piping in new construction buildings from the point of delivery at the gas meter.”

As I explained in these pages shortly after the April ruling in “The Ninth Circuit Spikes Berkeley’s Gas Ban,” the three judges assigned to the case found that EPCA:

expressly preempts State and local regulations concerning the energy use of many natural gas appliances, including those used in household and restaurant kitchens. Instead of directly banning those appliances in new buildings, Berkeley took a more circuitous route to the same result and enacted a building code that prohibits natural gas piping into those buildings, rendering the gas appliances useless… By its plain text and structure, EPCA’s preemption provision encompasses building codes that regulate natural gas use by covered products. And by preventing such appliances from using natural gas, the new Berkeley building code does exactly that.” (Emphasis in original.)

A January 3 article published by Oakland-based KTVU, quoted Berkeley City Council member Kate Harrison, who authored the gas-ban ordinance, saying her city “will continue to do everything in its power to fight climate change and protect the health of its residents.”

The Ninth Circuit’s latest decision should also mean that bans on natural gas in other parts of the country should also be nullified. But the Ninth Circuit only covers part of the country. That means its decisions may set a precedent, but it doesn’t mean the precedent applies to other regions. That could change soon, however, because Jorgenson has filed a similar suit against the state of New York.

Last May, New York became the first state to ban gas stoves and furnaces in most new buildings. The law requires all-electric heating and cooking in new buildings shorter than seven stories by 2026, and for taller buildings by 2029. The city of New York has also passed a ban in the form of Local Law 97, which is even more destructive. That measure requires building owners to remove gas boilers over the next few years or face huge financial penalties. For more on Local Law 97, see the September 26, 2023 edition of the Power Hungry Podcast with my pal, Jane Menton, a lifelong New Yorker, who calls the measure an “electrification monster” that could result in a humanitarian nightmare in Gotham.

On October 12, Jorgenson filed suit on behalf of a group of plaintiffs, including propane dealers, homebuilders, and plumbers. In a press release, Jorgenson’s firm said the “The drastic step of requiring ‘all-electric’ new buildings despite an already-strained electric grid stands at odds with the public’s need for a reliable, resilient, and affordable energy supply. New York’s gas ban is preempted by federal law, is contrary to the public interest, and harms plaintiffs and the members they represent.”

If Jorgenson prevails in New York, and she should, the next stop on the litigation is the U.S. Supreme Court, which should weigh in and declare that the electrify everything effort, is, as Jorgenson says, “contrary to the public interest.”

February 11, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

Ford Lost $4.7B On EVs Last Year, Or About $64,731 For Every EV It Sold

By Robert Bryce | February 7, 2024

How bad is the EV business? Yesterday afternoon, Ford Motor Company reported that the operating loss it incurred on its EV business in 2023 exceeded its total profit for the year.

That shocking fact comes directly from the company’s earnings report, which carried the headline, “Ford+ Delivers Solid 2023…” The Dearborn-based auto giant had an operating loss (also known as EBIT, or earnings before interest and taxes) of $4.7 billion on its EV business last year. Meanwhile, the company reported net income (profit) of just $4.3 billion, on revenue of $176 billion. The company also reported operating income, or what it called “adjusted EBIT,” of $10.4 billion.

Calculating the company’s per-EV operating loss requires only a bit of simple division. The company sold 72,608 EVs last year and had an EBIT loss of $4.7 billion in its “Model e” segment. Thus, the auto giant lost a knee-buckling $64,731 for each EV it sold in 2023. To put that $64,731 per-vehicle loss in perspective, a top-of-the-line Mustang Mach-E listed on the website of a large Ford dealership here in Austin (see below) is selling for $66,615.

The company said the $4.7 billion loss reflected “an extremely competitive pricing environment, along with strategic investments in the development of clean-sheet, next-generation EVs.” The $4.7 billion loss is far higher than the $3 billion loss Ford projected back in March. Further, it’s more than double the $2.2 billion loss it recorded in the EV segment in 2022. Thus, in the last two years alone, the company has lost nearly $7 billion on its foray into fully electric automobiles. Recall that, as I reported here last July, the company has plans to spend $50 billion on EVs.

