There is no need to inform the conscious world that the United States is applying all its power and influence to extradite Julian Assange from England in order to put him on trial in America. The case against him is based on his having committed journalism in publishing leaked secret government information on Wikileaks. While it is comprised of multiple charges, crafted with cynicism and malice in order to convict and imprison him for life, not one of them has any legal merit.
In truth, the case is not about commission of crime at all. It is a cruel, vindictive scam by a shamed empire to punish an honorable and ethical man for having revealed damning truths about its barbaric behavior in brazen, criminal contempt for the laws of peace and war.
Material he published has shown the United States to have been blatantly and contemptibly false to its own people and the world. That an individual could be framed and railroaded into a corrupt process contrived to punish him for exposing America’s monstrous crimes is a moral horror that beggars belief, and yet that is the unstated intention of the government of the United States.
Virtually the whole American and Western official press, including all mainstream news organizations, both print and television and their reporters, have not only abandoned Assange as if he were guilty of something other than what they all routinely do much less well, but in their moral cowardice they have made themselves vulnerable to precisely the kind of dirty, dishonest state vendetta he is suffering.
What is most extraordinary about the astonishing length to which the American government has gone to persecute Assange, and the vast amount of money it has wasted on it, is the fact that all he has been accused of exposing, and has been so vilified and anathematized for revealing, is mere incidental trivia when compared with the vast body of America’s horrific state crime so long documented as proven fact, on the public record, and already well known to the entire world.
Beginning with the contorted sham that legitimized black slavery when its Constitution declared all men created equal, and the routine violation of sworn treaties which facilitated the murder of whole native peoples, America has lied, stolen, bullied, and subverted as state policy throughout its era of imperial aggrandizement and continues to do so well into that of its richly deserved, and now inexorable decay.
The extent of blind, mindless loyalty to, and deeply, stubbornly ignorant worship of, this rogue, dishonest nation that unstinting poisoning by infantile propaganda has wrought on the American mind is profoundly sad. Our people never deserved to be traduced and shit on so brutishly. Nothing can justify it. It was done so that predatory, anti-life Capitalism could rape and fleece a people largely made crass, base, and stupid once decent values were replaced by the shallow, dead-end dogma of ethicless materialism. Americans now worship the money none but a tiny few ever see, in thrall to a monstrous criminal racket that scorns them as mindless serfs.
So it is that information readily available that shows, with irrefutable clarity, the villainous history of this morbidly rotten, failing empire is almost universally rejected by a citizenry whose hope of any decent future depends on its absorbing and comprehending that information. The catechism of rank bullshit marshalled for generations to cover the frauds, crimes, betrayals, invasions, assassinations and massacres that are America’s legacy has been exposed and documented for any mind not crippled and poisoned to see, and yet Americans have not had the mental or psychological capacity to take it in and act on it.
That said, it’s undeniable that more people have more exposure to more sound data than was ever conceivable before, and in spite of Capitalism doing all it can to pollute all information streams, more Americans are more aware, if dimly, that Exceptionalist notions they’ve been schooled to embrace are somehow desafinado, as the bossa nova song had it: out of tune. As the Presidential election nears, with the country facing a Hobson’s Choice between two defective, demented, old white shysters, and the nasty chore of electing another Congress of Pimps to represent their owners and sponsors, there is palpable disgust at the dysfunction of our polity.
This, though miserably painful to the spirit, is a good thing since it indicates a broad wave of actual recognition, an inchoate but definite awareness of the appalling depravity that the smothering gas of Exceptionalist propaganda has always concealed. How many now feel this malaise due to dawning comprehension of the monstrous, anti-democratic, destructive force America has historically been cannot be known, but for a large percentage this has to be true.
Because America’s dark secrets are not secret any more, and haven’t been for decades. The horror has been told, chapter and verse, in scholarly works that fill libraries, from barbaric rape of the Philippines and violent subversion of poor Central American countries reduced to money farms for Wall Street to the present kill list of Middle Eastern countries droned, blown up, devastated and destroyed by clumsily bungled wars run by stupid, sycophantic Big Brass Whores to feed the War Machine that our psychotic ruling cliques serve and obey.
All this being true, how is it that this sick, raging, giant monster of a nation can muster the free-floating fury to invest so much time and money to destroy one man who simply revealed a relatively minor snippet of its grossly criminal history? Whence comes this obsessive madness? It is the savage, vindictive mania of a failing empire. Like the shameful sixty-year Cuban embargo, it harks back in spirit to the Roman slaughter of Christians or Nazi atrocities at Lidice or Babi Yar. There is no force like humiliating failure to make a decaying empire lash out in insensate ferocity at an object that symbolizes its shame.
Assange is one of the rarest of men: those who put principles and personal honor above their safety or gain. America may succeed in destroying him or unexpected justice may save him, but nothing can save this sick empire that has betrayed and fatally envenomed itself.
Elephants in the Room: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II
The United States Government Is The Biggest Criminal Organisation in the World
“Since the end of the Second World War the United States has attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governmentsand
to crush more than 30 populist- nationalist movements struggling
against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US has caused the end
of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a
life of agony and despair” (William Blum(1)).
William Blum
was an employee of the US state department who became aware of the
scale of US crimes abroad and decided to document them. His book, Rogue
State, is one of the best beginner’s guides to understanding what really
goes on in the world. The following list is an updated version of his
analysis of the US government’s most serious crimes.
US Military and CIA Interventions since World War 2
China 1945–51
Korea 1945–53
The Phillippines 1945–53; 1970s -90s
Marshall Islands 1946–58
France 1947 Italy 1947–70s
Greece 1947–49; 1967–74
Albania 1949–53; 1991–92
Eastern Europe 1948–56
Soviet Union Late 1940s – 60s
Germany 1950s Iran 1953
British Guyana 1953–64 Guatemala 1953–90s
Costa Rica Mid 1950s; 1970–71
Syria 1956–57; 2011 — present
Middle East 1956–58
Indonesia 1957–58; 1965
East Timor 1975–99
Western Europe 1950s and 1960s
Italy 1950s — 70s
Vietnam 1950–73
Cambodia 1955–73
Laos 1957–73
Iraq 1958–63; 1972–75; 1991 — present
Cuba 1959 — present
Haiti 1959; 1987–2004
France/Algeria 1960s
South Africa 1960’s — 80s
Diego Garcia 1960s — present
Ecuador 1960–63; 2000
Congo/Zaire1960–65; 77–78
Brazil 1961–64
Peru 1965
Dominican Republic 1963–65
Chile 1964–73
Bolivia 1964–75
Thailand 1965–73
Ghana 1966
Uruguay 1969–72
Panama 1969–91
Australia 1972–75
Portugal 1974–76
Angola 1975-80s
Jamaica 1976
Seychelles 1979–81
Grenada 1979–83
Yemen 1979–84; 2015 — present
Nicaragua 1979–90
Afghanistan 1979–92; 2001 — present
South Korea 1980
Honduras 1980s; 2009
El Salvador 1980–92
Chad 1981–82
Libya 1981–89; 2011 — present
Suriname 1982-84
Morocco 1983
Fiji 1987
Bulgaria 1990–91
Columbia 1990s — present
Somalia 1993
Yugoslavia 1991–99
Venezuela 2001–04
Adapted From: William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide To The World’s Only Superpower
These
are just the most thoroughly documented examples. Many records remain
classified so this list is incomplete. More recent analysis adds 5 more
countries (Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Pakistan) where US
soldiers have invaded, occupied or bombed in the Middle East alone.(2)
Blum goes on to list US activities as follows:
“If
you flip over the rock of American foreign policy of the past century,
this is what crawls out…invasions, bombings, overthrowing governments,
assassinating political leaders, death squads, torture, biological
warfare, drug trafficking, mercenaries, suppressing movements for social
change, perverting elections, manipulating labour unions, manufacturing
“news”, depleted uranium…” – (William Blum, Introduction to www.killinghope.org)
Two
of the wars mentioned above are worth highlighting because of their
scale. In the war against Korea from 1945-1953, the US dropped 635,000
tons of bombs on North Korea, destroying everything of significance, and
slaughtering millions of people. In their war with the three
neighbouring countries of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from 1950 – 1973,
the US dropped over 7 million tons of bombs, approximately 3 times as
much as were dropped by all sides during WW2(3), and again slaughtered
millions of people. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger became
notorious for ordering “a massive bombing campaign in
Cambodia…everything that flies on anything that moves,”(4) meaning that
all men, women and children were acceptable targets. This is an example
of the US actually ordering genocide. The
total number of deaths from all of the US’s interventions throughout the
world during the last seventy-five years is estimated to be at least
thirteen million(5). This has been termed the US holocaust. One would
expect that slaughter on this scale would be discussed regularly by the
mainstream media, and would be taught to schoolchildren, but in Britain
and the US these crimes are almost never mentioned.
