The dawning of America’s Post-Pandemic Age

 

 

BY GRADY MEANS, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR

America will never be the same. The coronavirus pandemic has had an economic and social impact on America that ranks with the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, either World War, or the Great Depression. America never has been hit so hard and lost so much, so quickly. It has put millions out of work, has cut several trillion dollars out of the market, and endangered the survival of hundreds of thousands of American companies. In a very short period of time, it has been devastating and transformational.

The economic and social impact of COVID-19 has been the fastest and largest single shift in our lifetimes. Many will lose jobs, incomes, homes, savings and retirement incomes, overnight. America may go from the lowest unemployment rate in our lifetime to the highest, within weeks.

Which leads to the most important question: What will America itself be like in a few months as it recovers from the virus? Americans should prepare for a “Post-Pandemic Age.”

ADVERTISEMENT

First and foremost, many businesses will die and tens of thousands of manufacturing, retail and service jobs will not return. Many companies were on shaky financial foundations and will be shuttered forever. Many of those businesses are being replaced during the shutdown. Amazon alone is adding at least 100,000 to its workforce; the pandemic has made the shift to online retail permanent and decisive. Medical and legal professionals, bankers and nearly every other service sector have learned to work from home, suggesting a permanent, low-overhead model for many. Distance learning will grow and there will be more focus on telemeetings, as the structure of work changes.

America unexpectedly has been sucked into a space/time wormhole and will emerge in a new economic and political galaxy. But where? The American market is too fast, too efficient, too ruthless for anyone to predict, but some general trends may be emerging.

A new domestic economy will emerge. The market lost trillions of dollars of value in a few weeks. Over that short time, the market exposed enormous industry vulnerabilities and inefficiencies. The decline also provided cover for opportunistic layoffs in many companies. But, at the same time, it uncovered some huge opportunities. As the stock market recovers, investors won’t replace their previous investments in the same stocks and funds, some of which were undercapitalized and went under or were permanently damaged; they will be gone forever. Bottom line: Post-pandemic, the American economy will be fundamentally different. Wealth has massively shifted across the country and a huge proportion of American capital (and labor) will be reallocated.

Some sectors may have changed forever. In health care, a tremendously far-reaching pandemic response policy now allows doctors to practice across state borders. Doctors had been licensed state-by-state, but that impeded the smooth flow and reallocation of medical resources across the country. The new policy instantly creates a national, rather than regional, medical system and ushers in nationwide telemedicine and nationwide health delivery systems, making available the best medical advice to everyone in the country, instantly. It brings potential for vastly better allocation of capital and improved diagnostic and treatment services, nationwide. That’s a huge step toward better health care delivery and lower prices.

Telemedicine, distance learning, emergency response, telecommuting, even tele-socializing will all expand after this crisis.

ADVERTISEMENT

A new global economic and geopolitical balance also will emerge. The pandemic has exacerbated political and economic tensions between the United States and China. Chinese confusion and some secrecy at the outbreak, China’s decision to expel U.S. journalists, and the unfortunate threat from the Chinese foreign ministry to withhold lifesaving antibiotics from the U.S. has created a predictable, bipartisan, nationalistic reaction in Washington that may lead to policies aimed at creating more secure, probably domestic, supply sources for critical pharmaceuticals, rare earth metals, 5G technology, or any other sensitive technology.

The result is that America may be shifting toward what Trump might call “nationalistic globalism.” All of this, in the end, is a huge blow to U.S.-China trade relations that, for the most part, have benefitted both countries.

Further, America’s view of foreign policy and security will change dramatically and, again, capital will flow in new directions. Biosecurity will be on everyone’s mind. Other types of security will move to the fore, including cybersecurity, grid security (EMP hardening), emergency response and communication systems, and dominating space.

From a survival perspective, it’s worth observing that COVID-19 laid bare the devastating impact that a planned bioterror attack might have, and the relative ease with which such an attack could be launched. The objective of successful modern military attacks is not simply body count nor destruction of military capability — it is decisive economic, political and social disruption. If this had been an attack, it would have been the quickest and one of the most devastating military attacks in history. In some military doctrines, the most successful attacks can be those where the target never realizes they’ve been attacked at all. Hopefully, America’s intelligence and defense systems will learn much from the pandemic.

And so, out of nowhere, like it or not, an entirely new, Post-Pandemic Age is about to dawn in America. Wash your hands, and get prepared.

Grady Means is a writer (GradyMeans.com) and former corporate strategy consultant. He served in the White House as a policy assistant to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Follow him on Twitter @gradymeans1.

The COVID World Order Is Coming

The world’s reaction to COVID-19 is already providing very strong hints of what our dystopian future will probably look like.

COVID-19 has fundamentally changed life as we know it, and it’s more than likely that our future will be a dystopian one given how various governments have already responded to this viral outbreak. The skeptics among us are fearful that this whole pandemic is overblown and being exploited as a smokescreen for stealing our freedoms, and while their attitude towards this disease is questionable (and quite possibly dangerous), their suspicion about a government takeover of society is warranted. Never before have governments had so much power over the people, though in these emergency conditions, that might not be an entirely bad thing for the time being seeing as how it could very well be necessary for our survival. The problem, however, is that these newly assumed powers probably won’t be voluntarily surrendered after this epidemic ends, which is why many people are so concerned. They’re convinced that we’ve suddenly entered a period of global dictatorship, and it’s difficult to argue with them. So much else is also changing as well, and it’s hard to keep up with the “COVID World Order” that’s been thrust upon us, but what follows is an attempt to briefly describe everything that’s already taken place and predict what will probably follow:

* De-Facto Martial Law…:

There’s no other way to describe both the “recommended” and mandatory quarantines that many in the world are experiencing than to call them what they are, a state of de-facto martial law, which isn’t being formally declared in order to not provoke any more panic than there already is.

* …Is The “New Normal”:

Now that de-facto martial law of a seemingly indefinite period has been accepted by the people (whether willingly or begrudgingly), it’ll probably become the “new normal” and be implemented countless times in the future, be it as an “overabundance of caution” in the event of another outbreak or under any other pretext.

* Social Media Censorship Will Intensify:

“Big Brother” is already here, but he’s going to become a bigger bully than ever before by intensifying his censorship of people’s social media posts on the basis that they’re “socially irresponsible” (e.g. questioning the seriousness of this disease), after which the “politically incorrect” net will widen to encompass other topics too.

* Travel Will Never Be The Same Again:

Domestic and international travel will never be the same again, with internal restrictions on movement likely becoming commonplace and most foreign guests being required to self-quarantine for a period of time except in special circumstances, thus all but killing the global tourism industry.

* Border Control Will Become More Robust:

Gone are the days of so-called “open borders” where anyone can freely move between jurisdictions at will (whether legally or otherwise), with more stringent controls being put into place to protect the local population from outsiders (including their own compatriots from elsewhere in the country).

* Mandatory Vaccines Are Coming:

For whatever one thinks about vaccines, there’s probably no way to stop them from becoming mandatory after the COVID-19 pandemic, with it being predicted that people will have to prove that they’ve been vaccinated in order to do anything at all such as study, work, travel, and receive government benefits.

* Remote Learning & Working Will Increase:

With so many people stuck at home and unable to leave except to purchase essential goods in most cases, it’s predictable that remote learning and working (the latter which will of course be for those whose jobs allow them to do so) will pick up in the coming future as society gets used to this way of doing things.

* 5G Is Inevitable:

The massive surge of online traffic from folks who are learning, working, or simply entertaining themselves online will necessitate the rapid roll-out of 5G technology despite what some people suspect are its serious health concerns.

* Society Depends On Just A Few Jobs To Function:

The “new normal” of de-facto martial law has made many people realize that society really just depends on a few jobs in order to continue functioning at the bare minimum, with these being techies, grocery store and pharmacy employees, bank clerks, healthcare professionals, food service workers, farmers, and truckers.

* Nationalization Might Be Imminent:

For better or for worse, governments across the world might go on a nationalization spree in order to take control of what they regard as “essential industries” (though whether some of them truly are or not is another story), which could lead to the informal imposition of either socialist or fascist economic models.

* “Universal Basic Income”:

Given the scale and scope of the global economic collapse that was catalyzed by the world’s uncoordinated response to COVID-19, it’s foreseeable that governments will unveil what’s been described as a “universal basic income” in order to ensure that their people can continue to at least purchase basic goods and services.

* Mandatory Medical Training In Exchange For Government Benefits:

Medical training is arguably more important than military service nowadays, so the state will probably make it mandatory in schools from here on out and for anyone who wants to receive government benefits, thereby enabling the government to draft them in the future whenever there’s a dearth of healthcare professionals.

* Say Goodbye To Cash:

The cashless society is coming, whether justified by the (real, false, or exaggerated) fear that lethal viruses can be spread by paper currency or as the government’s preferred method of dispersing its “universal basic income”, meaning that the authorities can cut folks off from their funds at any time that they want to.

———-

There’s no guarantee that everything that was described above will come to pass, but there’s certainly a high likelihood that at least some of it will transpire with time, though it’ll remain to be seen how sustainable these socio-economic and political changes are and whether or not they can ever be reversed.

 

By Andrew Korybko

American political analyst

India, the World’s Most Overcrowded Nation Locks Down, Many w/out Resources

[Expect to see the death toll from starvation to far exceed numbers on coronavirus, especially among the “Untouchables”.  Among the Untouchables is the Dalits, the political voice of India’s underclass (SEE: Dalits ; Life In the Racist Hindu State–For Dalits, Who Are Considered Less Than Human).]

India’s poor pushed to live in trees for isolation

Modi apologises for ‘harsh’ lockdown amid violent police enforcement

Modi seeks ‘forgiveness’ from India’s poor over COVID-19 lockdown

Modi apologises as 21-day lockdown stings millions, leaving the poor hungry and forcing migrant workers to flee cities.

MORE ON CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

• Coronavirus: Which countries have confirmed cases?today
• In Pictures: The medical heroes on Italy’s front linetoday
• UK PM’s adviser Dominic Cummings ‘isolates with virus symptoms’today
• Doctor’s Note: Coronavirus myths and misconceptionstoday

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked the nation’s poor for forgiveness, as the economic and human toll from his 21-day nationwide lockdown deepens and criticism mounts over a lack of adequate planning ahead of the decision.

“I apologise for taking these harsh steps that have caused difficulties in your lives, especially the poor people,” Modi said in his monthly address on Sunday, broadcast on state radio.

More:

• Chaos and hunger amid India coronavirus lockdown

• Coronavirus lockdown: India grapples with migrant workers’ exodus

• India quarantines 15,000 after virus kills ‘super-spreader’ guru

“I know some of you will be angry with me. But these tough measures were needed to win this battle.”

Modi announced an unprecedented three-week lockdown – the world’s largest – which came into effect on March 25 to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

But the decision has stung millions of India’s poor, leaving many hungry and forcing jobless migrant labourers to flee cities and walk hundreds of kilometres to their native villages.

The poor “would definitely be thinking what kind of prime minister is this, who has put us into so much trouble,” he said, urging people to understand there was no other option.

“Steps taken so far … will give India victory over corona,” he added.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in India rose to 979 on Sunday, with 25 deaths.

The government announced a $22.6bn economic stimulus plan on Thursday to provide direct cash transfers and food handouts to India’s poor. A quarter of India’s 1.3 billion people live below the poverty line.

In an opinion piece published on Sunday, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo – two of the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 – said even more aid for the poor is needed.

“Without that, the demand crisis will snowball into an economic avalanche, and people will have no choice but to defy orders,” they wrote in the Indian Express.

The lockdown is expected to exacerbate India’s economic woes at a time when growth had already slumped to its slowest pace in six years.

‘No contingency plans’

There still appears to be broad support for strong measures to avoid a coronavirus catastrophe in India, a country where the public health system is poor.

But opposition leaders, analysts and some citizens are increasingly criticizing its implementation. In particular, they say the government appears to have been caught off guard by the mass movement of migrants following the announcement, which threatens to spread the disease into the hinterlands.

“The Gov’t had no contingency plans in place for this exodus,” tweeted opposition politician Rahul Gandhi as images of migrant labourers walking long distances to return home dominated local media.

#ModiMadeDisaster was a top trending topic in India on Sunday on Twitter.

Police said four migrants were killed on Saturday when a truck ran into them in the western state of Maharashtra. Also on Saturday, a migrant worker collapsed and died in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, according to a police official.

“We will die of walking and starving before getting killed by corona,” said migrant worker Madhav Raj, 28, as he walked along the road in Uttar Pradesh.

On Sunday, several hundred migrants in the town of Paippad, in southern Kerala state, gathered in a square demanding transport back to their hometowns.

The central government has called on states to provide marooned labourers with food and shelter, and Modi’s supporters slammed state governments on Twitter for failing to properly implement the lockdown.

In India’s cities, too, anger was rising.

“We have no food or drink. I am sat down thinking how to feed my family,” said homemaker Amirbee Shaikh Yusuf, 50, in Mumbai’s sprawling Dharavi slum.

“There is nothing good about this lockdown. People are angry, no one is caring for us.”

Large-Scale “Internet Rationing” Possible, Experts Warn

[For about three weeks, here in Southern Ohio, the Internet has been down as much as it has been working, very unusual, in that the cable has been malfunctioning about the same amount, in the same time frame.  Are we experiencing the same service rationing that they are now getting in UK?  Today, a beautiful, sunny day, the power went out, for no apparent reason…is this a sign of brown-outs to come?  If you start getting daily power brownouts, then it is time to fill all of your water jugs.–ed.]

by Tyler Durden

Netflix app downloads have exploded across Europe over the last several weeks as “Netflix and chill” “Netflix and quarantine” has been all the rage during countrywide lockdowns in Italy, France, Spain, and the UK.

netflix and self-quarantine?

— maura quint (@behindyourback) March 9, 2020

We noted last Thursday that Netflix had to reduce traffic to its European networks by 25% for 30 days to preserve internet functionality as streaming traffic surged among tens of millions of people in quarantine.

Days after Netflix pledged to reduce streaming traffic, experts are saying that European countries could start rolling out large-scale “internet rationing” to prioritize critical apps and websites.

“If we end up in a situation where worldwide, 850m children start to receive lessons virtually for an extended period of time, then networks might want to start prioritizing video traffic over gaming traffic,” said Matthew Howett, principal analyst at Assembly, who spoke with The Telegraph.

British internet provider BT Group said their communication network could handle the extreme levels of data of millions surfing the internet while in quarantine. But they warned that video streaming services could start bogging down the system and leave critical networks, reserved for emergency services, exposed to slow speeds.

Besides Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube are other streaming services limiting ultra-high definition videos to European users to preserve the functionality of the internet.

The French and UK governments have reportedly asked Disney to suspend the launch of its new streaming service in both countries on March 24.

The risk of large-scale “internet rationings” by European governments could be on the horizon as more and more people across the continent are forced to shelter in their homes. This could lead to the throttling of internet speeds for citizens while internet traffic is preserved for European healthcare systems, education systems, and emergency systems.

Important phone conversation with @ReedHastings, CEO of @Netflix

To beat #COVID19, we #StayAtHome

Teleworking & streaming help a lot but infrastructures might be in strain.

To secure Internet access for all, let’s #SwitchToStandard definition when HD is not necessary.

— Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) March 18, 2020

Kester Mann, an analyst at CCS Insight, said “drastic methods” could be nearing to throttle the internet if usage continues to increase exponentially:

“If you’re talking about education over other services, that could get a little bit controversial,” Mann said.

NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST

ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX

Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.

Andrew Ellis, a professor of optical communications at Aston University, called for mass throttling of the UK’s internet back in 2015 to avoid overloading networks.

Ellis said last week that the virus crisis has now spurred discussion that the UK’s internet infrastructure needs to be upgraded.

“If we carry on doubling what we do online every couple of years or so, eventually we’ll run out of energy or capacity and we’ll have to start making hard decisions,” he said.

Austria and Switzerland have already prioritized their internet traffic if networks become overloaded.

One reason why people aren’t rioting in the Western world and have accepted forced quarantines by governments is that they’re content with all the food they have just hoarded and can stream almost any movie on Netflix. Take the TV and food away, everyone would be in the streets.

Coronavirus and The Collapse Of The US Empire

ANGLO 5HEADLINE NEWSNATO

ISHCHENKO: Coronavirus & The Collapse Of The US Empire

It comes to be that empires collapse suddenly, after being quite sturdy (as was the Russian Empire in 1917). It comes to be that empires disappear after many decades even centuries of excruciating decline, like the Western Roman Empire in 476. But if the empire collapses, two conditions must always coincide: an acute global crisis, which the empire cannot resolve at the expense of domestic means alone, and the inability or unwillingness of imperial power to adapt to the crisis through the necessary reforms.

The West – the United States and its first-line vassals: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and the EU –  has long refused to recognize that the global imperial space it created is in systemic crisis. At worst, periodic economic crises were recognized, but the main thesis was that crisis events would pass quickly, growth would resume, and the results of the temporary recession would be quickly offset.

This was a lie. Since the mid-1980s, with Reagan’s administration (with his famous “Reaganomics”), US leaders have been well aware that the possibility of further expanding production through the development of new markets and the inclusion of new resources has been exhausted. Free markets and free resources on planet Earth are over. In fact, Reagan’s idea was to finance the current needs of the United States from the pocket of future generations through a monopoly on the printing of the dollar (already back then the currencies of international settlements).

It was assumed (by the way, quite rightly) that the United States and the USSR were equally exhausted by the Cold War and economic confrontation. The one who could last longer would win. The USSR could last longer. The US no longer had free resources for economic growth.

The money of future generations pumped into the economy has started to create bubbles that have been bursting since the beginning of the new century in front of us. But they were enough to last until Gorbachev and his perestroika. The leadership of the USSR then correctly defined the need for reforms, but they were carried out completely ineptly – it’s not by chance that people still call these reforms intentional sabotage.

Yes, it is hard to believe such an outstanding intellectual failure of a superpower’s top leadership.

Yes, there were clear traitors in Gorbachev’s entourage. But the primary things in the collapse of the USSR is still foolishness and unprofessional ways. Without the foolishness and unprofessional nature of the first persons, the traitors could do nothing.

Coming after an unexpected resounding victory over the USSR, America urgently needed to roll back “Reaganomics” and return to a normal economic model. But firstly, banks and exchanges had already tasted easy money. Household loans for household needs generated unprecedented demand that spurred sales and production. Everyone was living well, and no one wanted to give up their unearned benefits. Secondly, and most importantly, the Western economy of the 1950’s-1970’s still lacked free markets and free resources. It was necessary to start reforms ― reorganizing the West, but nobody knew how exactly to create a new steady global economic model without at the same time sacrificing western hegemony. In the event that reforms were abandoned, stimulating demand with cheap but unsecured credit remained the only way to prolong the existence of the cash model.

Perhaps such a model would even prove viable if money reached real production. But banks soon realized that speculation with securities generated significantly more income than investing in the real sector. As a result, more and more credit funds started to settle in the exchange-banking (financial) sector, and then almost all the money allocated for warming up the economy started to go there.

More and more funds were needed to continue this fictitious growth every time. As a result the public debt of the US started to grow exponentially, and the real purchasing power of the dollar fell just as quickly (the dollar of 1950, 1980, and 2010 are completely different dollars). The middle class in the United States started to erode rapidly.

For Europe, by moving defense spending and traditionally powerful social support programs to America, this process has been slowed down, but not stopped. Now in terms of the rate of erosion of the middle class, the EU is quickly catching up with the US. It’s just that Europe has its own features. Until recently, it managed to maintain an acceptable level of middle-class income in the “old EU” and in the rich north by the progressive impoverishment of the “new EU”, the poor south, and by attracting a mass of migrants.

As we can see, all the measures taken by the West delayed the onset of the crisis, or rather even made it less visible to the general population, but they were not only simply insufficient to solve the problem, they also only deepened it. Since the money of future generations became trivially not enough to maintain the appearance of well-being (contrary to conventional belief, the US was unable to print enough unsecured dollars, although it very much wanted to), the West tried to delay the crisis by appropriating the resources of the rest of the world. Hence the unresolved contradictions in the West’s relations with China, Iran, Russia, and the era of “wars for democracy” and “color revolutions” began.

All of this was just a method for transferring resources to the West. But the resources of all the states of the planet are not infinite, and since the needs of the West grew exponentially, they ended quickly. Especially since Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Venezuelan, and some other resources could not be reached. Under Obama and Trump, the United States tried to dispossess its European allies on several visits. So far, it’s been without success, but Washington continues to work on it.

Nevertheless, it was initially clear that recognition of the crisis could be delayed but could not be avoided. Moreover, the longer the crisis was not recognized and the exhausted global financial and economic mechanisms continued to operate, the more terrible (for the whole world) the collapse should have been. Not least because each next American administration refused to recognize the obvious, acting on the principle “for our century there will be enough, and there will be flood anyway” ― the next president will be responsible for it.

Crisis are like some diseases: the longer it stays in hidden form, the more devastating its effects are. Since 2016, its presence has become no longer possible to hide. Hence the phenomenon of Trump and the “new right” in Europe opposing globalism. In fact, they speak of the need to change an exhausted economic and political system. However, since Trump and the “new right” set two tasks for themselves at once – to reform the system and to overcome the crisis, without having renounced the western political and economic domination – it is possible to safely claim that they will not solve any of them.

Especially since their capabilities are limited by the division of the elites. While some of the West’s traditional elites have realized and accepted the need for reform (although trying to carry it out no more qualitatively than Gorbachev’s perestroika), strong positions in the ruling establishment still belong to the globalists, who do not want to change anything, hoping that they will be able to “outstay” Russia and China in the same way they “outstayed” the USSR, winning on an exhalation.

The gradual destruction of the Western Empire (led by the United States) could have taken place for a long time. In the West, they would pretend that there is no crisis, and in the East they would pretend to believe that they are trying to provide the West with a “soft landing”, because in a collapse, the consequences would be tragic for the entire global economy and would hurt everyone more or less. History, as always happens, was changed by chance.

The coronavirus pandemic became a straw breaking the western empire’s back. I am surprised by people trying to explain what is happening within the framework of a conspiracy theory. According to some, “China covered up coronavirus exercises to deploy the civil defense system during a special period”. According to others, “the West has covered up a world crisis via the coronavirus”. None of the “whistleblowers” wonder what was covered there if the crisis has not been talked about for a year only by a lazy person, and it has been going on for 20 years? No one is interested in how the authorities of one and a half dozen warring countries could collude to promote the same narrative.

No one is afraid that trillions of dollars, not unnecessary to the world economy, have already been spent on the fight against the virus and quarantine measures, and the total losses will be by an order of magnitude more. And all of this to deceive the plumber, the journalist, and the suspiciously well-off Instagram girls? A costly deception is the result.

Quarantine measures will indeed have a serious impact on both the world economy and the economies of individual countries. If this were happening at the time of a development rise, they would count the losses, shake them off and forget, and start to increase production again. But the blow came at a time of sharp exacerbation of the global systemic crisis. Quarantine measures break traditional trade and economic ties, forcing various national and regional economies to enter a regime of partial or complete autarky.

This, in turn, hits most integration projects. Eurasian projects have not yet been seriously affected: China has quickly stopped the spread of the epidemic, and Russia has not yet crossed the epidemic threshold, namely, the sustainability of Eurasian integration projects depends on them. But with the EU everything is quite bad. Not only and not so much because the internal borders are closed. It’s just that the EU has shown itself to be helpless, the full weight of the fight against the virus has fallen on national governments, and they immediately started pursuing selfish policies, trying to isolate themselves from the worst-hit countries, leaving them one-on-one with an epidemic.

As a result, Italy has already stated that it is necessary to refuse hospitalization to elderly people who are sick in order to save the younger ones. The national health care system has been over-stressed and there are not enough places in hospitals.

What is happening in the United States is not clear at all.

There is no way they can decide when the epidemic started and how many people actually got sick. There is already speculation that many of the “flu deaths” in the United States were actually from coronavirus. But this, in principle, does not matter, the helplessness and incompetence of the “world hegemon” in the face of the epidemic is important. It is possible not to cope with a flow of patients, but not to manage to count them is beyond good and evil.

The West is atomizing, countries are closing off from each other. I think that proud Eastern European border states in the current conditions have almost no chance of securing the EU’s multi-billion dollar aid for their budgets. No one else has any extra money. And “European unity” is retreating to the background in the face of national problems.

I do not want to say that the European Union will soon collapse (although such a result is possible), but its political and economic coherence will significantly weaken and centrifugal forces will strengthen. The unity of the EU will weaken. Weaker member states may receive a knockout blow from which they will not die, but will remain permanently disabled.

“Euro-oriented” countries like Ukraine will lose much of the West’s attention and support. When the usual world order collapses, when resources are lacking for urgent needs, it’s not time for games in the backyard of the empire, and even more so in someone else’s backyard. Ukraine, like other weak links in the global system, is the first candidate for being dumped as ballast. The West won’t kill it on purpose. It just won’t be able to help it survive anymore.

As for Russia, difficult times are also waiting for us. After all, we were part of the West’s global empire from 1991 to 2005 (at least until 2008). Over the past ten years (especially since 2014), Russia has distanced itself from the Western system, but many ties have remained intact, and the well-being of the Russian economy is still directly dependent on the state of the world economy. We cope with the crisis easier, but it’s still a crisis, not a Sunday picnic. In addition, we do not yet know whether the coronavirus epidemic will cover us and how destructive it will be (if it is) to the national economy.

But it can be stated that Russia has the largest safety margin in the world. It is the only one with a self-sufficient economy to survive in a state of complete autarky. As is always the case during global systemic crises that destroy empires, the one who lasts longer will survive. The safety margin is very important for this. But the history of the collapse of the USSR has shown that it is equally important to realize the need to stand up. It is possible (although not always necessary) to make peace with a former enemy after it has surrendered to us, not after we have surrendered to it.

Resultant from the current systemic crisis, we will certainly see the end of an empire. There is every reason to believe that it will be the empire of the West. But nothing is done by itself, and in order not to be a “victim of circumstances”, there is still a lot of effort to be made.

Trump Ex. Order Activates National Guard, Up To One Million Soldiers, For Up To Two Years

EO to Order the Selected Reserve and Certain Members of the Individual Ready Reserve of the Armed Forces to Active Duty

NATIONAL SECURITY & DEFENSE

 Issued on: March 27, 2020

---

---

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.),  and in furtherance of Proclamation 9994 of March 13, 2020 (Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak), which declared a national emergency by reason of the threat that the novel (new) coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2 poses to our Nation’s healthcare systems, I hereby order as follows:

Section 1.  Emergency Authority.  To provide additional authority to the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security to respond to the national emergency declared by Proclamation 9994, the authorities under section 12302 of title 10, United States Code, and sections 2127, 2308, 2314, and 3735 of title 14, United States Code, are invoked and made available, according to their terms, to the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security.  The Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, at the direction of the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Homeland Security with respect to the Coast Guard when it is not operating as a service in the Navy, are authorized to order to active duty not to exceed 24 consecutive months, such units, and individual members of the Ready Reserve under the jurisdiction of the Secretary concerned, not to exceed 1,000,000 members on active duty at any one time, as the Secretary of Defense and, with respect to the Coast Guard when it is not operating as a service in the Navy, the Secretary of Homeland Security consider necessary.  The Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of Homeland Security, as applicable, will ensure appropriate consultation is undertaken with relevant state officials with respect to the utilization of National Guard Reserve Component units activated under this authority.

Sec. 2.  General Provisions.  (a)  Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i)   the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii)  the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b)  This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c)  This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

DONALD J. TRUMP

THE WHITE HOUSE,
March 27, 2020.

Bill Gates Letting the “Planned-demic” Plot Slip

WTF?! You Can’t Travel Without a “VACCINE CERTIFICATE” – Bill Gates

Pentagon Preparing New Offensive Operations in Iraq To Destroy Iranian/Hezbollah Proxy, Kataib Hezbollah

Pentagon Order to Plan for Escalation in Iraq Meets Warning From Top Commander

A secret Pentagon directive orders planning to try to destroy a militia group backed by Iran, but America’s top general in Iraq cautions of the risks.

