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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/11/18/scott-ritter-all-lost-total-failure-achieved/

All Lost, Total Failure Achieved

Why you should be enraged with what Israel is doing in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Must Watch

One hour video interview with Scott Ritter at article address

Comments to video:

" One has to commend Ritter for his unwavering commitment to finding and articulating the truth, and his fearless integrity in openly embracing positions that are not only critical but damning of the power elite that runs The American Empire. His work to expose the flagrant villainy of Zionist Israel, and his willingness to expose himself to the false, vicious smearing inflicted on anyone with the balls to call the Zionist regime what it is–a Nazi clone–are testimony to his great courage and integrity. This is a man."

" Very true what you say about Ritter, he is brave. Let’s hope he has some good body guards because the ADL and a couple other organizations will hurt him given the chance. The good news is that so far he hasn’t been forced to live in a different country or imprisoned in the UK. We need him and others like him."

" Scott, Thank you for speaking the truth forcefully and without hesitation. I am outraged at the mass murder of Palestinians which has been committed by the criminal state of Israel for the last 75 years. The U.S. government has been an active participant in this genocide for the entire 75 year period and has now given its approval of this savage mass murder of innocent civilians. The U.S. also needs to answer for its participation in these crimes. I am sickened by this horror and repulsed by the fact that my government approves of, and actively participates in these crimes. I am disgusted by the failure of the media to condemn Israel and the U.S. for their crimes. We need more people like you to tell it like it is. "

" Israel will never dare to stage war against the Palestinian civilians and kill so many Palestinian children and babies without the US green light it. Joe Biden told Netanyahu (via Blinken) to move faster and kill as many Palestinian children as possible. Biden is refusing to impose ceasefire and had threatened Hezbollah and Iran if they get involved get involved. Since 07 October 2023, more than 15000 innocent Palestinians, including 5000 children and babies have been murdered in cold blood. The UN Secretary General Guterres said: Israeli Jews have turned “Gaza into a graveyard for children.” In fact, the Jews have turned Gaza hospitals into mass grave graveyards. It does not make sense and you cannot win war by killing women and children unless the aim is Genocide, a real holocaust.

In truth, Israel is incapable of doing anything without the U.S. It is armed and financed by the U.S., and therefore never interested in peace. For its part, the U.S. was never an honest broker. The U.S. is only following Zionist dictates. The Jews have an iron grip on all U.S. politicians and own the entire U.S. mainstream media and the entertainment industry. This will allow the Jews to brainwash and turn Americans into an ignorant and bewildered herd. Israel takes precedence over U.S. interests.
In reality, Fascism never ended. It continues where it was left in a different form, normalized and accepted by the media and the entertainment industry. American scholar Norman Finkelstein accurately said, Israel is worse than Nazi Germany and South Africa under Apartheid. We live under barbaric Jewish Fascism."

" U.S. citizens must be made to understand that it is our Country which makes these atrocities possible. Without U.S. financial, military and political support, the criminal state of Israel would not be able to execute this decades long process of genocide of the Palestinians, whose land and resources have been stolen by Israel. This conduct makes me ashamed to be a U.S. citizen. I hold Biden, Blinken and their fellow neocons in absolute contempt. They are terrible human beings and war criminals and deserve to be prosecuted as such. "

" Generally forceful and excellent.
However, and this is a big however, I don’t follow Ritter when he starts (ca. 25:00) talking about how Israel could have gotten the “international community” to hlep in eliminating Hamas. Just ten minutes before he said that Hamas is the governing entity of Gaza and had the DUTY to launch an attack against the occupying power, Israel.

These two pov’s simply do not compute. "

 ....

https://brownstone.org/articles/panopticism-on-steroids/

Panopticism on Steroids

It is no secret, especially since 2020, that we live in a society where surveillance of various kinds and at different levels – optical, audial, text-oriented, administrative – has increased almost unbearably. As long ago as 2011 Sherry Turkle sounded the alarm on the growing acceptance of surveillance (by the US government, among other agencies) and the concomitant loss of privacy by most people. In Alone Together (2011: p. 262) she raised this issue by observing: 

Privacy has a politics. For many, the idea ‘we’re all being observed all the time anyway, so who needs privacy?’ has become a commonplace. But this state of mind has a cost. At a Webby Awards ceremony, an event to recognize the best and most influential websites, I was reminded of just how costly it is. 

