Obama Is An Asshole, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
By Caitlin Johnstone | December 2, 2020
US empire: Assassinates scientists, invades countries, topples governments, circles the planet with military bases, deliberately starves civilians to death with sanctions, threatens the world with nuclear weapons.
Also the US empire: “Iran must begin acting like a normal country.”
❖
Obama’s job is to tell you that the ruling establishment which murders, oppresses and exploits people all day every day is quite progressive actually and the people who oppose it are immature lunatics who should be scoffed at.
❖
If you killed someone that’s all you’d be known for. When a US president kills thousands upon thousands of people all mainstream discourse is about his sound fiscal policy and ability to sink a three-pointer.
❖
Nice guy fascism: A murderous and tyrannical political ideology whose iron-fisted agendas of oppression, exploitation and violent domination are hidden behind lip service to progressivism, diverse cabinet picks, and nice tweets.
❖
The powerful are screwing us and there are more of us than there are of them. An entire culture and information ecosystem has been deliberately constructed around keeping a critical mass of us from awakening to this one basic fact.
❖
Any issue of international conflict involving the US-centralized empire is going to be awash with western media propaganda marketed to western audiences. No one who ignores this indisputable reality is able to understand any major international news story.
❖
It’s so weird how rich and powerful people are pouring massive amounts of wealth and manpower into manipulating our minds every single day and it’s not the main thing we talk about all the time.
❖
Biden is like if everyone suddenly started gushing poetically about how wonderful and refreshing and inclusive the Chevron logo is.
❖
Being part of the US-led liberal world order means that anyone, regardless of their race, gender or sexual orientation, is free to serve the globe-spanning murder machine in any way they choose.
❖
Being a part of the US-led liberal world order means you are free to do absolutely anything you want, so long as it doesn’t inconvenience the powerful in any way, shape or form.
❖
Sometimes I feel sad that Cobain died so young, but I brighten up when I remember it means we didn’t have to watch him turn into a cringey embarrassing shitlib.
❖
Failing to pardon Snowden and Assange would be an inexcusable evil. Please re-evaluate your opinion of Trump as needed when he pardons neither.
❖
Western imperialism is worse than every single issue the mass media are screaming in your face about on any given day. Without exaggeration it is worse than 100 percent of those issues. If people could really grasp the horrific nature of imperial warmongering, the wars would be forced to end.
It can be hard to avoid getting swept up in the MSM Issue Of The Day, but it’s important to keep your focus on the actual monster in the room. They’re ripping kids apart with explosives and starving them to death with sanctions, currently, and it is invisible to the news media.
❖
Charles Manson never murdered anyone, he just convinced people that it would be a good thing to do. The mass media have convinced far more people that it would be a good idea to commit far more murders than the Manson cult ever committed, and should be reviled as such.
The fastest way to get yourself banned from social media is to say something that sounds like you’re inciting violence. But mass media which do that constantly are never banned, because what’s actually forbidden is inciting violence that isn’t authorized by the powerful.
In fact the easiest way to advance your career in media is to incite violence on behalf of the powerful. This is true in news media, and it’s even true in video games and Hollywood; make compelling games and screenplays glorifying military violence and your career will thrive.
We live in a society that is built on violence, sustained by violence, and driven by violence. Those who promote unauthorized violence are vilified while those who promote violence in service of the powerful can ride that wave to fame and fortune. This should disgust us all.
If you remove your propaganda-installed perceptual filters, you see a machine that is fuelled by the blood of the powerless being piloted by serial killer politicians, laughing skullface comedians, and news men with human flesh in their teeth. Once you’ve seen the horror of the empire you can never unsee it.
Former Democratic Party organizer charged for attempted terrorist attack on railroad in Washington state
RT | December 2, 2020
Ellen Brennan Reiche, one of two women charged this week in Seattle for allegedly attempting a terrorist attack on a railroad, was reportedly the deputy field organizer for the Democratic Party in Washington state.
US Attorney Brian Moran announced the charges, saying that the 23-year-old Reiche and Samantha Frances Brooks, 27, were arrested on Saturday night after they allegedly placed a “shunt” on BNSF railroad tracks in Bellingham, Washington. A shunt is comprised of wire and magnets stretched between the tracks to disrupt the low-level electrical current and can be used to derail a train, cause train cars to decouple or stop safety gates from coming down at railroad crossings, Moran said.
The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force has been investigating the placement of shunts on BNSF tracks in Washington since January. There have been at least 41 such incidents during that period, causing crossing gates to malfunction, disrupting automatic braking systems and nearly derailing a train pulling tanks of hazardous and flammable chemicals.
An anarchist group called It’s Going Down claimed responsibility for the railway attacks on its website, saying it was being done to “fight against colonial invasion” of Wet’suwet’en Indian lands in British Columbia. Bellingham is located about 17 miles south of the Canadian border.
Reiche’s Linkedin profile, which has apparently been deleted, reportedly indicated that she had worked as deputy field organizer for Washington State Democrats. She’s currently a mentor for Wild Whatcom, which takes children on nature outings.
BNSF police observed Reiche and Brooks kneeling on railroad tracks on Saturday night, according to Moran’s statement. Whatcom County Sheriff’s Department deputies confronted the two women at the scene and found a shunt on the tracks near the spot where they had been spotted by surveillance cameras.
Reiche and Brooks tried to flee on foot but stopped when a deputy ordered them to halt. Deputies said they had a paper bag containing wire and a drill with a brush head. The wire was similar to the material used in previous shunting incidents. When confronted, Reiche allegedly told deputies that she and Brooks were walking along the tracks to look for her keys. They had no flashlight or other device to help see in the dark.