American military vehicles at Al Asad Air Base in Iraq in January. A new military campaign in Iraq could require thousands more troops.Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times 

By Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has ordered military commanders to plan for an escalation of American combat in Iraq, issuing a directive last week to prepare a campaign to destroy an Iranian-backed militia group that has threatened more attacks against American troops.

But the United States’ top commander in Iraq has warned that such a campaign could be bloody and counterproductive and risks war with Iran. In a blunt memo last week, the commander, Lt. Gen. Robert P. White, wrote that a new military campaign would also require thousands more American troops be sent to Iraq and divert resources from what has been the primary American military mission there: training Iraqi troops to combat the Islamic State.

The Pentagon directive and General White’s response — both classified internal military communications — were described by several American officials with direct knowledge of their contents. The exchange comes amid a simmering fight inside the Trump administration over policy toward Iran and the course of America’s war in Iraq, which began just over 17 years ago.

CORONAVIRUS CRISIS

As Iran reels over the coronavirus, top Trump administration aides are clashing over how to confront Iran and its Shiite military proxies in Iraq.

Some top officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Robert C. O’Brien, the national security adviser, have been pushing for aggressive new action against Iran and its proxy forces — and see an opportunity to try to destroy Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq as leaders in Iran are distracted by the pandemic crisis in their country.

Military leaders, including Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been wary of a sharp military escalation, warning it could further destabilize the Middle East at a time when President Trump has said he hopes to reduce the number of American troops in the region.

Still, American officials said Mr. Esper authorized planning for a new campaign inside Iraq — even as the military reduces its counterterrorism presence there — to provide options for Mr. Trump in the event that Iranian-backed militia groups escalate their own attacks against American troops, said two senior administration officials.

During an Oval Office meeting on March 19, Mr. Trump did not make a decision about whether he might authorize the new campaign in Iraq, but allowed the planning to continue, according to American officials.

A spokesman for the National Security Council declined to comment. Cmdr. Sean Robertson, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement: “Operation Inherent Resolve is in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government and remains focused on partnering with Iraqi security forces for the shared goal of permanently defeating ISIS remnants. We are not going to discuss hypotheticals or internal deliberations.”

The debate is happening as top Pentagon officials and senior commanders worldwide are also expressing growing concerns about coronavirus cases expanding rapidly in the ranks, potentially threatening the military’s ability to field combat-ready troops.

Several American officials said they were struck by the blunt tone of General White’s memorandum — sent on March 16, the day after he received the Pentagon directive to start the planning — which they said emphasized the costs and risks against an effort to try to destroy the militia group, known as Kataib Hezbollah.

The memo also pointed out that such a campaign might run afoul of the current agreement with the Iraqi government that allows American troops to operate in the country.

Iran’s leadership has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.Credit…Iranian President’s Office/EPA, via Shutterstock 

Beyond that, it would most likely put the Iraqi leadership and especially its military in the position of having to choose between its American allies — whose leaders are far away — and the Iranians, whom many senior Iraqis do not like but believe they have to live with because they are neighbors.

“Iraq cannot be a victim of the Iranian-U.S. conflict, because that would end up going in favor of Iran,” said Karim al-Nuri, a senior figure in the Badr Organization, an Iranian-backed militia, meaning that it would force Iraq closer to Iran.

Iran has long used Shiite militia groups in Iraq as proxy forces both to battle American and Iraqi troops and to exert political influence inside the government. Like Lebanese Hezbollah, Kataib Hezbollah has both military components and political operations, and links to Iraq politicians, businesses, charities and a web of other networks, several regional specialists said.

“It’s like a shadow state,” said Michael Knights, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who has studied the group for more than a decade.

Sign up to receive our daily Coronavirus Briefing, an informed guide with the latest developments and expert advice.

As a result, carrying out any large-scale plan to destroy Kataib Hezbollah poses huge political and security risks for the Trump administration, and practical challenges for the military.

It would also strain already frayed relations with Iraq’s weak central government. In January, members of Iraq’s Parliament called for the ouster of all U.S. troops in the country after the American drone strike at Baghdad’s international airport that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a top Iranian commander, as well as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the de facto leader of Iraq’s militia groups.

Several top American officials, including Mr. Pompeo and General Milley, have urged the Iraqi security forces to crack down on rogue Shiite militia groups that are attacking American troops, or else the United States will be forced to retaliate.

The Pentagon directive ordered planners at the military’s Central Command and in Iraq to draw up a strategy to dismantle the militia group’s operations, according to several American officials who saw the order or were briefed on it. The directive said that Iranian paramilitary forces — members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — could be legitimate targets if they are located with the Kataib Hezbollah fighters.

Kataib Hezbollah rocket attacks killed two American troops and one British soldier at a military base this month — prompting a reprisal strike by American warplanes one day later.

Even so, American officials said there was no firm evidence that Iran ordered the attack by the militia group. But Mr. Pompeo and other senior officials in recent weeks have argued for aggressive military action not only against Kataib Hezbollah but also against Iranian military forces.

During a White House meeting on March 12, Mr. Esper and General Milley argued for a more limited response to the rocket attacks — a view that prevailed on Mr. Trump, who ordered nighttime raids on five suspected weapons depots in Iraq used by Kataib Hezbollah.

Several American officials said there was an increased urgency in planning attack options against Kataib Hezbollah as the group, perhaps along with other Shiite militias, has threatened to ramp up strikes against U.S. troops stationed on Iraqi bases after the celebrations for Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, end soon. American military intelligence agencies have detected signs that big attacks could be in the works, according to a senior U.S. military official who has been briefed on some of the contingency planning in Iraq.

Kataib Hezbollah, in a statement on Wednesday, warned its fighters to prepare for possible attacks from the United States, and threatened to retaliate against Americans and any Iraqis who help them. “We will respond with full force to all their military, security, and economic facilities,” said the statement, according to SITE, a private company that monitors jihadists’ websites and postings.

The immediate targets of a Pentagon campaign against Kataib Hezbollah most likely would be the group’s leadership, bases and weapons depots, Mr. Knights said. In addition to a vast array of rockets, the group is believed to have access to a hidden arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles funneled into Iraq by Iran over the past several months, according to American intelligence and military officials.

An extended campaign could hit militia targets across a wide swath of Iraq and Syria, and possibly other Shiite militias in Iraq that are loosely aligned with Kataib Hezbollah. “You can’t just hit rank-and-file fighters, you’d have to hit leadership, most of whom have probably dispersed,” Mr. Knights said.

A funeral procession for members of Kataib Hezbollah who were killed in American airstrikes in Iraq last December.Credit…Alaa Al-Marjani/Reuters 

At the same time, American officials said the risks laid out in General White’s memo are genuine, and some military planners believe it would be foolish for the Trump administration to escalate military operations inside Iraq anytime soon.

More than 5,000 American troops are currently stationed in Iraq, most of them part of the mission to train and advise Iraqi security forces in the mission against the Islamic State. Pentagon officials had been seeking to reduce that presence to about 2,500 troops in the coming months.

Any campaign against Kataib Hezbollah is likely to draw from the roughly 70,000 American military personnel currently deployed around the Middle East, including in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations. More than 14,000 of those troops have moved into the region since last May amid rising tensions with Iran.

The Pentagon has also sent Patriot air and missile defense batteries, B-52 bombers, a carrier strike group, armed Reaper drones and other engineering and support personnel.

Commanders are still rushing more Patriot antimissile batteries and other weaponry into Iraq, but are still a week or two away from having the additional defensive systems in place there, a senior U.S. military official said.

In recent weeks, as the threat from militia attacks and exposure to the coronavirus has increased, the United States and its European allies have been turning over smaller coalition bases to their Iraqi counterparts, and either moving to a handful of larger Iraqi bases or leaving the country altogether.

Speaking to reporters the day after the United States hit the five Khatib Hezbollah weapons depots this month, Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the head of Central Command, said that the threat from Iran and its proxies remained “very high” and added that tensions “have actually not gone down” since the United States killed General Suleimani.

While American officials say they have no clear evidence that Iran specifically directed the deadly attack on Camp Taji on March 11, they say that Kataib Hezbollah and the Iranian Quds Force coordinate closely.

General McKenzie said the United States was poised to strike additional militia weapons storage sites and other targets should attacks against American forces continue. He blamed Kataib Hezbollah for about a dozen rocket attacks against American troops based in Iraq in the past six months.

Mr. Esper suggested on Wednesday that the United States could respond further to the militia’s rocket attacks, but offered no details.

“You don’t get to kill or wound Americans and get away with it,” Mr. Esper said in an interview with NPR. “We will respond at the time, place and manner of our choosing. We will hold them accountable.”

Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Baghdad.

Mark Mazzetti is a Washington investigative correspondent, a job he assumed after covering national security from the Washington bureau for 10 years. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. @MarkMazzettiNYT

Eric Schmitt is a senior writer who has traveled the world covering terrorism and national security. He was also the Pentagon correspondent. A member of the Times staff since 1983, he has shared three Pulitzer Prizes. @EricSchmittNYT

America’s Last Revolution Coming or Renaissance

America’s Last Revolution or Renaissance

The corona virus phenomenon will define Donald Trump either as the greatest American President in history, or the worst. It all depends on him; and it especially depends on his ability to listen to the American people, not his advisors. Here’s why.

by Scott Bennett

Authored by Scott Bennett, via Shellgame Whistleblower…

SITUATION ANALYSIS:

The American situation is this.  Social unrest and civil war in America are weeks away.  Anyone who denies this is a coward, a fool, or a liar; and certainly not aware of American’s sense of identity and destiny.  Let us remember the California Rodney King riots which occurred in the 1990’s when a group of police officers were videotaped beating-up a black man who refused to submit to orders.  This very same scenario could easily unfold if the police forget this lesson and are recorded physically harassing or abusing or arresting citizens who refuse to “stay at home” or are caught sitting outside a coffee shop or are seen playing with their kids at a park.  This would be a disaster for the police, spark an uprising, and quite possibly create a civil war unlike anything America has ever seen.  In fact it could change America forever.  Here’s how.

The moment Americans begin to feel their personal suffering and loss is no longer tolerable, is the moment they will no longer tolerate any police officer, national guardsman, or government bureaucrat ordering them to stay home, stagnate, and die of hunger or boredom.  It is the moment citizens begin to push back; and if the police rise-up or flex their muscle to intimidate, bully or crackdown on this impulse in citizens to liberate themselves, the citizens will enter a frame of mind not seen since 1776, and revolution and civil war will result.  This means the deaths of hundreds of police, military personnel, and actors turned politicians trying to oppress them.  Anyone who doesn’t believe this, doesn’t understand the true nature of the American mind and soul.  Statecraft is not stagecraft.  Governor Newsom would be well advised to silence himself about his new “nation-state” and temper his reliance on disordered advice from Mr. Perez and Ms. Pelosi.

Essentially there are only two paths for Trump to follow: 1) empower and strengthen every aspect of American life while defeating his political enemies; or 2) empower and strengthen his political enemies by increasing the absolute power and control of the American government.

Either by design or accident, the Corona virus outbreak and economic domino effect has essentially branded China a diseased danger to the rest of the world and dishonest business partner.  However, this does not translate into American domestic tranquility. As much as Americans may quietly like the idea of China being severely punished and defeated for its decades of intellectual property theft, slave labor, sex slavery and organ harvesting of religious minorities like Falun Gong or Falun Dafa, Christians, Uyghurs, fentanyl invasions of the United States, and as much as Americans want to see their manufacturing industry jobs return to the United States, the only thing that will pacify Americans is the immediate return of all their liberties, rights, and personal freedoms to travel, work, assemble, and worship.

Historically the self-imposed authoritarian police-state is fueled by uncertainty which gradually sours and grows into fear, and then like a cancer, eventually—sometimes taking many decades—kills the entire body politic and the police-state itself—which is essentially what happened to the Soviet Union in 1989, albeit a quiet death for communism.

Americans are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the closure of businesses and restriction of their Constitutional rights and movement and assembly is absolutely unconstitutional, and that no “State of Emergency” avoids and evades the Constitution.  They are simply tolerating it for a short time, but this time is ending quickly with each passing day.

THE HONEYMOON OF PUBLIC OPINION:

A recent poll indicated the majority of Americans approved and supported President Trump’s management of the United States in response to the alleged Corona Virus infection crisis.  But make no mistake, this will change, and it will change quickly, radically, and explosively the moment people’s emotions, spirits, and bodies feel real hunger pangs, and then view the police and government as preventing them from nourishing themselves.  This is the “fight or flight” moment, the “rebel or submit” moment, and the moment of choice when pride, adrenaline, fears, and desires all mix, combine, complement, and then combust into action—and this action could be deadly for the police and others perceived as trying to deny citizens their right to live, move, and assemble.   This is called a “flashpoint”, and it is unpredictable and often revolutionary, and it is violent, which is why many political manipulators take advantage and manipulate this flashpoint to create a domino effect in other areas of society.  This moment, this day of reckoning is coming, and President Trump needs to understand this.

He also must understand that his political honeymoon will end soon, most likely in less than 2-4 weeks, and his window of transforming this into a political victory is rapidly closing.

The Democrats and Leftists and the media have known this since the outbreak, and have been trying to drag it out and endlessly extend this crisis in order to grow a cancer of fear that will trigger the erection of a police state to brand Trump a tyrant and blame the consequent anger, resentment, and violence in American society entirely on Trump and the republicans.  Watch this script unfold at the Democrat National Convention like a stew or a dish for disaster, scripted no less by the machinations of Tom Perez, an ardent adherent of labor, humming a march with Pelosi appearing to be in the lead acting in her role as his front man.

Additionally, the Democrats and their minions like the Macbeth witches of ABC’s The View, and HBO political talk show host Bill Maher have shamelessly admitted that they want an economic downturn in order to create public suffering that they can then blame on Trump, and manipulate public aggression against him.  As narcissistic, reprehensible and vicious as this is, make no mistake, the Democrats and media mean what they say and say what they mean.  As former Obama Chief of Staff and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”  What Rahm was really saying was use a crisis to usher in changes—such as gun laws—that can radically change society by using the violence and force inherent in government and law.  So Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats and the mainstream media will be trying to exploit and pervert this Corona virus situation into a state of socio-political schizophrenia, and use it to trigger an  economic downturn or depression.  Make no mistake, Democrats and the media are inveterate and shameless liars, frauds and backstabbers, and like the Aesop’s fable of the scorpion riding the frog across the river, they will politely clap and smile if the President follows their advice, but then stick the blade into him in an effort to cripple his re-election.  The only thing Democrats may have that President Trump should use are the “fireside chats” which President Franklin D. Roosevelt utilized to calm and encourage the American people during the 1930’s economic depression. Trump needs to use this Corona virus situation as an opportunity to deliver his own personalized “fireside chats” to reassure Americans and the world; and to reinvent the American economy in ways that ostracize the unions for being filled with fraud and crime, taking worker’s wages for their own profit, cigars, and prostitutes.

For this reason, as soon as possible, Trump needs to open and unleash the floodgates of the American economy and by executive order establish long term tax cuts and financial incentives—economically and efficiently trimming the fraud and waste in our military budget—and finance and invest in an American Renaissance while also initiating an economic jubilee year, where debts of all kinds are forgiven.  The amazing ingenuity of Americans has made them competitive on the shale oil industry, and America no longer needs Saudi Arabia, as it is oil independent.  America also does not need Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi fanaticism that fuels endless hatred and terrorism, but that’s another story.

PRESIDENTIAL SUCCESSES:

The best thing the President has done so far is taking the time to give long press conferences and, for the first time, even sitting behind his desk in the oval office.  He should get a new speech writer as well.  Instead of standing at a podium deflecting darts of antagonistic journalists, or bellowing loudly against the wind as he prepares to board his presidential helicopter, President Trump is calming fears and promising to end the siege and shutdown of American life.   Indeed this was the reason many people for the first time, saw him as Presidential.  Remember, like it or not, he is perceived by most peoples to be the leader of the Free World, and he is the President of our Nation.

In a White House Press Conference on March 23, 2020, Trump described how he was intending to re-open the American economy sooner than previously reported, most likely in a matter of weeks.  Trump stated:

“We have to get our country back to work… Our country wants to go back to work. Suicides from depression will be ‘FAR GREATER’ than coronavirus deaths unless America reopens for business ‘soon’… We’ll be doing something relatively quickly… we have to do things to get our country open…people are suffering fantastic depression because they had a fantastic job and now they don’t know what’s happening…”, and, “I’d like to be able to bounce back to where we were…We can’t let this continue to go on… this two week period has been good….it has been this incredible learning process, this will go into the future, we are going to be watching New York, CA, Washington…We may quarantine, we will be quarantining many people in these areas.  Why would we shut down 100 % of the country?  To close the New York stock exchange and NASDAQ, we don’t want to be doing that.  We can do two things simultaneously… I think they (the American people) are ok with it, and I am ok with it…Because of the magnitude of our economy.  You have 160 million jobs in this country.  So we can’t turn that off and think that it is going to be wonderful.  There will be tremendous death because of turning off the economy.”

Additionally, President Trump has promised the American people that he will not “make the cure worse than the problem itself”—which is ironically the very same phrase I’ve been using for the past several weeks on our radio shows.  Interesting.

CONCLUSION

The government has essentially turned off the power and shut down the entire economic and social life of Americans, while allowing the government sectors—the police, the post office, the military, the emergency services—to continue.  Americans instinctively resent this because to them it feels like regular, working class Americans are being disrespected and dominated and put under the control of police and government types.  In other words, average Americans are beginning to feel like they are being treated like criminals and prisoners.

This is extremely dangerous because it smacks of fascism, and nowhere is fascism more hated than in suburbs, rural areas and in our small towns.  Just remember the patriotic feelings and clamoring for battle instincts that arose when you first saw the 1980’s film “Red Dawn.”  This could very easily be re-discovered in real life if flyers and leaflets with the words “WOLVERINE” on them are advertised around every major and minor town and city in America.  Life sometimes imitates fiction.

President Trump has some very bad advisors around him that justify their position with campaign contributions or legacies of mediocrity.  He needs new ones. I know, I saw them all the time when I worked in Washington for 15 years.  Dismiss the timid, embrace visionaries.  They are not hard to find.  Trump needs to remember he’s the Commander-in-Chief, not a whiteboard for political advisors or cabinet members to draw their own careers on.  Trump must remember that political advisors are interested only in capitalizing on socio-political events, trends, fads, and issues in order to grow their influence, careers, and wealth.  Contrary to their advice, political advisors are not looking to serve, but rather are parasites looking for opportunities. Trump should also remember that the vast majority of the American people, especially women who are wives and mothers—or desire to be wives and mothers—ignore politics for the most part and pay attention to their families—or their ability to form future families—and defend their ability to flourish and prosper.  It is natural, it is instinctive, it is the American way.

Trump should also remember that because of the past four years of the Democrat media’s shameless propaganda about Russian election meddling, the Mueller Investigation and political prosecution of Trump volunteers, the Ukraine-Biden bribery, and political hypocrisy, the American people—and indeed most of the truth seeking world—have become sensitive to lies; and subsequently developed a healthy distrust and scorn for the mainstream media (excluding channels like Russia Today, Sputnik, Press TV, Al Jazeera, and others outside the CIA-MI6-Mossad influence).  Trump needs to weaponize this distrust for the media and pre-emptively communicate to the American people and the world that despite the fear-porn the media will try and sell, they should ignore them, go back to work, exercise caution, take health supplements and immune boosting nutrients, and resurrect their lives and America.  They will follow his advice, and remember it come election day in November.

In the horror film, A Quiet Place we see a story which has similarities to our national story today.  The film is the story of an American family living isolated in the country in a lonely farmhouse, surrounded by wilderness, and who speak only in sign language and make no sounds.  Soon we discover it’s because of man-eating aliens who track humans by their sounds.  Aside from being similar to the many other science fiction and horror films and television such as the Walking Dead, or The Happening, or Cloverfield, or War of the Worlds, depicting human society being hunted, eaten, or under siege from invading monsters, this film is a kind of similar glimpse in to the current life Americans may be feeling under siege of the corona virus, with Americans being ordered to “shelter at home”—which is a polite way fascists say you are confined to home imprisonment.  This social isolation of Americans is more dangerous than Democrat socialists and the media think, because often when civilized behavior and altruism is forced out of the human social language in preference for survival, civilization is not easily re-learned, and the media and government bureaucrats are seen for what they are…discarded relics of a lost world.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Scott Bennett is am author and former U.S. Army Special Operations Officer (11th Psychological Operations Battalion, Civil Affairs-Psychological Operations Command), and a global psychological warfare-counterterrorism analyst, formerly with defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. His website is:  www.shellgamewhistleblower.com

He held a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information (TS/SCI) security clearance, and worked with Edward Snowden in the highest levels of international counterterrorism and developed and managed psychological warfare theories, products, and operations for U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Central Command, the State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism, and other government agencies.

US Preparing Panama-Style Invasion of Venezuela?

[In a replay of history, Venezuelan Pres. Maduro marked by Trump/CIA to receive the same treatment allotted to Manuel Noreiga and Panama (SEE: The Panama Deception).]

Feds charge Venezuelan President Maduro, other top officials with narco-terrorism

BY JAY WEAVER AND ANTONIO MARIA DELGADO

In a stunning announcement amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Justice Department announced Thursday that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and several other government officials have been charged with turning Venezuela into a narco-state by collaborating with a leftist Colombian guerrilla group that exported tons of cocaine to the United States.

An indictment, unveiled at a “virtual” news conference in Washington, D.C., accuses Maduro and other top officials in his socialist regime of conspiring with the U.S.-designated terrorist group known as the FARC so that Venezuela could be used for narcotics shipments to finance a long-running civil war against the Colombian government.

Charged along with Maduro are Diosdado Cabello, a former speaker of the National Assembly who is considered the second most powerful political figure in Venezuela, and Vladimir Padrino Lopez, the country’s minister of defense. All three Venezuelan officials face allegations of narco-terrorism, drug trafficking and weapons violations in a scheme initiated in the mid-2000s that was meant to help the Colombian rebel group while enriching themselves with cocaine-tainted bribes, according to federal authorities.

TOP ARTICLES

  00:15 / 00:15Feds charge Venezuelan President Maduro, other topofficials with narco-terrorism

Maduro’s indictment marks the second time that the U.S. government has brought criminal charges against a foreign head of state. The last time was in 1989, when federal prosecutors in Miami indicted Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega on drug-trafficking charges. and U.S. military forces seized him late that year. Noriega was convicted at trial, imprisoned in the Miami area and died in 2017.

Local news has never been more important

Subscribe for unlimited digital access to the news that matters to your community.

#READLOCAL

In announcing Maduro’s indictment, Attorney General William Barr said that the U.S. government will offer a $15 million reward to anyone who provides information on when Maduro leaves Venezuela that assists in his capture.

Barr said at the virtual news conference that Maduro and several other high-ranking officials betrayed the Venezuelan people by offering a “safe haven” in their country for the “extremely violent” Colombian rebel group, so the president and his allies could profit off the drug trade and “flood the United States with cocaine.”

The extraordinary criminal case, which was filed in the Southern District of New York, is undoubtedly meant to put even greater pressure on Maduro, who took over the reins of Venezuela’s government from the late Hugo Chávez after his death in 2013. While the once-prosperous country began its decline under Chávez, Venezuela’s economy has crashed during Maduro’s tenure — leading to the exodus of millions of Venezuelans, including some who resettled in South Florida over the past decade.

The federal targeting of Maduro and several other Venezuelan officials follows last year’s U.S. government threat to sanction any company that does business with his oil-rich country. The Trump administration has rejected Maduro as the president of Venezuela and formally recognized the opposition leader, Juan Guaido, as the nation’s rightful leader.

At the same time, the Justice Department has already brought several multibillion-dollar corruption cases against senior Venezuelan government officials, including Chávez’s former national treasurer, Alejandro Andrade (now imprisoned), executives in the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, and politically connected businessmen with luxury homes and bank accounts in the United States. These prosecutions have been under way for years in New York, Miami and Houston and more corruption cases are expected to be filed.

On Thursday, a corruption case was also unsealed in Miami charging Miakel Moreno, the president of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice in Venezuela, with accepting bribes in connection with PDVSA corruption and contract schemes. Moreno, the nation’s top judicial figure, is the fifth target of the widening Miami case that has implicated both national oil company officials and contractors.

As part of Thursday’s live-streamed news conference in Washington, the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, and the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, Ariana Fajardo Orshan, participated from Manhattan and Miami, respectively, because of concerns about gatherings of more than 10 during the coronavirus outbreak.

The most notable Venezuelan political figure charged Thursday is of course Maduro, the president. But the senior official who allegedly orchestrated the country’s drug-trafficking enterprises is Cabello, a prominent politician who was close to Chávez and has exerted tremendous influence over Venezuela’s military.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been investigating Cabello for years, claiming he is the leader of the so-called Cartel de los Soles — Cartel of the Suns — a powerful criminal organization consisting of military officers and officials of the Maduro regime that controls most drug-trafficking operations in Venezuela.

U.S. investigators have been collecting evidence and testimony from former regime and Venezuelan military officials about Cabello’s involvement in the cartel, which began by providing protection to Colombian drug traffickers but ended up shoving them aside to take over the illicit trade in partnership with Colombian guerrillas, the FARC.

(In 2016, the FARC signed a peace deal with the Colombian government that led to the demobilization of most of their fighting force and brought then-President Juan Manuel Santos a Nobel Prize. But a number of guerrilla holdouts, or FARC dissidents, continue to operate in the country and neighboring Venezuela.)

Cabello’s alleged role in drug trafficking was first mentioned officially by the U.S. government in May 2018, when the Department of Treasury sanctioned him. “Cabello organizes drug shipments being moved from Venezuela through the Dominican Republic, and onw:ards to Europe,” the Treasury Department said in a press release at the time.

Cabello, who also heads the regime’s National Constituent Assembly, a controversial body used by Maduro as a parallel Congress, collaborated with other senior officials in Maduro’s government. His principal partner: former Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami.

FROM REVOLUTIONARY DREAMS TO A CARTEL

Cabello and El Aissami are both founding members of the Cartel de los Soles that ended up turning Venezuela into a springboard for the Colombian drug shipments to the United States and Europe, U.S. investigators say.

According to cooperating witnesses who spoke to the DEA, both officials participated in a crucial meeting held in 2005 with then-President Chávez, who allegedly ordered his trusted lieutenants to take over the drug trade in Venezuela.

The former head of state argued the regime’s incursion in drug trafficking was necessary to help the leftist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) take power in the neighboring country and also to hurt the United States. Chávez deemed the U.S. as the main obstacle to his socialist movement in Venezuela, according to DEA documents obtained by el Nuevo Herald.

Besides Cabello and El Aissami, the meeting was also attended by then-head of military intelligence, Hugo Carvajal, general Henry Rangel Silva, who later became defense minister, and a high-ranking judge who later became a DEA informant and was identified in the documents as “Witness 1.”

“During the meeting, Chávez urged the group, in substance and in part, to promote its political objectives, including fighting the United States by ‘flooding’ the country with cocaine,” said Witness-1, whose statement is quoted in the DEA documents.

“Chávez ordered Carvajal, Cabello, Rangel Silva, and others to coordinate [the drug shipments] with the FARC, and Chávez assigned Witness-1, among others, to make sure that law enforcement officials did not interfere with these activities,” according to the DEA informant’s statement.

In one of the monthly meetings that followed, Cabello described the land and sea routes of drug trafficking through Venezuela, and Carvajal explained that the FARC would supply the cocaine loads in exchange for weapons, according to the DEA documents.

DRUG POWER

While Chávez may have approved the free transit of drugs in Venezuela as a way to hurt the United States and help the FARC to take power in Colombia, the decision seems to have had a more lasting impact in Venezuela, where drug trafficking dominated the state and corrupted its government, experts say.

A recent report by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington revealed that Chávez’s revolutionary mission was eventually upended by the regime’s move into drug trafficking, with top lieutenants eventually tossing aside their socialist agenda to concentrate on the narcotics trade.