Many
of these interventions have been analysed in detail, and some clear
patterns have emerged. An excuse is created to justify the intervention.
The media consistently present the government’s case without adequate
scrutiny, even though supporting evidence is poor. Years after the
events took place, classified documents become available or former
government insiders come forward to explain what the true intentions
were. In each case, the original justification for the war turns out to
be untrue or exaggerated. The real reason is always US imperialism.
(This will be discussed in more detail in later posts). US intervention
almost always has terrible consequences for the targeted country. There
is not a single example of the US or British governments carrying out
these activities for humanitarian reasons. None of the wars can be
described as ‘last resort’ – there were always non-violent courses of
action that could have been pursued:
“War is never the only choice, and always the worst one”(6)
The
US now has over 800 military bases around the world outside the USA,
and covert (secret) operations in many areas of the world(7). These
military activities are an attempt to gain what it calls Full Spectrum
Dominance. This refers to control of land, sea, air, space and
cyberspace.
The British Government Is Just As Criminal (but with a smaller army)
The
British government has followed similar policies using their military
and their intelligence agency, MI6. Britain had a vast empire before
1945, but they were unable to maintain that empire after World War 2, so
former colonies gained their independence. British leaders did not give
up control graciously. They were worried that the new rulers might
choose policies that would stop British corporations from exploiting
each country, so British soldiers were sent to ensure that future rulers
were acceptable to British decision-makers. Britain’s main goal in
their brutal war in Malaya (1948-60) was to make sure that British tin
and rubber corporations could continue to plunder the resources
there(8). Britain committed atrocities including killing civilians and
torture in many countries, such as Aden (South Yemen), Kenya, Palestine,
Cyprus, Brunei and Borneo. The leading researcher into British
atrocities has written:
“Britain bears significant responsibility for around 10 million deaths since 1945”(9).
In
more recent decades, Britain’s actions have mostly been alongside the
US. Their combined militaries are the main invaders, occupiers and mass
murderers in the world....
US Politics Isn’t ‘Polarized’; It’s In Almost Universal Agreement
When you look at US politics, it appears as though there are two
mainstream political factions that very strongly disagree with one
another. “Divided” is a word that comes up a lot. “Polarized” is
another.
It is of course true that a whole lot of emotion flows
between these two factions, and most of it is indeed negative. The hot
topics of any given news cycle in America will typically involve more
than one story pertaining to the vitriolic enmity between them.
But
beneath all the hurled insults and heated debates, these two factions
are actually furiously agreeing with one another. They’re agreeing the
entire time.
They agree that the US government should remain the
center of a globe-spanning empire; they just angrily quibble over a few
of the details of how that empire should be run, like whether or not the
Saudi crown prince should have received some small consequence for
dismembering a Washington Post reporter with a bone saw.
They
agree that the US should remain the earth’s unipolar hegemon at all
cost; they just loudly bicker over some of the specifics in how it
should look, like whether there should be the names of Confederate
generals on its military bases.
They agree that there should be a
massive US military presence around the world; they just furiously
dispute small particulars like whether a few thousand of those troops
should remain in Germany or be moved to Poland.
They agree that
there must be endless mass military violence to uphold the
US-centralized empire; they just make a big show of debating whether
that military violence should be more focused on Syria or Iran.
They
agree that it is necessary to menace the entire planet with nuclear
weapons while ramping up aggressions against other nuclear powers; they
just rage back and forth about whose finger should be on the button.
They
agree that it is necessary to control the world economy with an iron
fist; they just squabble about its features, like how and when to roll
out a trade war with China.
They agree that the environment should
continue to be destroyed; they just fight about the minutia, like
whether or not there should be some accommodations made for the profit
margins of green energy corporations.
They agree that income and
wealth inequality should persist in the US; they just passionately
disagree about how it should persist, like whether or not Americans
should receive another paltry $1200 stimulus payment this year.
They
agree that plutocracy should continue to rule America; they just spar
over the minor features, like whether or not those plutocrats should pay
a tiny bit more in taxes.
They agree that Americans should remain
aggressively propagandized; they just argue about whether it should be
by Fox News or MSNBC.
They agree Americans should be closely
surveilled and their speech tightly controlled; they just debate the
details, like whether or not right-wing pundits are being
disproportionately censored on social media.
On all issues that
most severely affect real people on mass scale, these two political
factions are in emphatic agreement. They just pour a whole lot of sound
and fury into the tiny one percent of the spectrum wherein they have
some disagreement.
They do not allow for any mainstream discussion of if the oligarchic empire should continue to exist; all their issues, arguments and histrionics revolve around how it should exist.
This
is what they are designed to do. They are designed to keep the American
populace from clearly seeing what the real debate is, which is why
anyone who relies on a worldview which favors either of these mainstream
factions will inevitably suffer confusion and misperception. They are
perceptual filters designed to hide the only real debate in US politics.
The
real debate in US politics is not between the two mainstream factions
which agree with one another on virtually everything that matters to
every extent that matters. The real debate is those two factions
together against those who understand that the entire American status
quo needs to be flushed down the toilet.
The real political debate
in America is between (A) those who understand that the US empire is
the single most destructive force on this planet and is corrupt from
root to flower, and (B) those who subscribe to mainstream partisan
narratives which by design support the US empire.
If politics were
real in America, this would be the debate everyone sees. Not between
two murderous septuagenarians yelling over each other about who hates
socialism more, but between the side which opposes the oligarchic empire
and the side which promotes and protects it.
But politics isn’t
real in America. It’s a show. A two-handed sock puppet show to distract
the audience while pickpockets rob them blind.
If you want to see
things clearly, ignore the fake drama of the sock puppet show altogether
and focus on advancing the real debate: that the US-centralized
oligarchic empire is corrupt beyond redemption and should be completely
dismantled.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Int’l. Message for Freedom and Hope
Children’s Health Defense October 24, 2020, there are many rallies around the world. Activists in these countries are joining in a common voice: Argentina; Bolivia; Peru; Uruguay; Italy; Germany; Poland; Belgium; Netherlands; United Kingdom; Ireland; Sweden; Denmark; France; and Austria.
Citizens of all countries are paying an enormous price for the epidemic. They have not only lost their loved ones, but their freedoms, their livelihood, their joy. Children and youth are suffering due to this crisis too. Without their friends and social activities, mental health problems in our young is at an all-time high. People around the world are demanding to be spared from the devastating consequences of the epidemic.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Chairman of Children’s Health Defense, provides an inspirational message for freedom and hope to activists around the world.
Join the movement. ChildrensHealthDefense.org
Transcript by Rawan R. Mahmasa
Hey, everybody, it’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. here, and I cannot tell you how happy I am to be able to have this opportunity to talk to thousands of citizens in 15 countries and all the continents in the world who have come together today to protest this Coup d’Etat by Big Data, by Big Telecom, by Big Tech, by the Big Oil and Chemical companies, and by the global public health cartel led by Bill Gates and the WHO that now amounts to two trillion dollars and wants to magnify and amplify its wealth and its power over our lives, over our liberties.
It wants to subvert our democracy and wants to destroy our sovereignty and our control over our lives and our children’s health.
