As promised, the White House hosted a virtual event followed by the issuance of a fact sheet and detailed strategic report last Thursday that described in some detail a sweeping plan that will be implemented to confront what it describes as surging antisemitism. I reported last week how the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, who participated in the ceremony, has articulated the Biden Administration’s somewhat hyperbolic view that “Antisemitism is not a niche issue…it is an existential threat to democracy.” She had also regretted that “America has never done something like a national plan to fight antisemitism.” It should be noted that Lipstadt’s brief as ambassador is to confront what she perceives to be antisemitism all around the world, though it is likely that her role will expand to include domestic authorities under whatever new arrangements emerge as the Biden plan is implemented.
The plan that was unveiled was developed by an interagency task force created by Joe Biden last December, which was headed by “Second Gentleman” Doug Emhoff, who is both Jewish and has the misfortune to be married to Kamala Harris. It reportedly incorporates contributions and insights from claimed discussions with no less than “more than 1,000 community leaders” including various Jewish religious denominations and also representing both Jewish and non-Jewish civic organizations in the United States. Prior to the virtual event and press release, President Biden promised that the plan would “include more than 200 measures that government agencies, social media platforms and elected officials can adopt to counter rising antisemitism.” The measures will reportedly include at least 100 “provisions” that will require congressional action.
That the plan will be considered a success by inter alia suppressing what once passed as free speech in the United States seems to have bothered none of the Jewish groups that applauded the development. Occasionally sensible liberal leaning J Street enthused how “In a period when the threats of antisemitism, far-right extremism and white nationalism are surging in the United States, it’s deeply encouraging to see the White House make this a top priority and adopt a nuanced, well-considered, comprehensive approach.”
J Street’s President Jeremy Ben-Ami, who describes George Soros as a “Jewish philanthropist,” misses the point that Israel, which will be a principal beneficiary from stomping down on the First Amendment as nearly any criticism of the Jewish state will become a “hate crime, is preeminently a country awash in “far-right extremism.” He slyly concludes that “The struggle against antisemitism and all forms of bigotry is far too important to become a mere proxy for debates over Israel,” making the entire issue vanish in typical J Street fashion. Nor does that particular irony appear to have bothered any Congressmen or anyone in the mainstream media, such is the power of the Jewish establishment over both the press and the two joined-at-the-hip on this issue political parties that alternately govern us.
Note how the Plan, relying on wildly exaggerated statistics relating to what are often contrived or alleged antisemitic incidents, not by coincidence, seeks to protect Jews from a malignant force which is presumed to be the “white supremacists” that Biden and his cohorts have been otherwise targeting and also labeling as “terrorists.” That accomplishes two things politically: it gets the powerful Jewish/Israel Lobby and their controlled media fully on board to reelect Biden and it also identifies the enemy as likely to be conservative Republicans. In so doing, you take highly visible steps to protect the Jews (whether or not they actually need protection) and you create a credible enemy that everyone can identify and attack.
So what does the White House’s May 25thpress release entitled “Fact Sheet: Biden-Harris Administration Releases First-Ever US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism” tell us about what will be put in place to protect America’s wealthiest and already most powerful ethno-religious group? A sub-heading and the lead paragraphs summarize it this way: “[The] Administration announces over 100 new actions and over 100 calls to action to combat antisemitism, including new actions to counter antisemitism on college campuses and online; whole-of-society strategy includes new stakeholder commitments.
“Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is releasing the first-ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. This strategy includes over 100 new actions the Administration will take to raise awareness of antisemitism and its threat to American democracy, protect Jewish communities, reverse the normalization of antisemitism, and build cross-community solidarity.
“While antisemitic incidents most directly and intensely affect the Jewish community, antisemitism threatens all of us. Antisemitic conspiracy theories fuel other forms of hatred, discrimination, and bias—including discrimination against other religious minorities, racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQI+ hate. Antisemitism seeks to divide Americans from one another, erodes trust in government and nongovernmental institutions, and undermines our democracy.”
The Fact Sheet and the full report explain in frightening detail how Biden is dedicating significant financial and human resources to essentially pander to Jews and Israel over their concerns that they are being perceived badly, something that might be attributed to their own behavior. Admittedly, some concerns were expressed that Israel would be immune from criticism in spite of the fact that it is widely recognized as an apartheid state that commits crimes against humanity and even war crimes on a nearly daily basis. Most recently this has included a Flag Day march in East Jerusalem in which settlers chanted “Death to Arabs.” The Times of Israelsubsequently printed an article calling for the extermination of the Palestinians. Willfully blind to that reality, the fact sheet has only this to say: “In addition, the strategy reaffirms the United States’ unshakable commitment to the State of Israel’s right to exist, its legitimacy, and its security—and makes clear that when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism.” In other words, because Israel is the self-designated Jewish state criticism of it will be ipso facto regarded as a hate crime, antisemitism.
I will not bore the reader by reviewing most of the 60 page long “Strategy” report’s more intrusive features, but it is worth observing that it commits itself to have “The US government…harness our collective resources to increase education about antisemitism and its threat to democracy, the Holocaust, and Jewish contributions to American society.” “Collective resources” of course includes taxpayer money, which will be flowing in the billions to Jewish businesses and facilities for “protection,” as is already happening with Department of Homeland Security discretionary grants, more than 90% of which support increased security for Jews and their organizations.
The “Strategy’s” four “Pillars” as elaborated in both the fact sheet and the full text are:
Pillar 1: Increase awareness and understanding of antisemitism, including its threat to America, and broaden appreciation of Jewish American heritage
Pillar 2: Improve safety and security for Jewish communities
Pillar 3: Reverse the normalization of antisemitism and counter antisemitic discrimination
Pillar 4: Build cross-community solidarity and collective action to counter hate
One should expect major initiatives in requiring educational courses in holocaust and other Jewish issues, compulsory training and re-education sessions both in government and the corporate world on the threat posed by antisemitism, and creating law enforcement mechanisms backed by new legislation that will provide empowerment to investigate and criminalize various antisemitic acts as “hate crimes.” One “Strategic Goal” that might be of particular interest to readers of this article might be “Tackling Antisemitism Online,” which includes “Ensure terms of service and community standards explicitly cover antisemitism. The Administration commends platforms with terms of service and community standards that establish ‘zero-tolerance’ for hate speech, including antisemitism. All online platforms are encouraged to adopt zero-tolerance terms of service and community standards” and “to permanently ban repeat offenders, both personal accounts and extremist websites.” It calls for “algorithms” to be employed on social media sites to block any and all antisemitic content. Somewhat bizarrely, it also calls for “Establish[ing] relationships with Jewish community organizations to share best practices related to reporting hate speech and utilizing platforms to lift up Jewish stories.”
So, in effect, the US government’s national security agencies would be answering to and propagandizing for “Jewish community organizations,” which one might think to be inappropriate. But the fact sheet and report itself do not mention what legislation will be in the works to penalize those who choose to be non-cooperative, though the model would likely be the laws that have been passed in 26 states and counting to punish or deny benefits to those who either support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) or are in favor of any nonviolent action directed against Israel. Note particularly that “college campuses” are explicitly mentioned as targets by the White House fact sheet since BDS, seen as a major threat by the Israeli government and by groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), is increasingly popular among students at a number of universities.
And speaking of BDS, where even Biden has perhaps hesitated to go too deep too directly, there is always a boneheaded congressmen who is ready to take up the pander to Israel mission. Senator Marco Rubio, who has never been bothered by having to think anything through, has introduced a bill that would prevent US companies and individuals from participating in boycotts of countries “friendly to the US.” Israel is not named in the legislation, but the Congressmen involved have freely admitted that it is directed particularly against BDS. Rubio claims that “The BDS movement is the single most destructive campaign of economic warfare against the Jewish state of Israel. This bill, which previously passed the Senate, would mark an important step toward bringing an end to the movement’s discriminatory efforts.” The bill’s cosponsor Republican Senator Bill Hagerty added that it would “Provide state and local governments [with] the tools they need to counter ‘the discriminatory and hate-inspired conduct of the anti-Semitic BDS movement aimed against Israel our closest ally in the Middle East.’”
Make no mistake, the “Strategy” and all that will develop from it is misguided, overkill, and the death of freedom to speak, write and associate. It is a consequence of the immense Jewish power over the United States government and is in no way justified by developments. One notes how conservative critics of the Biden Administration Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson have recently been called antisemites without any real evidence demonstrating that to be the case. Joe Biden’s plan of action will surely similarly open the door to what will quickly become an open season on alleged antisemites. It will subsequently be easy for politicians and the media to label critics of domestic issues like the state of the Mexican border or international issues like the pointless and highly dangerous war against Russia as “haters” and by a tortuous extension antisemites. Appropriate punishment will follow.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
US Senator Lindsey Graham’s name has been trending on social media in recent days. As exposed in a video circulating on the internet, on May 26, during a trip to Ukraine, the Republican allegedly said that killing Russians was a good investment. Obviously, the statement generated controversy and all sorts of reactions, including state measures on the part of Russia. However, the lack of clarification on the case leaves many questions unanswered.
In the aforementioned video, the senator seems to say: “And the Russians are dying… it’s the best money we’ve ever spent.” At the time, Graham was personally speaking to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. It is known that Lindsey led an American delegation on an official trip to Kiev, in which topics of interest to both countries in the context of the current conflict would have been discussed. The meeting at which the controversial phrase was allegedly voiced took place during this trip.
There are no means to prove the veracity of the video. Some analysts have claimed that there is a media editing connecting Graham’s words. According to some experts, the mention of the death of Russians and the comment about money were not originally in the same sentence. However, as well as there is no proof to believe in the edited version that circulates on the networks, there is also no full and official version to verify what was actually said by the Senator. Therefore, there is no certainty about what happened at the meeting.
Graham responded to the allegations circulating on the networks by classifying them as “Russian propaganda“. He said in a letter to Reuters that he told Zelensky that “it has been a good investment by the United States to help liberate Ukraine”, with no mention on the murder of Russians. However, despite possible video editing, it is evident that at some point in the conversation there was such a mention, and Graham failed to clarify what he really thinks about killing Russians.
Regardless of the veracity of the video, Graham’s accusations that the case is related to some kind of “Russian propaganda” are absolutely unsubstantiated. The edited video was shared on the internet precisely by Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office. So, if there is any propaganda intent around the case, it is on the part of Kiev, not Russia. Russians just reacted to something that was posted on social media and generated outrage among netizens and ordinary people.
In addition to the strong responses on social networks, the US senator also suffered state sanctions for his possible declaration. Moscow’s authorities have added the politician to a list of wanted international criminals due to his Russophobic behavior. It is necessary to emphasize that the case comes amid a serious wave of anti-Russian intolerance fomented by the Collective West as a reaction to the special military operation on the borders with Ukraine. Moscow has done its best to combat anti-Russian mentality around the world, and, in this regard, measures are needed to sanction Russophobic hate-based behavior on the part of foreign officials.
In fact, there are two possibilities around the topic. On the one hand, it is possible that Graham was unconsciously used by Ukrainian propaganda. As well known, the Kiev regime maintains open neo-Nazi and anti-Russian rhetoric, publicly promoting every type of attack against Russian citizens. The government’s propaganda sectors, in this sense, could have deliberately edited the video, without the senator’s authorization, and published it to boost their racist campaigns and fuel the West’s Russophobic frenzy.
On the other hand, it is possible that the Americans themselves were involved in the case and consented to the misuse of Graham’s words for propaganda purposes. Considering that the politician failed to provide concrete clarification on the matter, limiting his response to vague accusations against Russia, the hypothesis of his direct involvement definitely cannot be ignored.
Furthermore, it is necessary to remember that Graham is already highly known for his Russophobic pronouncements, having even suggested the assassination of Vladimir Putin in March 2022. Being a fanatical supporter of American interventionism, advocating the death of Russians would not be something really new for him.
So, in order to clarify the situation once and for all and enable Moscow to reconsider its decision to include Graham on the wanted list, the Republican should make a public statement denying American interest in the death of Russians. Otherwise, even if there is video editing, the accusations against him will continue to be appropriate, given his omission.