“Chávez’s motive was primarily political, but assuming a direct role in marketing FARC cocaine converted his government into a criminal enterprise,” the report said. “In this period, senior Chavista leaders became more interested in sustaining this lucrative corruption than in governing or managing the economy.”

Ever since, Cabello has been at the center of it all, using his political power to direct criminal enterprises in Venezuela and beyond, according to U.S. officials.

“Cabello has abused these influential positions [within the regime] in furtherance of his illicit and corrupt activities to control and direct government agencies and military officials in Venezuela,” the U.S. Department of Treasury said when it announced the sanctions against him in 2018.

“Cabello has entrenched a network of supporters by deciding who gets promoted within agencies such as the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Public Works ,” the Treasury Department said. “Cabello in turn used that sphere of influence to personally profit from extortion, money laundering, and embezzlement.”

RISE TO THE TOP

Cabello played a leading role in Chávez’s political movement from the beginning, as one of the military officers who accompanied him in his 1992 failed coup attempt.

Cabello was expelled from the Venezuelan army after the failed coup attempt, putting an end to his military career. But he found himself in government less than a decade later after the leaders of the coup attempt were pardoned and Chávez won the 1998 presidential election.

Since then, Cabello has occupied a series of key positions inside the Venezuelan government. U.S. officials believe Cabello, who today is one of Venezuela’s richest men, used his influence and position to advance in the drug trade.

Cabello consolidated his power within the Cartel de los Soles following the death of Chávez in 2013.

While the cocaine shipments were supplied by the FARC, Cabello used his official power to get rid of smaller competitors in the drug trade by arresting them and confiscating their stashes, according to U.S. investigators.

While often being referred to as a cartel, the drug-trafficking structure operating under the shadows of the Maduro regime is in reality made up of different networks, at times hostile to each other, that operate under the sponsorship of key Chavista figures, including Cabello and El Aissami.

“The Cartel of the Suns today is a disparate network of traffickers, including both state and non-state actors, but all operating with the blessing and protection of senior figures in the Venezuelan government,” said a 2018 report published by InSight Crime, an NGO that studies organized crime throughout Latin America. “Without such political top cover, and paying off the correct people, drug smuggling operations are shut down.”

“Drug trafficking is one of the main lubricants for corruption in Venezuela today,” the report said, “and this troubled Andean nation is becoming one of the world’s major cocaine trafficking hubs.”

A report by the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group for human rights, echoed that view to a degree, but also offered a different assessment of Venezuela’s role in the international narcotics trade.

“Venezuela’s state institutions have deteriorated and the country lacks an impartial, transparent, or even functional justice system. In this environment, armed groups and organized criminal structures, including drug trafficking groups, have thrived,” the March 2020 report said. But U.S government data suggests that, despite these challenges, Venezuela is not a primary transit country for U.S.-bound cocaine. U.S. policy toward Venezuela should be predicated on a realistic understanding of the transnational drug trade.

“Recent data from the U.S. interagency Consolidated Counterdrug Database (CCDB) indicates that 210 metric tons of cocaine passed through Venezuela in 2018. By comparison, the State Department reports that over six times as much cocaine (1,400 metric tons) passed through Guatemala the same year.”

Miami Herald Latin American correspondent Jim Wyss contributed to this report.

1 of 2

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro GETTY IMAGES

Coronavirus Panic–The United States Government Must Be Stopped Now

Any country that seeks to control others is a country that seeks aggression. Any country that seeks aggression is a country that seeks war. Any country that seeks war is a country that seeks domination. Therefore, any country that seeks control, aggression, war, and domination is a country that must enslave its people in order to advance this agenda of imperialism. This is a description of the United States of America today. It has become a nation based on control, aggression, war, and domination, and only a totalitarian regime can achieve and hold empire.

Watch closely what is hidden from view. While there is an enormous amount of speculation and studied hypotheses concerning this coronavirus, do not allow the virus hype to cause blindness to the government’s hidden agendas and methods of achieving dominance over the populace. Things are moving very quickly, and every single piece of new legislation, every executive order, and all mandated tyrannical measures instituted at any level of government could have very dangerous underlying consequences, and these will most likely not see the light of day in any mainstream media. That is why it is so important to seek out those that are researching these documents and tyrannical measures, and reporting on them outside the mainstream. In addition, the asinine social changes are not going away anytime soon, so get prepared for normal life in this new surveillance state of America to be one giant TSA center intent on inspecting and controlling all movement and action of the public. In other words, life in this country could become one big airport security line, and pat downs and the metaphorical equivalent (or not) of body cavity searches could become the norm.

What has happened so far is almost beyond the realm of imagination, but more tyranny at the hands of government is on the horizon. Whether this coronavirus is a real threat or not, the authoritarian measures now in place will remain. That alone is reason for worry. Considering renewed surveillance, forced quarantine, mandated isolation, high unemployment, forced business closure, medical martial law, economic destruction, ludicrous monetary policy, forced vaccinations to come, travel bans, and highly increased poverty, all due to measures instituted so far, where will it end? The sad truth is that this assault on Americans will not end, and in fact will worsen in the future.

Economically speaking, the damage already evident will cause an undetermined amount of harm to all of us. Some of course, many in fact, will face extreme hardship due to job loss, business closure, loss of income, and inflation pressures bound to show up due to massive money printing and distribution. The Federal Reserve Bank has been given an unlimited ability to print money out of thin air. Attempts are being made after passage of the largest bailout package in history, to fund corporations, big business, some small business, and even individuals, and all this fake money flooding into the public and private sectors will lead to much higher prices just as people have lost everything and do not have the ability to even pay their bills.

One of the provisions in this massive bailout bill (full text not available at this writing) coming from government is the creation of a digital currency, which if implemented could turn into a way to eliminate cash, and also to possibly in the future control the entire monetary processes. If China’s model were followed, this type of overreach could lead to social scoring and restrictions on movement, travel, credit, and even life sustaining needs should one not comply with government orders.

Unemployment is skyrocketing, and do not forget that this is forced unemployment, and unemployment websites are crashing. Many states and cities are completely quarantined, “locked-down” as the new coronavirus terminology would indicate, “social distancing” is becoming a pandemic on its own, and “shaming” others for not being sheep is increasing exponentially. Bankruptcies will abound, and suicide numbers in my opinion will outpace death from any coronavirus. For those in certain areas that refuse to comply, basic life-sustaining services such as power and water will be cut off, as threats have already been made. Food shortages are almost certain now, just as things worsen and distribution lines are closing. All this and very much more will certainly lead to riots and chaos at some point.

Pompeo, the current self-professed lying cretin who is Secretary of State, announced a few days ago that this so-called pandemic response is a “live exercise,” so active military war games are already taking place, which means preparations are being made to implement national martial law if considered necessary. Remember, 28 states have already called out National Guard units. No one really knows what is being discussed at the top, as anything of importance discussed by government is kept secret, and the cattle are only told what they want to hear, or at least not told of secret plans that might have horrible consequences to the populace at large.

One of the worst possible mandates that I think likely to come out of this fraudulent pandemic scare is forced vaccination of all. The first vaccination that will be mandated will probably be a fast-tracked and untested coronavirus vaccination. I believe that this will be extremely dangerous, and could cause mass illness and death. Barbara Loe Fisher explains this national plan here. Be very aware of any fast-tracked coronavirus vaccine that the government approves whether it is forcibly required at first or not.

The hype is actually worsening, even as so many questions are being asked and not answered, and even as the numbers of deaths are but a tiny fraction of the normal flu. Governors of many if not most states are now drunk with power, and explosive and unverified headlines are gaining in number. It is time to slow down and review things thoroughly before drastic measures are taken.

We are headed into unknown territory, and once this government gains complete and total control over the population due to this or any other claimed emergency, all freedom will disappear, and what will remain will be a helpless people trapped in a totalitarian state intent on global domination.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” 
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities

The Best of Gary D. Barnett

US Media Always Defends Al-Qaida, Whatever the Latest Incarnation

[Just as the US/CIA created Al-Qaida to fight against Russia in Afghanistan, it has created the group once known as the Al-Nusra Front to fight against Syria (SEE: What Is the Truth About ISIS? ). 

“Abdullah Azzam Brigades was spun-off from AQI in the process. A precursor to Al Nusra Front, “Al Nusra wal Jihad fi Bilad al Sham” split-off from AbAzzam in 2005.” 

Al-Nusra, whatever its current alias, has always been a US/Saudi-created terrorist army.]

US Media Defends Al Qaeda in Syria

March 26, 2020 (Tony Cartalucci – NEO) – When is a terrorist group not a terrorist group? Apparently when US foreign policy requires it not to be. This is precisely the case regarding Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch – Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) – the most recent rebrand of Jabhat Al Nusra – which currently occupies the northern Syrian governorate of Idlib.

The US corporate media has recently attempted to generate public sympathy for HTS – as well as animosity toward Syrian, Russian, and Iranian forces seeking to liberate the supposedly one million people trapped under the terrorist organization’s rule.

Another factor behind US media support for HTS is the necessity to explain why NATO member Turkey is providing direct military and material support for a US-designated terrorist organization, and why the US itself is in turn providing Turkey support to do so.

Articles have appeared in Newsweek – for example – framing Russian opposition to negotiations with HTS as negative – and echoing US State Department efforts to support the terrorist organization despite it appearing on Washington’s official Foreign Terrorist Organization designation list.

The article titled, “Russia Warns Against Any U.S. Talks with Militant Group It’s Bombing in Syria,” is actually referring to Al Qaeda’s HTS front when it refers to the “militant group” Russia is bombing in Syria.

Newsweek places Russian statements regarding the US designation of HTS as a terrorist organization in quotes as if to question the veracity of the claim.

However, a visit to the US State Department’s own website reveals a 2018 statement titled, “Amendments to the Terrorist Designations of al-Nusrah Front,” which openly admits:

The Department of State has amended the designation of al-Nusrah Front – an al-Qa’ida affiliate in Syria – to include Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and other aliases. These aliases have been added to al-Nusrah Front’s designations as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, and as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) under Executive Order 13224.

In January 2017, al-Nusrah Front launched the creation of HTS as a vehicle to advance its position in the Syrian uprising and to further its own goals as an al-Qa’ida affiliate. Since January 2017, the group has continued to operate through HTS in pursuit of these objectives.

Thus – according to all sides of the Syrian conflict including Washington – HTS is without doubt – unequivocally a terrorist organization.

And eventually – 5 paragraphs in – Newsweek also admits HTS is a US-designated terrorist organization – and even includes quotes from US military leaders admitting that Idlib is overrun by extremists. Yet the US-based publication still attempts to frame Syrian and Russian efforts to liberate Idlib from these extremists negatively.

Newsweek is just one example of the US corporate media obliquely defending terrorism. The New York Times would provide a much more robust defense.

New York Times Does PR for Al Qaeda in Idlib 

To illustrate just how far the US corporate media is willing to go to bolster Al Qaeda’s HTS and its Turkish and US backers, the New York Times claims its staff actually accompanied HTS terrorists in Idlib in order to write their emotionally manipulative article, “‘The Only Choice Is to Wait for Death’.”

The article’s author – Carlotta Gall – claims:

I made a rare visit into Idlib with a photographer and interpreter on Wednesday, crossing the border from Turkey. We were accompanied by relief workers of a Syrian charity and members of a jihadist rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which controls the province.

While the identity or organization these “relief workers” are affiliated with is never mentioned in the article – they are almost certainly from the so-called “White Helmets” and their presence alongside Al Qaeda HTS militants would only further confirm that they themselves are nothing more than Al Qaeda auxiliaries.

The article contains weepy anecdotes devoid of any actual evidence, playing on the familiar “humanitarian” concerns the US and its media often use to demonize its adversaries and justify its own – very real – aggression and abuse globally.

In this case – the aggression and abuse the US and its media are attempting to justify is the continued existence of Al Qaeda’s HTS in northern Syria and its rule over an alleged population of “one million” civilians.

The article describes Syrian and Russian security operations to liberate Idlib from Al Qaeda with paragraphs like:

There has been no letup for the people of Idlib Province as the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, backed by Russian air power, have smashed their way forward, demolishing towns and villages in the south and east of the province with punishing airstrikes.

Only until twenty-five paragraphs into the New York Times’ article, does author Carlotta Gall finally admit HTS is a US-designated terrorist organization, claiming:

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, has been designated a terrorist group by the United Nations but recently allowed Western journalists into Idlib in cooperation with Turkey, which has wanted to build international pressure against Russia and Syria.

In other words – Al Qaeda and its Turkish backers want to build pressure against Russia and Syria who are attempting to liquidate the terrorist organization and restore order to Idlib – and the New York Times is willingly – even eagerly – aiding Al Qaeda and Turkey in doing so.

The US Has Flattened Cities and Nations in Pursuit of “Terrorists” 

Cities held by terrorist organizations – or even entire nations for that matter – have served as a pretext for the United States and its allies to carry out brutal military operations. For example – the alleged presence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan served as the pretext for the now 19 year war the US has waged there since 2001.

In 2004 – citing the presence of extremists in the Iraqi city of Fallujah – the US military would flatten the urban center not once – but twice.

One might imagine that the US military and its allies would be eager to move against the northern governorate of Idlib in Syria – admittedly held by the terrorist HTS front.

Yet here the truth about America’s so-called “War on Terrorism” is revealed.

While extremists may have been based in Afghanistan in 2001 or active in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004 – that is not why the United States moved against them. The US had overarching geopolitical plans that required the long-term occupation of Afghanistan – with the presence of extremists serving merely as a pretext to pursue these plans.

In Fallujah it was not the militants or their extremism that bothered the United States – as Washington had previously armed and backed many of the groups there in proxy conflicts for decades beforehand and for nearly two decades since – it was their resistance to the US occupation that triggered the two battles for the city.

Al Qaeda in northern Syria serves US interests – the fact that it appears on the US State Department’s own terrorist designation list is merely a political inconvenience at the moment – one the above-mentioned Newsweek article even admits US diplomats are trying to work around.

Newsweek claimed:

James Jeffrey, the U.S. special representative on Syria and special envoy to the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), told a press briefing earlier this month he had not seen Hayat Tahrir al-Sham “planning or carrying out international terrorism attacks.” He made similar comments days earlier.

The obvious implications of Jeffery’s comment is that – at the moment and despite HTS’ status as a US-designated terrorist organization – the US does not see it as one. And not because HTS isn’t a terrorist organization – but simply because at the moment – such a designation is not politically convenient for US objectives in northern Syria.

So while the US has flattened entire cities in pursuit of “terrorists,” it currently seeks to complicate and draw out the Syrian conflict – placing the lives of “one million” civilians in the balance – in defense of terrorists.

The malignant nature of US foreign policy is fully illustrated by Washington and the US media’s stance regarding Al Qaeda’s HTS in northern Syria – amid circumstances where unequivocal terrorists threatening the lives of what the US itself claims are “one million” civilians have attracted the attention and support of American journalists and diplomats.

The coordinated nature of this support – spanning the corporate media and the US government itself – indicate just how deep the rot  is within US foreign policymaking and helps explain why – no matter who sits in the White House – this agenda continues forward, unabated and unfazed no matter how much the light of truth is shone upon it.

The fact that large amounts of resources are still being invested by Washington and the US corporate media indicates that US efforts to destabilize and destroy Syria are still very much in play – and now more than ever those seeking to restore order in Syria must guard against complacency.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest

Keep Talking – Pink Floyd

Lyrics

There’s a silence surrounding me
I can’t seem to think straight
I sit in the corner
And no one can bother me
I think I should speak now (why won’t you talk to me?)
I can’t seem to speak now (you never talk to me)
My words won’t come out right (what are you thinking?)
I feel like I’m drowning (what are you feeling?)
I’m feeling weak now (why won’t you talk to me?)
But I can’t show my weakness (you never talk to me)
I sometimes wonder (what are you thinking?)
Where do we go from here (what are you feeling?)

I feel like I’m drowning
(You never talk to me) you know I can’t breathe now
(What are you thinking?) We’re going nowhere
(What are you feeling?) We’re going nowhere
(Why won’t you talk to me?)
(You never talk to me)
(What are you thinking?)
(Where do we go from here?)

CDC Director Admits That Early Flu-Diagnosed Deaths Proved To Be Early Coronavirus Deaths

[How do we find out the dates of those early misdiagnosed coronavirus deaths?  We need answers to where the virus originated.]

US CDC: some Americans who died of flu might have had COVID-19| CCTV

Editor: Zhang Jianfeng 丨CGTN

03-17-2020

The following article is taken from the Chinese-language opinion column “The Real Point”.

Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has confirmed that some COVID-19 deaths had been diagnosed as flu-related in the United States.

The news has led to questions about whether this new coronavirus originated in the States in the first place, given that the flu season began last September in the country—months before the outbreak in China’s Wuhan, the host city for the 2019 Military World Games.

Questioning of the virus’ origin began in February when a Japanese couple tested positive for COVID-19 in Japan after returning from a trip to Hawaii, where they were reportedly treated as having seasonal influenza.

On February 21, a program produced by TV Asahi questioned whether some coronavirus patients were treated as flu patients, given the poor health checkups ordinary Americans have and the similar symptoms it shares with COVID-19.

The CDC immediately refuted the possibility suggested by the Japanese television network. However, 20 days later, its director made a U-turn, admitting such cases.

The assumption that COVID-19 originated in the United States is logical given that the 2019 Military World Games was held in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak in China, between October 18 and 27, just weeks before the first case was reportedly recorded in December in the city.

Reports on the shutdown of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick in July 2019 have added to the suspicion. According to a report by the New York Times, “Problems with disposal of dangerous materials led the government to suspend research at the military’s leading biodefense center,” where research involved dangerous microbes like the Ebola virus.

An article published on the website of the Canada-based Center for Research on Globalization earlier this month also asked, “Did the virus originate in the U.S.?” The author, Larry Romanoff, quoted a top virologist in Taiwan, who said both Iran and Italy had deciphered the locally prevalent genome and had declared them of different varieties from those in China, meaning they did not originate there but were of necessity introduced from another source.

The article points out, “Due to the enormous amount of Western media coverage focused on China, much of the world believes the coronavirus spread to all other nations from China, but this now appears to have been proven wrong.”

In fact, a January 24 article published on The Lancet medical journal website also indicated the origin of the virus may differ from what was first thought. Seven clinicians from Jinyintan Hospital, one of the key hospitals treating COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, revealed in the paper that 13 of the first 41 cases they treated had no link to the Huanan Seafood Market, the initial location to which cases of COVID-19 were linked, and, “no epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases.”

An article published on January 26 by the Science journal quoted Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University, saying, “That’s a big number, 13, with no link.” He further noted if the new data is accurate then the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan—and perhaps elsewhere—before the cluster of cases from the seafood market was discovered in late December.

China’s top respiratory specialist Zhong Nanshan has also said “though COVID-19 was first discovered in China, it does not mean it originated from China.”

The source of the virus is a scientific issue and requires scientific and professional investigation. Global epidemic prevention and control is at a critical stage. As of March 16, there were over 80 thousand confirmed cases outside China, of which more than three thousand had died. Many countries, including the United States, have declared a state of emergency.

Keeping in mind the spirit of science, the U.S. shares a responsibility with the rest of the world to find out when and where COVID-19 first appeared. It’s not only a responsible move for the life and health of the American people, but also a necessary step to curb the spread of the virus and safeguard global public health security.

Pompeo–“we are in a live exercise here”, Trump–“you shoulda let us know”

Mike Pompeo Admits COVID-19 Is a “Live Exercise,” Trump Retorts “I Wish You Would Have Told Us”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had a slip of the tongue while addressing the American people from the White House when he stated that COVID-19 is a live military exercise.

“This is not about retribution,” Pompeo explained. “This matter is going forward — we are in a live exercise here to get this right.”

“You shoulda let us know”–Donald Trump

My State (Ohio) to Implement Shelter in Place, We Are Ordered To STAY HOME

Ohio to Implement Shelter in Place (STAY HOME)

Order, Strictest Measure Yet to Combat COVID-19

Posted By Sam Allard on Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 3:22 pm

 

• State of Ohio photo

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Health Director Amy Acton and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted Sunday issued a “stay at home” order which mandates that all Ohioans stay in their homes for all but essential outings and closes down non-essential businesses as defined by the Dept. of Homeland Security.  (The list of essential businesses is included on page five of the document below.)

The order is the strictest yet in Ohio’s incremental efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, and it makes official the recommendations that DeWine and Dr. Acton have been imploring Ohioans to take seriously for days.

DeWine said that “common sense” exceptions have been included in the state order, so people will still be permitted to leave their homes for groceries, carry-out meals, medical supplies and other essentials. People are permitted, indeed encouraged, to go outside for physical exercise (though not at public playgrounds) and are allowed to tend to family members, friends, and pets who may be in other homes and in need of care.

Essential businesses that remain open must adhere to health and safety protocols, including social distancing (at least six feet between workers) and regular cleaning. DeWine repeated that these protocols will now be part of an order, “not a suggestion,” and that they can be enforced by both local health departments and law enforcement.

What DeWine calls the “stay at home” order has, in other states, been referred to as “Shelter in Place.” California, New York and Illinois, along with New Jersey, Connecticut and Louisiana, have now all instituted versions of the same mandate. Ohio’s will go into effect Monday at 11:59 p.m. and is currently scheduled to last until April 6. That date is of course subject to change.

DeWine also made an announcement about the state’s daycare facilities. Starting Thursday, daycares will only be allowed to operate with a temporary pandemic childcare license. Facilities will be limited to a maximum of six children per classroom, what DeWine called a “dramatic” but necessary shift.

“We have not faced an enemy like we are facing today in 102 years,” the governor said. “We are certainly at war. I don’t know any other way to describe this. In a time of war, we have to make sacrifices.”

Acton, too, continued to uncork wartime rhetoric, but said she had never been more hopeful that Ohioans would pull through the current pandemic.

“Today is the final order,” she said. “It’s absolutely essential that we don’t do this in a piecemeal way. There’s no time left. Listen to what Italy is telling us. Today is the day… This is not a joke. This is not a drill.”

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Ohio rose to 351 Sunday, including 125 in Cuyahoga County (the highest number among the state’s 88 counties), with 83 hospitalizations and three confirmed deaths. DeWine and Acton both reiterated that the current data does not tell the full story of the Coronavirus in Ohio.

“Even the data you’ll see in the future is minimal because we are conserving all our available testing for the most high-risk and hospitalized front line workers,” DeWine wrote on social media shortly before the press conference.

You can read the full order below.

PDFOhio_STAYHOME.pdf

*

The CDC’s US Patent On Human Coronavirus Expired Yesterday…Is this relevant?

FIGS. 2A–B are electronmicrographs illustrating ultrastructural characteristics of the SARS-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV). FIG. 2A is a thin-section electron-microscopical view of viral nucleocapsids aligned along the membrane of the rough endoplasmic reticulum (arrow) as particles bud into the cisternae. Enveloped virions have surface projections (arrowhead) and an electron-lucent center. Directly under the viral envelope lies a characteristic ring formed by the helical nucleocapsid, often seen in cross-section. FIG. 2B is a negative stain (methylamine tungstate) electronmicrograph showing stain-penetrated coronavirus particle with the typical internal helical nucleocapsid-like structure and club-shaped surface projections surrounding the periphery of the particle. Bars: 100 nm.

FIG. 6A–B are electronmicrographs illustrating ultrastructural characteristics of a coronavirus-infected cell in bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) from a SARS patient. FIG. 6A is an electronmicrograph of a coronavirus-infected cell. Numerous intracellular and extracellular particles are present; virions are indicated by the arrowheads. FIG. 6B is a higher magnification electronmicrograph of the area seen at the arrow in FIG. 6A (rotated clockwise approximately 90°). Bars: FIG. 6A, 1 μm; FIG. 6B, 100 nm.

Coronavirus isolated from humans

Abstract

Disclosed herein is a newly isolated human coronavirus (SARS-CoV), the causative agent of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Also provided are the nucleic acid sequence of the SARS-CoV genome and the amino acid sequences of the SARS-CoV open reading frames, as well as methods of using these molecules to detect a SARS-CoV and detect infections therewith. Immune stimulatory compositions are also provided, along with methods of their use.

Images (7)

      

Classifications

 C07K14/005 Peptides having more than 20 amino acids; Gastrins; Somatostatins; Melanotropins; Derivatives thereof from viruses

View 6 more classifications

US7220852B1

United States

 Download PDF  Find Prior Art  Similar

Inventor

Paul A. Rota

Larry J. Anderson

William J. Bellini

Cara Carthel Burns

Raymond Campagnoli

Qi Chen

James A. Comer

Shannon L. Emery

Dean D. Erdman

Cynthia S. Goldsmith

Charles D. Humphrey

Joseph P. Icenogle

Thomas G. Ksiazek

Stephan S. Monroe

William Allan Nix

M. Steven Oberste

Teresa C. T. Peret

Pierre E. Rollin

Mark A. Pallansch

Anthony Sanchez

Suxiang Tong

Sherif R. Zaki

Current Assignee

Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (Department of Health and Human Services)

---

Worldwide applications

2004  US 2007  US

---

Application US10/822,904 events

2003-04-25

Priority to US46592703P

2004-04-12

Application filed by Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (Department of Health and Human Services)

2004-04-12

Priority to US10/822,904

2007-05-22

Application granted

2007-05-22

Publication of US7220852B1

2007-06-28

Assigned to THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AS REPRESENTED BY THE SECRETARY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION

2020-03-17

Application status is Expired – Fee Related

2024-04-12

Anticipated expiration

---

Info

Patent citations (3)

Non-patent citations (16)

Cited by (8)

Legal events

Similar documents

Priority and Related Applications

External links

USPTO

USPTO Assignment

Espacenet

Global Dossier

Discuss

China Approves Coronavirus Test Kit That USGOV Ignores

source

Was Coronavirus a Biowarfare Attack Against China?

[The following is the republication of several long and very detailed comments by an unidentified purported expert on biowarfare that originally appeared on a recent thread of the Saker blogsite.]

OLDMICROBIOLOGIST • MARCH 13, 2020

I’ll throw my 2 cents in here. I have zero proof other than my gut feeling that this is a bioweapon. I do have 40 year of biodefense research experience behind me and worked at Fort Detrich on bacterial vaccines where I developed my own aerosol infection routes and developed multi-species models of pathogenesis to establish correlates of immunity. Because I was a one-stop shop doing everything including animal care, aerosol exposures, sample analysis, necropsy, and histopathology, etc. plus I had research programs in endemic areas studying the immunopathological response in human populations to establish immune correlates of protection for candidate vaccines all for the Biological Defense Research Program (BDRP).

I recall the early years when the Department of Homeland Security was stood up and they got the lion’s share of poorly performing ciivil servants un-fireable under the then OPMA policies. I was brought in as a technical expert as we were in dire straits for funding so I (and others) was lent out as a research prostitute. This is a little known problem with civil service employees. They are impossible to eliminate and generally rise to levels where they can cause the most damage. However, an opportunity arose whereby agencies in the Federal government had to contribute bodies to the new Department of Homeland Security (as no new vacancies were created when the agency was stood up meaning everyone had to sacrifice personnel) so most, if not all, employees sent to DHS were the worst of the worst. However, the DHS labs (specifically NBACC) also tied into some nefarious microbiologists working at the CIA (ostensibly part of DHS) and it is an understatement to say that what I saw being proposed horrified me. That work, I am certain was performed at Battle Memorial Institute in West Jefferson, Ohio under a DHS contract doing the work for the CIA under the auspices of NBACC. As I was very vocally opposed to this stuff I was removed from the secure access at DHS but not DoD to the offensive work which I had pointed out was not only illegal but unethical. I have since retired now more than 10 years and am far away from all of that. I won’t say more as they will reach out and seek retribution. But, if you look hard enough you can find still on the internet some references. There are some pissed off people out there should anyone care to actually do some leg work and try and figure this out. But, our news people no longer does this work so there is very little possibility of ever learning the truth.

