Who Really Controls the World? January 23, 2013 Prof. Dr. Mujahid Kamran, New Dawn Waking Times Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organised, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. —Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States (1856-1924) So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes. —Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister (1804-1881) The advent of the industrial revolution, the invention of a banking system based on usury, and scientific and technological advancements during the past three centuries have had three major consequences. These have made the incredible concentration of wealth in a few hands possible, have led to the construction of increasingly deadly weapons culminating in weapons of mass destruction, and have made it possible to mould the minds of vast populations by application of scientific techniques through the media and control of the educational system. The wealthiest families on planet earth call the shots in every major upheaval that they cause. Their sphere of activity extends over the entire globe, and even beyond, their ambition and greed for wealth and power knows no bounds, and for them, most of mankind is garbage – “human garbage.” It is also their target to depopulate the globe and maintain a much lower population compared to what we have now. It was Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild (1840-1915) who once said: “I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the British Empire on which the sun never sets. The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.” What was true of the British Empire is equally true of the US Empire, controlled remotely by the London based Elite through the Federal Reserve System. Judged by its consequences, the Federal Reserve System is the greatest con job in human history. It is sad and painful that man’s most beautiful construction, and the source of most power and wealth on earth, viz. scientific knowledge – the most sublime, most powerful and most organised expression of man’s inherent gift of thought, wonder and awe – became a tool for subjugation of humanity, a very dangerous tool in the hands of a tiny group of men. These men “hire” the scientist and take away, as a matter of right, the power the scientist creates through his inventions. This power is then used for their own purposes, at immense human and material cost to mankind. The goal of this handful of men, the members of the wealthiest families on the planet, the Elite, is a New World Order, a One World Government, under their control. Secrecy and anonymity is integral to the operations of the Elite as is absolute ruthlessness, deep deception and the most sordid spying and blackmail. The Elite pitches nations against each other, and aims at the destruction of religion and other traditional values, creates chaos, deliberately spreads poverty and misery, and then usurps power placing its stooges in place. These families “buy while the blood is still flowing in the streets” (Rothschild dictum). Wars, “revolutions” and assassinations are part of their tactics to destroy traditional civilisation and traditional religions (as in Soviet Russia), amass wealth and power, eliminate opponents, and proceed relentlessly towards their avowed goal, generation after generation. They operate through covert and overt societies and organisations. Professor Carroll Quigley wrote: The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands to be able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in private meetings and conferences.… The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralisation of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury to all other economic groups. Winston Churchill, who was eventually “bored by it all,” wrote around 1920: From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, to those of Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxembourg, and Emma Goldman, this world wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played a definitely recognisable role in the tragedy of French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century, and now at last, this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads, and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. The High Cabal Exposed by JFK It was in the dark days of World War II that Churchill referred to the existence of a “High Cabal” that had brought about unprecedented bloodshed in human history. Churchill is also said to have remarked about the Elite: “They have transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia…” (quoted by John Coleman in The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, Global Publications 2006). Who are ‘they’? Consider the 1961 statement of US President John F. Kennedy (JFK) before media personnel: The word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society, and we are as a people, inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, secret oaths and secret proceedings. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy, that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence. It depends on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published, its mistakes are buried, not headlined, and its dissenters are silenced, not praised, no expenditure is questioned, no secret revealed… I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people.” Secret societies, secret oaths, secret proceedings, infiltration, subversion, intimidation – these are the words used by JFK! On June 4, 1963, JFK ordered the printing of Treasury dollar bills instead of Federal Reserve notes (Executive Order 11110). He also ordered that once these had been printed, the Federal Reserve notes would be withdrawn, and the Treasury bills put into circulation. A few months later (November 22, 1963) he was killed in broad daylight in front of the whole world – his brains blown out. Upon assumption of power, his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, immediately reversed the order to switch to Treasury bills showing very clearly why JFK was murdered. Another order of JFK, to militarily disengage from the Far East by withdrawing US “advisors” from Vietnam, was also immediately reversed after his death. After the Cuban crisis JFK wanted peaceful non-confrontational coexistence with the Soviet Union and that meant no wars in the world. He knew the next war would be nuclear and there would be no winners. The defense industry and the banks that make money from war belong to the Elite. The Elite subscribes to a dialectical Hegelian philosophy, as pointed out by Antony Sutton, under which they bring about ‘controlled conflict’. The two world wars were ‘controlled conflicts’! Their arrogance, their ceaseless energy, their focus, their utter disregard for human life, their ability to plan decades in advance, to act on that planning, and their continual success are staggering and faith-shaking. Statements by men like Disraeli, Wilson, Churchill, JFK and others should not leave any doubt in the mind of the reader about who controls the world. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote in November 1933 to Col. Edward House: “The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centres has owned the government since the days of Andrew Jackson.” It may be recalled that Andrew Jackson, US President from 1829-1837, was so enraged by the tactics of bankers (Rothschilds) that he said: “You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning.” Interlocking Structure of Elite Control In his book Big Oil and Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families and Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics and Terror Network, Dean Henderson states: “My queries to bank regulatory agencies regarding stock ownership in the top 25 US bank holding companies were given Freedom of Information Act status, before being denied on ‘national security’ grounds. This is ironic since many of the bank’s stockholders reside in Europe.” This is, on the face of it, quite astonishing but it goes to show the US government works not for the people but for the Elite. It also shows that secrecy is paramount in Elite affairs. No media outlet will raise this issue because the Elite owns the media. Secrecy is essential for Elite control – if the world finds out the truth about the wealth, thought, ideology and activities of the Elite there would be a worldwide revolt against it. Henderson further states: The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP Amoco and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with other European and old money behemoths. But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch. According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stockholders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation. It is well known that in 2009, of the top 100 largest economic entities of the world, 44 were corporations. The wealth of these families, which are among the top 10% shareholders in each of these, is far in excess of national economies. In fact, total global GDP is around 70 trillion dollars. The Rothschild family wealth alone is estimated to be in the trillions of dollars. So is the case with the Rockefellers who were helped and provided money all along by the Rothschilds. The US has an annual GDP in the range of 14-15 trillion dollars. This pales into insignificance before the wealth of these trillionaires. With the US government and most European countries in debt to the Elite, there should be absolutely no doubt as to who owns the world and who controls it. To quote Eustace Mullins from his book The World Order: The Rothschilds rule the US through their Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Federal Reserve System with no serious challenges to their power. Expensive ‘political campaigns’ are routinely conducted, with carefully screened candidates who are pledged to the program of the World Order. Should they deviate from the program, they would have an ‘accident’, be framed on a sex charge, or indicted in some financial irregularity. The Elite members operate in absolute unison against public benefit, against a better life for mankind in which the individual is free to develop his or her innate creativity, a life free of war and bloodshed. James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defence of the US, became aware of Elite intrigue and had, according to Jim Marrs, accumulated 3,000 pages of notes to be used for writing a book. He died in mysterious circumstances and was almost certainly murdered. His notes were taken away and a sanitised version made public after one year! Just before he died, almost fifteen months before the outbreak of the Korean War, he had revealed that American soldiers would die in Korea! Marrs quotes Forrestal: “These men are not incompetent or stupid. Consistency has never been a mark of stupidity. If they were merely stupid, they would occasionally make a mistake in our favour.” The Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the mother of all these, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, are bodies where decisions about the future of mankind are arrived at. Who set these up and control them? The “international bankers” of course. In his book The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, Col. Fletcher Prouty, who was the briefing officer to the President of the US from 1955-1963, writes about “an inner sanctum of a new religious order.” By the phrase Secret Team he means a group of “security-cleared individuals in and out of government who receive secret intelligence data gathered by the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) and who react to those data.” He states: “The power of the Team derives from its vast intra-governmental undercover infrastructure and its direct relationship with great private industries, mutual funds and investment houses, universities, and the news media, including foreign and domestic publishing houses.” He further adds: “All true members of the Team remain in the power centre whether in office with the incumbent administration or out of office with the hard-core set. They simply rotate to and from official jobs and the business world or the pleasant haven of academe.” Training the Young for Elite Membership It is very remarkable as to how ‘they’ are able to exercise control and how ‘they’ always find people to carry out the job, and how is it ‘they’ always make the ‘right’ decision at the right time? This can only be possible if there exists a hidden program of inducting and training cadres mentally, ideologically, philosophically, psychologically and ability-wise, over prolonged periods of time and planting them in the centres of power of countries like the US, UK, etc. This training would begin at a young age in general. There must also be a method of continual appraisal, by small groups of very highly skilled men, of developing situations with ‘their’ men who are planted throughout the major power centres of the world so that immediate ‘remedial’ action, action that always favours Elite interests, can be taken. How does that happen? It is in finding answers to these questions that the role of secret societies and their control of universities, particularly in the US, assumes deeper importance. The work done by men like Antony Sutton, John Coleman, Eustace Mullins and others is ground breaking. Mankind owes a debt to such scholars who suffer for truth but do not give in. Whenever you trace the money source of important initiatives designed to bring about major wars, lay down policies for the future, enhance control of the Elite over mankind, etc., you will invariably find them linked to the so called banking families and their stooges operating out of Foundations. In April 2008 I was among approximately 200 Vice Chancellors, Rectors and Presidents of universities from Asia, Africa, Europe and the US at a two day Higher Education Summit for Global Development, held at the US State Department in Washington DC. The Summit was addressed by five US Secretaries, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The real emphasis throughout the Summit was only on one thing – that universities in developing countries operate in partnership with foundations so that global problems could be solved! These are private foundations and the only way to understand this emphasis is to realise the US government is owned by those who own these foundations. As an aside the inaugural address was delivered by the war criminal responsible for millions of deaths in Rwanda, trained in US military institutions, and awarded a doctorate – Dr. Paul Kagame! The very first presentation was made by the CEO of the Agha Khan Foundation! In a fascinating study of the Yale secret society Skull and Bones, Antony Sutton uncovered numerous aspects of profound importance about this one society. In his book America’s Secret Establishment – An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones, Sutton points out there is a set of “Old Line American Families and New Wealth” that dominates The Order (of Skull & Bones) – the Whitney family, the Stimson family, the Bundy family, the Rockefeller family, the Harriman family, the Taft family, the Bush family, and so on. He also points out that there is a British connection: The links between the Order and Britain go through Lazard Freres and the private merchant bankers. Notably the British establishment also founded a University – Oxford University, and especially All Souls College at Oxford. The British element is called ‘The Group’. The Group links to the Jewish equivalent through the Rothschilds in Britain (Lord Rothschild was an original member of Rhodes’ ‘inner circle’). The Order in the US links to the Guggenheim, Schiff and Warburg families… There is an Illuminati connection. Every year 15 young men, and very recently women, have been inducted into The Order from Yale students since 1832. Who selects them? A study of the career trajectories of many of those ‘chosen’ shows how they rise to prominence in American life and how their peers ensure these men penetrate the very fabric of important US institutions. They are always there in key positions during war and peace, manipulating and watching ceaselessly. The influence of the Elite families on the thought processes of nations is carried out through academic institutions and organisations, as well as the media. Sutton writes: Among academic associations the American Historical Association, the American Economic Association, the American Chemical Society, and the American Psychological Association were all started by members of The Order or persons close to The Order. These are key associations for the conditioning of society. The phenomenon of The Order as the FIRST on the scene is found especially among Foundations, although it appears that The Order keeps a continuing presence among Foundation Trustees… The FIRST Chairman of an influential but almost unknown organisation established in 1910 was also a member of The Order. In 1920 Theodore Marburg founded the American Society for the Judicial Settlement of Disputes, but Marburg was only President. The FIRST Chairman was member William Howard Taft. The Society was the forerunner of the League to Enforce Peace, which developed into the League of Nations concept and ultimately the United Nations. The United Nations is an instrument of the Elite designed to facilitate the setting up of One World Government under Elite control. The UN building stands on Rockefeller property. Selecting Future Prime Ministers to Serve the New World Order In his article, ‘Oxford University – The Illuminati Breeding Ground’, David Icke recounts an incident that demonstrates how these secret societies and groups, working for the Elite, select, train and plan to install their men in key positions. In 1940 a young man addressed a “study group” of the Labor Party in a room at University College Oxford. He stressed that he belonged to a secret group without a name which planned a “Marxist takeover” of Britain, Rhodesia and South Africa by infiltrating the British Parliament and Civil Services. Since the British do not like extremists they dismiss their critics as ‘right-wingers’ while themselves posing as ‘moderates’ (this seems like the anti-Semitism charge by ADL, etc. whenever Israel is criticised). The young man stated that he headed the political wing of that secret group and he expected to be made Prime Minister of Britain some day! The young man was Harold Wilson who became Prime Minister of Britain (1964-70, 1974-76)! All young men studying at Ivy League universities, and at others, must bear in mind they are being continually scrutinised by some of their Professors with the intention of selecting from amongst them, those who will serve the Elite, and become part of a global network of interlocked covert and overt societies and organisations, working for the New World Order. Some of those already selected will be present among them, mingling with them and yet, in their heart, separated from them by a sense of belonging to a brotherhood with a mission that has been going on for a long time. These young men also know they will be rewarded by advancement in career and also that if they falter they could be killed! Utter secrecy and absolute loyalty is essential to the continued success of this program. This is enforced through fear of murder or bankruptcy and through a cult which probably takes us back to the times of the pyramids and before. Philosophically ‘they’ believe in Hegelian dialectics through which they justify bringing about horrible wars – euphemistically called ‘controlled conflict’. Their political ideology is ‘collectivism’ whereby mankind has to be ‘managed’ by a group of men, ‘them’, organised for the purpose – a hidden ‘dominant minority’. ‘They’ believe that they know better than ordinary mortals. The Illuminati, the Freemasons, members of other known and unknown secret societies, all mesh together under the wealthiest cabal in human history to take a mesmerised, dormant and battered mankind from one abyss to the next. Former MI6 agent John Coleman refers to a “Committee of 300” that controls and guides this vast subterranean human machinery. In his book Memoirs, published in 2002, David Rockefeller, Sr. stated that his family had been attacked by “ideological extremists” for “more than a century… Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterising my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.” That’s it! If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn. About the Author Prof. Dr. MUJAHID KAMRAN is Vice Chancellor, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan, and his book The Grand Deception – Corporate America and Perpetual War has just been published (April 2011) by Sang e Meel Publications, Lahore, Pakistan, and is available from www.amazon.co.uk. Prof. Kamran’s website is www.mujahidkamran.com. This article is a feature of New Dawn magazine. © Copyright New Dawn Magazine, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com. Permission granted to freely distribute this article for non-commercial purposes if unedited and copied in full, including this notice. © Copyright New Dawn Magazine, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com. Permission to re-send, post and place on web sites for non-commercial purposes, and if shown only in its entirety with no changes or additions. This notice must accompany all re-posting. ~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with the buttons below… https://www.wakingtimes.com/who-really-controls-the-world/

Who Really Runs the World? Conspiracies, Hidden Agendas & the Plan for World Government May 22, 2013 Andrew Gavin Marshall, New Dawn Waking Times So, who runs the world? It’s a question that people have struggled with since people began to struggle. It’s certainly a question with many interpretations, and incites answers of many varied perspectives. Often, it is relegated to the realm of “conspiracy theory,” in that, those who discuss this question or propose answers to it, are purveyors of a conspiratorial view of the world. However, it is my intention to discard the labels, which seek to disprove a position without actually proving anything to the contrary. One of these labels – “conspiracy theorist” – does just that: it’s very application to a particular perspective or viewpoint has the intention of “disproving without proof;” all that is needed is to simply apply the label. What I intend to do is analyse the social structure of the transnational ruling class, the international elite, who together run the world. This is not a conspiratorial opinion piece, but is an examination of the socially constructed elite class of people; what is the nature of power, how does it get used, and who holds it? A Historical Understanding of Power In answering the question “Who Runs the World?” we must understand what positions within society hold the most power, and thus, the answer becomes clear. If we simply understand this as heads of state, the answer will be flawed and inaccurate. We must examine the globe as a whole, and the power structures of the global political economy. The greatest position of power within the global capitalist system lies in the authority of money-creation: the central banking system. The central banking system, originating in 1694 in England, consists of an international network of central banks that are privately owned by wealthy shareholders and are granted governmental authority to print and issue a nation’s currency, and set interest rates, collecting revenue and making profit through the interest charged. Central banks give loans to both governments and industries, controlling both simultaneously. The ultimate centre of power in the central banking system is at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), in Basle, Switzerland; which is the central bank to the world’s central banks, and is also a private bank owned by the world’s central banks. As Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley wrote: [T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.1 The central banks, and thus the central banking system as a whole, is a privately owned system in which the major shareholders are powerful international banking houses. These international banking houses emerged in tandem with the evolution of the central banking system. The central banking system first emerged in London, and expanded across Europe with time. With that expansion, the European banking houses also rose and expanded across the continent. The French Revolution resulted with Napoleon coming to power, who granted the French bankers a central bank of France, which they privately controlled.2 It was also out of the French Revolution that one of the major banking houses of the world emerged, the Rothschilds. Emerging out of a European Jewish ghetto, the Rothschilds quickly rose to the forefront in banking, and established banking houses in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna and Naples, allowing them to profit off of all sides in the Napoleonic wars.3 As Carroll Quigley wrote in his monumental Tragedy and Hope, “The merchant bankers of London had already at hand in 1810-1850 the Stock Exchange, the Bank of England, and the London money market,” and that: In time they brought into their financial network the provincial banking centres, organised as commercial banks and savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to form all of these into a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other.4 At the same time, in the United States, we saw the emergence of a powerful group of bankers and industrialists, such as the Morgans, Astors, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Carnegies, and they created massive industrial monopolies and oligopolies throughout the 19th century.5 These banking interests were very close to and allied with the powerful European banking houses. The European, and particularly the British elites of the time, were beginning to organise their power in an effort to properly exert their influence internationally. At this time, European empires were engaging in the Scramble for Africa, in which nearly the entire continent of Africa, save Ethiopia, was colonised and carved up by European nations. One notable imperialist was Cecil Rhodes who made his fortune from diamond and gold mining in Africa with financial support from the Rothschilds,6 and “at that time [had] the biggest concentration of financial capital in the world.”7 Cecil Rhodes was also known for his radical views regarding America, particularly in that he would “talk with total seriousness of ‘the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire’.”8 Rhodes saw himself not simply as a moneymaker, but primarily as an “empire builder.” As Carroll Quigley explained, in 1891 three British elites met with the intent to create a secret society. The three men were Cecil Rhodes, William T. Stead, a prominent journalist of the day, and Reginald Baliol Brett, a “friend and confidant of Queen Victoria, and later to be the most influential adviser of King Edward VII and King George V.” Within this secret society, “real power was to be exercised by the leader, and a ‘Junta of Three.’ The leader was to be Rhodes, and the Junta was to be Stead, Brett, and Alfred Milner.”9 The purpose of this secret society, which was later headed by Alfred Milner, was: “The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise… [with] the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire.” [Emphasis added]10 Essentially, it outlined a British-led cosmopolitical world order, one global system of governance under British hegemony. Among key players within this group were the Rothschilds and other banking interests.11 After the 1907 banking panic in the US, instigated by JP Morgan, pressure was placed upon the American political establishment to create a “stable” banking system. In 1910, a secret meeting of financiers was held on Jekyll Island, where they planned for the “creation of a National Reserve Association with fifteen major regions, controlled by a board of commercial bankers but empowered by the federal government to act like a central bank – creating money and lending reserves to private banks.”12 It was largely Paul M. Warburg, a Wall Street investment banker, who “had come up with a design for a single central bank [in 1910]. He called it the United Reserve Bank. From this and his later service on the first Federal Reserve Board, Warburg has, with some justice, been called the father of the System.”13President Woodrow Wilson followed the plan almost exactly as outlined by the Wall Street financiers, and added to it the creation of a Federal Reserve Board in Washington, which the President would appoint.14 Thus, true power in the world order was held by international banking houses, which privately owned the global central banking system, allowing them to control the credit of nations, and finance and control governments and industry. However, though the economic system was firmly in their control, allowing them to establish influence over finance, they needed to shape elite ideology accordingly. In effect, what was required was to socially construct a ruling class, internationally, which would serve their interests. To do this, these bankers set out to undertake a project of establishing think tanks to organise elites from politics, economics, academia, media, and the military into a generally cohesive and controllable ideology. Constructing a Ruling Class: Rise of the Think Tanks During World War I, a group of American scholars were tasked with briefing “Woodrow Wilson about options for the postwar world once the Kaiser and imperial Germany fell to defeat.” This group was called, “The Inquiry.” The group advised Wilson mostly through his trusted aide, Col. Edward M. House, who was Wilson’s “unofficial envoy to Europe during the period between the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the intervention by the United States in 1917,” and was the prime driving force in the Wilson administration behind the establishment of the Federal Reserve System.15 “The Inquiry” laid the foundations for the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the most powerful think tank in the US and, “The scholars of the Inquiry helped draw the borders of post World War I central Europe.” On May 30, 1919, a group of scholars and diplomats from Britain and the US met at the Hotel Majestic, where they “proposed a permanent Anglo-American Institute of International Affairs, with one branch in London, the other in New York.” When the scholars returned from Paris, they were met with open arms by New York lawyers and financiers, and together they formed the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921. The “British diplomats returning from Paris had made great headway in founding their Royal Institute of International Affairs.” The Anglo-American Institute envisioned in Paris, with two branches and combined membership was not feasible, so both the British and American branches retained national membership, however, they would cooperate closely with one another.16 They were referred to, and still are, as “Sister Institutes.”17 The Milner Group, the secret society formed by Cecil Rhodes, “dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it.”18 There were other groups founded in many countries representing the same interests of the secret Milner Group, and they came to be known as the Round Table Groups, preeminent among them were the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States, and parallel groups were set up in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India.19 These were, in effect, the first international think tanks, which remain today, and are in their respective nations, among the top, if not the most prominent think tanks. In 2008, a major study was done by the University of Philadelphia’s International Relations Program – the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program – which sought to analyse and examine the most powerful and influential think tanks in the world. While it is a useful resource to understanding the influence of think tanks, there is a flaw in its analysis. It failed to take into account the international origins of the Round Table Group think tanks, particularly the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States; Chatham House or the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London; the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, now renamed the Canadian International Council; and their respective sister organisations in India, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Further nations have since added to this group of related think tanks, including Germany, and a recently established European Council on Foreign Relations. The report, while putting focus on the international nature of think tanks, analysed these ones as separate institutions without being related or affiliated. This has, in effect, skewed the results of the study. However, it is still useful to examine. The top think tanks in the United States include the Council on Foreign Relations, (which was put at number 2, however, should be placed at the number 1 spot), the Brookings Institution, (which was inaccurately given the position of number one), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, RAND Corporation, Heritage Foundation, Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the American Enterprise Institute, among others. The top think tanks in the world, outside of the United States, are Chatham House (sitting at number one), the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the UK, the German Council on Foreign Relations, the French Institute of International Relations, the Adam Smith Institute in the UK, the Fraser Institute in Canada, the European Council on Foreign Relations, the International Crisis Group in Belgium, and the Canadian Institute of International Affairs.20 In 1954, the Bilderberg Group was founded in the Netherlands. Every year since then the group holds a secretive meeting, drawing roughly 130 of the political-financial-military-academic-media elites from North America and Western Europe as “an informal network of influential people who could consult each other privately and confidentially.”21 Regular participants include the CEOs or Chairmen of some of the largest corporations in the world, oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, and Total SA, as well as various European monarchs, international bankers such as David Rockefeller, major politicians, presidents, prime ministers, and central bankers of the world.22 The Bilderberg Group acts as a “secretive global think-tank,” with an original intent “to link governments and economies in Europe and North America amid the Cold War.”23 In 1970, David Rockefeller became Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, while also being Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan. In 1970, an academic who joined the Council on Foreign Relations in 1965 wrote a book called Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. The author, Zbigniew Brzezinski, called for the formation of “A Community of the Developed Nations,” consisting of Western Europe, the United States and Japan. Brzezinski wrote about how “the traditional sovereignty of nation states is becoming increasingly unglued as transnational forces such as multinational corporations, banks, and international organisations play a larger and larger role in shaping global politics.” So, in 1972, David Rockefeller and Brzezinski “presented the idea of a trilateral grouping at the annual Bilderberg meeting.” In July of 1972, seventeen powerful people met at David Rockefeller’s estate in New York to plan for the creation of another grouping. Also at the meeting was Brzezinski, McGeorge Bundy, the President of the Ford Foundation, (brother of William Bundy, editor of Foreign Affairs) and Bayless Manning, President of the Council on Foreign Relations.24 In 1973, these people formed the Trilateral Commission, which acted as a sister organisation to Bilderberg, linking the elites of Western Europe, North America, and Japan into a transnational ruling class. These think tanks have effectively socially constructed an ideologically cohesive ruling class in each nation and fostered the expansion of international ideological alignment among national elites, allowing for the development of a transnational ruling class sharing a dominant ideology. These same interests, controlled by the international banking houses, had to socially construct society itself. To do this, they created a massive network of tax-exempt foundations and non-profit organisations, which shaped civil society according to their designs. Among the most prominent of these are the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. The “Foundations” of Civil Society These foundations shaped civil society by financing research projects and initiatives into major social projects, creating both a dominant world-view for the elite classes, as well as managing the other classes. These foundations, since their establishment, played a large part in the funding and organising of the eugenics movement, which helped facilitate this racist, elitist ideology to having enormous growth and influence, ultimately culminating in the Nazi Holocaust. From then, the word “eugenics” had to be dropped from the ideology and philanthropy of elites, and was replaced with new forms of eugenics policies and concepts. Among them, genetics, population control and environmentalism. These foundations also funded seemingly progressive and alternative media sources in an effort to control the opposition, and manage the resistance to their world order, essentially making it ineffective and misguided. The Rockefeller Foundation was established in 1912, and immediately began giving money to eugenics research organisations.25 Eugenics was a pseudo-scientific and social science movement that emerged in the late 19th century, and gained significant traction in the first half of the 20th century. One of the founding ideologues of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist and cousin to Charles Darwin, wrote that eugenics “is the study of all agencies under social control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.”26 Ultimately, it was about the “sound” breeding of people and maintaining “purity” and “superiority” of the blood. It was an inherently racist ideology, which saw all non-white racial categories of people as inherently and naturally inferior, and sought to ground these racist theories in “science.” The vast wealth and fortunes of the major industrialists and bankers in the United States flowed heavily into the eugenics organisations, promoting and expanding this racist and elitist ideology. Money from the Harriman railroad fortune, with millions given by the Rockefeller and Carnegie family fortunes were subsequently “devoted to sterilisation of several hundred thousands of American ‘defectives’ annually, as a matter of eugenics.”27 In the United States, 27 states passed eugenics based sterilisation laws of the “unfit,” which ultimately led to the sterilisation of over 60,000 people. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the Carnegie and especially the Rockefeller Foundation, funded eugenics research in Germany, directly financing the Nazi scientists who perpetrated some of the greatest crimes of the Holocaust.28 Following the Holocaust, the word “eugenics” was highly discredited. Thus, these elites who wanted to continue with the implementation of their racist and elitist ideology desperately needed a new name for it. In 1939, the Eugenics Records Office became known as the Genetics Record Office.29 However, tens of thousands of Americans continued to be sterilised throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s, the majority of which were women.30 Edwin Black analysed how the pseudoscience of eugenics transformed into what we know as the science of genetics. In a 1943 edition of Eugenical News, an article titled “Eugenics After the War,” cited Charles Davenport, a major founder of eugenics, in his vision of “a new mankind of biological castes with master races in control and slave races serving them.”31 A 1946 article in Eugenical News stated that, “Population, genetics, [and] psychology, are the three sciences to which the eugenicist must look for the factual material on which to build an acceptable philosophy of eugenics and to develop and defend practical eugenics proposals.” As Black explained, “the incremental effort to transform eugenics into human genetics forged an entire worldwide infrastructure,” with the founding of the Institute for Human Genetics in Copenhagen in 1938, led by Tage Kemp, a Rockefeller Foundation eugenicist, and was financed with money from the Rockefeller Foundation.32 Today, much of civil society and major social projects are a product of these foundations, and align with various new forms of eugenics. The areas of population control and environmentalism are closely aligned and span a broad range of intellectual avenues. The major population control organisations emerged with funding from these various foundations, particularly the Rockefeller foundations and philanthropies. These organisations, such as the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, funded major civil society movements, such as the Civil Rights movement, in an effort to “create a wedge between social movement activists and their unpaid grassroots constituents, thereby facilitating professionalisation and institutionalisation within the movement,” ultimately facilitating a “narrowing and taming of the potential for broad dissent,” with an aim of limiting goals to “ameliorative rather than radical change.”33 Two major organisations in the development of the environmental movement were the Conservation Foundation and Resources for the Future, which were founded and funded with money from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and helped “launch an explicitly pro-corporate approach to resource conservation.”34 Even the World Wildlife Fund was founded in the early 1960s by the former president of the British Eugenics Society, and its first President was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a founding member of the Bilderberg Group. While the environmental movement positions people as the major problem for the earth, relating humanity to a cancer, population control becomes a significant factor in proposing environmental solutions. In May of 2009, a secret meeting of billionaire philanthropists took place in which they sought to coordinate how to “address” the world’s environmental, social, and industrial threats. Each billionaire at the meeting was given 15 minutes to discuss their “preferred” cause, and then they deliberated to create an “umbrella” cause to harness all their interests. The end result was that the umbrella cause for which the billionaires would aim to “give to” was population control, which “would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.” Among those present at the meeting were David Rockefeller, Jr., George Soros, Warren Buffet, Michael Bloomberg, Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and even Oprah Winfrey.35 Conclusion At the top of the list of those who run the world, we have the major international banking houses, which control the global central banking system. From there, these dynastic banking families created an international network of think tanks, which socialised the ruling elites of each nation and the international community as a whole, into a cohesive transnational elite class. The foundations they established helped shape civil society both nationally and internationally, playing a major part in the funding – and thus coordinating and co-opting – of major social-political movements. An excellent example of one member of the top of the hierarchy of the global elite is David Rockefeller, patriarch of the Rockefeller family. Long serving as Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan bank, he revolutionised the notion of building a truly global bank. He was also Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a founding member of Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission, heavily involved in the family philanthropies, and sits atop a vast number of boards and foundations. Even Alan Greenspan, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, said that David Rockefeller and the CFR have, “in many respects, formulated the foreign policy of this country.”36 In another speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, then World Bank President James Wolfesohn, said in 2005, in honour of David Rockefeller’s 90th birthday, that, “the person who had perhaps the greatest influence on my life professionally in this country, and I’m very happy to say personally there afterwards, is David Rockefeller.” He then said, “In fact, it’s fair to say that there has been no other single family influence greater than the Rockefeller’s in the whole issue of globalisation and in the whole issue of addressing the questions which, in some ways, are still before us today. And for that David, we’re deeply grateful to you and for your own contribution in carrying these forward in the way that you did.”37 David Rockefeller, himself, wrote, “For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicised incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterising my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”38 About the Author ANDREW G. MARSHALL is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization based out of Montreal, Canada (www.globalresearch.ca). He has written extensively on issues imperialism in the Middle East and Africa, the environment, Homeland Security, war, terrorism and the global economy. He is currently studying Global Political Economy and the History of the Middle East and Africa at Simon Fraser University (Canada). Footnotes: 1. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, New York: Macmillan Company, 1966, 324 2. Carroll Quigley, op.cit., 515; Robert Elgie and Helen Thompson, ed., The Politics of Central Banks, New York: Routledge, 1998, 97-98 3. Sylvia Nasar, ‘Masters of the Universe’, The New York Times: January 23, 2000; ‘The Family That Bankrolled Europe’, BBC News: July 9, 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/389053.stm 4. Carroll Quigley, op.cit., 51 5. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Harper Perennial: New York, 2003, 323 6. Carroll Quigley, op.cit., 130 7. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, New York: Basic Books, 2004, 186 8. Ibid, 190 9. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, GSG & Associates, 1981, 3 10. Ibid, 33 11. Ibid, 34 12. William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987, 276 13. John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1975, 121-122 14. William Greider, op.cit., 277 15. H.W. Brands, ‘He Is My Independent Self’, The Washington Post: June 11, 2006:www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/08/AR2006060801104.html 16. CFR, ‘Continuing the Inquiry. History of CFR’: www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/inquiry.html 17. Chatham House, ‘CHATHAM HOUSE (The Royal Institute of International Affairs): Background’, Chatham House History: www.chathamhouse.org.uk/about/history/ 18. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, op.cit., 5 19. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, op.cit., 132-133 20. James G. McGann, Ph.D., The Global “Go-To Think Tanks”: The Leading Public Policy Research Organizations In The World, The Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program: University of Pennsylvania, International Relations Program, 2008, 26-28 21. CBC, ‘Informal forum or global conspiracy?’, CBC News Online: June 13, 2006:www.cbc.ca/news/background/bilderberg-group/ 22. Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, South End Press: 1980, 161-171 23. Glen McGregor, ‘Secretive power brokers meeting coming to Ottawa?’, Ottawa Citizen: May 24, 2006 24. Holly Sklar, ed., op.cit., 76-78 25. Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, New York: Thunders’s Mouth Press, 2004, 93 26. Ibid, 18 27. Ibid, 101-102 28. Edwin Black, ‘Eugenics and the Nazis – the California connection’, The San Francisco Chronicle: November 9, 2003 29. Edwin Black, War Against the Weak, op.cit., 396 30. Ibid, 398 31. Ibid, 416 32. Ibid, 418 33. Michael Barker, The Liberal Foundations of Environmentalism: Revisiting the Rockefeller-Ford Connection, Capitalism Nature Socialism: 19, (2), June 2008, 18 34. Ibid, 19-20 35. John Harlow, ‘Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation’, Times Online: May 24, 2009 36. CFR, Remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations Annual Corporate Conference, Transcripts: March 10, 2005:www.cfr.org/publication/7908/remarks_at_the_council_on_foreign_relations_annual_corporate_conference.html 37. CFR, Council on Foreign Relations Special Symposium in honor of David Rockefeller’s 90th Birthday, Transcript: May 23, 2005:www.cfr.org/publication/8133/council_on_foreign_relations_special_symposium_in_honor_of_david_rockefellers_90th_birthday.html 38. David Rockefeller, Memoirs, New York: Random House: 2002, 405 The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 118 (Jan-Feb 2010). If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn. © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author. © Copyright New Dawn Magazine, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com. Permission granted to freely distribute this article for non-commercial purposes if unedited and copied in full, including this notice. © Copyright New Dawn Magazine, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com. Permission to re-send, post and place on web sites for non-commercial purposes, and if shown only in its entirety with no changes or additions. This notice must accompany all re-posting. ~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with the buttons below… https://www.wakingtimes.com/who-really-runs-the-world-conspiracies-hidden-agendas-the-plan-for-world-government/

The Khazarian Mafia in Hollywood Jonas E. Alexis, Senior EditorOctober 25, 2022 by Jonas E. Alexis, VT Editor If you walk into the film industry and start interviewing people like Eli Roth, you will almost certainly hear incredible and bizarre things. Roth would tell you that he aspires to “fuck up an entire generation”[1] through movies. Roth and his brethren have been in the business for years, so they know the drill. Roth probably knows the story of Samson and Delilah. He probably knows that Samson’s lust darkened his mind and eventually sent him to his death.[2] Roth almost certainly knows that the best way to destroy the morals of his audience is to prey on their lust and appetite. That is why Roth’s brethren have spent years fighting against obscenity laws and pornography in the United States.[3] roth2 As Jewish scholar Nathan Abrams himself puts it, “Older generation of Jewish filmmakers and actors, here [Woody] Allen, [Stanley] Kubrick and [Ron] Jeremy, arguably not only increased the Jewishness of their work but updated it to match the new post-1990 sensibility by defining it in increasingly sexualized (and pornographic) terms.”[4] Abrams declared elsewhere that “Jewish involvement in porn” is actually “is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion.”[5] Another Jewish scholar by the name of Josh Lambert tells us that people like Larry David and Sarah Silverman “are challenging America’s powerful religious, family-friendly culture and asserting their Jewishness by glorifying obscenity.”[6] Yet David and Silverman are hardly the only people who are “glorifying obscenity” in Hollywood. David Cronenberg obviously beat them to the punch. Cronenberg got to the heart of the matter years ago by laying out his ideological weltanschauung in an interview with Rolling Stone this way: “Nothing is true. It’s not an absolute. It’s only a human construct, very definitely able to change and susceptible to change and rethinking. And you can then be free. Free to be unethical, immoral, out of society, and an agent for some other power, never belonging. “Ultimately, if you are an existentialist and you don’t believe in God and the judgment after death, then you can do anything you want: You can kill, you can do whatever society considers the most taboo thing.”[7] Cronenberg’s moral calculus here is logically and philosophically incoherent. If “nothing is true,” then Cronenberg’s statement that “nothing is true” is not true. In order for the statement to make sense, Cronenberg has to assume that it is true! And if it is true, then the “nothing is true” is categorically false, which means that his entire argument collapses. In short, Cronenberg is positing truth claims while denying truth exists! He is trapped in his own ideological matrix.[8] Living the incoherency of his system aside, Cronenberg is basically saying that you can only be free if you can come to the conclusion that nothing is true and that morality is, as philosopher Michael Ruse believes, “flimflam.”[9] But because he is morally and intellectually blind, Cronenberg could not realize that his axiom is self-defeating. Morality, as we all know, is inexorably linked to practical reason. It is also essential to esthetic truth and intellectual pursuit and honesty. As E. Michael Jones rightly puts it, “The intellectual life is a function of the moral life of the thinker. In order to apprehend truth, which is the goal of the intellectual life, one must live a moral life. One can produce an intellectual product, but to the extent that one prescinds from living the moral life, that product will be more a function of internal desire—wish fulfillment, if you will than external reality. This is true of any intellectual field and any deeply held desire.”[10] Truth, as Plato puts it, is like seeing things the way they really are.[11] And the practical reason (another word for morality) is one of the main tools for discovering metaphysical truth. Yet since Cronenberg dismisses practical reason in his ideological calculus, there was no way for him to make a logical point without falling into his own trap. In the process, he has become a monster, as one scholar has argued.[12] The Rolling Stone interviewer asked, “Does the artist have any moral or social responsibility?” Cronenberg: “No…Your responsibility is to be irresponsible. As soon as you talk about social or political responsibility, you’ve amputated the best limbs you’ve got as an artist. You are plugging into a very restrictive system that is going to push and pull and mold you and is going to make your art totally useless and ineffective.”[13] Cronenberg’s philosophy, scholar William Beard tells us, is “the disappearance of ethics.”[14] It is actually “a world of unimpeded desires without consequences, where ‘everything is permitted.’ Metaphorically, this is the world of violent video games, of indulgent Hollywood movies, and also of the transgressive, boundary-piercing cinema of David Cronenberg.”[15] No responsibility, no morality, no ethical values, and no limit, nothing but ultimate meaninglessness and existential hell in movies. Existence itself, as indicated in Cronenberg’s movie eXistenZ, means corruption, moral degradation, and ultimately pathetic death. The axiom of eXistenZ is that “nothing is true; everything is permitted.”[16] “Every time I kill someone in my movie,” says Cronenberg, “I’m rehearsing my own death…It’s an existential truth, it’s very raw and real.” Didn’t Cronenberg state that nothing was true? Why is he now smuggling in truth in his philosophical trap? Cronenberg, who has a “historic affinity with existentialism,”[17] is also playing with the lives of his viewers. He admits that eXistenZ is filled with “existential propaganda.”[18] Scholar William Beard comments: “The disappearance of stable theoretical foundations for human society and human values, the stark realization of the insignificant position of humanity in a material cosmos, the undermining of all kinds of knowledge about the world and ourselves, leaves the existential human subject without a clear guideline for living, with no certainty of anything but his or her own death…Culture, science, the whole edifice of modern European civilization are ineffectual in addressing the individual’s desperate plight.”[19] Once the existentialist denies metaphysical truth, he has to start creating his own “truth”: “From this, we must create ourselves as meaningful beings, and create the world as meaningful for ourselves. From this we must build up the new foundations of our own lives, adding other people, culture, history, and politics tentatively and fragmentedly as necessary…”[20] Existentialists like Cronenberg, says Beard, “cut individuals off from the fundamental questions of personal existence, and leave them alienated in a world crowded with facts but void of meaning.”[21] The philosophy of existentialism teaches Cronenberg that people “are all doomed to die and be swallowed up by Nothingness, but along the way, we may carve out a niche or ledge on the cliff…”[22] Therefore “science” and technology are meaningful if they can advance sexual desires and appetite.[23] It was no coincidence that Cronenberg seized technology in the information age to advance his appetite to a wider audience. He bragged that “technology is with us,”[24] meaning that he can use that kind of medium to get his essentially Freudian and therefore Talmudic ideas to unsuspecting viewers. Put simply, Cronenberg is indirectly reinventing what Nietzsche would have called the transvaluation of all values, which again states that morality is an illusion and that any culture which becomes docile to the moral order must be overthrown. But in order to do that, Cronenberg has to go back to his revolutionary roots, which is neither Western nor rational but essentially Talmudic or Freudian: “I think we start off with what Freud called a polymorphous perverseness.”[25] One can easily argue that this “polymorphous perverseness” is at the core of virtually every Cronenberg film. In fact, Cronenberg admitted that characters in movies like Crash, M. Butterfly, Naked Lunch, Dead Ringers, and Stereo, were “reinventing sexuality,”[26] which is another way of saying that Cronenberg’s characters were subverting the sexual order.[27] Cronenberg’s existential philosophy, Beard says, is “sexual or predatory, a drive, an appetite, that invokes Freud far more readily than the Sartre who heatedly rejected a Freudian view of life in which individuals were unfree prisoners of their psychic histories and hardwired desires.”[28] Cronenberg’s characters in eXistenZ, Beard continues, “seem to reproduce that quasi-Freudian sense that their individual freedom—a sacrosanct item of the existentialist creed—is compromised by appetites that are so powerful they are strongly impelled to do something ethically ugly. This happens to Pikul in the Chinese restaurant. He finds he wants to kill the waiter and is told by Geller that the impulse is part of his game character’s make-up and that he won’t be able to do anything to stop it.”[29] David and Brandon Cronenberg David and Brandon Cronenberg The interesting thing is that Cronenberg has successfully passed his essentially diabolical ideas to his son Brandon, who is now following the family tradition. That fact became quite obvious when David edited Brandon’s first feature film Antiviral,[30] which the Rolling Stone itself has described as “sickening,” and which has the same “disturbing obsession with bodies and technology that animates his father’s films, from The Fly and Dead Ringers to Videodrome and Existenz.”[31] The Rolling Stone reported, “The son was infected with his father’s own sense of cerebral horror, and he is not rebelling against it. ‘I wrestled with it at first,’ he says, ‘but you get affected by how you grow up….’”[32] Cronenberg, whether he likes it or not, should be called a Satanist precisely because he is anti-Logos.[33] But there is a bigger picture here. Cronenberg’s ideology has been transported to places like Japan as well. For example, one of Japan’s most controversial filmmakers is none other than Takashi Miike. Miike says that he is a fervent admirer of directors like David Lynch (Lost Highway), Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct), and of course David Cronenberg. These people are what one should call cultural subverters. Verhoeven meant it when he said: “As a director, my goal is to be completely open. Just look at how I portray sex in my films. They’re considered shocking and obscene because I like to carefully examine human sexuality. It has to be realistic.”[34] Verhoeven also declares that he has been “fascinated by the occult: black magic, UFOs, and kinetic energy. I also experimented with hypnotism, trying to get my friends to remember former lives.”[35] It was a natural step for Verhoeven to move from an interest in the occult to bringing his viewpoint to life in films. Turning from the unknown and unknowable, Verhoeven replaced his own ideology with reality: “My films became my anchor to reality, and I began to make extremely realistic movies. I felt compelled to show things as explicitly as possible—a tendency which many film critics have dismissed as banal.”