We are virtual freelance legal assistants. We have over 180 documents posted online at www.scribd.com/nootkabearmcdonald
We enjoy being together, and sharing our lives with our two Kugsha. They are very large, and love to make us laugh, loads of fun!
Lake Mead, Lake Powell, Lake Shasta, Lake Oroville and countless other Western US reservoirs are all drying up by the day. When the water runs out, chaos will commence at blinding speed. While relentless record heat bakes much of the US and the world, freak flash summer snowstorms are increasing, the one that just occurred in the Northeastern US is a case in point. Now that California is completely dried out with dying and dead forests everywhere, a “rare lightning barrage of 66,000 strikes” just struck the state. Just a coincidence? Has climate engineering yet again set the stage for a year of unprecedented wildfires? As the walls close in, the controllers are now playing every “divide and conquer” card they have in order to keep the public’s eyes off of the wider horizon till the moment of impact. How soon till we hit the wall at full velocity? The latest installment of Global Alert News is below.
This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author
Bypass censorship by sharing this link:
25KVIEWS
(Natural News) America First Legal (AFL) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to investigate unconstitutional acts between the federal government and the Big Tech social media platforms. AFL obtained 256 pages of communication between the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Google, Facebook and Twitter. These pages document egregious violations of the US Constitution and provide evidence that the Federal Government violated the Nuremberg Code.
AFL President Stephen Miller issued a statement:
These explosive smoking-gun documents, obtained as a result of America First Legal’s litigation against the Biden Administration, conclusively demonstrate that Big Tech has unlawfully colluded with the federal government to silence, censor, and suppress Americans’ free speech and violate their First Amendment rights. Government is expressly prohibited from censoring competing or dissenting viewpoints or from silencing its political opponents whether it does so directly or whether it uses an outside corporation to achieve its draconian, totalitarian ends. AFL will not rest in the fight against illegal collusion between Big Tech and Big Government to trample on your voices and the Bill of Rights.
CDC conspired with Big Tech to censor Americans and destroy the informed consent principle
In July 2021, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki revealed that the Biden administration was “regularly making sure” to identify public health “disinformation” while working with social media networks to have it removed. “And we work to engage with them [Big Tech] to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies,” Psaki proclaimed in July of last year. The Biden regime went public with their censorship goals, targeting twelve sources of information that they claimed were “the dirty disinformation dozen.” The Biden regime subsequently called on Big Tech to completely remove these individuals from all social media platforms.
According to the latest document release, officials with the CDC and the Biden administration colluded with content moderation teams at Google, Twitter and Facebook to block US citizens from receiving the most basic level of informed consent about the emergency use covid-19 “vaccines.” The US government not only violated the free speech clause of the US Constitution, but they also conspired to withhold relevant medical information in the informed consent process, violating basic medical ethics on a grand scale.
US Constitution, Bill of Rights, Amendment 1:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
“This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision…”
Biden regime, CDC used Big Tech to force destructive, deadly experiments onto global population
The CDC documents detail regular communications between the federal government and the three biggest social media platforms. These included regular “be on the lookout” meetings to identify information that conflicted with the CDC’s VAX-all agenda. Federal officials provided “examples” of posts that should be flagged and posts that should be censored entirely.
On top of all the censorship, Facebook elevated government and pharmaceutical propaganda by gifting the CDC $15 million-worth of ad credits. These ad credits were used to promote social distancing, travel restrictions and vaccine uptake while hiding relevant information on the covid-19 vaccines. The CDC also established a list of “verifiable information sources” with Facebook to protect social media posts released by the State Department of Health.
At Twitter, employees arranged regular chats with CDC officials and warned Facebook officials that their algorithms were not doing a good enough job at eliminating “vaccine misinformation.” Twitter officials reached out to the CDC and asked for help to identify “misinformation” that should be censored off the platform. CDC officials sent Twitter officials an official chart detailing the tweets that they wanted to target as “misinformation.” The CDC targeted and eliminated specific information on vaccine injury, vaccine shedding, miscarriage risk, menstrual cycle disruption, and information on genetic alterations caused by the vaccine.
At Google, CDC officials went as far as editing Google’s code for its Knowledgebase. These edits were focused on promoting isolation, mask and vaccine use. CDC officials told Google to use the SEARCH engine itself to promote the CDC’s vaccine page. The CDC also utilized Google’s “signal boost” to promote similar propaganda coming from the World Health Organization and to promote “comprehensive global training on tracking, analyzing and addressing misinformation.”
CDC officials did not want to get caught colluding with social media. In the emails, CDC officials instructed Twitter employees not to share their directives. “Please do not share outside your trust and safety teams,” the CDC officials wrote. The CDC has tried to bury important information about the COVID “vaccines” – information that is essential to the informed consent process. As AFL brings these crimes up in court, it’s time for each and every individual involved in this deceitful, unconstitutional process to be held accountable and brought forth to stand trial.
As to what has caused the “state of collapse” the under socialist siege Americans are experiencing, this report details, it began in February-1941, which was when American publishing oligarch Henry Luce, who founded Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated magazines, and is called “the most influential private citizen in the America of his day”, released his historic manifesto “The American Century”, wherein he laid out a vision for American global domination arguing that the result of the United States immature refusal to accept the mantle of world leadership after the British Empire had begun to deteriorate in the wake of World War I was foolishness.
In these waning days of the American Century, Washington’s foreign policy establishment—the think tanks that define the limits of the possible—has splintered into two warring camps.
Defending the status quo are the liberal internationalists, who insist that the United States should retain its position of global armed primacy.
Against them stand the restrainers, who urge a fundamental rethinking of the U.S. approach to foreign policy, away from militarism and toward peaceful forms of international engagement.
The outcome of this debate will determine whether the United States remains committed to an atavistic foreign policy ill-suited to the twenty-first century, or whether the nation will take seriously the disasters of the past decades, abandon the hubris that has caused so much suffering worldwide, and, finally, embrace a grand strategy of restraint.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine—which was at least partially impelled by NATO expansion into Eastern Europe—is a clear example of the way in which behavior meant to deter war might very well incite it.
Yet these basic facts are difficult for liberal internationalists to admit. For them, the American Century can only be restored by facing China head-on.
Restrainers, by contrast, understand that the American Century is over. They maintain that the expansive use of the U.S. military has benefited neither the United States nor the world, and that charting a positive course in the twenty-first century requires taking a root and branch approach to the principles that have guided U.S. foreign policy since World War II.
Restrainers want to reduce the U.S. presence abroad, shrink the defense budget, restore Congress’s constitutional authority to declare war, and ensure that ordinary Americans actually have a say in what their country does abroad.
The origins of restraint can be traced to George Washington’s farewell address of September 1796, in which the president warned against “entangling our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice.”
Twenty-five years later, on July 4, 1821, the secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, likewise insisted that a defining characteristic of the United States was that it had “abstained from interference in the concerns of others. . . . She goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”
[Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]
Just like we aren’t supposed to question any of the other nakedly self-serving policies.
Who, for example, is surprised to learn there is a large and active Ukraine lobby in Washington? That has paid off handsomely, with our government now handing over $130 million daily to Kyiv with little to no oversight.
And of course, most maddeningly, any critically thinking American who even dares to question the US government’s obviously dangerous and counterproductive policies, bought and paid for by literal foreign agents, are themselves accused of being in the pay of Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran.
Never mind that all the evidence points in the opposite direction.
Again, the American people aren’t expected to think at all, only to stay in line and keep the money flowing.
This is the sad state of foreign policy in America, and it happens right out in the open.”
[Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]
Enjoy it, it may be the last one ever see. You can’t celebrate freedom and independence when you no longer have either. We are no longer the home of the Free and Brave, Our forefathers have rolled over in their graves already.
Divide and conquer we are being, wake the fuck up before it is too late. It may already be.
In their goals of disarming us, they have allowed or arranged for several mass shootings for this holiday. Stay away from large public gatherings, and be with loved ones.
May God have mercy on our souls, which they are also trying to take from us. We must join together despite our differences, just like we always have in times of turmoil and suffering. Together, we have a chance of surviving the coming devastation, divided, we will not survive it.
Love to all, you are all my brothers and sisters. Stay safe!!!
After hearing the witness statements to the German Corona Investigative Committee by former vice president of Pfizer dr Mike Yeadon who has been a scientist for 36 years, lawyers with Reiner Füllmich draw the same conclusion: The injections normally called Corona vaccines are designed to experiment on the human race and to find out what dosage of a yet unknown toxin is needed in order to kill people. The mortality rate linked to the vaccines, according to Yeadon, is traceable in terms of lot numbers of the different batches, as some batches appear to be more lethal than others. When taking a look at the evidence available, the main goal with the injections all over the world is global depopulation, according to the lawyers involved. Dr Füllmich told Perspektiv that the lawyers preparing an international law suit were no longer in doubt: Poisoning and mass murder through so called Corona vaccines is intentionally being perpetrated on the peoples of the world.
Citizen Journalist Ulf Bittner from EU/EES Healthcare blog and Sverige Granskas stated in the interview that the situation with traceable lot numbers and injuries and death related to lot numbers is similar in the different health care regions of Sweden. Bittner is in contact with a vaccine coordinator who has provided documents to keep track of how many people have been injured and lost their lives related to the different batches of the so-called vaccines.
01:00 Different numbers on the barcodes on the bottom of the vaccine doses are placebo which has been given to politicians according to a Slovenian chief nurse. Is it the same in other countries?
1:54 Mike Yeadon and the LOT numbers of some shots of the brands Moderna, Johnson& Johnson and Pfizer/Biontech are related to much higher mortality than for the other manufacturers.
3:52 The producers of the so-called vaccines are experimenting with the correct dosages to kill people according to Dr Füllmich. This according to the Corona Investigative Committee, constitute compelling evidence for punitive damages and attempted mass murder. They are intentionally killing people.
08:30 Lawyers from India have filed complaints for premeditative murder.
09:55 Mike Yeadon as a witness for the coming legal action against the perpetrators.
10:44 Everyone who critizises the wrongdoings of the governments of the world is being called a ‘right wing extremist’. This has also happened to the internationally renowned scientist Mike Yeadon.
13:05 CDC withdrew the recommendation for the PCR-tests diagnosing SARS-CoV-2 from 31/12-2021. PCR- tests are the foundation of the pandemic. Why is Anthony Fauci now doing a 180-degree turn?
17:25 At least a million dollars per person will be claimed in punitive damages if the lawsuit is successful.
18:33 Previously only ten percent of all adverse effects were reported. In the situation the world is right now, the team estimated that in fact only one percent of all adverse effects were being reported.
19:25 CEO of Life insurance company from Indiana USA with 100 billions of dollars in assets said: ”Over the span of this past year there has been an excess mortality of 40 percent”. This is believed to be due to the injections.
21:05 What substance in the vials makes them so lethal? Is it Graphene Oxide/graphene hydroxide?
22:37 Any vaccin is a poison, it is the dosage which makes the difference. This is not a vaccine, as a vaccine provides immunity, while these products demand incessant injections. Either a vaccine works or it does not.
24:40 This is not gene therapy either, since a gene therapy means exchanging a broken gene with a fixed one. This is more like experimenting on people, and trying to kill us.
25.15 The doses are not tested by governments, while governments will be keeping the contracts hidden from the public for at least 55 years. How is this affecting the possibility of getting people punished? Dr Füllmich goes through all the lies paving the way for the tyrannical situation the world is now in.
28:25 The vaccines are neither safe nor effective. The producers are experimenting on lethal doses of poison. Everyone now taking part in intentional malicious infliction of harm will be punished.
30:05 How sure are legal experts about the conclusion that Mike Yeadon has drawn from this, that it is all about depopulation and intentionally killing people through injections? If close to 50 lawyers are of the same opinion, it is regarded as “irrefutable proof”.
32:08 Batches of injections in Sweden can be traced by an application.
32:45 Füllmich is in cooperation with people working within the secret service of Germany who do not wish to take the injections.
34:15 Dr Lee Merritt on combat pilots in the USA refusing to get the shots. According to Dr Füllmich, Dr Merrit explained: ”They understood that if they were forced to [get vaccinated] they were going to get killed.”
35:15 Information is being collected on batches in Sweden from every region, the Swedish health authorities (Folkhälsomyndigheten) and medical board (Läkemedelsverket). Every batch is traceable through an application. There is economic reward for the Swedish regions which manage to get more people injected. One of the expert lawyers involved in the upcoming court hearings is a specialist on Nuremberg Trials.
38:45 How will the trials be performed, and through what legal structure? A common design, the same structure as for the Nuremberg trials.
39:40 Free choice should reign for members of the European Union. Consumers of health care have consumer rights. Fraud means misleading the people and consumers of health care.
42:00 The so called vaccines are an adulterated product put on to the market. According to Mike Yeadon there is a law in the US that will make everyone liable for the harms created by the adulterated product. Toxins are being put into the vials other than the known lipids etc, which the people who took the vaccines never consented to.
43:40 The importance of decentralization of power and national independence rather than global organizations such as the European Union telling the people what to do. Disconnecting from the banking system, NGO:s and creating independent and strong agricultural supply chains, energy supply chains etc.
46:15 When are the trials going to take place? How will the indicements happen and how will the trials be held? One of the goals is to inform people and expose the wrongdoings by involving the alternative media so that the mainstream media won’t be able to ignore the trials. The crew is working on a new system of law in the USA, Africa and Germany.
50:48 Dr Füllmich believes the world is close to a tipping point and the whole narrative will fall apart very very soon, maybe in a couple of weeks or months.
54:13 Robert Malone, Robert F Kennedy and Mike Yeadon and others involved in exposing the agenda are in contact with each other, and a tour is planned with these whistleblowers in the USA in March
The House Armed Services Committee gave initial approval Wednesday afternoon to a $37 billion increase to the Fiscal Year 2023 Pentagon budget request that would add funding for additional ships, aircraft, missile and air defense systems, ammunition and munitions technology improvements, among other things.
If the amendment, introduced by Reps. Elaine Luria (D-VA) and Jared Golden (D-ME), passes through the various legislative hoops – including a full committee vote on a final draft likely later tonight or early tomorrow – and is signed into law, the new Defense Department budget would raise from $773 billion to $810 billion. That would be the biggest Defense Department budget in history.
We’ve listed some of the highlights of the additional budget requests.
The measure calls for $178 million for safety and modernization upgrades to the military’s ammunition industrial base, $400 million for munitions technology development and more than $73 million to purchase 5.56 mm, 7.62 mm and 50 caliber ammunition.
Ukraine Security Assistance
The measure would add $550 million for Ukraine security assistance, as well as costs for advance planning to support presence on the Eastern front.
The measure passed the committee by a 42-17 margin.
“We need only look to world events in Ukraine reports regarding China’s plans and actions in the South China Sea, or simply read the latest headlines about Iranian nuclear ambitions and North Korean missile tests and close ongoing terrorist threats in order to see why this funding is necessary to meet the security challenges of our time,” Golden said, in support of his amendment. “At the same time, the inflationary pressures that are impacting economies worldwide are hampering our military’s ability to purchase new equipment, invest in emerging technologies and to adequately pay and support our greatest national security asset – the men and women in uniform.”
Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) lauded the measure because it increases the Army’s stock of 5.56 mm, 7.62 mm, and 50 caliber ammunition by 8.5 percent over the Presidential budget.
“This funding will help ensure we are meeting both the demands of our military and able to maintain a highly-skilled workforce as we prepare for the production of 6.8 mm ammunition for the Next Generation Squad Weapon.” You can read all about this new family of weapons here.
Hartzler said she was also happy that the measure includes $95 million in additional funding for urgently needed safety updates at the Lake City Army ammunition plant in Missouri.
The biggest complaints raised at the hearing about the measure centered on the LSC funding.
“I strongly object to restoring five of the LCSs when the President has asked for nine of them to be decommissioned,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA). “We all know what lemon cars are. We have a fleet of lemon LCS ships. We have spent billions of dollars on this fleet when they have no capability to help us deal with our largest threat, which is China and Russia. The only winners have been the contractors on which the Navy relies for sustaining these ships.”
Though this measure would increase the Defense Department budget by nearly 5%, there is a long way to go before it becomes a reality.
First, it has to be passed out of the committee in the final draft of the Fiscal Year National Defense Authorization Act, a vote that will likely take place later today or early tomorrow morning. Then it would have to pass the full House of Representatives, survive a conference with the Senate, which is seeking an additional $45 billion for the Defense Department budget, and ultimately, be signed into law by President Joe Biden.
There will be a lot more debate about these issues and The War Zone will take deeper dives into some of the specific systems and capabilities at stake as the process grinds on.
Biden Mocks Chevron Rebuke, Says “Didn’t Know They’d Get Their Feelings Hurt That Quickly”
by Tyler Durden
Wednesday, Jun 22, 2022 – 04:23 AM
Reposted Under the Fair Use Doctrine
Update: During a press conference at THe White House thia afternoon, President Biden was asked how he felt about the Chervon CEO’s response to his letter. His response sums a lot of things up about this administration’s approach.
The Reporter asked:
“The Chevron CEO… said that your administration has largely criticized the oil and gas industry and …would need to take a change in approach in order to make progress in reducing energy prices.”
To which Biden snapped back in quiet mode:
“He’s mildly sensitive…” before adding that “I didn’t know they’d get their feelings hurt that quickly.”
Then reverting back to his talking points he addressed the fact that its not his fault that ‘Big Oil’ won’t help cut prices, claiming that:
“We ought to be able to work something out whereby we can increase refining capacity and still not give up on transitioning to renewable energy.”
Once again completely missing the point that is holding back refiners from the massive investments required. given government’s long-term goals.
So we’re back at square one…
Reporter: “The Chevron CEO… said that your administration has largely criticized the oil and gas industry and …would need to take a change in approach in order to make progress in reducing energy prices.”
Biden: “I didn’t know they’d get their feelings hurt that quickly.”
Reporter: “The Chevron CEO… said that your administration has largely criticized the oil and gas industry and …would need to take a change in approach in order to make progress in reducing energy prices.”
Chevron CEO Mike Wirth sent an open letter to President Biden on Tuesday that probably started out closer to “go fuck yourself” than the final, still-snarky note seeking cooperation on ways to lower prices at the pump.
“At every level of the system, the policy of our government is to reduce demand, and so it’s very hard in a business where investments have a payout period of a decade or more. And the stated policy of the government for a long time has been to reduce demand for your products,” Wirth noted very frankly.
Then last week President Biden fired off an angry letter to oil companies accusing them of being greedy, and demanding that they help ease the “Putin price hike” or face consequences.
“At a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable,” wrote Biden.
The next day, Chevron hit back – claiming that the Biden administration’s policies since January 2021 ave sent a message that it aims to “impose obstacles to our industry delivering energy resources the world needs.”
Meanwhile, the American Petroleum Institute wrote the Biden administration last week recommending several measures, including lifting development restrictions on federal lands and waters, authorizing critical energy infrastructure projects, speed up the permitting process, and other items.
Fast forward to today’s letter to Biden from Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, which suggests that “Addressing this situation requires thoughtful action and a willingness to work together, not political rhetoric,” adding “your Administration has largely sought to criticize, and at times vilify, our industry.“
Wirth makes clear that “Chevron shares your concerns over the higher prices that Americans are experiencing,” noting that the company is “increasing capital expenditures to $18 billion in 2022 – over 50% higher than last year.“
Chevron still got a few blows in, writing “Chevron will engage in this week’s meeting with Secretary Granholm. I encourage you to also send your senior advisors to this meeting, so they too can engage in a robust conversation.“
Oh, and this is, well, quite something:
“Chevron will engage in this week’s meeting with Secretary Granholm. I encourage you to also send your senior advisors to this meeting, so they too can engage in a robust conversation.”
“Chevron will engage in this week’s meeting with Secretary Granholm. I encourage you to also send your senior advisors to this meeting, so they too can engage in a robust conversation.” — Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) June 21, 2022
The letter then outlines what the Biden administration can do to help solve the problem:
You have called on our industry to increase energy production. We agree. Let’s work together. The U.S. energy sector needs cooperation and support from your Administration for our country to return to a path toward greater energy security, economic prosperity, and environmental protection.
We need clarity and consistency on policy matters ranging from leases and permits on federal lands, to the ability to permit and build critical infrastructure, to the proper role of regulation that considers both costs and benefits. Many of these elements are described in our industry’s recently released 10-point plan. Most importantly, we need an honest dialogue on how to best balance energy, economic, and environmental objectives – one that recognizes our industry is a vital sector of the U.S. economy and is essential to our national security.
We can only meet these challenges by working together.
We can’t wait to say what the administration – which recently said it wouldn’t budge on easing pressure on the oil industry – will say in response.
The Administration needs to face it, Biden ain’t no Trump. Trump has couth, intelligence, and can carry on a conversation without anyone’s permission on talking points. Trump has charisma, charm, and people like to be around him
Biden on the other hand, is in a stupor, unless someone brings kids around, then he perks up all bubbly, yea, he still talks stupid, but he is awake. The only thing that wakes Biden up is, kids. Thank God I don’t have to hear his thoughts. After seeing how he was looking at his own kid, when she was probably 8-10 years old, with lust in his eyes, what a sick fucker.
Oh well, enough of my own thoughts on the matter…. You get the picture.
Image: ALLISON DINNER/AFP via Getty Images by Jason Koebler Vice News The City of Uvalde and its police department are working with a private law firm to prevent the release of nearly any record related to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in which 19 children and two teachers died, according to a letter obtained […]
Vice President Kamala Harris has been “honestly useless” at controlling the US border with Mexico, Republican Representative Mayra Flores (Texas) told Fox News earlier this week. In a recent special election, Flores flipped a seat comfortably won by her Democratic predecessor just two years ago.
Flores defeated Democratic candidate Dan Sanchez in a special election last week, picking up 51% of the vote in a district won by outgoing Democratic Rep. Filemon Vela by 13 points in 2020. Flores’ district, which sits in the Rio Grande Valley bordering Mexico, is 85% Hispanic, has been represented by Vela since 2012, and voted for Democrats in the last three presidential elections.
Flores’ victory is being interpreted by some analysts as a sign that voters are unhappy with the Democratic Party’s border policies, and Flores herself singled out Harris for criticism on Thursday.
“She’s honestly useless,” Flores said. “I don’t know why she’s in that position. She hasn’t been here in south Texas to see what their policies are creating, the mess that they’re creating in our country, and that their policies are hurting real people.”
