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The Making of a Global Dictator

Posted by M. C. on June 1, 2022

During a 2018 presentation at the annual World Economic Forum meeting, titled, Will the Future Be Human? Harari said he sees a future where info-tech and bio-tech merge, allowing the hacking of humans.

Harari claims the algorithms will know humans better than they know themselves.

The WEF philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari, says “humans are [good] for nothing and elites need to surveil them digitally.

By M Dowling
Independent Sentinel

Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), is a former member of the UN Advisory Board on Sustainable Development. He is also the leader of “The Great Reset”, and sees himself as the dictator of the new world order.

The WEF meets annually in Davos, Switzerland, and includes CEOs, cultural and political leaders, billionaires, and other globalists of renown.

They discuss gender equality, climate change, and the reworking of capitalism into a more feudalistic economic system they call stakeholder capitalism.

The WEF website states, “The non-profit organization’s aim is to engage the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.”

Transitioning Capitalism Into Socialism

The “Great Reset” is a term coined in a 2011 book by economist Richard Florida and enthusiastically embraced by Schwab in the context of the United Nation’s Agenda 2030.

They plan to determine “the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models, and the management of the global commons.” They plan to transform the social, economic, and political structure of the world’s “operating systems” – capitalism, the free market, and democracy.

“Stakeholder capitalism” – with the private sector tightly controlled by the government – will replace capitalism. The free market is considered unfair and skewed to the advantage of an exploitive business class. Democracy is regarded as an inefficient political arrangement. It fails since it relies on the incapacity of the common man to know what’s best for him.

Dictators are arrogant.

The WEF philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari, says “humans are [good] for nothing and elites need to surveil them digitally.

During a 2018 presentation at the annual World Economic Forum meeting, titled, Will the Future Be Human? Harari said he sees a future where info-tech and bio-tech merge, allowing the hacking of humans.

Harari claims the algorithms will know humans better than they know themselves.

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The Vicious Cycle Fueled By America’s Toxic Cult of Violence

Posted by M. C. on June 1, 2022

When you start to connect the dots, they lead right back to the American police state and the war-drenched, violence-imbued, profit-driven military industrial complex, both of which continue to dominate, dictate and shape almost every aspect of our lives.

by John W. Whitehead

“Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics.”—Professor Henry A. GirouxOur prolonged exposure to the toxic culture of the American police state is deadly.
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We are caught in a vicious cycle.

With alarming regularity, the nation is being subjected to a heartbreaking spate of violence that terrorizes the populace, fractures communities, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Mass shootings have taken place in schools, on college campuses, movie theaters, nightclubs, grocery stores, concert venues, bars, workplaces, churches, on military bases, and in government offices. In almost every instance, the shooters were dressed in military-style gear and armed with military-style weapons.

Take the latest shooting that took place in Uvalde, Texas, when 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, wearing body armor and carrying a rifle, walked into Robb Elementary School and opened fire, leaving at least 19 children and two teachers dead.

This Uvalde shooting took place ten days after another 18-year-old man, heavily armed and wearing tactical gear (including a tactical helmet and plated armor), opened fire in a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y, killing 10 people.

In 2018, a 19-year-old former student armed with a gas mask, smoke grenades, magazines of ammunition, and an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle opened fire on students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., leaving 17 people dead.

Ten years ago, 20-year-old Adam Lanza—wearing body armor and black clothing, and armed with military-style weapons—opened fire on students and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., leaving 26 dead. Prior to the shooting, Lanza reportedly spent his days “playing violent video games amid posters showcasing military equipment.”

According to an FBI report issued the day before the Uvalde shooting, these kinds of “active shooter attacks” have doubled in recent years.

As expected in the wake of such tragedies, there has been a vocal outcry for enacting more strident gun control measures, more mental health checks, and heightened security measures.

Yet surely there’s more to these shootings than just easy access to weapons and mental illness.

Ask yourself: Why do these mass shootings keep happening? Who are these shooters modelling themselves after? Where are they finding the inspiration for their weaponry and tactics? Whose stance and techniques are they mirroring?