Lucas Leiroz is an journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
A surprise popped up on my Twitter feed last week – the launch of BBC Verify, as announced by BBC journalist Marianna Spring. Apparently, the state broadcaster is now going to verify what is fact and what is fake news. Better late than never, I suppose, given the BBC’s relentless promotion of pro-lockdown and pro-vaccine misinformation during the Pandemic. However, as the presentation went on it revealed a somewhat different agenda – less of the fact-checking and more of the “searching for conspiracy theories from the far-right”. This was in support of the noble goal of protecting the British people from outbreaks of civil disorder supposedly linked to ‘conspiracy theories’, like the Jan 6th brouhaha. And Spring herself is going to get her hands dirty, at least as much as can be done using such tools as Google Maps and Facebook, along with 60 other BBC journalists. (How much is this costing?)
There was something very familiar about Ms. Spring for U.S. audiences. We had a ‘disinformation tsar’ just like her a year ago in the form of Nina Jankowicz.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) decided last year that it had fulfilled its primary mission of securing our borders by throwing them wide open, and instead decided to take on real issues such as rooting out disinformation to protect the homeland. In April 2022, DHS Top Man, Alejandro Majorkas, announced the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) and the hiring of disinformation ‘expert’ Nina Jankowicz to run it.
Ms. Jankowicz was not exactly well qualified for the job of rooting out fake news. She agreed with the 51 former Intelligence officials who proclaimed the laptop owned by Hunter Biden was Russian disinformation, when in fact the officials’ statement turned out to be disinformation. Ditto the Steele dossier procured by the Hilary campaign to trash Trump in the 2016 Presidential race. She believed this dodgy dossier was true even after reporting in 2017 showed it was not, and after 2019 when the Mueller Report confirmed this beyond doubt. In an unfortunate Tik Tok video, Jankowicz channeled Mary Poppins with an updated version of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ which referenced Democrat Party talking points on Ukraine and Covid. None of this is surprising as Jankowicz’s professional career up until that point had been spent in traditional Democrat Party training grounds such as the National Democratic Institute.
The brief of the DGB (one letter different from the KGB as the Wall Street Journalpointed out) was remarkably similar to that of BBC Verify, although it was based in a state agency as opposed to the state broadcaster. It intended to put a government imprimatur on what was fact and what was disinformation. To most Americans outside of Washington DC this is anathema. Americans believe the arbiter of truth is the individual, not the state, and that belief is enshrined in our Constitution as well as our laws.
Within three weeks of being born, the Disinformation Board was dead. The battle was not won on philosophical or constitutional grounds, but because of the ridicule inspired by Jankowicz’s antics. She came across as a less sympathetic version of Elizabeth Warren, if such a thing is possible, with the icing on the cake being the Mary Poppins video. Although in the minority in both the House and the Senate, Republicans killed the Board by mostly playing or referring to the video.
But a word of warning to those thinking that laughing at Spring and the rest of the BBC Verifiers will bring about another easy victory for free speech. The DHS may have ‘paused’ the Board and got rid of Ms. Jankowicz in May 2022, but the need to fight against certain points of view under the guise of protecting the American people from ‘far-right’ extremism is still being pursued only in more devious ways.
Last week, for example, the Media Research Center published some interesting reporting on the DHS. The DHS has changed the focus of the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program (TVTP) from real terrorism to the political Right. In the last two years, it has provided $40 Million in funding for 80 projects by various public institutions and private organisations that seem to be operating under the assumption that ‘far-right’ includes 50% of the American population, and that it is directly tied to white supremacy. One particularly disgraceful chart, taken from material developed by one of the grantees – the University of Dayton – shows the Republican Party, Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, Prager U and Quillette, among other perfectly respectable organisations, linked directly to Nazi-supporting fringe organisations.
Given that the organisations at the top of this pyramid supposedly pose the biggest threat to the homeland since Al-Qaeda, it’s remarkable that no-one seems to have more than a hazy idea of who they are. Even the Southern Poverty Law Center has acknowledged that the number of these supposedly dangerous, far-right organisations is down and identifies the threat as follows: “as organisational loyalty has dwindled and the internet has become white nationalism’s organising principle, however, the ideology is best understood as a loose coalition of social networks orbiting online propaganda hubs and forums.” Of course, such vagueness is ideal for the anti-disinfo grant applications – the vaguer things are, the easier it is to conjure up far-right conspiracies. No need to bother with real terrorists coming through our open borders when shadowy people linked to right-of-centre media companies and free speech organisations represent the real threat.
This is BBC Verify’s view as well, if their launch video is anything to go by. Spring defines their journalistic approach as setting up fake accounts on social media, aka ‘trolls’, to monitor sinister stuff going on in chat rooms, FB groups, and no doubt Twitter, now Elon Musk has gone over to the dark side with his support for free speech, a tool of white supremacy. Spring is promising a podcast called ‘Marianna in Conspiracyland’ inspired by Alice In Wonderland (she has to go down various alt-media rabbit holes to chase the conspiracy theorists).
The predilection of these two young women an ocean apart for using children’s literature to articulate their concerns about disinformation is not a coincidence. Our real problems in both the U.S. and the U.K. are largely the responsibility of our dysfunctional governments – porous borders, high inflation, rampant crime, Net Zero, the blowback from the disastrous lockdown policy. The narrative that the real threat to our prosperity and well-being is lurking in dark corners of the Internet is essentially a fairy story.
As Washington increasingly inflates the China threat, a few pieces of sly propaganda to sell that conflict are coming more into focus. Recent speeches devoted to China by key figures in the Biden administration largely rested on falsehoods that conveniently erase decades of mistakes by the American elite and therefore shift all the blame onto China.
Both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and national security advisor Jake Sullivan recently engaged in this rewriting of history that claims the Chinese stole American jobs and similarly that Beijing nefariously took control of the “clean” energy industry and will now use its position to coerce other nations, potentially slowing climate action.
One can see why it’s an attractive talking point for DC officials as it helps sell the conflict to working class Americans and environmentalists, but it’s simply not true.
The blame for American industry (green or not) relocating to China was caused by the greed of American elites who reaped massive profits in the process. Now they claim taking on China will bring back jobs and help tackle climate change. Nevermind that much of the American industry now being relocated out of China is going to other “low-cost” countries or that the US war machine is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter.
How are Yellen and Sullivan portraying the US as an innocent bystander that never could have foreseen the loss of US manufacturing to China?
Here’s Yellen speaking on April 20 at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:
Over the past few decades, China has experienced an impressive economic rise. Between 1980 and 2010, China’s economy grew by an average of 10 percent per year. This led to a truly remarkable feat: the rise of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. China’s rapid catch-up growth was fueled by its opening-up to global trade and pursuit of market reforms. … China has long used government support to help its firms gain market share at the expense of foreign competitors.
…The actions of China’s government have had dramatic implications for the location of global manufacturing activity. And they have harmed workers and firms in the U.S. and around the world…. China’s unfair economic practices have resulted in the over-concentration of the production of critical goods inside China.
And here’s Sullivan in his big speech about the new US international economic policy speaking at the Brookings Institution last month:
The so-called “China shock” that hit pockets of our domestic manufacturing industry especially hard—with large and long-lasting impacts—wasn’t adequately anticipated and wasn’t adequately addressed as it unfolded.
First off, to the point of government support. China no doubt provides subsidies for firms largely in fields deemed strategic. The US also does so (see: Inflation Reduction Act, oil, agriculture, auto, etc.).
No doubt that China has bent and broken WTO rules, but that was working just fine for US officials until it wasn’t. Now that officials like Sullivan have woken up to the fact that offshoring everything to China was a disastrous long-term security plan, they say it’s Beijing’s fault for the “China shock.” But contrary to Sullivan’s claim such an outcome couldn’t have been foreseen, it was “adequately anticipated.” Here’s a piece from the New York Times back in 2000 titled “Unions March Against China Trade Deal”:
Thousands of steelworkers, truck drivers, auto workers and other union members rallied on Capitol Hill and swept through the halls of Congress today in a show of muscle intended to block a trade agreement with China.
Their message, conveyed by union leaders and rank-and-file members who came from as far away as Michigan and Nebraska, was that trade was working for American corporations but not for American workers.
… [the union members] said, they are only opposing a deal with a country that does not respect workers’ rights and would stop at nothing, in their view, to steal the jobs that are the backbone of the American middle class.
It was obvious at the time what was happening; the real story is well-known, but just to recap: it was American elites’ greed that caused the American working class to lose 3.7 million decent paying jobs from 2001-2018.
Matt Stoller and Lukas Kunce tell the story from a national security perspective in a 2019 piece at The American Conservative. Using old US telecom equipment company Lucent Technologies as a starting point. In 1996, AT&T spun off Bell Labs into Lucent, which began to buy up companies in an effort to keep its stock price high. Lucent also lended money to risky startups who would then buy Lucent equipment. Then came the dot-com bust, and the company, already dealing with accounting scandals, began massive layoffs. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Stoller and Kunce write:
In the early 2000s, the telecom equipment market began to recover from the recession. Lucent’s new strategy, as Mottl put it, was to seek “margin” by offshoring production to China, continuing layoffs of American workers and hiring abroad. At first, it was the simpler parts of the telecom equipment, the boxes and assembly, but soon contract manufacturers in China were making virtually all of it. American telecom capacity would never return.
Lucent didn’t recover its former position. Chinese entrants, subsidized heavily by the Chinese state and using Western technology, underpriced Western companies. American policymakers, unconcerned with industrial capacity, allowed Chinese companies to capture market share despite the predatory subsidies and stolen technology. In 2006, French telecom equipment maker Alcatel bought Lucent, signifying the end of American control of Bell Labs. Today, Huawei, with state backing, dominates the market.
The erosion of much of the American industrial and defense industrial base proceeded like Lucent. First, in the 1980s and 1990s, Wall Street financiers focused on short-term profits, market power, and executive pay-outs over core competencies like research and production, often rolling an industry up into a monopoly producer. Then, in the 2000s, they offshored production to the lowest cost producer. This finance-centric approach opened the door to the Chinese government’s ability to strategically pick off industrial capacity by subsidizing its producers. Hand over cash to Wall Street, and China could get the American crown jewels.
Can you blame Beijing? If the US wants to sell off their industry, wouldn’t it be crazy not to take it? The fact is the Chinese used the system Washington built against them, and now the likes of Sullivan and Yellen cry foul.
Long Yongtu, China’s chief negotiator for WTO accession has defended Beijing’s role in the country’s economy, saying “when we promised to adopt a market economy, we made it absolutely clear that it would be a socialist market economy.”
The loss of US manufacturing decimated the country’s research capacity. It means the US relies on components made in China for aircraft carriers and submarines. It means a trillion dollars in defense spending helps enrich China – the very country which is supposedly behind the increased defense spending in the first place.
Of course, Yellen and Sullivan admit no mistakes by the US ruling class. It was impossible to know this would happen, they say, despite warnings at the time that this very situation would arise.
Not surprisingly, when Politico did a 20-year-anniversary story on China’s accession to the WTO, most US lawmakers didn’t want to talk about their vote to normalize trade relations with China in 2000 (which paved the way to the WTO).
But four American “experts” who did the planning and negotiating of the normalization of trade ties with China have zero regrets. That’s hardly surprising as it seems the number one qualification to become an expert is the ability to never admit being wrong. It also probably didn’t hurt that all these experts were rewarded with better positions and often cashed in afterwards.
***
Yellen and Sullivan also play up how confronting China is part of their newfound focus on minerals critical for a green economy, but what they’re really doing is disguising another lack of foresight by American elites. Sullivan says critical minerals are “the backbone of the clean-energy future” and that “clean-energy supply chains are at risk of being weaponized in the same way as oil in the 1970s, or natural gas in Europe in 2022.”
Many of these minerals are controlled by China and are also critical for the US defense industry. Who could have foreseen? Here’s another tidbit from that 2000 New York Times article:
In an effort to counter the unions’ message, the administration released a Commerce Department study showing that every state would benefit from increased trade with China. And Gen. Colin L. Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, endorsed the agreement, saying that among its other benefits it would be in the nation’s security interests.