Given the company’s 2023 results, it’s clear that Ford’s headlong plunge into the EV market has been an unmitigated disaster and that the company would be far more profitable had it ignored the EV fad. Of course, the company tried to put a positive spin on its EV results, noting that EV sales rose by 18% last year. But those sales must be put into context. In 2023, Ford sold 750,789 F-Series trucks. Thus, the auto giant sold more than 10 times as many conventionally powered trucks as EVs (72,608).

Warnings about the company’s failing EV business have been coming for months. In December, the automaker announced it was slashing production of its F-150 Lightning in half, from 3,200 trucks per week to 1,600 per week, as part of an effort “to match Lightning production to customer demand.” On January 19, the company said it was cutting production of Lightning even further because, as Reuters reported, “demand for EVs has been lower than expected.”

What should be particularly worrisome for investors — and for the company’s CEO, Jim Farley — is that Ford’s EV losses aren’t falling, they are rising. Indeed, those losses doubled between the first quarter and fourth quarter of 2023. Ford’s first-quarter EV operating loss was $722 million. In the second quarter, it was $1.1 billion. In the third quarter, it was $1.3 billion, and in the fourth quarter, Ford’s EV operating loss hit $1.57 billion.

Ford’s losses are only part of the ongoing train wreck in the EV market. Last October, General Motors said it would delay the opening of a $4 billion electric truck factory in Michigan for a year. That same month, Reuters reported that  Honda and General Motors “were ending a $5 billion plan to develop lower-cost EVs together just a year after announcing the effort.” The article continued, noting that GM “would focus near-term EV efforts on meeting demand rather than hitting specific volume targets.”

In November, nearly 3,900 automobile dealers across the country sent a letter to President Biden telling him that EV demand is “not keeping up with the large influx of BEVs arriving at our dealerships prompted by the current regulations. BEVs are stacking up on our lots.” They continued, saying EVs are “not selling nearly as fast as they are arriving at our dealerships.”

As I explained in the written testimony I submitted to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last month, EVs have always been a niche-market product, not a mass-market one. And that niche market is dominated by wealthy, white, male, liberal voters who live in a handful of heavily Democratic cities and counties.

I wrote:

Further, that niche market is primarily defined by class and ideology. Some 57% of EV owners earn more than $100,000 annually, 75% are male, and 87% are white. Last March, Gallup reported, “a substantial majority of Republicans, 71%, say they would not consider owning an electric vehicle.”

Last October, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, released a remarkable study that found “counties with affluent left-leaning cities” like Cambridge, San Francisco, and Seattle “play a disproportionately large role in driving the entire national increase in EV adoption.” The researchers found that over the past decade, about half of all the EVs sold in the U.S. were sold in the most heavily Democratic counties in the country. The summary of the study deserves quoting at length:

“The prospect for EVs as a climate change solution hinges on their widespread adoption across the political spectrum. In this paper, we use detailed county-level data on new vehicle registrations from 2012-2022 to measure the degree to which EV adoption is concentrated in the most left-leaning U.S. counties. The results point to a strong and enduring correlation between political ideology and U.S. EV adoption. During our time period about half of all EVs went to the 10% most Democratic counties, and about one-third went to the top 5%. There is relatively little evidence that this correlation has decreased over time, and even some specifications that point to increasing correlation. The results suggest that it may be harder than previously believed to reach high levels of U.S. EV adoption.” (Emphasis added.)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the staggering losses at Ford and the other automakers is that the carmakers didn’t understand the limited appeal of EVs. Their lack of knowledge of the history of EVs, the concentrated nature of the market, and the limited number of motorists interested in buying EVs should go down as one of the biggest blunders in modern automobile history. Again, as I noted in my written testimony:

Ford and the other big automakers have been spending billions of dollars to cater to the whims of a tiny segment of the overall car market — a segment heavily concentrated in a handful of liberal counties. That’s a lousy business strategy. But it is an even worse strategy for federal policymakers who must be responsive to the transportation needs of every American, not just those who live in liberal cities and large, wealthy states.

In October, the chairman of Toyota Motor Corporation, Akio Toyoda, gloated about his company’s success with hybrids and the friction other automakers face in the EV business. Toyoda said automakers are “finally seeing reality” about all-electric cars. Unfortunately for Ford and its shareholders, finally seeing reality comes with multi-billion-dollar losses.

