Episode 5 The Rosetta Stone and Much, Much More

The History of Ancient Egypt

Professor Robert Brier

Film Review

According to Brier, the Egyptian language vanished after a series of foreign conquests (by first Assyrians, then Babylonians, Nubians, Greeks and Romans) towards the end of their 3,000 year rule. The last Egyptian language inscription dates from 425 AD.

The assumption that written Egyptian (hieroglyphs) is picture writing is erroneous. Written Egyptian is a phonetic language, with each hieroglyph designating a specific sound, just as in modern languages. For example duck (pronounced “sa”) is often used to designate son (also pronounced “sa”). Writing a hieroglyph with a line under it, means the the hieroglyph represents the object, rather than the phonetic sound.

The Egyptian language could be written from left to right, from right to left or from top to bottom.

The Rosetta Stone discovered during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt is written in two languages (Egyptian and Greek) and three scripts: hieroglyphs (used for Egyptian religious and official documents), demotic (a shorthand alphabet used by Egyptian commoners)* and Coptic (a variant of the Greek alphabetic with extra letters for sounds not found in Greek).

Coptic script appeared with the advent of Christianity in Egypt because St Mark wouldn’t allow converts to use “pagan” hieroglyphs. Coptic renditions of the Egyptian language survived owing to its use in Coptic services.

The Coptic word Ankh (meaning life) has survived to the present day.

The content of the rosetta stone is a thank you note from some priests to the government for exempting them from taxes.

*Like Hebrew, written Egyptian has no vowels so is easy to abbreviate as short hand

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/1492791/1492801

By   Ramesh Thakur

An important takeaway from the last four years for many governments is the surprising ease of winning public compliance with demands for intrusive behavioural changes that completely reset the balance of rights and responsibilities between citizens, society, markets, and the government. Instead of implementing policies to give effect to voter priorities, the emboldened dominant metropolitan elites are entirely dedicated to the proposition that citizens should be forced to live by their rules on what to say, think, read, watch, do.

A telling indicator is the abandonment in practice of the long-standing principle of informed consent that was codified by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last December and came into effect in January.

[…]

Mass Immigration Contradicts Claims of Embedded Structural Racism

The West seems to be in decline economically, militarily, and as a moral inspiration for much of the rest of the world. With self-confidence sapped, its major political parties compete over which of them can be trusted to best manage the decline in order to ensure a soft landing, with slowly depleting wealth, falling standards of living, and global clout and influence shrinking.

[…]

Another indicator is the loss of control over border security. Mass inflow of peoples from diverse cultures with radically differing belief systems, values, and rights is not the best recipe for creating an integrated, harmonious, and cohesive new community – who knew? Instead, other than in countries like Japan that refused to go along with the mantra that uncontrolled ‘immigration and diversity’ are always an unqualified good, existing bonds of cohesion are breaking down with alarming speed and creating fresh security headaches.

Nearly nine million illegal migrants have swarmed across from Mexico into the US during Biden’s presidency. The biggest millstone around the Rishi Sunak government trapped in a political death spiral is the hundreds of thousands of legal and illegal migrants. Some 550,000 migrants came into Australia last year.

[…]

Climate and Trans Extremism

Holly Valance, the Australian-origin former Neighbours soap star, describes Greta Thunberg as a ‘demonic little gremlin high priestess of climatism’ who is treated ‘as a goddess in the classrooms despite contributing to the epidemic of ‘depression and anxiety’ in children.

Trans-activists are erasing the word woman even from motherhood and sexual assaults. Nurses are advised to use words like ‘birthing parents’ and ‘chestfeeding’ as substitutes for mothers and breastfeeding. Harry Potter series author JK Rowling has promised to keep calling transwomen ‘men’ and risk criminal conviction after a new Scottish law, that threatens to severely punish factually correct speech that violates legally correct definitions, came into effect on 1 April, appropriately enough. The linguistic gender madness of the crowds is spreading to esteemed medical journals that are banishing the ‘w’ word and associated language.

In Canada, a Supreme Court justice gratuitously reprimanded a lower court judge for using the word woman, in a sexual assault case no less, instead of a ‘person with vagina.’ That too with the explanation that the single word was confusing in comparison to the clarity of her own preferred phrase. Neither the complainant nor the accused in the case claimed to be transgender and gender identity and language was not an issue before the court. To cap it all, the decision came on International Women’s Day (8 March). I hope someone has forwarded Rowling’s mischievous tweet to the judge: ‘Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whose large gametes were fertilised resulting in small humans whose sex was assigned by doctors making mostly lucky guesses.’

Recording trans-identifying males as women in violent crime statistics, including rape and murder, will only distort and make a mockery of sex-specific statistics on violent crime. This was highlighted with the murder conviction of ‘Scarlet Blake,’ in February. He was recorded as a woman by the police in their official statistics even though sent to a male prison. The Women’s Rights Network pointedly asked: why accept his claim of being a woman against the clear biological evidence when, because of the evidence against him, you didn’t accept his protestations of innocence?