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Tucker Carlson: Elizabeth Warren’s Latest Plan to Make Herself More Powerful

Posted by M. C. on May 31, 2022

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In Stunning Shift, WaPo Admits Catastrophic-Conditions, Collapsing-Morale Of Ukraine Front-Line Forces

Posted by M. C. on May 31, 2022

https://www.zerohedge.com/military/wapo-stunning-first-admits-catastrophic-conditions-collapsing-morale-ukraine-forces-front

By Tyler Durden

Zero Hedge

With Russia’s war in Ukraine now in its fourth month, mainstream media consumers have been treated to seemingly endless headlines and analysis of Russia’s extensive military losses. At the same time Ukrainian forces have tended to be lionized and their battlefield prowess romanticized, with essentially zero public information so far being given which details up-to-date Ukrainian force casualties, set-backs, and equipment losses.

But for the first time The Washington Post is out with a surprisingly dire and negative assessment of how US-backed and equipped Ukrainian forces are actually fairing. Gone is the rosy idealizing lens through which each and every encounter with the Russians is typically portrayed. WaPo correspondent and author of the new report Sudarsan Raghavan underscores of the true situation that “Ukrainian leaders project an image of military invulnerability against Russia. But commanders offer a more realistic portrait of the war, where outgunned volunteers describe being abandoned by their military brass and facing certain death at the front.”

As many careful and less idealistic observers suspected the whole time, a steady stream of both wartime propaganda and one-sided social media feeds where it seems the only tanks being blown up are Russian ones has served to present a very skewed portrayal of the battlefield to the Western public. While it’s perhaps easier to get sucked into this pro-Ukraine bias based on the innumerable so-called open source intelligence self-anointed ‘experts’ on Twitter, this is less so if one wades into Telegram, where a flood of uncensored videos from both sides gives a truer picture, as the fresh report seems to also suggest.

The Washington Post report belatedly admits the avalanche of propaganda based in a pro-Kiev, pro-West narrative from the outset: “Videos of assaults on Russian tanks or positions are posted daily on social media. Artists are creating patriotic posters, billboards and T-shirts. The postal service even released stamps commemorating the sinking of a Russian warship in the Black Sea.”

The report then pivots to the reality of an undertrained, poorly commanded and equipped, rag-tag force of mostly volunteers in the East who find themselves increasingly surrounded by the numerically superior Russian military which has penetrated almost the entire Donbas region. “Ukraine, like Russia, has provided scant information about deaths, injuries or losses of military equipment. But after three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries and desertions,” the report reads as it follows one particular battalion.

The report’s sources speak out despite threat of being court-martialed amid a heavily controlled information flow:

“War breaks people down,” said Serhiy Haidai, head of the regional war administration in Luhansk province, acknowledging many volunteers were not properly trained because Ukrainian authorities did not expect Russia to invade. But he maintained that all soldiers are taken care of: “They have enough medical supplies and food. The only thing is there are people that aren’t ready to fight.”

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3NlbnNpdGl2ZV9tZWRpYV9pbnRlcnN0aXRpYWxfMTM5NjMiOnsiYnVja2V0IjoiaW50ZXJzdGl0aWFsIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH0sInRmd190d2VldF9yZXN1bHRfbWlncmF0aW9uXzEzOTc5Ijp7ImJ1Y2tldCI6InR3ZWV0X3Jlc3VsdCIsInZlcnNpb24iOm51bGx9fQ%3D%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1529925475568697346&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lewrockwell.com%2F2022%2F05%2Ftyler-durden%2Fin-stunning-shift-wapo-admits-catastrophic-conditions-collapsing-morale-of-ukraine-front-line-forces%2F&sessionId=0a136554389ed02e957d1daca64125d5f60f2647&siteScreenName=lewrockwell&theme=light&widgetsVersion=c8fe9736dd6fb%3A1649830956492&width=550px

The report references a video widely circulating online this week wherein a group the size of a platoon declares they simply can’t fight for lack of weaponry, ammunition, food and proper command support:

“We are being sent to certain death,” said a volunteer, reading from a prepared script, adding that a similar video was filmed by members of the 115th Brigade 1st Battalion. “We are not alone like this, we are many.”

