Colin Toddhunter

In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. The world’s poorest countries are due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports.

Oxfam and Development Finance International (DFI) have also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next five years.

According to Prof Michel Chossudovsky of the Centre for Research on Globalization, the closure of the world economy (March 11, 2020 Lockdown imposed on more than 190 countries) has triggered an unprecedented process of global indebtedness. Governments are now under the control of global creditors in the post-COVID era.

What we are seeing is a de facto privatisation of the state as governments capitulate to the needs of Western financial institutions.

Moreover, these debts are largely dollar-denominated, helping to strengthen the US dollar and US leverage over countries.

It raises the question: what was COVID really about?

Millions have been asking that question since lockdowns and restrictions began in early 2020. If it was indeed about public health, why close down the bulk of health services and the global economy knowing full well what the massive health, economic and debt implications would be?

Why mount a military-style propaganda campaign to censor world-renowned scientists and terrorise entire populations and use the full force and brutality of the police to ensure compliance?

These actions were wholly disproportionate to any risk posed to public health, especially when considering the way ‘COVID death’ definitions and data were often massaged and how PCR tests were misused to scare populations into submission.

Prof Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University implies we should have been suspicious from the start when the usually “unscrupulous ruling elites” froze the global economy in the face of a pathogen that targets almost exclusively the unproductive (the over 80s).

COVID was a crisis of capitalism masquerading as a public health emergency.

Capitalism  

Capitalism needs to keep expanding into or creating new markets to ensure the accumulation of capital to offset the tendency for the general rate of profit to fall. The capitalist needs to accumulate capital (wealth) to be able to reinvest it and make further profits. By placing downward pressure on workers’ wages, the capitalist extracts sufficient surplus value to be able to do this.

But when the capitalist is unable to sufficiently reinvest (due to declining demand for commodities, a lack of investment opportunities and markets, etc), wealth (capital) over accumulates, devalues and the system goes into crisis. To avoid crisis, capitalism requires constant growth, markets and sufficient demand.

According to writer Ted Reese, the capitalist rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. Although wages and corporate taxes have been slashed, the exploitability of labour was increasingly insufficient to meet the demands of capital accumulation.

By late 2019, many companies could not generate sufficient profit. Falling turnover, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.

Economic growth was weakening in the run up to the massive stock market crash in February 2020, which saw trillions more pumped into the system in the guise of ‘COVID relief’.

To stave off crisis up until that point, various tactics had been employed.

Credit markets were expanded and personal debt increased to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages were squeezed. Financial deregulation occurred and speculative capital was allowed to exploit new areas and investment opportunities. At the same time, stock buy backs, the student debt economy, quantitative easing and massive bail outs and subsidies and an expansion of militarism helped to maintain economic growth.

There was also a ramping up of an imperialist strategy that has seen indigenous systems of production abroad being displaced by global corporations and states pressurised to withdraw from areas of economic activity, leaving transnational players to occupy the space left open.

While these strategies produced speculative bubbles and led to an overevaluation of assets and increased both personal and government debt, they helped to continue to secure viable profits and returns on investment.

But come 2019, former governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King warned that the world was sleepwalking towards a fresh economic and financial crisis that would have devastating consequences. He argued that the global economy was stuck in a low growth trap and recovery from the crisis of 2008 was weaker than that after the Great Depression.

King concluded that it was time for the Federal Reserve and other central banks to begin talks behind closed doors with politicians.

That is precisely what happened as key players, including BlackRock, the world’s most powerful investment fund, got together to work out a strategy going forward. This took place in the lead up to COVID.

Aside from deepening the dependency of poorer countries on Western capital, Fabio Vighi says lockdowns and the global suspension of economic transactions allowed the US Fed to flood the ailing financial markets (under the guise of COVID) with freshly printed money while shutting down the real economy to avoid hyperinflation. Lockdowns suspended business transactions, which drained the demand for credit and stopped the contagion.

