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https://thegrayzone.com/2023/06/29/nuclear-annihilation-max-blumenthal-security-council/

Why are we tempting nuclear annihilation?’ Watch Max Blumenthal address UN Security Council

‘The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal addressed the UN Security Council on the role of US military aid to Ukraine in escalating the conflict with Russia and the real motives behind Washington’s support for Kiev’s proxy war.

Thank you to Wyatt Reed, Alex Rubinstein and Anya Parampil for helping me prepare this presentation. Wyatt has first hand experience with the subject as a journalist whose hotel in Donetsk was targeted with a US-made howitzer by the Ukrainian military in October 2022. He was 100 meters away when the strike hit, and was nearly killed.

My friend, the civil rights activist Randy Credico, is also here with me today. He was in Donetsk more recently, and was able to witness regular HIMARS attacks by the Ukrainian military on civilian targets.

I’m here not only as a journalist with over 20 years of experience covering politics and conflict on several continents, but as an American dragooned by my own government into funding a proxy war that has become a threat to regional and international stability at the expense of the welfare of my fellow countrymen and women.

This June 28, as emergency crews worked to clean up yet another toxic train derailment in the United States, this time on the Montana River, that further exposed our nation’s chronically underfunded infrastructure and its threats to our health, the Pentagon announced plans to send an additional $500 million worth of military aid to Ukraine.

The development came as Ukraine’s army enters the third week of a vaunted counter-offensive that CNN describes as “not meeting expectations,” and which even Volodymyr Zelensky says is “going slower than desired.”

As Ukraine’s military failed to breach Russia’s primary defense line, CNN reported that by June 12, Kiev quote “lost” 16 US-made armored vehicles sent to the country.

So what did the Pentagon do? It simply passed that bill down to average US taxpayers like myself, charging us another $325 million to replace Ukraine’s squandered military stock. There was zero effort to consult the US public’s position on the matter; and the vast majority of Americans likely did not even know the exchange took place.

The US policy I just described — which sees Washington prioritize unrestrained funding for a proxy war with a nuclear power in a foreign land while our own domestic infrastructure falls apart before our eyes — exposes a disturbing dynamic at the heart of the Ukraine conflict: an international Ponzi scheme that enables Western elites to seize hard earned wealth out of the hands of average US citizens and funnel itI into the coffers of a foreign government that even the Western-sponsored Transparency International ranks as one of the most corrupt in Europe.

The US government has yet to conduct an official audit of its funding for Ukraine. The American public has no idea where their tax dollars have gone.

That is why this week, The Grayzone published an independent audit of US tax dollar allocation to Ukraine throughout fiscal years 2022 and 2023. Our investigation was led by Heather Kaiser, a former military intelligence officer and veteran of US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We found a $4.48 million payment from the US Social Security Admin to the Kiev government.

We found $4.5 billion worth of payments from the United States Agency for International Development to pay off Ukraine’s sovereign debt, much of which is owned by the global investment firm BlackRock.

That alone amounts to $30 taken from every single US citizen at a time when 4 in 10 Americans are unable to afford a $400 emergency.

We found tax dollars earmarked for Ukraine padding the budgets of a television station in Toronto, a pro-NATO think tank in Poland, and, believe it or not, rural farmers in Kenya.

We found tens of millions to private equity firms, including one in the Republic of Georgia, as well as a million dollar payment to a single private entrepreneur in Kiev.

Our audit also revealed the Pentagon’s $4.5 million contract with a company called “Atlantic Diving Supply” to provide Ukraine with unspecified explosives equipment. This is a notoriously corrupt company that Thom Tillis, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, previously lambasted for its “history of fraud.”

Yet once again, Congress has failed to ensure these shady payments and massive arms deals are properly tracked.

In fact, much of the military and humanitarian aid shipped to Ukraine has simply vanished. Last year, CBS News quoted the director of a pro-Zelensky non-profit in Ukraine who reported that only around 30% of aid was reaching the front lines in Ukraine.

The embezzlement of funds and supplies is at least as troubling as the potential consequences of the illicit transfer and sales of military-grade weapons. Last June, the head of Interpol warned that the massive transfers of arms into Ukraine means “we can expect an influx of weapons in Europe and beyond,” and that “criminals are even now, as we speak, focusing on them.”

This May, a group of anti-Kremlin Russian neo-Nazis outfitted with gear supplied by the Ukrainian government, was hailed by Western politicians for carrying out terrorist attacks in Russian territory using American-made Humvees. Although the group, the so-called “Russian Volunteer Corps,” is led by a man who calls himself the “White King” and includes numerous open admirers of Adolf Hitler, the Western weaponization of this militia against Russian forces has not prompted any outcry from Congress.

And while the Biden administration has promised that it’s keeping tabs on the weapons sent, a State Department cable leaked last December conceded that “kinetic activity and active combat between Ukrainian and Russian forces create an environment in which standard verification measures are sometimes impracticable or impossible.”

The Biden administration not only knows that it can not track the weapons it is shipping to Ukraine, it knows it is escalating a proxy war against the world’s largest nuclear power, and is daring it to respond in kind.

We know they know this because back in 2014, President Barack Obama rejected demands to send lethal offensive weaponry to Kiev because, as the Wall Street Journal put it, he had a “long-standing concern that arming Ukraine would provoke Moscow into a further escalation that could drag Washington into a proxy war.”

When Donald Trump entered office in 2017, he attempted to hold the line on Obama’s policy, but was soon branded a Russian puppet by the Washington press corps and Democratic Party for refusing to send Raytheon’s Javelin missiles to the Ukrainian military. Trump’s reluctance to send the Javelins became part of the basis for his impeachment. He unsurprisingly relented.

As the US-made offensive weaponry began to reach the front lines of the Donbas, the collective West exploited the Minsk Accords to “give Ukraine time” to arm up, as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel put it.

In January 2022, the US announced a $200 million arms package to Ukraine. By the 18th of February, observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported a doubling in ceasefire violations, with OSCE maps showing the overwhelming majority of targeted sites on the side of the pro-Russian separatist population in Donetsk and Lugansk. Five days later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

And since then, the US and its allies have been scurrying up the escalation ladder at every opportunity.

“Things we couldn’t give in January because it was escalatory were given in February,” a former State Department official complained after meeting with Ukrainian counterparts. “And things we couldn’t give in February we can in April. That has been the distinct pattern, starting with, for crying out loud, Stingers,” they said, referring to shoulder mounted missiles.

President Joe Biden himself said in March 2022, “The idea that we’re gonna send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks… don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say, that’s called World War III.”

Just over a year later, Biden changed his tune, backing a plan to provide F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, and after pressuring Germany to send in the tanks he once feared would provoke World War III.

It would only take two months from receiving HIMARs systems from the US for the Ukrainian military to begin targeting critical infrastructure, using them to strike the Antonovsky Bridge over the Dnipro river, and again, two months later in a test strike on the Kakhovka Dam “to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings,” as the Washington Post reported.

