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“Not only is there no threat from Russia that is independent of American policy, but it is also the expansion of NATO to ‘meet the threat from Russia’ that creates the very threat that expansion was supposed to meet.” — Alastair Crooke
I doubt that many Americans — even the masses sunk in vaccine smuggery and obsessive Trump-o-phobia — believe that America’s Ukraine project is working out for us. Of course, to even begin thinking about this debacle, you must at least suspect that our government is lying about virtually everything it has its hand in. Name something it is not lying about, I dare you.
So, what is the Ukraine project about? To use that sad-ass country as a vector to disable and destroy Russia. You can’t over-state the stupidity of that objective. And why did we want to do that? Because… reasons. Oh? And what were they? Well, Russia was… there. Oh? And what was it doing? Trying to take over the world? Uh, no. It was actually just trying to be a normal European nation again after its traumatic 75-year-long experiment with communism, which ended in 1991.
And then, after that, coming along pretty well under Mr. Putin. Did I say that? Yes, I did, because it is a fact. Russia wrote new private property laws, made commerce legal again, and allowed its citizens to do business. Russia wasn’t threatening any other nations, most particularly not its former province, Ukraine. It had even invited Ukraine to be a sovereign member of its trade association, the customs union, with a bunch of other regional states who had rational interests in good regional relations. That’s what set off the maniacs at the US State Department — under Secretary John Kerry, a.k.a. the haircut-in-search-of a-brain — who, in 2014, decided to overthrow Ukraine’s government.
This is a long standing series of small items which have caught my eye or mind and which seem relevant, startling, amusing or all three. Occasionally, items which appear here may return as a longer piece. Mostly they will not.
1."The spirit of enquiry leads up a lane which hath no ending." ~ Beatrix Potter
2. Biological warfare isn’t new. In the sixteenth century the Aztec Empire collapsed when three and a half million Mexicans died of smallpox, brought by Cortez’s small army. Later smallpox was used to help defeat native American armies; Amherst and Colonel Bouquet, for example, used infected blankets to spread the disease among the Indians. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, smallpox was endemic in America; nine tenths of the population on the Massachusetts coast were killed by the infection, and small towns were sometimes almost completely wiped out. (From The Story of Medicine by Vernon Coleman)
We are moving rapidly into a dystopian, digital dictatorship.
A few years ago, in a book called The Game’s Afoot (published in 2018) I wrote that the Chinese Government was giving people marks according to behaviour. It was I wrote, called social engineering, and citizens were being ranked and rated according to their behaviour.
‘The Government,’ I said, ‘will measure people’s behaviour in order to decide what services they are entitled to. Anyone who incurs black marks for traffic offences, fare dodging or jay walking will find that they are no longer entitled to the full range of public services and rights. Moreover, internet activity will also be used to assess behaviour. Individuals who do bad things on the internet (or whose searches are considered questionable) will find themselves ‘black marked’. Individuals who have ‘responsible’ jobs will be subjected to enhanced scrutiny.’
It was called a social credit score and I wrote then that it was likely that Western Governments would soon follow suit. And they are doing so with great enthusiasm. It might not have obviously reached your town just yet – but it will, oh it will.
Stephen Lendman
[Originally posted on Stephen Lendman's blog on 04/27/2022]
"If the “world ends” ahead, I’m betting on a bang, not a whimper."
Most wars begin incrementally, rather than with a big bang. One thing leads to another then to full-blown conflict. WW I began before Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination — WW II before Pearl Harbor.
Months of advance planning precedes wars. US-led post-9/11 wars on Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, and Syria were planned long before the mother of all state-sponsored false flags to that time.
Years of US orchestrated and directed proxy war on Russia by Ukraine on Donbass preceded Moscow’s special military operation (SMO). Two months later, has WW III begun? Has hegemon USA-dominated NATO begun pushing things toward East/West confrontation? Is it inevitable ahead?
John Varoli
History is clear -- major outbreaks of disease only follow wars and/or sudden climatic cooling periods that lead to famine. We have none of this today. So, how can Covid be a 'pandemic'?
If microbes truly are deadly — as bumbling government bureaucrats and greedy Big Pharma execs tell us — then there should be pandemics every year. Humans should be dropping like flies, on the verge of extinction. But we’re not. Why?
No matter how much we sanitize our hands and bodies, the fact is that over 400 trillion viruses exist in each of us, and trillions more are in the air, water and surfaces around us. In addition, the Earth is home to millions of distinct viral species, as well as bacteria. In short, the microbial world is the most dominant life vector on Earth. I could easily argue that we live on their planet. And we’re simply their hosts. Thus, microbes have a vested interest in keeping us alive.
But what about a pandemic? It’s a major killer, right? Not so fast. As a purely natural phenomenon, a ‘pandemic’ is extremely rare. In fact, I can argue that pandemics don’t really exist, and anyone trying to scare you about the “next pandemic” is a wicked rogue and charlatan.
The scientific data and evidence is clear — major outbreaks of disease only follow wars, famine, social upheaval or a sudden climatic cooling that weakens one’s body and immune system. There’s never been a natural mass outbreak of disease during a time of peace and prosperity, such as the era we’ve been living in for 30 years.
As long as you’re well fed and housed, with access to clean water and air, and not facing the scourge of war and physical abuse, and not under great stress, then chances are that until you turn 65 years old, you’ll never get an infectious disease worse than the typical winter cold. Yes, as you age and reach your senior years, your body eventually breaks down. Sorry Folks, death is inescapable. The good news, however, is that for most of your life, you won’t need to have an irrational fear of ‘pathogens’
Neo-feudalism is what we are being offered in place of the “American dream”. This is why we are seeing growing efforts of workers to organize unions.
