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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/80363/biden-does-not-need-a-domestic-terrorism-agenda-unless-he-is-about-to-violate-american.html

Biden Does Not Need A Domestic “Terrorism” Agenda Unless He Is About To Violate American Rights

The federal government is a kind of self perpetuating blob; a cannibalistic creature that must continue to feed on the public and the systems around it in order to survive, but it also must create reasons for its existence so that it may go on feeding uninterrupted. Now, don’t get me wrong – I realize that the apparatus in Washington DC is nothing more than a tool for the power elite to grow their scope of control as well as grow their wealth. That said, without a large federal government the establishment oligarchy would have no ability to project the force they need to compel the population to comply with their agenda.

There are only two real mandates for the government, only two reasons for its existence in our republic: To secure America’s borders from invasion and to protect the freedoms of the citizenry. That’s it. It is not the job of the government to compel you to take an experimental and questionable covid vaccine over a virus that 99.7% of people will easily survive. It is not the job of the government to create artificial “social equity” by favoring one group or ethnicity over another. It is not the job of the government to spy on millions of Americans because they do not agree with the leftist ideology. It is not the job of government to make war on the very people it is mandated to protect.

Yet, this is exactly what the government is doing today while its totalitarianism is disguised as “humanitarianism”. In other words, they are essentially arguing that they must make war on the people in order to protect the people from themselves.

One of Joe Biden’s first actions upon entering the White House was to initiate a 100 day review of the government’s domestic terrorism policies, and I think this says a lot about what path his presidency is bound to follow. Yes, the media continually argues that the Capitol protest on Jan 6^th was a vast conspiracy on the part of conservatives to “overthrow” the democratic process and commit insurrection. In fact, all it really amounted to was a large protest which was less violent than the majority of Black Lives Matter protests across the nation over the past year.

The media also incessantly mentions the five deaths that occurred on the day of the protest while continuing to ignore the fact that NOT ONE of those deaths has been attributed to the direct actions of protesters, and at least three of the deaths were due to natural causes.

Why does the mainstream media keep lying by omission? Because they have to keep the narrative alive that the capitol protest is a sign of some underlying conservative “evil” that must be contained or destroyed. We don’t really give them much to work with, so they have to create reasons out of thin air to convince people to hate us.

Biden’s review of domestic terrorist policy was finally released last month and the propaganda has been building ever since.  It has now culminated in Big Tech conglomerates like Facebook calling for people to report family and friends that might be exhibiting “signs of extremism”.  This is the Soviet Cheka or the East German Stasi all over again.  

Two of the administration’s primary findings in their report included the assertion that domestic threats are “motivated by racism and white supremacy”, and that they are driven by anti-authority. For many this might sound like bizarro world.

What the hell does racism have to do with the capitol protests or anything else that conservatives have been fighting for the past year? Biden is a white guy, after all, so protesting his entry into the White House is hardly race motivated. And, if you ask the majority of patriots why they are angry you will find that most of them have grown tired of the pandemic restrictions and medical tyranny, which they know will only continue to get worse under Biden. Is this viewpoint “anti-authority”, or just anti-authoritarianism?

Keep in mind that these days almost anything can be labeled racist or extremist.  The interpretation is wide open and arbitrary.  This is how informant culture works.  Anyone can be a target for any reason and one is treated as guilty until proven innocent.

Obviously Biden and his handlers are not concerned with what is ACTUALLY causing Americans to rebel by the millions. They already know that THEY are the real cause, along with their attempts to undermine American civil liberties. What this is really about is gaslighting.

Yes, that classic strategy used by narcissists and psychopaths; the method an abuser uses to make his victims think they deserve the treatment they are getting. The establishment takes away your freedoms and abuses your rights, then if you react to defend yourself they call you a racist and a terrorist. It’s a tried and true maneuver.

First, I would point out that the racism issue is irrelevant at its core. No one except crazed social justice warriors thinks that institutional racism is a legitimate issue in America in 2021. There’s no proof whatsoever to support the incoherent ramblings of critical race theorists. By extension, it’s also not illegal to be a bigot. In America, you are welcome to dislike any group of people you want and the government cannot punish you for it. There is no such thing as “hate speech”, there is only speech which some people hate.

This is a strategy by leftists to create a weakness in the armor of free speech laws and grind them down. If they can regulate some speech, they can eventually regulate ALL speech. Biden is merely acting as a conduit for the critical race theory agenda, and he is attaching it to every single policy in the hopes that it will stick somewhere.

Second, let’s all be honest and acknowledge who the real target of Biden’s domestic terrorism policies is: Conservatives in general. And, it’s not just because of the capitol protests.

Here is my concern: Whenever psychopathic regimes are about to pursue an egregious action that will degrade freedoms and enrage the public, they have a tendency to preemptively demonize (and often disarm) the people they are about to abuse. To put it another way, Biden is obsessed with attacking conservatives as “racists” and “extremists” not because of what we have done (we haven’t done anything), but because of what we are ABOUT TO DO.

And how does Biden know what we are going to do in the future? He knows because he is going to take actions that he and his handlers know will piss us off. Biden is clearly planning to enforce more policies which will directly violate the constitutional rights of Americans and he is preparing in advance for the fallout by making it appear as if conservatives and patriots are the aggressors.

As I have noted in previous articles, this is the common mantra of the tyrants:

“Those that disagree with me are wrong because I will never allow them to prove they are right. Those that defend themselves against my attacks are evil because if they fight back they might harm me. Those that demand the truth do not understand how important my lies are to the stability of the world I have built for them. Why would I engage in battle when I can get others to fight my battles for me? When people are free, it means they are free to criticize or ignore me, so I must take away their freedom, so that they are made to revere me and recognize my importance. Morals are relative and principles are for suckers. The ends justify the means, and the greater good of the greater number is paramount – And as long as I am the one that determines what the definition of the “greater good” is, then I am the one that controls everything else.”

It is hard to say what Biden is about to do that requires so much preemptive demonization of liberty minded people. Forced vaccinations and vaccine passports are a hard line in the sand for the majority of conservatives, and we simply won’t allow such policies to remain. We will fight if we have to in order to stop them.

Disenfranchisement of conservatives from the economy or from the internet is another line that we will not back away from. The leftist mob is already attempting to make it acceptable to “cancel” conservatives on social media simply for being conservative, and by extension they are also seeking to normalize the punishment of conservatives for their views by threatening them with joblessness. This sort of ideological cleansing of America is not going to end well. Eventually, yes, conservatives will go to war over this because if we don’t our values of freedom, individualism, voluntarism and meritocracy will be erased from the public square and there will be no meaningful future for generations not yet born.

New gun control measures and gun bans are not going to fly, either. There is no chance that conservatives will comply with a Biden gun control plan, red flag gun laws, gun buybacks, etc. It’s not going to happen. Biden and the establishment knows this, so perhaps gun confiscation is next on the agenda?

Finally, it is possible that the establishment will go for broke during the next crisis event and Biden will seek to implement martial law. It might be an economic crash or a crash of the dollar. It might be a major cyberattack (look up the World Economic Forum’s “Cyberpolygon” event happening this week). It might be a new “variant” of covid that they use as an excuse to bring back nationwide lockdowns. Whatever the case may be, any attempt at martial law by Biden will be met with immediate and explosive resistance from conservatives, and frankly, I doubt that the Biden Admin would survive the duration.