And I want to remind you, those of you who are not Americans, of something that every American child learns when we’re growing up in this country about our history. And during the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt, who was one of the greatest presidents in American history, said to the American people: “the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself”
And we grow up hearing that but people don’t really understand what it means. And it was a very, very profound warning by Roosevelt because he saw what the Great Depression was doing in Eastern Europe, in Italy and Germany and Spain, where that crisis was turning people towards fascism in the eastern countries, where the same crisis was turning citizens and governments towards communism and also causing the collapse of governments all over the world. And in our country, In the United States, it’s hard for people to remember today that almost a third of the people in our country were completely disillusioned with capitalism and wanted to turn to communism and another third wanted to turn to fascism. And Franklin Roosevelt wanted to preserve our country for democracy, for free market capitalism, for civil rights and to preserve our Constitution.
And he recognized that the weapon of authoritarian control was going to be fear. And when I spoke a few weeks ago in Berlin, I reminded the people of Germany of a very famous story that happened during the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, when Hitler’s closest lieutenant the head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering, was asked by one of the prosecutors, how did you get the German people?, the German people are the most educated people in the world,
They were some of the most tolerant people in the world. The Weimar Republic was one of the strongest democracies in the world. How did you take them? These people were so well educated and so awakened and so tolerant and turned them into obedient slaves who had committed some of the worst atrocities in human history? and Goring said, ” Oh, that’s a simple thing.” And any of you can look up his quote and I urge you to do so. And he said, “And it works not just in the fascist government, but it works in a democracy, in a monarchy and in a communist government, and any government that you want, the job of the government is to put the people in fear. And and if you can keep them in fear, you can get them to do anything that you want them to do, that they will turn into sheep.”
And there’s a famous book by Naomi Klein and all of us should read called Disaster Capitalism. And that book shows it’s a historical chronology of all of the times in American history, the history of the world during the Great Depression and during the financial collapse in 2008, during the financial collapse in Chile, for example, in 1973, during the time of the World Trade Center bombing, that authoritarian elements in a society and large corporations and wealthy plutocrats and oligarchs, wealthy families and individuals use crises to shift wealth upward to obliterate the middle classes of those countries and to clamp down totalitarian control.
And of course, that’s an obvious thing that people who are used to voting for their governments are not going to vote for policies that make the rich people richer and give corporations even more power over their lives, that reduce democracy and reduce civil rights. These are not good vessels for populism, in order to transform the government so that it will reward the rich with even more wealth.
The people who want to do that, the large corporations who orchestrate that kind of change, have to get rid of civil rights. The first civil right that they begin with is freedom of speech. They need to clamp down censorship because censorship is the most important right. And our country, we put it, number one, the First Amendment of the Constitution, because all the other rights depend on it. If a government can hide what it’s doing, it can get away with anything it wants.
If a corporation can lie to you and conceal information, if there’s no transparency in a democracy, you do not have a democracy. So, if you want to get rid of all the other rights, like freedom of assembly, which you are exercising today, some of you are exercising it at grave threats. Some of you will suffer, some of you will be jailed, some of you will suffer injuries.
But that is a basic right, the right to freedom of expression, the right to a jury trial, the right to freedom of religion, the right to privacy, the right to have governments don’t spy on you and keep your information.
All of those other rights can only be subverted if they begin imposing censorship, by being able to silence people who want to speak. So the coup d’état that we are all fighting today, is a coup d’etat that starts with a conspiracy between the government agencies and the big technology companies that Silicon Valley billionaires, people like Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and the people who run Google and Facebook and Pinterest and all of these other Silicon Valley corporations who are now in this conspiracy to make sure that we cannot talk about our grievances, we cannot say bad things about pharmaceutical products.
We can not question government policies that make no sense to us. And I’m going to say a few things about some of those government policies. Number one, I am not a conspiracy theorist. I follow the facts. I don’t know that the covid illness was laboratory generated in Wuhan. There is plenty of evidence that it was, but not enough evidence for me to say that it’s a fact. My question is, why don’t we know the answer to that?
Why is Tony Fauci not being asked that question? Why is President Trump not launching an investigation? or President Xi Jinping or the presidents of any of these countries? Saying, “Where did this come from?” Because we need to know that, but global citizens, this is the worst calamity in history. And nobody seems curious about where this actually comes from?
We know it didn’t come from a bat in the wet market in Wuhan.
And that story was a fable that now has no basis, in fact.
And we have Nobel laureates, and we have large institutions and investigative agencies and prosecutorial agencies are saying, ” We think it came from the Wuhan lab, and we think that it may have come from studies that were funded by Bill Gates and Tony Fauci. I don’t know if this is true. Why are our government officials not asking that as the number one question? Why instead of sending their police to suppress dissent, are they not sending the police to question people who may know the answer to that question. There are many other questions that I’d like to know the answer. Questions about masks. I’m very willing to accept if the masks work. Then I want to wear them, if they’re going to protect other people from transmissibility then I want to wear them, but the studies I have seen indicate that they do not work against viral transmission for the most part, there’s some that say they may work under limited circumstances. What I don’t want to be told is: they work and you’re going to wear them, and you’d better not ask questions about it. Most Americans and most of people on this planet, we want leadership but we don’t want bullying. And we know the difference between bullying and leadership. We want to know the truth about hydroxychloroquine, we want to know why are we spending $18 billion on vaccines and only $1.4 billion on therapeutic drugs. What is the sense of that? There are many, many other questions that we, in a democracy, have a right to have answered, without being called conspiracy theorists, without being vilified as “inconsiderate” or being bad “citizens”. Everybody who’s part of this demonstrations are people who are striving with their lives to become good citizens.
Now let me tell you what we need to do to win this battle, the only way we can win it is with democracy. We need to fight to win our democracy back, to reclaim our democracy from these villains who are stealing it from us. And you notice the people who are getting richest from this quarantine are the same people who are censoring criticism of the quarantine. Who’s becoming the richest? Jeffrey Bezos, $83 billion he’s made, and he owns Amazon, and he’s censoring books that criticize the quarantine. Zuckerburg, who owns Facebook, who’s made tens of billions of dollars by this quarantine and he is censoring information that is critical of the quarantine. He censors my Instagram, he censors my Facebook, my Twitter page is also censored. And all of these people are people who are making billions of dollars on the quarantine. And what I want to know is a simple question: Is the quarantine actually effective? You know we’ve had plenty of pandemics in the past. In 1969, we had a Hong Kong Flu pandemic that killed 100.000 people in the United States. It’s the equivalent of 200,000 people today, who are being killed by coronavirus. Did we go into lockdown? No. Did we wear masks? No. We went to Woodstock. We went to the Democratic Convention in Chicago and had huge crowds of people. Nobody was told to lockdown, and don’t see your girlfriend, and wear a mask and don’t go out of your house, and shutdown your business and bankrupt every business in the country.
Last year, there were 1.6 million people in the world who died from tuberculosis. We have 1.6 million people die every year from tuberculosis. We’re not wearing masks. We’re not on lockdown. What’s the difference between tuberculosis and coronavirus? Tuberculosis has a vaccine, and the vaccine costs about $3 and that’s why we’re not on lockdown because nobody is making $39 a vaccine, or $300 a vaccine, the way that Moderna, and AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson are making from this catastrophe, and that is the only reason that I can think of. And I’m happy if somebody tells me there’s another reason, but lets hear it. Don’t just shut me up. Don’t just tell me that I can’t debate.
Here’s what we need to do. We need to do exactly what you’re doing today. We need to come out on the street and we need to stick together. What the Big Tech villains and scoundrels, and Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeffrey Bezos, and Bill Gates, and Toni Fauci want you to do is they want us fighting with each other, they want blacks fighting against whites, they want Republicans fighting against Democrats, they want everybody polarized, they want everybody fragmented, cause they know if we all get together, we’re going to start questions, and those are questions that they can’t answer, “Why are you getting rich?” And “Why are we all getting poor?” And “What’s the difference between tuberculosis and coronvirus?” And “Why are we not wearing masks for tuberculosis but we are for the coronavirus?” And “Where did it all come from?” And all of those questions that we deserve an answer to that we’re not getting answers, we need to stick together. If you’re a Republican or a Democrat, stop talking about that. Stop identifying yourself.
The enemy is Big Tech, Big Data, Big oil, Big Pharma, the Medical Cartel, the government totalitarian elements that are trying to oppress us, that are trying to rob us from our liberties, of our democracy, of our freedom of thought, of our freedom of expression, of our freedom of assembly, and all of the freedoms that give dignity to humanity.