Three weeks ago, the Kakhovka Dam was destroyed, triggering a major environmental catastrophe that caused mass flooding and contamination of the local water supply. Ukraine, of course, blames Russia for the attack, but has produced no evidence.

Around this time, Ukraine also baselessly accused Russia of planning a provocation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. This triggered a resolution by Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal (no relation to me) calling for NATO to intervene directly in Ukraine and attack Russia if such an incident occurred.

The move by Blumenthal and Graham thus established a de facto red line for initiating US military action, much like the one set down in Syria which, as a former US diplomat commented to journalist Charles Glass, “was an open invitation to a false flag.”

Will we see another Douma deception, but this time in Zaporizhzhia?

Why are we doing this? Why are we tempting nuclear annihilation by flooding Ukraine with advanced weapons and sabotaging negotiations at every turn?

We have been told by people like Sen. Dick Durbin that Ukraine is “literally in a battle for freedom and democracy themselves,” and we must therefore supply it with weapons “for as long as it takes,” as President Biden said. Anyone who opposes military aid to Ukraine opposes the defense of democracy, according to this logic.

So where is the democracy in Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to ban opposition parties, criminalize the media outlets of his legitimate political opponents, to jail his top political rival, round up his top deputies, raid Orthodox Churches and arrest clergymen?

Where is the democracy in the Ukrainian government’s imprisonment of Gonzalo Lira, a US citizen, for questioning the official narrative of their war effort?

And where is the democracy in Zelensky’s recent decision to suspend elections in 2024 on the grounds that martial law has been declared? Well, it seems that Ukraine’s democracy is harder to find these days than its military’s suddenly inconspicuous commander-in-chief, Valeriy Zaluzhny.

Senator Graham has offered a much more grim – and on-the-mark – rationale for supplying Ukraine with billions in weapons. As the senator boasted during a recent visit with Zelensky in Kiev, “The Russians are dying…it’s the best money we’ve ever spent.”

Graham, we should remember, has also said that we, the US, must fight this war to the last Ukrainian. While official casualty numbers are strictly classified, we must worry that Ukraine is well on its way to fulfilling the senator’s ghoulish fantasies.

As a Ukrainian soldier complained this month to Vice News, we don’t know what Zelensky’s “plans are, but it looks like extermination of its own population — like of the combat-ready and working-age population. That’s it.”

Indeed, military cemeteries in Ukraine are expanding almost as rapidly as the Northern Virginia McMansions and beachfront estates of executives from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and assorted Beltway contractors benefitting from the second highest level of military spending since World War Two.

These are the real winners of the Ukraine proxy war. Not average Ukrainians or Americans. Or Russians or even Western Europeans.

The winners are people like Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who spent his time between the Obama and Biden administrations launching a consulting firm called WestExec advisors which secured lucrative government contracts for intelligence firms and the arms industry. Blinken’s former partners at WestExec advisors include Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, CIA deputy director David Cohen, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, and almost a dozen current and former members of Biden’s national security team.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, for his part, is a former and possibly future board member of Raytheon, and ex-partner of the Pine Island Capital investment firm that collaborates with WestExec and which Blinken has advised.

Meanwhile, the current US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas Greenfield, is listed as a senior counsel at the Albright Stonebridge Group, a self-described “commercial diplomacy firm” that also finesses contracts for the intelligence sector and arms industry. This firm was founded by the late Madeleine Albright, who infamously declared that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children under the US sanctions regime was “worth it.”

So while middle-aged Ukrainian men are ripped off streets by military police and sent to the front lines, the financially and politically connected architects of this proxy war are planning to walk through the revolving door to reap unimaginable profits once their time in the Biden administration is over.

For them, a negotiated settlement to this territorial dispute means an end to the cash cow of close to $150 billion in US aid to Ukraine.

When the United States, a permanent member of this council, has fallen under the control of a government which seeks to perpetuate a proxy war for “as long as it takes,” which considers diplomacy synonymous with unilateral coercive measures to “turn the ruble to rubble,” as Biden has pledged to do; whose leadership subverts negotiations in order to pursue profit while refusing to properly inform its own citizens what they are paying for, and which pushes the sons and brothers of its supposed Ukrainian partners out onto a killing field in order to bludgeon a geopolitical rival; when both Zelensky and members of the US Congress are calling for preemptive strikes on Russia which contravene the spirit of Article 51 of the UN charter, this council must take action to enforce that charter.

Articles 33 – 38 of Chapter VI of that Charter are clear that the security council must use its authority to guarantee a pacific settlement of dispute, particularly when it threatens international security. That should not only apply to Russia and Ukraine. This council has an obligation to strictly monitor and restrain the US and the illegal military formation known as NATO.

Thank you. 

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https://silentcrownews.com/?p=7880

Enough of the Ukrainian Clown Show!

If the truth be told, we are getting sick and tired of the little piss-ant who runs the cease-pool of corruption, tyranny, delusion and death called Ukraine. This clown – and that’s what he is actually trained as – just can’t seem to stop stridently demanding money, arms and support from the rest of the world and lecturing everyone to fall into line or else.

In his actual clown days, of course, Volodymyr Zelensky was known for the act depicted below. But when it comes to the collective West, the latter seems to enjoy the fact that the Ukrainian president continues to bang away upon it, relentlessly pounding out a melody of me, me and more. But lately Zelensky has really gone over the top, peddling the hideous canard that if we don’t enable him to fight “them” over there with everything and all that he demands by way of money and weapons, we will soon bleed and die against “them” over here.

That’s the “Putin is going to invade Europe next and maybe America too”, nonsense. It’s actually groundless blithering idiocy, and yet Washington treats him as a brave ally and statesman:

“If any candidate thinks supporting Ukraine is too costly, are they ready to go to war? Are they ready to fight? Send their children? Die?” Zelensky said. “They will have to do it anyway if NATO enters this war, and if Ukraine fails and Russia occupies us, they will move on to the Baltics or Poland or some other NATO country. And then the US will have to choose between keeping NATO or entering the war.”

Let’s cut to the chase. No American or NATO soldier is going to be fighting Putin’s army in Poland, Berlin or Belgium because the Russian army ain’t going there. Not in a month of Sundays.

Vlad Putin is no prince of men, but his war aims are limited, rational and clear as a bell. To wit, as he warned for 15 years, he does not want NATO missiles on his doorstep in Ukraine, just as President Kennedy insisted about Khrushchev’s missiles 100 miles away in Cuba 61 years ago.

Likewise, he wants the Russian-speaking populations of the eastern Donbas region and the Black Sea rim, historically known as “Novorossiya” or New Russia, to have self-governing autonomy and protection from military attack by the anti-Russian Kiev government, as per the Minsk agreements. After all, those brutal attacks, which killed upwards of 14,000 mostly civilians, occurred nearly continuously for eight years after the Washington-sponsored Maidan coup of February 2014. The latter had installed hostile proto-Nazi elements in the unelected and illegal government stood up in Kiev by Victoria Nuland and her Washington gaggle of neocon hegemonists.