COVID provided cover for a multi-trillion-dollar bailout for the capitalist economy that was in meltdown prior to COVID. Despite a decade or more of ‘quantitative easing’, this new bailout came in the form of trillions of dollars pumped into financial markets by the US Fed (in the months prior to March 2020) and subsequent ‘COVID relief’.

The IMF, World bank and global leaders knew full well what the impact on the world’s poor would be of closing down the world economy through COVID-related lockdowns.

Yet they sanctioned it and there is now the prospect that in excess of a quarter of a billion more people worldwide will fall into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone.

In April 2020, the Wall Street Journal stated the IMF and World Bank faced a deluge of aid requests from scores of poorer countries seeking bailouts and loans from financial institutions with $1.2 trillion to lend.

In addition to helping to reboot the financial system, closing down the global economy deliberately deepened poorer countries’ dependency on Western global conglomerates and financial interests.

Lockdowns also helped accelerate the restructuring of capitalism that involves smaller enterprises being driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies and global chains, thereby ensuring continued viable profits for Big Tech, the digital payments giants and global online corporations like Meta and Amazon and the eradication of millions of jobs.

Although the effects of the conflict in Ukraine cannot be dismissed, with the global economy now open again, inflation is rising and causing a ‘cost of living’ crisis. With a debt-ridden economy, there is limited scope for rising interest rates to control inflation.

But this crisis is not inevitable: current inflation is not only induced by the liquidity injected into the financial system but also being fuelled by speculation in food commodity markets and corporate greed as energy and food corporations continue to rake in vast profits at the expense of ordinary people.

Resistance  

However, resistance is fertile.

Aside from the many anti-restriction/pro-freedom rallies during COVID, we are now seeing a more strident trade unionism coming to the fore – in Britain at least – led by media savvy leaders like Mick Lynch, general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), who know how to appeal to the public and tap into widely held resentment against soaring cost of living rises.

Teachers, health workers and others could follow the RMT into taking strike action.

Lynch says that millions of people in Britain face lower living standards and the stripping out of occupational pensions. He adds:

“COVID has been a smokescreen for the rich and powerful in this country to drive down wages as far as they can.”

Just like a decade of imposed ‘austerity’ was used to achieve similar results in the lead up to COVID.

The trade union movement should now be taking a leading role in resisting the attack on living standards and further attempts to run-down state-provided welfare and privatise what remains.

The strategy to wholly dismantle and privatise health and welfare services seems increasingly likely given the need to rein in (COVID-related) public debt and the trend towards AI, workplace automisation and worklessness.

This is a real concern because, following the logic of capitalism, work is a condition for the existence of the labouring classes. So, if a mass labour force is no longer deemed necessary, there is no need for mass education, welfare and healthcare provision and systems that have traditionally served to reproduce and maintain labour that capitalist economic activity has required.

In 2019, Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, accused British government ministers of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population” in the decade following the 2008 financial crash.

[…]

Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-capitalism-friedrich-boris/5785964

Dr Eddy Betterman

Science has uncovered more uses for the generic antiparasitic drug ivermectin, which was the subject of great controversy during the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “pandemic” because it was recommended by President Trump as both a treatment and as a prophylactic for the illness.

It turns out that ivermectin can be repurposed to treat many different health conditions beyond just parasites and COVID, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS), stroke, chronic pain, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and more.

Dr. William Makis recently wrote a piece specifically about ivermectin’s neuroprotective benefits that cites a number of studies about the drug’s efficacy. He found that ivermectin bears unique properties that promote remyelination in demyelination diseases such as MS, which adds to the drug’s long-known potential use against motor neuron disorders like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Ivermectin is so powerfully effective at repairing and protecting the nervous system that Belgian scientists filed a patent application for the drug back in 2007, which was covered in a paper called “Use of ivermectin and derivates thereof for the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” (Publication No.: WO/2008/034202A3).

mRNA causes Parkinson’s

Most of ivermectin’s neuroprotective power lies in its ability to modulate P2X4 receptors, which also gives the drug strong potential to help prevent alcohol use disorders by reducing alcohol cravings, this in addition to helping prevent motor neuron disease.

