The Full Story Of How Obama, Hillary And Brennan Carried Out The Crime Of The Century + Russia Hoax Collapses: Not A Single American Charged With Collusion With Russia; Left-Wing Media Has Been Lying All Along March 28 2019 | From: BigLeaguePolitics / NaturalNews / Various
The “Operation Crossfire Hurricane” plot against President Donald Trump is now exposed for the world to see, with special counsel Robert Mueller coming up empty in his quest to pin Trump with Russian collusion or obstruction of justice.
We have explosive information about this scheme, including the involvement of former president Barack Obama, Obama intelligence officials John Brennan and James Clapper, failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok, the Fusion GPS set-up agent Natalia Veselnitskaya, and even foreign leaders including Angela Merkel.
The Hillary Clinton campaign issued a press release on September 24, 2016 promoting information from the Christopher Steele dossier.
That press release has almost completely been scrubbed from the Internet, but is preserved in at least one tweet and in an Internet archive sponsored by The American Presidency Project.
The Clinton campaign, which funded the debunked dossier in an effort to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil Trump Tower, actively promoted a “Bombshell Report About Trump Aide’s Chilling Ties To Kremlin.”
Rep. Devin Nunes’ intelligence memo makes clear that Isikoff’s article, which was promoted by the Clinton campaign, used Christopher Steele as its source and was used to help obtain the FISA warrant. The FISA warrant application falsely states that Steele did not leak information to Yahoo News.
“We’ve never seen anything like this in American politics,” Hillary for America says in its statement, which called the information in Isikoff’s article “chilling.”
Clinton adviser Adam Parkhomenko tweeted out the statement:
Obama Officials Plotted To Get Senators Involved In The Plot In The Hours Before President Trump Took Office
Newly released emails show the Obama administration scrambling to create the “Russia” scandal within 24 hours of President Donald Trump taking the oath of office in January 2017.
The desperation of the Obama administration is evident in the emails, in which the Obama team tries to involve Democratic senators Warner and Cardin and Republican senator Corker in the plot.
Close observers know that the Operation Crossfire Hurricane strategy surfaced during the 2016 presidential election and continued well into Trump’s presidency, with General Michael Flynn getting snared in a Peter Strzok/Sally Yates ambush play in the early days of the Trump White House.
Now, Team Obama’s documented effort to cook up the Russia story before Trump’s inauguration emboldens a narrative already proved by text messages (presented below) involving Obama official James Clapper: the Obama people actually thought they could stop Trump from getting sworn in.
Judicial Watch, which obtained the emails in a Freedom of Information Act case, reports:
"In a Thursday, January 5, 2017, email chain then-State Department Congressional Advisor Hera Abassi indicates that then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland’s bureau was attempting to get Russian investigation related documents to the office of Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) office as quickly as possible.
(In June 2016 Nuland permitted a meeting between Steele and the FBI’s legal attaché in Rome. Nuland told CBS News that the State Department knew about the Steele dossier by July 2016.)
In the email, with the subject line “For Immediate Review – Call Sheet for S Call with Senator Warner,” Abassi writes:
“I told Cardin’s folks … that the process is long. Can we ensure that there are no holdups on our end?”
Minutes later, Abassi confirms that Nuland was fully aware of the information that the State Department was providing to members of Congress alleging Russia interference information:
Leaving no doubt that the State Department officials knew they were transmitting classified information, in a Wednesday, January 18, 2017, email with the subject line “Cables/M,” Former Foreign Service Officer Kerem Bilge writes to State Department Congressional advisor Hilary Johnson and others: “Highest class is SECRET/NOFORN.”
Johnson replies:
“FYI – so we can keep the SECRET/NOFORN header, and should declassify it 25 years from tomorrow."
“I forwarded the fully cleared version to the two of you on the high side [Editor’s Note: “high side” is State Department term for high security classification system], but let me know if there’s anything else you need from me on this.
“Note: we’ll need to make sure there is someone in Senate security tomorrow who can accept these.”
On Wednesday, January 18, 2017, Johnson confirms that classified documents were sent to Senator Corker in addition to Senator Cardin. “Flagging that I sent you a high side request for clearance of the draft transmittal letter to send documents to Senators Corker and Cardin.”
Additionally, involved in providing classified information to members of the Senate was Naz Durakoglu, Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs.
In an email dated Thursday, January 19, 2017, with the subject line “Signed, sealed, delivered” Durakoglu apparently confirms that Obama State Department officials were eager to provide the classified material before Trump was sworn into office: “We made the deadline!”
Durakoglu states [Emphasis added] “Thank you everyone for what was truly a Department-wide effort!”
President Trump Delivers a Statement Upon Departure
President Trump was inaugurated less than 24 hours later.
In a Wednesday, January 18, 2017 email, Naz Durakoglu signed off on the document transmittal letter on behalf of her bureau. This letter accompanied “the documents to Senator Corker and Cardin”
In a Thursday, January 19, 2017 email, Durakoglu appears to confirm that she is who carried the documents from the State Department to Capitol Hill. She states, “I will be carrying over the cables to the Hill.'”
Judicial Watch passage ends
Multiple elements of the Obama machine were working overtime on their Russian cooking in the immediate lead-up to President Donald Trump’s historic inauguration.
Obama - who also gave a stand-down order on stopping alleged Russian hacking - was personally implicated in the plot according to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page’s texts.
Obama’s director of national intelligence James Clapper confirms the obvious.
“If it weren’t for President Obama we might not have done the intelligence community assessment that we did that set up a whole sequence of events which are still unfolding today, notably Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation.
President Obama is responsible for that. It was he who tasked us to do that intelligence community assessment in the first place,”Clapper said in his Anderson Cooper interview.
Clapper Plotted With Brennan At Dinner
Catherine Herridge reported Tuesday for Fox News: “In a Dec. 12, 2016, text reviewed by Fox News, Page wrote to McCabe: “Btw, [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper told Pete that he was meeting with [CIA Director John] Brennan and Cohen for dinner tonight. Just FYSA [for your situational awareness].” Within a minute, McCabe replied, “OK.'”
Clapper Tried To Use ‘Russia’ To Get The Supreme Court To Block Trump’s Presidency
Obama administration Director of National Intelligence James Clapper held a meeting in his last days in office to discuss the idea of going to a Supreme Court justice to block President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to a high-level member of the intelligence community who spoke with a Big League Politics source.
Clapper discussed blocking the inauguration on the grounds that Trump was an illegitimate president due to alleged Russian interference in the election, according to the sources.
It is not known whether Clapper ever actually convened a meeting with a Supreme Court justice to discuss the Russia case, or whether he simply discussed the idea of doing so. By the time Trump entered office on January 20, the Russia narrative was already underway.
A high-level member of the intelligence community who witnessed the meeting said that Clapper discussed going to one of three female Supreme Court justices to make the case that alleged Russian interference could invalidate Trump’s claim to the presidency.
Another text the witness sent to BLP’s source around the same time described how the Deep State was making General Michael Flynn a “rising target” for his alleged involvement with Russians, and stated that House Speaker Paul Ryan is a “wild card” in the Deep State wars.
Big League Politics recently reported on an audiotape in which Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh admitted that slain DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source for Wikileaks’ release of DNC emails in 2016, not a Russian hack.
Hersh also said that Clapper and Obama administration CIA director John Brennan helped to create the Russia narrative against Trump.
So, how did the conspirators do it? They used a set-up agent named Natalia Veselnitskaya, the fabled “Russian lawyer.”
Comment:Read about the Alliance that has been working behind
the scenes for decades to take down the 'Cabal' within the work of David Wilcock.
Some of those reading this may be confused because the cabal-controlled mainstream media is doing everything within it's
power to denigrate Trump - as he is part of the effort to take the Illuminati down once and for all.
Natalia: The Conspirators Got Her In, Then Locked Her Out, of The Country
The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, then led by anti-President Trump activist Preet Bharara, played a key role in getting Natalia Veselnitskaya into the country in 2015-2016 on special Obama administration passes.
Now, fired U.S. Attorney Bharara’s former office has charged Veselnitskaya with obstruction of justice in an unrelated case. They did this to force Natalia to remain in Russia and not come back to the United States to testify, according to high-level FBI sources.
Why? Because Natalia has made it clear that she knows Glenn Simpson - the Fusion GPS head she had dinner with the night before and and the night after her Trump Tower set-up meeting - and she has said that her Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr. had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton.
Robert Mueller, Bharara, and the anti-Trump conspirators want to focus on Michael Cohen as a witness and block out any witnesses that would unravel their entire invented narrative - like Natalia, the spy who was used to set up the phony meeting that led to the fraudulent FISA warrants on the Trump team.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that Veseltnitskaya gained parole into the United States during the Obama administration due to a DHS decision made “in concurrence with the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Southern District of New York,” then headed by Preet Bharara.
But the very people who wanted to get Natalia in now very much want to keep her out.
Natalia Veselnitskaya was charged with obstruction of justice Tuesday to prevent her from coming back to the United States to testify in the Robert Mueller-related cases because her statements have already contradicted Mueller’s narrative, according to high-level FBI sources.
Veselnitskaya, who is now in Russia, was charged for making a “misleading declaration” in a civil money-laundering case.
Veselnitskaya’s indictment was filed in federal court in Manhattan and unsealed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, formerly led by anti-Trump activist Preet Bharara and still dominated by his underlings.
Now Veselnitskaya can’t return to the United States to contradict the Michael Cohen-focused case, because she would be arrested upon her arrival in this country. So what could Veselnitskaya spill if she testified?
Veselnitskaya’s appearance on Fox News, in which she discussed her relationship with Glenn Simpson, did not sit well with the Operation Crossfire Hurricane conspirators.
Particularly her quote, “But my meeting was not at all connected with Mrs. Hillary Clinton.”
Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney who signed the Veselnitskaya indictment, was recused from the Michael Cohen case by Department of Justice officials working under Rod Rosenstein. Berman is identified in the press as a Trump appointee but he is actually a Jeff Sessions appointee.
Here is what an FBI insider recently told us, prior to Mueller officially coming up empty-handed:
“Mueller’s team of partisans has a problem. They want to get Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner so they are working hard to prove that Jr and Kushner lied about the June 9th 2016 Trump Tower meeting.
The Special Counsel has their version (Fusion GPS’ version) of what happened in the meeting but Veselnitskaya and Manafort’s versions don’t support their version.
They tried to squeeze Manafort into reciting their version but in the end he resisted. So they claimed to the Judge that Manafort lied in his proffer to them.
Veselnitskaya already met with Senate investigators and gave testimony about the meeting.
This testimony doesn’t fall in line with the Special Counsel’s version so they have to discredit her and keep her from coming to the U.S. for any future hearings hence the strange indictment today by holdovers of Preet Bharara.
The Trump Tower meeting, facilitated by Fusion GPS and debriefed by Fusion GPS, was an original attempt to get candidate Trump to make commitments to Russia regarding the subversion of the Magnitsky Act.
This was the original purpose of the entrapment but candidate Trump didn’t fall for it. So they didn’t want a good set-up to go to waste.
Veselnitskaya only mentioned dirt on Hillary as a rouse to get the Trump campaign to meet with her regarding the Magnitsky scheme.
Fusion GPS, Brennan and Comey were trying to set Trump up to commit a serious crime related to Russia but they were unsuccessful.
After Trump was elected they dug through all of their attempts to find something useful and realized they could spin several setup meetings with Trump Campaign officials as somehow being related to hacked emails.
This is proven by the fact that all the meetings were conducted by people associated with the CIA (Halper and Mifsud) and the FBI (Fusion GPS and Henry Greenburg).
It is also proven by the fact that the FISA warrants obtained by the FBI never had any mention of Hacked emails.”
Stone’s lawyer Grant Smith wrote the following in a letter to Rep. Devin Nunes:
“By way of example, as you know, back in June I sent this Committee a letter regarding a longtime FBI informant named Gennadiy Vasilievich Vostretsov who, under the alias “Henry Greenberg”, was sent to approach my client in May 2016 with claims of having access to information that could impact the election.
Mr. Stone not only immediately and forcefully declined to participate in anything this FBI informant was proposing, but never saw or spoke to the informant again.
Mr. Stone believes it highly likely that Mr. Vostretsov/Greenberg’s status as an FBI informant was not “former”, and that Vostretsov/Greenberg was, in fact, actively working on behalf of the FBI at the time of their meeting, acting upon a calculated effort to entrap Mr. Stone and, further, to infiltrate and compromise the Trump effort.
Notably, Vostretsov was admitted to the country nine separate times on an FBI Informant’s visa.”
The Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya who set up Don Trump Jr. for a meeting in Trump Tower as part of a Fusion GPS plot was operating out of the Washington offices of Cozen O’Connor, a law firm run by an anti-Trump former Obama administration official whose super PAC donated to Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush in the 2016 presidential election.
Veselnitskaya’s work from the Cozen O’Connor office provides more evidence of a Democrat and establishment Republican effort to set up the Trump campaign for a future Russian collusion case.
Veselnitskaya was allowed into the United States by the Obama Department of Justice while the former Obama official who runs Cozen O’Connor publicly warned then-candidate Trump that if he became president he would be investigated by the DOJ for contacts with foreign leaders.
Big League Politics has confirmed that a Cozen O’Connor partner who lives in the same apartment building as James Comey’s friend Daniel Richman - who leaked classified information to the press on Comey’s behalf - spoke with Richman during the period that Comey and the Fusion GPS team were trying to obtain FISA warrants on Trump Tower.
Let’s break down the facts of an Obama administration official’s involvement in the Trump Tower plot:
Russian and U.S. citizen Rinat Akhmetshin, a Soviet military veteran, was present at Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Don Jr. in Trump Tower after leading a lobbying push supposedly to repeal the Magnitsky Act.
Akhmestshin is believed by insiders to be linked to Russian government intelligence, a fact that the Washington Post seized on when reporting that he met with Don Jr. and Jared Kushner in Trump Tower.
A nonprofit group focused on promoting Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya’s cause to lawmakers actually hired Cozen O’Connor, which the law firm confirms.
“In the spring of 2016, as the presidential race was heating up, Akhmetshin and lobbyists he hired sought meetings on Capitol Hill to make their case against the sanctions law. Akhmetshin hired former Democratic congressman Ron Dellums, along with a team of lobbyists from the law firm of Cozen O’Connor.
Steve Pruitt, a business colleague speaking on Dellums’s behalf, said his involvement was brief and ended when he determined that Congress was unlikely to change the law.
In June, after visiting Trump Tower in New York, Veselnitskaya came to Washington to lend a hand in the lobbying effort.
She attended a meeting of the team at the downtown offices of Cozen O’Connor, where she spoke at length in Russian about the issues but confused many in the room, who had not been told previously about her involvement, according to several participants.”
Washington Post passage ends.
Cozen O’Connor managing partner Howard Schweitzer is listed here on a DOJ form from an investigation into the breaking of lobbying laws by Russians trying to repeal the Magnitsky Act - which was just a front to get Russians in the room with Don Jr.
We know now that Natalia Veselnitskaya was actually operating out of the Cozen O’Connor offices.
Schweitzer worked as general counsel for the Export-Import Bank under George W. Bush and was chief operating officer of the TARP bailout program under both Bush and Obama from 2008-2009.
“In October 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson appointed Howard as the first COO of TARP. In this position, Howard led program execution and built the TARP infrastructure.
He served as a key point person regarding the financial crisis through the presidential transition and continued to serve as TARP COO under Secretary Timothy Geithner until August 2009,” reads Schweitzer’s Cozen O’Connor bio.
“He served as chief operating officer of the TARP in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations,” reads Schweitzer’s bio for a Politico piece he wrote in August 2016 headlined “7 Reasons Why Trump Would Hate Being President.”
Schweitzer’s virulently anti-Trump piece for Politico tries to make the case that Trump was “sabotaging his own bid for the White House.” Schweitzer said that if Trump became president then “He’ll be investigated to death” by Congress and the Justice Department for his business dealings and “relationships with foreign leaders.”
The narrative was being set.
The Philadelphia-based Cozen O’Connor law firm also has a political action committee that donated to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, in addition to Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Martin O’Malley.
In the 2018 election cycle, the Cozen O’Connor PAC donated more money to Hillary Clinton’s dormant campaign.
Cozen O’Connor’s connections to the anti-Trump “Operation Crossfire Hurricane” plot are wide-ranging, and show up in unexpected places.
James Comey’s friend, Columbia University professor Daniel Richman, leaked classified information that Comey gave him.
During this leaking period, Richman was apartment-building neighbors with a partner at the Cozen O’Connor law firm that strategized with Fusion GPS operative Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian plant who set up Don Jr. in Trump Tower.
Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS, led by Glenn Simpson, were part of John Brennan and Peter Strzok’s CIA-led “Operation Crossfire Hurricane” plot aimed at President Donald Trump and the Trump campaign.
“Yes, he is my neighbor,” Amy Wenzel, a partner at Cozen O’Connor, confirmed in a phone conversation with Big League Politics, confirming that they spoke. They live near each other in a Brooklyn high-rise.
The Washington Post’s release of Trump Tower documents shows the crowd surrounding non-sexual honeypot Natalia Veselnitskaya.
The crowd of conspirators knew they were damaging Trump by setting up the meeting.
The Post confirms British-citizen music promoter Rob Goldstone’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he described the conspirators’ push to get the meeting despite the fact that they knew it would create trouble for the Trump campaign.
“Rob Goldstone told the committee that his client, the Russian pop star and developer Emin Agalarov, had insisted he help set up the meeting between President Trump’s son and the lawyer during the campaign to pass along material on Clinton, overriding Goldstone’s own warnings that the meeting would be a bad idea.
“He said, ‘it doesn’t matter. You just have to get the meeting,’ ” Goldstone, a British citizen, testified.
The intensity with which Agalarov and his father, the billionaire Aras Agalarov, sought the Trump Tower meeting, which has become a key point of scrutiny for congressional inquiries and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, was revealed in more than 2,500 pages of congressional testimony and exhibits released by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning.”
Natalia Veselnitskaya is also inextricably linked to the case against Paul Manafort.
The Russian attorney partner of Paul Manafort who was named as a defendant in Robert Mueller charges is also linked to the Russian spy Natalia Vesenilskaya, who attended a meeting with Don Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner in Trump Tower.
According to Mueller’s charges, Manafort’s Russian partner Konstantin Kilimnik tried to intimidate or coerce witnesses in Manafort’s upcoming money laundering trial.
That put Konstantin Kilimnik at the center of the Mueller effort to find obstruction of justice in Trump-World.
So who is Konstantine Kilimnik? It turns out that Kilimnik is linked to Veselnitskaya, the Fusion GPS agent, according to Senate documents.
“Konstantin Kilimnik: Manafort, who worked for the pro-Russian party in Ukraine before running Trump’s campaign, had an employee in Kiev named Konstantin Kilimnik who U.S. and Ukrainian authorities have suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence, according to Politico.
Kilimnik served in the Russian army and learned English at a school that experts say often trains spies. Kilimnik denied being a spy to The Washington Post.
Manafort had dinner with Kilimnik last August in New York, just before he was forced out of the Trump campaign amid growing questions about his work in the Ukraine, the Post reported.”
Documents reveal Kilimnik’s ties to Veselniskaya. Let’s take a look at United States Senate Judiciary Committee documents questioning Veselniskaya in October.
Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley and Ranking Member Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked Veselniskaya if she knew a handful of characters believed to be conspirators in the case.
Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee as senator from Alabama.
Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Don Jr. in Trump Tower provided some of the basis for warrants to surveil Trump Tower and for other FBI surveillance measures on the Trump campaign.
The fact that Veselnitskaya, a lawyer herself, was in the meeting with Trump Jr. and Kushner opened the president’s son and son-in-law up to being qualified as “target associations” for law enforcement under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, passed during the Bush administration.
Veselniskaya’s link to suspected conspirator Kilimnik is now coming under scrutiny.
Peter Strzok, meanwhile, is firmly established as the go-to guy who ran point on the entire operation.
Both John Brennan and James Comey used Peter Strzok to damage President Donald Trump.
Strzok is the disgraced FBI agent and fired Robert Mueller team member whose text messages with mistress Lisa Page form the biggest scandal in FBI history. The lovers conspired to illegally bring down Trump, all while the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign.
Strzok interviewed Hillary Clinton without putting her under oath, and granted immunity to Cheryl Mills and Clinton’s other associates right before he flew to London to meet with Christopher Steele to work on the anti-Trump dossier, which was sponsored by the Clinton-funded firm Fusion GPS.
That dossier was used to fraudulently obtain FISA warrants to surveil Trump Tower. Barack Obama read bits of the dossier in his daily presidential briefings, courtesy of Brennan. Fusion GPS, meanwhile, sent operatives into Trump Tower to entrap Don Jr. and Jared Kushner in a meeting with planted Russians.
When it was time for the conspirators to focus on Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, Strzok was there to run information about the adviser to the Australians.
When it was time to take out Trump’s national security adviser General Michael Flynn, Strzok was there to stage an “ambush” interrogation of Flynn without Flynn’s lawyer present.
Let’s walk through Strzok’s amazing Zelig-like role in every facet of Operation Crossfire Hurricane:
Brennan hired Strzok to write the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in January 2017.
This was an official document used to spur on the Robert Mueller investigation.
But the document did not actually find any evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia, it merely said that Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump and that Russia “developed a clear preference for Trump.”
The Christopher Steele dossier was added as an “appendix” to the ICA report, even though Brennan lied and told Congress that it was never used.
Comey Sent Strzok To London To Meet With The Australians About George Papadopoulos
George Papadopoulos was surveilled in real time by the FBI. Who set him up?
Peter Strzok, whose meeting with the Australian ambassador in London provided key basis for the creation of Robert Mueller’s investigation, according to none other than the New York Times.
“The FBI sent counterintelligence agents, one of whom was Peter Strzok, to London in the summer of 2016 to meet with Australian ambassador, Alexander Downer, to describe his meeting with Trump campaign advisor, George Papadopoulos.
The meeting with Downer was described as “highly unusual,” and “helped provide the foundation for a case that, a year ago Thursday, became the special counsel investigation.”
The FBI kept details of the operation secret from most of the DOJ – with “only about five Justice Department officials” aware of the full scope of the case.”
Strzok Cleared Hillary Clinton Right Before He Left For London
Big League Politics called attention in July 2017 to the fact that Strzok was serving on the Mueller team after personally overseeing the Hillary Clinton email investigation at the FBI and personally conducting the interview with Hillary Clinton that was not under oath and which led to no incarceration for the Democrat candidate.
Strzok also withheld information about the Hillary case from Congress according to this text:
With the pressure on, Strzok’s wife Melissa Hodgman, Associate Director of the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission, is scrubbing her Obama and Clinton links.
Hodgman was promoted by Obama just two weeks before FBI director James Comey re-opened the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal in 2016, leading political insiders to suspect that Hodgman might have been involved in the federal government’s cover-up.
Some of the Liked pages on her Facebook account on December 3 included “Thank You Obama” and “We Voted For Hillary.”
Flynn apparently did not tell the White House about his meeting. Guess who did? Sally Yates, the anti-Trump deputy attorney general whose underling told the FBI to shut down the Clinton Foundation case.
Yates informed the White House on January 26 that Flynn met with the FBI.
That was the beginning of the end for the original Trump White House.
Strzok was close personal friends with the foreign intelligence judge Rudolph Contreras who accepted General Flynn’s guilty plea. Contreras recused himself after he already accepted Flynn’s guilty plea.
PAGE: “Rudy is on the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court]! Did you know that? Just appointed two months ago.”
STRZOK: “I did. I need to get together with him.”
PAGE: “said he’d gotten on a month or two ago at a graduation party we were both at.”
Strzok and Page’s Texts Revealed Their Anti-Trump Plot
It is well known that Strzok and Page discussed their anti-Trump conspiracy many thousands of times over text messages that have been mostly released. The lovers’ repeated references to “CF” refer to “Crossfire.”
STRZOK: "Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support…"
STRZOK: "I am riled up. Trump is a f***ing idiot, is unable to provide a coherent answer.”
Brennan Plotted For Years To Get Trump, Starting with a Fly-By-Night Operation in Reno
A whistleblower case currently in federal court in Washington, D.C. stands to bring out incredible allegations of John Brennan and James Clapper’s moves against Trump, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, and the former presiding judge of the FISA court Reggie Walton.
Real estate mogul Timothy Blixseth admitted that he saw records from CIA and NSA whistleblower Dennis Montgomery proving that Clapper and Obama CIA director John Brennan oversaw repeated spying on the phone calls of President Donald Trump and millions of other private American citizens, including Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and FISA court judge Reggie Walton.
Fired former FBI director James Comey received evidence from the whistleblower’s lawyer but sat on it.
In an audiotaped interview - conducted before Trump ever ran for president - Blixseth spoke to former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and detective Mike Zullo.
The audio was released in connection with a civil contempt case that the Department of Justice filed against Arpaio. The audio of this conversation appears to only be preserved in one location on the Internet, on a whistleblower Soundcloud page.
“This guy showed me 900 million phone calls. And I see myself in there. I see people I know. I see Donald Trump in there a zillion times, and Bloomberg is in there,” Blixseth said on the tape, referring to information that Montgomery allegedly showed him.
“He’s a very genius computer guy,” Blixseth said of Montgomery.
“What they did is, they were actually working for the CIA. And they mask it as - I’m sure you’ll remember this - the contracts with the CIA, of which I had many copies, said that they were decoding Al-Jazeera television, said that there was broadcast embedded, remember that?
Owned by Gore? Al Gore’s got part of it now. But it was all bullshit. That was bullshit. That was a front by the CIA. And this guy [Montgomery] worked for Brennan and Clapper. Those were the two guys running it,” Timothy Blixseth told Arpaio and Zullo on the tape.
“He started out in 2004 with another partner in Reno, Nevada, called eTreppid. They collected about $40 million from the CIA. Top security clearance.
All kinds of letters…In 2006 they started a new company that [my ex-wife] owns, and they started doing the same business for the government. What it really turns out they were doing is they were hacking into all of America."
Big League Politics called the listed number for eTreppid Technologies, but we were told that Montgomery no longer works there. “That company closed down years ago, sir,” a representative said of eTreppid Technologies. When asked what the company is called now, the representative said, “I’m sorry, I can’t discuss any more with you.”
Blixseth claimed in his conversation with Zullo and Arpaio that Brennan and Clapper were running the operation.
“Everything they said they didn’t do, that Brennan said recently, mainly Clapper. It’s all bullshit. And I’ve got it right here,”Blixseth said.
On the explosive tapes, Blixseth walks Arpaio and Zullo through the details of the program on a computer screen. At one point, the three begin pulling up specific names of targeted individuals.
“You know who that guy is? That’s the head of the FISA court they hacked into, Reggie Walton,” Blixseth tells the investigators.
“John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, was hacked,”Blixseth tells Arpaio and Zullo.
Insiders have always been skeptical of Roberts’ motives for siding with President Obama on Obamacare.
“The NEW YORK TIMES is looking into the adoption records of the children of Supreme Court Nominee John G. Roberts, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.
The TIMES has investigative reporter Glen Justice hot on the case to investigate the status of adoption records of Judge Roberts’ two young children, Josie age 5 and Jack age 4, a top source reveals.
Judge Roberts and his wife Jane adopted the children when they each were infants. Both children were adopted from Latin America.
A TIMES insider claims the look into the adoption papers are part of the paper’s “standard background check.”
Bill Borders, NYT senior editor, explains: “Our reporters made initial inquiries about the adoptions, as they did about many other aspects of his background. They did so with great care, understanding the sensitivity of the issue.”
Obama Kept The Scheme Going Overseas
House lawmakers are zeroing in on a meeting that German chancellor Angela Merkel held with President Obama at a key moment as one of the FISA warrants against Trump was set to expire.
Lawmakers are aware of the role of foreign governments in collaborating with U.S. intelligence agencies in the Trump investigation as recently as 2017.
Germany provided information beginning in 2015 to aide British spies and the Obama administration in compiling the Christopher Steele “dossier.”
Obama had been called out by the Drudge Report for visiting foreign leaders in Europe in the spring of 2017 right before President Trump visited those leaders in Europe. It turns out that one of those Obama meetings is now under scrutiny on Capitol Hill.
Deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein gave a redacted document to Rep. Devin Nunes, showing two major redactions about the creation of the Trump “Dossier” and the launch of FISA warrants and Robert Mueller’s investigation during the 2016 campaign.
The redactions were: “the name of a country and the name of a foreign agent who supplied information.”
Now we know: the country is Germany and the foreign agent was either Angela Merkel or someone who worked for Angela Merkel in foreign intelligence.
The redacted sections will be referencing one of the European countries and agents that share SIGINT (signal intelligence) to US Intelligence,” says Chuck Marler, a longtime agent of the FBI Special Surveillance Group under Robert Mueller, who is an official whistleblower in this case.
SIGINT countries were involved in sharing information that helped the Christopher Steele dossier to come together.
The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia, a member of the “Five Eyes” spying alliance that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said.”
So Germany helped build the dossier. When does Merkel re-emerge in this picture?
“Fast forward to April/May 2017, roughly the same time the fourth and final FISA warrant was running out (because the Carter Page story was determined false). Rosenstein and McCabe were in desperate need of renewed help from intelligence to keep the Russian Collusion narrative alive,” Marler reports.
“Well they weren’t going to get help from the CIA because Pompeo was now CIA Director and wouldn’t help with a faux collusion narrative.
In comes Obama to the rescue. He meets with Merkel in private (the US no longer monitored her communications because of the previous mishap) to beg for some more Sigint information to keep the collusion narrative alive.
Conveniently he meets her hours prior to Trump’s meeting and his stay in her heavily monitored territory.”
“Barack Obama is to visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on his first trip to Europe since leaving office.
The former US President will travel to Germany for the launch of a summer of special events to mark the 500th anniversary of the Protestant church.
He will arrive in Germany on the same day as his successor Donald Trump is due in Brussels for a meeting with other NATO leaders – the first scheduled foreign visit for the President since taking office.
Mr Obama is due to give a speech in the German capital and take part in a discussion on democracy with Ms Merkel, who he once called his “closest ally.'”
Russia Hoax Collapses: Not A Single American Charged With Collusion With Russia; Left-Wing Media Has Been Lying All Along
Well, that was a bust, but an expensive one - in real dollars and in terms of our country’s political health.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report regarding his “witch hunt” probe of POTUS Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign over allegations of “collusion” with Russia to “steal the election” from Hillary Clinton has proven two things.
One, that the investigation was a hoax - based on a phony narrative devised in the aftermath of an election the far-Left Democratic Party and its sympathetic Deep State thought they had in the bag.
And two, the lame stream fake news “establishment” media has been lying all along, playing the role of enabler to this mother-of-all political scandals, while at the same time covering for the real criminals and traitors and keeping the country stirred up, divided, and people at each other’s throats. Literally.
During his Friday program, Fox News ace Tucker Carlson recounted for viewers a list of Democratic “shills” and media who made it their mission in life to keep feeding the Russian collusion monster for as long as possible, hoping that Mueller would find something, anything, that would not only justify his appointment but prove to be political cyanide for POTUS and his administration.
“The people on TV have been lying to you. They’ll deny it now and will tell you this was always about Trump’s taxes or some foreign real estate deal or hush money he paid to a girlfriend.
That’s a crock,” Carlson noted, as reported by TownHall’s Beth Baumann.
“This investigation was always, from day one, about collusion with Russia, about betraying this country. They told us that for years. And we have the tape.”
One of the biggest liars has been Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan, whom many believe was the mastermind behind the “Spygate” scandal.
In a previous MSNBC appearance, he haughtily asserted he was pretty sure that some collusion took place.
“That was the former CIA Director, one of countless retired intel officials you see parading across your screen every night, all of them paid by MSNBC and or CNN to tote the party line, all of them no better.
They’re lying. It’s a habit many of them picked up years ago,” said Tucker.
POTUS is Right: They are Enemies of the People
Carlson then showed a clip of Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who appeared on CNN in July, telling host Wolf Blitzer that he believed most of Trump’s family would also be indicted.
The media hyped that one too, as noted by The National Sentinel. Breathlessly, for weeks, in fact.
“That man [Steve Cohen] is a sitting member of Congress. He wears a necktie. He’s on TV. People believed him. And why wouldn’t they? He’s an authority figure in this country and he was lying,” Tucker said.
And let’s not forget the master conspirator/liar, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who Tucker calls the “original collusion truther.”
“There’s no element of the Russia conspiracy that Swalwell, who’s been on this show many times, isn’t eager to believe and magnify,”he added.
The Fox News host reminded his viewers that there have actually been three separate investigations into the Russian collusion hoax - Mueller’s, of course, but also one each by the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Those committees “spent years looking into this and in the end, they found nothing, but during this time, the country they’re supposed to be running has become obviously and measurably worse,” said Tucker.
And the pathetic “mainstream” media has been front and center in the middle of perpetuating the hoax, through acts of commission and omission.
Despite opportunities galore to call these liars out, the media instead chose to keep bringing them back, allowing them to spin, yarn, and fib, all while tensions in the country boiled and Americans seethed at each other.
Scandalous, for certain. But perhaps even criminal. In another time more Americans would have been far more willing to call this behavior what it was (and continues to be): Treasonous.
The Global Fascist State: Physical Control Of The Global Population Is Impossible March 27 2019 | From: FinalWakeUpCall / Various
Centralised, controlled Global fascist state:The momentum for the completion of the New World Order (NWO) through centralised control of global politics, business, banking, military and media is gaining pace by the day, and is clearly evident through the large scale spying upon us.
Whenever a hidden agenda is about to be implemented, something occurs to scare the people, justifying the action for implementation. Our world is more and more becoming a recurrence of fascist Nazi Germany, before WWII. This is, in accordance with the plans of the Deep State Brotherhood, the new world that awaits the global population.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and multinational corporations already control most Governments;promoting the one world government through their control of the media, foundation grants, and education; with power exerted over all issues of the day; they already control almost all avenues; they have the financial power to promote the “New World Order”.
The key to their success is the control and manipulation bythe international bankers of the money systems of almost every nation, while making it appear as though they are controlled by the government.
If you wish to live in a world that is “urbane” enough to be run by a world government, managed by the Brotherhood of the élite and global bankers, then by all means, continue to follow the mainstream media to get all your information.
If, however, the idea of a select coterie of a global intellectual-financial elites running the world does not sound like the ideal society for humanity’s future, then it is time to come into action.
By battling the tide of misinformation and by helping to expose the dangers of the ‘New World Order.’
People have neither the slightest idea, nor the insight of the restrain that is going to be put on them. They would rather ignore the obvious and go into denial of the truth that has already become reality. Instead, people prefer assuring each other that they would never take people’s freedoms away and make us serfs of the elite.
Humanity has on a large scale given away its mind and its responsibility – it is advisable to consider the broader consequences of this behaviour for human existence.
When we give away our mind and responsibility, we give away our freedom and hence, our lives.
If enough people do it, we give the world away, and that is precisely what has been done throughout history. We’re now entering a fascist society, as was the case before WWII. The leaders of this era, such as Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany embodied the state and they claimed indisputable power, transforming countries into fascist states.
Now history is repeating itself and soon the world will become a fascist society all over again. The only difference is that this time, a few families, alias – the elite – are manipulating the entire planet, through the globalisation of business, banking and communications.
The primary goal of their control is to keep the people in ignorance, fear and at war. Divide, rule and conquer and keep the most important information secret.
Those who have applied these methods to control humanity for thousands of years are members of the same force, following a long-term Brotherhood Agenda, which now is reaching its point of completion.
So, the global fascist state is upon us. People must wake up now – and see this as their “final wake up call” – to mobilise and organise themselves to rebel against this injustice, as the real power is still with the many of us, and not with the few of the elites!
Infinite Power is Within Every Individual:
Infinite power is within each and every individual. The reason we are controlled is not because we don’t have the power to decide our own destiny, it is that we unknowingly give that power away when we don’t take responsibility for our destiny on all fronts.
When something happens that we don’t like, we look for someone else to blame. When there is a problem, people think first what are they, our so-called leaders going to do about it.
But remember it is they who have secretly created most problems, and they consequently respond to people’s demands by offering a ‘solution’ that always entails more centralisation of power and erosion of our freedom.
Man Sends Audition Tape To Globalists To Be Crisis Actor in Next False Flag Hilarious Satire Skit
If you want to give more power to the police, security agencies and military, that is exactly what they want the public to ask for, then they ensure there is more crime, more violence and more terrorism, and so they increasingly get exactly what they want, ever-increasing control and power.
Once people are in fear of being attacked by terrorists, they will demand to have their freedoms taken away, to protect them from what they have been manipulated to become – ‘fearful’.
As Benjamin Franklin once so typically stated:
“Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
The 9/11 Twin Tower destruction in New York in 2001 and the Global warming meme are both classic examples of ‘Problem - Reaction - Solution’ manipulations.
Physical Control of the Global Population is Impossible:
In short it is a technique of ‘problem - reaction - solution’. Create the problem; encourage the reaction that something has to be done about, and then offer the solution, their solution. In other words:
Create chaos and then offer a solution to restore order on people’s request, a solution which serves their agenda.
The masses are herded and directed by emotional and mental control. This is the only way their rules can be implemented. However, the few elites cannot control billions of people physically, unless a large number of people are involved.
So physical control of the global population is impossible. But when you can manipulate the way people feel and think to the point that they decide to do what they want us to do, by demanding to introduce regulations that they want to have implemented, then the door is set open for Centralised Global Control, by making people believe that it is their own idea.
Consequently, humanity becomes mind-controlled.
People are Mind Controlled:
The question is not how many people are mind-controlled, but how few are not. When you believe the news stories in the media, and allow these to affect your perception of events, your mind is controlled.
The answer to freedom of thought and perception is to take your mind back to conclude and decide for yourself.
The choice of interpretations is yours and not someone else’s. Remember they always want to have your mind, because once they have it, they have you. So keep your mind objective under all circumstances.
Think for yourself and don’t allow others to think for you, and if we All do this, their Agenda will not be able to be implemented and we will keep our freedoms, it’s as simple as that. Come into action now in the interest of our children, future generations, and in our own interest.
Remember; the secret Agenda is a conspiracy of minds, of people and events to ensure that the plans of the elite are employed. They conspire to put their people into positions of power, with hidden, stringent instructions to make the agenda happen, by conspiring to create events which will make the public demand the Agenda be implemented in complete ignorance of the devastating consequences.
It is frightening that we have entered the world George Orwell envisioned and wrote about in 1984 of mass surveillance, as portrayed in the movie ‘The Truman Show’.
Stick Your New World Order Up Your Arse!
Recently numerous scandals have revealed the surveillance state of the West and put it up for show. Whistleblowers have been warning about this for years!
But saying you were right won’t help you in the long run. Now we know that the government is listening, recording, and duplicating everything we do online or over the phone, it’s time to start taking action. It’s time to take back our right to privacy.
Although we may not fear Chinese tanks rolling through our streets, make no mistake; our most basic rights are under attack: reporters are being investigated and suspended by Government officials for exposing scandals, legislation is designed to water down our privacy rights and the NSA acts like it was nothing more than a necessity to crack down on terrorists, while presenting the matter as though they have the authority to do so.
Watch the powerful explanation of Snowden; it’s a lot easier, as was put forth by him, to change this intrusion on civilisation as has been laid out in the above writing: Be objective and make up your own mind; deciding for yourself.
New Zealand Follows Communist China In Erecting “Great Firewall” Of Internet Content To Block All Independent Journalism About The Mosque Shootings March 26 2019 | From: NaturalNews / Various
The damage that one maniac’s horrific act of terror is doing to New Zealand’s democratic processes will be irreversible - that is, without major societal upheaval at some point in the future.
When Brenton Tarrant live-streamed the murders of worshipers in two Christchurch mosques a week ago, he not only stole the life from innocent human beings, he stole the lifeblood of New Zealand’s peaceful, tranquil freedoms.
Now, after several Western websites broadcast footage of Tarrant’s livestream, allowed it to be shown on their sites, or permitted it to be freely discussed (on sites like Dissenter and Zero Hedge), not only did New Zealand telecoms ban them, but now the same firms want more censorship from big tech platforms - to “protect consumers.”
That censorship has already begun. Facebook, which was Tarrant’s chosen live-stream platform, took the video down and then proceeded to delete some 1.5 million additional videos of the assault; 1.2 million of those were blocked at the time of upload.
The social media giant also said it had been in contact with the other big tech behemoths including Google, Twitter, and Microsoft via the “Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT).”
Zero Hedgenoted on its site that the video could still be downloaded by anyone wishing to see it from BitTorrent.
Twitter has also been at work aggressively censoring a lot of content related to the Christchurch attack - “perhaps most egregiously forcing journalist Nick Monroe to delete a large number of tweets as he covered the incident in real time, just one of which had links to footage of the shooting,” Zero Hedge reported.
Terrorists Seek to Have Liberties and Freedom Restricted - That’s the Definition of Terrorism
Besides merely reporting on and documenting the attack and its aftermath, Monroe has also noted the widespread censorship taking place as well.
Examples include the New Zealand Herald quietly editing a March 15 story in order to remove mention of a “well known Muslim local” who “chased the shooters and fired two shots at them as they sped off” - because authorities there don’t want anyone getting the idea that guns can also be used for things like self-defense and protecting the public, and by ordinary citizens, not just armed police officers.
But none of the big tech censorship has progressed far enough, at least according to the CEOs of New Zealand telecom companies.
In a letter to Facebook, Google and Tweeter that was reported by the New Zealand Herald, execs from Spark, Vodafone, and 2degrees said they should be “following European proposals” that include censoring (taking down) of materials within a certain period and other “proactive” measures as well as imposing fins of up to $80 million for failure to act.
“Consumers have the right to be protected, whether using services funded by money or data. Now is the time for this conversation to be had and we call on all of you to join us at the table and be part of the solution,” they wrote.
The letter came as major New Zealand firms pulled their ads from the platforms.
“We call on Facebook, Twitter and Google, whose platforms carry so much content, to be a part of an urgent discussion at an industry and New Zealand Government level on an enduring solution to this issue,” the wrote.
Their solutions should be viewed as unacceptable to anyone who wishes to remain free.
Yes, what Tarrant did - especially live-streaming it - was an awful, terrible thing.
But punishing freedom and restricting liberties is exactly the kind of overreaction from governments that terrorists hope their attacks will accomplish.
Overcoming Anxiety By Embracing Uncertainty March 25 2019 | From: TheUnboundedSpirit “Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are caused by too much future, and not enough presence.” - Eckhart Tolle
Life is fundamentally unpredictable and so we can’t be certain about what is going to happen next. And although uncertainty is, in a sense, a blessing, since it allows space for freedom and change, at the same time it can feel like a curse.
Being used to the known reality of our lives, most of us become attached to it and hence dislike change. The future is unknown, and how can we be sure that what we possess - for example, our health, material possessions, friends or love partners - will not be taken away from us?
And, considering the inevitability of death, we tremble in the face of the unknown ahead of us. We are aware that at any time, even the very next moment, we might die. In fact, any moment we die will be the “next moment.”
In order to feel more secure, we try to control life as much as we can, by constantly trying to fit the future to our expectations.
Yet, the only thing we ultimately achieve by doing so is to put ourselves in a constant state of anxiety that prevents us from savoring the present moment. As put by Alan Watts:
"If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are ‘crying for the moon.’ We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die.
If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.”
Whether we like it or not, the truth is - and we better accept it - that we can’t predict what kind of fortune - good or ill - lies on our path. No matter how much we try to control life, it will inevitably disappoint us by taking its own course.
To overcome our overwhelming anxiety about the future, we need to let go of our desire to control every event, factor the unexpected into our plans, embrace uncertainty and flow with the wild current of life, trusting that it will takes us to new and exciting places.
By relaxing the tight fist of clinging to an expected end result, we will be able to focus on the here and now, and thus make the most out of every second of our lives as well as find gratitude in what we have without taking anything for granted.
I’d like to end this article with one of my favorite Taoist stories, which beautifully illustrates how uncertain life can be and the wisdom of embracing change rather than trying to control or fight against it:
"There was a farmer whose horse ran away. That evening the neighbors gathered to commiserate with him since this was such bad luck. He said, “May be.” The next day the horse returned, but brought with it six wild horses, and the neighbors came exclaiming at his good fortune.
He said, “May be.” And then, the following day, his son tried to saddle and ride one of the wild horses, was thrown, and broke his leg.
Again the neighbors came to offer their sympathy for the misfortune. He said, “May be.” The day after that, conscription officers came to the village to seize young men for the army, but because of the broken leg the farmer’s son was rejected.
When the neighbors came in to say how fortunately everything had turned out, he said, “May be.”
The Individual Versus Globalism March 24 2019 | From: JonRappoport
“Global solution” means the individual is cut out of the equation, he doesn’t count, he doesn’t mean anything in the larger scheme of things, he’s just another pawn and cipher to move around on the board.
This is purposeful. This is the script for the future: create problems whose only solution appears to be collective.
Psychologically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually divert the individual’s attention from his own vision, his own profound desires, his own imagination - and place it within The Group (“all of humanity”).
Propagandize the idea that, if the individual concerns himself with anything other than The Group, he is selfish, greedy, inhumane. He is a criminal.
More and more, this is how the young are being trained these days.
The grand “we” is being sold to them like a cheap street drug. They buy in. They believe this “we” is real, instead of a hollow con designed to drag them into a Globalist framework owned and operated by mega-corporations, banks, foundations, governments, and ubiquitous Rockefeller interests.
And what of the individual, his mind, his unique perception, his independent ideas, his originality, his life-force? Swept away in the rush toward “a better world.”
I have breaking news. Earth is not a spaceship and we are not crew members. If Earth is a spaceship, it has serious design flaws, because it keeps making the same trip around the same sun every year. Each one of us does not have a specified function, as a crew member would.
Going back as far as you want to in history, shortage and scarcity in the world that engendered a crisis was either created by some elite or maintained by them, for the purpose of eradicating dissent and fomenting a collectivist solution. Meaning a solution that came from the top. Meaning a solution that reduced individual freedom.
In recent human history, a different idea emerged: establish severely hamstrung government, in order to protect the individual against it. This idea has had a very tough time. Collectivists have fought it every step of the way.
But regardless of circumstances, the individual can author his own freedom and what it implies. He can discover, within himself, extraordinary possibilities. He can contemplate what it means to create reality that expresses his most profound desires.
And then he can begin a voyage that no one and no group can stop. Civilizations come and go, rise and fall; the individual remains.
The word “imagination,” when properly understood, indicates that the individual can envision and then create futures that never were, and never would be, unless he invented them.
Imagination is the opposite of “provincial,” “restricted,” “well-known,” “familiar,” “accepted.."
That is its challenge to the status quo.
That is the true threat the individual poses to all predictive systems. Therefore, “it’s all just information” is a psyop code-phrase. Ideas, thoughts - nothing is original, nothing is new; we all “share” information floating in the collective consciousness; the individual invents nothing.
Which is the opposite of the truth. The individual invents everything.
He can’t be predicted when he is himself. He is not a pattern. He is not a system.
He is not anyone else.
He thrives on his own inspiration.
He is the ultimate riverboat gambler. He bets the house on his own as-yet uncreated future.
He is not a piece of universe.
He is not a humble servant of Order.
He invents the space and time of his own time to come.
As early as 1961, a brilliant healer, Richard Jenkins, whom I write about in my book, The Secret Behind Secret Societies (part of the Exit From The Matrix collection), explained what was to come. He wrote me a note, which I’m paraphrasing from memory:
“People are confusing their own empathy for others with some inflated idea about group-identity. They aren’t the same. People are becoming afraid of their own unique and distinct existence.
This is a social fear. A new social contract is being foisted on the population. Either you belong, or you have no rights. This is a totalitarian concept. It’s coming in through the back door.”
Well, now, it’s right there at the front door. The individual still has a choice. But he has to make it.
Explore his own power, or give it away for nothing more than an illusion of belonging. Stoke the fires within, or form a diluted image of self, and bow down to The Group.
The “I” is not isolated. He can reach out to others whenever and however he wants to. The question is, is he moving on the ground of his own independence, or is he searching for a group life raft, to which he will attach himself without thought or hesitation?
Beyond economics or politics, Globalism is a system that offers a life raft which is heading toward a machine-future.
Comment:Read about the Alliance that has
been working behind
the scenes for decades to take down the 'Cabal' within the work of David Wilcock.
Some of those reading this may be confused because the cabal-controlled mainstream media is doing
everything within it's
power to denigrate Trump - as he is part of the effort to take the Illuminati down once and for
all.
Disembark and find the great We, a construct of integrated parts, each of which is an individual, in a state of spiritual amnesia. Happiness there is function and sedation, shadowless, wiped clean of distinctions.
This is the elitist end-game of social justice and equality. It’s a fake culture.
The Reasons Why We Can't Put Down Our Smartphones March 23 2019 | From: Forbes
The long-running news program 60 Minutes is taking on the smartphone industry by uncovering the ways mobile app makers keep people hooked.
Former Google exec Tristan Harris, interviewed for the episode, argues that we’ve been fooled into believing the “technology is neutral” argument.
Instead, he says that software makers have mastered a sort of “addiction code” that keeps people compulsively engaged, such that we can't stand leaving our phones for even a little while.
In other words, the technology has been manipulated to leverage our brains' habit-forming tendencies. Tech insiders call it "brain hacking," and Harris argues that it's destroying our focus and relationships.
This is a big topic that’s close to all of our lives because most of us are married to our gadgets. I covered it from several angles in my book, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite, and I’m refreshing the arguments for a new edition of the book coming out next year. With the 60 Minutes story as backdrop, I want to discuss a few of the angles here.
If app makers have mastered a habit-forming “code” that’s working overtime on our phones to keep us hooked, what brain dynamics are they tapping?
The Reward System
The most overarching of the dynamics, and the one that gives the others context, is what’s known as the brain’s reward system - the electro-chemically charged power grid that neurotransmitters surge through when our brains are doing what they’re structured to do: predict and anticipate rewards.
The term “rewards” is broad in this definition, because anything from learning to speak French to going on a date to laying money down on a blackjack table can amount to a reward.
We’re driven to seek rewards of all sorts; it’s how learning happens, and it’s also how habits are formed. The pro-con nature of the reward system - with the neurotransmitter dopamine driving much of the action - is so central to our lives it’s hard to overestimate its importance.
It’s at the core of how our brains interact with the world, whether tangible or virtual (it’s all the same to your brain). And since it’s the system that enables habit formation, both good and bad, it’s also the system that those interested in getting you hooked on anything spend most of their time studying.
(Sidebar: Often in discussions of the reward system, the role of dopamine is mischaracterized, with unfortunate claims like "dopamine is addictive." That's wrong for several reasons, not the least of which is that without dopamine we wouldn't have a reward system, nor would we learn, thrive, reproduce or live.
In combination with other chemicals, dopamine is the high-octane fuel that addictions use, just as it's the fuel that beneficial habits use; goes both ways.)
Anticipation
The reward system operates via anticipation of rewards, which makes the period between thinking of a reward and receiving it very critical. Manipulating that period is a key to engaging app design.
The ongoing series of intermittent, variable rewards that smartphones serve up are tantalizing to the brain because they so effectively leverage this dynamic. We’re forever anticipating the next little reward, and then the next and the next. Our attention is captivated by the anticipation of rewards.
What really charges this up is the meta-anticipation of hidden gems of rewards coming into the mix. For every 50 or so texts, Facebook posts, Instagram pictures or whatever, just a few are going to really deliver the goods. We're neurochemically trained to drill down and down for these rewards, through however much mediocrity and nonsense is in the way.
To elicit more rewards, we contribute to the reward stream by making our own posts and waiting for a response. Every time we post something, we're starting an anticipation stopwatch that works on the same principle. The jolt might even be more profound because it's coming from a reward process we initiated, and that's a brain boost with few equals.
And what's fueling all of this compulsive reward anticipation?
Anxiety
There’s a debate about which model best describes why we get hooked on technologies. Some think the addiction model fits best, but the problem with that argument is that addictions operate with a distinct pleasure principle. Someone starts using a drug to get the euphoria or other sensations at the other end, whether for pain relief or otherwise.
Over time the drug can’t deliver the same way, so more and more is taken to get the effect. Same for behavioral addictions like gambling - the gambler wants the high that comes from taking the risk, but the risk has to get bigger over time to deliver the same feeling.
What seems to better fit compulsive technology use is the anxiety model. It’s not purely a desire for pleasure, but a response to heightened stress and anxiety that keeps us clicking. We're not talking about overt, panic-level anxiety; anxiety is insidious precisely because it's usually not overt, but more like a charged hum in the background that seeps into our thoughts and influences our actions.
Often we react to it without consciously thinking through why. Smartphones, it turns out, are short-term anxiety elixirs.
As author Sharon Begley notes in her book on compulsive behavior, Can’t Just Stop,
“By making us feel we are always connected to the world, [smartphones] alleviate the anxiety that otherwise floods into us from feeling alone and untethered.”
Research on the topic backs up that argument, showing that compulsive smartphone use is tied closely to anxiety, even more so for those with forms of anxiety disorder, which happens to be an enormous and growing segment of the population. The same conclusions have been reached by research on problematic internet use in general: anxiety is a potent precursor.
One component of that anxiety is that we don’t like being alone with our thoughts. Begley discusses a study that I’ve also covered here, showing how for many people receiving a mild electric shock is preferable to doing nothing in a room for 15 minutes.
That makes sense when you consider how our smartphones now fill all of the empty time slots in our days, times we’d otherwise be alone to think.
The technology fills the empty space available, and then creeps into spaces already filled with things like conversations with people in front of us. (The 60 Minutes episode also pointed out that our phones seem to directly contribute to our anxiety over time by triggering spikes in the stress hormone cortisol.)
Compounding that anxiety, and fueling it along the way, is the constant fear that we’ll miss the important rewards. While the term "FOMO" (Fear of Missing Out) may have started as Urban Dictionary slang, it’s an on-the-mark description of a key brain dynamic.
Some psychologists have defined it as “a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing”–because it’s exactly “what others are doing,” whoever they may be, that drives the reward machine. If we’re not connected, the rewards pass us by and we feel a sense of loss, and we also miss the opportunity to contribute to the reward stream and anticipate the rewards we'll receive in response.
Withdrawal
When you combine that sense of loss with anxiety, you have the sensation that comes from feeling disconnected, and it really is a form of withdrawal.
Here again we have to be careful with definitions, because withdrawal is mostly associated with the addiction model. In the anxiety model, we’re struck by more and stronger anxiety from feeling disconnected via the digital conduit that keeps us tethered to the world.
It’s not the same as addiction withdrawal (especially from chemical addictions), but there are similar elements. When the brain has engaged and established a habit that alleviates anxiety, and that habit is disrupted, then the predictable result is even more anxiety.
Does anyone want to feel that? No, so the urge to keep our smartphones nearby at all times is a hedge against feeling anything like it.
This is a complex story, of course, as all brain stories are, but the dynamics we just walked through constitute much of the drama. Knowing all of this, you can see why those with a vested interest in keeping us hooked pay close attention to how these dynamics can be manipulated.
For an app to break through and grab us - to become part of our personal habit matrix–it must leverage all of these dynamics tied to the brain's reward system. The most successful of those apps are designed so well, the effects are seamless.
Is this all the same as saying we’re “addicted” to our smartphones? I'd argue no, for the reasons discussed, but there’s no question that we’ve developed an ever-more compulsive habit of using them to counterbalance stress and anxiety, which are only getting more intense in our pressure-keg culture.
It's the perfect storm of technology and need fulfillment, and we're all carrying around the proof in our pockets.
It's Official: This Is Straight Out Of Orwell's 1984... March 22 2019 | From: TruthstreamMedia
Google is actually stepping into the role of 1984's 'Ministry of Truth'.
New internal guidelines to filter search results of web pages - based upon "well established historical and scientific facts".
Everywhere In The Western World, Government Is A Conspiracy Against The People
& Cartels That Run The World March 21 2019 | From: PaulCraigRoberts / JonRappoport
In the West “conspiracy theory” is the name given to explanations that differ from those that serve the ruling oligarchy, the establishment or whatever we want to call those who set and control the agendas and the explanations that support the agendas.
The explanations imposed on us by the ruling class are themselves conspiracy theories. Moreover, they are conspiracy theories designed to hide the real conspiracy that our rulers are operating.
For example, the official explanation of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory. Some Muslims, mainly Saudi Arabians, delivered the greatest humiliation to a superpower since David slew Goliath.
They outsmarted all 17 US intelligence agencies and those of NATO and Israel, the National Security Council, the Transportation Safety Administration, Air Traffic Control, and Dick Cheney, hijacked four US airliners on one morning, brought down three World Trade Center skyscrapers, destroyed that part of the Pentagon where research was underway into the missing $2.3 trillion, and caused the morons in Washington to blame Afghanistan instead of Saudi Arabia.
Clearly, the Saudia Arabians who humiliated Ameria were involved in a conspiracy to do so. Is it a believable conspiracy?
The ability of a few young Muslim men to pull off such a feat is unbelievable. Such total failure of the US National Security State means that America was blindly vulnerable throughout the decades of Cold War with the Soviet Union. If such total failure of the National Security State had really occurred, the White House and Congress would have been screaming for an investigation.
People would have been held accountable for the long chain of security failures that allowed the plot to succeed. Instead, no one was even reprimanded, and the White House resisted all efforts for an investigation for a year. Finally, to shut up the 9/11 families, a 9/11 Commission was convened. The commission duly wrote down the government’s story and that was the “investigation.”
Moreover, there is no evidence to support the official conspiracy theory of 9/11. Indeed, all known evidence contradicts the official conspiracy theory.
For example, it is a proven fact that Building 7 came down at freefall acceleration, which means it was wired for demolition. Why was it wired for demolition? There is no official answer to this question.
It is the known evidence provided by scientists, architects, engineers, pilots, and the first responders who were in the twin towers and personally experienced the numerous explosions that brough down the towers that is described as a conspiracy theory.
The CIA introduced the term “conspiracy theory” into public discourse as part of its action plan to discredit skeptics of the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Any explanation other than the one handed down, which is contradicted by all known evidence, was debunked as a conspiracy theory.
Conspiracy theories are the backbone of US foreign policy. For example, the George W. Bush regime was active in a conspiracy against Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
The Bush regime created fake evidence of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction,” sold the false story to a gullible world and used it to destroy Iraq and murder its leader. Similarly, Gaddafi was a victim of an Obama/Hillary conspiracy to destroy Libya and murder Gaddafi. Assad of Syria and Iran were slated for the same treatment until the Russians intervened.
Currently, Washington is engaged in conspiracies against Russia, China, and Venezuela. Proclaiming a non-existant “Iranian threat,” Washington put US missiles on Russia’s border and used the “North Korean threat” to put missiles on China’s border.
The democratically elected leader of Venezuela is said by Washington to be a dictator, and sanctions have been put on Venezuela to help the small Spanish elite through whom Washington has traditionally ruled South American countries pull off a coup and reestablish US control over Venezuela.
Everyone is a threat: Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Aghanistan, tribes in Pakistan, Libya, Russia, China, North Korea, but never Washington. The greatest conspiracy theory of our time is that Americans are surrounded by foreign threats. We are not even safe from Venezuela,
The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and the rest of the presstitutes are quick to debunk as conspiracy theories all explanations that differ from the explanations of the ruling interests that the presstitutes serve.
Yet, as I write and for some nine months to date, the presstitute media has itself been promoting the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was involved in a conspiracy with the president of Russia and Russian intelligence services to hack the US presidential election and place Trump, a Russian agent, in the White House.
This conspiracy theory has no evidence whatsoever. It doesn’t need evidence, because it serves the interests of the military/security complex, the Democratic Party, the neoconservatives, and permits the presstitutes to show lavish devotion to their masters. By endless repetition a lie becomes truth.
There is a conspiracy, and it is against the Western people. Their jobs have been offshored in order to enrich the already rich. They have been forced into debt in a futile effort to maintain their living standards. Their effort to stem their decline by electing leaders who spoke for them is being subverted before their eyes by an utterly corrupt media and ruling class.
Sooner or later it will dawn on them that there is nothing they can do but violently revolt. Most likely, by the time they reach this conclusion it will be too late. Westerners are very slow to escape from the false reality in which they live. Westerners are a thoroughly brainwashed people who hold tightly to their false life within The Matrix.
For the gullible and naive who have been brainwashed into believing that any explanation that differs from the officially-blessed one is a conspiracy theory, there are available online long lists of government conspiracies that succeeded in deceiving the people in order that the governments could achieve agendas that the people would have rejected.
If liberty continues to exist on earth, it will not be in the Western world. It will be in Russia and China, countries that emerged out of the opposite and know the value of liberty, and it will be in those South American countries, such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia that fight for their sovereignty against American oppression.
Indeed, as historians unconcerned with their careers are beginning to write, the primary lesson in history is that governments deceive their peoples.
Everywhere in the Western world, government is a conspiracy against the people.
Cartels That Run The World
The following information comes from insider interviews with Ellis Medavoy and Richard Bell, two people I interview extensively in my collection, The Matrix Revealed. This is just a brief taste of what they have to say…
Major institutions on this planet that control Military, Money, Energy, Government, Medical, Corporate, Media, and Education are becoming, more and more, global cartels, horizontally integrated across national borders.
This is more than a top-down command process. It’s organically evolving. Three steps forward, two steps back. There is a great deal of competition among the components of a given cartel, but there is also cooperation. And in the long run, the see-saw is tipping in the direction of cooperation, as these entities realize they may well have more to gain that way.
I can’t stress too strongly this EVOLVING process. All attempts to merely assume twelve men in a room run the planet fall woefully short.
Instead, over time, people who lead a powerful institution (like Energy, for example) look out and recognize more major players, and in this recognition there is an impulse to compete and win and destroy, but there is also an impulse to build commonality and therefore monopolize the entire territory.
During one conversation with retired master propagandist Ellis Medavoy, I asked him about the extent of mutual cooperation in his given field, psychological warfare. He responded:
“Twenty years ago, I would have said we were all operating separately and jealously. Each of us was mining his own contacts and building his false pictures of reality for the masses. But then things began to change. Globally. First of all, more of us were pushing the same holograms.
And because communication and travel were speeding up so rapidly, we were working a lot of the same venues. We would run into each other more often. We began to share information. I mean, it was cautious. We weren’t gushing with unbridled love, I assure you. The competitive factor was still strong. And we had fights.
But through all that, we began to see through the fog, so to speak. We began to understand the effectiveness of cooperating. We would test each other with privileged information, to see if we could trust each other to keep it private. A tidbit here, a tidbit there.
And you see, behind us, other groups were finding commonality, too. For example, in the area of medical propaganda, where I operated a lot of the time. And these groups saw they could join together for specific operations, on an international scale.
They could push enormous lies globally, and everyone of their class would profit and gain wider control. So I would find myself working with a psy warfare guy from, say, France, or Germany in a joint venture. We would rub elbows. We’d be feeding from the same basic money trough.
We’d both be briefed by a team of intelligence experts, and those experts would be of several nationalities. Slowly, I saw a new kind of umbrella structure emerging.
See, suppose during the secret lead-up to a planned economic crisis [money cartel], you can distract everybody with a phony epidemic [medical cartel]. Do you see? Leaders perceive a reason to cooperate. Planners become more intelligent and clever. They reach across lines they never would have reached across before…
You begin to see the outlines of a much more inclusive future structure. This is multi-front warfare.”
Richard Bell, another former insider, said to me:
“People like to assume that money is everything. If you can limit the amount of money the public has, eventually they weaken and cave in and they’re easier to control. And this is certainly true.
But on the other hand, as mega-corporations gain more power and range and markets, you have a clash, because those corporations, which are now cooperating in ways they never have, as a cartel in some respects, want customers for their products.
They don’t want abject poverty across the board. People have to be able to buy their products.
“So there is a heavy conflict. It’s a conflict between elite bankers [money cartel] and mega-corporations [corporation cartel]. It needs to be resolved through advance planning, over the long term.
So now you have these powerful men sitting down and talking in a new way. Other big-time players get involved, too [government, media, energy cartels, for example].”
This is just the beginning of what these people have to say about the Matrix in their interviews and how it really works.
New Zealand Shooting Being Used By Governments To Create An Internet Police State March 20 2019 | From: NaturalNews / Various
The people of New Zealand are understandably shocked, hurt, and angry following the Friday shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, in which some 50 Muslim worshipers were killed and about that many wounded.
What makes the shootings even more horrific is that terrorism isn’t something New Zealanders have much experience with - especially when the terrorist is a bigoted hater who lived among them (though he is Australian).
But if Americans have learned any lessons from similar incidents they include these: Bad things happen to good people; hate is intolerable, no matter who is doing the hating; and liberties, once surrendered, are not easily recovered.
Following the shootings, the New Zealand government has already begun to consider restrictive new gun control measures, specifically, bans on semi-automatic rifles like the one used by the killer, Brenton Tarrant.
What’s more, in the government’s efforts to learn more about the attacks - that is, beyond what Tarrant provided in a rambling 74-page manifesto already - authorities are ready to trample additional rights.
As The Gateway Pundit reports, it took the New Zealand government less than 24 hours to shut down Internet access to VOAT and 8chan, online chat rooms that serve as principle forums of opposition to the Deep State (which is global, by the way).
In addition, authorities are demanding personal information on any online user at the Kiwifarms website who engaged in any discussions of Tarrant’s disturbing manifesto.
New Zealand isn’t the U.S., so it’s easy to understand the tendency to react strongly to what has happened. But destroying democracy to save it isn’t a strategy that will work out long term.
All the gun bans in the world aren’t going to stop evil people from doing evil things. As for Tarrant, he reportedly was a known gun owner because he had applied for, and received, a firearms license.
Don’t Give Up Essential Liberties for Temporary Security
“Tarrant obtained a license in November 2017 for the guns that police say were used in the shootings at the two mosques; he began purchasing the weapons that December, according to officials, and at least some of them had been modified..”
“Tarrant was in possession of five firearms. He held a basic, Category A New Zealand gun licence, and had likely used it to legally purchase the semi-automatic weapons. It is understood he then went on to illegally modify the AR15 semi-automatic with large magazines.”
Also, gun owners in the country appear to jealously guard their rights as much as Americans do; Newsroom acknowledged that despite Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s promise that “gun laws will change,” it won’t be simple.
As for cracking down on privacy, that isn’t something that countries wedded to democratic principles tend to tolerate, nor should they.
Once governments find it easy to tread upon civil and human rights, then it will become far easier to simply take them away.
And once that happens, the only way, historically, such rights have been restored is violently, after many people die.
Evil people will always walk the Earth, unfortunately. But they will be in the minority, subjugated by great governments and advanced civilizations that refuse to allow the actions of an evil few to destroy what they have built.
Founding father Benjamin Franklin once said,“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Founder Thomas Jefferson added, “Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.”
Google Will Help Diagnose Your Clinical Depression: It’s Wonderful March 19 2019 | From: JonRappoport
In my work-in-progress, The Underground, here is what I wrote about Google: “They’re clever, I’ll give them that. They’re saying you can search them for any information in the world, but they’re really searching you.”
Google has decided it’s not doing enough to lead us into a better world. So now it’s going to enter the field of psychiatry.
“Offering a medically validated, anonymous screening questionnaire for clinical depression if you search for information on the condition. This won’t definitively indicate that you’re clinically depressed, to be clear, but it will give you useful information you can take to a doctor.”
“Google and others are determined to fight fake news, and they know that the consequences of false or incomplete medical information could be serious. If you need help, they want to be sure you get the appropriate support.”
Let’s see if I can help Google fight false or incomplete medical information. For example, be aware that there is no defining lab test for clinical depression.
No blood test, no urine test, no saliva test, no brain scan, no genetic assay.
Committees of psychiatrists sit down and look at unscientific menus of human behavior, lump certain behaviors together, and arbitrarily label them “clinical depression.”
Therefore, any Google questionnaire is simply going to feed into that trough of pseudoscience. That’s all.
Then, of course, there are the drugs that come with a diagnosis of depression. Drugs like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. I’ll help Google fight “incomplete medical information” in this area as well.
In 2004, Dr. Peter Breggin, eminent psychiatrist, expert witness in court trials, and author of Toxic Psychiatry, wrote the following about these drugs. I suggest paying close attention:
“On March 22 [2004] the FDA issued an extraordinary ‘Public Health Advisory’ that cautioned about the risks associated with the whole new generation of antidepressants including Prozac and its knock offs, Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox, Celexa, and Lexapro, as well as Wellbutrin, Effexor, Serzone, and Remeron.
The warning followed a public hearing where dozens of family members and victims testified about suicide and violence committed by individuals taking these medications.”
“…In the debate over drug-induced suicide, little attention has been given to the FDA’s additional warning that certain behaviors are ‘known to be associated with these drugs’ including ‘anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, impulsivity, akathisia (severe restlessness), hypomania, and mania’.”
“From agitation and hostility to impulsivity and mania, the FDA’s litany of antidepressant-induced behaviors is identical to that of PCP, methamphetamine and cocaine - drugs known to cause aggression and violence. These older stimulants and most of the newer antidepressants cause similar effects as a result of their impact on a neurotransmitter in the brain called serotonin.”
“For more than a decade, I have documented in books and scientific reports how this stimulation or activation profile can lead to out-of-control behavior, including violence…”
“As a psychiatrist and as a medical expert, I have examined dozens of cases of individuals who have committed suicide or violent crimes while under the influence of the newer antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox and Celexa. In June in South Carolina, Christopher Pittman will go on trial for shooting his grandparents to death while they slept. Chris was twelve when his family doctor started him on Zoloft.
Three weeks later the doctor doubled his dose and one week later Chris committed the violent acts. In other cases, a fourteen-year-old girl on Prozac fired a pistol pointblank at a friend but the gun failed to go off, and a teenage boy on Zoloft beat to death an elderly woman who complained to him about his loud music. A greater number of cases involve adults who lost control of themselves while taking antidepressants.
In at least two cases judges have found individuals not guilty on the basis of involuntary intoxication with psychiatric drugs and other cases have resulted in reduced charges, lesser convictions, or shortened sentences.”
“The FDA includes mania in its list of known antidepressant effects. Manic individuals can become violent, especially when they are thwarted, and they can also ‘crash’ into depression and suicidal states. They can carry out elaborate but grandiose and doomed plans.
One clinical trial showed a rate of 6% manic reactions…on Prozac. None developed mania on a sugar pill [placebo]. Even in short-term clinical trials, 1% or more of depressed adults develop mania compared to a small fraction on the sugar pill.”
“Unfortunately, there are also risks involved with stopping antidepressants. Many can cause withdrawal reactions that last days and sometimes longer, causing some patients to feel depressed, suicidal or even violent. Stopping antidepressants should be done carefully and with experienced clinical supervision.”
“…the FDA and the medical profession must forthrightly educate potential patients and the public about the sometimes life-threatening risks associated with the use of antidepressant medications.”
Here is the kicker. Google can do anything it wants to with the information in this article, the one you’re now reading. It can lower its ranking.
Google can control the flow of information.
Given that Google has that kind of power, I strongly suggest caution when it touts its own “depression questionnaire.” It’s not only rigging the system, it is the system.
An Interactive Guide To Nutrition And The Human Body March 18 2019 | From: Good
We all need vitamins to maintain our well-being. But how do they really work?
This Vitamin Atlas goes back to basics with illustrations and explanations that will help you understand the complex interactions that keep us healthy.
Just as an everyday atlas can orient you to the roads, borders, and landmarks that constitute your external world, we hope this Vitamin Atlas can help you navigate your internal world.
The GOOD Wellness Project is an eight-month collaboration with Walgreens and Vitamin Angels, in support of the #100MillionReasons initiative to bring vital micronutrients to 100 million malnourished children across the globe by 2017. In order to gain clarity and raise awareness about health and well-being, we are diving into vitamins, alternative medicine, the effects of the environment on our body systems, and more, to provide a deeper understanding of what it looks like to live a healthy, well-balanced life.
NZ Massacre Reveals Mainstream Media’s Double Standard In Covering Religious Attacks & The Christchurch Shooting And The Normalization Of Anti-Muslim Terrorism March 17 2019 | From: Infowars / MintPressNews / Various
Legacy media once again picking and choosing preferred narratives.
The New Zealand massacre highlights a glaring double standard in how the mainstream media treats religious attacks worldwide.
The tragic murder of 49 people, most if not all of whom were Muslim, by a gunman draws similarities to the 2017 Palm Sunday massacre in which two ISIS suicide bombers killed nearly 50 Christians in Egypt in two separate attacks, much like how the two mosques were targeted in Thursday’s attack.
Additionally, there’s been a spate of culturally- and religiously-motivated attacks over the past several years, such as the 2015’s Charlie Hebdo shooting, the Bataclan’s theater massacre and the 2016’s Berlin Christmas market “truck attack” to name a few.
And the mainstream media reported on all these instances, but not quite with the zeal they’re displaying in the coverage of the New Zealand massacre.
Case in point, CNN host John Berman actually asked if President Trump’s “language” is to blame for the New Zealand massacre. Did CNN ask such questions in response to the Palm Sunday massacre? Likely not.
Why not cover all of these attacks with the same level of seriousness and fervor as they deserve? It shouldn’t matter whether the victims were Christians or Muslims because they’re still victims of heinous crimes.
But you’re not hearing any such rhetoric pushed by the mainstream media in regards with the New Zealand massacre, not that you should’ve with Khan’s statement to begin with.
The Christchurch Shooting And The Normalization Of Anti-Muslim Terrorism
The real forces responsible for the destruction of many Muslim-majority countries and the current chaos present in many Western countries are not generated by civilian populations or religions but instead by the global oligarchy that engineers and profits from this chaos.
What is without question the worst mass shooting in New Zealand’s history took place on Friday when shooters, 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant among them, opened fire at two Christchurch mosques.
Four, including Tarrant, have been arrested for the heinous act, which claimed at least 49 innocent lives. Tarrant was responsible for killing more than 40 victims, among them several children, in a rampage he live-streamed on Facebook, sending chills throughout the Muslim community, particularly Muslims living in Western countries.
Tarrant’s motives and ideology, laid bare in a 74-page manifesto, show a concern over the fertility rates of non-white groups as well as the immigration of non-whites to countries like New Zealand and Australia, which he likened to an “invasion” that threatened the white majority in those countries.
However, Tarrant - in his ignorance - failed to grasp that many of the Muslim immigrants he targeted had come to New Zealand after fleeing Western-backed invasions, occupations, or persecution in their home countries.
Notable among Tarrant’s views is the fact that he is a clear ethno-nationalist, promoting his view that different ethnic groups must be kept “separate, unique, undiluted in [sic] unrestrained in cultural or ethnic expression and autonomy.”
Tarrant also claimed that he doesn’t necessarily hate Muslims and only targeted those Muslims {i.e., immigrants) that chose “to invade our lands, live on our soil and replace our people.”
He also stated that he chose to target Muslims because “Islamic nations, in particular, have high birth rates, regardless of race or ethnicity” and to satiate “a want for revenge against Islam for the 1,300 years of war and devastation that it has brought upon the people of the West and other peoples of the world.”
His views are remarkably similar to those of Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, which is unsurprising given that Tarrant named him as an inspiration for the shooting.
Though many - in the hours after the shooting - have sought to place blame and point fingers at notable demagogues like President Donald Trump or “counter-jihad” alt-right figures like Laura Loomer and Jacob Wohl, it is important to place Tarrant’s motivations in context.
A body lies on the footpath outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019, following a mass shooting
Indeed, while Trump’s rise to political power has brought Islamophobic rhetoric into the public sphere in an undeniable way, it is a symptom of a much broader effort aimed at propagandizing the people of the United States and other Western countries to support wars in and military occupations of Muslim-majority countries.
This manufactured Islamophobia, largely a product of Western governments and a compliant mass media, has sought to vilify all Muslims by maligning the religion itself as terrorism, in order to justify the plunder of their countries and deflect attention from their suffering.
It is a classic “divide and conquer” scam aimed at keeping Westerners divided from Muslims in their own countries and abroad. The horrific shooting in Christchurch is a testament to its unfortunate success and pervasiveness, as well as a potent reminder that it must be stopped.
Indeed, this manufactured Islamophobia has made it so that Muslims in their home countries are in danger of dying from Western-backed wars and, if they flee to the “safer” West, they have targets on their backs painted by the very war propaganda used to justify Western military adventurism in Muslim-majority nations.
Islam, the Media and “Forever Wars”: Who’s the “Real” Terrorist?
Since September 11th and the advent of the “War on Terror,” mass media reporting increasingly began to conflate Muslims and Muslim-majority nations with war, terrorism and violence in general.
Indeed, 9 out of 10 mainstream news reports on Muslims, Islam, and Islamic organizations are related to violence and Muslims who are named on mainstream media are all-too-frequently warlords or terrorist leaders.
This near-constant association of Islam and violence has created the false perception that the religion of Islam, by its very nature, is violent and that Muslims too must then be violent and thus dangerous. This media-driven association has had very real and troubling consequences.
For instance, a 2010 study by the University of Exeter found “empirical evidence to demonstrate that assailants of Muslims are invariably motivated by a negative view of Muslims they have acquired from either mainstream or extremist nationalist reports or commentaries in the media.” In other words, Islamophobic media reports are directly related to hate crimes targeting Muslims.
This is no accident, as such biased reporting on Muslim-majority nations also began as Western-backed wars in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan sought to put these countries’ natural resources, namely their oil and mineral wealth, into the hands of American corporations.
It should be no surprise then that top funders of media outlets that have routinely promoted Islamophobic narratives are also those who have profited considerably from the “War on Terror” and Western-backed regime-change wars in other countries.
This concerted effort to vilify Muslims has had the potent effect, likely by design, of reducing empathy among Westerners for the largely Muslim victims of Western military adventurism in Muslim-majority countries.
Indeed, while mainstream news outlets often trumpet the imminent dangers Americans face from “radical Islamic terror,” the death toll of innocent people - most of them Muslim - that have been killed by the U.S.-led “War on Terror” is several orders of magnitude greater than the number of Americans who have died from all terror attacks over that same period.
Residents carry the body of several people killed during fights between Iraq security forces and Islamic State on the western side of Mosul, Iraq
For instance, from 2001 to 2013, an estimated 3,380 Americans died from domestic and foreign terrorism, including the September 11 attacks as well as acts of domestic terrorism carried out by white nationalists and supremacists. If one excludes the September 11 death toll, the number of American deaths over that same period stands at around 400, most of them victims of mass-killers who were not Muslim.
By comparison, an estimated 8 million innocent people in Muslim-majority nations died as a result of U.S. policies and wars in the Middle East and North Africa from 2001 to 2015. Yet, the magnitude of this loss of life of these “unworthy victims” is minimized by media and government silence, and the creation of a climate of Islamophobia in the West has only served to deepen the ease with which mass murder is accepted by the aggressor countries’ populations.
Beyond the staggering disparity in the death tolls caused by terror groups and Western-backed imperialist wars is the fact that many of these very Western governments that purport to be so concerned with “radical Islamic terror” have often created and funded the most notorious terror groups of all.
Indeed, the U.S. government helped to create Al Qaeda and continues to protect its Syrian branch - Hayat Tahrir al-Sham - in Syria’s Idlib province to this day. In addition, the CIA was just recently revealed to be helping the Islamic State regroup in Syrian refugee camps. Furthermore, the U.S. has long turned a blind eye to the funding of terror groups by allied states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The role of Western money, arms and policy in the creation and maintenance of radical Wahhabi terrorist groups is often entirely ignored by Western media portrayals of Muslim-majority nations, thereby creating a false image that such violence is endemic to these nations when, in fact, it is often imported state-sponsored terror.
These nuances of the situation are rarely heard in the narratives parroted out on mainstream media and those who regularly consume mainstream news sources are more likely than not to support those narratives. For that reason, it is easy to see how someone like Donald Trump - who is said to watch television for eight hours every day, much of it Fox News - has espoused the views that he has.
Thanks to the manufacturing of Islamophobia of mainstream media, racist policies like the so-called “Muslim ban” have found wide support, as this false narrative has conflated Islam with violence so often that many have come to believe that only by banning Islam can violence and terrorism in the U.S. be reduced.
However, the recent shooting in Christchurch, as well as the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting and other recent acts of domestic terrorism, should alert us to the fact that it is the hate manufactured by this false narrative that is itself endangering American lives while also covering up the mass murder that has been perpetrated by the U.S. and other governments around the world for decades.
Israel’s Leading Role in Stoking Ethnonationalism
While the realities of post-9/11 America, as well as the rise in visibility of white ethnonationalism during the Trump Era, have done much to normalize attacks on immigrants, the country that has done the most to normalize anti-Muslim terrorism over this same time frame has been the state of Israel.
Israel, from its founding days, has long been steeped in neocolonialist ideology that is remarkably similar to the ideological basis behind other settler states like the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
This system of beliefs holds that the native inhabitants of the land - whether the Palestinians, the Sioux or the Maori - are “primitive” and incompetent and that the land would have remained “wild” and undeveloped were it not for the “fortunate” appearance of European settlers.
As MintPress noted in a previous report on the subject, such narratives cast these settlers as both superior and normal while the natives become inferior and abnormal, thus obfuscating the settler’s status as foreigner and conqueror.
vNZ Shooter Is A Leftist Communist Sympathizer
In Israel’s case, this ideology has promoted the idea that all Arabs are “sons of the desert” while the desert simultaneously represents a barbaric obstacle to “progress” and development.
However, the state of Israel, under the lengthy tenure of current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has seen these long-standing and somewhat hidden underpinnings of the Zionist state burst out into the open.
The result has been the overt expression of ethnonationalism in such a way that Israel has become an inspiration to white nationalists in the United States, like Richard Spencer, and far-right ethno-fascist leaders like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and India’s Narendra Modi. The inspiration has been mutual, according to reports and testimonials published by Jewish newspaper The Forward.
For years, through its military occupation of Palestine, Israel’s government and military have sought to paint all Palestinians, including children, as “terrorists” or “terrorist sympathizers.”
Take, for example, current Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who wrote in 2014, “This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people …”
A more recent example came from former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who asserted just last year that “no innocent people” live in the Gaza Strip and that every inhabitant in the enclave is somehow connected to Hamas, even though nearly half of Gaza’s population are children and teenagers.
Such rhetoric has become par for the course and numerous examples show that Shaked and Lieberman’s views are increasingly accepted and “normal” in today’s Israel.
Yet, the clearest indication of anti-Muslim terror’s normalization in Israel is the recent rise of Otzma Yehudit, or the “Jewish Power” Party. This party, founded by devotees of radical American-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, has now merged - at Netanyahu’s urging - with the Jewish Home Party and stands to become part of Israel’s ruling coalition if Netanyahu manages to win in the country’s upcoming elections.
With a portrait of late Jewish extremist leader Rabbi Meir Kahane on the wall, left, a Jewish settler walks inside a disputed building in the West Bank town of Hebron Sunday, Nov. 16, 2008
In the office of Itamar Ben Gvir, one of Otzma Yehudit’s leaders, is a framed picture of Baruch Goldstein. In an act that bears a striking similarity to the events in Christchurch, Goldstein - a long-time devotee of Kahane - entered a mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron in 1994 and opened fire, killing 29 and injuring more than 125 worshippers.
After the act, Kahane’s Kach party - the predecessor of Otzma Yehudit - was labeled a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel.
Despite official condemnation, Goldstein’s atrocious act has been the subject of praise and inspiration for subsequent extremists who, under Netanyahu’s government, have become increasingly normalized.
Goldstein’s gravestone reads “He gave his life for the people of Israel, its Torah and land” and continues to be used as a site of pilgrimage and homage by the very extremists that Netanyahu is openly courting for political gain.
While the followers of Kahane are making a comeback in Israel, several notable Arab political parties have been banned from participating Israel’s upcoming elections, with some being accused of “supporting terrorism” owing to their opposition to Israel’s decades-long military occupation of Palestine.
Yet, by elevating clear terror supporters among the ranks of the Jewish Power Party, it has become increasingly clear that openly supporting and advocating anti-Muslim terrorism is no bar to legitimacy and political power in today’s Israel.
No ‘Clash of Civilizations,’ Only Manipulation and Exploitation of Differences
The tragic and barbaric shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand is yet another horrific and glaring reminder that the “divide and conquer” war propaganda that has sought to promote the so-called “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam, West and East, has not only been monstrously effective but continues to be monstrously destructive to people on both sides.
However, the media’s manufacture of Islamophobia, in seeking to Wite-out Muslim suffering and reduce Western empathy for innocent Muslim civilians, has increasingly placed targets on the back of Muslims everywhere - in the West and the East - making it increasingly difficult for practitioners of the Islamic faith to feel safe regardless of where they live.
With most Muslim-majority countries now killing fields in Western-backed wars, ruled by oppressive, Western-backed dictatorships, or under threat of Western-backed regime change, even those Muslims who have sought a safer, quieter life in the “civilized” West have now found themselves targets thanks to the very war propaganda used to justify the destruction of their home countries.
While the murderer Tarrant had stated that he hoped his horrific crime would help stoke “civil war” in Western countries, this tragedy should and must serve as a wake up call for people everywhere that the real forces responsible for the destruction of many Muslim-majority countries and the current chaos present in many Western countries are not generated by civilian populations or religions but instead by the global oligarchy that engineers and profits from this chaos.
These oligarchs loot from the people of the West just as they do from the people of the East and it is time to recognize that they are the real threats to a more peaceful world - not regular people praying, whether it be in a church, a synagogue or a mosque.
Loneliness More Hazardous To Your Health Than Obesity Or Smoking March 16 2019 | From: Mercola
Loneliness doesn't just affect your mind; it can also cause a number of health problems.
For example, previous research shows feeling lonely can raise your blood pressure up to 14 points, with greater increases the longer loneliness persists. With that, the risk for heart disease and dementia also increases.
More recently, researchers concluded social isolation and loneliness may have more severe consequences than obesity and smoking. Other recent research reveals the brain-related changes associated with feelings of loneliness start to take place after as little as 24 hours of isolation.
Loneliness More Hazardous to Your Health Than Obesity
Negative emotions will invariably impact your physical well-being, and feeling lonely is no different. According to two meta analyses presented at the 2017 Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, loneliness and social isolation - which are similar but not identical - pose greater threats to public health than obesity, raising your risk for premature death by as much as 50 percent. As reported by Medical News Today:
"While loneliness and social isolation are often used interchangeably, there are notable differences between the two. Social isolation is defined as a lack of contact with other individuals, while loneliness is the feeling that one is emotionally disconnected from others.
In essence, a person can be in the presence of others and still feel lonely.
According to a 2016 Harris Poll of more than 2,000 adults in the U.S., around 72 percent reported having felt lonely at some point in their lives. Of these adults, around 31 percent reported feeling lonely at least once a week."
The first analysis, which looked at 148 studies involving more than 300,000 adults, found social isolation increased the risk of premature death by 50 percent.
The second, which evaluated 70 studies that included more than 3.4 million individuals, found social isolation, loneliness and living alone correlated with a 29 percent, 26 percent and 32 percent increased risk of mortality respectively.
Overall, this is comparable to the risk of premature death associated with obesity and other well-established risk factors for mortality, including the risks associated with smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Other Health Risks Associated With Loneliness
According to the American Osteopathic Association, which commissioned the Harris Poll cited above, loneliness plays a role in many chronic health conditions, including pain, drug or alcohol abuse and depression. Recent studies have linked loneliness to an increased risk for Alzheimer's disease, heart attack and stroke, and lower survival rates for breast cancer patients.
Studies have also shown that people who are lonely are more likely to experience:
Epidemic of Loneliness and Social Isolation Looms Large
According to a 2010 study on loneliness conducted by the AARP, an estimated 42.6 million Americans over the age of 45 suffer from chronic loneliness, and census data reveals more than 25 percent of the U.S. population live alone. Why is loneliness becoming an increasingly prevalent experience?
According to researchers, common reasons include:
Long work hours
Use of social media surpassing face-to-face interaction
Frequent travel for work
Living far from family
Delaying and/or forgoing marriage
Commenting on the Harris Poll on loneliness, Dr. Jennifer Caudle, assistant professor of family medicine at Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine noted:
"Loneliness is an invisible epidemic masked by our online personas, which are rarely representative of our real emotions. It's important for patients to understand how their mental and emotional well-being directly affects the body …
Face-to-face communication is critical for emotional and mental health. Seeking out meaningful human interactions makes patients happier and, ultimately, healthier overall."
In light of a growing population of seniors and the rising prevalence of social isolation in general, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Ph.D., a professor of psychology who led the two meta-analyses, suggests we need to tackle loneliness both on an individual basis and as a society.
To do this, she suggests devoting resources to:
Social skills training for school-aged children
Training doctors to incorporate social connectedness evaluations into their medical screening
Seniors are also advised to prepare for the social implications of retirement, as many adults have few if any social networks outside of the workplace
The Mind-Body Connection
It truly is amazing how your mindset can influence your physical health. It's a powerful force that can either bolster or undermine your physical and mental health.
One reason for this has to do with epigenetics, which centers on the notion that environmental factors such as stress and diet influence your genetic expression.
It is the expression of your genes - not the genes themselves - that dictates whether you develop certain diseases or age prematurely.
Your epigenome is readily influenced by physical and emotional stresses - how you respond to everything that happens in your environment, from final exams to childhood abuse. So, if you are chronically lonely, this negative emotion will influence the expression of your genes and thus impact your risk of developing disease.
This also explains why, as Dawson Church cites in his book "The Genie in Your Genes: Epigenetic Medicine and the New Biology of Intention," heart surgery patients who have a strong social support network and spiritual practice have one-seventh the mortality rate of those who don't!
Strategies to Address Loneliness
If you struggle with loneliness, you're certainly not alone. The question is what to do about it. Following are a number of suggestions and strategies pulled from a variety of sources that can help address loneliness.
Join a Club
Proactive approaches to meeting others include joining a club and planning get-togethers with family, friends or neighbors, Meetup.com is an online source where you can locate a vast array of local clubs and get-togethers. Despite the evils of Facebook, it is a place where you can find local community interest groups.
Many communities also have community gardens where you can benefit from the outdoors while mingling with your neighbors.
Learn a New Skill
Consider enrolling in a class or taking an educational course. Even learn a new language - begin with a free app like Duolingo and maybe consider taking classes as well.
As described by Baya Voce in the TED Talk above, rituals are a powerful means for reducing loneliness. Examples include having weekly talk sessions with your girlfriends and/or making meal time a special time to connect with your family without rushing.
Consider a Digital Cleanse
If your digital life has overtaken face-to-face interactions, consider taking a break from social media while taking proactive steps to meet people in person. Recent research shows Facebook may be more harmful than helpful to your emotional well-being, raising your risk of depression - especially if your contacts' posts elicit envy.
In one recent study, Facebook users who took a one-week break from the site reported significantly higher levels of life satisfaction and a significantly improved emotional life.
Make Good Use of Digital Media
For others, a phone call or text message can be a much-needed lifeline. As noted by Will Wright in his TED Talk, "digitizing empathy" can be a powerful way to help each other.
Examples of this include sending encouraging text messages to people who are struggling with loneliness, offering support and help to live healthier lives and follow through on healthy lifestyle changes.
In the U.K., seniors can call the Silver Line, a help line for older people where they can speak to a live person for as long as they wish. The help line is open 24 hours a day, year-round. The service receives an average of 10,000 calls per week.
Exercise with Others
Joining a gym or signing up with a fitness-directed club or team sport will create opportunities to meet people while improving your physical fitness at the same time.
Shop Locally
Routinely frequenting local shops, coffee shops or farmers markets will help you develop a sense of community and encourage the formation of relationships.
Talk to Strangers
Talking to strangers in the store, in your neighborhood or on your daily commute is often a challenge, but can have many valuable benefits, including alleviating loneliness (your own and others'). Talking to strangers builds bridges between ordinary people who may not otherwise forge a connection.
People of the opposite gender, different walks of life or different cultures hold a key to opening up to new ideas or making connections with old ones. In this short video, reporter for The Atlantic, Dr. James Hamblin, demonstrates techniques for learning how to talk with strangers.
Volunteer
Volunteering is another way to increase your social interactions and pave the way for new relationships. When you are feeling sad, lonely and / or depressed, often helping others not only takes your mind off your problems - but can give you a sense of accomplishment in helping others.
Adopt a Companion Pet
A dog or cat can provide unconditional love and comfort, and studies show that owning a pet can help protect against loneliness, depression and anxiety.
The bond that forms between a person and a companion pet can be incredibly fulfilling and serves, in many ways, as an important and rewarding relationship. The research on this is really quite profound.
For instance, having a dog as a companion could add years to your life, as studies have shown that owning a dog played a significant role on survival rates in heart attack victims. Studies have also revealed that people on Medicaid or Medicare who own a pet make fewer visits to the doctor.
The unconditional acceptance and love an animal gives to their owner positively impacts their owner's emotional health in ways such as:
Boosting self-confidence and self-esteem
Helping to meet new friends and promoting communication between elderly residents and neighbors
Helping you cope with illness, loss and depression
Reducing stress levels
Providing a source of touch and affiliation
If you're looking for a furry friend, check out your local animal shelter. Most are filled with cats and dogs looking for someone to love. Petfinder.com is another excellent resource for finding a pet companion.
Move and / or Change Jobs
While the most drastic of all options, it may be part of the answer for some.
To make it worthwhile, be sure to identify the environment or culture that would fit your personality best and consider proximity to longtime friends and family.
Microsoft Now Conspiring With Pro-Monsanto Front Group “NewsGuard” To Censor All Anti-GMO News On Mobile Devices March 15 2019 | From: NaturalNews
Microsoft has just unveiled its plans to partner up with NewsGuard, a “startup” company bent on censoring the world wide web, disguised as an app that helps users weed out “fake news.”
Now, instead of being an app that users can choose to download, Microsoft will be incorporating the technology as an integrated feature of their mobile web browser, Edge.
If you use your cellphone to surf the web, Edge might not be the best choice - unless you enjoy being spoon-fed leftist propaganda by a neocon corporation that is tied to Monsanto.
As if the blatant censorship of conservatives across social media wasn’t bad enough, Microsoft and NewsGuard are now conspiring to suppress all kinds of information, ranging from conservative news organizations to scientific literature exposing the dangers of GMOs.
As sources report, the censorship software NewsGuard will soon be a key element of Microsoft’s mobile web browser, Edge. Instead of having to download an app, users will simply have to click a button to enable the rating system.
The system is described as a “green-red rating signal if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.”
Under this system, a select few people are tasked with deciding what is true, and what is false.
The people who run NewsGuard, who have elected themselves to be the arbiters of truth, now decide which news organizations are pushing a secret agenda, and which ones aren’t - at least, if you’re using Edge.
Microsoft’s integration ensures NewsGuard is present on every browser, and sources say that it is designed to be easier to use than to turn off.
Critics also say that by incorporating NewsGuard as a special feature, Microsoft is essentially branding the software with their seal of approval - perhaps, in order to make the product seem more trustworthy.
According to reports, some of the news organizations NewsGuard rates as “green”or “reliable” include CNN, Buzzfeed, New York Times and the Washington Post, along with Vice News and Refinery 29.
Conversely, sites that are ranked “red,” or as purveyors of fake news, include Breitbart, Drudge Report and Daily Mail.
Steve Brill, a NewsGuard co-founder, told The Guardian that Daily Mail received a “fake news” rating purely because an associate at the Mail hung up on them.
"We spell out fairly clearly in the label exactly how many times we have attempted to contact them.
The analyst that wrote this write-up got someone on the phone who, as soon he heard who she was and where she was calling from, hung up. We would love to hear if they have a complaint or if they change anything,” Brill stated.
Censoring Truth at Every Corner
NewsGuard has no legal authority to actually question anyone - let alone label them as trustworthy or untrustworthy. Don’t want to play ball with the corrupt left-wing’s agenda? They’ll brand you with a scarlet letter anyways.
The censorship isn’t going to stop with political ideologies, either.
Anyone who reports or publishes information that contradicts the scientific dogma overtaking society regarding vaccines, GMOs, geoengineering and other “high-stakes” topics is in danger of being flagged as “fake news.”
Many of NewsGuard’s top investors and contributors have ties to the fake news media, the Clinton campaign, or other parts of the leftist deep state. This is a covert attempt at not only quashing free speech, but suppressing access to truth.
See more coverage of the latest attacks on the First Amendment and more at Liberty.news.
Angela Merkel: Nation States Must "Give Up Sovereignty" To New World Order March 14 2019 | From: Zerohedge
“Nation states must today be prepared to give up their sovereignty”, according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who told an audience in Berlin that sovereign nation states must not listen to the will of their citizens when it comes to questions of immigration, borders, or even sovereignty.
No this wasn’t something Adolf Hitler said many decades ago, this is what German Chancellor Angela Merkel told attendants at an event by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin.
Merkel has announced she won’t seek re-election in 2021 and it is clear she is attempting to push the globalist agenda to its disturbing conclusion before she stands down.
“In an orderly fashion of course,” Merkel joked, attempting to lighten the mood.
But Merkel has always had a tin ear for comedy and she soon launched into a dark speech condemning those in her own party who think Germany should have listened to the will of its citizens and refused to sign the controversial UN migration pact:
“There were [politicians] who believed that they could decide when these agreements are no longer valid because they are representing The People”.
“[But] the people are individuals who are living in a country, they are not a group who define themselves as the [German] people,” she stressed.
Merkel has previously accused critics of the UN Global Compact for Safe and Orderly Migration of not being patriotic, saying “That is not patriotism, because patriotism is when you include others in German interests and accept win-win situations”.
Her words echo recent comments by the deeply unpopular French President Emmanuel Macron who stated in a Remembrance Day speech that:
“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism [because] nationalism is treason.”
The French president’s words were deeply unpopular with the French population and his approval rating nosedived even further after the comments.
Macron, whose lack of leadership is proving unable to deal with growing protests in France, told the Bundestag that France and Germany should be at the center of the emerging New World Order.
The Franco-German couple [has]the obligation not to let the world slip into chaos and to guide it on the road to peace”.
“Europe must be stronger… and win more sovereignty,” he went on to demand, just like Merkel, that EU member states surrender national sovereignty to Brussels over “foreign affairs, migration, and development” as well as giving “an increasing part of our budgets and even fiscal resources”.
“Negative Hallucination” Hypnosis Experiment Demonstration Video
& The Weaponisation Of History And Journalism March 13 2019 | From: NaturalNews / PaulCraigRoberts
In this mind-boggling short video, you can experiment firsthand how the mainstream media puts America [The West] under the SPELL of mass hypnosis, using a psychological phenomenon known as “negative hallucination.”
I covered this in great detail in this Natural News article that provides visual examples of both positive and negative hallucinations now in full effect across the American masses.
Watch the video and follow the instructions. In mere seconds, your mind will be controlled via “negative hallucination,” and you won’t believe how easily you have been manipulated.
This video is based on the psychology research of Daniel J. Simons, whose YouTube channel is found at this link. Once you become familiar with this research and how it works, you will begin to see through the lies of the mainstream media while understanding exactly how your perceptions, thoughts and beliefs are being expertly manipulated - even “engineered” - by the media narrative puppet masters.
Watch the video yourself and prepare to be amazed:
The Weaponisation Of History And Journalism
In the West, facts, an important element of truth, are not important. They are not important in the media, politics, universities, historical explanations, or the courtroom.
Non-factual explanations of the collapse of three World Trade Center buildings are served up as the official explanation. Facts have been politicized, emotionalized, weaponized and simply ignored. As David Irving has shown, Anglo-American histories of World War 2 are, for the most part, feel-good histories, as are “civil war” histories as Thomas DiLorenzo and others have demonstrated. Of course, they are feel good only for the victors. Their emotional purpose means that inconvenient facts are unpalatable and ignored.
Writing the truth is no way to succeed as an author. Only a small percentage of readers are interested in the truth. Most want their biases or brainwashing vindicated. They want to read what they already believe. It is comforting, reassuring. When their ignorance is confronted, they become angry.
The way to be successful as a writer is to pick a group and give them what they want. There is always a market for romance novels and for histories that uphold a country’s myths.
On the Internet successful sites are those that play to one ideology or another, to one emotion or the other, or to one interest group or another.
The single rule for success is to confine truth to what the readership group you serve believes.
Karl Marx said that there were only class truths.
Today we have a large variety of truths: truths for feminists, truths for blacks, Muslims, Hispanics, homosexuals, transgendered, truths for the foreign policy community that serves the military/security complex, truths for the neocons, truths for the One Percent that control the economy and the economists who serve them, truths for “white supremacists,” itself a truth term for their opponents.
You can add to the list. The “truth” in these “truths” is that they are self-serving of the group that expresses them. Their actual relation to truth is of no consequence to those espousing the “truths.”
Woe to you if you don’t go along with someone’s or some group’s truth. Not even famous film-maker Oliver Stone is immune. Recently, Stone expressed his frustration with the “False Flag War Against Russia.”
Little doubt that Stone is frustrated with taunts and accusations from completely ignorant media talking heads in response to his documentary, Putin, based on many hours of interviews over two years. Stone came under fire, because instead of demonizing Putin and Russia, thus confirming the official story, he showed us glimpses of the truth.
The organization, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, published a report that completely destroyed the false accusations about Trump/Russian hacking of the US presidential election.
The Nation published an objective article about the report and was assaulted by writers, contributors, and readers for publishing information that weakens the case, which the liberal/progressive/left in conjunction with the military/security complex, is orchestrating against Trump.
The magazine’s audience felt that the magazine had an obligation not to truth but to getting Trump out of office. Reportedly, the editor is considering whether to recall the article.
So here we have left-leaning Oliver Stone and leftwing magazine, The Nation, under fire for making information available that is out of step with the self-serving “truth” to which the liberal/progressive/left and their ally, the military/security complex, are committed.
When a country has a population among whom there are no truths except group-specific truths, the country is so divided as to be over and done with. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The white liberal/progressive/left leaders of divisive Identity Politics have little, if any, comprehension of where the movement they think they lead is headed.
At the moment the hate is focused on the “alt-right,” which has become “white nationalists,” which has become “white supremacists.” These “white supremacists” have become epitomized by statues of Confederate soldiers and generals.
All over the South, if local governments are not removing the statues, violent crazed thugs consumed by hate attempt to destroy them. In New Orleans someone with money bused in thugs from outside flying banners that apparently are derived from a communist flag to confront locals protesting the departure of their history down the Orwellian Memory Hole.
What happens when all the monuments are gone? Where does the hate turn next? Once non-whites are taught to hate whites, not even self-hating whites are safe. How do those taught hate tell a good white from a bad white? They can’t and they won’t.
By definition by Identity Politics, whites, for now white heterosexual males, are the victimizers and everyone else is their victim. The absurdity of this concept is apparent, yet the concept is unshaken by its absurdity. White heterosexual males are the only ones without the privilege of quotas.
They and only they can be put at the back of the bus for university admissions, employment, promotion, and only their speech is regulated. They, and only they, can be fired for using “gender specific terms,” for using race specific terms, for unknowingly offending some preferred group member by using a word that is no longer permissible.
They can be called every name in the book, beginning with racist, misogynist, and escalating, and no one is punished for the offense.
Recently, a professor in the business school of a major university told me that he used the word, girls, in a marketing discussion. A young womyn was offended. The result was he received a dressing down from the dean. Another professor told me that at his university there was a growing list of blacklisted words.
It wasn’t clear whether the list was official or unofficial, simply professors trying to stay up with Identity Politics and avoid words that could lead to their dismissal. Power, they tell me, is elsewhere than in the white male, the true victimized class.
For years commentators have recognized the shrinking arena of free speech in the United States. Any speech that offends anyone but a white male can be curtailed by punishment. Recently, John Whitehead, constitutional attorney who heads the Rutherford Institute, wrote that it is now dangerous just to defend free speech.
Reference to the First Amendment suffices to bring denunciation and threats of violence. Ron Unz notes that any website that can be demonized as “controversial” can find itself disappeared by Internet companies and PayPal. They simply terminate free speech by cutting off service.
It must be difficult to teach some subjects, such as the “civil war” for example. How would it be possible to describe the actual facts? For example, for decades prior to the Union’s invasion of the Confederacy North/South political conflict was over tariffs, not over slavery.
The fight over which new states created from former “Indian” territories would be “slave” and which “free” was a fight over keeping the protectionist (North) vs. free trade (South) balance in Congress equal so that the budding industrial north could not impose a tariff regime.
Two days before Lincoln’s inaugural address, a stiff tariff was signed into law. That same day in an effort to have the South accept the tariff and remain in or return to the Union - some southern states had seceded, some had not - Congress passed the Corwin amendment that provided constitutional protection to slavery. The amendment prohibited the federal government from abolishing slavery.
Two days later in his inaugural address, which seems to be aimed at the South, Lincoln said:
“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
Lincoln’s beef with the South was not over slavery or the Fugitive Slave Act. Lincoln did not accept the secessions and still intended to collect the tariff that now was law. Under the Constitution slavery was up to the states, but the Constitution gave the federal government to right to levy a tariff.
Lincoln said that “there needs to be no bloodshed or violence” over collecting the tariff. Lincoln said he will use the government’s power only “to collect the duties and imposts,” and that “there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.”
Here is Lincoln, “the Great Emancipator,” telling the South that they can have slavery if they will pay the duties and imposts on imports. How many black students and whites brainwashed by Identity Politics are going to sit there and listen to such a tale and not strongly protest the racist professor justifying white supremacy and slavery?
So what happens to history when you can’t tell it as it is, but instead have to refashion it to fit the preconceived beliefs formed by Identity Politics? The so-called “civil war,” of course, is far from the only example.
In its document of secession, South Carolina made a case that the Constitutional contract had been broken by some of the northern states breaking faith with Article IV of the Constitution.
This is true. However, it is also true that the Southern states had no inclination to abide by Section 8 of Article I, which says that “Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises.” So, also the South by not accepting the tariff was not constitutionally pure.
Before history became politicized, historians understood that the North intended for the South to bear costs of the North’s development of industry and manufacturing. The agricultural South preferred the lower priced goods from England.
The South understood that a tariff on British goods would push import prices above the high northern prices and lower the South’s living standards in the interest of raising living standards in the North.
The conflict was entirely economic and had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery, which also had existed in the North. Indeed, some northern states had “exclusion ordinances” and anti-immigration provisions in their state constitutions that prohibited the immigration of blacks into northern states.
If freeing slaves were important to the North and avoiding tariffs was important to the South, one can imagine some possible compromises. For example, the North could have committed to building factories in the South.
As the South became industrialized, new centers of wealth would arise independently from the agricultural plantations that produced cotton exports. The labor force would adjust with the economy, and slavery would have evolved into free labor.
Unfortunately, there were too many hot heads. And so, too, today.
In America there is nothing on the horizon but hate. Everywhere you look in America you see nothing but hate.
Putin is hated. Russia is hated. Muslims are hated. Venezuela is hated. Assad is hated. Iran is hated. Julian Assange is hated. Edward Snowden is hated. White heterosexual males are hated. Confederate monuments are hated. Truth-tellers are hated. “Conspiracy theorists” are hated. No one escapes being hated.
Hate groups are proliferating, especially on the liberal/progressive/left. For example, RootsAction has discovered a statue of Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol and urges all good people to demand its removal. Whether the level of ignorance that RootsAction personifies is real or just a fund-raising ploy, I do not know.
Robert Edward Lee was an American general known for commanding the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the American Civil War from 1862 until his surrender in 1865
But clearly RootsAction is relying on public ignorance in order to get the response that they want. In former times when the US had an educated population, everyone understood that there was a great effort to reconcile the North and South and that reconciliation would not come from the kind of hate-mongering that now infects RootsAction and most of the action groups and websites of the liberal/progressive/left.
Today our country is far more divided that it was in 1860. Identity Politics has taught Americans to hate each other, but, nevertheless, the zionist neoconservatives assure us that we are “the indispensable, exceptional people.”
We, a totally divided people, are said to have the right to rule the world and to bomb every country that doesn’t accept our will into the stone age.
In turn the world hates America. Washington has told too many lies about other countries and used those lies to destroy them. Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, and large chunks of Syria and Pakistan are in ruins. Washington intends yet more ruin with Venezuela currently in the cross hairs.
Eleven years ago Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez resonated with many peoples when he said in his UN speech:
“Yesterday at this very podium stood Satan himself [Bush], speaking as if he owned the world; you can still smell the sulphur.”
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that America is a font for hatred both at home and abroad.
Journalism Has A Problem - It’s Called Capitalism! + Media Serve The Governors, Not The Governed March 12 2019 | From: Scoop / ConsortiumNews / Various
Much has been written of late about the ‘problems’ of the Journalism industry and in particular the impacts of consolidation and layoffs on local news coverage.
However, I would propose that to the extent that Journalism does in fact have a problem, that problem is simply an extension of the market failures of Capitalism.
And to the extent that solutions exist, they must be solutions that allow journalism to move outside of the broken system that has caused this situation.
For this reason, a resurgence in more engaged and community focused local journalism offers hope for a way out of this situation.
Nobody with any sense really wants to go back to the ‘golden age’ of corporate ‘objective’ journalism which simply made a few magnates and shareholders wealthy while promoting a status quo editorial line. The future opportunity is rather to build something new and exciting outside of this paradigm, as we are trying to do with the Scoop 3.0 plan.
“Democracy will last as long as journalism does, not the other way around. And if we don’t figure out a way to pay for journalism, journalism, especially local journalism, will die.” ...
“I’d like to be as optimistic as Elizabeth: People want journalism, so journalism will persist… Someone has to pay for it, to make it sustainable.
Right now, journalism has a problem. And journalism’s problem is democracy’s problem.”
I would personally go even further and say that journalism’s problem IS capitalism. Focusing on finding out a way to pay for journalism is not really the solution. We already have that - it’s called a paywall - and for a number of reasons it is neither ethical, feasible or a systemic solution to the problem to make readers pay for information that furthers democratic participation.
Furthermore, making journalism even more profitable will just attract more and bigger sharks without a way to stop them from preying on the weaker players such as local news providers.
This is already happening as seen in the countless closures, acquisitions and mergers gobbling up of niche and local papers and digital players in NZ and globally.
How Bad is the Outlook?
Bad. As Jane Elizabeth points out: The model is broken. Yes, there are rapacious, short-sighted corporations to blame. And yes, the industry was too comfortable in the fat profit margins of the advertising era and too slow to adapt to changes in information consumption.
However, as Billman points out there’s also a more fundamental problem:
“We’ve tried to supplement declining print advertising with increased digital advertising and, for many dailies, paywalls.
In response to this situation, the Corporate Media has undergone a frenzy of consolidation. 2018 saw the further consolidation of news and media companies in the US across all traditional distribution channels: television, radio and print.
IHeartMedia, owner of the largest radio network in the US, filed for bankruptcy with $20B in debt. Its next largest rival, Cumulus filed for bankruptcy a few months earlier. Disney and Comcast have been in a bidding war to buy the entertainment division of 21st Century Fox since the summer of 2018.
Discovery Communications completed a merger with the Scripps Networks and Time Magazine was acquired by Meredith Corporation for $2.8 billion only to be put up for sale again four months later.
NBCUniversal has continued to make equity investments in Buzzfeed and Snapchat to grow its digital portfolio. Niche digital outlets with substantial audiences have also been forced to close. Media darlings like Buzzfeed and Vice both missed 2018 revenue targets by over $60 million and now have laid off staff in 2019.
In an increasingly globalised media environment, the NZ media sector is not immune to the buyouts, mergers and acquisitions. Broadcasting minister Kris Faafoi told Mediawatch in December that he had taken sounding from local media bosses who told him global online media rivals could put them out of business.
This is not as far fetched as it seems. Already Stuff’s owner has merged and announced it will be breaking up and selling off the spare parts of New Zealand’s largest online publisher.
Nor are NZ publishers immune to the ongoing decline in the profitability of print and digital media. In a sobering survey recently, Stuff reporter Tom Pullar-Strecker reckoned the three biggest private media companies today - Stuff, NZME and MediaWorks - are worth only about one-tenth of their market value in 2000 - or all together, roughly the same as that of Hallensteins and Glassons clothing chain.
Paul MacBeth reports for BusinessDesk that NZME, publisher of the NZ Herald newspaper also reported a 44 percent slide in annual profit for 2018.
The company claims this was due to its increased investment in new revenue streams it hopes will replace a structural decline in its traditional print business. NZME also invested $6.1 million (a sum NZME pointed to in explaining its big fall in earnings) in its new digital classifieds businesses, which the company sees as drivers of long-term growth.
The company apparently has high hopes for OneRoof real estate site taking on TradeMe, however the other two sites, Driven and Yudu, an employment site, seem to have failed to live up to expectations.
In the understatement of the year, NZME CEO Michael Boggs told Newsroom that the media market was “tough“ in 2018, with falls in business confidence affecting returns. He somewhat wishfully also pronounced NZME’s financial result “not a bad outcome”.
Meanwhile, NZME also announced recently it will be charging online audiences to access what it is calling "premium journalism” from June 2019.
Newsroom reports NZME hopes to attract up to 10,000 subscribers to the paywalled product by June 2020, raising a “modest” amount of money but outlaying $1.2 million in extra costs.
A paywall could be profitable in its second year and will feature paid content from international publishers such as the Washington Post who are providing the software tools.
Stuffed or Starved?
New Zealand’s biggest digital publisher, Stuff's Australian owner Fairfax was taken over by Nine Entertainment Co in 2018. Nine doesn't want to keep the Kiwi business and is preparing it for sale.
BusinessDesk reported that Stuff's 2019 first-half earnings fell at an even steeper pace than its already shrinking revenue. In its first reporting period as a subsidiary of Nine, the New Zealand business reported earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of A$14.5 million in the six months ended Dec. 31, compared to A$18.9 million a year earlier.
Stuff downsized last year, selling or closing a third of its mastheads - largely unprofitable community and regional publications. Stuff also adopted a digital-first mentality as it grappled with the declining trajectory of print advertising and accelerated efforts to transfer more of that business online, despite about half its revenue coming from just five of its mastheads.
Stuff still describes the core of what it does as producing quality journalism. However, it no longer views itself as a media company, having branched out into other products, including internet service provider Stuff Fibre, hyperlocal website Neighbourly, and electricity retailer energclubnz. Stuff has reportedly not ruled out bringing in a Paywall although are not actively pursuing it at this time.
The major Corporate Media players in New Zealand have also changed their marketing focus, launching new campaigns in 2019.
The newly launched Herald advertising tells us that they are providing comprehensive and local ‘community focused’ coverage, as if saying this loud enough will make it true.
However, they forgot to add, “... if you can afford to pay for it” as their paywalled ‘Premium’ content will e available only to those privileged enough to be able to afford to pay for it.
Real Solutions or Just Shuffling Deckchairs?
All this marketing and apparent change from NZ’s big players may sound innovative and fresh to the uninformed observer, but how different is it really to the “business as usual” approach?
Both Stuff and NZME appear to be following the standard corporate journalism solutions of cutting costs by centralising and layoffs, limiting the diversity of their coverage and considering imposing an unequal user pays model.
They are also heavily investing in new verticals that have absolutely nothing to do with providing a quality journalism service in an attempt to provide greater profits to shareholders and sustain lossmaking journalism.
Is this really an approach that is likely to deliver better outcomes for democracy or keep New Zealanders better informed?
Not really, NZME’s ‘Freemium model’ essentially comodifies information and makes it so that wealthy people who can afford to pay for information get access to a more comprehensive service than those who cannot. This inequal information availability based on socio-economic groups is already pronounced in NZ society and this will simply make it moreso.
News Deserts and Democracy
In the USA, Digital First Media, which despite its name owns several print community newspapers throughout the country, has been crushing its local papers with redundancies and layoffs and cutting hundreds of reporters. Amy Westervelt writes:
“That’s not because those papers haven’t been profitable, but because they haven’t been delivering high enough returns to the global hedge fund that owns a majority stake in Digital First.”
Similarly, with Stuff and NZME, it is not that rural, niche and community papers are not profitable or have a good following. In fact, RNZ reported at the time of Stuff closing NZ Farmer and 15 other rural titles, that most farmers still to prefer news on paper to online.
The reality is that it is simply easier and cheaper to cut costs by centralising operations and providing a one size fits all, cookie cutter media coverage with little locally focused content and few on-the-ground journalists.
However, it is clearly not increasing the quality or diversity of coverage provided to the reader and is in fact resulting in ‘news deserts’, towns or areas of cities with no local news coverage.
The Columbia Journalism Review has reported extensively on the rise of news deserts in the US. Even more concerning for democracy, Politico has reported on the clear correlation between lack of local news outlets and Trump supporters in the 2016 presidential elections. Newsrooms are relying more and more on wire services like the AP and Reuters as they cut staff under budget pressures.
The NZME approach of tapping into paid content from a number of overseas sources for its ‘premium content’ is simply following this international trend towards consolidation and decreasing diversity.
The paywall approach is also likely to contribute to the creation of news deserts in impoverished and rural parts of New Zealand as news becomes a commodity. Stuff’s approach of closing rural and niche titles is similarly concerning in this regard.
The impact of all this is very serious and goes beyond the fortunes of the leading US or NZ media companies. We should all be highly worried about what is happening to local news and how it impacts our democracy.
For these reasons, Scoop has developed an ‘ethical paywall’ approach which underpins the ScoopPro service and our Scoop 3.0 plan
This attempts to create a fairer solution through charging for professional use only and maintaining comprehensive free access for the public. ScoopPro is now on sale with 25% off annual rates until 31 March.
One other positive note for New Zealand is that this environment of retreating local news appears to be playing into the hands of our publicly owned broadcasters TVNZ and also RNZ. TVNZ also launched an ad campaign this year, this one rightly highlights their network of reporters in the field.
This network of real reporters is something that looks to give both TVNZ and RNZ an edge over rivals such as Stuff and NZME as they shed titles and journalists. As TVNZ looks to move further into the digital world they will find themselves competing with the Herald directly and according to reports, may well even look to acquire Stuff when it is sold off this year.
The core of the problem in the media is that the structure of most media companies as privately traded enterprises makes them susceptible to acquisition and takeovers and provide perverse incentives to reduce quality and diversity of coverage.
For instance, CEO salaries in these media companies remain high despite all the cost cutting and layoffs and is clearly not tied in any way to the quality of their companies’ performance of the valuable societal role of public interest journalism.
Like any corporate enterprise, Media shareholders want to see profits and not much else. If that means cutting local news coverage, laying off experienced journalists and replacing them with robots, then the dictates of the Corporate system mean that is what must happen.
The corporate journalism model simply does not question whether this Corporate Media model is an appropriate way to manage the provision of a vital democratic service such as providing news coverage.
Why would it? CEOs continue to get paid massive salaries and receive bonuses while cutting local news services and public service content and laying off staff. In 2017, US media conglomerate McClatchy’s CEO Craig Forman took home $2.4 million in salary, stock awards, and a $900,000 bonus.
According to the Columbia Journalism Review, his newest contract has a $1 million base salary, a $1 million bonus and a $35,000-a-month housing stipend. As a local example, TVNZ chief executive Kevin Kenrick took home a bonus of $460,054 in 2018 - part of his total remuneration of $1.43m.
“It’s not gonna be Gannett and Gatehouse going back into these communities and hiring.
Even if they find a magic revenue bullet tomorrow that money is going to go to their shareholders…communities have to take responsibility for their own local news needs, and so you’re seeing grassroots solutions emerging and communities supporting them, in a variety of models that include both for-profit and nonprofit, and niche and general interest, and public media.”
In other words, if we want to change this broken system, more of the same is certainly not the way to do so. Rather, what we need is resilient solutions that sit outside of the corporate financial system entirely.
If the root of this problem is capitalism, then the only robust answer is for local journalism to adopt a different business model to the Corporate Media ‘business as usual’ model. What is needed is rather a new and more distributed governance model for the companies that produce journalism that protects them from the vagaries of the capitalist market.
Public Media like RNZ and TVNZ are certainly a part of the mix in New Zealand, however we also need decentralised local journalism experiments owned locally and in resilient non-profit or cooperative models outside of the Corporate system.
Thankfully, such models already do exist - a number of non-profit, reader owned and member funded and operated online newsrooms are having great success globally and Scoop is one of them.
Trust owned newsrooms such as Scoop (owned by the Scoop Foundation) and The Guardian or ProPublica are good examples of this. Cooperative newsrooms like The Colorado Sun or Bristol Cable are another great example of resilient media structures.
These newsrooms are not susceptible to acquisition or hostile takeovers or shareholder inspired interference as corporate journalism organisations are. Engaged journalism is another model having success by optimizing for trust, with transparency and engagement with the local community.
The Scoop 3.0 plan aims to incorporate elements of a few of these different models to ensure that Scoop is a resilient, diverse, public interest focused media company long into the future. We will also combine this approach with Scoop’s unique ScoopPro commercial membership revenue model to offer something a little different to the world of progressive online journalism.
To help us ensure that this happens, we are seeking another 50 organisational members to join the ScoopPro ‘Founding 300’ organisations.
These companies (including the 250 existing members) will receive special benefits and will be a core part of this new membership community as we progressively add new membership features and services. They will also have VIP access to the Scoop 3.0 equity crowdfunding offering later this year.
Since 2006 WikiLeaks has been censuring governments with governments’ own words. It has been doing the job the U.S. constitution intended the press to do, says Joe Lauria.
In his 1971 opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote: “In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy.
The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.”
That’s what WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been doing since 2006: censuring governments with governments’ own words pried from secrecy by WikiLeak’s sources - whistleblowers. In other words, WikiLeaks has been doing the job the U.S. constitution intended the press to do.
One can hardly imagine anyone sitting on today’s U.S. Supreme Court writing such an opinion. Even more troubling is the news media having turned its back on its mission. Today they almost always serve the governors - not the governed.
The question is why.
Consolidation of media ownership has increased obedience of desperate journalists; entertainment divisions have taken over news departments; and careerist reporters live vicariously through the power of those they cover, rejecting the press’ unique power to hold those officials to account.
It comes down ultimately to lifestyles. Men go to war to protect and further their lifestyles. The press cheers them on for residual material betterment and increase in status.
It used to be accepted in television that news departments would lose money and would be supported by the entertainment division. That’s because news was considered a public service.
TV newsmen - they were almost all men in those days - were former wire service and newspaper reporters. But greed has put the presenters’ personalities before public service, as entertainment masquerades as news. Newspapers have sacrificed investigative units to maximize profit.
Government is the winner.
The abdication of the mainstream media of their constitutional responsibility to serve the governed and not the governors has left a void filled for more than a decade by WikiLeaks.
No longer do today’s Daniel Ellsbergs need to take their chances with editors at The New York Times or The Washington Post, or with their reporters spinning the damning information they risk their freedom to get to the public - no matter how disinterested and distracted the public may be.
Now the traditional media can be bypassed. WikiLeaks deals in the raw material - that when revealed - governments hang themselves with. That’s why they want Assange’s head.
They lust for revenge and to stop further leaks that threaten their grip on power. That the corporate media has turned on Assange and WikiLeaks reveals their service to the state and how much they prioritize their style of life - disregarding the carnage they help bring about.
In that Pentagon Papers’ decision, the majority of the court ruled that the First Amendment prohibited the government from exercising prior restraint - or censorship - on the media before publication of classified information. But the majority of the court also said the government could prosecute journalists after publication.
Joe Lauria and John Pilger at Assange rally
Indeed the U.S. Espionage Act, which has withstood First Amendment challenges, criminalizes a publisher’s or journalist’s mere possession, as well as dissemination, of classified material.
A 1961 amendment to the Act extended U.S. jurisdiction across the world. Assange is threatened by it.
U.S. administrations have been reluctant to take the step of post-publication prosecution, however.
Nixon did not prosecute Sen. Mike Gravel, who was constitutionally protected when he read the Papers, given to him by Ellsberg, into the Congressional record.
But Gravel could have been prosecuted for publishing the Papers as a book. Barack Obama decided to back off Assange when it was plain The New York Times and other corporate media would be as liable as Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing classified information.
The virulently anti-media Trump administration, however, may take that step if Assange is arrested.
From their point of view it’s easy to understand why the U.S. wants to crush Assange. But what is Australia’s excuse? Why is it fighting America’s battles?
Why has the Australian mainstream media also turned against Assange after an election held in the U.S., not here? What has happened to Australia’s sovereignty?
That’s a question that can be answered by Australians coming into the streets, like today - and staying there until their compatriot is at last free to leave that damned embassy. Free to continue to do the job the media refuses to do.
Facebook Bans All Content On Vaccine Awareness, Including Facts About Vaccine Ingredients, Vaccine Injury And Vaccine Industry Collusion
& Mark Zuckerberg Goes All-In With The Deadly Vaccine Industry In Sweeping New Plan To Censor All Posts That Question Big Pharma’s Vaccine Dogma March 11 2019 | From: NaturalNews / NaturalNews / Various
Just as we warned would happen, the tech giants are now moving aggressively to ban all speech that contradicts whatever “official” position is decided to be “the truth” by the corrupt establishment.
This week, Facebook announced it would block all content on Facebook that questions the official dogma on vaccines, which falsely insists that vaccines have never harmed anyone (a hilarious lie), that vaccines contain only safe ingredients (a blatant deception) and that vaccines always work on everyone (another laughable lie).
Facebook is achieving this by labeling vaccine awareness information “misinformation” or “hoaxes.”
At the top of the list is the assertion that vaccines are linked to autism - something that even the CDC’s own top whistleblower scientist reveals to be true, yet the vaccine industry claims it’s all a hoax (in order to cover of the crimes of medical violence against children that are being committed by the vaccine pushers).
Notably, tech giants are now banning vaccine truth information by labeling it “misinformation” in exactly the same way they ban conservative content by labeling it “hate speech.”
They simply invent a false category to justify the ban, all while crushing the free speech of users (and ultimately leading to the vaccine maiming of millions of innocent children).
Under this twisted system of speech policing, they can ban any content they don’t like by simply labeling it “false” or “hateful,” even if it’s true and important.
Don’t like infanticide and the killing of human infants after they are born? That’s “hate speech against women,” Facebook will soon declare. And you’ll be banned from talking about abortion.
The Censorship Trick: Limiting Content to “Authoritative Information”
“Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president for global policy management, said the social media network would reduce the distribution of false data and provide users with authoritative information about vaccinations,”reports AFP, via Breitbart. Of course, “authoritative information” means whatever propaganda the vaccine deep state is pushing at the moment.
The vaccine industry is steeped in conflicts of interest and a long history of suppressing scientists and whistleblowers who attempt to warn the public about the toxic effects of vaccine ingredients such as Thimerosal (containing mercury), aluminum adjuvants, MSG, formaldehyde and other neurotoxins that are openly admitted by the CDC to be ingredients used in vaccines administered to children.
Manufacturers are virtually immune from product liability, so the incentive to develop safer products is much diminished. Manufacturers may even refuse to make available a product believed to be safer, such as monovalent measles vaccine in preference to MMR (measles-mumps-rubella). Consumer refusal is the only incentive to do better.
There are enormous conflicts of interest involving lucrative relationships with vaccine purveyors.
Research into possible vaccine adverse effects is being quashed, as is dissent by professionals.
Vaccines are neither 100% safe nor 100% effective. Nor are they the only available means to control the spread of disease.
Yet Facebook, under pressure from radical, deranged Democrat Adam Schiff, has now been bullied into banning conversations about vaccines in order to appease the vaccine industry and cover up its crimes.
This is Only the Beginning: Facebook Will Soon Ban Human Opinions on Cancer, GMOs, Pesticides, Fluoride, Abortion and Politics
The bigger picture in all this goes way beyond the issue of vaccines, of course. With this decision, Facebook is now signaling that it will ban all conversations or content that contradicts “official positions” on any topic.
Those topics will very rapidly be expanded to include GMOs, cancer treatments, water fluoridation, politics, elections, abortions, pesticides and nutrition.
It’s no longer difficult to imagine Facebook banning all conversations about nutrition, citing the absurd FDA position that there is no such thing as a nutrient which can prevent, cure or treat any disease or health condition.
That’s the actual “authoritative” FDA position, so by the same logic that Facebook has applied to the vaccine debate, they could simply ban all posts about vitamin D, vitamin D, resveratrol, astaxanthin or any other supplement.
Imagine being banned from Facebook for saying that vitamin C boosts your immune function. That’s exactly what’s coming.
Even worse, Facebook could declare that “authoritative sources” have concluded President Trump colluded with the Russians. Any human opinion that contradicted that “authoritative source” would be banned on Facebook.
“Authoritative” Sources Are Often the Most Corrupt and Misleading Sources Run by the Globalist Pharma Establishment
The problem with Facebook relying on so-called “authoritative sources” for censorship is that such sources almost always represent the corrupt globalist, pro-pharma, pro-establishment point of view that’s steeped in fraud, deception and falsehoods.
Vaccines, for example, are so dangerous that the U.S. government has now paid out nearly $4 billion in awards to families of vaccine-damaged children, yet any mention of those government statistics which are openly published by HHS (VAERS.HHS.gov) will be falsely labeled a “hoax” by Facebook, since the vaccine industry falsely insists that vaccines have never harmed anyone.
Thus, truth become a “hoax,” but lies become the “official truth.” Facebook becomes the Ministry of Truth (or more accurately, the Ministry of Lies), and all voices of truth and reason are silenced in the name of protecting corrupt, harmful industries that sacrifice children for profit.
Before long, Facebook won’t even allow any human opinions at all, and the “social media” site will be nothing but AI robots spewing official propaganda that meets the definition of “authoritative” information from the globalist establishment.
Mark Zuckerberg Goes All-In With The Deadly Vaccine Industry In Sweeping New Plan To Censor All Posts That Question Big Pharma’s Vaccine Dogma
At the request of California Leftist, Democratic cult leader, and American traitor Adam Schiff, Facebook has announced that it may soon implement new policies to actively censor content on its platform that goes against the official narrative that all vaccines are 100 percent “safe and effective.”
Blaming several recent outbreaks of measles on the prevalence of “anti-vaccine information” online, Schiff believes that it’s now Facebook’s job to actively steer users towards only pro-vaccine content in order to keep people “protected.”
“There is strong evidence to suggest that at least part of the source of this trend is the degree to which medically inaccurate information about vaccines surface (sic) on the websites where many Americans get their information,” Schiff is quoted as saying, providing absolutely none of the supposedly “strong evidence” that he says proves that disease outbreaks are caused by people reading alternative information about vaccines on Facebook.
“The algorithms which power these services are not designed to distinguish quality information from misinformation or misleading information, and the consequences of that are particularly troubling for public health issues,” he added, inferring that the “all vaccines are safe and effective” narrative represents the only “quality information” about vaccines.
Facebook Capitulates to Schiff’s Demands, Says it’s Working on New Ways to “Combat the Problem”
In response to Schiff’s poorly-worded letter of warning to Facebook Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook reportedly released a statement in response, indicating that the company is “exploring additional measures to best combat the problem.”
These “measures” apparently include “reducing or removing this type of content from recommendations, including Groups You Should Join, and demoting it in search results, while also ensuring that higher quality and more authoritative information is available.”
YouTube Actively Demoting Videos that Tell the Other Side of the Vaccine Story
Google, which also received the same letter from Schiff, did not immediately respond with a statement like Facebook did. However, the Google-owned YouTube platform last month took action to demote videos that promote “misinformation” about vaccines, using the example of videos that promote “a phony miracle cure for a serious illness.”
Keep in mind that Schiff, the ringleader in all this, is the same tool bag that’s been parroting the “Russian collusion” conspiracy theory any chance he gets.
Despite a total lack of evidence that the Trump campaign in any way conspired with Vladimir Putin to “steal” the 2016 election, Schiff continues to tout it as though it were undeniable fact.
And now with vaccines, Schiff wants all Americans to be forced to consume only pro-vaccine propaganda, citing the “dangers” of online free speech.
It’s an Orwellian nightmare that Schiff and his fellow Democrats believe is necessary to promote the “greater good” – even though numerous outbreaks in the past occurred in populations that were fully vaccinated.
According to Bloomberg, the first result that turns up when searching for “vaccines” on YouTube is a “middle ground” video that features a debate between those who support them and those who reject them.
The fourth result is the first episode of the popular “The Truth About Vaccines” video series, which has around 1.2 million views.
“The current all-time-high measles outbreak in California since measles was ‘eradicated’ due to vaccines and vaccinations, has local health authorities stumped because 85 percent of those contracting measles were fully vaccinated,” Catherine J. Frompovich from Activist Post recalls hearing during a broadcast that aired on KYW Newsradio 1060 in Philadelphia during a measles outbreak that occurred back in 2014.
Green New Deal Reveals The Naked Truth Of Agenda 21 March 10 2019 | From: NewsWithViews/ Various
Sometimes if you fight hard enough and refuse to back down, no matter the odds, your truth is vindicated and prevails!
For twenty years I have been labeled a conspiracy theorist, scaremonger, extremist, dangerous, nut case. I’ve been denied access to stages, major news programs, and awarded tin foil hats. All because I have worked to expose Agenda 21 and its policy of sustainable development as a danger to our property rights, economic system, and culture of freedom.
From its inception in 1992 at the United Nation’s Earth Summit, 50,000 delegates, heads of state, diplomats and Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) hailed Agenda 21 as the “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society.”
They warned us that the reorganization would be dictated through all-encompassing policies affecting every aspect of our lives, using environmental protection simply as the excuse to pull at our emotions and get us to voluntarily surrender our liberties.
Section I details “Social and Economic Dimensions” of the plan, including redistribution of wealth to eradicate poverty, maintain health through vaccinations and modern medicine, and population control.
To introduce the plan, the Earth Summit Chairman, Maurice Strong boldly proclaimed, “Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.”
Of course, according to the plan, if it’s not “sustainable” it must be stopped.
In support of the plan, David Brower of the Sierra Club (one of the NGO authors of the agenda) said, “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license.”
Leading environmental groups advocated that the Earth could only support a maximum of one billion people, leading famed Dr. Jacques Cousteau to declare, “In order to stabilize world populations, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.”
Section II provides the “Conservation and Management of Resources for Development” by outlining how environmental protection was to be the main weapon, including global protection of the atmosphere, land, mountains, oceans, and fresh waters – all under the control of the United Nations.
To achieve such global control to save the planet, it is necessary to eliminate national sovereignty and independent nations.
Eliminating national borders quickly led to the excuse for openly allowing the “natural migration” of peoples.
The UN Commission on Global Governance clearly outlined the goal for global control stating:
“The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations.
It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.”
Comment:Read about the Alliance that has been working behind
the scenes for decades to take down the 'Cabal' within the work of David Wilcock.
Some of those reading this may be confused because the cabal-controlled mainstream media is doing everything within it's
power to denigrate Trump - as he is part of the effort to take the Illuminati down once and for all.
The main weapon for the Agenda was the threat of Environmental Armageddon, particularly manifested through the charge of man-made global warming, later to conveniently become “climate change.”
It didn’t matter if true science refused to cooperate in this scheme as actual global temperatures really are not rising and there continues to be no evidence of any man-made affect on the climate.
Truth hasn’t been important to the scare mongers. Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation said, “We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
To further drive home their complete lack of concern for truth, Paul Watson of Green Peace declared, “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
So in their zealotry to enforce the grand agenda, social justice became the “moral force” over the rule of law as free enterprise, private property, rural communities and individual consumption habits became the targets, labeled as racist and a social injustice.
Such established institutions and free market economics were seen as obstructions to the plan, as were traditional family units, religion, and those who were able to live independently in rural areas.
Finally, Agenda 21 was summed up in supporting documents this way:
"Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced.
It requires a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals, and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources.
This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”
Of course, such harsh terms had to be hidden from the American people if the plan was to be successfully imposed. They called it a “suggestion” for “voluntary” action – just in case a nation or community wanted to do something positive for mankind!
However, while using such innocent-sounding language, the Agenda 21 shock troops lost no time pushing it into government policy. In 1992, just after its introduction at the Earth Summit, Nancy Pelosi introduced a resolution of support for the plan into Congress.
It’s interesting to note that she boldly called it a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society.”
In 1993, new President, Bill Clinton ordered the establishment of the President’s Council for Sustainable Development, with the express purpose of enforcing the Agenda 21 blueprint into nearly every agency of the federal government to assure it became the law of the land.
Then the American Planning Association issued a newsletter in 1994, supporting Agenda 21’s ideas as a “comprehensive blueprint” for local planning.
So much for a voluntary idea!
However, as we, the opponents started to gain some ground in exposing its true purpose and citizens began to storm city halls protesting local implementation, suddenly the once proud proponents lost their collective memories about Agenda 21.
Never heard of it! “There are no blue-helmeted troops at city hall,” said one proponent, meaning policies being used to impose it were not UN driven, but just “local, local, local”.
"Oh, you mean that innocuous 20 year-old document that has no enforcement capability? This isn’t that!”
These were the excuses that rained down on us from the planners, NGOs and government agents as they scrambled to hide their true intentions.
I was attacked on the front page of the New York Times Sunday paper under the headline, “Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot.” The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) produced four separate reports on my efforts to stop it, calling our efforts an “Antigovernment Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory.”
The Atlantic magazine ran a story entitled, “Is the UN Using Bike Paths to Achieve World Domination?” Attack articles appeared in the Washington Post, Esquire magazine, Wingnut Watch, Mother Jones, and Tree Hugger.com to name a few.
All focused on labeling our opposition as tin-foil-hat-wearing nut jobs. Meanwhile, an alarmed American Planning Association (APA) created an “Agenda 21: Myths and Facts page on its web site to supposedly counter our claims.
APA then organized a “Boot Camp” to retrain its planners to deal with us, using a “Glossary for the Public,” teaching them new ways to talk about planning.
Said the opening line of the Glossary, “Given the heightened scrutiny of planners by some members of the public, what is said – or not said – is especially important in building support for planning.”
The Glossary went on to list words not to use like “Public Visioning,” “Stakeholders,” “Density,” and “Smart Growth,” because such words make the “Critics see red”.
Local elected officials, backed by NGO groups and planners, began to deride local activists – sometimes denying them access to speak at public meetings, telling them that Agenda 21 conspiracy theory has “been debunked”.
Most recently an irate city councilman answered a citizen who claimed local planning was part of Agenda 21 by saying “this is what’s “trending.” So, of course, if everyone is doing it is must be right!
Such has been our fight to stop this assault on our culture and Constitutional rights.
Over the years, since the introduction of Agenda 21 in 1992, the United Nations has created several companion updates to the original documents.
This practice serves two purposes. One is to provide more detail on how the plan is to be implemented. The second is to excite its global activists with a new rallying cry.
In 2000, the UN held the Millennium Summit, launching the Millennium Project featuring eight goals for global sustainability to be reached by 2015.
Then, when those goals were not achieved, the UN held another summit in New York City in September of 2015, this time outlining 17 goals to be reached by 2030.
This document became known as the 2030 Agenda, containing the exact same goals as were first outlined in Agenda 21 in 1992, and then again in 2000, only with each new incarnation offering more explicit direction for completion.
Enter the Green New Deal, representing the boldest tactic yet. The origins and the purpose of the Green New Deal couldn’t be more transparent.
The forces behind Agenda 21 and its goal of reorganizing human society have become both impatient and scared. Impatient that 27 years after Agenda 21 was introduced, and after hundreds of meetings, planning sessions, massive propaganda, and billions of dollars spent, the plan still is not fully in place.
Scared because people around the world are starting to learn its true purpose and opposition is beginning to grow.
So the forces behind the Agenda have boldly thrown off their cloaking devices and their innocent sounding arguments that they just want to protect the environment and make a better life for us all.
Instead, they are now openly revealing that their goal is socialism and global control, just as I’ve been warning about for these past twenty years.
Now they are determined to take congressional action to finally make it the law of the land.
Take a good look, those of you who have heard my warnings about Agenda 21 over the years. Do you see the plan I have warned about being fully in place in this Green New Deal?
I warned that Agenda 21 would control every aspect of our lives, including how and were we live, the jobs we have, the mode of transportation available to us, and even what we eat. The Green New Deal is a tax on everything we do, make, wear, eat, drink, drive, import, export and even breathe.
In opposing Smart Growth plans in your local community, I said the main goal was to eliminate cars, to be replaced with bikes, walking, and light rail trains.
The Green New Deal calls for the elimination of the internal combustion engine. Stay alert. The next step will be to put a ban on the sale of new combustion engines by a specific date and then limiting the number of new vehicles to be sold. Bans on commercial truck shipping will follow.
Then they will turn to airplanes, reducing their use. Always higher and higher taxes will be used to get the public to “voluntarily” reduce their use of such personal transportation choices. That’s how it works, slowly but steadily towards the goal.
I warned that under Smart Growth programs now taking over every city in the nation that single-family homes are a target for elimination, to be replaced by high-rise stack and pack apartments in the name of reducing energy use.
That will include curfews on carbon heating systems, mandating they be turned off during certain hours. Heating oil devises will become illegal. Gradually, energy use of any kind will be continually reduced. The Green New Deal calls for government control of every single home, office and factory to tear down or retrofit them to comply with massive environmental energy regulations.
I warned that Agenda 21 Sustainable policy sought to drive those in rural areas off the farms and into the cities where they could be better controlled.
Those in the cities will be ordered to convert their gardens into food producers. Most recently I warned that the beef industry is a direct target for elimination. It will start with mandatory decreases in meat consumption until it disappears form our daily diet. The consumption of dairy will follow.
Since the revelation of the Green New Deal the national debate is now over cattle emissions of methane and the drive to eliminate them from the planet. Controlling what we eat is a major part of the Green New Deal.
I warned that part of the plan for Agenda 2030 was “Zero Economic Growth.” The Green New Deal calls for a massive welfare plan where no one earns more than anyone else.
Incentive to get ahead is dead. New inventions would disrupt their plan for a well-organized, controlled society. So, where will jobs come from after we have banned most manufacturing, shut down most stores, stopped single-family home construction, closed the airline industry, and severely regulated farms and the entire food industry?
This is their answer to the hated free markets and individual choice.
The Green New Deal will destroy the very concept of our Constitutional Republic, eliminating private property, locally elected representative government, free markets and individual freedom.
All decisions in our lives will be made for us by the government – just to protect the environment of course. They haven’t forgotten how well that scheme works to keep the masses under control.
Though the label “Green New Deal” has been passing around globalist circles for a while, it’s interesting that its leaders have now handed it to a naïve, inexperienced little girl from New York who suddenly found herself rise from bartending to a national media sensation, almost over night.
That doesn’t just happen and there is no miracle here. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a created product. They probably needed her inexperienced enthusiasm to deliver the Green New Deal because no established politician would touch it.
Now that it’s been introduced and she is set up to take the heat, the gates have swung open allowing forty-five members of Congress to co-sponsor it in the House of Representatives as established Senator Ed. Markey (D-MA) has sponsored it in the Senate.
That doesn’t just happen either. Nothing has been left to chance.
Behind the sudden excitement and rush to support it are three radical groups each having direct ties to George Soros, including the Sunrise Movement – which markets itself as an “army of young people” seeking to make climate change a major priority.
Justice Democrats – which finds and recruits progressive candidates, and New Consensus – organized to change how we think about issues.
Leaders of these groups have connections with other Soros-backed movements including Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street. According to The New Yorker magazine, the plan was written over a single weekend in December, 2018. Ocasio-Cortez was included in the effort, chosen to introduce it.
This may be the single reason why she was able to appear out of nowhere to become the new darling of the radical left.
So there you have it - Agenda 21, the Millennium Project, Agenda 2030, the Green New Deal. Progress in the world of Progressives!
They warned us from the beginning that their plan was the “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society”.
And so it is to be the total destruction of our way of life.
To all of those elected officials, local, state and federal, who have smirked at we who have tried to sound the alarm, look around you now, hot shots! You have denied, ignored, and yet, helped put these very plans into place.
Are you prepared to accept what you have done? Will you allow your own homes and offices to be torn down – or will you be exempt as part of the elite or just useful idiots? Will you have to give up your car and ride your bike to work? Or is that just for we peasants?
Over these years you have listened to the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, ICLEI, the American Planning Association, and many more, as they assured you their plans were just environmental protection, just good policy for future generations.
They have been lying to you to fulfill their own agenda! Well, now the truth is right in front of you. There is no question of who and what is behind this. And no doubt as to what the final result will be.
Now, our elected leaders have to ask real questions. As the Green New Deal is implemented, and all energy except worthless, unworkable wind and solar are put into place, are you ready for the energy curfews that you will be forced to impose, perhaps each night as the sun fades, forcing factories, restaurants, hospitals, and stores to close at dusk?
How about all those folks forced to live in the stack and pack high-rises when the elevators don’t operate? What if they have an emergency?
How much energy will it take to rebuild those buildings that must be destroyed or retrofitted to maker them environmentally correct for your brave new world? Where will it come from after you have banned and destroyed all the workable sources of real energy?
What are you counting on to provide you with food, shelter, and the ability to travel so you can continue to push this poison? Because – this is what’s trending - now!
And how is it going to be financed when the entire economy crashes under its weight? Is it really the future you want for you, your family, and your constituents who elected you?
Every industry under attack by this lunacy should now join our efforts to stop it. Cattlemen, farmers, airlines, the auto industry, realtors, tourist industry, and many more, all will be put out of business – all should now take bold action to immediately kill this plan before it kills your industry.
Stomp it so deeply into the ground that no politician will ever dare think about resurrecting it.
For years I’ve watched politicians smirk, roll their eyes, and sigh whenever the words Agenda 21 were uttered.
As George Orwell said, “The further a society drifts from the truth the more it will hate those who speak it”.
Today I stand vindicated in my warnings of where Agenda 21 was truly headed, because it’s not longer me having to reveal the threat.
They are telling you themselves. Here’s the naked truth – Socialism is for the stupid.
The Green New Deal is pure Socialism. How far its perpetrators get in enforcing it depends entirely on how hard you are willing to fight for freedom.
Luke Perry Dead At 52 After “Serious Stroke” & Star Of Hobbit Films Elijah Wood Says Hollywood Is Masking A Child Sex Epidemic March 9 2019 | From: VigilantCitizen/ DailyMail / Various
Luke Perry was hospitalized since February 27th. On the same day, Fox Studios had announced the reboot of the series “Beverly Hills, 90210”.
Luke Perry, who was hospitalized since February 27 in Los Angeles after suffering a stroke, died Monday at the age of 52.
The actor was mostly known for his role as Dylan McKay in the television series Beverly Hills, 90210, which was a cultural phenomenon in the 1990s.
At the time of his death, Perry was working in Los Angeles on the set of the series Riverdale.
According to the release sent by his agent, Luke Perry died of a “serious stroke”.
He was surrounded by his children Jack and Sophie, his fiancée Wendy Madison Bauer, his ex-wife Minnie Sharp, as well as his mother, brother, and sister.
Perry was rushed to the hospital last Wednesday morning after suffering the stroke while at his home in Sherman Oaks, California.
According to the emergency dispatch audio obtained by TMZ, paramedics received a call for a stroke at the residence. When EMTs arrived, he was responsive and talking, but his condition deteriorated shortly after.
His reps said doctors had sedated Luke, hoping to give his brain a fighting chance to recover from the trauma of the stroke. However, apparently, the damage was too extensive.
Luke Perry was hospitalized the same day Fox Studios had announced the reboot of the series Beverly Hills, 90210 for six episodes this summer. While Luke had not signed on to be a regular on the series, he was scheduled to make a few guest appearances.
He also filmed a role in Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming Charles Manson movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
While Perry was an international star during the era of Beverly Hills, 90210, he mostly appeared in minor roles or low-budget productions in the last two of decades. While Perry found his way back to mainstream success, he mostly got involved in dark, elite-backed projects.
Perry had a recurring role in the Netflix series Riverdale – a series popular with teenagers that has been dealing with increasingly dark and disturbing topics.
Perry’s last role will be in Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – a movie about Charles Manson and the murders committed by his followers.
According to occult researchers, Manson was an MK slave and handler.
The movie was initially set to be released on August 9th, 2019 which coincided with the 50th anniversary of the gruesome and ritualistic murder of Sharon Tate (who was Roman Polanski’s wife). After some protests, the release date of the movie was moved to July 26th.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is well on its way of becoming one of the “cursed” movies in Hollywood. Indeed, Perry is the second actor to pass away after being cast in the film. Last September, Burt Reynolds died before he had begun filming.
In a final bizarre twist of fate, Perry suffered a “massive stroke” on the same day Fox Studios announced the reboot of 90210.
Although these facts might all be coincidences, Perry’s death nevertheless bears the markings of a typical suspicious Hollywood death. Did Perry actually suffer a stroke or is he the latest victim of the dark side of Hollywood?
Star Of Hobbit Films Elijah Wood Says Hollywood Is Masking A Child Sex Epidemic
Hollywood's Savile scandal: Elijah Wood says Tinseltown is masking a child sex epidemic in its 'seedy' underbelly full of predatory 'vipers'
Shocking allegations that top Hollywood figures have been protecting child abusers have circulated widely in recent years.Elijah Wood, 35, claims young actors are being abused in Hollywood and he compares it to the infamous Jimmy Savile scandal in Britain.
Several industry figures have been convicted following claims of sex abuse and former child actors - including The Goonies actor Corey Feldman, 44 - claimed he was 'surrounded' by molesters when he was a teenager.
Anne Henry, co-founder of Bizparentz - a group to help young actors - said that Tinseltown is currently sheltering around '100 active abusers'. Wood, who stars in his new film The Trust, sympathised with Savile's victims and said it much have been 'devastating'.
He told The Sunday Times that his mother had protected him from abuse when he first arrived in Hollywood aged eight. But he said:
"Ive been led down dark paths to realise that these things are probably still happening."
"This problem has been endemic in Hollywood for a long time and it's finally coming to light. Very bad people are still working here, protected by their friends."
In the last 10 years, several wealthy and significant people involved in the industry have been convicted. Some have left prison and returned to Hollywood and continued to work with children.
Wood, who now knows he was lucky to avoid being abused, compared the allegations in Hollywood to the claims linked to Savile following his death in October 2011. Wood said:
"You all grew up with Savile - Jesus, it must have been devastating. Clearly something major was going on in Hollywood. It was all organised.
There are a lot of vipers in this industry. There is a darkness in the underbelly - if you can imagine it, it's probably happened."
Feldman, who was one of the biggest child stars in the 1980s, was abused when he was a young actor. He said:
"The No 1 problem in Hollywood was and is - and always will be - paedophilia."
Other child actors were reportedly told by adults that it was perfectly normal for older men and younger boys in the industry to have sexual relations.
"When I was 14 and 15, things were happening to me. These older men were leching around me like vultures."
He went on to suffer with alcoholism, mental health problems and became addicted to drugs.
His friend, Corey Haim, another child actor, died of pnemonia aged 38 in 2010.
Feldman claims a 'Hollywood mogul' is to blame for his friend's death. He said abusers are still working and are some of the richest and most powerful people in the business.
It was also claimed that a number of pool parties were held in Los Angeles during the late 1990s - primarily hosted by millionaire businessman Marc Collins-Rector.
At these parties, Collins-Rector and other men are said to have sexually assaulted teenage boys, according to lawsuits filed in 2000 and 2014.
In contrast, the rapid expansion of railway transport systems across Eurasia has significantly changed the tribal mindset of the population there, so much so that they are now looking up to how and what products they could sell the global market with, rather than be forever stuck in the limited potential of their own domestic patrons.
The free access to information, and the free flowing conversation in social networks, have brought down the exceptionalist narrative that “white is good and colored is bad.”
Now, the Western population is beginning to appreciate the different cultures in Asia and realize how much they all share the same aspirations and dreams for a better world.
Those same aspirations that run counter to their own governments’ foreign and domestic policies.
“No One Trusts the US Government, Not Even the American People
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts | Global Research, February 24, 2019
Atlantic Bridge, a German front organization set up by Washington to propagandize Germans to serve Washington, has failed in the job.
The latest survey conducted by the front group shows that 85% of Germans are alienated from the US. The front group’s chairman acknowledged “the great lost of trust in the United States.”
By a margin of two to one, Germans see China as a more reliable partner for Germany than the US. (See this)
Americans have come to the same conclusion about the US government as have Germans. The latest Gallup Poll reveals that Americans regard America’s top problem to be the US government.
Twice as many respondents regard the US government to be the top problem than regard immigration, and Americans see Washington to be six times the problem that health care is.
As many have concluded, the United States is not a democracy. It is an oligarchy ruled by monied private interest groups. (See this)
There has clearly been a revolution in America. An aristocracy has overthrown the people. Democracy is dead. We live in the Oligarchy United Against the People.”
The deteriorating influence of Western diplomacy is not being observed only in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and other countries in the Middle East that were all recipients of the “War of Terror,” but also in India and Pakistan, two neighbors that are being pushed to war once again by the merchants of death solely for profit in arms sales and subsequent exploitation of their natural resources, because 50 tons of Syrian gold is simply not enough.
“Russia Officially Returns to South Asia by Offering to Host Indo-Pak Peace Talks
Russia’s 21st-century grand strategy of becoming the supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia is one major step closer to fruition after Foreign Minister Lavrov offered to host peace talks between India and Pakistan, proving that Russia’s refusal to take sides between its decades-long and newfound partners is part and parcel of President Putin’s pragmatic approach to regional affairs.
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov sent shockwaves through South Asia on Thursday by announcing his country’s intent to host peace talks between India and Pakistan if they wish for it to do so, thereby heralding Russia’s return to the region and putting it one major step closer towards fulfilling its 21st-century grand strategy of becoming the supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia…
All told, it’s nothing short of a game-changing geopolitical development that Russia would offer to host peace talks between India and Pakistan because it proves just how wildly successful President Putin’s “balancing” strategy has been thus far, considering how confident Moscow is that it can constructively apply this model to the two nuclear-armed Great Powers in South Asia.
Russia has truly returned to the region and is poised to play an even larger role in it over the coming years, which will enable Moscow to more assertively counter the US’ plans to destabilize South Asia and therefore ensure the success of the emerging Multipolar World Order."
This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare.
It’s no wonder that the Foreign Minister of Venezuela, Jorge Arreaza has been using the UN platform to voice the truth on the ground and destroy the black propaganda coming from the Western media.
The UN General Assembly itself is now headed by a reformist.
Hailed as the “best Prime Minister for 30 years” by his own people, Portuguese UN Sec. Gen. Antonio Guterres made it a point early on to “Let us resolve to put peace first,” in 2017.
Guterres was elected to the position at “the first time candidates for Secretary-General had to present their platform in public hearings in the UN General Assembly, a process during which Guterres emerged as a much stronger candidate than had been initially expected, given that he fit the bill on neither the gender nor the geographic scores.”
The prevailing pragmatic mindset in the US leadership is working positively for Venezuela…
“Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Arreaza Holds UN Marathon for Peace: Usurper Guaido Urges Military Intervention and War
In a herculean effort to prevent war, and protect the integrity of his country, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza held a breathtaking schedule of events at the United Nations, including a meeting with the Secretary-General, consultations with the envoys of 60 member states supporting Venezuela’s sovereignty, a press conference the evening of February 22, speaking at a Security Council meeting February 26, and presenting an address at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on February 27.
Arreaza’s encyclopedic knowledge of history is one of his powerful assets, as he patiently clarified to reporters, at last Friday’s press conference, the reality of US instigated economic warfare underlying Venezuela’s current crisis.
At one bizarre moment, a European reporter, asked, Mussolini-style, about a report that Venezuelan armed forces shot an unarmed indigenous person, and compared the incident to “what happened in China.” Arreaza asked whether the reporter had seen the incident, and, evading Arreaza’s question the reporter continued:
“Is your government giving specific orders to shoot unarmed people, and what will happen to those who refuse to comply with these orders?”
The stupefying question, less a query, and more unsubstantiated innuendo, was asked with such arrogance and grandiosity that Arreaza, fully aware of the insinuation intended, replied:
“Your question is full of venom and very poisonous. The army of Bolivar has never had orders to fire on the civilian population, and you should be the first to assess the reliability of false ‘reports,’ and false flag operations. It is your responsibility as a reporter to be smart, astute, and delve into the truth, and recognize propaganda.”
What was unmistakable, throughout last week, and at yesterday’s Security Council meeting, is Arreaza’s passionate effort to prevent the bloodbath of military confrontation, reiterating the historic context of the Venezuelan crisis to reporters and diplomats who may have a stunted recognition of the barbarous – but often ingenious – methods used by Washington to impose domination and de facto slavery on nations in Latin America.
Theirs is virtually a scientific formula – economic destabilization, a relentless media disinformation campaign, and if the current target – in this case Venezuela – does not submit to domination, ultimately military force will be decisive in inflicting regime change, installing a docile, subservient puppet. The horrific example of the overthrow of Allende in Chile is merely one example.
… The Wall Street Journal on February 25, 2019 headlined: “Maduro’s Opposition Urges Military Force in Venezuela,” making inescapable that the Venezuelan opposition is either lobotomized, or heedless of the bloodbath military action will culminate in. The New York Times on February 25, page 4, has a large photograph of “innocent, unarmed” protesters preparing Molotov cocktails on Sunday along the Venezuela-Colombia border.
The Security Council meeting Monday, February 25, was preceded by an asinine lineup of eight members of the European Union, demanding that Venezuela immediately call elections.
Evidently ignorant of the fact that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter characterized the Venezuelan electoral process as “one of the best in the world,” and the US electoral process as “one of the worst,” these European proxies were better suited to comic parody in a Mozart opera than to intervention in matters of war and peace.
And, of course, who is to determine that, even if new elections are called, they will be either free or fair. Obviously, the result will be as Washington directs its European colonies to approve.
It would not be possible to avoid reference to Marco Rubio’s gruesome tweet, threatening Maduro, and not incidentally Kim Jong Un, with hideous death by torture, including sodomization with bayonets before his murder.
These horrific actions were committed by those “vulnerable, peaceful Libyans” for whom the UN Security Council, enacting Resolution 1973 and “Responsibity to Protect,” in the unforgettable words of Indian Ambassador Puri, were authorized to “bomb the hell out of Libya.”
It is very likely that the Venezuelan opposition, especially those thugs, photographed by The New York Times on February 23 preparing Molotov cocktails, are the same breed as those Libyan monsters who, among other tortures, sodomized President Khadaffi with a bayonet before murdering him.
No doubt Kim Jong Un will duly note this threat, and perhaps Maduro will ponder Khadafi’s mistake in surrendering his nuclear program.
Today’s Security Council meeting, with the failure of both the US and Russian drafts, included Elliot Abrams regurgitating the same dangerous and deadly platitudes as always. The double veto of the US draft, by both China and Russia, saved the Security Council from endorsing another catastrophic military intervention."
Carla Stea is Global Research’s correspondent at United Nations Headquarters, New York, N.Y.
All of the above are reasons to be hopeful about our shared future.
This planet is not losing all its Good Men yet. But we have to do our part to appreciate what they’ve done so far, and to continue exposing the Deep State high crimes everywhere, so we can proactively prevent new ones from occurring.
The Truth About Addiction And Recovery March 7 2019 | From: Peele / Various
A radical new approach to recovery - using methods proven more effective than medical treatment or twelve-step programs.
Drawing on the latest research and detailed case studies, the authors expose the best-kept secrets in the recovery field:
Addictions - whether to food, cigarettes, sex, alcohol, or drugs - are not diseases, and they’re not necessarily lifelong problems.
Many more people give up addictions on their own than are helped by medical treatment or twelve-step programs.
Developing values, skills, and life resources enables people to quit addictions - and to shed the addict identity altogether.
In their revolutionary “Life Process Program” for overcoming all kinds of addictions, the authors emphasize self-help and treatment through coping with stress and achieving one’s goals. As helpful as it is controversial, The Truth About Addiction and Recovery will forever change the way we view and treat addiction.
“A classic.” - John Norcross, PhD, ABPP, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Scranton and author of Changing for Good
Addiction
What causes addiction? Easy, right? Drugs cause addiction. But maybe it is not that simple.
This video is adapted from Johann Hari's New York Times best-selling book 'Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.'
For more information, and to take a quiz to see what you know about addiction, visit chasingthescream.com
Why It Doesn’t Make Sense To Call Addiction A “Disease”
We frequently hear from people who say: “I drink too much sometimes, but I don’t think I’m an alcoholic. And I don’t want to stand up and talk about myself in front of a group. Is there any other way I can change the way I drink?”
“I’m overweight, but I understand that people are born to be fat and there’s not much you can do about it. I know I’ve tried to lose weight a million times and failed. Does this mean I’m doomed to be overweight?”
“I saw an ad saying the only way to lick your addiction to nicotine is by going to a doctor. Is that really true? Don’t people ever quit smoking on their own?”
“My father was an alcoholic. Does that mean I’m likely to become an alcoholic myself? Should I play it safe and quit drinking altogether? A friend of mine joined a ‘Children of Alcoholics’ group, even though she’s never even been drunk. Should I join such a group? And what about my kids?”
“My son was caught smoking marijuana. Now I’m told that, unless I place him in an expensive residential treatment program, he could escalate his drug use and die. I don’t have the money for this but, of course, if I have to save his life I’ll mortgage the house!”
People are much concerned about bad habits (which sometimes reach life-consuming proportions) that they’d like to do something about-drinking, smoking, overeating, taking drugs, gambling, overspending, or even compulsive romancing.
We hear more and more that every one of these things is a disease, and that we must go to treatment centers or join twelve-step support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous in order to change any of these behaviors.
Is there really no other way to change a powerful habit than to enter treatment for a disease? Do personal initiative, willpower, or just maturing and developing a more rewarding life have anything to do with people’s ability to overcome addictive habits?
As children, as spouses, as parents, as employers, as consumers, and as citizens we must struggle to understand and master the destructive potential of drugs, alcohol, and related addictions.
The kinds of questions so many people face today include: What do we do if we discover our children are smoking marijuana, or worse? Should we put them in a treatment center that will teach them they are chemically dependent for life?
How can we tell if co-workers, employees, and friends are secretly addicts or alcoholics? What is the most appropriate way to react to people who drink too much or do anything that harms themselves and others?
Click on the image above to open a larger versioj in a new window
Furthermore, as a society, how should we deal with these problems? Are our incessant wars on drugs really going to have the positive impact the generals in these wars always claim? Or is there some more sensible or direct way to reduce the damage people do to themselves through their uncontrollable habits?
Rather than arrest drug users, can we treat addicts so that they stop using drugs? And if we expand the treatment for all the addictions we have seen - like shopping and smoking and overeating and sexual behavior - who will pay for all this treatment?
Finally, does addiction diminish people’s judgment so that they can’t be held accountable for their behavior, or for crimes and financial excesses they commit while addicted?
This book is for those concerned with such questions. But what you will read here is not the same as what you see and hear in newspapers and magazines, on television, in addiction treatment centers, in twelve-step groups, and in most physicians’ and therapists’ offices or what your children are learning in school.
For in its desperate search for a way out of the convulsions caused by drug abuse and addiction, our society has seized upon a simple, seductive, but false answer that this book disputes. What we say is, indeed, so different from most things you hear that we have provided extensive documentation at the back of the book.
The simple but incorrect answer we constantly hear is expressed by the familiar statement, “Alcoholism is a disease.” In other words, we can treat away these problems in a medical setting.
This viewpoint has proved so appealing that it has been adopted by professional organizations and government agencies as well as by groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. And now the “disease” label is applied not only to alcoholism, drug addiction, cigarette smoking, and overeating, but also to gambling, compulsive shopping, desperate romantic attachments, and even committing rape or killing one’s newborn child!
A.A.’s image of “powerlessness over alcohol” is being extended to everything that people feel they are unable to resist or control.
But what lies behind the claim that alcoholism and other addictions are diseases? How accurate is it? What evidence supports it? Most important, what good does it do us to believe it? Will it really help you or someone you care about to overcome an addiction?
This book will show that the answer is no - that, in fact, it may do more harm than good. What’s wrong with calling a tenacious and destructive habit a disease?
Three things:
1.
It isn’t true.
2.
It doesn’t help most people (even those it does help might succeed just as well in a less costly, less limiting way).
3.
It prevents us from doing things that really would help.
In this chapter we will summarize what the disease model says, why it is wrong, and why it is harmful. As you will see, there is no good reason to label yourself or people you know as forever marked by an addictive “disease.” Challenging this useless folklore is the first step toward understanding addiction and doing something about it.
Then we will present an alternative way of thinking about and dealing with addiction called the Life Process Program. The accompanying table previews the major differences between the Life Process Program and the disease model of addiction.
Myths Versus Reality
To highlight some of the surprising facts we will reveal, here are some common beliefs about various addictions:
A person needs medical treatment or a program like Smokenders to quit smoking.
Attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings is the most effective way for alcoholics to stop drinking.
Nearly all regular cocaine users become addicted.
Very few people who have a drinking problem can ever drink in a normal, controlled manner.
Drunk drivers who undergo treatment for alcoholism are less likely to repeat the offense than those who receive normal judicial penalties such as license suspension.
Most people with an alcoholic parent become alcoholics themselves.
Most people who are binge drinkers in their twenties go on to become alcoholics.
Most of the American soldiers who were addicted to heroin in Vietnam remained addicted or became addicted again after they returned home.
The fact that alcoholism runs in families means that it is an inherited disease.
Fat children, because they have inherited their obesity, are more likely to be fat in later life than are people who become fat as adults.
Actually, the best scientific evidence available today indicates that none of these statements is true. Such specific misconceptions grow out of a foundation of false assumptions about the nature of addiction generally.
Ten Assumptions that Distinguish the Life Process Program from the Disease Model
DISEASE MODEL
LIFE PROCESS PROGRAM
1. Addiction is inbred and biological.
1. Addiction is a way of coping with yourself and your world.
2. The solution is medical treatment and membership in spiritual groups such as A.A.
2. The solution requires self-awareness, new coping skills, and changing your environment.
3. Addiction is all-or-nothing; you are or you aren’t an addict.
3. Addiction is a continuum; your behavior is more or less addicted.
4. Addiction is permanent and you can relapse at any moment.
4. Addiction can be outgrown.
5. Addicts are “in denial” and must be forced to acknowledge they have a disease.
5. You should identify problems and solutions in ways that work for you.
6. The recovering addict / alcoholic is the expert on addiction.
6. Those without an addiction problem are the best models.
7. Addiction is a “primary” disease.
7. Addiction stems from other life problems you have.
8. Your main associates must be other recovering addicts.
8. You should associate with a normal range of people.
9. You must accept the disease philosophy to recover.
9. Getting better is not a matter of believing a dogma.
10. Surrendering to a higher power is the key to recovery.
10. You must develop your own power to get better.
At first, it seems hard to understand what is meant by saying that something a person regularly does (such as· drinking alcohol) is a disease.
Habitual, voluntary behavior of this sort does not resemble what we normally think of as a disease, like cancer or diabetes. What is more, A.A. - and even hospital programs for alcoholism - don’t actually treat any biological causes of alcoholism.
After all the claims we have heard in the past decade about biological discoveries concerning alcoholism, not one of these findings has been translated into a usable treatment. Instead, the same group discussions and exhortations that have been used for the last fifty years are employed in hospital programs.
Nor is any biological method used to determine whether someone is an alcoholic other than by assessing how much that person drinks and the consequences of this drinking.
And if we have no special biological information about treating or identifying alcoholism, we surely know nothing about the biological causes of “diseases” such as compulsive gambling, shopping, and loving, which have nothing to do with drugs or alcohol.
There is, however, a standard way those who claim addiction is a disease describe addictive diseases. This description has been developed by groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, by the medical profession, and by various popularizers of the idea that alcoholism is a disease.
What they say is in every regard wrong.
When they tell you that you have the “disease” of alcoholism, “chemical dependency,” obesity, compulsive shopping, or whatever, this is what they mean:
The basis of the disease is inbred and/or biological. There is no need to look for the causes of the disease in your personal problems, the people you spend time with, the situations you find yourself in, or your ethnic or cultural background. Addiction is bred into you from birth or early childhood. Your current experience of life has nothing to do with it; nothing you can do makes you either more or less likely to become addicted.
It involves complete loss of control over your behavior. Once involved in your addiction, you are utterly at its mercy. You cannot choose whether, or how much, to lose yourself in the involvement. No matter how costly it may be in a given situation, you will go all the way. You cannot make reasonable, responsible choices about something to which you are addicted.
Addictions are forever. An addictive disease is like diabetes - it stays with you as long as you live. The mysterious bodily or psychic deficiency that lies at the root of addiction can never be remedied, and you can never safely expose yourself to the substance to which you were addicted. Once an addict, always an addict.
It inevitably expands until it takes over and destroys your life. “Irreversible progression” is a hallmark of addictive diseases as they are conceived today. The addiction grows and grows until it devours you, like AIDS or cancer. No rewards, no punishments, not even the most momentous developments in your life can stay its course, unless you completely swear off the addictive substance or activity.
If you say you don’t have it, that’s when they really know you have it. According to this “Catch22” of the disease theory, anyone suspected of having an addictive disease who insists that he or she doesn’t have the disease is guilty of the added offense of “denial.” In this way, the “disease” label is like a web that traps a person more firmly the harder the person fights to get out of it.
It requires medical and/or “spiritual” treatment. Thinking you can cure your addiction through willpower, changes in your life circumstances, or personal growth is a delusion (like denial), according to disease-theory proponents. Addiction is a disease of the body that can be controlled only by never-ending medical treatments.
It is also a disease of the soul requiring lifetime membership in a support group like Alcoholics Anonymous. Why supposed medical treatment consists mainly of going to group meetings and why people can’t develop their own spiritual approaches to life if they choose are questions disease theory adherents ignore.
Your kids are going to get it, too. Since addiction is an inherited disease, the children of addicts are considered at high risk for developing the same disease - no matter what you or they do or how careful you are. Logical deductions from this viewpoint are that you should have your kids tested for their genetic predisposition to alcoholism or addiction before they start school, or that you should simply teach them never to touch a drop of alcohol or expose themselves to whatever your addiction is.
Obviously, this approach presents special difficulties in dealing with addictions to eating, shopping, and making love. Where did these notions come from - notions that, when examined in the clear light of day, often seem quite bizarre and contrary to common experience?
The disease theory takes a set of precepts that were made up by and about a small group of severe, long-term alcoholics in the 1930s and applies them inappropriately to people with a wide range of drinking and other life problems. The original members of Alcoholics Anonymous, realizing they would soon die if they did not give up alcohol, adopted wholesale the dogma of the nineteenth century temperance movement.
The one major difference was that the A.A. members said drinking was a disease only for them, and not for everyone who drank - therefore not everyone needed to eschew “demon rum,” as temperance advocates had insisted.
When he co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) to offer a support group for those addicted to alcohol, Bill Wilson made the first major advance in addressing alcoholism.
A fact which is less well-known is that Bill Wilson also made the second major advance when he became aware of, and later promoted the use of niacin vitamin B3 as a treatment for chronic drinkers.
Orthomolecular Medicine and Alcoholism
Even as Alcoholics Anonymous slowly expanded, many of Bill Wilson's personal and financial problems lingered, especially his depression.
Canadian biochemist Dr. Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D., a psychiatrist and physician, writes: "I met Bill in New York in 1960. Humphry Osmond and I introduced him to the concept of megavitamin therapy. Bill was very curious about it and began to take niacin, 3,000 mg daily. Within a few weeks fatigue and depression which had plagued him for years were gone."
Dr. Hoffer, in his foreword to the book "Alcoholism: The Cause and The Cure", describes how he and Bill Wilson investigated together the effect of Niacin vitamin B3 on alcoholics.
Dr Hoffer writes: “Bill understood it first hand, for even though he had been abstinent for many years, he was still unwell. He suffered from immense anxiety, tension, and fatigue, but was able to function in spite of what might have been disabling.
After taking 3 grams of niacin daily for two weeks, his symptoms vanished and he remained free of addiction. This was a peak experience that he never forgot. He became determined to give as many AA members as possible the benefit of the same healing vitamin,”.
Dr. Hoffer further writes: “Without telling me that he was doing so, Bill conducted a trial of niacin on 30 friends and colleagues in New York. Most of them were very productive and sober members of AA, but they all suffered from the common mind and mood afflictions that people formerly addicted to alcohol experience, even when they are not drinking.
After three months he showed me his data. After one month, ten of the subjects were well. After the second month another ten had recovered, and the remaining one-third had shown no improvement after the third month. By this time I had also treated a number of people addicted to alcohol and had seen similar recoveries.”
Beyond AA Meetings
Between 1960 and his death in 1971, Bill Wilson shared this information with physician members of AA in a series of 3 brochures, Communications to Alcoholics Anonymous.
Bill’s findings were unfortunately dismissed by the AA’s International Board, because he was not an "M.D." and the fact that Alcoholics Anonymous is a social support structure, not a medical treatment provider.
The A.A. model has struck a responsive chord among Americans. Obviously, with the rejection of Prohibition, the United States had decided against a national policy that everyone should abstain from drinking.
Yet Westernn society continues even today to show a deep unease about alcohol and about intoxication, which many people seek even while fearing its disturbing effects.
Given this national ambivalence, we have been drawn to the “old-time religion” of temperance, as represented by A.A., now cloaked in the modern language of medicine and the neurosciences.
But, as this book will make clear, the operative assumptions about addiction have never arisen directly from biological sciences. Rather, they have been superimposed on scientific research, much of which directly contradicts the assumptions of the disease theory.
Why the Disease Model Is Wrong
Every major tenet of the “disease” view of addiction is refuted both by scientific research and by everyday observation.
This is true even for alcoholism and drug addiction, let alone the many other behaviors that plainly have little to do with biology and medicine.
No biological or genetic mechanisms have been identified that account for addictive behavior.
Even for alcoholism, as the following chapter will show, the evidence for genetic inheritance is unconvincing. By now, probably every well-informed reader has heard announcements that scientists have discovered a gene that causes alcoholism.
In fact, as one of us wrote in The Atlantic, this is far from the case, and the study that prompted these claims has already been refuted by another study in the same journal.
Moreover, if a gene were found to influence alcoholism, would the same gene cause drug addiction?
Would it be related to smoking? Would it also cause compulsive gambling and overeating? If so, this would mean that everyone with any of these addictions has this genetic inheritance.
Indeed, given the ubiquity of the problems described, the person without this inheritance would seem to be the notable exception.
How could an addiction like smoking be genetic? Why are some types of people more likely to smoke than others (about half of waitresses and car salesmen smoke, compared with about a tenth of lawyers and doctors)?
And does believing that an addiction like smoking is genetic help the person quit (are all those smokers who quit not “genetically” addicted)?
Returning to alcohol, are people really predestined biologically to become alcoholics and thus to become A.A. members? Think about the rock group Aerosmith: all five members of this group now belong to A.A., just as they once all drank and took drugs together.
How unlikely a coincidence it is that five unrelated people with the alcoholic / addictive inheritance should run into one another and form a band!
The idea that genes make you become alcoholic cannot possibly help us understand how people develop drinking problems over years, why they choose on so many occasions to go out drinking, how they become members of heavy-drinking groups, and how drinkers are so influenced by the circumstances of their lives.
Genes may make a person unusually sensitive to the physiological effects of alcohol; a person can find drinking extremely relaxing or enjoyable; but this says nothing about how the person drinks over the course of a lifetime.
After all, some people say, “I never have more than one or two drinks at a time, because alcohol goes straight to my head.”
As we document here and in the following chapter, we can actually predict the likelihood of people’s becoming addicted far more reliably from their nationality and social class, from the social groups they join, and from their beliefs and expectations about alcohol or drugs (or other activities), than from their biological makeup.
Often, people who become addicted set themselves up by investing a substance or an experience with magical powers to transform their beings (“Getting drunk is great”; “When I drink I’m really at ease”; “Drinking makes me attractive to people of the opposite sex”).
It is simply not within the chemical properties of alcohol or a drug, or the experience of an activity like shopping, to offer people what they want and seek from an addiction.
People find this in an addiction when they believe they can’t achieve the feelings they need in ordinary ways. Clearly, attitudes, values, and the opportunities available in a person’s environment have much to do with whether the person has a significant risk for a particular addiction.
People do not necessarily lose control of themselves whenever they are exposed to the object of their addiction.
On the contrary, many practice their addictions quite selectively. For example, military and religious personnel are often deprived of tobacco during training or on retreats, and business people realize they can’t smoke in certain rooms.
Orthodox Jews who smoke heavily abstain from smoking on the Sabbath, showing that their religious values mean more to them than nicotine does. Alcoholics in experiments routinely control their drinking when it is in their interest to do so - say, when they must leave a cozy room with television and companionship in order to get more to drink.
These variations occur in real life just as they do in the laboratory - for example, when people avoid drugs or cigarettes when they are with people who won’t tolerate those habits. When something they really care about is jeopardized if they continue to drink, smoke, or whatever, most people will stop or cut down accordingly.
Addiction usually does not last a lifetime. “Once an addict, always an addict” is a pessimistic notion that is both wrong and harmful. It leaves people two choices: either you stay constantly addicted and miserable until you die; or you abstain for life while attending group meetings and viewing yourself as the perpetually “recovering” person.
Sadly, a small number of people do die of their addictions; and another group succeeds in quitting drinking, drug taking, or whatever by maintaining the role of the recovering addict.
But most people are more resilient and resourceful than that. Most people who have addictive habits moderate or eliminate these habits over the course of their lives.
And they do it without having to say “I am an alcoholic” or “I am an overeater” or “I am a sex addict” as long as they live.
Remember that, today, a majority of adults who have ever smoked have quit and nearly all did so without treatment.
Progression is not inevitable - it is the exception. If the majority of people give up addictive habits, then the idea of “inevitable progression” doesn’t hold water. Calling addiction a “progressive disease” comes from looking at the few who have progressed to severe addiction and tracing the path by which they got there.
The progression of addictive problems only seems inevitable after the fact. For example, the great majority of college overdrinkers, even those who black out at fraternity parties, become moderate drinkers in middle age.
When you consider that even most of the people who use narcotics and cocaine do not end up addicted, you can see that drug-and-alcohol use patterns are many and varied, even when a person uses a substance abusively for a time.
Treatment is no panacea. Contrary to all the advertising we hear, treatment for addictions is often no more effective than letting addiction and recovery take their natural course.
The vast majority of people who have given up addictions (beginning with more than 90 percent of the forty-four million Americans who have quit smoking have done so on their own.
This does not mean that treatment for addictions cannot work - research has shown that some forms of treatment are effective. But the ones that are more effective are not the ones that have become popular in the United States.
You can outgrow an addictive habit on your own or in therapy, but either way the principles of the Life Process Program are the same.
What about joining support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous? Here, too, research reveals the opposite of what we have been led to believe.
A.A is a valuable community resource for those who find support in a certain type of religiously oriented group ritual.
But the best we can say about A.A is that it works for those for whom it works. Meanwhile, there are plenty for whom it doesn’t work. There is no scientific evidence that A.A. works better than other approaches when randomly selected alcoholics are assigned to A.A. or other treatments.
In fact, the evidence is that the people who are now often compelled to attend A.A - after being arrested for drunk driving or being sent by a company Employee Assistance Program - do worse than those who are left on their own.
How can we reconcile this finding with the glowing testimonials we hear about A.A.? The people we see in A.A. are the ones who like it, find it helpful, and stick it out. But there are many others who don’t go to A.A. or who don’t like it and drop out.
And as we show below, those who seriously try to stop drinking on their own are more likely to maintain their abstinence than those who attend A.A.
In addition, since many more people try to quit on their own than through therapy or joining a group, the number of self-curers is triple or more the number of successful treatment or A.A cases.
But such self-curers are not very visible, because they are individuals without an organized group to publicize their success.
These, then, are the key fallacies of the popularly held view of addiction. Even generally well-informed people may be astonished that we contradict such widely held beliefs. All of our refutations of conventional wisdom are carefully documented in the notes at the back of the book.
But you don’t need to read scholarly articles and scientific reports to test the accuracy of what we say. Just check it out against your own experience and observation. Don’t you know anyone who used to drink excessively, at times uncontrollably, but who no longer drinks at all or now drinks in a normal, appropriate manner?
Obviously, most people who used to drink excessively but who have now cut back (or even quit) do not attend meetings where they must rise and declare, “I am an alcoholic.”
How many people of all ages do you know who quit smoking? How many of them did it by going through a medical program or joining a support group, and how many finally just decided to quit and made good on that resolve? What happened to all the people you knew who used illegal drugs in college, some quite heavily?
How many of them are “chemically dependent” now? If we simply examine the cases of most of those we are close to personally, we will see how addictions usually do not follow the disease course.
Why the Disease Model Doesn’t Work - Why It Even Does More Harm than Good
The assumption that calling addiction a “disease” actually helps people crumbles when subjected to critical scrutiny. Some people feel comfortable thinking of their addiction as a disease and are able to function better on this basis for a time.
But whatever short-term benefits medical, disease-oriented treatment produces are double-edged even for the individuals who claim it has helped them.
Many of the most “successful” recipients of disease treatment might achieve a real breakthrough by learning to think about addiction differently.
Meanwhile, for the majority of people, the disadvantages of the disease approach clearly outweigh the advantages from the start.
The disadvantages of the disease approach are that it:
Attacks people’s feelings of personal control and can thus become a self-fulfilling prophecy;
Makes mountains out of molehills, since it fails to differentiate between the worst alcoholics and addicts and those with minor substance-use dependence;
Stigmatizes people - in their own minds - for life
Iinterrupts normal maturation for the young, for whom this approach is completely inappropriate;
Holds up as models for drinking and drug use the people who have shown the least capacity to manage their lives;
Isolates alcoholism and addiction as problems from the rest of the alcoholic’s or addict’s life;
Limits people’s human contacts primarily to other recovering alcoholics or addicts, who only reinforce their preoccupation with drinking and drug use;
Dispenses a rigid program of therapy that is founded - in the words of the director of the government’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIA.A.A) - “on hunch, not evidence, and not on science,” while attacking more effective therapies.
How can therapy that so many people believe in and swear by actually do more harm than good? To illustrate this point, consider the case of a famous psychiatrist who evaluated his hospital’s alcoholism program - one he felt was among the most outstanding in the world.
This program first detoxified the alcoholic in the hospital, then mandated A.A. attendance, and finally actively followed patients’ progress with an outreach counseling program.
When the psychiatrist running the program, Dr. George Vaillant, evaluated how well his patients were doing two years and eight years after treatment, however, he found they had fared about as well as comparable alcoholics who received no treatment at all!
How could Vaillant have been so wrong as to think his patients were doing phenomenally well, when actually they were doing no better than if he had left them alone completely?
Naturally, he wanted to think it worked. But his research prevented his rose-colored views from distorting the actual results of his treatment.
When he counted all his patients, not just his successes, when he scrutinized and verified what they were telling him in order to see exactly how well they were doing, and when he compared them with alcoholics out on their own instead of just assuming that all these people died without the help of treatment like his, Vaillant found that his expensive hospital treatment was close to useless.
Very few people in the treatment industry or in A.A. are as scrupulous as is Vaillant. When we hear from A.A. boosters, they tell us only about those who have stuck with the program and are currently sober. The same is true of treatment programs. They parade their best stars up front.
We don’t hear about all their failures. Yet Vaillant, in a book that is cited as the major source of support for the benefits of treating alcoholics according to the disease model, concluded as follows:
“If treatment as we currently understand it does not seem more effective than the natural healing processes, then we need to understand those healing processes better.”
Indeed, Vaillant repeats another researcher’s conclusion that “it may be easier for improper treatment to retard recovery than for proper treatment to hasten it.”major source of support for the benefits of treating alcoholics according to the disease model
What are the dangers of this kind of disease treatment? Here are explanations of the disadvantages listed at the beginning of this section:
It sets people up for failure.
All disease treatments emphasize how much out of control “patients” are, and what a delusion it is for them to feel they can exert any control over their addictions. Is it possible that such a message can do more harm than good?
William Miller and Reid Hester, reviewing all the comparative studies on treatment for alcoholism, made a surprising finding: in the only two studies in which alcoholics were randomly assigned either to A.A., to other forms of treatment, or to no treatment, those assigned to A.A. did no better or actually suffered more relapse than those who received other treatment or who weren’t treated at all!
Intrigued by this outcome, one of us wrote George Vaillant and asked him whether subjects he studied who abstained without entering formal treatment did better if they joined A.A. Again, A.A. members were less likely to maintain their abstinence.
Why would people be more likely to relapse if they entered A.A. than if they quit drinking on their own? There are several reasons. For one, people who enter A.A. are told they cannot succeed on their own. Therefore, if they should stop attending A.A., many are convinced that they will soon resume alcoholic drinking.
A.A. and disease treatments are especially defeatist in dealing with relapse. Accepting the disease-oriented philosophy of inevitable loss of control thus makes it more likely that the alcoholic will binge if he or she ever has a drink.
Yet, Vaillant found, nearly all alcoholics will drink again at some time.
It makes matters worse than they are. Can attending A.A. or going into addiction treatment really cause people to develop some of their alcoholism symptoms? In his book Becoming Alcoholic, sociologist David Rudy reports on the time he spent observing A.A. meetings.
Rudy found that most people had to learn their role as alcoholics. An important “rite of passage” is the first time members tell their story for the group, beginning by acknowledging, “I am an alcoholic.” In Rudy’s words;
“The alcoholic’s tale “is made up of two parts: a story about how bad it was before A.A. and a story about how good it is now.”
Narcotics anonymous is the drug users version of AA, although is generally accepting of AA members as well
This presentation is warmly greeted by the member’s sponsor in A.A., and the entire membership responds with enthusiastic acceptance of the convert.
When alcoholics introduce their experiences and symptoms in or treatment, the group or therapist homogenizes them through interpretation and clarification. For example, most people who enter have not had blackouts, which are more typical of long-term alcoholics than of the younger drinkers now flooding into treatment and A.A.
But blackouts are taken as the badge of alcoholism, and according to Rudy, “members learn the importance of blackouts as a behavior that verifies their alcoholism, and an indeterminable number of members who may not have had blackouts report them.” Rudy continues:
"When newcomers to A.A. claim that they cannot remember if they had any blackouts or not, other members use this claim as evidence of the event in question. As one member put it to a newcomer:
The reason you can’t remember is because alcohol fogs your brain. If it fogs your brain now after not drinking for a few days it must have fogged your brain before. See, you must have had blackouts then.”
A large part of alcoholism and drug treatment consists of group meetings where alcoholics or addicts “confront” one another and their problems.
Newcomers who don’t report the correct symptoms are treated with knowing condescension or are actively hazed - sometimes quite abusively - until they “get” and repeat the party line.
When Dwight Gooden entered the alcoholism-andcocaine program at the Smithers Alcoholism Center, he described being assailed by his fellow residents there during the constant group-therapy sessions. “My stories weren’t as good as theirs. . . . They said, ‘C’mon, man, you’re lying.’ They didn’t believe me. . . . I cried a lot before I went to bed at night.”
After he left the Betty Ford Center, Chevy Chase reported that he had often been angry at the counselors, who heckled the residents mercilessly, constantly denigrating them and claiming they had been living worthless lives.
Does all this sound like good therapy technique? It is simple common sense that belief in your personal value and your own strength is superior to having these things denigrated for getting your life under control.
It stigmatizes people for life. The disease model puts a label on you that you can never outgrow. Once diseased, always diseased. The effects of this defeatist view are especially tragic - and unjust - in the case of people to whom the “disease” label is most inappropriately applied in the first place: teenage binge drinkers, most drunk drivers, “adult children of alcoholics,” recreational drug users discovered through drug tests, and - in areas not involving drugs or alcohol - overweight adolescents or “hyperactive” or “learning-disabled” children.
It brutalizes and brainwashes the young. The largest single age group of people undergoing hospital treatment today for chemical dependency, eating disorders, depression, and so forth is adolescents. A.A. members are also much younger today, on average, than when the fellowship was founded by a group of men with serious, lifelong drinking problems.
Nonetheless, virtually none of these young people meet clinical standards of alcoholism or drug addiction.
Indeed, numerous cases have been identified in which young people have been hospitalized for smoking marijuana or even for being suspected of using drugs.
When one such case was revealed on national television, an unusually forthright consultant for the National Association for Alcoholism Treatment Programs confessed, “I’m afraid this happens far more than people in the field want to admit; it’s something of a scandal.”
Meanwhile, A.A. and Alateen (for teenage children of alcoholics) groups now pervade high-school and college campuses.
What is the impact of treatment that forces teenagers to take on the identity of addicts or alcoholics or children of alcoholics?
Young people are warned that their substance abuse is a permanent trait, even though we have seen that a large majority will outgrow substance-abuse problems as they mature.
Presenting this message to the young can only prolong or exacerbate their substance abuse, since it denies their own capacity for change and forces them to believe that any substance use for the rest of their lives will lead them back to excess, addiction, and drunkenness.
Young treatment grads who constantly relapse and return to treatment are the norm, as in the cases of Carrie Hamilton, Erinn Cosby, Drew Barrymore, and other young “patients” whose stories are less well publicized.
Of course, the relapses are then attributed to their “disease” and to their failure to heed the treatment’s warning to abstain forever.
These programs fairly frequently involve emotional abuse. Such “treatments” for children include “refusing to allow them to wear street clothes, keeping them in isolation for prolonged periods, or forcing them to wear self-derogatory signs, engage in other humiliation rituals . . . , or submit to intense and prolonged group confrontation” all of which, psychologists believe, “may destroy the youngsters’ already fragile self-esteem.”
When we describe these experiences, treatment specialists often argue in response, “Well, what if the kids would end up dead if we didn’t do this to them?” In other words, to object to these programs is likened to promoting intoxication leading to death.
Certainly, it is crucial to prevent children from harming themselves, and it can be worthwhile to remove children from a problem home, whether through a residential program or a visit to a sympathetic relative.
But brainwashing, emotional blackmail, denigration, and psychological torture never work, except to make people so unsure of who they are or what they value that they will temporarily consent to the demands of those in charge.
Worst of all, therapies that were devised for the most incorrigible children - though they don’t benefit even these unfortunate kids have been spreading down the ladder to more and more children whose behavior represents typical adolescent exploration and insubordination.
Parents are then confronted over whether they want to “save” their kids or allow them to die, as though the latter were the normal outcome of adolescence. The threat of their children’s dying is then used as emotional blackmail to make parents accept the sacrifices necessary to place their children in expensive residential treatment programs.
It presents the alcoholic or addict as someone to emulate. Prominent graduates of treatment programs, like Drew Barrymore, Betty Ford, Kitty Dukakis, and a host of athletes now lecture to others about chemical dependency.
If alcoholics and drug abusers suffer from a disease and are now recovering, then they can educate others about the disease and even about how young people should live and behave.
If, on the other hand, we think of them as people who are tremendously poor at self-management, then it is indeed stupid for the rest of us, who have not been seriously addicted, to ask them for advice and information.
Someone like former football star Bob Hayes explains that he took and sold drugs as a result of an inherited disease.
One reviewer’s reaction to Hayes’s book, Run, Bullet, Run, could stand for any and all of these confessional tracts: “Aside from a brief closing statement on personal responsibility, he self-servingly portrays himself as a victim throughout the book.”
Alcoholics and addicts like Hayes regularly come into schools to relay their tortured drinking experiences and to reiterate that alcohol is a dangerous drug. But nearly every child in these schools will drink.
It is as though the schools wished to undermine children’s sense of self-control and to attack their chances of becoming normal drinkers, which in most cases their “nonexpert” parents are.
In treatment itself, “recovering” addicts and alcoholics counsel the drug or alcohol abuser - who usually has not drunk as destructively and hurt himself or herself as much as the counselors!
In all types of twelve-step groups, the most severely debilitated person tends to become the leader and model for others, so that the most out-of-control shopping addict tells others about the nature of their problems.
Who should be counseling whom? In the case of drug abuse, a number of reviews have found that informational and scare lectures by recovering addicts produce the worst results of all prevention programs. These programs have never yet been found to reduce drug use; on the contrary, several studies have found increased drug use in their aftermath.
It ignores the rest of the person’s problems in favor of blaming them all on the addiction.
When someone like Carrie Hamilton lectures about her youthful drug abuse and delinquency (often alongside her mother, Carol Burnett), she makes drug abuse and family failures sound like mysterious, unavoidable illnesses that some people and their parents “have.”
Of course, this excuses her and her mother from dealing with painful problems they would prefer to avoid.
But by adopting the disease identity as her protection through the rest of her life, the youthful convert guarantees that she cannot grow beyond the limitations of her adolescent family life.
Can people hope for more than this?
When treatment views alcoholics as being victims of a different body chemistry that forces them to become alcoholics, the treatment process ignores the person’s life problems and the functions drinking serves for the alcoholic.
For example, in family therapy where the alcoholic’s drinking is addressed as simply the result of a disease, the therapist and the family are not able to understand that some people use alcohol to air feelings they cannot express when sober.
Ignoring dynamics like these leaves the drinker unable to cope with the things that led him or her to need to drink - such as doubts about self-worth, a difficult relationship with a spouse, roles (such as homosexuality) that create conflict for the person, and so on.
If the labeling of alcoholism as a disease provides welcome relief from the shame of overdrinking. it also prevents people from confronting the emotional tasks they need to accomplish to attain personal wholeness.
It traps people in a world inhabited by fellow disease-sufferers. Many “recovering” people report that they feel comfortable only with others in exactly the same plight. They find they can’t create intimacy outside of treatment and that they are driven constantly to talk about their alcoholism or addiction.
This is a frequent hang-up for recovering alcoholics who attend A.A. meetings so religiously that they can’t maintain a life outside of the group. The phenomenon of compulsive therapy attendance has made many people ask us, “Is there such a thing as addiction to treatment?” Indeed there is, when people rely on a twelve step group or therapy to the point where it disables them from conducting outside relationships and activities.
One of us has treated a number of A.A. members or treatment graduates who now fear they can’t deal with normal society. One man, who was regularly asked to head his local A.A. group, had dated a series of women he met at A.A. Unfortunately, all of these relationships had ended in bitterness and mutual recriminations.
But when he tried to date outside the group, he discovered that nonalcoholic women found him overbearing and compulsive.
“I don’t want to be limited for the rest of my life to dealing with alkies - I’d like to think I can advance beyond that; “ he plaintively told us.
This man felt that dealing exclusively with alcoholics was debilitating him, and yet he couldn’t escape A.A.
It excludes other approaches, many of which are more successful. Even if one accepts that many A.A. members are happy and successful, it is simply absurd to discourage people from trying to recover without A.A. The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (NCADD) frequently announces statistics about the continually rising costs of alcoholism and the increasing number of alcoholics in our society.
But, then, the NCADD is capable only of calling for more of the standard approach to treating alcoholism that has accompanied these increases, while discouraging all alternative approaches.
Why should things improve all of a sudden if we simply do more of the same? The A.A. approach to people’s drinking problems has shown conclusively that it cannot make a decisive difference for most active problem drinkers, since there are very few alcoholics who aren’t already aware of - or who haven’t already attended - A.A.
Meanwhile, greater numbers of people are being forced to enter private treatment centers and A.A. as a result of court orders, Employee Assistance Programs, or school counseling programs.
Despite the almost universal belief that compelling people to attend standard treatment programs is helpful, these programs regularly demonstrate they are no more effective than self-initiated programs for curing addictions.
Psychologists William Miller and Reid Hester, reviewing all the comparative studies on treatment for alcoholism, made a surprising finding:
“Virtually all of them [the standard treatments] lacked adequate scientific evidence of effectiveness.”
At the same time, they discovered, the “treatment approaches most clearly supported as effective... were very rarely used in American treatment programs.”
What don’t really work in the long run are the conversion-experience type treatments; what do work are therapies that teach people skills at self-management and coping.
Nonetheless, most American treatment personnel seem hell-bent on eliminating any other treatment for alcoholism besides twelve-step programs. In the United States, discredited disease-treatment programs - ones that NIAAA Director Enoch Gordis believes may be “frequently useless and wasteful and sometimes dangerous” - proliferate and spread into whole new areas of behavior.
This issue is important because the United States spends more money on health care than any other country - and the percentage of our gross national product that we spend on health care is growing faster than that in any other country.
The fastest-growing component of the health-care system is substance abuse and related mental-health treatments. According to a hospital trade publication;
“Psychiatric, chemical dependency and rehabilitative hospital care - all largely unregulated by government payment mechanisms - are booming.”
This is one reason so many companies are being forced to cut insurance benefits or are asking employees to pay a greater share. What if your insurance rates were raised to pay for a fellow employee who was undergoing a repeat treatment for cocaine addiction, since he had relapsed one or more times?
How would you feel about sharing the bill for a colleague who entered an expensive hospital eating-disorders clinic?
Do you think that smokers who want to quit should enter treatment programs and be excused from work, with pay, while they concentrate on quitting? And, especially, how would you react if you had quit smoking on your own?
It is morally and economically necessary for us to evaluate the effectiveness of alcoholism and other addiction treatments. For we are wasting limited health-care resources to place people in expensive treatments - treatments that have not shown they do more than inexpensive, straightforward skills counseling or than people accomplish on their own - often more reliably!
Kitty Dukakis: “Chemical Dependency” Reduced to Absurdity
Kitty Dukakis became the paradigm of the addicted person of the 1990s. Kitty Dukakis has been eager all along to accept the “disease” and “chemically dependent” labels. Advertisements for her autobiography, Now You Know, trumpet the opening line of the book, “I’m Kitty Dukakis and I’m a drug addict and an alcoholic.”
Mrs. Dukakis seemingly has been either addicted or in treatment throughout her adult life. Shortly before she joined her husband in his 1988 presidential campaign, she revealed that she had been treated for a twenty-six-year reliance on diet pills, which she began before she married Michael Dukakis.
Soon after her husband’s defeat in the election, she began to drink herself unconscious and underwent a series of treatments for her alcoholism and for a variety of emotional problems.
That treatment did not succeed. Mrs. Dukakis only began getting drunk after the election, for which she first entered the Edgehill Newport hospital.
But soon after this treatment experience, she began having explosive relapses in which she drank rubbing alcohol, nail polish remover, hair spray, and other commercial products containing alcohol.
Moreover, she discovered during the course of writing her book that she suffers from another disease - manic-depressive disorder - and as a result she ends the book with the revelation that she is receiving lithium treatment.
Previously, Mrs. Dukakis had been prescribed Prozac, a drug featured on the cover of Newsweek in 1990 as a new miracle in the treatment of depression, to no avail.
Mrs. Dukakis appears, in the book and on television, a forlorn being. Indeed, syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman, who had known Mrs. Dukakis, wrote a column entitled “Do Our Drug Treatment Programs Label Patients as Losers?” Ms. Goodman wondered aloud how labeling oneself as sick and without hope is helpful.
“What happens when those who wrestle with problems of self-esteem are required to wear such a label? . . . Today, Kitty Dukakis describes herself by diagnosis. Drug addict. Alcoholic. Manic-depressive.”
Ms. Goodman ended her column by wishing that Kitty Dukakis might see the brighter qualities that others have seen in her, and which seem entirely to have disappeared thanks to her various diagnoses and cures.
It seems clear that excessive drinking is only the tip of Mrs. Dukakis’s problems, and that medical treatment will never get to the bottom of them. Labeling Kitty Dukakis as a “sick” person who needs medical treatment is a palliative for her uncomfortable marital and personal problems.
Reviewers have commented about how insensitive and unaware of her problems Michael Dukakis appeared to be, yet Kitty never reflects on the limitations of her spouse or their relationship.
Somehow, her never-ending disease-oriented treatment fails to raise crucial issues for Mrs. Dukakis about a life and marriage she seems to have found intolerable.
Will Kitty Dukakis be writing another book in which she reveals she has discovered she is suffering from one more dis-ease that of codependence?
With Kitty Dukakis as a prominent model of the addict/alcoholic, those who look to her life for answers are being fed yet another self-defeating solution. To call Kitty Dukakis’s and her audiences’ problems diseases is to evade reality, much as Mrs. Dukakis used diet pills and alcohol to do.
Whether the pain Mrs. Dukakis and others feel is temporary or persistent, relatively mild or relatively severe, it does not need to rule the rest of their lives. Kitty Dukakis and the rest of us are more than our misery and problems.
Moreover, what troubles her and those like her are life problems, not diseases. And when we have reduced them to life size, we can begin to deal with them reasonably and hopefully.
The Experience of Addiction
The question is: “If addiction isn’t a disease, then what is it?” An addiction is a habitual response and a source of gratification or security.
It is a way of coping with internal feelings and external pressures that provides the addict with predictable gratifications, but that has concomitant costs.
Eventually these costs may outweigh the subjective benefits the addiction offers the individual. Nonetheless, people continue their addictions as long as they believe the addictions continue to do something for them.
It is important to place addictive habits in their proper context, as part of people’s lives, their personalities, their relationships, their environments, their perspectives. The effort to change an addiction will generally affect all these other facets of a person’s life as well.
An addiction may involve any attachment or sensation that grows to such proportions that it damages a person’s life.
Addictions, no matter to what, follow certain common patterns. We first made clear in Love and Addiction that addiction - the single-minded grasping of a magic-seeming object or involvement; the loss of control, perspective, and priorities - is not limited to drug and alcohol addictions. When a person becomes addicted, it is not to a chemical but to an experience. Anything that a person finds sufficiently consuming and that seems to remedy deficiencies in the person’s life can serve as an addiction.
The addictive potential of a substance or other involvement lies primarily in the meaning it has for a person.
A person is vulnerable to addiction when that person feels a lack of satisfaction in life, an absence of intimacy or strong connections to other people, a lack of self-confidence or compelling interests, or a loss of hope.
Periods such as adolescence, military service, and times of isolation or grief may for a time make people especially susceptible to an addiction.
Under some circumstances, a harmful involvement can become so important to a person that addiction is very likely, as heroin addiction was for many in Vietnam.
Situations in which people are deprived of family and the usual community supports; where they are denied rewarding or constructive activities; where they are afraid, uncomfortable, and under stress; and where they are out of control of their lives - these are situations especially likely to create addiction.
The relationship between hopelessness, lack of opportunity, and persistent addiction is, of course, a template for lives in ghettos. Recognizing the connection between these situational factors and addiction will explain why our wars on drugs, including the latest, never succeed.
The “hook” of the addiction - the thing that keeps people coming back to it - is that it gives people feelings and gratifying sensations that they are not able to get in other ways. It may block out sensations of pain, uncertainty, or discomfort.
It may create powerfully distracting sensations that focus and absorb attention. It may enable a person to forget, or feel “okay” about, insurmountable problems.
It may provide artificial, temporary feelings of security or calm, of self-worth or accomplishment, of power or control, of intimacy or belonging.
These benefits explain why a person keeps coming back to the addictive experience - an addiction accomplishes something for that person, or the person anticipates that it will do so, however illusory these benefits may actually be.
Addiction, drug abuse, alcoholism, obesity, and smoking all involve and are fueled by value choices. Think of people whose lives are “together” - who enjoy strong emotional bonds with others, productive work, satisfying feelings of competence and of fun, and a sense of responsibility toward others.
Will they become addicted to drugs or alcohol because of some physiological susceptibility and allow the addiction to undo the fabric of their lives? For you personally, can you imagine getting so drunk that you would abuse your infant child? It just doesn’t happen that way.
If you have better things to do and value other things more than escape into intoxication, then you won’t make intoxication the center of your life.
And if you are addicted, you can best overcome it by creating or re-creating those personal strengths and values.
Whatever the subjective benefits of an addiction or the values that drive an addiction, the person pays a price for an addictive involvement.
Addictions make people less aware of and less able to respond to other people, events, and activities. Thus, the addictive experience reinforces and exacerbates the problems the person wanted so badly to get away from in the first place.
In the person’s inner, subjective experience, the addiction may make things seem better.
But in the real world, it only makes things worse. With the worst addictions, jobs and relationships fall away; health deteriorates; debts increase; opportunities disappear; the business of life is neglected.
The person is increasingly “out of touch” with nourishing contacts and essential responsibilities.
This growing disengagement from the realities of life sets the person up for the trauma of withdrawal. When the addictive experience is removed, the person is deprived of what has become his or her primary source of comfort and reassurance.
Simultaneously, the person “crash-lands” back onto an inhospitable world, a world from which the person has been using the addiction to escape.
Compared with these existential torments, the purely physical dislocations of withdrawal are, even for most heroin addicts, not particularly debilitating.
After all, nearly everyone who receives powerful narcotics in the hospital gives them up after returning home or when the illness is over. Consider also that drug addicts and alcoholics indicate that the most unbearable drug withdrawal is from cigarettes.
And if one puts all withdrawal on a scale, probably the worst of all occurs in the case of failed love relationships.
The experience of withdrawal, like that of addiction, is shaped by the way a person interprets it. In therapeutic communities like Daytop Village in New York, addicts are not excused from their normal duties when they undergo withdrawal; as a result, withdrawing addicts - even those who have had several withdrawal episodes previously - continue mopping floors and carrying out other duties.
Cultural beliefs also play a crucial role in addiction - for example, beliefs that are widely propagated about the power of a drug to enslave a person and the difficulty of escaping it actually contribute to the difficulties of withdrawal.
Equally important are the person’s readiness to confront withdrawal and belief that he or she can manage it.
If you are convinced that withdrawal will be intolerably painful and that you cannot withstand it, or if you don’t have sufficiently powerful reasons to confront withdrawal experiences, you won’t be prepared to withdraw from your addiction.
The addict who feels incapable of existing without a drug can never successfully withdraw, and doesn’t want to try.
Ironically, one of the beliefs that most contribute to the susceptibility to addiction is the belief in the power of addiction itself.
Believing that drugs are stronger than you are means you will become addicted more easily and stay addicted longer.
But if you recognize that drugs and alcohol never take away your own responsibilities and capacity to control your destiny - even if you have alcoholic relatives or have had addictive problems in the past - you always stand a better chance of avoiding addiction or dealing with it successfully.
A Commonsense Way of Thinking About Overcoming an Addiction
Although the schematic description above is useful for understanding what addiction is and how it comes about, we need not think of all our troublesome habits or fixations in such dire terms.
In fact, when we overdramatize our addictions, we may do ourselves an injustice and make change more difficult.
An addiction may be more or less severe - and a person may be more or less able to give it up - depending on the circumstances of the person’s life.
Addiction is more likely in stressful times, times when gratifications are slim, times when a person is less together or secure.
Likewise, one type of excess may be more stubbornly entrenched in a person’s routine, or more closely linked to a person’s self-doubt and insecurity, than another.
Addiction occurs along a continuum - there is no easy test to tell you whether you have an addiction or just a bad habit.
For example, by some estimates, half of all Americans are overweight. Are they all addicted overeaters?
Many people encounter significant health risks because of the way they eat (recall that heart disease is America’s major killer). Are these the addicts? Some people are preoccupied day and night with their eating; they are suffused with guilt over eating too much, yet they are unable to change their eating habits.
Surely, these are the addicts, we think. A still more limited group of people encounter major health problems through their overweight, severely restricting their lives, but are unable to modify their eating habits.
At the furthest extreme of addiction are the minuscule number of people who become so fat they are completely immobile - people we sometimes see on television who may not even be able to fit through their doorways.
If we call only these people - people who have given up all effort to control their eating - true addicts, we end up with a fraction of a percentage of addicted overeaters, and books wouldn’t need to be written for millions of people who fear they have food addictions.
Moreover, for this minuscule group, concepts such as “denial” hardly seem to have meaning - does the twelve-hundred-pound man who hasn’t left his house in years really need to be told that he has an addictive eating problem?
For most people, the exercise of drawing the line that divides “addicted” from “normal” is not very helpful.
We need to remember that nearly all people cut back and forth across these categories at different points in their lives and in different situations.
Although letting your urges overcome you to gain total control of your life is a relatively rare phenomenon, everyone has addictive urges and sometimes gives in to them. Addiction characterizes some aspect of everyone’s life - this is one reason why it is so ridiculous to think of it as a disease.
Thin people whom we envy for their self-control will tell us there are some treats they can’t keep in the house because otherwise they would eat them all at once.
Remember that people whom we admire for having had the strength to quit smoking used to search ashtrays desperately looking for a butt when they ran out of cigarettes!
What we most need to know is not how bad off or how genuinely addicted we are but, rather, how people learn to resist successfully the addictive or unhealthy urges that come with being human.
How do they construct full lives, develop alternatives to addiction, learn the strength to stop after having started or, when necessary, not to start at all?
Let us start, then, with alcoholism, the addiction most commonly referred to as a disease. There must be - there is - a better way to understand and redirect the paths people take into and out of problem drinking.
Socialism: Thick Lipstick On A Global Pig March 6 2019 | From: JonRappoport
To give you an idea of the deception inherent in socialism, here is a quote from none other than Andrew Carnegie, once one of the richest men in America:
“I believe Socialism is the grandest theory ever presented, and I am sure it will someday rule the world. Then we will have attained the Millennium…Then men will be content to work for the general welfare and share their riches with their neighbors.” (The New York Times, 1 January 1885, “A Millionaire Socialist”)
Carnegie, of course, like several of his ultra-rich compatriots, devised a method to give away his riches while keeping them: the non-profit foundation.
The last thing on Carnegie’s bloated mind was becoming “equal” with the great unwashed.
He was a liar of the first order. He recognized that, when you win the game of free enterprise, your most corrupt bet is to turn around and find every possible way to block others from winning. Then, you stand at the top of the heap, unchallenged.
That is exactly what he had in mind. That’s what socialism actually meant to him.
Let’s see socialism for what it is. Not in the abstract, but in reality.
Socialism is:
The taking of money (taxes) from some people who work for it and giving it to others who don’t work for it. On a grand scale.
The vast expansion of freebies doled out by central government. In order to create and sustain dependence.
The government protection of favored persons and corporations, permitting them and aiding them to expand their fortunes without limit, regardless of what crimes they commit in the process. (Monsanto would be a fine example.)
The squeezing out of those who would compete with the favored persons and corporations.
The dictatorship by and for the very wealthy, pretending to be the servant of the masses.
The lie that the dictatorship is being run by the masses.
The gradual lowering of the standard of living for the overwhelming number of people.
The propaganda claiming socialism is the path to a better world for all.
In other words, socialism is a protection racket and a long con and a heartless system of elite control, posing as the greatest good.
Except in the specifics of its updated lies, it is just another form of top-down tyranny - as old as the hills.
A year or two ago, a person living in Europe told me that the European Union was not a problem, because it was just another layer of socialism placed over the existing socialist governments of European nations, and no one really noticed the existence of the EU.
As if blindness were a reason not to worry. As you can see from the elements of socialism I’ve listed above, America [the West] is moving more and more into the socialist orbit.
Protesting that America is, instead, a system of greed and inequality is merely saying that the central government is protecting certain corporations and favored persons.
The real and true definition of socialism accounts for that favoritism and protection.
SOCIALISM WAS NEVER ABOUT UNIVERSAL EQUALITY AND UNIVERSAL SHARING.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS UNIVERSAL AND COMPLETE EQUALITY AND SHARING, ONLY A FAKE VERSION DICTATED FROM ABOVE.
Socialism is, in the minds of most people who advocate it, a vague sentiment about people being kinder to each other. Consider this fatuous and ludicrous statement, uttered by the mob boss of bosses of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1961:
“The socialist economy has become so strong, so vigorous that from the summits we have reached we can issue an open challenge of peaceful economic competition to the most powerful capitalist country - the United States of America.”
“Bankrolled and given vital technology by a few elites from the West, our vast society of socialist slave workers is now able to engage in capitalist competition with America.”
The raving of a madman.Today’s youth who push and protest and riot and censor, on behalf of socialism, are working for the ultra-rich whom they despise.
That’s the long and short of “the glorious revolution.”
The Carnegies and Rockefellers of today (including a miniature Rockefeller named George Soros) have engaged the young as foot soldiers, and they know the young are willing dupes for socialism, because they created, for the young, an education system that makes them clueless and mindless.
The Carnegies and Rockefellers of today are saying:
“Bring on the new world, the better world, the more just world, the happier world - whatever you want to call it - so we can run it from the top and show you what we really think of you. Make every conceivable lever of power ours, and then we’ll reveal what we really have planned for you.”
Here is a relevant backgrounder I recently wrote about private property:
Once private property is abolished, the socialist crime bosses win. They build their heaven on earth, which means they can take what they want and run civilization, top-down. They can keep saying nobody owns anything, but in fact they own it all.
They execute this squeeze play as if they were messiahs eradicating the prime evil: private ownership. This is such a preposterous stage play that, in a sane society, it would close down after one night.
Newsflash: There is a difference between an idea and the way that idea is applied in practice.
For example, certain groups will take the idea of freedom and interpret it to mean,“We have the freedom to steal everything we can.”
Based on this practice, many people will claim freedom was always a failed and corrupt idea at the core. This is wrong, absurd, and dim. Very dim.
In the same way, the idea of private property can certainly be twisted to mean,“I, an elite banker, will steal what you have, make it my own, and then declare it is my property, over which I have control.”
But the idea of private property remains independent of what people will do to distort it. A child used to be able to see this.
Centuries of struggle resulted in a shift from monarchs and priest classes owning all available land, to individuals having the right to own land. Once that principle was firmly established, groups immediately tried to modify the principle to their advantage.
In 1776, a group called the Illuminati declared its existence in Bavaria. One of its guiding ideas was: the abolition of all private property. That concept traveled down to Karl Marx and the Communist agenda.
Private property was called an inherent crime. Instead, the people/everybody would own all property. This garbled incoherent pronouncement would be backed up by the ruling government, who would act as stewards for the masses - meaning the government would take control of all property until such time as the people evolved to the point where the State was unnecessary.
As a straight con, it was very weak. A two-bit hustler on a street corner with a folding table and three cards could see through it in a second.
The people evolving? The State withering away on its own? Equality defined as everybody owning everything?
Of course, if people injected their own utopian fantasies into the mix, if people assumed the government was a beneficent force for good, if people assumed there was an “everybody” operating unanimously, if people fantasized about a history of peaceful tribes (who fought wars against each other) gracefully abdicating the whole notion of individual property…well then, yes, the abolition of private property became a marvelous proposition.
In the light of day, however, with a clear mind, the idea was terrible. It was quite insane. It signaled a transfer of property from the individual to power-mad lunatics.
Needless to say, this idea of no-private-property is alive and well on planet Earth today. We are in another round of fantasy-drenched propaganda.
In a nutshell, the threat of pure private property is: it establishes individual rights that stand against the unchecked force of the government-corporate-banking nexus. It implies the individual is free, independent, and the ruler of what he owns.
To which the addled mind replies: “But suppose a person is polluting his land and the poison is running beyond his borders and endangering others?”
Well, that is called a crime. It should be prosecuted. It should be stopped. The fact that it is often ignored doesn’t negate the whole assumption of private property. It points to the corruption of public officials who refuse to prosecute the protected and favored offender.
Here is utopia laid bare: the government and its partners, who are doing everything they can to limit, squash, and outlaw the individual right to own property, are the same force that is acting as the wondrous representative of all the people.
Surrender to this force; give it power to appropriate all property and hold it in trust, for that day when the population has risen to enlightenment, when the open sharing of “everything” is a natural impulse. Then victory will be ours.
Not the iron fist. The open helping hand. Not the hammer. The smiling guide. Not the monarch. The servant of humanity.
If you buy that one, I have waterfront condos for sale on Jupiter’s four moons. No terms. Cash up front. Construction begins in 2058. Promise.
The Homeowners Association actually owns the condos and the land. They are a subsidiary of the Jupiter Government Authority. There are rules. No flags of any kind flying from porches. No privately owned electricity generators. No growing of vegetables or fruit on the land. No weapons.
Domiciles must be shared with migrants arriving from Earth. The migrants are given beds, meals, and clothing. Possessions are shared. The prime directive: everything belongs to everybody.
Power to the people.
Any alert mind blows apart this delusional nightmare in a minute.
The Growing Anti-Semitism Scam March 5 2019 | From: UNZ
“An anti-Semite used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now it means a man who is hated by Jews.” - Joe Sobran
In his novel 1984George Orwell invented the expression “newspeak” to describe the ambiguous or deliberately misleading use of language to make political propaganda and narrow the “thought options” of those who are on the receiving end.
In the context of today’s political discourse, or what passes for the same, it would be interesting to know what George would think of the saturation use of “anti-Semitism” as something like a tactical discussion stopper, employed to end all dispute while also condemning those accused of the crime as somehow outside the pale, monsters who are consigned forever to derision and obscurity.
The Israelis and, to be sure, many diaspora Jews know exactly how the expression has been weaponized. Former Israeli Minister Shulamit Aloni explained how it is done:
“Anti-Semitic”… ”its a trick, we always use it.”
If one were to read the U.S. mainstream media, reflective as it nearly always is of a certain institutional Jewish viewpoint, one would think that there has been a dramatic increase in anti-Semitism worldwide, but that claim is incorrect.
What has been taking place is not hatred of Jews but rather a confluence of two factors. First is the undeniable fact that Israel has been behaving particularly badly, even by its admittedly low standards.
Its slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza has been unusually observable in spite of media attempts to avoid mentioning it, plus its support of terrorists in Syria and attacks on that country have also raised questions about the intentions of the kleptocratic regime in Tel Aviv, which is currently pushing for an attack on Iran.
That all means that the perception of Israel, which boasts that it is the exclusively Jewish state, inevitably raises questions about the international Jewish community that provides much of its support.
But the shift in perception is driven by Israeli behavior, not by Jews as an ethnicity or a religion.
Second, the alleged increase in anti-Semitic incidents is largely fueled by how those incidents are defined. Israel and its friends have worked hard to broaden the parameters of the discussion, making any criticism of Israel or its activities either a hate crime or ipso facto an anti-Semitic incident.
The U.S. State Department’s working definition of anti-Semitism includes “…the targeting of the state of Israel” and it warns that anti-Semitism is a criminal offense.
Recent legislation in Washington and also in Europe has criminalized hitherto legal and non-violent efforts to pressure Israel regarding its inhumanity vis-à-vis the Palestinians.
Legitimate criticism of Israel thereby becomes both anti-Semitism and criminal, increasing the count of so-called anti-Semitic incidents. That means that the numbers inevitably go up, providing fodder to validate a repressive response.
One might add that Hollywood, the mainstream media and academia have contributed to the allegations regarding surging anti-Semitism, relentlessly unleashing a torrent of material rooting out alleged anti-Semites and so-called holocaust deniers, while simultaneously heaping praise on Israel and its achievements.
Professor of Holocaust Studies Deborah Lipstadt has written a bookAnti-Semitism: Here and Now about what she regards as the new anti-Semitism, supporting her belief that it is getting markedly worse in both Europe and the U.S.
There is also a movie about her confrontation with holocaust critic David Irving called Denial.
All of the media exposure of so-called anti-Semitism has a political objective, whether intended or not, which is to insulate Israel itself from any criticism and to create for all Jews the status of perpetual victimhood which permits many in the diaspora to unflinchingly support a foreign country against the interests of the nations where they were born, raised and made their fortunes.
That is called dual loyalty and, in spite of frequent denials from Israel-apologists, it clearly exists for many American Jews who are passionate about the Jewish state, including members of the Trump Administration Jason Greenblatt, David Friedman and Jared Kushner.
Recently, a newly elected member of congress has been derided, shunned and then forced to both recant and apologize for having said something that is manifestly true: that Jewish money corrupts the American political system to favor Israel.
The controversy erupted after House minority leader Republican Kevin McCarthy said he would initiate investigations of two Muslim congresswomen, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, over their criticisms of Israel.
McCarthy called for the two to be denounced by the Democratic Party as anti-Semites after Tlaib had said"that the sponsors of recent legislation intended to benefit Israel by limiting free speech “ - forgot what country they represent.
This is the U.S. where boycotting is a right and part of our historical fight for freedom and equality. Maybe a refresher on our U.S. Constitution is in order, then get back to opening up our government instead of taking our rights away.”
Indeed, Tlaib had a point as the Congressional Israel boosters have long since forgotten that they are supposed to uphold the Constitution of the United States while also promoting the interests of their constituents, not those of a country seven thousand miles away.
Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept responded to the news of the McCarthy threat with a tweet “It’s stunning how much time US political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans.” Ilhan Omar then tweeted her own pithy rejoinder to Greenwald on Sunday February 10th:
“It’s all about the Benjamins, baby!” which was in reference to the Founder Benjamin Franklin’s portrait on hundred-dollar bills. Her comment was almost immediately interpreted as meaning that she was accusing McCarthy of being bought by Jews.
She followed up on a question about who was doing the buying she tweeted “AIPAC,” an elaboration that unleashed something like an anti-Semitism shit storm in her direction.
It was manufactured outrage, with political leaders from both parties latching on to a media frenzy to score points against each other.
Even though it is perfectly legitimate for a Congresswoman on the Foreign Affairs Committee to challenge what AIPAC does and where its money comes from, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi complained that Omar’s “use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters” was “deeply offensive.” Chelsea Clinton accused Omar of “trafficking in anti-Semitism.”
President Donald Trump, who has admitted that his Mideast policy is intended to serve Israeli rather than U.S. interests, also jumped in, saying “I think she should either resign from congress or she should certainly resign from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.”
Ilhan Omar quickly understood that she had touched a live wire, surrendered, and recanted. She apologized by Monday afternoon, 18 hours after her original tweet, saying:
“Anti-Semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes.
My intention is never to offend my constituents or Jewish Americans as a whole. We have to always be willing to step back and think through criticism, just as I expect people to hear me when others attack me for my identity.
This is why I unequivocally apologize.” But she also bravely wrote “At the same time, I reaffirm the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics, whether it be AIPAC, the NRA or the fossil fuel industry. It’s gone on too long and we must be willing to address it.”
Pelosi approved of the apology. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota who is running for president in 2020, chimed in to make sure that everyone knew how much she loves Israel, saying: “I’m glad she apologized. That was the right thing to do. There is just no room for those kinds of words. I think Israel is our beacon of democracy. I’ve been a strong supporter of Israel and that will never change.”
Two days later, a motion sponsored by Congressman Lee Zeldin of New York passed by a 424 to 0 vote. It was specifically intended to serve as a rebuke to Omar. It stated that:
“It is in the national security interest of the United States to combat anti-Semitism around the world because… there has been a significant amount of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hatred that must be most strongly condemned.”
Congressional votes professing love for Israel notwithstanding, the fact is that there is a massive, generously funded effort to corrupt America’s government in favor of Israel.
It is euphemistically called the Israel Lobby even though it is overwhelmingly Jewish and it boasts fairly openly of its power when talking with its closest friends about how its money influences the decisions made on Capitol Hill and in the White House.
Its combined budget exceeds one billion dollars per year and it includes lobbying powerhouses like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) which alone had $229 million in income in 2017, supporting more than 200 employees.
It exists only to promote Israeli interests on Capitol Hill and throughout the United States with an army of lobbyists and its activities include using questionably legal all expenses paid “orientation” trips to Israel for all new congressmen and spouses.
McCarthy and the other stooges in Congress deliberately sought to frame the argument in terms of Ilhan Omar having claimed that he personally was receiving money from pro-Israel sources and that money influenced his voting.
Well, the fact is that such activity does take place and was documented three years ago by the respected Foreign Policy Journal, which published a piece entitled “The Best Congress AIPAC can Buy” as well as more recently in an al-Jazeera investigative expose using a concealed camera.
And Kevin McCarthy does indeed receive money from Israel PACs – $33,200 in 2018. The amount individual congressmen receive is dependent on their actual or potential value to Israel.
Completely corrupt and enthusiastically pro-Israel Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey received $548,507 in 2018. In the House, Beto O’Rourke of Texas received $226,690.
The numbers do not include individual contributions of under $200, which are encouraged by AIPAC and can be considerable. In general, congressmen currently receive over $23,000 on average from the major pro-Israel organizations while Senators get $77,000.
But, of course, direct donations of money are not the whole story. If a congressman is unfriendly to Israel, money moves in the other direction, towards funding an opponent when re-election is coming up.
“Any member of Congress knows that AIPAC is associated indirectly with significant amounts of campaign spending if you’re with them, and significant amounts against you if you’re not with them.”
Lara Friedman, who has worked on the Hill for 15 years on Israel/Palestine, notes how congressmen and staffs of “both parties told me over and over that they agreed with me but didn’t dare say so publicly for fear of repercussions from AIPAC.”
A good example of how it all worked involves one honest congressman, Walter Jones of North Carolina, who recently passed away. In 2014, “Wall Street billionaires, financial industry lobbyists, and neoconservative hawks” tried to unseat Jones by bankrolling his primary opponent.
The “dark money” intended to defeat him came from a PAC called “The Emergency Committee for Israel,” headed by leading neoconservative Bill Kristol. Jones’ war views, including avoiding a war with Iran, were clearly perceived as anti-Israel.
And one should also consider contributions directly to the political parties. Israeli/U.S. dual nationals Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban are the largest single donors to the GOP and to the Democrats, having contributed $82 million and $8,780,000 respectively in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Both have indicated openly that Israel is their top priority.
If they have demonstrated fealty to Israel while in office, many Congressmen also find that loyalty pays off after retirement from government with richly remunerated second careers in Jewish dominated industries, like financial services or the media.
And there are hundreds of Jewish organizations that contribute to Israel as charities, even though the money frequently goes to fund illegal activity, including the settlements.
Money also is used to buy newspapers and media outlets which then adhere to a pro-Israel line, or, where that does not work, to buy advertising that is conditional on being friendly to Israel. So the bottom line is indeed “the Benjamins” and the corruption that they buy.
Karen Pollock of the Holocaust Education Trust said in January that:
“One person questioning the truth of the Holocaust is one too many.”
Any, and all, historical events should be questioned regularly, a principle that is particular true regarding developments that carry a lot of emotional baggage.
The Israel Lobby would have all Americans believe that any criticism of Israel is motivated by historic hatred of Jews and is therefore anti-Semitism.
Don’t believe it. When the AIPAC crowd screams that linking Jews and money is a classic anti-Semitic trope respond by pointing out that Jews and money are very much in play in the corruption of congress and the media over Israel.
Terrible things are being done in the Middle East in the name of Jews and of Israel and it all comes down to those Benjamins and the silence they buy by accusing all critics of anti-Semitism.
Just recall what the Israeli minister admitted, “It’s a trick, we always use it.”
I Woke Up And The World Around Me Is Still Asleep: What To Do? + Once You Learn These Nine Lessons From Confucius, Your Priorities In Life Will Completely Change March 4 2019 | From: JulietTang / RiseEarth
More and more of us are awakening to our true spiritual nature every day.
In addition to some of the common and uncommon “awakening symptoms,” teary struggles and glorious “aha” moments we experience (to read more about the awakening steps, refer to my article I Woke Up, Now What? Post Awakening Thrive Guide – 9 Steps to Embrace the Path of Light), our interactions with the world can get even trickier when we are surrounded by those who are still deep asleep.
A period of solitude usually accompanies the process of awakening, and that is because awakening is a journey into the deepest parts of our psyches that can only be taken alone.
Solitude does not necessarily mean making the sudden decision of leaving our lives behind, selling all our belongings and finding a desolate mountaintop to meditate on.
Rather, it usually shows up as wanting to socialize less or shift the way we relate to others, take more time for ourselves to connect with our energy, as well as contemplate on our emotional states, thoughts, the meaning of life and what truly matters to us.
Loneliness usually accompanies this period of solitude though some rejoice over the feeling of being alone with who they are for what seems like the first time in their lives.
As always, there is no right or wrong way to feel and the most important thing to do is to honor how you feel. If going out on a Saturday night drinking with your friends doesn’t feel like your thing anymore, choose what feels good and nurturing to you.
“Know that whether you are feeling like no one in the whole wide world understands who you are and what are you going through, or you are enjoying the embodiment of your inner hermit, these feelings most likely are in the process of morphing into the next grand step of your journey.
For now, embrace where you are and what life has gifted you.”
Don't be a Snob, It’s Still a Dream
The snob syndrome is quite common during the awakening process. This is when everything - both the positive and the negative aspects of our existence that we used to take for granted suddenly takes on a new meaning, and the concept of duality becomes intensified and magnified in our experiences.
Among everything that feels magnificent and exciting, so much in this world also feels wrong and chaotic! At times, it seems our loved ones are contributing to the “wrongs” in the world.
We cringe when they make decisions we deem unspiritual, we judge them when we see them commit acts we identify as unconscious, and we attempt to run away from them when they are in a bad mood so we don’t get pulled into their “bad” vibration.
My own snob syndrome consisted of trying to convince everyone to read the same books that helped with my awakening, as well as preaching spirituality to anyone who was willing, or unwilling to listen as if I was on the crusade.
I’ve also witnessed awakening individuals obsessively going after the feeling of “being in 5-D” and calling everyone else out on their misalignment, or bypassing working through emotions they believe to be low frequency by using the concept of love and oneness as an excuse to not feel.
In the end, this is all part of our growth. So if you are committing your own snob syndrome, know that everything you are going through is leading to your greater evolution.
After my own snob period, I slowly realized whether we are awakened, or un-awakened, the bigger picture is that this is still a dream state. In the end, we are all Consciousness co-creating a grand dream, and the only reason why we chose to forget this at birth is so we can dream convincingly and have fun along the way.
“Being awakened does not make anyone better, wiser, or more special; it is not a badge to be worn or an authoritative place to be in.
Rather, it is just another part of the active dreaming process and instead of getting fixated on it, or feeling it is anyone’s job to tell others how to dream better, treat it with lightness and humor.”
Approach every event and interaction with curiosity knowing our external reality is but a projection of our own consciousness, and if something external triggers us, simply ask, “What is inside me that is reacting to this, and how is this helping me decide who I am and who I want to be?”
Set Your Boundaries and Stay Empowered
While some experience the snob syndrome, others, especially those who have past boundary issues find it even more difficult to set boundaries feeling they are betraying the oneness principle.
“While it is very true that there is no separation between anyone or anything, and in the ultimate reality, there is only One, we did each choose to come here with the illusion of separation to experience one unique aspect of the divine.
In that sense, until we learn true self-expression, love and authenticity by committing ourselves to thoughts, words and actions that honor our truths, we are not fully fulfilling our life purpose to be who we are.”
While it is important for us to never judge others, it is equally essential for us to take care of our needs, say no when we mean no, set our boundaries and make choices that are conscious and empowering.
Passivity or avoidance of confrontation in the name of universal love is an indication of lack of self-love; likewise, engaging in compromising and self-sacrificing activities fearing how others may feel is not the expression of authenticity.
Embrace Being Human with Consciousness
For the longest time, I was in a somewhat detached phase that made me feel like an outsider who was observing the motions of all the happenings around me without intense emotional involvement.
There is nothing wrong with being in that place of stillness though one day, I decided I wanted to be more human again since that was the only reason why I took on this body to begin with!
The universe granted my decision with a bunch of ups and downs, intense emotions and even some drama here and there
.
The difference with experiencing what we call difficulties in life after an awakening is that if we desire to, we can choose to experience everything from both the human self, and the conscious True Self.
In that sense, though we may be feeling anger, frustration and even hopelessness, there is always a higher perspective within in which our True Self is experiencing these events very differently and without any duality.
For instance, whilst the mind is condemning lack and figuring out how to attract abundance, the True Self could very much be revering at this chance of knowing ourselves as abundance and expansion. As the mind is craving for love and approval, the True Self could be coming from the perspective of wanting to use this opportunity for us to go inward and remember our unconditional worth.
“As difficult as it is for the human mind to conceive, from the perspective of the True Self, EVERYTHING in life is a manifestation of divine love and every experience serves the purpose of creation and expansion for us to know our True Infinite Being .”
Finding the balance between the two perspectives can be tricky in the beginning, but once we do, it can make embracing the human aspect of living more fun and effortless because for as long as we choose to stay conscious, we know there is no need to take anything in life so seriously since we are all Gods dreaming ourselves being human in a simulated reality.
If we knew at the core we are intelligent Source Energy that is eternal, infinite and ever-evolving, why not do whatever we can to make the most of this dream?
Perhaps this means we can allow ourselves to embrace being human more and inhale all its delights by forgiving, laughing, loving and having fun more often, doing what makes our hearts sing, seeing the light in every negative situation and relationship, taking more leaps of faith, going on more adventures and enjoying that occasional ice cream or cookie without the guilt!
On the soul level, there is truly no difference between an awakened and un-awakened being. If one’s passion and choice is to assist in the world’s awakening and empower humanity, that calling is not superior, or inferior to another soul’s mission of wanting to live a simple and un-awakened life in a remote village as a fisherman.
While we may never know why another soul chose a certain path and what it is looking to experience and co-create, and therefore can never judge anyone else's path, we are here to experience all of it in this dream called life. In the eyes of the Divine True Self, all is beautiful. All is well. All is expansion.
Once You Learn These Nine Lessons From Confucius, Your Priorities In Life Will Completely Change
Confucius (September 28, 551 BC – 479 BC) was one of the most significant philosophers in the Chinese history. His theories had a great impact on the society and much of what he said is still significant today.
His philosophies were related to personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice etc.
Listed below are some lessons that we can learn from Confucius:
1. Keep Moving
Consistency is a lot harder to achieve in life than we think. According to Confucius, we should keep moving on the right path till the time we reach our destination. We should not give up in life because you will eventually attain your goals/dreams as you keep on persisting. It’s not carved in stone when you will make it, but eventually you will.
2. Keep Your Company Well
Take care of who you surround yourself with.Your companions matter as they will influence many things in and about your life. Make sure that you have the right friends who care for you and you for them. A healthy and positive social circle is extremely crucial for our development as well as happiness.
As Jim Rohn states it: “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
3. Good Things Take Time
Patience is a virtue and we have heard this quite a lot. Good things take time to happen and we should be patient enough to let things happen on their own. Do not succumb to the temptations of negativity. Negative thinking will get you nowhere except to the land of anxiety and stress.
4. “To be Wronged is Nothing Unless You Continue to Remember it.”
Everyone has suffered setbacks and heartbreaks in the past. There is no one who hasn’t been deceived in life.
But it is essential to let those experiences impart wisdom to you rather than guide your present life. You cannot keep remembering the evils done to you because that will make you stuck in time.
Move forward with new goals and ambitions.
5. “When Anger Rises, Think of the Consequences.”
We don’t generally think about the consequences that’ll follow our actions. But Confucius highlights the importance of thinking about the consequences especially when one is angry.
Anger can make us do terrible things which we will regret later in life. Take a step back whenever you are angry. Think of a measured response.
Remember “The tongue like a sharp knife, kills without drawing blood.”
6. Adjustments are Necessary
Life does not follow a linear trajectory. Confucius said that if we can’t seem to attain our goals then we should not change our goals but change our plan of action.
Adjustments in life are necessary and we can’t escape it. It’s better to pursue than to give up on our dreams. If you don’t adjust, especially in the world today that is changing every hour, you will surely work to attain failure.
7. Everyone Teaches You Something
Confucius said;
"If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher.
I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them and bad points of the other and correct them in myself”.
8. All or None
“Wherever you go, go with all your heart” said Confucius in relation to achieving your goals.
You have to give it all, or else leave entirely.
9. Sharpen Your Tools
One cannot achieve anything with inadequate means. Just like a mechanic sharpens his tools before setting to work, similarly we need to sharpen our skills in order to achieve our great goals in life.
We have to constantly improve ourselves so that we do not become complacent or arrogant. Don’t try to take a shortcut!
Why Is The Minister Of Health Taking Advice About The Health Effects Of 5G From A Committee Influenced By People With Ties To The Telecommunications Industry?
March 3 2019 | From: 5GNZ
On February 26 News Hub published an article titled “Health Minister David Clark dismisses 5G radiation exposure warnings”.
The article quoted New Zealand scientist Bruce Rapley, PhD, one of the signatories to the International EMF Scientist Appeal which calls for “Protection from Non-ionizing Electromagnetic Field Exposure” and warns that “Numerous recent scientific publications have shown that EMF affects living organisms at levels well below most international and national guidelines.”
"It is nearly impossible to get funding for research, the outcome of which may affect commercial profit,” adding that “the proof of this is the strong opposition encountered by any scientist who dares to research and publish results that are indicative of harm, thus threatening profitability of a corporation.”
He further warns that:
"For as long as those that control our society are predicated on profit rather than public health, we will continue to experience problems, and disasters. The precautionary approach is a dead concept, killed in a hit-and-run by the Almighty Dollar.”
In contrast, the article quoted the Minister of Health, David Clark as saying: “I am advised by Ministry of Health officials that the balance of research evidence suggests that exposure to the radiofrequency produced by any transmitter, including those that will be used by 5G services, do not cause health problems, provided they comply with international guidelines.”
What Could Account for the Widely Differing Perspectives?
Dr. Rapley is a scientist and accustomed to assessing evidence.
The Minister of Health David Clark was ordained as a Presbyterian Minister prior to entering politics. (His PhD thesis examined the life of a German theologist.)
The source of advice upon which the Minister has chosen to reply when it comes to non ionising radiation and health is a committee named “The Interagency Committee on Non Ionising Radiation”. As is explained in Part 3 of the article at this link:
"…meets regularly with the ostensible aim of considering new research and making recommendations to the Director General of Health.
The committee’s remit to report on non ionising radiation covers research relating to low frequency non ionising radiation (such as from household wiring and high voltage power lines) in addition to higher frequency radiation such as microwaves*.
If 5G is introduced, this committee would become responsible for assessing health effects from millimetre wave exposure.
(*NB: Documents produced by the committee tend to use the term “radiofrequency radiation” or “RF fields” rather than the words “microwaves” or “microwave radiation”.)
The “Terms of Reference for the Interagency Committee on the Health Effects of Non Ionising Fields” lists the following information under the heading “Composition of the Committee”
“‘The membership of the Committee will include representatives from the following agencies, organisations, and sectors:
Ministry of Health
Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment: Energy Safety Service, Workplace Health & Safety, Radio Spectrum Management
Ministry for the Environment
Public health unit
Local government
Academics/scientists
Consumers
Electrical industry: transmission and supply
Telecommunications industry’”
I have bolded up the type of some of the categories of committee members to emphasise that the composition of the committee that is supposed to provide independent advice on health effects on non ionising radiation was intentionally designed to include representatives of organisations responsible for producing non ionising radiation.
Specifically, Radio Spectrum Management is a business unit of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment which, among other things, is responsible for authorising the use of specific microwave and other frequencies in NZ.
Assignment of rights for the commercial exploitation of specific frequencies is often done by auction so you could consider that there is a financial incentive for the Radio Spectrum Management NZ (and perhaps the MBIE) to support the proliferation of wireless communications infrastructure over safer wired communications infrastructure.
The telecommunications industry produces microwave radiation emissions from its cellular phone towers etc. and now wants to add new millimetre wave emissions.
The electricity industry produces low frequency radiation (an inadvertent by-product of from the transmission of AC electricity over our national grid) plus it has become an unnecessary source of microwave radiation in many NZ homes thanks to the introduction of so-called ‘smart” or “advanced” meters which emit powerful pulses of microwave radiation.
I don’t know about you, but I think most thoughtful people would agree that it is a bad idea to for a committee that is supposed to assess health effects to include representatives of industries that produce the types of radiation that the committee is charged with assessing.
Back to quoting from part 3 of the article that you can read in its entirety by clicking Here:
"One of the people whose names regularly features on the lists of committee members is Sally Gilbert from the Ministry of Health – presumably the same Sally Gilbert from the Ministry of Health who was part of the “Telecommunications Industry Reference Group” who wrote the report that formed the basis of the National Environmental Standard for Telecommunications Facilities (NESTF)".)
[You can read more about the NESTF in Part 2 of the article at this link – Ed.]
“Another person whose name frequently appears on the list of members of the Interagency Committee on the Health Effects on Non Ionising Fields is Martin Gledhill who has provided consultancy services to companies in the electricity (see this link) and telecommunications industries.
“‘The results from recent research considered by the Committee have not given cause for concern and no change to existing regulations.’
“This statement is included despite the completion of the US National Toxicology Project (NTP) research showing excess cancer risk in rats exposed to microwave radiation:
One would hope that the current Minister of Health’s statement was made in ignorance of the fact that the advice that he is receiving from the Interagency Committee on the Health Effects of Non Ionising Fields may be biased in favour of the telecommunications industry due to the composition of the committee.
If it was, one would hope that as an ordained Presbyterian Minister, David Clark would have sufficient backbone to stand up to the telco lobby, support the international appeal against the deployment of space-based 5G and call for a moratorium on the introduction of 5G into New Zealand until such time as proper pre-market safety testing has shown the technology to be safe.
If the Minister wants good quality advice about non ionising radiation and health, there is no shortage of scientists who are not beholden to the telco industry who could provide him with genuinely independent advice.
He could use this advice as the basis for urgently needed public education programmes about the health risks of wireless technology as well as reforming the NZ regulatory system so that it protects New Zealanders’ health instead of facilitating massive profit-making by the wireless industry.
Let’s hope Dr. David Clark has a genuine desire to be a Minister for Health – not a Minister for Sickness.
The wireless industry in NZ has had what virtually any thinking person would consider undue and inappropriate influence over the development of the NZ standard (NZS 2772.1:1999) that governs how much microwave radiation is allowed to be emitted by cellular phone towers (and similar infrastructure).
Similarly, the telecommunications industry has had what most people would consider undue and inappropriate influence over the standard (the National Environmental Standard on Telecommunications Facilities (NESTF)) that largely determines where cellular phone towers (and other wireless infrastructure) are allowed to be sited.
The NZ Ministry of Health has set up a committee (the Interagency Committee on the Health Effects on Non Ionising Fields) which is supposed “provide the Director General of Health with high quality, independent scientific and technical advice on any potential health effects from exposures to extremely low or radiofrequency [microwave] fields…” (See: “Terms of Reference for the Interagency Committee on the Health Effects of Non Ionising Fields”)
"Most people have no idea of how failure to take into account conflict of interest and/or ineptitude on the part of successive New Zealand governments has led to New Zealanders being exposed to unprecedented levels of microwave radiation..”
I hope that you will share this post widely to help your friends, family and colleagues understand why devices and infrastructure that produce microwave radiation that conform with New Zealand standards CANNOT be assumed to be safe.
The sad fact of the matter is that the current system of regulation of microwave radiation emissions in New Zealand essentially provides a license to the telecommunications industry to legally produce levels of microwave radiation that have been linked to a variety of adverse health effects, including increased risk of cancers.
Until the majority of New Zealanders realise that the current regulatory system for microwave radiation emissions is a essentially a license for the wireless industry to pollute – and sicken and even kill in its quest for profits – there is little chance that this outrageous state of affairs can be remedied.
A good summation of the development of NZ’s current standard for infrastructure that emits microwave radiation may be read at this link: 5G in NZ – the legal and regulatory situation
Thank you for reading this post on www.5G.org.nz, NZ’s 5G information website. If you found it to be interesting, please share it with your friends and family.
If you would like to help in any way with the campaign against 5G in NZ, please email through the Contact Form on this website.
There is a now Resources page on the site where you can download flyers and poster for printing and distribution and also download the new 5G Free New Zealand Personal Action Plan.
We now also have anEvents Page in which events relating to 5G will be listed as information comes to hand.
If you would like to stay up to date with information on what is happening in NZ in relation to smart technology, 5G and wireless and health issues, please sign yourself up to the free email list at www.stopsmartmeters.org,nz
Former Law Enforcement Official: Benghazi Coverup Was To Protect Clinton Foundation – General Flynn Attacked Because He Knew Too Much March 2 2019 | From: TheGatewayPundit / Various
A former Law Enforcement Officer named Roscoe B. Davis unveiled a number or tweets recently tying the attack in Benghazi to the Clinton Foundation.
The foundation reportedly made millions gun running and General Flynn was allegedly attacked because he knew too much.
McCain’s contact by the name of Marc Turi sold billions to the US in weapons and was involved in the Obama plan to give guns to Al-Qaeda to get them to overthrow Qaddafi:
Hillary put Stephens in Benghazi to clean up her mess after it was discovered that Al-Qaeda terrorists were obtaining the US arms. When he was murdered Hillary and Obama had to create a cover up story:
Hillary tried to tie the attack to Turi but WikiLeaks released emails (which we wrote about at TGP at the time) showing Hillary’s plans and ties to Al-Qaeda –
Hillary didn’t care about any deaths or guns to American enemies – she was making millions on the deal.
It’s time that Hillary and Obama are brought to justice.
If President Trump does not bring to justice the people in the Deep State responsible for selling guns to our enemies and lying about it and the fate of four Americans, he will have a difficult time being re-elected!
Americans [or perhaps more accurately, those around the world who are awakened to the activities of these cabal criminals] want the swamp drained and Hillary locked up!
Why Anti-Authoritarians Are Diagnosed As Mentally Ill March 1 2019 | From: MadInAmerica
In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians, and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.
Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously.
Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority.
And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority - sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.
Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.
Why Mental Health Professionals Diagnose Anti-Authoritarians with Mental Illness
Gaining acceptance into graduate school or medical school and achieving a PhD or MD and becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist means jumping through many hoops, all of which require much behavioral and attentional compliance to authorities, even to those authorities that one lacks respect for.
The selection and socialization of mental health professionals tends to breed out many anti-authoritarians. Having steered the higher-education terrain for a decade of my life, I know that degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance.
Those with extended schooling have lived for many years in a world where one routinely conforms to the demands of authorities. Thus for many MDs and PhDs, people different from them who reject this attentional and behavioral compliance appear to be from another world - a diagnosable one.
I have found that most psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals are not only extraordinarily compliant with authorities but also unaware of the magnitude of their obedience.
And it also has become clear to me that the anti-authoritarianism of their patients creates enormous anxiety for these professionals, and their anxiety fuels diagnoses and treatments.
In graduate school, I discovered that all it took to be labeled as having “issues with authority” was to not kiss up to a director of clinical training whose personality was a combination of Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, and Howard Cosell.
When I was told by some faculty that I had “issues with authority,” I had mixed feelings about being so labeled. On the one hand, I found it quite amusing, because among the working-class kids whom I had grown up with, I was considered relatively compliant with authorities.
After all, I had done my homework, studied, and received good grades. However, while my new “issues with authority” label made me grin because I was now being seen as a “bad boy,” it also very much concerned me about just what kind of a profession that I had entered.
Specifically, if somebody such as myself was being labeled with “issues with authority,” what were they calling the kids I grew up with who paid attention to many things that they cared about but didn’t care enough about school to comply there? Well, the answer soon became clear.
Mental Illness Diagnoses for Anti-Authoritarians
A 2009 Psychiatric Times article titled “ADHD & ODD: Confronting the Challenges of Disruptive Behavior” reports that “disruptive disorders,” which include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and opposition defiant disorder (ODD), are the most common mental health problem of children and teenagers.
ADHD is defined by poor attention and distractibility, poor self-control and impulsivity, and hyperactivity. ODD is defined as a “a pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior without the more serious violations of the basic rights of others that are seen in conduct disorder”; and ODD symptoms include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules” and “often argues with adults.”
Psychologist Russell Barkley, one of mainstream mental health’s leading authorities on ADHD, says that those afflicted with ADHD have deficits in what he calls “rule-governed behavior,” as they are less responsive to rules of established authorities and less sensitive to positive or negative consequences.
ODD young people, according to mainstream mental health authorities, also have these so-called deficits in rule-governed behavior, and so it is extremely common for young people to have a “duel diagnosis” of AHDH and ODD.
Do we really want to diagnose and medicate everyone with “deficits in rule-governed behavior”?
Albert Einstein, as a youth, would have likely received an ADHD diagnosis, and maybe an ODD one as well. Albert didn’t pay attention to his teachers, failed his college entrance examinations twice, and had difficulty holding jobs.
However, Einstein biographer Ronald Clark (Einstein: The Life and Times) asserts that Albert’s problems did not stem from attention deficits but rather from his hatred of authoritarian, Prussian discipline in his schools.
Einstein said, “The teachers in the elementary school appeared to me like sergeants and in the Gymnasium the teachers were like lieutenants.”
At age 13, Einstein read Kant’s difficult Critique of Pure Reason - because Albert was interested in it. Clark also tells us Einstein refused to prepare himself for his college admissions as a rebellion against his father’s “unbearable” path of a “practical profession.”
After he did enter college, one professor told Einstein, “You have one fault; one can’t tell you anything.” The very characteristics of Einstein that upset authorities so much were exactly the ones that allowed him to excel.
By today’s standards, Saul Alinsky, the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would have certainly been diagnosed with one or more disruptive disorders.
Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Alinsky also recalls a time when he was ten or eleven and his rabbi was tutoring him in Hebrew:
"One particular day I read three pages in a row without any errors in pronunciation, and suddenly a penny fell onto the Bible . . .
Then the next day the rabbi turned up and he told me to start reading. And I wouldn’t; I just sat there in silence, refusing to read. He asked me why I was so quiet, and I said, “This time it’s a nickel or nothing.”
He threw back his arm and slammed me across the room."
Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians.
Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.
I have also spent a great deal of time with people who had at one time in their lives had thoughts and behavior that were so bizarre that they were extremely frightening for their families and even themselves; they were diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses, but have fully recovered and have been, for many years, leading productive lives.
Among this population, I have not met one person whom I would not consider a major anti-authoritarian. Once recovered, they have learned to channel their anti-authoritarianism into more constructive political ends, including reforming mental health treatment.
Many anti-authoritarians who earlier in their lives were diagnosed with mental illness tell me that once they were labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis, they got caught in a dilemma.
Authoritarians, by definition, demand unquestioning obedience, and so any resistance to their diagnosis and treatment created enormous anxiety for authoritarian mental health professionals; and professionals, feeling out of control, labeled them “noncompliant with treatment,” increased the severity of their diagnosis, and jacked up their medications.
This was enraging for these anti-authoritarians, sometimes so much so that they reacted in ways that made them appear even more frightening to their families.
There are anti-authoritarians who use psychiatric drugs to help them function, but they often reject psychiatric authorities’ explanations for why they have difficulty functioning.
So, for example, they may take Adderall (an amphetamine prescribed for ADHD), but they know that their attentional problem is not a result of a biochemical brain imbalance but rather caused by a boring job.
And similarly, many anti-authoritarians in highly stressful environments will occasionally take prescribed benzodiazepines such as Xanax even though they believe it would be safer to occasionally use marijuana but can’t because of drug testing on their job
It has been my experience that many anti-authoritarians labeled with psychiatric diagnoses usually don’t reject all authorities, simply those they’ve assessed to be illegitimate ones, which just happens to be a great deal of society’s authorities.
Maintaining the Societal Status Quo
Americans [Westerners] have been increasingly socialized to equate inattention, anger, anxiety, and immobilizing despair with a medical condition, and to seek medical treatment rather than political remedies.
What better way to maintain the status quo than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society.
The reality is that depression is highly associated with societal and financial pains. One is much more likely to be depressed if one is unemployed, underemployed, on public assistance, or in debt (for documentation, see “400% Rise in Anti-Depressant Pill Use”).
And ADHD labeled kids do pay attention when they are getting paid, or when an activity is novel, interests them, or is chosen by them (documented in my book Commonsense Rebellion).
In an earlier dark age, authoritarian monarchies partnered with authoritarian religious institutions. When the world exited from this dark age and entered the Enlightenment, there was a burst of energy.
Much of this revitalization had to do with risking skepticism about authoritarian and corrupt institutions and regaining confidence in one’s own mind.
We are now in another dark age, only the institutions have changed. Americans [Westerners] desperately need anti-authoritarians to question, challenge, and resist new illegitimate authorities and regain confidence in their own common sense.
In every generation there will be authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. While it is unusual in American history for anti-authoritarians to take the kind of effective action that inspires others to successfully revolt, every once in a while a Tom Paine, Crazy Horse, or Malcolm X come along.
So authoritarians financially marginalize those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their “cure.”
The Power Of Words And Why Words Can Manifest Life February 28 2019 | From: EsotericKnowledge
To innerstand how powerful words are, we need to know what the term word means on an esoteric and spiritual level. Before we explore its esoteric and spiritual meaning, it is important that we study its common definitions and investigate other words related to it.)
The term word is defined by TheFreeDictionary.com as, "A sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination of morphemes."
According to OxfordDictionaries.com, the term word means, "A single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed." When you think about it, words are symbols that transmit information.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1 (KJV))
The Word was in the beginning because the Word was the Spiritual Seed, also known as the Source. The evidence that words are "seeds" can be found in the Bible verse Luke 8:11 (NKJV): "Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God."
A seed (word) is a nucleus of a thing or being, and therefore is the beginning or source of that thing or being. Hence, the biblical saying, "In the beginning was the Word."
Within the Word or Spiritual Seed is the source of vibration. The word vibration is phonetically "verbration." Vibration allows the creation of sacred geometry, one of the foundations of the universe.
The word verb in "verbration"/vibration comes from Latin verbum which means "word" in English. Verb is defined by Dictionary.com as, "any member of a class of words that function as the main elements of predicates, that typically express action, state, or a relation between two things, and that may be inflected for tense, aspect, voice, mood, and to show agreement with their subject or object." (Bold emphasis added)
It is important to know that verbs express actions which rely on verbration/vibration to act. In other words, the verbal word created vibration. This verbration/vibration allows the creation of motion and light.
"Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light." (Genesis 1:3)
Light is also known as photon. In physics, a photon is usually indicated by the symbol γ (gamma). The uppercase of γ (gamma) is this Greek symbol Γ.
The Greek symbol gamma has a strong connection to the English word grammar. According to EtymOnline.com, gamma (the third letter of the Greek alphabet) comes from Phoenician gimel (gimmel) which is the origin of the English letters C and G. Keep in mind that the first letter of the English word grammar is G/g.
The letter G is also the first letter of the word God. Many esoteric, occult, and religious teachings have said that God is Light! Remember, light is also known as photon and the symbol for photon is γ (gamma).
A term that has a strong connection to the word photon is gamma ray. Dictionary.com defines the term gamma ray as, "a photon of penetrating electromagnetic radiation (gamma radiation) emitted from an atomic nucleus." (Bold emphases added)
Remember, the Greek word gamma has a strong connection to the English word grammar. According to Dictionary.com, grammar means "the study of the way the sentences of a language are constructed; morphology and syntax." In simple terms, it is the study of how words are put together in order to make sentences to express thought.
"Grammar is the art of inventing symbols and combining them to express thought; logic is the art of thinking; and rhetoric is the art of communicating thought from one mind to another; the adaptation of language to circumstance."
One of the origins of the word grammar is the Old French word gramaire. As described on EtymOnline.com:
"Late 14c., “Latin grammar, rules of Latin,” from Old French gramaire “grammar; learning,” especially Latin and philology, also “(magic) incantation, spells, mumbo-jumbo” (12c., Modern French grammaire), an “irregular semi-popular adoption” [OED] of Latin grammatica “grammar, philology,” perhaps via an unrecorded Medieval Latin form *grammaria.
The classical Latin word is from Greek grammatike (tekhne) "(art) of letters," referring both to philology and to literature in the broadest sense, fem. of grammatikos (adj.) "pertaining to or versed in letters or learning," from gramma "letter" (see -gram). An Old English gloss of it was stæfcræft (see staff (n.))." [Bold emphasis added]
The Old French word gramaire has a strong connection to the English word grimoire. Dictionary.com defines grimoire using these exact words: "a manual of magic or witchcraft used by witches and sorcerers." (Bold emphasis added)
To innerstand what words are on a deeper level, we need to investigate the Greek word λόγος (logos). Many people pronounce it as "low goes," however, many linguists pronounce it as "law gahs."
According to NewWorldEncyclopedia.org, logos "is often translated into English as "Word," but can also mean thought, speech, meaning, reason, proportions, principle, standard, or logic, among other things. In religious contexts, it can indicate the divine Word, wisdom, or truth."
Britannica.com defines logos as, "the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning." (Bold emphasis added) Did you notice that the first syllable of logos, which is "lah," sounds like "law"? The Laws of Nature are the natural laws that give order to the universe. Hence, the word logos ("law gahs").
The word logos is defined by YourDictionary.com as, "… the source that controls the universe, the written word or inspiration of God, or a logic and rational argument." (Emphasis added)
To innerstand the terms word and logos on a spiritual level, we need to turn our attention back to the Book of John. In the Bible verse John 1:1 (NKJV) it says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
According to many biblical scholars, the Book of John was originally written in Greek. Remember, the term Word means "Logos" in Greek and Logos means "… the source that controls the universe, the written word or inspiration of God, or a logic and rational argument."
In other words, “In the beginning was the Source.” The Source of what? The Source of the codes of reality. These codes made up of letters and numbers were written by God and He wrote them into the fabric of space. Some of these letters can be found in DNA. Today, scientists often refer to them as genetic letters.
The letters and numbers of God have the power to create words, codes, and formulas, which can be used to express the Laws of Nature. These Divine Laws give order to the universe, making it possible for life to exist. This is why words have the power to manifest worlds and life.
An important fact about words is that they are symbols. Because words are symbols, and grammar is a magic art of inventing symbols to express thought, when you use the art of grammar to write words, you are playing with sigils and magic.
According to Merriam-Webster.com, the word sigil means "a sign, word, or device held to have occult power in astrology or magic." (Bold emphasis added) In other words, writing words is an art of magic. This is why words can be used to cast magic SPELLs. Keep in mind that the forming of words from letters is called SPELLing.
Near the beginning of this video, I said that words are "seeds." Because they are seeds, when they are deeply planted in the mind, they can grow and produce ideas. With enough energetic nourishment or programming, these ideas can manifest into reality. Depending on what the ideas are based on, they can heal or harm the mind and body.
An important fact about words is that they are codes. This is why a man who only speaks English cannot understand a man who only speaks Chinese. All languages of mankind operate similar to computer languages.
Computers can only read languages that they have been programmed to process. The human brain operates like a computer, therefore can only interpret languages that it has been programmed to process.
Because words have the magic power to program the mind, they are heavily used by corporations, the religious system, the legal system, and the education system to hypnotize your mind and control you.
In fact, the legal system is one of the biggest practitioners of word magic, which is "the art of communication using sacred sounds and symbols to direct and control energy to produce certain desired effects."
Look at the term words carefully and pay attention to its letters. Did you notice that the term words is an anagram for the term sword? Move the letter "s" in the term words to the left of the letter "w" and it transforms into the term sword.
Words are like swords because they can be used to energetically cut you. In many ways, words are more powerful than swords because they can cut you at the deepest level of your soul and spirit.
"For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. [Hebrews 4:12 (NKJV)]"
Because words are powerful, please use words wisely.
< Service Interrupted >
February 27 2019 | From: WakeUpKiwi
Occasionally one just runs out of resources.
Perhaps today, take the opportunity to delve deeper into the various sections of this website that you may not have visited before.
Or another website - and maybe if you can find something that you feel to be of worth sharing with others you may know, give it a nudge.
You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.
We will all find the truth in the end.
Top New Zealand Scientist Describes “Global Warming” As Pseudo-Science February 26 2019 | From: Stovouno / Various
The widespread obsession with Global-Warming-Climate-Change, in opposition to all factual evidence, is quite incredible. (Dr David Kear)
Dr David Kear is a former Director General of New Zealand’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) – as such he would have been considered one of New Zealand’s top scientists. He has been publishing on sea levels since the 1950s.
In 2013 Dr Kear prepared a booklet in which he set out his views on the globalist climate project. In the booklet, Dr Kear describes:
His experience with the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change
The corrupted science behind the Global Warming narrative
The corrupted science behind the claims of rising sea-levels
The demonisation by “Global Warmers” of the “essential and innocent gas, carbon dioxide”.
How councils are making zoning & other decisions purely to satisfy a false narrative, with total disregard for the facts
Think globally, act locally (UN catchcry) Dr Kear describes how local councils are ignoring scientific fact in order to satisfy an agenda imposed on them from above.
No matter if scientists, engineers and local observers all indicate that the sea is not rising, even retreating – once a council has decided on a policy that assumes that the sea IS rising, the council is immovable, and makes decisions on zoning and building codes on that basis.
Such policies will be being applied in coastal and non-coastal areas alike, thereby contributing to fulfillment of Agenda 21 goals of eventually eliminating small towns and villages and moving people to “sustainable” megacities.
Dr Kear’s text is reproduced here in its entirety with minimal changes to format.
[the NON-EXISTENT, incredibly expensive, THREAT TO US ALL, including to our GRANDCHILDREN]
by David Kear, 34 West End, Ohope, Whakatane, NZ
(former Director-General, NZ DSIR; United Nations consultant; & South Pacific geoscientist)
Introduction
“Climate Change” has become an important international topic – one might almost say religion. It began life as “Global Warming”.
So very many people, including politicians and “news people”, appear to have been overwhelmed by it, and have led others to believe, and follow the doctrine.
It has sponsored a good deal of international co-operation, which can only have been good.
However, the cost of “Combating Carbon” has been extremely high, and the debt and economic consequences are being passed on to present citizens, and, worse still, to future generations, including all our grandchildren.
This booklet attempts to raise, in citizens’ minds, questions regarding the enormous sums of money and effort being wasted on this topic.
Is it soundly based? Will it “do good” or “do bad” for ordinary citizens? Do those promoting it deserve our attention?
This booklet suggests that Global-Warming-alias-Climate-Change, as proposed by “Global Warmers” makes no sense.
You, as the reader, must judge that for yourself – not to help the writer of this booklet, but to help you and your family.
Do you think after reading all this that the proponents are absolutely reliable?
Should you add your voice to those against it, or at least talk to your councillors and members of parliament and see how they feel?
. The Ancient Acceptable View
Our Earth’s climate is highly variable, and records show clearly that it always has been so. Animals and plants have had no option but to accept what comes, and to adapt life in ways that suit best. Evolution gave some help by introducing “the Survival of the Fittest.”
Humans found early that their discussion and understanding were helped by a belief in some extraneous source being the cause of recorded changes of climate – perhaps with divine power. This booklet uses “Mother Nature” in that role to avoid wordy explanations.
Humans discovered that they could ameliorate climatic effects with buildings, clothing and the rest, and even create “microclimates” through windbreaks, forest clearing, artificial lakes, fossil fuel burning, and the rest.
However, no-one originally thought seriously that man could change the basic influences to our climate – our Sun, our Earth’s rotation, the total quantity of our Planet’s water, and the rest.
Mother Nature is able to change all such things (and has been doing so for some 3,000,000,000 years), but we are not.
The New Belief - The New Problem
Introduction
That ancient and acceptable view was amended in the minds of some people whom I call the “Global Warmers”. I’ve heard nothing convincing about their so-called “Science”; but what they publish convinces me that it’s close to nonsense. The most convincing evidence against it comes mostly from the Global Warmers themselves.
In this booklet, the beliefs of “Global Warming”, and “Climate Change” have initial capital letters. That contrasts with natural warming, or natural changing of climate – indicated by lower case initial letters. The idea of a human cause is much less than 300 years old.
My interest in our changing climate and sea level
During fieldwork for a PhD thesis I found a coastal exposure of soft sandstone at Ohuka Creek, south of Port Waikato. There were Pliocene fossils of marine shellfish below an extensive horizontal bedding plane.
Above that plane were more fossils, but of cool-lovinga plants. A finger could show the exact location of the abrupt change to the cooler climate at the onset of the first of the world-wide Pleistocene glaciations [Ice Ages]. Ice formed widely at the ultimate expense of sea water, so sea level fell.
At Ohuka, sea bed had become land. Such changes are rarely seen in a continuous sequence, so I recorded it in a 1957 scientific paperb. That resulted in my joining an informal world-wide Group researching changing sea levels.
Most interest then was about the rate of sea level rise as the Earth warmed following the “Little Ice Age”. That cool period, from about 1500 to 1700 AD, halted winemaking in England and taro cropping in New Zealand.
Our Group determined the rate of sea level rise in many different World regions, from widely-available readings of tide gauges (less variable than those of thermometers).
The average for us all was 125 mm/century (“125” here). Hence it would take 8 centuries for sea level to rise 1m – no serious threat to us.
Global Warming Dawns
Subsequently, I attended many international science conferences representing DSIR, NZ or Pacific Nations. I noted the words “Global Warming” appearing increasingly in paper titles, and sensed a growing number of adherents.
Those latter arranged a first-ever “Conference on Global Warming” in Vienna in 1985. Unlike most such meetings, where a communiqué summarising achievements was released on the final day, the full results of this one were delayed for over 2 years.
When they did appear (front page NZ Herald, two days before Christmas 1987) a World Declaration included “Overseas scientists have estimated that the seas around New Zealand will rise by up to 1.4 m in the next 40 years”.
That article concentrated on the massive consequent problems, caused by our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but gave no adequate supporting science.
That rate of rise was equivalent to 3,500 mm/century, 28 times faster than our 125. Hence we stupidly ignored it, thinking noone could possibly believe it. But the World did believe, and the Global Warming mirage was born. Had 3,500 been true, sea level should have risen by almost 1 m by today – it hasn’t, not even closely.
This showed unambiguously that those “Overseas Scientists” were not true scientists. They ignored a most important basic rule of true science “Thou shall not publish Science without first checking it.
A check against local tide gauges would have shown how wrong 1.4 m in 40 yrs was; they simply hadn’t bothered to check. That was a First Grave Error.
Australian government scientists were concerned about the effects on Pacific Island nations by any sea level rise of around 3,500 mm/century, and launched a project to determine the correct figure at that time.
They announced the result at the 1992 meeting of SOPAC – a geoscientific organisation of South Pacific nations. Their figure was 122 mm/century, confirming the order of magnitude of our group’s 125 average value.
Fooling the World
The Global Warmers persisted with their use of pseudo-science and made further predictions. Understandably they too all proved wrong.
At conferences I began to hear, regardless of the science involved, when a speaker wished to “rubbish” some scientific idea or research, he/she stated that conclusion firmly, and followed it by “Just like Global Warming”. Clearly the Global Warmers heard that too.
They didn’t change their pseudo-science, but cleverly changed the name to ‘Climate Change”. [One can disprove warming, but the words change of climate can’t be proved wrong].
The United Nations became interested – major sea level rise could cause havoc in low-lying areas or island groups. They established an Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) and invited nations to send delegates.
Not surprisingly those chosen were almost entirely Global Warmers, because they clearly knew something about it. But to do them credit the Panel members acted a little more like true scientists than those earlier.
They accepted that “1.4 m in 40 yrs” was wrong and re-evaluated it as “0.49 m by 2100”, [roundly a century ahead]. Thus they dropped 3,500 down to 500 mm/century – to 14% of the original.
The cause remained unchanged – our CO2 emissions to the atmosphere. In no other human activity would those involved retain a belief when the most crucial item involved was found to be 86% wrong by themselves. That was a Second Grave Error.
In spite of that, the World was taken in. Politicians were able to promise to save us from the consequences, and the Media had an unending “Field Day”.
It wasn’t that people necessarily believed, but they lacked the courage to risk that it might come true, and that they might have to bear the terrible consequences that had been so forcibly promised.
The New Errors
The new value of “0.49 m by 2100” became widely accepted. In New Zealand, District Councils were instructed by Government Departments, like Conservation and Environment, and by Regional Councils, that they must take full account of the risk that “0.49” implied for a sea level rise by 2100.
Councils had to consider that in the same way as earthquake and volcanic risk. Yet that “0.49” value doesn’t stand up to the most simple scientific scrutiny.
First, the rate is four times faster than the current sea level rise, as indicated by regional, widely-available tide gauges; second, no reason was given for quadrupling the value, and third, good science interprets “0.49” in this sense as being deliberately different from 0.48 and 0.50.
Thus that effectively claims that those who determined that value know, for sure, where sea level will be a century ahead to ±5 mm. That was, and is, patently absurd
These were the Third, Fourth & Fifth Grave Errors.
Further Damning Disclosures
The United Nations appointed me personally to their UNCSTD Committee which assists small countries with their ability regarding Science and Technology Development.
Three or so of us would go to a central city to talk and discuss their options with delegates from regional countries. On one occasion we met in Prague, to assist countries on both sides of the “Iron Curtain”. While there, we were invited to visit the World’s only “Institute for Global Warming”.
It was founded and funded incredibly by the USA and Soviet Union jointly, at the height of their “Cold War”, in an attempt to fund something “for the good of Mankind”, rather than “for armaments”. Some of its staff could have attended the 1985 Conference, and helped create the 1987 World Declaration.
I took the opportunity of asking to see copies of the documents that had been brought to that 1985 Meeting in neutral Austria. Several attendees brought their estimates for sea level rise due to Global Warming.
The values, converted to mm/century, ranged from 500 minimum to 3,500 maximum. There can be no doubt that, to ensure that their 1987 World Declaration made the greatest impact, they published the maximum value – contravening the most sacred rule of acceptable science Thou shall not publish items for monetary, political, or personal gain that are not clear un-biased un-inflated truths.
The fact that “up to” was used, might be allowed in non-scientific areas, but not in Science.
If World Media had distorted the message, the Warmers should immediately have denied what was wrongly claimed, and ensured that the proper statement got equal publicity. Using a maximum value for greatest effect was the Sixth (and Worst) Grave Error.
Old Scientific Conclusions on Climate Ignored
19th Century science posed a important question. Why is our Earth’s average temperature significantly higher than that calculated from the then-recent determinations of our Sun’s distance and its radiation?
Knowing my interests in climate, DSIR librarians found me a publication in German that answered that puzzle early. It had Scandinavian author(s), if I remember correctly.
Its answer was that the CO2 in our atmosphere acts like glass in a glasshouse. Both change the optical physical nature of the Sun’s infra-red rays [that carry the warmth to us] such that they may enter, but cannot then leave. So we are warmed by the heat trapped below our CO2; like the glasshouse below its glass.
I surmise that the Global Warmers, along with Al Gore, noted correctly that CO2 keeps us warm, but thought wrongly that more would make us warmer.
The analogy with glass is important. Horticultural experiments long ago found that more (thicker) glass does not cause more warming, so more CO2 probably doesn’t either. The effect is like that of polarising spectacles, where the change takes place as light begins passing through the lenses.
Thickness makes no difference. Polarisation is either 100%, or not at all. A coincidence timed the Little Ice Age’s end with the Industrial Revolution’s start. The Warmers blamed the undoubted warming on the latter – ignoring the glasshouse evidence.
The New Climate Regime
NIWA The National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) retains New Zealand climate records. It has a history of persuading successive governments that Global Warming and Climate Change are both real.
It often encouraged media headlines like “We are Getting Warmer”, when any news item suggested any higher temperature. Science progresses by new concepts and ideas being aired freely for scientific scrutiny.
That has sometimes taken centuries to be completed. Although I don’t agree with some of NIWA’s views, it is proper that they should be aired for discussion, as in this booklet.
One announcement (that surely originated from NIWA) was very important to me and all citizens, and was a credit to NIWA itself. At the close of 2007, it stated that the decade just finishing was the warmest since New Zealand records began.
The announcement added that, of those 10 years, 1998 was the warmest ever since records began. I was grateful to NIWA, and concluded that 2007 was no warmer than 1998, and probably cooler.
I could assume therefore that warming at our 125 rate finished in 1998. In the roundest of figures, the Little Ice Age lasted for some 200 years. There would be no conflict with accepting that the following warming should similarly last for some 200 years.
As always in Science one seeks confirmation whenever possible. I have seen many items that lead to that same view of “no warming since 1998”.
The best was a written debate in the Imperial Engineer of autumn 2008. [That scientific journal is produced for engineering graduates of Imperial College, London – arguably UK’s top university in engineering.]
The debate was on whether Humans were to blame for current changes of climate. Prof Joanna Haigh blamed Humans, Lord Monckton blamed Mother Nature.
The only point on which they both agreed was that there had been no warming since 1998. That confirmed NIWA’s statement perfectly, along with several comparable pronouncements.
My conclusion is that warming since the Little Ice Age’s end is now almost certainly finished. That was supported further by NIWA’s release at the end of 2012,concerning the Eastern Bay of Plenty.
Their report was that 2012 had been drier andcolder than 2011. Citizens also notice that warming seems to be over.
Skiing seasons are extended, winter fires are needed earlier, and some of us travelling overseas have been asked by those from Queensland, even Hawaii, whether we in New Zealand feel colder generally – as they do.
I conclude that the New Zealand climate has not been warming since 1998.
The Affects on Citizens
Astronomical Cost of Major Measures to Combat a Non-Existent Threat: Politicians and the Media have listened to the proponents of Global-Warming-Climate-Change, but don’t seem to have made any critical assessment of it all.
Perhaps they were bemused by the Global Warmers constantly naming themselves and associates as “Scientists”. As has been shown, those people disregarded the basic rules of true Science. Their political and media audiences innocently believed the statements – which contained grave errors.
Innocents in politics and the media were badly mis-led. They gladly supported projects to combat the non-existent threat of Global-Warming-Climate-Change.
The projects were unnecessary because there was no threat; extremely costly in money time and effort; full of praise where ridicule was deservedmisleading about benefits & options; and above all diversionary away from today’s real problems.
A huge international bureaucratic industry was born – with Cabinet Ministers, government departments, company sections, travel, conferences, treaties, carbon credits, and carbon trading, and very much more.
The challenge was often heard that we must curb our carbon emissions or sacrifice our grandchildren’s well-being. In truth, those children were being saddled with a gigantic debt to pay for everything encompassed by the Warmers’ “carbon footprints”, including the salaries and expenses of the loudest proponents.
Perhaps the saddest part has been that the essential and innocent gas, carbon dioxide, has been demonised and criminalised. It is essential in creating plant growth using chlorophyll and photo-synthesis.
It is thus essential for our very existence. Crops grow better in a CO2-enriched and warmer atmosphere, when heated by an oldfashioned vertical kerosene heater. It gives off “carbon emissions” that are valuable to us all.
Costs and Dangers of Local Measures to combat the Non-Existent Threat: Local authorities were compelled to adopt measures designed to combat the nonexistent threat.
Typically, maps were drawn showing the coastline’s position now, and in the year 2100 with intermediate zone(s), assuming that sea level would rise 0.49 m in the next 100 years.
Onerous restrictions have been emplaced within the zones that were thus defined.
Many regions have vast quantities of sand transported by rivers to their coast, released by the erosion of hills and mountains, continuously raised by Mother Nature.
Their coastline extends seawards steadily. Citizens in such regions have long noted (with surveys and photos) that the coastline has a net seawards movement. It contrasts with many Councils’ imposed belief in “0.49” which demands landwards movement (“inundation”).
Councils seem unable to accept their citizens’ constant and loud protests about all this. They seem to feel that higher authorities insist that they must ignore such views.
It is not just (a) the absurdity of restrictions about where houses may be erected (only inland of certain lines), etc.; or (b) the increasing costs to those building their first home. At the other end of the scale there are enforced dangers; a requirement for higher floor levels, leading to more steps, with unnecessary risks to elderly folk falling, when using them.
The fact that sea level is no longer rising is a new extra factor for councils to ignore. In the example of Ohope Beach, a Commission of enquiry, set up by Council, backed the Council’s view of landwards inundation.
That rejected all citizens’ factual evidence of seawards net movement for periods ranging from 50 to 5,000 years. Council also rejected the advice, supporting the Citizens, by one who was highly qualified in engineering and science and had had long and successful experience in coastal work.
Much worse, the Council’s own appointed consultants provided an additional report based on every coastal survey for which a record was available.
It showed a“retreatof the sea” [seaward shoreline movement, or accretion] at the only three Ohopesites, of 0.30-0.94 m/yr over 130 years that was still ongoing in 2008. Clearlyneither Council nor Commission had bothered to read that critical report, writtenby highly regarded consultants, who had been appointed for this project by theCouncil itself.
The widespread obsession with Global-Warming-Climate-Change, in opposition to all factual evidence, is quite incredible. It leads to unfair treatment of some citizens, and a massive bill for all, for nothing useful. When will citizens revolt effectively against such callous disregard for their observations and wishes, by those who are essentially their elected employees?
When will the perpetrators examine the basis of their ideology, and realise that it’s based on unfounded unscientific beliefs, not on confirmed, widely-available investigations by real scientists who abide by the moral standards of their profession?
SPCA Calls For Ban On 1080 & “No Birds,No Kiwi, Tui, Weka, Kereru - All Gone” – An Observation On The West Coast From An 82 Year Old February 25 2019 | From: Newshub / EnviroWatchRangitikei / Various
The SPCA has issued a statement calling for a ban on the use of 1080, saying it causes "intense and prolonged suffering" to animals.
The organisation is "deeply concerned" over the use of 1080, it says in a statement, adding it is working to achieve change.
The SPCA does not regard the lives of one species over another. However, it does recognise there is a concern regarding the impact of "so-called 'pest' animals," the statement says.
"Sometimes it is necessary to capture certain animals or manage populations of species for various reasons, including biodiversity, conservation, and sustainability.
In these instances, methods that are proven to be humane and effective should be used."
The statement says the welfare of all animals - whether native or introduced - should be viewed equally.
"There should be greater emphasis on looking for solutions that would enable species who cannot be completely removed, to co-exist in the environment instead."
But Forest & Bird disagree, calling SPCA's statement "naive", "misinformed" and inaccurate.
"While the idea of stoats and rats peacefully coexisting with native birds sounds great, the reality is that an estimated 25 million native birds, eggs and chicks are cruelly eaten alive by introduced predators every year in New Zealand," said the organisation's chief executive, Kevin Hague.
"The SPCA's position on 1080 is a blow to their credibility. It's sad to see them promoting flawed logic."
Mr Hague said the SPCA's position reflected their history of caring for domesticated animals "without understanding the needs of New Zealand's native animals and ecosystems."
"Giving up 1080 would lead to an ecocide of huge proportions in New Zealand, and the SPCA need to understand this is the outcome of their pest control position."
Last month, the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) released its report into the aerial use of 1080 during 2017, saying the use of 1080 keeps people and the environment safe.
The report details information on 50 aerial operations covering 875,000 hectares of land.
General Manager of the EPA's Hazardous Substances Group, Dr Fiona Thomson-Carter, says 1080 remains one of the most strictly controlled hazardous substances in New Zealand, and is a critical tool in the ongoing fight to protect our native birds from introduced predators - possums, rodents and stoats.
"While around 30 research projects continue to look at 1080 alternatives and ways to improve the targeting of pests, the EPA believes the current rules around 1080 keep people and the environment safe," she said.
“No Birds, No Kiwi, Tui, Weka, Kereru - All Gone” – An Observation On The West Coast From An 82 Year Old
“Just before Christmas my worker and I were clearing back overhanging foliage from a footpath in a built up area. Along came an elderly gentleman on his little scooter thing they have these days."
"He wanted to stop for a yarn so we obliged. He was 82 and had just made one last journey back home to the area he grew up in … the West coast. He went to all his childhood and teenage years haunts and spent time, a lot of it in and on bush tracks."
I asked him did he notice much in the way of change since those days?
"The Birds he said … the place used to be full of native birds but all he saw on this whole trip there was one Weka. Everything has gone. The bush is now dead. No Kiwi, no Weka or Tui, even the Kea had gone."
“The place used to be lousy with Keruru, now nothing. He has no doubt whatsoever that 1080 is to blame. It’s just destroyed everything.
Where he lives now, and I have no idea where that is, he said he had planted lots of Kowhai and every year the Tui came and he used to sit on the front porch and watch them … this year … nothing … not one bird."
"But of course a lifetime’s observation is unscientific and counts for nothing.”
“… a lifetime’s observation is unscientific and counts for nothing” … note that even the independent science from bona fide scientists counts for nothing.
Only the ‘science’ that the authorities sign off is considered acceptable.
Remember the recent post citing Reihana Robinson in ‘The Killing Nation’ and the revelation that 70% of the Department of Conservation’s ‘scientific’ studies justifying the aerial distribution of 1080 are done in-house?
So called anti-1080 people aren’t actually terrorists. They simply want clean, non poisoned water & food, at least 70% independent science and pest control that really does target pests without killing our natives.
It is simply not acceptable to kill 10,000 birds in one single 1080 drop.
Birds collected following a 1080 drop in the Kahurangi National Park, clearly, many are natives
Their doco is a very comprehensive overview with the independent science to illustrate the question marks that remain over the use of this poison. There are links also on our 1080 resources page to most of the groups, pages, sites etc that will provide you with further information to make your own informed decision on this matter.
If you are pro poisoning of the environment, EnvirowatchRangitikei is not the place to espouse your opinions. Mainstream would be the place to air those. This is a venue for sharing the independent science you won’t of course find there.
Finally we don’t endorse violence in any way shape or form. We are not terrorists.
CBS Reporter Calls Mainstream Press ‘Political Activists,’ ‘Propagandists’ +
Max Blumental Proves Western Media A Propagandist For War Criminals February 24 2019 | From: BigLeaguePolitics / PaulCraigRoberts / RT / Various
Lara Logan gives her honest opinion about the leftwing media.
A mainstream press reported admitted what conservatives already knew in a Friday podcast interview – that the corporate news media is not journalism, but leftist political hackery.
"Although the media has historically always been left-leaning, we’ve abandoned our pretense - or at least the effort - to be objective, today. … We’ve become political activists, and some could argue propagandists, and there’s some merit to that,” CBS’s Lara Logan said on the “Mike Drop” podcast with Mike Ritland.
Logan encouraged people to seek out alternative viewpoints from conservative outlets like Breitbart.
She went on to describe the sheer volume of left-leaning news vs. conservative news using an analogy of the Wailing Wall in Israel:
"Visually, anyone who’s ever been to Israel and been to the Wailing Wall has seen that the women have this tiny little spot in front of the wall to pray, and the rest of the wall is for the men.
To me, that’s a great representation of the American media, is that in this tiny little corner where the women pray you’ve got Breitbart and Fox News and a few others, and from there on, you have CBS, ABC, NBC, Huffington Post, Politico, whatever, right?
All of them. And that’s a problem for me, because even if it was reversed, if it was vastly mostly on the right, that would also be a problem for me."
She also bashed the press for its so obvious hatred of President Donald J. Trump.
"How do you know you’re being lied to? How do you know you’re being manipulated? How do you know there’s something not right with the coverage?
When they simplify it all [and] there’s no grey. It’s all one way. Well, life isn’t like that. If it doesn’t match real life, it’s probably not. Something’s wrong.
For example, all the coverage on Trump all the time is negative. … That’s a distortion of the way things go in real life.”
Logan even spoke of the dangers of only one ideology or set of ideas prevailing, while the rest are shunned by major institutions in society.
"One ideological perspective on everything never leads to an open free diverse tolerant society. The more opinions and views … of everything that you have, the better off we all are.
So creating one ideological position on everything throughout your universities, throughout academia, in school and college, in media, and everywhere else, that’s what concerns me. I don’t have to agree with everybody.”
The country’s shops remain open but “sparsely stocked,” The Guardian laments. Even “basic commodities” such as toothbrushes aren’t available for purchase, CNN bemoans. “Hungry” Venezuelans must choose between “torture or starvation,” Bloomberg grimly concludes.
Mainstream media coverage of Venezuela gives the impression that President Nicolas Maduro is slowly starving his own people – a narrative which, as journalist Max Blumenthal found after surveying a massive supermarket in Caracas, is wildly deceptive.
Read the story and watch the video of Blumenthal in the Caracas supermarket jammed with all the allegedly unobtainable foods and products.
The reason Washington wants to shut down the English language Russian news organizations is that, unlike the US, UK, and European media, the Russian news organizations report truthfully, thus undermining Washington’s attempt to control all explantions.
The dumbshit Westerners who rely on the Western presstitutes are brainwashed to the point that they are useless for the cause of freedom and democracy. Indeed, they are dangerous to freedom and democracy.
Where Are The ‘Empty Shelves’? Max Blumenthal Tours Caracas Supermarket
Corporate media grieve for the barren shelves and empty bellies in Venezuela, but are the alleged food shortages real?
After touring a supermarket in Caracas, Max Blumenthal found plenty to buy – even craft beer.
“Grocery shelves lie empty as food becomes increasingly scarce” in Venezuela, the UK Independent weeps. The country’s shops remain open but “sparsely stocked,” The Guardian laments. Even “basic commodities” such as toothbrushes aren’t available for purchase, CNN bemoans.
“Hungry” Venezuelans must choose between “torture or starvation,” Bloomberg grimly concludes.
Mainstream media coverage of Venezuela gives the impression that President Nicolas Maduro is slowly starving his own people – a narrative which, as journalist Max Blumenthal found after surveying a massive supermarket in Caracas, is wildly deceptive.
The store offered a wide selection of meat, produce, and dairy (although no low-fat Greek yogurt, an indignity which is likely the result of Maduro’s tyrannical ways, Blumenthal jokingly hypothesizes).
Most importantly, craft beer – a hallmark of heroic consumerism – could be found in the supermarket’s alcohol aisle.
Blumenthal also marveled at the store’s huge variety of scented toilet paper, shampoo and toiletries – the “basic commodities” which, according to CNN, are nowhere to be found in Venezuela.
"There isn’t an issue here with food distribution or food scarcity,” Blumenthal concludes.
“The issue is the buying power of Venezuelans has been completely destroyed because their currency has been so badly weakened by hyperinflation, speculation and the flood of dollars that the government can’t control here, as well as hoarding by private capitalist elements that support the opposition.”
The amusing bit of on-the-ground reporting comes amid a tense stand-off over US attempts to deliver what Washington describes as humanitarian aid into Venezuela, in defiance of the wishes of its government.
Juan Guaido, the US-backed, self-declared “interim president” of Venezuela, said on Thursday that he will personally go to the border with Colombia to get the shipment from the US, urging drivers to go with him and defy the border guards ordered to prevent the delivery.
Humanitarian organizations have distanced themselves from the alleged aid package, amid accusations that the “humanitarian aid” could contain military equipment, or be used for political purposes.
We Have Been Criminalized By An Overabundance Of Laws February 23 2019 | From: PaulCraigRoberts “Order may be nothing more than evidence of tyranny. Order may be nothing more than the prohibitions on freedom, the elimination of rights and the suppression of liberty. You are just as unsafe when things are too orderly as when they are disorderly.” - Jerry Day
Governments have learned that laws can be used as revenue and control measures by criminalizing more and more of human activity.
Indeed, in many instances the term “criminal” is now meaningless as law enforcement has become a greater threat to ordinary people than actual criminals.
At an accelerating rate, western governments are criminalizing victimless trivialities for profit and control of the masses.
In Denmark, the laws governing unemployment benefits are more than 36,000 pages and grow by almost seven pages daily on average.
A massive 20,000 laws have been formulated to control ownership and use of guns in the US. The taxfoundation.org has shown that in order to understand and comply with US tax laws one must go through about 80,000 pages.
Civil libertarians protest that prosecutors can charge any American with several crimes every day of the year because there are so many laws and regulations.
As it is impossible for a person to peruse all the required pages in order to comply with the laws, we are all probable criminals. Thus, the word “criminal” has effectively lost its meaning.
Governments not only criminalize behavior for revenue purposes and in order to create a slave prison population to be exploited by private industries.
Governments also legalize crimes, such as gambling for which government prosecuted private interests, and turn them into government sponsored lotteries. There is also evidence that the US government is actively involved in illegal drug trade.
San Jose Mercury investigative reporter Gary Webb found evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the drug trade.
The Mercury published it. The CIA then used its media assets, such as the Washington Post, to carry on a campaign against Webb to discredit him.
Investigative reporters got the message and have not looked into the CIA’s presence in the Afghan opium drug trade despite the massive growth under US occupation of Afghanistan’s opium share of the world market.
The Taliban had suppressed the opium trade, but under US occupation the percentage of the world market supplied by Afghanistan rose from 6% in 2001 to 93% in 2007.
An explosion in drug laws and incarcerations saw the light of the day after President Nixon launched the US War on Drugs in 1971. After 50 years of stable incarceration rates, the number of US prisoners went from 161 per 100,000 population in 1972 to 767 per 100,000 in 2007, almost a fivefold increase.
In 2007, federal and state prisons and local jails held nearly 2.3 million inmates (over 20% of the world’s prisoners), but if parolees and probationers are included, the total US correctional population exceeded 7 million.
Prisoners have become integrated into the corporate world as privately owned prisons and forced labor have become big businesses. Corporations who owe their low labor cost to prison labor have a vested interest in harsh sentences and expansion of the already seemingly infinite number of laws.
Prohibition of drugs does not deter people from using them. If harsh drug laws deterred people from drugs, not many offenders would be found in correctional facilities with a drug offense on their rap sheet.
If we consider the 2015 statistics for people on probation and parole, 25% and 31% respectively had a drug charge as their most serious offense, a total of 1,217,305 people. In 2016, 47% and 15% respectively of federal and state prisoners were in prison for drug violations, their most serious offense.
In 2017, federal agents and state police made 1,632,921 arrests for drugs violations of which 85.4% of these arrests were for possession.
These numbers clearly show that harsher sentences do not deter people from drugs. This was also echoed in a study by the Pew Research Center which showed that drug use, drug arrest, and overdose death had no statistically significant relationship with drug imprisonment.
That is, higher incarceration rates did not deter people from drugs. Drug laws also result in the murders of many people by police in violation of due process.
As police are seldom held accountable for their crimes, the legal and constitutional protections of citizens are being lost.
Moreover, prohibition leads to secondary crimes as indicated by a study that showed “17% of state and 18% of federal prisoners committed their crimes to obtain money for drugs.”
If cigarettes, alcohol and chocolate were outlawed tomorrow, prices would rise, vicious syndicates would appear and people would commit real crimes, including robbery and theft in order to get their preferred stimulant. Prohibition of alcohol in the US and elsewhere produced a new class of criminal activity.
It should come as no surprise that a study by Coyne et al concluded that:
"Prohibition is not only ineffective, but counterproductive, at achieving the goals of policymakers both domestically and abroad … the domestic War on Drugs has contributed to an increase in drug overdoses and fostered and sustained the creation of powerful drug cartels.”
Getting access to drug war expenditures is notoriously difficult, but a 2010 estimate showed that one trillion dollars in tax revenue have been spent on the War on Drugs since 1971.
Nevertheless a multiyear study, published in the British Medical Journal by Werb et al, concluded that “expanding efforts at controlling the global illegal drug market through law enforcement are failing.”
It appears that the US War on Drugs has been a disaster for the average American, but has enriched certain powerful organizations.
Some governments not only participate in the illegal drug trade, but also approve the production and sale of addictive drugs by private businesses.
Many of the drugs that can be purchased on the street from your average drug dealer have been approved by the FDA, including amphetamines, MDMA, opioids, psilocybin and methamphetamine.
One of these drugs is called Adzenys which is a formulation of amphetamine (yes, it is the same drug sold by street dealers), has been approved by the FDA for children.
This amphetamine drug comes in “great-tasting” fruit and candy flavors for children who do not like taking pills. Possible side effects include addiction, heart attack, and death.
Large pharmaceutical corporations which have deep financial ties to policymakers produce and distribute these drugs on a grand scale. The US government cashes in on the drugs via taxation and through campaign contributions from these multibillion dollar industries.
Transparency International concludes:
"Pharmaceutical companies can unduly influence national political systems through their large spending power. Pharmaceutical companies often fund candidates that support their position on key issues.
Outside of elections, the pharmaceutical industry spends vast sums of money lobbying.”
Professor Peter Gøtzsche, former director of the independent Nordic Cochrane Centre, shows in his book, Lethal Medicine and Organized Crime, that legalized drugs kill at least 200,000 Americans and also 200,000 Europeans every year.
Half of those people take their drugs as prescribed, the other half die because of contraindications and accidental overdoses.
Data from the CDC show that in 2017, heroin and cocaine killed 15,482 and 13,942 Americans respectively. However, 88,000 died from alcohol related causes, over 480,000 from tobacco, but zero died from a cannabis overdose.
There are innumerable examples of how laws turn citizens into criminals. On June 1, 2012, in Denmark, anyone without a permit could purchase an air gun with a caliber in excess of 4.5 millimeters.
However, on June 2 such possession brought a prison sentence. Every day governments define the word “criminal” more and more broadly. Eventually, by existence alone we will all be criminals.
The Mystery Of Rennes-le-Chateau February 22 2019 | From: FinalWakeUpCall
Secret Societies: Was the Priory of Sion involved with the Unification of Europe?
If recent claims by various authors are correct, the Priory of Sion may be the oldest and most powerful secret society in history.
It is said that they are the driving force behind the Knights Templar, and documents show that former leaders include names such as Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Fludd, Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and the artist Jean Cocteau. This group was not known to the public until the mid-twentieth century.
The mystery surrounding the Priory of Sion takes place around the abbey of Rennes-le-Chateau in the Languedoc in southern France, where the Cathars were established in the 10th century.
They were the ancestors of the Scottish Carbonari, who had a lot of influence on the illuminati.
The Cathar Society was a humanitarian order who believed that their religious views were purer than those of the Catholic Church. They were followers of the former Gnostics, who devoted themselves more to spiritual matters than to material wealth.
Catharians and Catharism
The name Cathar means ‘the pure’. They were bloodily slaughtered between 1208 and 1244 at the religious command of Pope Innocent III by his papal army. Tens of thousands of men were sent by the Vatican to the province of Languedoc in France.
Rennes-le-Chateau became, many years later, the home of the Templars who from their early years had maintained warm relations with the Catharians.
They were more Cathar than Catholic. The Catharians, many of whom were wealthy, had a considerable secret cache of gold and silver and important writings. Researchers report that these treasures were smuggled away three months before their slaughter, after which this hoard was lost forever.
The Mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau
Caught up in the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau in 1885, was a Catholic priest by the name of François Berenger Saunière. He took the initiative of restoring the city church that in 1059 was dedicated to Mary Magdalene and stood on West Gothic ruins, dating back to the sixth century.
While he was at work in the church in 1891, he removed an altar stone and discovered that one of the supports was hollow and contained four parchment papers; two pieces with pedigrees from 1244 and 1644 and two missives written between 1780 and 1790 by a former parish priest, the abbot Antoine Bigou.
The texts were unusual and seemed to have been written in code, some of which were incredibly complex. Saunière was referred to Paris by his superior and met the director general of the seminar, Saint Sulpice. Later it became known that this seminary was probably a cover for the Priory of Sion.
What the documents contained is still a secret to this day, but it was a big turning point in the life of Saunière. His visit to Paris not only earned him new friends in high circles, but also great wealth.
Before his sudden death in 1917, he spent many millions on new constructions and renovations in his town.
Shortly before his death, he discovered a small crypt underneath the church, which allegedly contained skeletons. He also discovered that the treasure he found belonged to King Dagobert II and to Sion, where he ultimately died.
Conspiracies
This dark mixture of conspiracies clearly points to a level of reality that does not come to light in the MSM.
Researchers have found irrefutable evidence of involvement of an organised and coherent framework active behind the scenes, sometimes facilitated by using other organisations as a façade, aiming at the involvement of the Priory of Sion in the ‘dark underworld of European issues’ – where the mafia partially mergers with secret societies and intelligence services.
The big business world plays cosy hand clapping with the Vatican, where huge amounts of money are used for clandestine purposes, where the dividing lines between politics, religion, espionage, the banking world and organised crime fade and become negligible.
It is a turbid sphere of influence where European Christian Democratic parties, and various societies are committed to the European unity. It is a realm in which those in royal circles, neo-knight orders, masonic sects, the CIA, Mossad, the Maltese Knights and the Vatican are driven together, to temporarily join forces for a common purpose.
However, as far as is known, no researcher has been able to get a firm grip on the Priory of Sion and its surrounding secret societies and groups. All is faded away and obfuscated by false documents, contradictory statements and smokescreens.
Moreover, yet other researchers are of the opinion that the Priory of Sion represents the summit of the current power pyramid and that the Priory of Sion recruits freemasons for its society through the Rosicrucians.
The European Union now seems to be a meticulous copy of the united Europe as envisaged by the leaders of the New World Order and the Priory of Sion.
It is believed that secret societies are inter connected with the CIA, Mossad, the CFR, Bilderbergers, Round tables and Freemasonry, and even further back in history to the Illuminati, the Templars, the Maltese Knights and the Priory of Sion.
With their continuing agenda to discredit both national and ecclesiastical authorities in their attempt to first forge a united Europe and to then unite the rest of the world, i.e. to realise the NWO.
Instead of taking part in ecumenical studies to determine which traditions are most accurate, the Roman Church has attempted to eradicate everything that defied their authority with particularly violent and murderous means.
One of the most prominent and powerful threats of ecclesiastical dogma came from the Templars. This order, originally a small secret group of knights, was formed to protect pilgrims after the first crusade was successfully completed, after having conquered the city of Jerusalem.
The Knights Templar really did not spend much time patrolling the roads. Instead, this group of knights, who had good connections with the most powerful European families, made excavations deep below where once Solomon’s Temple had stood in Jerusalem.
Whatever they found there, was all taken to Europe and was apparently hidden in the south of France in the village of Rennes-le-Chateau.
While nobody seems to know anything with absolute certainty about the particularities of these treasures of the Knights Templar, most researchers have come to the conclusion that in addition to a literal treasure of gold and silver, they most probably found old documents and works of art that could have been used to challenge and ultimately destroy ecclesiastical traditions.
A group whose beliefs were possibly strengthened by the Templars’ discovery, was the Catharians, who were mainly based in the Languedoc region.
Merovingian Dynasty
The authorities of the Roman church felt threatened by the power of the Merovingian bloodline and they arranged the murder of King Dagobert II, through their influence over his stewards, after which they organised their own principality.
When the peace-loving Catharians condemned such abuse of power by the Church in 1209, Pope Innocent III began to take military steps against them too.
It is the strong suspicion that the treasures found in Jerusalem by the Knights Templar confirmed the Catharians’ faith. In fact, many Cathars were kept out of the hands of the papal army through the support of the Templars.
The Templars
Meanwhile the Knights Templar succeeded in intimidating the Roman Catholic Church so that the Church grantedspecial rights and favours to their order, through which they became one of the most powerful multinational organisations in the world.
Nonetheless, in 1307 the Templars themselves became victims of the wrath of the Vatican. In that year, all Templars in France were arrested and tortured by King Philip IV of France, who was commissioned by the Pope and the Vatican to perpetrate this slaughter.
Philip IV had previously been dismissed as a member of the Templars because of his great debts to them. Most of Templars fled the country with a large fleet of boats that was stationed in La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast. It is assumed that they took the treasures with them.
Abroad, the Templars simply continued in various countries, albeit under different secret societies and orders, such as the Knights of Christ, Hospital Knights, and the Knights of the Teutonic Order.
In this way, their unorthodox ideas were spread throughout Europe and converged in the Masonic lodge of the Strict Observation where the “illuminated” Freemasonry arose.
It is assumed that among the hidden treasures, were genealogical documents that made the connections of the descendants of Jesus through the Merovingian royal family to individuals of our time.
Possibly, these repressed royals may have had their hand in the movement for the creation of a united Europe, in order to restore the old Holy Roman Empire.
Research into the movement for the unification of Europe and the Priory of Sion reveals connections between many of the modern secret societies, including freemasonry, intelligence services and the Vatican.
This underworld of intrigues was briefly in the news when in the eighties of the last century, the scandal of the P2 lodge in Italy erupted.
The hidden knowledge of the past contains secrets from our very distant history that have provided the basis for the theologies of secret societies.
These secrets garner the attention of high-ranking members of secret societies and even secret services. It was precisely these secrets that formed the link between modern conspiratorial societies and ancient mysteries.
For more comprehensive information about our secret rulers, it is recommended to read my latest book; The Great Awakening, in which various chapters are dedicated to this subject, explaining the hierarchy in depth, incorporating with the names of today’s well-known authorities and their roles.
The Deeper Reason For Drug Ads On Television & The Pharmaceutical Industry Is Largely Run By Leftists, Stunning New Research Finds… Vaccine Mandates, Drugging Of Children, Chemotherapy And More February 21 2019 | From: JonRappoport / NaturalNews / Various
Television viewers are inundated with drug ads from Big Pharma. It’s a flood.
Have you ever heard of these drugs? Otezla, Xeljanz, Namzaric, Keytruda, Breo, Cosentyz? Not likely. If you have, do you know what conditions they treat? Highly unlikely. But there they are, splashed in commercials.
Why? Who is going to remember to ask their doctor whether these and other obscure meds are right for them?
What’s going on here?
The answer is: It doesn't matter what drugs are being advertised. If Pharma can pay enough TOTAL money for ads, for ALL drugs, and dominate the allotted TV time for commercials, it can control the news - and that is exactly what it wants to do.
Reporting on them, wall to wall, isn’t good for the drug business. However, as an industry ponying up billions of dollars for TV ads, Pharma can limit exposure and negative publicity. It can (and does) say to television networks: If you give us a hard time on the news, we’ll take our ad money and go somewhere else.
Boom. End of problem.
Face it, the billions of dollars Pharma is paying for TV ads are a drop in the bucket, compared with its profits gained from selling the drugs. The ads are a good investment. As a bribe.
Control the news; There is another reason for the insane flood of TV drug ads:
By their sheer number, they convince viewers that medical drugs (no matter what they are) are absolutely necessary.
Hour by hour, viewers numbly watch drug commercial after commercial.
The overall message is: To keep illness from your door, to cure illness, to alleviate illness, you must take these medicines.
THIS IS LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY. You’re all sick, and you need help, and this is the ONLY kind of help there is.
The drug companies could invent names of fake drugs that don’t even exist, advertise them in a cascade on television, with the same intent. DRUGS ARE AS VITAL TO LIFE AS WATER OR AIR.
But what about all those dire warnings of side effects from the drugs? By law, the companies must include them in their commercials.
Well, the companies have calculated that, on balance, the stark, front-line, unending message of DRUGS, DRUGS, AND MORE DRUGS will outweigh the warnings in viewers’ minds.
If the television audience is nailed with the idea that they can’t escape; that their health always hangs in the balance; that dire illnesses are always waiting in the shadows to strike; that the slightest ache or pain could be a precursor to a crippling or fatal disease; and drugs are the only solution and protection - they’re going to overlook the warnings about side effects.
All in all, drug ads are news.
That’s the approach. Pharma is blasting out 24/7 news asserting modern medicine’s central and commanding role in the life of every human.
It’s a gigantic and stupendous piece of mind control, but when did that ever stop tyrants from inventing reality for the masses?
Implicit in “ask your doctor if drug X is right for you,” is the message: “go to your doctor.” That’s the key. If the ads can put a viewer into the system, he will be diagnosed with something, and he’ll be given a drug for it.
So the drug ads are also promotions for doctors, who are the arbiters and the decision makers. Some kind of medical need (drugs) always exists - and the doctor will tell you what it is. And all patients should OBEY. Even if, in the process, they go broke.
Take the case of Opdivo, a drug that treats squamous non-small cell lung cancer. Cost? $12,500 a month. Patients on Medicare will pay $2500 a month out of their own pockets. And the result?
Wall St, Journal: “In the clinical study on which the Opdivo ad bases its claims, the drug extended median patient survival to 9.2 months from the start of treatment…”
The cancer patient pays $22,500 for nine months of survival, during which the suffering continues, and then he dies.
The ad isn’t mentioning THAT.
The ad relies on the doctor to convince the patient to go along with this lunatic program.
The Pharmaceutical Industry Is Largely Run By Leftists, Stunning New Research Finds… Vaccine Mandates, Drugging Of Children, Chemotherapy And More
New research led by Crowdpac, a nonpartisan polling group, has taken a hard look at federal campaign contributions across a number of different industries.
And as it turns out, Big Pharma is largely run by members of the Left-wing - as is the entertainment industry, the news media, academia, tech and other influential industries.
Across the board, liberals are dominating some very powerful arenas, and often are virtually unchallenged by anyone else in their profession.
Ideological echo chambers exist not just on social media but across a variety of industries - it is no wonder leftist ideologies are now running amok. Take a look at Big Tech: As the Crowdpac data indicates, tech is largely a liberal industry.
Some of the biggest tech companies right now are patting each other on the back for censoring conservatives as “hate speech.” They have no foil, and there are no conservative tech companies to take a stand against this blatant abuse of power.
Similarly, Big Pharma is also largely run by leftists - which explains the industry’s continuous attempts at overthrowing personal autonomy by way of vaccine mandates, medical kidnapping and more.
To conduct their research, Crowdpac assigned individual donors a “score” of being more liberal or conservative, based on who they donated money to.
Crowdpac founder and CEO Steve Hilton told Business Insider that the goal of this research is to provide people with “good objective, nonpartisan information about the candidates on their ballot in a simple form that they can understand.”
He added that “research shows that campaign contributions are the best predictor of how a candidate will behave in office.”
Hilton says the hope is that more small donations will reduce the pull of “big money” in politics.
The research led by Crowdpac has also provided insight into the political leanings of major industries here in the United States:
Click on the image above to view a larger version in a new window
The pharmaceutical industry is overwhelmingly liberal with a score of 2.8L - though not quite as liberal as Big Tech, the news media, academia or the entertainment industry, who are admittedly hard to beat when it comes to radical leftism.
As the industry which stands to profit most from vaccine mandates, toxic chemotherapy, medical kidnapping and more, it is no surprise that Big Pharma votes for liberals: A vote for Big Government means a vote for big money for them.
Big Pharma and Big Government Go Hand-in-Hand
The pharmaceutical industry’s campaign donations are just the tip of the iceberg when it come to Big Pharma’s ties to Big Government. For example, Senator Dr. Richard Pan is notorious for his involvement in creating vaccine mandates in California, SB277.
Senator Pan has extensive ties to the pharma industry, having received an estimated $95,000 from Merck alone during the 2010 election cycle.
Reports indicate that Pan received another campaign donation from a pharma company just before diving into SB277. Over the years, pharma companies have donated millions of dollars to California political candidates.
And it’s not just individual politicians, either - the pharma industry has entire federal agencies doing their bidding. Look no further than the CDC for proof of that.
One of the more shocking yet little known details is that the CDC takes money from Big Pharma indirectly through a shadow organization known as The CDC Foundation.
This foundation’s sole purpose is to accept money from Big Pharma and other corporations, and funnel it to a federal agency.
As reported:
"During the 2016 fiscal year alone, the CDC Foundation raised over $42 million.
The donor list for that year includes dozens of corporations, but some of the more notable ones include Bayer Corporation, Cargill, Inc., The Coca Cola Company, Genzyme Corporation, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer Foundation, United Industries Corporation, and countless others.”
This is government-sanctioned corruption at its finest. But it gets worse: Medical kidnappings are on the rise, and you can bet that Big Pharma’s ties to Big Government are to blame.
Russiagate Is Finished & Senate Intel Committee Finds No Direct Evidence of Conspiracy Between Trump Campaign and Russia February 20 2019 | From: LewRockwell / TheGatewayPundit
For more than two years U.S. politicians, the media and some bloggers hyped a conspiracy theory.
They claimed that Russia had somehow colluded with the Trump campaign to get him elected.
An obviously fake ‘Dirty Dossier’ about Trump, commissioned by the Clinton campaign, was presented as evidence.
Regular business contacts between Trump flunkies and people in Ukraine or Russia were claimed to be proof for nefarious deals.
A Russian click-bait company was accused of manipulating the U.S. electorate by posting puppy pictures and crazy memes on social media.
Huge investigations were launched. Every rumor or irrelevant detail coming from them was declared to be – finally – the evidence that would put Trump into the slammer. Every month the walls were closing in on Trump.
Finally the conspiracy theory has run out of steam. Russiagate is finished:
"After two years and 200 interviews, the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the end of its investigation into the 2016 election, having uncovered no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to both Democrats and Republicans on the committee.
…
Democrats and other Trump opponents have long believed that special counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional investigators would unearth new and more explosive evidence of Trump campaign coordination with Russians.
Mueller may yet do so, although Justice Department and Congressional sources say they believe that he, too, is close to wrapping up his investigation.”
The Russia Hoax: The I... Gregg Jarrett Best Price: $7.00 Buy New $11.00 (as of 09:15 EST - Details) Nothing, zero, nada was found to support the conspiracy theory.
The Trump campaign did not collude with Russia. A few flunkies were indicted for unrelated tax issues and for lying to the investigators about some minor details.
But nothing at all supports the dramatic claims of collusion made since the beginning of the affair.
In a recent statement House leader Nancy Pelosi was reduced to accuse Trump campaign officials of doing their job:
"The indictment of Roger Stone makes clear that there was a deliberate, coordinated attempt by top Trump campaign officials to influence the 2016 election and subvert the will of the American people. ….”
No one called her out for spouting such nonsense.
Russiagate created a lot of damage.
The alleged Russian influence campaign that never happened was used to install censorship on social media. It was used to undermine the election of progressive Democrats.
The weapon salesmen used it to push for more NATO aggression against Russia. Maria Butina, an innocent Russian woman interested in good relation with the United States, was held in solitary confinement (recommended) until she signed a paper which claims that she was involved in a conspiracy.
In a just world the people who for more then two years hyped the conspiracy theory and caused so much damage would be pushed out of their public positions.
Unfortunately that is not going to happen. They will jump onto the next conspiracy train continue from there.
Senate Intel Committee Finds No Direct Evidence of Conspiracy Between Trump Campaign and Russia
The Senate Intel Committee has found no direct evidence of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to BOTH Democrats and Republicans on the Committee, NBC reported.
After over two years, 200 interviews and reviewing hundreds of thousands of documents and wasting money, Senate investigators are now saying what we’ve known all along - there was no Trump-Russia collusion.
"If we write a report based upon the facts that we have, then we don’t have anything that would suggest there was collusion by the Trump campaign and Russia.”
“If I can finish tomorrow, I would finish tomorrow,” Burr said, adding, “We know we’re getting to the bottom of the barrel because there’re not new questions that we’re searching for answers to.”
The President tweeted his support for Richard Burr on Sunday and asked, “Is anybody really surprised by this?” after the Committee found zero collusion with Russia.
According to NBC, even the Democrats on the Committee admit there is no Trump-Russia conspiracy.
“We were never going find a contract signed in blood saying, ‘Hey Vlad, we’re going to collude,'” one Democrat aide said.
One Democrat investigator twisted himself into a pretzel trying to make even the most insignificant contact with anyone of Russian descent an issue - “Donald Trump Jr. made clear in his messages that he was willing to accept help from the Russians,” one Democratic Senate investigator said. “Trump publicly urged the Russians to find Clinton’s missing emails.”
What does that even mean? Again, no crimes were committed and the Democrats blatantly ignore Hillary Clinton’s contact with a British spy who compiled a fake dossier from Russian intel sources to spy on her political opponent.
The House Intel Panel also began a parallel ‘Trump-Russia’ probe in January of 2017, but concluded in April of 2018 that they found zero evidence of collusion.
Mark Warner, the Democrat working along side of Senator Burr as Vice Chairman of the Senate Intel Panel has made numerous media appearances over the last two years complaining about Russian Twitter trolls and vaguely suggesting there are new developments in his committee’s Russia probe as evidence Trump may have conspired with Russia.
Although Senate Intel Chairman Burr doesn’t speak to the media too often, he publicly stated over the summer his committee still had found no evidence of Russian collusion and reiterated that statement once again in the Fall.
According to NBC, it is going to take about 6 or 7 months for the Senate Intel Committee to write their final report - JUST IN TIME FOR ELECTION SEASON! How convenient!
As the Senate Intel Committee and Robert Mueller wind down their investigations into ‘Trump-Russia collusion,’ House Intel Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) is ramping up a massive investigation into President Trump’s finances and personal life, also known as presidential harassment.
Satellite Data: No Real Increase In Global Warming For The Last 23 Years + University Of Alabama Scientists: ‘No Evidence’ Climate Change Causes Extreme Cold February 19 2019 | From: NaturalNews / WashingtonTImes / Various
There is no question that global warming is a contentious issue.
While many people have accepted it as established scientific fact, there are also many who adamantly insist that the rising and falling temperatures associated with climate change are simply part of the Earth’s natural cycles.
Now, a new study by climate scientists John Christy and Richard McNider of the University of Alabama-Huntsville, is sure to lead to even more heated discussions at dinner tables around the country.
The study, which was funded by the Department of Energy, found that if you remove the unusual heating and cooling effects caused by two major volcanoes – El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991 – from the satellite temperature record, it becomes clear that there has been virtually no change in the rate of warming in the past 23 years.
Christy explained that the volcanoes initially resulted in lower temperatures when soot, ash and debris in the atmosphere reflected sunlight back into space.
This initial cooling was followed by higher temperatures in the years immediately following the eruptions.
Christy believes that this caused what looked like a trend of warming caused by man-made emissions that was actually strictly caused by the volcanoes.
"While volcanic eruptions are natural events, it was the timing of these that had such a noticeable effect on the trend,” said Christy.
“If the same eruptions had happened near the more recent end of the dataset, they could have pushed the overall trend into negative numbers, or a long-term cooling.”
"Christy and McNider found the rate of warming has been 0.096 degrees Celsius per decade after “the removal of volcanic cooling in the early part of the record,” which “is essentially the same value we determined in 1994 … using only 15 years of data.”
Like many other climate scientists, Christy has argued for years that climate models are incorrect and exaggerate the levels of global warming in the bulk atmospheres. These levels have been monitored by satellites since the latter part of the 1970s.
"We indicated 23 years ago - in our 1994 Nature article - that climate models had the atmosphere’s sensitivity to CO2 much too high,” Christy noted in a statement. “This recent paper bolsters that conclusion.”
Christy has been insisting for years that climate models predict too much warming in the lowest five miles of the atmosphere – known as the troposphere – and that they are too sensitive to increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
"From our observations we calculated that value as 1.1 C (almost 2° Fahrenheit), while climate models estimate that value as 2.3 C (about 4.1° F),” Christy noted.
Several scientists have, in fact, admitted that the climate models run too hot, with climate scientist Ben Santer explaining that the “overestimation” was “partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings used in the model simulations.”
Nonetheless, there are many scientists who insist that the climate models are accurate, and who would also question this study’s removal of the volcano-caused temperature variances from the data.
Still, this study is more proof that not all scientists accept catastrophic man-made global warming as a foregone conclusion, and that the science is far from settled.
University Of Alabama Scientists: ‘No Evidence’ Climate Change Causes Extreme Cold
Numerous media outlets cited last week’s polar vortex as an example of extreme weather caused by climate change, but it turns out such cold snaps are actually on the decline.
Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, posted a graphic of November-March cold waves in the East and Midwest dating back to 1895 that flies in the face of the “global warming causes extreme cold” argument.
The theory has it that the decline of Arctic sea ice, which has dropped by about 15 percent over the last 40 years, has disrupted the polar vortex, causing it to move southward, but the data assembled by Mr. Spencer and UAH professor of atmospheric science John Christy showed otherwise.
“As can be seen in the plot below, there is no evidence in the data supporting the claim that decreasing Arctic sea ice in recent decades is causing more frequent displacement of cold winter air masses into the eastern U.S., at least through the winter of 2017-18,”Mr. Spencer said Thursday on his Global Warming blog.
Not only that, but “[t]he trend is markedly downward in the most recent 40 years (since 1979) which is the earliest we have reliable measurements of Arctic sea ice from satellite microwave radiometers (my specialty),” Mr. Spencer said.
The analysis focused on cold waves in 27 Midwestern and Eastern states lasting more than two days and featuring temperatures below the 5th percentile of daily January maximums.
"If the Polar Vortex is due to Global Warming, Why are U.S. Cold Waves Decreasing?"
News outlets were filled with stories timed to last week’s deep freeze in the Midwest and Northeast about how global warming may paradoxically result in unusual cold.
“This is the Age of Weather Extremes,” declared a New York Times headline, while the Washington Post reported, “Extreme weather, like the polar vortex, is becoming more common as the Arctic continues to be disrupted by climate change.”
“Scientists generally agree that the polar vortex is shape-shifting and wandering more often in recent years, and many scientists say there may be a connection between global warming and the vortex,” said a USA Today video.
“The theory is that when higher temperatures invade the Arctic, the vortex is corrupted, and loses its structural integrity, meaning it goes on a chilly road show to the South.”
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, a potential 2020 presidential contender, tweeted last week, “The science is clear: Climate change makes extreme weather more frequent and more intense.”
Coldest Temps Ever Freezes Midwest - Here's Why Mocking Global Warming Is Appropriate
Michael E. Mann, Penn State professor and leader of the so-called warmist school of climate change - Mr. Spencer and Mr. Christy are well-known skeptics - said that two cold records were set last week in Illinois towns, while 35 heat records were set in January, almost all in Australia.
“So we’re seeing a trend toward more record heat, not record cold,” said Mr. Mann in a Saturday op-ed in the [U.K.] Guardian.
“And even if we were seeing an increase in cold winter outbreaks in certain parts of the US and Europe, it wouldn’t necessarily contradict the case for climate change - it might even be symptomatic of it, associated with the breakdown in the polar vortex.”
?
Other scientists have pushed back on the narrative, arguing that southward dips in the polar vortex are nothing new and date back well before the increase in atmospheric carbon emissions.
“These southward movements of part of the vortex have always occurred,” said University of Colorado Boulder atmospheric scientist Roger A. Pielke Sr. “With respect to climate, a strong polar vortex occurs when it is particularly cold at higher latitudes.
The colder the troposphere at the higher latitudes, the stronger is the polar jet stream. So if anything, these extreme Arctic outbreaks suggest global warming has little effect on them.”
Mr. Spencer chalked up the hype to those seeking to find an explanation for cold-weather events despite gradually increasing temperatures.
"When these cold air outbreaks continued to menace the United States even as global warming has caused global average temperatures to creep upward, an explanation had to be found,” he said in his post.
“After all, snow was supposed to be a thing of the past now.”
He concluded that the “connection between Eastern U.S. cold waves and Arctic sea ice is speculative, at best. Just like most theories of climate change.”
Already in January three leading US digital outlets - BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and Vice announced layoffs that have left many accomplished journalists unemployed.
Consolidation of journalism looks set to continue unabated as larger media conglomerates swallow up smaller players globally. We also appear to be witnessing the death throes of the concept of ‘objective’ truth in journalism.
However, perhaps that is not at all as bad as it sounds, and we are just finally waking up to the reality that it never really existed in the first place.
Also, on the positive side, smaller independent players with innovative digital models and a more open approach like our ScoopPro service look likely to be more relevant than ever to their reader communities in this increasingly fractured and homogenised media environment.
When an industry is bleeding, it tends to bring out the sharks - now, it seems even the sharks are being attacked by other sharks. Take the Gannett newspaper chain: one of the largest players in a shrunken industry, it owns dozens of leading papers across the US, including flagships such as USA Today and the Detroit Free Press.
Some see it as a perfect candidate to snap up some of the other players in the market. However, unfortunately for Gannett, competitor Digital First Media has thrown a large wrench into the works, by quietly acquiring 7.5 percent of the chain's stock as a prelude to launching a takeover bid of Gannett.
The Drum notes that since Gannett owns Newsquest, a major UK newspaper publisher, any move to acquire Gannett could set off a consolidation spree in Great Britain as well.
Also in the UK, an independent, government-commissioned report on the state of the media industry warns that closure of local newspapers threatens democracy.
The Cairncross review concluded that many local newspapers are owned by debt-laden publishers which have cut investment and sacked hundreds of journalists in an effort to maintain profit margins.
Here in New Zealand, in 2018, Australian Nine Entertainment took over Stuff’s parent company Fairfax Media. The impact of this merger on the future ownership of Stuff and its New Zealand media holdings remain unknown, but speculation abounds that it will be sold off.
Likely buyers could be Mediaworks or NZME or even TVNZ, in each case, leading to further consolidation (and potentially more commerce commission complications).
Stuff's earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation shrank 27 per cent to $40.5m in the year ended June 2018.
Revenue fell 7.5 per cent to $301.4m. The NZ print newspaper market also shrunk considerably last year after Stuff closed more than 35% of its print newspapers and announced additional cuts in community papers.
In November 2018, MediaWorks also announced that it had signed a conditional merger agreement with Australian outdoor advertising company QMS.
If the deal goes through, QMS will have a substantial shareholding in MediaWorks, however, current owner Oaktree Capital Management will maintain the majority shareholding in the merged entity.
Stuff's news clout and large digital assets would add another appealing layer to the MediaWorks offering. However, such a deal seems unlikely to get past the Commerce Commission, which has already shown a strong tendency to protect media plurality.
Is all of this talk of mergers and acquisitions and positive outlooks just reshuffling deckchairs on the Titanic? Probably. Both Herald and Stuff, NZ’s biggest digital players, are now essentially making nothing after tax and amortisation etc, and both have now stopped paying dividends.
It appears that they are persisting in fudging their revenue statistics to make things seem rosier than the reality. Why? Because they are denial about how bad things are in the online Media industry.
They are afraid that talking about this will have a further negative impact on their dwindling advertising revenues.
One of the most positive aspects of the ScoopPro revenue model is that we are no longer reliant on these advertising revenues to stay alive, making us more resilient than most.
Looking around the NZ online media, not many other organisations can say this right now. With a few exceptions like NBR and ODT (Paywall) and Newsroom (NewsroomPro although still reliant on sponsorship) and Stuff (Various associated offerings like Fibre and streaming services), the majority of newsrooms seem to be reliant on either advertising revenue or sponsorship market.
In 2018, NZME (the NZ Herald) announced the introduction of digital subscriptions for its premium content, but the exact launch time has not been announced.
Many other publishers will probably follow suit in 2019, however, exactly how much revenue this approach will bring them is yet to be seen.
The End of Objectivity?
The fingers of blame for all these takeovers and layoffs of journalists are of course quick to point at the great bogeymen of our media age - Facebook and Google. Many have rightly warned about the threat to democracy posed by this trend.
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, has highlighted tech monopolies and concentrated media ownership as the biggest threats to democracy.
There is certainly a lot of truth in that critique, however maybe that is not the end of the story. Antonio García Mar postulates that perhaps American journalism isn’t dying, it’s just returning to its opinionated roots.
Instead, he says, what is dying is that flavor of ‘objective’ journalism that purports (usually without basis) to record an unbiased account of world events:
“We take journalistic objectivity to be as natural and immutable as the stars, but it’s a relatively short-lived artifact of 20th-century America.”
" ‘Objectivity’ is an atavism from the days of studiously inoffensive and circulation-expanding reportage lavishly supported by unquestioning advertiser budgets.
That’s all gone now. And it’s not clear that this studious “objectivity” more closely approximates the truth. Iraq and the WMDs? Madame President?
Those were headlines produced under rigorously “objective” (and wrong) coverage, while those who got it right * and there were some - spoke from less regimented perches.”
More support for this viewpoint comes from The View from Somewhere, a new podcast by Lewis Raven Wallace exploring the fraught history of journalistic objectivity.
“A lot of great journalism in the United States and all over the world has been journalism that stood for something,” says Wallace, who was fired by American Public Media’s Marketplace in 2017 after he refused to delete a blog post questioning the value of traditional objectivity.
“Standing up to power requires standing for something.”
As the US political commentator Michael Parenti once observed: 'Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for "objectivity". Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.'
Looking at the purportedly ‘objective’ mainstream media coverage of the current Venezuela crisis, which is incredibly similar to the ‘consent manufacturing’ narratives of the Iraq and Libya invasions, I am inclined to agree with this view.
The general approach of the supposedly ‘objective’ mainstream media to Venezuela (including the anti-trump self-described ‘resistance’ media) has almost unilaterally fallen in unquestioningly behind the Trump administration’s party line in support for military intervention whilst ignoring the facts, such as the effects of illegal US sanctions and ongoing covert activities to destabilise the country.
If the idea of the mainstream liberal media as the dispenser of ‘objective’ truth is behind such manipulation of the population into support for such abominations, then I want no part in it, and will certainly not shed a tear for its demise.
The highly negative side of this Balkanisation of the US media is of course the increased success of highly partisan journalism such as Fox News and other rabidly neocon news outlets.
Winners in this polarised environment on the left seem to be The Times and the Washington Post, both highly critical of Trump.
It seems that in a polarised society, people are seeking out the news that confirms their existing bias leading to opposing echo chambers and ‘filter bubbles’ and very little compromise or real dialogue.
However, arguably an ‘objective’ journalism environment is exactly what has allowed such ‘news’ providers to have any credibility at all as something other than the opinion of a selection of (mostly white, male and wealthy) editors and shareholders.
Perhaps the time has come more a more nuanced and mature approach to the understanding of ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ that is fit for today’s online media environment.
However, a more positive aspect of the movement away from this ‘objective’ journalism is the rise of a particular hybrid of robust investigation and opinion oriented journalism.
The independent and member funded ‘engaged journalism’ approach has been pioneered by De Correspondent in the Netherlands and has been studied extensively by Jay Rosen and team at the Membership Puzzle Project in the USA.
This ‘engaged’ journalism approach “seeks to build a newsroom optimized for trust” and taking into account the needs and views of the community of readers by harnessing the depth of knowledge of the wider community of readers and subject experts.
Call it what you like; ‘engaged journalism’, ‘community centred journalism’ or ‘collaborative journalism’, this approach seems to be resonating with audiences.
Last month, The Correspondent, the English-language expansion of the Dutch news site, smashed through the US$2.5 million target for its launch crowdfunding campaign by more than $100,000 with over 40,000 members joining.
This De Correspondent approach does not censor or force its journalists to pretend to be objective.
Rather De Correspondent allows its journalists scope to form an opinion and take a transparency, usually ‘solutions-focused’, approach to investigations in collaboration with the input of readers.
De Correspondent journalists are expected to offer their readers transparency via access to their train of thought leading up to the definitive story and can be open about any problems they have with truth verification and challenges to interpret what they learn, observe, or experience.
Founder Rob Wijnberg believes this conception of journalism should not be equated with partisan reporting or with the “journalism of assertion” for that matter.
Although subjectivity and personality is embraced, independent truth verification remains at the heart of De Correspondent’s journalism practice.
Yet, by acknowledging the participatory culture and collective intelligence they tone down the universalistic connotation of “the truth” a notch.
This approach recognises our current culture as “an era in which truth is no longer set in stone, but can be constantly updated and subsequently contested in thousands of responses below the article.
Another interesting approach pioneered by Cathrine Gyldensted in Denmark is called ‘constructive journalism’.
Much like ‘solutions journalism,’ this approach focuses on reporting news in a more engaging, constructive way. A central component of such an approach is the “wellbeing model of the world”, in which journalists challenge their default setting of seeing people as victims to also see them as people with strengths and resilience – and report on that too.
Such an approach could attempt to encourage collaboration between politicians or opposing sides of a debate, thus helping to break down silos and promote more understanding and dialogue in online discourse.
Embrace Being Human with Consciousness
How To Realise Your True Calling & The 5 Stages Of Awakening: Are Demons Walking Among Us?
CURRENT AFFAIRS
Hillary Clinton’s campaign used the Christopher Steele dossier before their involvement was covered up
President Trump Warns the Deep State: “It Began Illegally… Somebody’s Going to be Looking at the Other Side”
In a Wednesday, January 18, 2017 
Who Is QAnon? An Introduction To The QAnon Phenomenon #QAnon #GreatAwakening
Roger Stone was also targeted by one of these set-up plays
Microsoft Launches Censorship Software
Introduction