Ukraine’s military rebutted the volunteers’ claims in their own video posted online, saying the “deserters” had everything they needed to fight: “They thought they came for a vacation,” one service member said. “That’s why they left their positions.”

In the wake of the video, the Ukrainian troops featured are being accused of ‘desertion’:

Additional videos have surfaced that are similar: units complain even of being left to fight in already impossible conditions with WWI and WWII-era rifles, which can do little up against Russia’s far superior firepower.

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The Tyranny of Modern Scientism

Posted by M. C. on May 31, 2022

By Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null

In 1976, Dr. Halstead Holman, the youngest professor to be named chairman of Stanford University’s Department of Medicine at the age of 35, wrote,

“the medical establishment is not primarily engaged in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge into medical practice; rather in significant part it is engaged in special interest advocacy, pursuing and preserving social power.”  

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In 1976, Dr. Halstead Holman, the youngest professor to be named chairman of Stanford University’s Department of Medicine at the age of 35, wrote,

“the medical establishment is not primarily engaged in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge into medical practice; rather in significant part it is engaged in special interest advocacy, pursuing and preserving social power.”  

Holman called for a paradigm shift in medical laboratory research that would be innovative, support intellectual freedom, and have the courage to tackle the many challenges and shortcomings clinical medical practice faced.

The greatest obstacle Holman confronted within the medical community was what he called “excellence deception,” which he defined as an “ideological justification” that rejects criticism and insulates itself from alternative medical theories and opinions.

Consequently Holman was calling out the hubris that pervaded the higher echelons of the medical establishment.

A decade later, Dr. Robert Petersdorf, an internationally renowned expert in infectious disease, also worried over the direction modern medicine was headed. In 1989, Petersdorf stated, “We can no longer tolerate dishonesty, cheating, fraud and conflict of interest that have invaded science and medicine.” Looking back over the past three decades, Holman’s and Petersdorf’s warnings may have just as well been feathers floating down a cliff. The paradigm shift never occurred.  The medical profession has instead become increasingly corporatized, dogmatic, and oppressive.

Corruption is a high-stakes game played by the pharmaceutical complex, without which we might actually have a functioning healthcare system that improves public health. Whether it be concealing or fudging prior knowledge about drugs’ adverse effects to maximize profits, publishing junk clinical trials, buying off legislators, or engaging in devious retaliatory efforts to pressure and silence critics, these are only the costs of doing business that keep drug companies’ and Wall Street’s coffers overflowing. And this corporate culture of deception has the full approval of governments’ health ministries and the World Health Organization. Today our lives are at the mercy of a powerful cartel of medical bureaucrats in white physician coats intent on protecting a corporate-based inquisition to stifle dissent.

If anyone doubts that the Inquisition was only a dark anomaly in western history when the Church and superstitions reigned, and that our “enlightened” civilization would never fall back again into such tyranny or repeat the horrors of witch trials, you have not been paying attention. Monty Python got it correct, the Inquisition’s “chief weapon is surprise and fear… fear and surprise… and ruthless efficiency.” During the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, fear, not science base on viable consensus, ruled over the population as a means to police compliance.

For years, Noam Chomsky has been pointing out the censorship that emerges when propaganda is united with a control over the media. Today’s media is no longer distinguishable from the CDC, the FDA and Silicon Valley’s technological masters of cancel culture and virtue signaling. The architecture of scientific materialism’s Inquisition has grown steadily. Tuomas Tahko, a professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki, warns that the rise of a “Scientific Inquisition” is an effort to “convert us all to naturalism [scientific materialism or Scientism] and to denounce the false gods of intuition, a priori reasoning and thought experiments.”