[36] Verhoeven applied this tendency most often to the area of sexuality, explicitly portraying sex in movies like Showgirls, Basic Instinct, Turkish Delight, and The Fourth Man. Yet even in RoboCop, which in comparison has little sexuality, Verhoeven’s worldview is clear—this time he is substituting Logos incarnate with his own imagination: “It’s pure resurrection. For me, RoboCop is a Cytale. First, Murphy is gunned down in the most horrific way: that is Crucifixion. And it has to be so violent because the audience has to remember him. “Before that, he has not done anything in the film. He comes to the police station to put on his uniform, then he goes after the villains with his partner, and bang! he is dead. That shooting is the only thing about him—I did that deliberately. “Next, the film makes a steep descent into the finite, after which he experiences his Resurrection, in a modern-day…RoboCop is a Jesus figure—an American Jesus…Americans want to be humane, but if they think it takes too long, Christian morality is pushed aside for the moment and they go for their weapons—just like Robocop.”[37] Biographer Rob van Scheers writes, “Both in his films and in his personal life, Paul Verhoeven has always practiced a free sexual morality of which he makes no secret…Verhoeven would add in the gay magazine The Advocate: ‘Sex is a form of play—doing what you did when you were four or five years old and were playing in the street with your friends. Once you are grown up, it is difficult to be playful, but one of the ways you can is with sex. It is a way of showing yourself: That’s how I’m made. This is what I like.”[38] Takashi Miike and Eli roth Takashi Miike and Eli roth In short, Verhoeven and Takashi Miike are on the same subversive boat. Both individuals want to overthrow the moral order. Eli Roth and Takashi Miike are also in the same boat, working to “fu$k an entire generation.” Of course, Roth himself admitted that he admires Miike’s work. In fact, Roth would have loved to make Ichi the Killer 2. Keep in mind that Ichi the Killer is one of Miike’s “most controversial films,” an “ultra-violent” film that portrays “sadomasochistic” scenes. Miike admits in an interview with the BBC that he is a “feminist,” so it was inevitable that he would pull this ideology out of his film. “Miike has garnered international notoriety for depicting shocking scenes of extreme violence and sexual perversions…” Of course, this is exactly what Eli Roth and David Cronenberg have been doing for years. What we are seeing here is that Hollywood stirred the subversive pot, and other nations such as Japan and South Korea followed suit. Even the new South Korean movie, Train to Busan, “borrows heavily from World War Z in its depiction of the fast-moving undead masses while also boasting an emotional core the Brad Pitt-starring extravaganza often lacked.”[39] If no social progress is possible outside the moral order, then Satanists in Hollywood are contributing to the demise of social docility and cultural harmony around the world. The solution? A return to practical reason and metaphysical Logos, the essence of true creativity and beauty. Movies such as The Lord of the Rings were written under those premises. As Israel Shamir rightly points out, Logos is “the main fountain of creativity.” Shamir also argues that true visual art or poetry simply cannot exist outside of Logos.[40] If Satanists in Hollywood reject “the main fountain of creativity,” then they can only produce degradation, ugliness, meaninglessness, despair, and ultimate chaos and confusion. It was only a matter of time before the art world was used as a weapon against Logos: “A photograph of a crucifix in a container of urine, entitled Piss Christ, was exhibited in the Whitney Museum, which is headed by a great friend of [former Israeli Prime Minister] Ariel Sharon, a member of Mega, Leonard Lauder.”[41] This is one reason why people like Carolee Schneemann use nothing but blatant sadistic/ sadomasochistic sexual imagery in their “art.” First published in October 2016. Citations [1] Quoted in Stuart Dredge, “Netflix series Hemlock Grove: ‘People want their horror horrific,’ says Eli Roth,” Guardian, April 10, 2013. [2] See E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008), 1054-1056. [3] See Josh Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014). [4] Nathan Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 72. [5] Nathan Abrams, “Triple-exthnics,” Jewish Quarterly, Winter 2004. [6] Josh Lambert, “‘Dirty Jews’ and the Christian Right,” Haaretz, February 3, 2014. [7] David Breskin, “David Cronenberg: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, February 6, 1992: 66-70. [8] It is almost the same thing with relativism. I have been listening to an interview E. Michael Jones did with Alex Fontana during which Fontana declared that he doesn’t know if he agrees with “objective reality.” He then lays out his position by saying, “I guess I am a relativist.” I was completely stunned because during the entire interview Fontana was basically dissecting some ideas in the culture and implicitly arguing that they were wrong! Fontana could not see that there is no way to adjudicate two fundamentally opposite ideas if relativism is true. I was also shocked because relativism has been abandoned by serious thinkers years ago precisely because it is devoid of coherency and rigor. This is why Jones told him that relativism “is incoherent. It makes no sense ultimately.” I have discussed the incoherency of relativism in numerous articles. An example can be found here. [9] Michael Ruse, “God is dead. Long live morality,” Guardian, March 15, 2010. [10] E. Michael Jones, Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2012), 15. [11] Plato, The Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 116. [12] See for example William Beard, The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). [13] Breskin, “David Cronenberg: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, February 6, 1992: 66-70. [14] William Beard, The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 434. [15] Ibid., 443. [16] Ibid., 434 [17] Ibid., 429. [18] Ibid., 430. [19] Ibid., 430-431. [20] Ibid., 431. [21] Ibid. [22] Ibid., 433. [23] Ibid., 430. [24] Ibid., 446. [25] Breskin, “David Cronenberg: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, February 6, 1992: 66-70. [26] Beard, Artist as Monster, 452. [27] Beard goes into great detail of this. See pages 452-453, 455-456. [28] Beard, Artist as Monster, 433. [29] Ibid., 434. [30] Bruce Kirkland, “Brandon Cronenberg brings first feature film ‘Antiviral’ home,” Toronto Sun, September 9, 2012. [31] Logan Hill, “’Antiviral’ Explores Sickness of Celebrity Culture,” Rolling Stone, April 10, 2013. [32] Ibid. [33] For a dissertation on this, see E. Michael Jones, “The Great Satan and Me: Reflections on Iran and Postmodernism’s Faustian Pact,” Culture Wars, July/August 2015. [34] Rob van Scheers, Paul Verhoeven (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 159-161. [35] Paul Verhoeven, Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010), xi, 5. [36] Ibid., 6. [37] Van Scheers, Paul Verhoeven, 195. [38] Ibid., 258. [39] Clark Collis, “Train to Busan: EW review,” Entertainment Weekly, July 22, 2016. [40] Israel Shamir, Cabbala of Power (Charleston, SC: BookSurge, 2007), 153. [41] Ibid., 150. ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://veteranstoday.com/2022/10/25/the-khazarian-mafia-in-hollywood/

The Alternative Healthcare Model is the Original One Calling all doctors and patients to rebuild the healthcare landscape Dr. Syed Haider Norman Rockwell Visits A Family Doctor,” A Story, 57% OFF Doctors usually make good money in exchange for working way too much, while paradoxically spending way too little time with each patient. They’re pinched more and more every year by declining reimbursements from insurance companies, so they have to see more patients in the same amount of time. They also have to document visits in excruciating detail and are enslaved to their electronic medical records (EMRs) - which is why you almost never catch the eye of an insurance doc, they are so busy typing everything while talking to you. What you see in the visit is just the tip of the iceberg. They have more typing and arranging and clicking demanded by the bossy EMR outside the room before and after your visit. They also aren’t incentivized properly because the wrong person is paying them. You pay for health insurance and maybe a small copay visit fee, but most of their compensation comes to them via insurance, the middleman, so they are beholden to the insurance companies which are in bed with Big Harm-a (not misspelled). Image So Big Harm-a ultimately dictates what doctors can and can’t do, and via the insurance reimbursements dangles the most tempting bait if the government decides it’s time for something like mRNA shots all around. Almost all doctors are trapped in a vise that’s gradually tightening, but they don’t have to be. Most think there’s no easy way out, because they’ve never done the math on the rapidly growing alternative practice model. THE LIFELINE Most primary care physicians working with insurance have thousands of patients. A 2012 study published in the Annals of Family Medicine estimated that the average PCP has a panel of 2300 patients, and went on to note that: “Estimates suggest that a primary care physician would spend 21.7 hours per day to provide all recommended acute, chronic, and preventive care for a panel of 2,500 patients.” I have met many doctors with busy mature practices with panels of 5000 patients and above. On the other hand, cash pay direct primary care (DPC) docs have far fewer patients, often numbering in the low to mid hundreds depending on how much they charge (usual range is anywhere from $100-$500/month and can be higher for more specialized, exclusive or concierge level services). Even a low end DPC doc charging $100/month will clear the same or more than a typical insurance practice with just a few hundred patients (ie as little as 1/10th the patient panel). 500 patients at $100/month = $50,000/month = $600,000/year. Minus typical practice overhead of 50% = $300,000/year take home. (And overhead could go even lower in DPC due to no need for back office staff hired just to pester insurance companies to pay what they owe.) Depending on who you ask, the average PCP salary in the US is now somewhere between $200k and $260k per year, so $300k would be a really good, above market salary for an insurance doctor carrying a mid range 2300 patient panel, and all the PCPs on the wrong end of the bell curve make a lot less (while doing way more work). Thank you for reading Dr. Syed Haider. This post is public so feel free to share it. Share Any reasonably agreeable, likable doctor with thousands of preexisting insurance patients can easily transition to hundreds willing to pay monthly out of pocket to stay in their practice and get a lot more personal time and attention. And a doctor just starting out only needs to convince a few hundred patients to join his practice. Until they are up and running they can moonlight weekends at a local hospital to get by. For the best advertising/outreach they could just whip up a convincing presentation and go deliver it for free at nursing homes, schools and churches (or just copy one they find from someone else as a start and then make it their own). Hand out flyers with a number and link to a simple signup page with more free stuff, like a short video or ebook about simple changes to help finally resolve chronic health issues, optimize health or taper off chronic meds. The pitch is simple. You don’t need any more proof than your own experience to know that primary care is broken in the US. Of course there’s also plenty of data to support it. For example one study noted that “only 8% of US adults aged 35 years or older received all recommended, high-priority, appropriate clinical preventive services.” (Mechley, 2021) In any endeavor outcomes matter, but they are especially important in medicine. In the US 42% of people now have 2 or more chronic health conditions, and the rates are skyrocketing at the same time that healthcare utilization is shooting up. The more prescriptions and procedures we get, the more disease we have. On the other hand studies show that patients in DPC have better health, including fewer hospital stays, better blood pressures, and improved diabetes care. It stands to reason that if we cut out the middlemen and pay doctors the way we pay lawyers and plumbers, societal and personal health care costs would plummet because doctors would be incentivized to actually keep you healthy and out of the hospital and have the time to convince you to do what it takes to achieve the best health outcomes. LEAVE NO MAN BEHIND Along the way there are some easy solutions for privatizing health coverage for those who can’t afford it. It’s estimate that between 6 and 16% of Americans already have some form of DPC or concierge physician and that 8-16% of doctors are currently planning to transition to some form of cash based practice outside the mainstream insurance model. So where does that leave the rest of the country? Inflation is making it harder than ever for people to make ends meet, and it’s difficult to find a spare $100/month in most households. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. What we used to do to solve this problem wasn’t rely on big government, but for those who could afford it to donate money to groups like churches that built health care systems that treated people for free. Those same non profit systems do still exist in many cities, but have been warped by their interactions with insurance companies. We need to starve the insurance companies out of existence and transition to local communities supporting themselves again. In order to help cover expensive procedures, people who can afford to pay in to a plan monthly, can choose to join existing nonprofit health sharing co-ops that provide coverage similar to insurance at a much lower cost. Physicians should also normalize a culture of pro bono work the way lawyers have. They can provide premium concierge tier services for wealthy clients and a regular DPC tier for those who do have enough money, and another pro bono tier for those who don’t. I’ve written about my desire to start an online PCP service before and I’m still looking for a doctor who’s aligned with my own philosophy to help me launch it for mygotodoc. I’m also looking into how we can branch out and efficiently find new patients in a hybrid local telemedicine model. If any of you are physicians, NPs or PAs and are interested in starting your own local DPC/concierge style practice maybe we can help you market and launch it. AN INSATIABLE APPETITE Healthcare is the single biggest industry in the US today and like any capitalistic endeavor in a debt driven inflationary economy, it can only get bigger fast or die trying. This is a deeper topic, for another day, but you can see this post in the meantime that helps explain why that is: In order to grow at the current pace, “healthcare” actually needs to be disease care. If everyone who came in for a consult left without their illness, the whole industry would collapse and the bankers wouldn’t get paid back on the loans that keep it all afloat and growing. The trifecta of Big Ag, Big Chemical and Big Harm-a create a perfect storm of ever spreading disease. In the eye of that storm, there’s a welcoming casino where the doors are always open, that goes by the name of Medical Insurance. But medical insurance is far worse than simple gambling. Even though many people do get big payouts, the house always wins because disease is what’s incentivized, not health. In a casino they comp the room, in the insurance biz you get comped for bad care year in and year out that breeds disease. The only way to get rid of the super-sized insurance parasite, is to starve it to death by choosing an alternative system, to flee the roach motel while you still can. It will start small, but grow by leaps and bounds once people start to see others doing it more and more and then they too will jump ship. It seems like a difficult and dangerous leap, but it really isn’t. If doctors think it through and focus on the very reasonable numbers required to make it work it will be a lot more manageable and if patients prioritize their health and take a hard look at their finances, many may be able to swing it until there are more options that help the less fortunate pay for real healthcare rather than disease management. In the meantime it is possible to simply take radical responsibility for your health and get well without a doctor. You will find many people on social media who have done it and are more than happy to coach you to do it too. At least 90% of health, if not more, is really in your hands and is as simple as making different lifestyle choices: get motivated, increase emotional intimacy and time spent with family and friends without technology, improve emotional health with a gratitude practice, turn off the lights and screens at sunset, sleep early and deeply, wake early, work early rather than late, get direct sun throughout the day and spend as much time outdoors as possible, take walks, sweat a little, eat real, slow food made at home from scratch, avoid vegetable oils, get rid of chemicals from your home, invest in a simple and cheap air purifier (you can even DIY them for 20 bucks, or if you can swing it, a more fancy one like Molekule), etc. Sounds like a lot, but take it slow, take baby steps, and it will be easy. https://blog.mygotodoc.com/p/the-alternative-healthcare-model

Surveillance Capitalism and PsyWar Explanation of the central business model of Google, Facebook, and most social media Robert W Malone MD, MS Surveillance capitalism is a novel economic system that has emerged in the digital era. It is characterized by the unilateral claim of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. In this version of capitalism, predicting and influencing behavior (political and economic) rather than producing goods and services is the primary product. This economic logic prioritizes extracting, processing, and trading personal data to predict and influence human behavior by exploiting those predictions for various economic (marketing) and political objectives. In many cases, surveillance capitalism merges with PsyWar tools and technologies to power the modern surveillance state, giving rise to a new form of Fascism (public-private partnerships) known as techno-totalitarianism. Leading corporations employing the surveillance capitalism business model include Google, Amazon and Facebook. Surveillance capitalism has now fused with the science and theory of psychology, marketing, and algorithmic manipulation of online information to give rise to propaganda and censorship capabilities that go far beyond those imagined by the twentieth-century predictions of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Key Features of Surveillance Capitalism One-way mirror operations: Surveillance capitalists engineer operations to operate in secrecy, hiding their methods and intentions from users, who are unaware of the extent of data collection and analysis. Instrumentation power: Surveillance capitalists wield power by designing systems that cultivate “radical indifference,” rendering users oblivious to their observations and manipulations. Behavioral futures markets: The extracted data is traded in new markets, enabling companies to bet on users’ future behavior, generating immense wealth for surveillance capitalists. Collaboration with the state: Surveillance capitalism often involves partnerships with governments, leveraging favorable laws, policing, and information sharing to further entrench its power. Historical Development Surveillance capitalism has its roots in the early days of the internet, when companies like Google and Facebook exploited the “ungoverned spaces” of the digital realm. The dot-com bust, the success of Apple’s consumer-centric approach, and the surveillance-friendly environment created by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and CIA’s investments in the “war on terror” all contributed to the rise of surveillance capitalism. Consequences Loss of autonomy: Surveillance capitalism erodes individual autonomy as users are manipulated and influenced by algorithms designed to predict and shape their behavior. Threat to democracy: The concentration of power in the hands of surveillance capitalists undermines democratic processes, as they use their influence to shape public opinion and policy. Economic inequality: The wealth generated by surveillance capitalism exacerbates economic inequality, as those who own and control the data and algorithms reap the benefits while users are exploited as free commodities. Resistance and Reform To counter surveillance capitalism, it is essential to: Promote transparency and accountability: Demand greater openness about data collection and processing practices and mechanisms for users to exercise control over their data. Regulate surveillance capitalism: Establish robust regulations to limit the power of surveillance capitalists, protect user rights, and promote fair competition. Foster alternative economic models: Encourage the development of alternative economic systems that prioritize human well-being, autonomy, and democracy over profit and surveillance. Shoshana Zuboff “Surveillance Capitalism unilaterally claims our private human experience as a free source of raw material for its own production processes. It translates our experience into behavioral data. Those behavioral data are then combined with its advanced computation capabilities, what people today refer to as AI machine intelligence. Out of that black box come predictions about our behavior, what we will do now, soon and later. Turns out there are a lot of businesses that want to know what we will do in the future, and so these have constituted a new kind of marketplace, a marketplace that trades exclusively in behavioral futures, in our behavioral futures. That's where surveillance capitalists make their money. That's where the big pioneers of this economic logic, like Google and Facebook have become so wealthy by selling predictions of our behavior first to online targeted advertisers, and now of course, these business customers range across the entire economy, no longer confined to that original context of online targeted advertising. All of this is conducted in secret. All of this is conducted through the social relations of the One-Way mirror. Ergo surveillance, the vast amounts of capital that have been accumulated here are trained to create these systems in a way that keeps us ignorant. Specifically the data scientists write about their methods in a way that brags about the fact that these systems bypass our awareness so that they bypass our rights to say yes or no. I want to participate, or I don't want to participate. I want to contest, or I don't want to contest. I want to fight, or I don't want to fight. All of that is bypassed. We are robbed of the right to combat because we are engineered into ignorance. We saw these same methods being used by Cambridge Analytica with those revelations a year ago with only a tiny difference. All they did was take these same every day routine methods of surveillance, capitalism, pivot them just a couple of degrees toward political outcomes rather than commercial outcomes, showing that they could use our data to intervene and influence our behavior, our real world behavior, and our real world thinking and feeling in order to change political outcomes.” Publication scheduled for end of September 2024. Pre-purchase link here. Per Wikipedia Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics which denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. This phenomenon is distinct from government surveillance, although the two can be mutually reinforcing. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, is driven by a profit-making incentive, and arose as advertising companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.[1] Increased data collection may have various benefits for individuals and society, such as self-optimization (the quantified self),[2] societal optimizations (e.g., by smart cities) and optimized services (including various web applications). However, as capitalism focuses on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing,[2] this can have significant implications for vulnerability and control of society, as well as for privacy. The economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of online connection and monitoring, with spaces of social life opening up to saturation by corporate actors, directed at making profits and/or regulating behavior. Therefore, personal data points increased in value after the possibilities of targeted advertising were known.[3] As a result, the increasing price of data has limited access to the purchase of personal data points to the richest in society.[4] Shoshana Zuboff writes that "analyzing massive data sets began as a way to reduce uncertainty by discovering the probabilities of future patterns in the behavior of people and systems.[5] In 2014, Vincent Mosco referred to marketing information about customers and subscribers to advertisers as surveillance capitalism and made note of the surveillance state alongside it.[6] Christian Fuchs found that the surveillance state fuses with surveillance capitalism.[7] Similarly, Zuboff informs that the issue is further complicated by highly invisible collaborative arrangements with state security apparatuses. According to Trebor Scholz, companies recruit people as informants for this type of capitalism.[8] Zuboff contrasts the mass production of industrial capitalism with surveillance capitalism, where the former is interdependent with its populations, who are its consumers and employees, and the latter preys on dependent populations, who are neither its consumers nor its employees and largely ignorant of its procedures.[9] Their research shows that the capitalist addition to the analysis of massive amounts of data has taken its original purpose in an unexpected direction.[1] Surveillance has been changing power structures in the information economy, potentially shifting the balance of power further from nation-states and towards large corporations employing the surveillance capitalist logic.[10] Zuboff notes that surveillance capitalism extends beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm, accumulating not only surveillance assets and capital but also rights, and operating without meaningful mechanisms of consent.[9] In other words, analyzing massive data sets was at some point executed not only by the state apparatuses but also by companies. Zuboff claims that both Google and Facebook have invented surveillance capitalism and translated it into "a new logic of accumulation".[1][11][12] This mutation resulted in both companies collecting many data points about their users, with the core purpose of making a profit. Selling these data points to external users (particularly advertisers) has become an economic mechanism. The combination of the analysis of massive data sets and the use of these data sets as a market mechanism has shaped the concept of surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism has been heralded as the successor to neoliberalism.[13][14] Oliver Stone, creator of the film Snowden, pointed to the location-based game Pokémon Go as the "latest sign of the emerging phenomenon and demonstration of surveillance capitalism". Stone criticized that the location of its users was used not only for game purposes, but also to retrieve more information about its players. By tracking users' locations, the game collected far more information than just users' names and locations: "it can access the contents of your USB storage, your accounts, photographs, network connections, and phone activities, and can even activate your phone, when it is in standby mode". This data can then be analyzed and commodified by companies such as Google (which significantly invested in the game's development) to improve the effectiveness of the targeted advertisements.[15][16] Another aspect of surveillance capitalism is its influence on political campaigning. Personal data retrieved by data miners can enable various companies (most notoriously Cambridge Analytica) to improve the targeting of political advertising, a step beyond the commercial aims of previous surveillance capitalist operations. In this way, it is possible that political parties will be able to produce far more targeted political advertising to maximize its impact on voters. However, Cory Doctorow writes that the misuse of these data sets "will lead us towards totalitarianism".[17]This may resemble a corporatocracy, and Joseph Turow writes that "the centrality of corporate power is a direct reality at the very heart of the digital age".[2][18]: 17  The terminology "surveillance capitalism" was popularized by Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff.[19]: 107  In Zuboff's theory, surveillance capitalism is a novel market form and a specific logic of capitalist accumulation. In her 2014 essay A Digital Declaration: Big Data as Surveillance Capitalism, she characterized it as a "radically disembedded and extractive variant of information capitalism" based on commodifying "reality" and transforming it into behavioral data for analysis and sales.[20][21][22][23] In a subsequent article in 2015, Zuboff analyzed the societal implications of this mutation of capitalism. She distinguished between "surveillance assets", "surveillance capital", and "surveillance capitalism" and their dependence on a global architecture of computer mediation that she calls "Big Other", a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power that constitutes hidden mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that threatens core values such as freedom, democracy, and privacy.[24][2] According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism was pioneered by Google and later Facebook, just as mass-production and managerial capitalism were pioneered by Ford and General Motors a century earlier, and has now become the dominant form of information capitalism.[9] Zuboff emphasizes that behavioral changes enabled by artificial intelligence have become aligned with the financial goals of American internet companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon.[19]: 107  In her Oxford University lecture published in 2016, Zuboff identified the mechanisms and practices of surveillance capitalism, including producing "prediction products" for sale in new "behavioral futures markets." She introduced the concept of "dispossession by surveillance", arguing that it challenges the psychological and political bases of self-determination by concentrating rights in the surveillance regime. This is described as a "coup from above."[25] Zuboff's book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism[26] is a detailed examination of the unprecedented power of surveillance capitalism and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control human behavior.