A final note: Ford’s EV sales in January fell by 11% compared to the same period last year. There’s more carnage ahead for FoMoCo.

February 11, 2024 Posted by | Economics | | Leave a comment

Here’s why you shouldn’t trust the ‘declining’ Gaza death toll narrative

By Robert Inlakesh | RT | February 11, 2024

Shortly before the International Court of Justice’s highly anticipated decision to pursue South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide, the New York Times released a report titled ‘The Decline of Death in Gaza’.

The article attributed this alleged decline to a change in Israel’s battle strategy in Gaza, yet the piece omitted key data that contradicted its claims. Then, in the aftermath of the ICJ preliminary ruling, the NYT became the first news outlet to receive and publish information from an Israeli dossier that accused UNRWA staff of complicity in the armed activities of Hamas.

Since the beginning of the war between Israel and Gaza, which began with the Hamas-led attack on October 7, Western corporate media have shown what can only be described as pro-Israeli double standards. On January 9, The Intercept published a quantitative analysis of over 1,000 articles in US mainstream media, including by the NYT, proving the undeniable bias demonstrated in favor of Israeli life and underreporting on Palestinian suffering.

An even more targeted analysis was published by researchers Jan Lietava and Dana Najjar, who specifically looked at the BBC’s coverage of the conflict between October 17 to December 2. The study documented that words like murder(ed), massacre(d) and slaughter(ed) were used by the BBC to describe Israelis 144 times, while Palestinians had only been described as having been murdered or massacred one time each; the word slaughter had never been used to describe the killing of Palestinians. The study clearly shows the disparity in humanizing language used and the number of stories on Palestinian deaths, despite the Palestinian death toll being far higher than the Israeli one.

The Israeli death toll throughout the war officially stands around 700 civilians and 600 combatants, while for Palestinians it is roughly 27,600, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The estimates are that between 61% to 75% of the Palestinians killed in Gaza are women and children. Ranging estimates as to how many Palestinian combatants have been killed are not trustworthy. Israeli spokespeople claim between 7,000 to 10,000 Hamas fighters, depending on the time of day, but provide no estimate for the number of fighters killed who are members of the dozen or so other armed groups in Gaza.

While the NYT report attempts to make the point that deaths in Gaza are steadily declining as the Israeli operation goes on, statistics released by the authorities in Gaza, from January 17 (when the NYT data chart ends) until January 24, clearly show the opposite trend. For reference the daily death tolls read: 163, 172, 142, 165, 178, 190, 195, 210.

The piece also lacks any evidence showing a correlation between the Israeli announcement of what it calls “phase 3” of its battle plan and the death toll charts that showed a downward arc in the daily fatality rate. Israel began announcing its intention to implement its new phase at the beginning of January, yet the argument presented in the article attempted to draw the conclusion that pressure from the US government had contributed to a lowering of fatalities between early December and January 17.

There was a decline in the daily reported death toll, but this occurred prior to any stated change in the military strategy. Also observable is that during the week that the report was released, the daily Gaza death toll actually jumped to 188. Monday through to Sunday of that week there were some 1,317 Palestinians killed by Israel. The week prior, a total of 1,110 were killed.

The NYT also pointed to the Israeli withdrawal of forces from northern Gaza, attempting to use this as evidence of a change in tactics in January that had been brought about due to efforts from the Biden administration. Israel actually reinvaded the north, briefly, after the article was published.

Furthermore, Israel didn’t start withdrawing from northern Gaza in January – it began this process around December 21, when it withdrew the elite Golani Brigades. In late December, five brigades were withdrawn and the reservists amongst them were released for economic reasons. Then, earlier last month, a further four brigades were withdrawn as the Israeli army implemented a retreat from most of the built-up areas in northern Gaza.

Israeli authorities claim that the reason for the change in the war strategy, shifting from the high-pressure tactics of the first two phases, was due to their desire to continue the fight for the whole of 2024. If Israel is planning to fight a year-long war, it makes sense for it to use fewer munitions and soldiers, as munitions are finite and the cost of the initial battle strategy would have been a significant economic burden.