Reiche told deputies that she had left her phone in her car and pointed out her vehicle parked nearby, according to court documents in the case. The car had a sticker on the back with the words “indigenous land” over a map of the US.
If convicted, Reiche and Brooks could be sentenced to up to 20 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. “These crimes endanger our community,” Moran said.
Fauci Slammed For Finally Admitting Schools Should Be Open
By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 1, 2020
Lockdown zealot Dr. Anthony Fauci was slammed this week for finally admitting that schools should have been open despite coronavirus restrictions, with critics charging that children have been subjected to eight months of hell for no good reason.
During a Sunday appearance on ABC’s “This Week”, Fauci stated that “The default position should be to try as best as possible, within reason, to keep the children in school, to get them back to school.”
“If you look at the data, the spread among children and from children is not very big at all, not like one would have suspected. So let’s try to get the kids back,” Fauci said.
Senator Rand Paul, who has been consistently pushing for an explanation as to why schools were closed without any scientific backing said that Fauci “owes [an apology] to every single parent and school-age child in America.”
Referring to Fauci’s admission, Paul said “I told him this multiple times this summer.”
Tucker Carlson took Fauci to task Monday, noting that “the country’s public health establishment has tortured your children for eight months for no apparent reason.”
“The authorities have admitted it,” Carlson urged, adding that “the most amazing part — and this really is the headline of the story — is that they knew they were wrong when they did it. But they kept lying about it even as American children began to kill themselves.”
“Why is this just now occurring to Tony Fauci?” Tucker asked, adding “Isn’t this Fauci’s entire job to, quote, ‘look at the data?’ Yes, it is. And, yet, somehow he never thought to do that.”
Covid-19 was present in America BEFORE being officially confirmed in China, study by US health protection agency says
RT | December 2, 2020
Coronavirus had been infecting people in the US even before China reported its first cases on December 31, 2019, research by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Red Cross has revealed.
American medics officially registered their first Covid-19 patient on January 19, 2020, but the findings in a paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases suggest the virus may have been circulating in the US prior to that.
The researchers studied almost 7,400 blood donations made in nine US states between December 13, 2019 and January 17, 2020. Evidence of Covid-19 bodies antibodies, the presence of which suggest a person had contact with the virus, were present in 106 of those samples, according to the study.
This means coronavirus could have been in the US a month before it saw its first confirmed case, and weeks before the Chinese authorities announced the infection in the city of Wuhan.
The analysis of hospital data from across the US in late 2019 also showed a spike in flu patients, many of whom had “heavy coughing” and other severe respiratory symptoms.
European researchers have also speculated that coronavirus had been present in their countries before China officially announced the outbreak of the new strain. A French survey has discovered there were Covid-19 antibodies in blood samples taken in early December 2019. A similar study carried out by their Italian peers revealed that samples in Italy were already showing antibodies in September.
Spanish virologists, meanwhile, found traces of coronavirus in sewage water samples collected in March 2019 – a full nine month before the events in Wuhan.
The precise origins of coronavirus are currently unknown, but the US has been making active attempts to blame it on China since the start of the pandemic. President Donald Trump has often referred to the disease – which has so far infected more than 13.8 million people, and killed more than 271,000 in America – as the “Chinese virus,” provoking vehement protest from Beijing.
“And Why Stop There?”: CNN Analyst Calls For Sweeping Regulation of Free Speech On The Internet
By Jonathan Turley | November 30, 2020
We previously discussed the unrelenting drumbeat of censorship on the Internet from Democratic leaders, including President-elect Joe Biden. Those calls are growing as anti-free speech advocates see an opportunity in the Biden Administration to crackdown on opposing views. One vocal advocate of censorship and speech controls has been CNN media analyst Oliver Darcy who just ratcheted up his call for de-platforming opposing views. Like many anti-free speech advocates, Darcy simply labels those with opposing views as spreading “disinformation” and demands that they be labeled or barred from social media. In a recent newsletter, Darcy calls for every tweet by Trump to be labeled as disinformation while asking “and why stop there?” Precisely. Once you cross the Rubicon of speech regulation, there is little reason or inclination to stop. Just look at Europe.
Darcy wrote:
“Nearly every tweet from the president at this point is labeled for misinfo. Which had me thinking. Why doesn’t Twitter just take the step of labeling his entire account as a known source of election disinfo? And why stop there? Why not label accounts that repeatedly spread claims the platform has to fact-check?”
There was a time when the very touchstone of American journalism was the rejection of such calls for censorship, including at CNN.
What is chilling about Darcy’s writings is that they reflect the view of many now in Congress and in the Democratic Party. Indeed, they reflect many in the Biden campaign. Once a party that fought for free speech, it has become the party demanding Internet censorship and hate speech laws. President-Elect Joe Biden has called for speech controls and recently appointed a transition head for agency media issues that is one of the most pronounced anti-free speech figures in the United States. It is a trend that seems now to be finding support in the media, which celebrated the speech of French President Emmanuel Macron before Congress where he called on the United States to follow the model of Europe on hate speech.
Darcy is calling for a more active and extensive regulation of speech to protect users from thoughts or views that he considers false or dangerous: “Think of it as a version of NewsGuard for Twitter.”