So, yes, in a way Biden is right. The biggest threat to the system today is a domestic conflict, IF the system intends to attack the citizenry and their liberties. That said, the establishment is not sacrosanct, and when a government violates the rights of the people the people have a duty to overthrow it. We would only be “terrorists” in the eyes of the people who started the conflict to begin with.

At this point we have to ask ourselves, “Who does the federal government actually represent when they do these things?” Do they represent us? Or do they represent special interests, such as globalists and career Marxists? Are they tearing away our freedoms at record pace for our benefit, or the benefit of people with malicious intentions? If they are acting in the interests of evil people, then isn’t rebellion inevitable? And who is to blame for that inevitable conflagration? Them, or us?

....

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly21/50-trillion7-21.html

The $50 Trillion Plundered from Workers by America's Aristocracy Is Trickling Back

The depth of America's indoctrination can be measured by the unquestioned assumption that Capital should earn 15% every year, rain or shine, while workers are fated to lose ground every year, rain or shine. And if wages should ever start ticking upward even slightly, then the Billionaires' Apologists are unleashed to shout that higher wages means higher inflation, which will kill the economic "recovery."

Said another way: if wages stagnate so workers lose ground every year as inflation in essentials rises, that's the way it should be. If wages rise so workers can keep up with inflation, then that will trigger an inflationary death spiral.

That this indoctrination is so widely accepted reveals the success of America's Aristocracy in reshaping the narrative to make their plundering appear to be "inevitable." But the siphoning of $50 trillion from workers to the Aristocracy, and the Nobility's control of political power was anything but inevitable: it was engineered by policies that enriched billionaires, the top 0.01% Aristocracy, and the top 10% who own 90% of America's productive capital.

This wholesale transfer of wealth and income from workers to Capital was documented by a RAND Corporation report, Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018. Time magazine summarized the findings: The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% -- And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure.

There are some who blame the current plight of working Americans on structural changes in the underlying economy--on automation, and especially on globalization. According to this popular narrative, the lower wages of the past 40 years were the unfortunate but necessary price of keeping American businesses competitive in an increasingly cutthroat global market. But in fact, the $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn't inevitable; it was a choice--a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose to implement since 1975.

The net result of this four-decade siphoning of wealth/income from workers was recently documented by a Foreign Affairs article: Monopoly Versus Democracy:

Ten percent of Americans now control 97 percent of all capital income in the country. Nearly half of the new income generated since the global financial crisis of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens. The richest three Americans collectively have more wealth than the poorest 160 million Americans.

In other words, the bottom 90% have very little stake in the status quo: they receive essentially zero income from America's stupendous $121 trillion hoard of private wealth and have essentially zero political influence, as documented in Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.

Now the worm has finally turned, and workers are refusing to accept the Neofeudal dominance of the Aristocracy, not by open revolts that the State can violently crush but by indirect means. Fed-up Boomers are retiring, fed-up Gen-Xers are cutting their hours, refusing to go back to the office, starting their own enterprises and Millennials are assembling multiple income streams, building micro-houses, and leveraging shortages of workers for higher wages.

The techno-fantasy that's Corporate America's fondest dream is automation of all labor: get rid of all human workers and just manage the robots with loving care. But the reality is robots have limits, as I explain in my book Will You Be Richer or Poorer?--limits imposed by physics and finance.

And so, weeping inconsolably, Corporate America continues exploiting its workforce with the usual threats: you're powerless because we can automate your job or offshore it to Lower Slobovia.

Contrast this with the real world: a young man of my acquaintance recently took a job at a Corporate America Big Box outlet. His wage was $12/hour, and all the power was of course in the hands of Corporate America: he had no power over his schedule, or anything else.

In the script of the past four decades, Corporate America (while crushing small business and buying the best government money can buy) could keep the serfs slaving away for stagnating wages, all in service of maximizing corporate insiders' stock options, buybacks and soaring profits.

This individual was tipped off to a much better opportunity, and when he gave notice to the Big Box manager, the manager corralled him for two hours, first offering a $3/hour raise (25%) and then badgering him to stay on as a serf on the Big Box plantation. He refused.

This is the pure distillation of Corporate America and the Aristocracy: if they'd offered this hard-working individual the 25% raise after he proved his worth, then maybe he wouldn't have been so motivated to seek better opportunities elsewhere.

At long last, some the $50 trillion plundered from workers is trickling back to the people who actually create the income and wealth. As a thought experiment, consider an economy in which farmers and workers reaped 15% gains annually like clockwork, and Corporate America's insiders, financiers and speculators, and Wall Street's parasites all lost 15% of their wealth and income every year like clockwork.

In other words, imagine the $50 trillion flowing back to those who generated it from those who looted it.

As I often note here, when you push the pendulum to an extreme of wealth and income inequality, it will swing to the opposite extreme minus a tiny bit of friction. The serfs are quietly slipping away, and the Aristocracy, blinded by hubris and greed, believes nothing will ever change because, well, their wealth and power is deserved. What they really deserve will manifest in the next four years as the chairs at the banquet of consequences are shuffled. 

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https://scheerpost.com/2021/07/12/hedges-bless-the-traitors/

Bless the Traitors

Daniel Hale exposed the widespread and indiscriminate murder of noncombatants in the global US drone war. For his heroism, he faces ten years in prison while those who oversee these war crimes continue their killing spree.  

Daniel Hale, an active-duty Air Force intelligence analyst, stood in the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park in October 2011 in his military uniform. He held up a sign that read “Free Bradley Manning,” who had not yet announced her transition. It was a singular act of conscience few in uniform had the strength to replicate. He had taken a week off from his job to join the protestors in the park. He was present at 6:00 am on October 14 when Mayor Michael Bloomberg made his first attempt to clear the park. He stood in solidarity with thousands of protestors, including many unionized transit workers, teachers, Teamsters and communications workers, who formed a ring around the park. He watched the police back down as the crowd erupted into cheers. But this act of defiance and moral courage was only the beginning. 

At the time, Hale was stationed at Fort Bragg. A few months later he deployed to Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Force Base. He would later learn that that while he was in Zuccotti Park, Barack Obama ordered a drone strike some 12,000 miles away in Yemen that killed Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of the radical cleric and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been killed by a drone strike two weeks earlier. The Obama administration claimed it was targeting the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Ibrahim al-Banna, who it believed, incorrectly, was with the boy and his cousins, all of whom were also killed in the attack. That massacre of innocents became public, but there were thousands more such attacks that wantonly killed noncombatants that only Hale and those with top-security clearances knew about.

Starting in 2013, Hale, while working as a private contractor, leaked some 17 classified documents about the drone program to investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, although the reporter is not named in court documents. The leaked documents, published by The Intercept on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”

Hale was coerced by Biden’s Justice Department on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public government lies and crimes. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to “retention and transmission of national security information” and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. He is being held in the Alexandria Adult Detention Center in Virginia, awaiting sentencing on July 27. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison. He now faces up to a decade in prison.