In other words, what we have here is a Washington-triggered civil war in an area that has been either a Russian vassal or appendage for centuries and where the term “Ukraine” actually means “borderlands” in Russian.

And that’s not even the half of it. The borders of these very “borderlands” do not define a nation or state that was the product of natural development and accretion over centuries. To the contrary, they are a 20th century artifact confected by three of the bloodiest tyrants in all of human history – Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev. The only connection these black-lined borders shown below have to the history of the area is that they were drawn-up for reasons of totalitarian administrative convenience, not as an expression of social, ethnic, religious or economic affinities.

That is to say, Ukraine is a state that was not built to last; and, in fact, it barely outlasted its Soviet rulers after their demise in 1991. For instance, during the 1994 presidential election the pro-Russian candidate, Leonid Kuchma, defeated the incumbent and strident Ukrainian nationalist, Leonid Kravchuk.

As the map below makes clear, however, Kravchuk won overwhelming majorities of 89-95% in the western Ukraine regions (yellow and orange), which had historically been part of Poland or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. By the same token, the pro-Russian Kuchma won the national election because he racked up the same preponderant majorities (blue areas) in the eastern Donbas and southern Novorossiya regions. In the historic Russian province (since 1783) of Crimea, in fact, Kuchma won 90% of the vote.

Electoral Map of Ukraine’s 1994 Presidential Election:

Essentially, the same radical split in the electorate occurred election after election. During the last legitimate election held within the old communist borders of the country during 201o, the above pattern was replicated. This time Kuchma’s protégé, Viktor Yanukovich, won the election by a hair by virtue of lopsided margins in the historic Russian-speaking territories of the east and south (blue areas of the map).

On the other side, the Ukrainian nationalist and former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, garnered 80-90% margins in the center and west (red areas of the map).

Not surprisingly, when the pro-Russian winner of the election from the blue regions was ousted from office by Washington in February 2014, the red area Ukrainian nationalists and their crypto-Nazi allies took control of the Kiev government and proceeded to outlaw the Russian language as its first act of government; and soon thereafter launched armed warfare when the two Donbas provinces declared themselves independent states.

At the end of the day, GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis was exactly right. The war in Ukraine is at bottom a”territorial dispute” that has absolutely nothing to do with the homeland security of America or Zelensky’s ridiculous lie that Putin is coming after NATO next.

And it most certainly has no bearing whatsoever on absurd abstractions like the rule of law and the sanctity of borders. After all, when it comes to the latter, Washington is far and away the greatest border-violating, regime-changing outlaw in the postwar world.

In some real sense, the postwar peace conference has already been held and the verdict is in. We are referring to the de facto Ukrainian referendums on the illegitimate state that Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev built, and which the Washington neocons and War Party are determined to uphold at any cost, including going to the brink of nuclear war with Russia.

Time and again the Ukrainian electorate effectively voted for partition, as dramatically underscored by the elector maps above.

So send Zelensky packing back to his comedy show and let the blue states of the Ukrainian east and south have their own countries or return to the bosom of Mother Russia, from which these communities emerged during the 18th and 19th centuries.

That would end the carnage in a heartbeat, and would stop the senseless slaughter of Ukrainians and Russians alike – a human catastrophe that is beginning to rival the heinous criminality of World War I trench warfare.

The implicit Peace of the Partition, however, would have an additional silver lining. It would expose the absolute mendacity of the Washington War Party and the fact that it is so desperate to rule the world that it will prop up even utter nincompoops like Zelensky to stay in the business of fighting falsely demonized monsters who are no threat at all to America’s real homeland security.

As we indicated recently, its time to get back to a Fortress America defense policy, which could be funded for a fraction of today’s $900 billion defense-a-palooza. And we wouldn’t have to waste our national treasure on un-useful idiots like Zelensky, either.

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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/a_state_of_martial_law_america_is_a_military_dictatorship_disguised_as_a_democracy

A State of Martial Law: America Is a Military Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”—Thomas Jefferson

The government is goosestepping all over our freedoms.

Case in point: America’s founders did not want a military government ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

Most Americans seem relatively untroubled by this state of martial law.

Incredibly, when President Biden bragged about how the average citizen doesn’t stand a chance against the government’s massive arsenal of militarized firepower, it barely caused a ripple.

As Biden remarked at a fundraising event in California, “I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is—you know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16.  You need something else than just an AR-15.”

The message being sent to the citizenry is clear: there is no place in our nation today for the kind of revolution our forefathers mounted against a tyrannical government.

For that matter, the government has declared an all-out war on any resistance whatsoever by the citizenry to its mandates, power grabs and abuses.

By this standard, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning.

For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

A 2008 Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report goes on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

Subsequent reports by the Department of Homeland Security to identify, monitor and label right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) have manifested into full-fledged pre-crime surveillance programs. Almost a decade later, after locking down the nation and spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that is colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

The events of recent years have all been part of a master plan to shut us up and preemptively shut us down: by making peaceful revolution impossible and violent revolution inevitable.

The powers-that-be want an excuse to lockdown the nation and throw the switch to all-out martial law.

This is how it begins.

As John Lennon warned, “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”

Already, discontent is growing.

According to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, 7 out of 10 Americans believe that American democracy is “imperiled.”

Americans are worried about the state of their country, afraid of an increasingly violent and oppressive federal government, and tired of being treated like suspects and criminals.

What we’ll see more of before long is a growing dissatisfaction with the government and its heavy-handed tactics by people who are tired of being used and abused and are ready to say “enough is enough.”

This is what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent.

Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Brace yourselves.

There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by political theater and public spectacle that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

The architects of the police state have us exactly where they want us: under their stamping boot, gasping for breath, desperate for freedom, grappling for some semblance of a future that does not resemble the totalitarian prison being erected around us.

The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to express their displeasure with the government is through voting, yet that is no real recourse at all.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what is unfolding before us is not a revolution. This is an anti-revolution.

We are at our most vulnerable right now.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/world-war-iii-already-begun-but-truth-being-withheld-from-public-until-very-last-moment/5794660

World War III Has Already Begun, but the Truth Is Being Withheld from the Public Until the Very Last Moment

World War III has already begun. You simply aren’t being told this because your government and dishonest media outlets are dedicated to keeping you in the dark. After all, they want to use the remaining time to stockpile food, ammunition, medical supplies and precious metals for themselves, and this can only be accomplished by withholding the truth about the situation for as long as possible.

The President of Serbia may be an exception to this, as he is now publicly warning that the world is about to experience a “great world conflict” that will likely begin in the next two months.

“Aleksandar Vucic made the alarming comments during the first day of the UN General Assembly session in New York,” reports Paul Joseph Watson at Summit.news. The full quote from Vucic is:

I assume that we’re leaving the phase of the special military operation and approaching a major armed conflict, and now the question becomes where is the line, and whether after a certain time – maybe a month or two, even – we will enter a great world conflict not seen since the Second World War.

