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Who Owns the United States?

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • SEPTEMBER 26, 2023

The recent sparring between Elon Musk and the despicable Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has cast considerable light on the successful attempts by Jewish groups to dominate America’s foreign as well as some domestic policies, in part by taking away the First Amendment right to Freedom of Speech so their behavior cannot be challenged. As readers of Unz will be aware, Musk has threatened to sue the ADL for as much as $22 billion for defaming him and doing material damage to his business interests while also falsely smearing Musk himself and the platform for allegedly providing an antisemitic haven for “hate speech.” In Musk’s view, the ADL has put pressure on potential advertisers not to do business with him and to engage in a total boycott of his social networking sites.

Greenblatt’s argument is that material that he considers to be anti-semitic should not be allowed on any public forum, to include Musk’s site X, formerly known as Twitter. If Greenblatt were concerned with public incitements to kill Jews or damage their property there might be a case to be made, but the fact is that such behavior is already criminalized. Greenblatt is much more expansive than that, condemning any criticism of Jewish group or even individual behavior or the actions of Israel, which have included various war crimes and crimes against humanity to include targeting and killing Palestinian children and harvesting the organs of Palestinian prisoners. Israel is also a nation that is increasingly ethnically exclusive and has a state religion that is intolerant and repressive of other creeds, to include minority Christians and Muslims.

Beyond Musk, Greenblatt and the ADL have also focused on Tucker Carlson given his high profile and popularity among conservatives. Greenblatt repeatedly demanded that Fox News fire Tucker for discussing the “great replacement” theory as well as other white-nationalist talking points. Greenblatt has denounced Carlston’s alleged willingness “To use his platform as a megaphone to spread the toxic, antisemitic, and xenophobic ‘great replacement theory’ is a repugnant and dangerous abuse of his platform.” He called on advertisers to stop supporting the Carlson program and Fox with their dollars and was delighted when Carlson was finally fired in April. Many believe that the firing was in large part due to pressure from ADL and other Jewish groups.

In other words, in the America envisioned by Greenblatt and his friends who are pressuring advertisers not to support sites like X and passing laws penalizing or even criminalizing anyone who seeks to boycott Israel over its behavior, it will be more-or-less possible to speak freely on any subject as long as it does not involve Jews. That suggests an assumption by ADL that Jews have special status not enjoyed by anyone else. As a result Jews have been able to exploit their alleged singular and perpetual victimhood to assume de facto control over media sources of information as well as both major political parties using that old tried and true mechanism, money, and lots of it. It is a subject that in itself will not be open to discussion and which Greenblatt dismisses as an anti-semitic trope amounting to “hate speech.”

Interestingly enough, the wrath of Greenblatt is apparently not shared by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is regarded as no shrinking violet when it comes to promoting his country’s interests, as he sees them, and the dominance of Jewry worldwide. Netanyahu was in the United States last week for the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly but he made time to fly to California to visit Musk’s Tesla car assembly plant. The two men sat down to have a public chat in front of news cameras and, while it was clear that they were being polite and non-combative, it was also true that Netanyahu was careful not to accuse Musk of being an anti-semite or anything like that.

Netanyahu, who may have a better understanding than does Greenblatt of which way the wind is blowing regarding his country and Jewish power in general, might be playing a clever game in which he avoids a hard edged and dangerous Greenblatt approach while proceeding quietly with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and aggrandizing himself in power through his attack on the country’s courts. Netanyahu clearly understands that Israel has crossed the apartheid threshold vis-à-vis Palestine and its neighbors and that most of the world despises his country, to include many Americans who are beginning to see the light that they have been used and abused for the past 75 years. He has chosen to ignore the critics as the wisest path, in which he may be correct.

How have Jews in America and Canada as well as in Europe and Australasia become so politically powerful? Now that Musk has opened the door to discussing the Jewish issue with some candor, a number of articles and discussions have begun to appear in the media and some universities have even developed enough of a spine to start teaching true narratives on the Middle East supported by books that groups like ADL are seeking to ban. The most powerful piece to appear recently was on Mondoweiss, entitled “Biden’s Israel Policy is Scripted by Saban.”