She proceeded to describe how, when the issue of ‘illegal wiretapping’ by government cropped up, the general response by the ‘Weberati’ was that, if one had ‘nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,’ in this way revealing their apathy about the incremental loss of privacy. On this occasion, a ‘Web luminary’ confided to her that someone might always be observing your activity on the internet, but that it really did not matter if this were the case: ‘As long as you are not doing anything wrong, you are safe.’

To Turkle’s surprise, this web-authority justified his lack of concern by (incongruously) referring to French thinker Michel Foucault’s discussion of the architectural idea of a ‘panopticon’ (p. 262): 

Foucault’s critical take on disciplinary society had, in the hands of this technology guru, become a justification for the U.S. government to use the Internet to spy on its citizens. For Foucault, the task of the modern state is to reduce its need for actual surveillance by creating a citizenry that will watch itself. A disciplined citizen minds the rules. Foucault wrote about Jeremy Bentham’s design for a panopticon because it captured how such a citizenry is shaped. In the panopticon, a wheellike structure with an observer at its hub, one develops the sense of always being watched, whether or not the observer is actually present. If the structure is a prison, inmates know that a guard can potentially always see them. In the end, the architecture encourages self-surveillance.

Foucault’s use of Bentham’s idea of the panopticon in his monumental study of modes of punishment in modern society – Discipline and Punish (1995) – cannot be discussed at length here (it will have to wait for a future occasion). In this regard Turkle provides a very succinct summary that will have to do for the moment, and adds a corollary about the web-illuminatus’s allusion to it (p. 262): 

The panopticon serves as a metaphor for how, in the modern state, every citizen becomes his or her own policeman. Force becomes unnecessary because the state creates its own obedient citizenry. Always available for scrutiny, all turn their eyes on themselves….Foucault’s critical take on disciplinary society had, in the hands of this technology guru, become a justification for the U.S. government to use the Internet to spy on its citizens. 

Unsurprisingly, people around her and her interlocutor at the cocktail party indicated their agreement with this sentiment, which Turkle – someone who clearly understands the meaning of democracy – evidently could not stomach, judging by her further elaboration on what she perceived as something ‘very common in the technology community,’ and as gaining growing approval even among young people at high school and college. 

Turkle (p. 263) granted that voluntarily giving up one’s privacy concerning everything from one’s preferences in music to sex on social media such as Facebook is symptomatic of being unphased by the thought that impersonal government agencies are spying on you to ascertain what websites you visit or whom you associate with. It is well-known that some welcome such public revelations because it seems to be a justification of them as individuals: they are ‘seen’ as having significance. Small wonder that discussions with teenagers about online privacy meet with resignation instead of outrage. 

In contrast, Turkle’s own comparable experience of attacks on privacy, dating back to the McCarthy era in the 1950s, was informed by her grandparents’ fear that the McCarthy hearings were about anything but patriotism; they saw it in the light of what they had experienced in Eastern Europe, with the government spying on citizens and sometimes persecuting them. She recounted how her grandmother valorised living in America, pointing out to her granddaughter that no one living in their apartment block was afraid of having their names on their post boxes for everyone else to see, and reminding her that it was a federal offence for anyone to look at one’s mail: ‘That’s the beauty of this country’ (p. 263). 

Turkle regarded this as her ‘civics lessons at the mailbox,’ which ‘linked privacy and civil liberties,’ and compared this to contemporary children who grow up with the thought that their email and other messages may be shared with others and are not (unlike mail in a bygone era) protected by law. Why, even the internet guru referred to earlier saw no irony in citing Foucault on panopticism in relation to the internet having perfected it, arguing that all one could do was ‘to just be good.’ To her credit, however, Turkle would have none of it (p. 263-264):      

But sometimes a citizenry should not simply ‘be good.’ You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent. There needs to be technical space (a sacrosanct mailbox) and mental space. The two are intertwined. We make our technologies, and they, in turn, make and shape us. My grandmother made me an American citizen, a civil libertarian, a defender of individual rights in an apartment lobby in Brooklyn… 

    In democracy, perhaps we all need to begin with the assumption that everyone has something to hide, a zone of private action and reflection, one that must be protected no matter what our techno-enthusiasms. I am haunted by the sixteen-year-old boy who told me that when he needs to make a private call, he uses a pay phone that takes coins and complains how hard it is to find one in Boston… 

   I learned to be a citizen at the Brooklyn mailboxes. To me, opening up a conversation about technology, privacy, and civil society is not romantically nostalgic, not Luddite in the least. It seems like part of democracy defining its sacred spaces.