NATO is already at war with Russia, and Putin is gearing up for a continental battle

What’s happening is that psychopathic western nations have — the real aggressors in this war — have unleashed not just “suicide sanctions” against Russia, but are also running Ukraine’s military operations against Russia. This means NATO is already in the war, even if NATO won’t admit it yet. Worse yet, NATO leaders are openly demanding the complete destruction of Russia and the occupation / exploitation of Russia’s natural resources, which is of course the entire model of global exploitation and pillaging typically carried out by the west. (Disrupt, pillage, control. That’s the CIA model that has been unleashed against other nations for decades…)

Conditions are already long past the point of negotiation or de-escalation between Russia and the west. The psychopathic leaders of the west (Victoria Nuland comes to mind) are russo-phobic Russia haters who are determined to carry out genocide against the Russian people, even if it means destroying their own economies and agricultural supply chains in the process. These psychopaths, Putin has come to realize, can’t be reasoned with or trusted to abide by any agreements whatsoever. Russia realizes it must fight or die. That’s where we are right now.

Unfortunately, the insanity of western nations has escalated this conflict to a condition where whoever launches nukes first has the advantage. This is a very dangerous dynamic, obviously, and it stems from the fact that the west has repeatedly signaled it will not allow the existence of Russia in its “New World Order” vision of planet Earth. With friends like Victoria Nuland calling the shots, who needs enemies?

Russia has a 30+ year advantage over the west in terms of nuclear weapons and anti-air defenses

An important realization in all this is that NATO’s nuclear arsenal is ancient — mostly running on designed originally engineered in the 1970s — while Russia’s nuclear capabilities are at least two generations ahead, modernized with hyperglide reentry vehicles, evasive maneuver capabilities for ICBMs, hypersonic cruise missiles which are nuclear capable, and highly advanced anti-air defense systems that can even intercept and take down incoming ICBMs. In addition, Russia possesses secret “doomsday” weapons — far beyond their thermobaric bombs — that the world hasn’t even seen yet. On the current trajectory, those weapons are going to be introduced to the west without any warning whatsoever, resulting in the complete annihilation of Western European governments, currencies and industry.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Russia has already designated the targets of its first strike, and that those targets include London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, US naval fleets and virtually all military bases across Western Europe. We are now just one launch away from a civilization-ending event.

The USA and NATO have deluded themselves into thinking they can win a nuclear exchange with Russia, but this is just as delusional as thinking “men can get pregnant” or that money printing doesn’t cause inflation (notably, the brain dead Biden regime insists that both of these absurdities are absolutely true). Over the past two decades — and more recently led by the insanity of wokeism — the west has become fully invested in delusional thinking and fairy tale narratives that have no connection with reality. While the west has been waging a propaganda narrative war, Russia has been engineering the world’s most advanced nuclear weapons. Once the nuclear exchange begins, there’s no question whatsoever about its outcome. Russia will lose a few million people — far less than what they lost in World War II — but they will annihilate Germany, Poland, France and the United Kingdom. Western Europe will be plunged into a generation of despair and darkness, while the U.S. suffers a cascading financial collapse due to exposure to European banks, currencies and debt markets. 

Western journalists and kleptocrats are incapable of seeing this reality, and they are similarly incapable of acting to stop it. They are caught in their own delusional world of self-inflicted brainwashing and propaganda, believing (somehow) that they can bully Russia into capitulating to the west’s insane demands. But Russia is no Third World nation. Russia can’t be economically dismantled with western sanctions, and Russia has its own domestic supply chain for literally everything it needs to feed its people, build more weapons and earn a fortune in exports of energy and commodities to willing trade partners like India, China, Turkey and Iran.

Finally, Putin will not back down, and Putin is far more intelligent than any of the cognitively-challenged lunatics running the USA, UK or NATO countries.

The West has already grossly miscalculated with “suicide sanctions” but still won’t admit to their catastrophic errors

As proof of the incompetence of western nations, consider the fact that their “suicide sanctions” against Russia — originally implemented to try to force Russia into a currency collapse — has had the opposite effect. The sanctions are destroying the Euro, not the Ruble, and now all of Western Europe faces a winter of darkness, famine and freezing to death. That’s on top of the “permanent deindustrialization” of European industry that is already well under way, with about 70% of metals smelting and ammonia production already offline. Fertilizer production has ground to a halt, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline has been halted, and to add insult to injury, Belgium is proudly announcing the shutting down of a nuclear power plant, right as Belgium faces an energy scarcity catastrophe.

Germany, meanwhile, is putting another $8 billion into bailing out Uniper, a major natural gas provider, and that’s on top of $15 billion already spent trying to prevent Uniper’s collapse. Germany’s industrial base is being wiped out at astonishing speed, and nobody in the German government is telling the German people they won’t have jobs as industry collapses.

Putin must be astonished at the speed of which Western Europe — and Germany in particular — is destroying itself. Recall that Germany destroyed Western Europe twice already: World War I and World War II. Now, Germany (still largely run by Nazis) is leading the way to the total destruction of Europe yet again. At one level, Putin need not launch any nukes at all… he merely needs to wait for winter to kick in and for the laws of thermodynamics and economics to do the rest.

The greens must be proud: Entire forests are being clear cut for firewood

Yesterday I spoke with war correspondent Michael Yon who had just traveled through Germany (my interview with him will post tomorrow on Brighteon.com). He told me the forests were being clear-cut everywhere across Germany (at least that he could see) in a desperate effort by the people to stockpile firewood for the coming winter. This is the new “green” agenda on parade: Clear-cutting forests that will take decades to grow back. Will the greenies celebrate all the dead forests because at least Germany didn’t burn fossil fuels? Does anybody realize that a 19th century economy can’t support a 21st century population? Famine is a mathematical certainty.

To stop this crisis, all Germany has to do is apologize to Russia, drop the economic sanctions and beg Gazprom to turn the gas back on, but no, they won’t dare do that, even if hundreds of thousands of German citizens starve to death and die of exposure. In exactly the same way Adolf Hitler threw starving, freezing German soldiers into Russia’s defensive lines at Stalingrad in 1943, today’s German leaders are sacrificing the lives of their own citizens in a desperate bid to try to economically harm Russia … and it isn’t even accomplishing that! In the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet Union surrounded and defeated Germany’s Sixth Army, which surrendered more than 220,000 soldiers to the Russians. Today, Germany is willing to sacrifice millions of its own citizens if necessary, proving that Nazi-style suicide maneuvers remain alive and well in Berlin, even generations after the catastrophic outcome of World War II.

You can beat the Nazis out of Russia, but you can’t beat the Nazi tendencies out of the German political leaders.

Russia, meanwhile, is sitting on massive quantities of low-cost energy, minerals, steel manufacturing, fertilizer production, successful food crops, electronics manufacturing and everything else needed to keep civilization on its feet. Yet to this very day, there isn’t one Western European politician who will admit the truth of where things stand. Too bad propaganda can’t heat homes, or the western media would be the ultimate renewable energy source for the entire planet.

The upshot of all this? Anyone living in Western Europe should prepare for economic collapse, famine and nuclear war.