How has that worked out? Well, it’s now unclear. As Army Technologypoints out:
The US Department of the Interior released a list of 35 minerals it deems essential to the economic and national security in 2018 (updated in 2022), amongst them many REEs. The problem for the US is that the local production of these materials is hugely limited.
The extent of reliance on imports varies from mineral to mineral. Beryllium is mainly used to create lightweight material used in fighter jets, lithium is essential for modern battery production and tin is used in electronics, including soldier semiconductors, a sector that is projected to reach a value of $17.5bn by 2030.
Whereas the US produces some of the minerals mentioned above, it entirely relies on China and other countries for many other supplies. Cerium is used in batteries and in most devices with a screen and magnets forged from neodymium and samarium are impervious to extreme temperatures that are used in fighter jet fin actuators, missile guidance, control systems, aircraft and tank motors, satellite communications and radar and sonar systems.
Here again, it was the US that moved rare earth and other mineral processing to China, that sold off mining operations to Chinese companies, and reaped the rewards for doing so. As Stoller and Kunce describe:
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Defense Department invested in the development of a technology to use what are known as rare-earth magnets. The investment was so successful that General Motors engineers, using Pentagon grants, succeeded in creating a rare earth magnet that is now essential for nearly every high-tech piece of military equipment in the U.S. inventory, from smart bombs and fighter jets to lasers and communications devices. The benefit of DARPA’s investment wasn’t restricted to the military. The magnets make cell phones and modern commercial electronics possible.
China recognized the value of these magnets early on. Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping famously said in 1992 that “The Middle East has oil, China has rare earth,” to underscore the importance of a rare earth strategy he adopted for China. Part of that strategy was to take control of the industry by manipulating the motivations of Wall Street.
And now as the US presses the situation in Taiwan and enacts chip controls (and pressures other countries to do the same), how is China considering retaliating? From Nikkei Asia:
China is considering prohibiting exports of certain rare-earth magnet technology in a move that would counter the U.S.’s advantage in the high-tech arena.
Japan specializes in making high-performance magnets from rare earths while the U.S. produces products that use the magnets… Washington has since moved to forge a rare-earth supply chain on U.S. soil. China’s share of all rare earths produced globally dropped to roughly 70% last year from about 90% a decade earlier, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
At the same time, China still holds a tight grip on processing rare earths. Most rare earths extracted in the U.S. go to China for refining before being shipped back to the U.S.
The CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act have added roughly 77,000 jobs so far, according to Jack Conness who does a neat job tracking the investments. That’s still a far cry from the 3.7 million jobs sent to China from 2001 to 2018, and it doesn’t look like many more will be returning despite the push to move production out of China as ties deteriorate. There’s the problem of automation, which FiveThirtyEight noted back in 2016:
Because of rising wages in China, the need for shorter supply chains and other factors, a small but growing group of companies are shifting production back to the U.S. But the factories they build here are heavily automated, employing a small fraction of the workers they would have a generation ago.
And there’s always the pesky issue of American workers asking for decent wages. Both Yellen and Sullivan waxed on about “friendshoring” – relocating from China to friendly countries, which also happen to below-wage. This is evidence of more short term thinking and prioritizing profits. Recall that China was initially thought of as friendly, and the selling point was that gifting it American industry would only make it friendlier.
Companies from China are already out in front of the friendshoring trend and are increasingly setting up shop in Mexico in order to be closer to their biggest market in the US.
Sullivan and Yellen don’t touch on that or just how difficult this reorganizing of supply chains will be. A 2020 Bank of America study found that it would cost American and European firms $1 trillion over five years to shift all the export-related manufacturing that is not intended for Chinese consumption out of China.
Additionally, China remains the main player in East Asian production networks, which makes manufacturing electronics products, for example, without Chinese parts and components increasingly unrealistic. Meanwhile, the US is still the largest source of inward foreign direct investment flows into ASEAN. From The Diplomat :
These different roles played by the U.S. and China in the East Asian economic system are a result of the distinct fundamentals of their domestic economies. China has pursued a production – and investment – based growth model in the past few decades, while the United States is a post-industrial, heavily financialized economy, sustained by high consumption and its central position in the global financial order. These fundamentals will prove to be harder to shape than unilaterally altering trade policies.
On the one hand, this means that attempts at isolating China are limited by the economic realities. “Friend-shoring,” “nearshoring,” and newfound industrial policies in the United States (and Europe) could very well lead to the diversification of U.S. imports, lessen the perceived national security risks associated with import dependence, and provide economic benefits to ASEAN countries by shifting some manufacturing activity from China to Southeast Asia. However, these policies are unlikely to fundamentally challenge China’s central position in regional trade and production networks in the mid-term. As Apple’s struggles in diversifying the production of the iPhone show, China-centered production networks are not easy to replicate in other countries, as Chinese logistics and suppliers possess significant advantages.
With that in mind, it’s likely this ends up as another situation similar to the purchasing of Russian oil via India:
When you look into it, "Made in India" is really "Assembled in India with China-made components". I suspect that's what most of those increasing imports are. https://t.co/YuHDGliAbo
Once the undisputed hegemonic power in the Middle East, thought to be indispensable for the security and success of a range of regional leaderships, the US has been fading into the background to the benefit of its adversaries.
As armed conflict erupted between NATO-backed Ukraine and Russia in February of 2022, the Joe Biden administration in Washington decided to throw its weight behind Kiev and focus on a project to bog down Moscow, while unleashing wave after wave of sanctions. Despite spending at least $75 billion dollars on assistance to Ukraine and making Russia the most sanctioned nation on earth, the US has failed to bring Moscow to its knees. In fact, one could say that it is the US that has been cut down to size in the global arena, especially in the Middle East, an area it once considered its own backyard.
As the months pass, blow after blow has been inflicted on US power in the Middle East. In direct opposition to Washington’s agenda, the Syrian Arab Republic was readmitted to the Arab League following a 12-year hiatus, paving the way to end the crisis in Syria, which the US seeks to prolong. China has also entered Middle East politics in a dramatic way, brokering an Iranian-Saudi rapprochement back in March, and this then spurred a wider normalization wave. Although the US attempted to play off the Saudi Arabia-Iran agreement as an acceptable and welcomed move, this has now clearly worked to collapse Washington’s long-term effort towards regional supremacy, which was based on feeding a proxy conflict between the two powers.
The failure of US sanctions
Western leaders publicly predicted that Russia’s economy would collapse under sanctions, a result which clearly has not materialized, with the IMF predicting the Russian economy will grow. Similarly, the US “maximum pressure” sanctions that were first introduced against Iran under the Trump administration, were expected to severely hinder the Islamic Republic’s ability to continue its developments in the defense field, but have failed to achieve those goals.
However, perhaps the worst blowback against Russia sanctions has been the nullification of previous limits to Moscow-Tehran economic relations. The two nations are already the most sanctioned on earth, so they need not worry about the potential consequences from their trade, which has encouraged further cooperation between them. Recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi signed a deal to finance an Iranian railway line as part of a North-South Transport Corridor.
Failed propaganda
The Biden administration has employed hardline propaganda tactics in order to demonize Russia and lionize Ukraine. Although for some Western audiences the arguments set forth may have proven effective, in the global community and especially the Middle East, such rhetoric is tiresome and clearly hypocritical.
After having illegally invaded Iraq, inflicting around a million deaths, over a concoction of factually-challenged conspiracy theories about weapons of mass destruction, it comes off as laughable that the US is now claiming to oppose illegal invasions. Former Bush administration officials, such as Condolezza Rice, have even appeared on national television shows in the US to condemn illegal invasions of foreign countries. Even former US President George W. Bush seemingly condemned the “holy unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq… I mean of Ukraine” in a Freudian slip.
The US has positioned itself now as being opposed to the illegal occupation of foreign territory, in addition to claiming it stands in principle against annexation. When US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked by a CNN correspondent whether his government supported the annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights by Israel, he answered: “Look, leaving aside the legalities of that question, as a practical matter, the Golan is very important to Israel’s security,” again demonstrating Washington’s double standards. Washington continues to maintain its recognition of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, which not only defies international law, but also the majority opinion at the United Nations.
The faltering image of the US
From the perspective of Middle Eastern nations, the US is overcommitted to the conflict in Ukraine, even as they have refrained from taking a clear side and instead remained neutral for the most part. Neither the people nor the governments of these countries buy the platitudes espoused by US officials when it comes to Ukraine. The stark difference between the way Palestinians and Ukrainians are portrayed for the exact same actions are enough to make eyes roll.
Now that China is presenting opportunities for countless Middle East nations, especially in the economic sphere, the US has a real competitor. However, the US continues to operate as if the world has not undergone a dramatic shift and refuses to rein in its allies. Ukraine in some respects is getting the special treatment that Israel has enjoyed for years: unlimited aid with few or no questions asked. In the case of Israel, as its government proceeds with introducing controversial legal reforms, takes steps to change the status quo at the al-Aqsa Mosque and pursues hardline far-right policies against the Palestinian people, all coming at a cost to Washington itself, the Biden administration refuses to put it in its place. What Israel is currently doing is embarrassing its own Arab allies that recently normalized ties, even threatening to put a wedge in relations with the likes of neighboring Jordan.
It is this refusal to recalibrate that is not only costing the US its influence, but also evaporating the prize of bringing Israel and Saudi Arabia together, which has clearly been a foreign policy achievement goal dear to the Biden administration. Now that Riyadh and Tehran have restored relations, the excuse of combating Iran’s regional influence is gone for negotiating a Saudi-Israeli rapprochement. The refusal to punish Israel for its constant provocations also makes it more difficult for Saudi Arabia to normalize with an unrestrained Israeli government that continues to insult the Muslim world and invites popular Arab support for the Palestinian cause. If there is no change to the arrogant and out of touch approach of the US, which rules with an iron fist and a “my way or the highway” approach, it will be the US itself that is going to be taking a hike from the Middle East.
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. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.
The NATO-Russia proxy conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated the significance of drones in modern warfare, with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used by both sides for reconnaissance, targeting, and kamikaze attacks. What are the four main kinds of anti-drone defenses? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? Sputnik explores.
“The wars of the future will not be fought on a battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots and as you go forth today remember always – your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots.”
That was the humorous but eerie prediction by the military school commandant in the 1997 The Simpsons episode “The Secret War of Lisa Simpson.” A quarter of a century later, the idea of using drones in warfare has become ubiquitous, and The Simpsons’ comedic flourish has been forever tainted by real-life conflict.
Although small propeller and rocket-propelled reconnaissance drones fitted with film cameras have been around since the Cold War, modern drone warfare, including camera-mounted, remote-operated GPS-equipped spy and strike drones, is a product of the early 21st century, with the United States kicking off the world’s first campaign of targeted killings using UAVs in 2002.
As small, inexpensive, off-the-shelf drones began entering the commercial market in the 2010s, they started to be used by non-state actors to attack armies and governments – with US-backed terrorists using them in the Syrian dirty war against Syrian and Russian forces, and Yemen’s Houthi militants deploying them against the Saudi-led coalition.
Large, military-grade drones were used to effect in the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenian volunteers in Nagorno-Karabakh, and, starting in 2022, have been deployed extensively by NATO-backed Ukrainian forces in Donbass and throughout Ukraine against Russian forces. Russia has countered them using a series of domestically-developed drone defense systems. But more on that below.
Drone Defenses: What Types Are There?
In the second half of the 20th century, the USSR and the USA focused their air and missile defense research on targeting big, expensive manned fighters, bombers, transport planes, and ballistic and cruise missiles. Although this included research into fantastical concepts including the use of powerful lasers in space under Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense program, its main focus remained missiles – rocket-powered projectiles designed to intercept and destroy enemy aircraft and missiles.
Can Missiles Be Used to Down Drones?