And the last thing that all of us need to do is we need to stay educated and informed. One of the things that I want to announce to you today is that Children’s Health Defense, my organization with the help of many of you who are in these crowds, is launching a journal, a daily journal, and we are going to weaponize information for you, we’re going to tell you what the newest science is. We’re going to take all the information that is censored everywhere else and we’re going to reprint it in our publication, and you can get that everyday, so, if you see something that is censored, we want to hear about it because we want to put it up. We are going to be the enemies of censorship. We are going to be the refuge, and we’re going to allow debate. We’re going to make sure it’s civil debate. We’re going to encourage people to be non-partisan. But we’re going to allow people to comment and have different opinions than us, we are not scared of debate, the way pharmaceutical companies and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeffrey Bezos, and Toni Fauci, are terrified of debate. We welcome debate, we want to hear if we’ve got a different opinion than me, I want to hear about it, and I want to see your science. And I want the public to hear us talking about it and debating about it because the free-flow of information, the cauldron of debate is the only thing that allows governments to develop rational policies in which self-governance will actually work and triumph.
You are on the front lines of the most important battle in history and it is the battle to save democracy and freedom and human liberty and human dignity from this totalitarian cartel that is trying to rob us simultaneously in every nation in the world of the rights that every human being is born with. So thank you for your courage, thank you for your commitment, so thank you for your brotherhood, and I can pledge to you, I will go down dying with my boots on, fighting side-by-side with all of you to make sure that we return these rights and preserve them from our children. And I will see all of you on the barricades, thank you.
Operation Warp Speed is Using a CIA-Linked Contractor to Keep Covid-19 Vaccine Contracts Secret
$6 billion in Covid-19 vaccine contracts awarded by Operation Warp Speed have been doled out by a secretive government contractor with deep ties to the CIA and DHS, escaping regulatory scrutiny and beyond the reach of FOIA requests.
Last Tuesday, while most Americans were distracted by the first US presidential debate, NPRquietly reported
that the US government’s Operation Warp Speed, a public-private
partnership launched by the Trump administration to rapidly develop and
distribute a Covid-19 vaccine, had taken the unusual step of awarding
contracts to vaccine companies, not directly, but through a secretive
defense contractor.
Though NPR named thedefense
contractor—South Carolina–based Advanced Technology International—they
declined to explore the company’s deep ties to the CIA, Department of
Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense and how ATI is helping
to lead those agencies’ efforts to militarize health care and create a
surveillance panopticon that not only monitors the world around us but
our physiology as well.
The “secret” vaccine contracts awarded
through ATI as part of Warp Speed total approximately $6 billion,
accounting for the majority of Operation Warp Speed’s $10 billion
budget. Both Paul Mango, Health and Human Services’ deputy chief of
staff for policy, and Robert Kadlec, HHS assistant secretary for
preparedness and response (ASPR), personally signed off on the
contracts.
Operation Warp Speed, which officially
involves the combined efforts of HHS and the military to deliver over
300 million Covid-19 vaccines to Americans by next January, is a highly secretive program dominated by military personnel, most of whom have no experience
in health care or vaccine production. The Trump administration has
often compared Warp Speed to the Manhattan Project, which produced the
atomic bomb.
Several very unsettling revelations about
the true nature and scope of Warp Speed, including the out-sized role
of ATI, began to emerge starting last Monday. Yet, most of this new
information was not covered by US news outlets due to the media frenzy
surrounding the first presidential debate and the subsequent news that
President Trump and several other politicians and White House officials
had tested positive for Covid-19.
NPR noted
that the decision to use a nongovernment intermediary like ATI to issue
the coronavirus vaccine contracts, as opposed to the government itself
directly awarding those contracts, allows Operation Warp Speed to
“bypass the regulatory oversight and transparency of traditional federal
contracting mechanisms.” This means that, among other things, the
vaccine contracts awarded under Operation Warp Speed are unlikely to be
publicly released in the near future, if ever.
The report from NPR also noted that the Congressional Research Service reported just last year
that using such intermediaries to award contracts can result in
“significant risks, including potentially diminished oversight and
exemption from laws and regulations designed to protect government and
taxpayer interests.” Proponents of this unorthodox way of issuing
contracts, known as “other transaction agreements” (OTAs), often argue
that utilizing this alternative method for awarding contracts
significantly hastens the process. However, the Congressional Research
Service also noted that the Department of Defense, which has been
increasingly relying on OTAs in recent years, has never tracked the
information necessary to determine if OTAs are actually faster than
traditional contracting methods. This suggests that claims regarding the
alleged “speed advantage” of OTAs are based on assumptions rather than
data-based evidence.
Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, Pfizer,
and Sanofi are among the companies that have received these covert
vaccine contracts through the OTA authorized by Operation Warp Speed and
managed by ATI. Many of these companies, particularly Johnson & Johnson, have been involved in scandals related to selling and marketing products they knew to be unsafe
to the public. This makes the lack of oversight and their exemption
from federal regulations (including safety regulations) an issue of
concern regarding their participation in Warp Speed.
This concern is further compounded by the fact that, on September 21, HHS Secretary Alex Azar told FOX Business
that all Operation Warp Speed vaccine manufacturers would be exempt
from liability for any damages their vaccines may cause and that those
who administer their vaccines would also not be liable for damages.
“Under the PREP Act, which is a provision in Congress, any treatment or
vaccine for purposes of a national emergency pandemic like this actually
comes with liability protection. Both the product as well as those who
administer it or provide it,” Azar stated during the televised
interview. The PREP Act that Azar referenced was originally signed into
law in 2005 but was updated this past April,
a few weeks before Operation Warp Speed was announced, so that vaccine
and therapeutic manufacturers “cannot be sued for money damages in
court” over injuries caused by medical countermeasures for Covid-19.
WASHINGTON,
DC – MARCH 02: Flanked by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence (L) and
Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, U.S. President Donald
Trump leads a meeting with the White House Coronavirus Task Force and
pharmaceutical executives in Cabinet Room of the White House on March 2,
2020 in Washington, DC. President Trump and his Coronavirus Task Force
team met with pharmaceutical companies representatives who are actively
working to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty
Images)
Notably, the architect
of that controversial April update to the PREP Act, HHS ASPR Kadlec, is
intimately involved in deciding who is awarded Operation Warp Speed
contracts.STAT News reported
last week, citing senior HHS officials, that Kadlec “personally signs
off” on every business agreement made on behalf of HHS for Operation
Warp Speed. In addition to his past activities in lobbying for intelligence and defense contractors, Kadlec also previously worked as a lobbyist for the scandal-ridden biodefense company Emergent Biosolutions,
which is also a major player in Operation Warp Speed as well as the
manufacturer of the controversial anthrax vaccine BioThrax.
Despite top HHS officials allegedly overseeing every single one of these business agreements, NPR was told
by HHS that the department has “no records” of the $1.6 billion
Operation Warp Speed contract with Novavax, which was awarded through
ATI. This is a strange response given that HHS is supposedly the lead
agency overseeing Operation Warp Speed, yet they somehow lack a copy of a
massive vaccine contract at the heart of the operation. NPR also asked the DoD for a copy of the Novavax contract and have yet to receive a response.
At a press conference in mid-September, Lt. Gen. Paul Ostrowski, a key figure in Operation Warp Speed, told reporters:
“With respect to the contracts, the contracts are between ourselves,
the United States government and private entities, and they are
releasable to an extent. Obviously everything cannot be released, but
they are releasable to an extent and they will be made available at some
point in time.” Ostrowski declined to elaborate on when that “point in
time” would be.
Also odd is that ATI told NPR that,
at the time they were awarding these secretive vaccine contracts, it
was never explicitly told by the Department of Defense that these
contracts were part of Operation Warp Speed, with a former ATI executive
describing that key fact as “invisible” to the company.
Spooks and Skunkworks
Advanced Technology International (ATI)
is a nonprofit company that organizes consortia of public, private, and
academic organizations that perform research and development (R&D)
on behalf of the US government. ATI mostly manages R&D consortia for
the Department of Defense for things like weapons manufacturing, metal
casting and forging, ship production, and technology aimed at countering
so-called weapons of mass destruction. They also manage the Border Security Technology Consortium (BSTC) for the Department of Homeland Security, primarily surveillance technology companies, among other DHS research projects.