This book by Turkle was first published in 2011, when things were already pretty bad as far as honouring the democratic right to privacy was concerned. Contrary to her initial optimism regarding human use of computers and the internet, Turkle – who has for some time been a leading thinker on the relation of information technology to human experience of it – has more recently expressed serious concern about the negative effects, via the use of smartphones, of social media on (particularly young people’s) linguistic and emotional-affective development and capacities; see her Reclaiming Conversation (2015).

How have things changed since then, particularly during the Covid era? Judging by Sara Morrison’s experience it has changed for the worst: 

As a digital privacy reporter, I try to avoid sites and services that invade my privacy, collect my data, and track my actions. Then the pandemic came, and I threw most of that out the window. You probably did, too…

   Millions of Americans have had a similar pandemic experience. School went remote, work was done from home, happy hours went virtual. In just a few short months, people shifted their entire lives online, accelerating a trend that would have otherwise taken years and will endure after the pandemic ends — all while exposing more and more personal information to the barely regulated internet ecosystem. At the same time, attempts to enact federal legislation to protect digital privacy were derailed, first by the pandemic and then by increasing politicization over how the internet should be regulated.

Keep in mind that, so far, only the issue of (the right to) privacy as a democratic principle has been considered. If one goes a step further, in the direction of inquiring about “Americans’ perceptions of privacy and surveillance in the COVID-19 pandemic” (December 2020), a more nuanced picture emerges. In this survey-based analysis of responses from 2,000 American adults, the authors set out to assess respondents’ support for nine surveillance measures used during the Covid period. Their assessment of attitudes brought out partisan differences on a number of surveillance procedures, but enabled them to come to the following conclusion: 

Support for public health surveillance policies to curb the spread of COVID-19 is relatively low in the U.S. Contact tracing apps that use decentralized data storage, compared with those that use centralized data storage, are more accepted by the public. While respondents’ support for expanding traditional contact tracing is greater than their support for the government encouraging the public to download and use contact tracing apps, there are smaller partisan differences in support for the latter policy. 

Regardless of how US citizens (and citizens of other countries) may evaluate surveillance policies and measures such as those covered in the study referred to above, three years down the line, we face surveillance measures that are considerably more far-reaching than something like contact-tracing, for example.

What should one think about the proposed European Digital Wallet – which is certain to be copied in the US and other countries – that will enable authorities to track virtually everything one does, in the name of the ‘convenience’ of having everything together in one digital ‘burrito,’ as Clayton Morris calls it in the video linked above. It will include one’s biometric data, one’s central bank digital currency, one’s vaccine status and other ‘health’ data, as well as data on your whereabouts and movement records…what is left for privacy? Nothing. This would be panopticism on steroids. 

As Morris further points out, despite some opposition to this conspicuously totalitarian move within the European Parliament, when it is brought to a vote it will probably be accepted, with disastrous consequences for European Union citizens. He also remarks, appositely, that people usually do not do what is required beforehand – such as contacting one’s representative in parliament to protest the proposed measure – in an attempt to prevent such draconian measures from being adopted; as a rule they wait for it to be pushed through, and when the pain becomes too unbearable they will start protesting. But then it would be too late.

....

https://brownstone.org/articles/looking-for-trouble-that-doesnt-exist/

Looking for Trouble that Doesn’t Exist

About a month ago, I underwent my annual physical. I’m required to do this to keep my medical insurance.

As I generally avoid medical treatment, I don’t value medical insurance as highly as do most other people. On a society-wide basis, medical expenditures deliver poor return on investment. While 2010’s Affordable Care Act has extended medical insurance to 35 million more Americans—subsidized by $1.8 trillion/year in tax dollars—life expectancy is lower now than it was in 1996. Despite all of the additional money spent on Covid, including the vaunted “vaccine,” America, and much of Europe, have had sustained 8-40 percent excess mortality since March, 2020, including during the three years since the shots were introduced.

One can’t help but wonder how many of these excess deaths were caused by the lockdowns’ effects, the Covid hospital protocols and the mRNA injections; probably the vast majority were, because as Substacker Bill Rice and others have observed, the virus was around in autumn 2019 without the death trend.

Given that a family insurance policy costs an employer over $20,000/year, I’d prefer to have, for the past four decades, received this sum to spend as I saw fit. I could have used some of these funds to buy a nicer house and to donate to NGOs that help others to eat better food, drink better water, and control malaria.