Tragically, his case has not garnered the attention it should. When Nick Mottern, of the Ban Killer Drones campaign, accompanied artists projecting Hale’s image on downtown walls in Washington, D.C., he found that everyone he spoke to was unaware of Hale’s plight. Prominent human rights organizations, such as the ACLU and PEN, have largely remained silent and uninvolved. The group Stand with Daniel Hale has called on President Biden to pardon Hale and end the use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers, mounted a letter-writing campaign to the judge to request leniency and is collecting donations for Hale’s legal fund. 

“Daniel Hale is one of the most consequential whistleblowers,” Edward Snowden said on a May Day panel held at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst on the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the Pentagon Papers.  “He sacrificed everything — an incredibly courageous person — to tell us that the drone war, that, you know, is so obviously occurring to everyone else, but the government was still officially denying in so many ways, is here, it is happening, and 90 percent of the casualties in one five-month period were innocents or bystanders or not the target of the drone strike. We could not establish that, we could not prove that, without Daniel Hale’s voice.”

Speaking on Democracy Now! with host Amy Goodman a few weeks later, Daniel Ellsberg agreed that Hale “acted very admirably, in a way that very, very few officials have ever done in showing the moral courage to separate themselves from criminal activities and wrongful activities of their own administration, and resist them, as well as exposing them.”

Because Hale was charged under the Espionage Act, he, like other whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, who spent two-and-a-half years in prison for exposing the routine torture of suspects held in black sites, was not permitted to explain his motivations and intent to the court. Nor could he provide evidence to the court that the drone assassination program killed and wounded large numbers of noncombatants, including children. He faced trial in the Eastern District of Virginia, much of whose population has links to the military or intelligence community, and whose courts have become notorious for their harsh sentences on behalf of the government. 

The 2012 “Living Under Drones” report by the Stanford International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic provides a detailed documentation of the human impact of US drone strikes in Pakistan. Drones often fire Hellfire missiles that are equipped with an explosive warhead of about 20 pounds. A Hellfire variant, known as the R9X, carries “an inert warhead,” The New York Times reported. Instead of exploding, it hurls about 100 pounds of metal through a vehicle. The missile’s other feature includes “six long blades tucked inside,” which deploy “seconds before impact to slice up anything in its path” — including, of course, people.

The numbers of civilian dead from US drone strikes run into the thousands, if not tens of thousands. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), an independent journalist organization, for example, reported that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, drone strikes killed between 2,562 and 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom an estimated 474 to 881 were civilians, including 176 children.

Drones hover 24 hours a day in the skies over Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. Without warning, the drones, operated remotely from Air Force bases as far away as Nevada, fire ordinance that obliterates homes and vehicles or kills whole groups of people in fields or attending community gatherings, funerals and weddings. The leaked banter of the young drone operators, who often treat the killings as if they are an enhanced video game, exposes the callousness of the indiscriminate killings. Drone operators refer to child victims of drone attacks as “fun-sized terrorists.”

“Ever step on ants and never give it another thought?” Michael Hass, a former drone operator for the Air Force told The Guardian.  “That’s what you are made to think of the targets — as just black blobs on a screen. You start to do these psychological gymnastics to make it easier to do what you have to do — they deserved it, they chose their side. You had to kill part of your conscience to keep doing your job every day — and ignore those voices telling you this wasn’t right.”

The ubiquitous presence of drones in the skies, and the awareness that at any moment these drones can kill you and your family, induces feelings of helplessness, anxiety and constant fear.

“Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities,” the 2012 report reads of the drone war in Pakistan. “Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves. These fears have affected behavior. The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school.”

Drones have become killing machines that mete out random death and usually permanently cripple those victims who survive.

“The missiles fired from drones kill or injure in several ways, including through incineration, shrapnel, and the release of powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs,” the report reads.  “Those who do survive drone strikes often suffer disfiguring burns and shrapnel wounds, limb amputations, as well as vision and hearing loss.”

Hale, now 33, always had doubts about the war, but he enlisted in 2009 when Obama assumed office. He hoped that Obama would undo the excesses and lawlessness of the Bush administration. Instead, Obama, a few weeks after he took office, approved the deployment of an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan where 36,000 U.S. troops and 32,000 NATO troops were already deployed. By the end of the year, Obama increased troop levels in Afghanistan again by 30,000, doubling U.S. casualties. He also massively expanded the drone program, raising the number of drone strikes from several dozen the year before he took office to 117 by his second year in office.  By the time he left office Obama had presided over the killing of at least 3,000 suspected militants and hundreds of civilians. He authorized what are known as “signature strikes” allowing the CIA to carry out drone attacks against groups of suspected militants without getting positive identification. He spread the footprint of the drone war, establishing drone bases in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other overseas locations to expand attacks to Syria and Yemen. The Obama administration also indicted eight whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all previous administrations combined. The Biden administration, like the Trump and Obama administrations, continues to launch widespread global drone strikes.

“Before I joined the military, I was well aware that what I was about to enter was something I was against, that I disagreed with,” Hale says in the 2016 documentary film “National Bird.” “I joined anyway out of desperation. I was homeless. I was desperate. I had nowhere else to go. I was on my last leg. The Air Force was ready to accept me.”

In the film, Hale alludes to a difficult and chaotic childhood.

“It’s kind of funny, a little ironic too, because so far I’m the only adult male in my entire family, immediate and external, who had not been to prison so far,” he says. “I come from a long lineage of prisoners, actually, a very proud tradition of fuck-ups who get drunk and go driving, or sell pot, or carry a gun when they shouldn’t be carrying a gun, in the wrong place at the wrong time, a lot of that where I’m from.”

He was assigned to the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg and underwent language and intelligence training. He worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) in Afghanistan as an intelligence analyst identifying targets for the drone program. His Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearance gave him access to the vast, global drone war hidden from public view and Obama’s huge secret “kill lists.”

“There are several such lists, used to target individuals for different reasons,” he wrote in an essay titled “Why I Leaked the Watchlist Documents,” originally published anonymously in the book “The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program” by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. The book is based on the leaked documents provided by Hale that first appeared as an eight-part series called “The Drone Papers” published by The Intercept.

“Some lists are closely kept; others span multiple intelligence and local law enforcement agencies,” Hale writes in the essay. “There are lists used to kill or capture supposed ‘high-value targets,’ and others intended to threaten, coerce, or simply monitor a person’s activity. However, all the lists, whether to kill or silence, originate from the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, and they are maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center at the National Counterterrorism Center. The existence of TIDE is unclassified, yet details about how it functions in our government are completely unknown to the public. In August 2013 the database reached a milestone of one million entries. Today it is thousands of entries larger and is growing faster than it has since its inception in 2003.” 

The Terrorist Screening Center, he writes, not only stores names, dates of birth, and other identifying information of potential targets, but also stores “medical records, transcripts, and passport data; license plate numbers, email, and cell-phone numbers (along with the phone’s International Mobile Subscriber Identity and International Mobile Station Equipment Identity numbers); your bank account numbers and purchases; and other sensitive information, including DNA and photographs capable of identifying you using facial recognition software.”

Data on suspects is collected and pooled by the intelligence agencies known as the Five Eyes, the intelligence alliance formed by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Each person on the list is assigned a TIDE personal number, or TPN.