ATI only currently manages two consortia that have any relationship to health care, the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium
(MTEC) and the Medical CBRN Defense Consortium (MCDC). The MTEC,
operating on behalf of the US Army Medical Research and Development
Command, aims to “accelerate the development of revolutionary medical solutions,” which include gene editing, nanotechnology, “telehealth solutions,” artificial limbs, and brain implants. They are also currently developing a wearable device that would diagnose individuals with Covid-19 before symptoms appear.
The other ATI-managed “health-care” consortia, the MCDC, is focused on
“advanced development efforts to support the Department of Defense’s
(DoD) medical pharmaceutical and diagnostic requirements to counter
Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) threat agents.”
They are specifically involved in
“enabling prototype technologies for therapeutic medical
countermeasures targeting viral, bacterial and biological toxin targets
of interest to the DoD,” including the development of vaccines. ATI told NPR that theywere
contacted by the DoD sometime between March and April, before Warp
Speed was announced in May, and asked to issue requests for proposals
related to Covid-19 from MCDC members.
MCDC members include Emergent Biosolutions as well as DoD/CIA contractor Battelle Memorial Institute, with both of those companies having unsettling ties
to the 2001 anthrax attacks. Another member of the MCDC is CIA/NSA
contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and weapons manufacturer General
Dynamics. MCDC’s membership has expanded significantly following ATI’s
acquisition by Analytic Services Inc. (ANSER), the principal sponsor of the Dark Winter bioterror simulation, with eighteen new members added just three months after the acquisition had concluded.
In addition, there is considerable
overlap between the MCDC and the vaccine companies that have been
awarded secretive contracts through ATI as part of Operation Warp Speed.
Sanofi, Novavax, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson are all MCDC members
as well as recipients of Warp Speed vaccine contracts. In addition,
Emergent Biosolutions, another MCDC member, was awarded a major Warp Speed contract
to manufacture Covid-19 vaccines, but that contract was awarded through
HHS Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), not
ATI.
ANSER’s Rise, Its Fall, and Its Saving Grace
In February 2017, ATI was acquired by
Analytic Services Inc. ANSER, like ATI, manages R&D projects for
the federal government, historically for DHS, with ANSER being the
long-time manager of one of the two DHS federally funded research and
development centers. However, ANSER also provides services to the DoD,
NASA, the State Department, and the US intelligence community.
ANSER was originally founded as a
spin-off from the RAND Corporation in the late 1950s, but it became a
much larger part of government operations, particularly in the realm of
Homeland Security, after Ruth David became its president and CEO in
1998. Prior to becoming ANSER’s CEO, David had been the deputy director for science and technology at the CIA, where, among other things, she laid the groundwork
for what would become In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm
responsible for the rise of several Silicon Valley behemoths such as
Google and Palantir. David led ANSER until 2015. After David took
charge, ANSER became an early leader
in promoting the use of biometric and facial recognition software by US
law enforcement agencies and became a key driver in pivoting the
government toward “homeland defense” and “homeland security” in the
years leading up to the events of September 11, 2001.
As journalist Margie Burns noted in a 2002 article,
the rise of “homeland defense” as a centerpiece of US government
policy, including the push to create a new “homeland security” agency,
began with former State Department official Richard Armitage’s alleged
coining of the term in 1997 in a National Defense Policy document. In
the years that followed, this pivot toward seeing the American homeland
as a future battlefield was heavily promoted by a web of media outlets
owned by South Korean cult leader and CIA assetSun Myong Moon, including the Washington Times, Insight Magazine, and UPI. Allpublished
numerous articles either penned by ANSER analysts or that heavily cited
ANSER reports and employees regarding the need for a greatly expanded
“homeland security” apparatus.
Lt.
Gen. Paul A. Ostrowski, deputy commander at Army Futures Command under
commanding general Mike Murray. (Photo by Catherine DeRan/U.S. Army)
In October 1999, at David’s behest, ANSER
created the Institute for Homeland Security (ANSER-IHS). Though fully
funded and established at that time, but for reasons still unclear, the
ANSER-IHS was not formally launched until April 2001. The Institute’s
first director was Randall Larsen, who was at that time—and still is
today—a close associate
of current HHS ASPR Robert Kadlec. Though ANSER has never explained the
reason behind the lengthy delay in officially launching ANSER-IHS, it
is possible that the timing was related to the introduction of H.R.1158
in March 2001. That bill called for the creation of the National
Homeland Security Agency, which was the foundation of the later
Department of Homeland Security.
One month after ANSER-IHS was created, Insight Magazine published an article in May 2001 entitled “Preparing for the Next Pearl Harbor,”
which heavily cited ANSER and its Institute for Homeland Security as
being among “the nation’s top experts” in warning that a terrorist
attack on the US mainland was imminent. It also stated that “the first
responders on tomorrow’s battlefield won’t be soldiers, but city
ambulance workers and small-town firefighters.”
The following month, ANSER-IHS cohosted the Dark Winter exercise, with two top ANSER-IHS officials, Mark DeMier and Randall Larsen, cowriting
the exercise with Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins
Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies (now the Johns Hopkins Center
for Health Security). O’Toole, at the time, was on the ANSER-IHS board of advisers.
As previously detailed in the Engineering Contagion series,
several of those involved in Dark Winter had foreknowledge of the 2001
anthrax attacks, and Dark Winter itself originated what became the
initial, yet false, narrative for those attacks—that
Iraq and Al Qaeda were working together to conduct acts of bioterrorism
on US soil. However, the anthrax used in the attacks was quickly
determined to have either originated from a US military lab or a US
defense contractor.
ANSER’s convenient gamble that the US
government would imminently pivot toward homeland security soon after
April 2001 paid off tremendously. Thanks largely to the fear stoked by
9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks, the Department of Homeland Security
was created, and ANSER-IHS quickly became the first government think
tank, that is, federally funded research and development center.
Not long after its formal creation as an
agency, DHS established its Science and Technology (S & T)
Directorate in 2003 with the mission “to protect the homeland by
providing . . . officials with state-of-the-art technology.” DHS later announced
in 2004 that it had “selected [ANSER] to operate the Homeland Security
Institute . . . [f]ollowing a full and open competition procurement
process conducted by [DHS] Science and Technology.” This is despite this
very institute having already been funded and established by ANSER in
1999 and then launched in 2001.
From 2009 to 2013, the head of DHS
Science and Technology Directorate was Dark Winter coauthor and
bioterror alarmist Tara O’Toole, who had long-standing, close ties to
ANSER-IHS, as previously mentioned. With O’Toole at the helm, DHS focused on
“more robust public-private sector partnerships” and “increasing the
budget for innovative, longer-term technology projects,” such as those
overseen by ANSER on the behalf of DHS. She also made it her mission to
model the S & T Directorate more closely after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
During her tenure, DHS also claimed to be “unaware”
of how the department’s multibillion dollar research expenditures were
being used, suggesting a lack of oversight in the millions of dollars
DHS S & T was funneling to the ANSER-run research center and the
other DHS research center, which is run by the equally shady MITRE Corporation.
Unexpectedly for ANSER, DHS declined to renew
ANSER’s federally funded research and development center contract in
October 2016. They instead awarded that contract to the RAND
Corporation, which created a new research and development center with “a
different set of focus areas, aligned more closely with current DHS
priorities.” ANSER’s apparent plans for restructuring following the loss
of this critical contract included its decision to acquire ATI, which
took place just a few months later in February 2017.
The acquisition of ATI gave ANSER access
to the key OTA research consortia that ATI manages, ensuring that
ANSER’s board of former intelligence officials, military officers, and
defense-industry executives continued to wield considerable influence
over the direction of government-funded research projects. Per the press release,
the acquisition was aimed at combining ANSER’s “government
problem-solving heritage with ATI’s technical expertise,” allowing ANSER
to continue to execute “thought leadership independent of commercial
influences” over the “important defense technology developments” being
overseen by ATI. Thus, whatever decisions are being made by ATI with
respect to these secretive Operation Warp Speed vaccine contracts, it is
ultimately ANSER that is signing off on them.