For drones that are large enough – including unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAV) like the Bayraktar TB2, the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper, or the Northrop Grumman RQ-4A Global Hawk, which have wingspans of 12, 20, or even 40 meters, respectively, the most effective defenses are still good old-fashioned missiles designed to target jet aircraft.
Last month, Russian Air Defense Force Commander Andrey Demin reported that over 100 Bayraktar drones had been destroyed in fighting in Ukraine.
“There are practically no fundamental distinctions between fighting against strategic drones like the US Global Hawk (RQ-4) or Reaper (MQ-9) or Turkiye’s operational-tactical Bayraktar-TB and counteraction to crewed aircraft. The elimination of more than 100 Bayraktars, delivered to Ukraine throughout the period of the special military operation, is clear evidence of this,” Demin said, speaking with Russia’s official army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda.
For the battle against large drones, including their detection and destruction, the same monitoring and strike systems as those used against traditional aircraft can be used. This has been demonstrated not only in Ukraine, but with the June 2019 shootdown over Iranian airspace in the Strait of Hormuz of a $220 million Global Hawk operated by the US Navy by an Iranian road-mobile air defense system known as the 3rd Khordad.
How Can Electronic Countermeasures Be Used to Destroy Drones?
Smaller drones, including so-called mini and micro UAVs, are more difficult to detect, Demin admitted, pointing to these weapons’ “small effective reflective surface” for radar detection, and saying that tracking such systems and revealing their trajectory using standard radar equipment is “rather problematic.”
For this purpose, the Russian military has developed an air defense system of a different sort – the RLK-MTs Valdai, a special-purpose radar designed specifically to detect, suppress, and neutralize small drones with extremely low radar cross sections.
Developed by Almaz-Antey, manufacturer of the Buk and S-300/S-400/S-500 series of air and missile defense systems, the RLK-MTs is a vehicle-mounted radar complex designed to detect enemy drones at distances of up to 15 km, and to take them down using electronic countermeasures (using a control and navigation signal suppression module) at close-in ranges of 2 km or less. The complex’s detection systems include an X-band radar module, thermal imagers and cameras, a radio signal source-finder module. The vehicles can be operated remotely.
Demin confirmed that the RLK-MTs is “already performing combat missions to cover critical military and state facilities, including those in the special military operation zone,” and said he expects production of the systems to ramp up dramatically in the coming years.
Large, vehicle-based systems stuffed with detection systems and powerful electronic countermeasures are arguably the most capable defenses against small drones, but certainly aren’t the only ones. Smaller systems, ranging from commercial and industrial anti-drone monitoring and suppression hardware, to military-grade man-portable anti-drone rifles have been created by several Russian manufacturers. These weapons include the PARS-S Stepashka – a 9.6 kg anti-drone gun with the capability to hijack enemy drones and force them to land or return to their launch sites. The system is effective at ranges between 500 meters and 1.5 km.
Other, similar portable anti-drone systems have been spotted in footage from the battlefield, including the Stupor electromagnetic rifle – which uses electromagnetic pulses to suppress drones’ control channels and force them down.
How Can Lasers Fight Drones?
Advances in laser pulse weaponry have enhanced prospects for their use in modern warfare. Last year, Yuri Borisov – the former Russian deputy prime minister responsible for defense and the space industry since appointed boss of Roscosmos, revealed that the Russian military has tested a mystery combat laser system known as the Zadira that’s capable of incinerating drones in seconds at distances of up to 5 km in Ukraine. Its development began in 2016 under the auspices of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center, a subsidiary of Rosatom.
The Zadira is not to be confused with the Peresvet – a strategic laser weapon designed to target an enemy up to 1,500 km in orbit over the planet. That system entered combat duty on a test basis in December 2018, but has not been used in Ukraine.
Russia is not the only country tinkering with the use of laser weapons for anti-drone warfare, with the United States and Israel also working on such weapons.
Lasers have several clear advantages over conventional air defense missiles – including their low cost (Israeli officials have boasted, for example, that the new Iron Beam laser-based air defense system uses just $2-worth of electricity – 10,000-50,000 times less than conventional Iron Dome missiles). But lasers also have a number of drawbacks, including the need to secure large amounts of electricity (limiting their mobility), plus problems operating in certain weather conditions, including fog and cloud cover).
Can Drones Be Used to Counter Other Drones?
Last but not least in the list of portable anti-drone defenses are other UAVs. Systems like the ZALA Lancet multipurpose loitering munition/kamikaze drone are capable of targeting enemy UAVs, with its developers creating a concept which they’ve dubbed “air mining” involving the deployment of large numbers of Lancets in an area of the front to protect against incursions by heavy attack drones. As an enemy drones approach, the Lancet locks on to the enemy target and dives onto it at high speeds to force it from the skies.
How Successful Has Russia’s Anti-Drone War Been?
Since Russia entered the Ukraine crisis, it has made many of the difficult but necessary changes to supply the Army with the equipment it needs for effective drone warfare.
Last week, an unclassified intelligence assessment by Britain’s Ministry of Defense concluded that Russia’s military had successfully integrated drone reconnaissance into operations involving long-range missile strikes in the Ukrainian hinterland. Also last week, a separate report by Britain’s Royal United Services Institute calculated that Russia has been using electronic warfare capabilities to destroy upwards of 10,000 Ukrainian drones per month. According to the assessment, Russia maintains “a major electronic warfare system roughly every 6 miles (9.6 km)” along the entire 1,200 km front line.
These assessments echo complaints by an insider at Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, who told one Western outlet in March that Russian forces had obtained “black magic” capabilities against Ukraine’s vast arsenal of NATO-supplied drones, including the ability to “jam frequencies, spoof GPS, [and] send a drone to the wrong altitude so that it simply drops out of the sky.”
Gregg Semenza, a pediatrician and a professor of Genetic Science, is a prominent researcher. Prof. Semenza works at Johns Hopkins University, a premier scientific institution so important that it received $1,050,368,895 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (JHU played the most prominent role in the Covid pandemic response.)
Prof. Semenza made major discoveries regarding how cells adapt to oxygen availability. Those findings could potentially lead to curing cancer! So important was his work that he was awarded a Nobel Prize in medicine in 2019.
There was a small problem, however.
Seven of his studies were fake and were eventually retracted. Retraction Watch has the details. Even the pictures of mice used in the studies were photoshopped:
The authors have retracted this article as multiple image irregularities have been noted within this article, specifically: Figure 1A, upper panel (HIF-1a blot), lanes five and seven appear to be duplicates. Figure 6B, lower panel (b-actin blot), the first six lanes appear to be identical to Fig. 6G, lower panel (b-actin blot). Figure 3G, the image of the third mouse in the D10 Saline group is identical to the image of the third mouse in the D21 Digoxin group.
Here’s one retracted article and the retraction notice. I downloaded the image from that study and highlighted the mouse in question, which appears in two pictures but with different scan results.
The authors copied/pasted the mouse picture and overlaid different scan results on the two copies. So, they did not have the scientific measurements they claimed to have!
Other retractions expose similarly ridiculous scientific fraud, including fake Western blots and more.
This fraud was not perpetrated by an obscure researcher languishing at a third-rate institution. Quite to the contrary, Prof. Semenza is a world-renowned scientist, occupying a position at a premier facility favored by the major funder of science, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Prof. Semenza shares the honor of receiving a Nobel prize with other famed recipients, such as Barack Obama, recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, and António Egas Moniz, inventor oflobotomy and the winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in medicine.
Antonio Moniz, Inventor of Lobotomy
So, the world of Nobel prizes is very special!
In consolation, we at least know about this fraud, and Semenza’s articles in question were properly retracted. So the self-correcting scientific process worked as intended, at last.
Sadly, as we know, retractions do not always work in an evidence-based, scientific way. For example, many honest articles questioning Covid vaccines or masks were retracted under pressure from science funders.
I feel that my trust in scientists has been violated by “COVID science” and certain other new scientific developments, but I still like the science of the good kind. I have much less faith in Nobel Prizes, however.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee are demanding an FBI briefing on the status of their January 6 Pipe Bomb Investigation following disclosures that the feds have enough information to identify a suspect.
In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) said the slow progression of the Bureau’s investigation into the pipe bombs “raises significant concerns about the FBI’s prioritization of that case in relation to other January 6 investigations.”
One former FBI assistant director observed, “[i]t just doesn’t add up . . . [t]here’s just too much to work with to not know who this guy is.” pic.twitter.com/ZVpwEkhS0r
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) May 24, 2023
Former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin, a whistleblower who worked on the pipe bomb investigation, told the Washington Times that after planting the bombs, the suspect used a MetroRail SmarTrip card to travel through the Washington metro system to a stop in northern Virginia.
“The FBI used security footage in the Northern Virginia to identify the license plate of the car that the individual entered,” the congressmen wrote. “Still, the FBI has not identified the subject.”
The suspect was caught on surveillance video. He wore a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, a pair of Air Max Speed Turf shoes with a yellow Nike logo, a backpack and gloves. He was recorded walking through Capitol Hill neighborhoods carrying what federal investigators said were two live pipe bombs.
However, Mr. Seraphin said technicians determined the pipe bombs were inoperable.
His story runs counter to the FBI’s official version that the devices could have detonated at any time. The bureau repeated that story in January while offering a $500,000 reward for information leading to the suspect’s arrest.
Seraphin also told Times reporter Kerry Picket that a separate individual bought the Metrorail SmarTrip card one year before the pipe bomber suspect used it on Jan. 5, 2021.
“The card had never been used before. It was bought a year prior by a retired chief master sergeant in the Air Force, and he was a security contractor. So he held a security clearance,” Seraphin said.
Mr. Seraphin and his team surveilled the retired airman, who lived in a Northern Virginia townhouse, for a couple of days and learned about his background.
Although Mr. Seraphin, who also served in the Air Force, wanted to approach the Air Force veteran and talk to him, his bureau superiors forbade him to do so before his team was removed from the case.
“I don’t know what they [eventually] did on that case, but I know that it was BS and the bombs were BS, and it seems like they had a good lead, and they could have run it down. But as far as I know, they never did,” he told the Times. “He may still be occasionally surveilled. That’s how dumb it gets.”
The congressmen cited former FBI assistant director Christopher Swecker, who told Picket, “[i]t just doesn’t add up . . . [t]here’s just too much to work with to not know who this guy is.”
The committee requested an update on the case in a briefing no later that June 7, 2023.
Der Spiegel, after running multiplestories peddling the canard that mysterious “Russian ships” were implicated in the Nord Stream attacks of 26 September 2022, has in a familiar pattern now totally reversed course and declared instead that there is increasing evidence pointing to Ukrainian attackers. They report that the theory of a Russian “false-flag operation,” to which they’ve given so much attention, is in fact “considered extremely unlikely” by “those familiar with the case.” The key evidence is unspecified “email metadata” from the mysterious parties who rented the Andromeda.
The investigators of the Public Prosecutor General Peter Frank … are now certain that the sailing yacht “Andromeda” was used for the attack. She sailed from Rostock-Warnemünde in early September 2022 and returned after the attacks. Forged identity documents were apparently used for her charter.
Remains of an underwater explosive were found across a large area of the cabin of the “Andromeda.” It is said to be octogen, an explosive widely used both in the West and in the former Eastern Bloc. …
Octogen is much lighter than TNT, capable of transport in a relatively small boat. Experienced combat divers could have placed it at the site of the attack on the bottom of the Baltic. The often-heard argument, that the weight of the explosives would have required a larger ship and perhaps a miniature submarine, is therefore no longer convincing.
The traces found by the Federal Criminal Police Office align with the assessments of several intelligence services, according to which the perpetrators hail from the Ukraine. Intelligence services have also asked whether the attack could have been carried out by an uncontrolled commando, or by Ukrainian intelligence services – and to what extent elements of the Ukrainian state apparatus may have been implicated. ,,,
Even before the attacks, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) received a warning from the American CIA that were indications Ukrainian perpetrators were planning an attack on the pipelines. The BND did not, however, consider the reports to be very credible.
