News Articles | May 15, 2022
1. Summary from the Russian Mod telegram channel
Ideologues of US military-biological activities in Ukraine are the leaders of the Democratic Party.
▫️Thus, through the US executive branch, a legislative framework for funding military biomedical research directly from the federal budget was formed. Funds were raised under state guarantees from NGOs controlled by the Democratic Party leadership, including the investment funds of the Clintons, Rockefellers, Soros and Biden.
▫️The scheme involves major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Moderna, Merck and the US military-affiliated company Gilead. U.S. experts are working to test new medicines that circumvent international safety standards. As a result, Western companies are seriously reducing the cost of research programmes and gaining a significant competitive advantage.
▫️The involvement of controlled nongovernmental and biotechnological organisations, and the increase in their revenues, allows the leaders of the Democratic Party to generate additional campaign finance and hide its distribution.
▫️In addition to US pharmaceutical companies and Pentagon contractors, Ukrainian state agencies are involved in military bioweapons activities, whose main tasks are to conceal illegal activities, conduct field and clinical trials and provide the necessary biomaterial. READ MORE
Article
How a Century of Political Violence In Ukraine is Linked to the Atrocities of Today
By: Olga Sukharevskaya
Troops shot in the legs screaming in pain. Others dying from blood loss and shock. With no one around to provide medical assistance. A Russian soldier crucified on an anti-tank barrier, chained to a metal 'hedgehog' and then burned alive...
For many, graphic footage of Russian servicemen tortured and killed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and nationalist battalions, came as a real shock. But this did not surprise those who are familiar with the 'traditions' of Ukraine's 'fighters for national freedom', as they have more than a century of history in this sort of thing.
Europe's First Concentration Camps
The first concentration camps in Europe - Terezin and Thalerhof - were established in Austria-Hungary in the fall of 1914, not to hold prisoners of war, but the empire's own citizens. This is how Vienna, then the 'sick man of Europe', tried to protect its eastern border areas from members of its population which sympathized with neighboring Russia. Fighting between the two countries had broken out just before the beginning of the First World War. Austria-Hungary's last emperor, Charles I, confessed in his edict of May 7, 1917:
"All the arrested Russians are innocent, but they were detained to prevent them becoming guilty."
People from Galicia who did not want to call themselves Ukrainians, as the Austrian authorities insisted, and continued to use the name 'Rusyns', were arrested and incarcerated in two places - in a garrison fortress in Terezin and in a valley near Graz, the capital of Styria. While the prisoners in Terezin were held in the vaults and dungeons of the fortress, with the support of local Czechs, the concentration camp later known as Thalerhof was little more than a bare field fenced in with barbed wire. READ MORE
Youth Under Siege
One of the most important registers in measuring the democratic health of a society can be found in how it treats its youth. By any current standard, which includes the quality of public schools to laws that protect the health and well-being of young people, the United States is failing miserably. Youth, especially youth of color, are not only viewed as a liability, much of their behavior is also being increasingly criminalized. When young people are relentlessly and ruthlessly subject to forces that commodify them, criminalize, punish them, and deem them unworthy of receiving a critical and meaningful education, it bodes ill for the nation as a whole. Of course, this attack on youth is not new.
In the 1970s youth were viewed as both predatory and dangerous and in succeeding generations they were increasingly marginalized, terrorized, and written out of the social contract.[1] The United States is one of the few countries in the world that puts children in supermax prisons, tries them as adults, incarcerates them for exceptionally long periods of time, defines them as “super predators,” pepper sprays them for engaging in peaceful protests, and describes them as “teenage time bombs.”[2] More recently, it has been reported that hundreds of Native American children in the United States and even more Indigenous children in Canada in government and reservation schools were not only separated from their families but also abused physically, emotionally, and sexually. Many others died in these genocidal factories and were buried in unmarked graves. The legacy of violence against children of color runs deep in the United States.[3] Viewed as a long-term investment, they are defined under neoliberalism as both an economic liability and a drain on the resources needed to concentrate wealth in the hands of the ruling classes and financial elite. READ MORE
In a blindingly dizzying act of hypocrisy, the U.S. recently indicated it will invade the Solomon Islands, if that country’s new pact with Beijing leads to a Chinese military base there. This, after months of our politicos hollering like raving lunatics about the supposedly nonpareil, never-before-witnessed evil of Russia invading Ukraine, replete with comparisons between Putin and Hitler. Well, if Biden invades the Solomon Islands, is he Hitler? For that matter, what about George Bush, who invaded Iraq and Afghanistan? Is he Hitler? And Britain’s Tony Blair – is he Hitler?
In addition, are the hundreds if not thousands of rulers in human history who invaded foreign countries – are they all Hitler? And I guess we’ve just forgotten about the part where Hitler exterminated six million Jews along with millions of Slavs, Roma, communists and other so-called undesirables. That apparently is no longer considered a defining characteristic of Hitler’s unique evil. How else to explain that accusations of being Hitler are a dime a dozen these days? Such cheap rhetoric does nothing to help ordinary, suffering Ukrainian people. But it sure helps corporate war-mongers get richer. That’s the point. READ MORE
Including examination of the racism that helped create them, conversations with residents and activists, and brief observations about the history, politics, music, art, architecture, and scenery of the region, illustrated with historic artworks and original photographs by the author.
April 22 (Earth Day): Jekyll Island and Brunswick, Georgia
As we headed north on Highway 41 from Micanopy, Florida, I thought about the first Earth Day. I was a freshman at Forest Hills High School in Queens, and the world seemed, at last, to be calming down. Though assassination, riot and war still darkened my dreams, there appeared to be, as the Vietnam War planners liked to say, “light at the end of the tunnel.” On April 20, 1970, Nixon announced the withdrawal of an additional 150,000 U.S. troops, accelerating “Vietnamization” — the handoff of fighting from American to South Vietnamese troops — and hastening the end of the war.
Along with hundreds of thousands of others, I marched, two days later, from 14th Street to 59th Street in Manhattan. I wore my gold-colored Nehru shirt and sandals and acted the hippie, though I was just a recent Bar Mitzvah boy. We demanded an ecological republic and naively believed it might soon be achieved. Back home after the rally, and in the months that followed, I read books by the popular science authors I admired: Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, George Gamow, and Isaac Asimov. Commoner’s book Science and Survival (1966) made a particular impression. He described in plain language the impacts of water and air pollution, nuclear fallout, and CO2. The burning of fossil fuels, he said, would cause a greenhouse effect, raising global temperatures, melting ice caps, and increasing world-wide flooding. It seemed like science fiction, but even if it wasn’t, I was sure we had the technology and the will to fix it. READ MORE
Last month, not long after Florida federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled that the transportation mask mandate was illegal, I flew from New York City to Miami. Videos of airplane passengers in midflight ripping off their masks and cheering with joy had already gone viral following the judge’s ruling.
I’ve traveled domestically and internationally many times since the start of the pandemic and I hate the mask as much as anyone. It makes me sneeze and it tickles. After 10 hours on long hauls, I can indeed feel like I’m suffocating. It can be almost unbearable. But after two years of obediently masking up to enter airports and planes around the world, I found my first unmasked travel experience jarring indeed, even though I kept mine on. I was not the only masked person on that American Airlines flight, but I was definitely in the minority. READ MORE
Article
Devastated family of woman who died after giving birth share heartbreaking last image - Daily Record
The GOP’s “Pro-Life” Victory Will Mean More Dead Mothers
Under a Louisiana bill likely to become law when the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, a woman who has an abortion is guilty of first-degree murder. For this, she’ll face the death penalty or — if the prosecutor chooses leniency — life imprisonment and hard labor.
Some Republican abortion foes have called for a federal law along the same lines, criminalizing abortions nationally as homicide.
Most of the new wave of anti-abortion statutes include no exceptions for incest or rape. A 14-year-old girl who does not want to give birth to her father’s child could be imprisoned for 10 or 15 years. So could a mother who refuses to add a rapist’s child to her family.
Under many of the statutes, a human egg is defined as an “unborn child” from the moment of fertilization, even before the egg has become implanted in the womb. Criminal penalties therefore apply no matter how early a woman seeks to terminate a pregnancy.
A pregnant person could be charged with the “murder” of what doctors call a “blastocyte,” the stage an egg reaches around the sixth day after fertilization. Anti-abortion laws define this microscopic entity — less than one hundredth of an inch long — as an “unborn child.” READ MORE
Human rights advocates on Wednesday called for a thorough and transparent investigation after Al Jazeera and witnesses said Israeli forces shot and killed one of the network’s reporters while she was at work.
Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known 51-year-old Palestinian-American correspondent, was wearing a helmet and press jacket that clearly identified her as a journalist when Israeli forces shot her in the face as she covered an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the illegally occupied West Bank of Palestine.
While Israeli officials falsely claimed Palestinian militants shot Abu Akleh, Al Jazeera condemned her killing as “blatant murder.”
Citing the IDF’s deadly history of targeting journalists during wars, invasions, and other military operations in Palestine, the women-led peace group CodePink demanded an “immediate suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel and a thorough and impartial investigation of Shireen’s murder.”
The U.S. gives Israel, one of the world’s wealthiest nations per capita, around $3.8 billion in unconditional annual military aid, despite being classified an apartheid state by prominent international and Israeli officials and organizations. READ MORE
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday called the attack on the funeral procession of slain journalist Shireen Abu Akleh that took place earlier in the day "an outrage" that must be condemnation by the U.S. government as he also called for an investigation into the killing.
Friday's attack was described as "horrific" and "grotesque" across the world after footage emerged of Israeli Defense Forces and security personnel hitting and otherwise assaulting the pallbearers of Abu Akleh's coffin and other mourners as they made their way through the streets of occupied East Jerusalem.
"The attack by Israeli forces against mourners at the funeral of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh is an outrage," Sanders tweeted Friday afternoon. "The United States must condemn this, and demand an independent investigation into her killing." READ MORE
Ever since the heads of East India Trading Company (1600) and Hudson Bay Company (1670), were incorporated by English Royal charters, there have been corporate dictators. Their range and actions, have varied widely however. Today’s new corporate dictators shatter past restraints.
John D. Rockefeller ruled the Standard Oil Company monopoly until the trust busters from Washington broke up its giant price-fixing and predatory practices into several companies.
Andrew Carnegie was the ruler of the giant Carnegie Steel Company (which became U.S. Steel Corporation). Carnegie violently broke up strikes, such as the 1892 Homestead strike, before he left the company to be a major philanthropist building libraries and universities.
In the post-World War II years, the CEOs of General Motors and Ford had immense power but still had to contend with a strong United Auto Workers union and later with jolting consumer advocacy leading to federal safety and emissions regulation.
Today’s corporate dictators are like no others, with unparalleled wealth towering over that held by Rockefeller and Carnegie (adjusted for inflation).
Consider the sheer unchallenged power of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook (Meta), Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, the wannabe CEO of a going-private Twitter, Elon Musk, (unless the sinking Tesla stock ends the debt-deep acquisition price), and Sergey Brin and Larry Page still in control of Google. Despite recent stirrings, there are no companywide unions at these companies and the prospect for such is still in the distant future. READ MORE
Much ink has been spilt on the subject of populism, so it would be a fool's errand for me to presume to settle the debate over the meaning of the term. I will simply confine myself to pointing out two well-established facts. First, the original 19th century U.S. populists sought to forge a multi-racial movement of the producing classes to challenge the abuses of power by big corporations and wealthy individuals. They believed that business interests such as railroads and banks as well as wealthy individuals constituted a plutocratic threat to democracy in gilded age America.
This history leads to the second point. It has never made much sense to speak of "right-wing populism" as an ideological corollary to left-wing populism. Especially today when what many writers have referred to as Trumpian right-wing populism has gone off the rails into something overtly authoritarian and anti-democratic (as have other so-called "right-wing populist movements"), the simplistic and false equivalence of "right-wing populism" should be permanently laid to rest. Perhaps the time has come to simply refer to these movements as "sham populist" or even fascist as U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin does.
It has been suggested by writers such as John Judis and others that the current spate of populist and sham populist movements and candidacies we are seeing around the world are a result of the 2008 Great Recession much as the populist movement of the late 19th century (and the reaction to it) was the result of a depression that hit the agricultural sector especially hard. Yet, as was also true of the nineteenth century depression, it was not so much the simple occurrence of the Great Recession, but the mismanagement of the response to it by politicians and governments in ways that overtly served the interests of banks and monied interests while disadvantaging ordinary citizens, especially those in "upside down" mortgages, that gave rise to the authentic populisms and right-wing "sham populisms" of today. READ MORE
With the U.S. Supreme Court at the forefront of the nation's attention as right-wing justices appear ready to overturn Roe v. Wade, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced legislation Tuesday that spotlights the powerful judicial body's complete lack of binding ethics rules—and proposes a number of solutions to tackle the high court's "corruption."
The Supreme Court is currently the only court in the United States that is not governed by a code of ethics, leaving justices free to accept lavish gifts from partisan actors, attend political fundraisers, and participate in cases in which they have glaring conflicts of interest.
"At a time when public trust in the Supreme Court has collapsed to historic lows, it's critical that we enact legislation to reform this broken system," Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement Tuesday. "From banning federal judges from owning individual stocks to overhauling the broken judicial recusal process, my bill would help root out corruption and restore public trust in the federal judiciary—something that Chief Justice [John] Roberts has simply failed to do." READ MORE
A new investigation published Wednesday reveals that some of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world—from Exxon in the U.S. to Gazprom in Russia to Aramco in Saudi Arabia—are planning or currently operating nearly 200 "carbon bombs," massive oil and gas projects that could unleash 646 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions and doom efforts to rein in planetary warming.
Research shared exclusively with The Guardian ahead of its formal publication identifies at least 195 "carbon bombs" that are either in the process of being built or already in place across the globe as scientists warn that fossil fuel use must be quickly phased out to prevent catastrophic climate outcomes.
Led by Kjell Kühne from the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, the research specifically defines carbon bombs as "projects capable of pumping at least 1 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over their lifetimes," The Guardian noted in its detailed report on Wednesday.
Around 60% of the projects are already producing oil and gas, the research found. READ MORE
WASHINGTON - Nurses across the country applaud the reintroduction of Medicare for All legislation in the U.S. Senate. National Nurses United (NNU), the nation’s largest union and professional organization for registered nurses, has long supported Medicare for All because health care is a human right.
NNU Executive Director Bonnie Castillo, RN, testified at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on May 12 that Covid-19’s impacts on health care are evidence that Medicare for All is necessary now more than ever. The hearing was chaired by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who also introduced the new Medicare for All Senate bill today. Sanders is joined by 14 Senate colleagues as cosponsors.
“For more than two years, nurses across the country have worked on the frontlines of the Covid pandemic. We have cared for patients despite atrocious working conditions,” Castillo said at Thursday’s hearing. “If it was ever in doubt before, this pandemic has shown that our current profit-driven and fragmented healthcare system does not work. It does not provide quality, therapeutic care to millions of Americans. It does not value and protect its own health care workers. And it is unable to provide a comprehensive pandemic response.” READ MORE
As United Nations and other experts gather in Côte d'Ivoire's largest city for a major conference on fighting desertification, an agency of the world body published a new report warning that humanity is "at a crossroads" in drought management, and that mitigation must proceed "urgently, using every tool we can" if the planet is to avert catastrophic consequences.
The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) report—entitled Drought in Numbers, 2022—was released to mark Drought Day at UNCCD's 15th Conference of Parties (COP15), which began on Monday and will run through May 20, in Abidjan.
"The facts and figures of this publication all point in the same direction: an upward trajectory in the duration of droughts and the severity of impacts, not only affecting human societies but also the ecological systems upon which the survival of all life depends, including that of our own species," UNCCD Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw said in a statement.
"We are at a crossroads," he warned. "We need to steer toward the solutions rather than continuing with destructive actions, believing that marginal change can heal systemic failure." READ MORE
The climate movement Extinction Rebellion on Wednesday revealed plans to bring millions of people into the United Kingdom's streets on September 10 in response to the government's latest efforts to enact new limits on protest.
In the Queen's Speech—which outlines the government's priorities at the ceremony to open a new session of Parliament—Prince Charles on Tuesday announced the Public Order Bill containing anti-protest measures that the House of Lords last year rejected as "draconian and anti-democratic."
Charlie Waterhouse of Extinction Rebellion (XR) said in a statement that "it is foolish to think that announcing new curbs in the Queen's Speech will stop people taking to the streets to demand their government act to ensure a safe future for people in the U.K. and around the world."
"As we in Extinction Rebellion know full well: what we do works," he continued. "It's worked countless times before. It has worked to give us weekends and the vote, human rights, and freedom. And it will work again. Faced with a government incapable of anything other than a desperate attempt to shore up its own power and cover up its criminality it is the only thing we can do. To be a bystander is not enough." READ MORE
The U.S. Air Force (USAF) has 9,730 personnel permanently deployed throughout Britain, an increase of 22 percent from six years ago.
Analysis by Declassified has found that Britain hosts the third-highest level of USAF personnel of any country in the world, ahead of historic U.S. military outposts like South Korea and Italy.
These American airmen have in recent years flown bombing missions to Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya from their bases in Britain.
“The USAF presence in Britain isn’t just some remnant of the Cold War, it’s ongoing and very active,” Kate Hudson, chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), told Declassified.
In recent months, huge American B-52 nuclear-capable bombers have been seen leaving and arriving at a RAF base in Gloucestershire.
“The U.S. says they were on a training exercise to ensure they are ‘ready,’ presumably for war on Ukraine,” Hudson added. “Once again we have a situation where war or other military actions can be prosecuted from Britain without parliamentary scrutiny.” READ MORE
Why has the United States already become so heavily invested in the Russia-Ukraine war? And why has it so regularly gotten involved, in some fashion, in so many other wars on this planet since it invaded Afghanistan in 2001?
Those with long memories might echo the conclusion reached more than a century ago by radical social critic Randolph Bourne that “war is the health of the state” or recall the ancient warnings of this country’s founders like James Madison that democracy dies not in darkness, but in the ghastly light thrown by too many bombs bursting in air for far too long.
In 1985, when I first went on active duty in the U.S. Air Force, a conflict between the Soviet Union and Ukraine would, of course, have been treated as a civil war between Soviet republics. In the context of the Cold War, the U.S. certainly wouldn’t have risked openly sending billions of dollars in weaponry directly to Ukraine to “weaken” Russia. Back then, such obvious interference in a conflict between the USSR and Ukraine would have simply been an act of war. (Of course, even more ominously, back then, Ukraine also had nuclear weapons on its soil.)
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, everything changed. The Soviet sphere of influence gradually became the U.S. and NATO sphere of influence. Nobody asked Russia whether it truly cared, since that country was in serious decline. READ MORE
The power to decree what is “disinformation” now determines what can and cannot be discussed on the internet. It is now in the hands of trained disinformation agents of the U.S. Security State.
The most egregious and blatant official U.S. disinformation campaign in years took place three weeks before the 2020 presidential election. That was when dozens of former intelligence officials purported, in an open letter, to believe that authentic emails regarding Joe Biden’s activities in China and Ukraine, reported by The New York Post, were “Russian disinformation.” That quasi-official proclamation enabled liberal corporate media outlets to uncritically mock and then ignore those emails as Kremlin-created fakes, and it pressured Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to censor the reporting at exactly the time Americans were preparing to decide who would be the next U.S. president.
The letter from these former intelligence officials was orchestrated by trained career liars — disinformation agents — such as former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Yet that letter was nonetheless crucial to discredit and ultimately suppress the New York Post‘s incriminating reporting on Biden. It provided a quasi-official imprimatur — something that could be depicted as an authoritative decree — that these authentic emails were, in fact, fraudulent. READ MORE
The head of what has been dubbed the Biden administration’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ previously compared free speech to “fairy dust” during testimony about social media censorship in front of the UK Parliament.
Yes, really.
Nina Jankowicz, recently appointed DHS ‘disinformation czar,’ made the comments while providing oral evidence regarding the implementation of the UK’s controversial Online Safety Bill, which will ban legal content which has “the potential to cause harm.”
After agreeing that the government should set minimum speech standards which ban “misogyny,” Jankowicz blasted alternative social media platforms for supporting “freedom of expression and fairy dust.”
She also said that government-connected communications regulators such as Ofcom should “be able to establish the minimum standards that would be applied to all platforms and incur fines.”
“That could be based, again, on the preexisting terms of service,” she added.
Jankowicz also endorsed empowering governments to demand data on individual users from social media cites for the purpose of implementing further censorship policies. READ MORE
In a newly released video clip, Biden disinformation czar Nina Jankowicz demands that “trustworthy verified people” like her be given the power to edit other people’s tweets, making Twitter more like Wikipedia.
Yes, really.
Asserting that she was “eligible for it because I’m verified,” Jankowicz then bemoaned the fact there are people on Twitter with different opinions to her who also have the blue tick but “shouldn’t be verified” because they’re “not trustworthy.”
“So verified people can essentially start to edit Twitter the same sort of way that Wikipedia is so they can add context to certain tweets,” said Jankowicz.
She then provided the example, which she claimed was non-political, of President Trump tweeting about voter fraud.
NEW – Biden's new "disinformation" czar wants "trustworthy verified people" like her to be able to "add context" to other people's tweets.pic.twitter.com/V4mLNsB5HV
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) May 10, 2022
“Someone could add context from one of the 60 lawsuits that went through the court or something that an election official in one of the states said, perhaps your own Secretary of State and his news conferences, something like that,” said Jankowicz.
“Adding context so that people have a fuller picture rather than just an individual claim on a tweet,” she added.
Of course, Twitter already slaps warning labels on such tweets, but now Jankowicz wants approved regime propagandists to be empowered to insert their narrative on an individual basis. READ MORE
The attorneys general of 20 states have threatened legal action against the US government unless they disband the newly formed Disinformation Governance Board.
We shared with you recently an article about the people behind the DGB, who have a history of trying to curb dissenting speech by calling it “disinformation.” We here at the OP have been the targets of censorship before and would not be surprised to see more of the same. (Here’s how we’re meeting the possibility of further oppression head-on.)
It turns out that we’re not the only ones concerned about this. READ MORE
Senator Rand Paul has blocked a fast-track senate vote on the additional $40 billion funding package created by Joe Biden and House Democrats. Both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell approved a fast-track vote; however, senator Rand Paul (KY) stood defiant against their effort.
Despite the high-profile pressure from the two Senate leaders, Rand Paul refused to move and that means the Senate will have to take procedural steps to overcome his objection, which could take several days.
“My oath of office is the US constitution not to any foreign nation and no matter how sympathetic the cause, my oath of office is to the national security of the United States of America,” Paul said in his remarks before objecting to moving to swift passage of the bill. “We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the US economy.”
Watch:
The $40 billion supplemental spending bill for Ukraine is more than the total military budget of Russia. The combined Ukraine aid packages now exceed $60 billion, more than the entire budget for the U.S. Dept of Homeland Security including border protection. READ MORE
How is it that in the exceptional and indispensable USA, a former American president [Trump] can be denied his constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech by a private communications company?
How can a mere private company cancel the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights?
How is it possible that the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of Americans (including a former US president) is dependent on who owns Twitter? And Facebook? And Google? And the New York Times?
How can Americans, especially conservatives, think they live in a free country when a former president of the United States can have his Constitutional Rights cancelled or granted by a private company CEO?
Isn’t this a case of the “private sector” controlling the government?
How can people be free when they are denied access to facts, open debate, and truth?
The head of Homeland Security, a Nazi-era institution now assuming a governing role in the USA, has established a US Ministry of Truth with the power to shut down all who challenge the official narrative.
How is it possible that a presidential administration dares establish in the USA a Nazi-era Gestapo institution with the power to cancel the truth? And still be supported by 45% of the population? How can a country with 45% of its population completely stupid beyond all belief survive?
What is the matter with “Biden Democrats”? Are they unable to comprehend that freedom, liberty, the rights for which the founders of the country fought for, are at stake? READ MORE
“It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion.” Leo Tolstoy
For an ever-growing number of Americans, life is becoming ever more difficult and precarious to maneuver for making ends meet.
Each subsequent year becomes more challenging. It seems that suffering has become an endemic quality to the nation’s character. However, not everyone has been suffering equally.
This national chronic illness is not uniform. Much of our suffering depends upon the institutionalization and negligence of previous injustices, the loss of social equanimity, economic heedlessness, and our leaders’ unmitigated greed and pursuit of power. Nor is everyone adversely affected by the shifts underway in the imaginations of the political and ideological universes.
The transnational corporate class has little motivation to respect or contribute to national boundaries and interests. They perceive themselves as global actors. For the generals and captains of neoliberal globalization, the puppet masters of financial markets, the Covid-19 pandemic only caused annoying disruptions in the quality of their lives. For the remainder, it has been cataclysmic.
Now that Washington acknowledges its proxy war against Russia, and the hawkish ambitions of the political class are determined to drive the economy into the abyss, we must pause and reflect carefully about what we want and don’t want as individuals and as a nation to secure a sustainable future. READ MORE
The hybrid warfare being waged to determine the future of Ukraine, intertwines frequently with many aspects of the manufactured COVID crisis. Both fiascos have at their core basic questions concerning how global economic relationships are to be restructured. Those who manufactured the COVID crisis in the quest to bring about a financial reset have pictured the process as one that would formalize the ascent of supranational agencies over institutions of national sovereignty.
Happy to play the role as prime ministerial mascot for the Davos-based World Economic Forum, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made it clear that he is busily engaged in uploading Canada’s remaining repositories of national sovereignty to supranational entities. Trudeau is sacrificing the little that remains of the self-determination of average Canadians in order to further empower the ruling array of multi-billionaires and the globalist bankers backing them.
In Trudeau’s mind, Canada is a core entity of the World Health Organization and is subject to the political sway of its corrupt sponsors including the fake philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This and many other surrenders of Canadian sovereignty by Trudeau reflect his fixation on leading the world’s “first post-national country.” READ MORE
The British home secretary, Priti Patel, will decide this month whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to the United States, where he faces a sentence of up to 175 years – served most likely in strict, 24-hour isolation in a US super-max jail.
He has already spent three years in similarly harsh conditions in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison.
The 18 charges laid against Assange in the US relate to the publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of leaked official documents, many of them showing that the US and UK were responsible for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one has been brought to justice for those crimes.
Instead, the US has defined Assange’s journalism as espionage – and by implication asserted a right to seize any journalist in the world who takes on the US national security state – and in a series of extradition hearings, the British courts have given their blessing.
The lengthy proceedings against Assange have been carried out in courtrooms with tightly restricted access and in circumstances that have repeatedly denied journalists the ability to cover the case properly.
Despite the grave implications for a free press and democratic accountability, however, Assange’s plight has provoked little more than a flicker of concern from much of the western media. READ MORE
An estimated $350 million in undisclosed royalties were paid to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and hundreds of its scientists, including the agency’s recently departed director, Dr. Francis Collins, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, according to a nonprofit government watchdog.
“We estimate that up to $350 million in royalties from third parties were paid to NIH scientists during the fiscal years between 2010 and 2020,” Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski told reporters in a telephone news conference on May 9.
“We draw that conclusion because, in the first five years, there has been $134 million that we have been able to quantify of top-line numbers that flowed from third-party payers, meaning pharmaceutical companies or other payers, to NIH scientists.”
The first five years, from 2010 to 2014, constitute 40 percent of the total, he said.
“We now know that there are 1,675 scientists that received payments during that period, at least one payment. In fiscal year 2014, for instance, $36 million was paid out and that is on average $21,100 per scientist,” Andrzejewski said.
“We also find that during this period, leadership at NIH was involved in receiving third-party payments. For instance, Francis Collins, the immediate past director of NIH, received 14 payments. Dr. Anthony Fauci received 23 payments and his deputy, Clifford Lane, received eight payments.”
Collins resigned as NIH director in December 2021 after 12 years of leading the world’s largest public health agency. Fauci is the longtime head of NIH’s National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), as well as chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden. Lane is the deputy director of NIAID, under Fauci. READ MORE
In 2014, the journalist and writer John Pilger wrote an article for The Guardian newspaper entitled ‘In Ukraine the US is dragging us towards war with Russia’.[i] Eight years later, in 2022, this prediction came true when Russia invaded Ukraine. Readers should be aware that I am anti-war, and therefore not in favour of any country invading any other. This article is to help readers understand why Russia invaded Ukraine.
A peaceful outcome is possible if negotiators from the US, Ukraine, Europe (particularly Germany and France) and Russia are able to sit down and agree a solution. Negotiations have to deal with two sets of connected problems. The first is about how different regions in Ukraine are governed. The second is about the role that Ukraine plays internationally.
The key issues within Ukraine
Ukraine is a patchwork of regions, whose people have very different backgrounds and loyalties. In simple terms, in the West of Ukraine, most people are pro-Europe, in the East most people are pro-Russia. The US engineered a coup in Ukraine in 2014 to overthrow the pro-Russian leader, Yanukovych, and replace him with the pro-US leader, Yatsenyuk. The current leader, Zelensky (elected in 2019) is also pro-US. During the 2014 coup, there were protests in Maidan Square which began peacefully but were hi-jacked by violent extremists,[ii] who have committed many atrocities.
There are two regions in Ukraine which are particularly relevant for understanding recent events. The first region is Crimea, in the south. This is a Russian-speaking area that contains Russia’s only warm-water port in Sevastopol. In 2014 the people of Crimea overwhelmingly voted to leave Ukraine and become part of Russia. The Ukrainian leader, Zelensky, said in March 2021, “we are taking back Crimea”. Since then, the Ukrainian army have increased the number of soldiers in the south and east of the country.
Russian would like to create a peace agreement where Ukraine has no claims on Crimea. READ MORE
It’s been shown that Pfizer and the CDC committed fraud when they willfully withheld critical data from the public, resulting in harm and death to thousands from the injections.
What’s going on here is criminal. For the people close to the data who said nothing, there will be legal consequences. They will either be witnesses or defendants.
The FDA and the CDC had to be sued to release the data on a biological product that every person is being asked, if not forced to take. This should make everyone very concerned.
DoD data shows clear increase in disease after injection and WorldInData.org reports a 73% of the COVID deaths in both high income and middle-high income nations (that could afford vaxx) occurred AFTER vaxx was released. In a pandemic, the most deaths should occur at the beginning, before treatment is available. However, the COVID vaxxines failed to improve health, which was apparently by design. READ MORE
Until this week, Republicans, like Democrats and the general public, were largely unaware of the nationwide baby formula shortage. But eager to feed the outrage machine, the GOP is now parlaying the shortage into an appalling political attack over the Biden administration’s immigration policies. And they’re specifically going after migrant babies.
“While mothers and fathers stare at empty grocery store shelves in a panic, the Biden Administration is happy to provide a baby formula to illegal immigrants coming across our southern border,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement Thursday, blasting the government providing baby formula to immigrant holding facilities.
“American families, there’s a shortage, but if you’re a migrant, don’t worry, because Uncle Sam has a stash of that,” Fox News host Steve Doocy said in a recent segment. “Joe Biden continues to put America LAST by shipping pallets of baby formula to the southern border as American families face empty shelves,” Rep. Elise Stefanik tweeted. READ MORE
After careful evaluation, the Kremlin is rearranging the geopolitical chessboard to end the unipolar hegemony of the “indispensable nation”.
But it’s our fate / To have no place to rest, / As suffering mortals / Blindly fall and vanish / From one hour / To the next, / Like water falling / From cliff to cliff, downward / For years to uncertainty.
Holderlin, Hyperion’s Fate Song
Operation Z is the first salvo of a titanic struggle: three decades after the fall of the USSR, and 77 years after the end of WWII, after careful evaluation, the Kremlin is rearranging the geopolitical chessboard to end the unipolar hegemony of the “indispensable nation”. No wonder the Empire of Lies has gone completely berserk, obsessed in completely expelling Russia from the West-centric system.
The U.S. and its NATO puppies cannot possibly come to grips with their perplexity when faced with a staggering loss: no more entitlement allowing exclusive geopolitical use of force to perpetuate “our values”. No more Full Spectrum Dominance.
The micro-picture is also clear. The U.S. Deep State is milking to Kingdom Come its planned Ukraine gambit to cloak a strategic attack on Russia. The “secret” was to force Moscow into an intra-Slav war in Ukraine to break Nord Stream 2 – and thus German reliance on Russian natural resources. That ends – at least for the foreseeable future – the prospect of a Bismarckian Russo-German connection that would ultimately cause the U.S. to lose control of the Eurasian landmass from the English Channel to the Pacific to an emerging China-Russia-Germany pact.
It is no secret that the United States of America has a deeply dark and disturbing history in regard to how Native Americans were treated in this country. After wiping out large portions of the indigenous populations with European diseases, the federal government took to forcibly assimilating the remaining population in government institutions.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, hundreds of federal schools were set up across the country in which Native children were taken from their families and tribes to be re-educated into the American way of life. Within these facilities, tens of thousands of children were both physically and sexually abused as “teachers” forced them to talk, dress and act “American.”
In these boarding schools, children were prohibited from speaking their Native American language and forced to assimilate into society. The abuse they suffered at the hands of staff was often times fatal and many of these schools began digging mass grave sites as a result. READ MORE
Opposition to 5G has been worldwide for years due to various significant issues with the technology (see 1, 2, 3) including serious service woes (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Recently proponents got together and dished about additional 5G “challenges”. Ay carumba.
From RCR Wireless:
‘It’s a complete hot mess’: Challenges and opportunities (challenges, mostly) in 5G, private networks and service assurance
By Kelly Hill
Private networks are all about cost, control, security, new use cases and performance, summarizes Jagadeesh Dantuluri, general manager for private and dedicated networks at Keysight Technologies. But as much as telcos, NEMs and other ecosystem players are eyeing private 5G networks and more tailored services for industrial verticals as a key part of monetizing 5G, the current reality is that there are critical elements of assuring such services that have yet to be fully defined, costs are high compared to LTE, many of the most innovative possibilities require 5G Standalone, there’s a dearth of devices with the right features implemented, and the language of designing, monitoring and maintaining cellular systems still needs to be successfully translated into the metrics that enterprises actually want and need. READ MORE
On a chilly afternoon last autumn, I padded down a faint path beneath a grove of hemlock trees in British Columbia’s inland temperate rainforest. The moss on the ground was as thick as a mattress. Above, gray-green beards of lichen hung from the branches. Located along the province’s eastern flank, bordering Alberta, the inland rainforest gets much less attention from environmental groups than BC’s coastal rainforests, where activist blockades of old-growth tracts regularly make the news. But cold-climate inland rainforests are even rarer ecosystems.
The older the forest, the more lichen it has, explained my guide, Michelle Connolly, an ecologist who recites their names like poetry: peppered moon, netted specklebelly, pink dimple, cryptic paw. New species continue to be discovered here, making this forest among the most lichen-diverse places on the planet. As we walked, she described the area’s remaining ancient cedars, which grow up to four meters in diameter and can be close to 2,000 years old. The inland rainforest is also home to around 2,400 plant species, many of them rare, and wildlife such as wolves, wolverines, and southern mountain caribou.
But this patch of forest is also under threat. In 2021, Connolly co-authored a peer-reviewed study that found that BC’s inland rainforest — which once totaled over 1.3 million hectares — was endangered, according to International Union for Conservation of Nature criteria, and could experience ecological collapse within a decade if current logging rates continue. The study found that 95 percent of its core habitat, forest located more than 100 meters from a road, had been lost since 1970. “We’re fighting over the last pieces,” Connolly says. READ MORE
The Guardian is out with an exclusive, explosive report based on months of research that documents the scores of new projects fossil fuel companies are proposing, enough to wipe out the world’s remaining carbon budget and shatter any effort to hold global warming to 1.5°C.
“The fossil fuel industry’s short-term expansion plans involve the start of oil and gas projects that will produce greenhouse gases equivalent to a decade of CO2 emissions from China, the world’s biggest [carbon] polluter,” the UK-based newspaper reports. “These plans include 195 carbon bombs, gigantic oil and gas projects that would each result in at least a billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over their lifetimes, in total equivalent to about 18 years of current global CO2 emissions. About 60% of these have already started pumping.”
The world’s dozen biggest oil companies are on track to spend US$103 million per day through the end of this decade, “exploiting new fields of oil and gas that cannot be burned if global heating is to be limited to well under 2.0°,” The Guardian adds.
The story cites the United States, Canada, and Australia “among the countries with the biggest expansion plans and the highest number of carbon bombs,” as well as some of the highest per capita fossil fuel subsidies. READ MORE
Israel’s mounting PR crisis boils down to the fact that its violence and oppression isn’t happening in some far off land as in the case with US wars, it’s happening right at home surrounded by video cameras and enforced by police and soldiers who are not adept PR spinmeisters.
Israeli apartheid is imposed not by trained propagandists but by armed thugs who’ve been told their whole lives that the people they’re responsible for keeping in check are inferior. They don’t think how it’s going to look when they, for example, assault mourners at the funeral of a Palestinian American journalist who was slain by IDF sniper fire. If the whole thing was being upheld by spinmeisters like Jen Psaki, Michael McFaul and Jake Tapper it would unfold in a much more media-friendly way, but it’s being largely upheld by people who’ve been indoctrinated with an apartheid mindframe their entire lives instead. READ MORE or LISTEN
Article | Audio or Text
Fake Political Parties In A Fake Democracy: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
I remember feeling such solidarity with Democrats who opposed Bush’s warmongering. I sincerely did not know it was just empty political posturing for them and they’d happily sign off on any war no matter how insane as long as the president doing it had a (D) next to their name.
All the Democratic Party’s actions make sense when you switch from thinking of it as a political party whose job is to enact the will of voters to thinking about it as a narrative control operation whose job is to prevent the local riff raff from tampering with the gears of a globe-spanning empire.
The US doesn’t have political parties, it has narrative control ops disguised as political parties. One of them overtly promotes capitalism and imperialism by appealing to Americans’ worst impulses, the other covertly diverts healthy impulses back into capitalism and imperialism. READ MORE or LISTEN
We are once again witnessing history being made, folks. Today, in the Year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-two, we get the great privilege of bearing witness to the single most American thing that has ever happened.
The Biden administration has asked top Democrats to decouple the federal government’s Covid relief spending package from its much larger bill for funding of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, because one of those two things is too controversial and contentious to pass quickly.
Guess which one.
Politico reports:
Congressional Democratic leaders reached a bipartisan accord to send $39.8 billion to Ukraine to bolster its monthslong battle against a brutal Russian assault.
And that deal is now expected to move swiftly to President Joe Biden’s desk after Democrats agreed to drop another one of their top priorities — billions of dollars in pandemic aid that has stalled on the Hill. The Ukraine aid could come to the House floor for a vote as soon as Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke candidly on condition of anonymity.
That nearly $40 billion worth of proxy war funding eclipses the paltry $10 billion in Covid relief funding that was being debated in congress, and is in fact well in excess of the already massive $33 billion sum requested by the White House. READ MORE or LISTEN
Carbon dioxide (CO₂) reached an average daily concentration of 422.06 ppm on April 26, 2022, at Mauna Loa, Hawaii.
Furthermore, very high methane (CH₄) concentrations were recorded recently at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, with surface flask readings appearing to be as high as 1955 ppb.
The U.S. plans to boost liquefied natural gas exports to Europe to help the EU reduce its dependence on Russian gas. This could spur an expansion of LNG terminals, which analysts say would lead to long-term increases in gas production and greenhouse gas emissions.
In the span of weeks, Russia’s war on Ukraine has created millions of refugees, transformed the geopolitical landscape, upended global energy markets and food supply chains, and hastened Europe’s efforts to transition away from fossil fuels. The war also threatens to alter the trajectory of energy and climate policy in the United States.
On March 25, a month after Russia launched its invasion, President Biden met with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels and jointly announced a new initiative to help Europe reduce its reliance on Russian fossil fuels. Their plan calls for boosting exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the U.S. to the European Union by 15 billion cubic meters this year and as much as 50 billion cubic meters — a third of what Europe currently buys from Russia — by 2030. READ MORE
Britt Wray is a leading researcher on the mental health impact of climate change. In an e360 interview, she talks about the rise of climate anxiety in young people, how social media exacerbates this trend, and why distress about the climate crisis can spur positive change.
People who have come of age in recent decades — millennials and members of Generation Z — have been exposed to a steady stream of alarming news about climate change and ecological destruction. And a growing body of evidence suggests that these worsening problems, and the failure to address them, are taking an emotional toll.
Among those studying this phenomenon is Britt Wray, 35, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Innovation in Global Health. Wray recently coauthored the largest-ever survey of climate anxiety in teenagers and young adults, a 10-nation study published in The Lancet, which found that climate change is having a profound impact on young people. She is also the author of the new book, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis.
In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Wray explains how climate anxiety is greatest for Gen Z — those born between 1997 and 2012 — who have been bombarded with news of climate disasters on social media. They feel betrayed, she says, by government inaction and dismayed when told they are overreacting to what they see as an existential threat. More than half of the 16- to 25-year-olds in the Lancet survey said they believe humanity is doomed. And close to 40 percent said that fears about the future have made them reluctant to have children of their own. READ MORE
Electricity prices are rising in much of the country at the same time that climate change is contributing to extreme heat and a high chance of blackouts this summer.
For consumers, the result is an increase in financial strain to pay for a product that often is less reliable than before.
The national average electricity price for households is on track to rise 4 percent this year compared to 2021, which would be the largest percentage increase since 2008, the Energy Information Administration said on Tuesday. One of the main reasons for the price surge is a rise in the cost of natural gas, the leading fuel for power plants. The New England region is poised to get the worst of it, with a projected increase of 15 percent.
This follows recent warnings from grid operators serving California and the Midwest that they may not have enough power plants available this summer to meet customer needs at times of high demand. READ MORE
“You Will Own Nothing & Be Happy” - Davos 2022 The Great Reset
887,658 views | Jan 24, 2022 | 12.25 Minutes |
The annual “globalization ball” in Davos is upon us once again - a virtual event for the second year running. A new book ‘Davos Man’ reveals how its founder Klaus Schwab benefits from this gathering of the global elite.
Nick Estes: Indian Boarding Schools Were Part of "Horrific Genocidal Process" by the U.S.
47,445 views | May 13, 2022 | 24 Minutes |
A true horror was perpetrated against thousands of children by our government and many were killed. They were mostly exploited slaves. |
Chris Hedges | The HORRIFIC State of the American Empire
521,301 views | Jul 20, 2021 | 12:21 Min