Mess Hall
Given that Operation Warp Speed’s
official purpose is to use taxpayer funds to produce, accelerate, and
distribute a medical treatment (i. e., vaccine) to Americans, there is
no reason for such extreme secrecy and also no reason for the excessive
role of the military and secretive contractors like ATI and ANSER in the
execution of this “public health” effort.
While the officially stated purpose of
Warp Speed makes the extreme secrecy involved seem not just unnecessary
but absurd, it is worth noting that several recent revelations regarding
Warp Speed’s structure, strategy, and execution strongly suggest that
the reason for the operation’s covert nature is because its scope goes
well beyond its publicly stated purpose.
For instance, Stat News noted last week that Operation Warp Speed “looks
a lot more like a military operation than a science project,” adding
that “roughly 60 military officials—including at least four generals—are
involved in the leadership of Operation Warp Speed, many of whom have
never worked in health care or vaccine development.” That report also
pointed out that “just 29 of the roughly 90 leaders on the chart aren’t
employed by the Department of Defense.”
Though the military’s initial
justification for playing such a major role in Warp Speed was related to
its “expertise” in logistics and supply chains, the recent release of
the operation’s vaccine distribution strategy makes no direct mention of
the military’s role in those aspects of Warp Speed. So noticeable was
the disconnect that, soon after the release of the official distribution
strategy, the Department of Defense “clarified” the military’s role in
the operation by publishing an interview
on its website with Lt. Gen. Ostrowski, who is leading Warp Speed’s
efforts to supply, produce, and distribute vaccines. Per Ostrowski, the
reason the military is playing such an outsize role in Warp Speed is
because of the military’s “program management and contracting expertise.”
Yet, as this article has shown, Warp
Speed contracts are being funneled through secretive contractors to
avoid scrutiny and are apparently not being made available to HHS, the
civilian agency supposedly “co-leading” Warp Speed alongside the
military.
Such examples of extreme secrecy and
conflicting statements appear to be just scratching the surface of what
Operation Warp Speed truly aims to accomplish. An upcoming series of
investigative reports produced by this author in collaboration with Ryan
Cristián and Derrick Broze of The Last American Vagabond will
explore in depth this operation and the individuals leading it in order
to expose Operation Warp Speed as the most clandestine, and arguably
most dangerous, US military operation in decades. Unlike such
well-funded and secretive military operations of years past, this one is
aimed directly at the American people.
Death, Money, and the Dueling Frauds: Trump and Biden
When The New York Times and CNN recently referred
to the staged town hall spectacles of Biden and Trump as dueling events,
they inadvertently revealed the truth that U.S. presidential elections
are America’s favorite movie and that the corporate media is in the
entertainment business.
While it is ludicrous to imagine these tottering actors crossing
swords in tights, their skirmishes in suits and ties are good for a few
laughs, if you have the stomach to watch them. Only people who still
believe in professional wrestling would think these clowns don’t work
for the same bosses – the Umbrella People, aka the power elites, the
national security state, etc., who own the country and choose their
stooges to represent their interests in the White House.
I much prefer Mel Brooks, a genuinely funny guy.
The columnist Russell Baker once said the purpose of such political
entertainment is to “provide a manageably small cast for a national
sitcom, or soap opera, or docudrama, making it easy for media people to
persuade themselves they are covering the news while mostly just
entertaining us.”
As for debates and town hall farces in television prime time, the
witty Baker said that “the charm of television entertainment is its
ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental
distraction.”
Now let’s proceed to the dark side, where the sardonic screams of laughter dissolve into tears.
For such entertainment serves a devious distracting purpose: to
conceal the nature of social evil and the driving forces behind American
politics today. It is not particularly complicated unless the
syllogism – All cats die/Socrates is dead/ therefore Socrates is a cat –
rings true.
Then it’s an impossible conundrum.
We are not cats or Socrates, as far as I know. But like them, we
will also die. Everyone knows this, but the thought of death is not
particularly “have-a-nice-dayish,” so people deny it as much as possible
in a host of ways. Most people prefer life over death, and when death
does approach and can no longer be denied, most hope for immortality in
some way, shape, or form.
Yes, there are those who assert this isn’t true for them, and there
is no reason to doubt their sincerity. There are philosophical arguments
to support their position, such as that of the Roman poet Lucretius in
his famous poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things).
But I would maintain with the great psychoanalyst Rollo May that all
such naturalistic efforts, including Lucretius’s, to explain away human
anxiety rooted in death, founder on the human emotions of pity, grief,
love, and loneliness. Rational explanations take us only so far. In
their efforts to deny the human condition and dismiss the spiritual
dimension, the irrational, and the daimonic, they open the door to
madness, as is happening today with the push by the world’s economic
elite to convince people that they are machines and that their machine
dreams will conquer death.
For those who love life, it seems axiomatic to me that some form of
perpetuation and redemption of an individual’s life in the face and fear
of death is widely desired. This can take many forms: a literal
afterlife, fame, heirs, monuments, money, children, etc. History is
quite clear that people have always sought some way of transcending
their physical fates.
This was aptly noted by Graham Greene, the English novelist, when, as
an old man approaching death, he was asked if he was disappointed at
not receiving the Nobel Prize, and he said no, since he was hoping for a
greater prize.
In his important book, The Denial of Death (Pulitzer Prize 1974 for general non-fiction), the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, puts it succinctly:
Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his
own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering
majesty, and yet goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly
and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.
Faced with such an impossible situation, then, overwhelmed from
childhood with a sense of one’s own ultimate physical powerlessness but
being symbolic creatures as well as physical ones, the normal person
learns to repress the terror of death by building various defenses that
allow one to believe that he ultimately controls his death. One’s
natural impotence is then hidden within “ the vital lie of character”;
one lives within the manageable social world that helps one blot out
existential awareness by offering various social games and cultural
symbols, agreed forms of madness that narcotize the fear. One learns to
adjust. The aim is to cut life down to manageable proportions,
domesticate terror, and trust in the cultural and social authorities for
protection and reassurance. Obedience is key.
Listen to Big Daddy and he will rescue you , especially when he first
tells you that Mr. Pumpkin Head is coming to get you unless you run
into his protective embrace.
These days, it’s Halloween all year round in the land of the free and
the home of the brave where the fear of death is handed out like
poisoned candy and Big Daddy waits at the door disguised as everyone’s
benevolent grandfather. To be treated, you must be masked. That is his
trick. “Stay well,” he mutters, after he drops a dollop of sweet fear
into your bag and cackles behind his face.
Everywhere you look these days, people are doubly masked. The paper
kind and by definition, since the the word person, being derived from
the Latin, persona, means mask, while there is another Latin word, larva, that also means mask or ghost or evil spirit. Clearly there is a dance contest underway, a danse macabre. And who will win nobody knows.
“Every conflict over truth,” wrote the psychoanalyst Otto Rank, “ is
in the last analysis just the same old struggle over … immortality.”
This is exactly what is going on now with the fierce disagreements over Covid-19.
Like the attacks of September 11, 2001, the anthrax attacks, the
ginning up of terrorism fear with Homeland “Security’s” color-coded
warning system, the lies about weapons of mass-destruction, and the
coronavirus early warning systems, people have adopted positions upon
which they stake their psychological lives. To admit you were snookered
is a little death that is hard to swallow.
We are being subjected to mind-control on a vast scale, the continual
pumping up of the fear of death to control the population. Americans
have been living in an atmosphere of dread for almost twenty years.
It’s so old and so obvious but cuts so deep it works like a charm. “You
don’t want to die, do you, so come here into Big Daddy’s arms.”
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell writes that “The
Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.” It is a famous quote that
is not true when taken out of context. The Umbrella People and their
lackeys don’t seek power entirely for its own sake. They have a larger
agenda: immortality.