The story, picked up within hours by multipleGermanpressoutlets, follows slightly earlier reporting from the Süddeutsche Zeitung and German state media broadcasters WDR and NDR that likewise claims to have evidence of Ukrainian complicity, though the details of these earlier reports are so murky and unclear, I decided it was better to ignore them at the time. Allegedly, these news organisations discovered that the entity which rented the Andromeda is a shell company masquerading as a travel agency registered in Poland. The unnamed president of this unnamed company lives in Kiev; her name is also on the paperwork of various other companies, and so it seems likely she’s merely a frontman who has no specific involvement with the firm.
The same journalists also reported that, among the forged passports used to rent the Andromeda, was a Romanian document in the name of a certain “Stefan M.”
A person with this name and date of birth appears actually to exist, but according to the findings of the BKA [the German Federal Criminal Police Office], he was likely in Romania at the time of the explosions. But who was the man who presented the passport in the Baltic? According to research by WDR, NDR, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and their media partners, German investigators believe it could be a Ukrainian national – a man in his mid-20s from a town southeast of Kiev …
Social media photos show a young man, often smiling, sometimes in military uniform with a helmet – and with conspicuous tattoos. The young Ukrainian is said to have previously served in an infantry unit. Investigators are apparently following up on other names and clues. Only one of the young man’s relatives can be reached on the phone: she says he is currently serving in the military. … So far, official Ukrainian agencies have not responded to enquiries.
So, to sum up: One of the emails sent to rent the Andromeda came from Ukraine; the shell company that rented the Andromeda is registered under the name of an unrelated Polish woman living in Kiev; and one of the forged passports presented in this transaction carried a photo that might be of a Ukrainian soldier.
The duelling narratives here are clearly more significant than the specific facts (or, “facts”) which they relate. As I noted in my last Nord Stream update, the Russian-ships theory of the attack has been put about by some source within NATO and laundered through OSINT propagandists, and it looks for all the world like an implicit attack on Hersh’s story, for it centres on the alleged movements of the SS-750, a Russian ship outfitted with a miniature submarine designed for underwater rescue operations. The subtext is that the divers of Hersh’s scenario could never have done the job.
The Andromeda story, meanwhile, hails from intelligence services, specifically the CIA and (probably at second-hand) the German BND, whence it flowed to German criminal investigators and the press. This scenario is framed as an explicit attack on the Russian-ships theory, which the anonymous Spiegel informants go out of their way to discredit. The reason, as far as I can tell, is that the Russia-did-it line has overtly escalatory potential, for it posits a Russian attack in Swedish and Danish waters on energy infrastructure that, in the case of Nord Stream 1, is even partly owned by Germany. The Andromeda story generally strives to make room for a non-state actor, thus removing the immediate diplomatic significance of the attacks. This would explain the bizarre and thinly veiled suggestion of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, back in March, that former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko may have been involved in orchestrating the explosions, because they took place on his birthday.
Once again, it remains an enduring mystery, why none of the major published scenarios – not even Seymour Hersh’s detailed account of How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline – accounts for the specifics of the sabotage, which featured two sets of explosions at two separate locations, exactly 17 hours apart. John Mearsheimer recently remarked that if he “had to bet,” he’d “bet that the United States destroyed Nord Stream,” because such an action would be “completely consistent with what America’s overall policy is towards Russia.” It’s very easy to imagine that the United States would have orchestrated the attack through proxies, and it’s at least worth asking whether Hersh’s source fed him an incomplete account for the purposes of obfuscating Ukrainian involvement. On the other hand, the Andromeda theory is very hard to believe; if it is an intelligence service “cover story,” as Hersh claims, we must ask why it is so implausible.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko recently warned that the West’s possible shipment of F-16s to Kiev “is fraught with colossal risks” for that de facto New Cold War bloc, shortly after which his boss Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described this scenario as “an unacceptable escalation.” The Kremlin’s assessment clashes with the Pentagon’s, whose Air Force chief Frank Kendall claimed last week that “it’s not going to be a dramatic game-changer…for their total military capabilities.”
Biden’s support at the G7 Summit for training Ukrainian pilots to fly the F-16s and some countries’ like the UK’s plans to assemble a so-called “jetcoalition” for their Eastern European proxy suggest that these opposite predictions will be put to the test after some time unless a ceasefire is reached first. Considering this possibility, it’s timely to weigh the merits of each side’s assessment in order to get a better idea of whether the Kremlin’s or the Pentagon’s will more closely reflect reality in that scenario.
Sky News’ explainer that was published on Sunday provides a good starting point for answering this question. According to military analyst Sean Bell, Kiev will likely receive old F-16s that are “heavily dependent on spares” and urgently in need of being updated with modern equipment. “Anything less” than “Modern air-to-air missiles married to a modern F-16 radar”, which he said “would pose a credible threat”, “risks emboldening the Russian Air Force.”
Before reaching his conclusion, Bell also informed readers that “In addition to radar, modern fighters also need state-of-the-art electronic warfare, defensive aids, infrared sensors, link-16 datalinks, and a computer system to programme and deliver the latest generation of high-tech air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons”, not to mention “trained pilots and groundcrew, weapons, spares, ground planning facilities, intelligence, and a suite of supporting infrastructure are also required.”
Quite clearly, it’ll be an herculean task for the West to make Kiev’s possible F-16 fleet a formidable challenge for Russia’s much more modern one that’s already manned by very experienced pilots. This take therefore extends credence to Kendall’s claim that it won’t be a game-changer. Nevertheless, Kiev reportedly envisages arming the F-16s with Swedish-German Taurus missiles that could reach Moscow with their 500-kilometer maximum range, though it’s unclear whether they’ll receive them.
Even if they do, then this doesn’t mean that they’ll be able to break through Russia’s air defenses. Should they succeed in striking targets near or within that Great Power’s capital, however, then it would certainly be spun by them and their supporters as a soft power coup. This is especially the case if verified footage emerges of an F-16 taking down a much more modern Russian jet. Both scenarios are unlikely, though, but their political significance partially explains why Kiev wants these planes so badly.
The other motivation behind obtaining these systems is for them “to strike the command centers and logistical networks of the Russian forces” in the former Ukrainian regions that Kiev claims as its own according to their Air Force spokesman Yuri Ignat. While it’s obviously better for them to have more capabilities available than less, this use of the F-16s also wouldn’t be a game-changer and could even be counterproductive for the West’s soft power if Russia ends up shooting them down.
On the other hand, there are still plausible reasons for why the Kremlin would regard the West’s transfer of these planes to Ukraine as an unacceptable escalation. For starters, it represents yet another unilateral escalation by NATO in its proxywar with Russia, which could prompt Moscow to respond in ways that risk bringing the conflict closer to nuclear brinksmanship. The Kremlin might feel forced to react more seriously than usual in order to “save face” after yet another of its “red lines” was crossed.
The US is basically taunting Russia to do so at this point per an interpretation of Politico’srecent report. According to their unnamed administration sources, “The Pentagon, including top military officials, have long worried about the potential of escalation on the Russian side should the West take such a step as giving Ukraine F-16 capabilities. But Blinken had observed over the past year that Russia rarely escalates beyond rhetoric, even as the West has introduced more military offerings into Ukraine.”
Russian policymakers might therefore calculate that they finally have to do something meaningful to signal their displeasure if this latest “red line” is crossed, particularly if Moscow gets bombed by the F-16s and/or verified footage emerges of them taking down one of their jets. The odds of that happening would spike if a few of those planes are secretly modernized. In that case, Russia risks becoming a laughingstock if nothing serious is done in response, after which even more escalations might follow.
Other than possibly being placed in this particular dilemma, there’s another reason why the Kremlin considers the West’s potential transfer of these planes to Ukraine to be unacceptable, and that’s the chance that they could be based in NATO states and/or manned by “volunteer pilots” from NATO. The first scenario would already be provocative enough, but could prompt an unprecedented crisis if those NATO-based F-16s are used to bomb Russia’s pre-2014 territory.
As for the second, it would almost certainly entail the most modern F-16s being used since NATO likely wouldn’t risk its “volunteer pilots’” lives by having them fly outdated deathtraps. Furthermore, these planes would then probably be based in a NATO state for additional protection even if they’re only used to hit targets over the airspace or in the territory that Kiev claims as its own. As with the first scenario, that would already be a major provocation, let alone if they’re used to bomb Russia’s pre-2014 territory.
To be absolutely clear, there’s nothing credible in the public domain to suggest that these last two worst-case scenarios are being contemplated, but it’s likely the Kremlin’s concerns that the West’s possible transfer of F-16s to Ukraine could lead to those escalations that it considers this unacceptable. Russian policymakers probably expect that any reluctance to meaningfully signal their displeasure at the crossing of that latest “red line” would embolden the West to eventually think about doing precisely that in time.
They obviously don’t want to be placed in the dilemma whereby they might feel damned if they express such a signal by escalating in response for deterrence purposes and equally damned if they decline. In either case, the consequences are unpredictable and could result in everything spiraling out of control, hence why they prefer for Kiev not to obtain any F-16s in the first place. Nobody can therefore say with certainty what will ultimately happen, which is why many observers are becoming worried about this.
Ukraine President Zelensky and US President Biden met on the sideline of the G7 Summit at Hiroshima within hours of the statement from the Kremlin at 1 am last Sunday, transmitting President Vladimir Putin’s greetings to the Russian forces for the “completion of the operation to liberate Artemovsk” (known as Bakhmut in Ukraine.)
The operation lasted 224 days and turned into an epic battle. Ukraine paid a heavy price in blood in trying to hold onto Bakhmut, which came to be called a “Meat Grinder”. American analysts have listed twenty five Ukrainian brigades and at least 9 battalions and 5 regiments —an estimated deployment 120,000 troops at the very least — thrown into the battle by Kiev. An estimated 70% casualties would mean that Ukraine suffered as many as 94,150 killed and wounded. It is a devastating defeat.
Conventional military doctrine says that an army attacking an entrenched force will need at least three times more soldiers than the defending force entrenched in fortifications. But Wagner fighters numbering 32,000 fighters faced off with a NATO proxy force almost 4 times bigger in numbers and equipped with modern weaponry.
The shock over the crushing defeat was writ large on the faces of US President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky as they faced the media at Hiroshima a few hours after the Kremlin statement appeared. Reading from a prepared text, Biden announced, in a major reversal of policy, that the US would be “launching some new joint efforts with our partners to train Ukrainian pilots on a fourth-generation fighter aircraft like the F-16.”
Meanwhile, in a series of showy incidents, Ukraine began hitting targets in Russia with US and British supplied weapons. There have been sporadic artillery and Himars missile attacks on Russian civilians in border towns; two drone attacks on the Kremlin; and British Storm Shadow cruise missile strikes on targets in Russia. In one particular instance last week, there has been a cross border incursion in the Belgorod region with US supplied vehicles and weapons. But none of these attacks can be deemed as “game changers.”
While the US and the rest of NATO are feigning ignorance about these attacks, the key fact is that Ukraine gets targeting data that only NATO intelligence sources could provide. Thus, the decades-old red line dating back to Cold War has been breached — namely, that neither the US nor Russia would attack the other side’s territory directly or indirectly. (They held the guardrails even during the Afghan jihad in the 1980s.)
There are going to be consequences. The first sign of it came with the news that nuclear weapons are already being deployed in Belarus and Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu was in Minsk to sign the necessary agreement detailing the logistics of deployment.Biden told reporters on Friday after returning from Japan that his reaction to the Russian deployment is “extremely negative.”
But in reality, Moscow’s intention is to provide Belarus with deterrent capability against any rash moved by NATO such as cutting off access to Kaliningrad. Incidentally, the US too has been keeping nuclear weapons on European soil for many years.
But a flashpoint can always arise. The upcoming NATO exercise codenamed Air Defender 23 (June 12-23) will be the most significant military exercise ever carried out over the European skies and the most extensive deployment exercise of air forces in the history of the western alliance — involving 25 NATO countries, 10,000 military personnel and approximately 220 aircraft.