Mondoweiss’s title refers to Israeli-American Hollywood-based media producer Haim Saban, who sums up his political philosophy with a pithy “I’m a one issue guy and my issue is Israel!” Saban has been the largest individual donor to the Democratic Party since the Clintons and his power has resulted in unswerving fealty to US interests as perceived through the optic of its relationship with the Jewish state. He is similar to megadonor Sheldon Adelson, now deceased, who performed the same service with the Republican Party. Sheldon’s wife Miriam, an Israeli, has maintained the legacy of keeping the GOP in line through control of political donations. The Adelsons were reportedly responsible for Donald Trump’s move of the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and other concessions re the Palestinians, Iranians and Syrians. The withdrawal of the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was due to pressure from the Adelsons, a move that was contrary to the actual US interest to monitor Iranian nuclear developments. Sheldon’s only failure was failing to convince Trump to bomb Iran.

Saban, who recently spent three hours in the Oval Office advising Joe Biden, is most clearly seen through his own comments on the relationship between the US and Israel. Hint: Israel’s interests always come first! For example, he shrugged off criticism of his giving money to AIPAC, “which supports Republican election deniers, because his one issue is Israel” saying in an interview: “The only goal of this organization is to prevent people who are against US-Israel relations from advancing and to support those who support relations between Jerusalem and Washington… Many Democrats called me and said ‘are you stupid? you’re a Democrat who supports [2020 election deniers]?’ I always say the same thing: It’s a specific, defined issue, and that is the US-Israel relationship. In that sense, I’m not interested in anything else.”

Re the Democratic Party leadership and Joe Biden, Saban observed that the party is “still solidly pro-Israel, and there are only about a dozen members of Congress who are anti-Israel.” Saban funded Hillary Clinton in 2008 but responded angrily when Obama “refused to echo Hillary Clinton’s call to ‘obliterate’ Iran if Iran attacked Israel.” Saban did not trust Obama on the issue of Israel and was initially rebuffed when he tried to arrange a meeting in 2010. He told a journalist that “I had a list of questions… And Chicago’—Obama campaign headquarters—‘could not organize that meeting. … I was ready and willing to be helpful, but ‘helpful’ is not to write a check for two thousand three hundred dollars. It’s to raise millions, which I am fully capable of doing.” Obama eventually came to respect Saban’s millions. “By 2013, President Obama was the speaker at a fundraiser at the Sabans’ house in L.A. attended by 120 people who paid between $16,200 and $32,400 each to attend.”

The result of the largesse is that Biden’s policy on the Middle East is now being scripted by Haim Saban, whose millions he requires for the upcoming 2024 campaign. It is as simple as that, appreciating that donation of cash in hand is better than platitudes about suffering Palestinians. That is what constitutes “truth” for both major political parties, who are de facto owned by the Adelsons and the Sabans who will always place Israel first. That Saban and Adelson (who is buried in Jerusalem) were and are both Israeli citizens and have been allowed to wield such power on behalf of a foreign country with which the US shares almost nothing in the way of actual values is shameful and it is also technically illegal or possibly even treasonous as they are acting as Foreign Agents. And it is more than that morally speaking – it is a disgrace. Joe Biden in particular should be ashamed of his folding when confronted by Jewish money as he is in charge, but it is apparently not an emotion that he is familiar with.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , | 2 Comments

Of Mice and Men: Aspartame at Doses Lower Than FDA Limits Made Male Mice Slower and Dumber

By Angelo DePalma, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 26, 2023

Male mice fed doses of aspartame far lower than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends got slower and dumber working through a maze — a literal and metaphorical test of human intelligence since ancient times, before Homer wrote of Theseus chasing the Minotaur through the mythic labyrinth in the “Iliad.”

According to a study published Aug. 31 in Scientific Reports, the mice passed on the learning and memory deficits to their first-generation offspring — but not second-generation offspring.

The researchers studied males and not females because they were looking for problems caused only by genes and not by direct exposure. Fetuses developing inside an exposed female would experience both.

Aspartame, an artificial sweetener found in more than 6,000 foods and medicines, has been linked to heart disease, obesity, mood disorders and other serious health issues. In the U.S., it’s sold under the brand names Equal and Nutrasweet.

Researchers led by Pradeep Bhide, Ph.D., at the Florida State University College of Medicine, provided adult 8-week-old male mice with free access to drinking water containing either 0.015% or 0.03% (by weight) of aspartame.