“From Osama bin Laden (TPN 1063599) to Abdulrahman Awlaki (TPN 26350617), the American son of Anwar al Awlaki, anyone who has ever been the target of a covert operation was first assigned a TPN and closely monitored by all agencies who follow that TPN long before they were eventually put on a separate list and extrajudicially sentenced to death,” Hale wrote.

He also exposed that the more than one million entries in the TIDE database includes about 21,000 United States citizens.

After leaving the Air Force in July 2013, Hale was employed by the private defense contractor National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as a political geography analyst between December 2013 and August 2014. He said he took the job, which paid $80,000 a year, because he was in desperate need of money and hoped to go to college. But by then he was disgusted with the drone program and determined to make the public aware of its abuses and lawlessness. Inspired by the peace activist David Dellinger, he, like Dellinger, had decided to become a traitor to “the American way of death.” He would make amends for his complicity in the killings, even at the cost of his own security and freedom. 

“When the president gets up in front of the nation and says they are doing everything they can to ensure there is near certainty there will be no civilians killed, he is saying that because he can’t say otherwise, because anytime an action is taken to finish a target there is a certain amount of guesswork in that action,” Hale says in the film. “It’s only in the aftermath of any kind of ordinance being dropped that you know how much actual damage was done. Oftentimes, the intelligence community is reliant, the Joint Special Operations Command, the CIA included, is reliant on intelligence coming afterwards that confirms that who they were targeting was killed in the strike, or that they weren’t killed in that strike.”

“The people who defend drones, and the way they are used, say they protect American lives by not putting them in harm’s way,” he says. “What they really do is embolden decision makers, because there is no threat, there is no immediate consequence. They can do this strike. They can potentially kill this person they are so desperate to eliminate because of how potentially dangerous they could be to the US. But if it just so happens that they don’t kill that person, or some other people involved in the strike get killed as well, there are no consequences for it. When it comes to high-value targets, every mission you go after one person at a time, but anybody else killed in that strike is blanketly assumed to be an associate of the targeted individual. So as long as they can reasonably identify that all of the people in the field view of the camera are military-aged males, meaning anybody who is believed to be age 16 or older, they are a legitimate target under the rules of engagement. If that strike occurs and kills all of them, they just say they got them all.”

Drones, he warns, make remote killing “too easy, too convenient.”

On August 8, 2014, the FBI raided his home. It was his last day of work for the private contractor. A male and female FBI agent shoved their badges in his face when he opened the door.

“Immediately behind them came about 20 agents, basically all of them with pistols drawn, some wearing body armor,” he says in the film. “At this point I was extremely scared. I did not understand what was going on. Altogether, there might have been at least 30 to 50 agents in and out of the house at different points throughout the evening taking photos of every room and everything, searching for different things.”

By the time they finished his house was stripped of all electronics, including his cell phone.

For the next five years he lived with the uncertainty of his fate. He struggled to find work, fought off depression and contemplated suicide. He was barred, by law, from speaking about his plight, even with a therapist. In 2019, the Trump administration indicted Hale on four counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of theft of government property. 

The thousands of targeted assassinations carried out by drones, often in countries that are not at war with the United States, are an egregious violation of international law. They are turning huge swaths of the planet against us. The secret kill lists, which include US citizens, have transformed the executive branch into judge, jury and executioner, obliterating the right to due process. Those that commit these killings are unaccountable. Hale sacrificed his career and his freedom to warn us. He is not a danger to the country. The danger we face comes from the secret drone program, which is spiraling out of control and ominously being adopted by domestic law enforcement agencies. If left unchecked, the terror we impose on others we will soon impose on ourselves.

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http://edwardcurtin.com/drinking-coffee-in-the-early-morning-rain-and-thinking-of-donald-rumsfeld/

Drinking Coffee in the Early Morning Rain and Thinking of Donald Rumsfeld

It’s been raining incessantly for three days.  It is a cool early morning in the beginning of July and I have just made a cup of coffee. Now an electrical power outage has occurred and so I am sitting in a rocking chair in the semi-darkness savoring my coffee and feeling thankful that I made it in time.  I have a close relationship with coffee and the end of night and the break of day.  As for time, that is as mysterious to me as the fact that I am sitting here in its embrace. The electric clocks have stopped.  I think: To exist – how amazing!

More than the coffee, however, I am luxuriating in the sound of the tumbling rain.  Its beautiful music creates a cocoon of peace within which I find temporary joy.  The joy of doing nothing, of pursuing no purpose.  Of knowing that whatever I do it will never be enough, for me or anyone, and the world will continue turning until time stands still, or whatever time does or is according to those who invented it.  I will be gone and others will have arrived and the water will flow from the skies and the clocks will still tell people what they don’t know – time – although they will continue to tell it.

Humans are the telling animals.

A few weeks ago, when this area was in a mini-drought, the local newspaper, in the typical wisdom of such cant, had a headline that said “there is a threat of rain later this week.”  They are experts at threats.  This is the corporate media’s purpose.   Rain is a threat, joy is a threat, doing nothing is a threat, the sun is a threat – but the real threats they conceal.  To create fear seems to be their purpose, as they do not tell us about the real threats.  Their purpose is not to tell the truth, but if you listen closely you can hear it.

In the middle of the night I woke up to go to the bathroom, and outside the small bathroom window I watched the rain engulfing the lower roof and sluicing down the shingles in two heavy streams.  I thought how the desiccated mind of the headline writer must be feeling now, but then I realized that he or she was asleep, as usual.  There is a moist world and a dry one, and the corporate media is run by arid souls who would like to make the world a desert like their masters of war in Washington.

Then as I sit here my brief peace is roiled by the memory of reading Tacitus, the Roman historian, and his famous quote of Calgacus, an enemy of Rome:

These plunderers of the world [the Romans], after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

I think of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on his recent deathbed.  Here was a man whose entire life was dedicated to the American Empire.  He spent all his allotted time making war or making money from the spoils of war.  He was a desert maker, a slaughterer for the Empire.  No doubt he died very rich in gold.

I can no longer hear the rain because my mind is filled with the loud thought of what Rumsfeld thought as he lay dying.  Was he sorry?  Did he believe in God or was his god Mars, the Roman god of war?   Did he smile a bloody smile or say he was sorry and beg for forgiveness from all his innocent victims?  Did he see the faces of the children of Iraq that he slaughtered?  Or did he pull an Eichmann and say, “I will leap into my grave laughing”?

Your guess is as good as mine, but mine leans toward the bloody smile of a life well spent in desert making.  But that is a “known unknown.”

Rolling thunder and a lightning strike in the east jolt me back from my deaf dark thoughts.  The sound of the rain returns.  The coffee tastes great.  Peace returns with the unalloyed gift of the ravishing rain.

Yet the more I sit and listen and watch it soundly stipple the garden and grass, the more thoughts come to me, as my father once told me: Thoughts think us as much as we think thoughts.  It’s what we do with our thoughts that count, he said, and like lightning, if we don’t flash when we are given the gift of life, when we’re gone, it will be as if we never were, like the lightning before it flashed.

Thomas Merton’s prophetic words from his hermitage in the Kentucky woods in 1966 think me:

Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.