According to Larry Johnson, well-known American blogger and former analyst at the CIA, “a training operation of this size and scale against the backdrop of heightened tensions in the region is akin to lighting a match in a gasoline storage tank.” That said, at the tactical level, the Russian military is also positioning itself for further operations to complete the liberation of Donbass, after having gained control of Bakhmut, which is a major communication hub through which all Ukrainian logistics passed along the Donetsk arc up to Seversk.
A report in Izvestia on Wednesday said, quoting expert opinion, that Avdiivka and Maryinka are “next in line… so that there will be no shelling of Donetsk city… Next, we will have to turn off the big Donetsk arc — from Ugledar to Seversk with access to Konstantinovka and Slavyansk. These are the last two cities of the large Donbass agglomeration, followed by the steppe (leading toward Dnieper River) where it will be very difficult for the enemy to hold on.”
Again, the Wagner fighters being replaced by regular Russian forces for further operations. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview on Russian TV on Friday: “It’s hard to say where the breaking point is… Obviously, the degree of direct and indirect involvement in this conflict by the countries of the collective West is surging day by day. This may protract the conflict, but will not turn the tide drastically. It cannot turn the tide at all. Russia will press on with the operation, and Russia will ensure its interests one way or another and achieve the designated objectives.”
Meanwhile, Russia has been conducting an intensive bombing campaign to make it difficult for Kiev to assemble the manpower and firepower required to launch and sustain an offensive operation beyond a few days, and is intensifying its operations overall to decimate Ukraine’s military capabilities.
The “known unknown” is how the 2024 US election campaign will affect the trajectory of the war. Biden’s shift on F-16s can be seen as a knee-jerk reaction. Even Gen. Mark Milley, chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff admits that F-16 isn’t a “magic weapon.”
Meanwhile, Russia continues to probe the US intentions. In an interview with the prestigious International Affairs magazine, Russian Deputy Defence Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Friday that “The US ruling elite has consolidated itself to a great extent on an anti-Russian basis, regardless of party affiliation. In my opinion, the situation is turning into a force majeure.”
However, Ryabkov who is the highest ranking “point person” for relations with the US at the foreign ministry also added, “No matter how things turn out, we are willing to maintain dialogue with whoever comes to power (in the US), stays in power.”
Therefore, Ukraine relinquishing the accession to NATO and the EU and returning to neutral non-aligned status will remain one of the key conditions of a successful peace process in Ukraine. The big question is how far the NATO will go at its forthcoming summit in July in Vilnius; would this mean Ukraine’s full membership or something else? The likelihood of any big decisions in Vilnius doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Interestingly, the Kremlin instinctively warmed up to the idea of a phone call to Putin “in due course,” voiced by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz after his return to Berlin from the G7 summit in Hiroshima. Berlin has consistently disfavoured any precipitate move by NATO apropos Ukraine’s membership.
In an interview with Wall Street Journal on Friday celebrating his centennial, Henry Kissinger also remarked that “the offer to put Ukraine into NATO was a grave mistake and led to this war.” Kissinger advocated instead greater clarity in Russia’s stance on Europe, flagging that while Russia is interested in fostering ties with Europe for its own development, it is also cautious of potential threats coming from the West.
I’ve been wondering for quite some time about whether we are in a War and the resolution of my thoughts on the subject has recently improved.
Oddly enough, I have some standing on the subject.
I lived in Iraq between 1981 to 1991, a period that covered almost all of the Iraq/Iran War and all of the Gulf War, the original, not the sequels.
It was an old school type of war, with two parties fighting over territory and trying to redraw a border. A lot of people died over 8 years and the border stayed the same. But weapons were sold, and internal power was consolidated.
That’s really what war is about, territory. You have something that I want, and I will fight you for it.
So, if this is a war, who are the warring parties and what is the fight over?
The war is between “the state” and “the citizen”. The latter is YOU and ME and it’s easy enough to understand (sort of), but THE STATE is not straightforward anymore and I’ll cover that later.
The border between these two parties is being redrawn. The relationship between the State and the Citizen is being RESET.
When you hear about The Great Reset, that is what “Reset” really means.
Think back to your life, last year in Feb 2020. Think back to how you thought, what you did, what degree of intrusion the State had in your life and what level of control you had over your life and choices.
In Feb 2020 there was a border, a fairly large circle that you stood in the centre of. Everything within that circle was your domain, your freedoms, and your sovereignty.
Now, reflect on your life today, but more importantly reflect on the size of that circle. It obviously is much, much smaller today. The border between you and the State has been Reset.
Within that circle is a second circle that is much smaller, and it surrounds you almost like a second skin. Within this second circle, you have what is your “bodily sovereignty”. What is within your body is YOURS and not the State’s.
If you have acquiesced to the State’s injection, you have surrendered your bodily autonomy to the State. There is no border anymore between you and the State. It’s a depressing conclusion but true.
Your rationalisation for taking it is irrelevant, you wouldn’t have taken it but for the State’s lies and threats. Unless you took the flu vaccine every year religiously, to “protect yourself and others”, you have surrendered to the State. You may have had no choice because you need to make a living and feed your family, so it was a calculated surrender, but a surrender, nevertheless.
But for almost everyone else, you surrendered your bodily autonomy (let alone your current and future health) so that you could go to the pub, go to the hairdresser, go to the gym, see your parents, travel, plus a laundry list of other reasons that the world has used to rationalise its surrender to the State.
It is worth noting, that if you have surrendered your bodily sovereignty to the State, and there is no longer a border between you and the State, what would you ever say no to in the future. If you were not prepared to stand up for your bodily sovereignty, what would you ever stand up for?
But as a friend of mine said the other day, people just don’t know. They haven’t spent the time (for some hundreds of hours) necessary to figure out what is true and what is a lie.
They think the jab is safe (without understanding the meaning of the word).
They think it is effective (that it will protect them from getting Covid or giving it to parents, grandparents and others).
They think the State is truthful (why would they lie?).
They think the disease is exceptionally deadly (because they were told it is).
They think that masks work (when hazmat suits are necessary to protect against respiratory viruses).
They think that lockdowns work and are worth the cost.
They think that social distancing works.
They think that healthy people can spread the deadly disease.
They think that test results are real.
They think that contact tracing works (so they keep checking in, even when nobody is watching or cares).
And they think many other things that all form the framework for the biggest lie ever told to the world.
You need a lot of time to dismantle each one of these falsehoods and unravel the matrix that has been built.
I now would add another leg to this line of thinking.
They think there is no war.
This is a vital point, and I draw on my time in Iraq to understand it.
We knew there was a war. We knew who the warring parties were. We knew there was a border being fought over. We knew that our wants and needs needed to recalibrate to the reality of the war we were in. I don’t remember anyone ever complaining about missing out on all of life’s “nice to haves”. Our wants had recalibrated very tightly around our needs, there wasn’t a gap really. If we and our loved ones were fed and safe for the night and we had a job in the morning that allowed us to be fed and safe for the night, then we were generally happy. To survive war, you need to recalibrate psychologically to it. Of all my friends during those years, I don’t remember any of them being depressed. They had psychologically adapted to the reality of war, and to a climate of having and doing less. Within that recalibration, we were content.
We bunkered down and got through it.
The Iraq-Iran War went on for 8 years. Early on people thought it would be over in a few months, that was just normal human optimism. But after a couple of years most understood that thinking in terms of timeframes just created false hope and wasn’t helpful to having a robust and resilient War mindset. So, we accepted that it would be a long war and stopped trying to guess it’s end. Basically, for our own psychological well-being we settled in for the long haul.
I recommend that you do the same here, start settling in for the long haul. This War is not ending any time soon.
Learn to live with less.
I wrote this short piece many years ago, mainly so that I wouldn’t forget the stories and that my kids would get a glimpse into their history. It was a time where we learned to live with less.
The Generator
The first thing the Americans did was take out most of the infrastructure. They took out the bridges, they took out the TV stations and they took out the power plants. We lost our electricity on the first night of bombing in January 1991.
The war lasted for about three months, 100 days to be precise, and then it took another three months before the lights came back on, so all in all about six months without electricity.
Six months!
I’ve heard it said that society falls apart and anarchy sets after a couple of weeks without electricity. Well, that didn’t happen. Maybe we had other things on our minds.
A lot of things changed quickly when the power went out on that first night of bombing. Sleep cycles for one, no more TV and some candle use initially but that quickly changed to mainly a kerosene gas lantern that we had. It looked something like this.
It had a pump that you would use to pressurise the tank, it would then spray a kerosene mist onto a ball shaped net that burned brightly. It made a sssshhh sound that I still remember. I don’t recall anyone else having one and I don’t remember how we got it but it was our main source of light in the living room during those dark months. It burned white and bright and had a constant, soothing pressured burning sound.
One day a friend and neighbour, Abu Bashar (Father of Bashar), managed to get his hands on an old broken down generator. He asked me if I wanted to have a look at it. Having never before seen a generator in my life, let alone fixed one, I announced my intention to resurrect the machine.
I was asked the question because over the years I had built up a reputation as a fixer, helper and general handyman. I had no idea how to “fix” a generator, especially seeing I didn’t know what was wrong with it. But I loved taking things apart, so I did just that.
It was about the size of a large esky and I spent most of the day dismembering the unfortunate machine. I carefully cleaned every piece and when there was nothing left to take apart, I started to put it all back together again. As evening fell the now cleaned generator was pieced together with only a small collection of “extra” bits and pieces left in my pocket.
It was evening by now, Abu Bashar, his family and the occasional neighbour had been casually keeping an eye on me all day. Anyway, the thing was back together by late evening, it was filled up with petrol and now the moment of truth had arrived. As I was about to pull the starter cable, I remember thinking I had no idea why I thought it might work. I knew that all I had done was take it apart, clean it and put it back together again. I hadn’t “fixed” anything. So, any hope that it might work was clearly without basis. Put simply, it was a Hail Mary.
So, I pulled that cable, hailing Mary… and that beautiful two stoke started first time!! The bloody thing was working! And it was loud. As loud as any two stroke, angry at being silent for years, making up for lost time.
It was late, around nine or ten pm and the whole neighbourhood could hear this monster roaring, but no one seemed to care. There was electricity in the street!
The first thing everyone wanted to do was watch a video of an old Egyptian movie. Anything to take their mind off the misery and drudgery that was their daily life. And so there we were, family, friends and neighbours crammed together in a small living room, watching an old favourite movie, barely hearing a word over the roar of the machine outside. But happy that a little bit of joy and normalcy had returned despite the contrived and temporarily nature of the whole affair.
If you don’t know that you are in a war, and “just want your old life back” then taking a “safe and effective vaccine” to “protect you and your loved ones” from a “deadly disease” seems entirely reasonable. But unfortunately, none of that is true, including the bit about getting “your old life back”.
So, to summarise.
Yes, there is a war.
It is being fought over the Territory and the Border between The State and YOU The Citizen. It’s a land grab.
The State has been winning since March 2020.
The injection is the final step in that War and dissolves the last Border surrounding our Bodily Sovereignty.
In War, a War Mindset is required to survive.
War is a battle between two parties over territory
The state is in open warfare to reset its relationship with its citizens. To move the border
Passports not only move the border but then permit the state to keep moving that border as they see fit
One year ago today: WHO officially declares COVID-19 a pandemic.
Director-General Dr. Tedros: “We’re deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction.” pic.twitter.com/D0k0wOuYa2
Now, watch this through the lens of War. This was a declaration of War on The Citizen.
It was not clear to most, certainly not to me, back then. It is as clear as daylight today.
What’s interesting about this War, is that REGULAR Compliance is the end game. Not just today’s compliance, but ONGOING Compliance.
Please understand, there is no such thing as “fully vaccinated”.
There is now only non compliant and temporarily compliant.
The unjabbed are the Resistance.
But, not getting the jab, is among other things just a proxy for non-compliance.
So, in truth the non-compliant are The Resistance.
And what’s interesting about that is that if you have surrendered to date, you can Un-surrender.
If you QR Code to check-in everywhere, you could stop doing that. You can deploy a range of evasion tactics.
If you have taken one dose, you can choose to not take the second.