If one reads Orwell carefully, one comes upon a key passage that
clarifies the previous quote. The evil O’Brien, the torturer and member
of the Inner Party who poses as a member of the resistance to Big
Brother (sound familiar?), asks his victim Winston Smith to reverse the
slogan from “Freedom is Slavery” to Slavery is Freedom:
Alone – free – the human being is always defeated. It
must be so, because every human being is destined to die, which is the
greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter
submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself
in the Party so that he is the Party, then he will be
all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that
power is power over human beings. Over the body – but, above all, over
the mind. Power over matter – external reality as you would call it –
is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.
All power is fundamentally power to deny mortality. This is true
whether it is the power of the state or church. And it is always sacred
power.
Many often ask why do the super-rich and powerful always want more.
It’s simple. They wish to transcend their pre-existing human mortality
and become gods – immortals. They stupidly believe that if they can
lord it over others, kill, dominate, achieve status, become
billionaires, presidents, magnates, celebrities, etc., they will somehow
live in some weird forever.
In a process that has spanned at least a hundred and fifty years or
so, our traditional cultural/religious symbol systems have been
radically undermined, most momentously by the Faustian creation of Lord
Nuke. All forms of symbolic immortality (theological, biological,
creative, natural, and experiential) that formerly provided a sense of
continuity have been severely threatened. This is the haunting specter
lurking in the background of life today.
What is death? How to defeat or transcend it? How to affirm life in the face of death?
One paradoxical way that political leaders do this is by killing.
Followers who accede to such killing join their leaders, not simply to
see others dead, but to acquire power over death itself – to kill their
own deaths. It is perverse of course, and is summed up in the saying to
love the bomb joyously, to experience the nightmare of oblivion as
ecstasy. Isn’t this what the philosophy of voting for the lesser of two
evil is about? At least he will be our killer. Our evil killer, but
not as bad as yours. You lose.
I have read that there is a painting still visible at the entrance to
a house in ruined Pompeii that tells us much about power and wealth. It
perfectly symbolizes the meaning of the economic gap between the
super-rich – e.g. those behind the World Economic Forum, the CIA, the
presidential candidates, the corporate media – and the rest of us. It
pictures a man weighing his penis on a scale of gold coins. Gold, God,
wealth, and power. It’s an old story.
Today, however, there is a difference, for the spirit of nihilism has
grown as belief in the spiritual dimension and God has diminished
dramatically. Money or gold, wealth in all its forms, is today’s
foremost immortality symbol, a sign that one is powerful and can conquer
death. What else are Trump’s gold-emblazoned Tower and hair, and
Biden’s boastfully admitted threat to withhold one billion dollars from
Ukraine unless they fire the prosecutor investigating his son, Hunter.
The greasing of palms, bribery, tax theft, etc. – par for the course in a
corrupt society run by thieves and criminals.
Becker says of this wealth obsession:
The only hint we get of the cultural repression seeping
through is that even dedicated financiers wash their hands after
handling money. The victory over death is a fantasy that cannot be
fully believed in; money doesn’t entirely banish feces [decay and death
that is of course defeated with toilet paper as Covid-19 has proven],
and so the threat of germs and vulnerability in the very process of
securing immortality.
Pseudo immortality.
Enter Covid-19. Like the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is death
writ large. An insidious terrorist threat. Invisible, sneaky, ready to
pounce. Fear and trembling. So-called surprise attacks that were
preceded by simulations and live drills. Numerous parallels, too many
to mention. Let’s not. Have a nice day! Stay safe!
So what do the super-rich controllers want now? What are the World
Economic Forum’s Claus Schwab, Google and the Defense Department’s Eric
Schmidt, Bill Gates, Ray Kurzweil of Google and “The Singularity,” et
al. pushing now that Covid-19 has so many cowering in fear?
These people have realized that the thing that their money and power
must do is to create a world where trans-humanism must triumph and
people of flesh and blood must be induced and forced to become the
machines they have been told they are. If you doubt this is underway,
research the World Economic Forum’s agenda, see what the Great Reset is
about, the Build Back Better slogans, the massive push to create on-line
existence for everyone, etc. As a recent ad I saw says: “The world is
going digital.”
The goal of these mad technocratic elites is to create a fabricated
reality where the visible world becomes nearly meaningless once the
screen world becomes people’s “window on the world.” An electronic
nothingness to replace reality as people in the industrialized countries
gleefully embrace digital wraparound apparitions and the poor and
vulnerable of this world suffer and die out of sight and out of mind. It
is the fundamental seismic shift of our era and perhaps the greatest
propaganda operation ever undertaken. A sort of end-times desperate
gambit.
And “it just so happens” to revolve around the use of death fear to accomplish its goals.
But for the elites, there will be no death. For having realized that
their stolen wealth and power can only take them so far, and they too
will become food for worms, they have commandeered science and medicine
to undertake their immortality projects. If medicine fails to find for
them the secret of immortality, then computer science and Artificial
Intelligence will, and they will be uploaded into computers and live
forever in their beloved cyberspace. Digital immortality is not a joke
for these people – see Kurzweil’s (the director of engineering at
Google) “The Singularity,” etc. – for they are actually insane but hold
key positions throughout the computer and biotechnology industries.
Check where the super rich invest their money to confirm this. None of
it is secret.
Having heeded Russell Baker’s words about television offering no
mental distraction between dinner and bedtime, I took to my crib early,
knowing Tweedledee and Tweedledum would be dueling again, this time in
what they humorously called a debate. I was surrounded by my stuffed
animals that protected me and I slept safe and sound.
Upon awakening, I read that the gladiators had exchanged blows but
that both were left standing for the big showdown on November 3. I also
noticed that each had used the words “dark winter” in reference to
Covid-19. Biden said one was coming and Trump said he didn’t know.
Neither, of course, spoke of the Dark Winter Exercise, a senior level
war game conducted on June 22-23, 2001, about a biological attack, a
smallpox outbreak, the public health response, the lack of vaccines, the
need for quarantine and isolation, the restriction of civil liberties,
and the role of the Defense Department and the military in the response.
Nor did they speak of anthrax attacks, but the Canadian researcher, Graeme MacQueen, will here fill you in on both, in case you don’t know. Maybe the boys just forgot.
I am sure they didn’t talk about the elements of Trump’s “Operation
Warp Speed,” but if you wish to understand how we are being gamed,
Whitney Webb will tell you here.
Was there any mention of the Russians? I haven’t heard. They are
always a kind of a solution. As my friend Joe Green has said:
All dissenting opinions are Russian. I think Socrates said that. I’m paraphrasing.
Let's revisit the pandemic projection chart I prepared on February 2, 2020, nine days
after authorities publicly acknowledged the Covid virus outbreak in China. Wave 2
shown on the chart is now underway with a vengeance and next up is Global Depression.
This projection was based on two well-known dynamics:
1. History offers a basic template for viral pandemics in which the initial wave dies back in
summer and then re-ignites in a second larger Wave 2 in autumn and winter.
2. Humanity's default responses to novel crises: denial, fantasy, magical thinking and manipulating
data to support a simplistic, emotionally satisfying ideological position.
Each of these predictable dynamics has manifested in all their perverse glory.
A number of cognitive/logical errors are manifesting as well.
False binaries i.e. false perceptions of the situation being either/or.
For example: you get the virus and either recover or die. We only count those two options.
This false binary conveniently ignores:
A. the third category--you get the virus and
become a long-hauler (a.k.a. Long Covid) who is debilitated for months by exhaustion
and other post-viral conditions;
(Long COVID slide presentation)
B. the fourth category--you get the virus and recover quickly but suffer major organ damage that
isn't immediately visible/symptomatic;
C. the fifth category--you get the virus, recover, assume you're immune forever and then
contract the virus again some months later--only this time the consequences are far more
severe.
And so on. The same holds true for ideological false binaries. Those holding binary
ideological positions--you are either With Me or With The Wrong Side--spend their time
and energy cherry-picking and manipulating data so it supports their pre-selected ideological
world view.
Those of us who simply want unmolested data so we can decide for ourselves have no recourse,
as the ideologically motivated have poisoned the data (don't test don't tell, under-reporting,
over-reporting, ignoring lag times in reporting, suppressing data, requiring data be reported
to privately owned corporations rather than government agencies, discounting good data in
favor of bogus data that reaches the "right" conclusion, and so on) in an endless profusion
of manipulation for political purposes.
