Tuesday, January 31, 2023

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-war-against-us/

The War Against Us

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy ”

The question you might ask these days: how did we weaponize everything in American life against ourselves? Can you name an institution that is not at war with the people of this land? The exact mechanisms for all that bad faith stand in plain sight these days, and persons responsible can be easily identified. What’s missing are discernible motives. For now, it just looks like the greatest collective act of ass-covering in history.

     It’s pretty clear, for instance, that all the criminal misconduct in the FBI / DOJ — continuing to this moment — emanates from the years-long effort to cover up the seditious campaign to nullify Donald Trump starting well before Nov. 8, 2016. All the players in the agencies, and their news media accomplices, stand to lose at least their reputations, if the public cared about how dishonestly they acted. Many of those still working would lose their jobs and their livelihoods too, and quite a few would lose their freedom in prison. So, their motive to keep up the skullduggery is simple self-preservation.

     The Covid-19 pandemic looks like a pretty large-scale racketeering operation gone awry with plenty to hide. You have the reckless, symbiotic relations between the US public health bureaucracy and the pharmaceutical companies, and tons of money at stake, plus the colossal ego of hapless Dr. Anthony Fauci wishing to pose as an historic world-saver, another Louis Pasteur or Alexander Fleming. And then you have the amazingly foolish act of imposing an untested, dangerous “vaccine” on the world, and years of lying and covering-up its repercussions of injury and death. And then the opaque and nefarious roles of other actors in the story ranging from the CCP to the WEF to the Bill Gates and George Soros empires of money in what looks like genocide.

     It’s harder to unpack the enigma of the obviously unfit “Joe Biden” getting installed in the White House. My guess: the Obama claque behind him knew that “JB” was easily manipulable, and that his lame rivals, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Liz Warren, and especially the proud socialist Bernie Sanders, could not be counted on to do exactly what they were told. The Obama claque especially needed a president to appoint agency heads who would cover-up its creation of an Intel Community Frankenstein, and all that monster has inflicted on the American public.

     Of course, the main device the claque had for pulling “Joe Biden’s” strings was the flagrant record of his many years of bribery and treason. The major effort to cover-up all that criminality was the DOJ and FBI’s suppression since 2019 of the Hunter Biden laptop, and the most stunning upshot was that the incendiary evidence of bribery and treason came out anyway, because so many copies of the laptop’s hard-drive got distributed. And absolutely nothing was ever done about it, nor about the actual persons — Christopher Wray, William Barr, and Merrick Garland — who worked to squash it, making themselves accomplices to ongoing bribery and treason.

      All this criminal misconduct is connected in a foul matrix of lawbreaking. The fact-patterns are well-established. Dozens of excellent books have catalogued the misdeed of RussiaGate and scores of websites daily dissect the shady intrigues around the “vaccine” crusade. The infamies of gross election interference have been systematically laid-out in the Twitter Files of the past two months. Many books, published essays, and videos substantiate the reality of massive ballot fraud in 2020 and 2022, including the felonious role of Mark Zuckerberg’s front org, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, and the election law manipulations of Lawfare goblin Marc Elias.

      There’s an understandable wish that upcoming hearings in Congress will lead to a reckoning for all of this. To banish consequence from public life, as we have done, is a pretty grave insult to nature, but who can tell whether accountability might restore our institutions at this point. We may be too far gone. The US is visibly collapsing now: our economy, our financial arrangements, our culture, our influence in world affairs, and our basic consensus about reality. We’re entering a phase of disorder and hardship that is likely to moot the further depredations of a government at war with its people. For one thing, it’s becoming impossible to pretend that this vicious leviathan has the money to carry on because the money is only pretending to be money.