If you have taken two doses, you can choose to not take the “booster”.
If you were “enjoying your freedoms” you can choose to adopt a War mindset.
You can choose at any moment to stop complying with The State and reclaim some of your lost territory.
And while we are on the subject of surrender; just as you can un-surrender at any time, you can also surrender at any time, so do you need to surrender today?
If you have not taken the jab so far, do you need to give in today?
Why not leave your surrender for another day or another week?
I have written extensively about my D.A.D Strategy and a Waiting for Novavax Strategy so why surrender today, wait until tomorrow and then ask yourself the same question. In War, taking things one day and one week at a time makes a lot of sense.
Stuart Lindsay, an Australian retired Federal Circuit Court Judge wrote this wonderful piece:
Strictly speaking, we fell in March 2020 when COVID arrived in earnest, but I date it from my acceptance that my fellow citizens would never stir. You cannot wake someone who is pretending to be asleep. The truth is that whether through cowardice or prolonged conditioning the vast majority of Australians, including many of my close friends and even family members, have manifested since then the absence of any kind of allegiance to their country or their heritage.
Most of those I live among have no desire at all to recover the freedom to speak or to assemble which has been taken from them. What would they have to say anyway? The only public utterances to which they now aspire are those to be roared as part of a crowd at the bread-and-circuses events, such as the football, which they are occasionally granted permission to attend. Then they replace their masks for the drive home past empty shops on patrolled and near-deserted streets.
Stuart has some wonderful turns of phrase, such as this one describing the acquiescing (surrendered) masses:
Netflix, full bellies and a warm place to defecate. That is all most want these days, is it not?
Stuart understands the mindset required for these times, and the years ahead:
I show you the times. Look out of your window if you need corroboration. I show you what you must do to get yourself in order if you want to be of any value in the fight to preserve what is left of your heritage. Here are some other ways to ready yourself for that fight.
Relinquish all of that unseemly longing for the return of unregulated visits to the theatre or the cinema and those beloved restaurants. Accept that never again will such things be free of petty invigilation and that on the worst case outcome they will only be possible if you keep having mRNA booster jabs — now the case in Israel, where three shots are now required even as officials moot lifting it four. If you are wary and reluctant to be inoculated with treatments whose long-term effects remain unknown, as am I, you need to accept that governments intend to make you a pariah for not having a “COVID passport” and be prepared to forfeit such pre-Fall pleasures as dining out. Keep your self-respect instead. Read that long-neglected Cervantes or C.S. Lewis on your bookshelf, help out at a refuge for the homeless or visit your sick grannie. Australia is teeming with sick grannies, so I’ve heard.
Here is a wonderful recent speech by Dr. Julie Ponesse.
She references War a few times, here are the War references:
But it is not only information that is being weaponized, in this WAR; it is a person’s right to think for herself.
… we are in a kind of moral WAR.
But the WARS of the past have had clear and distinct boundaries: the east and the west, patriots, and government.
The WAR we find ourselves in today is one of infiltration instead of invasion, intimidation instead of free choice, of psychological forces so insidious we come to believe the ideas are our own and that we are doing our part by giving up our rights.
As a wise colleague recently said “This is a WAR about the role of government. It is about our freedom to think and ask questions, and about whether individual autonomy can be downgraded to a conditional privilege or whether it remains a right. It is a WAR about whether you are to remain a citizen or become a subject. It is about who owns you, you or the state.”
As someone born in the 70s, I never thought THIS would be a WAR I would have to fight, that the right to bodily autonomy, to the free and transparent exchange of information would be at risk.
Ok, I think it’s time we talk about The State. What does that word mean?
Well, let’s start off by saying that it doesn’t mean what it used to mean, and it doesn’t mean what you think it means.
It used to mean that your government, acting independently of other governments, independently of business and independently of media would try to increase its territorial footprint while reducing the citizens territory. Sometimes they would win and sometimes they would lose and there were checks and balances within the system that worked to reduce the speed and scale of the government’s land grabs.
Well, does that sound like what it is going on today?
If all 200 countries around the world are pretty much all doing the same thing, do you think they are acting independently?
Do you think that business is acting with the government or with you? Do you think business is a check against the government or is business aiding and abetting The State?
Do you think that Media is acting as a check against the government, or is it helping the government disseminate its misinformation and disinformation?
Is the legal profession standing up for you or aligning itself with the government?
Is the medical establishment acting honestly to protect its patients or supporting the government in its campaign?
The State is now a NETWORK and it’s borderless. It’s a Global Network on a scale never seen nor imagined before.
Several months ago, I described it as The MGM Triad
I was saying to my wife last night that in the past the “collapse” of a society happened within contained borders. The institutions of that particular country decayed to the point of collapse and/or takeover by nefarious actors (those that want to dominate others, look after others, “fix” the world’s problems because they know best etc., it is a very real personality type and is always a percentage of the population and they climb the poles of business and government).
Because of the way the globe has been rewired over the last 50 years and especially the last 20 years with ever more powerful global institutions and a communication grid with central points of influence and control, the collapse we are witnessing at the moment is “post-national”, its far higher upstream, all the way at the source of the river, which is why it’s happening everywhere.
Today I can say that I was on the right track, but I don’t think The MGM Triad even does this Global Network justice. It’s a good introduction to the question of “Why is this happening?” to someone just waking up, but there are even more layers to understand.
You will need to use a web translator to read it from the Norwegian website.
Within the article you will find a link and reference to this 169 page document, that does a deep dive into this global network. The document:
… shows connections between the Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, WHO, GAVI and other NGOs and Big Pharma. It contains round about 6,500 objects including like Persons, NGOs, Companies, Documents, etc. It also includes more than 7,200 links between them.
A great passage in this essay highlights the immense power of these networks. They have shown that they are able to get the largest governments in the world to heel.
The incredible power of the networks
To give an example of how much power these NGIs and actors have, I would like to show a current example that has hardly been mentioned in the media (nor in the alternative media), but which Mr.X immediately noticed, as he keeps an eye on the “right” NGIs.
On August 3, 2021, an open letter to the Biden administration was published. In this letter, the important NGOs, who – after what we have concluded – have been planning a pandemic since 2017, demanded. We will now take a closer look at these requirements from 3 August 2021.
Global Summit on Vaccinations
In the open letter, for example, one could read the following requirements:
” to host a global presidential-level summit on vaccinations, before the UN General Assembly in September, bringing together leading forces from the public and private sectors from around the world (…) and commits to taking the necessary measures to close gaps in vaccine supply and correct deficiencies in funding and capacity in the distribution and distribution of vaccines, as well as to create demand.”
It took only six weeks for Biden to comply with the claim. In parallel with the United Nations General Assembly, President Biden is currently hosting a virtual summit with representatives from 100 countries, where the president announced just that. And he urged the other countries to follow the example of the United States, as reported by Die Tagesschau, for example.
Do you now understand the power of these actors, when all it takes is for them to write an open letter to the president, and he complies with their demands within six weeks?
Vaccinate 70% of the world’s population
Furthermore, in the open letter it was demanded:
“To get the heads of state and government in the world, before or during the summit, to commit to achieving the goal of vaccinating 70% of the world’s population by mid-2022.”
«As an organizational framework, Biden introduced a transatlantic vaccination partnership. ‘Today we are launching a partnership between the EU and the US for a global vaccination offensive,’ he said, in order to have closer cooperation. The goal is to have vaccinated 70% of the world’s population by September next year.”
Within six weeks, Biden (and also the European Union) pledged to fully comply with the requirements set out in the letter.
This is another good piece fleshing out the role of the WEF (World Economic Forum) network and the many people involved.
What a co-incidence, the World Economic Forum outlines a vision in 2018 for Digital Identity and in 2021 the Australian Government is about to finalise its laws making it a reality.
A wonderful Australian writer fighting the good fight is Alexandra Marshall.
Make no mistake, vaccine passports are a domestic Social Credit System created under the watch of the federal Liberal Party. It is a sprawling government entity that denies rights based upon compliance in the hope that you will obey rather than exercising your democratic right to resist.
Citizens accepted vaccine passports because the government made them a condition of release from unlawful detention. As a population, we have been emotionally damaged to the point that people cheer on the discrimination of their neighbours. Ethics have been replaced by the intense fear of being sent into lockdown.
We are not witnessing a casual overreach of power – vaccine passports and QR check-ins are a complete abandonment of the Western democratic system. They are a threat to the liberty of our children and the survival of Australia’s laid-back spirit.
CJ Hopkins is a wonderful writer; he has written eloquently about his new War.
He describes the core desire of Totalitarianism as wanting:
… to remake the world in its paranoid image; to replace reality with its own “reality”
He goes further:
We are right in the middle of this process currently, which is why everything feels so batshit crazy. The global capitalist ruling classes are implementing a new official ideology, in other words, a new “reality.” That’s what an official ideology is. It’s more than just a set of beliefs. Anyone can have any beliefs they want. Your personal beliefs do not constitute “reality.” In order to make your beliefs “reality,” you need to have the power to impose them on society. You need the power of the police, the military, the media, scientific “experts,” academia, the culture industry, the entire ideology-manufacturing machine.
What I call The State he calls here Supranational Global Capitalism:
And, yes, it is all one ideology, not “communism,” or “fascism,” or any other nostalgia, but the ideology of the system that actually rules us, supranational global capitalism. We’re living in the first truly global-hegemonic ideological system in human history. We have been for the last 30 years. If you are touchy about the term “global capitalism,” go ahead and call it “globalism,” or “crony capitalism,” or “corporatism,” or whatever other name you need to. Whatever you call it, it became the unrivalled globally-hegemonic ideological system when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. Yes, there are pockets of internal resistance, but it has no external adversaries, so its progression toward a more openly totalitarian structure is logical and entirely predictable.
Naturally, there would be one official reality that you would force everyone to rigidly conform to at any given moment in time, but you would change the official reality frequently, and force everyone to conform to the new one (and pretend that they had never conformed to the old one), and then, once they had settled into that one, you would change the official reality again, until people’s brains just shut down completely, and they gave up trying to make sense of anything, and just tried to figure out what you wanted them to believe on any given day.
He coins the term GloboCap, which is his version of my MGM Triad.
But the goal of GloboCap’s War on Reality isn’t simply to deceive the masses and divide them into opposing camps. Rulers have been deceiving the masses and dividing them into opposing camps since the dawn of human civilization. This time, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
And depressingly this paragraph:
You could experimentally “vaccinate” millions of people whose risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from your apocalyptic virus was minuscule or non-existent, and kill tens or hundreds of thousands in the process, and the people whose brains you had methodically broken would thank you for murdering their friends and neighbors, and then rush out to their local discount drugstore to experimentally “vaccinate” their own kids and post pictures of it on the Internet.
We have watched as the New Normal has done precisely what every totalitarian movement in history has done before it, right by the numbers. We pointed all this out, each step of the way. I’m not going to reiterate all that again.
I am, however, going to document where we are at the moment, and how we got here … for the record, so that the people who will tell you later that they “had no clue where the trains were going” will understand why we no longer trust them, and why we regard them as cowards and collaborators, or worse.
Yes, that’s harsh, but this is not a game. It isn’t a difference of opinion. The global-capitalist ruling establishment is implementing a new, more openly totalitarian structure of society and method of rule. They are revoking our constitutional and human rights, transferring power out of sovereign governments and democratic institutions into unaccountable global entities that have no allegiance to any nation or its people.
That is what is happening … right now. It isn’t a TV show. It’s actually happening.
Whereas 20th-Century totalitarianism (i.e., the form most people are generally familiar with) was more or less national and overtly political, New Normal totalitarianism is supranational, and its ideology is much more subtle. The New Normal is not Nazism or Stalinism. It is global-capitalist totalitarianism, and global capitalism doesn’t have an ideology, technically, or rather, its ideology is “reality” When you are an unrivalled global ideological hegemon, as global capitalism has been for the last 30 years or so, your ideology automatically becomes “reality,” because there are no competing ideologies. Actually, there is no ideology at all … there is only “reality” and “unreality,” “normality” and “deviations from the norm.”