However, that said, I notice some interesting things with COVID-19, that perked my ears up a bit. Yes, it could be a natural infection jumping species from bats to humans with a probable intermediate host, under conditions of human encroachment into world habitats. It is actually most likely to have been that, except for the strain differences being observed. That leads one to believe if it is in fact true, and I have no reason to doubt the Chinese on this, that it originated outside of China and it seems likely to have originated in the US. If, in fact, the US has 5 strains currently and China only one then it must have been percolating in the US for some time before it arose in China. Likely, deaths in the US were attributed to other diseases such as influenza and only retrospective sampling will determine this. It would be interesting to do a combination GPS-Molecular biology tracking of strains over time and distance. Also, a definite genetic analysis of strains over time would also be beneficial and can be done easily on every isolated strain. This would have value in attributing the course of the disease over time as part of a natural history study of the virus. We would need access to all samples of every lung disease related death for the past 12 months to be certain to track all potential deaths. NBACC is the key to figuring out what nefarious stuff was being funded.

It is possible that this virus has mutated over time to become more virulent. In particular engineered strains are generally unstable over multiple passages through multiple hosts. In my experience when testing strains for pathogenesis and lethality it is wise to first passage a frozen isolate several times through a susceptible animal host to regain full strength. If you test a lab isolate (usually frozen or lyophilized) generally it is wimpy unless you passage it at least 3 passages through an animal model. The worst strains are always those recovered from humans who died from the disease and not field collected strains. If this was perceived to be a useful agent from the likes of Bolton or Pompeo, who are terrible and evil people, then it is conceivable this was thought to teach the Chinese a lesson in economics. You have to be a complete idiot to release a virus for which you have no effective countermeasures but this administration seems to be filled with complete idiots. So, expecting normal behavior from these people is futile.

It could have been released during the 7th CISM military games held in Wuhan October 18-27, 2019 and that fits perfectly into the time scale for the actual infections. Now interestingly enough, I was a participant in several CISM competitions in Europe for skiing (I was on active duty for 26 years) so I am very well versed in who these athletes are. In general the best are Olympic competitors who are ostensibly part of the National Guard of their states who pay for their training by extended military active duty periods where their sole job is sports training. I used to lose every year to one of these guys and generally I placed a distant second place in cross country skiing. I also participated in the biathlon competitions and our soldiers were the very top level because they were in fact Olympic athletes. Rumor is that the US participants at CISM were atrocious which is very atypical so one wonders who these “athletes” were. I am reminded of the US military mission in Brazil to help flood victims which coincidentally was the exact same time that all the power transmission stations in Venezuela were destroyed. So, again a hackle or 2 rise when I heard about that. However, it is the perfect opportunity to release a virus on a target population.

I will also like to add that not all biological warfare agents are lethal. In fact, the worst are non-lethal as it consumes vast amounts of resources in treatment and lost productivity. Deaths are actually cheaper. So, a high communicability, low lethality disease is perfect for ruining an economy. As Trump’s administration claims they are waging war against economic enemies (currently China heads the list) using all possible actions. This fits perfectly into that; however, it may end up destroying the American economy which would be ironic.

I believe the Chinese response was exactly what a country would do if they were attacked with a bioweapon which explains a lot of their actions. I do not believe it was an accidental release from the BSL-4 labs in Wuhan. In fact, this may have been an irresistible opportunity similar to the alleged Novichuk release just 8 k away from Porton Down laboratories (the UK Fort Detrich). Interestingly, the potential release from PDL was never put forward as a logical explanation. Anyway, it sticks me that the CIA seems to have developed a pattern over time. As long as I am pushing my gut feelings I will throw out there the potential for a bioengineered adenovirus with c-fos and c-jun over expression which would cause sarcomas. That work was all published at the National Cancer Institute located where? Fort Detrich. I am certain it is just a coincidence. I can imagine the cackling going on at the CIA when planning this operation and again the coronavirus operation(s). I believe there were at least two attacks with Iran being the second and perhaps North Korea as well. However, evidence against it being a bioweapon is Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba are minimally affected. This could mean effective countermeasures or botched attacks. It is inconsistent though with the way the CIA operates.

Adenovirus is another virus similar to coronavirus in usage and easily aerosolized. I have made my own for over expression of medical treatments for wound infections. Has anyone other than myself noted that so many enemies of the US have died from sarcomas particularly in South America? My point is perhaps this stuff has been ongoing for quite some time and with some fairly good results. So, familiarity breeds contempt so as they gin more experience and begin to think this is good stuff, it is not out of the realm of possibility that this is in fact a bioweapon. That Iran was hit so hard is another hackle rising. It is just simply too good (for the idiots in the US government) to be a coincidence.

So, we are left with some interesting problems about this virus. Where was patient zero in China. What will be the results if a natural history study is conducted correlating geolocation, strain identity, severity of disease over time? Will that work be prevented? If so, that is yet another reason to be suspicious. Will it continue to mutate and what will be the outcome of this? Lots of good stuff to examine here and it will keep a lot of people busy for years.

Maybe you can explain this:
“Coronavirus have not previously been known to cause severe disease in humans”.
This is excerpt from the patent issued to CDC, US government. Link:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7220852B1/en

Coronavirus isolated from humans

Abstract

Disclosed herein is a newly isolated human coronavirus (SARS-CoV), the causative agent of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Also provided are the nucleic acid sequence of the SARS-CoV genome and the amino acid sequences of the SARS-CoV open reading frames, as well as methods of using these molecules to detect a SARS-CoV and detect infections therewith. Immune stimulatory compositions are also provided, along with methods of their use.

So the question for me is why should a harmless virus be patented by the US government and used for research in labs like US army research at Ft. Derick? That makes it military. Why is there then the SARS-CoV, and the latest COVID-19 which is SARS-CoV-2 ? The swineflu was likewise proven to be lab made at least in sources other than mainstream and WHO, the same was the case with Ebola, and even HIV.
It immediately raises the question of ban of biological weapons labs in my mind, by internatiopnal treaties just like a ban on the use of napalm, landmines and so on, since a harmless virus are researched in army labs and suddenly appears as aggresive viruses .

It is an interesting question. Under the bioweapons conference treaty no offensive work can legally be done and any signatory can demand an onsite inspection of facilities for verification at any time. To my knowledge that has never been demanded of the US. It has been done to Russia and China is not a signatory, nor is Israel or North Korea. We have been caught doing inappropriate biodefense research several times now but only because it became known and there were no consequences.

The slippery slope within DoD is to make a counter measure you have to try and look forwards and using intelligence based informatics to design offensive agents. In my opinion this is fallacious as we can’t make countermeasures against the normal 10 agents on the high threat list (since the program’s inception in 1942) other than anthrax and smallpox for which we have had effective vaccines for decades. Since 9/11 no new effective and/or safe vaccines have been been made for any of the rest of the agents on the list. This includes several far more likely biothreats like the plague, tularemia, glanders, brucella, Ebola, Marburg, etc. This was despite pouring billions into biodefense research most of which went to universities. When things cooled down the funding dried up as always. USAMRIID is currently shut down and may never re-open. But contracted services still go on and are funded using black money so not under the purview of Congress. So trying to make vaccines against biothreat agents that don’t exist seems ridiculous when the real threats, some of which the US has used in warfare, are still out there without effective preventatives. What happens is when you pour money into an area as happened after 9/11 all kinds of ridiculous stuff gets funded with very little oversight. The goal is to spend the money and no one really cares if any actual product is created. In fact, success means the demise of your program so the incentive is to drag it out for as long as funding is available. I had programs managed under DTRA funding that because I got new program managers as often as every 3 months had no clue or even any expertise in the matter and had zero idea of what we were doing. I got tired of doing a new dog and pony show each time I was assigned a new manager who usually was some very young recent PhD graduate with no experience at all. Often they were nebutistic appointments and daddy was a Congressman or Under Secretary.

The intelligence based decisions are as usual idiotic as is most intelligence coming out of the CIA and its affiliates. You get better intelligence reading PUBMED than you get out of any intelligence agencies. The microbiologists who work at the CIA and its contract companies were all military microbiologists who because they were essentially incompetent drifted over to the CIA. Then you have some IMHO ridiculous events. I recall when Ken Alibekov “defected” he spoonfed a bunch of made up BS which the CIA bought lock stock and barrel. I had working for me at the same time several former Soviet microbiologists (one of who was a senior researcher at Biopreparat) who were in fact the real deal and all told me he was a bullshit artist. One thing he peddled was a chimeric smallpox-Ebola and another a Ebola-anthrax. So the CIA immediately funded an effort to create chimeric viruses. To my knowledge these were unsuccessful however, the COVID-19 may be being caused by a chimeric virus. The only good reason to make a chimeric virus is to develop a attenuated strain for use as a vaccine. But, as often happens some attenuated mutants become more lethal as an unintended consequence. Another event was trying to force photo data from Iraq to prove they had an offensive bioweapons program. These guys had no clue what laboratory equipment was in actuality and had offered up a cooking truck with pots and pans etc. as proof. They were and I assume still are, idiots.

DoD programs are actually transparent and managed by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Less transparent are the foreign stuff being funded under the Nunn-Lugar Act which includes the debacle of the “white elephant” lab and its satellite labs in the Republic of Georgia. No one will ever look into any of this but likely will end up blaming Russia or China.

They tend to underestimate their adversaries. China has an offensive program and if they get convinced they were attacked then I believe something nasty will be coming soon to the US. But, China is not stupid and won’t release a biothreat agent they have no preventative or treatment for. I also had several Chinese scientists working for me and I respect them immensely.

That should be PROMED for current infectious disease reporting around the world. It is exceptionally good and not funded or controlled by governments. PUBMED is for online publications which is also good but controlled by the government. I am fully aware of censorship of research papers by the US. I recall I wrote a letter to the editor of Science back in 1999 when the government decided to stockpile billions of doses of ciprofloxacin. I did a quick BLAST search and found that only a single base pair mutation in anthrax made it completely resistant to cipro. That letter was published and after 9/11 never seen again. There are other example such as the Canadian paper maybe also in 1999 showing that anthrax delivered in envelopes was not very effective. That one disappeared as well and the same as the Canadian paper where they were aerosolizing B. cereus spores out the back of a moving truck and using aerial infrared cameras demonstrated that these streams of aerosolized spores agglomerated into cloudlets which moved along in the wind and would usually avoid detector arrays which sampled airflow for aerosol particles. That is still the current state of the art for battlefield detection and that paper showed it to be ineffective at best. I can think of dozens of papers that were removed. After 9/11 any research paper that could be used by a foreign actor to develop better biothreat agents was rejected for publication outright. Almost none of my work was published after that except in classified reports which I believe were never read by anyone. I recall part of the madness in setting up NBACC was to generate very lengthy “white papers” that scrubbed through all published articles to assemble the complete picture for the then 10 threat agents. I wrote or edited two of those and they were immediately buried in some deep classified archive to the researchers who might benefit from this work could never actually use it. A complete waste of months and a ton of money. If you are perceiving that the US government biothreat programs are a complete shambles then you are not wrong.

I’ll go into that a bit more as well. It used to be in the military programs we were “command directed”. This means the military made a decision to make a vaccine against a perceived threat agent. They would assemble a research group assign them the mission and give 5 years funding to be continued if milestones (reasonable given the pittance of funding given). If you made progress then you got another 5 years of funding. That funding agency located at MRMC Fort Detrick was a Research area managed usually by a Major and a Captain, both microbiologists and experienced. Two people. There were 5 research area Directorates so a total of 10 program managers and a couple administrative colonels. This managed the entire DoD biothreat research programs and did it well. However, someone decided we needed an Agency to manage this stuff and DTRA which was funded by the Nunn-Lugar Act was already involved in the disassembly of Soviet nuclear capabilities so they wanted a bigger piece of the pie so absorbed the Research Directorates. The BDRP program at DTRA (basically identical as before) was now managed by over 400 contractors. The money came out of the research money we were supposed to be allocated.

After DTRA took over the funding was no longer Command Directed and we were all required to go out and fu-ind whatever funding we could hence why we made “deals” with DHS and the CIA. We went to an annual funding cycle instead of 5 years and never ending Gantt charts and reports. This was the age of 6 Sigma and the end of Management by Objective. We were also charged rent and had to pay for every service at our Institute including the security and even the library. Even our higher command MRMC stole 6% off the top to pay for pet projects unfunded by anyone with a brain. So, this became the age of entrepreneurial research and the end of productive research. Our commander, as an example, had no idea what we were doing at all and was shocked at all the “cool” stuff we were doing. This is the new breed of commander who manages by committee and never goes out walking the floors to visit labs. What the old school commanders call management by walking around and poking your nose into everything. But now these guys sit in their office and are fed whatever the REMFs decide they should hear. This is management in the US government as a whole and there are so many hidden agendas and internal conflicts between programs it is difficult to describe just how awful it is to try and do research in that environment. A lot of the worst of those commanders or research Division Directors went on to be current heads of HHS, CDC, and their undersecretaries, etc. which explains why those agencies are so screwed up and why there is such a horrible response to this virus.

 

(Republished from The Vineyard of the Saker by permission of author or representative)

Trump Tries To Buy and Limit Distribution of Coronavirus Vaccine

Trump ‘offers large sums’ for exclusive access to coronavirus vaccine

German government tries to fight off aggressive takeover bid by US, say reports

• Coronavirus – live coverage
• See all our coronavirus coverage

Philip Oltermann in Berlin

 A researcher at the German biopharmaceutical company CureVac demonstrates work on a vaccine for the coronavirus at its laboratory in Tübingen. Photograph: Andreas Gebert/Reuters

The Trump administration has offered a German medical company “large sums of money” for exclusive access to a Covid-19 vaccine, German media have reported.

The German government is trying to fight off what it sees as an aggressive takeover bid by the US, the broadsheet Die Welt reports, citing German government circles.

The US president had offered the Tübingen-based biopharmaceutical company CureVac “large sums of money” to gain exclusive access to their work, wrote Die Welt.

According to an anonymous source quoted in the newspaper, Trump was doing everything to secure a vaccine against the coronavirus for the US, “but for the US only”.

The German government was reportedly offering its own financial incentives for the vaccine to stay in the country.

The German health minister Jens Spahn said that a takeover of the CureVac company by the Trump administration was “off the table”. CureVac would only develop vaccine “for the whole world”, Spahn said, “not for individual countries”.

Earlier, when approached about the report by the Guardian, the German health ministry would only confirm the accuracy of the quotes attributed to one of its spokespersons in the article.

“The federal government is very interested in vaccines and antiviral agents against the novel coronavirus being developed in Germany and Europe,” the spokesperson quoted in the original article had said. “In this regard the government is in an intensive exchange with the company CureVac.”

The German health ministry spokesperson declined the opportunity to correct any inaccuracies in Die Welt’s account.

With its headquarters in the south-western German city of Tübingen, CureVac also has sites in Frankfurt and Boston in the US. Linked with the German health ministry, it works closely with the Paul Ehrlich Institute, a research institution and medical regulatory body that is subordinate to the German health ministry.

On 11 March, CureVac released a statement that its CEO, the US citizen Daniel Menichella, was unexpectedly leaving the firm and would be replaced by the company’s founder, Ingmar Hoerr.

At the start of the month, Menichella was invited to the White House in Washington to discuss strategy for the rapid development and production of a coronavirus vaccine with Trump, the vice-president, Mike Pence, and members of the White House coronavirus task force.

The White House has been contacted for comment.

Additional reporting by Oliver Laughland

Pentagon Pushing To Re-Create Salafist (ISIS) Caliphate For Syrian Terrorists

“there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared salafist principality in Eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers [Western countries, the Gulf States and Turkey–ed.] to the opposition want.”
—Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report dated August 12 2012 on the “general situation” in Syria

US seeking to carve out Sunni state as its influence in Iraq wanes

With Shia parties pressuring American troops to leave, Washington wants to create an autonomous region around Anbar to maintain its presence

A US soldier standing at northern Iraq’s Qayyarah military base in 2016. Shia Iraqi parties are vying to expel US troops from their country (AFP)

Backed into a corner and influence waning, the United States has in recent weeks been promoting a plan to create an autonomous Sunni region in western Iraq, officials from both countries told Middle East Eye.

The US efforts, the officials say, come in response to Shia Iraqi parties’ attempts to expel American troops from their country.

Iraq represents a strategic land bridge between Iran and its allies in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.

Establishing a US-controlled Sunni buffer zone in western Iraq would deprive Iran of using land routes into Syria and prevent it from reaching the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

For Washington, the idea of carving out a Sunni region dates back to a 2007 proposition by Joe Biden, who is now vying to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.

‘The creation of a Sunni region has always been an option for the US. The Iranians cannot be allowed to reach the Mediterranean Sea or benefit from the land bridge connecting them to Hezbollah’

– Former US official

It was hoped that the scheme could tighten US control over Iraq and provide protection for Sunnis during the 2006-08 sectarian civil conflict, in which tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis from both the Sunni and Shia communities were slaughtered.

But opposition to Iraq being divided along sectarian and ethnic lines, as well as Americans’ insistence on keeping the country united, has postponed attempts at its implementation.

Now efforts to expel US troops have breathed new life into the project, and the creation of a Sunni region is just one of the options being considered by Washington to counter Iranian pressure, a top Iraqi Shia official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told MEE.

Iraqi unity “is no longer a priority now for the US,” the Shia official said.

“If the Americans reach a dead-end in terms of the presence of their forces in Iraq, they will work to implement this project vigorously.”

A former US official familiar with the project confirmed that the Americans have worked on “taking this project out of the drawer and putting it on the table”.

“The creation of a Sunni region has always been an option for the US. The Iranians cannot be allowed to reach the Mediterranean Sea or benefit from the land bridge connecting them to Hezbollah” in Lebanon, the former US official told MEE.

“The project is American, not Sunni. The presence of the American forces has been the guarantor for the Sunnis and the Kurds, so if the US has to leave Iraq, then establishing a Sunni region in western Iraq is its plan to curb Iran and its arms in the Middle East,” he added.

“We are talking about establishing a country, not an administrative region.”

Tensions spike

Since the 2003 US invasion, Iraq has been one of the largest arenas of conflict between Washington and Tehran.

But tension between the two enemies climaxed on 3 January, when a US drone strike in Baghdad killed top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy head of Iraq’s Hashd al-Shaabi paramilitary.

The assassination of Soleimani, who was in charge of Iranian field operations in the Middle East, and Muhandis, who established most of his country’s Shia armed factions and acted as a kind of “spiritual father” to the fighters, sent shockwaves through Iraq.

It forced Iraqi Shia politicians and a number of their allies to respond to pressure from the armed factions by heading to parliament and voting to end the 17-year US military presence in the country.

Tracked, targeted, killed: Qassem Soleimani’s final hours

Read More »

Though it was non-binding, the 5 January vote to expel foreign forces sent a powerful message.

The absence of Sunni and Kurdish MPs in parliament highlighted the fragile relationship between Sunni leaders and their Iran-backed Shia allies. Most abstaining MPs left Baghdad toward either Erbil in northern Iraq or Jordan’s Amman for fear of retaliation.

The latest developments in Iraq have prompted them to search for other options, foremost among which was an autonomous Sunni region, Sunni lawmakers told MEE.

As soon as some Sunni politicians arrived in Erbil and Amman, they met US officials there to “discuss options for both sides,” sources said.

In the early hours of 8 January, Iran targeted two Iraqi military bases hosting US forces, one in western Iraq and the other in the north, with ballistic missiles that left no casualties.

Less than 24 hours later, US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker flew to Erbil, without going through Baghdad, to meet key US ally and former president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Masoud Barzani, in addition to a number of other Kurdish officials.

Although statements later issued by the US did not mention any meetings that took place with Sunni leaders in Erbil, many sources confirmed that both the assistant secretary of state and Stephen Fagin, the US consul in Erbil, met a number of Sunni politicians “to discuss the implications of the parliament’s decision, the threats that Sunnis face and options for facing the two issues”.

On the same day, Schenker flew to the UAE. There, he later said, he met “by chance” with the speaker of the Iraqi parliament, Muhammad al-Halbousi, “who happened to be there”.

After meeting with Schenker, Halbousi held a series of meetings in the UAE on 9 and 10 January with several prominent Sunni leaders.

‘The talks on this topic are uninterrupted and increase in frequency over time’

– Abdullah al-Khirbeit, Sunni lawmaker

“The idea of establishing a Sunni region came as a reaction to Shia forces’ attempts to make crucial decisions without the approval of Sunnis,” a lawmaker who participated in the UAE meetings told MEE on condition of anonymity.

“Claims for our own region do not come on a sectarian basis, but on an administrative basis to develop our provinces,” the lawmaker said.

“The attendees agreed on the idea and said that they will present it to our audience at an appropriate time.”

Halbousi, who is currently the strongest Sunni ally of the Iranian-backed al-Binnaa parliamentary alliance, and who secured his office thanks to this support, has denied that such a plan was even discussed, let alone agreed upon.

However, a number of leaders in Halbousi’s coalition have said they are subject to pressure from political partners keen to pursue the plan, and are presented with various temptations.

“The talks on this topic are uninterrupted and increase in frequency over time,” Abdullah al-Khirbeit, a prominent Sunni lawmaker and a close ally of Halbousi, told MEE.

“When we say we want decentralisation in Iraq, this can be discussed. But federalism and confederation is not acceptable to us because it means dividing Iraq.”

The map

None of the Sunni and Shia leaders and officials spoken to by MEE have any clear idea of the project’s details.

They all say that it is still just ideas and no clear information has been provided regarding the region’s prospective borders, the number of provinces it would contain and mechanisms to solve the problems that it will face.

It is perfectly clear, however, that the project will be launched from Anbar province, to later include the provinces of Nineveh and Salah al-Din, and part of Diyala.

The proposed Sunni region will be created first in accordance with the articles of the Iraqi constitution, which allows for administrative regions to be established alongside Kurdistan.

Later, the region will be temporarily annexed to Kurdistan in a federal or confederal form, “to avoid the conflict between Sunnis and Kurds over Kirkuk and the disputed areas”, according to a prominent Sunni leader.

The last step, MEE understands, will be to have this region recognised internationally.

Saudi and UAE support

The Arab Gulf states allied to US, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, support and finance this project, Sunni and Shia leaders and officials told MEE.

“Funding is in place, international pressure is in place, and the necessary military strength is in place to create this region,” a prominent Sunni leader familiar with the talks said.

‘Neither Iran nor the Shia forces will be able to stand against the project because the US and Gulf states back it’

– Sunni leader

“Neither Iran nor the Shia forces will be able to stand against the project because the US and Gulf states back it,” the leader added.

“A huge amount of money and investment offered by the Sunni states is at stake, and these will turn the Anbar desert into green oases and rebuild the destroyed areas in Mosul and Salah al-Din. Who will care about oil?”

All eyes on the protests

Since 1 October, Baghdad and nine predominantly Shia provinces have been rocked by anti-government demonstrations, which have demanded an end to corruption, the government’s downfall and early elections based on a new electoral law that will limit Iran’s influence.

Iraqi security forces and some Iran-backed armed groups have led a bloody crackdown on demonstrators, activists and journalists in response, killing some 500 people.

The Sunni-dominated governorates have not participated in the demonstrations, however, fearing it could be used by Shia factions to justify violent repression.

‘No to America, no to Iran’: Thousands protest against foreign influence across Iraq

Read More »

And while the majority of Sunni politicians have remained silent over the protests, in general Sunnis have shown sympathy for the Shia protesters’ cause.

Leaders familiar with the ongoing talks on partitioning Iraq said that Sunni politicians are seriously involved in the discussions and are waiting to see the demonstrations’ outcome before deciding on their path.

“The meetings are taking place in full swing, and all the Sunni leaders are attending. But they deny this publicly, waiting for the conditions that protect them,” a prominent Sunni leader familiar with the talks told MEE.

If the protesters are able to force through a national government that takes care of all Iraqi communities, then the Sunnis will reject any planned autonomous area, the leader said.

Failure to achieve this, he warned, would see Sunnis supporting the partition project en masse.

“Sunnis do not want to be part of the Shia crescent, and refuse to submit to Iranian control. So they will offer the Americans permission to build military bases in their lands, in exchange for the necessary support to establish the desired region.”

If Covid Is Really Bioweapon Targeting China and Iran, Then Does This Explain Targeting of Italy?

MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING

BETWEEN

THE GOVERNMENT OF THE ITALIAN REPUBLIC

IS

THE GOVERNMENT OF THE CHINESE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC

ON THE COLLABORATION WITHIN THE “VIA

OF ECONOMIC SILK “AND OF THE” INITIATIVE FOR ONE

MARITIME SILK ROUTE OF THE 21ST CENTURY “

The Government of the Italian Republic and the Government of

People’s Republic of China (hereinafter referred to as “the Parties”) moved

with the intention of deepening concrete bilateral cooperation;

Welcoming the organization of the “Belt and Road

Forum for International Cooperation ”, held in Beijing in May

2017;

Recognizing the importance and benefits of a

improved connectivity between Asia and Europe and the role it plays

the “Belt and Road” initiative can carry out in this regard;

Recalling the joint press release of the Round Table of the

Leader at the “Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation”;

Recalling the Action Plan for strengthening the

economic, commercial, cultural and scientific cooperation

technology between Italy and China 2017-2020, adopted in Beijing in May

2017;

Recalling the joint press release of the Ninth session of the

Italy-China Intergovernmental Committee, held in Rome on January 25th

2019 and the commitment expressed therein to promote the partnership

bilateral in a spirit of mutual respect, equality and justice, with

mutually beneficial methods, with a view to strengthening

global solidarity;

Aware of the common historical heritage developed along the

land and sea communication routes between Europe and Asia,

as well as the traditional role of Italy as a terminal on the Via della

Maritime silk;

Renewing the common commitment to the observance of goals and objectives

principles expressed in the United Nations Charter and the promotion of

inclusive growth and sustainable development in line with

the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on

climate changes;

---

Page 2

2

Recalling also the objectives established by the Strategic Agenda

-China 2020 Cooperation Project and the principles that guide the Strategy

EU for Connectivity between Europe and Asia adopted in October 2018;

have achieved the following intentions:

Paragraph I: Objectives and Guiding Principles of Collaboration

1. The Parties will work together under the Belt Initiative

and Road ”in order to translate their respective complementary strengths

in mutual benefits for concrete collaboration and growth

sustainable, supporting the synergies between the “Belt and Road” initiative and the

priorities identified in the Investment Plan for Europe and the Networks of

Trans-European transport, taking into account the ongoing discussions in

within the “EU-China Connectivity Platform”. In doing so, the Parties

they also intend to strengthen political relations, economic ties and

direct exchanges between the two peoples. The Parties will strengthen collaboration

and promote regional connectivity in an open context,

inclusive and balanced, beneficial for all, so as to promote the

peace, security, stability and sustainable development in the region.

2. The Parties will promote bilateral collaboration on the basis of

following principles:

(i) Guided by the objectives and principles of the Charter

United Nations, the Parties will work for development and prosperity

common, for a deeper mutual trust and collaboration

of mutual benefit;

(ii) In compliance with the respective national laws and regulations

and in accordance with their respective international obligations, the Parties do

will endeavor to promote the regular development of their projects

cooperation;

(iii)

The Parties will explore possible synergies and ensure

coherence and complementarity with collaboration mechanisms

bilateral and multilateral and with regional cooperation platforms

already existing.

Paragraph II: Areas of Collaboration.

---

Page 3

3

The Parties will cooperate in the following areas:

1. Policy dialogue. The Parties will encourage synergies and

will consolidate communication and coordination. They will promote

also the dialogue on policies relating to connectivity initiatives and

on technical and regulatory standards.

The Parties will work together within the Bank

Asian Infrastructure Investment (AIIB), in order to

promote connectivity, in accordance with the purposes and functions

of the bank.

2. Transport, logistics and infrastructure. Both

share a common vision about the need to improve

transport system with a view to accessibility, security and inclusion

and sustainability.

The Parties will cooperate in the development of connectivity

infrastructure, including aspects such as funding arrangements,

interoperability and logistics, in areas of mutual interest (such as

roads, railways, bridges, civil aviation, ports, energy – including

renewable energies and natural gas – and telecommunications).