If I’d had the ability to choose, I would have purchased a high-deductible medical insurance policy that covered only catastrophic injury, put some of the remainder of the repurposed insurance money in the bank and paid out-of-pocket for selected treatments that might have been helpful. I’m baseline healthy, eat carefully and take no meds.

But employer-based plans like mine didn’t offer a high-d option. Plus, many state laws require medical insurers to cover a range of costly and morally and socially problematic treatments, such as sex-changes and IVF, which I’d rather not subsidize. Allowing individuals to assess our own risks would defeat the purpose of providing an inexhaustible source of private and public money to fund the Med/Pharma juggernaut.

In this vein, such unfunny clowns as Jimmy Kimmel and Howard Stern demanded that earned medical insurance, and treatments of all types, be taken away from those, like me, who declined to inject mRNA. This stance seemed odd, given that vaxx mob members had never before supported conduct-based insurance nullification. For decades, none of the vaxxers demanded insurance forfeiture by those who engaged in far riskier behaviors than vaxx refusal, e.g., street drug use, smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or engaging in promiscuous sex that spread HIV or sterilizing STDs.

Yet, even those who supported taking away medical treatments from the uninjected were marginally more decent than those like Noam Chomsky, who demanded that the shot-decliners also be barred from buying food. Overall, the vaxx mandaters weren’t the great thinkers and humanitarians they considered themselves to be. They wrongly ascribed magical powers to the shots, which failed, as had been unequivocally promised, to stop infection and spread or to prevent serious illness.

To say nothing of widespread vaxx injuries and deaths. Go away, fulminating mandaters: your credibility is gone.

I submit to the annual ritual/physical because my wife’s insurance also depends on my physical, even though she’s not required to take one. I also figure that I might as well keep the insurance, a non-negotiable term of employment, in the unlikely event that I break a bone or snap a tendon or ligament and need some operation to repair it. Who knows what something like that would cost these days? Medical bills often bear no reasonable relation to the cost of providing treatment.

The existence of medical insurance, both public and private, has badly inflated medical treatments’ costs, thus placing basic services out of the reach of the uninsured. Insurance and medical mergers have also disfigured the practice of medicine. Many doctors dislike all of the attendant structure, strictures, quotas, billing and coding machinations and interference with professional judgment. Medical malpractice attorneys have also added pressure to over-test and over-treat.

Overall, I question whether the US should spend one-fifth of its $25.6 trillion GDP—i.e., $5,120,000,000,000—annually on medicine. About 85 percent of that amount is consumed by 20 percent of the population; 70 percent is spent on 10 percent. Seeing Pharma, hospitals, and personal injury law firms as the biggest advertisers reflects major social, economic, and governmental dysfunction.

Without undergoing a physical, I know roughly what kind of condition I’m in. To begin with, I know how I feel and function. Getting on a scale supplies another useful data point; my scale reveals to within one-fifth of a pound when I’ve eaten stuff that I shouldn’t have. Running for a train, playing sports, or otherwise exerting myself provides another test: do I get short of breath or does anything hurt the next day? Someone told me that, if you wake up over 50 and nothing hurts, you know you’ve died. By that measure, I’m dead. And grateful to be.

Overall, if you told me at 18 that I could do the things I can do now, at 65.9, I would have been pleased and surprised. At this stage of life, I look at the doughnut, not the hole. Though I avoid eating doughnuts. Or bagels.

I like my doctor well enough. She’s amiable and doesn’t talk down to me. And she doesn’t perform all of the invasive tests that I’ve heard that other doctors perform. She does nothing while checking me out that requires her to wear a latex glove.

But when I go for my physical, I feel she’s nit-picking.

She says my blood sugar readings—I do like me my watermelon—make me “pre-diabetic.” But this label is a scare tactic: only 15 percent of those diagnosed as pre-diabetic ever develop diabetes. My mom was pre-diabetic for decades until she died at 94 and-a-half after a series of strokes that were temporally linked to the mRNA shots. I would have tried to talk Mom out of injecting but she would have gone along anyway. Like so many, she did whatever the doctor said.

My doctor also told me my cholesterol is high. But my HDL/LDL ratio is supposedly good, as are my triglycerides. I’ve read that those are better indicators of circulatory health than is total cholesterol. My blood pressure and pulse are also favorably low. If my arteries were hardening or my heart was weak, wouldn’t these metrics be worse?

Regardless, my doctor recommended that I take a statin. I declined because statins have many negative effects, including cognitive impairment and raising blood sugar. Taking pills to counteract pills seems tricky, unhealthy, and weird. Besides, I don’t want to excrete meds into rivers.