Few others have written as well as CJ Hopkins on how to deal with this New Normal “Reality”.
So we need to adopt a different strategy. We need to make the monster show itself, not to those of us who can already see it, but to the New Normal masses, the Covidian cultists. We need to make Jim Jones drop the peace-and-love crap, move into the jungle, and break out the Kool-Aid. We need to make Charles Manson put down his guitar, cancel orgy-time, and go homicidal hippie. This is how you take down a cult from within. You do not try to thwart its progress; you push it toward its logical conclusion. You make it manifest its full expression, because that it when it implodes, and dies. You do not do that by being polite, conciliatory, or avoiding conflict. You do that by generating as much internal conflict within the cult as you can.
In other words, we need to make GloboCap (and its minions) go openly totalitarian … because it can’t. If it could, it would have done so already. Global capitalism cannot function that way. Going openly totalitarian will cause it to implode … no, not global capitalism itself, but this totalitarian version of it. In fact, this is starting to happen already. It needs the simulation of “reality,” and “democracy,” and “normality,” to keep the masses docile. So we need to attack that simulation. We need to hammer on it until it cracks, and the monster hiding within in appears.
That is the weakness of the system … the New Normal totalitarianism will not work if the masses perceive it as totalitarianism, as a political/ideological program, rather than as “a response to a deadly pandemic.” So we need to make it visible as totalitarianism. We need to force the New Normals to see it as what it is. I do not mean that we need to explain it to them. They are beyond the reach of explanations. I mean that we need to make them see it, feel it, tangibly, inescapably, until they recognize what they are collaborating with.
Here is a good example of the tools now available to assault reality and create a new “reality”.
The global assault on reality and the creation of a new “reality” has created a Mass Psychosis, described by Dr. Mattias Desmet as Mass Formation.
John Waters, writes beautifully about a recent Desmet interview.
You cannot extract the Mass Psychosis from the New Totalitarianism. They are two sides of the same coin. Here are some extracts that help explain the phenomenon:
Le Bon it was who observed that the consciousness bestowed by membership of a crowd can be transformative, possessing individual members with ‘a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think and act in a manner quite differently from that in which each individual would feel, think and act were that person in a state of isolation.’ In such a ‘psychological crowd’, individual personality disappears, brain activity is replaced by reflex activity: a lowering of intelligence, provoking a complete transformation of sentiments, which collectively may manifest as better and worse than those of the crowd’s constituent members. A crowd may just as easily become heroic or criminal, but is generally disposed towards destruction.
‘The ascendancy of crowds,’ wrote Le Bon, ‘indicates the death throes of a civilisation.’ The upward climb to civilisation is an intellectual process driven by individuals; the descent is a herd in stampede. ‘Crowds are only useful for destruction.’
–
He says there are four conditions that need to be in place to enable mass formation to occur in a society. The first is the presence of large numbers of socially isolated, atomised, people. The social bonds between people need to have been weakened. This is the most important, and the other conditions follow from it. Secondly, there will be large numbers of people who experience lack of sense-making in their lives and work — people who feel that their jobs are senseless, meaningless. Thirdly, there requires to be ‘a lot of free-floating anxiety’ — i.e. anxiety that is not connected to a mental representation so that the sufferer doesn’t know why he is anxious and afraid. And fourthly, there needs to be a lot of ‘free-floating psychological discontent’ — anger and frustration at, again, apparently nothing in particular.
And you also need mass media — without which mass formation would be impossible. Desmet does not explicitly say so, but of course it is also essential that these media be biddable and readily prone to corruption.
These conditions, he says, existed in Western societies long before the Covid crisis. There was, he says, ‘an epidemic of burnout’. He says something between 40 and 70 per cent of people in modern societies experience their jobs as senseless. He points also to the escalating use of psycho-pharmaceutical medicines to treat anxiety and depression.
–
There are, in situations of mass formation, says Desmet, three distinct groups that manifest themselves. Only 30 per cent, he says, are really hypnotised, and cannot be reached in any way. In addition, however, there are about 40 per cent who usually follow the crowd, and from the outset go along with that 30 per cent of total believers. There is another cohort of about 30 per cent who are not hypnotised, who try to speak out and resist. This group, he says, is extremely heterogeneous and disunited. If these people could unite, he says, they could bring the whole thing quickly to an end, but this seldom proves possible.
–
Totalitarianism in its full-blown form, then, is something that comes after, but ‘after’ what? It comes after a lengthy ‘preparation’, not necessarily planned with malign intent, in which human beings become isolated, atomised, alienated and lonely — conditions for which the totalitarian has ready solutions in the promulgation of bogus community and imagined bonds of mutual hatreds. The negative undertones of these processes suggests some form of prior error, and this may well have been present, perhaps in the pursuit of greed or exploitation, but this is not any longer admissible. Totalitarianism is like a secondary condition that descends on a society that has first of all been subjected to certain processes of modernity: technologisation, industrialisation, individualisation, atomisation. It is, in a sense, like the lung cancer that ensues from a lifetime of smoking, or the type 2 diabetes that results from an excessively sweet tooth. But it is not ‘secondary’ in the sense suggesting ‘lesser’ or ‘minor’ or ‘subordinate’: When it arrives, totalitarianism announces itself as the actual purpose and destination-point of the entire historical process, the discovery of the actual meaning of history. It follows, but is not collateral to, the events which preceded it. Indeed, its arrival announces a coherence to those previous events that had not hitherto been perceived: It ‘makes sense’ of the drifts and apparent randomness of the past, and in doing so turns common sense on its head and compels man to admit his prior errors of understanding and accept that the true direction of history has now been revealed.
Paul Collits has done incredible work all throughout the scamdemic, and I was lucky enough to come across him early. Here he writes about August Landmesser (look him up):
Two excuses might be proffered for going along with tyranny – we didn’t know what was going on, and I thought I personally would be safe from the tyranny if I played along.
Take the first excuse. Dr Robert Malone, an inventor of the mRNA vaccine, has noted, “… if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention”. He was speaking of the hideous truths about the jab. Malone’s accusation implies the first excuse. We didn’t know. We perhaps suspected something, but we excused the political class for mere “mistakes”. We made a choice, not to think too deeply about the emerging “new normal”. We didn’t try very hard at all to comprehend what was going on. We found excuses to justify our own compliance. Going against the crowd is too much like hard work. People will think I am … an anti-vaxxer! Thinking hard about difficult issues will only give me the guilts, and make my life complicated, so I will park it.
Here he talks about “strategic obeyers” and how they sustain The State:
Some of this behaviour might be termed “strategic obeying”. This is self-regarding conduct whose aim is to protect the things that are important to us while ceding minor freedoms to the Covid State. Anyone who hates mask mandates but obeys them in order to get the shopping done, rather than risk a fine or risk getting spat at by angry CovidManiacs, is a strategic obeyer. A reluctant obeyer, perhaps, but an obeyer nonetheless. If I just do this, maybe they won’t come for me. If they come for the unvaccinated, maybe they won’t come for me. Strategic obeyers sustain the Covid State. They form a key part of the group that remains silent, and no doubt all the various Nudge Units will have figured this all out.
And:
Those who go along to get along enjoy what Levant terms “the peace of surrender”.
I retweeted this yesterday & now again, so nobody misses it. One of those speeches that might get recorded in history as an important event on its own, because it captured the exact inflection when things started to turn around. 🥊pic.twitter.com/ixtRWGpz0l
This article went viral recently, written anonymously by Spartacus. Personally, I think that Dr. David Martin wrote it as it covers a lot of ground that he is very familiar with. I recommend reading the whole thing as it is a great summary of the story to date.
What is the purpose of all of this? One can only speculate as to the perpetrators’ motives, however, we have some theories.
The Elites are trying to pull up the ladder, erase upward mobility for large segments of the population, cull political opponents and other “undesirables”, and put the remainder of humanity on a tight leash, rationing our access to certain goods and services that they have deemed “high-impact”, such as automobile use, tourism, meat consumption, and so on. Naturally, they will continue to have their own luxuries, as part of a strict caste system akin to feudalism.
Why are they doing this? Simple. The Elites are Neo-Malthusians and believe that we are overpopulated and that resource depletion will collapse civilization in a matter of a few short decades.
Head of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab wrote a Harvard Business Review piece titled, ‘Power and Policy: The New Economic World Order’ where he detailed his belief that the industrialised world has been going through an economic revolution. Keep in mind, the article is written in 1994. He correctly lusts after [he] points out the rise of Asia, commenting, “One consequence of the new parity is that the West can no longer hope to dictate the rules of the game.”
In this, he is only partially right. The circumstance he prophesied has only manifested because organisations like the World Economic Forum and the United Nations have trained Western leaders to be weak. It was not an inevitability of trade structures, but rather a matter of ideological infestation. The constant infiltration of socialist rhetoric into the once free world via endless champagne conferences has left it unable to work out what gender it is, let alone present a strong front against the rise of Asia.
By 2018, the World Economic Forum was publishing articles insisting that we must all work together to hasten the rise of Asia and teach ourselves to embrace the New World Order. The United Nations have a similar song sheet. Before Covid, they spoke of the New World Order in the context of a green revolution and the dismantling of old industrialised nations in favour of empowering the third world.
Most of the propaganda coming out of the United Nations these days talks about sustainability, mass-migration, climate goals, and Covid as a singular item – an omini-shambles apocalypse with only one solution: world socialism disguised as environmentalism.
And lastly here is Iain Davis writing about the “global commons”. It’s a good way of further understanding the “territory” this War is fighting over.
While we have been distracted and transitioned by the alleged global pandemic, or pseudopandemic, the Global Public Private Partnership (GPPP), who orchestrated the chaos, have been very busy. They have created the asset rating system that will afford them total, global economic control. This is based upon Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and utilises Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics (SCM).
This new global economic system is what the politicians mean by “build back better.” It is the essence of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.
–
Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics – SCM – were devised by the World Economic Forum, who describe themselves as the international organisation for public-private cooperation. When combined with the SDGs outlined in the UN Agenda 21 and 2030 frameworks, SCM enable the GPPP to seize the entire Earth, all its resources and everything on it, including us.
In order to control us we are being transitioned into a technocracy with the biosecurity state acting as the central control mechanism. Public health is the new focus for global security and centralised control of the entire system has been established during, and as a result of, the pseudopandemic.
–
Again we see the recurrent themes of the GPPP. The planet must be saved from us, we are a pestilence that must be controlled; Covid-19 is, as ever, an opportunity to transform the global economy; our survival and GPPP stewardship of the global commons are one and the same and everything must be transformed.
Put simply:
If the world is being destroyed by humans doing whatever they want (climate catastrophism)
And these humans are grouped together within pesky democracies and pesky borders
Then to save the world we need to build a system that keeps people from doing whatever they want
By changing the democracies and dissolving the borders
It has been a long term project that is coming to fruition today
The role of the CCP within this network is both very real and complex. I’m not going to spend time on it here, god knows this piece is long enough, but you could do worse than follow Michael Senger’s work on the subject.
I will say this though, as long the the Network is useful to the CCP, they will play along. If the Network helps to diminish and destabilise its strategic adversaries, then why not help it along. But if the Network stops being useful, the CCP will simply devour it.
All the players in this Network will one day be long gone, but the CCP will still be around. They are playing the longest game in town.
By Kevin Barrett | Crescent | Dhu al-Qa’dah 24, 1445
In corporate America, hostile takeovers are commonplace. They occur when an aggressor—a larger corporation or rich individuals—seizes control of a smaller corporation without asking permission.
What few recognize is that the United States itself has been subjected to a hostile takeover. Since the aggressor, the illegitimate settler colony known as “Israel,” is much smaller than the US, the takeover has necessarily been surreptitious.
As of June, 2024, Israel’s gradual takeover of the US has become obvious and undeniable—a proverbial “elephant in the living room.” … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
The global assault on reality and the creation of a new “reality” has created a Mass Psychosis, described by Dr. Mattias Desmet as Mass Formation.
Aletho News