The following interview is a follow-up to an earlier one conducted this month with American writer and veteran labor rights activist Bruce Gagnon. He explains the current U.S.-led NATO conflict against Russia in a historical context. U.S.-dominated Western capitalism is addicted to war as a modus operandi going back to its original genocidal conquest and foundations in slavery through its colonial wars and other wars of aggression over the past century and more. The current conflict playing out in Ukraine is but a continuum of class war against the workers of the United States and other Western states.
American workers, however, are fighting back in the form of a resurgence in unionizing and strike actions. The crisis in capitalism is driving the U.S. ruling class and its European NATO associates to war against Russia, and ultimately a Third World War.
The struggle for real democracy in the U.S. (and Europe) is part of the same challenge to defeat American-led Western imperialism. What’s at stake is the very future of the planet. Bruce Gagnon coordinates the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He began his political career in 1978 organizing Florida fruit pickers for the United Farm Workers Union (UFW). While working for the UFW, he served on the union team negotiating contracts between the Coca-Cola Corporation (Minute Maid orange juice) and the UFW. He writes a daily blog called Organizing Notes.
“We’ve quite literally outsourced the definition of reality to a small group of technocrats in nondescript offices whose names we’ll never know and who self-selected for issue advocacy and whose interests likely diverge severely from those of we the people.” –El Gato Malo on Substack
The big annual World Economic Forum meet-up concluded last week with a mighty “So, What?” as the world struggled with some success to get its mind right after years of relentless WEF-inspired psy-ops. Own nothing… eat bugs… great re-set… yeah, right. These days, fewer sovereign individuals believe der Schwabenklaus bullshit about the necessity of becoming menials for the “fittest 0.1 percent” of mankind who comprise the WEF’s cabal of elite “strategic partners.” News reports pegged the attendance in Davos this year at a shocking mere half of invitees. Did the absentees quail at the risk of all being together in the same auditorium (what with all those drones and missiles available on the black market)? Or could they not find enough unvaccinated pilots to fly their private jets?
By no strange coincidence, one of the WEF’s most sadistic leadership implants, PM Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, dropped out of office the same week, declaring she had “no gas left in the tank.” Old George Orwell had a pretty keen eye for the arc of history, but it never occurred to him that Big Brother would turn out to be Big Sister. Ms. Ardern was the one who said of her regime, “We will continue to be your single source of truth… Unless you hear it from us it is not the truth.” Polls indicated her party would get thrashed in this year’s parliamentary election. Next door in equally vaxxed-to-the-max Australia, the government had to confess last week that the country had more Covid-19 deaths in the first half of January this new year than in all of 2021.
It can happen suddenly or later on. Anyone claiming that flu/covid jabs are safe and effective is lying. Yet the mother of all Big Lies is repeated with disturbing regularity by the medical industrial complex, its MSM echo chamber, as well as genocidists infesting the Biden regime and Congress.
The same reality goes for Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, an unindicted mass-murderer, turning truth on its head, saying:
“We constantly review and analyze the data (sic). We’ve not seen a single (safety) signal”
— A bald-faced Big Lie. The Gateway Pundit cited evidence from a new Chinese study reported on by journalist Alex Berenson. Masquerading as a business official, Bourla is a serial killer.
[Posted on AWIP on 06/30/10] Saturday was the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, established twelve years ago to mark the day, in 1987, when the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Punishment or Treatment came into force, but you wouldn’t have found out about it through the mainstream US media.
No editorials or news broadcasts reminded Americans that “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture,” and that anyone responsible for authorizing torture must be prosecuted, and no one called for the prosecution of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld or their supportive colleagues and co-conspirators, including, for example, John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, the authors of the Office of Legal Counsel’s “torture memos,” or other key figures in Cheney’s “War Council” that drove the policies: David Addington, Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, Alberto Gonzales, the former Attorney general, and William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s former Chief Counsel.
Instead, two mainstream newspaper articles revealed the extent to which President Obama has, over the last 17 months, conspired with senior officials and with Congress to maintain the bitter fruits of the Bush administration’s torture program — and its closely related themes of arbitrary detention and hyperbole about the perceived threat of terrorism.
In the first of these two bleak stories, “US to repatriate Guantánamo detainee to Yemen after judge orders him to be released,” anonymous administration officials told the Washington Post that the President had generously decided to release a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo, Mohammed Hassan Odaini, whose release was ordered last month by a judge in the District Court in Washington D.C.
[Posted on AWIP on 10/25/10]
Last week, Truthout published an important article by Jason Leopold, Truthout’s Deputy Managing Editor, and psychologist and blogger Jeffrey Kaye, revealing, for the first time, a secret memorandum dated March 25, 2002, approved by deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, which authorized human experimentation on detainees in the “War on Terror.” The release of the memo followed some little-noticed maneuvering in Congress in December 2001, when the requirement of “informed consent” in any experimentation by the Defense Department (introduced in 1972) was quietly dropped.
The article — which involved over a year of research, as Leopold and Kaye persuaded former officials to open up to them — not only adds to Leopold’s important work and to Kaye’s formidable track record as a chronicler of the development of human experimentation in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” torture program (which he has also revealed as part of an obsession with human experimentation reaching back to the 1950s), but also confirms the existence of an important new front in the struggle to raise awareness of the horrors of torture, and the requirement that those who authorized it be held accountable for their crimes.