There are moments in many lives when, if one is lucky, they are initiated into a ritual that sustains them throughout life.  To others these experiences can easily seem paltry and meaningless, but to the receiver they offer a crack into deeper dimensions of being and becoming.  For me it was my introduction to coffee during a hurricane.

My father had driven my mother, three of my sisters, and me to Jones Beach on Long Island.  This was before people checked the weather every minute.  The sky in the southwest grew darker as we drove, but on we went.  The beach was deserted except for some gulls and the parking lot empty.  My father parked the car close to the beach and while my sisters and mother sat in the car, and my mother, listening to the weather reports, issued warnings to us, my father and I ran like wild dogs into the heavy surf despite her admonitions that the hurricane from the south was arriving sooner than expected.  It started to rain hard. The surf picked up.  We swam and got battered and shouted exultantly and came out shaking with the chills.  A pure white sea gull landed on my wet head and my father laughed.  Awe-struck, I stood stock still and my shaking stopped. In its mouth the sea gull held a purple ribbon, which it dropped at my feet as it flew off.  I grabbed the ribbon and we jogged up to the concession building where there was one man working.  My father ordered coffee and a hot chocolate for me.  But they had run out of hot chocolate.  So my father ordered two coffees and filled mine with three or four sugars. I had never sampled coffee and didn’t like the smell, but my father said to drink it, with the sugar it will taste good and it will warm you up.  It strangely tasted like hot chocolate. We toasted our adventure as I drank my Proustian madeleine at eleven-years-old.

I had put the ribbon on the counter as we drank.  When we were going back to the car, I noticed there were words on the ribbon. They said: Rest in peace.  I have long lost the ribbon but retain its message.

So now every morning between the end of night and the break of day, I sit with my coffee and listen.  And even when it isn’t raining, I watch the birds emerge from their nightly rests to greet the day with their songs.  They tell me many things, and they are all free.

This morning I am wondering if Donald Rumsfeld ever heard them.

I suspect their message was an “unknown unknown” for him, just like the gift of rain.  He preferred the rain of death from the skies in the form of bombs and missiles.  He was only doing his job.

He made a desert and called it peace.

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http://endoftheamericandream.com/the-scale-of-the-nightmarish-crisis-currently-unfolding-in-our-western-states-is-being-compared-to-hurricane-katrina/

The Scale Of The Nightmarish Crisis Currently Unfolding In Our Western States Is Being Compared To Hurricane Katrina

One of the worst natural disasters in the history of our country is unfolding right in front of our eyes.  In the entire history of the United States, we have never seen heat in the western third of the nation like we have in 2021.  In the entire history of the United States, we have never seen drought in the western third of the nation like we have in 2021.  Needless to say, countless numbers of farmers and ranchers are deeply suffering because of the heat and drought, and it is being projected that this is going to be one of the worst years for wildfires that we have ever experienced.  As you will see below, this crisis is being compared to Hurricane Katrina, but Hurricane Katrina only lasted for a few days.  The crisis that we are now facing has already stretched on for many months, and there is no end in sight.

Let me start by discussing the record-breaking heat.  Yet another heat wave is baking the western third of the nation right now, and it is being reported that the high temperature in Death Valley actually reached 130 degrees on Friday…

On Friday, the temperature at Death Valley soared to 130 degrees, breaking the previous daily record high of 129 set back in 1913, according to the National Weather Service. This reading comes within 4 degrees of the all-time world record of 134 F set there in 1913. The 134-degree mark happens to be the world record for the highest temperature ever measured on Earth.

Unfortunately, things didn’t really cool off during the weekend.  The high temperature in Death Valley was 129 degrees on Saturday, and it was expected that the same high temperature would be hit on Sunday…

AccuWeather expected the temperature in Death Valley to reach 129 degrees Sunday, which would tie for the daily record high. Death Valley hit the same temperature Saturday. The world record high is 134 degrees.

Forecasters called for Las Vegas to hit another all-time high, as it did Saturday with a temperature of 117 degrees.

On Saturday, St. George, Utah, also hit 117, setting another tie for an all-time high, according to the National Weather Service in Salt Lake City.

There are moments every summer when conditions get really hot, but so far this summer the heat has been absolutely relentless.  The extremely high temperatures that we have witnessed this month follow the hottest June that the continent of North America has ever experienced…

Researchers have confirmed what millions of Americans and Canadians who just endured scorching temperatures probably already suspected: Last month was the hottest June on record in North America.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), an agency supported by the European Union, said that average surface temperatures for June in North America were about one-quarter of a degree Fahrenheit (0.15 of a degree Celsius) higher than the average for June 2012, the previous record-holder.

At the same time, there has been very little meaningful precipitation in the western third of the nation this summer, and the latest map from the U.S. Drought Monitor is the worst that I have ever seen.

The state of Utah is being hit particularly hard, and one official is openly admitting that this is “the worst drought in the state of Utah’s history”…

That official, Dave Ure, speaking just after a tour of waterworks facilities in Summit County, put the situation in stark terms.

“We are in the worst drought in the state of Utah’s history right now, and the only thing compared to it is the droughts back in 1895 and 1933,” Ure said.

If you don’t live in the western third of the nation, it is going to be difficult for you to grasp how desperate things are becoming.

This isn’t just a drought.  What we are witnessing right now is a mega-disaster of epic proportions, and scientists are telling us not to expect relief for the foreseeable future.

Farmers and ranchers are having a particularly difficult time.  They can’t operate successfully without water, and one rancher in Utah told Fox News that this crisis is “going to equal or surpass the amount of people that that were impacted by Hurricane Katrina”…

Ron Gibson manages 1,500 head of cattle in Northern Utah but may soon lack the resources to sustain his herd. Scorching temperatures and the absence of rain have created a depletion in feed supply for cattle farmers like Ron. With watering rights in his area cut about 70% in efforts to preserve the water supply, more farmers are forced to outsource their feed, and the high demand has driven up the price four times greater than usual.

“When we look at the amount of impact that this kind of disaster is going to have on the country, it’s going to equal or surpass the amount of people that that were impacted by Hurricane Katrina,” he told Fox News.

Hurricane Katrina absolutely devastated one major city, but this crisis threatens to cripple one-third of the entire nation.

The longer the drought drags on, the lower water levels get, and at this point reservoir levels are getting dangerously low…

Reservoir levels are dropping throughout the West, as the drought tightens its grip on the region and intense summer heat further stresses both water supply and the surrounding landscape. Many reservoirs are at or approaching historic low levels due to lackluster rainy seasons combined with increasing temperatures due to climate change.

The drought crisis is perhaps most apparent in the Colorado River basin, which saw one of its driest years on record, following two decades of less-than-adequate flows. The nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead near Las Vegas, is at its lowest level since the lake filled after the construction of the Hoover dam in the 1930s; it currently sits at 1,069 feet above sea level, or 35% of its total capacity. It supplies water to Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico.

Water restrictions have already been implemented in many areas, but if this drought persists we are eventually going to see water restrictions that are far more draconian than we have ever seen before.

Needless to say, a lot of people living in the region won’t like that at all.

Of course the hot, dry conditions have also created an ideal environment for wildfires, and right at this moment hundreds of thousands of acres are currently burning…

More than 300,000 acres are burning across six states across the western United States on Sunday as the region battled yet another brutal heat wave that shattered records and strained power grids.

The largest, the so-called Bootleg Fire, burned across 143,607 acres in Oregon and was 0% contained. Officials in neighboring state California asked all residents to reduce power consumption quickly after the fire knocked out interstate power lines, preventing up to 4,000 megawatts of electricity from flowing into the state.

We are being told that this is going to be one of the worst years for wildfires in our history, and it may end up topping the list by the time it is all said and done.

This isn’t just a “bad summer” we are talking about.

What we are facing is a crisis that is unprecedented in size and scope, and scientists are telling us that it isn’t going to end any time soon.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56629.htm

Miserere For The Land Of The Free

In science and mathematics, problems based on faulty data or corrupt inputs yield worthless results. Sound outcomes depend on accurate foundational elements.  With physical substances and numbers exactitude is possible.  The means, that is, always justify the end.  Or not…  Garbage in; garbage out.
 
In social and political constructs and, in fact, in all relating to the tangled, confusing labyrinth of human affairs, absolute precision can never be attained.  The best that can be said of them is that the sounder the foundation on which a social or political premise is based, the more likely it is that forecast of its evolution and  prediction of its future state may be possible.
 
Countries are, and have always been, accidents.  The myriad random events and historic freaks and anomalies that coalesce to form them in their historically malleable plasticity are uncountable, often lost in time, mysterious or untraceable.
 
The modern custom is that nations—forming or once formed—prepare a constitution to express—to itself, its people, and the world—the principles according to which it proposes to function.  This is in the nature of a testament to the virtue and integrity its founders intend to inculcate and implement through it.  It is always based on an acknowledged dominant collection of “laws”—natural, religious or cultural—on which to establish its bona fides as a viable, legal, and legitimate country.
 
The United States Constitution was based theoretically on three fundamental, long established pillars of European political, religious, and economic thought.  The political element was a synthesis of the core ideals of the Enlightenment, much of it in Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government” and in his “A Letter Concerning Toleration”.  The religious element derived from Protestant Christianity, materially modified by Deist thinking. The economic influence came exclusively from classic Capitalism, then beginning its period of dynamic worldwide expansion.

From amalgamation of these three sources the Constitution drew its theoretical potency and vitality, and each of these doctrines embodied in it took on, with time, the character of holy writ.  The men who crafted it, with meticulous attention to their private and personal interests, presented it to the birthing nation as the summation of the wisdom of the enlightened ages expressed in as compact, practical form as humanly possible. This it was not.

Insofar as it was a gross deception—which it was—this was not  intentional.  The powerful men who produced it had no dark, nefarious design to inflict an oppressive, exploitative system on their country and their people.  They, to a man, it seems, meant well by their lights in the cultural context in which they matured.  The flaws, biases, and gross injustices so obvious in it from a current perspective were, in large measure, the prejudices of all European ruling classes of the time and, indeed, the consensus of the most acute, discriminating philosophical minds of the era.
 
Behind their sincere conviction in the merit of their creation was the inherent human incapacity to see through and beyond their own zeitgeist; to see past what amounts to a kind of philosophic categorical imperative that prevents men from conceiving ideas that are not implicit in the moral conventions of their time.  It is what makes the egregious ethical failures of past generations so baldly obvious to us, while we remain utterly blind to our own.
 
Once the Constitution was ratified, a far more insidious and truly damning set of behaviors came into play.  The exalted principles from which it was synthesized left such latitude in their generality that it was susceptible to great abuses and perversions. For its religious, political, and economic bases were never sincerely pursued, rigorously practiced, or honestly implemented.  Once the dead words of the document, themselves so bereft of equity and justice, were given to ordinary men to oversee, deform and exploit, the little that was noble and just in it was largely lost.
 
The myth postulating an exalted American character was forged and employed from earliest days as a cover for a vicious, elitist program of murder, slavery, and exploitation of man and nature, that has led today to a nation so divided, destabilized, and lost, that our psychopathic monstrosity of a government is no longer safe in its long, evil charade behind its hubris, lies, and violence. 
 
In the back of their minds, in the dim unconscious of the mass of people, there is a nagging sense of unease, a foreboding of unavoidable disaster gathering.  They are not mistaken.  Every faction on the long spectrum of opinion and belief is searching desperately for an answer, hope, a renewal.  There will be none.
 
The reason a repulsive, vulgar oaf such as Trump, or a corrupt, addled nonentity like Biden can be elected President is that all ethical standards that might prevent it have been eroded by two hundred years of dishonesty and calculated betrayal by the privileged financial elite that owned our nation and plunged it into the dysfunction, disaster, and doom that is now inevitable.
 
The American people have been victimized, violated, and ruined by psychotic criminals who deceived and enslaved them and trained them to worship their abusers, to embrace their serfdom.  When, for decades, centuries, a people is subjected to endless indoctrination in cruelty and dishonesty, awakening from that propagandized state must be traumatic, if it is even possible.
 
The mythic “democracy” we were to have was subverted from the beginning by the power of official chicanery, and denied to the poor and ignorant, foreigners, Indians, women, and blacks.  The Christianity solemnly endorsed was always a pious, hollow fraud, chanted as a mantra of the ruling class, never practiced in the violent piracy and murder of our imperial expansion.  And the sanctified economics of Capitalism has always been based on extraction of profit from the sweat and blood of pauperized labor for the aggrandizement of conscienceless plutocrat exploiters.
 
When a nation is poisoned for its entire history by its ruling elite with toxic propaganda that contradicts the moral, ethical bases it was founded on, its only end is implosion and dissolution.
 
The impending crash of the American Empire is essential for the survival and health of the natural and political world.  The tragedy is not in what is coming; it is in the astonishing possibility we had that was despised and thrown away and will never be regained.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56617.htm

The long and winding multipolar road

The West’s ‘rules-based order’ invokes rulers’ authority; Russia-China say it’s time to return to law-based order

We do live in extraordinary times.

On the day of the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), President Xi Jinping, in Tiananmen square, amid all the pomp and circumstance, delivered a stark geopolitical message:

The Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to intimidate, oppress or subjugate them. Anyone who tries to do this will find themselves on a collision course with a large steel wall forged by more than 1.4 billion Chinese.

I have offered a concise version of the modern Chinese miracle – which has nothing to do with divine intervention, but “searching truth from facts” (copyright Deng Xiaoping), inspired by a solid cultural and historical tradition.

The “large steel wall” evoked by Xi now permeates a dynamic “moderately prosperous society” – a goal achieved by the CCP on the eve of the centennial. Lifting over 800 million people out of poverty is a historical first – in every aspect.

As in all things China, the past informs the future. This is all about xiaokang – which may be loosely translated as “moderately prosperous society”.

The concept first appeared no less than 2,500 years ago, in the classic Shijing (“The Book of Poetry”). The Little Helmsman Deng, with his historical eagle eye, revived it in 1979, right at the start of the “opening up” economic reforms.

Now compare the breakthrough celebrated in Tiananmen – which will be interpreted all across the Global South as evidence of the success of a Chinese model for economic development – with footage being circulated of the Taliban riding captured T-55 tanks across impoverished villages in northern Afghanistan.

History Repeating: this is something I saw with my own eyes over twenty years ago.

The Taliban now control nearly the same amount of Afghan territory they did immediately before 9/11. They control the border with Tajikistan and are closing in on the border with Uzbekistan.

Exactly twenty years ago I was deep into yet another epic journey across Karachi, Peshawar, the Pakistan tribal areas, Tajikistan and finally the Panjshir valley, where I interviewed Commander Masoud – who told me the Taliban at the time were controlling 85% of Afghanistan.

Three weeks later Masoud was assassinated by an al-Qaeda-linked commando disguised as “journalists” – two days before 9/11. The empire – at the height of the unipolar moment – went into Forever Wars on overdrive, while China – and Russia – went deep into consolidating their emergence, geopolitically and geoeconomically.

We are now living the consequences of these opposed strategies.

That strategic partnership

President Putin has just spent three hours and fifty minutes answering non-pre-screened questions, live, from Russian citizens during his annual ‘Direct Line’ session. The notion that Western “leaders” of the Biden, BoJo, Merkel and Macron kind would be able to handle something even remotely similar, non-scripted, is laughable.

The key takeaway: Putin stressed US elites understand that the world is changing but still want to preserve their dominant position. He illustrated it with the recent British caper in Crimea straight out of a Monty Python fail, a “complex provocation” that was in fact Anglo-American: a NATO aircraft had previously conducted a reconnaissance flight. Putin: “It was obvious that the destroyer entered [Crimean waters] pursuing military goals.”

Earlier this week Putin and Xi held a videoconference. One of the key items was quite significant: the extension of the China-Russia Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, originally signed 20 years ago.

A key provision: “When a situation arises in which one of the contracting parties deems that…it is confronted with the threat of aggression, the contracting parties shall immediately hold contacts and consultations in order to eliminate such threats.”

This treaty is at the heart of what is now officially described – by Moscow and Beijing – as a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era”. Such a broad definition is warranted because this is a complex multi-level partnership, not an “alliance”, designed as a counterbalance and viable alternative to hegemony and unilateralism.

A graphic example is provided by the progressive interpolation of two trade/development strategies, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), which Putin and Xi again discussed, in connection with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which was founded only three months before 9/11.

It’s no wonder that one of the highlights in Beijing this week were trade talks between the Chinese and four Central Asia “stans” – all of them SCO members.

“Law” and “rule”

The defining multipolarity road map has been sketched in an essay by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that deserves careful examination.

Lavrov surveys the results of the recent G7, NATO and US-EU summits prior to Putin-Biden in Geneva:

These meetings were carefully prepared in a way that leaves no doubt that the West wanted to send a clear message: it stands united like never before and will do what it believes to be right in international affairs, while forcing others, primarily Russia and China, to follow its lead. The documents adopted at the Cornwall and Brussels summits cemented the rules-based world order concept as a counterweight to the universal principles of international law with the UN Charter as its primary source. In doing so, the West deliberately shies away from spelling out the rules it purports to follow, just as it refrains from explaining why they are needed.

As he dismisses how Russia and China have been labeled as “authoritarian powers” (or “illiberal”, according to the favorite New York-Paris-London mantra), Lavrov smashes Western hypocrisy:

While proclaiming the ‘right’ to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries for the sake of promoting democracy as it understands it, the West instantly loses all interest when we raise the prospect of making international relations more democratic, including renouncing arrogant behavior and committing to abide by the universally recognized tenets of international law instead of ‘rules’.

That provides Lavrov with an opening for a linguistic analysis of “law” and “rule”:

In Russian, the words “law” and “rule” share a single root. To us, a rule that is genuine and just is inseparable from the law. This is not the case for Western languages. For instance, in English, the words “law” and “rule” do not share any resemblance. See the difference? “Rule” is not so much about the law, in the sense of generally accepted laws, as it is about the decisions taken by the one who rules or governs. It is also worth noting that “rule” shares a single root with “ruler,” with the latter’s meanings including the commonplace device for measuring and drawing straight lines. It can be inferred that through its concept of “rules” the West seeks to align everyone around its vision or apply the same yardstick to everybody, so that everyone falls into a single file.

In a nutshell: the road to multipolarity will not follow “ultimatums”. The G20, where the BRICS are represented, is a “natural platform” for “mutually accepted agreements”. Russia for its part is driving a Greater Eurasia Partnership. And a “polycentric world order” implies the necessary reform of the UN Security Council, “strengthening it with Asian, African and Latin American countries”.

Will the Unilateral Masters ply this road? Over their dead bodies: after all, Russia and China are “existential threats”. Hence our collective angst, spectators under the volcano.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/07/08/the-assange-case-isnt-about-national-security-its-about-narrative-control/

The Assange Case Isn’t About National Security, It’s About Narrative Control

Julian Assange once said, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

As someone whose life’s work before his imprisonment was combing through documents of an often classified nature, he’d have been in a prime position to know. He’d have seen time and time again how a nation’s citizenry are not under the slightest threat from the secret information in the documents that had been leaked to him from around the world, but that it could damage the reputation of a politician or a government or its military.

As the persecution of the WikiLeaks founder continues to trudge on with the UK government’s granting the Biden administration permission to appeal a declined extradition request, claiming that it can safely imprison Assange without subjecting him to the draconian aspects of America’s prison system which caused the initial dismissal, it’s good to keep in mind that this is being done entirely for the purpose of controlling public access to information that is inconvenient for the powerful.

The prosecution of Julian Assange under the Espionage Act is being touted by the US government as a matter of national security; you can’t simply allow journalists to publish classified information about the things its military forces are doing in the nations they occupy, because that could endanger American lives.

Leaving aside the fact that the Pentagon already admitted years ago that it could not find a single instance of lives being lost due to the publications for which Assange is currently being prosecuted, this case is not and has never been about national security. This case has always been about narrative control.

The US government is not afraid that unauthorized publication of government secrets will lead to Americans being killed, it’s afraid it will lead to their knowing the truth. The powerful understand that narrative control is everything, and that an entire globe-spanning empire depends on keeping the masses from having a lucid perception of what’s really going on in the world. There is an unfathomable amount of power riding on their ability to continue doing this.

Assange isn’t in Belmarsh Prison for doing something wrong, but for doing something right. For trying to give the public information which will help them form a truth-based worldview so that they can make intelligent informed decisions about where they want to collectively steer society together. Because the oligarchic empire depends on the ability to manipulate the way people think, act and vote to benefit the powerful, this was like handing someone who’s being groomed by a sexual predator a guidebook of all of the psychological tactics that are being used.

This good deed could not go unpunished.

Nothing WikiLeaks published endangered the American people, it endangered a globe-spanning empire’s ability to control our understanding of what’s happening in the world. This was a most egregious offense as far as our rulers are concerned, and it could not be allowed to stand.

So an example is being made. In less polite times Assange would have been tortured and drawn and quartered in the town square while the king looked on sipping from a goblet of mead. In the days of polite liberal democracy our rulers must remain hidden, and they must publicly torture dissidents to death in the name of national security concerns.

Beneath all the spin and excuses, this is all being done to show everyone what happens to you if you reveal embarrassing truths about the most powerful people on earth. If you compromise their political security. It’s telling the world, “If you ever try to interfere in our control over the dominant narratives, this is what we will do to you.”