The doctor reminded me that I’ve had a skin cancer spot removed and that I should avoid the sun and/or wear sunscreen. Fair enough, but I can’t change the past. I did much work and play in the sun before anyone told me that I was supposed to wear long sleeves, sunscreen, sunglasses, and a hat. If my skin is damaged, it’s not surprising. It came from living life.

Additionally, she noted that my BMI is high. But BMI resembles an asymptomatic 40-cycle PCR Covid test: both are very dubious heuristics that look for trouble that doesn’t exist. I’m 6’1,” 204 pounds, with no pinchable flesh. This is the same height/weight as many well-conditioned professional athletes. If I dropped my weight to attain an acceptable BMI—i.e., if I were 22 pounds lighter—family and friends would ask if I was OK.

I’m not claiming I’m as fit as a professional athlete in his twenties. I’m not in my twenties. I don’t expect to have the speed, stamina, flexibility, skin, hair, or vision that I had in that decade, even if I devoted my life to exercising and eating with extreme care. I already eat plenty of cold-water fish and vegetables. I stay active but I like to do stuff other than exercise. And I think it’s helpful to mix rest with motion. I get my pulse up 4-5 times/week. It feels like enough.

My doctor also asked me if I had changed my mind about taking the Covid “vaxx.” I responded, “For the past three years, I’ve said the virus didn’t scare me, the shots wouldn’t work, and seemed risky. What’s happened to change my mind?”

She replied, sheepishly, “Just asking.”

I wonder why she’s still asking. Many doctors seem to want to promote Pharma products, especially ones that you’ll take for the rest of your life. If Big Pharma had its way, we’d all be getting Covid and flu shots every year and swallowing multiple pills every day until we die.

Many doctors, bureaucrats, politicians, and ads sell the overarching notion that health comes out of a needle or small, hard, green, brown or yellow plastic cylinders with white caps. Many people have adopted this latter-day religion, which falsely connotes sophistication, safety, and modernity; one vaxx manufacturer even named itself to promote the bias that those who take shots are, as Flip Wilson used to say, members of “The Church of What’s Happening Now.” But just as attorneys advise clients but can’t force clients to heed their advice, medical patients needn’t follow physicians’ direction.

Last night, my wife and I watched two movies in New York City’s documentary film fest, which, after three years of Covophobia, returned to in-person showings. One, entitled Songs of the Earth, spectacularly portrayed an aging Norwegian fjord-dwelling couple. The next, Famadou Konate: King of Djembe, paid lively tribute to an 80-year-old African drummer.

Despite their distinctively different latitudes and cultures—and that the movies were long on compelling visuals and music, and short on talk—protagonists in both of these films expressly emphasized a basic human theme: Our bodies wear out. None of us lives forever. We must consider our time on Earth as a link in the long chain of humanity and try to pass on to our successors: constructive tradition, family, knowledge, wisdom, faith and opportunities for happiness.

Before we watched last night’s movies, we visited NYC’s 9/11 museum and saw photos of thousands of people cut down in their prime. In contrast to those who purportedly died with Covid, the 9/11, and many other, deaths of the non-old are deeply unjust.

Chiefly, I’ve hated Coronamania because it was built on the lie that the deaths of old, sick people were shocking and tragic. Under the pretense of slightly extending some tiny fraction of these lives, many supported taking away significant chunks of the primes of hundreds of millions of non-old peoples’ lives. This ethic, and the lockdown/lockout/mask-up policies that flowed from it, were obscene.

I’ve lived a long time and dodged some bullets. I’ll likely be around for a while longer. But I won’t use every medical modality in a futile, and perhaps counterproductive, attempt to extend my life. As Ivan Illich wrote 47 years ago in Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, the costs—both to the individual and to the society—of doing so outweigh the benefits.

As did the Corona hospital protocols, many medical treatments shorten lives, or lower lives’ quality. And with broad public support, the powers that be isolated and wrecked the lives of the young during Coronamania. I never want to be an accomplice to such inter-generational theft.

I’ve also hated the Scamdemic because, like much of what passes for modern medicine, it centered on looking for trouble that didn’t exist in order to sell products: tests, ventilators, drugs, and shots and to tighten political and social control, not to improve public health. Remaining grounded in reality and recognizing that the duration and quality of our earthly lives are intrinsically limited would provide fewer excuses, and fewer means, to control and derive profit from others.