“NewsGuard” has a lovely Orwellian sound to be added to other codes for censorship like Sen. Richard Blumenthal recently calling for “robust content modification” on the internet. Who can object to a NewsGuard, which Darcy describes like some beneficent St. Bernard watching over our news and social postings? Of course, what Darcy considers “disinformation” or what Blumenthal considers “robust content modification” is left dangerously undefined.
So put me down as preferring free speech without the helpful guards and content modification. Instead, I hold a novel idea that people can reach their own conclusions on such is disinformation just as Darcy does.
The Mainstream Press Has Failed America
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 1, 2020
While President Trump continues to maintain that the presidential election was marred by massive fraud, the mainstream press continues to maintain that Trump’s charges are “false” and “baseless” and that his allegations are damaging trust in America’s democratic electoral system.
Actually, however, it’s the other way around: It’s the mainstream press, owing to its extreme deferential attitude toward the Washington, D.C., establishment, that has severely damaged trust in America’s democratic system.
Of course, this isn’t the first election in which the losing side has charged that he has been cheated out of his victory. In virtually every election cycle, there is at least one political candidate that charges that he lost because of fraud committed by the other side.
But let’s face it: Sometimes there is fraud. As I have pointed out before (see here and here and here), there is now no doubt that Lyndon Johnson employed fraud to win the 1948 U.S. Senate race in Texas against popular Governor Coke Stevenson. Johnson told a South Texas crony who controlled some South Texas counties to keep his poll results open in case Johnson needed extra votes to win. When the vote-counting was over, Johnson did need a few more votes to win. He called his crony, a man named George Parr, and Parr ordered a local election judge to produce 200 additional votes for LBJ, which then gave Johnson the win. Many years later, the election judge confirmed that he had done this. The 200 signatures on the voter list were all in the same ink, and the names of the 200 voters were in alphabetical order. If Johnson had lost the election, he never would have become vice-president or president, which truly made him a truly illegitimate president in U.S, history, one who ended up sending tens of thousands of American men to their deaths in a senseless war thousands of miles away in Southeast Asia.
The problem with the mainstream press in the Trump-Biden race is the speed by which it concluded that the 2020 presidential election was not marred by fraud. It reached its conclusion before the election was even over.
Now, it’s very possible that Trump’s assertions are, in fact, false and baseless, but how could the mainstream press know that before or immediately after the election without even the semblance of any press investigation into the allegations?
Perhaps the mainstream press believed that the stealing of an election through fraud is simply inconceivable. But how can it be inconceivable when it is undisputed that LBJ won his Senate race through fraud? If it happened once, doesn’t that negate the idea of inconceivability?
It certainly can’t be that the press immediately conducted an investigation and found no evidence of fraud in the Trump-Biden race because the mainstream press reached its conclusions immediately and never conducted any independent investigation.
And that’s the core of the problem — the mainstream press’s deference to the Washington, D.C., establishment by automatically embracing its official position that the election was honest and above board.
In a free society, the citizenry necessarily depend on an independent press to keep government honest. The citizenry simply lack the resources and time to investigate official misconduct. Thus, they necessarily depend on a vibrant, dynamic independent press to do this job for them.
That’s where the mainstream press has failed America and has severely damaged America’s democratic system. It has essentially become a loyal lapdog of the Washington, D.C., establishment, never daring to challenge it, question, or investigate it at a fundamental level.
That’s why people don’t trust the mainstream press. That’s one big reason why mainstream papers have lost massive numbers of subscribers ever since the Internet came into existence. People know that when it comes to confronting political power with truth, they are going to find it on the Internet rather than in the mainstream press.
In the meantime, the mainstream press cannot figure out why people don’t blindly accept its pronouncements. They cannot figure out why people have been leaving them in droves and going to the Internet for answers. They cannot figure out why people don’t trust them or believe what they say.
Now, I’m not saying that the mainstream press should go out and investigate every charge of fraud that every loser of a political race makes. What I am saying is that when there are extreme anomalies in votes, as there have been in the Trump-Biden race, it is incumbent on an independent press to severely scrutinize them. Extreme anomalies, of course, don’t equate to fraud but they do equate — or should equate — to the need for extremely careful scrutiny to ensure that there is no fraud.
An independent press is in the best position to perform such an investigation. If America were characterized by such a press, it would actually strengthen, not weaken, America’s democratic system because then people would be more assured that elections were not marred by fraud. When you instead have a passive and deferential press that automatically defers to the D.C. establishment, immediately concludes that the election is on the up and up despite extreme anomalies, and just pokes fun of the losing candidate for asserting fraud, that tends to make people suspicious, distrustful, and cynical.
Of course, the passive and deferential nature of the mainstream press has been going on for much longer than the 2020 presidential race. One of the best examples is the Kennedy assassination. From the time Kennedy was declared dead, the mainstream press has always automatically accepted the official version of events of the national-security establishment, never daring to conduct independent investigations into whether that version was false and baseless.
In the 1970s, after the House Select Committee on Assassinations met to reinvestigate the assassination, several enlisted men came forward with a remarkable story. They said that they had secretly carried the president’s body into the morgue almost 1 1/2 hours before the body was officially reintroduced into the morgue. They said that they had been sworn to secrecy on the weekend of the assassination and had been forced to sign secrecy oaths. Their superiors threatened them with extreme punitive action if they ever disclosed what they had seen or done.
Now, wouldn’t you think that that was something that the mainstream press would find worth investigating? Were these enlisted men lying? Were they just making up a story? Why would they do that? Why would the national-security establishment be sneaking the president’s body into the morgue? Why was the military in charge of the autopsy?