Those living in North America should prepare for economic collapse and worldwide nuclear fallout that will disrupt crops for years to come.

Those who don’t store food will end up eating radioactive food, if they can find any at all.

Prepare accordingly.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/27/patrick-lawrence-ellsberg-and-the-process-of-my-awakening/

Ellsberg and ‘The Process of My Awakening’

Of all the fine things written and said about Daniel Ellsberg since his death June 16, there is a thread running through them we ought not miss, a story Ellsberg himself told better than anyone else. It is a story from which we can all learn. As we consider this story, we can embrace Ellsberg as an exemplar as much as he was a courageous man of conscience. As he put it in an interview some years ago, “courage is contagious.” 

Ellsberg did not give the story I have in mind a name, a title, a headline, or any such designation, but he may as well have, and I take the liberty of drawing from his words to name it now, the process of Dan Ellsberg’s awakening. 

In 1970, a year and maybe less before Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, he traveled to Nevada City, California, a small burg 150 miles north of and inland from San Francisco, and knocked on the door of the house wherein dwelt Gary Snyder, one of the brightest lights among the Beat poets. We can confidently infer that Ellsberg had the still-secret Pentagon Papers in his car, as he wrote the following in “The First Two Times We Met,” an essay that appeared in a collective celebration of Snyder’s life and work called Dimensions of a Life (Sierra Club Books, 1991):

I didn’t show him any papers from the trunk, so as not to implicate him; but I hinted that he was implicated anyway, in the process of my awakening. I wanted to thank him.

Let us consider the scene. How far did Ellsberg drive that day to knock unannounced on a noted poet’s door simply to say thank you? Thank you for what? What had Snyder done, and when, that was worthy of such gratitude?

As Ellsberg told the story on various occasions, he had met Snyder in Kyoto in 1960—the first of the two times mentioned in his essay. Snyder was then halfway through a decade-long study of Zen Buddhism under the tutelage of Oda Sesso Roshi. Ellsberg was living in Tokyo at the time, developing policies concerning the use of nuclear weapons for the Office of Naval Research. As Ellsberg recounted the meeting, the two met by chance at a bar near Ryoanji, the Zen monastery famous for its garden. He had by then read of it in The Dharma Bums, the Kerouac novel, and, so inspired, had traveled to Kyoto more or less as a tourist.

Imagine reading Kerouac, training to a place he writes of, and there meeting one of the novelist’s close friends. In the accounts I have read, the Vietnam War was a major topic of conversation. Ellsberg was still a dedicated supporter; Snyder, who by this time had the sturdy composure of the monks under whom he studied, talked of it from the other side. They liked one another, a little improbably from our perspective. They had lunch together the next day, continuing the conversation begun the previous evening. 

A decade later Ellsberg identified the encounter with Snyder with his “awakening.” And so the defense technocrat drove a long way, we have to assume, to thank the poet. There is something in this to love. 

Nine years after the Kyoto meeting and a year before the Nevada City reunion—we are now in August 1969—Ellsberg attended a gathering sponsored by the War Resisters’ League. (The good old WRL.) This was at Haverford College. You have to figure Ellsberg was by this time at some stage in the process of his awakening: Why would he be there otherwise? Among the speakers that evening was an antiwar activist named Randy Kehler, who was then on his way to prison, without so much as a flinch, for turning in his draft card and refusing all cooperation with the Selective Service System. 

Parenthetically, Kehler had his life hanging on the line long after serving his prison term, which ran most of two years. After he long refused to pay taxes to protest the Pentagon’s budget, in 1989 the federal government seized the Kehlers’ house in Colrain, a small town in northern Massachusetts. It was Chris Appy, the UMass historian of the Vietnam War, who related this story to me many years after the fact.

That evening at Haverford had much to do with Ellsberg’s subsequent decision to copy the Pentagon Papers and, two years later, do with them what we all know he did. Ellsberg recounted his experience to Marlo Thomas many years later. “I left the auditorium and found a deserted men’s room,” he told the actress and sometime activist. “I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. The only time in my life I’ve reacted to something like that.”

Let us ask at this point who was crying on the men’s room floor at Haverford, that we can understand the moment for what it was. Was it the eager Marine Ellsberg had been, the RAND war planner, the technocrat who toured the carnage in Vietnam, the Defense Department analyst? Or was it the person Ellsberg had just then become, mourning all that he had been and all that he had done until that moment—the Marine and the analyst having that very evening died?

Ellsberg’s account of that evening brings to mind Saul on his way to Damascus as related in Acts 9. There was a fall in each case and then an epiphany, a sudden conversion. Everything thereupon changed in each case. Saul became Paul, and, whatever you may think of him, St. Paul altered the course of Western civilization. Ellsberg, perfectly fair to say, spent the rest of his life attempting to do the same.

I go back now to something Ellsberg said in that brief essay he contributed to the book Gary Snyder’s friends put together to honor him. What most affected him when he first met the poet was what he intuited: He saw someone “who was in charge of his own life, a model of the way a life could be lived.” This comment is key, it seems to me. It explains why Ellsberg made the long drive to Nevada City a decade later. And it tells us what later happened to Ellsberg in the fullest sense. When we think of Ellsberg’s presence in the public sphere, we conclude that getting the Pentagon Papers published was the most important thing he ever did. But he could never have done that, we must not miss, if he had not first done something far larger: If he had not changed his life—the way he lived it and what he did with it. 

If he had not, in other words, completed the awakening, his chance encounter with a Beat poet did much to set in motion. This, “the process of my awakening,” is the very truest story Ellsberg has to tell us and the one from which we can learn the most.

As in St. Paul’s story, coming awake was the wellspring from which flowed everything Ellsberg did after, figuratively speaking, he fell from his horse on the road to his Damascus. It was his awakening—in essence to the difference between truths and lies—that enabled him to consider the prospect of life in prison with a remarkable aplomb, even equanimity. He knew, by the time he faced that prospect, that there was no turning back. You don’t get to go back to sleep once you come awake. Aeschylus famously put it this way:

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Ellsberg understood this, surely. He was well aware that to come awake means to suffer and of his own need to be pulled along by others as he made his way toward the state of wakefulness. From a 2006 interview:

I’d like peoples’ consciences to be rethought and reshaped as much as possible … Learning from people who have already had that conversion is very helpful. In my case it was crucial for me to meet people who were of that mind and who were going to prison rather than take part at all in what they saw as a wrongful war. … Courage is contagious, and coming into contact or exposing yourself to people who are taking those risks is very helpful as a first step toward doing it yourself.

“As a first step toward doing it yourself.”  Brilliant. It is what Ellsberg had most to offer us, what we can learn from him and put most directly to use in our own lives. Ellsberg’s story, the one he told in recounting the incidents noted here—Kyoto, Nevada City, Haverford—is in part one of surrender. He had to give up the eager Marine and the accomplished war planner. This meant giving up altogether a worldview. It left him weeping on a men’s room floor. 