Such are the contradictions when legal fiction collides with the reality of male-female interactions in prisons. Because ‘deadnaming’ is criminalised, his pre-trans name cannot be published. Because the media lacks the courage to fight this en masse, the insanity is slowly but surely normalised.

New age feminists attack alleged male privileges but support men who claim to be women under the banal slogan ‘transwomen are women and trans rights are human rights.’ The push for more women in boardrooms, meant to redress gender imbalance, is subverted when transwomen are included in the female category in gender-specific lists of CEOs.

Cleanse your memory of the aggressive big trans bullies you see in action on the streets intimidating gender-realist critics. The ultimate emotional blackmail card of trans-terrorists is the threat of self-harm and suicide by vulnerable trans snowflakes. Watch any old Bollywood movie and you will quickly discover that the master of emotional blackmail as the tool of choice for ensuring compliance by adult children with parents’ wishes is the Indian family.

To be clear, I have nothing but sympathy for adults who feel genuinely trapped in the wrong body and are more comfortable with dress, appearance, and lifestyle choices better suited to their felt gender. But I draw the line at using trans identity to violate women’s hard-earned rights to dignity, privacy, and safety, from locker rooms and toilets to rape and domestic violence shelters, hospital wards, and prisons. Inclusion for trans should not become an alibi to enable abuse of women. Any gender equality law based on gender self-ID can be quickly corrupted into a predator’s charter that shreds women’s rights. Telling women to subordinate their safety worries to accommodate the wishes of biological males is old-fashioned misogyny.

Wokery and Net Zero Are Strategic Own Goals by the West

UK Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch is surely right to insist that quota-filling clumsy diversity drives are not a substitute for effective action to redress inequalities. Often, instead of unity and inclusion they produce division and alienation. Do Western elites have any real grasp of the mockery and ridicule in which they are held for their indulgence of race baiters and grifters and obsession with pronouns and rainbow flags? They present easy targets for the world’s autocrats to point to the dangers of activist-captured democracy. In a fiery address to the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi in October 2021, President Vladimir Putin attacked teaching children ‘that a boy can become a girl and vice versa’ as monstrous and ‘on the verge of a crime against humanity.’ He stoutly rejected the demands of transgender rights supporters to end ‘basic things such as mother, father, family or gender differences.’

[…]

The democratic centre has been infiltrated and captured by the elite fringe. Just like those who spoke out against and refused to go along with the Covid narrative, many have been cancelled for calling out the madness of the metastasising wokery. They should take comfort and solace in the truth that by the enemies they make in resisting tyranny, they shall be known for their virtues of courage and integrity.

An even bigger threat to the West’s relative power is the singular determination to destroy its economies and transfer wealth to China through self-harm in the doomed pursuit of Net Zero. The alleged climate emergency has become the de facto battleground for strategic dominance carried out by other means. European manufacturers of solar panels are facing extinction because of the massive influx of Chinese products and the mix of incentives for electric vehicles (EVs). Extra levies on internal combustion engines (ICE) are subsidising China’s already dominant EV industry.

This is over and above the harsh reality that EVs make neither economic, environmental, nor energy security sense when all factors are taken into consideration over the full life cycle of a vehicle. If vehicle emissions were measured in the components and energy requirements in the total production cycle, energy mix in the grid, backup power requirements, impact of tyres and weight, and disposal after end of life, EVs would likely be banned for performing not too well.

The claim of 97 percent scientific consensus behind man-made global warming was always a confected furphy. The new Climate The Movie exposes this big lie with several credible experts questioning the science behind the rush to embrace Net Zero. Countries should look for the energy sweet spot between emissions, reliability, affordability, and collateral costs that lead to ruin. For two-three decades I’ve been hearing that renewables will make emissions-free power supply plentiful, reliable, and progressively cheaper. So far ‘lived’ experience is the exact opposite on all three counts.

[…]

Because of the fixation on CO2 emissions, market forces and consumer choice are not permitted to determine what people buy and what products businesses make and sell. Even conservative governments use state power to dictate production and consumer choices, from nuclear power to EVs. EV sales have been slowing and dealers’ stocks are not budging beyond fleet sales, with the first early signs of pushback even in the latter category. Hertz is cutting its losses and eliminating its EV fleet of hire vehicles. Manufacturers have put production on hold. Sales of  hybrids have grown with no range and charging station anxiety.

Emulating the doomed heat pump mandate in the UK, President Joe Biden imposed a government fiat on consumer preference in the US with a sweeping crackdown on petrol cars. Half of all cars sold in the US by 2030 must be electric. Let’s wait and see how this holds up against the bumper sticker opposition ‘Biden is coming for your truck.’ On 21 March Audi issued a second recall of EVs sold in Australia owing to battery fire risk. British citizens have been awakened to the real-world impacts of the rush to embrace heat pumps and EVs. The perennially cash-strapped National Health Service prefers to spend half a billion pounds on switching to electric ambulances instead of hiring more frontline nurses.

[…]

As this shows, people are mobilising to fight back. The ‘Bud Light moment’ has entered marketing folklore as the perfect lesson of go woke, go broke. Hollywood and Disney are relearning that people watch movies and TV shows to be entertained and not to be lectured on moralism. Political activism by the entertainment industry cuts into profits. In the UK, when the BBC reprimanded Justin Webb, a longtime radio presenter, for saying ‘trans women, in other words males’, it caused an internal ‘meltdown’ among female staff who described his statement as fact.