Wouldn’t just one mainstream investigative reporter want to investigate such things? Well, if he did, he would be fired by every mainstream paper in the land, owing to the passivity and deferential attitude that the mainstream press have had about the Kennedy assassination since the beginning.
In the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board discovered the existence of a Marine Sergeant named Roger Boyajian, who told the ARRB that it was his team that secretly carried the president’s body into the morgue at 6:35 p.m., almost 1 1/2 hours before the official entry time of 8 p.m. Boyajian even produced a copy of his official report that he had submitted to the military immediately after the assassination weekend in November 1963, a report that the military had kept secret. His statement and his report confirmed what those enlisted men has said back in the 1970s.
Did the mainstream press then conduct an investigation? Not on your life. It was still considered verboten for any mainstream news media outlet to investigate any aspect of the Kennedy assassination.
When Congress enacted the law that established the ARRB, someone slipped a provision into the law that prohibited the ARRB from investigating any aspect of the Kennedy assassination. It was a prohibition that was strictly enforced by the ARRB board of trustees. Now, wouldn’t you think that some enterprising, independent-minded mainstream investigative reporter would want to find out why anyone would want to keep the ARRB from investigating things it discovered while securing the release of long secret records of the national-security establishment? Nope. It just didn’t happen.
The ARRB also discovered the existence of a woman named Saundra Spencer. She was a chief petty officer in charge of the Navy’’s lab at its photography center in Washington, D.C. She had a top secret security clearance and worked closely with the White House on both classified and unclassified photographs.
Spencer told the ARRB a remarkable story. She said that on the weekend of the assassination, she had been asked to develop, on a top-secret basis, the photographs of President Kennedy’s autopsy, which had been conducted by the U.S. national-security establishment on the night of the assassination. Spencer had kept her secret for more than 30 years.
Spencer was shown the official autopsy photographs in the record. After closely examining them, she said: No, those are not the autopsy photographs I developed. The ones I developed showed a massive exit-sized wound in the back of the president’s head. The photographs in the official record show the back of the president’s head to be fully intact.
Now, wouldn’t you think that that would be enough to get the mainstream press to send an investigative reporter out to get to the bottom of this, especially given that Spencer’s testimony about the massive exit-sized wound in the back of Kennedy’s head matched the statements of the treating physicians at Parkland Hospital, along with the treating nurses, two FBI agents, a Secret Service agent, and others? Wouldn’t you think that fraudulent autopsy photographs would be enough to generate such an investigation?
Nope. The position of every mainstream paper in the country has always been: “Stay away from the Kennedy assassination. That’s what the national-security establishment wants and that’s the way it’s going to be.”
The ARRB made another remarkable discovery. It discovered that there were two separate brain examinations in the Kennedy autopsy. At the first one, the president’s brain was “sectioned,” which meant cutting it like a loaf of bread to study the trajectory of the bullet that hit the president in the head. At the second brain exam, the brain was fully intact.
There is one big problem: Once a brain is sectioned, it cannot reconstitute itself. That means that the second brain exam had to have involved a brain that wasn’t the same brain at the first exam.
Wouldn’t you think that the mainstream press would find this worth investigating? Nope. And it’s not like they weren’t aware of the two brain exams. The Washington Post and the Associated Press both carried stories on the ARRB’s discovery (see here and here). Unfortunately, as astounding as it is, the discovery of a fraudulent brain exam was not enough to induce the mainstream press to follow up with aggressive investigations to get to the bottom of this.
Many years ago, the American people discovered the existence of Operation Mockingbird, a secret illegal operation of the CIA to convert journalists in the mainstream press into CIA assets and operatives. Mainstream journalists who were asked to serve loved it and considered it a great honor to secretly serve the national-security establishment.
Today, the CIA need not bother because the entire mainstream press has willingly made itself a de facto asset of the national-security state. The American people have been left without an independent mainstream press whose mission is to keep the government honest and instead rely on people on the Internet to perform that service. In the process, the mainstream press has done a tremendous disservice to the American people and to America’s democratic processes by abdicating its responsibility to be a watchdog, not a lapdog, to the Washington, D.C., establishment.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education.
‘I want blood’: Rachel Maddow’s audience fired up by NYT story baselessly accusing ‘Russian hackers’ of attacking US hospital
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | November 30, 2020
Accusing Russia of hacking anything from the 2016 election to US cancer hospitals may be fun and games for MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, but when her audience responds by demanding apocalypse, the shtick stops being funny.
Maddow’s conspiracy theories about ‘Russian collusion’ and supposed hacking of the 2016 election that resulted in President Donald Trump have been a staple of MSNBC audiences over the past four years. She’s not giving up that routine now, even as the entire mainstream media machine has turned on a dime and insists that the 2020 election was flawless – since it resulted in Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, that is.
On Monday, Maddow cherry-picked a couple of quotes and linked a New York Times story – published last week – about ‘Russian’ hackers allegedly targeting the University of Vermont Medical Center last month.
The Times story is long on feelings and emotions of the medical personnel and cancer patients affected by the fact that the UVMC computers stopped working, but short on actual facts about the case. It works in a jab at President Donald Trump for firing head of the cybersecurity agency Chris Krebs – for disputing “baseless claims of voter fraud,” of course – even though that happened long after the alleged attack.
The story also notes that the FBI has requested the center administrators to refrain from commenting on the case – even to confirm or deny their own statements about alleged ransom requests. Absent the facts, the Times is happy to fill in the blanks by citing a private cybersecurity company, Hold Security.
