Category: zerohedge

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

If we need a date when the West started to go seriously wrong, let’s start with Rome in the early 5th century…

In 2020, we saw the enshrinement of techno-feudalism – one of the overarching themes of my latest book, Raging Twenties.

In lightning speed, the techno-feudalism virus is metastasizing into an even more lethal, wilderness of mirrors variant, where cancel culture is enforced by Big Tech all across the spectrum, science is routinely debased as fake news in social media, and the average citizen is discombobulated to the point of lobotomy.

Giorgio Agamben has defined it as a new totalitarianism.

Top political analyst Alastair Crooke has attempted a sharp breakdown of the broader configuration.

Geopolitically, the Hegemon would even resort to 5G war to maintain its primacy, while seeking moral legitimization via the woke revolution, duly exported to its Western satrapies.

The woke revolution is a culture war – in symbiosis with Big Tech and Big Business – that has smashed the real thing: class war. The atomized working classes, struggling to barely survive, have been left to wallow in anomie.

The great panacea, actually the ultimate “opportunity” offered by Covid-19, is the Great Reset advanced by Herr Schwab of Davos: essentially the replacement of a dwindling manufacturing base by automation, in tandem with a reset of the financial system.

The concomitant wishful thinking envisages a world economy that will “move closer to a cleaner capitalist model”. One of its features is a delightfully benign Council for Inclusive Capitalism in partnership with the Catholic Church.

As much as the pandemic – the “opportunity” for the Reset – was somewhat rehearsed by Event 201 in October 2019, additional strategies are already in place for the next steps, such as Cyber Polygon, which warns against the “key risks of digitalization”. Don’t miss their “technical exercise” on July 9th, when “participants will hone their practical skills in mitigating a targeted supply chain attack on a corporate ecosystem in real time.”

A New Concert of Powers?

Sovereignty is a lethal threat to the ongoing cultural revolution. That concerns the role of the European Union institutions – especially the European Commission – going no holds barred to dissolve the national interests of nation states. And that largely explains the weaponizing, in varying degrees, of Russophobia, Sinophobia and Iranophobia.

The anchoring essay in Raging Twenties analyzes the stakes in Eurasia exactly in terms of the Hegemon pitted against the Three Sovereigns – which are Russia, China and Iran.

It’s under this framework, for instance, that a massive, 270-plus page bill, the Strategic Competition Act , has been recently passed at the US Senate. That goes way beyond geopolitical competition, charting a road map to fight China across the full spectrum. It’s bound to become law, as Sinophobia is a bipartisan sport in D.C.

Hegemon oracles such as the perennial Henry Kissinger at least are taking a pause from their customary Divide and Rule shenanigans to warn that the escalation of “endless” competition may derail into hot war – especially considering AI and the latest generations of smart weapons.

On the incandescent US-Russia front, where Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sees the lack of mutual trust, no to mention respect, as much worse than during the Cold War, analyst Glenn Diesen notes how the Hegemon “strives to convert the security dependence of the Europeans into geoeconomic loyalty”.

That’s at the heart of a make-or-break saga: Nord Stream 2. The Hegemon uses every weapon – including cultural war, where convicted crook Navalny is a major pawn – to derail an energy deal that is essential for Germany’s industrial interests. Simultaneously, pressure increases against Europe buying Chinese technology.

Meanwhile, NATO – which lords over the EU – keeps being built up as a global Robocop, via the NATO 2030 project – even after turning Libya into a militia-ridden wasteland and having its collective behind humiliatingly spanked in Afghanistan.

For all the sound and fury of sanction hysteria and declinations of cultural war, the Hegemon establishment is not exactly blind to the West “losing not only its material dominance but also its ideological sway”.

So the Council on Foreign Relations – in a sort of Bismarckian hangover – is now proposing a New Concert of Powers to deal with “angry populism” and “illiberal temptations”, conducted of course by those malign actors such as “pugnacious Russia” who dare to “challenge the West’s authority”.

As much as this geopolitical proposal may be couched in benign rhetoric, the endgame remains the same: to “restore US leadership”, under US terms. Damn those “illiberals” Russia, China and Iran.

Crooke evokes exactly a Russian and a Chinese example to illustrate where the woke cultural revolution may lead to.

In the case of the Chinese cultural revolution, the end result was chaos, fomented by the Red Guards, which started to wreak their own particular havoc independent of the Communist Party leadership.

And then there’s Dostoevsky in The Possessed, which showed how the secular Russian liberals of the 1840s created the conditions for the emergence of the 1860s generation: ideological radicals bent on burning down the house.

No question: “revolutions” always eat their children. It usually starts with a ruling elite imposing their newfound Platonic Forms on others. Remember Robespierre. He formulated his politics in a very Platonic way – “the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality, the reign of eternal justice” with laws “engraved in the hearts of all men”.