Another crucial point is that the report completely left aside all other considerations as to what could explain a decline in death tolls across certain periods of time. A major issue that is faced today is a lack of a properly functioning health sector in Gaza altogether; according to the World Health Organization (WHO), only 16 hospitals out of 36 remain operational and all are “minimally or partially functioning.”

One of the last remaining professional journalists in northern Gaza, Anas al-Sharif, reported to Al Jazeera Arabic, on January 16, of the intensifying bombardments in the area and the underreporting of casualties there. A resident named Akram based in the Jabalia Refugee Camp told RT that “the bombing over those few days returned to how it was at the start of the war, it was terrifying and it seemed like it didn’t stop at all for over a day.”

With a health sector that has all but collapsed, properly accounting for the dead is a tough challenge, which is why the Gaza Health Ministry routinely includes the caveat to its daily death tolls that there are others under the rubble who are unaccounted for. To demonstrate how big of a difference the death toll is, when those missing under the rubble are factored in, take the statistics released by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which stated that 31,497 Palestinians had been killed by January 14.

Aside from us not having a full picture of the true daily death toll, Israel is also being accused of using starvation as a weapon of war, and the statistics that are being cited do not include those who are now dying due to disease and starvation. Some 400,000 people living in northern Gaza are without aid altogether, as efforts by international organizations to transport medical, food and fuel aid to the north have repeatedly been blocked. On December 9, Save The Children warned that the primary cause of death in Gaza could soon be starvation and disease, instead of bombs, with the humanitarian situation having severely deteriorated since then.

When the Israeli government later released its allegations that 12 UNRWA employees – out of 13,000 working in Gaza – had participated in the Hamas-led attack of October 7, the New York Times was the first to get its hands on the Israeli dossier that detailed its allegations. The newspaper failed to report that most of the allegations were based on interrogations conducted by the Shin Bet (Israeli secret police), which is renowned for extracting confessions through torture. The article that the NYT published on the issue made the dossier’s information seem somewhat credible, yet, when the UK’s Channel 4 obtained it and quoted it directly to the public, it concluded that “no evidence” was contained within the dossier.

The NYT’s reporting on Israeli allegations that Hamas conducted a premeditated mass rape campaign have come under fire also. In one case family members of an Israeli woman killed on October 7 had to take to social media to denounce the NYT’s attempts to suggest she had been raped, which the newspaper allegedly failed to tell the family it was planning to include in its article.

At every turn, Western corporate media has used distortions, linguistic manipulation, and outright lies to mislead its audiences on the truth about what is occurring in Gaza. It does not get lower than playing with statistics in order to downplay what the highest judicial body on earth has overwhelmingly ruled is plausibly a genocide, or what UN aid chief Martin Griffiths has called “the worst ever” humanitarian crisis.

Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News.

February 11, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The WHO Overplays its Hand and Watches Support Drain Away

BY BEN KINGSLEY AND MOLLY KINGSLEY  | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Cracks are forming in the World Health Organisation’s plans to secure a vast expansion of its powers and resources. Presented as a necessarily urgent response to the empirically unsupported assertion that pandemics are increasing in frequency and severity, negotiations for a broad package of amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) and a new parallel Pandemic Treaty had been expected to be over by the end of 2023. Having missed that deadline, in late January the Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus pleaded for WHO member states to give ground so that the negotiations could be completed at all. In the same comments he sought to apportion blame for the unexpected headwinds on those who had misconstrued, or misrepresented, the benign intentions of the WHO and its key supporters (which include China and some wealthy private organisations).

Reading between the lines, it appears that Mr. Ghebreyesus and his supporters may finally have realised that the game could soon be up: the strength of opposition to the ambitions of this unelected technocratic administration has compounded rapidly in recent weeks. That opposition has become more evident not only in smaller less influential countries, but in countries which are major contributors to the WHO. Significantly this has included groups of politicians in the U.K. and the U.S. who are seriously alarmed by the vision of a WHO-centred ‘command and control’ public health system, and by the constitutional and public spending implications of these two proposed international agreements.

The Director-General has perhaps realised that his blind ambition has not only put at risk the negotiations that might have elevated his unelected advisory organisation to the status of a supra-national rule-making authority, but is also now starting to jeopardise the future status, funding and membership of the WHO.