Hold Security and its chief executive Alex Holden are the sole source for the claim that ‘Russian’ hackers were behind the alleged cyberattack on UVMC and other US hospitals – at least according to the Times, as well as the media coverage of the FBI’s warning in late October that Maddow referenced.
The whole thing sounds much like the debunked Times story about Russia allegedly paying “bounties” to the Taliban for killing US troops in Afghanistan, a June bombshell that was used to hammer Trump and oppose his efforts to end the endless US war there.
Even the Pentagon’s own denials didn’t make a difference; Maddow and her colleagues were “all in” on the bounties story being true. So was her audience, as evidenced by some of the replies to her tweet.
While much of the replies were in the same vein, there were some that crossed the line from partisanship into genocidal – and apocalyptic – calls for blood.
“Russia needs to finally be handled. They need to be knocked back into the stone age,” said one follower.
“I did not hate the leaders of the old Soviet Union as much as I hate the leaders of Russia right now. I want them to experience monumental, historic, unprecedented, apocalyptic pain for what they have done to us. I want blood,” said another.
Earlier this year, MSNBC’s lawyers defended Maddow against a defamation lawsuit by One America News (OANN) – whom she called “literally Russian propaganda” – by arguing her show isn’t news but opinion, and that her statement was “rhetorical hyperbole” that no reasonable person would understand as fact.
While that admission got Maddow and MSNBC off the legal hook, it raises the question of how many of her followers and their audience qualify as “reasonable” people – as the comments on her tweet about the Times story show anew.
No one, Maddow included, should be held legally liable for the content of their replies, obviously. It’s something beyond their control. But when a steady diet of propaganda, ‘insinuendo’ and conspiracy theories presented as facts creates an atmosphere that results in this sort of bloodthirst that’s on display, it doesn’t inspire confidence in her audience’s mental state.
Keep in mind that the politicians Maddow supports may soon end up with absolute power, if Trump’s claims about election fraud are really as “baseless” as the media claim. Also, don’t forget that the US and Russia have enough nuclear weapons between themselves to destroy all life on the planet. And that’s something people so obsessed with their feelings to be calling for “monumental, historic, unprecedented, apocalyptic pain” clearly haven’t given any thought.
Killing The Future: COVID Madness Will Lead To HALF A MILLION Fewer U.S. Births In 2021
By Steve Watson | Summit News | November 30, 2020
Research has concluded that the US will experience 500,000 fewer births in 2021, as couples choose not to have children because of the coronavirus fallout.
The findings by the Brookings Institute were published last week in the Wall Street Journal, which noted that there will be “between 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births in the U.S. next year, compared with a drop of 44,172 last year.”
The numbers equate to a 13% drop from the 3.8 million babies born in 2019.
The “analysis, partly based on what happened following the 2007-2009 recession, is that weaker job prospects equate to fewer births,” the report further notes.
“Women will have many fewer babies in the short term, and for some of them, a lower total number of children over their lifetimes,” the research, previously previewed in the Summer, noted.
The US birthrate is already at its lowest level on record, and according to clinics, there has been a 50% jump in requests for birth control since the beginning of the pandemic, and a 40% increase in requests for Plan B.
CDC research notes that the birth rate in the US has been below replacement level since 1971. It is now a problem across all major racial groups including Hispanics, non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, and non-Hispanic Asians. All have below replacement birth levels.
A recent survey from the Guttmacher Institute discovered that 34% of women able to have babies in the US have made a decision to either delay having a child, or to just have fewer children because of COIVD.
Analysts say this will have a long and profound impact on the economy for many years to come, as the US could be falling into a so called ‘Fertility trap’ where there are fewer women around to have babies, resulting in smaller families, and low population growth reducing economic growth.
All of this results in increased pessimism and a downward spiral that is difficult to break.
It will also mean that in the near future there will be a huge mismatch between the amounts of younger and older people in the country.
Indeed, by 2034 Americans over age 65 are expected to outnumber those under 18 for the first time in the history of the nation.
Unless it is stopped now, the COVID madness, the lockdowns, the panic, the social engineering will not only be causing irrevocable damage to our collective psyche, societal morale, and cultural richness, it will also destroy future prosperity and literally deny life to millions along the way.
But perhaps that was the endgame all along?
Biden Appointee Neera Tanden Spread the Conspiracy That Russian Hackers Changed Hillary’s 2016 Votes to Trump
By Glenn Greenwald | November 30, 2020
The announcement that Joe Biden intends to nominate Neera Tanden as his Director of the Office of Management and Budget — a critical position overseeing U.S. economic and regulatory policy — triggered a wide range of mockery, indignation and disgust from both the left and the right.
That should not be surprising: though a thoroughly mediocre and ordinary D.C. swamp creature from the perspective of both ideology and competence, Tanden’s uniquely unhinged, venomous, corrupt and pathologically dishonest conduct as a Clinton Family and DNC apparatchik and President of the corporatist-and-despot-funded Center for American Progress (CAP) has earned her a list of enemies far longer and more impressive than her accomplishments.
When news of her appointment broke, many of the journalists and activists she has spent years abusing, slandering, and lying about instantly stepped forward to compile just some of her worst political and behavioral lowlights. And some preliminary signs emerged that she might encounter difficulty in obtaining the Senate confirmation needed for her to assume this position. The Communications Director for GOP Senator John Cornyn of Texas announced that “Tanden stands zero chance of being confirmed” by the Senate.