[26] Zuboff identifies four key features in the logic of surveillance capitalism and explicitly follows the four key features identified by Google's chief economist, Hal Varian:[27] The drive toward more and more data extraction and analysis. The development of new contractual forms using computer-monitoring and automation. The desire to personalize and customize the services offered to users of digital platforms. The use of the technological infrastructure to carry out continual experiments on its users and consumers. Zuboff compares demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet to asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand and states that such demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity's survival.[9] Zuboff warns that principles of self-determination might be forfeited due to "ignorance, learned helplessness, inattention, inconvenience, habituation, or drift" and states that "we tend to rely on mental models, vocabularies, and tools distilled from past catastrophes," referring to the twentieth century's totalitarian nightmares or the monopolistic predations of Gilded Age capitalism, with countermeasures that have been developed to fight those earlier threats not being sufficient or even appropriate to meet the novel challenges.[9] She also poses the question: "will we be the masters of information, or will we be its slaves?" and states that "if the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so".[28] Zuboff discusses the differences between industrial capitalism and surveillance capitalism in her book. Zuboff writes that as industrial capitalism exploits nature, surveillance capitalism exploits human nature.[29] Zuboff, Shoshana (January 2019). "Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action". New Labor Forum. 28 (1): 10–29. doi:10.1177/1095796018819461. ISSN 1095-7960. S2CID 159380755. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Couldry, Nick (23 September 2016). "The price of connection: 'surveillance capitalism'". The Conversation. Archived from the original on 20 May 2020. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (1 June 2018), Data analytics and big data: chapter 5: Data analytics process:there's great work behind the scenes, pp. 77–99, doi:10.1002/9781119528043.ch5, ISBN 978-1-119-52804-3, S2CID 243896249 ^ Jump up to:a b Cadwalladr, Carole (20 June 2019). "The Great Hack". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 4 February 2020. Retrieved 6 February 2020. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana; Möllers, Norma; Murakami Wood, David; Lyon, David (31 March 2019). "Surveillance Capitalism: An Interview with Shoshana Zuboff". Surveillance & Society. 17 (1/2): 257–266. doi:10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.13238. ISSN 1477-7487. ^ Mosco, Vincent (17 November 2015). To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World. Routledge. ISBN 9781317250388. Archived from the original on 19 October 2021. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ Fuchs, Christian (20 February 2017). Social Media: A Critical Introduction. SAGE. ISBN 9781473987494. Archived from the original on 19 October 2021. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ Scholz, Trebor (27 December 2016). Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781509508181. Archived from the original on 19 October 2021. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e Zuboff, Shoshana (5 March 2016). "Google as a Fortune Teller: The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism". Faz.net. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Archived from the original on 11 February 2017. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ Galič, Maša; Timan, Tjerk; Koops, Bert-Jaap (13 May 2016). "Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation". Philosophy & Technology. 30: 9–37. doi:10.1007/s13347-016-0219-1. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana. "Shoshana Zuboff: A Digital Declaration". FAZ.NET (in German). ISSN 0174-4909. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 18 May 2020. ^ "Shoshana Zuboff On surveillance capitalism". Contagious. Archived from the original on 6 February 2020. Retrieved 18 May 2020. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. p. 504-505, 519. ^ Sandberg, Roy (May 2020). "Surveillance capitalism in the context of futurology : an inquiry to the implications of surveillance capitalism on the future of humanity". Helsinki University Library. pp. 33, 39, 87. Archived (PDF) from the original on 1 July 2020. Retrieved 29 December 2023. ^ "Comic-Con 2016: Marvel turns focus away from the Avengers, 'Game of Thrones' cosplay proposals, and more". Los Angeles Times. 24 July 2016. Archived from the original on 11 February 2017. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ "Oliver Stone Calls Pokémon Go "Totalitarian"". Fortune. 23 July 2016. Archived from the original on 14 February 2020. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ Doctorow, Cory (5 May 2017). "Unchecked Surveillance Technology Is Leading Us Towards Totalitarianism | Opinion". International Business Times. Archived from the original on 1 July 2020. Retrieved 19 May 2020. ^ Turow, Joseph (10 January 2012). The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. Yale University Press. p. 256. ISBN 978-0300165012. Archived from the original on 19 October 2021. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ Jump up to:a b Roach, Stephen (2022). Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives. Yale University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv2z0vv2v. ISBN 978-0-300-26901-7. JSTOR j.ctv2z0vv2v. S2CID 252800309. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (15 September 2014). "A Digital Declaration: Big Data as Surveillance Capitalism". FAZ.NET (in German). ISSN 0174-4909. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 28 August 2018. ^ Powles, Julia (2 May 2016). "Google and Microsoft have made a pact to protect surveillance capitalism". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 30 May 2020. Retrieved 9 February 2017. Sterling, Bruce (March 2016). "Shoshanna Zuboff condemning Google "surveillance capitalism"". WIRED. Archived from the original on 14 January 2019. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ "The Unlikely Activists Who Took On Silicon Valley — and Won". New York Times. 14 August 2018. Archived from the original on 7 June 2020. Retrieved 28 August 2018. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (4 April 2015). "Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization". Journal of Information Technology. 30 (1): 75–89. doi:10.1057/jit.2015.5. ISSN 0268-3962. S2CID 15329793. SSRN 2594754. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (5 March 2016). "Google as a Fortune Teller: The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism". FAZ.NET (in German). ISSN 0174-4909. Retrieved 28 August 2018. ^ Jump up to:a b Zuboff, Shoshana (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 9781610395694. OCLC 1049577294. ^ Varian, Hal (May 2010). "Computer Mediated Transactions". American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings. 100 (2): 1–10. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.216.691. doi:10.1257/aer.100.2.1. For further information about the theory, practice, and implications of Surveillance Capitalism, I recommend reading the following book: https://www.malone.news/p/surveillance-capitalism-and-psywar

How Big Tech Spawned Surveillance Capitalism Robert Malone Surveillance capitalism is a novel economic system that has emerged in the digital era. It is characterized by the unilateral claim of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. In this version of capitalism, predicting and influencing behavior (political and economic) rather than producing goods and services is the primary product. This economic logic prioritizes extracting, processing, and trading personal data to predict and influence human behavior by exploiting those predictions for various economic (marketing) and political objectives. In many cases, surveillance capitalism merges with PsyWar tools and technologies to power the modern surveillance state, giving rise to a new form of Fascism (public-private partnerships) known as techno-totalitarianism. Leading corporations employing the surveillance capitalism business model include Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Surveillance capitalism has now fused with the science and theory of psychology, marketing, and algorithmic manipulation of online information to give rise to propaganda and censorship capabilities that go far beyond those imagined by the 20th-century predictions of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Key Features of Surveillance Capitalism One-way mirror operations: Surveillance capitalists engineer operations to operate in secrecy, hiding their methods and intentions from users, who are unaware of the extent of data collection and analysis. Instrumentation power: Surveillance capitalists wield power by designing systems that cultivate “radical indifference,” rendering users oblivious to their observations and manipulations. Behavioral futures markets: The extracted data is traded in new markets, enabling companies to bet on users’ future behavior, generating immense wealth for surveillance capitalists. Collaboration with the state: Surveillance capitalism often involves partnerships with governments, leveraging favorable laws, policing, and information sharing to further entrench its power. Historical Development Surveillance capitalism has its roots in the early days of the internet, when companies like Google and Facebook exploited the “ungoverned spaces” of the digital realm. The dot-com bust, the success of Apple’s consumer-centric approach, and the surveillance-friendly environment created by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and CIA’s investments in the “war on terror” all contributed to the rise of surveillance capitalism. Consequences Loss of autonomy: Surveillance capitalism erodes individual autonomy as users are manipulated and influenced by algorithms designed to predict and shape their behavior. Threat to democracy: The concentration of power in the hands of surveillance capitalists undermines democratic processes, as they use their influence to shape public opinion and policy. Economic inequality: The wealth generated by surveillance capitalism exacerbates economic inequality, as those who own and control the data and algorithms reap the benefits while users are exploited as free commodities. Resistance and Reform To counter surveillance capitalism, it is essential to: Promote transparency and accountability: Demand greater openness about data collection and processing practices and mechanisms for users to exercise control over their data. Regulate surveillance capitalism: Establish robust regulations to limit the power of surveillance capitalists, protect user rights, and promote fair competition. Foster alternative economic models: Encourage the development of alternative economic systems that prioritize human well-being, autonomy, and democracy over profit and surveillance. Surveillance Capitalism unilaterally claims our private human experience as a free source of raw material for its own production processes. It translates our experience into behavioral data. Those behavioral data are then combined with its advanced computation capabilities, what people today refer to as AI machine intelligence. Out of that black box come predictions about our behavior, what we will do now, soon, and later. Turns out there are a lot of businesses that want to know what we will do in the future, and so these have constituted a new kind of marketplace, a marketplace that trades exclusively in behavioral futures, in our behavioral futures. That’s where surveillance capitalists make their money. That’s where the big pioneers of this economic logic, like Google and Facebook have become so wealthy by selling predictions of our behavior first to online targeted advertisers, and now of course, these business customers range across the entire economy, no longer confined to that original context of online targeted advertising. All of this is conducted in secret. All of this is conducted through the social relations of the One-Way mirror. Ergo surveillance, the vast amounts of capital that have been accumulated here are trained to create these systems in a way that keeps us ignorant. Specifically the data scientists write about their methods in a way that brags about the fact that these systems bypass our awareness so that they bypass our rights to say yes or no. I want to participate, or I don’t want to participate. I want to contest, or I don’t want to contest. I want to fight, or I don’t want to fight. All of that is bypassed. We are robbed of the right to combat because we are engineered into ignorance. We saw these same methods being used by Cambridge Analytica with those revelations a year ago with only a tiny difference. All they did was take these same every day routine methods of surveillance capitalism, pivot them just a couple of degrees toward political outcomes rather than commercial outcomes, showing that they could use our data to intervene and influence our behavior, our real world behavior, and our real world thinking and feeling in order to change political outcomes. Shoshana Zuboff Per Wikipedia Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics which denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. This phenomenon is distinct from government surveillance, although the two can be mutually reinforcing. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, is driven by a profit-making incentive, and arose as advertising companies, led by Google’s AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.[1] Increased data collection may have various benefits for individuals and society, such as self-optimization (the quantified self),[2] societal optimizations (e.g., by smart cities), and optimized services (including various web applications). However, as capitalism focuses on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing,[2] this can have significant implications for vulnerability and control of society, as well as for privacy. The economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of online connection and monitoring, with spaces of social life opening up to saturation by corporate actors, directed at making profits and/or regulating behavior. Therefore, personal data points increased in value after the possibilities of targeted advertising were known.[3] As a result, the increasing price of data has limited access to the purchase of personal data points to the richest in society.[4] Shoshana Zuboff writes that “analyzing massive data sets began as a way to reduce uncertainty by discovering the probabilities of future patterns in the behavior of people and systems.[5] In 2014, Vincent Mosco referred to marketing information about customers and subscribers to advertisers as surveillance capitalism and made note of the surveillance state alongside it.[6] Christian Fuchs found that the surveillance state fuses with surveillance capitalism.[7] Similarly, Zuboff informs that the issue is further complicated by highly invisible collaborative arrangements with state security apparatuses. According to Trebor Scholz, companies recruit people as informants for this type of capitalism.[8] Zuboff contrasts the mass production of industrial capitalism with surveillance capitalism, where the former is interdependent with its populations, who are its consumers and employees, and the latter preys on dependent populations, who are neither its consumers nor its employees and largely ignorant of its procedures.[9] Their research shows that the capitalist addition to the analysis of massive amounts of data has taken its original purpose in an unexpected direction.[1] Surveillance has been changing power structures in the information economy, potentially shifting the balance of power further from nation-states and towards large corporations employing the surveillance capitalist logic.[10] Zuboff notes that surveillance capitalism extends beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm, accumulating not only surveillance assets and capital but also rights, and operating without meaningful mechanisms of consent.[9] In other words, analyzing massive data sets was at some point executed not only by the state apparatuses but also by companies. Zuboff claims that both Google and Facebook have invented surveillance capitalism and translated it into “a new logic of accumulation.”[1][11][12] This mutation resulted in both companies collecting many data points about their users, with the core purpose of making a profit. Selling these data points to external users (particularly advertisers) has become an economic mechanism. The combination of the analysis of massive data sets and the use of these data sets as a market mechanism has shaped the concept of surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism has been heralded as the successor to neoliberalism.[13][14] Oliver Stone, creator of the film Snowden, pointed to the location-based game Pokémon Go as the “latest sign of the emerging phenomenon and demonstration of surveillance capitalism.” Stone criticized that the location of its users was used not only for game purposes but also to retrieve more information about its players. By tracking users’ locations, the game collected far more information than just users’ names and locations: “It can access the contents of your USB storage, your accounts, photographs, network connections, and phone activities, and can even activate your phone, when it is in standby mode.” This data can then be analyzed and commodified by companies such as Google (which significantly invested in the game’s development) to improve the effectiveness of the targeted advertisements.[15][16] Another aspect of surveillance capitalism is its influence on political campaigning. Personal data retrieved by data miners can enable various companies (most notoriously Cambridge Analytica) to improve the targeting of political advertising, a step beyond the commercial aims of previous surveillance capitalist operations. In this way, it is possible that political parties will be able to produce far more targeted political advertising to maximize its impact on voters. However, Cory Doctorow writes that the misuse of these data sets “will lead us towards totalitarianism.”[17] This may resemble a corporatocracy, and Joseph Turow writes that “the centrality of corporate power is a direct reality at the very heart of the digital age.”[2][18]: 17  The terminology “surveillance capitalism” was popularized by Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff.[19]: 107  In Zuboff’s theory, surveillance capitalism is a novel market form and a specific logic of capitalist accumulation. In her 2014 essay A Digital Declaration: Big Data as Surveillance Capitalism, she characterized it as a “radically disembedded and extractive variant of information capitalism” based on commodifying “reality” and transforming it into behavioral data for analysis and sales.[20][21][22][23] In a subsequent article in 2015, Zuboff analyzed the societal implications of this mutation of capitalism. She distinguished between “surveillance assets,” “surveillance capital,” and “surveillance capitalism” and their dependence on a global architecture of computer mediation that she calls “Big Other,” a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power that constitutes hidden mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that threatens core values such as freedom, democracy, and privacy.[24][2] According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism was pioneered by Google and later Facebook, just as mass-production and managerial capitalism were pioneered by Ford and General Motors a century earlier, and has now become the dominant form of information capitalism.[9] Zuboff emphasizes that behavioral changes enabled by artificial intelligence have become aligned with the financial goals of American internet companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon.[19]: 107  In her Oxford University lecture published in 2016, Zuboff identified the mechanisms and practices of surveillance capitalism, including producing “prediction products” for sale in new “behavioral futures markets.” She introduced the concept of “dispossession by surveillance,” arguing that it challenges the psychological and political bases of self-determination by concentrating rights in the surveillance regime. This is described as a “coup from above.”[25] Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism[26] is a detailed examination of the unprecedented power of surveillance capitalism and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control human behavior.[26] Zuboff identifies four key features in the logic of surveillance capitalism and explicitly follows the four key features identified by Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian:[27] The drive toward more and more data extraction and analysis. The development of new contractual forms using computer-monitoring and automation. The desire to personalize and customize the services offered to users of digital platforms. The use of the technological infrastructure to carry out continual experiments on its users and consumers. Zuboff compares demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet to asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand and states that such demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival.[9] Zuboff warns that principles of self-determination might be forfeited due to “ignorance, learned helplessness, inattention, inconvenience, habituation, or drift” and states that “we tend to rely on mental models, vocabularies, and tools distilled from past catastrophes,” referring to the 20th century’s totalitarian nightmares or the monopolistic predations of Gilded Age capitalism, with countermeasures that have been developed to fight those earlier threats not being sufficient or even appropriate to meet the novel challenges.[9] She also poses the question: “Will we be the masters of information, or will we be its slaves?” and states that “if the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so.”[28] Zuboff discusses the differences between industrial capitalism and surveillance capitalism in her book. Zuboff writes that as industrial capitalism exploits nature, surveillance capitalism exploits human nature.[29] References Zuboff, Shoshana (January 2019). “Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action.” New Labor Forum. 28 (1): 10–29. doi:10.1177/1095796018819461. ISSN 1095-7960. S2CID 159380755. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Couldry, Nick (23 September 2016). “The price of connection: ‘surveillance capitalism.'” The Conversation. Archived from the original on 20 May 2020. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (1 June 2018), Data analytics and big data: chapter 5: Data analytics process:there’s great work behind the scenes, pp. 77–99, doi:10.1002/9781119528043.ch5, ISBN 978-1-119-52804-3, S2CID 243896249 ^ Jump up to:a b Cadwalladr, Carole (20 June 2019). “The Great Hack.” The Guardian. Archived from the original on 4 February 2020. Retrieved 6 February 2020. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana; Möllers, Norma; Murakami Wood, David; Lyon, David (31 March 2019). “Surveillance Capitalism: An Interview with Shoshana Zuboff.” Surveillance & Society. 17 (1/2): 257–266. doi:10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.13238. ISSN 1477-7487. ^ Mosco, Vincent (17 November 2015). To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World. Routledge. ISBN 9781317250388. Archived from the original on 19 October 2021. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ Fuchs, Christian (20 February 2017). Social Media: A Critical Introduction. SAGE. ISBN 9781473987494. Archived from the original on 19 October 2021. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ Scholz, Trebor (27 December 2016). Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781509508181. Archivedfrom the original on 19 October 2021. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e Zuboff, Shoshana (5 March 2016). “Google as a Fortune Teller: The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism.” Faz.net. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Archived from the original on 11 February 2017. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ Galič, Maša; Timan, Tjerk; Koops, Bert-Jaap (13 May 2016). “Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation.” Philosophy & Technology. 30: 9–37. doi:10.1007/s13347-016-0219-1. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana. “Shoshana Zuboff: A Digital Declaration.” FAZ.NET (in German). ISSN 0174-4909. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 18 May 2020. ^ “Shoshana Zuboff On surveillance capitalism.” Contagious. Archived from the original on 6 February 2020. Retrieved 18 May 2020. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. p. 504-505, 519. ^ Sandberg, Roy (May 2020). “Surveillance capitalism in the context of futurology : an inquiry to the implications of surveillance capitalism on the future of humanity.” Helsinki University Library. pp. 33, 39, 87. Archived (PDF) from the original on 1 July 2020. Retrieved 29 December 2023. ^ “Comic-Con 2016: Marvel turns focus away from the Avengers, ‘Game of Thrones’ cosplay proposals, and more.” Los Angeles Times. 24 July 2016. Archivedfrom the original on 11 February 2017. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ “Oliver Stone Calls Pokémon Go “Totalitarian.” Fortune. 23 July 2016. Archived from the original on 14 February 2020. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ Doctorow, Cory (5 May 2017). “Unchecked Surveillance Technology Is Leading Us Towards Totalitarianism | Opinion.” International Business Times. Archivedfrom the original on 1 July 2020. Retrieved 19 May 2020. ^ Turow, Joseph (10 January 2012). The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. Yale University Press. p. 256. ISBN 978-0300165012. Archived from the original on 19 October 2021. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ Jump up to:a b Roach, Stephen (2022). Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives. Yale University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv2z0vv2v. ISBN 978-0-300-26901-7. JSTOR j.ctv2z0vv2v. S2CID 252800309. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (15 September 2014). “A Digital Declaration: Big Data as Surveillance Capitalism.” FAZ.NET (in German). ISSN 0174-4909. Archived from the original on 22 June 2020. Retrieved 28 August 2018. ^ Powles, Julia (2 May 2016). “Google and Microsoft have made a pact to protect surveillance capitalism.” The Guardian. Archived from the original on 30 May 2020. Retrieved 9 February 2017. Sterling, Bruce (March 2016). “Shoshanna Zuboff condemning Google “surveillance capitalism.” WIRED. Archived from the original on 14 January 2019. Retrieved 9 February 2017. ^ “The Unlikely Activists Who Took On Silicon Valley — and Won.” New York Times. 14 August 2018. Archived from the original on 7 June 2020. Retrieved 28 August 2018. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (4 April 2015). “Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization.” Journal of Information Technology. 30 (1): 75–89. doi:10.1057/jit.2015.5. ISSN 0268-3962. S2CID 15329793. SSRN 2594754. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (5 March 2016). “Google as a Fortune Teller: The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism.” FAZ.NET (in German). ISSN 0174-4909. Retrieved 28 August 2018. ^ Jump up to:a b Zuboff, Shoshana (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 9781610395694. OCLC 1049577294. ^ Varian, Hal (May 2010). “Computer Mediated Transactions.” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings. 100 (2): 1–10. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.216.691. doi:10.1257/aer.100.2.1. Republished from the author’s Substack Author Robert W. Malone is a physician and biochemist. His work focuses on mRNA technology, pharmaceuticals, and drug repurposing research. You can find him at Substack and Gettr View all posts https://brownstone.org/articles/how-big-tech-spawned-surveillance-capitalism/