Secrecy, opacity and delay

The original timeline presented by the WHO had envisaged a final text of the proposed IHR amendments – where many of the most contentious proposals reside – being published before January 27th 2024, with a view to their adoption taking place at the World Health Assembly meeting scheduled from May 27th to June 1st 2024, alongside adoption of the proposed new Pandemic Treaty. That timeline, although tight, would have allowed four months for negotiators to brief domestic stakeholders, for national legislatures to debate the combined proposals and for any necessary pre-adoption formalities (approvals, technical scrutiny, cost/benefit analyses, etc.) to be completed prior to a vote at the WHA meeting in May.

Yet, on its own initiative, in October 2023 the Working Group for the negotiation of the IHR amendments unilaterally moved its own goalposts so that in place of publishing a final draft text to be scrutinised well in advance of that WHA meeting, it instead committed to circulate by the end of January a copy of the original set of proposed amendments and an interim ‘working draft’ text showing the current state of play. Negotiations would then continue between February and April 2024.  It was – and remains – ambiguous whether this move was compatible with the procedural legal requirements already enshrined in the International Health Regulations, but perhaps member states quietly agreed with the WHO secretariat not to look too hard at that issue.

Notwithstanding this commitment, no interim working draft of the IHR amendments appears yet to have been published, and the U.K. officials involved in the negotiations have been inexplicably reluctant to reveal the current position of the text. Indeed, to date all demands for transparency by U.K. parliamentarians have been ignored or deflected by the ministers responsible for the U.K.’s relationship with the WHO. Astonishingly the U.K. Government has refused even to confirm who is negotiating on the U.K.’s behalf.

We understand that the IHR Working Group anticipates a final text being settled only during April or possibly even into May, but there remains no official deadline for it to publish that final text. It refuses to confirm what the documents say, and it refuses to say when it will reveal those documents. If any further evidence were needed of the disregard and disrespect for democratic process and the sovereignty of national parliaments now alleged of the WHO, then surely this is it.

Out of time

That corrosive secrecy, opacity and delay has left a vanishingly narrow window for domestic public health organisations and parliamentarians to review or comment meaningfully on what may become generationally-significant changes to the U.K.’s relationship with the WHO, with other countries and with the public health business community. It means Parliament will have scant opportunity to scrutinise the IHR amendments and the new international funding and resource-sharing commitments enshrined in the parallel Pandemic Treaty. Yet these are documents with the potential to impact materially on the U.K.’s ability to act autonomously, on freedom of speech and opinion, on health security and on the nature of U.K. democracy itself. They also have the potential to commit future generations to very significant public spending obligations.

Given their significance, the IHR proposals and the parallel Pandemic Treaty require a commensurate degree of examination by Parliament. The current nature of the WHO’s funding, 85% of which now comes from private commercially-interested organisations, creates an additional imperative for rigorous, investigative scrutiny. In November 2023, Human Rights Watch wrote that:

The draft [treaty] reflects a process disproportionately guided by corporate demands and the policy positions of high-income governments seeking to protect the power of private actors in health including the pharmaceutical industry.

Without sight of any working drafts of the revised IHRs, nor of the current state of the draft treaty, scrutiny is completely frustrated. At this late stage in the process, after repetitive calls for transparency seemingly have been ignored, one is left to wonder whether this is precisely the intent of the officials involved.

Deferral is the rational solution

As the window for full, fair, candid appraisal by national democratically-elected legislatures is now all but shut, the logical and necessary solution is for member states to demand that any vote to adopt either of these two international accords is held over to the next WHA meeting in May 2025. This will allow ample time both for the conclusion of the negotiations and for member state-level scrutiny of the proposals served up by the negotiating teams.

If it is truly the case that the WHO and its member officials do not intend for national legislatures to cede rule-making sovereignty to an enlarged WHO technocracy, they will surely accept the need for state-level legislatures to control the timing of this process. Calls for deferral have begun, but more voices will be needed to press relevant political leaders and officials to accept that deferral is the only legitimate response to this situation.