Former Sanders campaign aide David Sirota hypothesized that “it is not a coincidence that they are putting Neera Tanden — the single biggest, most aggressive Bernie Sanders critic in the United States of America — specifically at OMB while Sanders is Senate Budget Committee ranking/chair.” Sirota’s statement suggests Biden’s nomination of Tanden was intended as yet more humiliation doled out to the Democratic-loyal Sanders left by cucking the Vermont Senator even further by forcing him to shepherd the confirmation of one of his most vicious and amoral attackers (who Sanders himself in 2019 vehemently denounced). But Sirota’s point also raises the prospect that Tanden’s nomination could even encounter trouble from that side of the aisle as well (given Sanders’ compliant and disciplined conduct over the last six months, it’s more likely we will see him roll out a literal red carpet for Tanden to walk on, gently toss red roses on it before she passes, and then serve her a glass of Chardonnay rather than meaningfully obstruct her confirmation).
The list of sociopathic and even monstrous acts from Tanden is too long to list comprehensively. She punched one of her own employees, a reporter for CAP’s now-abolished blog ThinkProgress, after he had the temerity to ask Hillary Clinton in 2008 about her support for the Iraq War (Tanden claimed she “merely” had “pushed,” not punched, her undeferential reporter). In 2011, as the Obama administration was participating in the NATO bombing of Libya, Tanden suggested in internal CAP discussions that the U.S. steal Libya’s oil as a way of reducing the U.S. deficit (a story I was able to report only because Tanden had abused and alienated so many of her employees that they worked together to leak her incriminating emails to me).
During her tenure as CAP’s President, Tanden accepted millions of dollars from the regime of the United Arab Emirates, which built Dubai and Abu Dhabi using slave labor, along with massive donations from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, J.P. Morgan, the Walton Family and Michael Bloomberg, while hiding the identity of some of her think tank’s largest donors. A huge chapter on the NYPD’s abusive policies toward Muslims under Mayor Michael Bloomberg was removed from a CAP report after Boomberg donated more than $1 million to Tanden’s organization, and he continued to donate even more after that courteous gesture.
She ordered the supposedly independent journalists of the ThinkProgress blog, including Muslim writers, to stop writing critically about Israel after key CAP donors, including Barney Frank’s sister Ann Lewis and long-time Clinton advisor Howard Wolfson, complained. [More info on this and about AIPAC’S influence is here and here. and here and here]
Ann Lewis speaks at AIPAC national conference, March 20, 2016 in Washington DC. Lewis is a Democratic political strategist and former White House Communications Director to President Bill Clinton.
Tanden and Wolfson plotted in 2016 how to weaponize female journalists and people of color against Hillary’s critics as well to use their identity to stigmatize and thus stop undesirable coverage from The New York Times. In 2018, she outed a CAP employee at a staff-wide meeting who had filed an anonymous complaint of sexual harassment and retaliation against one of Tanden’s male allies. Secure with her UAE-and-corporate-funded large salary, she has long urged cuts to Social Security. The list goes on and on.
One can reasonably view Biden’s choice of Tanden as a positive. She is no different in character or ideology than any of the faceless, more obscure DNC operatives who would occupy this position if she did not. But because of how well-known her sociopathy, militarism and corporatism are to many on the liberal-left, her face serves as an undeniable and unavoidable reminder of what the Biden administration and the Democratic Party really are. She illuminates the truth about their real aims.
But beyond things like wanting to steal Libya’s oil after bombing it into oblivion, outing sexual harassment complainants, and physically assaulting and censoring her own employees, there is one uniquely abominable feature of Neera Tanden. She is one of the most deranged conspiracy theorists in the United States, and has done more than almost any other Washington functionary to contaminate Democrats’ mental health, capacity to reason, and faith in the legitimacy of U.S. elections.
Tanden owes her entire career to the patronage of Hillary Clinton, and her devotion to Hillary approaches restraining-order levels of creepiness (here you can watch Tanden beam with adoration as then-Senator Hillary Clinton, on the Senate floor in 2004, explains her steadfast opposition to marriage equality for same-sex couples on the ground that “marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman” and “exists between a man and a woman going back into the mists of history” for the primary purpose of raising children — just a few short years before Democrats changed views on this, after which it instantly became the hallmark of an unreconstructed hateful bigot to say this).
Few people took Hillary’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump as hard as Tanden, or handled it as poorly. Indeed, she refused to believe it really happened, and encouraged others to similarly refuse to accept its reality.
In the weeks after Trump’s victory, Tanden joined numerous Democrats in encouraging electors of the Electoral College to ignore their states’ votes and refuse to elect Trump as President (many rationale were invoked for this: Tanden’s was a CAP article promoting #Resistance fanatic Richard Painter’s argument that Trump’s violations of the Emolument Clause precluded an Electoral College win). She insisted that Hillary lost because of Russia, claiming the “Russians did enough damage to affect more than 70k votes in 3 states.” And she was not only one of the first to push the Steele Dossier’s claim that Russia held blackmail power over Trump but also one of the last to do so — insisting in 2018 that “the dossier been mostly proven to be true” and claiming as late as 2019 that nothing in this discredited junk report had been disproven.
Tanden’s bizarre claims about Russian hackers
But what really distinguished Tanden when it came to unhinged and toxic behavior was her repeated (and obviously baseless) claims that Hillary only lost because Russian hackers invaded the U.S. voting system and clandestinely changed Hillary’s votes to Trump’s, costing the real winner — Hillary — her rightful place on the throne, behind the Resolute Desk.