A third group of control mice drank plain water.

“A key public health implication of our findings,” the authors wrote, “is that the population at risk of aspartame’s adverse effects on learning and memory may be larger than current estimates, which consider the directly exposed individuals only. Our findings underscore the need for considering heritable effects as part of the safety evaluation of artificial sweeteners by regulatory agencies.”

Mice in the 0.015% and 0.03% aspartame groups consumed, on average, 43.2 milligrams and 86.4 milligrams of aspartame per kilogram of body weight per day.

“Milligrams per kilogram” (mg/kg), is a way to express dosages relative to a subject’s weight, to account for a larger subject requiring a larger dose to obtain a specific effect.

The FDA-recommended maximum daily intake value of aspartame for humans is 50 mg/kg but most consumers take in much less — 4.1 mg/kg.

Mice in the lower-concentration aspartame group received approximately this dose, while those in the 0.030% group got about twice the average daily intake. So low and high dosages were just 8.2% and 16.4% of the maximum “safe” agency-recommended intake, respectively.

During the 16-week experiment, all mouse groups underwent tests for spatial working memory, spatial learning, reversal learning and learned helplessness, which are used to assess the cognitive or learning effects of drugs, foods, or other interventions.

Bihde’s study design was typical for mouse experiments except for his focus on male mice and their male or female offspring. Most studies examining the heritability of characteristics use female study animals.

He selected this mouse strain because a previous study showed the animals neither preferred nor avoided aspartame in drinking water, nor did they experience changes in weight or metabolism after exposure.

Aspartame recently was in the news as a possible cancer-causing agent. Based on what it termed “limited evidence” the World Health Organization considers the sweetener, at a maximum daily exposure limit of 40 mg/kg, as “possibly carcinogenic [cancer-causing] to humans.” WHO does not recommend using artificial sweeteners for weight control.

U.S. regulators disagree with the WHO’s position and even recommend a higher daily maximum intake.

As The Defender reported last week, industry representatives are paying dietary influencers on social media to promote artificially and naturally sweetened products to children.

Testing: How did the mice perform?

Mice in all three dosage groups underwent regular cognitive testing during the study. Researchers found deficits in spatial working memory in treated mice relative to controls at 4 weeks, an effect that persisted at weeks 8 and 12.

No differences between high- and low-dose groups were evident.

The spatial learning and memory test used a maze to determine how long it took mice to find a way out and the number of mistakes they made before escaping. This test began at 14 weeks after initial dosing and continued for 10 consecutive days.

Mice typically improved over time on this test, which was true for all three groups.

But mice ingesting aspartame found their way out of the maze much more slowly than control animals. Again, no difference was noticed between treatment groups.

“Learned helplessness,” a term from human psychology, describes a feeling of being stuck in a situation or circumstance and being “paralyzed” from acting.

Psychologists use learned helplessness tests to characterize depressive episodes. Animals undergoing learned helplessness testing are observed for how hard they try to avoid an apparently inescapable bad situation, for example, an electric shock.

To assess learned helplessness Bhide and co-authors used a tail suspension test, which involves hanging mice upside down by their tails to quantify the effort they expend in pulling up and righting themselves. They found no difference here between aspartame and control groups.

Cognitive dysfunction: the next generations

Treated and control mice were bred with stock females to produce second-generation test animals. Litters were of normal size, with pups meeting normal developmental milestones. However, several deficits noted in the original test mice were also seen in these unexposed animals.

The effects on spatial working memory for treated vs. control fathers were particularly pronounced. Offspring of both dosage groups also showed significant learning deficits compared to the control lineage.

But no differences were apparent between offspring of low- and high-dose aspartame fathers, or for reversal learning — a measure of how an animal unlearns old, ineffective behavior and develops new problem-solving strategies.

Deficits among first-generation mice in learned helplessness were also not evident.

To eliminate the question of whether these effects are a permanent part of the animals’ DNA, vs. a temporary effect on sperm cells, researchers bred first-generation males to produce second-generation litters.

To simplify their analysis they compared learning test responses of second-generation control group offspring only to the second-generation higher aspartame dosage group but found no second-generation effects.

Why just male mice?