But his story is also one of embrace, of transcendence, of self-mastery, of living “a life that could be lived.”   

Ellsberg’s first wakeful act was to rip the veil from the pointless savagery of our Vietnam adventure. Few of us will ever have occasion to do anything of remotely comparable magnitude. But each of us, providing we each summon the courage, can act as truly, as faithfully, as loyally to the human cause as Ellsberg did. No illusions here: Most of us prefer the irresponsibility of slumber. But for those who so choose, we can allow ourselves to awaken. We can accept the burdens knowledge always brings with it, just as Dan Ellsberg showed us in his own life.

Comments to article:

" This may be the most beautiful tribute to Mr. Ellsberg I have read. Epiphanies on the Damascus road of life are few and far between and those who experience them are belittled for the sake of Empire’s narrative.

I have been greatly influenced by a close friend of Gary Snyder–Wendell Berry. Zen and the Sermon on the Mount brought together in two minds open to the possibilities and absolute beauty of simplicity and peace. For the savagery of war, in all its exploitative forms, we as Americans need to sit on the bathroom floor and weep. Weep long and hard for so many years of blind complicity and/or our role as outright cheerleaders for the real American dream–might makes right.

Thank you to the poets and prophets of the world who may not change the world through directly their words, but may inspire the Ellsbergs of our world who can. "

" I am in complete agreement: for me as well, this is the most eloquent tribute to Ellsberg that I have read since his passing. I too didn’t know the two had met but having recently read Snyder’s brilliant The Practice of the. Wild and listened subsequently to some interviews with him from the 1970s where he lays bare the evil the US government was inflicting on the Vietnamese people, I’m not surprised he had such a profound influence on the young Ellsberg. Thank you so much Patrick Lawrence for writing this beautiful piece. "

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https://edwardcurtin.com/sea-monsters-threaten-the-world-with-their-tridents/

Sea Monsters Threaten the World With Their Tridents

Sometimes you wake up from a dream to realize it is telling you to pay close attention to the depth of its message, especially when it is linked to what you have been thinking about for days.  I have just come up from a dream in which I went down to the cellar of the house I grew up in because the basement light was on and the back cellar door had been opened by a mysterious man who stood outside.

I will spare you additional details or an interpretation, except to say that my daytime thoughts concerned the media spectacle surrounding the Titan submersible that imploded two miles down in the ocean’s cellar while trying to give its passengers a view of the wreck of the Titanic, the “unsinkable” ship nicknamed “the Millionaire’s Special.”  The ship that no one could sink except an ice cube in the drink that swallowed it.

Cellar dreams are well-known as the place where we as individuals and societies can face the flickering shadows that we refuse to face in conscious life.  Carl Jung called it “the shadow.”  Such shadows, when unacknowledged and repressed, have a tendency to autonomously surface and erupt, not only leading to personal self-destruction but that of whole societies.  History is replete with examples.  My dream’s mysterious stranger had lit my way through some dark thoughts and opened the door to a possible escape.  He got me thinking about what all of us tend to want to deny or avoid because its implications are so monstrous.

The obsession with the alleged marvels of technology together with naming them after ancient Greek and Roman gods are fixations of elite technologues who have lost what Spengler called “living inner religiousness” but wish to show they know the classical names even though they miss the meaning of these myths.  Such myths tell the stories of things that never happened but always are.  Appropriating the ancient names without irony – such as naming a boat Titanic or a submersible Titan – unveils the hubristic ignorance of people who have never descended to the underworld to learn its lessons.  Relinquishing  their sense of god-like power doesn’t occur to them, nor does the shadow side of their Faustian dreams.

They will never name some machine Nemesis, for that would expose the fact that they have exceeded the eternal limits with their maniacal technological extremism, and, to paraphrase Camus, dark Furies will swoop down to destroy them.

Nietzsche termed the result nihilism.  Once people have killed God, machines are a handy replacement in societies that worship the illusion of technique and are scared to death of death and the machines that they invented to administer it.

The latter is not a matter fit to print since it must remain in the dark basement of the public’s consciousness.  If it were publicized, the game of nihilistic death-dealing would be exposed.  Because power, money, and technology are the ruling deities today, the mass media revolve around publicizing their marvels in spectacular fashion, and when “accidents” occur, they never point out the myth of the machines, or what Lewis Mumford called “The Pentagon of Power.”  Tragedies occur, they tell us, but they are minor by-products of the marvels of technology.

But if these media would take us down to see the truth beneath the oceans’ surfaces, we would see not false monsters such as the Titanic or Moby Dick or cartoon fictions such as Disney’s Monstro the whale, but the handiwork of thousands of mad Captain Ahabs who have attached the technologues “greatest” invention – nuclear weapons – to nuclear-powered ballistic submarines.

Trident submarines. First strike submarines, such as the USS Ohio.

These Trident subs live and breathe in the cellars of our minds where few dare descend.  They are controlled by jackals in Washington and the Pentagon with polished faces in well-appointed offices with coffee machines and tasty snacks.  Madmen.  They hum through the deep waters ready to strike and destroy the world.  Few hear them, almost none see them, most prefer not to know of them.

But wait, what’s the buzz, tell me what’s happening: the Titan and the Titanic, wealthy voyeurs intent on getting a glance into the sepulchre of those long dead, while six hundred or so desperate migrants drown in the Mediterranean sea from which the ancient gods were born.  These are the priorities of a society that worships the wealthy; a society of the spectacle that entertains and distracts while the end of the world cruises below consciousness.

The United States alone has fourteen such submarines armed with Trident missiles constantly prowling the ocean depths, while the British have four.  Named for the three-pronged weapon of the Greek and Roman sea gods, Poseidon and Neptune respectively, these submarine-launched ballistic missiles, manufactured by Lockheed Martin (“We deliver innovative solutions to the world’s toughest challenges”), can destroy the world in a flash. Destroy it many times over. A final solution.

While the United States has abrogated all treaties that offered some protection from their use and has declared their right of first use, it has consistently pushed toward a nuclear confrontation with Russia and China.  Today – 2023 June – we stand on the precipice of nuclear annihilation as never before.

A single Trident submarine has 20 Trident missiles, each carrying 12 independently targeted warheads for a total of 240 warheads, with each warhead approximately 40 times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb.  Fourteen submarines times 240 equals 3,360 nuclear warheads times 40 equals 134,400 Hiroshimas.  Such are the lessons of mathematics in absurd times.

James W. Douglass, the author of the renown JFK and the Unspeakable and a longtime activist against the Tridents at Ground Zero Center for Non-Violent Action outside the Bangor Submarine Base in Washington state, put it this way in 2015 when asked about Robert Aldridge, the heroic Lockheed Trident missile designer who resigned his position in an act of conscience and became an inspirational force for the campaign against the Tridents and nuclear weapons:

Question: “What did the Nuremberg attorneys say about war crimes that had such a deep impact on Robert Aldridge?”