The Parties express their interest in developing synergies between

the “Belt and Road” initiative, the Italian transport system ed

infrastructure – such as, for example, roads, railways, bridges, aviation

civilian and ports – and the Trans-European Transport Networks (TEN-T).

The Parties welcome the discussions within the “Platform

of EU-China connectivity “aimed at improving the efficiency of the

connectivity between Europe and China.

The Parties will cooperate to facilitate customs clearance of

goods, strengthening cooperation to find transportation solutions

sustainable, secure and digital, as well as in the related investment plans

and financing. The Parties stress the importance of

open, transparent and non-discriminatory contracts.

3. Trade and investment without obstacles. The Parties do

they will work to increase investment and trade flows

in both directions, as well as industrial collaboration

bilateral, as well as collaboration in third country markets,

through the identification of useful ways to promote a real and

---

Page 4

4

effective mutual collaboration. The Parties reaffirm the municipality

willingness to favor a free commercial and investment system ed

open, counter excessive macroeconomic imbalances and oppose

to unilateralism and protectionism. Within the framework of the “Belt

and Road ”, the Parties will encourage commercial collaboration

and industrial transparent, non-discriminatory, open and free;

open procurement procedures; the setting up of a level playing field

and respect for intellectual property rights. Parts

they will explore closer ways of collaboration and partnership

which are mutually beneficial and which also entail the

improvement of North-South, South-South and triangular cooperation.

4. Financial collaboration. The Parties will strengthen the

bilateral policy communication and coordination

fiscal, financial and structural reforms in order to create an environment

conducive to economic and financial cooperation, too

through the establishment of the Italy-China Dialogue at a financial level between

the Ministry of Economy and Finance of the Italian Republic

and the Ministry of Finance of the People’s Republic of China.

The Parties will foster partnerships between their respective financial institutions

to jointly support collaboration on

investments and financing, bilaterally and multilaterally and in the

vis-à-vis third countries, as part of the “Belt and Road” initiative.

5. People-to-people connectivity. The Parties will seek to expand

interpersonal exchanges, developing the network of twin cities,

enhance the Italy-China Cultural Forum for the realization of the

twinning projects between Italian and Chinese sites registered by UNESCO

as heritages of humanity. They will promote forms of

collaboration between the respective Administrations on the issues

of education, culture, science, innovation,

health, tourism and public welfare. Parts

they will promote exchanges and collaborations between the respective Authorities

premises, the media, think-tanks, universities and between

Young people.

6. Green Development Cooperation. The Parties argue

fully aim to develop connectivity by following a

sustainable and environmentally friendly approach, promoting

actively the global transition process towards green development,

low carbon and circular economy. In this spirit,

---

Page 5

5

the Parties will cooperate in the field of ecological protection and

environmental, climate change and other mutual sectors

interest.

The Parties will exchange views on green development and promote

actively implementing the 2030 Agenda for Development

Sustainable and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The

Ministry of the Environment and Land and Sea Protection of the

Italian Republic will actively participate in the Coalition

International for Green Development within the “Belt

and Road “, launched by the Ministry of Ecology and the Environment of the

People’s Republic of China and the United Nations Program for

the Environment (UNEP).

Paragraph III: Methods of Collaboration

1. Collaboration arrangements may include – but will not

limited to:

(i) Exchanges of high level visits and discussions in the framework of

governmental and non-governmental exchange mechanisms already

existing. The Parties will expand the exchange of information in

various sectors and through multiple channels, in order to increase

transparency and encourage participation from all sectors

of society.

(ii) Explore the possibility of launching pilot programs in sectors

key, exchanges and economic cooperation, joint research,

capacity building, exchanges of human resources and training.

2. The Parties will identify models of collaboration with each other

advantageous in order to promote the implementation of the main ones

projects envisaged under the “Belt and Road” initiative. The

Parties will follow market principles, promote the

collaboration between public and private capital, will encourage

investment and financial support through models

diversified. Both sides renew their commitment to

sustainable investments from an environmental and social point of view and

economically feasible.

3. The Parties will jointly explore opportunities for

collaboration in Italy and China and will discuss the

collaboration in third countries. The Parties undertake in favor of

advantageous methods of collaboration for all participants and of

---

Page 6

6

projects that bring benefits to third countries by supporting them

priorities in terms of development and needs of local populations,

in a sustainable and tax-efficient and social way,

economic and environmental.

4. The competent Authorities of the Parties may finalize agreements for the

collaboration in specific sectors and for the creation of special ones

collaboration mechanisms.

Paragraph IV: Collaboration mechanisms

The Parties will make full use of the bilateral mechanisms already

existing in order to develop collaboration within the framework

of the “Belt and Road” initiative.

The Italy-China Governmental Committee will be used for

monitor progress and follow-up.

Paragraph V: Interpretative Divergences

The Parties will resolve any differences amicably

interpretative of this Memorandum of Understanding through

direct consultations.

Paragraph VI: Applicable law

This Memorandum of Understanding does not constitute an agreement

international from which rights and legal obligations may derive

international. None of the provisions of this Memorandum

must be interpreted and applied as a legal obligation or

financial or commitment for the Parties.

The interpretation of this Memorandum of Understanding must

be in accordance with the national laws of the Parties as well as

with applicable international law and, as far as the Party is concerned

Italian, with the obligations deriving from belonging to Italy

to the European Union.

***

This Memorandum becomes effective on the date of signature.

This Memorandum will remain valid for a period of

five years and will automatically be extended by five years in five

---

Page 7

7

years, unless a Party terminates it by giving notice

written at least three months to the other Party.

Made in Rome on March 2019, in two originals, each in

Italian, Chinese and English, all texts equally authentic. In

in the event of differences of interpretation, the English text will prevail.

For the

For the

Government of the Italian Republic Government of the Republic

Chinese popular

America’s Planned Fragmentation Accelerates

[SEE: The Planned Collapse of America]

“The ruling elites can manipulate financial metrics, but they can’t manipulate rising wealth/power inequality or social discord. The nation is fragmenting because the Status Quo is failing the majority of the citizenry. The protected few are reaping all the benefits at the expense of the unprotected many.”

Our Fragmentation Accelerates

December 20, 2019

As our fragmentation accelerates, shared economic interests are ignored in favor of divisive warring camps that share no common interests.

That our society and economy are fragmenting is self-evident. This fragmentation is accelerating rapidly, as middle ground vanishes and competing camps harden their positions to solidify the loyalty of the “tribe.” All or nothing, either-or binaries are the order of the day: you’re either 100% with us or 100% against us, you’re either part of the solution or part of the problem.

As fragmentation accelerates, “tribes” splinter into warring groups who compete for members of once-broad-based movements. Moderation is no longer tolerated as it smacks of mixed loyalties or (most dangerous) independent analysis and action.

What’s striking is the complete absence of economic class loyalty or identity: Few if any feel any shared identity with other workers, or feel any loyalty to a class that shares economic interests. Identities and loyalties are to ethnicity, gender, faith, political ideology or sports teams; shared economic interests simply don’t register in the U.S.

This is a remarkable divergence from past eras of social disruption and discord, as in past eras workers banded together to wield the political power of organized large numbers to demand an end to child labor, 8-hour workday, and other basic rights that were denied by an exploitive Gilded Age class of crony capitalists.

In previous eras of social discord, the obvious shared interests of gig economy workers and Amazon employees would have generated movements of millions of people demanding fair wages, basic protections and a larger say in decisions directly impacting the work force.

Imagine millions of gig-economy workers, and millions of their allies / sympathizers– boycotting Uber and Lyft to force these corporations to accept more of the risk they’ve offloaded onto the gig workers.

Imagine tens of millions of people boycotting Amazon to support its exploited work force, or boycotting Too Big To Fail Banks for ripping off customers. These economic identities and loyalties were once common; in today’s fragmenting economy, the Titanic is sinking and the steerage passengers (a.k.a. the working class) feel no class identity with their fellow steerage passengers.

As I noted in Misplaced Pride: Most of the “Middle Class” Is Actually Working Class, most of the people who identify as middle class are actually working class: they own few assets that generate unearned income, they’re burdened with debt and their social mobility is limited.

This absence of class identity makes it extremely easy to control the fragmented masses. Nothing could be better for the ruling elites than a fragmented, disintegrating social order that lacks the most basic appreciation of shared economic interests.

When cooperation fails to deliver what was promised, disintegration is the next step. As historian Peter Turchin has explained, when a fundamental scarcity of positive economic and social roles leaves the majority of society in the dust, social discord is the result.

Turchin’s model identifies three primary forces in these cycles:

1. An over-supply of labor that suppresses real (inflation-adjusted) wages

2. An overproduction of essentially parasitic Elites

3. A deterioration in central state finances (over-indebtedness, decline in tax revenues, increase in state dependents, fiscal burdens of war, etc.)

The ruling elites can manipulate financial metrics, but they can’t manipulate rising wealth/power inequality or social discord. The nation is fragmenting because the Status Quo is failing the majority of the citizenry. The protected few are reaping all the benefits at the expense of the unprotected many.

As I have outlined many times, this guaranteed-to-collapse asymmetry is the only possible outcome of our socio-economic system, which is dominated by these forces:

1. Globalization–free flow of capital, labor arbitrage (workers must compete with the lowest-cost labor around the world).

2. Nearly free money from central banks for bankers, financiers and corporations.

3. Pay-to-play “democracy”– wealth casts the only votes that count.

4. State protected cartels that privatize gains and socialize losses.

5. A political system stripped of self-correcting feedback and accountability.

As I explain in my book Will You Be Richer or Poorer? Profit, Power and A.I. in a Traumatized World, policy tweaks only provide an illusion of reform that serves the need of those at the top to obscure the systemic injustices and unsustainability of the extractive, exploitive, predatory, parasitic system that’s enriching them.

The social and economic buffers have thinned, leaving the entire system increasingly fragile: we sense this, but are unable to identify with our own economic class, and so we’re left powerless and fragmented.

The status quo’s “solutions” are the drivers of collapse, as depicted in this chart: 

As our fragmentation accelerates, shared economic interests are ignored in favor of divisive warring camps that share no common interests. This is how societies decay and collapse. We’re experiencing it in real time.

Russia Just Told the World, “No.”

 

There is real power in the word “No.”

In fact, I’d argue that it is the single most powerful word in any language.

In the midst of the worst market meltdown in a dozen years which has at its source problems within global dollar-funding markets, Russia found itself in the position to exercise the Power of No.

Multiple overlapping crises are happening worldwide right now and they all interlock into a fabric of chaos.

Between political instability in Europe, presidential primary shenanigans in the U.S., coronavirus creating mass hysteria and Turkey’s military adventurism in Syria, the eastern Mediterranean and Libya, markets are finally calling the bluff of central bankers who have been propping up asset prices for years.

But, at its core, the current crisis stems from the simple truth that those prices around the world are vastly overvalued.

Western government and central bank policies have used the power of the dollar to push the world to this state.

And that state is, at best, meta-stable.

But when this number of shits get this freaking real, well… meeting the fan was inevitable.

And all it took to push a correction into a full-scale panic was the Russians saying, “No.”

The reality has been evident in the commodity markets for months.  Copper and other industrial metals have all been in slumps while equity markets zoomed higher.

But it was oil that was the most confounding of all.

Most of 2019 we saw oil prices behaving oddly as events occurred with regularity to push prices higher but ultimately see them fall.

Since peaking after the killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani oil prices have been a one-way trade. Down.

Our inept leaders are trying to blame coronavirus as the proximate cause for all of the market’s jitters.

But that masks the truth. The problems have been there for months, pushed to the back burner by incessant Fed intervention in the dollar-funding markets.

The 2008 financial crisis was never dealt with, just papered over.

The repo crisis of last September never ended, it’s still there.

And it reappeared with ferocity this week as people sold dollars and bought U.S. treasuries pushing U.S. yields on the long end of the curve to absurd levels.

Credit markets are melting down. Stock markets are the tail, credit markets are the dog. And this dog was run over by a bus.

The Fed intervenes to keep short term interest rates from rising to preserve the fiction it is still in control.

The market wants higher rates for short-term access to dollars.

The Fed tried to help by cutting rates by 0.5% but all that did was tell people the Fed was as scared as they were.  The selling resumed and gold bounced back to it’s recent high near $1690, only to be swatted down on the New York open this morning.

That didn’t work either.

OOPS!

And into this mess OPEC tried to save itself by asking for a historic production cut.

OPEC needs this cut to remain relevant. The cartel is dying. It’s been dying for years, kept on life support by Russia’s willingness to trade favors to achieve other geostrategic goals.

I’ve said before that OPEC production cuts are not bullish for oil just like rate cuts are not inflationary during crisis periods.

But finally Russia said No. And they didn’t equivocate. They told everyone they are prepared for lower oil prices.

The panic was palpable in the reporting on the meeting.

“Regarding cuts in production, given today’s decision, from April 1, no one — neither OPEC countries nor OPEC+ countries — are obliged to lower production,” he told reporters after the meeting.

OPEC’s Secretary General Mohammed Barkindo said the meeting had been adjourned, although consultations would continue.

“At the end of the day, it was the general, painful decision of the joint conference to adjourn the meeting,” he told reporters.

Earlier, Oanda analyst Edward Moya had suggested that a failure to reach an agreement could spell the end of OPEC+.

“No-deal OPEC+ means the three-year experiment is over. OPEC+ is dead. The Saudis are all-in on stabling oil prices and they may need to do something extraordinary,” he said.

There comes a point where negotiating with your adversaries ends, where someone finally says, “Enough.” Russia has been attacked mercilessly by the West for the crime of being Russia.

And I’ve documented nearly every twist and turn of how they have skillfully buttressed their position waiting for the right moment to get maximum return to reverse the tables on their tormentors.

And, to me, this was that perfect moment for them to finally say “No,” to get maximum effect.

When dealing with a more-powerful enemy you have to target where they are most vulnerable to inflict the most damage.

For the West that place is in the financial markets.

Remember, the first basic fact of economics.  Prices are set at the margin. The only price that matters is the last one recorded.

That price sets the cost for the next unit of that good, in this case a barrel of oil, up for sale.

In a world of cartelized markets the world over, where prices are set by external actors, it is easy to forget that in the real economy (regardless of your political persuasion) the world is an auction and everything is up for bid.

High bid wins.

So, the most important geostrategic question is, “Who produces the marginal barrel of oil?”

For more than three years now, President Trump has supported his policy of Energy Dominance in a Quixotic quest for the U.S. to become that supplier.  Trillions of dollars have been spent on building up domestic production to their current, unsustainable levels.

This policy pre-dates Trump, certainly, but he has been its most ardent pursuer of it, sanctioning and embargoing everyone he can to keep them off the bid.

What he could never do, however, was push Russia off that bid.

The reason U.S. production rates are unsustainable is because their costs are higher per barrel than the marginal price especially when all other prices are deflating.  Simple, straightforward economics.

If they were, on balance, profitable then the industry as a whole would not have burned through a few hundred billion in free cash flow over the past decade.

That’s where the Russians’ power comes from.  Russia is one of the lowest cost producers in the world.  Even after paying their taxes to the government their costs are far lower, close to $20 per barrel break-even point, than anyone else in the world when one factors in external costs.

When you don’t owe anyone anything you are free to tell them, “No.”

Sure, the Saudis produce at similar cash costs to the Russians but once you factor in its budgetary needs, the numbers aren’t even close as they need something closer to $85 per barrel.

They can’t tell their people, “No,” you have to do without. Because the populace will revolt.

Russia can ride out, if not thrive, in this low price regime because :

1. the ruble floats to absorb price shocks in dollars.
2. A majority of their oil is now sold in non-dollar currencies – rubles, yuan, euros, etc. – to lessen their exposure to capital outflows
3. the major oil firms have little dollar-denominated debt
4. low extraction costs.
5. its primary governmental budget ebbs and flows with oil prices.

All of this adds up to Russia holding the whip hand over the global market for oil.

The ability to say, “No.”

And they will have it for years to come as U.S. production implodes.  Because they can and do produce the marginal barrel of oil.

That is why oil prices plunged as much as 10% into today’s close on the news they would not cut production.

There is a cascade lurking beneath this market. There is a lot of bank and pension fund exposure in the U.S. to what is now soon-to-be non-performing fracking debt.

Liquidations will begin in earnest later this year.

But the market is handicapping this now.

I cannot overstate how important and far-reaching this move by Russia is.  If they don’t make a deal here they can break OPEC. If they do make a deal it will come with strings that ensure pressure is lifted in other areas of stress for them.

The knock-on effects of oil plunging from $70 per barrel to $45 over two months will be felt for months, if not years.

And it is no shock to me that Russia held their water here. If they didn’t, I would have been surprised.

This was Putin’s opportunity to finally strike back at Russia’s tormentors and inflict real pain for their unscrupulous behavior in places like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Venezuela and Afghanistan.

He is now in a position to extract maximum concessions from the U.S. and the OPEC nations who are supporting U.S. belligerence against Russia’s allies in China, Iran and Syria.

We saw the beginnings of this in his dealings with Turkish President Erdogan in Moscow, extracting a ceasefire agreement that was nothing short of a Turkish surrender.

Erdogan asked to be saved from his own stupidity and Russia said, “No.”

This condition of producing the marginal barrel of oil in a deflationary world places Russia in the driver’s seat to drive U.S. foreign policy behavior in an election year.

Talk about meddling in our elections!

The Achilles’ heel of the U.S. empire is the debt.  The dollar has been its greatest weapon and it is still king.  And it is a weapon with a great deal of power but wielded only against the U.S.’s allies, not Russia.

Markets will adjust and calm down in a few days. The panic will subside. But it will come back soon enough in a more virulent form. Today is a replay of 2007-08 but this time Russia is far better prepared to fight back.

And when that happens, I suspect it won’t be the Saudis or the Turks that come running to Russia to save them, but the U.S. and Europe.

At which point, I have to wonder if Putin will channel his inner Rorschach.

US Marines Erect Patriot Missile Battery On UAE Illegally Occupied Yemeni Island, Socotra

[SEE: Abu Dhabi Troops Occupy Yemen’s Socotra Island, UNESCO-Protected Site, Begin Massive Environmental Looting]

US Marines Arrive on Yemen’s Socotra Island to Back UAE Troops: Reports

A new batch of US Marines has arrived on Yemen’s strategic Socotra Island, installing Patriot defense systems, according to local reports.

Sanaa Post reported that the American soldiers were received by the occupying UAE forces at their headquarters on the island.

There is speculation that the US intends to establish its own military base amid reports that America had sent military experts to equip observation points to deploy radars and air defense points on the strategically located island overlooking the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, according to Middle East Monitor.

US forces had previously arrived on Socotra in December of last year and started installing a Patriot missile system in order to protect the Saudi and Emirati forces on the island at the time.

Socotra, home to some 60,000 people, sits at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden. Shipping traffic passes by the island on the way to the Bab al-Mandab Strait and Suez Canal.

The island has a unique ecosystem and has been listed by UNESCO as a world natural heritage site.

Residents of Socotra Island have repeatedly staged protests to vent their outrage at the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for deploying military forces there.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are key members of a coalition that has been waging a deadly war on Yemen since March 2015 in support of the former Yemeni president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, and against the Houthi Ansarullah movement.

The Saudi-led military campaign has killed and injured over 600,000 civilians, according to the Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights.

Several Western countries, the US and the UK in particular, are accused of being complicit in the aggression as they supply the Riyadh regime with advanced weapons and military equipment.

The original source of this article is Tasnim News Agency

Copyright © Tasnim News Agency, Tasnim News Agency, 2020

The Real Oil Demand Shock Is Yet To Come

By Julianne Geiger

Oil demand has been revised downward several times since the start of the year by nearly every analyst or banking institution thanks to the devastating impact of the coronavirus. With the number of coronavirus cases in China–the world’s largest oil importer–seemingly leveling off in recent days, some may be taking the view that the worst of the oil demand shocks is now behind us.

But more shocks are on the horizon as the world’s number one crude oil consumer–the United States–begins its own war on the deadly virus.

When China first issued travel bans in its areas hardest hit by the coronavirus, or COVID-19, oil demand took a beating, and analysts tried to work out just how much oil demand would be lost. As it became clear that China didn’t have the situation contained, other countries closed their borders and halted or tapered air travel, worsening the demand outlook.

On Wednesday the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the COVID-19 situation a “pandemic”, adding in an opening statement to its Wednesday media briefing that “we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction.”

The reclassification as a pandemic, along with the rather rich chiding by the WHO, which in January advised against travel restrictions.

“Although travel restrictions may intuitively seem like the right thing to do, this is not something that WHO usually recommends,” Tarik Jašarevi?, a WHO spokesperson, explained at the time. “This is because of the social disruption they cause and the intensive use of resources required.”

No Europe to US Travel 

Nevertheless, late Wednesday night, US President Donald Trump halted all travel from Europe, except from the UK, to the United States for the next thirty days to contain the virus that has plagued Europe.

This is exactly the kind of action that ate into oil demand in China. The IEA warned last month that oil demand for Q1 would sink 435,000 bpd–and that’s when the virus was contained mostly to China.Related: Energy Stocks Battered As Market Meltdown Continues

As of 2017, the US consumed 19.96 million barrels per day of crude oil and petroleum liquids–this accounts for 20% of the world’s oil consumption, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

To compare, China consumed 13.57 million barrels per day in 2017.

And in the United States, it’s more than just a travel ban that will hit oil demand.

A full-on panic has set in, resulting in daily household items being out of stock in most stores and online–including hand sanitizer, antibacterial soap, and toilet paper. This is people preparing for hunkering down, checking out, and avoiding crowds.

You know it’s bad when…

We love our sports. But even a billion-dollar sports machine cannot claim immunity from the virus. On Wednesday, the NBA canceled the entire season after one player tested positive for the coronavirus. On Thursday, the NHL said it was canceling the rest of its season, too, which includes 189 games. Also following suit, MLB is expected to suspend operations.

This level of canceling activities is unprecedented in professional sports, and it will surely eat into oil demand as fans and teams will have no need for travel to events that aren’t taking place.

States of Emergency

Michigan, Tennessee, California, Massachusetts, Washington state, Washington D.C., Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Alaska, New York, Ohio, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Florida, and more have all declared states of emergency. Related: Traders Are Making A Killing In The Oil Price War

In Michigan, all public universities have shut down and converted to online classes. Courts are stopping jury trials, and the governor has recommended that any gatherings of more than 100 people be canceled–this stifles economic activity and in turn, the demand for fuel and oil.

While New York–a city with a population of nearly 9 million–is trying to avoid going full-Italy, but while the schools and subways may stay open for now, Broadway may get shut down. Broadway entertains 14 million people a year.

In California, a state still reeling from the blackouts, some schools–including UC Berkeley and Stanford–are shut down, Hollywood is canceling releases. Business travel has fallen off, convention interest has been scaled back, and this sector is unlikely to recover this year.

From zero to negative territory?

OPEC was the most recent body to revise down its oil demand growth, from 980,000 bpd for 2020 last month, to 60,000 bpd–essentially a zero growth forecast. As people stockpile necessities preparing to stay home, sporting events and other entertainment canceled, and academic institutions sending kids home, the demand growth for oil is set to take additional hits.

Expect further analyst revisions in the coming month, and look to the number of confirmed US coronavirus cases and public sentiment as a bellwether for oil demand growth’s–or loss’s future.

By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com

Trump plans to declare national emergency over coronavirus pandemic

PUBLISHED FRI, MAR 13 202010:58 AM

Dan Mangan@_DANMANGAN

Christina Wilkie@CHRISTINAWILKIE

KEY POINTS

• President Trump plans to declare a national emergency over the coronavirus pandemic, administration officials told NBC News.
• The president has scheduled a 3 p.m. ET press conference Friday at the White House.
• French President Emmanuel Macron said leaders of Group of 7 economic giant nations have “agreed to organize an extraordinary Leaders Summit by videoconference on Monday” on coronavirus.
• Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the White House and Congress are nearing a deal that would provide stimulus to the U.S. economy.

President Donald Trump plans to declare a national emergency over the coronavirus pandemic, administration officials told NBC News.

The declaration would free up financial resources to assist Americans affected by the outbreak.

The president has scheduled a 3 p.m. ET news conference Friday at in the Rose Garden at the White House. He will be joined by Vice President Mike Pence, who is leading the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force.

The conference is set to occur shortly after Trump is scheduled to meet at the White House with major laboratory company executives about the response to the coronavirus outbreak.

A White House spokesman declined to comment when asked about the plan.

The Senate’s top Democrat, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, cautiously voiced support for such a declaration, provided Trump doesn’t “overstep his authority or indulge his autocratic tendencies.”

Trump’s emergency designation is expected to fall under the Stafford Act, which allows for two types of presidential declarations.

The first is an emergency, which is what Trump is expected to declare.

The second is a major disaster, which gives emergency management even more access to resources. Both designations place FEMA in charge of what happens.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Friday that he, Trump and the rest of leaders of the Group of 7 economic giant nations have “agreed to organize an extraordinary Leaders Summit by videoconference on Monday on Covid-19.”

“We will coordinate research efforts on a vaccine and treatments, and work on an economic and financial response,” Macron announced in a tweet.

The announcement of a U.S. national emergency would come just a day after Trump said he was not yet ready to make such a declaration.

“We have very strong emergency powers under the Stafford Act, and we are — we have it — I mean, I have it memorized, practically, as to the powers in that act. If I need to do something, I’ll do it,” Trump said in an Oval Office meeting with Ireland’s prime minister, Leo Varadkar.

“I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about.”

An emergency declaration also would put to rest weeks of debate within the White House, where different factions of Trump’s top aides disagreed about whether a Stafford Act declaration is necessary.

Those opposed to making the declaration, which had included Trump himself, worried that it would cause financial markets to panic.

They also feared political fallout if it appeared Trump was sending the opposite message about coronavirus, namely that it is an emergency, from the one he had consistently delivered so far. Trump has claimed that coronavirus is no more dangerous than the common flu, and that it will likely disappear quickly and without a significant impact on American life. Health officials say neither of these statements is accurate.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a state of emergency in the city on Thursday. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on the same day banned gatherings of 500 or more in the state “for the forseeable future.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told CNBC earlier Friday the White House and Congress are nearing a deal that would provide stimulus to the U.S. economy amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“I think we’re very close to getting this done,” Mnuchin said in a “Squawk on the Street” interview.

“The president is absolutely committed that this will be an entire government effort, that we will be working with the House and Senate.”

As of Friday, there were more than 135,000 known cases of coronavirus globally, including nearly 5,000 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

In the United States, there have been at least 1,700 known cases, with at least 40 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Correction: An earlier version misstated when the mayor declared an emergency in New York City. It was Thursday. 

— Additional reporting by CNBC’s Yelena Dhzanova

In the Middle of A Global “Pandemic,” We Begin A Brand New War In the Middle East

US blames Iran-backed Shiite militas for Iraq rocket attack

Trump authorizes U.S. military to respond after Iran-backed militia kills troops

Shiite militia likely to blame for killing US troops in Iraq: US general

“The US-led military coalition in Iraq says 18 107 mm Katyusha rockets struck Iraq’s Taji military camp.”

A truck loaded with Katyusha rockets is seen in Rashidiya, after ten rockets struck the Taji military camp, north of Baghdad, Iraq in this undated picture obtained Mar. 12, 2020. (Reuters)

• The head of US Central Command did not blame any specific militia but noted that only Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah had been known to wage such an attack in the past

• Washington blamed Kataib Hezbollah for a strike in December that killed a US contractor

WASHINGTON: Shiite militia groups in Iraq were likely responsible for the attack on Wednesday that killed one British and two American troops at a base north of Baghdad, a top US general said on Thursday, in remarks that leave the door open to potential escalation with Tehran.
US Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, the head of the military’s Central Command, did not blame any specific militia but noted that only Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah had been known to wage such an attack in the past.

“While we are still investigating the attack, I will note that the Iranian proxy group Kataib Hezbollah is the only group known to have previously conducted an indirect fire attack of this scale against US and coalition forces in Iraq,” McKenzie told a US Senate hearing.