Bhide’s focus on paternal lineage is unusual for inter-generational toxin exposure studies. Historically, most investigations consider only maternal exposures, particularly on events occurring during pregnancy or nursing.

Since a father’s biological involvement ends at conception, intergenerational effects must occur through effects on exposed males’ sperm cells. If these effects had been permanent, second-generation mice as well as first-generation offspring would show learning deficits, but this was not observed.

Until relatively recently, biologists believed that acquired characteristics were not heritable. While this remains true for most traits, scientists now recognize the potential for certain drug, food or toxic exposures to turn genes on or off temporarily.

Epigenetics is the emerging science describing how certain life events, including toxic exposures, may act as temporary genetic switches.

Epigenetics also explains how a drug or pesticide might cause harm to individuals with no history of exposure, and how this effect eventually disappears.

The alternative — permanent genetic damage — would continue to affect offspring for generations. The effects of aspartame lasted only one generation, which is consistent with transient, reversible epigenetic alterations to sperm cells.

Considering epigenetic effects, and not just direct contact with toxins, amplifies the potential harms of certain exposures and expands the scope of potential consequences to exposure that regulators should consider before licensing or approving certain products.

Angelo DePalma, Ph.D., is a science reporter/editor for The Defender.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Media and Architects of Online Censorship Law Heap Pressure on Rumble After it Defends Principle of Neutrality

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 25, 2023

Media outlets and architects of the UK’s censorship law, the Online Safety Bill, are increasing the pressure on neutral video sharing platform Rumble after it refused to bow down to the UK Parliament’s pressure to demonetize comedian Russell Brand.

The pressure to demonetize Brand came after anonymous sexual assault allegations were made against him. Brand has denied the allegations and has not been arrested, charged, or convicted of any of the allegations made against him.

Several companies, including YouTube, took action against Brand after the allegations surfaced, despite Brand having no content violations on YouTube. But Rumble stood up to the pressure and rejected the UK Parliament’s request to cut off Brand’s monetization, with CEO Chris Pavlovski noting that the allegations against Brand have “nothing to do with content on Rumble’s platform.”

Now, several media outlets and people who helped craft the UK’s online censorship law, the upcoming Online Safety Bill, are targeting Rumble’s stance.

Lord Allan of Hallam, a former Facebook executive who advised on the Online Safety Bill, branded Rumble a “crazy American platform” and expressed disdain at Rumble’s philosophy of allowing free expression.

He and internet law expert Professor Lorna Woods, an architect of the Online Safety Bill, also complained about Rumble’s refusal to bow down to pressure from UK officials and framed it as “grandstand[ing] before the press.”

The Times also took aim at Rumble by noting that under the Online Safety Bill, Rumble will have to “prevent children from seeing pornography… material that promotes self-harm, suicide or eating disorders… violent content… material harmful to health, such as vaccine misinformation” and “take down material that is illegal, such as videos that incite violence or race hate.”

However, Bryn Harris, the Chief Legal Council for The Free Speech Union, pointed out that The Times’ article doesn’t actually provide examples of any of the alleged illegal or harmful to kids content on Rumble.

Additionally, the Associated Press piled in on Rumble after it stood up to the demands of UK officials by claiming that Rumble is a “haven for disinformation and extremism.”

This mounting pressure comes days after the UK passed the Online Safety Bill — one of the most sweeping censorship laws to ever be introduced in the UK. The controversial censorship and surveillance bill is set to come into law next month.

The censorship provisions in the Online Safety Bill can be aimed at both citizens who post speech that’s deemed to cause “harm” and companies that fail to censor this so-called harmful content. The harms in the bill extend beyond physical or direct harm and into the realms of “psychological” harm and “potential” harm. Certain types of “false” communications are also prohibited under the bill.

As UK officials heap pressure on Rumble, reports have revealed that several UK politicians have ties to the pro-censorship Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and the UK politician that pressured Rumble to demonetize Brand received a donation in kind from Google.

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 2 Comments

Scotland To Set Up New Police Unit To Tackle “Hate” and “Misgendering,” Ignites Free Speech Concerns

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | September 25, 2023

On the brink of implementing Humza Yousaf’s highly contentious legislation early next year, a specialized hate crime unit has been announced by Police Scotland. With the unit scheduled to be operational by November, a comprehensive training of about 16,400 law enforcement officers will follow in December.