Douglass: “They said that first-strike weapons and weapons that directly target a civilian population were war crimes in violation of the Nuremberg principles. Those Nuremberg principles, which are the foundations of international law, are violated by both by electronic warfare – which is why we poured blood on the files for electronic warfare [at the base] – and also by the Trident missile system, which is what Robert Aldridge was building.”

Robert Aldridge saw his shadow side.  He went to the cellar of his darkest dreams. He refused to turn away.  He became an inspiration for James and Shelley Douglass and so many others.  He was a man in and of the system, who saw the truth of his complicity in radical evil and underwent a metanoia.  It is possible.

If those missiles are ever launched from the monsters that carry them through the hidden recesses of the world’s oceans, there will never be another Nuremberg Trial to judge the guilty, for the innocent and the guilty will all be dead.

We will have failed to shed light on our darkest shadows....

....We turn away at our peril.

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https://indi.ca/the-worst-case-scenario-for-ai-is-already-here/

The Worst Case Scenario For AI Is Already Here

If you expand your definition of AI to match the legal definition, it’s already here. Corporations have had legal personhood for centuries and used that to run riot over the world. Just because these artificial beings have human components we don’t call them AI, but we’re the ones getting squashed. Corporate AI is AI, and we ignore that established legal and political fact at our peril. Ignorant pride won’t protect us from what’s going on.

You can call corporations cyborgs if you want, ie a combination of man and machine. Whether you call the cyborgs or AI, they are artificial constructs that can act upon the world with agency and are already acting up. As I wrote earlier:

When Mitt Romney said “corporations are people, my friend” people laughed at him. But he was right. Corporations are legal persons. This is not an analogy or a metaphor but a legal fact. Corporate personhood has been accepted since ancient India, through Rome, to the present day.

Corporations can buy property, enter contracts, and are treated generally the same as ‘natural’ persons in the eyes of the law. They even have the right to free speech, including influencing elections. Corporations are artificial persons. Therefore (since we assume people are intelligent), they are artificially intelligent. Corporations are AI.

Corporations are already fully legal artificial beings who are already fucking shit up. This has been legally established for centuries and politically evident for decades at least (for white people) and ever since colonialism for the rest of us, which was corporations viciously preying on us.

Hence the worst case for AI is already here and has been for centuries for most of the world. But because they encountered a convincing chatbot, commentators are vainly writing think pieces about how to avoid the worst case. My brother in capitalism, we’re already fucked. As some dude writes in the New Yorker (I only read until the paywall kicked in):

In the worst-case scenario envisioned by these thinkers, uncontrollable A.I.s could infiltrate every aspect of our technological lives, disrupting or redirecting our infrastructure, financial systems, communications, and more. Fake people, now endowed with superhuman cunning, might persuade us to vote for measures and invest in concerns that fortify their standing, and susceptible individuals or factions could overthrow governments or terrorize populations. (New Yorker 🤮)

Honestly, these people aren’t thinking hard enough. What the writer describes here is what corporations are already doing. Infiltrating our technological lives (Amazon, literally everyone), messing up infrastructure for profit (Enron, fossil fuel companies, all the privatized train wrecks), fucking up the financial world (BlackRock, everyone), corrupting communications (Facebook, et al). Persuading us to vote for measures we don’t want and fortify their standing? This is literally being a corporation 101. Lobbying, bribing politicians, and couping governments they don’t like? This is old hat by now. Just because corporations act through humans parts doesn’t make it less of an Artificial Intelligence. Missing that point is a failure of our intelligence, not theirs.

I will return again and again to the point that corporations are already legal persons, with most of the rights of humans, even more rights that humans don’t have (like getting away with murder), and basically none of the responsibility (limited liability FTW). Whatever threshold we think AI is going to have to clear to ‘be accepted’ has already been leapt over long, long, ago while we sit around debating semantics. The first AI was the Dutch East India Company in the 1600s and it literally enslaved people and stripped the Earth. And the corporations haven’t stopped. This is not something ChatGPT is going to do to us in the future. It’s already been done.

In this sense ‘talking’ AI is a bit of a party trick. Corporate AI has been talking through legal documents and corporate statements for centuries. You could say that it’s been humans doing and directing this, but are we?

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https://brownstone.org/articles/pandemic-leaders-were-biodefense-puppets-and-profiteers/

Pandemic Leaders Were Biodefense Puppets and Profiteers

Scandalous incompetence. Profound stupidity. Astounding errors. This is how many analysts – including Dr. Vinay Prasad, Dr. Scott Atlas, and popular Substack commentator eugyppius – explain how leading public health experts could prescribe so many terrible pandemic response policies.

And it’s true: the so-called experts certainly have made themselves look foolish over the last three years: Public health leaders like Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci make false claims, or contradict themselves repeatedly, on subjects related to the pandemic response, while leading scientists, like Peter Hotez in the US and Christian Drosten in Germany, are equally susceptible to such flip-flops and lies. Then there are the internationally renowned medical researchers, like Eric Topol, who repeatedly commit obvious errors in interpreting Covid-related research studies. [ref]

All of these figures publicly and aggressively promoted anti-public health policies, including universal masking, social distancing, mass testing and quarantining of healthy people, lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

It seems like an open-and-shut case: Dumb policies, dumb people in charge of those policies. 

This might be true in a few individual cases of public health or medical leaders who really are incapable of understanding even high school level science. However, if we look at leading pandemic public health and medical experts as a group – a group consisting of the most powerful, widely published, and well-paid researchers and scientists in the world – that simple explanation sounds much less convincing. 

Even if you believe that most medical researchers are shills for pharmaceutical companies and that scientists rarely break new ground anymore, I think you’d be hard-pressed to claim that they lack basic analytical skills or a solid educational background in the areas they’ve studied. Most doctors and scientists with advanced degrees know how to analyze simple scientific documents and understand basic data. 

Additionally, those doctors and public health professionals who were deemed experts during the pandemic were also clever enough to have climbed the academic, scientific, and/or government ladders to the highest levels.

They might be unscrupulous, sycophantic, greedy, or power-mongering. You might think they make bad moral or ethical decisions. But it defies logic to say that every single one of them understands simple scientific data less than, say, someone like me or you. In fact, I find that to be a facile, superficial judgment that does not get to the root cause of their seemingly stupid, incompetent behavior.

Returning to some specific examples, I would argue that it is irrational to conclude, as Dr. Prasad did, that someone like Dr. Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who has published over 1,300 peer-reviewed articles and is one of the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine [ref] cannot read research papers “at a high level.” And it is equally unlikely that Anthony Fauci, who managed to ascend and remain atop the highest scientific perch in the federal government for many decades, controlling billions of dollars in research grants [ref], was too dumb to know that masks don’t stop viruses.

There must, therefore, be a different reason why all the top pro-lockdown scientists and public health experts – in perfect lockstep – suddenly started (and continue to this day) to misread studies and advocate policies that they had claimed in the past were unnecessary, making themselves look like fools.

Public health experts were messengers for the biodefense response

The most crucial single fact to know and remember when trying to understand the craziness of Covid times is this:

The public health experts were not responsible for pandemic response policy. The military-intelligence-biodefense leadership was in charge.