Washington blamed Kataib Hezbollah for a strike in December that killed a US contractor, leading to a cycle of tit-for-tat confrontations earlier this year that culminated in January’s US killing of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and a retaliatory Iranian missile attack that left more than 100 U.S. troops with brain injuries.

The US-led military coalition in Iraq says 18 107 mm Katyusha rockets struck Iraq’s Taji military camp.A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a total of 30 of the rockets were fired from nearby truck and that only 18 of them landed at the Iraqi base.

On Thursday, Saudi Arabia condemned the rocket attack on Iraq’s Taji military camp .

US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that all options were on the table after the rocket attack in Iraq.

“Yesterday’s attack by Iranian backed Shia militia groups, consisted of multiple indirect fires that originated from a stationary platform and was clearly targeting coalition and partnered forces on Camp Taji,” Esper told reporters on Thursday. 

“Let me be clear, the United States will not tolerate attacks against our people, our interests, or our allies,” Esper said.

“All options are on the table as we work with our partners to bring the perpetrators to justice and maintain deterrence,” he added.

Esper told reporters he spoke Wednesday with US President Donald Trump about possible retaliatory measures. “He gave me the authority to do what we need to do,” Esper said.
On Wednesday, the US-led coalition said about a dozen personnel were injured. McKenzie told the Senate there were several servicemembers injured, which leaves open the possibility that the additional wounded were contractors.

In a sign of concern that tensions between the United States and Iran could be headed toward open conflict, the Democratic-led US House of Representatives passed legislation on Wednesday to limit President Donald Trump’s ability to wage war against Iran.

The Republican president has been engaged in a maximum-pressure campaign of renewed sanctions and near-constant rhetoric against Iran, after pulling the United States out of the international nuclear deal reached during the administration of his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama.

Tensions between Washington and Tehran have mostly played out on Iraqi soil in recent months.
Iran-backed paramilitary groups have regularly been rocketing and shelling bases in Iraq that host US forces and the area around the US Embassy in Baghdad.

Saudis Double Mideast Oil Tanker Prices After Tanking US Shale Oil Industry

Saudi Schemes To Steal US Gas/Oil Market Pay-Off, Making Near-Idle Saudi Shipping Fleet Profitable

Oil Tanker Costs Just Doubled on Vital Middle East to Asia Route

• Surge in oil exports, floating storage boosts freight rates
•  
  Transport costs likely to continue to rise, shipbrokers say

The cost to transport oil from the Middle East to Northeast Asia has almost doubled since late last week after the disintegration of the OPEC+ alliance set the scene for a flood of crude exports.

Charter rates for supertankers carrying oil from the Persian Gulf to South Korea surged to 95 points, according to three shipbrokers and fixtures seen by Bloomberg. The route is typically priced at a small premium of five points or less over the more widely-referenced Middle East to China rate, which averaged 49 points last week.

Routes between the Middle East and China, South Korea and Japan are among the busiest in the world as the big Asian importers rely on crude from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq for their baseload oil feedstock. Tankers are booked at rates known as worldscale points, which is a percentage of an underlying flat rate for a specific route that’s fixed for the year.

 

Surging demand from Saudi Arabia, plus more interest in floating storage, has spurred a flurry of tanker inquiries, according to three shipbrokers. Bahri, the kingdom’s national shipping carrier, booked close to a dozen vessels this week, fixtures showed, following a pledge by OPEC’s top producer to swamp the market with a record 12.3 million barrels a day of oil next month.

VLCC Maran Arete was placed on provisional charter to load Middle Eastern crude toward the end of March for delivery to South Korea at 95 points, fixtures showed. That’s a jump from late last week when another VLCC FPMC C Noble was chartered for the same route at 45 points.

Rates on the Middle East to China route, also known as TD3C, may soon rise to 100 points, said two of the three shipbrokers, who asked not to be identified due to company policy.

There Was Actually Hopeful COVID-19 News Today

China shuts all 16 temporary coronavirus hospitals in Wuhan

Believe It or Not, There Was Actually Good COVID-19 News Today

It’s not where you’d think.

Billy Duberstein

(TMFStoneOak)

Let’s face it, the COVID-19 coronavirus is concerning, and the daily financial headlines about it are even scarier, thanks to the constant media coverage. However, it’s never a good idea to make investment decisions out of panic. That means taking the very real negative headlines along with the positive ones, and making as objective an assessment as you can.

No doubt, U.S. headlines have been nerve-wracking, with cases multiplying in hotspots like Washington state, New York, and northern California. In addition, Italy looks especially dour, with the entire country recently being put on lockdown. The World Health Organization (WHO) says we are “very close” to a pandemic — albeit one that can possibly be contained.

So where was the good news today? The unlikeliest place of all: Wuhan, China.

IMAGE SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES.

New China cases down to 19

China reported only 19 new cases in the country today, with 17 in the city of Wuhan, where the virus originated. That’s a fairly remarkable decline in a country that experienced a huge explosion of cases just a little over a month ago. Since late December, China has reported 80,000 cases, with 67,000 in Hubei province, home of the origin city of Wuhan. The recent declines are fairly striking, considering the degree to which other countries have recently had difficulty containing the virus. It’s also a testament to the unprecedented lockdown measures the Chinese government put in place in Wuhan in late January.

In fact, the situation has improved so much that Wuhan recently shut down 11 of the 14 temporary hospitals it had built for the influx of new patients. And in perhaps an even more important symbolic move, President Xi Jinping visited Wuhan today, the first time he has done so since the virus erupted around the New Year holiday.

“I always felt that the number one signal for the Chinese government having enough confidence to declare this as the end would be when President Xi goes to Wuhan,” Mark Matthews, head of research Asia at Bank Julius Baer, told CNBC’s Street Signs Asia.

It appears that at least in China, the government is claiming to have gotten a confident handle on the virus.

The Chinese economy is returning to normal

In addition, several leading Chinese companies are reporting that they’re getting back to normal operations. E-commerce giant Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) is reportedly back to full staffing for its package delivery unit Cainiao and food delivery unit Ele.me. Alibaba rival JD.com (NASDAQ:JD) just reported a strong quarter and projected that it would grow sales “at least” 10% year over year in the first quarter — a quarter in which a large part of the country was on extended holiday and a major city was completely locked down. And CNBC is reporting that iPhone giant Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has reopened 38 of its 42 Apple stores in China, up from 29 on Feb. 24 and zero on Feb. 9, when Apple shut down all of its stores as a precaution. In addition, Apple said its production facilities in China are back to 50% capacity, and should be at full capacity by the end of the month.

China is important

While the U.S. looks as if its economy might slow in the coming weeks, it appears China is coming back. China has been a major engine of global growth ever since the financial crisis of 2008, and many commodity-related companies as well as global businesses like Apple depend on China for a fair amount of their revenue.

The rapid decline in new cases in China also provides hope that newly affected countries can potentially control the spread of the virus, provided they take stringent enough measures to control it. Of course, that all remains to be seen.

While a lockdown wouldn’t be so great for travel, event, airline, or oil stocks, it should benefit “stay-at-home” stocks in the near term. That’s why those types of stocks are the ones I would look to buy amid this market sell-off.

 

Billy Duberstein owns shares of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Apple, and JD.com and has the following options: short June 2020 $400 calls on Apple. His clients may own shares of the companies mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Apple, and JD.com. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

 

Saudi Schemes To Steal US Gas/Oil Market Pay-Off, Making Near-Idle Saudi Shipping Fleet Profitable

Tanker rates soar as Saudi’s Bahri books up to 14 ships for rising output – sources–MARCH 11, 2020

Saudis Buy Supertankers To Service US, Fracking Makes Them Unemployed Tankers—October 3, 2014

Aramco Hiring Laid-Off US Fracking Oil Engineers To Help Saudis Develop “Dry-Fracking”—March 17, 2015

After Practically Killing the US Shale Oil Industry, Saudis To Acquire Tech For Desert Fracking—May 27, 2015

Saudi Arabia Books Supertankers To Flood U.S. Markets With Oil

By Julianne Geiger 

Saudi Arabia’s state-run shipping company has hired multiple very large crude carriers to carry all the extra oil it plans on exporting next month—a rare move indeed for the shipping company that sports its own fleet of 41 tankers, according to Bloomberg sources.

Bahri, as the Saudi’s shipping company is known, has booked passage for its crude oil on three VLCCs, each with the capacity to haul 2 million barrels of crude. The preliminary bookings are heading to the US Gulf Coast, the sources say—but the bookings could still fail.

The extra VLCC charters are a logical step given Saudi Arabia’s professed plans to ramp up its crude production to more than 12 million barrels per day, after the OPEC+ fell apart last Friday when Russia refused to join in on additional production cuts.

Next month, Saudi Arabia has plans to increase shipments of crude to its prized market, Asia, who will be more than happy to take on more oil at the substantial discount that the Saudis are selling their oil for as part of its oil war strategy. However, trips from to the US take 40 days, and Bahir’s own tankers would not return to Saudi Arabia in time to load these extra volumes.

But all that could change in the blink of an eye.

­­­­The other active participant in the oil price war, Russia, said today that it had not ruled out yet the possibility of rekindling its love affair with Saudi Arabia by returning to cooperation with OPEC should necessity dictate. Russian oil companies and the Russian Oil Ministry will hold talks on Wednesday to discuss the matter, Reuters sources said on Tuesday.

By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com

(updated 3/15)–October 18–27, Military World Games Were Held In Wuhan, China Nov. 17, First Announced Case of Coronavirus In Wuhan

The 2019 Military World Games, officially known as the 7th CISM Military World Games, was held from October 18–27, 2019 in the capital of Hubei Province in Wuhan, China

…The first confirmed case of new-type coronavirus pneumonia developed on December 1

[Editor Update….3/15/2020….
The first case of someone in China suffering from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, can be traced back to November 17, according to government data seen by the South China Morning Post.]

Lancet reveals first onset of neonatal pneumonia in patients, 7 days before official notification

The Beijing News

The first confirmed case of new-type coronavirus pneumonia developed on December 1, last year, and there is no history of South China seafood market exposure.

Beijing News (Reporter Xu Wen Chen Qinhan) A study published online January 24 by the international medical journal The Lancet showed that the first confirmed case of new-type coronavirus pneumonia developed on December 1, last year, and no South China seafood Market exposure history.

Corresponding author of this study is Cao Bin, director of the Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, China-Japan Friendship Hospital. Co-authors include Huang Chaolin, deputy director and chief physician of Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, Professor Li Xingwang of the Clinical Research Center of Infectious Diseases of Beijing Ditan Hospital, Professor Lili Ren of the Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and Zhao Jianping, director of Respiratory Department of Wuhan Tongji Hospital.

Screenshot of lancet thesis

The infection occurred at least in November last year or earlier

The study analyzed the first 41 confirmed cases of new coronavirus admitted to Wuhan between December 16, 2019 and January 2, 2020. The results showed that of the first 41 confirmed cases, 27 had been to the South China Seafood Market and 14 had no history of exposure to the South China Seafood Market.

Of the 4 confirmed patients with initial onset, 3 had no history of South China seafood market exposure. Among them, the first confirmed patient’s onset date was December 1, 2019, and none of his family members had fever or any respiratory symptoms. The patient had no history of exposure to the South China seafood market, and no epidemiological link was found between subsequent cases.

This is 7 days earlier than the earliest onset of official notification. In the third official circular issued by the Wuhan Health and Medical Commission on January 5, the earliest onset of the disease was mentioned on December 12, 2019. The official report on January 11 updated the earliest onset date to December 8, 2019.

Infectious disease specialist Daniel Lucey of Georgetown University said in the journal Science that “the infection was at least November or earlier because there is a latency period between infection and the onset of symptoms.”

Wife of first death has also been infected

The Lancet paper mentioned that the first death case had been continuously exposed to the South China Seafood Market and was admitted to the hospital for 7 days with fever, cough and dyspnea. Five days after the onset of this patient, his 53-year-old wife also developed pneumonia and was admitted to an isolation ward with no history of exposure to the South China seafood market.

According to official notification, the above-mentioned deaths died on January 9. According to a report by the Wuhan Health and Medical Commission on January 11, the patient was a 61-year-old man who was admitted to the hospital due to respiratory failure and severe pneumonia. He also had abdominal tumors and chronic liver disease. The patient purchases goods from the South China Seafood Market in Wuhan. After admission to the hospital, symptomatic support, anti-infection, ventilator-assisted breathing, continuous ECMO in vitro life support, and other treatments were not improved. On January 9, 2020, the heartbeat stopped and she died after rescue. The results of the etiology test indicated that the new coronavirus was positive for nucleic acid.

A circular issued by the Wuhan Health Commission on January 14 referred to the above-mentioned couple cases. The report said that among the 41 cases currently diagnosed, one was found to be family-gathering. The couple developed the disease, and the husband first developed the disease. He was an employee of the South China Seafood Wholesale Market, and his wife denied a history of South China Seafood Wholesale Market exposure. The report explained that, “No clear evidence of human-to-human transmission has been found, and the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, but the risk of continued human-to-human transmission is low.”

Beijing News reporter Xu Wen Chen Qinhan

Editor Liu Mengjie proofreads Jia Ning

The Great Saudi Fracking Fraud

<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/254835165″>Fishbones Stimulation Technology</a> from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/user11348401″>Fishbones AS</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

Fishbones

[SEE: Saudis Salivate Over Fracking Mirage–NO WATER, NO FRACKIE ; After Practically Killing the US Shale Oil Industry, Saudis To Acquire Tech For Desert Fracking ; Aramco Hiring Laid-Off US Fracking Oil Engineers To Help Saudis Develop “Dry-Fracking” ; ]

The Great Saudi Shale Swindle

By Simon Watkins

Saudi Arabia’s oil and gas giant, Aramco, has been given the go-ahead to launch the Jafurah shale gas field project, which will be the biggest shale gas development outside the U.S. The official reason is that the project will boost domestic gas supply and end the burning of oil at its power generation plants. The first reason is true by dint of the fact that it is a simple truism whilst the second is only partly true. It is extraordinarily unlikely to end Saudi Arabia’s oil burning at its power generation plants – given Saudi Arabia’s history of lying in this regard – but it may possibly reduce it. The core element that Saudi did not mention in its official comments on this issue is that the Kingdom will desperately need another primary energy source in the relatively near future because it has nowhere near the amount of oil remaining that it has stated since the early 1970s. So, will Saudi Arabia’s further comments that the Jafurah field will be a key part of the Kingdom becoming a significant gas exporter in ‘the near future’ also turn out to be nonsense?

If the provenance of these comments – Saudi Oil Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman – is anything to go by, then the global energy markets would be better off reading the latest Harry Potter book as guidance to what Saudi Arabia may achieve in the years to come. This is the individual who said at the time of the 14 September attacks against two of Saudi Arabia’s key oil facilities that “the Kingdom plans to restore its production capacity to 11 million bpd by the end of September and recover its full capacity of 12 million bpd two months later.” Bearing in mind that he was Oil Minister at the time, it was surprising to see that both figures were wrong. In reality, from 1973 to the end of 2020, Saudi Arabia has averaged crude oil production of just 8.151 barrels per day (bpd) and had never averaged anywhere near 11 million bpd until it finally did so in November 2018 (11.093 bpd, to be precise, and only briefly) because U.S. President Donald Trump had expressly told King Salman to get the oil price down ‘or else’Related: Oil Prices In Freefall As Pandemic Fears Grow

The reality as well is that Saudi Arabia’s long-stated ‘spare capacity’ of between 2.0-2.5 million bpd, based on the assumption of a 10 million bpd crude oil production average, is, and has always been, highly exaggerated. Quite aside from the actual mathematics involved, it is fair to assume that if the Saudis had been in possession of anything near 12 million bpd capacity, the absolute number one occasion to have pumped it on a sustained basis would have been in 2014 when it had just embarked on the neo-existential strategy of trying to destroy the then-nascent U.S. shale oil industry by dumping prices through overproduction.  Additionally, the EIA defines spare capacity specifically as production that can be brought online within 30 days and sustained for at least 90 days. In a rare moment of reality a couple of years ago, even Saudi Arabia admitted that it would need at least 90 days to move rigs to drill new wells and raise production to the mythical 12 million bpd or 12.5 million bpd level.

At the same time, of course, Saudi Arabia’s reserves numbers appear to be of the Hans Christian Andersen school of economics, as highlighted in my latest book on the global oil markets. At the beginning of 1989, Saudi Arabia claimed proven oil reserves of 170 billion barrels but only a year later, and without the discovery of any major new oil fields, the official reserves estimate somehow grew by 51.2 percent, to 257 billion barrels. Relatively shortly thereafter, it increased again to the longstanding 266 ‘or so’ billion barrels level. Bewilderingly – and a mathematical impossibility – Saudi Arabia’s proven oil reserves figure has stayed at around the same level for nearly 30 years, despite Saudi pumping an average of nearly three billion barrels of oil every year from 1973 to the end of 2017 – totalling 132 billion barrels – with, again, no new significant oil finds being made during that period.

So, Saudi Arabia really needs Jafurah to work and, to this effect, announced that it is to spend at least US$110 billion on the project, with the intention being as well that it will become the world’s third largest gas producer by 2030, after the U.S., and Russia. As even Aramco has noticed that Saudi Arabia does not have abundant freshwater supplies – Aramco chief executive officer, Amin Nasser, highlighted this shrewd observation last week (“we are not rich with water”) – Aramco is apparently going to use seawater instead for the fracking process. Unsurprisingly, there is no shortage of U.S. companies keen to provide their fracking technology and engineering services to Aramco, a situation dripping in irony as the U.S. shale players are now in a position to screw Saudi Arabia to the wall in terms of extreme pricing for their services just as Saudi wanted to completely destroy them from 2014 to 2016. Precisely how screwed Saudi Arabia is going to be will be evident when Aramco holds its bidding rounds for the work, technology, engineering, and chemicals on the fields in the coming weeks.Related: Shale Decline Inevitable As Oil Prices Crash

So, is this project likely to make Saudi Arabia a major gas exporter by 2030? No, is the short answer, and here is why. According to the aforementioned weaver of fairy tales – Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman – the Jafurah field has an estimated 200 trillion cubic feet of gas (TcF), a figure that should be taken in context of all other Saudi energy reserves estimates but let us pretend that it is true. In the meantime, Aramco has gas reserves supposedly of around 233.8 Tcf, which for the purposes of this analysis, we can also pretend is true. The plan is for Aramco to start production from Jafurah in 2024 and to reach 2.2 billion cubic feet (Bcf) per day (Bcf/d) of gas by 2036. Last year – without Jafurah – Aramco produced 8.9 Bcf/d of natural gas, a notional total of 11.1 Bcf/d. Crucially, however, even with this current 8.9 Bcf/d of gas production in place, Saudi has been burning around 400,000 bpd of oil for power generation (on top of enormous actual volumes of fuel oil and diesel).

All other factors remaining equal, one billion cubic feet of gas equals 0.167 million barrels of oil equivalent, so 2.2 Bcf/d (the future Jafurah output) equals 0.3674 million barrels of oil equivalent, or 367,400 barrels. Therefore, the total projected new amount of gas to come from Jafurah is around 367,400 barrels per day, which is not even enough to cover the current amount of oil being (400,000 bpd) burned for power generation in Saudi Arabia, even if Aramco’s already elevated gas production holds steady. Based on independent industry estimates on changing Saudi demographics and corollary changing power demand patterns, the Kingdom will probably need gas production of around 23-25 Bcf/d within the next 15 years just to cover its own power and industrial demand, compared to the 11.1 Bcf/d of Aramco’s current peak production added to the notional production from Jafurah. In sum, then, even if the quality of the Jafurah find is unparalleled in the history of gas finds, then Saudi would still be in deficit in its power generation sector if there was a straight switch from crude oil burning to gas-only burning.

By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com

Globalization Bleeding-Out, Utopian Globalism–The Recurring Dream and Nightmare of Being A ‘citizen of the world’

Globalization Bleeding

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

A staff member stands in front of a coronavirus global map at the secretary’s operation center during a coronavirus task force meeting at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., February 27, 2020. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)\ 

The recurring dream — or nightmare — of being a ‘citizen of the world’

By the early 21st century, cosmopolitans were gushing that high-tech, instant communications, transnational agencies and agreements, free-flowing capital, international corporations, and a new eerily uniform global elite had, finally, made nationalism, borders, and even the nation-state itself all irrelevant. Nationalism was apparently relegated to dustbin of history, as we hit peak Socratic citizen-of-the-worldism.

There were always two flaws to these adolescent giddy reports from world-bestriding New York Times op-ed journalists about win-win globalization, with their praise of gleaming airports and superior high-speed rail in what was otherwise Communist China, or accounts of flying first-class on Qatar Airlines was heavenly compared with backward United or American Airlines.

Nothing New under the Sun

One, globalization was not the end of history. It is a recurrent, cyclical, and at best morally neutral phenomenon that has always, at least in relative terms, waxed and waned over the past 2,500 years of civilization — although recent transcontinentalism carries greater consequences in the era of electronic interconnectedness.

By a.d. 200, there was a globalized Roman world of 2 million square miles, stretching from Hadrian’s Wall to the Persian Gulf, and from the Rhine to the Atlas Mountains. Like frogs around the pond of Mare Nostrum, all official business was conducted in Latin or, increasingly in the East, Greek. A Roman citizen could enjoy habeas corpus from Bithynia to the Atlantic. Thousands of small towns were marked by fora and agorae, colonnades, and basilicas. While multiracial and non-Italian, otherwise uniformly equipped and trained legions secured the vast borders. It was quite an achievement of providing aqueducts, security, and property rights to 70 million disparate peoples, but it was no longer really the earlier Roman Republic of the Scipios, either.

Yet by a.d. 500, the vast sameness was eroding. Most of the Empire in the West and the old borders in East had been picked apart by Vandals, Visigoths, Osogoths, Huns, Sasanians, and a host of other tribes and migrant and aggressive peoples.

History’s succession of subsequent would-be imperial globalists — the Byzantines, the Caliphates, the Ottomans, Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler — for a while collapsed national borders and spread uniform language, architecture, customs, and culture until their dreams eventually imploded, usually from overreach, military defeat, corruption, bankrupt ideology, demographic calcification, rampant inflation, or sheer inefficiency and bloated bureaucracy.

It was never set in stone that the European Union could forever abolish national borders and invent something permanent called Europeanism. Or that the new Chinese Silk Road would tie the world together under Chinese hegemony. Or that the World Health Organization’s international protocols would make something like the coronavirus virtually impossible. Or that the world would shrink as tens of millions flew on identical Boeing 737 Maxes.

History does not end in something, it continues on with everything.

Tribalism, nations, empires, and globalizations all grow and collapse, not unlike natural long-term changes in climate. Or, as the Greeks believed, societies are like the endless cycles of natural birth, aging, and decline of humans themselves.

One World, One Bigger Problem

A second problem: Why did we assume that globalization was inherently superior to, say, nationalism, or that pancontinental conglomeration was superior to small autonomous countries? Of course, absorption of local customs and protocols into a uniform culture could be beneficial in some areas, but why by extension would it be in most all areas? Why were globalized projects and empires per se to be preferred to local republics?

The premise of Orwell’s dystopian 1984 is that the nations of the postwar world have been absorbed by just three transcontinental feuding empires, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia; and with such nightmarish aggregation comes the death of free expression and individualism itself.

Globalization’s supposed selling points — worldwide markets, shared popular tastes, a common commercial language and currency, a nationless elite culture, ease of travel, dissemination of information, and communications — were never so simple. Was the easy transoceanic networking that linked Christopher Steele, John Brennan, Stefan Harper, Joseph Mifsud, and various Russian oligarchical gossip-mongers proof of the attractions of a common global culture?

After all, do we really feel comfortable with Westernized virology labs under the control of the Chinese Communist Party that might have the ability to spread a mistake throughout the world in a matter of hours? Is it really a great thing that imported toxic Chinese drywall or tainted Chinese dog food undercuts American suppliers, and thereby makes us more “competitive,” and creatively destroys those businesses that “need” to be destroyed? Do we think it is good business to have everything from our heart medicines to chemotherapy produced in China?

Trump got elected in part because voters were wary of asymmetrical globalization. He campaigned on secure borders, legal-only immigration, and an end to the outsourcing of key industries (defense, strategic industries, and manufacturing) to a totalitarian and hostile China, and he promoted general American independence in fuel, food, and key components of everyday life. Is the antithesis of his agenda — open borders, the free flow of all foreign nationals, more production of key U.S. consumption in China — the way to combat the coronavirus?

Is diversity actually our strength when over a million illegal immigrants over the past three years from impoverished Central America and southern Mexico — without legal sanction, without criminal background checks, mostly without high-school diplomas and skills, without health audits, and without any knowledge of or familiarity with America — simply en masse crashed the U.S. border and declared themselves permanent residents if not de facto citizens? In my neighborhood, we see nearby roads now littered with abandoned couches, cast-off refrigerators, and worn-out tires; the occasional shoot-outs between rival gangs; shade-tree illegal barber shops, illicit day-care centers, and unlicensed, unvaccinated packs of dogs — are these all teaching me to celebrate diversity and to get with the culture of most of the world?

Do we really know which particular Chinese technology students in Silicon Valley — with shades, Levi’s, and flip-flops — are in the sometime employment of the Chinese military? Does it matter?

Are those who jet into Davos the sort that we trust to guide our political, commercial, corporate, and entertainment future, to protect the American Bill of Rights? Is it so neat that the NBA players now tailor their political expression to fit the wishes of their financial enablers in China? Has Angela Merkel’s globalized visions of immigration come down to earth at the fetid refugee camps of Turkey and Lesbos and Chios?

I can understand why brilliant or powerful or at least well-connected grandees — Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, George Soros, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Emmanuel Macron, the geniuses of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the European Union — applaud the globalization of the world. But I am not reassured that their money, titles, influence, degrees, or connections mean that they are either wise or even always well-intentioned. Mike Bloomberg’s description of supposed know-nothing farming, ancient and modern, reminds one of how global commercial brilliance and practical stupidity are often symbiotic.

Did we really think that fundamentalist Islam would simply accept Western encroachment on its Dark Age culture and allow the disruption of its fervent reach and influence, simply because we called it “globalization” — without seeing such growing uniformity as a threat to its eighth-century view of the world and to the sway of imams and mullahs?

Was it really unforeseen that Bin Laden or the Taliban or the creepy al-Baghdadi might find Westernized social media and the Internet useful in expediting anti-Western terror? The fact that Bin Laden was once a playboy in Beirut or in his dotage supposedly sat glued to Westernized porn on his computer did not suggest he felt anything but hatred for the Westernized modern world and wished to use its own protocols to destroy it. How strange that most of the worst Islamists were creatures of globalization, without which no one would have cared much about their usual local hell-raising and thuggery in the streets of Baghdad, Damascus, or Cairo. Or were they virtual creatures of the Western strip mall: hooked on consumerism while despising the forces that created it, like veteran old bass at the bottom of the pond that still cannot resist biting on the shiny lures that will reel them in.

If our globalized future is what is regurgitated nightly on the standard homogenized CNN or BBC international news, the political orthodoxy of Davos, the platitudes of Brussels and Strasbourg, or the globalized ethos that sent Bill Clinton to Moscow for a quid pro quo $500,000 honorarium or Hunter Biden to Burisma, or Google to data-mine and massage the international Internet searches of over a 3 billion people, then I would prefer to live under the customs and culture of a flyover nation.

Yes, unfettered globalization gave the impoverished people of sub-Saharan Africa a shot at lifesaving pharmaceuticals, and it spread market capitalism that lifted billions out of poverty. The irony is that the most reliable and trustworthy custodians of dangerous globalized and internationalized science — or volatile harmonized culture, commerce, and politics — were not Orwellian international and stateless technocrats but viable nation-states that still might regulate and filter out globalism’s excesses and dangers. In the end, we have no control over Wuhan, China, but it apparently has a lot of control over us.