      It’s no wonder that the collective ability for sense-making has failed. It will be quickly restored by each of us in the scramble to survive these disorders and hardships. The bewildering hypotheticals of recent years begin to dissolve like mist on the mountain and things come back into focus: your health, your daily bread, your shelter, your associations with other people close to you, your values, and most of all the power of your own choices. Nature, much insulted and maligned, will sort out the rest.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/biomedical-security-state-british-edition/

The Biomedical Security State

First, by way of contextual backdrop, let me offer a quick recap of some relevant developments, which I describe in more detail in The New Abnormal:

  • November 2021: As reported by the New York Times, the Israeli government issued emergency pandemic legislation permitting Shin Bet (their equivalent of the CIA), to access mobile phones and extract track and trace data from suspected covid patients without their knowledge or consent.
  • December 2021: Canada’s Public Health Agency confirmed that it had been extracting mobile phone data from the outset of pandemic to covertly track citizens’ movements, again without their knowledge or consent. Unlike Israel, this was not done legislatively or publicly. The agency confirmed that it planned to expand and continue this program until 2026.
  • May 2022: Vice broke story that over the past two years, “The CDC tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders.” The CDC used phone location data to, among other things, monitor citizens’ movements at schools and churches. They confirmed plans to use the data for applications beyond covid in coming years. Researchers from Princeton demonstrated that with only four location data points, the supposedly anonymized data could easily be connected to specific persons.
  • Evidence also emerged last year that the CIA has been using unauthorized digital surveillance to spy on Americans. Two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee warned that “documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans.”

Not to be left out of the digital panopticon game, news from Britain broke this week with the following headline:

The article begins:

A shadowy Army unit secretly spied on British citizens who criticised the Government’s Covid lockdown policies, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Military operatives in the UK’s ‘information warfare’ brigade were part of a sinister operation that targeted politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the official pandemic response.

They compiled dossiers on public figures such as ex-Minister David Davis, who questioned the modelling behind alarming death toll predictions, as well as journalists such as Peter Hitchens and Toby Young. Their dissenting views were then reported back to No 10 [Downing Street, the office of the British Prime Minister].

Documents obtained by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, and shared exclusively with this newspaper, exposed the work of Government cells such as the Counter Disinformation Unit, based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office.

But the most secretive is the MoD’s 77th Brigade, which deploys ‘non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of adversaries.’

As happened with so many of our federal agencies in the US, which have strayed beyond their original mission of protecting citizens from foreign threats to protecting the state from its own citizens, we see the following developments in the UK:

According to a whistleblower who worked for the brigade during the lockdowns, the unit strayed far beyond its remit of targeting foreign powers. 

They said that British citizens’ social media accounts were scrutinised – a sinister activity that the Ministry of Defence, in public, repeatedly denied doing.

Papers show the outfits were tasked with countering ‘disinformation’ and ‘harmful narratives… from purported experts,’ with civil servants and artificial intelligence deployed to ‘scrape’ social media for keywords such as ‘ventilators’ that would have been of interest.

The information was then used to orchestrate Government responses to criticisms of policies such as the stay-at-home order, when police were given power to issue fines and break up gatherings. 

It also allowed Ministers to push social media platforms to remove posts and promote Government-approved lines.

The Army whistleblower said: ‘It is quite obvious that our activities resulted in the monitoring of the UK population… monitoring the social media posts of ordinary, scared people. These posts did not contain information that was untrue or co-ordinated – it was simply fear.’

Last night, former Cabinet Minister Mr Davis, a member of the Privy Council, said: ‘It’s outrageous that people questioning the Government’s policies were subject to covert surveillance’ – and questioned the waste of public money.

Our Missouri v. Biden case and the Twitter Files have revealed these kinds of surveillance and censorship policies to be operating in the US, as I have previously written about here.

This latest story suggests the British government has likewise been engaging in the same totalitarian policies against its own citizens. 

I am reminded here of CISA, a little known U.S. government agency that’s been around for only about six years. The Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency was originally set up to protect us from cyberattacks—malware, computer viruses, etc. But a year or so into their existence, CISA leadership decided that their real mission was combatting another kind of threat, which they called—in a brilliant Orwellian euphemism—domestic threats to our “Cognitive Infrastructure.” 