Well, when others disagreed with Robespierre’s vision of Virtue, we all know what happened: the Terror. Just like Plato, incidentally, recommended in Laws. So it’s fair to expect that the children of the woke revolution will eventually be eaten alive by their zeal.

Canceling freedom of speech

As it stands, it’s fair to argue when the “West” started to go seriously wrong – in a cancel culture sense. Allow me to offer the Cynic/Stoic point of view of a 21st century global nomad.

If we need a date, let’s start with Rome – the epitome of the West – in the early 5th century. Follow the money. That’s the time when income from properties owned by temples were transferred to the Catholic Church – thus boosting its economic power. By the end of the century, even gifts to temples were forbidden.

In parallel, a destruction overdrive was in progress – fueled by Christian iconoclasm, ranging from crosses carved in pagan statues to bathhouses converted into churches. Bathing naked? Quelle horreur!

The devastation was quite something. One of the very few survivors was the fabulous bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback, in the Campidoglio/ Capitoline Hill (today it’s housed in the museum). The statue survived only because the pious mobs thought the emperor was Constantine.

The very urban fabric of Rome was destroyed: rituals, the sense of community, singin’ and dancin’. We should remember that people still lower their voices when entering a church.

For centuries we did not hear the voices of the dispossessed. A glaring exception is to be found in an early 6th century text by an Athenian philosopher, quoted by Ramsay MacMullen in Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eight Centuries.

The Greek philosopher wrote that Christians are “a race dissolved in every passion, destroyed by controlled self-indulgence, cringing and womanish in its thinking, close to cowardice, wallowing in all swinishness, debased, content with servitude in security.”

If that sounds like a proto-definition of 21st century Western cancel culture, that’s because it is.

Things were also pretty bad in Alexandria. A Christian mob killed and dismembered the alluring Hypatia, mathematician and philosopher. That de facto ended the era of great Greek mathematics. No wonder Gibbon turned the assassination of Hypatia into a remarkable set piece in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (“In the bloom of beauty, and in the maturity of wisdom, the modest maid refused her lovers and instructed her disciples; the persons most illustrious for their rank or merit were impatient to visit the female philosopher”).

Under Justinian – emperor from 527 to 565 – cancel culture went after paganism no holds barred. One of his laws ended imperial toleration of all religions, which was in effect since Constantine in 313.

If you were a pagan, you’d better get ready for the death penalty. Pagan teachers – especially philosophers – were banned. They lost their parrhesia: their license to teach (here is Foucault’s brilliant analysis).

Parrhesia – loosely translated as “frank criticism” – is a tremendously serious issue: for no less than a thousand years, this was the definition of freedom of speech (italics mine).

There you go: first half of the 6th century. This was when freedom of speech was canceled in the West.

The last Egyptian temple – to Isis, in an island in southern Egypt – was shut down in 526. The legendary Plato’s Academy – with no less than 900 years of teaching in its curriculum – was shut down in Athens in 529.

Guess where the Greek philosophers chose to go into exile: Persia.

Those were the days – in the early 2nd century – when the greatest Stoic, Epictetus, a freed slave from Phrygia, admirer of both Socrates and Diogenes, was consulted by an emperor, Hadrian; and became the role model of another emperor, Marcus Aurelius.

History tells us that the Greek intellectual tradition simply did not fade away in the West. It was a target of cancel culture.

The leaked content of a fiery anti-China speech and secretive briefing to elite military personnel by one of Australia’s top generals has landed on the front pages of major newspapers from Sydney to Melbourne to London on Tuesday. The confidential address issued by Major-General Adam Findlay, who was then commander of Australia’s special forces and currently advises the Australian Defense Force, had focused on a coming war with China which he said is a “high likelihood”. Publication of the speech’s full key controversial contents is now threatening to plunge China-Australia relations past breaking point.

The April 2020 briefing given to the country’s most elite special forces units was obtained and first published by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and quickly spread to the front page of London’s The Times. The general’s words were leaked by anonymous sources. He had detailed that China is now engaged in “grey zone” covert operations against Australian and Western allied interests and that Aussie defense forces must prepare for the “high likelihood” of this turning into direct war.

Major-General Findlay was heard in the leaked briefing saying:

“Who do you reckon the main (regional) threat is?” General Findlay asked his troops and officers before answering: “China.”

He continued: “OK, so if China is a threat, how many special forces brigades in China? You should know there are 26,000 Chinese SOF (Special Operations Forces) personnel.”

The revelation comes at a moment of hardened and tense relations with Beijing on trade, diplomatic, and even military fronts, despite China long being Australia’s biggest single trading partner.