When modern medicine’s greatest threat becomes “intellectual freedom,” even the freedom to carry out thought experiments outside the parameters of the dominant scientific tradition is heretical. The frontline physicians who found strong evidence for cheap off-patent drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as effective treatments against SARS-2 infections acted upon their intuitive suspicions and prescribed these drugs. They were proven correct; yet, despite having saved countless lives, who would have otherwise died in intensive care units due to the medical bureaucracy’s faith in the unfounded and barbaric medical advice from Anthony Fauci and the CDC, these physicians were vilified and viciously attacked in the media. “The philosophies of one age,” wrote the father of modern medicine William Osler, “have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday have become the wisdom of tomorrow.”  For the hardcore followers of modern scientism, particularly those in the medical and biological sciences, a human being is nothing more than an animate machine controlled by a computer in the skull that will break and ultimately cease to function.

This is not an exaggeration. One of sicentism’s most popular voices, Daniel Dennett at Tufts University, would have us believe:

 “What we think of as our consciousness is actually our brains pulling a number of tricks to conjure up the world as we experience it. But in reality, it’s all smoke, mirrors and rapidly firing neurons… But it goes even further: If our brains are robots, then our neurons are smaller robots, which in turn are made up of even smaller robots.”

Or even a brilliant genius such as Stephen Hawking who describes the existence of the human race as “just chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” Hawking also believed the brain was simply a computer that could survive outside the body and replicated in artificial intelligence to reach immortality.  He also believed a computer virus was an actual life form.

Dennett’s and Hawking’s scientism, as well as many others in our educational institutions, are in line with the long term goals of the World Economic Forum for humanity’s dystopian future.  In our modern civilization where human life has lost all existential meaning and therefore it has forfeited its social moral compass, Klaus Schwab asks the appropriate questions: “Where do we draw the line between human and machine? What does it mean to be human?” The fact that we are even asking these questions indicates how far modern humanity has been torn away from itself. The potential consequences of this catastrophic self-inflicted dementia permeating scientism are literally terrifying.

Since Scientism embraces an extremely limited, and a rather demented view of reality, which discards much of human experience such as intuition and creative flights of the imagination as subjective nonsense, there is no room for “thought experiments” in modern reductionist science. Hence, no investigation or research is warranted nor should be funded that explores outside the conventional box. To even consider that biomolecular health and disease may be understood from certain principles of quantum theory is anathema; yet, for quantum physicist Prof. Marc Henry at the University of Strasbourg, understanding the particle-signal quanta of cellular biology is exactly what medicine needs to start learning.

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Peace through Strength? Excessive US Military Spending Encourages More War

Posted by M. C. on May 31, 2022

The surge in US military spending over the last two decades mirrors a dramatic increase in the number of US military interventions.

https://mises.org/wire/peace-through-strength-excessive-us-military-spending-encourages-more-war

Mihai Macovei

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought America’s foreign policy interventions under the limelight once again. Ryan McMaken argues that the US administration’s claim that countries should not have the right to a sphere of influence, implicitly addressing Russia, is hypocritical. The US opposes a sphere of influence for Russia and other regional powers, while at the same time has steadily expanded its own global outreach. Among other, one can judge how true this is by looking at the amount of US military spending and size of its foreign military interventions.

The USA not only spends a disproportionately high amount of money on military relative to the rest of the world, but has also continued doing so when the Cold War was over and it could have set in motion a virtuous cycle of international disarmament. The USA has also multiplied its foreign military actions and engaged in controversial and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, harming both international peace and the global economy. From this point of view, Lew Rockwell’s scathing criticism of the US military interventions in Iraq and global hegemonic ambitions in general, appears still relevant after almost twenty-five years.

US Military Spending in Perspective

The US spends about 11 percent of its federal budget on defense, which is the third largest item after Social Security and Health, and costs almost twice as much as education. The US defense budget was $754 billion for the financial year 2022, before President Biden increased it by another $29 billion following the war in Ukraine.