As with China's Communist leadership, if data that can't be gamed or manipulated enters
the public domain, it's immediately suppressed. Skeptics of China's permanently miraculous
"growth" statistics discovered electrical consumption figures did not reflect the miraculous
"growth" in the officially sanctioned statistics, and so China moved to suppress this
inconveniently factual data so it would not longer be available.
We're seeing the same politicization of data in the U.S. We're now down to public-health
data collection that hasn't yet been suppressed or manipulated: hospital admissions and
death certificates. Authorities suppressing Covid-related deaths can report any cause of
death they want, but the peak of deaths far above the statistical norm tells us an important
fact despite the suppression/obfuscation.
Confusing categories, correlations, causes and conclusions. It's widely held that
the Covid pandemic is fundamentally a power-grab by elites. Fair enough; crises
have long been the excuse given for "temporary emergency measures" that become permanent
power-grabs.
But to accept that the pandemic is the cover for a power-grab by elites does not mean the
Covid virus is a harmless chimera. The virus can be dangerous in ways that aren't measured
by counting deaths and the pandemic can still be the excuse for "emergency powers" becoming
permanent, i.e. a power grab. One conclusion (a power-grab) does not require a second completely
different conclusion (the virus is not dangerous to anyone under the age of 70 and
therefore it's no big deal).
The assumption that there's a correlation between an ideological position and wearing a mask
(or other behavior) is ungrounded. An individual can reach conclusions outside rigid
ideological boundaries.
Personally, I found this study of which passengers caught the virus on a bus in China
useful in my own decision-making:
Coronavirus can travel twice as far as official 'safe distance' and
stay in air for 30 minutes.
The most consequential falsity in my view is the belief that the global economy was
robust before the pandemic and it will revert to that robustness once we:
get a vaccine, end the lockdowns, seek herd immunity, etc. etc.
The global economy was teetering on the edge of recession and financial implosion long
before the pandemic appeared. Ending the pandemic cannot restore an illusion of
"growth" that masked a hollowed out, fragile, brittle global economy.
The Global Depression was baked in long before the pandemic. All the pandemic did
was kick out the last rotten 2X4s holding up the fading facade of "growth."
As the global tsunami of Wave 2 sweeps away the sandcastles of denial, fantasy
and magical thinking, it's worth recalling that the Covid-19 virus has four features
that make it difficult to control:
1. It is highly contagious.
2. Carriers with no symptoms can infect others.
3. A significant percentage of older / compromised patients develop severe symptoms that
require hospitalization.
4. Once the healthcare system is overwhelmed,
the system cannot provide care to everyone who needs it. As a result, the death rate rises
the moment the healthcare system is overwhelmed / breaks down.
We've drawn a gravely false conclusion from central bank money-printing and technology:
we now assume that central banks can print up as much money as we need to buy whatever
we need in whatever quantity we need. The magic of technology essentially guarantees that
there will always be a substitute, "cure" or "solution" available whenever we need one.
Unfortunately, central banks can't "print" experienced doctors or nurses. When the
front line of healthcare workers is depleted by illness and burnout, there are no substitutes
or Big Tech robots-to-the-rescue. The healthcare system we've optimized for "creating
shareholder value" (i.e. unlimited greed pathologically pursued by any means available)
will break down and that will be that.
Central banks can't "print" creditworthy borrowers, solvent companies, real-world
collateral, risk-free "investing," oil, jobs, trust in failed institutions, social
cohesion or anything else of importance that is now scarce.
The belief that central banks printing currency can "buy/fix" everything that's broken, lost or
scarce is the ultimate in denial, fantasy and magical thinking. All that was
unsustainably fragile, corrupt and brittle is unraveling, and thinking that ending the
lockdowns, approving a vaccine, etc. will stave off causality is the supreme indulgence
in denial, fantasy and magical thinking.
It's pretty much universally recognized that authorities use crises to impose "emergency
powers" that become permanent. This erosion of civil and economic liberties is always
sold as "necessary for your own good." Of course the accretion of ever greater power in the
hands of the few is for our own good. How could it be otherwise? (Irony off)
In this environment of "emergency powers", it's almost refreshing to find a power grab so blatant that
its sheer boldness boggles the mind. I'm talking about the Federal Reserve's FedNow,
a proposed system of instant payments and digital dollars.
The rationale for the system is two-fold: The Fed sees the current ACH (automatic
clearing house) payment system used by banks as too slow and limited. Payments need
to be instantaneous and there must be a way to reach unbanked households, the roughly
9 million U.S. households without a bank account. In the current system, stimulus payments
couldn't reach these households quickly.
The solution is a new payment system in which every household and business in the nation would
have an account at FedNow, so the Fed can transfer funds directly and instantaneously into
every household account (and presumably every business that the Fed has chosen to fund).
The second part of FedNow is the creation of a digital dollar which is just
like the existing dollar with one tiny little difference: unlike cash (for example,
a $20 bill), the digital dollars won't be anonymous. Each newly created digital dollar will
be trackable.
The Fed's rationale is that panic-hoarding of coins and cash by households is a problem, as
the Treasury has to go to a lot of trouble to mint more coins and print more cash. The
FedNow digital dollars will be quick and easy to create and distribute--and, ahem,
track.
Do you see the monstrous power grabs this we're-here-to-help system would institute?
1. The power to borrow and distribute money that is currently reserved for the elected
representatives in Congress would be bypassed by FedNow. Why wait around for
slow, corrupt Congress to agree on stimulus, Universal Basic Income (UBI), etc.? With
FedNow, the Fed can create trillions out of thin air and distribute the dough to
households without any Congressional approval.
What's interesting about this is that Congress has no power to stop the Fed from printing
endless trillions and distributing the money however the Fed chooses. As an independent
quasi-public agency, intended to be apolitical and outside the reach of corrupt politicos,
the Fed is free to create and distribute as much new digital currency as it sees fit.
With FedNow, Congress has lost the government's monopoly power to distribute funds.
Congress can still borrow and spend money, of course, but the citizenry's elected officials
no longer have the monopoly granted by the Constitution.
2. The anonymity of the nation's money will be lost to the Fed's digital dollars.
Perhaps the Fed will declare that only those who wear their underwear outside their clothing
will avoid penalties. (Referencing the 1970s film Bananas.) Who's to say what the Fed
will track, and for what purposes? The Fed, that's who.
There's a whiff of desperation in these FedNow power grabs. It's possible that
the Fed has concluded that the elected legislative branch of government is now so thoroughly
corrupt and dysfunctional that the Fed is forced to save the day, so to speak, by grabbing
the power to create and distribute endless trillions to keep the increasingly impoverished
and powerless citizenry from rebelling against the status quo.
The irony of course is that the primary source of the impoverishment of soaring inequality
is the Fed itself, as the Fed's "permanent emergency powers" of sluicing trillions
in free money for financiers has goosed the wealth of the top 0.1% while leaving 95%
of the citizenry worse off as wage stagnation and rising inflation has eroded the
standard of living / purchasing power of labor.
It's a nice trick, isn't it? First the Fed creates the inequality that makes rebellion
inevitable and then it rides to the rescue with a power grab that nullifies the monopoly
over governmental allocation of money the Constitution grants to Congress, and it destroys
the anonymity of the "free money" it plans to distribute in the ultimate bread and circuses.
Clearly, the Fed reckons the public is foolish enough to believe the Fed's
money will actually be "free." Check out what you've lost before declaring anything "free."
SC stands for Storm Coming. Humanity has created an ever growing tempest of myriad converging difficulties and realistically unsolvable complexities. The architecture of the human mind and its manner of functioning meant we would always go down this increasingly troubled path as a species. My postings here are a collection of articles on the long list of looming dire issues. I have been posting SC for a few years at another website. To find earlier SC postings go to :
http://deepcreekhotsprings.net/dchs/forum/list.php?1 , then look for the SC postings in the forum list. To access older SC threads there go back in the older pages of the forum list to SC84 posted in January 2009. SC84 through SC1 ( titled " A storm is coming ) can be viewed at that forum. Use this blog for SC85 to current SC postings. I will be adding further updated info here at my Hotspringswizard blog as time permits.
My email:
hotspringswizard@hotmail.com