The Vaccine Religion and its Effect on Medical Research 900% increase in vertigo after the Pfizer shot must be discussed only quietly by those walking in the hallowed shrines of the vaccine religion, if blasphemy is to be practiced surreptitiously. Dr. Colleen Huber The Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City, one of the largest cathedrals in the Americas was built right next to the holiest Aztec shrine, the Templo Mayor, drawing almost all of its stones to construct the cathedral. With the conquest of Mexico by 16th century Spanish explorer Hernán Cortez, the Aztec descendants, who called themselves Mexica, and their capital city Tenochtitlan, did the physical labor of building the Spanish cathedrals in Mexico. They engraved Aztec symbols under and deep inside Mexico City’s largest cathedrals. Many of those cathedrals are built right on top of Aztec ruins, but some number among the cathedral building crews engraved their ancestral symbols in the walls and pillars of the conquerors’ religious shrines. Unearthing the Aztec past, the destruction of the Templo Mayor Photo: https://smarthistory.org/unearthing-the-aztec-past-the-destruction-of-the-templo-mayor/ What does this have to do with vaccine research in the era of the vaccine religion? The prevailing medical philosophy / religion of our era holds vaccine beliefs as core tenets. The notion of immune function conferred by an arbitrarily chosen injected liquid, rather than organized by specialized and synergistic leukocytes (with complex interactions with nutrients), as optimal bulwark against infectious disease, is an 18th century superstition dressed up as contemporary medical sophistication. The crescendo of fervent belief in the vaccine sacrament during the last two hundred years of medical history, and especially over the last half-century, has now left us living through an era of intense vaccine zealotry. Everyone is now expected to accept and receive the many dozens of vaccines on the CDC schedule – some for adults and many more for infants and children - and is expected to not question the bribes and bullying that put all those vaccines, which are liability-free pharma products, into the vaccine catechism. Consequently, blasphemy against COVID vaccination has been punished even more relentlessly from late 2020 through early 2023 than blasphemy against the so-called childhood vaccines. Critical skeptics and those who refuse vaccines themselves have very often been fired from their jobs and excluded from studying at universities. At this writing in early 2024, an abundance of evidence has shown the harmful effects of the COVID vaccines, mostly the mRNA type, made by Pfizer and Moderna. There are thousands of studies showing injuries from these vaccines. I compiled over 700 of the largest studies and of those showing how the mRNA vaccines cause damage to multiple bodily organs in this book. I cited half as many studies in its earlier edition, which was more widely read, probably for the novelty of its subject matter, while still remaining obscure and little known. Thus, medical literature showing injuries following COVID vaccination, without overtly announcing vaccine criticism, is a 21st century metaphor for the practice of engraving the contrarian viewpoint surreptitiously in the shadows of the cathedral. Archiving data in the catacombs under the shrine It is much easier for an independent researcher such as me to write about vaccine-related harms than it is for institutional researchers who depend on industry-funded grants for their research. If those researchers are to show any findings about vaccine harms, those must be buried deeply enough to survive the peer-review process, and the casual perusal of the reviewers. Their studies must sing the hymns of praise for vaccination that the universal religion requires, and it must extol the fancy gilded façade of the church, while keeping the contradictory evidence well below the surface, revealing the same only to careful students of the data. This is how epidemic myocarditis was hidden from the public even as the most widely used and most hurriedly deployed vaccine in human history was being injected into billions of people. We learned this week that the CDC knew about myocarditis effects by at least May 25, 2021, but did not want to “appear alarmist” to clinicians and to the public. [1] For context, it had been known since November 2020, before any of the public was injected, that the Pfizer vaccine arrives to the heart, brain and other organs within seconds. By the middle of 2021, myocarditis reports were accumulating throughout injected populations, and cardiac arrest ambulance calls had skyrocketed in heavily injected Israel. Appearing alarmist has been detrimental to the paychecks of the skeptics, and so many keep silent, until a preponderance of evidence makes the use of free speech less hazardous to employment and college enrollment. Vaccine effects on the brain Damaging effects of the COVID vaccines on cognition and other brain function are beginning to emerge. We are likely to see more and more of these studies over 2024 and beyond, especially as researchers have become emboldened by the now overwhelming and irrefutable evidence of cardiovascular injuries and deaths following those injections. Now that the COVID vaccines, especially the mRNA type, are losing their initial luster from the growing negative press regarding cardiovascular risks, it is just a little more acceptable to also expose these vaccines’ other problems than it had been in the peak 2021-2022 vaccine mania heyday. Here is an example regarding effects of the Pfizer vaccine in Danish adolescents: [2] The study begins by sounding vaguely pro-vaccine, discussing: “ . . . [another] study . . . which showed that BNT162b2 [Pfizer] had an acceptable safety profile, . . . and was effective against SARS-CoV-2,” and goes on to list minor-sounding symptoms, such as pain at the injection site, fatigue, headache, chills, etc. Thus begin the dulcet tones of the hymn of praise for vaccines. Is this lullaby to induce sleep in the peer reviewers, to not see the data contained deep inside the report? What was not mentioned in the Introduction, but is listed very deep in the study’s reporting is the study’s shocking findings in Danish adolescents. Nine times the “dizziness and giddiness” in girls “Dizziness and giddiness” in COVID-vaccinated girls occurred at 922% the rate in unvaccinated girls, 57 to 182 days post-Pfizer shot. (Giddiness is usually called vertigo and can include lightheadedness in US medical parlance). “Unspecified cognitive symptoms” were 92% higher in COVID-vaccinated girls than in unvaccinated girls, and “Syncope” was 418% higher in COVID-vaccinated girls than unvaccinated girls 0-56 days after the Pfizer shot. S Berg, H Wallach Kildemoes, et al. Symptom-specific hospital contacts in 12-18-year-olds vaccinated against COVID-19: A Danish register-based cohort study. Jun 2023. Vaccines (Basel). 11 (6). 1049. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10301149/#app1-vaccines-11-01049 One might think that a nine times greater rate of “dizziness and giddiness” and four times the syncope, and nearly twice the unspecified cognitive symptoms in vaccinated girls over unvaccinated would be of great concern. There is an important flaw in this study, which stems from a political artifact. The authors used the term “unvaccinated” 51 times without defining it at all. In fact, the term “unvaccinated” has been very sloppily defined in the COVID era. Does unvaccinated now mean never having received any vaccines at all, even the earlier childhood vaccines? Or that the Danish teenage girls suffered injury after some of the prior childhood vaccines, and at some point decided to receive no more vaccines? Adding even more confusion, people who had been injected with COVID vaccines less than two weeks earlier were (very dishonestly) called “unvaccinated” at least throughout the U.S. and Europe. This had the grossly misleading effect of sweeping the earliest (Day 0 to 14) vaccine injuries away from official scrutiny. A fourth problem with the term unvaccinated is that those who only received one COVID vaccine dose, but refused a second, were in some places being called “unvaccinated.” And a fifth problem was that those who could not prove in a hospital setting how many COVID vaccines they had were sometimes also lumped in with the “unvaccinated” cohort. So it is anybody’s guess as to the composition of the “unvaccinated” cohort, and the study authors did not even attempt to sort through any of the above problems with vaccination status. Whereas the authors did define their vaccinated cohort as having specifically two doses of Pfizer, > 3 weeks apart, they did not define their unvaccinated cohort. We do see however, that after two Pfizer mRNA vaccine doses, the Danish girls had almost double the unspecified cognitive symptoms and over nine times the dizziness and vertigo of the presumably unvaccinated girls, even after two months post-vaccine, which was the most striking finding of the study. Share Autistic-like behaviors in rats post-Pfizer shot Another 2023 study showed a significant increase in autism-like behaviors in the offspring of Pfizer-injected rats. [3] That study begins with, “The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the swift development and distribution of mRNA vaccines, including BNT162b2, to address the disease,” but then quickly go into the major problems that the study found post-vaccine. The researchers discovered profound effects on neurological development including autism-like behaviors and impaired motor performance in male rats after their mothers were vaccinated prenatally. I wrote of mechanisms of effects on the brain following the COVID vaccines, [4] and prion-like proteins as a likely downstream cause [5] and mitochondrial damage as another likely downstream cause [6] of brain injury after COVID vaccination. Now that the dam of information is cracking open to reveal myriad and abundant injuries correlated with the COVID vaccines, I think that the last taboo subject, namely cognitive, emotional and psychiatric effects of the COVID vaccines will be explored by researchers in more depth through this new year and beyond. Is this a place where a suspension of disbelief is encouraged, or is it a citadel of timeless truth, or both? How about PubMed and the universities? Photo by José Roldan [1] Z Stieber. Exclusive: Email reveals why CDC didn’t issue alert on COVID vaccines and myocarditis. Jan 25 2024. The Epoch Times. https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/exclusive-email-reveals-why-cdc-didnt-issue-alert-on-covid-vaccines-and-myocarditis-5571675 [2] S Berg, H Wallach Kildemoes, et al. Symptom-specific hospital contacts in 12-18-year-olds vaccinated against COVID-19: A Danish register-based cohort study. Jun 2023. Vaccines (Basel). 11 (6). 1049. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10301149/#app1-vaccines-11-01049 [3] M Erdogan, O Gurbuz, et al. Prenatal exposure to COVID-19 mRNA vaccine BNT162b2 induces autism-like behaviors in male neonatal rats: Insights into WNT and BDNF signaling perturbations. Jul 3 2023. Neurochem Res. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11064-023-04089-2 [4] C Huber. Brain injuries after COVID vaccination. Apr 10 2023. https://colleenhuber.substack.com/p/brain-injuries-after-covid-vaccination [5] C Huber. Prion risks in the COVID vaccines. May 17 2023. https://colleenhuber.substack.com/p/prion-risks-in-the-covid-vaccines [6] C Huber. Brain threat from COVID vaccines. Mar 24 2022. https://colleenhuber.substack.com/p/brain-threat-from-covid-vaccines Share https://substack.com/home/post/p-141055473 https://donshafi911sars-cov-2.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-vaccine-religion-and-its-effect-on.html

Israel attacks Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon with US, NATO weapons – Day 287 [email protected] July 21, 2024 aid to Israel, biden withdrawal, houthis, icj ruling, israel lobby, lebanon attack, nato, palestinians at the olympics, polio, Sir Alan Duncan, West Bank, yemen attack Israel carries out major strikes on three regions in one day (collage) Baby born after mother killed in Gaza; Israeli raids in West Bank tripled; Palestinians at the Olympics; Israel gets weapons from countries that have officially halted arms sales; Israel bombs Lebanon, Yemen; Israel’s privileged soldiers will be vaccinated against polio, as Gazans remain at risk; Netanyahu’s intransigent response to ICJ; UK minister calls out pro-Israel lobby; how much aid has the US given Israel since October 7th?; Biden’s withdrawal may be linked to Netanyahu’s visit; Germany criticizes Israel’s opposition to Palestinian state; more. By IAK staff, from reports. AFP reports: A Gaza hospital said Saturday it saved a baby boy from his mother’s womb after she died from wounds sustained in an Israeli strike. Ola Adnan Harb al-Kurd, who was nine months pregnant, barely survived a punishing night of missile strikes that reportedly killed more than 24 people, including six members of the same family. Doctors were unable to save the mother, but quickly staged an emergency cesarean section “and extracted the fetus,” the surgeon told AFP. The newborn was initially in critical condition, but after receiving oxygen and medical attention was stabilized, said Raed al-Saudi, head of the hospital’s obstetrics and gynecology department. He was placed in an incubator and transferred to Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah. Kurd was among three women and a child killed by an Israeli missile fired on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, according to a medical official at Al-Awda Hospital. Her husband was also wounded in the strike on the family home. Israel has not confirmed individual strikes, but a military statement said troops were “conducting targeted raids on terrorist infrastructure sites” in central Gaza. Gaza ministry warns residents of Israel’s safe passage hoax Israeli raids more than triple in occupied West Bank Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh reports from Ramallah: The number of daily raids in the West Bank, whether at night or in the morning, has more than tripled in these past months. We’ve also seen an escalation in attacks by illegal Israeli settlers. Yesterday, as that ruling at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was being read against the Israeli occupation, settlers attacked Palestinians in the Nablus area in Huwara; they burned businesses and fields. Also in the South Hebron Hills, there was an attack by a group of Israeli settlers against a family. A woman, who was severely beaten, is now being treated in hospital. In all those attacks of Israeli settlers, the Israeli soldiers were close by defending the settlers and protecting them and barring the Palestinians from defending themselves, which is something again referenced by the judges at the ICJ in The Hague. Palestinians are winners by just being at Paris Games, say athletes Reuters reports: The presence of Palestinian athletes at the Paris Olympic Games is already a major victory for the team amid the conflict in the Middle East, they said on Saturday, less than a week before the start of the Olympics. The Palestinian team for the Games starting on Friday consists of six athletes who will be competing in boxing, judo, taekwondo, shooting and swimming, with slim hopes of a medal. “Whether a medal or not, we already win,” swimmer Yazan Al Bawwab told Reuters. “The fact that we’re here. The fact that people don’t want us to be here, they don’t want us to play sports. They don’t want us to exist.” “People don’t want Palestinians to exist. They look at the flag and they don’t want it. So to be here is a win,” said Al Bawwab, who will be the team’s flag bearer during the opening ceremony. Palestinian sports officials have said that since the start of the conflict in October 2023 more than 300 athletes, referees and sports officials have been killed and all sports facilities in Gaza demolished. “I said it before but I’m one of the luckiest people in the world,” swimmer Valerie Tarazi said. “I have the opportunity to compete for my country, to raise the flag for my country.” “My heart is with them. Every time I swim, every time I jump in the pool, I’m thinking about the people of Palestine, their struggles. And I just want to represent them in the best way possible.” Valerie Tarazi and Yazan al-Bawwab, swimmers for Palesitne in Paris Olympics Valerie Tarazi and Yazan al-Bawwab, swimmers for Palesitne in Paris Olympics (screengrab) Israeli official implies call for Olympics ban for athletes is ‘unsportsmanlike’ Al Jazeera reports: An official with Israel’s Foreign Ministry has suggested that calls from the Palestine Olympic Committee (POC) for a ban on Israeli athletes participating in the Paris Olympics over the war on Gaza is unfair. POC has called for a ban on Israeli athletes at the games in Paris, which start on July 26, as they say some have failed to uphold the Olympic spirit. The POC cited examples including Israeli Olympians visiting troops and posting pictures of signed missiles used by Israel in its war on Gaza, in which about 39,000 people have been killed. “The reason why we’re doing this – for the human rights violations happening in Gaza, and the killings and murders of every single person,” said Nader Jayousi, the deputy secretary-general of the POC. European countries use 3rd-party countries to keep arming Israel: British journalist Andalou Agency reports: European countries continue providing weapons to Israel through third countries and secret deals, according to some media reports. Although countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and the UK have announced a halt to arms sales to Israel, international media reports suggest otherwise. The UK maintains that it has not directly supplied arms to Israel since Oct. 7 last year, which marks the beginning of Tel Aviv’s devastating Gaza offensive that has killed over 38,800 Palestinians. However, estimations suggest that private British companies have continued to sell Israel weapons. Italy, meanwhile, has reportedly halted arms supplies to Israel as required by law. But according to a report in business magazine Altreconomia, the country’s Customs Agency data confirmed that Rome exported arms and ammunition to Tel Aviv between December 2023 and January 2024. Despite Norwegian law prohibiting arms sales to any country at war, media reports have said Israel continues to procure weapons produced in a US subsidiary of a defense company in which Oslo has a 50% stake. While the Greek Cypriot administration appears on paper to be one of Tel Aviv’s smallest arms suppliers, it has been claimed that Western nations are using it as a military stockpile site for their own weapons destined for Israel. Media reports indicate that the British base in Southern Cyprus has facilitated more than 30 military transport flights delivering weapons and equipment to Israel since the attacks on Gaza began. British journalist Iain Overton told Anadolu that almost all European countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the UK, have exported arms to Israel in the past, and many continue to do so today. Overton cited the example of the UK, which issued 100 export licenses for arms sales to Israel since Oct. 7, hiding this fact for months, only to later reveal the truth. He noted that many other European countries also sell arms to Israel, adding that this is often concealed from the public. (Read the full article here.) Relentless Israeli airstrikes cause widespread damage across Gaza. Relentless Israeli airstrikes cause widespread damage across Gaza. (photo) NATO/US Complicity in The Relentless Israeli Genocide of Gaza World Beyond War reports: According to NATO documents, NATO and Israel have worked together for almost 30 years, cooperating in science and technology, counter terrorism, civil preparedness, countering weapons of mass destruction and women, peace and security. To strengthen NATO naval interoperability NATO brought on Israel as a partner for its Operation Sea Guardian. Israel’s military medical academy now serves as a “unique asset” for NATO’s Partnership Training and Education Centers community. Israel is not officially integrated in NATO but is part of the Mediterranean Dialogue, a program sponsored by NATO in cooperation with seven countries of the Mediterranean. NATO’s long-standing working relationship with Israel has translated into NATO countries selling weapons to Israel and other countries buying weapons from Israel’s big weapons industry. Israel ranks 98th in world population, with a population of 9.4 million, only 0.11 percent of the world’s population, and ranks 154th of all countries in land mass. Despite its small population and land, a study by SIPRI ranks Israel as the world’s 15th top weapons importer, receiving 2.1 percent of all imports, according to globally available data from 2019-2023. Israel is the world’s 9th top weapons exporter, responsible for 2.4 percent of exports. With the exception of Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, and Belgium, the remainder of the 32 NATO members continue to sell/send weapons to Israel as Israel conducts genocide operations on Palestinians in Gaza. All of the Israeli Air Force’s manned aircraft that are bombing people in Gaza are American-made, with the exception of one helicopter built by France’s Airbus Helicopters. Israel is the first international operator of the U.S. F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most technologically advanced fighter jet ever made, and had taken delivery of 36 of 75 F-35s by the end of 2023, paying for them with U.S. assistance. (Read the full article by Colonel (Ret) Ann Wright, here.) Israeli jets bomb Yemen city in response to Tel Aviv drone strike The Cradle reports: Israeli warplanes launched heavy raids on Yemen’s western port city of Hodeidah on 20 July, targeting fuel depots and oil refineries as well as the province’s power station, according to reports in Saudi media and Yemen’s Al-Masirah TV. Local reports say the air raids left several dead and wounded. Videos shared on social media show massive fires blazing at the Port of Hodeidah. Nasr El-Din Amer, Vice President of the Ansarallah Media Authority, stressed on Saturday evening that the Israeli raids “will not change” Yemen’s steadfast support for the Palestinian resistance in Gaza. “We are also a people who, when targeted, do not retreat but instead increase in determination and conviction in the necessity of confrontation and response. We are Yemen, the land of faith, wisdom, jihad, and steadfastness.” Ansarallah spokesman Mohammed Abdul Salam issued a similar statement, saying that by targeting civilian facilities, Israel “aims to double the suffering of the people and pressure Yemen to stop supporting Gaza. This is a dream that, Allah willing, will never come true.” Israel’s first-ever direct attack on Yemen comes one day after Sanaa launched an unprecedented drone strike on the city of Tel Aviv, bypassing all air defense systems before hitting a building near the US consulate. Hours after this attack, the Israeli prime minister said in a televised address that Israel will “defend ourselves by all means…I have a message for Israel’s enemies: Make no mistake. We will defend ourselves by all means, on all fronts. Anyone who harms us will pay a very heavy price for their aggression.” Israel strikes Hezbollah ammunition depot in south Lebanon, sources say Reuters reports: Israeli strikes late on Saturday targeted a depot storing ammunition belonging to Lebanese armed group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, three security sources told Reuters. The strikes on the town of Adloun, about 40 km (25 miles) north of Lebanon’s border with Israel, set off a string of loud explosions heard by witnesses across the south of Lebanon. At least four civilians in Adloun were wounded in the strikes, a medical source and a security source told Reuters. IDF to Vaccinate Israeli Soldiers Against Polio After Virus Found in Gaza Sewage Ha’aretz reports: The Israeli army will begin on Sunday to vaccinate against polio all soldiers operating in Gaza or due to enter there soon, after a high concentration of the virus was found in sewage in Gaza. The IDF stresses that the soldiers not make any use of the local Gazan water system, and that the army regularly brings in large quantities of water from Israel, including millions of bottles of water for drinking and bathing, and tons of ice, as well as field showers, soap and disinfectant wipes. Regarding a possible polio outbreak in Gaza, the IDF says that, according to the information it has, there is no confirmation of any clinical cases of the disease, but that there is real concern over a possible outbreak, especially given the conditions in Gaza. NOTE: Palestinians in Gaza have no choice but to use local water. An Oxfam report released July 18, Water War Crimes, reveals how Israel has been systematically weaponizing water against Palestinians in Gaza, showing disregard for human life and international law.  The report, finds that Israel’s cutting of external water supply, systematic destruction of water facilities and deliberate aid obstruction have reduced the amount of water available in Gaza by 94% to 4.74 liters a day per person – just under a third of the recommended minimum in emergencies and less than a single toilet flush. Israeli military attacks have damaged or destroyed five water and sanitation infrastructure sites every three days since the start of the war.  Israel has destroyed 70% of all sewage pumps and 100% of all wastewater treatment plants, as well as the main water quality testing laboratories in Gaza, and restricted the entry of Oxfam water testing equipment.  Gaza City has lost nearly all its water production capacity, with 88% of its water wells and 100% of its desalination plants damaged or destroyed.  The report also highlighted the dire impact of this extreme lack of clean water and sanitation on Palestinians’ health, with more than a quarter (26%) of Gaza’s population falling severely ill from easily preventable diseases.  RECOMMENDED READING: ‘Buying Our Own Stolen Water’ in Bethlehem – Scorching Summer Awaits Palestinians in the West Bank Human rights reports on Israel-Palestine (regularly updated) The polio virus has been detected in Gaza's sewage, which flows through areas with displaced persons and residential zones due to infrastructure destruction, and “represents a new health crisis.” The polio virus has been detected in Gaza’s sewage, which flows through areas with displaced persons and residential zones due to infrastructure destruction, and “represents a new health crisis.” (photo) Netanyahu filed draft decision rejecting ICJ’s advisory opinion –without consulting Israel’s AG Ha’aretz reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu filed on Sunday a draft decision that rejects the advisory opinion published by the International Court of Justice on Friday about the illegality of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. The draft was written without the collaboration of Israel’s Attorney General, Gali Baharav-Miara, and the legal opinion attached to it was written by Professor Talia Einhorn. “The people of Israel are not occupiers in their own land and in their eternal capital, Jerusalem!” the document reads, and “Israel rejects the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, that blatantly ignored the natural and historic right of the Jewish people over the state of Israel, that was recognized in International law.” The statement adds that the ICJ opinion ignores the right of Israeli citizens to settle in any parts of the land, “from accepted international legal principles regarding territories that did not have a foreign sovereign, and from Israel’s duty and right for self-defense and safe boundaries.” RECOMMENDED READING: Netanyahu purveyed a fictional history of Israel to Jordan Peterson Root out the ‘poison’ of the pro-Israel lobby, says former Tory minister cleared of anti-Semitism Middle East Monitor reports: A former Conservative minister and Foreign Office official has been cleared of anti-Semitism allegations following an internal party investigation. Following his exoneration, Sir Alan Duncan issued a stark warning to his party, asserting that if the Conservative Party hopes to recover from its huge defeat in the recent General Election, it must confront and address what he termed the “poison” in its midst. According to Duncan, this “poison” is the undue influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups, particularly the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), on party policy and decision-making. He argued that this influence has led to a distortion of UK foreign policy, prioritising Israeli interests over Britain’s, and has undermined the party’s integrity. Anti-Semitism allegations against Duncan — a major target of the pro-Israel lobby — stemmed from comments he made during an interview in which he took aim at the CFI over its influence on government policy and criticized senior Conservative figures for not acknowledging the illegality of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. “The Conservative Friends of Israel has been doing the bidding of Netanyahu,” Duncan told Ferrari, “bypassing all proper processes of government to exercise undue influence at the top of government.” He argued that “money, improper influence, and the promotion of Israeli interests above our own [British interests] have contributed to the destruction of the UK’s independent foreign policy.” Drawing on his experience in the Foreign Office, Duncan revealed that there is “a lot of deep concern amongst officials and ambassadors about this undue influence.” (Read the full article here.) NOTE: Actual antisemitism is not as prevalent as Israel partisans would like us to think. A large portion of what they call antisemitism is simply criticism of Israel, the self-proclaimed “Jewish State.” Most of the animosity Israel experiences is opposition to Zionism. Zionism is not a benign philosophy, but a racist ideology – the ideology under which Israel dispossessed 750,000 Palestinian people and exiled them to Gaza and other locations. The so-called “demonization” of Israel is in most cases a legitimate criticism of Israel’s policies of occupation, apartheid, and genocide, and other illegal practices. A few of the many children wounded by shrapnel – some also severely burned – in the course of Israel's now nine-month-long attack on Gaza. The weapons create small pieces of shrapnel that leave barely discernible entry wounds but create extensive destruction inside the body. A few of the many children wounded by shrapnel – some also severely burned – in the course of Israel’s now nine-month-long attack on Gaza. The weapons create small pieces of shrapnel that leave barely discernible entry wounds but create extensive destruction inside the body. (collage) Pakistan calls Netanyahu a ‘terrorist’ Voice of America reports: Under pressure from right wing protesters, Pakistan’s government declared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a terrorist Friday, demanding the leader be brought to justice for alleged war crimes against Palestinians. The statement by Rana Sanaullah, adviser to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on political and public affairs, was part of a deal with a religious political party, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan or TLP, to end its days-long sit-in on a key road outside the capital. Thousands of TLP supporters rallied near the capital last Saturday to condemn Israeli strikes in Gaza. They demanded the government declare Netanyahu a terrorist, boycott Israeli products and send aid to Palestinians. How much aid has the US given to Israel since October 7th? Middle East Monitor reports: In the aftermath of the Hamas attack of 7 October, 2023, the Biden administration announced its support for Israel in the form of a $105 billion national security package, including military and humanitarian assistance for Israel and Ukraine. Of this $105 billion, $14.3 billion – as supplementary funding – was meant to provide security support to Israel, release hostages, provide humanitarian aid to Israel and Gaza and replenish Israel’s stockpile of interceptors for its Iron Dome missile defense system, artillery shells and other munitions. The assistance further included support for air and missile defense, investments in the industrial base and replenishment of US stocks to aid Israel. This aid is intended to improve Israel’s air and missile defence systems’ readiness and help procure and develop various missile defence components. Additionally, $3.7 billion in aid and assistance continued under the Ten-Year Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Israel, enhancing Israel’s military capabilities and security. In comparison, approximately $3.3 billion in aid is given to Israel every year to purchase arms from the US and Israeli companies. More recently, in April 2024, the Biden administration approved an additional $95 billion assistance package for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. Of this package, $26 billion would go to Israel and $9.15 billion in humanitarian assistance to Gaza, the West Bank and Ukraine. POTUS tweet, October 18, 2023 "I spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu regarding the situation on the ground, security assistance and humanitarian needs, and information on unaccounted Americans. I asked tough questions as a friend of Israel. We will continue to deter any actor wanting to widen this conflict." POTUS tweet, October 18, 2023 “I spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu regarding the situation on the ground, security assistance and humanitarian needs, and information on unaccounted Americans. I asked tough questions as a friend of Israel. We will continue to deter any actor wanting to widen this conflict.” (photo) Biden may delay his withdrawal from presidential race until after Netanyahu’s speech in Congress: Report New York Times reports: While Mr. Biden and his team publicly insist that he is staying in the race, privately people close to him have said that he is increasingly accepting that he may not be able to, and some have begun discussing dates and venues for a possible announcement that he is stepping aside. One factor that may stretch out a decision: Advisers believe that Mr. Biden would not want to do it before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel visits Washington on Wednesday at the initiative of Republicans to address Congress, unwilling to give the premier the satisfaction given their strained relations lately over the Gaza war. Germany: ‘Israel is isolating itself by refusing to establish Palestine state’ Middle East Monitor reports: The German government expressed its deep concern about the Israeli Parliament’s refusal to establish a Palestinian state. A German Foreign Ministry spokesperson shared on Friday in Berlin: “The decision contradicts many UN Security Council resolutions. Israel is, therefore, distancing itself from the overwhelming majority of the international community and isolating itself. We all know that isolation is the enemy of any security.” The spokesperson said that although the resolution is non-binding, it: “Poses a setback to our efforts to achieve a balance between the legitimate security interests of Israel and the Palestinians’ right to self-determination,” adding that the German government believes that there is no alternative to a two-state solution that also protects the rights of the Palestinians. He noted that Israel’s long-term security can only be guaranteed through a two-state solution, adding: “Just like the Israelis, the Palestinians also have the right to live in security and dignity through their ability to determine their fate in a state of their own.” The majority of Knesset members voted on Thursday in favor of a resolution rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state. Footage shared by local media shows the destruction caused by Israel’s attack on the Shati refugee camp where at least 24 Palestinians have been reported killed. Footage shared by local media shows the destruction caused by Israel’s attack on the Shati refugee camp where at least 24 Palestinians have been reported killed. (screenshot) MORE NEWS: IMEMC Daily Reports. The Guardian: Slowly but surely, Israel tightens its grip on Gaza’s lifeline to Egypt Jacobin: Getting Rid of Netanyahu Is Not Enough – an interview with Gideon Levy STATISTICS OCTOBER 7 – JULY 20: Palestinian death toll from October 7 – July 20: at least 39,497* (38,919 in Gaza* – 11,445 women (30%), 16,034 children as of June 17. [The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.] This is expected to be a significant undercount since thousands of those killed have yet to be identified – and at least 578 in the West Bank (~140 children). This does not include an estimated 10,000 more still buried under rubble (4,900 women and children). Euro-Med Monitor reports 46,848 Palestinian deaths. Lancet: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Ralph Nader earlier estimated 200,000 Palestinians may have been killed in Gaza. At least 46 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons (27 from Gaza, 18 from West Bank). At least 40 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition**. About 1.7 million, or 75% of Gaza’s population are currently displaced. 