This is all in anticipation of the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, expected to be ratified early in 2024. This Act expands upon the existing law, offering a broader protective net for “vulnerable” groups and introduces the notion of “stirring up hatred”.

However, some critics and free speech advocates have raised concerns that the Act, which holds potential to elevate sentencing if prejudice is based on factors such as age, race, disability, religion, transgender identity or variations in sex characteristics, may invigorate the increasingly toxic culture wars surrounding gender issues. It is posited that the law may sidetrack police resources from tackling violent conduct to address “harmful” words.

The thought of free speech being stifled by the new laws is particularly horrifying for some, with warnings that women’s rights advocates may find themselves entangled in allegations of transphobia.

Critics argue that a significant portion of police time may now be geared towards a subjective concept of hate crime, such as “misgendering,” instead of dealing with tangible violent acts.

Helen Joyce, part of the human rights group Sex Matters, asserted her alarm at the creation of this specific hate crime unit. She voiced concern for those who stand for the rights of women and children, warning of a “chilling effect” on free speech, as reported by The Scottish Express.

Police Scotland remains tight-lipped about the size of the proposed unit plus the financial implications of the new laws – a cause for concern for many.

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Nord Stream Blast: Why the West Still Can’t Name the Culprit

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 26.09.2023

Exactly a year ago three out of four Nord Stream pipelines running from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea to provide Western Europe with natural gas were destroyed. Western investigators have so far failed to find the saboteurs behind the blast.

Gas leaks from the Nord Stream pipeline system were detected on 26 September 2022, with the EU leadership admitting that this could be the result of a “deliberate attack”.

Two days later, on 28 September, the Kremlin announced that Russia was ready to consider applications from EU countries for a joint investigation into the Nord Stream incident.

However, not only did the West snub Moscow’s request but also blamed Russia for destroying its own pipelines. Later, European and American officials backtracked on their accusations but fell short of naming a potential perpetrator.

On 12 October 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the incident “an act of international terrorism”. Meanwhile, as gas prices soared and US energy producers secured lucrative liquefied natural gas (LNG) contracts with European countries, it became clear that Washington had been the major beneficiary from the Nord Stream destruction.

Furthermore, the US leadership had previously issued several threats that it would destroy the pipelines.

“We know that the United States President Joe Biden, threatened openly that he would stop Nord Stream 2 if the Russians were to militarily intervene in Ukraine,” Philip Giraldi, former CIA station chief and now an executive director of the Council for the National Interest, told Sputnik. “That was repeated by Victoria Nuland, who was Number Three at the State Department. She said basically the same thing. So we had the President and a senior official both saying that they would stop the pipeline if this were to happen. So we have a statement coming from the government itself saying it would do this.”

“And then I would say on top of that, the United States – given its military capabilities – had the capability to do this. They sent divers down to attach explosives and to arrange for a drone satellite that would ignite the charges and blow up the pipelines. It had the capability to do it. And it also had the motive, which was basically to weaken Russia’s ability to use its energy resources to affect politics in Europe. So this is what it was all about,” Giraldi continued.

On 8 February 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell, detailing an apparent plot by Team Biden and the US intelligence community to blast the Nord Stream pipelines with the help of Norwegian operatives.

Reflecting on Hersh’s version, Giraldi said that he feels that Hersh’s narrative is “correct in every detail.”

“And I can confirm to you that Sy Hersh, whom I know somewhat, has excellent sources inside CIA and inside the Pentagon. So what he’s telling us comes straight from people who know about it,” the CIA veteran said.

Blame Game Time: The Andromeda Yarn

On 7 March, the US and German mainstream sources published two separate articles claiming that international investigators had managed to trace the 26 September 2022 sabotage attack to a “pro-Ukrainian” group operating from the Andromeda, a 15-meter chartered yacht. The story immediately prompted a lot of controversy.

German media, for example, asked how a 15-meter chartered yacht could carry the 1,500-2,000 kilograms of explosives needed to destroy the pipelines, adding that the Andromeda does not have a crane to hoist such quantities safely into the water. It was also unclear how the group of volunteers managed to transport that amount of explosives across Europe.