Now, just what does this refer to? The new dangerous threats to our cognitive infrastructure are your thoughts, your ideas, the things you express for example on Twitter or Facebook or in the newspaper. With this sleight-of-hand, CISA quickly positioned itself to become the thought police at the center of the US government’s illegal censorship regime.

But back to the UK. The article describes the targeting of one of my favorite British journalists, Peter Hitchens:

Mail on Sunday journalist Mr Hitchens was monitored after sharing an article, based on leaked NHS [British National Health Service] papers, which claimed data used to publicly justify lockdown was incomplete. An internal Rapid Response Unit email said Mr Hitchens wanted to ‘further [an] anti-lockdown agenda and influence the Commons vote.’ 

Writing today, Mr Hitchens questions if he was ‘shadow-banned’ over his criticisms, with his views effectively censored by being downgraded in search results. 

He says: ‘The most astonishing thing about the great Covid panic was how many attacks the state managed to make on basic freedoms without anyone much even caring, let alone protesting. Now is the time to demand a full and powerful investigation into the dark material Big Brother Watch has bravely uncovered.’

The whistleblower from 77 Brigade, which uses both regular and reserve troops, said: ‘I developed the impression the Government were more interested in protecting the success of their policies than uncovering any potential foreign interference, and I regret that I was a part of it. Frankly, the work I was doing should never have happened.’

The source also suggested that the Government was so focused on monitoring critics it may have missed genuine Chinese-led pro-lockdown campaigns.

Silkie Carlo, of Big Brother Watch, said: ‘This is an alarming case of mission creep, where public money and military power have been misused to monitor academics, journalists, campaigners and MPs who criticised the Government, particularly during the pandemic.

‘The fact that this political monitoring happened under the guise of ‘countering misinformation’ highlights how, without serious safeguards, the concept of ‘wrong information’ is open to abuse and has become a blank cheque the Government uses in an attempt to control narratives online.

‘Contrary to their stated aims, these Government truth units are secretive and harmful to our democracy. The Counter Disinformation Unit should be suspended immediately and subject to a full investigation.’

If you scroll to the bottom of the article, you’ll find that the Mail also published an accompanying commentary from the anonymous whistleblower, “This snooping was wrong, it hangs over my proud Army career like a black cloud,” and a commentary from Peter Hitchens, “How shadowy censors tried to remove my ‘unhelpful’ Covid views from YouTube”. 

In Britain, Orwell’s country of origin, seven decades after the publication of 1984, it turns out that Big Brother is Always Watching. Perhaps this is a good moment to remind everyone that Orwell’s classic dystopian novel was meant to be a warning, not an instruction manual.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/neither-we-nor-our-allies-prepared-fight-all-out-war-russia-regionally-globally/5806534

This Time It’s Different. Neither We Nor Our Allies Are Prepared to Fight All-out War with Russia, Regionally or Globally.

Until it decided to confront Moscow with an existential military threat in Ukraine, Washington confined the use of American military power to conflicts that Americans could afford to lose, wars with weak opponents in the developing world from Saigon to Baghdad that did not present an existential threat to U.S. forces or American territory. This time—a proxy war with Russia—is different. 

Contrary to early Beltway hopes and expectations, Russia neither collapsed internally nor capitulated to the collective West’s demands for regime change in Moscow. Washington underestimated Russia’s societal cohesion, its latent military potential, and its relative immunity to Western economic sanctions.

As a result, Washington’s proxy war against Russia is failing. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was unusually candid about the situation in Ukraine when he told the allies in Germany at Ramstein Air Base on January 20, “We have a window of opportunity here, between now and the spring,” admitting, “That’s not a long time.”