Four days after the 2016 election, Tanden began strongly implying, if not outright stating, that Russian hackers changed the vote totals, and that this is why “Trump was as surprised as everyone else” by his victory. When I highlighted her conspiratorial claims, she did not deny their obvious meaning, but rationalized them by insisting that her conspiracies were not as bad as Trump’s refusal, in advance of the election, to acknowledge the legitimacy of an election that had not yet taken place:
Tanden’s insistence that Russia changed the voting results through hacking did not once her traumatic shock in the weeks after Hillary’s loss dissipated (if it ever did). After The Intercept published an anonymous, evidence-free document in June, 2017, allegedly sent by NSA employee Reality Winner, which led that site to claim that “Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials,” Tanden returned to pushing this bizarre conspiracy theory, demanding that I “retract” my post-election criticism of her for peddling this Russia-changed-the-votes madness — as if this NSA document published by The Intercept proved vote-changing hacking by Russia.
This conspiracy-mongering led by Tanden and other prominent liberal activists had a corrosive effect on the ability of Democrats to perceive basic reality, to put that mildly. A 2018 poll from Economist/YouGov — conducted more than a year after Trump’s inauguration — found that a large majority of Democrats (66%) believe that “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President.”
Economist/YouGov poll, published Mar. 9, 2018
Thereafter, Hillary herself took to calling Trump an “illegitimate” president, further fueling the destruction of confidence and faith among Democrats in the legitimacy of the vote totals and specifically the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
Democratic leaders and their media allies love to patronizingly warn that conservative media outlets and their audiences are prone to spread and believe crazy conspiracy theories. They purport particular worry when such conspiracies are designed to undermine faith and trust in the U.S. electoral system itself.
Yet few have done more to destroy such confidence and faith than Neera Tanden, achieved by disseminating over the course of several years some of the most unhinged, evidence-free and deranged conspiracy theories in which she deliberately deceived Democratic partisans into believing that Moscow’s dastardly hackers invaded the sanctity of the U.S. voting system to change Hillary’s votes to Trump’s. And it worked: at least as of 2018, large majorities of Democrats believe that this utterly unproven but dangerous assertion is true.
If Joe Biden succeeds in empowering someone like Neera Tanden without extreme opposition from supposedly adversarial journalists, not only Democrats but also these media outlets will lose whatever lingering credibility they have to denounce conspiracy theories and to defend the legitimacy of U.S. elections. And they will deserve that fate. You can’t run around expecting people will take you seriously when you warn of the dangers of toxic, moronic conspiracy theories when you yourself embrace, elevate and promote the most prolific and reckless purveyors of them.
Johns Hopkins study explodes COVID death hoax; it’s re-labeling on a grand scale
By Jon Rappoport | November 30, 2020
“This patient who died had an ordinary heart attack.”
“Not anymore. We’re repackaging it as COVID.”
Don’t blink. Johns Hopkins may delete or retract their analysis at any moment. Their author’s study is devastating. Too hot to handle.
UPDATE: Yes, I wrote that opener a few hours before Johns Hopkins stepped in and DID retract the article. Boom. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Hopkins claims the article has been used to spread misinformation about the pandemic, and contains factual errors. CDC is cited as one correct source of facts. Hmm.
Regardless, here is my article, finished before the Johns Hopkins retraction. Since then, I’ve only polished it a bit in several places, for clarity:
Months ago, I told you this, in a number of articles: The overwhelming percentage of people who are “dying from the virus” are actually dying from traditional diseases.
These people have been relabeled and repackaged as “COVID-19.”
It has nothing to do with “the virus.”
A new analysis from Johns Hopkins confirms this in spades.
The Johns Hopkins News-Letter article, in a student publication, is headlined, “A closer look at US deaths due to COVID-19.” It lays out the case made by “Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s degree program at Hopkins.”
As you keep reading, keep this in mind: If the so-called increase in mortality from COVID is offset, almost exactly, by a decrease in deaths from all other major diseases…
Indicating that the so-called COVID deaths are nothing more than an exercise in re-labeling, then…
You can say there is a new coronavirus, but it’s even less harmful than flu, because virtually everybody recovers…
Or you can say the whole story of a new coronavirus is a fake narrative. There is no new virus.
My readers know I’ve been offering much evidence for the latter conclusion.
Here are key quotes from the Johns Hopkins News-Letter article:
“These data analyses suggest that in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.”
“This comes as a shock to many people. How is it that the data lie so far from our perception?”
“When Briand looked at the 2020 data during that seasonal period, COVID-19-related deaths exceeded deaths from heart diseases. This was highly unusual since heart disease has always prevailed as the leading cause of deaths. However, when taking a closer look at the death numbers, she noted something strange. As Briand compared the number of deaths per cause during that period in 2020 to [deaths per cause in] 2018, she noticed that instead of the expected drastic increase across all causes, there was a significant decrease in deaths due to heart disease. Even more surprising, as seen in the graph below, this sudden decline in deaths is observed for all other causes.”
“This trend is completely contrary to the pattern observed in all previous years. Interestingly, as depicted in the table below, the total decrease in deaths by other causes almost exactly equals the increase in deaths by COVID-19. This suggests, according to Briand, that the COVID-19 death toll is misleading. Briand believes that deaths due to heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza and pneumonia may instead be [may have been] recategorized as being due to COVID-19.”
“The CDC classified all deaths that are related to COVID-19 simply as COVID-19 deaths. Even patients dying from other underlying diseases but are infected with COVID-19 count as COVID-19 deaths. This is likely the main explanation as to why COVID-19 deaths drastically increased while deaths by all other diseases experienced a significant decrease.”