Another problem, cited by the press, was that at the site of the explosion, the depth of the Baltic Sea is about 80 meters, requiring special diving equipment which the private vessel lacked. On top of this, the gang of saboteurs returned the yacht in bad condition and even left a couple of fake passports on board which made the story even fishier.

Hersh ridiculed the mainstream media yarn while discussing it with an anonymous CIA operative familiar with the issue. According to Hersh, it’s not just a “bad” media story but a deliberate “parody” fed by the CIA to the US and German media.

“In the world of professional analysts and operators, everyone will universally and correctly conclude from your story that the devilish CIA concocted a counter-op that is on its face so ridiculous and childish that the real purpose was to reinforce the truth,” the investigative journalist wrote on 5 April.

The most recent Western media stories alleging Ukraine’s involvement don’t hold water, either, according to Giraldi:

“Look, when you’re doing things in the intelligence world, you look for corroborative details – details that tell you that this story is coming from a good source or that it is fundamentally correct. And I saw none of that in this story. There have been a number of stories, of course, about people from Ukraine having done this, or people even from Germany renting boats and going over there, and they didn’t know what nationality they were. I mean, these are repeated stories. I have no reason to assume that this story is correct.”

The CIA veteran goes on to say that at present there is no story that sounds as credible as Hersh’s version. Besides, the US had the motive; it had the capability to do it; and it also had the objective to do it as a way of weakening Russia’s ability to influence Western Europe, Giraldi summarized.

“So I think that a lot of the background or the backstory supports the fact that the United States basically did it, though, apparently with the assistance of the Norwegians, and I would imagine some of the other NATO allies were also briefed in a certain fashion. In other words, not all the details, but given some indication that something might be happening in the near future in the Baltic.”

Why Couldn’t EU Investigators Name the Culprit?

It’s hardly surprising that despite official investigations in three countries – Sweden, Denmark, and Germany – the question of who is responsible for the sabotage remains unanswered, according to Giraldi.

“The fact that there have been three investigations carried out means nothing because the three countries that carry out the investigation are all NATO members. So they would have no motive whatsoever to challenge the argument that this was carried out by the Russians themselves or by the Ukrainians,” the CIA veteran said.

However, Giraldi suspects that the German investigation probably came closest to the truth. However, what they told the public was essentially a narrative acceptable to the United States and to NATO. The former CIA field officer pointed out that Germany suffered the most from the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines.

“Their economy is in trouble. They were dependent on Russian energy and so they are paying a price for it, and I’m sure that many Germans – I do know that many Germans are aware of this and are complaining that this ever took place. I was in Eastern Europe about two months ago, and I heard this a lot from Europeans, how stupid this whole thing was to destroy a resource that was very good for Europe as well as being good for Russia.”

According to Giraldi, it’s interesting to examine who else – apart from the US and Norway – was aware of the Nord Stream plot and was foolhardy enough to get involved in it. Giraldi doubted whether Berlin had been in collusion with the US and Norway from the beginning and said that it did not make sense for a country to sacrifice its own economy willingly.

Furthermore, the Nord Stream pipelines weren’t just a Gazprom asset, Giraldi emphasized: there were other countries – other companies from Western Europe – that participated in the project that had been worth billions of dollars. And because of the US plot, their money had been squandered and their infrastructure had suffered incalculable damage.

But the financial aspect is only half the story: the most worrying part is that those who blew the pipelines up risked escalating the crisis dramatically.

“The destruction of the pipeline was an act of war,” stressed Giraldi, “… so this is an interesting story if we ever find out the truth.”

On 17 September 2023, the First Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN Dmitry Polyansky said that Russia was calling for the UN Security Council to meet to discuss the Nord Stream gas pipelines and the council will gather on Tuesday, 26 September – a year after the sabotage occurred.

On 27 August, the Prime Minister of the German federal state of Saxony, Michael Kretschmer, announced the need to repair the damaged gas pipelines which he said will help to ensure the country’s energy supply for another five to 10 years.

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Economics, War Crimes | , , , , | 1 Comment

US intel knew Biden planned to blow up Nord Stream prior to Ukraine conflict – Hersh

RT | September 26, 2023

US President Joe Biden initially planned on destroying the Nord Stream gas pipelines to deter Russia from launching its military operation in Ukraine, American journalist Seymour Hersh reported on Tuesday. However, Hersh alleged that the sabotage operation went ahead later not to deter Russia, but to damage the German economy.

The Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, which connected Russia and Germany through the Baltic Sea, were destroyed in a series of underwater explosions exactly a year ago on Tuesday. Competing theories have emerged as to who was to blame, with mainstream media in the West blaming a Ukrainian commando unit and Seymour Hersh claiming that the CIA carried out the operation under direct orders from Biden.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Hersh alleged that US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan convened a series of meetings in late 2021, tasking intelligence officials with coming up with a means of deterring Russian President Vladimir Putin from sending troops into Ukraine.

“The White House’s policy was to deter Russia from an attack,” an intelligence source told Hersh. “The challenge it gave to the intelligence community was to come up with a way that was powerful enough to do that, and to make a strong statement of American capability.”

By January, as Russian forces were massing on the Ukrainian border, the CIA had “solved the problem,” the source said. With a plan in place to plant remotely-detonated explosives on the pipelines under the Baltic Sea, Biden warned in early February that in the event of military action by Russia, “there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Following Biden’s statement, which was delivered alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the CIA team tasked with sabotaging the pipelines received new orders, Hersh claimed. Instead of immediately destroying Nord Stream, the team was instructed to plant the explosives for detonation at a later date.

“It was then that we understood that the attack on the pipelines was not a deterrent because as the war went on we never got the command,” a member of the team told Hersh.

“We realized that the destruction of the two Russian pipelines was not related to the Ukrainian war,” the source continued. “But was part of a neocon political agenda to keep Scholz and Germany, with winter coming up and the pipelines shut down, from getting cold feet and opening up.”

According to Hersh’s earlier reporting, CIA divers planted the explosives last summer with the help of the Norwegian navy, using a NATO exercise in the region as cover. By the time the bombs were triggered in September, the flow of Russian gas to Germany via Nord Stream 1 had already been slowed to a trickle by Russia in response to Western sanctions, while Nord Stream 2 was never certified to begin operation by Scholz’s government. However, with the German economy heavily dependent on Russian gas, Biden reportedly feared that Scholz would choose reproachment with Moscow over support for Ukraine.

“The President of the United States would rather see Germany freeze than [see] Germany possibly stop supporting Ukraine,” Hersh declared earlier this year.

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | 2 Comments

The US Military Is Laying the Groundwork to Reinstitute the Draft

By Zachary Yost | Mises Wire | September 25, 2023

The most recent edition of the U.S. Army War College’s academic journal includes a highly disturbing essay on what lessons the U.S. military should take away from the continuing war in Ukraine. By far the most concerning and most relevant section for the average American citizen is a subsection entitled “Casualties, Replacements, and Reconstitutions” which, to cut right to the chase, directly states, “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”

An Industrial War of Attrition Would Require Vast Numbers of Troops

The context for this supposed need to reinstate conscription is the estimate that were the U.S. to enter into a large-scale conflict, every day it would likely suffer thirty-six hundred casualties and require eight hundred replacements, again per day. The report notes that over the course of twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. suffered fifty thousand casualties, a number which would likely be reached in merely two weeks of large-scale intensive combat.

The military is already facing an enormous recruiting shortfall. Last year the army alone fell short of its goal by fifteen thousand soldiers and is on track to be short an additional twenty thousand this year. On top of that, the report notes that the Individual Ready Reserve, which is composed of former service personnel who do not actively train and drill but may be called back into active service in the event they are needed, has dropped from seven hundred thousand in 1973 to seventy-six thousand now.

Prior to the Ukraine war, the fad theory in military planning was the idea of “hybrid warfare,” where the idea of giant state armies clashing on the battlefield requiring and consuming vast amounts of men and material was viewed as out of date as massed cavalry charges. Instead, these theorists argued that even when states did fight, it would be via proxies and special operations and would look more like the past twenty years of battling nonstate actors in the hills of Afghanistan. In a recent essay in the Journal of Security Studies, realist scholar Patrick Porter documents the rise of this theory and the fact that it is obviously garbage given the return of industrial wars of attrition.