There also used to be old-fashioned, honored Western concepts such as autonomia and autarkeia — independence and self-sufficiency — that have now been demonized as chauvinism and protectionism. But it once was a reassuring fact to Americans that most of their lifesaving drugs and pharmaceuticals were produced in North America and Europe under Western auspices rather than in China and India, as it is now reassuring that most Americans consume oil and natural gas that are extracted at home and not imported from the Middle East, Russia, or North Africa. One of the reasons that maximum pressure is working on Iran, and that the theocracy is desperate, is that the Great Satan doesn’t need Iranian oil — and that the Little Satan doesn’t need it, either.

We should be relieved that the U.S. is still self-sufficient in grains, fruits, meats, and vegetables — and can export its fuels and foods to others rather than solely vice versa, given that it produces them according to standards that are far superior to China’s, Russia’s, or what is found in Africa and Latin America.

When we become citizens of the world, that is, citizens of everyplace, then we end up citizens of utopia. That is, as citizens of οὐ τόπος — of “no place.”

 

NRO contributor VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. @vdhanson

Turkish Invaders and Terrorist Proxies Merge At Illegal Outposts In Syria, Making Forces Indistinguishable Targets

Terrorist fortifications in Idlib have ‘merged’ with Turkish outposts – Russian Defense Ministry

A still image taken from a video shows Syrian army soldiers walking as they advance on the town of Kfar Nabl, Syria. ©  Reuters TV

Turkey has allowed its observation posts, established under a 2018 deal with Moscow, to virtually merge with terrorist bases in Idlib, Russia’s Defense Ministry said, amid a Turkish assault against advancing Syrian forces.

“The fortified areas of the terrorists have merged with the Turkish observation posts deployed under the 2018 Sochi agreement,” Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said early on Wednesday.

Attacks and mass artillery fire on neighboring civilian settlements and the Russian airbase at Khmeimim turned from sporadic to daily.

ALSO ON RT.COMTurkish soldiers were with ‘terrorist groups’ when they were hit by Syrian military – Russian MoD

Europe and the United States have consistently ignored Turkey’s failure to abide by the 2018 deal, the spokesman continued, stating that neither is “interested in the actual humanitarian situation inside and around Idlib.”

All of Russia’s official requests to the UN and Western countries – who delivered humanitarian aid across the Turkish border and all of it went not to refugees, but to terrorists – remained unanswered. All we heard were the lamentations about the need to ‘preserve the Sochi agreements at all costs.’

Despite repeated attacks on civilians and clear links to known terrorist groups, Western media have transformed Idlib’s armed factions into so-called ‘moderates,’ the spokesman said.

“Where among these supposedly ‘opposition’ fighters in the Turkish-controlled zone was [Abu Mohammad] al-Julani – the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, a terrorist group officially recognized by the UN – together with his nearly 20,000 cutthroats?” he asked.

At a click of the finger, all of Idlib’s terrorists became supposedly the ‘representatives of the moderate opposition’ in the Western media. However, it is not clear how the ISIS chief al-Baghdadi was recently ‘pinpointed’ and killed, according to the US, amid all these ‘moderates.’

Ankara’s ongoing attacks on the Syrian Army as it advances on the terrorist groups amounts to a “violation of international law,” and yet has gone utterly “unnoticed by anyone in the West,” Konashenkov said, despite the latter’s professed commitment to a ‘rules-based order.’

ALSO ON RT.COMImpotent in Idlib: US pits Turkey & Russia against each other with ammo offer, but remains irrelevant in Syria

The remarks come amid hostilities between Turkey and Syria in Idlib, which escalated last month. Turkey sent thousands of troops across the Syrian border in an effort to push Syrian government forces out of the province.

Idlib is the last large stronghold of anti-government armed groups in Syria. Turkey was supposed to use the influence it has on some of the groups to suppress jihadists, who are determined to continue fighting, and ensure a lasting ceasefire. In practice, attacks in Idlib continued, and last year Damascus forces went on the offensive, capturing large swathes of land in the south of the province.

Damascus has long accused Turkey of foul play, saying Ankara was fueling violence against Syrian soldiers and civilians rather than curbing it.

Social Engineering the Masses

Robert David Steele’s blog

Review: TAVISTOCK INSTITUTE – Social Engineering the Masses by Daniel Estulin — Deep State Playbook

TAVISTOCK INSTITUTE: Social Engineering the Masses by Daniel Estulin (Trine Day, 2015)

6 Stars – A Seminal Work Integrating Deep Looks from Others – A Mind-Altering Soul-Enhancing Book

Given the author’s past as a former Russian intelligence employee, I have considered the possibility that this book is an active disinformation treatise. While some of this information may be exaggerated or mis-interpreted, on balance I believe this to be a most valuable holistic perspective essential to taking down the Deep State.

My bottom line up front: the Deep State — the vestiges of the Black Nobility/Ceasar, the British Empire, the Vatican, the Zionists, and the Freemasons (33+ only – the rest can be saved) and their banking fronts including the Rothschilds and Central Banks — are the common enemies of America, China, and Russia as well as all other nation-states and cultural/ethnic/linguistic tribes. We are not doing well at collaborating against these common enemies.

This book floored me. Written in 2011 and republished in 2015, this book is one of three in the past ten years that have altered my perception of reality. The other two:

• Review: Project Human Extinction – The Ultimate Conspiracy
• Review: Trance: Formation of America

I thought I understood covert action and its subset propaganda. I did not. What this book makes clear, with meticulous naming of names (drawing on varied noted sources), is that virtually everything about our daily lives is propaganda, from church and school to the news to social media to government lies and “statistics.” I am a fan of Jon Rappoport’s work (The Matrix and his blog No More Fake News), I managed a false flag operation for the CIA, I have done a great deal to confront fake news, but this book leaves me almost breathless with disbelief. EVERYTHING is a programmed lie – I am reminded of Barbara Honegger’s IN THE ROOM recollection of William Casey telling Ronald Reagan:

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

Barbara Honegger, Quora, 25 November 2014

At the above link, do not miss Bill Bray, retired CIA scientist, on the fake news culture that CIA spawns.

The saddest and most troubling aspect of this book for me, as a former CIA operations officer, was its documentation of the degree to which CIA, in active collaboration with universities funded by the Rockefellers and other elites, deliberately created the drug culture in the 1960’s, liberally dispending LSD and other drugs, and in particularly, handing out 50,000 or so LSD tabs at Woodstock. The author is compelling in suggesting that the Grateful Dead (perhaps unwitting) were a covert operation by the CIA intended to introduce and then proliferate the drug and consciousness culture, reducing by a considerable number those able to reach adulthood without losing a substantial portion of their brain cells.

QUOTE (110): “At Woodstock,” writes journalist Donald Phau, “nearly half a million youth gathered to be drugged and brainwashed on a farm. The victims were isolated, immersed in filth, pumped with [free] psychedelic drugs, and kept awake continuously for three straight days, and all with the full complicity of the FBI and government officials.”

Decades later, and after Viet-Nam, we have the crack cocaine explosion at the intersection of the Nicaraguan contras, the US Marine Corps and El Toro, and the CIA.

Review: Dark Alliance–The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

The second most troubling aspect of this book for me, as a lapsed Catholic and still Christian who believes strongly in the family unit as the foundation for national power (along with the education of its citizens in the art of critical reasoned thinking) was the documentation of how the pill was explicitly invented and popularized (along with Affirmative Action) in order to break up families and foster a libertine culture harmful to children, at the same time that television and Hollywood were used to dumb down the public and make all manner of perversions “normal.” Herbert Marcuse and others have defined “repressive tolerance” as the ultimate destroyer of family, community, and tribal values: when “anything goes,” which is the Democratic Party’s approach to life, then NOTHING is sacred.

Betty Boop: France Legalizes Pedophila — Any Child, Any Age UPDATE 1 Comment, Pedos are People Poster, Marcuse on “Repressive Tolerance”

Although the author relies heavily on one or two sources around which he builds a chapter, he has a gift for synthesis and a gift for narrative, and I have to say that this book is a capstone book – a book so important that if I had the money I would be handing out ten million copies tomorrow.

There is a Trumpian bottom line that I want to emphasize up front: the absolute worst nightmare for the Deep State and the 1% elite seeking to create a New World Order in which the 99% are dumbed down drugged up automatons, is a strong family unit and bottom up community ethos that values individual learning and independence of mind. We are at the tail end of fifty years of elite efforts to destroy our ability to think for ourselves while seeking to infect us with both physical and mental diseases, all the while carrying out eugenics and euthanasia programs ranging from vaccines that sterilize to wars based on 935 lies (Iraq).

Review: 935 Lies – The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity

We are in the midst of a moral and spiritual decline that has been deliberately contrived over the past seventy two years, since 1947 to be precise (the National Security Act and more). CIA was created by Wall Street to be its secret fixer and destabilizer not only abroad, but in the USA, establishing covert and controlled positions in every institution of significance including local law enforcement and of course state governments – Governor Jesse Ventura has spoken and written to this point.

Review: The Devil’s Chessboard – Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

There are three targets that the Deep State – the New World Order elitists – desire to destroy:

• the first is the individual, who cannot be allowed to be effectively armed, educated, and independent;
• the second is the family, which Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew once called the bedrock of civilization and which others have said is the precise opposite of the industrial slavery model;
• the second is the nation-state, that cannot be allowed to be effectively armed, educated, and independent.

The author, drawing on thin but balanced sources, excels at making it clear that all the chaos in the world is contrived – the whole point is to keep us all off balance and unable to realize that there is ample wealth for everyone if we simply come together with intelligence and integrity. We are being lied to, divided and conquered, drugged up, “herded,” and generally repressed mentally, spiritually, and physically. 600 lb people are not an accident – they are a symptom of a complete breakdown – BY DESIGN – of the cultural and social mores that characterize healthy people living in healthy communities.

The author excels at documenting – with the help of his few cited sources – the timeline from World War II to today – in which the psychological operations profession saw a marriage of the Nazis, the British, and the CIA, in service to the 1%, toward the end of asserting political control over everyone on the basis of driving everyone into a state of psychosis using programmed behavior modification.

The New World Order (One World Order) fascist corporate state demands the end of nationalism, the repression of languages and cultures and ethnic or cultural identities, the fragmentation of the family, and the dissolution of community. In other words, everything that we in “fly over” country or the rural heartland, believe is our essence. I cannot help but conclude that California and New York are now like the concentration camp or prison “trustees” of the neo-Nazi elitists, and this is one reason why the Electoral College is so important – to keep those two states populated by libertine morons from destroying America the Beautiful.

Early on the author talks about how the elites understand that local sheriffs loyal to their local communities are a major obstacle to the imposition of a “national” police regime, and I contemplate how we have since 9/11 – a false flag operation by the Zionists with the complicity of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (and then the post-event obstruction of justice and complicity in murder after the fact of Robert Mueller) – militarized our police and turned the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) into a national Gestapo that specializes in false flag operations from Sandy Hook to the Boston Bombing to Orlando and beyond.

Memoranda for the President on 9/11: Time for the Truth — False Flag Deep State Truth! UPDATE 14: Spanish Translation

The author covers MKULTRA and mind-control to an extent, and between this book and other reading I am now persuaded that virtually every “active shooter” since 9/11 has been a mind-controlled individual explicitly activated to terrorize us and justify even more draconian police measures.

• Mind Control @ Phi Beta Iota
• MKULTRA @ Phi Beta Iota
• 5G @ Phi Beta Iota

QUOTE (13): Deliberate and habitual falsification of the information is a way of creating desensitization effects in the mass population by causing socially-accredited interpretation of cause-effect relations to violate sensuous rational interpretation of experience.”

The author offers some provocative information about Vladimir Putin as a Freemason also subject to MI-6 mind-control who freed himself. All I know if how much I do not know but I pray that Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin are all talking and in the process of cleansing the top ranks of the Freemasons what I am told is the Chinese objective: to place the Freemasons on the side of the 99% and the creation of a prosperous world at peace that works for all.

Elitist control of the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association (and follow ons, such as the morons who blessed water-boarding by the CIA) has been used to “game” mental health so that the dumbed-down obedient individual is considered “healthy” while the recalcitrant obstructionist is considered “unhealthy.” Control of these associations also enabled the repression of natural and alternative cures, substituting a panoply of drugs both legal and illegal, all intended to fragment and soften the mental and physical health of the population. Today just 1% of our youth are qualified for military service. The elite have been successful.

The authors adds to my knowledge of the breadth and depth of Nazi transplants to the CIA and to NASA, and the degree to which they were committed to mind-control, occult practices, and the liberal use of drugs to subjugate and enslave individuals. The point is made that over time research across America became so corrupted that only the collaborators survived – “honest academicians where generally weeded out and hounded into retirement.”

The central pivot in the book, from the theory to the practice to today, is chapter three, “Killing of the King,” which coherently, grippingly connects the assassination of John F. Kennedy (JFK) with all that followed including particularly the fragmentation and mind-fucking of America.

Although I have reviewed numerous books on the assassination of JFK, none have focused on Freemasons as much as this chapter does, drawing on other sources.

Reviews on Assassination of JFK

Although I have heard and read over the years of CIA and KGB Freemasons collaborating in betrayal of their countries and organizations by order of the Freemasons, this chapter more than anything I have seen before makes me wonder if we don’t need a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) scrub of the Freemasons – of course we would have to deal with the fact that the President and virtually everyone of consequence in Congress, Justice, and the FBI is a high-ranking Freemason – which brings in the Chinese Freemasons. I know one of their leaders. Could they be the ones who finally purge global Freemasonry at the top and redirect it toward its more benign avowed goals? Or will we simply get a Chinese version of the Deep State leveraging the Freemasons outside of China to do China’s bidding?

What this chapter does is place the assassination of JFK in the context of a much larger scheme to destroy the innocence and quest for excellence that he inspired and that was inherent in the USA as “the greatest generation” left war behind, created families, and prepared to go to the moon and beyond.

The chapter is a treatise in symbolism, occult machinations, and the alchemy of a hidden government using the assassination as a form of trauma that is then followed by an orchestrated combination of music, movies, television shows, and the creation of a drug culture such that civic consciousness could be said to have been assassinated as well.

The next chapter, “The Doors of Perception: The CIA’s Psychedelic Revolution,” deepens our understanding of how the public was drugged up and dumbed down in the aftermath of the JFK assassination….by design.

I knew the lyrist for the Grateful Dead John Perry Barlow (RIP) and this I found shocking because I have continued to be naïve:

“An FBI internal memo from 1968 mentions the employment of the Grateful Dead as an avenue to ‘channel youth dissent and rebellion into more benign and non-threatening directions.’ [They] performed a vital service in distracting many young persons into drugs and mysticism, rather than politics.” He cites Jim Keith’s Mind Control, World Control (Adventures Unlimited Press, 1998), no page number. I learn that Jim Keith is the author of two other books I have not read, Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2003), and also Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (Feral House, 1993).

The author draws on multiple sources to show that the CIA orchestrated drug proliferation experiments at over eighty US university campuses with the intent of popularizing LSD, creating a drug counterculture that took an entire generation – or multiple generations – out of civics, out of politics. The intent was to turn people away from God and man in God’s (good) image, and instead transform America into a perverse complex of dehumanizing drug abuse, sexual perversion, and the glorification of violence. At its most extreme, the intent was to create multiple generations of murderous pedophiles and necrophiliacs. It worked.

The dumbing down of education, turning it into a rote memorization process devoid of critical thinking, to include the teaching of agnosticism, the elimination of core values – ethics – the denial of the nobility of man and the unlimited potential of man for creating heaven on Earth, the denial of “soul,” were all focused on creating an autistic population living in a virtual concentration camp. Add to this vaccines actually creating a massive number of truly autistic children, and the opioid crisis our own President has condemned, and one begins to see that we are at the tail end of a half century of deliberate genocide and ecocide. Add to this 5G and the alienation and ignorance inherent in what I have termed #GoogleGestapo, and the death knell of civilization is sounded.

It has been my horrible mistake to presume, wrongly, that information pathologies such as I have itemized in various works but with the following specific reviews (one by a guest), were calculated betrayals of the public trust but somehow isolated, temporal, reversible. I have been reading individual trees and not seeing the forest.

• Review: Fog Facts –Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
• Review: Forbidden Knowledge–From Prometheus to Pornography
• Review: Lost History–Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’
• Review: Manufacturing Consent–The Political Economy of the Mass Media
• Review: The Age of Missing Information
• Review (Guest): Propaganda–The Formation of Men’s Attitudes
• Review: Rule by Secrecy–The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
• Review: Weapons of Mass Deception–The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq
• Review: Weapons of Mass Instruction

I have been in denial. Even in the past two years, as I have taken an interest in 9/11 and a series of false flag events and mind-controlled active shooters across the USA, I have been in denial of the obscenely broad, calculated, deep, intended, persistent nature of this organized threat to society – a threat that includes rogue elements of academia, civil society (labor unions and religions particularly), commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government or non-profit “foundations” that turn out to be the true centers of evil.

We are at war, and the two political parties in the USA represent Satan – the repressive tolerance (anything goes including pedophilia) and authoritarian façade that has been conducting mass surveillance, militarizing the police, using false flag operations to advance an anti-gun agenda, drugging us, lying to us, all of it is “the plan.” President Donald Trump may or may not be part of the plan, as I write this I pray that his “America First” NATIONALISM will triumph and his tongue-kissing of Benjamin Netanyahu is merely a temporary deception. #UNRIG, the unity for integrity electoral reform movement I founded, I can now see is half of the solution – the other solution is a completely independent Web 3.0 that cannot be censored, where individuals cannot be lied to and also digitally assassinated, as is the case today with Amazon, Facebook, Google, MeetUp, Twitter, and YouTube.

The “left” – and Noam Chomsky does not fare well in this chapter – was creating to pre-empt the radicalization of the growing middle class and college educated youth. I am reminded of the Great Depression, which was created by the banks, with the complicity of two Presidents, to destroy the middle class rising in political power while concentrating their own power over government and buying up land at depression level prices. That story is told by my friend and brilliant economist Wayne Jett.

Review: The Fruits of Graft

The chapter on “Television” is one of the longest and most valuable. Television is how everyone is “educated” to the same low level, homogenized, made politically correct, distracted, brainwashed, and turned against everything that is the opposite of television: civics, community, country, culture, ethics, family, and more. Television is about fostering apathy and ignorance. Among the author’s contributions are the naming of names. Television is the Deep State’s voice, and I am immediately reminded of Fareed Zakaria, the most elegant whore of the Deep State on the air today.

Included in this chapter is a most interesting section suggesting that Wikileaks is an intelligence operation that has received the directed support of TIME Magazine and the media outlets under the control of Robert Murdoch, whose own public relations person is on the board of Wikileaks. One does wonder.

Also in this chapter is a segment on language as the cornerstone of independence and the observation that languages created nations, not the other way around.

The chapter concludes most compellingly in suggesting that television as it is used in the USA today is nothing more of less than a Satanic indoctrination program justifying the complete moral collapse of the Republic, and the complete emptying of the public mind of any form of constructive thinking.

The chapter on cybernetics blends CIA MKULTRA mind control with #GoogleGestapo mind control, but I am surprised to find here information about how both contraceptives and Affirmative Action were devised by the Rockefeller and other foundation as very deliberate means of destroying families.

This chapter is helpful in making it clear that globalization and liberalism (anything goes repressive tolerance) are the opposite of nationalism and family values. The line is drawn and I dare say that 2020 is going to be a turning point in American history – either we continue the Trump Revolution and defeat the Deep State and Shadow Government seeking to undermine individual and state sovereignty, or we return to the original program of national debasement and devolution.

Mental health as defined by the authorities is totally centered on obedience and credulity to lies.

UNESCO and most medicine including vaccines is about eugenics – population control to the point of genocide and the deliberate eradication of entire cultures.

The enemy of the Deep State is humanity itself.

The final chapter on “Science Fiction and the Tavistock Institute” is a fitting conclusion to a book that has truly shocked me into thinking more deeply and more urgently about the challenges that face humanity in 2020 and beyond.

I am completely persuaded that saving the family, the community, the individual states and provinces and the larger nation-stations including particularly the United STATES of America (anyone calling for the end of the Electoral College is either an idiot or a traitor), is our millennial challenge.

I am persuaded that my concept for Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE), including the truth & wisdom channel that cannot be censored in which individuals cannot be digitally assassinated, and the engineering revolution that restores power to the distributed public and ends the ability of banks and lawyers to impoverish the public (while achieving Buckminster Fuller’s concept of ephemeralism, doing more with less), is the other half of the solution (beyond #UNRIG). The human individual, optimized to exercise free will and independent discovery, is the opposite of the fascist corporate top-down controlled economy of, by, and for the Satanic elite. Open, not closed systems, are necessary to enable humanity to achieve its cosmic destiny.

• Concept for a Post-Western Economic-Engineering Paradigm: How Putin-Modi and Xi-Trump Can Save Humanity with Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE)
• For UN SecGen – Achieving SDG with OSEE
• D3C Presidential Innovation Memorandum 3.3
• Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) – A Nordic Manifesto
• Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) – Creating the Academy, Economy, Government, and Society of the Future
• The Ultimate Hack: Resilient Villages, Smart Cities, Prosperous Nations at Peace — and Unlimited Clean Water
• Marcin Jakubowski: Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) is 10-20% the Cost of Industrial-Era Engineering

I will end with three reviews I have done that make it clear that the future of humanity depends on localization, not globalization. I believe this strongly and I will spend the rest of my life fighting the Deep State and seeking to empower the individual, the family, the local community, and the sovereign state, in that order. Bottom up, not top down, must be our generative guiding principle.

• Review: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)
• Review: Skin in the Game – Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
• Review: ANTIFRAGILE – Things That Gain From Disorder

Other recent reviews of possible interest to independent thinkers:

• Review: Kushner Inc. – Greed. Ambition. Corruption. Kushner = Judas
• Review: The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna
• Review: In the Shadows of a Presidency by Daniel Estulin

Access All Reviews (2500+/97 Non-Fiction Categories)

PRINTABLE REVIEW: Review Tavistock Institute 2.1

Turkey Weaponizing Refugee Stream, Directing Thousands Into the Heart of Europe

Turkey’s blackmail, EU “solidarity” and Greece in emergency: refugees and migrants are not “human after all”

Irregular migrants injured after Greek forces open fire

Blackmail will not pass

Austrian Chancellor Kurz Declares Turkey is Attacking Europe and Greece

By Nick Kampouris

---

Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz. Photo Credit: AMNA

In an unprecedented gesture of support for Greece, Sebastian Kurz, the Chancellor of Austria flatly declared on Tuesday that Turkey is attacking the European Union and Greece.

Kurz accused the Turkish President from Vienna of “consciously” organizing this refugee ”attack,” which as he said is deliberately targeted toward Greece and not Bulgaria.

Wir erleben eine massive Zuspitzung des Zustroms von Migranten an der türkisch-griechischen Grenze. Diesen Ansturm gibt es gezielt an der Grenze zu Griechenland, aber nicht an der zu Bulgarien. Das zeigt klar, dass dieser organisiert stattfindet.

“We are seeing a massive increase in the influx of migrants on the Turkish-Greek border. This rush is targeted at the border with Greece, but not at the Bulgarian one. This clearly shows that this is organized.”–Goog. Trans.

— Sebastian Kurz (@sebastiankurz) March 3, 2020

The Austrian leader noted that within a few days 13,000 people have arrived at the Greek border and at the same time there have been no arrivals in Bulgaria, highlighting the fact that this is is not a random but a deliberately organized act.

Kurz also added that those now in Evros are not refugees from Idlib in Syria but people who have been living in Turkey for years.

The Austrian chancellor went on to further lend his support to Greece by saying that if Europe does not put pressure on Erdogan, then this will be ”the beginning of the end.”

”If we succumb to Erdogan… then Europe without internal borders will be history,” Kurz said in his stern warning.

“We are in touch with the Greeks, who have our full support for border protection measures and we are discussing about where we can contribute financially, as well as with police officers,” the leader of the Conservative-Greens coalition in Austria added.

This was the very first time a European leader has ever spoken so clearly about the dire situation in Evros.

Both Taliban and US Forces Already Breaking So-called Afghan “Peace Treaty”

US military says it conducted airstrike against Taliban forces, first since peace deal

By Brie Stimson | Fox News

Afghanistan peace deal hits road block over release of Taliban prisoners

Afghanistan is refusing to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners ahead of talks to share power. Greg Palkot reports from Kabul.

The U.S. military said early Wednesday it had conducted an airstrike against Taliban forces in Afghanistan, the first such attack since a historic peace deal was signed with the militant group Saturday.

The Helmand Province strikes targeted fighters attacking an Afghan government checkpoint.

TRUMP SAYS HE HAD ‘GOOD TALK’ WITH TALIBAN LEADER

“This was a defensive strike to disrupt the attack. This was our 1st strike against the Taliban in 11 days,” Col. Sonny Leggett, a U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan, tweeted.

“To be clear- we are committed to peace, however, we have the responsibility to defend our #ANDSF partners. #Afghans & US have complied w/ our agreements; however, Talibs appear intent on squandering this opp. and ignoring the will of the people for #peace. #Showyourcommitment,” he added.

He said the U.S. is calling on the Taliban to stop needless attacks and uphold their commitments to the peace deal.

President Trump confirmed Tuesday that he spoke on the phone to a Taliban leader, making him the first U.S. president believed to have ever spoken directly with the militant group responsible for the deaths of thousands of U.S. troops in nearly 19 years of fighting in Afghanistan.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

Russian Jets Pound Idlib, Syria Declares Area “No Fly Zone”

Syrian military imposes no-fly-zone over Idlib: SANA

Russian Air Force launches wide-scale attack across Idlib to stop militant advance

BEIRUT, LEBANON (9:30 A.M.) – The Russian Air Force is back to launching heavy strikes over the Idlib Governorate, as their warplanes were reported to have carried out several attacks against the Turkish-backed militants and jihadists in the Jabal Al-Zawiya and Jisr Al-Shughour areas.

According to a military source in northwestern Syria, the Russian Air Force has stepped up their strikes over the Idlib Governorate these past 12 hours, hitting several sites belonging to the Turkish-backed National Liberation Front (NLF) and their jihadist allies.

These strikes by the Russian Air Force came in response to several attacks launched by the Turkish military on the Syrian Arab Army’s (SAA) positions in the Jabal Al-Zawiya region and Saraqib area.

The Turkish military’s attacks have paved the way for their allied militants and jihadists to advance in Jabal Al-Zawiya, resulting in the capture of some towns, including Kafr ‘Awaid near the Shashabo Mountain.

The Russian Air Force will likely intensify their strikes over northwestern Syria for the next few days, as they await the arrival of more military equipment via their navy.

Taliban Claim U.S. Agrees To Total Withdrawal from Afghanistan Within 14 Months

‘It Was a Historic Day’: Taliban’s Top Negotiator Says

“All rights given to women by Islam will be respected–Islam has given women the right to get an education and work…” said Stanekzai.

Taliban’s top negotiator Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai on Saturday expressed satisfaction over the peace deal signed between the United States and the group in Doha, saying today’s signing of the peace deal was a historic moment for the country.

“Today it was a historic day in the history of Afghanistan,” Stanekzai told TOLOnews’ Sharif Amiri in a live interview in Doha, hours after the peace deal was officially signed by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy leader of the Taliban, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, in the presence of representatives of over 30 countries including US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

“After 20 years of imposed war on Afghanistan by the American and NATO forces, today a peace deal was signed between Americans and the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” said Stanekzai, adding: “Based on the agreement, all US and NATO forces must leave Afghanistan within 14 months of signing the agreement.”

When asked whether the Reduction in Violence (RIV) plan will continue in coming days, Stanekzai said: “Based on the agreement, from tomorrow (01 March), the war between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the US will drop to zero, it means they will not stage attacks on each other, but when it comes to the war between the Taliban and the Kabul administration forces (term used by the Taliban for the Afghan govt), it needs a new agreement which will be discussed in the intra-Afghan talks,” he said.

He rejected the prospect of engaging in a direct negotiation with the Afghan government.

“You know that today there is no government in Afghanistan, you know that the elections weren’t held in a transparent manner, public turnout was quite low, only one million voted out of 36 million,” he said.