“’All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers. We found no evidence to the contrary,’ Briand concluded.”
“’If [the COVID-19 death toll] was not misleading at all, what we should have observed is an increased number of heart attacks and increased COVID-19 numbers. But a decreased number of heart attacks and all the other death causes doesn’t give us a choice but to point to some misclassification [re-labeling],’ Briand replied.”
“In other words, the effect of COVID-19 on deaths in the U.S. is considered problematic only when it increases the total number of deaths or the true death burden by a significant amount in addition to the expected deaths by other causes. Since the crude number of total deaths by all causes before and after COVID-19 [was first announced] has stayed the same, one can hardly say, in Briand’s view, that COVID-19 deaths are concerning.”
Of course, there is some mealy-mouthed backtracking in the article. The virus is deadly and the pandemic is real, etc. But the data are the data.
The whole COVID operation is a hoax.
If I thought other honest researchers would investigate and re-calculate the Hopkins analysis, I would say, let’s see what they come up with. But based on my experience, there will be, at best, a brief flurry of articles in the press about this extraordinary finding, and then the scientific and press denizens will move on, as if nothing happened. That is their way. They briefly expose a scandal and then they slither off to cover up the scandal.
The other possibility is: Hopkins will retract the analysis, claiming it was flawed. That is the other strategy the low-crawling creatures sometimes deploy.
So there you have it.
Hoax. Con. Fake.
As I keep reporting, the virus (never proven to exist) is the cover story for the true phase-one goal: destruction of the economy.
If the virus were real, if it were attacking people left and right, the all-cause mortality numbers would be through the roof.
But they aren’t.
“I have a great idea, Bill. Let’s declare a fake pandemic. We’ll report all sorts of high death numbers. But really, we’ll just be subtracting numbers from other traditional diseases that cause deaths, and we’ll add those numbers to our fake pandemic.”
“Sounds great, Tony. Can you pull it off? I mean, it’s pretty obvious.”
“Sure, we can pull it off. And if some journalist with a mainstream reputation or an institution suddenly develops a brief infection of ETHICS, we’ll call their work a mistake or a lapse in judgment.”
“You mean an institution like the World Health Organization or Johns Hopkins?”
“Right. We’ll say the institution didn’t issue the study, it was just one of their people, a lone researcher. And if necessary, the institution, under pressure, will back off. But that’s assuming anyone noticed the study in the first place. Normally, these ‘revelations’ surface for a moment and then sink like a stone. No one cares. A pandemic is a money waterfall. The beneficiaries won’t sacrifice their bottom lines, or their reputations…”
Of course, people can rise up and raise holy hell.
SOURCES:
[1] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/11/a-closer-look-at-u-s-deaths-due-to-covid-19
[3] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iO0K75EZAF8dkNDkDmM3L4zNNY0X-Xw5/view
Featured Video
Russia Helping Build a New Middle East /Trita Parsi
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Sam Husseini: The entire US establishment helped lie their way into the Iraq war
By Slava Zilber | American Herald Tribune | October 14, 2019
Sam Husseini is a senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, independent journalist and contributor to The Nation and FAIR.
Slava Zilber: Sam, three years ago, you appeared on Talk Nation Radio with David Swanson and spoke about the case of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. You pointed out that the people involved in the spying on the UN and the people authorizing the Iraq War were not held accountable:
“Virtually everybody who went along with the war, whether it is Kerry or Clinton, of course, the Bush administration themselves has falsified their own records in terms of why, what they did, when they did, why they did it, to the extent that they’ve been scrutinised at all.”
You also address it in a recent article. And recently, Joe Biden has been lying about his position on the Iraq War. How can such an important issue escape meaningful scrutiny? … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Russia Helping Build a New Middle East /Trita Parsi
- Barghouti: ‘Netanyahu has fallen,’ era of Smotrich, Ben-Gvir over
- China slams US policy on Iran as Russia rejects legality of nuclear meeting at UN
- The Mecca Pact Courts Iran: Containment Comes Full Circle
- Oman FM: Persian Gulf states, Iran, Iraq should form security pact excluding US
- Trump peddles fresh falsehoods, claims Iran ‘started the war’ as US aggression drags on
- Ukraine quagmire? Yes, but it’s for NATO, not Russia
- US intelligence hypes Chinese, Russian space threats while accelerating its own military buildup in orbit
- Iran FM Araghchi: “Hormuz Will No Longer Be the Same”
- EU facing trillion-euro debt hole while seeking more cash for Kiev
- If Americans Knew
- Israel blocks international visitors from West Bank – what is it trying to hide?
- ‘There are no dreams here’: How Israel’s outgoing gov’t remade the West Bank
- Netanyahu, Katz Blocked IDF Plan to End Hebron Raids, Allow Locals to Return
- Mamdani’s NYPD is poised to sign a three-year, $750,500 no-bid contract with Israeli surveillance firm
- Israel Votes Today: What the Election Means for Americans and How Netanyahu’s Rivals Differ
- DAILY UPDATE: Latest essential news on Palestine, Israel, & region
- Israeli media analysis: 2 Paths to War With Iran Loom Over Israel’s Election
- Diaspora Jewish leaders stress Israel ties — no matter the outcome of tomorrow’s elections
- Israeli forces kill 14 in Gaza as UN commission says genocide continues
- The Israeli elections have become a fight over October 7, but only Zionist opinions are allowed
- No Tricks Zone
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
