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How To Run for School Board and Win Every TimeTuesday 25 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
If you are goofy enough to like face masks or COVID shots, please don’t read this. This information is too effective and we have enough goofy people in office already. If you are cowardly enough to ever wear a face mask for any reason, please don’t read this. This information is too effective and we have enough cowardly people in office already. Everyone else, please read on. This stuff really works. If you didn’t succeed at moving your school board (or any other government body you are focussed on) after months of diligent work on key issues, following yesterday’s writing on this topic, there is probably a defect in the system and it’s time to change one of the cogs for a more responsive, finely milled, and well oiled version: You! 1.) Learn The Date — Ask your school board administrator when elections for school board are. 2.) Double Check — Contact your country clerk’s office and ask the same. 3.) Learn The Rules — Find out the requirements for running from the county clerk’s office. Often the clerks will have information packets for people looking to run for office. Read that packet, keep coming back to it. It’s a good way to make sure you follow all the rules. 4.) Confirm Important Details — Every important number, deadline, or detail that I read in packets like that, I always contact the county clerks office to confirm. I like confirmation. I don’t want a misprint or a policy update to cause me to miss out on an opportunity to help usher a bad person out of office. Some county clerks will have a lawyer in the office who handles election matters. As you become aware of this person and prove themselves valuable to you, theirs is a direct phone line you will want to have. It is someone you should always feel comfortable turning to for a more in depth understanding of the process. 5.) Make A Platform — Make a clear platform of core issues that you are running on. If I were running, I would say “Remove all one size fits all health mandates from our schools.” That would be my one key issue that I care about and that I would run on and activate others around. There are many other things you may disagree on, but if you and your supporters agree on a core set of issues, you are in good shape. Focus on your key issues. Don’t get distracted. Lots of people will want to distract you. Your thoughts on the latest war are not relevant. Your thoughts on the controversial sewer improvements are not relevant. Your political party preference in national politics is not relevant. This is relevant: “Remove all one size fits all health mandates from our schools.” 6.) Activate Your Network — Get them out there helping you. If you don’t know how to build a network of activists around you, read this, this, and this. Using the techniques in those articles, you can build a network of activists around you that can win a school board seat or which could win a congressional seat, though dare I say it: a school board seat often has more impact. The real day-to-day impact that one person can have on the lives of so many people is so powerful. 7.) No Campaign Manager Needed, But — You don’t need a campaign manager for a school board run, you can handle that on your own, but even if it’s not necessary to have a campaign manager, with the right person, it makes the campaign so much easier and can have such powerful impact. It helps for one person to have one set of duties (be the candidate) and another person to have another set of duties (manage the organization and be responsible for everything else). Importantly, structure can help you challenge your network and make a loose network into an even more cohesive organization. Don’t just appoint a campaign manager (whose job it is to operate the campaign), have a finance committee manager (whose job it is to help bring in checks for supplies), have a treasurer (whose job it is to keep records), have a volunteer coordinator (whose job it is to recruit new volunteers, train them, and activate them), have a coalitions outreach captain (whose job it is to befriend other groups in the community). All that too can be distraction though if overdone. As the campaign progresses, and you hold your planning meetings with your confidantes, you’ll see people gravitate toward roles. Don’t be afraid to ask for them to take on a role and to give them a title. 8.) Check With Your Mates — Talk to your confidantes before you run, during your run, and after your run. 9.) No Professionals Needed — You don’t need professionals either. Those who you know and have already fought in the trenches alongside will serve you so much better than more than 95% of hired guns. Surround yourself with people from your community and your life who want to achieve the same goals as you. Hired guns can really be a distraction. 10.) Budget Can’t Beat Fury — Stay as low budget or as high budget as you want, but realize this, there’s hardly no budget that can defeat a well organized grassroots campaign like this one that I am in the process of describing to you. 11.) Voter Roles — Get a copy of the voter registration rolls. 12.) Precinct Maps — Get paper maps of your district from the county clerk. There are ways to do this with software. I still find that paper works better. A map spread out on the kitchen table tends to be easier for many people to visualize the terrain of as opposed to a map on a device. 13.) Knock On Every Door — Knock on every door of every voter in that district. (This is the most important part of winning local office.) I really mean every door of every voter in that district. 14.) Leave A Note — If they do not answer, leave them a letter asking for their vote, signed by you, welcoming them to contact you. Your campaign email address and your campaign cell phone number should both be included. You want to be contacted by people. An important reason to run is to bring good people together in order to change the way the community around you is being run. Those contacts matter so much. If you give contact information, yes a few rascals might reach out, but so many more supporters or potential supporters will reach out. The rascals will help you build thicker skin, the supporters will help you win. 15.) ID Supporters — Identify who your supporters are. Make a list. (This is the second most important part of winning.) Very clearly ask them if they will vote for you. You want a clear yes or no. 16.) Get Contact Info — If they like you, ask for their phone number and email address. (This is the third most important part of winning.) 17.) Keep In Touch — Reach out to your supporters periodically, keep them engaged. This can be as simple as a BCC email once or twice a week to your five supporters at the beginning that lets them know how you are progressing and some of your goals. And it can grow into an email to your 500 or 5,000 or 50,000 supporters. Let them be part of even your little victories. 18.) Keep Supporters Engaged, An Important Part Of Leading — I really mean engaged. If any supporter says after the campaign “I really wish you would have asked me to get more involved,” then you are doing something wrong. This is a true test of your leadership. Engage a supporter at the highest level of commitment they will be engaged at: financially, time wise, activity wise, vote wise. Don’t waste these precious resources of the people who want to help you win by leaving them inactivated. There is always more work to do, even if it is “Mrs. Johnson at 123 Rothbard Street hasn’t answered the door, will you go knock on her neighbors’ doors and ask if they know how to reach her?” or “Dale Miller is still holding out and not willing to support us, will you go take him for coffee and ask him what’s on his mind?” Most campaigns don’t have time for that level of voter by voter detail, but no campaign should consider its resources over-utilized until it reaches that level of detail. 19.) Election Day Follow Through — Make sure your supporters come out for you on Election Day or by early voting. It is impossible to bother them too much about this. Until they say they have voted for you, keep contacting them to come vote for you. After they’ve said that, invite them to come volunteer on Election Day. The process of getting your supporters to go to the polling place and vote for you is often called GOTV (Get out the vote). It’s one of the more commonly known acronyms used by people in this process. 20.) Put Early Voting Poll Watchers In Place — If you have the man power, have a volunteer present at the early voting locations in your district. Do not ever consider activities like this a waste of time. You are helping someone to develop skills for future civic engagement. A big part of winning in politics and government is just showing up. There are some quiet times just waiting for people to show up. You want your supporters totally comfortable doing that, totally comfortable around the halls of power, so comfortable that they practically consider them their halls of power, which they are and which the people in those halls of power want you to forget. A lot of discouragement is practiced by people in those positions in order to try to protect that power. Don’t be discouraged, get your people to show up. 21.) Debrief Volunteers Daily — Every single day debrief people. Don’t let even one person end a shift without someone on your team asking 1.) what went well, 2.) what went wrong, 3.) what would you change for next time? This should almost always be done in an individual conversation. This lets you know if anything went awry that you should know about, but it also is a decent thing to do for the volunteer. This is part of thanking a person, helping them to return the next time, and helping them be even better the next time for you and for other civic activism. 22.) Read The Election Judge & Poll Worker Manual — Long before Election Day, contact the county clerk to get the manual for election officials and poll watchers. Understand this manual. If this is your team’s first Election Day, the manual won’t do the process justice, but it will be a good primer. READ THE MANUAL EVERY ELECTION. There are people who have twenty years of campaign experience who really know what they are doing. They grow each campaign more and more. There are other people who have one year of experience repeated twenty times. They don’t seem to ever get to the next level of learning. It can be very hard to tell the difference at first, especially when someone wants you to think they know it all. Don’t let some veteran on your team convince you that the manual is not worth reading every single election. There are always little tidbits in there. The tidbits are so plentiful that I think it’s a good idea to have every single person on the core team read the manual in preparation for the first Election Day operations meeting. 23.) Have Poll Watchers In Each Polling Place — Have a poll watcher present at each polling place with a list of registered voters, marking down who has come to vote. This has so many useful purposes. Make sure someone is always keeping in touch with them and keeping track of who has come in to vote. This should be done during early voting and on Election Day. 24.) Man The Outside Of Polling Places — Have people who will work outside every poling place on Election Day circulating your material to the people who come in to vote that day and who have not yet made a decision. 25.) Have Command Central — Have a phone number ready to handle any inquiries that day that come in from your Election Day volunteers who are very reachable by phone all day long. 26.) Victory Party — Hold a victory party on election night as the returns come in. Win or lose, have your key players ready in a room, ready to hear the next action steps moving forward. DO NOT refuse to run again, do not let them down with a depressing speech. Win or lose, every political campaign is a step toward the next one. Walk into election night ready with, at the very least, your plan A (We won and change begins right here, right now), plan B (We lost and will fight harder starting today), and plan C (The outcome is uncertain, we’ve come too far to turn back, and we plan to close on this victory). 27.) Canvass The Vote — Have a group of volunteers who will participate in the vote canvass after the election. Spend a day having them trained on how to canvass and irregularities to watch out for. Whether you win or lose, canvass the vote. You are building potential for the next race and the race after that. Since part of the reason to run is to raise up civic leaders from among you who are as comfortable in the halls of power as they are on their own couch, who recognize that they are the ones who legitimately should control the halls of power. By having people canvass the vote each time, you will really have a ready and capable team when a vote canvass is contested and truly matters. 28.) Election Lawyer Ready — Have an experienced election lawyer ready to challenge results if needed. Have a backup to your lawyer as well. You don’t want a political operative lawyer to bail on you at the last minute and to derail your plans. Know where the money to pay for the challenge will come from. 29.) Run Again Starting Immediately — If you don’t win, immediately announce your candidacy in the next election. Run until you win. Those who supported you deserve the certainty that you will run until you win. In doing so you will truly build name recognition, build your reputation as a leader in these issues, and build a movement. 30.) Close — Get sworn in. 31.) Propose — Get your important issues on the agenda. 32.) Keep Supporters Engaged — Get your supporters active each time one of your agenda items come up for a vote. 33.) Influence — Sway others on the board. 34.) Recruit — Get others who are likeminded to run for the other board seats. 35.) Execute — Change the school from the top down and from the bottom up. 36.) Stay Agile And Excel — Don’t rest on your laurels, don’t become part of the problem, leave if you grow jaded. Remain a person that everyone who voted you in considers an open, honest, and capable person who keeps their word. Conclusory Remarks Virtually anyone can win an election following this process. The most important from the list above are 1.) Knock on every door 2.) Identify supporters 3.) Get email and phone numbers 4.) Get them out to vote Then the most important civics lesson for being a force multiplier is this: Use your list to stay involved. The process is not rocket science. Any good and diligent person who wants to win a seat from school board to state senate can do it this wayand it sometimes even works for offices bigger than that. Local politics really matters. That has been shown resoundingly since the Ides of March 2020. Regardless of what happened in Washington, D.C. or on television, it was the sheriff, the district attorney, the school board, and the town council that had so much ability to stand up and make their community wonderful and free. Alternatively, they were also the ones who could choose to go along with a more sinister spirit of fear. Those who spread a spirit of fear through our communities after the Ides of March 2020, need to be replaced and never allowed to hold public office again. It’s time for them to go. Through elections and through direct individuals action, stop the face mask in your own lives and the lives of everyone around you. Do it quickly, easily, and without conflict. Read Allan Stevo’s “Face Masks in One Lesson” to learn how. Read’s his LewRockwell.com writing to learn how. And sign up for his RealStevo.com newsletter, videos, and classes to learn how. The post How To Run for School Board and Win Every Time appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Inflation: Your Role as a Milk CowTuesday 25 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Traditionally, inflation has been defined as “an increase in the amount of currency in circulation.” Such an increase almost always causes an increase in the cost of goods and services, since, more plentiful currency units lowers their rarity, as compared to the supply of goods and services, which remains roughly the same. Therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising if a 20% increase in the amount of currency units translates into a 20% increase in the price of goods and services. Unfortunately, in recent decades, even dictionaries have been offering a revised definition of inflation, as “an increase in the price of goods and services.” This is a pity, as it makes an already confusing subject even more difficult to understand. This is especially true for the average guy who has a minimal understanding of economics, but does realise that, even if his wages increase (which he regards as a good thing), he never seems to get ahead. In the end, he always seems to be worse off. Let’s say that you’re paid $4000 per month. You budget for housing, food, clothing, transportation, etc. Let’s say that that adds up to $3800 per month, and you’re hoping to put $200 per month into savings. Often that doesn’t happen, as unplanned expenses “pop up,” and must be paid for. So, in the end, you save little or nothing. In the meantime, you’re daydreaming about buying a new car, but it can’t be bought, because you don’t have any money to allocate to it. Then, your boss says that the recent prosperity has resulted in a big new contract for the company that allows him to give you a raise of $200 a month. This is your big chance. You go to the car dealership, buy the car, and arrange for time payments of $200 per month to pay for it. However, what’s rarely understood is that the theoretical “prosperity” is the result of governmentally induced inflation. What appears to be prosperity is merely a rise in costs and, along with it, a rise in your wages. You appear to be “getting ahead,” but here’s what really happens… The inflation that resulted in your pay rise also raises the prices on most or all other goods and services. So, instead of spending $3800 on expenses every month, your costs have risen to, say, $4200. So, only months after your pay rise, you become aware that, not only are all your expenses higher (which you didn’t figure on when you bought the car), you now have the extra monthly obligation of the $200 car payment. A year later, you look back and say to yourself, “Just when I was finally getting ahead, just when I was realizing my dream to have a new car, all those greedy businesspeople raised their prices because they just want to be rich, and I ended up a loser.” Not so. The businesspeople raised their prices for the same reason everyone does during inflation—because their costs are also higher and they must either raise prices or go out of business. So, in effect… no one got ahead. But, worse, you got behind. Because, now, in addition to your monthly expenses, you have debt obligations, and buying on time is always more costly than paying as you go. As time goes on, you run into emergencies of one type or another that dip into your meagre savings. You must renegotiate your debt with the bank in order to keep your car and, of course, the bank demands a greater percentage than before, assuring that your economic situation will only get worse. Ergo, inflation has not been a boon, but a curse. And that, in fact, is exactly the idea. Banks figured out ages ago that, although people will only tolerate so much taxation, they’ll not only tolerate, but welcome the hidden tax of inflation. The illusion that they’re “getting ahead” gives them the false confidence to take on debt, which will, over time, cripple them. The purpose of bank-created inflation is to extract wealth from the populace. By regularly increasing the amount of currency in circulation, banks create an environment in which the concept of debt appears to be beneficial. As a result, virtually everyone in today’s society not only has debt; he actually believes that he couldn’t improve his life except through debt. So, that’s essentially how inflation works. However, there’s a further knock-on effect from inflation that comes with retirement. When retirement arrives, almost no one who is caught up in the system described above has found a way to get out of debt. Inflation always gobbles up whatever advances he feels he’s made, because inflation itself created those imagined advances. Just before retirement, most people have their most expensive houses, cars, etc., and appear to have prospered, but they also have the greatest level of debt that they’ve ever carried. If they’ve been careful, they may have savings and/or investments that they hope will carry them through their twilight years. But they quickly find that inflation continues after they retire. Savings in banks no longer earn money. In fact, they do the opposite. Inflation takes more than the paltry interest savings received, resulting in an annual loss on any money held in banks. But, inflation continues to march on, assuring that the retiree’s costs will continue to rise, even as his savings decline. In essence, the inflation concept was invented by banks as an invisible tax—a means by which they could extract wealth from the populace. And, here we get back to the original complaint of the individual. As he tries to balance his chequebook or to plan for his retirement, he scratches his head and wonders, “How is it that no matter how much more money I make, I never seem to get ahead?” In effect, the individual is used by the banking system as a milk cow. For his entire working life, inflation is carefully adjusted to extract as much monetary value from his labours as possible, whilst still leaving him capable of continued production. Pretty grim… So, is that it, or is there a way out? Well, to begin, it would be very helpful to exit any country where the dual monetary drains of taxation and inflation are prominent. (By leaving, you may take an initial step down, but, over the long haul, you’re more likely to prosper.) An additional move would be to refuse to borrow money for any situation. Yes, it will mean that, as your friends show off their new cars, you’ll be driving an older model. They’ll also live in nicer houses than you and they’ll “own” their own house before you do. But, at some point, since you’re free from debt, you’ll pass them by and eventually retire well. By understanding inflation, and acting on that understanding, the odds of living your life as a milk cow can be greatly diminished. Reprinted with permission from International Man. The post Inflation: Your Role as a Milk Cow appeared first on LewRockwell. |
On Being Sane in Insane TimesTuesday 25 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
In 1973, Dr. D. L. Rosenhan, a professor of psychology and law at Stanford University, published a ground-breaking psychiatric study in the January 19 issue of Science magazine. The article exposed a serious short-coming in the psychiatric hospital system at the time, and therefore it became very controversial. Dr. Rosenhan designed the study to try to answer the question in the title of this article: “If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?” The now famous (some of the offended or embarrassed psychiatrists preferred to call it “infamous”) experiment that was carried out involved 12 different psychiatric hospitals and 8 different people, mostly professionals (including the author). Each of the eight were totally and certifiably sane “pseudo-patients”. Each one secretly gained admission to one or two different mental hospitals by falsely complaining to a psychiatrist that they had been hearing voices over the past few weeks. The “voices” in each case were saying only the three words “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” No visual hallucinations or other psychological abnormalities were relayed to the examining psychiatrist. Except for the fake “chief complaint”, the intake histories relayed by the patients were entirely truthful. Each individual was immediately admitted to the target psychiatric hospital, much to the surprise of most of the pseudo-patients. All but one of the admitted “patients” were given a diagnosis of “schizophrenia”. The other one was labeled “manic-depressive”. When they were discharged, the eleven had discharge diagnoses of “schizophrenia, in remission,” despite the fact that absolutely no psychotic or manic behaviors had been observed during their stays. After admission, the pseudo-patients all acted totally sane, each emphasizing to the hospital staff member that the voices had disappeared. When given the chance, each also asked about when they could be discharged. Those questions were largely ignored by staff. Despite the fact that each one acted totally normally throughout, hospital stays averaged 19 days, ranging from 7 to 52 days. The patients engaged in all the normal ward activities except for the fact that they never swallowed the variety of antipsychotic pills that had been prescribed for them. The only obvious difference between the behaviors of the experimental group and the regular patients was that each of them took notes during their hospitalizations. On several occasions, a staff member wrote in the patient’s chart: “the patient engages in note-taking behavior”. Otherwise none of the staff seemed interested in any of the patient’s behaviors. Although the pseudo-patients planned to secretly smuggle out their daily notes, they eventually stopped trying to hide the fact that they were recording their impressions of their stays, and they soon stopped the smuggling operations – with no consequences. The average daily contact with the therapeutic staff averaged only 6.8 minutes per day (mean 3.9 – 25.1 minutes) and that included the admission interviews, ward meetings, group and individual psychotherapy contacts, case conferences and discharge meetings. The group observed that attendants only came outside the locked “cage” 11.5 times per 8-hour shift but usually the staff only interacted minimally with the patients when doing so. The staff psychiatrists rarely interacted meaningfully with any patient. If any interaction occurred, it was usually rather patronizing. None of the professional therapeutic staff ever suspected that any of the 12 were pseudo- patients, whereas many of the actual patients knew for certain that they were faking. These patients (who were probably actually swallowing their medications) often said things like: “You’re not crazy. You’re a journalist or a professor. You’re checking up on the hospital.” The therapeutic staff never tumbled to the subterfuge. The only people who recognized normality were those who themselves had been labeled “insane”. Upon the publication of the Rosenhan paper, there arose an enormous uproar from the psychiatric community about the “ethics” of performing such a study. Rosenhan was attacked viciously by those who had been fooled or had themselves jumped to erroneous psychiatric diagnoses in the past. Because of the controversy, Rosenhan announced that a follow-up study would be done in a certain research and teaching hospital whose staff had heard about the first stu but doubted that such errors could occur in their own hospital. The staff was led to believe that sometime in the next 3 months there would be one or more pseudo-patients attempting to be admitted. However, by design, no pseudo-patients actually attempted admission. Among the total of 193 patients that were admitted for psychiatric treatment during the 3-month period, 41 genuine patients (20 % of the total) were suspected, with high confidence, of being pseudo-patients by at least one member of the staff. 23 of the 41 were suspected of being fake patients by a psychiatrist, and 19 were suspected by both a psychiatrist and one other staff member. On the bright side, their heightened vigilance saved 41 normal people from receiving a diagnosis of permanent mental illness and the prescribing of brain-altering drugs. Among the conclusions the reader can draw from these two experiments are these important and quite logical ones: 1] The sane are not “sane” all of the time, nor are those labeled “insane” actually insane all of the time Therefore, definitions of sanity or insanity may often be erroneous. 2] Sanity and insanity have cultural variations What is viewed as normal in one culture may be seen as quite aberrant in another. As just one example, there was a famous experiment contrasting American and British psychiatrists and each country’s diagnostic differences. The two groups studied identical video-taped interviews of a group of psychiatric patients. In that series of cases, American psychiatrists diagnosed “schizophrenia” far more often than did British psychiatrists. 3] Bizarre behaviors in people constitute only a small fraction of total behavior For example, violent, even homicidal people are nonviolent most of the time. 4] Psychiatric diagnoses, even those made in error, carry with them personal, legal and social stigmas that can be impossible to shake and which often last a lifetime It is a fact that hallucinations can occur in up to 10% of normal people. Vivid flashbacks in patients with PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) have, in the past, been commonly and tragically misdiagnosed as “hallucinations”. Therefore, those unfortunate patients can be permanently labeled (and then permanently over-drugged) as a chronic “schizophrenic of undetermined etiology rather than as an otherwise normal patient with a history of psychological trauma that was having temporary “flashbacks”. (Note that combat-traumatized war veterans prior to the 1990s were often mis-diagnosed – and therefore mis-treated – as schizophrenics.). Hallucinations can normally occur during certain phases of sleep, half-waking states, sleep deprivation, or from drug effects – either because of neurotoxic or psychotoxic effects from brain-altering, psycho-stimulating prescription (or illicit) drugs or from withdrawal from sedating antipsychotic drugs. It is not uncommon for Novartis’s Ritalin; cocaine; Shire’s Adderall; speed; or Eli Lilly’s Prozac; Pfizer’s Zoloft; Sandoz/Novartis’s Paxil; Forest Lab’sLexapro; Solvay/Abbott’s Luvox; to cause (drug-induced) psychotic episodes. It is also well known that drug-induced mania (and thus a false diagnosis of bipolar disorder “of unknown etiology”) can occur from even standard doses of most psycho-stimulating antidepressant drugs, especially the SSRIs (“selective” serotonin reuptake inhibitors). But mania can also occur during withdrawal from “minor” tranquilizer drugs (such as the Valium-type benzodiazepines) or “major” tranquilizers (such as antipsychotics like Pfizer’sGeodon; Smith Kline & French’s (GSK) Thorazine; Janssen’s (& Johnson) Haldol; Janssen/J & J) Risperdal;Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa; Bristol-Myers Squibb’s (GSK) Abilify; AstraZeneca’s Seroquel; Sandoz’s (Novartis) Clozaril; etc.) One well-done study showed that a significant percentage of patients admitted from one psychiatric hospital emergency room was ultimately discharged with a diagnosis SSRI-induced mania and not “bipolar disorder of unknown etiology”. The cause of those ER visits was not a mental disorder but rather a drug-induced neurological disorder that was self-limited and best treated by stopping or tapering-down the offending drug. Rosenhan rightly points out, reminding readers of Jack Nicholson’s and the Chief’s characters in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”:
To those concerns, I would add, how many patients have suffered the brain-disabling and neurotoxic and neurodegenerative consequences of dangerous, dependency-inducing, and very powerful psychiatric drugs that, if used long enough can easily produce dementia as well as deadly withdrawal effects when the dosages are cut down or stopped? Rosenhan’s study has far more implications for our society today than in 1973. Back then there was only small numbers of relatively untested psychiatric drugs to be concerned about compared to the hundreds of even more toxic drugs that are being given to more and more people. Both the old “obsolete” drugs and the “modern”, over-hyped drugs in the current psychiatrist’s armamentaria have been discovered to be brain-damaging and often addictive. However, today there are scores and scores of what the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries euphemistically call “second and third generation”, “novel” or “atypical” psychostimulants, anti-depressants or anti-psychotics (see lists above) that were never tested for long-term safety or efficacy before they were granted marketing approval by the FDA. Many of them are commonly used in hugely expensive cocktail combinations which likewise have never been tested for long-term OR short-term safety in the animal labs, much less thoroughly tested in human long-term clinical trials. All of these psychiatric drugs enter the blood stream and then go everywhere the blood goes, including liver, kidneys, heart, brain, etc. Psych drugs are bio-accumulative substances that are considered hazardous materials by professional waste management crews at manufacturing sites. Such chemicals need to be handled with extreme care – unless, of course, they are prescribed by unaware physicians or nurse practitioners for lifetime use by poorly-informed, obedient patients who may not have adequate liver detoxification capabilities and who might also be taking other prescription drugs with unknown drug-drug interactions. The irony of that reality should give us all pause. *** Choice quotes from Rosenhan’s original article entitled “On Being Sane in Insane Places”. (Science magazine 1973, Vol. 179 p. 250 – 258) “It is commonplace, for example, to read about murder trials wherein eminent psychiatrists for the defense are contradicted by equally eminent psychiatrists for the prosecution on the matter of the defendant’s sanity.” “Psychological suffering exists…but do the salient characteristics that lead to diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the environments and contexts in which observers find them?… Psychiatric diagnosis betrays little about the patient but much about the environment in which an observer finds him.” “The view has grown that psychological categorization of mental illness is useless at best and downright harmful, misleading, and pejorative at worst.” “Despite their public ‘show’ of sanity, the pseudo-patients were never detected, and each was discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia ‘in remission.'” “Once labeled schizophrenic, the pseudo-patients (in the study group) were stuck with that label. If the pseudo-patient was to be discharged, he must naturally be ‘in remission’; but he was not sane, nor, in the institution’s view, had he ever been sane.” “It was quite common for fellow patients to ‘detect’ the pseudo-patient’s sanity. The fact that fellow patients could recognize normality when staff did not raises important questions.” “Physicians are more inclined to call a healthy person sick (a false positive) than a sick person healthy (a false negative). The reasons for this are not hard to find: it is clearly more dangerous to misdiagnose illness than health. Better to err on the side of caution, to suspect illness even among the healthy.” “‘Patient engaged in writing behavior’ was the daily nursing comment on one of the pseudo-patients who was never questioned about his writing. Given that the patient is in the hospital, he must be psychologically disturbed. And given that he is disturbed, continuous writing must be a behavioral manifestation of that disturbance, perhaps a subset of the compulsive behaviors that are sometimes correlated with schizophrenia.” “One tacit characteristic of psychiatric diagnosis is that it locates the sources of aberration within the individual and only rarely within the complex of stimuli that surrounds him.” “Often enough, a patient would go ‘berserk’ because he had, wittingly or unwittingly, been mistreated by, say, an attendant.” “Never were the staff found to assume that they themselves or the structure of the hospital had anything to do with a patient’s behavior.” “A psychiatric label has a life and an influence of its own. Such labels, conferred by mental health professionals, are as influential on the patient as they are on his relatives and friends, and it should not surprise anyone that the diagnosis acts on all of them as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually, the patient himself accepts the diagnosis, with all of its surplus meanings and expectations and behaves accordingly.” “There is enormous overlap in the behaviors of the sane and the insane. The sane are not ‘sane’ all of the time. Similarly, the insane are not always insane. It makes no sense to label (anyone as)permanently depressed on the basis of an occasional depression…” “I may hallucinate because I am sleeping, or I may hallucinate because I have ingested a peculiar drug. These are termed sleep-induced hallucinations (or dreams) and drug-induced hallucinations, respectively. But when the stimuli to my hallucinations are unknown, that is called craziness, or schizophrenia.” “The average amount of time spent by attendants outside of the cage was 11.3 percent (range, 3 to 52 percent). It was the relatively rare attendant who spent time talking with patients…” “Those with the most power have the least to do with patients, and those with the least power are the most involved with them.” “Neither anecdotal nor ‘hard’ data can convey the overwhelming sense of powerlessness which invades the individual as he is continually exposed to the depersonalization of the psychiatric hospital.” “Heavy reliance upon psychotropic medication tacitly contributes to depersonalization by convincing staff that treatment is indeed being conducted and that further patient contact may not be necessary.” “The facts of the matter are that we have known for a long time that diagnoses are often not useful or reliable, but we have nevertheless continued to use them.” “Finally, how many patients might be ‘sane’ outside the psychiatric hospital but seem insane within it…” “It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals.” This article was originally published by Duluth Reader in September 2010, updated version on Global Research on January 11, 2021. The post On Being Sane in Insane Times appeared first on LewRockwell. |
America Dominant Again (in Arms Sales)Tuesday 25 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
When it comes to trade in the tools of death and destruction, no one tops the United States of America. In April of this year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) published its annual analysis of trends in global arms sales and the winner — as always — was the U.S. of A. Between 2016 and 2020, this country accounted for 37% of total international weapons deliveries, nearly twice the level of its closest rival, Russia, and more than six times that of Washington’s threat du jour, China. Sadly, this was no surprise to arms-trade analysts. The U.S. has held that top spot for 28 of the past 30 years, posting massive sales numbers regardless of which party held power in the White House or Congress. This is, of course, the definition of good news for weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, even if it’s bad news for so many of the rest of us, especially those who suffer from the use of those arms by militaries in places like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates. The recent bombing and leveling of Gaza by the U.S.-financed and supplied Israeli military is just the latest example of the devastating toll exacted by American weapons transfers in these years. While it is well known that the United States provides substantial aid to Israel, the degree to which the Israeli military relies on U.S. planes, bombs, and missiles is not fully appreciated. According to statistics compiled by the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor, the United States has provided Israel with $63 billion in security assistance over the past two decades, more than 90% of it through the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing, which provides funds to buy U.S. weaponry. But Washington’s support for the Israeli state goes back much further. Total U.S. military and economic aid to Israel exceeds $236 billion (in inflation-adjusted 2018 dollars) since its founding — nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars. King of the Arms Dealers Donald Trump, sometimes referred to by President Joe Biden as “the other guy,” warmly embraced the role of arms-dealer-in-chief and not just by sustaining massive U.S. arms aid for Israel, but throughout the Middle East and beyond. In a May 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia — his first foreign trip — Trump would tout a mammoth (if, as it turned out, highly exaggerated) $110-billion arms deal with that kingdom. On one level, the Saudi deal was a publicity stunt meant to show that President Trump could, in his own words, negotiate agreements that would benefit the U.S. economy. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a pal of Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), the architect of Saudi Arabia’s devastating intervention in Yemen, even put in a call to then-Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson. His desire: to get a better deal for the Saudi regime on a multibillion-dollar missile defense system that Lockheed was planning to sell it. The point of the call was to put together the biggest arms package imaginable in advance of his father-in-law’s trip to Riyadh. When Trump arrived in Saudi Arabia to immense local fanfare, he milked the deal for all it was worth. Calling the future Saudi sales “tremendous,” he assured the world that they would create “jobs, jobs, jobs” in the United States. That arms package, however, did far more than burnish Trump’s reputation as a deal maker and jobs creator. It represented an endorsement of the Saudi-led coalition’s brutal war in Yemen, which has now resulted in the deaths of nearly a quarter of a million people and put millions of others on the brink of famine. And don’t for a second think that Trump was alone in enabling that intervention. The kingdom had received a record $115 billion in arms offers — notifications to Congress that don’t always result in final sales — over the eight years of the Obama administration, including for combat aircraft, bombs, missiles, tanks, and attack helicopters, many of which have since been used in Yemen. After repeated Saudi air strikes on civilian targets, the Obama foreign-policy team finally decided to slow Washington’s support for that war effort, moving in December 2016 to stop a multibillion-dollar bomb sale. Upon taking office, however, Trump reversed course and pushed that deal forward, despite Saudi actions that Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA) said “look like war crimes to me.” Trump made it abundantly clear, in fact, that his reasons for arming Saudi Arabia were anything but strategic. In an infamous March 2018 White House meeting with Mohammed bin Salman, he even brandished a map of the United States to show which places were likely to benefit most from those Saudi arms deals, including election swing states Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He doubled down on that economic argument after the October 2018 murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at that country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, even as calls to cut off sales to the regime mounted in Congress. The president made it clear then that jobs and profits, not human rights, were paramount to him, stating:
And so it went. In the summer of 2019 Trump vetoed an effort by Congress to block an $8.1-billion arms package that included bombs and support for the Royal Saudi Air Force and he continued to back the kingdom even in his final weeks in office. In December 2020, he offered more than $500 million worth of bombs to that regime on the heels of a $23-billion package to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), its partner-in-crime in the Yemen war. Saudi Arabia and the UAE weren’t the only beneficiaries of Trump’s penchant for selling weapons. According to a report by the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, his administration made arms sales offers of more than $110 billion to customers all over the world in 2020, a 75% increase over the yearly averages reached during the Obama administration, as well as in the first three years of his tenure. Will Biden Be Different? Advocates of reining in U.S. weapons trafficking took note of Joe Biden’s campaign-trail pledge that, if elected, he would not “check our values at the door” in deciding whether to continue arming the Saudi regime. Hopes were further raised when, in his first foreign policy speech as president, he announced that his administration would end “support for offensive operations in Yemen” along with “relevant arms sales.” That statement, of course, left a potentially giant loophole on the question of which weapons would be considered in support of “offensive operations,” but it did at least appear to mark a sharp departure from the Trump era. In the wake of Biden’s statement, arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE were indeed put on hold, pending a review of their potential consequences. Three months into Biden’s term, however, the president’s early pledge to rein in damaging arms deals are already eroding. The first blow was the news that the administration would indeed move forward with a $23-billion arms package to the UAE, including F-35 combat aircraft, armed drones, and a staggering $10 billion worth of bombs and missiles. The decision was ill-advised on several fronts, most notably because of that country’s role in Yemen’s brutal civil war. There, despite scaling back its troops on the ground, it continues to arm, train, and finance 90,000 militia members, including extremist groups with links to the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The UAE has also backed armed opposition forces in Libya in violation of a United Nations embargo, launched drone strikes there that killed scores of civilians, and cracked down on dissidents at home and abroad. It regularly makes arbitrary arrests and uses torture. If arming the UAE isn’t a case of “checking our values at the door,” it’s not clear what is. To its credit, the Biden administration committed to suspending two Trump bomb deals with Saudi Arabia. Otherwise, it’s not clear what (if any) other pending Saudi sales will be deemed “offensive” and blocked. Certainly, the new administration has allowed U.S. government personnel and contractors to help maintain the effectiveness of the Saudi Air Force and so has continued to enable ongoing air strikes in Yemen that are notorious for killing civilians. The Biden team has also failed to forcefully pressure the Saudis to end their blockade of that country, which United Nations agencies have determined could put 400,000 Yemeni children at risk of death by starvation in the next year. In addition, the Biden administration has cleared a sale of anti-ship missiles to the Egyptian regime of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the most repressive government in that nation’s history, helmed by the man Donald Trump referred to as “my favorite dictator.” The missiles themselves are in no way useful for either internal repression or that country’s scorched-earth anti-terror campaign against rebels in its part of the Sinai peninsula — where civilians have been tortured and killed, and tens of thousands displaced from their homes — but the sale does represent a tacit endorsement of the regime’s repressive activities. Guns, Anyone? While Biden’s early actions have undermined promises to take a different approach to arms sales, the story isn’t over. Key members of Congress are planning to closely monitor the UAE sale and perhaps intervene to prevent the delivery of the weapons. Questions have been raised about what arms should go to Saudi Arabia and reforms that would strengthen Congress’s role in blocking objectionable arms transfers are being pressed by at least some members of the House and the Senate. One area where President Biden could readily begin to fulfill his campaign pledge to reduce the harm to civilians from U.S. arms sales would be firearms exports. The Trump administration significantly loosened restrictions and regulations on the export of a wide range of guns, including semi-automatic firearms and sniper rifles. As a result, such exports surged in 2020, with record sales of more than 175,000 military rifles and shotguns. In a distinctly deregulatory mood, Trump’s team moved sales of deadly firearms from the jurisdiction of the State Department, which had a mandate to vet any such deals for possible human-rights abuses, to the Commerce Department, whose main mission was simply to promote the export of just about anything. Trump’s “reforms” also eliminated the need to pre-notify Congress on any major firearms sales, making it far harder to stop deals with repressive regimes. As he pledged to do during his presidential campaign, President Biden could reverse Trump’s approach without even seeking Congressional approval. The time to do so is now, given the damage such gun exports cause in places like the Philippines and Mexico, where U.S.-supplied firearms have been used to kill thousands of civilians, while repressing democratic movements and human-rights defenders. Who Benefits? Beyond the slightest doubt, a major — or perhaps even the major — obstacle to reforming arms sales policies and practices is the weapons industry itself. That includes major contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, and General Dynamics that produce fighter planes, bombs, armored vehicles, and other major weapons systems, as well as firearms makers like Sig Sauer. Raytheon stands out in this crowd because of its determined efforts to push through bomb sales to Saudi Arabia and the deep involvement of its former (or future) employees with the U.S. government. A former Raytheon lobbyist, Charles Faulkner, worked in the Trump State Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and was involved in deciding that Saudi Arabia was not — it was! — intentionally bombing civilians in Yemen. He then supported declaring a bogus “emergency” to ram through the sale of bombs and of aircraft support to Saudi Arabia. Raytheon has indeed insinuated itself in the halls of government in a fashion that should be deeply troubling even by the minimalist standards of the twenty-first-century military-industrial complex. Former Trump defense secretary Mark Esper was Raytheon’s chief in-house lobbyist before joining the administration, while current Biden defense secretary Lloyd Austin served on Raytheon’s board of directors. While Austin has pledged to recuse himself from decisions involving the company, it’s a pledge that will prove difficult to verify. Arms sales are Big Business — the caps are a must! — for the top weapons makers. Lockheed Martin gets roughly one-quarter of its sales from foreign governments and Raytheon five percent of its revenue from Saudi sales. American jobs allegedly tied to weapons exports are always the selling point for such dealings, but in reality, they’ve been greatly exaggerated. At most, arms sales account for just more than one-tenth of one percent of U.S. employment. Many such sales, in fact, involve outsourcing production, in whole or in part, to recipient nations, reducing the jobs impact here significantly. Though it’s seldom noted, virtually any other form of spending creates more jobs than weapons production. In addition, exporting green-technology products would create far larger global markets for U.S. goods, should the government ever decide to support them in anything like the way it supports the arms industry. Given what’s at stake for them economically, Raytheon and its cohorts spend vast sums attempting to influence both parties in Congress and any administration. In the past two decades, defense companies, led by the major arms exporting firms, spent $285 million in campaign contributions alone and $2.5 billion on lobbying, according to statistics gathered by the Center for Responsive Politics. Any changes in arms export policy will mean forcefully taking on the arms lobby and generating enough citizen pressure to overcome its considerable influence in Washington. Given the political will to do so, there are many steps the Biden administration and Congress could take to rein in runaway arms exports, especially since such deals are uniquely unpopular with the public. A September 2019 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, for example, found that 70% of Americans think arms sales make the country less safe. The question is: Can such public sentiment be mobilized in favor of actions to stop at least the most egregious cases of U.S. weapons trafficking, even as the global arms trade rolls on? Selling death should be no joy for any country, so halting it is a goal well worth fighting for. Still, it remains to be seen whether the Biden administration will ever limit weapons sales or if it will simply continue to promote this country as the world’s top arms exporter of all time. Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com. The post America Dominant Again (in Arms Sales) appeared first on LewRockwell. |
The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski DoctrineTuesday 25 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
For two decades, the Pentagon has been applying the “Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine” to the “wider Middle East”. Several times, it thought of extending it to the “Caribbean Basin”, but refrained from doing so, concentrating its power on its first target. The Pentagon acts as an autonomous decision-making center that is effectively outside the power of the president. It is a civil-military administration that imposes its objectives on the rest of the military. In my book L’Effroyable imposture [1] [2], I wrote, in March, 2002, that the attacks of September 11 were aimed at making the United States accept : Things only became clearer in 2005, when Colonel Ralph Peters – at the time a Fox News commentator – published the famous map of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the map of the “reshaping” of the “broader Middle East” [3]. It came as a shock to all chancelleries: the Pentagon was planning to redraw the borders inherited from the Franco-British colonization (the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Agreements of 1916) without regard for any state, even an ally. From then on, each state in the region did everything in its power to prevent the storm from falling on its people. Instead of uniting with neighboring countries in the face of the common enemy, each tried to deflect the Pentagon’s hand to its neighbors. The most emblematic case is that of Turkey, which changed its position several times, giving the confused impression of a mad dog.
However, the map revealed by Colonel Peters -who hated the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld- did not make it possible to understand the overall project. Already, at the time of the September 11 attacks, he had published an article in the US Army magazine, Parameters [4]. He alluded to the map that he did not publish until four years later, and suggested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were preparing to carry it out by means of atrocious crimes that they would have to subcontract in order not to dirty their hands. One might think that he was referring to private armies, but history showed that they could not engage in crimes against humanity either. The final word on the project was in the “Office of Force Transformation,” created by Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in the days following the 9/11 attacks. It was occupied by Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. This famous strategist had been the designer of the computerization of the armed forces [5]. One could believe that this Office was a way to finish his work. But no one disputed this reorganization anymore. No, he was there to transform the mission of the U.S. armed forces, as the few recordings of his lectures in military academies attest. Arthur Cebrowski spent three years lecturing to all senior U.S. officers, thus to all current general officers.
What he was teaching was quite simple. The world economy was becoming globalized. To remain the world’s leading power, the United States had to adapt to financial capitalism. The best way to do this was to ensure that developed countries could exploit the natural resources of poor countries without political obstacles. From this, it divided the world into two: on the one hand, the globalized economies (including Russia and China) destined to be stable markets and, on the other, all the others that were to be deprived of state structures and left to chaos so that transnationals could exploit their wealth without resistance. To achieve this, the non-globalized peoples were to be divided along ethnic lines and held ideologically. The first region to be affected was to be the Arab-Muslim area from Morocco to Pakistan, with the exception of Israel and two neighboring micro-states that were to prevent the fire from spreading, Jordan and Lebanon. This is what the State Department called the “broader Middle East. This area was not defined by oil reserves, but by elements of the common culture of its inhabitants. The war that Admiral Cebrowski imagined was to cover the entire region. It was not to take into account the divisions of the Cold War. The United States no longer had any friends or enemies there. The enemy was not defined by its ideology (the communists) or its religion (the “clash of civilizations”), but only by its non-integration into the globalized economy of financial capitalism. Nothing could protect those who had the misfortune not to be followers, to be independent. This war was not intended to allow the US alone to exploit natural resources, as previous wars had done, but for all globalized states to do so. Moreover, the United States was no longer really interested in capturing raw materials, but rather in dividing up work on a global scale and making others work for them. All this implied tactical changes in the way wars were waged, since it was no longer a question of obtaining victory, but of waging a “war without end”, as President George W. Bush put it. Indeed, all the wars started since 9/11 are still going on on five different fronts: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen. It doesn’t matter if allied governments interpret these wars in accordance with the US communication: they are not civil wars, but stages of a plan preestablished by the Pentagon. The “Cebrowski Doctrine” shook up the US military. His assistant, Thomas Barnett, wrote an article for Esquire Magazine [6], then published a book to present it in more detail to the general public: The Pentagon’s New Map [7]. The fact that in his book, published after Admiral Cebrowski’s death, Barnett claims authorship of his doctrine should not be misleading. It is just a way for the Pentagon not to assume it. The same phenomenon had taken place, for example, with the “clash of civilizations”. It was originally the “Lewis Doctrine”, a communication argument devised within the National Security Council to sell new wars to public opinion. It was presented to the general public by Bernard Lewis’s assistant, Samuel Huntington, who presented it as an academic description of an inescapable reality. The implementation of the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski Doctrine has had many ups and downs. Some came from the Pentagon itself, others from the people who were being crushed. Thus, the resignation of the commander of Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, was organized because he had negotiated a reasoned peace with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran on his own initiative. It was provoked by… Barnett himself, who published an article accusing Fallon of abusing President Bush. Or again, the failure to disrupt Syria was due to the resistance of its people and the entry of the Russian army. The Pentagon has come to burn down crops and organize a blockade of the country to starve it; revengeful actions that attest to its inability to destroy state structures. During his election campaign, Donald Trump campaigned against the endless war and for the return of the GI’s to their homes. He managed not to start new fronts and to bring some men home, but failed to tame the Pentagon. The Pentagon developed its Special Forces without a “signature” and managed to destroy the Lebanese state without the use of soldiers in a visible way. It is this strategy that it is implementing in Israel itself, organizing anti-Arab and anti-Jewish pogroms as a result of the confrontation between Hamas and Israel. The Pentagon has repeatedly tried to extend the “Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine” to the Caribbean Basin. It planned an overthrow, not of the Nicolás Maduro regime, but of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. It finally postponed this. It must be noted that the Pentagon has become an autonomous power. It has a gigantic budget of 740 billion dollars, which is about twice the annual budget of the entire French state. In practice, its power extends far beyond that, since it controls all the member states of the Atlantic Alliance. It is supposed to be accountable to the President of the United States, but the experiences of Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump show the absolute opposite. The former failed to impose his policy on General John Allen in the face of Daesh, while the latter was led astray by Central Command. There is no reason to believe that it will be any different with President Joe Biden. The recent open letter of former US general officers [8] shows that nobody knows who is in charge of the US military anymore. No matter how much their political analysis is worthy of the Cold War, this does not invalidate their observation: the Federal Administration and the general officers are no longer on the same wavelength. William Arkin’s work, published by the Washington Post, has shown that the federal government organized a nebulous group of agencies under the supervision of the Department of Homeland Security after the September 11 attacks [9]. In the greatest secrecy, they intercept and archive the communications of all people living in the United States. Arkin has just revealed in Newsweek that, for its part, the Department of Defense has created secret Special Forces, separate from those in uniform [10]. They are now in charge of the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine, regardless of who is in the White House and what their foreign policy is. When the Pentagon attacked Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001, it used its conventional armies – it had no other – and those of its British ally. However, during the “endless war” in Iraq, it built up Iraqi jihadist forces, both Sunni and Shiite, to plunge the country into civil war [11]. One of them, derived from al-Qaeda, was used in Libya in 2011, another in Iraq in 2014 under the name of Daesh. Gradually these groups have replaced the US armies to do the dirty work described by Colonel Ralph Peters in 2001. Today, no one has seen US soldiers in uniform in Yemen, Lebanon and Israel. The Pentagon itself has advertised their withdrawal. But there are 60,000 clandestine, i.e. non-uniformed, US Special Forces creating chaos, via civil war, in these countries. — [1] September, 11 2001 : The big lie, Thierry Meyssan, Carnot (2002). [2] Contrary to popular belief, this book does not deal with the attacks of September 11. Only the first part (“Bloody staging”) demonstrates the material impossibility of the dominant version. The other two parts deal with the politics of mass surveillance (“Death of Democracy in America”) and the imperial project to come (“The Empire Attacks”). [3] “Blood borders. How a better Middle East would look“, Ralph Peters, Armed Forces Journal, June 1, 2006. [4] “Stability. America’s ennemy”, Ralph Peters, Parameters, #31-4, Winter 2001. [5] Transforming Military Force. The Legacy of Arthur Cebrowski and Network Centric Warfare, James R. Blaker, Praeger Security International (2007). [6] “Why the Pentagon Changes Its Maps. And why we’ll keep going to war“, Thomas Barnett, Esquire Magazine, March 2003. [7] The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century, Thomas P. M. Barnett, Paw Prints (2004). [8] “Open Letter from Retired Generals and Admirals“, Voltaire Network, 9 May 2021. [9] Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, William M. Arkin & Dana Priest, Back Bay Books (2012). [10] “Exclusive: Inside the Military’s Secret Undercover Army“, William M. Arkin, Newsweek, May 17, 2021. [11] Before Our Very Eyes, Fake Wars and Big Lies: From 9/11 to Donald Trump, Chapter : “The fusion of the two “Gladio” networks and preparation of Daesh” 104#, Thierry Meyssan, Progressive Press (2018) The post The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski Doctrine appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Welcome to Joe Biden’s Police StateTuesday 25 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
The Biden administration is using the Jan. 6 incursion into the Capitol building as a pretext for a domestic spying campaign that will supposedly target “violent extremists” but is more accurately described as the beginnings of a Biden police state. Last week, we learned that the Defense Department plans to monitor service members’ social media posts for “concerning behaviors.” According to The Intercept, which broke this story, the plan is to enlist a private firm to do the spying, so as to avoid nasty entanglements with the First Amendment. The Intercept reports that:
This isn’t the only such incident. Earlier this month, CNN reported that the Biden administration “is considering using outside firms to track extremist chatter by Americans online, an effort that would expand the government’s ability to gather intelligence but could draw criticism over surveillance of US citizens.” And last month, Yahoo News broke the story that the U.S. Postal Service has been covertly monitoring Americans’ social media posts. “The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as ‘inflammatory’ postings and then sharing that information across government agencies,” Yahoo said. That story notes that “such data collection has also sparked concerns about the government surveilling peaceful protesters or those engaged in protected First Amendment activities.” Ya think? The New York Post editorial page details various other Biden administration projects aimed at “extremists.”
This is all bad enough and should be denounced by anyone who cares about the First Amendment. The post Welcome to Joe Biden’s Police State appeared first on LewRockwell. |
The Six Stages in the Creation of the StateTuesday 25 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
[Excerpted from chapter 1 of The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically] In the genesis of the state, from the subjection of a peasant folk by a tribe of herdsmen or by sea nomads, six stages may be distinguished. In the following discussion it should not be assumed that the actual historical development must, in each particular case, climb the entire scale step by step. Although, even here, the argument does not depend upon bare theoretical construction, since every particular stage is found in numerous examples, both in the world’s history and in ethnology, and there are states which have apparently progressed through them all. But there are many more that have skipped one or more of these stages. Stage 1: Looting The first stage comprises robbery and killing in border fights, endless combats broken neither by peace nor by armistice. It is marked by killing of men, carrying away of children and women, looting of herds, and burning of dwellings. Even if the offenders are defeated at first, they return in stronger and stronger bodies, impelled by the duty of blood feud. Sometimes the peasant group may assemble, may organize its militia, and perhaps temporarily defeat the nimble enemy; but mobilization is too slow and supplies to be brought into the desert too costly for the peasants. The peasants’ militia does not, as does the enemy, carry its stock of food — its herds — with it into the field. In Southwest Africa the Germans recently experienced the difficulties that a well-disciplined and superior force, equipped with a supply train, with a railway reaching back to its base of supply, and with millions of the German Empire behind it, may have with a handful of herdsmen warriors, who were able to give the Germans a decided setback. In the case of primitive levies, this difficulty is increased by the narrow spirit of the peasant, who considers only his own neighborhood, and by the fact that while the war is going on the lands are uncultivated. Therefore, in such cases, in the long run, the small but compact and easily mobilized body constantly defeats the greater disjointed mass, as the panther triumphs over the buffalo. This is the first stage in the formation of states. The state may remain stationary at this point for centuries, for a thousand years. The following is a thoroughly characteristic example:
The entire history of the old world is replete with well-known instances of mass expeditions, which must be assigned to the first stage of state development, inasmuch as they were intent, not upon conquest, but directly on looting. Western Europe suffered through these expeditions at the hands of the Celts, Germans, Huns, Avars, Arabs, Magyars, Tartars, Mongolians and Turks by land; while the Vikings and the Saracens harassed it on the waterways. These hordes inundated entire continents far beyond the limits of their accustomed looting ground. They disappeared, returned, were absorbed, and left behind them only wasted lands. In many cases, however, they advanced in some part of the inundated district directly to the sixth and last stage of state formation, in cases namely, where they established a permanent dominion over the peasant population. Ratzel describes these mass migrations excellently in the following:
What has been said here of Hamites, Semites, and Mongolians may be said also, at least in part, of the Aryan tribes of herdsmen. It applies also to the true negroes, at least to those who live entirely from their herds:
All this has taken place before our eyes. Some of it is still going on. During many thousands of years it has “jarred all Eastern Africa from the Zambesi to the Mediterranean.” The incursion of the Hyksos, whereby for over 500 years Egypt was subject to the shepherd tribes of the eastern and northern deserts — “kinsmen of the peoples who up to the present day herd their stock between the Nile and the Red Sea” — is the first authenticated foundation of a state. These states were followed by many others both in the country of the Nile itself, and farther southward, as far as the Empire of Muata Jamvo on the southern rim of the central Congo district, which Portuguese traders in Angola reported as early as the end of the 16th century, and down to the Empire of Uganda, which only in our own day has finally succumbed to the superior military organization of Europe. “Desert land and civilization never lie peaceably alongside one another; but their battles are alike and full of repetitions.” “Alike and full of repetitions”! That may be said of universal history on its basic lines. The human ego in its fundamental aspect is much the same all the world over. It acts uniformly, in obedience to the same influences of its environment, with races of all colors, in all parts of the earth, in the tropics as in the temperate zones. One must step back far enough and choose a point of view so high that the variegated aspect of the details does not hide the great movements of the mass. In such a case, our eye misses the “mode” of fighting, wandering, laboring humanity, while its “substance,” ever similar, ever new, ever enduring through change, reveals itself under uniform laws. Stage 2: Truce Gradually, from this first stage, there develops the second, in which the peasant, through thousands of unsuccessful attempts at revolt, has accepted his fate and has ceased every resistance. About this time, it begins to dawn on the consciousness of the wild herdsman that a murdered peasant can no longer plow, and that a fruit tree hacked down will no longer bear. In his own interest, then, wherever it is possible, he lets the peasant live and the tree stand. The expedition of the herdsmen comes just as before, every member bristling with arms, but no longer intending nor expecting war and violent appropriation. The raiders burn and kill only so far as is necessary to enforce a wholesome respect, or to break an isolated resistance. But in general, principally in accordance with a developing customary right — the first germ of the development of all public law — the herdsman now appropriates only the surplus of the peasant. That is to say, he leaves the peasant his house, his gear, and his provisions up to the next crop. The herdsman in the first stage is like the bear, who for the purpose of robbing the beehive, destroys it. In the second stage he is like the beekeeper, who leaves the bees enough honey to carry them through the winter. Great is the progress between the first stage and the second. Long is the forward step, both economically and politically. In the beginning, as we have seen, the acquisition by the tribe of herdsmen was purely an occupying one. Regardless of consequences, they destroyed the source of future wealth for the enjoyment of the moment. Henceforth the acquisition becomes economical, because all economy is based on wise housekeeping, or in other words, on restraining the enjoyment of the moment in view of the needs of the future. The herdsman has learned to “capitalize.” It is a vast step forward in politics when an utterly strange human being, prey heretofore like the wild animals, obtains a value and is recognized as a source of wealth. Although this is the beginning of all slavery, subjugation, and exploitation, it is at the same time the genesis of a higher form of society, that reaches out beyond the family based upon blood relationship. We saw how, between the robbers and the robbed, the first threads of a jural relation were spun across the cleft which separated those who had heretofore been only “mortal enemies.” The peasant thus obtains a semblance of right to the bare necessaries of life; so that it comes to be regarded as wrong to kill an unresisting man or to strip him of everything. And better than this, gradually more delicate and softer threads are woven into a net very thin as yet, but which, nevertheless, brings about more human relations than the customary arrangement of the division of spoils. Since the herdsmen no longer meet the peasants in combat only, they are likely now to grant a respectful request, or to remedy a well-grounded grievance. “The categorical imperative” of equity, “Do to others as you would have them do unto you,” had heretofore ruled the herdsmen only in their dealings with their own tribesmen and kind. Now for the first time it begins to speak, shyly whispering in behalf of those who are alien to blood relationship. In this, we find the germ of that magnificent process of external amalgamation that, out of small hordes, has formed nations and unions of nations — and that, in the future, is to give life to the concept of “humanity.” We find also the germ of the internal unification of tribes once separated, from which, in place of the hatred of “barbarians,” will come the all-comprising love of humanity, of Christianity and Buddhism. The moment when first the conqueror spared his victim in order permanently to exploit him in productive work, was of incomparable historical importance. It gave birth to nation and state, to right and the higher economics, with all the developments and ramifications that have grown and that will hereafter grow out of them. The root of everything human reaches down into the dark soil of the animal love and art, no less than state, justice, and economics. Still another tendency knots yet more closely these psychic relations. To return to the comparison of the herdsman and the bear, there are in the desert, beside the bear who guards the bees, other bears who also lust after honey. But our tribe of herdsmen blocks their way, and protects its beehives by force of arms. The peasants become accustomed, when danger threatens, to call on the herdsmen, whom they no longer regard as robbers and murderers, but as protectors and saviors. Imagine the joy of the peasants when the returning band of avengers brings back to the village the looted women and children, with the enemies’ heads or scalps. These ties are no longer threads, but strong and knotted bands. Here is one of the principal forces of that “integration,” whereby in the further development, those originally not of the same blood, and often enough of different groups speaking different languages, will in the end be welded together into one people, with one speech, one custom, and one feeling of nationality. This unity grows by degrees from common suffering and need, common victory and defeat, common rejoicing and common sorrow. A new and vast domain is open when master and slave serve the same interests; then arises a stream of sympathy, a sense of common service. Both sides apprehend, and gradually recognize, each other’s common humanity. Gradually the points of similarity are sensed, in place of the differences in build and apparel, of language and religion, which had heretofore brought about only antipathy and hatred. Gradually they learn to understand one another, first through a common speech, and then through a common mental habit. The net of the psychical interrelations becomes stronger. In this second stage of the formation of states, the ground work, in its essentials, has been mapped out. No further step can be compared in importance to the transition whereby the bear becomes a beekeeper. For this reason, short references must suffice. Stage 3: Tribute The third stage arrives when the “surplus” obtained by the peasantry is brought by them regularly to the tents of the herdsmen as “tribute,” a regulation that affords to both parties self-evident and considerable advantages. By this means, the peasantry is relieved entirely from the little irregularities connected with the former method of taxation, such as a few men knocked on the head, women violated, or farmhouses burned down. The herdsmen on the other hand, need no longer apply to this “business” any “expense” and labor, to use a mercantile expression, and they devote the time and energy thus set free toward an “extension of the works,” in other words, to subjugating other peasants. This form of tribute is found in many well-known instances in history: Huns, Magyars, Tartars, Turks, have derived their largest income from their European tributes. Sometimes the character of the tribute paid by the subjects to their master is more or less blurred, and the act assumes the guise of payment for protection, or indeed, of a subvention. The tale is well known whereby Attila was pictured by the weakling emperor at Constantinople as a vassal prince; while the tribute he paid to the Hun appeared as a fee. Stage 4: Occupation The fourth stage, once more, is of very great importance, since it adds the decisive factor in the development of the state, as we are accustomed to see it, namely, the union on one strip of land of both ethnic groups. (It is well known that no jural definition of a state can be arrived at without the concept of state territory.) From now on, the relation of the two groups, which was originally international, gradually becomes more and more intranational. This territorial union may be caused by foreign influences. It may be that stronger hordes have crowded the herdsmen forward, or that their increase in population has reached the limit set by the nutritive capacity of the steppes or prairies; it may be that a great cattle plague has forced the herdsmen to exchange the unlimited scope of the prairies for the narrows of some river valley. In general, however, internal causes alone suffice to bring it about that the herdsmen stay in the neighborhood of their peasants. The duty of protecting their tributaries against other “bears” forces them to keep a levy of young warriors in the neighborhood of their subjects; and this is at the same time an excellent measure of defense since it prevents the peasants from giving way to a desire to break their bonds, or to let some other herdsmen become their overlords. This latter occurrence is by no means rare, since, if tradition is correct, it is the means whereby the sons of Rurik came to Russia. As yet the local juxtaposition does not mean a state community in its narrowest sense; that is to say, a unital organization. In case the herdsmen are dealing with utterly unwarlike subjects, they carry on their nomad life, peaceably wandering up and down and herding their cattle among the perioike and helots. This is the case with the light-colored Wahuma, “the handsomest men of the world” (Kandt), in central Africa, or the Tuareg clan of the Hadanara of the Asgars, “who have taken up their seats among the Imrad and have become wandering freebooters. These Imrad are the serving class of the Asgars, who live on them, although the Imrad could put into the field ten times as many warriors; the situation is analogous to that of the Spartans in relation to their Helots.” The same may be said of the Teda among the neighboring Borku:
And the same applies to the entire group of herdsmen known as the Galla Masi and Wahuma.
In case the country is not adapted to herding cattle on a large scale — as was universally the case in Western Europe — or where a less unwarlike population might make attempts at insurrection, the crowd of lords becomes more or less permanently settled, taking either steep places or strategically important points for their camps, castles, or towns. From these centers, they control their “subjects,” mainly for the purpose of gathering their tribute, paying no attention to them in other respects. They let them administer their affairs, carry on their religious worship, settle their disputes, and adjust their methods of internal economy. Their autochthonous constitution, their local officials, are, in fact, not interfered with. If Frants Buhl reports correctly, that was the beginning of the rule of the Israelites in Canaan. Abyssinia, that great military force, though at the first glance it may appear to be a fully developed state, does not, however, seem to have advanced beyond the fourth stage. At least Ratzel states,
The best example of the fourth stage is found in the situation in ancient Mexico before the Spanish conquest:
It will be observed that one can not speak of this as a state in any proper sense. Ratzel shows this in the note following the above:
Stage 5: Monopoly The logic of events presses quickly from the fourth to the fifth stage, and fashions almost completely the full state. Quarrels arise between neighboring villages or clans that the lords no longer permit to be fought out, since by this the capacity of the peasants for service would be impaired. The lords assume the right to arbitrate, and in case of need, to enforce their judgment. In the end, it happens that at each “court” of the village king or chief of the clan there is an official deputy who exercises the power, while the chiefs are permitted to retain the appearance of authority. The state of the Incas shows, in a primitive condition, a typical example of this arrangement. Here we find the Incas united at Cuzco where they had their patrimonial lands and dwellings. A representative of the Incas, the Tucricuc, however, resided in every district at the court of the native chieftain. He
The same institutions that have been developed by American huntsmen and Semite shepherds are found also among African herdsmen. In Ashanti, the system of the Tucricuc has been developed in a typical fashion; and the Dualla have established for their subjects living in segregated villages “an institution based on conquest midway between a feudal system and slavery.” The same author reports that the Barotse have a constitution corresponding to the earliest stage of the mediaeval feudal organization:
The only thing that is not typical here consists in this, that the lords do not live in isolated castles or halls, but are settled in villages among their subjects. Stage 6: State It is only a very small step from the Incas to the Dorians in Lacedaemon, Messenia, or Crete; and no greater distance separates the Fulbe, Dualla, and Barotse from the comparatively rigidly organized feudal states of the African Negro Empires of Uganda, Unyoro, etc.; and the corresponding feudal empires of Eastern and Western Europe and of all Asia. In all places, the same results are brought about by force of the same sociopsychological causes. The necessity of keeping the subjects in order and at the same time of maintaining them at their full capacity for labor leads step by step from the fifth to the sixth stage, in which the state, by acquiring full intranationality and by the evolution of “Nationality,” is developed in every sense. The need becomes more and more frequent to interfere, to allay difficulties, to punish, or to coerce obedience; and thus develop the habit of rule and the usages of government. The two groups, separated, to begin with, and then united on one territory, are at first merely laid alongside one another, then are scattered through one another like a mechanical mixture, as the term is used in chemistry, until gradually they become more and more of a “chemical combination.” They intermingle, unite, amalgamate to unity, in customs and habits, in speech and worship. Soon the bonds of relationship unite the upper and the lower strata. In nearly all cases the master class picks the handsomest virgins from the subject races for its concubines. A race of bastards thus develops, sometimes taken into the ruling class, sometimes rejected, and then because of the blood of the masters in their veins, becoming the born leaders of the subject race. In form and in content the primitive state is completed. The post The Six Stages in the Creation of the State appeared first on LewRockwell. |
The FDA Cover-Up That Led to the Approval of the Pfizer JabTuesday 25 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
As I’ve been documenting for the past year, the COVID experts have been contradicting themselves six ways from Sunday. As charlatans, they’re abject failures. They can’t keep their own story straight. Thanks to an alert reader, I’ve come across a new blockbuster. BY THEIR OWN STANDARDS, the FDA should never have allowed the Pfizer COVID vaccine to be shot into a single arm. The Agency’s Emergency Use Authorization was a crime—according to their own data. Here we go. The document, posted on the FDA website, is titled, “Vaccines and Related Biological Products; Advisory Committee Meeting; FDA Briefing Document Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.” [1] It is dated December 10, 2020. The date tells us that all the information in the document is taken from the Pfizer clinical trial, based on which the FDA authorized the vaccine for public use. A key quote is buried on page 42: “Among 3410 total cases of suspected but unconfirmed COVID-19 in the overall study population, 1594 occurred in the vaccine group vs. 1816 in the placebo group [who received a saltwater shot].” Those shocking numbers have never seen the light of day in news media. The comparative numbers reveal that the vaccine was not effective at preventing COVID-19. It was certainly not 50% more effective than no vaccine at all—the standard for FDA Emergency Use Authorization. To make all this clear, I need to back up and explain the theory of the vaccine clinical trial. The researchers assumed the SARS-CoV-2 virus was spreading everywhere in the world, and during the clinical trial, it would descend on some volunteers. The billion-dollar question was: how many people receiving the vaccine would become infected, vs. how many people in the placebo group? If it turned out that FAR FEWER people getting the vaccine became infected with SARS-CoV-2, the vaccine would be hailed as a success. It protected people against the virus. But as you can see from the numbers above, that wasn’t the case at all. So now we come to the vital weasel-phrase in the FDA document I just quoted: “suspected but unconfirmed COVID-19 [cases].” “Well, you see, we can’t say these were ACTUAL COVID-19 cases. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. They’re in limbo. We want to keep them in limbo. Otherwise, our clinical trial is dead in the water, and we’ll never get approval for the vaccine.” What does “suspected cases” mean? It can only mean these people all displayed symptoms consistent with the definition of COVID-19, but they’re unconfirmed cases because…their PCR tests were negative, not positive. However, if their tests were negative, why would they be called “suspected cases” instead of “NOT CASES”? Something is wrong here. The FDA is hedging its bets, muddying the waters, obscuring facts. By FDA/CDC rules, a case of COVID-19 means: a person has tested positive, period. That’s the way cases are counted. These several thousand volunteers in the Pfizer clinical trial were either COVID-19 cases or they weren’t. Which is it? The official response to that question is obvious: the FDA decided to throw the data from all those suspected cases in the garbage and ignore them. Poof. Gone. Why do I say that? Because if the FDA had paid serious attention to the several thousand “suspected cases,” they never would have authorized the vaccine for public use. They would have stopped the clinical trial and undertaken a very deep and extensive investigation. Which they didn’t. This is called a crime. “But…but it’s not that simple. This is a complex situation. It’s a gray area.” “No. It isn’t. If you were running a clinical trial of a new drug, and a few thousand people in the trial, who were given the drug, nevertheless came down with the disease symptoms the drug was supposed to cure, wouldn’t you cancel the trial and go back to the drawing board?” “You mean if we were being honest? That’s a joke, right? We’re not honest. Don’t you get it?” Yes. I get it. You’re criminals. Killers. But wait. There’s more. The FDA document also states: “Suspected COVID-19 cases that occurred within 7 days after any vaccination were 409 in the vaccine group vs. 287 in the placebo group.” That’s explosive. Right after vaccination, 409 people who received the shots became “suspected COVID cases.” This alone should have been enough to stop the clinical trial altogether. But it wasn’t. In fact, the FDA document tries to excuse those 409 cases with a slippery comment: “It is possible that the imbalance in suspected COVID-19 cases occurring in the 7 days post vaccination represents vaccine reactogenicity with symptoms that overlap with those of COVID-19.” Translation: You see, a number of clinical symptoms of COVID-19 and adverse effects from the vaccine are the same. Therefore, we have no idea whether the vaccinated people developed COVID or were just reacting to the vaccine. So we’re going to ignore this whole mess and pretend it’s of no importance. Back in April of 2020, I predicted the vaccine manufacturers would use this strategy to explain away COVID cases occurring in the vaccine groups of their clinical trials. It’s called cooking the data. It’s a way of writing off and ignoring COVID symptoms in the vaccine group—and instead saying, “The vaccine is safe and effective.” And the FDA document, as I stated above, just puts an impenetrable cloud over all the volunteers in the Pfizer clinical trial by inventing a category called “suspected but unconfirmed COVID-19 cases,” and throwing those crucial data away, never to be spoken of again. I’m speaking about them now. Any sensible person, looking at them, would conclude that the vaccine should never have been authorized. Unless fraud, deception, profits, and destruction of human life via the vaccine were and are the true goals. Finally: When you have “suspected cases,” and their ultimate status depends on doing a test, you do the test. You do it as many times as you need to, until it registers positive or negative. Then each “suspected case” becomes an actual case or no case at all. Perhaps these “suspected cases” in the clinical trial were tested, and many of them came up positive, revealing they were actual COVID cases—but the researchers lied and covered up the fact that they were tested. Or if you really don’t want to know whether “suspected cases” are actual cases, you don’t test them. You leave them in a convenient limbo and park them, never to be seen again. Either way, the situation is patently absurd. By official standards, the PCR test decides whether a person is a case or not a case. Just do the test. Saying “we don’t know” is nothing more than a con and a hustle. I’d love to hear the researchers try to talk their way out of this one. Here is how the conversation might go: “So you’re saying these several thousand suspected COVID cases couldn’t be adjudicated one way or another?” “That’s right. Their PCR tests were ‘indeterminate’.” “That says something devastating about the test itself.” “Well, sometimes you just can’t tell whether it’s positive or negative.” “I see. And this ‘indeterminate’ result occurred in SEVERAL THOUSAND suspected cases.” “I guess so, yes.” “You know, you could have done something else with these suspected cases. A different test. You could have taken tissue samples and looked for the virus itself in a more direct way.” “No. That wouldn’t work.” “Why not?” “Because…the actual virus…” “Because no one has been able to come up with a specimen of the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus.” “Right.” “So tell me—what does that indicate? I’ll tell you what it indicates. You can’t prove the SARS-CoV-2 virus exists. “I have to go. I’m late for a meeting.” “You’re late for more than just a meeting. Is it true a person becomes a virologist by cutting out a coupon from the back of a comic book and mailing it to a PO Box in Maryland?’ “Absolutely not. That’s outrageous.” “What then?” “The PO Box is in Virginia.” SOURCES: [1] https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download Reprinted with permission from Jon Rappoport’s blog. The post The FDA Cover-Up That Led to the Approval of the Pfizer Jab appeared first on LewRockwell. |
How American Journalism Became a Mouthpiece of the Deep StateTuesday 25 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Reporters joke that the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions, say, “No comment,” and head to happy hour. The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information. They meanwhile profit from the other side of the equation, active information operations designed to influence events in America. It is 2021 and the CIA is running an op against the American people. Leon Panetta, once director of CIA, explained bluntly that the agency influenced foreign media outlets ahead of elections in order to “change attitudes within the country.” The method was to “acquire media within a country or within a region that could very well be used for being able to deliver a specific message or work to influence those that may own elements of the media to be able to cooperate, work with you in delivering that message.” The CIA has been running such ops to influence foreign elections continuously since the end of WWII. The goal is to control information as a tool of influence. Sometimes the control is very direct, operating the media outlet yourself. The problem is this is easily exposed, destroying credibility. A more effective strategy is to become a source for legitimate media such that your (dis)information inherits their credibility. Most effective is when one CIA plant is the initial source while a second CIA plant acts seemingly independently as a confirming source. You can push information to the mainstream media, who can then “independently” confirm it, sometimes unknowingly, through your secondary agents. You can basically write tomorrow’s headlines. Other techniques include exclusive true information mixed with disinformation to establish credibility, using official sources like embassy spokesmen “inadvertently” confirm sub details, and covert funding of research and side gigs to promote academics and experts who can discredit counter-narratives. From the end of WWII to the Church Committee in 1976, this was all dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Of course the U.S. would not use the CIA to influence elections, especially in fellow democracies. Except it did. Real-time reporting on intelligence is by nature based on limited information, albeit marked with the unambiguous fingerprints of established tradecraft. Always give time a chance to explain. Through Operation Mockingbird the CIA ran over 400 American journalists as direct assets. Almost none have ever discussed their work publicly. Journalists performed these tasks for the CIA with the consent of America’s leading news organizations. The New York Times alone willingly provided cover for ten CIA officers over decades and kept quiet about it. Long term relationships are a powerful tool, so feeding a true big story to a young reporter to get him promoted is part of the game. Don’t forget the anonymous source who drove the Watergate story was an FBI official who through his actions made the careers of cub reporters Woodward and Bernstein. Bernstein went on to champion Russiagate. Woodward became a Washington hagiographer. Ken Dilanian, formerly with the Associated Press and now working for NBC, still maintains a “collaborative relationship” with the CIA. That’s the tradecraft. The problem for America is once again the tools of war abroad have come home, just the same as when post-9/11 the NSA turned its antennas inward. The intelligence community is currently operating against the American people using established media. Some of it can’t be more obvious. The CIA always planted stories abroad for American outlets to pick up. To influence public opinion they lied to journalists in the run up to the 2003 Iraq war. The agency works directly with Hollywood to control movies about itself. Turn on any of the advocacy media outlets and you see panels of former CIA officials. None however is more egregious than John Brennan, former director, who for years touted Russiagate when he knew from information gathered while he was still in office that it was all fake. Brennan probably leaked the foundational lie alleging Trump was dirty with Russia to the press in January of 2017 as the kickoff event to the info op still running today. Brennan’s role is more than speculation. John Durham, the U.S. attorney leading the ongoing “how it happened” Russiagate investigation into the intelligence community, has requested Brennan’s emails and call logs from CIA. Durham is also examining whether Brennan changed his story between his public comments (not under oath: say anything) and his May 2017 testimony to Congress (under oath: watch out for perjury) about the dossier. Reporter Aaron Mate is less delicate, laying out the evidence Brennan was “a central architect and promoter of the conspiracy theory from its inception.” Even blunter is Senator Rand Paul, who directly accuses Brennan of trying “to bring down a sitting president.” How that worked helps show how info ops intertwine with covert ops. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report shows the FBI unleashed a full-spectrum spying campaign with the primary document of the information op, the Steele Dossier, as an excuse. Dossier author and ex-British intel officer Christopher Steele also created a textbook information loop to publicize his work, secretly becoming his own corroborating source. The Horowitz report also shows it was a 5 Eyes team effort; Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, a man with ties to his nation’s intel services, arranged a meeting with Trump staffer George Papadopoulos to set in motion FISA surveillance. British GCHQ monitored Trump officials and passed info to the NSA. The op used CIA assets, shadowy academics Stefan Halper and Joseph Mifsud, as dangles. There was even a honey trap with a female FBI undercover agent inserted into Israeli-arranged social situations with a Trump staffer. The post How American Journalism Became a Mouthpiece of the Deep State appeared first on LewRockwell. |
CDC Churches Bow CDC Churches Genuflect to the GovernmentTuesday 25 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
More and more churches have begun returning their services to normal since the CDC updated its public health recommendations. While the return to normalcy is a good thing, it is also a bad thing in one respect. In an effort to further push the dangerous and unnecessary Covid-19 vaccine on Americans, the CDC updated its public health recommendations on May 13. According to the CDC, the guiding principles for fully vaccinated people are:
Accordingly, in a non-healthcare setting, fully vaccinated people can:
CDC churches have taken notice. Last year, in the middle of the bogus “pandemic,” I coined the term CDC churches to describe those churches that altered their practices because of government propaganda and decrees. At the time I wrote about this (July 14), some churches—especially liberal churches—were still closed, but most had reopened with greatly limited and altered services. Some heroic churches either never completely closed or else fully reopened with no restrictions after a month or so of online-only services after they realized what a giant government scam the whole “pandemic” was. These CDC churches encouraged or required face masks, closed off some of their pews, stopped all congregational singing, made people register for services, took people’s temperature, outlawed handshaking and hugging, turned off their water fountains, mandated social distancing, quit passing offering plates, and cancelled potluck dinners, baptisms, nurseries, choirs, Sunday schools, Bible studies, prayer meetings, and communion services. All for absolutely nothing. It was all theatre. As the year progressed, and some states and localities began to relax their draconian Covid restrictions, many CDC churches began to follow suit, but always in lockstep with the government. After the government began pushing the Covid vaccine, many CDC churches jumped on the government bandwagon. The biggest promoter of Covid vaccines in Texas was a megachurch, First Baptist of Church of Dallas. And now that the CDC has said that no one needs to wear a mask outside, and that vaccinated individuals don’t have to wear a mask inside, CDC churches around the country have begun to relax most of their remaining Covid restrictions—restrictions that they never should have made to begin with. They have turned on water fountains, reconstituted their choirs, opened up all of the pews, stopped recommending face masks, started passing offering plates, and stopped promoting social distancing. I know this is happening because I get e-mails on a regular basis from Christians all over the country about what is going on in their churches. What is disgraceful and shameful about these CDC churches relaxing their Covid restrictions is that it is in response to CDC guidelines and government pronouncements. These churches will always be CDC churches even when they return to normalcy. When Covid-23 is pronounced a pandemic, these churches can be counted on to limit their capacity, shut off their water fountains, require face masks, block off every other pew, enforce social distancing, and cancel all activities aside from their Sunday morning service—if they don’t close altogether. The post CDC Churches Bow CDC Churches Genuflect to the Government appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Getting Away With Murder, Or Is The Tide Turning?Tuesday 25 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
The mainstream narrative of the COVID pandemic is changing. Mainstream media outlets are now permitting some severe criticisms of Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates, and the entire community of virologists who only know how to sell fear and vaccines. Perhaps this is done cynically to prevent people from losing trust in propaganda institutions, but it also has real effects that can save lives. At first, the reversal was driven by certain Senators who just got sick of listening to Fauci, who has been more than busy singlehandedly wrecking peoples’ lives and the Constitution. It has ended up as an all-out attack on dangerous viral research while nailing the Wuhan lab as the definitive source of COVID. But perhaps leading the charge was Tucker Carlson from FOX news, who has been asking tough questions about vaccines never before heard in the mainstream. The more aware the public becomes of abusive imperial pharmaceutical power dynamics, the less abuse Big Pharma can get away with. Expanding our consciousness about dastardly deeds of the most depraved institutions like the CDC, WHO, and the FDA will always be beneficial. Even the digital giants seem to be coming around, allowing more information that does not lick the behind of the mainstream narrative, which has been murderously one-sided. It is hard to ignore millions of people who now conclude that the pandemic is over. What are more and more people seeing? Thousands of full vaccinated are coming down with COVID infections. The number of COVID cases is fraudulently inflated, not least by running the PCR test at too many cycles. The ludicrous practice of denying COVID cases treatment until hospitalization. What vaccinations are producing are large numbers of death and hundreds of thousands of adverse events. VAERS data released May 14 showed 227,805 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines, including 4,201 deaths and 18,528 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020, and May 14, 2021. That 60% of new Covid cases are among the vaccinated. The public is now beginning to believe that the virus to be lab-created. It was always evident and acknowledged by the intelligence community. But this critical information was covered up with massive disinformation campaigns from mainstream media. That mask mandates and lockdowns were not effective. The virus itself was not that hurtful for healthy people. As a standalone pathogen, it was only effective against already compromised individuals with preexisting conditions, including obesity and primarily those with advanced age. COVID deaths are dropping to new lows. How wrong can health officials be?
After seeing relatively success in handling the COVID crisis, emphasizing early treatments such as Ivermectin, India is suddenly seeing a surge in cases and deaths being attributed to the COVID-19 virus. But some are wondering if the ramping up of COVID “vaccines” is the cause behind these recent surges. Talking about the Lie of the Century and Medical Murder:
The New England Journal of Medicine – has published findings revealing that the COVID-19 vaccine is causing spontaneous abortions in pregnant women. According to the abstract of the study published last week, results from the study are tragic. It appears that many women have jeopardized their infants’ health, and some have, no doubt, caused their death by taking a vaccine designed to cure an illness that has an almost zero percent chance of killing expectant mothers or their babies. Amid growing safety concerns, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Meryl Nass, on behalf of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), filed a Citizen Petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asking the agency to immediately revoke the Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for COVID vaccines and to refrain from licensing them. Conclusion COVID vaccines are failing to do everything but make sure certain people and companies get rich. Masks are a colossal failure, same with lockdowns and everything else public health officials and hysterical politicians has wanted us to do over the last year. “The 55-year government lifer and windbag, Anthony Fauci, has single-handedly made a mockery of “the science” and the U.S. Constitution during the past 14 months, writes David Stockman. “America is indeed suffering from a dangerous plague—a plague of misanthropic fear-mongering from the likes of Dr. Fauci, the Scarf Lady, and the Biden’s new CDC director, among countless others of the self-designated Virus Patrol.” GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene introduces a bill to slash Fauci’s $400,000 salary to ZERO until he’s replaced. In Europe, folks are demonstrating on the streets against their COVID oppressors. In America, we have certain state governors (called Neianderthols by Biden) leading the State populations to the promised land of freedom. The federal government is at war (informational) against the States and their governors that are opening up against the advice of our dear and most cherished Dr. Fauci, whose salary and job are hopefully about to be taken from him. The new director of the CDC is adding tears to the war, hoping that they will convince everyone to panic. Meanwhile, the CDC is Pretending That NOBODY Is Getting Injured Or Killed From COVID-19 Vaccines. State Supreme Court Ends Evers’ Never-Ending Emergency Orders. “The question, in this case, is not whether the Governor acted wisely; it is whether he acted lawfully. We conclude he did not” – Justice Brian Hagedorn. “While a pandemic will not follow the laws of men, the Governor must” – Justice Rebecca Bradley Where is the Supreme Court of the United States? They seem to be hiding from the most critical issues of the day. I wonder if they will enjoy getting caught up with the illegality of emergency authorizations of experimental vaccines breaking every principle of the Nurenberg Code. Not only that but emergency authorization of vaccines was based on there being no other alternative treatments. Huge lie. The lie that killed the most from both virus and vaccine. But nothing stops the cartel that runs the world from making everyone think that everyone else is getting vaccinated. “They’re riling up the mob to tar and feather those who prefer to wait and watch. Brutalized by state-imposed lockdowns for over a year, now that we’ve got Helsinki syndrome (‘save me, loving captor’), we’re told our very saving grace is finally near.” Reprinted with permission from Dr.Sircus.com. The post Getting Away With Murder, Or Is The Tide Turning? appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Spike Protein Damages Vascular CellsTuesday 25 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
During 2020, many people learned more about coronaviruses, and specifically the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Pictures of the spiked virus have been plastered across the news media. The image is reminiscent of a chain mace, or flail. This was a medieval weapon with a spiked steel ball at the end of a chain or leather strap. The image may be frightening. It turns out researchers believe the spikes are responsible for significant vascular damage leading to severe disease.1 Most people will be infected at least one time in their lives by some type of coronavirus. If the COVID-19 pandemic is the first time you’ve heard about coronaviruses, you should know the first one was discovered in chickens in 1930.2 A few decades later the first human coronavirus was identified.3 Currently, scientists have identified four types of coronaviruses that are endemic and can cause up to 15% of common colds.4 Interestingly, if all coronaviruses have originated in the wild, the rate at which the virus is mutating has accelerated dramatically in 20 years. In the last two decades, three new coronaviruses have emerged: SARS in November 2002;5 MERS in September 2012;6 and SARS-CoV-2 in December 2019.7 The symptoms of COVID-19 from an infection with SARS-CoV-2 can vary to a great extent. Some people carrying the virus have had no symptoms. Others report fever, headache, body aches, dry cough, loss of appetite and loss of smell.8 In others, more severe symptoms can develop that affect the respiratory tract and lead to pneumonia. Approximately 36% of individuals have experienced gastrointestinal symptoms or neurological symptoms, either with or without respiratory symptoms.9 A recent paper published in Circulation Research10 revealed it is the spiked proteins on the virus that play a key role in your symptoms. Spiked SARS-CoV-2 Damages More Than Your Lungs A team of researchers including scientists from the University of California San Diego evaluated the effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in animals. The researchers were not surprised by the clinical findings, but the data revealed a detailed explanation of how the spike (S) protein triggers damage to the vascular system.11 The researchers created a pseudo virus, or cell surrounded by the spike proteins that did not contain a virus.12 Using an animal model, the researchers administered the pseudo virus into the lungs and found the virus was not necessary to create damage. Instead, the spike protein was enough to cause inflammation. The experiment was then replicated in the lab using cell cultures. The team exposed healthy endothelial cells that line your arteries to the spiked pseudo virus. Past studies had demonstrated that exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus elicited damage to the cells by binding to angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). However, the team found the cells responded in a similar way when exposed to the pseudo virus. When the S protein attached to the ACE2 receptor it disrupted signaling to the mitochondria and caused damage and fragmentation. The alterations in mitochondrial function were confirmed as part of the inhibition of ACE2 signaling in the lab. The results also revealed that the virus could induce endothelial cell inflammation and endotheliitis. The protein reportedly decreased ACE2 levels and impaired nitric oxide bioavailability.13 Co-senior author of the study, Uri Manor, explained in a press release from Salk Institute:14
Long Haul Symptoms May Be Related to Vascular Damage Some of the symptoms from COVID-19 that last weeks or months for some people may be the result of vascular damage. People who have had these symptoms have been given the name “long haulers.”15 In theory, they have recovered from the worst symptoms of the illness and test negative. Yet, they continue to have symptoms without an active infection. According to a paper in JAMA,16 approximately 10% of people who have had COVID-19 may experience long haul symptoms. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention17 report that a combination of the following symptoms without an active COVID infection can appear weeks after the infection and last for months. Symptoms may worsen after physical or mental activity.
The predominant pathophysiology of COVID-19 includes endothelial damage and microvascular injury, stimulation of hyperinflammation and hypercoagulability.18 A recent review in Physiological Reports19 examined how the capillary damage and inflammation from endotheliitis triggered by COVID-19 could contribute to the persistent symptoms by interfering with tissue oxygenation. The combined effects of capillary damage in multiple key organs may accelerate hypoxia related inflammation and lead to long haul symptoms. Although exercise temporarily worsens long haul symptoms and some have rejected high-intensity interval training (HIIT) as an option, one paper published in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine from Denmark suggests the opposite.20 The authors of this study argue that the pathophysiology of COVID-19 may be overcome by the physiological effects of HIIT and it should be considered as one of the rehabilitation choices to potentially reverse these symptoms. They propose that exercise could increase viral clearance and modulate TNF-alpha and interleukin-1 beta signaling. This may in turn reduce vascular inflammation. They acknowledge that HIIT is the most controversial type of exercise intervention to be prescribed after COVID-19, due to the risk of sudden cardiac arrest secondary to cardiovascular damage. Several experts21,22 recommend even those accustomed to high intensity exercise should first complete a cardiovascular exam and approach their return to physical activity gradually. They cite a small retrospective study of 28 people with a history of COVID-19 in which the researchers concluded that “comprehensive cardiopulmonary rehabilitation after COVID-19 is safe, feasible, and effective.”23 Early Treatment May Reduce the Number of Long Haulers In my interview with Dr. Vladimir Zelenko in March 2021, we discussed the treatment of COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine. At that point, Zelenko had treated 3,000 patients with symptoms of COVID-19 and only three of his high-risk patients had subsequently succumbed to the disease. While the focus of the interview was on treatment protocols and the use of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, Zelenko shared an interesting statistic about his protocol. In the early months of COVID-19, Zelenko decided to treat his high-risk patients as early as possible, without waiting for severe symptoms. This turned out to be one key to his significant success. Without waiting for test results that often took five days, by which time high-risk patients were exhibiting more severe symptoms, he started treatment immediately. His understanding of the mechanism behind hydroxychloroquine and zinc led to using the combination alongside azithromycin, to prevent bacterial pneumonia and other bacterial infections common with COVID. What is interesting are the statistics for Zelenko’s patients with long haul symptoms. As I’ve discussed, approximately 10% of the population that is infected with COVID-19 will go on to experience persistent symptoms.24 However, Zelenko has treated 3,000 patients and none who received treatment within the first five days went on to develop long-haul symptoms. While he has had patients with persistent symptoms from COVID-19, they sought medical care after the first five days of symptoms, which meant the inflammatory process had advanced. From his experience, and the experience of the patients he treated, early intervention with the protocol nearly eliminated the risk of persistent symptoms. Researchers Find Another Vaccine Target During vaccine development, researchers and pharmaceutical companies have focused on the spike protein that surrounds the virus. It appears that this is how the virus enters the cells and it seemed reasonable if the virus could not replicate inside the cells, the infection could be stopped. However, as has been discovered, the virus has more than just a single spike protein.25 There are four proteins that form the structure surrounding the RNA. There is an envelope (E), a membrane (M) and a nucleocapsid (N), in addition to the spike (S). Your immune system recognizes all four of these proteins. Researchers have discovered humans make more antibodies to the N protein than the S protein.26 However, it seemed counterintuitive to address the N protein since this is found inside the structure with the viral RNA. Therefore, any antibodies your body makes against the N protein will not block the virus from entering the cells.27 New information has revealed that once the N protein antibodies get inside the cell they are recognized by an antibiotic receptor, TRIM21. This antibody receptor shreds the N protein, which then reaches the surface of an infected cell. Your body’s T cells recognize the fragments and kill the cell along with any virus. This has suggested to researchers that inducing N protein antibodies may be another way of stimulating the immune response against SARS-CoV-2. Another benefit of focusing on the N protein is that it has a lower mutation rate.28 In other words, as the virus mutates in the wild the current vaccine may no longer have any effectiveness against it, in much the same way that the flu vaccine must be altered each year to address influenza variants. The sequence in the N protein is more stable, so researchers postulate that a vaccine may be effective for a longer period. List of Current Vaccine Side Effects Is Growing Early in May 2021, reports from France indicated five cases of myocarditis were found in those who had taken the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine. Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle that can have lifelong effects as it weakens the muscle and creates scar tissue.29 The national medicines safety agency (ANSM) released their weekly vaccine update, saying “five cases have been declared in France.”30 The agency didn’t feel there was enough information to conclude the vaccine had played a role but would continue to monitor reports. Over 13.5 million doses of COVID vaccines have been administered in France since April 22, 2021. The ANSM reports 16,030 adverse events from those who had been vaccinated. Israel has also reported several cases of myocarditis after people receive their second dose. A review of the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) shows 12 reports of myocarditis were recorded in the U.S. by April 30, 2021. According to Our World in Data,31 by April 30, 2021, 30.32% of the population in the U.S. had been fully vaccinated. VAERS also showed there were 157,277 adverse events reported by April 30, 2021.32 These numbers are likely far lower than the actual number of people who have experienced adverse events from the vaccines. Research data33 show health care providers identify and report vaccine adverse events in woefully low numbers. In fact, the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine was recently paused to teach doctors how to report vaccine injuries.34 The pause has since been lifted in the U.S. It is crucial to report a vaccine injury or side effect to VAERS, as the data are essential in helping individuals, doctors and researchers make informed decisions. You can make your own report online or using a PDF by going to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.35 You’ll find more information about adverse events and how vaccines affect your health at the National Vaccine Information Center.36 Sources and References
The post Spike Protein Damages Vascular Cells appeared first on LewRockwell. |
How Texas Killed CovidWednesday 26 May 2021 01:24 AM UTC-05
In March, Governor Greg Abbott announced that Texas would open for business 100 percent without a statewide mask mandate. The pro-lockdown “experts” were shocked. If a state as big as Texas joined Florida and succeeded in thumbing its nose at “the science” – which told us that for the first time in history healthy people should be forced to stay in their houses and wear oxygen-restricting face masks – then the lockdown narrative would begin falling apart. President Biden famously attacked the decision as “Neanderthal thinking.” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa warned that, with this order, Abbott would “kill Texans.” Incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky tearfully told us about her feelings of “impending doom.” When the poster child for Covid lockdowns Dr. Fauci was asked several weeks later why cases and deaths continued to evaporate in Texas, he answered simply, “I’m not sure.” That moment may have been a look at the man behind the proverbial curtain, who projected his power so confidently until confronted with reality. Now a new study appearing as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, highlighted recently in Reason Magazine, has found “no evidence that the reopening affected the rate of new COVID-19 cases in the five-week period following the reopening. …State-level COVID-19 mortality rates were unaffected by the March 10 reopening.” In other words, not only did the doom and gloom predicted by the lockdown fanatics fail to materialize, but the steady, seasonal downward trend of the virus toward extinction continued regardless of government action. As we have repeated for a year on the Liberty Report, the virus was going to virus regardless of anything we did about it. And Texas proved it. However, some very important questions remain to be answered as the Covid panic across the United States is finally starting to recede.
The politicization of medicine is anti-science, anti-human, and anti-American. Will those who needlessly died due to this politicization finally get their justice? Second, though Abbott deserves credit for taking the bold step, shouldn’t he be held accountable for closing the state in the first place? After all, when someone has been punching you in the face and then they stop, do you thank them for letting up or do you ask why they punched you in the first place? Will all the tyrannical rule-by-decree orders across the United States be stricken from the books? Or will they just be allowed to do this again for any reason they choose? Third, thanks to Senator Rand Paul, we are now all aware of Dr. Fauci’s role in funding gain-of-function research on viruses in China. Will we be able to find out exactly why we are being forced to pay for the mad scientist research into how to create more deadly viruses? Can we opt-out of this funding? Though Greg Abbott deserves much criticism for shutting Texas down, his re-opening decree effectively ended Covid tyranny across the country. We are thankful for that. Now we must resolve to never let this happen again. The post How Texas Killed Covid appeared first on LewRockwell. |
on the inside, a system of mass surveillance (the Patriot Act) ;
First, will anyone be held responsible for the thousands who died because of the prohibition on safe treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin that have since been shown to be effective against Covid-19? As soon as Donald Trump mentioned that hydroxychloroquine might be effective against the virus, the “experts” circled the wagons. It was banned for use, until it later was quietly un-banned.
from https://youtu.be/V0EQNQssk6U
May 26, 2021
from https://youtu.be/UuC5mCL9HC8
May 26, 2021 at 02:29AM
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