However, this is not the full picture, because other federal spending is also closely tied to defense. The budgets of Department of Veterans Affairs ($113 billion), Homeland Security ($55 billion), the State Department ($64 billion), and the FBI and Cybersecurity in the Department of Justice ($10 billion) add another $242 billion to the base budget of the Department of Defense (DoD). By adding it all up, defense spending is set to exceed $1 trillion in 2022—i.e., 14 percent of the federal budget and 4 percent of gross domestic product.1

The US defense budget represents not only a significant burden on the domestic economy, but looks completely disproportionate relative to other countries’ military outlays. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) the US military spending is greater than those of the next ten largest military expenditures combined. At around $800 billion in 2021, the US military budget was almost three times higher than China’s ($293 billion) and twelve times larger than Russia’s ($66 billion).

Except for China’s military budget which has increased about ten times over the last two decades, albeit from a very low level, the steady increase in the US military spending has widened the gap with the rest of the World (graph 1). Together with its allies in Western Europe, the US spent on military three times more than Russia and China combined in 2021. As the annual spending differential between the US and other countries took place over many years, it means that the United States’ overall military supremacy in terms of stock and quality of military equipment is undisputable.

Graph 1: Annual military spending

mahai_picture_1.png

Mahai Picture 1
Source: SIPRI

The key question is why the USA has not decreased dramatically its military spending when the Cold War was over and the main threat to its security disappeared. In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union’s military spending was very high at about $220 billion and almost in the same ballpark with the $300 billion spent by the US. However, when the Soviet Union disintegrated and its economy collapsed in the early 1990s, Russia’s military spending shrunk to a puny $10 billion on average during that decade. Yet, despite being a nuclear superpower, the US kept its military spending at the Cold War level of around $300 billion and later increased it exponentially during the War on Terror.

Endless Foreign Military Interventions Post–Cold War

The surge in US military spending over the last two decades mirrors a dramatic increase in the number of US military interventions. Monica Duffy Toft shows that US military interventions—i.e., the deployment of US armed forces to other countries—intensified over time, in particular after the Cold War.

See the rest here

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Pot, Meet Kettle: America’s Use of Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear Weapons

Posted by M. C. on May 31, 2022

by Patrick Macfarlane

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/pot-meet-kettle-americas-use-of-chemical-biological-and-nuclear-weapons/

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In a recent editorial, I discussed a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on May 1, 2022, by Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).

The proposed AUMF, if passed, would allow President Biden to deploy American forces to restore “the territorial integrity of Ukraine” in the event that Russia uses chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

Thankfully, as Antiwar.com news editor Dave DeCamp writes, Kinzinger’s AUMF has failed to gain traction. This may seem like a bright spot in an otherwise apocalyptically bad news cycle, but not to worry! Antiwar.com Opinion Editor Kyle Anzalone noted in his recent interview of me, Kinzinger’s proposed AUMF will likely sit on the House Floor until the necessary political capital appears.

It probably will when Russia (or anyone really) uses the above-described weapons.

Although Kinzinger’s proposed AUMF asserts the moral high ground by threatening war against Russia, it can claim none. The United States itself has deployed all three types of weapons against its enemies—in the recent past, if not sooner.

As for nuclear weapons—the United States is the only country in world history to have used nuclear weapons against an enemy during wartime. Their use is even more abhorrent considering Hiroshima and Nagasaki held no strategic military value and the ordinance overwhelmingly killed civilians.

As if obliterating two major Japanese cities wasn’t enough, the Manhattan Project’s test detonations in the New Mexico desert exposed nearby farmers and their families to dangerous levels of radiation. Although the family members did not exhibit external symptoms, much of their livestock died.

In tune with their character, between 1945 and 1947 Manhattan Project scientists purposely injected 30 Americans with plutonium just to see what would happen. These injections were administered without the subjects’ knowledge or consent.

As for biological warfare, the United States’ military has tested biological weapons against its own citizens on several occasions.

In 1949, the Army Chemical Corps secretly released a harmless bacteria into the Pentagon’s air conditioning system to see how it spread through the building.

In April of 1950 and September of 1950, the Army Chemical Corps sprayed the coasts of Norfolk, Virginia and San Francisco, California, respectively, with two types of bacteria.

The types of bacteria that were released, Bacillus globigii and Serratia marcesens were believed to be harmless at the time. However,

Bacillus globigii is now [considered] to be a pathogen, causes food poisoning, and can hurt anyone with a weak immune system. As for Serratia marcesens, 11 people were admitted to a hospital with serious bacterial infections after the San Francisco test. One of them–Edward Nevin–died three weeks later.

In a previous editorial, I wrote about how the U.S. Army Chemical Corps sprayed several cities in the United States and Canada with zinc cadmium sulfide. At the time, zinc cadmium sulfide was considered to be harmless, but a large class of victims brought a federal lawsuit claiming the exposure caused myriad ailments. The lawsuit was dismissed, in part because the U.S. Government cannot be sued without its consent.

In the 1980s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provided Iraq with pathogens, which were ostensibly used against Iran in the Iraq-Iran War. In fact, the United States supported both sides of the war.

In September 2002, West Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd entered the CDC’s own documents into the Congressional Record during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. The documents showed that

the CDC and a biological sample company, American Type Culture Collection, sent strains of all the germs Iraq used to make weapons, including anthrax, the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and the germs that cause gas gangrene…Iraq also got samples of other deadly pathogens, including West Nile virus.

A few years later, the United States invaded Iraq under the pretext of destroying the above weapons. In the largest battle of said invasion, the Second Battle of Fallujah, the United States used white phosphorous against insurgents.

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White phosphorous is a chemical compound that burns intensely when exposed to oxygen. When it contacts the human body, it burns to the bone, causing horrific injuries.

Although the legality of using white phosphorous against combatants is debatable, and beyond the scope of this piece, the use of white phosphorus against civilians is a war crime.

There is evidence that the United States’ use of white phosphorous in Fallujah harmed civilians. It is also confirmed that the United States used white phosphorous in Iraq and Syria in its ostensible fight against the Islamic State. Human Rights Watch could not confirm several allegations that the white phosphorous harmed civilians, but it noted that the allegations exist and are supported by at least some evidence.

U.S. partners Israel and Turkey have been accused of using white phosphorous. Israel admitted it.

One of the most grievous and well-documented cases of the United States’ use of chemical weapons occurred during the Vietnam War.

While working on solutions to its counterinsurgency problem in Vietnam, the Pentagon, through ARPA, created a defoliant that gained international notoriety under the name “Agent Orange.”

Agent Orange was supposed to combat the Vietcong insurgency by denying it “protective cover from the jungle canopy.” Its second purpose was to starve the enemy “by poisoning their primary food crop, a jungle root called manioc.” Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Security Advisor Walt Rostow called the defoliant program “a type of chemical warfare.”

By the end of the war, the United States had sprayed 19 million gallons of Agent Orange on Vietnam’s jungles. “A 2012 congressional report determined that over the course of the war, between 2.1 million and 4.8 million Vietnamese were directly exposed[.]”

In addition to destroying its natural resources, Agent Orange caused abhorrent health defects in the Vietnamese population.

Ninety-eight refugees who had been exposed to chemical sprays in South Vietnam were interviewed in Hanoi. Most reported effects on eyes and skin and gastrointestinal upsets. Ninety-two percent suffered fatigue, prolonged or indefinite in 17 percent of cases. Reports of abortions and monstrous births in sprayed humans and animals and of substantial numbers of deaths among fish, fowl, and pigs were also given.

2006 meta-analysis found a very high correlation between exposure to Agent Orange and birth defects:

Results In total, 22 studies including 13 Vietnamese and nine non-Vietnamese studies were identified. The summary relative risk (RR) of birth defects associated with exposure to Agent Orange was 1.95 [95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.59–2.39], with substantial heterogeneity across studies. Vietnamese studies showed a higher summary RR (RR = 3.00; 95% CI 2.19–4.12) than non-Vietnamese studies (RR = 1.29; 95% CI 1.04–1.59). Sub-group analyses found that the magnitude of association tended to increase with greater degrees of exposure to Agent Orange, rated on intensity and duration of exposure and dioxin concentrations measured in affected populations. Conclusion Parental exposure to Agent Orange appears to be associated with an increased risk of birth defects.