The Sydney Morning Herald summarized further of the leaked briefing’s contents as follows:

They say General Findlay told his troops that, if the threat of conflict was realised, the ADF needed to rely not only on traditional air, land and sea capabilities but also on Australia’s ability to use cyber and space warfare.

He also highlighted the need for the ADF to reassert its presence and play “first grade” in south-east Asia and the south-west Pacific, describing how the military had uncovered information showing China was seeking to exploit “our [Australia’s] absence” in the region.

“We need to make sure we don’t lose momentum… get back in the region,” General Findlay said, highlighting Australia’s close ties to Indonesia.

In words sure to add more fuel to the fire of Chinese officials’ outrage, Findlay was further described as saying China knew “Western democracies have peace, and then, when they cross a line, we get really angry.”

“Then we start bombing people. China said, let’s be smarter. Let’s just play below the threshold, before it goes to war,” The Sydney Morning Herald quoted him as saying.

And more:

General Findlay said that to “stop war from breaking out” Australia’s military must compete against the “coercive constraints” imposed on Australia by China. In undertaking its own grey zone missions, Australia’s aim was to “put the adversary at a disadvantage, put us at an advantage” and avoid war.

He’s certainly not the first top Aussie official to strongly suggest that a near-future war is coming, but it’s being viewed as more serious given it was a classified briefing to special forces commanders, and thus can’t be chalked up to a politician expressing opinion or speculation, however provocative. 

For example just the day before the leaked contents were exposed Tuesday, Senator Jim Molan wrote in an op-ed in The Australian newspaper that he believes a war is “likely”…

It wouldn’t start as a direct war between Australia and China, but would more likely be a war that Australia could find itself fighting on behalf of its most powerful ally, Senator Molan said.

“Many ordinary Australians, not just those who have personally experienced global conflict, are awakening to the sombre reality that war is not just possible in our region, but likely,” he wrote.

“Armed to the teeth, adversaries are maneuvering ships and planes around each other, intimidating and threatening, loaded with real weapons of war, forging alliances.”

He said Australia would be making a mistake if leaders do not act now to strengthen a military that is not capable of winning a war against “a peer opponent”.

Of course, the “most powerful ally” being referenced here is the United States, revealing the apparent increased anxiety in Canberra that the confrontational attitude between Washington and Beijing being played out even on the ground in places like the South China Sea will inevitably drag Australia into the mix.

There’s also the distinct possibility that all of this “drums of war” rhetoric of late coming out of Australian officials’ mouths and pens may be part of a coordinated effort at drastically increasing defense spending and psychologically preparing the public for a more confrontational bit of muscle-flexing with Beijing.

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“They were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.”

– Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The U.S. government, in its pursuit of so-called monsters, has itself become a monster.

This is not a new development, nor is it a revelation.

This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

Mind you, there is no greater good when the government is involved. There is only greater greed for money and power.

Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government.

These horrors have been meted out against humans and animals alike.

For all intents and purposes, “we the people” have become lab rats in the government’s secret experiments.

Fifty years from now, we may well find out the whole sordid truth behind this COVID-19 pandemic. However, this isn’t intended to be a debate over whether COVID-19 is a legitimate health crisis or a manufactured threat. It is merely to acknowledge that such crises can—and are—manipulated by governments in order to expand their powers.

As we have learned, it is entirely possible for something to be both a genuine menace to the nation’s health and security and a menace to freedom.

This is a road the United States has been traveling for many years now. Indeed, grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions have become synonymous with the U.S. government, which has meted out untold horrors against humans and animals alike.

For instance, did you know that the U.S. government has been buying hundreds of dogs and cats from “Asian meat markets” as part of a gruesome experiment into food-borne illnesses? The cannibalistic experiments involve killing cats and dogs purchased from Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, China and Ethiopia, and then feeding the dead remains to laboratory kittens, bred in government laboratories for the express purpose of being infected with a disease and then killed.

It gets more gruesome.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been removing parts of dogs’ brains to see how it affects their breathing; applying electrodes to dogs’ spinal cords (before and after severing them) to see how it impacts their cough reflexes; and implanting pacemakers in dogs’ hearts and then inducing them to have heart attacks (before draining their blood). All of the laboratory dogs are killed during the course of these experiments.

It’s not just animals that are being treated like lab rats by government agencies.

“We the people” have also become the police state’s guinea pigs: to be caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.

Back in 2017, FEMA “inadvertently” exposed nearly 10,000 firefighters, paramedics and other responders to a deadly form of ricin during simulated bioterrorism response sessions. In 2015, it was discovered that an Army lab had been “mistakenly” shipping deadly anthrax to labs and defense contractors for a decade.

While these particular incidents have been dismissed as “accidents,” you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.

At the time, the government reasoned that it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients, and poor blacks.

In Alabama, for example, 600 black men with syphilis were allowed to suffer without proper medical treatment in order to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis. In California, older prisoners had testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts implanted in them to test their virility. In Connecticut, mental patients were injected with hepatitis.

In Maryland, sleeping prisoners had a pandemic flu virus sprayed up their noses. In Georgia, two dozen “volunteering” prison inmates had gonorrhea bacteria pumped directly into their urinary tracts through the penis. In Michigan, male patients at an insane asylum were exposed to the flu after first being injected with an experimental flu vaccine. In Minnesota, 11 public service employee “volunteers” were injected with malaria, then starved for five days.

As the Associated Press reports, “The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs … because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.”

Moreover, “Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the ’60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.”

Media blackouts, propaganda, spin. Sound familiar?

How many government incursions into our freedoms have been blacked out, buried under “entertainment” news headlines, or spun in such a way as to suggest that anyone voicing a word of caution is paranoid or conspiratorial?

Unfortunately, these incidents are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the atrocities the government has inflicted on an unsuspecting populace in the name of secret experimentation.

For instance, there was the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. As NPR reports, “All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren’t recorded on the subjects’ official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn’t tell doctors what happened to them.”

And then there was the CIA’s MKULTRA program in which hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel were dosed with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. As Time reports, “before the documentation and other facts of the program were made public, those who talked of it were frequently dismissed as being psychotic.”

Now one might argue that this is all ancient history and that the government today is different from the government of yesteryear, but has the U.S. government really changed?

Has the government become any more humane, any more respectful of the rights of the citizenry? Has it become any more transparent or willing to abide by the rule of law? Has it become any more truthful about its activities? Has it become any more cognizant of its appointed role as a guardian of our rights?

Or has the government simply hunkered down and hidden its nefarious acts and dastardly experiments under layers of secrecy, legalism and obfuscations? Has it not become wilier, more slippery, more difficult to pin down?

Having mastered the Orwellian art of Doublespeak and followed the Huxleyan blueprint for distraction and diversion, are we not dealing with a government that is simply craftier and more conniving that it used to be?

Consider this: after revelations about the government’s experiments spanning the 20th century spawned outrage, the government began looking for human guinea pigs in other countries, where “clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules.”

In Guatemala, prisoners and patients at a mental hospital were infected with syphilis, “apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease.” In Uganda, U.S.-funded doctors “failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study… even though it would have protected their newborns.” Meanwhile, in Nigeria, children with meningitis were used to test an antibiotic named Trovan. Eleven children died and many others were left disabled.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Case in point: back in 2016, it was announced that scientists working for the Department of Homeland Security would begin releasing various gases and particles on crowded subway platforms as part of an experiment aimed at testing bioterror airflow in New York subways.

The government insisted that the gases released into the subways by the DHS were nontoxic and did not pose a health risk. It’s in our best interests, they said, to understand how quickly a chemical or biological terrorist attack might spread. And look how cool the technology is—said the government cheerleaders—that scientists can use something called DNATrax to track the movement of microscopic substances in air and food. (Imagine the kinds of surveillance that could be carried out by the government using trackable airborne microscopic substances you breathe in or ingest.)

Mind you, this is the same government that in 1949 sprayed bacteria into the Pentagon’s air handling system, then the world’s largest office building. In 1950, special ops forces sprayed bacteria from Navy ships off the coast of Norfolk and San Francisco, in the latter case exposing all of the city’s 800,000 residents.

In 1953, government operatives staged “mock” anthrax attacks on St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg using generators placed on top of cars. Local governments were reportedly told that “‘invisible smokescreen[s]’ were being deployed to mask the city on enemy radar.” Later experiments covered territories as wide-ranging as Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas.

In 1965, the government’s experiments in bioterror took aim at Washington’s National Airport, followed by a 1966 experiment in which army scientists exposed a million subway NYC passengers to airborne bacteria that causes food poisoning.

And this is the same government that has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

So, no, I don’t think the government’s ethics have changed much over the years. It’s just taken its nefarious programs undercover.

The question remains: why is the government doing this? The answer is always the same: money, power and total domination.

It’s the same answer no matter which totalitarian regime is in power.

The mindset driving these programs has, appropriately, been likened to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews. As the Holocaust Museum recounts, Nazi physicians “conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent.”

The Nazi’s unethical experiments ran the gamut from freezing experiments using prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia, tests to determine the maximum altitude for parachuting out of a plane, injecting prisoners with malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis, exposing prisoners to phosgene and mustard gas, and mass sterilization experiments.

The horrors being meted out against the American people can be traced back, in a direct line, to the horrors meted out in Nazi laboratories. In fact, following the second World War, the U.S. government recruited many of Hitler’s employees, adopted his protocols, embraced his mindset about law and order and experimentation, and implemented his tactics in incremental steps.

Sounds far-fetched, you say? Read on. It’s all documented.

As historian Robert Gellately recounts, the Nazi police state was initially so admired for its efficiency and order by the world powers of the day that J. Edgar Hoover, then-head of the FBI, actually sent one of his right-hand men, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s secret police, the Gestapo.

The FBI was so impressed with the Nazi regime that, according to the New York Times, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen.

All told, thousands of Nazi collaborators—including the head of a Nazi concentration camp, among others—were given secret visas and brought to America by way of Project Paperclip. Subsequently, they were hired on as spies, informants and scientific advisers, and then camouflaged to ensure that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown. All the while, thousands of Jewish refugees were refused entry visas to the U.S. on the grounds that it could threaten national security.

Adding further insult to injury, American taxpayers have been paying to keep these ex-Nazis on the U.S. government’s payroll ever since. And in true Gestapo fashion, anyone who has dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s illicit Nazi ties has found himself spied upon, intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national security.

As if the government’s covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World War II wasn’t bad enough, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have since fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics, and have used them repeatedly against American citizens.

It’s certainly easy to denounce the full-frontal horrors carried out by the scientific and medical community within a despotic regime such as Nazi Germany, but what do you do when it’s your own government that claims to be a champion of human rights all the while allowing its agents to engage in the foulest, bases and most despicable acts of torture, abuse and experimentation?

When all is said and done, this is not a government that has our best interests at heart.

This is not a government that values us.

Perhaps the answer lies in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s influential 1949 film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. In the film, set in a post-WW II Vienna, rogue war profiteer Harry Lime has come to view human carnage with a callous indifference, unconcerned that the diluted penicillin he’s been trafficking underground has resulted in the tortured deaths of young children.

Challenged by his old friend Holly Martins to consider the consequences of his actions, Lime responds, “In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we?”

“Have you ever seen any of your victims?” asks Martins.

“Victims?” responds Limes, as he looks down from the top of a Ferris wheel onto a populace reduced to mere dots on the ground. “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax — the only way you can save money nowadays.”

This is how the U.S. government sees us, too, when it looks down upon us from its lofty perch.

To the powers-that-be, the rest of us are insignificant specks, faceless dots on the ground.

To the architects of the American police state, we are not worthy or vested with inherent rights. This is how the government can justify treating us like economic units to be bought and sold and traded, or caged rats to be experimented upon and discarded when we’ve outgrown our usefulness.

To those who call the shots in the halls of government, “we the people” are merely the means to an end.

“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become obsolete, undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that, in the words of Rod Serling, “has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom.”

In this sense, we are all Romney Wordsworth, the condemned man in Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”

“The Obsolete Man” speaks to the dangers of a government that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State. Yet—and here’s the kicker—this is where the government through its monstrous inhumanity also becomes obsolete. As Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete.”

How do you defeat a monster?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you start by recognizing the monster for what it is.

China has proclaimed bold goals of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2060. 

But if the country is to meet its climate goals, it is going to have to shut down 600 coal fired power plants and replace them with renewable energy, a new article from The Guardian points out.

A company called TransitionZero performed an analysis that the switch to renewables like wind and solar could also save $1.6 trillion over the time period, since renewables are now cheaper than coal.

China’s coal consumption has long been in focus of the rest of the world. Despite its proclaimed goals, China “has ramped up plans for new coal-fired power stations in an effort to spur economic growth after the recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic,” the report notes.

Global climate “experts” are afraid that, despite the long term goals, China’s next 10 years of coal power will overdraw the world’s global carbon budget (which we guess is an actual thing?)

Matthew Gray, the co-chief executive of TransitionZero, commented: “If China fails on coal, the rest of the world will fail on containing dangerous climate change. But the stars are now somewhat aligning on breaking China’s addiction to coal.”

He also says the transition could be tough, as coal is “deeply embedded” in China’s economy and society. But Gray says renewables could create as many jobs as would be lost from shuttering the country’s coal plants. “Moving to net zero will be jobs intensive,” he said.

Al Gore, who wrote a forward to the analysis (of course), stated: “This shows that not only can China meet their climate goals, the country and its leaders can accelerate them rapidly. The economic opportunity presented by a transition from coal to clean energy shows that climate action and economic growth go hand in hand.”

UN Secretary General António Guterres has also “urged” the country to move away from coal. China has plans to submit a new climate plan under the 2015 Paris Climate Accord this November.

Authored by John Hirschauer & Chandler Lasch via RealClearPolitics (emphasis ours),

In the internet age, articles can be revised after publication almost without a trace. “Stealth editing,” the practice of revising a published piece without disclosing that is has been edited, poses an interesting challenge to fact-checking outlets and the integrity of their investigations. Last month, fact-checkers relied on an op-ed in USA Today written by Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams to evaluate critics’ claims about Abrams’ position on recent Georgia boycotts. However, they didn’t know the piece had been stealth-edited after a key development in the story.

​

On March 31, USA Today published Abrams’ op-ed assessing the merits of business boycotts after Gov. Brian Kemp signed what she described as a “racist, classist [election] bill” into law. While Abrams cautioned that she did not think a boycott was necessary “yet,” she added that until “we hear clear, unequivocal statements that show Georgia-based companies get what’s at stake, I can’t argue with an individual’s choice to opt for their competition.”

Three days later, Major League Baseball announced that it would be pulling the All-Star Game out of Atlanta due to Georgia’s alleged infringement on its citizens’ voting rights. USA Today allowed Abrams to update the op-ed on April 6 in the aftermath of MLB’s decision. The resulting op-ed was substantially different from the March 31 version. For example, the paragraph in which Abrams originally declared that she couldn’t “argue with an individual’s choice to opt for” certain Georgia-based companies’ competitors had been revised to appear much less sympathetic to boycotts. It now read this way:

The impassioned (and understandable) response to the racist, classist bill that is now the law of Georgia is to boycott in order to achieve change. Events that can bring millions of dollars to struggling families hang in the balance. Major League Baseball pulled both its All-Star Game and its draft from Georgia, which could cost our state nearly $100 million in lost revenue.

Abrams also added a paragraph emphasizing that boycotts “cost jobs” and that the costs of a boycott “must be shared rather than borne by those who are least resilient.” For more than two weeks after the piece was revised, USA Today let the op-ed sit on its website without an editor’s note. An archived version of the op-ed from April 21 does not show the editor’s note, which only appeared a day or two later. A version from April 23 included a note that read, “This column was originally published before the MLB moved the All-Star Game out of Atlanta. It was updated after that decision.”

On April 27, a spokesperson for Gannett, USA Today’s parent company, issued a statement that said, “We regret the oversight in updating the Stacey Abrams column. As soon as we recognized there was no editor’s note, we added it to the page to reflect her changes. We have reviewed our procedures to ensure this does not occur again.”

The next day, following criticism of USA Today by numerous outlets, the op-ed was again updated with a new editor’s note and a link to the archived version. The note currently states, “This column originally published online on March 31. On April 2, the MLB announced it was moving the 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta. In advance of running the column in print editions, USA TODAY asked Stacey Abrams to update her piece to reflect that news.”

The stealth edits went unnoticed by some fact-checkers, who cited the USA Today piece prior to the addition of the editor’s note. In an April 21 essay called “What Joe Biden, Stacey Abrams and Georgia senators said about a MLB boycott,” PolitiFact’s Amy Sherman criticized Kemp and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro for claiming that Abrams initially supported boycotts in Georgia and later changed her mind. “But Abrams repeatedly spoke against boycotts before and after Major League Baseball’s decision to pull the All-Star Game from Georgia,” Sherman wrote.

As evidence, PolitiFact cited Abrams’ USA Today op-ed, and quoted her revised assertions in the stealth version: “Boycotts invariably also cost jobs. To be sustainable, the pain of deprivation must be shared rather than borne by those who are least resilient. They also require a long-term commitment to action.”

Sherman initially failed to recognize that these comments did not exist in the original op-ed. On April 27, after a RealClearPolitics reporter reached out for comment, PolitiFact added an editor’s note and a disclaimer following the above quote, noting, “Abrams originally wrote the op-ed March 31, but it was updated to include those comments days after MLB’s announcement. Her initial op-ed also raised concerns about boycotts.”

Twitter also used the revised version of Abrams’s op-ed to dismiss claims that she had supported the Georgia boycotts. In a curated item that ran on the site on April 22, Twitter asserted that Abrams had “expressed opposition to a financial boycott of” Georgia “according to journalists and fact-checkers.” Twitter included a quote from Abrams’ altered USA Today column that did not appear in the original version without noting the revision. It also included a tweet from PolitiFact linking to Sherman’s fact check, which, at that point, still did not have an editor’s note appended to it acknowledging that USA Today had revised the piece.

Both PolitiFact and Twitter cited claims made by Abrams after the MLB’s decision and presented them as though they had occurred before the league pulled the All-Star Game out of Atlanta. The moral of this story is that stealth-editing represents a whole new degree of difficulty for fact-checkers, who have now been put on notice that they must be on guard against such deceptive practices as they pursue their mission of holding politicians accountable to the truth.

 

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has majorly backtracked from statements made by treasurer Josh Frydenberg – who said last week that citizens trying to return home from COVID-stricken India will face fines and jail time, after two Australian cricketers circumvented a travel ban after traveling from India to Qatar before returning home, despite the government banning all direct flights from India.

“I think the likelihood of any of that occurring is pretty much zero,” Morrison said on Tuesday, adding that it was “highly unlikely” that anyone would be jailed for skirting the ban, according to AFP (via Yahoo).

There are approximately 9,000 Australians believed to be in India right now, which has been reporting hundreds of thousands of new COVID-19 cases per day as the death toll soars.

Among those trapped are some of Australia’s most high profile sporting stars — cricketers playing in the lucrative Indian Premier League.

Commentator and former Test cricket star Michael Slater was among those who pilloried Morrison’s decision, saying it was a “disgrace”.

“Blood on your hands PM. How dare you treat us like this,” he tweeted. “If our Government cared for the safety of Aussies they would allow us to get home.” -AFP

If our Government cared for the safety of Aussies they would allow us to get home. It’s a disgrace!! Blood on your hands PM. How dare you treat us like this. How about you sort out quarantine system. I had government permission to work on the IPL but I now have government neglect

— Michael Slater (@mj_slats) May 3, 2021

Morrison rejected the notion that he had blood on his hands, calling it “absurd,” and saying “The buck stops here when it comes to these decisions, and I’m going to take decisions that I believe are going to protect Australia from a third wave.”

“I’m working to bring them home safely,” he added, indicating that repatriation flights could begin soon after May 15.

Prominent civil rights groups denounced the government flight ban, including Sky News commentator Andrew Bolt who said it “stinks of racism.”

At present, there is a blanket ban on travel to-and-from the country unless travelers secure an exemption.

Non-residents are mostly banned from entering and anyone who does come into the country must carry out a mandatory 14-day hotel quarantine.

But that system has come under increasing strain as the virus has jumped from quarantine facilities and caused a series of outbreaks in the largely unvaccinated community.

The conservative prime minister faces reelection in the next 12 months, and had hoped Australia’s relatively successful handling of the pandemic would propel him to victory. -AFP

In short, ‘nevermind.’

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We recently discussed how the plea agreement with a BLM protester (who tried to cut the brake lines on a police vehicle) may indicate a significant shift from the Trump Administration in prosecuting violent protesters.  New figures out of Portland would indicate that there is such a major shift occurring. The Justice Department are dropping 58 of the 97 criminal charges brought after the Portland riots, including assaults on officers.

I previously criticized the federalization of these protest cases. Local police were clearly relying on the federal government – as opposed to their own local prosecutors – to address violent protesters. Yet I was also critical of the role of local officials in dismissing and even in some cases fueling such violence with their rhetoric or inaction. 

There is clearly a reluctance by many local officials to prosecute violent protesters. Indeed, cities like Atlanta have dropped charges against protesters.

Most of the charges brought for violent protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd were dismissed.

One of those defendants who saw their charges dropped in Portland was David Bouchard who admitted that he put a Customs and Border Protection officer in a chokehold.

Likewise, the Justice Department dismissed the charge against Charles Comfort who was indicted by a grand jury of civil disorder for twice charging at Portland Police Bureau officers and hitting them with a makeshift shield and kicking a third officer.

Once again, I remain opposed to using federal charges in many of these local cases, but the decision was to pursue these individuals in the federal system. Now they will walk without any prosecution. There are reportedly 31 deferred resolution agreements (DRA) signed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Portland, including 19 charged with felonies and some involving alleged assaults on federal officers.

We recently saw a belated change in the rhetoric of some leaders like Portland’s Mayor Ted Wheeler finally condemning anarchists (though he avoided specifically mentioning Portland’s homegrown Antifa group). While such leaders previously blamed the Trump Administration for the protests, they have continued unabated after the election, including continued rioting in Portland.

There are a wide array of apps and life hacks out there designed to help regulate personal internet use and media consumption, but, as Visual Capitalist’s Aran Ali notes, the data suggests they haven’t been working.

Today, we consume more media than at any point in time in the last decade.

 

This data from Recode looks at how many minutes U.S. adults spend on various forms of media, comparing mobile, desktop, radio, television, and magazines.

How Many Minutes are Spent on Media?

In 2021, collective media consumption continues its upward trajectory, and is set to be at the highest it’s ever been. In 2021, overall media consumption among U.S. adults is estimated to be around 666 minutes per day, or 11.1 hours—a 20.2% increase from 2011.

Although media consumption has grown overall, this is predominantly driven by mobile usage. In fact, every category with the exception of mobile has shrunk from their respective peaks. Mobile on the other hand, has grown a whopping 460% in 10 years, from an average daily use of 45 minutes to a staggering 252 minutes.

Consumption by Generation

Disparities in media consumption have a generational aspect that’s worth noting, as well. For instance, older Americans like Baby Boomers still consume media routinely through television. On the other hand, younger cohorts like Millennials and Gen Z tend to consume more through mobile.

Increasing internet use has come with criticism, and is said to be partially responsible for our waning attention spans. With only 1,440 minutes in a day, it remains unknown exactly how many minutes we will continue to direct towards mobile use. But with figures growing 9% last year, we may not have yet reached the peak.

Submitted by South Front,

Military bases of the United States in Iraq are suffering from poor weather conditions, as it would seem it’s raining rockets in the first days of May and late April.

Late on May 2nd, the US Camp Victory in Iraq came under rocket fire. Two rockets hit the site near the Baghdad airport. The third shell was reportedly intercepted by the C-RAM anti-aircraft system.

It was the second attack on Camp Victory in the last 10 days.

Not too long after, on May 3d, the Balad Air Base in the Salah al-Din province that houses Iraqi forces and US contractors was targeted by another rocket attack. The commander of the base, Div. Gen. Sahi Abdul Ameri, said that a total of 9-10 explosions were heard, but only three self-made rockets exploded on the territory of the base.

The rockets reportedly were 107mm Katyushas. Alleged photos show that the launchers were labeled with photos of assassinated Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Popular Mobilization Units commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

Still, the Pentagon said the increasing frequency of attacks against US forces in Iraq does not mean that effective measures are not taken to protect them, adding that the targeted base only hosted only by Iraqi troops and contractors working for an American company.

Alongside this, almost daily IED attacks target convoys moving logistic supplies and equipment for the US-led coalition all over Iraq. Most recently, on May 2nd, two separate convoys were targeted. Pro-Iranian groups are suspected of carrying out the attacks.

The recent strikes may be in response to explosions at a large chemical plant located near the city of Qom in central Iran, on May 2nd.

A spokesman for the Qom Fire Department told the semi-official ISNA news agency that the fire had been prevented from reaching nearby alcohol tanks which would have caused a “very large accident” if they had caught fire.

There is no official release of what caused the explosion, but it did happen just as there were some reports that some progress had been made in Vienna in negotiations to salvage the Iranian Nuclear Deal. On May 1st, Iran revealed that the US had agreed to lift some sanctions in order to revive the 2015 deal.

Tel Aviv has been attempting to hinder the talks between the US and Iran for a while.

Last month, an act of sabotage targeted Iran’s uranium enrichment facility in Natanz. Israeli intelligence was blamed for this.

The vicious cycle that is the situation around the Iran Nuclear Deal continues, and it is likely that the situation could deteriorate further if Washington and Tehran reach a deal Tel Aviv is unsatisfied with.

La Nina, the cooling of the equatorial Pacific waters that creates volatile weather worldwide, has produced dryness for California and contributed to a record-setting year of wildfires in the state in 2020. This week, Red Flag Warnings have been posted in the Bay Area, an ominous warning of things to come, according to local news ABC7. 

California’s top fire officials warn conditions are already ripe for wildfires – way ahead of schedule – and could quickly transpire into the worst wildfire season on record – even outpacing last year, where 9,639 fires burned 4,397,809 acres, more than 4% of the state’s 100 million acres of land.

“Every acre in California can and will burn someday,” said CAL FIRE Director Thom Porter. “I need not say here in the Bay Area how devastating it is when you’re hillsides are on fire, some of your communities are on fire, and you’re deep in smoke that looks like Armageddon for a week on end.”

New concerns come as La Nina continues to produce dryness for the state and other surrounding states. Droughts in California, Southwest states, and Texas are some of the worst on record.  

The latest warning comes months after the worst wildfire season on record. 

“Since it was such a monumental fire year last year, we saw 32 counties fall under a major presidential disaster declaration,” said CAL Office of Emergency Services Director Mark Ghilarducci.

With an extremely sparse rainy season and temperatures above 90 degrees, there’s concern this upcoming fire season could be pulled forward much earlier, with risks of the peak fire season in June. 

“There are millions of dying trees and all of those pose hazards across California for all of us,” said Robert Baird, chief for the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region.

CALFIRE is already preparing for what could be a fiery year. The fire department is ramping up personnel and added five new helicopters. 

If the 2021 fire season is anything like last year – then watch out; the gates of hell could be opening up this summer.

Would a more intense fire season drive out more Californians to live in other states?