In the US, 16 female athletes have launched a lawsuit against their professional association that allowed Lia Thomas to share a locker room and bathroom facilities with more than 300 women despite ‘full male genitalia.’ This exposed the athletes ‘to shock, humiliation, and embarrassment in violation of their constitutional right to bodily privacy.’ In Alaska, Patricia Silva confronted a man shaving in the women’s locker room, was banned from Planet Fitness gym for violating its policy of inclusive kindness, and posted on X that the gym would rather cancel her membership than protect young women and 12-year-old girls from ‘men with a penis.’

More generally, realisation is dawning across the West, but not yet in Australia, that routine prescription of puberty-blocking drugs to gender-confused young people is child abuse. England banned these for under-18s on 12 March.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/elites-at-war-with-the-people/

My first article on the coming backlash – admittedly wildly optimistic – went to print April 24, 2020. After 6 weeks of lockdown, I confidently predicted a political revolt, a movement against masks, a population-wide revulsion against the elites, a demand to reject “social distancing” and streaming-only life, plus widespread disgust at everything and everyone involved.

I was off by four years. I wrongly assumed back then that society was still functioning and that our elites would be responsive to the obvious flop of the whole lockdown scheme. I assumed that people were smarter than they proved to be. I also did not anticipate just how devastating the effects of lockdown would be: in terms of learning loss, economic chaos, cultural shock, and the population-wide demoralization and loss of trust.

The forces that set in motion those grim days were far more deep than I knew at the time. They involved a willing complicity from tech, media, pharma, and the administrative state at all levels of society.

There is every evidence that it was planned to be exactly what it became; not just a foolish deployment of public health powers but a “great reset” of our lives. The newfound powers of the ruling class were not given up so easily, and it took far longer for people to shake off the trauma than I had anticipated.

Is that backlash finally here? If so, it’s about time.

New literature is emerging to document it all.

The new book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy is a viciously partisan, histrionic, and gravely inaccurate account that gets nearly everything wrong but one: vast swaths of the public are fed up, not with democracy but its opposite of ruling class hegemony. The revolt is not racial and not geographically determined. It’s not even about left and right, categories that are mostly a distraction. it’s class-based in large part but more precisely about the rulers vs. the ruled.

With more precision, new voices are emerging among people who detect a “vibe change” in the population. One is Elizabeth Nickson’s article “Strongholds Falling; Populists Seize the Culture.” She argues, quoting Bret Weinstein, that “The lessons of [C]ovid are profound. The most important lesson of Covid is that without knowing the game, we outfoxed them and their narrative collapsed…The revolution is happening all over the socials, especially in videos. And the disgust is palpable.”

A second article is “Vibe Shift” by Santiago Pliego:

The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled. Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.

We truly want to believe this is true. And this much is certainly correct: the battle lines are incredibly clear these days. The media that uncritically echo the deep-state line are known: Slate, Wired, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, New Republic, New Yorker, and so on, to say nothing of the New York Times. What used to be politically partisan venues with certain predictable biases are now more readily described as ruling-class mouthpieces, forever instructing you precisely how to think while demonizing disagreement.

After all, all of these venues, in addition to the obvious case of the science journals, are still defending the lockdowns and everything that followed. Rather than express regret for their bad models and immoral means of control, they have continued to insist that they did the right thing, regardless of the civilization-wide carnage everywhere in evidence, while ignoring the relationship between the policies they championed and the terrible results.

Instead of allowing their mistakes to change their own outlook, they have adapted their own worldview to allow for snap lockdowns anytime they deem them necessary. In holding this view, they have forged a view of politics that it is embarrassingly acquiescent to the powerful.

The liberalism that once questioned authority and demanded free speech seems extinct. This transmogrified and captured liberalism now demands compliance with authority and calls for further restrictions on free speech. Now anyone who makes a basic demand for normal freedom – to speak or choose one’s own medical treatment or to decline to wear a mask – can reliably anticipate being denounced as “right-wing” even when it makes absolutely no sense.

The smears, cancellations, and denunciations are out of control, and so unbearably predictable.

It’s enough to make one’s head spin. As for the pandemic protocols themselves, there have been no apologies but only more insistence that they were imposed with the best of intentions and mostly correct. The World Health Organization wants more power, and so does the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even though the evidence of the failure of pharma pours in daily, major media venues pretend that all is well, and thereby out themselves as mouthpieces for the ruling regime.

The issue is that major and unbearably obvious failures have never been admitted. Institutions and individuals who only double down on preposterous lies that everyone knows are lies only end up discrediting themselves.

That’s a pretty good summary of where we are today, with vast swaths of elite culture facing an unprecedented loss of trust. Elites have chosen the lie over truth and cover-up over transparency.

This is becoming operationalized in declining traffic for legacy media, which is shedding costly staff as fast as possible. The social media venues that cooperated closely with government during the lockdowns are losing cultural sway while uncensored ones like Elon Musk’s X are gaining attention. Disney is reeling from its partisanship, while states are passing new laws against WHO policies and interventions.

Sometimes this whole revolt can be quite entertaining. When the CDC or WHO posts an update on X, when they allow comments, it is followed by thousands of reader comments of denunciation and poking fun, with flurries of comments to the effect of “I will not comply.”

DEI is being systematically defunded by major corporations while financial institutions are turning on it. Indeed, the culture in general has come to regard DEI as a sure indication of incompetence. Meanwhile, the outer reaches of the “great reset” such as the hope that EVs would replace internal combustion have come to naught as the EV market has collapsed, along with consumer demand for fake meat to say nothing of bug eating.

As for politics, yes, it does seem like the backlash has empowered populist movements all over the world. We see them in the farmers’ revolt in Europe, the street protests in Brazil against a sketchy election, the widespread discontent in Canada over government policies, and even in migration trends out of US blue states toward red ones. Already, the administrative state in D.C. is working to secure itself against a possible unfriendly president in the form of Trump or RFK, Jr.

So, yes, there are many signs of revolt. These are all very encouraging.

What does all this mean in practice? How does this end? How precisely does a revolt take shape in an industrialized democracy? What is the mostly likely pathway for long-term social change? These are legitimate questions.

For hundreds of years, our best political philosophers have opined that no system can function in a sustainable way in which a huge majority is coercively governed by a tiny elite with a class interest in serving themselves at public expense.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/did-lockdowns-set-a-global-revolt-in-motion/

Dr Eddy Betterman

New research out of Saudi Arabia has found that a shocking 27.11 percent of, or a little more than one in four, people who got “vaccinated” for the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) suffered heart-related complications within a month to more than a year after injection.

Microbiologist and immunologist Muazzam M. Sheriff and colleagues at Ibn Sina National College for Medical Studies and King Faisal General Hospital noted that more than a quarter of COVID jab recipients suffered some kind of cardiac complication after getting the mRNA variety of shot, made by either Pfizer and BioNTech or Moderna.

Nearly 15 percent of mRNA jab recipients reported experiencing heart-related symptoms within one month of injection, while others reported heart problems upwards of a year or more after doing the deed.

TrialSite News is calling Sheriff’s study a “bombshell,” with founder Daniel O’Connor telling The Defender that “the rate of hospitalized cases was certainly notable, especially given the existing cardiac myocarditis and pericarditis signal associated with the vaccines.”

(Related: Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche says that the genocide from Operation Warp Speed has only just begun.)

Destroying the heart

According to Dr. Peter McCullough, nearly 16 percent of all COVID jab recipients who developed cardiovascular symptoms had to be rushed to an intensive care unit (ICU) for treatment – that is how bad their symptoms were.

“More than half of subjects indicated they were influenced by a healthcare professional or government agency to get vaccinated,” McCullough is quoted as saying.

“Never in recent times has there been such a cardiotoxic vaccine released on the public.”

Concerning the long-term impact of the shots, O’Connor added that many such cases of heart problems are being reported sometimes several years post-injection.

“The surge in cardiac-related incidents in the news over the last year or two doesn’t comfort one either,” he added.

Published in the medical journal Cureus, the new study out of Saudi Arabia looked at 804 participants, 379 of whom are men and 425 of whom are women. All of them received at least one dose of an mRNA shot.

About 40 percent of the participants took just one shot, meaning they did not complete even the initial two-shot series, let alone get any “booster” shots.

Nearly 10 percent of the participants had to receive medical care for their injuries for more than 12 months while 7.11 percent were undergoing some kind of continuous and ongoing treatment at the time of the survey.

Amazingly, only about 20 percent of study participants indicated that they believe their cardiac symptoms were “strongly related” or “somewhat related” to the injections. A full 65 percent were either “neutral,” “somewhat not confident,” or “not confident at all” that the shots were to blame.

Nearly half of the participants have diabetes or hypertension, and about 40 percent are obese. Just over 22 percent reported other sedentary lifestyle-related health issues.

“Despite the bias of recruitment strategy to find patients with cardiovascular side effects from mRNA, these are large percentages requiring hospital and or ICU care,” McCullough further commented.

“More data are needed on these cases including diagnosis, treatment and outcomes such as recurrent hospitalization and death.”

More investigation is needed, the study authors claim, to make any kind of definitive declarations about the matter. This is always what they say to avoid placing direct blame on the shots for anything.

TrialSite News called it “a strong study in regard to methodology, relevance and ethical considerations,” noting that the authors seemed to “downplay the magnitude of the response” despite what “seems like an awfully high rate” of cardiac complications.

[…]

Via https://dreddymd.com/2024/04/11/mrna-covid-vaccines-saudi-arabia-heart-issues/

By Simplicius

US Treasury Secretary Yellen Dispatched to Beg China for Face-Saving Slowdown

The U.S.’ growing urgency in ‘containing’ China’s development was thrown in sharp relief this week as Janet Yellen arrived in Beijing for what turned out to be an execrable beggar’s tour. Just days prior to her arrival, she had buzzed the punditry with her historically memorable exclamation that China was now operating at “overcapacity”(!!).