Stanekzai said that based on the agreement, Afghanistan’s soil will not be used against any country in the world including the United States.

On the potential intra-Afghan talks, Stanekzai said: “The intra-Afghan talks will start on  March 10, once 5,000 of our hostages who are imprisoned in different parts of the country are released.”

When asked if it is possible to release this large number of prisoners in ten days, the Taliban negotiator said: “Based on the agreement, the US has made commitments to us about it, a lot of work has been done on the issue–we have shared the names of these prisoners, work will start on the release of these prisoners starting tomorrow (March 1st). If this process is delayed for one or two days or a week, the intra-Afghan talks will be delayed until they release these prisoners.”

Stanekzai said that it is premature to say that what kind of a political system the Taliban want, but he clarified that the Taliban will accept the kind of political system that the majority of Afghans will find acceptable.

“I think it’s better to decide the structure, format and form of the next government in the intra-Afghan talks; we will accept what the majority of Afghans decide about it,” he said.

Stanekzai said that the Taliban will respect the basic rights of Afghan women and children.

“The rights of all Afghans including the women and children will be respected in line with the Islamic values and the Afghan culture,” he said.

“All rights given to women by Islam will be respected, Islam has given the women the right to get education and work, the right to go out and other related rights such as the right to do business and choose a husband,” said Stanekzai.

On the future status of the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces (ANDSF), Stanekzai said: “This will be discussed in the intra-Afghan talks,  there is a need for some important reforms to be implemented in the structure of the country’s armed forces.”

When asked whether the Taliban were ready to cut ties with other militant groups such as Al Qaeda, the Taliban negotiator said: “You know that Al Qaeda took part in the Afghan jihad against the Soviets, they (Al Qaeda) fought against the Russians, they came with the help of the Americans here and other Western countries, but in the agreement, we have committed not to allow anyone to use the Afghan soil against our neighbors and other nations of the world.”

He said that the Taliban is ready to meet Afghans from all political parties and minority groups at the peace table.

Meanwhile, Abdul Salam Hanafi, another senior Taliban member, said that the group has no problem with the media and that it is the duty of media to “criticize us if we have any defects.”

““We are not against the media…media is a complement to society. There should be constructive criticism. We want reforms in media,” said Hanafi.

The agreement states that the US will fully withdraw its forces over the next 14 months, and that the current force of about 13,000 troops will be reduced to 8,600 within 135 days. Non-US NATO and other coalition forces will also be reduced proportionally over that time.

Was Spymaster D’Andrea Quietly Buried In New Castle, PA?

[SEE: Obituary for Michael Joseph D’Andrea

–Michael Joseph D’Andrea, 51, of New Castle passed away the morning of February 14, 2020 at LaCasa Personal Care Home.]

 

The Mysterious Michael D’Andrea: Was the C.I.A.’s Iran Mission Center Chief Shot Down?

 

*Pictures shared by Taliban linked social media accounts showed wreckage of an E11 aircraft on a snowy plain. Credit: Pajhwok

Last Monday a United States Air Force Bombardier E11A communications and intelligence gathering jet was either shot down or crashed in a remote mountainous region of Afghanistan. Almost immediately a story sourcing Taliban officials ran on Iranian State television claiming that the dead had included Michael D’Andrea, the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.)’s special Iran task force, which goes by the name Iran Mission Center.

U.S. forces were hampered by weather, Taliban gunfire and terrain from reaching the site of the crash for more than 24 hours, and the lack of any kind of definitive commentary from Washington gave the story legs. Given the news vacuum on the story, the Iranian account was picked up throughout the Middle East, to include photos allegedly taken of the downed plane and of burned corpses. Russian Media also featured the story and it was eventually even reported, though with some editorial skepticism, by the Independent and Daily Mail in the United Kingdom.

The Pentagon eventually issued a brief report that the crash appeared to be accidental, perhaps due to weather, and stated still later that the pilot and co-pilot, both Air Force officers, had been killed. The statement to the media did not explicitly say whether or not there was anyone else on board the plane, which is capable of carrying additional crewmen and passengers. The C.I.A. refused to comment. Fully forty-eight hours after the crash the Pentagon released a second statement confirming that the two crewmen were Lt. Col. Paul K. Voss, 46, of Yigo, Guam; and Capt. Ryan S. Phaneuf, 30, of Hudson, New Hampshire.

The mainstream media in the U.S. dutifully replayed the government version of what had occurred, but that did not stop a wave of speculation regarding a possible cover-up. Some reasoned that the Iranians, who are cooperating with the Taliban against U.S. forces, seemed to be on top of the story first, indicating that they might have known what occurred in real time because they had been in the loop with the Taliban armed unit that may have shot the aircraft down using a Russian produced portable anti-aircraft missile launcher.

Many who were following the story were inclined to believe the account circulated by Iran and other media outlets because the United States has a recent track record of lying about nearly everything, including the “imminent threat” details of its recent assassination of Iranian Major General and Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. The U.S. also lied when it claimed that there had been no casualties among American forces after Iran struck back against two bases in Iraq and many observers are quick to note that the United States has as its Chief Executive a man who calls journalists the “enemy of the people” and who is constantly claiming that there exists a huge reservoir of “fake news.”

So, another lie by the Pentagon in reporting the possibly successful attempt to kill a senior C.I.A. officer would be expected by nearly everyone, which is not to suggest that the Iranian account was necessarily true or accurate in all details. Iran would have had plenty of motive to create confusion about the United States and what it was doing in Afghanistan, particularly if the implication is that Afghanistan was being used as a launching pad to destabilize or even attack Iran, with which Kabul is not at war.

The White House and Agency have neither confirmed nor denied that the C.I.A. Chief of the Iran Mission Center Michael D’Andrea is still alive. He has in any event an interesting history. He is apparently a near contemporary of mine though I did not know him and do not know if that is his true name. As he is reported to be under cover, the fact that a name has surfaced at all is due to investigative reporting on him in the U.S. media. A former chief of the CI.A.’s Counter Terrorism Center, he was appointed to his current position by then Agency Director Mike Pompeo in June 2017. The New York Times reported that his appearance on the scene would mean a much harder line in opposing Iran on the part of the Trump Administration.

Within the Agency, D’Andrea was reportedly referred to as the Dark Prince or Ayatollah Mike, nicknames he acquired while heading the search for Usama bin Laden and also while directed drone strikes against al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. As a chain-smoking observant convert to Islam, he is not your conventional Agency officer, many of whom are more comfortable working inside from an Embassy desk rather than from a helicopter. A workaholic who keeps a roll away bed in his office, D’Andrea is, as a result of his abrasive style, reportedly extremely difficult to work with and not terribly popular.

One might also speculate that the claimed killing of D’Andrea is something like a half truth that might be construed as a warning. The C.I.A. officer might still be alive, but it is completely possible that the tale of his death was something of a contrivance to serve as a warning coming from the Iranian government suggesting that if the American government can kill senior Iranian officials, American senior officials might likewise also be targeted.

Even if D’Andrea was not on the plane, he just might come to the conclusion that his movements were being monitored. U.S. bases overseas are full of local employees who are engaged in menial tasks like driving or cleaning and even for perimeter and other basic security. Any number of them might be reporting on the movement of important Americans to the Taliban and other interested parties. D’Andrea and other senior U.S. government officials will inevitably have to think twice and increase their security arrangements when next they venture forth. And even an obstinate White House will perhaps begin to think that killing men like Qassem Soleimani is not a good idea because if we continue to do it to “them,” “they” will turn around and do it to us.

 

Giving Life To the “Terminator” Nightmare World

While Putin Defends Russia Israel Helps Create a Terminator World

One of these days a tourist visiting the Holy Land will probably get popped in between the eyes by a designated Israeli Defense Forces shooter. News of a new AI technology the Israelis are working on, it echoes of the “Terminator” films. Very soon Israeli citizens will be living inside a prison of killing technology.

The Israel Ministry of Defense is adopting a networked sensor-to-shooter system known as Fire Weaver, according to news from C4ISR. According to the report, the Israelis will pair infantry weapon-centric AI and display with its F-35s and UAV capabilities, in order to “digitalize” the urban battlefield. The makers of the technology say Fire Weaver will make situations in densely populated areas safer, but sane people must surely have doubts.

Now get this, Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems recently partnered with French company Atos Information Technology to create for Germany a so-called “glass battlefield” where:

“Interconnected platforms, sensor information moving in a ‘tactical internet of things,’ advanced and immune communications as a basis to allow seamless connectivity between UAS, vehicles, and soldiers on the ground.”

What could go wrong, right? I can think of many horrific scenarios. For one, cyberwarriors from Langley hacking the systems may soon be able to assassinate you from above, below, across the street, or half a world away in some fish market in Bangkok.

And what about the latest in German thinking? Since when did Angela Merkel’s Utopia start envisioning using drone swarms controlled by AI to support combat vehicles and future battle tanks? And Vladimir Putin is crazy for building unstoppable killer nukes? Right. No wonder.

The world peace Miss USA beauty pageant contestants used to pray for, it seems to get farther and farther away. And more expensive. Nations spend enough money today to cure all hunger in a few months. With those trillions America alone spends, whole families of diseases could surely be cured. And what makes this “Terminator” battlefield lunacy even crazier, is how so-called terrorists in pickup trucks in the desert can defeat every army. Now Tel-Aviv is going to set up next-generation digital killing machines. There’s the “peace” for you. Trump presents a peace plan to the Palestinians with nothing in their favor, then Jerusalem comes up with Phase II of annexation. Fire Weaver, which I guess will end up being fully automated with killer robots, drones, spy satellites, and smart killer viruses. Good God. We really are doomed.

No longer will the TSA need to do cavity searches for explosives in airports, new Terminator micro technologies will sting would-be plane highjackers to death in an instant. And while they are onboard the all-new glass airplanes flying from glass airports, carrying glass people to glass destinations all over the world. What, you think I am hysterical? Think again. A tactical Internet of Military Things (IoMT)? Where does this end?

Just because the concept of IoMT is largely driven by the idea that future military battles will be dominated by machine intelligence and cyber warfare in urban environments, does not mean the network will not be used in other situations. Think of it, the U.S. Army’s current operational outline for 2020 to 2040, titled “Winning in a Complex World,” will surely have counterintelligence and civilian peacekeeping capabilities. Soon the local police will be wired into the system, and who do you think will be in charge? The end result will not be safer, it will be a horrific future world where innocent people accidentally get snuffed. It won’t end with the new German Reich and swarms of Luftwaffe drones, it will end the way all Sci-Fi epics start. We’ll be helpless in a world totally controlled by real and perceived force. And feasible deniability and computer glitches will take the place of accountability.

“Oh, we are so sorry, a glitch in the Fire Weaver AI was the cause of those innocent Palestinian protesters being blown to pieces. But we are working on it.”

Yeah, right. Safer for who?

Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Brewing A Proper “Forever War” Stew In N. Syria Takes Time For the CIA and Magical Powers They Do Not Have

Military “Free-for-all” Brewing Around Idlib, Coincidentally With Upsurge In Al-Nusra Terror Attacks

Turkey Claims Syrian Shelling of Turkish Troops, Then Turkish Counterattack–Russia Reports Nothing Happened

“The threat of a Russia-Turkey-NATO hot war over Idlib is a godsend for US foreign policy”

 Absolutely! Yes, it is! A point that’s been made over and over and over again here.

When the main stream and alt media are frenzied with blood lust at the prospect of a falling out, the hope here has been for diplomacy. For so many reasons. 

Three recent posts broaching the idea of a godsend to the US : Russia/Turkey Planning New Talks on Idlib- Joint Patrols Continue & US Driving Wedge Between Turkey & Russia OR   Idlib Media Coverage Hyper Inflated To Prep For US Intervention In Syria? Before that :Saturday, February 15, 2020 Intense Battles For the Mind Are Raging! Turkish/ Russian Dissolution or Adapting to Changing Realities?

  “The empire’s opinion makers are positively drooling at the prospect of a Russian/Turkish falling out. They want it so bad their willing to fabricate a reality that doesn’t exist at this time. Imagining and presenting all sorts of scenarios to manage our minds.”

Here, at PFYT, we’re hoping Turkey and Russia keep it together and settle Syria in the manner that has been written about for years. With an eye to keeping Greater Kurdistan aka Israel 2.0, and the further death and destruction that will bring, at bay. 

The so called alt anti imperial media doesn’t promote the idea of Russia and Turkey keeping it together, with cooperation returning eventually, to Ankara and Damascus. Enabling Syria to rebuild. Wanting Syria, Turkey and Iran to be good neighbours. Which for the most part they had been, until 2011. The alleged alt media. like their main stream counterparts, promote the idea of increased warfare.  Cause it’s good for business.  Honestly “alt media” hasn’t struck me as alternative (not the same as another or each other; unlike in nature, form, or quality) for a very, very long time.

Image from RT article

RT Oped -Darius Shahtahmasebi 

Whether a hot war is on the table or not, the current situation is almost ripe for the United States foreign policy establishment, which has been dreaming of putting Russia and Turkey on a collision course for a while now. If you doubt this, you need only look to this final paragraph of a recent Guardian article:

Same as the so called alternative media- they’ve got Russia and Turkey clashing endlessly despite the FACT there has been lots of cooperation. Oh well, why bother with fact when one can push fancy?

“Kay Bailey Hutchison, the US ambassador to Nato, said Thursday’s events should show Turkey “who is their reliable partner and who isn’t” and prompt it to drop its purchase of a major Russian missile defence system, which Washington says threatens the western alliance.” [emphasis added]

The US has been seriously troubled by Turkey’s move to procure Russia’s S-400 missile system. Washington is also concerned by Turkey’s desire to join the China-Russia dominated Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), which could see Turkey in an alliance with not only Russia and China, but Iran as well.”

It’s not just S-400’s or the SCO. It’s pipelines. Nuclear power. Trade. Turkey trading with Iran and Russia, both. 

The US is willing to back Turkey into a corner in which it finds itself confronting Russia, with or without the full support of the NATO alliance, if it means that what was looking like a budding fruitful relationship between Ankara and Moscow will fall completely apart.

Oh, gosh, who would want that? What parties would want Ankara and Moscow at odds?

“The divide-and-conquer strategy of the American empire is still alive and well. Given the risk of a heightened conflict involving a NATO member who holds a significant stock of US nukes, one can only hope that cooler heads will prevail and avert the ignition of such a regional powder keg.”

Divide and conquer… 

UPDATE:

Putin and Erdogan have been in contact via phone.

The presidents of Turkey and Russia spoke over the phone on Friday, a day after Syrian government air strikes killed 33 Turkish troops, significantly ratcheting up tensions between Ankara and Moscow.

UPDATE 2 and this isn’t a shocker, because the US had met with the Saudis prior to all this coming about in Idlib- US Saudi Joint Support for Idlib Opposition

“The US embassy’s announcement came as a “surprise” to observers especially that Saudi Arabia has been strongly critical of Turkey which supports the Syrian opposition (not all of it) ; accusing it of interfering in Arab affairs and working to expand its influence in Syria, Libya and other regions of the Arab world”

Special Envoy for #Syria Joel Rayburn met with Saudi partners re: Syria, especially the Assad, Russian & IRGC assault on #Idlib. He praised Saudi-U.S. partnership in support of the Syrian opposition and in support of a political solution per UNSCR2254. @USEmbassySyria pic.twitter.com/Ygdogs7KrX

— U.S. Mission to KSA (@USAinKSA) February 27, 2020

 

UPDATE 3: Russian, US top brass discuss situation in Syria in phone call

Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov and Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley discussed the situation in Syria in a phone call on Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry reported.
“The sides exchanged opinions on the situation in Syria and on other issues of mutual interest,” the ministry added.

  From yesterday

• Russia/ Turkey Meetings Outcomes Unknown. Russia and Turkey Bombing One Another? Or Just More Spin?

• Russian and Turkish forces run new joint patrol in rural Al-Darbasiyah

• Psyop! Erdogan and Putin Not Meeting March 5, Was There a Meeting Actually Set For This Date?

The Shadow On The World – America’s Killer Presidents

I have indeed been watching the political circus happening in the United States closely these days…. It is so laughable to see so many gullible Americans not even realize that their nation is NOT their own, and that it does not matter whether or not they vote either “Democrat” aka Communist, or “Republican” for what they get is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the criminal state of Israel in the White House…..

And with that, I want to turn to a brand new article from John Kaminski, that comes from his website at http://www.johnkaminski.org…. This one is entitled: “The Shadow On The World” with the subheading of “America’s Killer Presidents”….. It once again is a must read by everyone, and I have it right here for everyone to see for themselves… I have my usual own thoughts and comments to follow:

The shadow on the world

America’s killer presidents

“I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me

there is something charming in the sound.”
— George Washington

If there exists a simple way to describe the highest ideal of human civilization, it just might be that might does not make right. However, no country in world history has ever survived using that philosophy, which says something quintessentially pathetic about the human species.

For instance, the United States has been attacking Iran for 75 years but has never officially been at war with one of the oldest and most respected nations on Earth. Yet we — the American people dba (doing business as) the United States of America — have been making war on Iran since the end of the Ottoman Empire at the close of World War I, all because of the oil that runs the U.S. war machine and the cutthroat mentality that it encourages.

Iran is an essentially white country with a healthy Jewish population. Yet international Jew moneylenders have earned a sordid reputation of duping white countries into killing each other. They have done this since at least the French Revolution, when for several decades the sadistic Jacobins encouraged the French to butcher each other, which they did.

The really regrettable fact for Americans is that U.S. presidents have slaughtered innumerable innocents, especially throughout the 20th century. This barrage of butchery has not benefited the American people, only the wealthy tyrants whose ill gotten wealth enables them to pick presidents who will do their bidding, which is to plunder the world for profit. These are the Jewish bankers whose philosophy regards all the other non Jewish peoples of the world as farm animals or insects deserving of callous derision and ruthless slaughter, at least according to their rabid rabbis and pornographic holy books.

Recently, our current combover champ in the bloodstained White House, the real estate tycoon Donald Trump (2017- ), assassinated Iranian general Qassem Soleimani (along with ten other senior officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) as they traveled to an impromptu peace conference in Iraq. Earlier in his first term Trump also murdered 50 or so Syrians whom he offed with a missile to impress his paleo Republican allies, notably the notorious traitor John McCain, who is now thankfully dead.

Americans have been persecuting the Iranian people since the end of the Ottoman Empire in World War I; these same Western Deep State powers later installed another murderer known as The Shah to keep the Iranian people in a totalitarian lockdown, which is the hallmark of Western capitalism. Trump continues to threaten Iran with annihilation at the behest of Israel and Saudi Arabia, two demonic Jewish principalities in the Middle East. The former casino owner and TV personality is also in the process of slowly killing Julian Assange, a fearless journalist who merely revealed a series of Washington crimes that many people already knew about anyway.

Trump is currently seeking re-election and his Democratic opponent is expected to be chosen from among two Jew Communists and a homosexual CIA agent.

Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama (2009-17), managed to become the first black president in U.S. history. Ironically, it was Obama who ordered the murder of Muammar Gadhafi, the greatest leader in the history of the African continent — and not just murder him but have him sodomized and tortured in the streets of his own capital. Obama, with the able assistance of his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, also is responsible for the death of one of his own ambassadors, Christopher Stevens, plus three other heroic Americans, in an attempt to cover up weapons the Deep State was shipping from Libya to Syria to start yet another war at the behest of his Israeli masters. Obama also was responsible for the killing of Seal Team 6 naval officers so they couldn’t blow the whistle on the fake capture of the long dead alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden, who actually died in 2001 of kidney disease. Furthermore, three young black men reputed to be former homosexual lovers of this queer president men were all suspiciously murdered separately.

George Bush II (2001-09) deserves all the credit for all those who died on 9/11/2001 although he was incapable of either planning or explaining this false flag catastrophe (“They hate our freedoms,” he famously said.). He is also responsible for the unnecessarily high death toll, several million, during eight years worth of killings in Afghanistan, Iraq and other assorted countries in wars that were all both based on self-serving lies and the theft of valuable minerals, notably oil, as well as poppies used for the CIA’s worldwide heroin industry.

William Jefferson Clinton (1993-2001) is most famed for the deaths of many of his state trooper bodyguards who were assigned to protect him while he was off screwing one woman or another during his terms as governor of Arkansas. Sticking with Harry Truman’s “the buck stops here” comment of many years before, Slick Willie (with the help of Janet Reno and Wesley Clark) also wracked up a bunch of burned up Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas (a few survivors of which are all still in jail and prevented from telling the public what really happened). And Clinton can also take credit for all those adults and children who were blown up in Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in order to get the first Patriot Act passed. Rational Wiki says Bill and his shrewish wife Hillary have killed 140 people. Conservative Daily says celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and young Seth Rich were recent additions to the Clinton hit list for secrets they revealed to the wrong people.

George Bush I (1989-93) was in the White House when Gen. Barry McCaffrey ordered the deaths of 10,000 weaponless Iraqi troops who were retreating under a white flag from Kuwait, some of whom were buried alive by bulldozers. Bush 1 can also take credit for the 4000 people (according to the Panama Human Rights Commission) murdered in Panama during the hunt for renegade president Manuel Noriega, who remains in a Florida jail today, some 30 years later. It was also during Bush’s term when an FBI sniper in the Idaho woods shot Vickie Weaver in the head while she was holding her 18-month-old baby in her arms. The sniper was later given an award for his actions.

The former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan (1981-89) was responsible for millions of deaths by funding both sides in the 8-year long Iran-Iraq war. He also lost 241 Marines in Lebanon when Israel blew up the barracks in which they were housed and flexed his muscle by invading the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. And he is also credited with 248 more deaths of soldiers when a badly maintained military charter plane crashed in Newfoundland.

When Jimmy Carter (1977-81) prohibited the reburning of nuclear fuel he created the monstrous problem of nuclear waste that has yet to be solved. There is still no place to put it, so Carter’s death count is likely to increase in the future. More than 60,000 tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel is stored on the shores of four of the five Great Lakes — in some cases, mere yards from the waterline — in still-growing stockpiles. Scientific research has shown a radioactive cloud from a spent fuel pool fire would force the evacuation of millions of residents in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and Toronto.

Richard Nixon (1969-74) let the Vietnam war fester five years longer than was actually needed, thanks to Rothschild secretary of state Henry Kissinger; he also assisted Israel in the Yom Kippur war. He would have been impeached, ostensibly over the infamous Watergate burglary but really for telling secret Jew evangelist Billy Graham what he really thought about the Jews, but he chose to resign.

It’s funny how you can’t find the true impact of Lyndon Johnson (1963-69) on the Internet. Although he is suspected in the assassination of his predecessor John F. Kennedy, he definitely expanded the Vietnam war — from 16,000 to 500,00 troops, 58,000 of whom wound up dead (the U.S. also killed more than 2 million Vietnamese). Johnson’s lasting sabotage of the American republic derived from devastating legislation drastically increasing the importation of low IQ Third World immigrants who have had a traumatic effect on American society. LBJ also managed to cover up the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, the worst example of presidential treason until Bush 2 covered up 9/11.

Former general and secret Jew Dwight Eisenhower (1953-61) committed the bulk of his needless murders long before he became president. As commander in chief of U.S. forces during World War II (promoted to his post over 4100 officers who were better qualified and more deserving of the post), Eisenhower restrained American forces, which allowed the Soviets to capture the eastern half of Europe. But his really dastardly deeds occurred after the war had ended when he let 2.1 million Germans die of starvation in the fields of France after he refused to feed them and wouldn’t let the Red Cross see them.

Harry Truman (1945-53) saddled the U.S. with its killer reputation by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, killing hundreds of thousands. This wanton act of savagery actually occurred after the war had been essentially decided. The former haberdasher signed the legislation that allowed Israel to steal a key part of the Middle East after receiving large amounts of cash in the White House, allowing a staggering Palestinian death toll that continues rising to this day.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-45) lays claim to being the most ruthlessly deceptive U.S. president of all time (a title he shares with Woodrow Wilson). After forcing Americans to turn in all their gold to the government in 1934, the price of gold was redoubled, making a fortune for Jewish bankers as the rest of America was starving in the aftermath of the Great Depression. FDR called the greatest murderer in modern history “Uncle Joe” as he helped build up the military power of the Soviet Union while turning the U.S. into a socialist state. After kindling WW2 by goading the Japanese into bombing Pearl Harbor, he rejected seven peace proposals from Hitler and then colossally betrayed China after the war by abandoning his nationalist allies and allowing the Communists to come to power.

Woodrow Wilson (1913-21), the so-called Peace Candidate in 1913, was given credit by The New York Times for the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, which has ravaged the American economy in perpetuity and allowed the U.S. to enter World War I. His most famous quote goes like this: “I have unwittingly ruined my country. [. . .] We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world — no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

It was William McKinley (1896-1901) who turned the U.S. into a world power with his aggressive attitude toward foreign affairs. After he was assassinated right after winning his second term, his successor Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09) completed the Spanish American War and added most of the Caribbean, Hawaii and the Philippines to the American empire.
The Philippines in particular was an egregious genocide resulting in more than 200,000 Filipino deaths (some say 2 million before the islands were able to regain their independence).

Abraham Lincoln (1861-65), when he illegally started the War between the States, which wound up resulting in 620,000 American deaths. To this day most Americans think the Civil War was about slavery but the actual reason was the unfair treatment by Northern financiers of the Southern producers of raw materials, a plundering which lasted well into the 20th century and resulted in the nullification of the U.S. Constitution.

Nicknamed “Indian killer” and “Sharp Knife”, in Andrew Jackson’s (1829-37) brutal military campaigns against Indians, Andrew Jackson recommended that troops systematically kill Indian women and children after massacres in order to complete the extermination. The Creeks lost 23 million acres of land in southern Georgia and central Alabama, paving the way for cotton plantation slavery.

As a major general in 1818, Jackson invaded Spanish Florida chasing fugitive slaves who had escaped with the intent of returning them to their “owners,” and sparked the First Seminole War. In 1830, a year after he became president, Jackson signed a law that he had proposed – the Indian Removal Act – which legalized ethnic cleansing. Within seven years 46,000 indigenous people were removed from their homelands east of the Mississippi. Their removal gave 25 million acres of land “to white settlement and to slavery,” according to PBS. The area was home to the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations. In the Trail of Tears alone, 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger and disease on their way to their new, desolate Western prison camps.

Conotocaurius (Town Destroyer) was a nickname given to George Washington (1789-97) by the Iroquois in 1753. Washington was a raw and ambitious 21-year old when he was first sent to the Ohio Valley to confront the growing French presence in the region. His actions sparked the French & Indian War.

“I fortunately escaped without any wound, for the right wing, where I stood, was exposed to and received all the enemy’s fire, and it was the part where the man was killed, and the rest wounded. I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me there is something charming in the sound.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

Today’s presidential lineup

Today we have two Communists and a homosexual CIA agent vying for the right to become America’s next killer president. But since we already have one in office they probably won’t win.

I want to tell you something that will shock a lot of my friends, and that is what I learned from a presidential candidate named Jesse Jackson, who should have been America’s first black president back in 1988 until he was screwed out of it by the pro-white power elite (instead we got Bush 1 over Mike Dukakis, and instead of taking the Peace Dividend that later came with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we got the Gulf War and a new push toward raping the world with power which continues to this day and threatens our existence as a viable species.

Jackson frequently stated that it is no crime — and definitely not treason — to criticize your own government. It is our sacred duty to life to point out immorality and injustice no matter who is committing it, and it is the ultimate act of patriotism to disagree with our warmongering leaders to say this is wrong, no matter who is committing the atrocities, whether it’s U.S. Grant shooting up the Indians or Woodrow Wilson gassing the Germans. This is what Americans have consistently failed to do throughout their bloody history.

America has no conscience, and that is what is destroying it. Unfortunately, the same can be said about the entire human species. In their struggle to survive, people have forgotten what it takes to live. Because without love, compassion and understanding, what remains is really no life at all, only imprisonment by people who don’t really care, dear reader, whether you live or die as long as they make lots of money. If this is what we continue to teach our children, then our future is not very bright, and likely won’t last very long.