2.15 million (out of total population of 2.3 million) are projected to face Crisis or worse levels of food insecurity. Palestinian injuries from October 7 – July 20: at least 95,042 (including at least 89,622 in Gaza and 5,420 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how many Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.] Reported Israeli death toll from October 7 – July 20: ~1,481 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 326 military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza; 16 in the West Bank) and~8,730 injured. Times of Israel reports: The IDF listed 41 soldiers killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents – nearly 16%. NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries in Israel on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers. *Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.** Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals. † For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics. Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here. https://israelpalestinenews.org/israel-attacks-gaza-yemen-lebanon-with-us-nato-weapons-day-287/

The Pandemic Excuse for a Corporatist Coup Jeffrey A. Tucker We’ve just come across a document hosted by the Department of Homeland Security, posted March 2023, but written in 2007, that amounts to a full-blown corporatist imposition on the US, abolishing anything remotely resembling the Bill of Rights and Constitutional law. It is right there in plain sight for anyone curious enough to dig. There is nothing in it that you haven’t already experienced with lockdowns. What makes it interesting are the participants in the forging of the plan, which is pretty much the whole of corporate America as it stood in 2007. It was a George W. Bush initiative. The conclusions are startling. “Quarantine is a legally enforceable declaration that a government body may institute over individuals potentially exposed to a disease, but who are not symptomatic. If enacted, Federal quarantine laws will be coordinated between CDC and State and local public health officials, and, if necessary, law enforcement personnel…The government may also enact travel restrictions to limit the movement of people and products between geographic areas in an effort to limit disease transmission and spread. Authorities are currently reviewing possible plans to curtail international travel upon a pandemic’s emergence overseas. “Limiting public assembly opportunities also helps limit the spread of disease. Concert halls, movie theaters, sports arenas, shopping malls, and other large public gathering places might close indefinitely during a pandemic—whether because of voluntary closures or government-imposed closures. Similarly, officials may close schools and non-essential businesses during pandemic waves in an effort to significantly slow disease transmission rates. These strategies aim to prevent the close interaction of individuals, the primary conduit of spreading the influenza virus. Even taking steps such as limiting person-to-person interactions within a distance of three feet or avoiding instances of casual close contact, such as shaking hands, will help limit disease spread.” There we have it: the pandemic plans. They once seemed abstract. In 2020, they became very real. Your rights were deleted. No more freedom even to have house guests. In those days, the rule was to enforce only three feet of distance rather than six feet of distance, neither of which had any basis in science. Indeed, the actual scientific literature even at that time recommended against any physical interventions designed to limit the spread of respiratory viruses. They were known not to work. The entire profession of public health accepted that. Therefore, for many years before lockdowns wrecked economic functioning, there had been two parallel tracks in operation, one intellectual/academic and one imposed by state/corporate managers. They had nothing to do with each other. This situation persisted for the better part of 15 years. Suddenly in 2020, there was a reckoning, and the state/corporate managers won it. Seemingly out of nowhere, liberty as we have long known it was gone. Back in 2005, I first came across a Bush administration scheme, an early draft of the above, that would have ended freedom as we know it. It was a scheme for combating the bird flu, which officials back then imagined would involve universal quarantines, business and event closures, travel restrictions, and more. I wrote: “Even if the flu does come, and taxpayers have coughed up, the government will surely have a ball imposing travel restrictions, shutting down schools and businesses, quarantining cities, and banning public gatherings…It is a serious matter when the government purports to plan to abolish all liberty and nationalize all economic life and put every business under the control of the military, especially in the name of a bug that seems largely restricted to the bird population. Perhaps we should pay more attention. Perhaps such plans for the total state ought to even ruffle our feathers a bit.” For years I wrote about this topic, trying to get others interested. It was all there in black and white. At the drop of a hat, under the guise of a pandemic that only state managers can declare, real or drummed up, freedom itself could be abolished. These plans were never legislated, debated, or publicly discussed. They were simply posted as the result of various consultations with experts, who worked out their totalitarian fantasies as if scripting a Hollywood film. The 2007 blueprint is more explicit than anything I’ve seen. It comes from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, which “includes executive leaders from the private sector and state/local government who advise the White House on how to reduce physical and cyber risks and improve the security and resilience of the nation’s critical infrastructure sectors. The NIAC is administered on behalf of the President in accordance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act under the authority of the Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security.” And who sat on this committee in 2007 that decided that governments “may close schools and non-essential businesses”? Let us see. Mr. Edmund G. Archuleta, General Manager, El Paso Water Utilities Mr. Alfred R. Berkeley III, Chairman and CEO, Pipeline Trading Group, LLC, and former President and Vice Chairman of NASDAQ Chief Rebecca F. Denlinger, Fire Chief, Cobb County (Ga.) Fire and Emergency Services Chief Gilbert G. Gallegos, Police Chief (ret.), City of Albuquerque, N.M. Police Department Ms. Martha H. Marsh, President and CEO, Stanford Hospital and Clinics Mr. James B. Nicholson, President and CEO, PVS Chemical, Inc. Mr. Erle A. Nye, Chairman Emeritus, TXU Corp., NIAC Chairman Mr. Bruce A. Rohde, Chairman and CEO Emeritus, ConAgra Foods, Inc. Mr. John W. Thompson, Chairman and CEO, Symantec Corporation Mr. Brent Baglien, ConAgra Foods, Inc. Mr. David Barron, Bell South Mr. Dan Bart, TIA Mr. Scott Blanchette, Healthways Ms. Donna Burns, Georgia Emergency Management Agency Mr. Rob Clyde, Symantec Corporation Mr. Scott Culp, Microsoft Mr. Clay Detlefsen, International Dairy Foods Association Mr. Dave Engaldo, The Options Clearing Corporation Ms. Courtenay Enright, Symantec Corporation Mr. Gary Gardner, American Gas Association Mr. Bob Garfield, American Frozen Foods Institute Ms. Joan Gehrke, PVS Chemical, Inc. Ms. Sarah Gordon, Symantec Mr. Mike Hickey, Verizon Mr. Ron Hicks, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation Mr. George Hender, The Options Clearing Corporation Mr. James Hunter, City of Albuquerque, NM Emergency Management Mr. Stan Johnson, North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) Mr. David Jones, El Paso Corporation Inspector Jay Kopstein, Operations Division, New York City Police Department (NYPD) Ms. Tiffany Jones, Symantec Corporation Mr. Bruce Larson, American Water Mr. Charlie Lathram, Business Executives for National Security (BENS)/BellSouth Mr. Turner Madden, Madden & Patton Chief Mary Beth Michos, Prince William County (Va.) Fire and Rescue Mr. Bill Muston, TXU Corp. Mr. Vijay Nilekani, Nuclear Energy Institute Mr. Phil Reitinger, Microsoft Mr. Rob Rolfsen, Cisco Systems, Inc. Mr. Tim Roxey, Constellation Ms. Charyl Sarber, Symantec Mr. Lyman Shaffer, Pacific Gas and Electric, Ms. Diane VanDeHei, Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) Ms. Susan Vismor, Mellon Financial Corporation Mr. Ken Watson, Cisco Systems, Inc. Mr. Greg Wells, Southwest Airlines Mr. Gino Zucca, Cisco Systems, Inc. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Resources Dr. Bruce Gellin, Rockefeller Foundation Dr. Mary Mazanec Dr. Stuart Nightingale, CDC Ms. Julie Schafer Dr. Ben Schwartz, CDC Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Resources Mr. James Caverly, Director, Infrastructure Partnerships Division Ms. Nancy Wong, NIAC Designated Federal Officer (DFO) Ms. Jenny Menna, NIAC Designated Federal Officer (DFO) Dr. Til Jolly Mr. Jon MacLaren Ms. Laverne Madison Ms. Kathie McCracken Mr. Bucky Owens Mr. Dale Brown, Contractor Mr. John Dragseth, IP attorney, Contractor Mr. Jeff Green, Contractor Mr. Tim McCabe, Contractor Mr. William B. Anderson, ITS America Mr. Michael Arceneaux, Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) Mr. Chad Callaghan, Marriott Corporation Mr. Ted Cromwell, American Chemistry Council (ACC) Ms. Jeanne Dumas, American Trucking Association (ATA) Ms. Joan Harris, US Department of Transportation, Office of the Secretary Mr. Greg Hull, American Public Transportation Association Mr. Joe LaRocca, National Retail Federation Mr. Jack McKlveen, United Parcel Service (UPS) Ms. Beth Montgomery, Wal-Mart Dr. J. Patrick O’Neal, Georgia Office of EMS/Trauma/EP Mr. Roger Platt, The Real Estate Roundtable Mr. Martin Rojas, American Trucking Association (ATA) Mr. Timothy Sargent, Senior Chief, Economic Analysis and Forecasting Division, Economic and Fiscal Policy Branch, Finance Canada In other words, big everything: food, energy, retail, computers, water, and you name it. It’s a corporatist dream team. Consider ConAgra itself. What is that? It is Banquet, Chef Boyardee, Healthy Choice, Orville Redenbacher’s, Reddi-Wip, Slim Jim, Hunt’s Peter Pan Egg Beaters, Hebrew National, Marie Callender’s, P.F. Chang’s, Ranch Style Beans, Ro*Tel, Wolf Brand Chili, Angie’s, Duke’s, Gardein, Frontera, Bertolli, among many other seemingly independent brands that are all actually one company. Now, ask yourself: why might all these companies favor a plan for lockdowns? Why might WalMart, for example? It stands to reason. Lockdowns are a massive interference with competitive capitalism. They provide the best possible subsidy to big business while shutting down independent small businesses and putting them at a huge disadvantage once the opening up happens. In other words, it is an industrial racket, very much akin to interwar-style fascism, a corporatist combination of big business and big government. Throw pharma into the mix and you see exactly what came to pass in 2020, which amounted to the largest transfer of wealth from small and medium-sized business plus the middle class to wealthy industrialists in the history of humanity. The document is open even about managing information flows: “The public and private sectors should align their communications, exercises, investments, and support activities absolutely with both the plan and priorities during a pandemic influenza event. Continue data gathering, analysis, reporting, and open review.” There is nothing in any of this that fits with any Western tradition of law and liberty. Nothing. It was never approved by any democratic means. It was never part of any political campaign. It has never been the subject of any serious media examination. No think tank has ever pushed back on such plans in any systematic way. The last serious attempt to debunk this whole apparatus was from D.H. Henderson in 2006. His two co-authors on that paper eventually came around to going along with lockdowns of 2020. Henderson died in 2016. One of the co-authors of the original article told me that if Dr. Henderson had been around, instead of Dr. Fauci, the lockdowns would never have taken place. Here we are four years following the deployment of this lockdown machinery, and we are witness to what it destroys. It would be nice to say that the entire apparatus and theory behind it have been fully discredited. But that is not correct. All the plans are still in place. There have been no changes in federal law. Not one effort has been made to dismantle the corporatist/biosecurity planning state that made all this possible. Every bit of it is in place for the next go-around. Much of the authority for this whole coup traces to the Public Health Services Act of 1944, which was passed in wartime. For the first time in US history, it gave the federal government the power to quarantine. Even when the Biden administration was looking for some basis to justify its transportation mask mandate, it fell back to this one piece of legislation. If anyone really wants to get to the root of this problem, there are decisive steps that need to be taken. The indemnification of pharma from liability for harm needs to be repealed. The court precedent of forced shots in Jacobson needs to be overthrown. But even more fundamentally, the quarantine power itself has to go, and that means the full repeal of the Public Health Services Act of 1944. That is the root of the problem. Freedom will not be safe until it is uprooted. As it stands right now, everything that unfolded in 2020 and 2021 can happen again. Indeed, the plans are in place for exactly that. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author. Author Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. View all posts https://brownstone.org/articles/the-pandemic-excuse-for-a-corporatist-coup/

The Pandemic Excuse for a Corporatist Coup Jeffrey A. Tucker We’ve just come across a document hosted by the Department of Homeland Security, posted March 2023, but written in 2007, that amounts to a full-blown corporatist imposition on the US, abolishing anything remotely resembling the Bill of Rights and Constitutional law. It is right there in plain sight for anyone curious enough to dig. There is nothing in it that you haven’t already experienced with lockdowns. What makes it interesting are the participants in the forging of the plan, which is pretty much the whole of corporate America as it stood in 2007. It was a George W. Bush initiative. The conclusions are startling. “Quarantine is a legally enforceable declaration that a government body may institute over individuals potentially exposed to a disease, but who are not symptomatic. If enacted, Federal quarantine laws will be coordinated between CDC and State and local public health officials, and, if necessary, law enforcement personnel…The government may also enact travel restrictions to limit the movement of people and products between geographic areas in an effort to limit disease transmission and spread. Authorities are currently reviewing possible plans to curtail international travel upon a pandemic’s emergence overseas. “Limiting public assembly opportunities also helps limit the spread of disease. Concert halls, movie theaters, sports arenas, shopping malls, and other large public gathering places might close indefinitely during a pandemic—whether because of voluntary closures or government-imposed closures. Similarly, officials may close schools and non-essential businesses during pandemic waves in an effort to significantly slow disease transmission rates. These strategies aim to prevent the close interaction of individuals, the primary conduit of spreading the influenza virus. Even taking steps such as limiting person-to-person interactions within a distance of three feet or avoiding instances of casual close contact, such as shaking hands, will help limit disease spread.” There we have it: the pandemic plans. They once seemed abstract. In 2020, they became very real. Your rights were deleted. No more freedom even to have house guests. In those days, the rule was to enforce only three feet of distance rather than six feet of distance, neither of which had any basis in science. Indeed, the actual scientific literature even at that time recommended against any physical interventions designed to limit the spread of respiratory viruses. They were known not to work. The entire profession of public health accepted that. Therefore, for many years before lockdowns wrecked economic functioning, there had been two parallel tracks in operation, one intellectual/academic and one imposed by state/corporate managers. They had nothing to do with each other. This situation persisted for the better part of 15 years. Suddenly in 2020, there was a reckoning, and the state/corporate managers won it. Seemingly out of nowhere, liberty as we have long known it was gone. Back in 2005, I first came across a Bush administration scheme, an early draft of the above, that would have ended freedom as we know it. It was a scheme for combating the bird flu, which officials back then imagined would involve universal quarantines, business and event closures, travel restrictions, and more. I wrote: “Even if the flu does come, and taxpayers have coughed up, the government will surely have a ball imposing travel restrictions, shutting down schools and businesses, quarantining cities, and banning public gatherings…It is a serious matter when the government purports to plan to abolish all liberty and nationalize all economic life and put every business under the control of the military, especially in the name of a bug that seems largely restricted to the bird population. Perhaps we should pay more attention. Perhaps such plans for the total state ought to even ruffle our feathers a bit.” For years I wrote about this topic, trying to get others interested. It was all there in black and white. At the drop of a hat, under the guise of a pandemic that only state managers can declare, real or drummed up, freedom itself could be abolished. These plans were never legislated, debated, or publicly discussed. They were simply posted as the result of various consultations with experts, who worked out their totalitarian fantasies as if scripting a Hollywood film. The 2007 blueprint is more explicit than anything I’ve seen. It comes from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, which “includes executive leaders from the private sector and state/local government who advise the White House on how to reduce physical and cyber risks and improve the security and resilience of the nation’s critical infrastructure sectors. The NIAC is administered on behalf of the President in accordance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act under the authority of the Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security.” And who sat on this committee in 2007 that decided that governments “may close schools and non-essential businesses”? Let us see. Mr. Edmund G. Archuleta, General Manager, El Paso Water Utilities Mr. Alfred R. Berkeley III, Chairman and CEO, Pipeline Trading Group, LLC, and former President and Vice Chairman of NASDAQ Chief Rebecca F. Denlinger, Fire Chief, Cobb County (Ga.) Fire and Emergency Services Chief Gilbert G. Gallegos, Police Chief (ret.), City of Albuquerque, N.M. Police Department Ms. Martha H. Marsh, President and CEO, Stanford Hospital and Clinics Mr. James B. Nicholson, President and CEO, PVS Chemical, Inc. Mr. Erle A. Nye, Chairman Emeritus, TXU Corp., NIAC Chairman Mr. Bruce A. Rohde, Chairman and CEO Emeritus, ConAgra Foods, Inc. Mr. John W. Thompson, Chairman and CEO, Symantec Corporation Mr. Brent Baglien, ConAgra Foods, Inc. Mr. David Barron, Bell South Mr. Dan Bart, TIA Mr. Scott Blanchette, Healthways Ms. Donna Burns, Georgia Emergency Management Agency Mr. Rob Clyde, Symantec Corporation Mr. Scott Culp, Microsoft Mr. Clay Detlefsen, International Dairy Foods Association Mr. Dave Engaldo, The Options Clearing Corporation Ms. Courtenay Enright, Symantec Corporation Mr. Gary Gardner, American Gas Association Mr. Bob Garfield, American Frozen Foods Institute Ms. Joan Gehrke, PVS Chemical, Inc. Ms. Sarah Gordon, Symantec Mr. Mike Hickey, Verizon Mr. Ron Hicks, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation Mr. George Hender, The Options Clearing Corporation Mr. James Hunter, City of Albuquerque, NM Emergency Management Mr. Stan Johnson, North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) Mr. David Jones, El Paso Corporation Inspector Jay Kopstein, Operations Division, New York City Police Department (NYPD) Ms. Tiffany Jones, Symantec Corporation Mr. Bruce Larson, American Water Mr. Charlie Lathram, Business Executives for National Security (BENS)/BellSouth Mr. Turner Madden, Madden & Patton Chief Mary Beth Michos, Prince William County (Va.) Fire and Rescue Mr. Bill Muston, TXU Corp. Mr. Vijay Nilekani, Nuclear Energy Institute Mr. Phil Reitinger, Microsoft Mr. Rob Rolfsen, Cisco Systems, Inc. Mr. Tim Roxey, Constellation Ms. Charyl Sarber, Symantec Mr. Lyman Shaffer, Pacific Gas and Electric, Ms. Diane VanDeHei, Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) Ms. Susan Vismor, Mellon Financial Corporation Mr. Ken Watson, Cisco Systems, Inc. Mr. Greg Wells, Southwest Airlines Mr. Gino Zucca, Cisco Systems, Inc. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Resources Dr. Bruce Gellin, Rockefeller Foundation Dr. Mary Mazanec Dr. Stuart Nightingale, CDC Ms. Julie Schafer Dr. Ben Schwartz, CDC Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Resources Mr. James Caverly, Director, Infrastructure Partnerships Division Ms. Nancy Wong, NIAC Designated Federal Officer (DFO) Ms. Jenny Menna, NIAC Designated Federal Officer (DFO) Dr. Til Jolly Mr. Jon MacLaren Ms. Laverne Madison Ms. Kathie McCracken Mr. Bucky Owens Mr. Dale Brown, Contractor Mr. John Dragseth, IP attorney, Contractor Mr. Jeff Green, Contractor Mr. Tim McCabe, Contractor Mr. William B. Anderson, ITS America Mr. Michael Arceneaux, Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) Mr. Chad Callaghan, Marriott Corporation Mr. Ted Cromwell, American Chemistry Council (ACC) Ms. Jeanne Dumas, American Trucking Association (ATA) Ms. Joan Harris, US Department of Transportation, Office of the Secretary Mr. Greg Hull, American Public Transportation Association Mr. Joe LaRocca, National Retail Federation Mr. Jack McKlveen, United Parcel Service (UPS) Ms. Beth Montgomery, Wal-Mart Dr. J. Patrick O’Neal, Georgia Office of EMS/Trauma/EP Mr. Roger Platt, The Real Estate Roundtable Mr. Martin Rojas, American Trucking Association (ATA) Mr. Timothy Sargent, Senior Chief, Economic Analysis and Forecasting Division, Economic and Fiscal Policy Branch, Finance Canada In other words, big everything: food, energy, retail, computers, water, and you name it. It’s a corporatist dream team. Consider ConAgra itself. What is that? It is Banquet, Chef Boyardee, Healthy Choice, Orville Redenbacher’s, Reddi-Wip, Slim Jim, Hunt’s Peter Pan Egg Beaters, Hebrew National, Marie Callender’s, P.F. Chang’s, Ranch Style Beans, Ro*Tel, Wolf Brand Chili, Angie’s, Duke’s, Gardein, Frontera, Bertolli, among many other seemingly independent brands that are all actually one company. Now, ask yourself: why might all these companies favor a plan for lockdowns? Why might WalMart, for example? It stands to reason. Lockdowns are a massive interference with competitive capitalism. They provide the best possible subsidy to big business while shutting down independent small businesses and putting them at a huge disadvantage once the opening up happens. In other words, it is an industrial racket, very much akin to interwar-style fascism, a corporatist combination of big business and big government. Throw pharma into the mix and you see exactly what came to pass in 2020, which amounted to the largest transfer of wealth from small and medium-sized business plus the middle class to wealthy industrialists in the history of humanity. The document is open even about managing information flows: “The public and private sectors should align their communications, exercises, investments, and support activities absolutely with both the plan and priorities during a pandemic influenza event. Continue data gathering, analysis, reporting, and open review.” There is nothing in any of this that fits with any Western tradition of law and liberty. Nothing. It was never approved by any democratic means. It was never part of any political campaign. It has never been the subject of any serious media examination. No think tank has ever pushed back on such plans in any systematic way. The last serious attempt to debunk this whole apparatus was from D.H. Henderson in 2006. His two co-authors on that paper eventually came around to going along with lockdowns of 2020. Henderson died in 2016. One of the co-authors of the original article told me that if Dr. Henderson had been around, instead of Dr. Fauci, the lockdowns would never have taken place. Here we are four years following the deployment of this lockdown machinery, and we are witness to what it destroys. It would be nice to say that the entire apparatus and theory behind it have been fully discredited. But that is not correct. All the plans are still in place. There have been no changes in federal law. Not one effort has been made to dismantle the corporatist/biosecurity planning state that made all this possible. Every bit of it is in place for the next go-around. Much of the authority for this whole coup traces to the Public Health Services Act of 1944, which was passed in wartime. For the first time in US history, it gave the federal government the power to quarantine. Even when the Biden administration was looking for some basis to justify its transportation mask mandate, it fell back to this one piece of legislation. If anyone really wants to get to the root of this problem, there are decisive steps that need to be taken. The indemnification of pharma from liability for harm needs to be repealed. The court precedent of forced shots in Jacobson needs to be overthrown. But even more fundamentally, the quarantine power itself has to go, and that means the full repeal of the Public Health Services Act of 1944. That is the root of the problem. Freedom will not be safe until it is uprooted. As it stands right now, everything that unfolded in 2020 and 2021 can happen again. Indeed, the plans are in place for exactly that. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author. Author Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. View all posts https://brownstone.org/articles/the-pandemic-excuse-for-a-corporatist-coup/