[…]

“China is now simply too large for the rest of the world to absorb this enormous capacity. Actions taken by the PRC today can shift world prices….”

And the bombshell:

“When the global market is flooded with cheap Chinese goods, the viability of American firms is put into question.”

[…]

The fact of the matter is, China is simply leaping ahead of the decrepit, deteriorating U.S. by every measure and the panicked elites have sent Yellen to beg China to “slow down” and not embarrass them on the world stage.

The above is factual: Esquire reported that a Brown University investigation found the U.S. has spent an ineffable $14T on wars since 9/11. Source

And yes, the current U.S. debt is a massive $34T. That means quite literally almost half of the entire current U.S. debt was blown on endless, mindless, genocidal wars in the Middle East.

The U.S. has wasted its entire blood and treasure on war. Imagine what the U.S. could have built with $14 trillion dollars? Where the U.S. could have been in relation to China for that amount? As someone else noted, the U.S. could have very well built its own “one belt and road” project for that money, connecting the world and reaping untold benefits.

China hasn’t spent a cent on war, and puts everything right back into economic development and wellbeing for its own people.

[…]

What makes this historic mal-appropriation of American funds most tragic is that none of it came at the benefit of American people. The entire operation was carried out by an ethnic cabal within the U.S. government with loyalties only to Israel, and no one else. I’m speaking of course of the PNAC clan, who masterminded the entire breadth of the 21st century wars which have engulfed America in wretched shame and misery, irreversibly gutting the country and squandering its global standing. These wars had nothing whatsoever to do with America’s national interests or security, and have done naught but make Americans less safe and the entire world more dangerous and unstable.

China doesn’t have this problem: there is no inimical ‘out’ group parasitizing their country’s leadership, literally assassinating (JFK) and blackmailing their presidents (Clinton).* China is therefore able to focus on the interests of its own people.*

[…]

China doesn’t form vassals, it forms partners. That means it spends comparatively far less spreading its influence because that influence has compounding abilities owing to the fair bilateral nature of China’s arrangements. The U.S. has to spend comparatively inordinate amounts of blood and treasure to maintain the same level of ‘influence’ because that ‘influence’ is totally artificial, confected out of a poisonous mixture of fear, strong-arming tactics, economic terrorism that leads to blowback which hurts the U.S. economy, etc. In short, it is mafia tactics versus real business partnerships.

One big difference between China and the U.S. is that China is open to sharing the earth, willing to co-prosper with the U.S. Conversely, the U.S. is unwilling to abdicate its global domination.

China-US Relations: From Trade War to Hot War?

Contrast President Xi’s magnanimous statements with those of the seething, guilt-wracked, bloodthirstily conniving Western ‘executives’. In fact, Xi called for more exchanges between China and the U.S. in order to entwine the two countries in mutual understanding . . .

[…]

Meanwhile, when one thinks of America’s progressive decline, the one enduring image that comes to mind is of a bitterly frightened but dangerous, beady-eyed cornered rodent, conspiring on how to inflict damage and suffering onto the world in order to mask its own downfall.

[…]

In reality, the U.S. economy is in atrocious shape with sky-high inflation.

[…]

U.S. home ownership is on a precipitous decline toward the low ~60s%, while China now has over 90% home ownership rate:

The above naturally springs the question of how China is able to do these things while the U.S. cannot. One of the answers comes by way of this fascinating explainer which shows that, contrary to the West’s depiction of China as some kind of rigidly authoritarian system, forward-looking President Xi is actually utilizing very cutting edge economic experimentation models to keep the Chinese economy as innovative, limber, and supple as possible.

In short, a deep study of thousands of official documents shows a huge upswing in language promoting economic experimentation in the directives issued under Xi’s government.

This is further compounded by the most important point of all: that under President Xi, China has embarked on a meticulous plan of curbing financialization and speculation of the ‘Western model’ in its economy. This is where it starts getting important so buckle up.

[…]

Observers of the current American hegemony will recognize the transformation of the global system to suit American interests. The maintenance of an ideologically charged ‘rules-based’ order – ostensibly for the benefit of everyone – fits neatly into the category of conflation of national and international interests. Meanwhile, the previous hegemon, the British, had their own version that incorporated both free-trade policies and a matching ideology that emphasized the wealth of nations over national sovereignty.

[…]

In short: as an empire dies, loses its industrial and manufacturing capacity, finance takes over, pumping up huge bubbles of phony speculative money that gives the brief appearance of economic prosperity—for a time. This is what’s currently happening in the U.S., as it drowns in its self-created agony of debt, misery, corruption, and global destabilization.

[…]

. . . the United States’ underground economy evolved parallel to its legitimate economy, exploiting loopholes and leveraging secrecy jurisdictions to facilitate illegal activities such as drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and money laundering.

[…]

It is noteworthy that the CPC leadership recently launched a major drive to build China into a “financial great power,” with a financial system “based on the real economy.” That would be the antithesis to Anglo-American-style economic financialization.

[…].