Alexei Arestovich, President Zelensky’s recently fired advisor and unofficial “Spinmeister,” was more direct. He expressed his own doubts that Ukraine can win its war with Russia and he now questions whether Ukraine will even survive the war. Ukrainian lossesat least 150,000 dead including 35,000 missing in action and presumed dead—have fatally weakened Ukrainian forces resulting in a fragile Ukrainian defensive posture that will likely shatter under the crushing weight of attacking Russian forces in the next few weeks.

Ukraine’s materiel losses are equally severe. These include thousands of tanks and armored infantry fighting vehicles, artillery systems, air defense platforms, and weapons of all calibers. These totals include the equivalent of seven years of Javelin missile production. In a setting where Russian artillery systems can fire nearly 60,000 rounds of all types—rockets, missiles, drones, and hard-shell ammunition—a day, Ukrainian forces are hard-pressed to answer these Russian salvos with 6,000 rounds daily. New platform and ammunition packages for Ukraine may enrich the Washington community, but they cannot change these conditions.

Predictably, Washington’s frustration with the collective West’s failure to stem the tide of Ukrainian defeat is growing. In fact, the frustration is rapidly giving way to desperation.

Michael Rubin, a former Bush appointee and avid supporter of America’s permanent conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan, vented his frustration in a 1945 article asserting that, “if the world allows Russia to remain a unitary state, and if it allows Putinism to survive Putin, then, Ukraine should be allowed to maintain its own nuclear deterrence, whether it joins NATO or not.” On its face, the suggestion is reckless, but the statement does accurately reflect the anxiety in Washington circles that Ukrainian defeat is inevitable.

NATO’s members were never strongly united behind Washington’s crusade to fatally weaken Russia. The governments of Hungary and Croatia are simply acknowledging the wider European public’s opposition to war with Russia and lack of support for Washington’s desire to postpone Ukraine’s foreseeable defeat.

Though sympathetic to the Ukrainian people, Berlin did not support all-out war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf. Now, Germans are also uneasy with the catastrophic condition of the German armed forces.

Retired German Air Force General (four-star equivalent) Harald Kujat, former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, severely criticized Berlin for allowing Washington to railroad Germany into conflict with Russia, noting that several decades of German political leaders actively disarmed Germany and thus deprived Berlin of authority or credibility in Europe. Though actively suppressed by the German government and media, his comments are resonating strongly with the German electorate.

The blunt fact is that in its efforts to secure victory in its proxy war with Russia, Washington ignores historical reality. From the 13th century onward, Ukraine was a region dominated by larger, more powerful national powers, whether Lithuanian, Polish, Swedish, Austrian, or Russian.

In the aftermath of the First World War, abortive Polish designs for an independent Ukrainian State were conceived to weaken Bolshevik Russia. Today, Russia is not communist, nor does Moscow seek the destruction of the Polish State as Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, and their followers did in 1920.

So where is Washington headed with its proxy war against Russia? The question deserves an answer.

On Sunday December 7, 1941, U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman was with Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill having dinner at Churchill’s home when the BBC broadcast the news that the Japanese had attacked the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. Harriman was visibly shocked. He simply repeated the words, “The Japanese have raided Pearl Harbor.”

Harriman need not have been surprised. The Roosevelt administration had practically done everything in its power to goad Tokyo into attacking U.S. forces in the Pacific with a series of hostile policy decisions culminating in Washington’s oil embargo during the summer of 1941.

In the Second World War, Washington was lucky with timing and allies. This time it’s different. Washington and its NATO allies are advocating a full-blown war against Russia, the devastation and breakup of the Russian Federation, as well as the destruction of millions of lives in Russia and Ukraine.

Washington emotes. Washington does not think, and it is also overtly hostile to empiricism and truth. Neither we nor our allies are prepared to fight all-out war with Russia, regionally or globally. The point is, if war breaks out between Russia and the United States, Americans should not be surprised. The Biden administration and its bipartisan supporters in Washington are doing all they possibly can to make it happen.

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