A turning point

Even now, in the face of a chorus of rational legally-grounded concerns raised by U.K. parliamentarians about the substance of the proposed amendments and the opacity of the negotiations, the Government has remained steadfastly unwilling to comment on its negotiating intent and objectives, beyond vague platitudes. Efforts by members of the public, legal experts and parliamentarians to understand the current state of negotiations, and even just the arrangements within the U.K. Government to conduct the negotiations, have been stonewalled. The WHO equally has remained virtually mute and offered no meaningful evidence to support claims that its ambitions have been misunderstood.

This has served only to fuel distrust in this process, in the Government and its senior officials, in the U.K.’s relationship with the WHO, and in the WHO’s relationship with its influential funding providers.

Behaviour of this overtly undemocratic nature indicates that the WHO project has long since lost sight of its noble foundations in post-war benevolent multilateralism, and indeed of its reason for being: health for all in pursuit of global peace and security. Unfortunately, the WHO is now a symbol of all that is wrong with what has become a system of global public health patronage. This shamelessly undemocratic and chaotic power grab is also indicative of an organisation which has reached the end of its useful life, at least in its current guise. We suggest that this sorry episode should become the impetus for the U.K. to revisit its relationship with the WHO, and the relationship of the WHO with its funding providers.

The U.K. will not be an outlier if it does so, but rather a role model and – judging by the breadth and strength of international expressions of antipathy for the WHO’s ambitions – a leader of fast followers. This may well be the U.K.’s best post-Brexit opportunity to be an actor of global significance on the international stage.

Molly Kingsley is a founder and Ben Kingsley is the Head of Legal Affairs at children’s rights campaign group UsForThem. Find UsForThem on Substack. Ben and Molly’s new book (co-authored with Arabella Skinner) The Accountability Deficit is available now at Amazon and other book stores.

February 11, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Vote fraud prevented Trump victory in 2020 – study

RT | February 11, 2024

Mail-in ballot fraud “significantly” impacted the 2020 US presidential election, handing President Joe Biden his victory, according to a study published by conservative think tank the Heartland Institute on Friday.

“Had the 2020 election been conducted like every national election has been over the past two centuries, wherein the vast majority of voters cast ballots in-person rather than by mail, Donald Trump would have almost certainly been re-elected,” the report stated, citing survey data collected in December.

As many as 28.2% of mail-in voters potentially committed some form of fraud, acting in ways that were “under most circumstances, illegal,” the institute’s data suggested.

With over 43% of 2020’s votes cast by mail – the highest percentage in US history – this alleged fraud “significantly” impacted the election results.

The group’s December survey of 1085 likely voters found that about one in five mail-in voters may have acted fraudulently. Over a fifth (21%) of respondents admitted to filling out ballots for others or voting in a state where they were no longer a permanent resident, while 17% said they signed ballots for family members without their approval. Another 19% said a friend or family member had filled out their own ballot.

After subjecting the data to further statistical analysis, however, Heartland upped the percentage of potentially fraudulent mail-in ballots to 28.2%, adding that mail-in voters disproportionately favored Biden, further skewing the results.

Even if the percentage of fraudulent mail-in ballots was as low as 3%,Trump would have won, the think tank, which is known for opposing government regulation, argued, laying out 29 different scenarios with varying degrees of fraud to bolster its case that the Republican incumbent would have triumphed in the absence of fraudulent ballots.

The report urged lawmakers to crack down on mail-in voter fraud by requiring in-person voting or, in cases where that was impossible, requiring mail-in vote signatures be notarized or otherwise authenticated by a trusted third party.

“If state lawmakers fail to solve this problem, Americans’ confidence in the legitimacy of elections in 2024 and beyond will likely decrease, paving the way for chaos and civil unrest,” the report stated.

Mail-in voting, previously restricted to a small segment of the US population, was opened up to all during the 2020 presidential election due to the Covid-19 pandemic, despite bipartisan concerns about the potential for voter fraud.

While the Department of Homeland Security insisted the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history,” Trump and many of his supporters blamed voter fraud for his loss. Thousands descended on Washington DC on January 6, 2021 to protest the certification of Biden’s victory in the Electoral College. Clashes between Capitol police and protesters attempting to enter the Capitol building subsequently triggered the infamous riot for which thousands – including the former president – have been charged.

February 11, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption | | Leave a comment