“China’s 461-trillion-yuan (US$63.7 trillion) financial industry and its regulatory regime will be heavily prioritised in a broad economic reshuffle engendered by the country’s top leadership, with the sector remoulded to serve national objectives like sustainable growth and advancement in the global tech race.

[…]

Specifically, it vowed to rein in Wall Street-style practices seen as unsustainable and crisis-prone, and move toward functionality as an overriding value for the financial system rather than profitability.

It also mandated that Chinese financial institutions have “higher efficiency” than their peers in the capitalist world and provide inclusive, accessible services in the pursuit of common prosperity.

[…]

It’s hard not to wax poetic on these developments, because they are truly groundbreaking. China is paving a new path forward for the entire world. The Chinese banking industry is now by far the largest on earth and President Xi has wisely put his foot down with a bold edict: we will not follow the path of destruction chosen by the West, but rather will set our own new path.

[…]

Market-based US and European economies are struggling to survive against China’s “very effective” alternative economic model, a top US trade representative has warned, according to Euractiv.

Katherine Tai told a briefing in Brussels on Thursday that Beijing’s “non-market” policies will cause severe economic and political damage, unless they are tackled through appropriate “countermeasures.” Tai’s remarks came as the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) kicked off in Leuven, Belgium.

“I think what we see in terms of the challenge that we have from China is… the ability for our firms to be able to survive in competition with a very effective economic system,” Tai said in response to a question from Euractiv.

In short: China isn’t playing fair—they’re actually privileging their people and economy over financial speculation, and this is causing their firms to outcompete ours!

But what she’s really talking about gets to the essence of the difference in the two systems:

The trade official described China as a system “that we’ve articulated as being not market-based, as being fundamentally nurtured differently, against which a market-based system like ours is going to have trouble competing against and surviving.”

These are code words: what she means by “market based” is free market capitalism, while China uses more of a centrally-planned directive system, as outlined earlier. Recall just recently I posted complaints from Western officials that their companies are not able to compete with Russian defense manufacturers due to their ‘unfairly’ efficient ‘central planning’ style.

Here too, what they mean is that the Chinese government creates directives that spurn ‘market logics’ and are aimed at direct improvements to the lives of ordinary citizens. In the West there’s no such thing: all market decisions are based merely on the totally detached financial firms’ speculations and are exclusively at the behest of a tiny claque of finance and banking elite at the top of the pyramid.

You see, the U.S. is threatened because it knows it can never compete with China fairly, by squelching or containing its own gluttonous financial elite—so that leaves only one avenue for keeping up: sabotage and war.

This is the real reason the U.S. is desperate to stoke a Chinese invasion of Taiwan by various provocations, including weapons shipments. Just like the U.S. used Ukraine as the battering ram to bleed and weaken Russia economically, disconnecting it from Europe, U.S. hopes to use Taiwan as the Ukraine against China. It would love to foment a bloody war that would leave China battered and economically set back to give the failing and greed-suffocated U.S. economy some breathing room.

[…]

*And yes, for those wondering, it’s now fairly proven that Lewinsky was a Mossad honeytrap used to blackmail Clinton in assenting to various Israeli demands vis-a-vis the Oslo Accords, Wye River Memorandum, etc.

Fluoride Free New Zealand

Fluoride Free New Zealand (FFNZ), along with New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out for Science (NZDSOS), filed for an Injunction against the Hastings District Council in the Wellington High Court yesterday (9 April 2024).

FFNZ and NZDSOS consider the Hastings District Council’s decision to resume fluoridating Hastings community water supplies to be unlawful, unscientific, undemocratic and a reckless wielding of power against a citizenship that will be forced to consume this toxic industrial byproduct. Hastings District Council had the same options that other councils have taken to wait until the lawfulness of water fluoridation was clarified by the Courts. Hastings District Council has instead decided to force this measure on its community

In 2018 the New Zealand Supreme Court ruled that fluoridation was “compulsory medical treatment” that violated section 11 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act (BORA), the right to refuse to undergo medical treatment. No consensus was reached as to whether this was justifiable under section 5 of the Act.

FFNZ and NZDSOS have applied for an injunction that fluoridation not be allowed to start in Hastings until all legal matters are settled.

Fluoride is now widely accepted as a neurotoxin with high quality US Government funded studies showing that fluoride can reduce IQ in children. Pregnant women and parents of bottle-fed babies should be warned that fluoridated water poses an irreversible risk to the mental development of their child.

The High Court ruled in November 2023 that every decision-maker must undertake a BORA analysis prior. Therefore, FFNZ and NZDSOS believe the Hastings District Council is acting unlawfully by making the decision to start fluoridation when neither the DGoH or the council has done this BORA analysis.

Nelson City Council has requested an extension from the Ministry of Health to their deadline of starting fluoridation in April 2024, claiming uneasiness with implementing an unlawful direction. The Ministry of Health granted this extension. Other councils such as Rotorua, Waitaki and Horowhenua have taken similar steps to delay the introduction of fluoridation.

There is no compulsion for Hastings District Council to start fluoridation now.