Harris was tapped by US President Joe Biden in 2021 to address a brewing crisis on the US-Mexico border. After Biden ended former President Donald Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy and reinstated the Obama-era policy of ‘Catch and Release’, the number of migrants interdicted along the US’ southern border nearly tripled during the president’s first six months in office. Enormous shanty towns of migrants sprung up along crossing points, as Republicans accused Biden of ignoring the problem.
Harris visited the border region once while serving as Biden’s ‘border czar’, and the last migration-related event held by the vice president took place in January, when she met with Honduran President Xiomara Castro to discuss the “root causes of migration.” Meanwhile, illegal border crossings reached a record 239,416 last month – not counting those who evaded detection – and this year’s illegal entries are on track to pass last year’s total of 1.7 million within the coming weeks.
Flores, who was born in Mexico and immigrated to the US as a child, made border security front and center of her campaign. Her television ads touted her marriage to a Border Patrol agent and accused Democrats in Washington of putting the Rio Grande Valley “under attack.” As Flores is currently finishing out Vela’s term, she will have to fight for her seat again in November, in a redrawn district map that is believed to favor her Democrat opponent, Vincente Gonzalez Jr.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recently shared his opinion of the Ukraine crisis and Russia’s ongoing special military operation in that country. At the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, he suggested that it was time for Kiev to think about a diplomatic settlement of the conflict, even if that means territorial concessions.
Henry Kissinger, a geopolitics colossus who turned 99 on 27 May, has claimed that the US is “infinitely” more divided today than at the time of the Vietnam War (1955-1975).
The former US Secretary of State to presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, whose book, Leadership, is set to come out on July 5, offered his opinion of the present state of US internal politics, the Ukraine crisis and US the stand-off with China in an exclusive interview for The Sunday Times.
‘Unremitting Hostility of the Opposition’
The patriarch of international politics deplored the partisan antipathy that has surged in the US over the past several decades. The American National Election Studies surveys and polls have increasingly shown that Democrats and Republicans view members of the other party more as enemies than simply as political opponents.
According to Kissinger, in the early Seventies, there was “still a possibility of bipartisanship” in the US, before the “hostility” firmly took root.
“The national interest was a meaningful term, it was not in itself a subject of debate. That has ended. Every administration now faces the unremitting hostility of the opposition and in a way that is built on different premises … The unstated but very real debate in America right now is about whether the basic values of America have been valid,” underscored Kissinger, a Republican since the Fifties.
The “values” in question refer to the sacrosanct status of the American Constitution and the “primacy of individual liberty and equality before the law”, the publication explained.
Kissinger deplored the stance espoused at present by the “progressive left,” which, according to him, argues that “unless these basic values are overturned, and the principles of [their] execution altered, we have no moral right even to carry out our own domestic policy, much less our foreign policy”.
Kissinger warned that this is “not a common view yet, but it is sufficiently virulent to drive everything else in its direction and to prevent unifying policies … [It] is [a view held] by a large group of the intellectual community, probably dominating all universities and many media.”
Kissinger offered a dire warning of what such “unbridgeable divisions” are fraught with.
“Either the society collapses and is no longer capable of carrying out its missions under either leadership, or it transcends them …”
The veteran foreign policy scholar agreed that sometimes an “external shock” or an “external enemy” was resorted to to bridge this “divide”.
At this point Kissinger broached the subject of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, where Russia launched a special military operation to demilitarise and de-Nazify the country on 24 February after the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) appealed for help in defending themselves against shelling from Ukrainian forces.
Kissinger recently sparked controversy by his brief virtual speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on 23 May. Movement toward peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine needs to begin within the next two months or so, he said, before the conflict escalates to a point where tensions are much harder to overcome.
Kissinger, known for his efforts to ease tensions between the US and the Soviet Union, emphasised Russia’s importance to Europe and, in his Davos address, urged western countries not to get swept up “in the mood of the moment”, as he advocated that the West pressure Kiev into accepting negotiations even if that means territorial concessions.
The seasoned US scholar, renowned for his wise statements on geopolitics, faced a backlash for his calls for negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
Kissinger, who played an integral role in developing the relationship between the US and the People’s Republic of China during the Nixon administration, found himself blacklisted by Ukraine’s notorious website Mirotvorets (Peacemaker) for “participation in Russia’s special information operation against Ukraine”. He was also charged with “propaganda, blackmail and encroachment on the territorial integrity of Ukraine”.
As western countries seek to isolate Russia with a sweeping sanctions policy while funnelling weapons into Ukraine and eyeing NATO expansion, Henry Kissinger predicted in The Sunday Times interview that “big issues are going to take place in the relations of the Middle East and Asia to Europe and America.”
Against the backdrop of squabbling over Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership bid with Turkey, Russia has continuously reiterated that further expansion of the NATO bloc will not bring greater security to Europe.
Kissinger, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, claimed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is an “institution whose components don’t necessarily have compatible views. They came together on Ukraine because that was reminiscent of [older] threats and they did very well, and I support what they did. The question will now be how to end that war. At its end a place has to be found for Ukraine and a place has to be found for Russia – if we don’t want Russia to become an outpost of China in Europe.”
Obligation to Avert ‘Catastrophic Collision’
On the issue of China, Kissinger believed that Beijing and Washington were “facing each other as the ultimate contestants”, who are “governed by incompatible domestic systems”.
“And this is occurring when technology means that a war would set back civilisation, if not destroy it,” said Kissinger, agreeing that the two superpowers “have a minimum common obligation to prevent [a catastrophic collision] from happening”.
Kissinger concluded by acknowledging his profound concerns about the lack of a dialogue between superpowers, as “other countries will want to exploit this rivalry”.
“So we’re heading into a very difficult period,” Kissinger foretold.
Earlier this yearKaren discussedthe secret nighttime flights that the Biden administration has arranged to bring illegal migrants from the border to other locations around the country, where they are then released into the wild. One spot seeing a lot of this traffic was the airport in Westchester, New York. Planeloads of migrants were arriving on an almost nightly basis. They were given boxes of welcome gifts and loaded onto buses to be dropped off in New York City or other communities around the state. No announcements of these arrivals were given to the communities where it was taking place.
Once the news went public, I foolishly thought that the practice might come to an end, or at least be made public so more oversight could be applied. Neither of…
The anti-Constitution cabal is clearly confident that it will maintain power after the November 8 elections. Source: Navarro arrest is a Democrat assault on American liberty
Paris, like official Berlin, and Rome, which has joined these two co-founders of the European Union, are less and less willing to listen to what they are being told from Kiev (and almost no longer pay attention to the tone of what was said, bordering on bizarre abuse), and to the fact that what Washington is trying to convince them of.
Neither France, nor Germany, nor Italy in any way wants to mess with the Russians when they meet them on the battlefield.
Despite all attempts to erase the memory of the power of Russian weapons and the Russian military spirit, the spinal cord of a united Europe still remembers perfectly what outcome awaits those who come to Russia with a sword.
The “Horsemen of the Apocalypse” are only unlocking the gates of the stable where their horses are. Western Europe, hearing, of course, this creaking of the castle, cannot help but understand that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to turn these horses around later.
Being aware of what this could threaten, even the European military-industrial complex and the European military are trying to stop the apocalypse by any means: either as the Dassault family or by various “leaks”.
But Europe, which ordered the fight, regardless of whether it wants it or not, at the moment when the order is received, will not be able to return everything “back”. Even if the outcome, that is, the European loss, as well as the European break, in theory, is already a foregone conclusion.
As to why a beyond shocking 16% of Americans polled would like to see President Putin as their leader, this report continues, becomes self explanatory when noticing that as these under socialist siege peoples are being economically destroyed by the hour, their suffering was ignored yesterday by Supreme Socialist Leader Joe Biden, who, instead of addressing the needs of his citizens, engaged in a teenage mean girl spat with the world’s richest man Elon Musk telling him to have “lots of luck in his trip to the Moon”.
The West ought to pay compensation to those who have suffered from its actions.
I would recommend to the collective West this one thing. If you want to condemn aggression — start with yourselves. Set an example by condemning your own military adventures, illegal economic restrictions, deadly colonial and neo-colonial wars, genocide, and robbery of indigenous peoples.
Start paying off compensations to states and nations that suffered from you. Such a step would indeed bring us closer to having a more just world order that would have no place for anyone’s self-proclaimed exceptionalism.
When NATO was attacking Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, international law was perceived only as an annoying impediment.
In futile attempts to justify their aggression against sovereign states, the collective West had to come up with exotic concepts, such as ‘humanitarian intervention’, ‘war on terror‘ and ‘preventive strikes’. The outcome is always the same: lots of casualties, and no one held accountable.
[Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]
When America socialists can’t even tell what a woman is and start claiming that bees are fish, one would think people would start to notice something is really wrong!
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on May 21, 2022 | Sundance May 21, 2022 | Sundance | 209 Comments The early voting in Georgia is breaking all state records. According to the GA secretary of state office statement yesterday, “through Wednesday, May 19th, over 565,000 people have early voted in Georgia—a 189% increase from the same point in the early […]
(Natural News) The Biden regime’s intent to destroy the powerhouse economy that President Donald Trump built in just four short years actually began when the leftist deep state pushed him to agree to recommend lockdowns and business closures during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the year the same people were plotting to steal his reelection.
And now that the process is in full swing, the regime is set to finish the job.
During Biden’s first year in office, the Democrat-majority Congress passed one major spending bill after another, flooding the country with newly printed trillions at a time when there was a worsening supply chain crisis and ongoing shutdowns. The result was out-of-control inflation as more money in the system competed for fewer goods and services, a perfect recipe for spiking inflation.
Ostensibly to ‘control’ inflation, the Federal Reserve has begun hiking interest rates which is expected to slow down spending to allow the supply chain to catch up with the money supply. But at the same time, the rate hikes come as used cars have risen in price by 35 percent while prices for existing homes have also shot skyward as they did in the years before the 2007 Great Recession.
The resulting crash left millions of Americans with overpriced homes that lost a third of their value, leading to massive foreclosures and an economy literally on the brink of collapse — and it’s all happening again.
In March 2022, foreclosures surged 181% to [the] highest levels since March 2020, with Chicago, New York, LA and Houston leading the pack.
Some eight months after a nationwide moratorium on foreclosures expired, foreclosure filings soared to the highest level since the pandemic began.
Last month, 33,333 properties across the U.S. faced foreclosure, a 181 percent jump from March 2021 and 29 percent pop from February, according to a report by foreclosure tracker Attom. The first quarter saw 78,271 properties with a foreclosure filing, a 39 percent increase from the previous quarter and 132 percent from last year.
In March 2020, barely a month into the COVID pandemic shutdown, nearly 47,000 homes were held in foreclosure filings according to Rick Sharga, the executive vice president of market intelligence for the firm ATTOM.
And in fact, March was the 11th consecutive month where foreclosure activity posted a rise year-over-year.
“Not only did foreclosure activity hit a peak, the time it took properties to foreclose ticked down 3 percent from the previous quarter. Properties foreclosed on in the first quarter were in the process for an average of 917 days, down from 941 in the previous period and 930 in the first quarter of 2021,” Strange Sounds added.
Not surprisingly, California was the state where the highest number of foreclosure starts for the first three months of this year — 5,378 — thanks to the insanely overpriced housing market there. But Florida and Texas were second and third, respectively, with 4,707 and 4,649.
Among the country’s major metropolitan areas, Chicago saw the largest increase in new foreclosure filings during the first quarter of this year with 3,101. New York City followed with 2.580 starts after a statewide foreclosure moratorium expired in January.
Despite the rise in activity, Sharga believes that economic growth in the country will continue. However, he added, the U.S. isn’t likely to see pre-pandemic levels “until the end of the year at the earliest, unless the economy takes a significant turn for the worse.”
And that’s really the plan: The Biden regime and the leftist deep state running it will be fine, economically, as their investments and assets will be protected from their own economy-destroying policies. The rest of the country, however, is in for a massive contraction like that seen just a short 15 years ago.
My office is located here!! Robbinsdale had a shots fired incident about 4:30 p.m. Sunday near the 3400 block of France Avenue North, according to information aired over dispatch to Minneapolis police. No official information was released by police about the incident. Twin Cities weekend crime incident recap
WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a darkened room in Washington, faithful followers of the Biden administration gathered dutifully for this morning’s Two Minutes Hate. Every day, zealous disciples of the Party come together to rile one another up in hatred and anger over a different target of the Party’s wrath. Recent objects of the Two Minutes Hate include […]
(Natural News) A group of Canadian doctors has painstakingly demonstrated how Pfizer committed monumental fraud in conducting rapid clinical trials of its COVID-19 vaccine as they present evidence refuting nearly all claims that the jab is safer and that getting one reduces the incidence and seriousness of the coronavirus.
The organization called the Canadian COVID Care Alliance, representing more than 500 independent Canadian doctors, scientists and health care practitioners, presented a 40-minute video and accompanying slide presentation explaining exactly how Pfizer fudged numbers and testing in order to get its shot approved quickly under a program launched by former President Donald Trump, who very likely had no idea what the big pharma giant had done when his administration green-lighted Pfizer’s mRNA vaccinefor emergency authorization.
In short, according to The COVID World, “The full 40-minute video presentation by the group includes PDF slides that show evidence that Pfizer misrepresented data to hide the fact that their COVID injections came with an increased risk of illness and death when compared to the placebo group in their trial.”
The presentation “explains how Pfizer failed to follow established, high-quality safety and efficacy protocols for vaccine development as everything was done in under a year and animal testing was skipped,” the website adds.
The organization also highlights how Pfizer allegedly minimized vaccine injury to Maddie de Garay, a teen who was paralyzed from the waist down after she took part in a clinical trial for 12-to-15-year-olds in December 2020, noting that she still requires a wheelchair in order to get around and that she needs a feeding tube more than a year after the trial ended.
The presentation begins by noting that the best empirical evidence when conducting vaccine and other medicinal trials is “Level 1 evidence,” which is the “gold standard” and the only way that something can actually be proven true. As such, when making public health policy, only Level 1 evidence should be utilized.
But that wasn’t the case when it came to Pfizer’s vaccine, at least. The company said in its original trial report dated Dec. 31, 2020, after just two months’ worth of randomized testing — the appropriate way to test medication efficacy — that its vaccine had an efficacy rate of 95 percent seven days after the second dose, but further examination found that to be a gross exaggeration.
In reality, the 95-percent rate reflects “relative risk reduction,” but the “absolute risk reduction,” the more important metric, showed that the vaccine only carried a .84 percent efficacy rate.
Here is a short video that explains the difference:
In addition, the Canadian organization also broke down Pfizer’s short clinical trial to explain how the pharmaceutical maker fudged the process in order to come up with its inaccurate success rate.
The group noted that the clinical trial that began in late July 2020 should have featured two evenly divided groups of inoculated and non-vaccinated participants in a blind study — that is, no one in either group was supposed to know who got the vaccine and go was given a placebo. But instead, as the above slide shows, a “crossover” occurred in early 2021 and the placebo group was given “the opportunity to take the inoculation,” with the majority having agreed to do so. At that point, the Canadian group notes, “it’s no longer a randomized control trial,” as the “control group is gone.”