And, whether we fully understand what’s really happening or not, that’s the message that is being ingested here. Journalists who find themselves in a position to publish such things going forward will find themselves thinking thoughts about what happened to Julian Assange.

This is why it’s so important that they don’t win this case. We cannot allow ourselves to be cowed away from the truth in this way, or else we’re flying blind. We’re unable to obtain information which will help us steer society in a truth-based direction.

The Assange case receives so much attention not because of interest in one man’s fate, but because of interest in everyone’s fate. If humanity is ever to turn away from its self-destructive patterns and create a healthy world, it will necessarily need to do so guided by the light of truth and transparency. As long as the powerful are able to keep us confused and deluded using propaganda and government secrecy, such a world will never come into being.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/07/10/violent-extremists-took-over-the-us-capitol-long-before-january-6/

Violent Extremists Took Over The US Capitol Long Before January 6

No longer content with absurd claims that the January 6 Capitol riot was as bad as the 9/11 attacks, Democratic Party-aligned pundits are now insisting that it was in fact worse.

On a recent appearance with MSNBC’s ReidOut with Joy Reid, former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd said he felt the Capitol riot was “much worse” than 9/11 and that this is the “most perilous point in time” since the beginning of the American Civil War.

“To me, though there was less loss of life on January 6, January 6 was worse than 9/11, because it’s continued to rip our country apart and get permission for people to pursue autocratic means, and so I think we’re in a much worse place than we’ve been,” Dowd said. “I think we’re in the most perilous point in time since 1861 in the advent of the Civil War.”

“I do too,” Reid said.

Not to be outdone, Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Smith cited Dowd’s hysterical claim but adding that not only was January 6 worse than 9/11, but it was actually going to kill more Americans somehow, even counting all those killed in the US wars which ensued from the 9/11 attacks.

“He couldn’t be more right,” Schmidt said at a town hall for the Lincoln Project. “The 1/6 attack for the future of the country was a profoundly more dangerous event than the 9/11 attacks. And in the end, the 1/6 attacks are likely to kill a lot more Americans than were killed in the 9/11 attacks, which will include the casualties of the wars that lasted 20 years following.”

A total of 2,996 Americans were killed in the 9/11 attacks, and a further seven thousand US troops have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Exactly one person was killed in the January 6 riot, and it was a rioter shot by police inside the Capitol Building. Early reports that rioters had beaten a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher turned out to have been false.

These bizarre alternate-reality takes are awful for a whole host of reasons, including the fact that this so-called “insurrection” everyone is still shrieking about never at any point in its planning or enactment had a higher than zero percent chance of overthrowing the most powerful government in the world, and the fact that they are manufacturing consent for new authoritarian measures just like 9/11 did.

But perhaps the most annoying thing about all the melodramatic garment-rending over how close the US Capitol came to being taken over by violent extremists is that the US Capitol has been under the control of violent extremists for a very long time already.

For all the fretting everyone has been doing about fascists and white supremacist groups, those are not the violent extremists posing the greatest threat and amassing the highest body count today. Neither are the communists. Neither are the anarchists. Neither are the radicalized Muslims, nor the fundamentalist Christians, nor the environmentalists, nor the incels. No, the most dangerous and deadly group of violent extremists in our day are adherents of the mainstream status quo politics of the US-centralized power alliance.

And it’s not even close. Certainly many of the groups listed above are dangerous and undesirable, but they’re not the ones raining explosives upon families around the world for power and profit. They’re not the ones brandishing nuclear weapons with steadily increasing recklessness as they ramp up a new cold war against Russia and China. They’re not the ones poisoning the air and the water and rapidly destroying the environment we all depend on for survival. They’re not the ones enslaving humanity to a brutal, oppressive and exploitative global capitalist system which leaves far too many toiling for far too little when there’s plenty for everyone.

That would be the so-called “moderates” of the western empire, who in reality are anything but.

It is violent to wage nonstop campaigns of military mass murder and impose civilian-killing economic sanctions on nations which disobey your dictates. It is extremist to brutalize, brainwash and enslave humanity while continuously shoving the world in the direction of extinction and armageddon in the name of profit and unipolar hegemony. Because US officials sit almost entirely on the right side of the global political spectrum, we can accurately say that everyone is fretting about violent right-wing extremists storming a Capitol building that had already long been occupied by violent right-wing extremists.

And yet when Facebook started sending Americans warnings that they may have viewed “extremist content” scrolling through their feeds, posts supporting this most dangerous group of extremists were not the content they were being warned about, but any kind of content which opposes the status quo those extremists have created. They’re killing the ecosystem and murdering people every single day while imperiling us all with the risk of nuclear war, my social media feeds are full of Americans literally trying to crowdfund their own survival while the world’s worst add trillions to their wealth, but it’s the people who want to change this abusive system who are the dangerous extremists.

Some analysts focus primarily on criticizing the really obvious monsters who spout racist and bigoted rhetoric to advance their toxic agendas. Others focus more on criticizing the monsters that are harder to see through the fog of feigned politeness and propaganda distortion, the ones you see in government buildings and on Fortune Magazine covers and on TV news shows telling you what to think about the world. Those who spend their time criticizing the latter more than the former are often attacked and ridiculed as fascist sympathizers and Kremlin assets, but only by those who don’t actually see the monsters that they are pointing to.

Hollywood trained us to fear psychopathic killers prowling around in the dark so we won’t notice the psychopathic killers who rule our world in broad daylight. We’ve been trained to fear the serial killer covered in blood and wielding a chainsaw so we won’t notice the serial killer wearing a suit and wielding a pen.

Our collective maturity cannot begin until we learn to see the violent extremist monsters where they actually exist, and not just where we’ve been trained to look for them.

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 https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/george_orwells_1984_has_become_a_blueprint_for_our_dystopian_reality

George Orwell’s 1984 Has Become a Blueprint for Our Dystopian Reality

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”— George Orwell, 1984

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell (Jun. 25, 1903-Jan. 21, 1950) has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm—depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.

Who could have predicted that so many years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”—George Orwell

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”―George Orwell

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

Our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”―George Orwell

The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.

What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.

In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.

Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.

Orwell understood what many Americans are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs.

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” ― George Orwell

Even our ability to speak and think freely is being regulated.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons.

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.

In my debut novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the dystopian future that George Orwell predicted for 1984 has finally arrived, 100 years late and ten times as brutal. In this post-apocalyptic world where everyone marches to the beat of the same drummer and words like “freedom” are taboo, Erik Blair—Orwell’s descendant and unwitting heir to his legacy—isn’t volunteering to be anyone’s hero. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always go according to plan. To save all that he loves, Orwell will have to travel between his future self and the past.

And in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” Orwell’s Big Brother relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

This is the final link in the police state chain.

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.

We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.

“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell

Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the government.

The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.

In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity. 

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” ― George Orwell

Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter. 

Say hello to the new Thought Police.

Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA has been working on an artificial intelligence system designed to anticipate your every move. Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence) has been designed to detect patterns and predict behavior.

No information is sacred or spared.

Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS.

What we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.

So where does that leave us?

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.

It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.

Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw. Just look at what happened to Julian Assange.

So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?

We’re running out of options.

Whether you’re dealing with fact or fiction, as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.