[…]

Via https://fluoridefree.org.nz/fluoride-free-new-zealand-and-new-zealand-doctors-speaking-out-for-science-take-legal-action-against-hastings-district-council-over-fluoridation/

The sprawling U.S. embassy in Berlin. [Source: spiegel.de]

By Kit Klarenberg | CovertAction Magazine 

On February 4th, The Economist published a devastating analysis—or perhaps, “pre-mortem”—on the collapse of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) under Olaf Scholz’s stewardship. Elected in what the Western media contemporaneously branded a “shock” result in September 2021, hopes for his coalition government in many quarters were high. Today, he enjoys the worst approval ratings of any Chancellor in modern history, and national opinion polls place SPD approval at 15% or lower.

The Economist frames Scholz’s collapsed fortunes, and the prospects of his party’s imminent extinction as a serious force within German politics, as a microcosm of Berlin’s declining economic and political clout more widely. It notes that the nation’s finances have gone “limp” during his tenure, with business-sector confidence collapsing, and record inflation destroying citizens’ incomes and savings. Other sources have detailed the country’s “deindustrialization,” Politico coining the nickname, “Rust Belt on the Rhine.”

In keeping with those meditations on Germany’s ever-worsening woes, The Economist’s bleak diagnosis made no mention of how Western sanctions imposed on Russia in February 2022 created Berlin’s crisis. Scholz was a prominent cheerleader for the Biden administration’s push to “make the Ruble rubble.” Now that effort has so spectacularly backfired that it can no longer be ignored or spun otherwise; Newsweek admits “any realistic war game could have easily predicted” the sanctions would not only fail, but boomerang on the sanctioners.

Those few analysts who predicted the invasion of Ukraine well in advance universally failed to anticipate Berlin would support and facilitate any U.S. counterattack, particularly in the financial sphere. They believed Germany possessed the requisite autonomy and sense not to commit willful economic suicide in service of Empire. After all, the country’s stability, prosperity and power were heavily dependent on cheap, readily accessible Russian energy. Voluntarily ending that supply would be inescapably disastrous.

For this failure, they can be forgiven. Berlin, particularly in the wake of reunification, has successfully presented itself to the world as sovereign, led by sensible people acting in the best interests of their nation, and Europe. In truth, ever since 1945, Germany has been a heavily occupied nation, drowning under the weight of U.S. military installations, and its politics, society and culture aggressively shaped and influenced by the CIA.

This unacknowledged reality is amply spelled out in Agency whistleblower Philip Agee’s 1978 tell-all book, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe. Comprehending who is truly in charge in Berlin, and what interests Germany’s elected representatives are actually serving, is fundamental to understanding why Scholz, et al., so eagerly embraced the self-destructive sanctions. And why the facts of Nord Stream 2’s criminal destruction can never emerge.

“Enormous Presence”

Following World War II, the United States emerged as the world’s undisputed military and economic superpower. As Agee wrote, the overriding aim of U.S. foreign policy thereafter was to “guarantee the coherence of the Western world” under its exclusive leadership. CIA activities were accordingly “directed toward achieving this goal.” In service of the Empire’s global domination project, “left opposition movements had to be discredited and destroyed” everywhere.

After West Germany was forged from the respective occupation zones of Britain, France and the U.S., the fledgling country became a particularly “crucial area” in this regard, serving as “one of the most important operational areas for far-reaching CIA programs” in Europe and elsewhere. Domestic Agency operations in West Germany were explicitly concerned with ensuring the country was “pro-American,” and structured according to U.S. “commercial interests.”

In the process, the CIA covertly supported the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and SPD, and trade unions. The Agency “wanted the influence of the two major political parties to be strong enough to shut out and hold down any left opposition,” Agee explained. The SPD had a radical, Marxist tradition. It was the only party in the Reichstag to vote against the 1933 Enabling Act, which laid the foundations for Germany’s total Nazification, and led to its proscription.

Newly reinstituted following the war, the SPD maintained its revolutionary roots until 1959. Then, under the Godesberg Program, it abandoned any commitment to challenging capitalism in a serious way. It stretches credibility to suggest the CIA was not expressly responsible for neutering the party’s radical tendencies.

In any event, effective control of West German democracy ensured that Washington’s “enormous presence” there–which included hundreds of thousands of troops and almost 300 separate military and intelligence installations—was not challenged by those in power, irrespective of the party to which they belonged, despite a majority of the population consistently opposing U.S. military occupation.

This presence in turn granted the CIA “a number of different covers to work behind,” according to Agee. The majority of its operatives were embedded within the U.S. military, posing as mere soldiers. The Agency’s biggest station was an army base in Frankfurt, although it also boasted units in West Berlin and Munich. U.S. operatives were “highly qualified technicians who tap telephones, open mail, keep people under surveillance, and encode and decode intelligence transmissions,” working “all over the country.”

Dedicated divisions were charged with “making contact with organizations and people within the political establishment,” such as the SPD and its elected representatives. All the intelligence collected was “used to infiltrate and manipulate” the same organizations. The CIA, moreover, collaborated “very closely” with West German security services in many domestic spying efforts, the country’s assorted intelligence agencies conducting operations at the Agency’s direct behest, “often [to] protect CIA activities from any legal consequences.”