By 2023, the long-term safety data “that was supposed to be assessed at this point is no longer possible to ascertain as the placebo group crossed over two years previously,” so whatever efficacy data Pfizer claims to have discovered by now is essentially worthless.
To that point, the company’s most recent report claims an efficacy rate of 91.3 for its vaccine. But there, too, the group found that, when compared to the initial placebo group, there has also been an “increase in illness and death” despite the vaccine, thus, “there is no benefit to a reduction in cases if it comes at the cost of increased sickness and death.”
And mind you, all of the Canadian group’s findings come straight from Pfizer‘s own reporting; they are not random conclusions based on hunches or suspicions.
There’s more.
The group found that Pfizer did not follow established research protocols when conducting its clinical trial. Specifically:
— Animal testing was not performed.
— Phases II and III were combined.
— Emergency use was authorized after only two months’ worth of Phase II/III trials.
— The trials were unblinded.
— Phase III trials are continuing into 2023.
Also, Pfizer used misleading demographics and the wrong target population.
“When designing a trial for the efficacy and safety of a potential treatment, the focus should be on the target population who could most benefit from that treatment,” the group noted. “Instead Pfizer chose participants from younger demographic that would be a) less likely to need a vaccine, b) less likely to suffer an adverse event during a trial, c) more likely to respond well to a vaccine, as the elderly have comparatively poor immune responses.”
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers and experts have known that the virus afflicts younger, healthier people far less severely than older people and those with preexisting conditions.
But while roughly 95 percent of those who have died from COVID-19 had at least one co-morbidity listed as a cause of death — and the average is four co-morbidities — just one-in-five clinical trial participants, or around 21 percent, had a co-existing condition, according to the group.
In addition, the group found that Pfizer:
— Used inadequate control groups
— Failed to track biomarkers
— Used wrong clinical endpoints; did not focus on the question “Do people who take the vaccines have less illness and death than those who don’t?”
— “The Pfizer trials DID NOT test all participants for COVID-19,” meaning, “Asymptomatic infection would be missed entirely.”
— The adolescent trial was extremely small and therefore nearly worthless; “Pfizer claimed these were great results, but since adolescents are at statistically 0% risk of death from COVID-19, and very low risk of severe illness, the inoculation is of little benefit to them. Instead, it presents a very real risk of adverse events.”
— The vaccines appear to greatly increase cases of, or risk of, myocarditis.
BlackRock and Vanguard are taking over centralized food production technologies and will have near-total control over the future food supply in America
(Natural News) Many people are still blissfully unaware of what has happened, but the global food supply has been largely taken over by the oligarchs, including financial giants BlackRock and Vanguard.
It turns out that BlackRock and Vanguard have been gradually gobbling up ownership of the means of production, and now intend to lord it over the masses by centralizing all food production technologies in the United States and enslaving everyone under their control.
The top three shareholders of CD Industries Holdings, the world’s largest fertilizer company, include both BlackRock and Vanguard. BlackRock and Vanguard are also the top shareholders in Union Pacific, the railroad giant that moves fertilizer and other agriculture inputs all across the country.
The world’s top 10 food companies are also largely owned by both BlackRock and Vanguard. These include Nestlé, PepsiCo, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Associated British Foods, Mondel?z, Mars, Danone, Unilever, and Coca-Cola.
“What happens when they control all of the seeds, produce, and meat too?” asks Corey’s Digs.
“What happens when produce and meat are all grown inside secured facilities after a gene splice or inside a petri dish, and farmland becomes dormant due to overreaching regulations, lack of supplies, and manufactured inflation?”
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says “it’s time to force people’s behavior to change”
BlackRock and Vanguard’s influence over CF Industries Holdings and T. Rowe Price Associates is having a major and direct impact on farming in the Midwest. It is also important to note that Union Pacific recently began mandating railroad shipping reductions of 20 percent, further impacting American agriculture.
“This will directly impact key agricultural areas such as Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, and California,” Corey’s Digs adds. “This will ultimately affect food supply and pricing. CF Industries is only one of 30 companies dealing with these restrictions.”
Another major transporter of agricultural goods, the Canadian National Railway (CN), is reportedly trying to help the fertilizer market grow. But its largest owner is none other than billionaire eugenicist Bill Gates, whom we reported is buying up as much American farmland as he can get his grubby little demonic hands on.
Back to BlackRock and Vanguard, the finance giants are also top shareholders in AppHarvest, a Kentucky-based agriculture company that boasts one of the biggest greenhouses in the world at 2.76 million square feet on 60 acres. The facility grows only tomatoes, which are sold at Kroger, Meijer, and Walmart.
Then there is Hydrofarm Holdings, based in Pennsylvania. This company also grows crops in a controlled environment with vertical farming technology. BlackRock and Vanguard are top shareholders in this company as well.
BlackRock currently boasts more than $20 trillion in investments, all of which follow the ESG and “socially responsible” guidelines required by its CEO Larry Fink. Fink infamously stated that “it’s time to force people’s behavior to change,” and he is apparently doing that by seizing control of American agriculture.
“Despite the LED lighting, robotics, computer data analysis, and ventilation systems required to power vertical growing facilities of this magnitude, since water is being saved and less of Bill Gates’ landmass is being used, investments are flowing into these alleged sustainable and environmentally friendly facilities, as well as massive greenhouses,” Corey’s Digs further explains.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) is capturing medicine and health care by moving swiftly to pass a new “pandemic treaty” that will give the United Nations total control over public health. This one-two punch of seizing both food and medicine spells a grim future of totalitarian fascism in the entire world.
More related news coverage about the engineered implosion of the global food supply can be found at Collapse.news.
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on April 28, 2022 This is getting seriously out of hand. On top of the $14 billion already appropriated for Ukraine assistance, Joe Biden is now asking for a supplemental budget allocation of an additional $33 billion for Ukraine. Good grief, that’s almost $50 billion in aid, plus […]
Elon Musk responded to Joe Biden’s establishment of a far-left disinformation board with one word – discomforting. We reported on this new entity that will be under the biggest liar in the Biden gang, the DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who is responsible for millions of illegals crossing his wide-open Southern Border. Biden Regime Announces Creation […]
Principia Scientifica Written by apnews.com The coronavirus pandemic ushered in what may be the most rapid rise in homeschooling the U.S. has ever seen. Two years later, even after schools reopened and vaccines became widely available, many parents have chosen to continue directing their children’s educations themselves. Homeschooling numbers this year dipped from […]
The power of language is magical to behold. Through the mere pronouncement of words, people can be persuaded to do what they would never have thought to do, left to their own devices. The playbook with the most success in this regard is that of war. When people are “informed” that they and their families are in mortal danger, they can and often will acquiesce to any and all policies which government authorities claim to be necessary in order to protect them.
Young people can be coaxed into killing complete strangers who never did anything personally to them. Citizens can be brainwashed to believe that suitably labeled persons can and indeed must be denied any and all human rights. When the stakes are claimed to be life and death, even apparently intelligent people can be goaded to accept that the mere possession of a divergent opinion is evil, and the expression of dissent a crime. The use of military weapons to execute obviously innocent, entirely innocuous civilians, including children, suddenly becomes permissible, so long as the victims have been labeled collateral damage. All any of this takes is to identify “the enemy” as evil.
In centuries past, “the laws of war” were said to require the humane treatment of enemy soldiers. They were diagnosed as suffering from “invincible ignorance,” misled and mistaken about the dispute said to necessitate recourse to war, but still acknowledged as persons capable of being courageous combatants who found themselves through historical fortuity on the wrong side. An enemy soldier was to be provided with the opportunity to lay down his weapon and surrender in order to save his own life. Disarmed or incapacitated soldiers were not to be executed by their captors, for they had already been neutralized and posed no more danger than unarmed civilians. Prisoners of war were to be treated as human beings, and when they were tortured or summarily executed, this constituted a war crime. Such “laws of war,” which form the basis of international agreements, including the Geneva Conventions, have needless to say often been flouted, but, in theory, they were to be upheld by civilized people.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, political leaders and government officials proclaimed that “everything changed.” The Bush administration legal team deployed linguistic innovation to issue in an entirely new era of warfare, wherein the “laws of war” would still be said to obtain, but they would be inapplicable to entire classes of human beings. Jihadist soldiers for radical Islamist causes were labeled unlawful enemy combatants, whose “unlawful” status was said to imply that they were protected by neither international norms such as the Geneva Conventions nor the laws of civil society.
Under this pretext, terrorist suspects were tortured while held captive at prisons in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and Baghram, in addition to many black sites around the world. Ever keen to cover their tracks, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) also flatly denied that they ever tortured anyone, by redefining as enhanced interrogation techniques the abusive practices inflicted on hundreds, if not thousands, of men in an effort to extract from them actionable intelligence. And just in case any of this “logic” was called into question by pesky human rights advocates, Bush administration officials also derided the Geneva Conventions as “quaint.”
Imminent vs. Immediate in the Global War on Terror
The “peace candidate” Barack Obama was elected in 2008 on the promise to rein in the excesses of the Bush administration, including what Obama characterized as the “dumb” war on Iraq. The new president publicly denounced “enhanced interrogation techniques” as torture but then proceeded to take linguistic neologism to an entirely new level by not only redefining assassination as targeted killing but also labeling any suspect eliminated through the use of lethal drones as an Enemy Killed in Action (EKIA).
The slaughtered “soldiers” were assumed to be guilty of possible complicity in future possible crimes, a preposterous position never fully grasped by Obama’s devotees, who somehow failed to recognize that the specific implement used to kill does not distinguish various types of homicide from one another, morally speaking. The extrajudicial execution of individual human beings in civil society is illegal, but the Obama administration effectively maintained that the targeting of suspicious persons and their associates in lands far away was perfectly permissible, so long as the victims were killed by missiles launched from drones, thereby rendering them “acts of war.”
The entire drone program, whether within or far from areas of active hostilities (i.e., war zones), was portrayed by Obama and his administration as just another facet of “just war.” Blinded to the moral atrocity of this new lethal-centric approach to dealing with suspected enemies, whereby they would be executed rather than taken prisoner, Obama’s loyal supporters blithely embraced the propaganda according to which he was a smart warrior. After demonstrating his death creds to the satisfaction of hawks, by killing not only Osama bin Laden, but also U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, suspected of complicity in factional terrorism, Obama was reelected for a second term in 2012, despite having summarily executed thousands of men—mostly brown-skinned, unnamed, and unarmed—located in their own civil societies, far from any U.S. citizen, and in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.
The deft deployment of two simple words, immediate and imminent, played a key role in allowing Obama to get away with murder, even of U.S. citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki and his sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Guided by drone-killing czar John Brennan, Obama’s lawyers calmly explained in public addresses and official documents that suspects who posed imminent threats to the United States could be targeted by lethal drones because an imminent threat did not imply immediacy. In other words, they could be killed even when they were currently unarmed and living in their own civil society, surrounded by family members and friends, and even when the future crime of which they were vaguely suspected was merely hypothetical and therefore had no specific date.
When targets were “nominated” for execution, the administration operated under the assumption that they were guilty unless specific information was brought forth to demonstrate their innocence. The victims themselves obviously could not do this, initially, because they were not informed that they were being targeted and, later, because they were dead. Meanwhile, local residents and journalists on the ground who knew these people’s names and dared to assert that the victims were not terrorists were either denounced as propagandists or cast as misguided persons hoodwinked by the rhetoric of jihadists.
As the death toll mounted, outspoken critics in the vicinity of the missile strikes became progressively more terrified of being themselves eliminated for seeming to support terrorist groups. Their concerns were not unfounded, for they risked being affixed with the lethal label associate and added to hit lists for execution if they dared to question the drone warriors’ narrative. This oppressive climate needless to say served actively to suppress dissent from the U.S. government’s official story of what they had done, even among locals who witnessed the grisly scenes where entirely innocent community members were incinerated by missiles launched from drones.
Imminent vs. Immediate in the Opioid Crisis
Improbably enough, the very same two words, imminent and immediate, used by the Obama legal team to invert the presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt in the case of terrorist suspects located abroad, proved to be deadly in an entirely different context during the twenty-first century as well.
The causes of the sudden and shocking increase in the number of narcotics addicts and overdose deaths all over the United States are manifold, but a tidal wave of diversion was made possible by drug-dealer doctors and the notorious “pain clinics” where they plied their trade. Manufacturers produced and pharmacies dispensed billions of pills as demand multiplied in tandem with the creation of more and more new addicts, who could no longer function without narcotics.
Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family are widely regarded as the prime movers of the opioid crisis, having undertaken a highly successful campaign to coax doctors into believing that their patented time-release prescription narcotic Oxycontin was nonaddictive and could be safely provided to patients even for moderate pain. This marketing feat was achieved by influencing key players at the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), who not only approved the medication but permitted it to be sold along with a package insert falsely suggesting that it was less prone to abuse than other narcotics.
In its quest to sell as many pills as possible, the pharmaceutical industry repeatedly pivoted to neologize in lethal ways over the two decades following the launch of Oxycontin in 1996. When it emerged that the pills sometimes wore off before the twelve-hour time release period, marketers and sales representatives claimed that those patients were suffering from breakthrough pain, the remedy for which was (surprise!) to double their dose. The narcotics marketers indulged in flat-out sophistry when they insisted that patients who appeared to be addicted to their painkillers were in fact suffering from pseudoaddiction, the remedy for which was (surprise!) even higher doses of their drugs. As farcical as these arguments may seem in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight and in the light of the overdose epidemic now running rampant, many doctors appear to have been persuaded to believe that their patients’ miserable condition was not indicative of addiction but a manifestation of their ongoing and unbearable pain, the solution to which was to ply them with yet more powerful narcotics.
Pharma-coopted lawmakers were notified of the proliferating addiction problem early on but refused to stop the runaway train by demanding that the FDA cease playing along with Purdue’s insane pro-narcotics marketing campaign. Other companies needless to say contributed as well, through promulgating the “pain epidemic” propaganda so as to expand the market niche of such products, which had previously been reserved for terminally ill patients. Johnson & Johnson played a causal role in what became the opioid crisis by growing tons of poppies (in Tasmania) to meet the enormous increased industry need for raw opium, without which the billions of pills prescribed could not and would never have been produced.
As the opioid crisis began to become recognized for what it was, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sought to issue “Immediate Suspension Orders” (ISOs) against the three major drug wholesale distributors to pharmacies, Cardinal Health, McKesson, and Amerisource Bergen. Through issuing such orders, Joe Rannazzisi, the deputy director of the Office of Diversion Control, hoped to halt the ongoing mass shipments of opioids to retailers such as CVS in cases where the sheer volume of prescriptions could not be explained by ordinary medical practice and so was a clear indication that widespread diversion of narcotics was underway.
Rannazzisi ended up being hobbled by a team of corporate lawyers and lobbyists who managed to cobble together a new law in 2014 which, despite its beneficent-sounding name, “The Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act” (HR4709), served to protect, above all, drug manufacturers and distributors. The Act rewrote the law already on the books through redefining the imminent danger required to issue an ISO to mean “a substantial likelihood of an immediate threat.” One of the new Act’s enthusiastic promoters, Linden Barber (a former DEA officer and lawyer who had left his government position to represent the drug distributors), persuasively explained on the floor of Congress that “having a clear legal standard is always better.” The measure passed unanimously, without a roll call vote, for the simple reason that it sounded like a policy to which no decent person could object. But rather than stemming the tide of the opioid crisis, the Act severely hampered the DEA’s ability to issue ISOs, for it was prohibitively difficult for officials to meet the newly stipulated legal standard of imminence as requiring immediacy.
President Obama signed the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2014 into law, and the marketing campaign used to promote the use of highly addictive time-release narcotics barreled ahead. The DEA’s sudden inability to call a halt to the shipment of tons of narcotics to retailers effectively guaranteed that the number of dependent persons would multiply, as potent prescription pills continued to be diverted for recreational uses and thereby create more addicts. But more addicts meant more overdoses, not only from the potent pills themselves, but also because the street supplies of heroin to which many users eventually turned were often cut with extremely dangerous fentanyl.
Unfazed by the death tolls, which had already soared to many thousands by 2014, the pharmaceutical giants insisted that the sorry situation of addicts was no argument against helping patients genuinely in pain, who would in fact be wronged if their access to narcotics were curbed. The addicts dropping like flies were painted as solely responsible for their plight, despite ample evidence that many of the overdose victims began as legitimate pain patients, who became aware of their dependency only upon reaching the bottom of their amber vials.
The Role of Obamacare in Propelling and Augmenting the Opioid Crisis
“Everything changed” in the twenty-first century, not only with the war on terror, the rebranding of torture, and the normalization of assassination, but also in the pharma-friendly approach to healthcare ushered in by President Barack Obama. By pushing through his signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, which leftists were led to believe would create a system of socialized medicine (referred to by many as Obamacare), the president notoriously bowed to drug makers and the insurance industry, extending to those sectors the very form of crony corporate welfare already enjoyed by companies in the military industry.
Obama’s collaboration with pharmaceutical and insurance company executives in crafting the ACA allowed them to secure advantageous pricing arrangements to ensure the maximization of their profits, while at the same time massively increasing the sheer volume of sales. The pharmaceutical industry was greatly enriched through the provision of virtually limitless free psychiatric medications to low-income patients through government programs such as Medicaid and Medicare, and to veterans through the VA (Veterans Administration). Mental health-based disability claims soared, and the sales of SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), anti-anxiety, atypical anti-psychotic medications and other psychotropes, including narcotics, increased accordingly. The millions of new prescription medications dispensed to formerly uninsured Americans ended up being paid for by the middle class, who were mandated by law to sign up for Obamacare or else face a hefty tax penalty, should they decline to comply.
Despite what may have been Obama’s initial good intention, to make healthcare available to uninsured persons, Obamacare ultimately made medical treatment in the United States prohibitively expensive for many middle class families, whose copays, premiums and deductibles increased dramatically. The new mandatory healthcare program skyrocketed the salaries of health industry executives while pricing drugs and procedures out of reach for many persons who had previously been able to afford them. Millions of people in the United States have filed medical bankruptcy in recent years. In cases where prescription narcotics addicts became uninsured because they lost their jobs, they turned to the streets for their needed drugs, given the impossibility of paying out of pocket for extraordinarily expensive prescription pills.
Given the story of Obamacare, perhaps no one should be surprised that when the Obama administration finally took action to address the opioid epidemic, most of the allocated $1.1 billion was for the alternative medication of already existing addicts. The pharma-friendly approach prevailed once again, encouraging the sale of more and more drugs (such as Suboxone) to help addicts to wean themselves off their narcotics. Obama’s dilatory and pro-pill approach to the opioid crisis ultimately generated even more people who, in order to kick their narcotics habit, would need to avail themselves of further pharmaceutical means, effectively trading one drug for another. In other words, both the problem of opioid overprescription, facilitated through Obamacare by providing easy access to narcotics to formerly uninsured persons, and the measures implemented by the Obama administration in response to the overdose epidemic, served to increase pharmaceutical industry profits.
The Death Connection
Whether or not one wishes to connect any further dots in the cases of drone assassination and the opioid epidemic, it does seem worth pointing out that Obama’s own attorney general, Eric Holder (2009-2015), was a former legal counselor to Purdue Pharma, who in fact defended the company in a 2004 lawsuit alleging deceptive marketing of Oxycontin. This is noteworthy because it was none other than Eric Holder who, in an infamous White Paper and various public addresses, so adamantly defended the creative interpretation of imminence as not implying immediacy, the crucial linguistic maneuver used to defend and promote Obama’s drone killing spree.
The normalization of assassination achieved by the Obama administration expanded the domain of what was said to be legitimate state killing by inverting the burden of proof on suspects while simultaneously claiming (illogically enough) that “areas outside active hostilities” were in fact war zones. Together, all of these linguistic tricks generated a veritable killing machine, opening up vast new market niches and dramatically increasing the profit potential for companies in the shockingly lucrative business of state-inflicted homicide. Not only weapons manufacturers but also logistics and analytics companies were able to reap hefty profits through eliminating as many people pegged as “terrorist suspects” as possible.
The imminent vs. immediate dichotomy was inverted and redeployed, but in the opposite direction, by pharmaceutical company legal teams and collaborating lawmakers in 2014 to permit the promiscuous sale of narcotics to continue on despite the opioid overdose epidemic on display throughout the United States. The Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2014 ironically “ensured” only profits for drug companies, as millions of new addicts would be created during the second decade of the twenty-first century, accelerating and multiplying the domino effect of diversion and overdoses already ravaging communities all across the United States. It matters not that pharmaceutical company executives sought not to kill people but to sell pills. They aggressively pushed narcotics without regard for the likely future consequences of their drive for profit. Indeed, they persisted in pushing narcotics even as drug overdose deaths reached record levels.
Under Obama, more than two thousand suspects outside areas of active hostilities were premeditatedly and intentionally incinerated by missiles launched from drones. The tally of overdose deaths in the United States exceeded 100K for the single year ending in April 2021. The long-range effects of the normalization of assassination, however, are likely to be more deadly than the opioid crisis, given that many other governments have followed suit in acquiring lethal drones for their own use, having been persuaded by the precedent set by the U.S. government that this form of state-inflicted homicide is perfectly permissible. In contrast, the promiscuous opioid prescription practices of doctors in the United States has been curtailed and was not emulated in the UK or in Europe, although the pharmaceutical giants do appear to have continued their morally dubious marketing practices in other countries abroad, especially in less-developed lands.
As both the drone program and the opioid prescription debacle illustrate, when government agencies such as the Pentagon and the FDA have been captured by industry forces focused above all on maximizing profits, they will simply look the other way as the corpses pile up, denying responsibility for any and all “collateral damage.” This tendency of bureaucrats and corporate leaders to shirk responsibility for the negative consequences of their policies helps to explain the ease with which lawmakers are coopted by lobbyists from not only the military but also the pharmaceutical industry. The recent deployment of imminent and immediate by lethal legal “experts” serves to underscore why the censorship of language by government officials themselves is inherently dangerous, given that their policies in recent years have multiplied, not prevented, the deaths of human beings.
In a representative democracy, the lawmakers promote the interests of the voters who elected them. What kind of government sacrifices the lives of human beings in order to maximize the profits of corporate leaders?9,969