The United States constantly grandstands about enforcing the “international rules-based order,” but what does that order stand for? If its own conduct is the measure, then the United States should have no quarrel with Russia for using chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

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About Patrick Macfarlane

Patrick MacFarlane is the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute where he advocates a noninterventionist foreign policy. He is a Wisconsin attorney in private practice. He is the host of the Liberty Weekly Podcast at www.libertyweekly.net, where he seeks to expose establishment narratives with well researched documentary-style content and insightful guest interviews. His work has appeared on antiwar.com and Zerohedge. He may be reached at patrick.macfarlane@libertyweekly.net

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Elon Musk versus the Woke Cartel

Posted by M. C. on May 31, 2022

But the best indication that the woke cartel has really gone berserk is its removal of Tesla from the S&P 500’s ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) Index. This last rebuff proves that “ESG is a scam.”

I’ve argued that the ESG is a means for dividing the woke wheat from the unwoke chaff to assemble a woke monopolistic cartel, but this exclusion is especially hypocritical and ludicrous. Tesla has produced more electric vehicles than any other manufacturer,

https://mises.org/wire/elon-musk-versus-woke-cartel

Michael Rectenwald

Many criticisms have been leveled against Elon Musk—that he’s part of the elite, that Tesla has been the beneficiary of government handouts and exemptions, that his transhumanist Neuralink is a brain-data-mining operation. Yet his planned purchase of Twitter, his supposed free-speech absolutism, and his subsequent renunciation of the Democratic Party as “the party of hate” have put Musk squarely in the crosshairs of the woke cartel.

Vitriolic Twitter storms, a New York TimesFinancial Times biographical exposé, a slew of hit pieces and scaremongering segments in the legacy media, and allegations of sexual harassment have dogged the automobile magnate ever since his Twitter bid. In response, Musk announced on Twitter that he’s assembling a legal crew to sue defamers and defend Tesla (and likely himself) against lawsuits.

But the best indication that the woke cartel has really gone berserk is its removal of Tesla from the S&P 500’s ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) Index. This last rebuff proves that “ESG is a scam.”

I’ve argued that the ESG is a means for dividing the woke wheat from the unwoke chaff to assemble a woke monopolistic cartel, but this exclusion is especially hypocritical and ludicrous. Tesla has produced more electric vehicles than any other manufacturer, yet Exxon Mobil and JP Morgan Chase rank among the S&P 500’s top ESG performers after a recent rebalancing. JP Morgan is the world’s largest investor in oil producers and ExxonMobil ranks first among them.

The reasons given for axing Tesla from the index also prove that ESG indexing is political to the core. Writes Margaret Dorn of Indexology Blog:

A few of the factors contributing to its 2021 S&P DJI ESG Score were a decline in criteria level scores related to Tesla’s (lack of) low carbon strategy and codes of business conduct. In addition, a Media and Stakeholder Analysis, a process that seeks to identify a company’s current and potential future exposure to risks stemming from its involvement in a controversial incident, identified two separate events centered around claims of racial discrimination and poor working conditions at Tesla’s Fremont factory, as well as its handling of the NHTSA investigation after multiple deaths and injuries were linked to its autopilot vehicles. Both of these events had a negative impact on the company’s S&P DJI ESG Score at the criteria level, and subsequently its overall score. While Tesla may be playing its part in taking fuel-powered cars off the road, it has fallen behind its peers when examined through a wider ESG lens.

What we see through this “wider ESG lens” is a political spectacle. ESG grading, notes Bloomberg, is a measure of public relations imagery, not environmental performance. Tesla has been besmirched with bad press regarding supposed racial discrimination, and Musk’s South African provenance is used to support such allegations. In 2018, Business Insider claimed that Musk was a beneficiary of an apartheid emerald mine owned by his father, Errol, and worked by black South Africans. Twitter mobs and other media outlets have continued to repeat the allegation, despite Musk’s convincing refutation.

Tesla and Musk have thus been subjected to the S in ESG—the “social” or “social justice” quotient. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” means exclusion of the politically incorrect. This applies to corporations as much as it does to individuals. Musk has been deemed a deplorable, and thus his company does not pass “social justice” muster.

As such, Musk has exposed the contradictions within the woke cartel’s measurement apparatus. Anything that can be used against a company, or its owners, will be used—

when the target runs afoul of the woke arbiters, that is. That’s because the ESG is an impressionistic, qualitative metric that subjects companies to the whims of a woke dictatorship.

I’m not suggesting that Musk is a free-market hero or a lowercase libertarian, but there is little doubt that he’s become corporate enemy number one for the state-backed woke cartel. The battle shaping up between Musk and the regime will prove to be an important one, if only because it pits the power of the latter against a high-visibility manufacturer and the reputed “richest man in the world.” What we will learn is how powerful the woke cartel is and just how far it will go to infringe property rights and eradicate any remaining legitimate (consumer-based) market criteria—no matter how much its moves reek of hypocrisy or how obvious its vendetta.

In today’s political economy, satisfying shareholders and customers has become less important than ingratiation with the woke cartel and the government that supports it. Corporations’ fealty to wokeness, state dictates, and state narratives can be explained in terms of a fully politicized economy. Corporations seek to curry favor with the clique in power, and thus they have become organs of the Democratic Party and the federal government it now runs unilaterally.

Woke corporatism is what happens when social democracy or democratic socialism grows to such proportions as to make profiting nearly impossible without political approval. Unfortunately, Elon Musk will learn much more about woke political capitalism in the not-so-distant future.

Author:

Contact Michael Rectenwald

Michael Rectenwald is the author of eleven books, including Thought CriminalBeyond WokeGoogle Archipelago, and Springtime for Snowflakes.

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Watch “Here’s Why It’s So Bloody Hard To Sit Down And Get Work Done” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on May 31, 2022

https://youtu.be/g7KI3TO_8-w

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Buffalo, NY Mass Shooter Had Been Coached by Former FBI Agent

Posted by M. C. on May 31, 2022

While it is claimed that this FBI agent was retired, their behavior is consistent with the actions of active FBI agents, who regularly infiltrate extremist cells and provoke them to commit acts of terror.

Shane Trejo

The recent mass shooter in Buffalo, NY had reportedly been coached by a former FBI agent before committing his heinous actions.

Law enforcement sources have informed The Buffalo News that a supposedly retired federal agent was in a chat room with the killer and was given advance notice of what he was planning to do at least 30 minutes beforehand. The former agent never informed authorities.

A law enforcement source said that the former federal agent regularly stoked the accused gunman Payton Gendron with racism, anti-Semitism and other propaganda designed to inflame the deranged man.

“These were like-minded people who used this chat group to talk about their shared interests in racial hatred, replacement theory and hatred of anyone who is Jewish, a person of color or not of European ancestry,” the law enforcement source stated. “What is especially upsetting is that these six people received advanced notice of the Buffalo shooting, about 30 minutes before it happened.

“The FBI has verified that none of these people called law enforcement to warn them about the shooting. The FBI database shows no advance tips from anyone that this shooting was about to happen,” they added.

While it is claimed that this FBI agent was retired, their behavior is consistent with the actions of active FBI agents, who regularly infiltrate extremist cells and provoke them to commit acts of terror.

Big League Politics has reported on how federal agents were influential in promoting the violent events of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol called an attempted coup or insurrection by critics:

Project Veritas has released video of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Matthew Rosenberg admitting that feds were embedded in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot and that the fake news media has lied about the nature of the threat of the infamous election integrity protest.

Rosenberg can be seen on hidden camera speaking candidly about snowflakes who work for the Times. He called the young reporters “f*ckin’ b*tches” for their histrionics in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 rally.

Read the Whole Article

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