“Discredit and Destroy”

Intimate bedfellows as they were, there were nonetheless “difficulties” in the CIA’s relationship with its West German counterparts, per Agee. The Agency never fully trusted their protégés, and felt a pronounced need to “keep an eye” on them. Still, this lack of faith was no barrier to the CIA partnering with the BND, West Germany’s foreign intelligence service, to secretly purchase Swiss encryption firm Crypto AG in 1970. Perhaps this was done to “protect CIA activities from any legal consequences.”

Crypto AG produced high-tech machines through which foreign governments could transmit sensitive high-level communications around the world, safe from prying eyes. Or so they thought. In reality, the clandestine owners of Crypto AG, and by extension the NSA and GCHQ, could easily decipher any messages sent via the firm’s devices, as they themselves crafted the encryption codes. The connivance operated in total secrecy for decades thereafter, only being exposed in February 2020.

The full extent of the information collected via Crypto AG—along with key national competitor Omnisec AG, which the CIA also owned—and the nefarious purposes to which it was put is unknown. It would be entirely unsurprising though if the harvested data helped inform CIA operations to “discredit and destroy” left-wing opposition in West Germany and beyond, efforts that no doubt continue to this day.

The Cold War may be over, but Germany remains heavily occupied. It hosts the largest number of U.S. troops of any European country, despite an overwhelming majority of the population supporting their partial or total withdrawal in the years following the Berlin Wall’s collapse. In July 2020, then-President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of 12,000 soldiers of the 38,600-strong contingent still there.

While intended to punish Germany for greenlighting the now-destroyed Nord Stream 2, polls indicated most Germans were only too happy to say “auf wiedersehen.” In all, 47% were in favor of them leaving, while a quarter called for the permanent closure of all U.S. bases on their soil. Yet, just two weeks after entering the White House, Joe Biden reversed his predecessor’s policy, returning 500 soldiers who had departed.

The President also scrapped plans to relocate the Stuttgart-based U.S. Africa Command, which effectively embeds Washington in the armed forces of 53 countries across the continent, elsewhere in Europe. Research shows the Command’s training programs have precipitated a significant rise in the number of military coups in Africa. As Agee attested, U.S. military bases are a hotbed of CIA spies. Berlin therefore must remain “one of the most important operational areas for far-reaching CIA programs” within and without the country, whether Germans like it or not.

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/04/09/occupied-nation-how-the-cia-created-modern-germany/

Lance D Johnson

“Out of an abundance of caution,” the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been “depopulating” poultry farms whenever a hen tests positive for avian influenza. These government-enforced depopulation schemes target millions of egg-laying hens, decimating large flocks of harmless animals.

The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development recently reported that a few birds tested positive for avian influenza at a major Michigan poultry facility. The birds at this facility were put under quarantine and scheduled to be killed, en masse. Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch recently had a few hens test positive at their Green Meadow Organics facility, and entire flocks will be culled because of it. This is an issue that is occurring at greater frequency across the country. PCR fallibility and disease pandemonium allows government agencies to cull entire flocks, driving food price inflation and putting the food supply at risk.

Overzealous laws allow USDA to cull millions of harmless animals

Factory farms are notorious for raising chickens in unhealthy, crowded environments that do not consider the holistic health of the animals. This often causes the chickens to become more susceptible to sickness and more likely to spread infections. The animals are not allowed to roam freely and develop proper immunity to the pathogens in their environment. These animals are often subject to conditions, drugs and vaccines that further weaken their ability to adapt to disease. Instead of allowing chicken populations to gain natural immunity, the government depopulates entire flocks and puts the next generation of chickens at greater risk, due to waning herd immunity from generation to generation.

[…]

Via https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-04-07-usda-using-pcr-testing-depopulate-poultry-farms-harming-us-food-supply.html

A group of January 6 defendants has reportedly filed a class action lawsuit against 21 Capitol Police officers and others for millions of dollars in damages.

Defendant Jake Lang told Real America’s Voice on Friday that the group of more than 78 defendants filed the lawsuit, according to Newsweek.

He told the show, “I got shot in the foot with a rubber bullet, other people were bludgeoned nearly to death, hit with chemical spray and had long-lasting lung effects and so… we are now serving 21 defendants…Capitol Police officers, Capitol Police officials.”

Lang turned 29 on April 7 — his fourth birthday behind bars without a trial. He posted on X:

Lang was 25 when he participated in a protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as Congress was preparing to certify the 2020 presidential election results.

He was arrested shortly after January 6 when people saw his social media posts about participating in the protest and contacted federal authorities, according to the FBI’s affidavit.

Lang is accused of assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees; civil disorder; unlawful entry in a restricted building or grounds; and violent entry or disorderly conduct. The affidavit said a video showed he “swung, thrusted, and/or jabbed” a bat at Capitol Police officers. He has pleaded not guilty to all counts.

He also said, “17 other US Capitol Police / MPD officers & officials remain to be SERVED in the J6 Class Action Lawsuit for their actions that left 4 unarmed peaceful protestors dead.”

.[…]

Via https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/04/09/report-january-6-defendants-sue-capitol-police-officers-for-millions/