Meet the Mad Scientist Who wants to Fight Climate Change by Making Humans Smaller and Allergic to Meat. Yes, it's a crazy world. Anthony Colpo If WEF frontman Klaus Schwab is your archetypal Bond villain, S. Matthew Liao is your textbook classic evil nerd. The kind that should be locked away somewhere he can't hurt anybody. If you think I'm being harsh, read on. I first became aware of Laio, a 'bioethicist' at NYU, several years ago while researching the nonsensical Unified Cow Fart Theory of Global Warming put forward by people who think the ultimate in human nutrition is to eat like a rabbit. During the course of that research, I came upon a 2012 paper Liao co-authored with UK professors Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache titled “Human Engineering and Climate Change.” The paper begins by claiming "Anthropogenic climate change is arguably one of the biggest problems that confront us today." I can't disagree with that. The nonsensical claim that the minsicule 0.28% of global greenhouse gases attributable to humans has caused runaway warming is being used to implement measures with potentially dire consequences for both the global economy and human wellbeing. That is a big problem. This feigned concern for the environment, by the way, is organized and funded by the same people who masterminded the campaign to pollute the entire human species with toxic gene therapies ('Lockstep' author and dark money 'philanthropy’ outfit Rockefeller Foundation, for example, recently announced they were pumping $1 billion dollars to advance climate bribes “solutions”). These are the same people heavily invested in industries that pollute both our bodies and the environment with all manner of toxic porqueria. Climate change is not a science, but a religion. It is not comprised of known facts based on valid and reproducible experimentation, but a belief system resting entirely upon the highly fallible (and often fraudulent) practice of climate modelling. That modelling is used to issue doomsday forecasts, expressly designed to scare the population into compliance. Those who dare express skepticism of this nonsense are derided as "deniers," no matter how sound their arguments. Of course, Liao, Sandberg and Roache don't see climate change as a problem for the same reasons I do. Liao really seems to believe Planet Earth is in danger of becoming Planet Hot Pot With Extra Chili if we don't "do something" yesterday, and his co-authors are happy to tag along for the ride. A brief intro to this trio is in order. S. Matthew Liao is a bioethicist at NYU Global School of Public Health. As you’re about to see, Liao has a rather twisted set of ethics, and I find it quite worrying to read he “provides students with an education grounded in a broad conception of bioethics encompassing both medical and environmental ethics.” Anders Sandberg is a Swedish transhumanist and currently a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford which, along with Loma Linda University in the US, has produced most of the world’s peer-reviewed propaganda epidemiology erroneously claiming meat-free diets are better for you. In 2018, Sandberg published a paper on arxiv.org entitled "Blueberry Earth", which finally answered the pressing question that has bothered great minds for centuries: "What if the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries?" Seriously. Rebecca Roache, formerly of Oxford, is now a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. According to Wikipedia, Roache “is particularly noted for her work on swearing, which has featured in various media, such as the BBC.” If that’s not the resume of a trio with way too much time on their hands, I don’t know what is. So now you know the intellectual caliber of this brains trust, let’s see how it proposes to solve the non-existent problem of anthropogenic global warming. Noting that geoengineering is too risky (I think they just confirmed another conspiracy theory as fact), our heroic trio propose something every bit as dicey and stupid: Biomedical human engineering. According to Liao et al, this "involves biomedical modifications of humans so that they can mitigate and/or adapt to climate change." They further argue that this Frankensteinian idiocy "is potentially less risky" than geoengineering. As staunch believers in the nonsensical Unified Cow Fart Theory of Global Warming, the first order of business for our intrepid trio would be to create “Pharmacological meat intolerance.” Because "people often lack the motivation or willpower to give up eating red meat," they write, "a more realistic option might be to induce mild intolerance (akin, e.g., to milk intolerance) to these kinds of meat." "While meat intolerance is normally uncommon," they continue, oblivious to the fact they've just confirmed meat is an ideal, evolutionary-correct food for humans, "in principle, it could be induced by stimulating the immune system against common bovine proteins." "The immune system would then become primed to react to such proteins, and henceforth eating ‘eco-unfriendly’ food would induce unpleasant experiences," they continue. "A potentially safe and practical way of delivering such intolerance may be to produce ‘meat’ patches – akin to nicotine patches," they write. "We can produce patches for those animals that contribute the most to greenhouse gas emissions and encourage people to use such patches." Kids, this is why you need to avoid drugs, vegan propaganda, and mad scientists masquerading as university professors. But our cray cray trio aren’t finished yet. Heck no. Their next brilliant idea for saving the planet is “Making humans smaller.” "[O]ther things being equal," they write, "the larger one is, the more food and energy one requires." With their brains farting like the winner of a baked beans eating contest, they further claim "a car uses more fuel per mile to carry a heavier person than a lighter person; more fabric is needed to clothe larger than smaller people; heavier people wear out shoes, carpets, and furniture more quickly than lighter people, and so on." So how do we make humans smaller so that their shoes won't wear out as quick? Oh, that's easy. "One way is through preimplantation genetic diagnosis" which "would simply involve rethinking the criteria for selecting which embryos to implant" during IVF. !? Another way "is to use hormone treatment either to affect somatotropin (growth hormone) levels or to trigger the closing of the epiphyseal plate (at the ends of bones) earlier than normal.” Hormone treatments are used for growth reduction in excessively tall children so, argue Liao et al, why not use them to make normal height kids shorter? I mean, what could possibly go wrong by subjecting growing bodies to unnecessary hormone treatments? But hey, why even wait for kids to get to that point? Why not target them before they've even popped out of mummy’s tummy? "[A] more speculative and controversial way of reducing adult height is to reduce birth weight," write our unabashed Masters of the Looniverse. "Drugs or nutrients that either reduce the expression of paternally imprinted genes, or increase the expression of maternally imprinted genes, could potentially regulate birth size." But again, why even wait to target kids in the womb? Why not stop them being conceived in the first place? Yep, it's time to roll out the overpopulation card. Which brings us to a dilemma: How to lower birth rates when almost one half of the world’s population already lives in countries with below replacement fertility? Oh, again, that's easy. Make women smarter! Hey, they said it, not me. They write there is “strong evidence that birth-rates are negatively correlated with adequate access to education for women” and "[a]t least in the US, women with low cognitive ability are more likely to have children before age 18." Even if that latter contention is true (it’s based on a single case-control study published in 2002), the median age for giving birth in the US is now 30. They’re basically saying that the number of kids a women has is negatively correlated with her intelligence. If you’re a woman who wants to have multiple kids, then they assume you can’t be the sharpest tool in the shed. But women are made to have children, and Feminism Inc. still hasn’t figured out how to sue Mother Nature for designating this role to females. So in a world already saturated with hook-up culture, abortion and morning-after pills, how do Liao et al propose to stop women making the ‘dumb’ choice of ensuring the continued propagation of the human species? Well, they don’t actually say. Not surprising, given their own intellectual output indicates they themselves have yet to discover an effective brain doping strategy. They do seem to be alluding to pharmaceutical means when they write “many parents are indeed happy to give their children cognitive enhancements," citing the widespread (and often misguided) use of Ritalin. They’re basically saying making kids smarter will make them want to avoid or minimize childbearing when older. In order to get people to go along with this bollocks, Liao et al suggest administering oxytocin in an attempt to increase people’s trust levels. Interestingly, when discussing how to convince people into cooperating with this nonsense despite its obvious downsides, the authors note “people are routinely vaccinated to prevent themselves and those around them from acquiring infectious diseases, even though vaccinations can sometimes even lead to death.” Thanks for confirming. The authors wrote in their paper, “To be clear, we shall not argue that human engineering ought to be adopted; such a claim would require far more exposition and argument than we have space for here.” The 2012 paper understandably caused controversy and aroused heated responses from both laymen and academics. When a Guardian writer asked shortly afterwards just what they were trying to achieve with their paper, all three authors and one of the journal’s editors were at pains to portray it as a philosophical “thought experiment” designed to stimulate discussion. When discussion of their patently absurd suggestions didn’t go the way they hoped, Sandberg and Roache accused critics of not having read the paper, which begs the question of just how critics knew of its numerous bizarre suggestions. For the record, I have read the paper in its entirety, and rather than find it an innocuous philosophical excursion, I find it disturbing that people could put forward such suggestions without any awareness of just how truly dystopian and dysfunctional they sound. Sandberg even told the reporter that in his work “with global catastrophic risks at the Future of Humanity Institute, climate change is at the lower end of concern. Certainly a problem, but unlikely to wipe out humanity.” So why the need for radically ridiculous suggestions to deal with a problem that’s been way overblown? Is this how academics entertain themselves when they’re bored? As you’re about to learn, despite the apparently token disclaimer in the 2012 paper, Liao in fact remains a highly enthusiastic promoter of the human engineering angle - and he may have some powerful sympathizers. From Poison Pricks to Toxic Ticks In 2016, Liao spoke at the 2016 World Science Festival, once again insisting we eat too much meat and that human engineering held the potential to solve this non-problem. If you watch the following snippet through to the end, you’ll hear Liao say “There’s this thing called the Lone Star tick where if it bites you, you will become allergic to meat. So that’s something we can do through human engineering. We can possibly address really big world problems through human engineering.” In 2017, he gave a TED Talk, which is a really popular forum for crazy ‘interesting’ people to get up on a stage and pretend they’re experts. A snippet of the talk, for which YouTube comments are understandably turned off, can be viewed below. Note the complete lack of shame or embarrassment as Liao recites the core principles of his insane 2012 paper. He can barely hide his glee, both at expressing his transhuman fantasies and being in the presence of people who don’t respond by telling him to check into an asylum. Note how when he mentions creating “mild intolerance to meat,” a handful of vetards in the transfixed audience begin applauding, and one even lets out a “wooo!” The audience also laughs along when Liao suggests preemptively screening for smaller IVF babies. They also applaud and chuckle approvingly when he suggests this carry on will allow parents the “liberty-enhancing option” of having “one large child, two medium-sized children, or three smaller children.” A liberty-enhancing option suggests an improvement over current restrictions, which isn’t the case. Ah, lunatics. Where would we be without them? While the video is basically a condensed rehash of his 2012 paper, there are a few new revelations. In an attempt to make “people” smarter (ever the PC sycophant, he doesn’t say “women” in front of the mixed-gender audience), he’s now embracing ritalin as a nootropic for kids, despite acknowledging in his 2012 paper it’s “for children with ADHD and certainly has side effects.” He’s also suggesting modafinil for kids, the long-term use of which has not been studied in children. Reckless is as stupid does. Enter the Biggest Lunatics of All It should come as no surprise to most readers that Liao’s demented “human engineering” suggestions have garnered favourable attention from the hypocritical parasite class that descends upon Davos every year to decide what’s best for the rest of us. In December 2020, the WEF unveiled its bioengineering framework in a presentation called “3 Scenarios for How Bioengineering Could Change Our World in 10 Years.” Among the highlights were edible vaccines grown in plants and various forms of genetic manipulation. That presentation was based off a WEF-sponsored academic paper titled Bioengineering Horizon Scan 2020. For the WEF’s 2021 Davos Summit, reported BioHack, Liao et al’s 2012 paper was cited during discussion of the ‘Planetary Health Diet’, a globalist initiative to shift humankind towards plant-and insect-based diets. Liao et al’s 2012 paper was also considered as a possible add-on to the Bioengineering Horizon Scan 2020 paper. However, perusal of the reference list shows no mention of the 2012 paper. It seems the Liao et al paper may have been too much of a hot potato for the WEF, which had to pull it’s original 2030 video that featured what may go down in history as the world’s worst PR line (“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”). It seems that just about every week, what was once considered a kooky conspiracy theory is confirmed as a genuine concern. Share https://anthonycolpo.substack.com/p/meet-the-mad-scientist-who-wants?utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

“Brain Dead” is NOT Dead! LIVE people are murdered daily for organs and to “save money” You MUST KNOW that “no brain activity” means NOTHING except that doctors didn’t do the tests that would find the brain activity. Don’t let your loved one be killed. Brucha Weisberger BS”D From the beginning of time, people knew that cessation of heartbeat and breath meant death. This is the G-d-given definition, and it is logical. Since it’s real, this definition does not require anything to “prop it up.” Of course, G-d, Who creates life, is the only One Who has the authority to say when it ends, and to end it. Unfortunately, two motivations came into play in the 20th century to create a new, and false, “definition” of death. Marina Zhang at Epoch Times explains in her June 2024 article, “Brain-Dead People May Not Be Dead—Here’s Why.” https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/are-brain-dead-people-really-dead-5629496 The definition of brain death, also known as death by neurological criteria, is when a person falls into a permanent coma, loses their brainstem reflexes and consciousness, and can’t breathe without stimulus or support. Yet a person’s heart can be beating, his or her organs functional, and he or she can fight off infection, grow, and even carry babies to term. (Delivery of a Healthy Baby from a Brain-Dead Woman After 117 Days of Somatic Support: A Case Report - PMC https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8141338/) Though they may exhibit no signs of consciousness, some areas of the brain may still work. About 50 percent of brain-death patients retain activity in their hypothalamus, which coordinates the body’s endocrine system and regulates body temperature. However, all of this stops if they are taken off life support. What is the big rush to declare death and take people off of breathing assistance? First, there is a need for transplant organs, and second, a wish to “save resources” by having people hurry up and die already. From Rachel Aviv’s article in the New Yorker, 2018: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/what-does-it-mean-to-die Until the nineteen-sixties, cardio-respiratory failure was the only way to die. The notion that death could be diagnosed in the brain didn’t emerge until after the advent of the modern ventilator, allowing what was known at the time as “oxygen treatment”: as long as blood carrying oxygen reached the heart, it could continue to beat. In 1967, Henry Beecher, a renowned bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, wrote to a colleague, “It would be most desirable for a group at Harvard University to come to some subtle conclusion as to a new definition of death.” Permanently comatose patients, maintained by mechanical ventilators, were “increasing in numbers over the land and there are a number of problems which should be faced up to.” Beecher created a committee comprising men who already knew one another: ten doctors, one lawyer, one historian, and one theologian. In less than six months, they completed a report, which they published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The only citation in the article was from a speech by the Pope. They proposed that the irreversible destruction of the brain should be defined as death, giving two reasons: to relieve the burden on families and hospitals, which were providing futile care to patients who would never recover, and to address the fact that “obsolete criteria for the definition of death can lead to controversy in obtaining organs for transplantation,” a field that had developed rapidly; in the previous five years, doctors had performed the world’s first transplant of a pancreas, a liver, a lung, and a heart. In an earlier draft, the second reason was stated more directly: “There is great need for the tissues and organs of the hopelessly comatose in order to restore to health those who are still salvageable.” (The sentence was revised after Harvard’s medical dean wrote that “the connotation of this statement is unfortunate.”) In the next twelve years, twenty-seven states rewrote their definitions of death to conform to the Harvard committee’s conclusions. Thousands of lives were prolonged or saved every year because patients declared brain-dead—a form of death eventually adopted by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and most of Europe—were now eligible to donate their organs. The philosopher Peter Singer described it as “a concept so desirable in its consequences that it is unthinkable to give up, and so shaky on its foundations that it can scarcely be supported.” The new death was “an ethical choice masquerading as a medical fact,” he wrote. Legal ambiguities remained—people considered alive in one region of the country could be declared dead in another—and, in 1981, the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems proposed a uniform definition and theory of death. Its report, which was endorsed by the American Medical Association, stated that death is the moment when the body stops operating as an “integrated whole.” Even if life continues in individual organs and cells, the person is no longer alive, because the functioning organs are merely a collection of artificially maintained subsystems that will inevitably disintegrate. “The heart usually stops beating within two to ten days,” the report said. The commission’s staff philosopher, Daniel Wikler, a professor at Harvard and the first staff ethicist for the World Health Organization, told me that he didn’t think the commission’s theory of death was supported by the scientific facts it cited. “I thought it was demonstrably untrue, but so what?” he said. “I didn’t see a downside at the time.” Wikler told the commission that it would be more logical to say that death occurred when the cerebrum—the center for consciousness, thoughts, and feelings, the properties essential to having a personal identity—was destroyed. His formulation would have rendered a much broader population of patients, including those who could breathe on their own, dead. Despite Wikler’s reservations, he drafted the third chapter of the report, “Understanding the ‘Meaning’ of Death.” “I was put in a tight spot, and I fudged,” he told me. “I knew that there was an air of bad faith about it. I made it seem like there are a lot of profound unknowns and went in the direction of fuzziness, so that no one could say, ‘Hey, your philosopher says this is nonsense.’ That’s what I thought, but you’d never know from what I wrote.” So much for “brain dead” being a scientific definition. It is truly horrifying to contemplate that living, feeling people have their vital organs barbarically cut out while they are alive. Organs must be “harvested” from live donors in order to be viable. Live, in the true sense of the word - the heart is beating. (As you will see in this article, there is awareness, as well, even if the person cannot express it.) From Marina Zhang’s ET article: Among European anesthesiologists, there is an ongoing debate about whether brain-dead organ donors should be given consciousness blockers during organ procurement. Some argue that they should do so in case patients feel pain. Others disagree. Surprisingly, the anesthesiologists’ position is “not based on the claim that patients were incapable of experiencing pain,” but, instead, out of concern that the public might have doubts about the brain-death diagnosis, bioethicists Dr. Robert Truog and Franklin Miller (who has a doctorate in philosophy) wrote in their book, “Death, Dying, and Organ Transplantation.” Dr. Ronald Dworkin, a research fellow and anesthesiologist, wrote in an article on organ procurement that he chose to give consciousness blockers because he thought his patient “might still be a ‘little alive’, [sic] whatever that means.” Mr. Miller, who is also a professor of medical ethics in medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, said the label of brain death is misleading. He and Dr. Truog, professor of anesthesiology and director emeritus of the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, are of the opinion that brain-dead people are alive but likely will not regain consciousness and recover. See this chilling account by a doctor, in the ET article: It was 1989, and she was still a resident anesthesiologist, Dr. Heidi Klessig recalled in her book, “The Brain Death Fallacy.” One day, her attending anesthesiologist told her to prepare a brain-dead organ donor for organ removal surgery. Upon examining the patient, Dr. Klessig was surprised to find that the man looked exactly like every other critically ill, living patient and, in fact, better than most. “He was warm, his heart was beating, and his monitors showed stable vital signs,” Dr. Klessig wrote. “Nevertheless, on his bedside exam, he checked all the boxes for brain death, and the neurologist declared him ‘dead.’” Dr. Klessig’s supervising attending anesthesiologist asked her what anesthesia she was going to give the donor for the operation. Her answer was a paralyzing agent so the donor wouldn’t move during surgery, as well as some fentanyl to blunt the body’s responses to pain. The anesthesiologist looked at her and asked, “Well, are you going to give anything to block consciousness?” Dr. Klessig was stunned. Consciousness blockers are given to patients to ensure they aren’t awake and aware during an operation. Her education told her that brain-dead patients should not be conscious; apart from having a biologically active body, their minds were gone. “I looked at him and said, ‘Why would I do that? Isn’t he dead?’” Her attending anesthesiologist looked at her and asked, “Why don’t you give him something to block consciousness—just in case.” “I get a pit in my stomach every time I remember his face,” Dr. Klessig told The Epoch Times. “I remember him looking at me over his mask ... It seemed very confusing. Please don’t miss the extremely powerful video testimony above. It is horrific to realize that parents and other family members are routinely told that their child or loved one is “dead” because of absence of “brain activity” when in reality, the person is alive, and will die only when the family agrees to to having the respirator unplugged - in order words, to have their relative murdered. Someone that I know personally told me of an immensely tragic case that he was was involved with, in which a brain-injured child whom he was helping to heal after she had been declared “brain dead,” was murdered after he was removed from the premises. The child had been making progress towards recovery. He knows of many other similar cases. In one case, the child’s father witnessed with his own eyes the nurse giving the child an injection, after which the child’s heart stopped - but the nurse denied administering anything. This person that I know told me of a doctor in Louisiana, Dr. Paul Harch, who has helped scores of “brain dead” children and adults to become completely well again - using a walk-in hyperbaric oxygen chamber which accommodates people on life support. Dr. Harch uses a special test that can pick up brain activity not picked up on standard brain tests - but hospitals refuse to use it. Why do the powers-that-be want people dead, so badly? Here are some stories which clearly illustrate how very much alive people who are pronounced “brain dead” actually are. Most of them were collected on this website: https://www.respectforhumanlife.com/survivors Harrison Elmer: Three week old boy with meningitis had life support machine turned off - but staged a miracle recovery https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/three-week-old-boy-meningitis-6733061 Harrison had become desperately ill after being struck down by meningitis and doctors said they could do no more. Scans showed he was completely brain dead. Heartbroken Samantha Baker, 22, and Adam Ellmer, 26, chose to take Harrison to a hospice so he could pass away peacefully by their side. But after the machine was turned off, little Harrison not only managed to breathe on his own, he began an incredible journey back to health. Now he is about to reach his third birthday, and is hitting all the milestones as expected. Samantha, a full-time mum, said: “When Harrison's life support was switched off we never imagined he would continue to breathe. “We were all so heartbroken when we were told he wasn't going to survive, it felt like a real miracle. “Despite surviving, doctors still warned us that he would never be able to walk or talk. “We were terrified but so thankful he had survived that we just took each day as it came.” Jahi Mcmath 2000 - 2018 Declared "Brain Dead" in the state of California in December 2013. She lived five more years in New Jersey post diagnosis Jahi’s case is particularly tragic because it didn’t have to happen - she had surgery to remove her tonsils, because of sleep apnea which caused her exhaustion and difficulty focusing. Her post-op observation was grossly lacking, and her unusual bleeding was ignored. Jahi hemorrhaged and lost her pulse. Doctors declared her “brain dead,” but her mother never gave up. She fought and fought against the furious medical “professionals:” On December 19th, ten days after the surgery, David Durand, the hospital’s senior vice-president and chief medical officer, held a meeting with the family. They asked Durand to allow Jahi to remain on the ventilator [for six more days], suggesting that the swelling in her brain might subside. Durand said no. They also asked that she be given a feeding tube. Durand dismissed this request, too. The idea that the procedure would help her recover was an “absurd notion,” he later wrote, and would only add to the “illusion that she is not dead.” When they persisted, Durand asked, “What is it that you don’t understand?” According to Jahi’s mother, stepfather, grandmother, brother, and Dolan, who took notes, Durand pounded his fist on the table, saying, “She’s dead, dead, dead.” Jahi’s mother wouldn’t give up, and moved Jahi to another state. Her family constantly spoke with her and stimulated her. Despite having a death certificate, Jahi was clearly alive. She would move her hands and feet in response to requests, and even began menstruating (a process mediated by the hypothalamus, near the front of the brain.) On the (MRI) scans, Machado observed that Jahi’s brain stem was nearly destroyed. The nerve fibres that connect the brain’s right and left hemispheres were barely recognizable. But large areas of her cerebrum, which mediates consciousness, language, and voluntary movements, were structurally intact. Unfortunately, Jahi passed away of liver failure after five years of devoted care and of progress. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/what-does-it-mean-to-die On Thursday, a senior doctor told the High Court she was "shocked" when a baby declared brain stem dead after two tests began breathing by himself two weeks later. The court heard that ventilation continued on the four-month-old after he was declared dead because there was an ongoing legal dispute. In July, doctors treating him at a London hospital were forced to rescind "the clinical ascertainment of death" after a nurse noticed the infant had independent rhythmic breathing. Mr Justice Hayden, who has been asked by Guys' and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust to decide what is in the baby's best interests, said the juxtaposition of a baby being declared dead but then breathing independently is "striking even for those of us experienced in these cases". He called the test "unreliable". The doctor said the "wording" of the test could be changed to include a warning about the test's reliability. She said she had approached the AMRC to explain what happened, saying it would be "problematic" if news of the test's unreliability "got out in the public domain". The brain stem test is a clinical test done when there is clear evidence of serious brain damage that cannot be cured. It is a series of mini tests to check the brain's automatic functions including reaction to light in the eyes, ice-cold water in the ear and a short period off a ventilator to see whether a patient attempts to take a breath. Lewis Roberts In March 2021, 18-year-old Lewis Roberts was declared brain stem dead after a road accident but began breathing independently hours before his organs were to be extracted for donation. Today he is well enough to play football and basketball. Last month his sister told Sky News the test is done too soon. "They rushed it through," she said. "Eight months ago he was sat in a wheelchair, his eyes were gone, he couldn't speak. From how he was then to how he is now, that just shows that the brain can heal given the time." https://news.sky.com/story/brain-death-test-in-uk-under-review-after-baby-declared-dead-began-breathing-independently-12681630 It’s not only young people who can have miraculous recoveries. Here, a woman in her seventies who had a severe heart attack made a comeback after 6 days of a flat EEG. This story by Judy Doobov, from the book Small Miracles for the Jewish Heart, was republished on Chabad.org. After sustaining a severe heart attack in 1973, my grandmother sank into a deep coma and was placed on life support systems in the hospital. Her EEG was totally flat, indicating zero brain activity. She was hooked up both to a pacemaker that made her heart beat artificially and a respirator that made her lungs breathe artificially. But technically, as the doctors told me privately, she was basically as good as dead. "She'll never come out of the coma," they said, "and she's better off this way. If she did, her life would be meaningless. She'd exist in a purely vegetative state. Even though she was in her mid-seventies and had lived a full life, I refused to believe that my beloved grandmother could simply slip away like this. She was too feisty, too vital to just disappear into a coma. My instincts told me to start talking to her and keep chatting away. I stayed at her bedside day and night, and that's precisely what I did. I spoke to her all the time about my husband and our two small children, about other relatives, about her own life. I told her all the news that was circulating in Australia at the time. I also kept urging her to keep clinging to life, not to give up. "Don't you dare leave us!" I exhorted. "I need you, Mom needs you, your grandchildren need you. They're just beginning to get to know you. It's too soon for you to go!" It was hard for me to do battle for my grandmother's life, alone as I was. During the time that she fell ill, I was her only relative in Sydney. Her daughter (my mother) was away overseas on a trip, and my only sibling — a brother — lived in Israel. My husband was home caring for our children so that I could take my post at her bedside. I stood a solitary vigil, but that was not what placed such tremendous pressure on me. What was enormously difficult was being asked to make decisions alone. The emotional burden was huge. When four days passed with no signs of life flickering in either my grandmother's eyes or her hands, and no change recorded by the EEG, the doctors advised me to authorize the papers that would turn off the life support systems. I trembled to think that I held the power of consigning my grandmother to an early grave. "But she's really already dead," the doctors argued. "She's just being kept artificially alive by the pacemaker and the respirator. Keeping her hooked up to these machines is just a waste." "Well, listen," I said. "It's Thursday afternoon, and in the Jewish religion we bury people right away. My parents are overseas — practically two days away — and they would certainly want to be here for the funeral. But we don't do funerals on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. The earliest we could do the funeral would be on Sunday. So let me call my parents to get ready to fly home, and I'll sign the papers on Sunday." It was all very cold and calculating, but deep inside, my heart was aching. Meanwhile, I didn't let up. I kept talking up a storm. "Guess what, Grandma?" I gossiped. "You won't believe who ended up being your roommate here in the hospital! Stringfellow! Your next door neighbor at home, Mrs. Stringfellow, was just brought in with a serious condition. Isn't that a coincidence? She lives next door to you in Sydney and now she's your roommate here in the hospital!" On Saturday, I was at my usual post at my grandmother's bedside, getting ready to start a round of tearful goodbyes, when I thought I noticed her eyes blinking. I called a nurse and told her what I had seen. "It's just your imagination, dearie," the nurse said compassionately. "Why don't you go downstairs for some coffee, and I'll stay with her until you come back?" But when I returned, the nurse was brimming over with excitement herself. "You know," she said, "I think you may be right. I've been sitting here watching your grandmother, and I could swear I saw her blinking, too." A few hours later, my grandmother's eyelids flew open. She stared at me and then craned her neck to look at the empty bed on the other side of the room. "Hey," she yelled, "what happened to Stringfellow?" By the time my mother arrived at the hospital the next day, my grandmother was sitting up in bed, conversing cheerfully with the hospital staff, and looking perfectly normal. My mother glared at me, annoyed, sure I had exaggerated my grandmother's condition. "For this, I had to schlep all the way home?" she asked. Later, my grandmother told me that while she was in the "coma" she had heard every single word that was said to her and about her. She repeated all the conversations to me, and her retention was remarkable. "I kept shouting to you," she said, "but somehow you didn't hear me. I kept on trying to tell you, 'Don't bury me yet.'" After she was discharged from the hospital, my grandmother's quality of life remained excellent. She lived on her own as a self-sufficient, independent, and high-spirited lady and continued to live in this manner until her death sixteen years after I almost pulled the plug. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/68197/jewish/Coma.htm How the world has spiraled downwards. When I read my husband the Australian miracle story above, which happened fifty years ago, he commented that today, the nurse who offered to “stay with grandma” while the granddaughter took a coffee break would likely have been the one to pull the plug in her absence. There are many more stories of survivors of a “brain death” diagnosis on the respectforhumanlife.com site. For example: Zack Dunlap 21 year old Oklahoman Zack Dunlap was declared “brain dead” in November 2007 after a terrible ATV accident. It was so bad that brain matter was coming out of his ear, and a blood flow scan showed no blood flow to his brain. Zack heard the doctors pronounce his 'death'. Minutes before his organ harvest was about to begin, his grandmother prayed for him to live, and his cousin urged him to pray for himself. Within minutes, Zack’s cousin proved that he had reflexes. 48 days after he was declared dead, Zack left the rehab hospital, and lives a fully recovered life. You must read Zack’s entire miraculous story here: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna23768436 Taylor Hale 14 year old Iowa girl Taylor Hale was injured in an accident. Her parents were told that she was brain dead and that her brain had “turned to mush;” now she is alive and well: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/local/daniel-finney/2015/05/12/waukee-faith-healing-graduation/27207307/ Steven Thorpe 21 year old Steven Thorpe was declared “brain dead” after a car accident in February 2008, after only two days in the hospital. His parents refused to accept the diagnosis, and demanded a second opinion. After four doctors confirmed the diagnosis, the family still refused to give up, and two weeks later, Steven woke up. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-17757112 Trenton McKinley 13 year old Alabama boy Trenton McKinley was diagnosed as “brain dead” in March 2018 after an accident caused severe brain trauma. His parents had signed papers for his organ donation. The day before the harvest surgery he started showing signs of life and began a long recovery. “A man from the UAB organ donation came and talked to us in the family conference room about donating five organs to UAB children's hospital that would save five other children. But just a day before doctors were set to end Trenton's life support, he showed signs of cognition, and now he's slowly going through recovery.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trenton-mckinley-regains-consciousness-after-parents-sign-papers-to-donate-his-organs-2018-05-06/ James Howard Jones James Howard-Jones was diagnosed “brain dead” after being attacked in April 2022. His family asked doctors to delay the organ donation for a week so James’ friends and family could say goodbye. Waiting the few extra days led to James waking up, despite his diagnosis. •Colleen S. Burns 1969 - 2011, was diagnosed "brain dead" after an attempted overdose in 2009. She awoke on the operating table minutes before her organs were to be harvested. Sadly, she passed away in 2011 of depression. I remember my disbelief and sadness in 2005 as brain-injured Terry Schiavo was starved and dehydrated to death by her estranged husband - under a court order permitting him to do so. And today? That same horrific murder by starvation and dehydration is now an everyday story, “brain dead” or not. Terry Schiavo’s brother now campaigns for the right of brain-injured people to food and water, and has an organization to assist families facing brain-injury crisis. See https://terrischiavo.org/terri-schiavo-life-hope-network/ and https://www.lifeandhope.com/. What should family members do if faced with the unthinkable diagnosis of “brain death,” G-d forbid? Prayer to the One and only Creator of the world is the most effective avenue of all. Insist that your religious beliefs do not allow for discontinuation of life support. Keep fighting them off to give your loved one time to recover. Do not leave the patient alone, and watch the patient vigilantly, as medical personnel may take matters into their own hands. Treatments which have helped “brain dead” patients recover include: •hyperbaric oxygen therapy •ozone therapy •craniosacral visceral manipulations •lymphatic drainage therapy •transcranial low-level laser therapy (LLLT) or photobiomodulation (PBM) therapy •high doses of Omega 3 fatty acids, found in fish oil. From Unbekoming’s interview of Lourdes Lavoy, whose “brain dead” daughter is well today: When our daughter was hospitalized with a severe brain injury (brain dead), we were informed that the hospital would keep her alive until we could arrive and say our goodbyes. The hospital was unaware that I am Option C. I conducted my own research and discovered that high doses of omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil could potentially reverse severe brain damage. When we arrived at the hospital, it was not to say goodbye to our daughter, but to instruct the medical staff on how we were going to save her. Chris was respectful and considerate in his approach, but when I noticed that we were not deviating from the hospital's predetermined course of action, I intervened and was less than polite. This is a critical aspect of Option C that people must understand. Option C acknowledges the reality that the hospital does not have complete control over the measures taken to restore a patient's health. My daughter got a high dose of fish oil, as I demanded, and she is alive and well today. The hospital and its doctors cannot compel a patient to receive a particular treatment or dictate how they should proceed with their recovery. You can email Lourdes at [email protected]. https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/interview-with-lourdes-and-chris Please share and save lives! Share To help me continue my work, you may make a one-time gift here: https://ko-fi.com/truth613 https://substack.com/home/post/p-146415265

How we conveniently ignore the ‘terrorists’ among our allies Before they were prime minister, two Israelis were leaders of violent political movements that killed innocent people. Jonas E. Alexis, Senior EditorJuly 9, 2024 VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State. Paul R. Pillar Paul R. Pillar Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. The term “terrorist” often gets used as a general-purpose epithet intended to consign a disliked state or group to perpetual isolation and punishment. Used in this way, the label of “terrorist” becomes a substitute for careful analysis of policy toward the state or group in question. Usually, the object of the labeling has indeed used terrorism — but so have many others who don’t get labeled the same way and may even be treated as friends and allies. If the operative notion is “once a terrorist, always a terrorist,” then there are many shady histories that warrant examination. Consider, for example, as Benjamin Netanyahu — who has flung the “terrorist” label at least as freely as anyone else — is finally being pushed out of the prime minister’s job in Israel, the histories of some of his predecessors. Menachem Begin, who held that job in the late 1970s and early 1980s — longer than anyone except Netanyahu, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Rabin — had an earlier career as a hard-core terrorist. As leader of the Irgun group during World War II, Begin conducted a campaign of attacks, focused principally on British government and police targets, intended to drive the British out of Palestine — while Britain was busy waging a war against the Nazis. Begin’s terrorist campaign continued after the war. His group’s most spectacular operation was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 91 persons and injuring 46. The list of victims went far beyond the British administrators who were the purported targets and included people of multiple nationalities not only in the hotel but in adjacent buildings and the street. As the British exit neared, Begin’s group used more of its terrorist tactics against Palestinian Arabs, evidently aimed in part to terrorize Arabs into fleeing their homes and villages. An especially notorious operation was the massacre in the village of Deir Yassin, in which more than a hundred Arabs, including women and children, were killed. Begin emerged from the clandestine world after the creation of Israel as he established the right-wing Herut party in 1948. This did not erase his terrorist past — certainly not in the minds of the British, who barred him from making a visit to London in the 1950s. The British were not the only ones who took notice of what Begin represented. A trip by him to the United States in late 1948 elicited an open letter by Jewish dignitaries, including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, protesting the visit and describing Herut as “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Herut later became the core of the Likud Party — the party of Netanyahu and the dominant party in most governing coalitions in Israel over the past four decades. Begin’s successor as prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, had a similar history. He was co-leader of another Jewish terrorist group of the 1940s: Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang after its founder, which was considered even more extreme than the Irgun. Besides also participating in the Deir Yassin massacre, Shamir’s group specialized in assassinations, including the murder in Cairo in 1944 of the British minister of state responsible for the Middle East. In September 1948, the group assassinated the Swedish diplomat and United Nations mediator for Palestine, Folke Bernadotte, notwithstanding Bernadotte’s diplomatic work during World War II that had won the release of many prisoners incarcerated by the Nazis. The apparent motive for the killing was the expectation that Bernadotte, who was responsible for developing a more stable formula for Jewish-Arab peace in Palestine, would make proposals that would not give the Jewish side everything it wanted regarding Jerusalem. The legacy of Begin and Shamir has lived on with Israeli terrorist operations that, as with the bombing of the King David Hotel, have taken out innocent victims. For example, in 1979 (when Begin was prime minister), an attack aimed at a leader of the Palestinian Black September organization used a car bomb in a busy Beirut street that killed not only the intended target and his bodyguards but also four bystanders, including a British student and a German nun, and injured 18 others. (Six years earlier, Israeli agents had killed an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway whom they had mistaken for their Palestinian target.) Later chapters in the story of Israeli assassinations have included the murder of Iranian scientists, with the most recent killing taking place last November. Another Middle Eastern state that usually escapes the “terrorist” label despite a record of terrorist operations is Saudi Arabia, with the most glaring case being the butchering of a dissident journalist and U.S. resident in 2018 in a consulate in Turkey. The operation was almost certainly ordered from the top of the Saudi regime. A tactic, not a state or group Terrorism is a tactic. It is not a fixed set of bad guys, bad states, or bad groups. Use of the tactic is despicable but its use does not dictate a policy of ostracism and isolation, or any other specific policy, toward a regime that has used it. Whatever one thinks of Begin and Shamir, they became duly empowered prime ministers of Israel. It was necessary and proper for the United States and other countries to conduct business with them. Today, it is necessary and proper to conduct business with Israel and with Saudi Arabia, both of which are important states of the Middle East. Their terrorist practices should not preclude such business, although those practices can and should be raised as issues with those governments. The recent Israeli and Saudi uses of terrorist tactics run against one of the major trends in international terrorism over the past four decades, which has been a decline in state sponsorship and state practice of terrorism. Reasons for the decline include the costs of being a pariah in a globalized age and the inability to play one superpower against the other ever since the USSR collapsed. But what matters for any one state are the incentives and disincentives, the opportunities and lack of opportunities, and the penalties and pandering that it faces and that shape its decisions. The fact that some past state practitioners of terrorism have, amid changing incentives and changing circumstances, reduced or ended their use of the tactic (Muammar Gadaffi’s Libya is an outstanding example) refutes the notion that state-sponsored terrorism is a matter of certain “terrorist states” being hard-wired to indulge in the practice. That notion underlies the “once a terrorist, always a terrorist” approach often taken toward such states. And that approach leads to unfruitful ostracism rather than a management of incentives and circumstances that would make it less likely a state will engage in terrorism in the future. The hard-wire myth persists Unfortunately, the hard-wiring notion too often prevails. Iran probably is the state to which the notion is most often applied. The seemingly permanent tag of “number one state sponsor of terrorism” automatically rolls off the tongue and substitutes for any serious consideration of what, when, and why Iran has use terrorist techniques, let alone any serious consideration of what policies by other countries would tend to reduce such use in the future. Iran’s use of such techniques has changed substantially during the four decades of the Islamic Republic, especially with the curtailment of extraterritorial assassinations of political opponents — which were similar in many ways to the extraterritorial assassinations by Israel — after that practice got in the way of better relations between Iran and European states. The most conspicuous international terrorist operations that Iran attempted in later years were direct responses to similar clandestine Israeli attacks against Iran. Iran, like Israel and Saudi Arabia, is an important state in the Middle East. Whatever one thinks of its leaders or its political coloration, business needs to be conducted with it, on security, economic, and other matters. Merely slapping on the “terrorist state” label and using that as an excuse not to do business with Iran and to sanction it in perpetuity is not an effective way to deal with any issues involving Iran, including the terrorism issue itself. The Palestinian organization Hamas is a prime example of a non-state actor to which the hard-wiring assumption is often applied, and where the label “terrorist group” is taken to be the only thing we need to know about the organization to formulate policy toward it. And Hamas demonstrates, like many other states and groups, how false that assumption is. Yes, Hamas has used terrorism, but it has used other ways of pursuing its political objectives when circumstances have permitted, including competing in free and fair elections and negotiating with Israel to free prisoners and to establish and maintain armistices. Like it or not, it is a significant player in Palestinian politics and the closest thing to a local governing authority in the blockaded Gaza Strip. The case of Hamas illustrates another shortcoming of primitive reliance on the “terrorist” label, which is failure to take full account of the moral and legal significance of other forms of political violence that harm innocent people. I have used the term “terrorism” throughout this article to conform with the official, legally prescribed U.S. definition as used by the State Department, which refers to “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.” Hamas is a subnational organization, not a state, and its firing of rockets at Israeli cities can be defined as terrorism. Because the far greater civilian casualties among Palestinians have been inflicted by overt use of military force by a state — Israel — the attacks causing those casualties do not meet this definition of terrorism. If Hamas had F-16s or other modern combat aircraft, it undoubtedly would use them rather than poorly guided rockets to strike back at Israel. It probably would aim at targets it describes as combatants while perhaps, like Israel, dismissing the resulting civilian casualties as unfortunate collateral damage. And if Hamas were the government of a recognized state, it could do all those things and still avoid having any such use of force be defined as terrorism. Hamas is not a state and it doesn’t have F-16s. But those facts should not determine where moral opprobrium is to be applied when force results in innocent civilians getting killed and injured. Nor does it determine legal culpability with regard to war crimes, which can occur when civilians are harmed even if a military target is in the vicinity. Relevant asymmetries are to be found not in the lines drawn by definitions of terrorism, useful though they are for many other purposes, but rather in disproportionalities in the inflicted suffering and in the circumstances that have led to bloodshed in the first place. ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/07/how-we-conveniently-ignore-the-terrorists-among-our-allies/

JUST A MINUTE PLEASE 🙏[THE PREACHER'S CORNER] 🚥🚥🚥🚥🚥🚥🚥🚥🚥🚥🚥🚥🚥🚥🚥🚥 WEIGHED IN BALANCE (SCALE) AND FOUND WANTING! [DAN.5:4-5) 🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧 Someday, every one of us is going to be in this world for the last day of our life. Every day that we live should be a day t;:hat we live in reference to that fact, because whether we live until Chist Jesus returns, or die first, there will come a day when our destiny is fixed for eternity and there will be nothing that we can do to change it. You know as I have always inferred, MANY OF US DO THINK THAT LIFE ENDS HERE WHEN WE CLOSE OUR EYES IN DEATH, AND HONESTLY, I PITY THEM. If it was so,then what s miserable people we would all be(the learned and unlearned) that dedicated their lives to the Work of God! Those who are committed to the pursuit of eternal life are deemed and mocked as fools. And why is it so? It's the impression (overblown knowledge that has led to truly scientific, architectural and engineering wonders. A ploy Satan is using to harden the heart of many a soul...THERE CAN NEVER BE ANY HEAVEN MORE THAN THIS; In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them. (2Co 4: 4) Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: (Eph 4: 18) Now,let consider the story a Bible character that thought that will never be a *tomorrow* 4. They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.(JUST LIKE WE HYPE MONEY TODAY.) 5. In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king's palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. (Dan 5: 4-5) 6. It was Belshazzar’s last day on this earth, and we are told that he was giving a party. “They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze, and iron, wood and stone.” Daniel 5:4. Have you ever read the text in the Bible that says, “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth”? Ecclesiastes 7:4. “In the same hour the fingers of a man’s hand appeared and wrote opposite the lampstand on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king’s countenance changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his hips were loosened and his knees knocked against each other.” Daniel 5:5, 6. “When God makes men fear, they cannot hide the intensity of their terror.” So, Belshazzar called in all of the wise men, those that understand science and philosophy, that they might tell him the meaning of the writing; but they could not do so. “The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers. And the king spoke, saying to the wise men of Babylon, ‘Whoever reads this writing, and tells me its . around his neck; and he shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.’” Daniel 5:7. Philosophy and science have their proper place, but learning and education will not save you on your last day on earth unless yoou know the God of heaven. The queen mother then came to Belshazzar and said, “There is a man in your kingdom in whom is the Spirit of the Holy God. And in the days of your father, light and understanding and wisdom, like the wisdom of the gods, were found in him; There's a man and King, 4 Nebuchadnezzar your father—your father the king—made him chief of the magicians, astrologers, Chaldeans, and soothsayers. Inasmuch as an excellent spirit, knowledge, understanding, interpreting dreams, solving riddles, and explaining enigmas were found in this Daniel, whom the king named Belteshazzar, now let Daniel be called, and he will give the interpretation.” Verses 11, 12. BUT ALSO DON'T FORGET...IN THE LION'S DEN... HE TOLD THE KING *INNOCENCE WAS FOUND IN ME* Let's be sincere with ourselves...Can innocence be found in us weighed in God's scale! So Daniel came in and gave the interpretation of the handwriting that was on the wall. He began by reviewing with him the providence of God in the life of Nebuchadnezzar. “But when his heart was lifted up, and his spirit was hardened in pride, he was deposed from his kingly throne, and they took his glory from him. Then he was driven from the sons of men, his heart was made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild donkeys. They fed him with grass like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, TILL HE KNEW THAT THE MOST HIGH GOD RULES IN THE KINGDOM OF MEN and appoints over it whomever He chooses. But you his son, Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart, ALTHOUGH YOU KNEW ALL THIS, And you have lifted yourself up against the Lord of heaven.” Verses 20–23. By his actions, Belshazzar had despised the God of heaven. It's the SAME WITH MANY OF US TOFAY . We despised God and His Word in so many activities or our way of life. “The fingers of the hand were sent from Him, and this writing was written. And this is the inscription that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of each word. MENE; God has numbered your kingdom and finished it.” Verses 24–16. The time is going to come when we will be in this world for our last day, and our character is going to be put into that balance. Though there are stories in the Bible about people who were going in a certain direction who came to a point late in their life when they decided to reverse their direction, those cares are few in number. “Many are quieting a troubled conscience with the thought that they can change a course of evil when they choose; that they can trifle with the invitations of mercy, and yet be again and again impressed. They think that after doing despite to the Spirit of grace, after casting their influence on the side of Satan, in a moment of terrible extremity they can change their course. But this is not so easily done. The experience, the education of a lifetime, has so thoroughly molded the character that few then desire to receive the image of Jesus.” The judgment is the heart of the message that God Our whole message has to do with judgment, because we are living in the end times when the judgment is taking place. When, in the judgment, we are weighed in God’s balances; every detail of our character will be examined. “God weighs every man in the balances of the sanctuary. In one scale is placed His perfect, unchangeable law, demanding perfect obedience. If in the other there are years of forgetfulness, of rebellion, of self-pleasing, with no repentance, no confession, no effort to do right, God says, “‘Thou art R In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them. (2Co 4: 4) Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: (Eph 4: 18) found wanting.’” None of us can weigh out unless someone takes away our guilt and in its place supplies us with the righteous fulfillment of the Law. That is what the gospel is all about. We are living in a time when people have become unconcerned about this judgment. They believe that they can live in any way that they please and that it is sufficient to just say, “Lord, I am confessing my sins,” and their sins will be forgiven. But as we just read, if there has been no repentance and no effort to do right, God will say, “No, you are not going to weigh out.” “A decree went forth to slay the saints, which caused them to cry day and night for deliverance. This was the time of Jacob’s trouble. Then all the saints cried out with anguish of spirit, and were delivered by the voice of God. The 144,000 triumphed. Their faces lighted up with the glory of God. Then I was shown a company who were howling in agony.”

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