As military planners have woken up from the fevered dream of imagining that modern war consisted of chasing the Taliban through the hills with complete and overwhelming airpower, they have similarly started to wake up to the idea that industrial war has vast manpower requirements and that seemingly the only way to fill these requirements is by forcing young people into the ranks. That has certainly been the only way Ukraine has been able to maintain its forces, although it has required increasingly draconian measures to do so as conscripts face attrition rates of 80 to 90 percent by Ukraine’s own admission.

Obviously, the reintroduction of conscription is an extremely disturbing prospect given America’s propensity for getting involved in meaningless wars that accomplish nothing other than empowering our enemies, killing and maiming our soldiers, and wasting vast resources.

This is especially true given the unstated assumptions implicit in this paper. Who is the enemy that would be inflicting thirty-six hundred casualties a day? A war in the Pacific against China would primarily be a naval and airpower war with an extremely limited role for the army (even the current inept regime seems unlikely to be stupid enough to try and wage a land war against China) which obviously leaves Russia as the main adversary that would require the U.S. Army to round up conscripts to feed into the attritional meat grinder.

There Is No American National Interest That Requires a Standing Army

However, while these manpower shortages may be a valid concern for someplace like Russia, Ukraine, or Poland, we here in the U.S. are quite fortunate that we have no compelling national interest that would require us to engage in an industrial war of attrition in Eastern Europe.

To the extent we are at risk of becoming involved in such a disastrous mess, it is entirely of our own doing via the entangling alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and our leader’s own messianic gnostic crusades for democracy or whatever pseudo religious ideology is presently in vogue.

The U.S. is blessed as being the most secure power in history. We are the hegemon of the western hemisphere, with vast moats in the form of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that no other state has the capability to project military force across, and all our neighbors are weak and relatively friendly. We are not at any risk of being forced to fight an industrial land war on the home front. Any war the army would be used in would be as an expeditionary force fighting in the eastern hemisphere, where we have no compelling defensive need to do so.

From the beginning of the U.S., there have been warnings against the dangers of both entangling alliances and standing armies. The best solution to the military recruitment crisis is to simply abolish the standing army and not plan to wage a costly and pointless war on the other side of the planet that would result in trillions of dollars down the drain and who knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans being killed, maimed, and psychologically scarred.

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , | 3 Comments

Who Will Fact Check the Fact Checkers? I Will!!!

Corbett • 09/25/2023

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So we all remember the rhetorical question I asked three years ago, right? Who will fact check the fact checkers? Well, guess what. It isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s a real question with a real answer: I will! That’s right, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work dismantling the dissembling disinfo dissertations of the would-be fact checkers and make fun of the clowns on the front lines of the infowar.

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Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee / Rokfin / Rumble / Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES

Episode 381 – Who Will Fact Check the Fact Checkers?

SCARY POPPINNina Jankowic, Our Mary Poppins of Disinformation!

Nina Jankowicz RESIGNS, Good Riddance To Partisan Disinfo HACK: Robby Soave

Watch the moment BBC reporter is ‘destroyed’ by Elon Musk in trainwreck interview

Marianna Spring on disinformation, conspiracies & dealing with trolls

BBC’s chief fact-checker Marianna Spring accused of lying on CV | Headliners

Deconstructing Marianna in Conspiracyland Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5

BBC ‘disinformation’ correspondent busted spreading disinfo on her own bio

9/10/2001: Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon

$2.3 Trillion Missing Money – Here’s How “Fact Checking” Works

9/11 Trillions: Follow the Money (Follow this link for the hyperlinked transcript of all sources cited in this clip)

Misinformation in the media: global coverage of GMOs 2019-2021

Peer-reviewed critique published of Mark Lynas’s article in which he accused GMO critics of spreading “misinformation”

Agricultural GMOs and their associated pesticides: misinformation, science, and evidence

Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review Promotes Its Own Misinformation

Fact-Checking Is Ineffective Where It Counts

The Psychology of Fact-Checking: Fact-checkers aim to get closer to the truth, but their biases can shroud the very truth they seek

PolitiFact gave Obama “Lie of the Year” for 2013 for the EXACT SAME statement they rated as “half true” in 2009 and 2012

Snopes gisve the EXACT SAME claim about the Titanic submersible True / Unproven / False ratings

ALWAYS trust the science! (man-made meteor hole)

Facebook suspends RMIT FactLab after voice no campaigners criticise factchecker

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment