SC299-4

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/04/07/facing-nuclear-war/

Facing Nuclear War

The invention of nuclear weapons was an act of total insanity. If the massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons are not dismantled and destroyed, sooner or later they will destroy planet Earth.

We have survived so far because the Cuban Missile Crisis awoke President Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev to the danger of distrust between nuclear powers. For the remainder of the 20th century Washington and Moscow worked to defuse tensions and to build transparency and trust. Sufficient success was achieved to avoid false indications from warning systems showing incoming ICBMs from resulting in the launch of nuclear war.

Today there is no trust. In the 21st century all of the arms agreements hammered out over the decades of the Cold War have been abandoned, first by Washington and then in response by the Kremlin. The Soviet collapse in 1991 gave rise to the neoconservative doctrine of US hegemony, an assertion of American unilateralism, a claim of American supremacy. Such an absurd and unrealistic claim is totally inconsistent with the existence of nuclear weapons.

All trust has been erased. In the US Russia has been demonized to an unprecedented extent. It is so extreme that anyone who gives an objective analysis is branded a “Putin agent/dupe.” This makes realistic assessments impossible.

In Russia trust of Washington has been completely destroyed by broken promises, such as NATO will not move one inch to the East, broken arms agreements, deceit over the Minsk Agreement, and by Washington’s endless rejections of Russian requests for a mutual security agreement.

Today all it takes for the world to end is one false warning of incoming missiles.

It was Washington, not Russia, that created this situation, and nothing is being done about it. The world is content with the Sword of Damocles hanging by a thread over the planet.

Whenever I raise this most serious of all issues, a gaggle of idiots pronounce that nuclear weapons will never be used because there can be no winners. All the while Putin is warning that Washington and its NATO puppets are pushing Russia into nuclear war. There is no end of people too stupid to see the dire threat.

If Biden, the defense secretary, anyone in Washington had any sense, they would call Putin and declare that we need more than a mutual security agreement. We need to dismantle and destroy all nuclear weapons–the US, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, France and the UK. To demonstrate our newly acquired good intentions, Washington should announce that it is closing its worldwide network of illegal bioweapon research laboratories and abandoning its effort to substitute Washington’s self-serving “rule-based order” for established international law.

The notion that the US needs to defend against a Russian or Chinese invasion is an absurdity when the US is being overrun daily by immigrant-invaders. According to official numbers, immigrant-invaders recruited from 160 countries by NGOs financed with federal tax dollars are entering unopposed our country monthly in numbers equivalent to the population of Pittsburgh.

300,000 a month is 3.6 million a year. No one knows how many immigrant-invaders have entered our country, but the evidence is clear that the US is being colonized. The best guess is that 30 million illegals have taken up residence in the US. And this at a time when US manufacturing has been offshored and robotics is eliminating many remaining jobs. The influx is so great that even schools, airports and bus stations, and hotels are being turned into housing for immigrant invaders. There are reports that private businesses are being paid by state, local, and federal governments to provide housing for the immigrant-invaders. In other words, an invasion is being turned into a profit center for private businesses based on government tax dollars.

American property owners are finding themselves dispossessed by immigrant-invaders. A family can return from vacation to find immigrant-invaders, who cannot be evicted, occupying their home. Breaking and entering has been turned into an “owner-tenant dispute.” Rental property owners find rental units vacant between leases occupied by illegals who cannot be evicted. I have reported examples on this website.

American citizens are exploited in additional ways. They have to pay for schooling, health care, and prepaid credit cards given to illegals. The character of neighborhoods is erased. Crime multiplies. Liberals demand that illegals be given voting rights. California hires them as police officers. Members of Congress want to put the immigrant-invaders in the US military and use them to defend the country whose borders they have violated. As Washington refuses to oppose this invasion, why is Washington so concerned about a mythical Chinese or Russian invasion? The absurdity boggles the mind. America has been turned into a tower of babel.

We know for certain that Russia and China combined do not have armies approaching in size the immigrant-invaders overrunning our country. So, why are we only concerned about being invaded by Russians and Chinese or the UN, but not by the invaders we are actually experiencing, about which nothing is done?

Instead we are pursuing an aggressive foreign policy toward, Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran that is fomenting nuclear war. Washington’s aggression is a dire threat to the existence of life.

To comprehend the collapse in US-Russian relations, compare the warm reception given to the American pianist, Van Cliburn, in Moscow in 1958 when he won the international Tchaikovsky piano competition with the refusal today of Western orchestras to perform the music of Russian composers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9aKbfnMSrY

This Sunday morning brings news that Washington think tanks are now saying it is time for NATO troops to be sent to Ukraine or the West will suffer a catastrophic defeat. So, after all the denials, it is the West’s war against Russia. Perhaps Putin will take note.

Following the Vietnam pattern, the NATO troops will be used for logistics and support personnel, thereby freeing more Ukrainian soldiers for the front, but not themselves used in combat. It was through this door that the US ended up with 500,000 soldiers in Vietnam and still lost the war.

The US already has soldiers in Moldova where they are engaged in exercises with Moldovan soldiers. There is talk of Moldova joining the US in occupying Odessa, Ukraine’s last remaining position on the Black Sea. Once again it seems Putin’s lackadaisical way of fighting war has worked against him.

In Romania law changes are underway that allow Romanian soldiers to engage in offensive operations against countries that have not attacked Romania, and the Polish foreign minister is sending a mission to coordinate with Ukraine.

As it has since day one of Putin’s “limited military operation,” the war continues to widen. And dangerously. Perhaps for budget reasons, perhaps for civilian labor force needs, Putin has not raised an army sufficiently large to defend with conventional weapons the enormous length of Russia’s border with NATO. As attacks can come from the Arctic to the Black Sea and even from Georgia in central Asia, Russia is relying on nuclear weapons.

Putin was forced to intervene in Donbas, but it should have been done in a way that quickly ended the conflict and chilled any appetite for war with Russia.

Donald W. Miller, Jr., calls to our attention a new book by Annie Jacobsen titled Nuclear War: A Scenario: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/04/donald-w-miller-jr-md/facing-nuclear-war/
Read the article and the book and demand that Washington sober up before it gets everyone killed.

....

https://brownstone.org/articles/poynters-creepy-fact-based-expression/

Poynter’s Creepy ‘Fact-Based Expression’

Fact-based expression.

That is what the once vaunted now openly vile Poynter Institute – a pivot point of the international censorship-industrial complex – wishes to “strengthen…around the globe.”

Pointedly, not “free speech,” but “fact-based expression.” 

They’re not the same thing.

This absurd term, floated through the invite to read the institute’s annual and recently released “Impact Report,” may at first blush seem to be yet another silly woke wiggle, like “birthing person (mother) or “involved in the criminal justice system” (a felon) or “experiencing homelessness” (vagrant).

Like many Orwellian neologisms, it might, if you hear it only once or twice, seem to make a tiny bit of sense because “fact-based expression” implies telling the truth.

But like so many other progressive rewordings, it is purely an attempt to sound reasonable so as to mask a deeply ominous intent.

That intent? To control speech and public discourse by being the lone decider as to what is factual and what is not and those decisions are being – and will be – made based on the sociopolitical outlook of the progressive woke elite, the socialite socialist statist global drivers that fund Poynter.

But the Poynter Institute – once the premier media/journalism teaching and thinking, for lack of a better term, organizations – made a significant error in rolling out the term: it appears right after “free press,” inviting the clear comparison.

“…meaningful achievements we have made to help strengthen a free press and fact-based expression around the globe,” is how the email introduction to the report read.

So why not simply say “free speech?”

Because that’s not what they want at all (they don’t really believe in a free press either, noting the importance of the press being “responsible,” i.e..housebroken.)

To the contrary, “fact-based expression” demands both self and external censorship, a political, social, and cultural censorship that will drown out and drone on.

That is the business Poynter is in now – fact-checking. So Poynter will be telling the world what constitutes “fact-based expression” and what is not, what is verboten.

How convenient for Poynter, how wonderful for the globalists, how terrible for everyone else.

And Poynter has the connections to make it stick – take December, 2020 and Covid for example.

The American Medical Association “partnered” with Poynter to spread the gospel of vaccines, of pandemic panic, and the evils of “misinformation.”

Poynter even offered an online course that local (and national) news people from around the country could take that would leverage the trust they have built in the community to convince people to take the “vaccine:”

We know from previous vaccination efforts that local news is critically important: Audiences trust local news the most, and local journalists will be critical in guiding the public to vaccine administration sites and explaining eligibility.

The first rounds of vaccines will be based on new mRNA technology that, while being a scientific breakthrough, may raise questions in the public’s mind about safety and efficacy. We will explain the technology in ways you can pass along to the public.

The course made sure the locals reported how safe the vaccine was, how important it was, and what “misinformation” about the vaccine needed to be shot down.

Oddly enough, it also worked to help journalists “explain to audiences the importance of the second dosage of the vaccines.” On December 4, 2020 – curiously early for that specific topic – the “vaccine” had been out for only a couple of weeks.

As for all of 2020, you can see Poynter’s round-up here. Note it features the term “covidiot.”  

(And you can watch a rerun of the webinar here.)

How convenient for Poynter, how wonderful for the globalists, how terrible for everyone else.

Just nine years ago, Poynter had a budget of $3.8 million and, unless you worked in the media, you had no idea it even existed. Today, thanks to massive support from the likes of Google, Meta (Facebook), and others, Poynter is a $15 million a year nexus point for those who wish to control the press and, more importantly, what everyone else says.

Poynter runs PolitiFact, a media outlet that pretends to be in the business of checking facts. 

But it does no such thing. It is a global elite swamp third-party validation machine that twists and turns and backflips to put its “FACT” stamp of approval on just about anything that needs to be buttressed.

Or, more importantly, it stamps “FALSE” on a statement or story or concept that is at odds with the current popular narrative that keeps that same global elite in power (a litany of Poynter’s obfuscation and the tricks it uses can be found here).

It runs MediaWise, an outfit that claims to train (largely) younger people how to spot “misinformation,” something that does not actually exist but is a pillar of the censor’s claim to their right to exist. And through its “Teen Fact Checking Network,” Poynter is training a new generation of censors.

If Poynter were honestly trying to stop misinformation, it would not practice the art so well. 

And Poynter is the home of the International Fact Checking Network, a group of global media and other fact-checking organizations that is dedicated to “fighting repression and misinformation.”

To quote the IFCN chief: “Misinformation is on the march. The politically powerful are using disinformation to confuse the public and control the agenda. And fact-checkers and other journalists face attack and harassment simply for doing their jobs,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, IFCN director. “Yet our work continues. We are on the side of truth. We are on the side of information integrity.”

And the IFCN determines what is the truth, what information has the requisite “integrity” to pass muster?

In other words, doing to the world what it has done to the United States: work with social media and government agencies to stamp out dissent.

April 2 was “International Fact Checking Day.” To honor the occasion, Drobnic Holan took to her blog to claim that fact-checkers are not censors and, it appears, that the Murthy v. Missouri case currently in front of the United States Supreme Court is not really about the basic and immutable American tenet of freedom of speech but about letting misinformers keep muddying the waters of official truth:

The Supreme Court case is primarily about the government’s actions in dealing with tech platforms: Did the Biden administration go too far in asking for takedowns of vaccine-related misinformation? For years, similar attacks have been aimed at fact-checkers. As director of the International Fact-Checking Network, I’ve watched this movement label fact-checkers as part of a “censorship industrial complex,” claiming that fact-checkers are trying to suppress debatable information.

Ironically, this deeply misleading argument itself is aimed at suppressing critique and debate.

Google and Meta (Facebook) and TikTok are, as noted, Poynter funders and use its products to help decide what is or is not allowed on their platforms. That actual fact does not bode well for the neutrality of Poynter’s fact-checking efforts.

Specifically as to TikTok, Poynter proudly claims that “(T)hrough innovative fact-checking partnerships with Meta and TikTok, PolitiFact is slowing the spread of thousands of pieces of false or harmful online content each month — reducing future views of false information by 80% on average.”

And Poynter decides what is “harmful” and “false.”

And just a few days ago, clearly in response to the bill to force the sale of TikTok going through Congress, Poynter decided to “fact check” who really owns TikTok. Poynter decided that the statement that the “Chinese government owns TikTok” is – surprise surprise – false.

Because of its vaunted past, Poynter is the respectable (actually becoming less respectable with each passing million) face of the international movement to determine what the public can talk about.

And it seems being in the “fact” industry is good for business – budget tripled, staff doubled, got far more notoriety, and getting a bit of actual global power, all in the past decade.

Google, Meta, the Omidyar network (lefty media funders), The Just Trust (a spinoff of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative that focuses on “criminal justice), TikTok, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Stanford Impact Labs, which “invests in teams of researchers working with leaders in government, business, and communities to design, test, and scale interventions that can help us make progress on some of the world’s most pressing and persistent social challenges” are some of the major funders of Poynter.

All of the above are powerful progressive/woke companies and foundations and are intertwined with the global movement to muzzle the freedom of the average person, to create a rental world in which people will simply be interchangeable cogs to be watched, fed, and placated.

Another funder of Poynter is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), one of the most caustic – and powerful – members of the international “civil society” behemoth that lay somewhere between government and private industry and is now more powerful than either.

Note: NED was specifically founded in the 1980s to do in public what the CIA could no longer do in secret: play international politics, foment revolutions, buy supporters, and influence foreign media.

Another Poynter partner is the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a stepchild of the still-extant German Marshall Fund.

Reminder – the Marshall Plan was set up after World War II to help rebuild Germany and Europe; the Fund was created by the West German government and is now one of most slithery internationalist think tanks on the planet.

Last November, Poynter hosted a very very poorly attended “United Facts of America” online symposium, which included the participation of the Fund and the ASD. The ASD was the group behind the “Hamilton 68” Russian disinformation dashboard, a tool used countless times by the mainstream media to show how much Russia had warped the American electoral process.

The world can expect to see “fact-based expression” more often in the very near future, can expect to hear “Are you in favor of lying?” arguments if you say you are worried about the new rubric, and can expect to see ‘fact-based expression” in law books soon as an appropriate mitigation of free and unfettered speech.

The concept is already making headway – see the Online Harms Bill proposed in Canada, which “authorizes house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future (hate) crime.”

Poynter is a far far distance away from its original mission, but in theory still understands the actual news business. We asked them what exactly is “fact-based expression:”

“What is ‘fact-based expression’ exactly?  What does that term mean? It has to be different from ‘free speech’ because (the report intro) would have read ‘free speech’ just as it did ‘free press.’”

The response from the transparent media training foundation?

“We have seen your message and I have shared it with the team. We did see your deadline note in the subject line and in the body text. We’ll try to respond as soon as we can, keeping your deadline in mind.”

No further response – I guess “the team” didn’t want to answer the question or they didn’t have a “fact-based expression” to reply with.

....

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/04/07/as-support-for-gaza-goes-mainstream-dont-let-the-empire-co-opt-the-movement/

As Support For Gaza Goes Mainstream, Don’t Let The Empire Co-Opt The Movement

Opposition to the slaughter in Gaza appears to be getting more mainstream, which is obviously great, but when political impulses go mainstream it means there’s going to be a massive and concerted effort to funnel public sentiment in a direction that doesn’t damage the interests of the empire.

They’re going to try to blame this all on Netanyahu.

They’re going to insist that Israel itself is fine and the only thing that went wrong was a fluke incident in which an aberrational right wing faction briefly got into power.

They’re going to try to wash the western empire’s hands of the mass atrocities it directly facilitated in Gaza.

They’re going to try to frame Biden as a basically decent politician who found himself trapped in an impossible situation.

They’re going to keep pretending a two-state solution is right around the corner and doing everything they can to stall out meaningful change on Palestinian rights, while blaming any obstacles to peace on the Palestinian resistance.

They’re going to pollute the information ecosystem with a deluge of messaging which is all designed to counter the notion that Gaza means the entire status quo needs to be overhauled — with regard to Israel-Palestine, with regard to US foreign policy, with regard to the US government itself, and with regard to the western power structure in general.

They’re going to say everything they need to say to ensure that everyone understands that the basic status quo in Israel, the United States and the western world is working perfectly fine, and this was all just an innocent little oopsie poopsie caused by a few bad apples.

They’ll justify, they’ll excuse, they’ll exonerate, and then they’ll distract, moving public attention on to the next big thing and allowing the amnesia of the daily news churn to wash Gaza from our attention — all while pretending to be on our side.

This messaging will need to be fought tooth and claw. We cannot allow them to neuter this political moment with spin and propaganda. We need to make sure their criminality remains front and center of public awareness, and we need to push for the real revolutionary changes that Gaza plainly proves are needed.

Let mainstream sentiment turn against the current Israeli regime and bring an end to the butchery in Gaza, but don’t let the imperial narrative managers co-opt anything. Don’t let them hijack the zeitgeist that’s been building. 

View all words and actions of the western political-media class with aggressive skepticism, and push back forcefully every time they try to push public sentiment in a direction that advantages the empire.