In previous articles, I examined in great detail the government documents that show how standard tenets of public health pandemic management were abruptly and secretly thrown out during Covid. The most startling switch was the replacement of the public health agencies by the National Security Council and Department of Homeland Security at the helm of pandemic policy and planning.

As part of the secret switch, all communications – defined in every previous pandemic planning document as the responsibility of the CDC – were taken over by the National Security Council under the auspices of the White House Task Force. The CDC was not even allowed to hold its own press conferences!

 As a Senate report from December 2022 notes:

From March through June 2020, CDC was not permitted to conduct public briefings, despite multiple requests by the agency and CDC media requests were “rarely cleared.” HHS stated that by early April 2020, “after several attempts to get approvals,” its Office of Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs “stopped asking” the White House “for a while.” (p. 8)

When public health and medical experts blanketed the airwaves and Internet with “recommendations” urging universal masking, mass testing and quarantining of asymptomatic people, vaccine mandates, and other anti-public health policies – or when they promoted obviously flawed studies that supported the quarantine-until-vaccine biodefense agenda – they were not doing so because they were dumb, incompetent, or misguided. 

They were performing the role that the leaders of the national security/biodefense response gave them: to be the trusted public face that made people believe quarantine-until-vaccine was a legitimate public health response. 

Why did public health leaders go along with the biodefense agenda?

We have to imagine ourselves in the position of public health and medical experts at top government positions when the intelligence-military-biodefense network took over the pandemic response. 

What would you do if you were a government employee, or a scientist dependent on government grants, and you were told that the quarantine-until-vaccine policy was actually the only way to deal with this particular engineered potential bioweapon?

How would you behave if an unprecedented event in human history happened on your watch: an engineered virus designed as a potential bioweapon was spreading around the world, and the people who designed it told you that terrifying the entire population into locking down and waiting for a vaccine was the only way to stop it from killing many millions? 

More mundanely, if your position and power depended on going along with whatever the powers-that-be in the NSC and DHS told you to do – if your job and livelihood were on the line – would you go against the narrative and risk losing it all?

And, finally, in a more venal vain: what if you stood to gain a lot more money and/or power by advocating for policies that might not be the gold standard of public health, but that you told yourself could bring about major innovations (vaccines/countermeasures) that would save humanity from future pandemics?

We know how the most prominent Covid “experts” answered those questions. Not because they were dumb, but because they had a lot to lose and/or a lot to gain by going along with the biodefense narrative – and they were told millions would die if they failed to do so.

Why understanding the motives of public health leaders during Covid is so important

Paradoxically, deeming public health experts stupid and incompetent actually reinforces the consensus narrative: that lockdowns and vaccines were part of a public health plan. In this reading, the response may have been terrible, or it may have gone awry, but it was still just a stupid public health plan designed by incompetent public health leaders.

Such a conclusion leads to calls for misguided and necessarily ineffectual solutions: Even if we replaced every single HHS employee or defunded the HHS or even the WHO altogether, we would not solve the problem and would be poised to repeat the entire pandemic fiasco all over again.

The only way to avoid such repetition is to recognize the Covid catastrophe for what it was: an international counterterrorism effort focused myopically on lockdowns and vaccines, to the exclusion of all traditional and time-tested public health protocols.

We need to wake up to the fact that, since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (if not earlier), we have ceded control of the agencies that are supposed to be in charge of public health to an international military-intelligence-pharmaceutical cartel. 

This “public-private partnership” of bioterrorism experts and vaccine developers is not interested in public health at all, except as a cover for their very secret and very lucrative biowarfare research and countermeasure development.

Public health was shunted aside during the Covid pandemic, and the public health leaders were used as trusted “experts” to convey biowarfare edicts to the population. Their cooperation does not reflect stupidity or incompetence. Making such claims contributes to the coverup of the much more sinister and dangerous transfer of power that their seemingly foolish behavior was meant to hide.

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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/fbi_make_work_entrapment_schemes_creating_criminals_in_order_to_arrest_them

FBI Make-Work Entrapment Schemes: Creating Criminals in Order to Arrest Them

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Friedrich Nietzsche

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.

Rather, we are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Case in point: the FBI.

The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.

Clearly, this is not a government agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.

Indeed, this same government agency has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.

Basically, it works like this: in order to justify their crime-fighting superpowers, the FBI manufactures criminals by targeting vulnerable individuals and feeding them anti-government propaganda; then, undercover agents and informants equip the targeted individuals with the training and resources to challenge what they’ve been indoctrinated into believing is government corruption; and finally, the FBI arrests the targeted individuals for engaging in anti-government, terrorist activities.

This is what passes for the government’s perverse idea of being tough on crime.

For example, undercover FBI agents pretending to be associated with ISIS have been accused of seeking out online and befriending a 16-year-old with brain development issues, persuading him to secretly send them small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and then the moment Mateo Ventura, turned 18, arresting him for providing financial support to an Islamic terrorist group.

If convicted, the teenager could spend up to 10 years in prison.

Yet as The Intercept explains, “the only ‘terrorist’ he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old… This law enforcement tactic has been criticized by national security researchers who have scrutinized the FBI’s role in manufacturing terrorism cases using vulnerable people who would have been unable to commit crimes without prolonged government assistance and encouragement… the Ventura case may indicate that authorities are still open to conjuring terrorists where none existed.”

In another incident, the FBI used an undercover agent/informant to seek out and groom an impressionable young man, cultivating his friendship, gaining his sympathy, stoking his outrage over injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government, then enlisting his help to blow up the Herald Square subway station. Despite the fact that Shahawar Matin Siraj ultimately refused to plant a bomb at the train station, he was arrested for conspiring to do so at the urging of his FBI informant and used to bolster the government’s track record in foiling terrorist plots. Of course, no mention was made of the part the government played in fabricating the plot, recruiting a would-be bomber, and setting him up to take the fall.

These are Machiavellian tactics with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings, but it is especially dangerous for anyone whose views could in any way be characterized as anti-government.

As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”

For instance, it was reported that the FBI had been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.

All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.

What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.

Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.

This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.  

To go after terrorists, they become terrorists.

To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers.

To go after thieves, they become thieves.

For instance, when the FBI raided a California business that was suspected of letting drug dealers anonymously stash guns, drugs and cash in its private vaults, agents seized the contents of all the  safety deposit boxes and filed forfeiture motions to keep the contents, which include millions of dollars’ worth of valuables owned by individuals not accused of any crime whatsoever.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy. 

This certainly isn’t a constitutional democracy, however.

Some days, it feels like the FBI is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.

In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.

USA Today estimates that agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.

In a stunning development reported by The Washington Post, a probe into misconduct by an FBI agent resulted in the release of at least a dozen convicted drug dealers from prison.

In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.

For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”

Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.

The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”

The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.

Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

The powers-that-be are not acting in our best interests.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Think about it.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.

The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms. It is, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the source of the threats to our freedoms.