“Ivermectin (IVM), a positive modulator of P2X4Rs, enhanced levodopa (L-DOPA)-induced motor behaviour,” new research on the subject explains. “Thus, IVM is increasing striatal dopamine release through enhanced cholinergic activity on dopamine terminals.”

Recognizing that humans in the modern age are regularly bombarded with electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) and other toxins that disrupt proper nervous system function, ivermectin might be worth taking for preventative purposes to keep the nervous system optimized through stabilization of P2X4 receptors.

Stabilizing P2X4 receptors is important because expression of P2X4 is a major driving factor in ALS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, chronic neuropathic pain, migraines, epilepsy, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and anxiety.

“In various pathological states, such as trauma, ischemia, chronic pain, neurodegenerative processes and several neuropsychiatric disorders, de novo expression of P2X4 and / or an increase in cell surface P2X4 density has been reported in microglia and / or neurons, thus suggesting possible key and multiple roles of neuronal and microglial P2X4 receptors in the establishment and/or maintenance of these pathologies,” research shows.

“Changes in the intracellular expression of P2X4 may also have important consequences in the pathophysiological context.”

Keep in mind that the mRNA (modRNA) “vaccines” introduced through Operation Warp Speed during COVID are also linked to the development of these various nervous system disorders, which taking ivermectin could help to remediate.

“Ivermectin may not just be the anti-parasitic, anti-cancer, anti-viral repurposed drug we recognise but may have multiple other neuroprotective benefits for humanity in an era where we all may be subjected to neurotoxins – some apparent, and others invisible like EMF,” writes Dr. Justus R. Hope about the findings.

It is important to note that ivermectin has been linked to a downturn in births among sheep given the antiparasitic drug for veterinary purposes. Some people believe that this points to ivermectin possibly affecting fertility in a negative way, so do your own due diligence.

“Take active charcoal and eat cilantro and other detox foods,” one of our readers commented about how to target parasites naturally.

Another suggested chlorine dioxide (ClO2) at a dose of one drop per 50 pounds of weight in water daily to keep the body cleansed of parasites and toxins.

Learn more about how to protect your health naturally at Remedies.news.

[…]

Via https://dreddymd.com/2024/07/20/ivermectin-neuroprotective-properties-protect-damage-emfs-vaccines/

Ilya Tsukanov

A sloppy update to software made by US cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike has taken PCs and servers used by airlines, railways, banks, broadcasters and even medical facilities around the world offline. For anyone following US politics over the past decade or so, the company’s name should be eerily familiar.

CrowdStrike is making global headlines (and causing global headaches) this week after an update released Friday morning afflicted thousands of corporate machines running Microsoft products with the infamous blue screen of death error.

While the company has already put out a fix, the buggy update is expected to cause billions of dollars and hours in lost productivity, and experts say it may take “weeks” for businesses and governments worldwide to fully recover.

But behind the company’s reputation as a major provider of endpoint security products is the odd routineness of its name popping up in US politics.

During the 2016 US presidential election, the Clinton campaign asked none other than CrowdStrike for help investigating the hack attack against the Democratic National Committee – which had revealed embarrassing info about the party’s efforts to rig the nomination process in Mrs. Clinton’s favor.

CrowdStrike’s probe gave rise to the very first claims that Russia was behind the DNC hack, and the company provided its “forensic evidence and analysis” to the FBI, starting the ball rolling on the Russiagate conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia to “steal” the election.

CrowdStrike executive Shawn Henry admitted under oath in congressional testimony in 2017 that the company had no “concrete evidence” to back up its “Russian hackers” story, but by that point it was too late, and Trump would spend virtually the entirety of his term in office dogged by the “collusion” claims.

CrowdStrike’s name also came up in the infamous 2019 phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, with the then-US president asking Zelensky to “do us a favor” and “find out what happened” with CrowdStrike’s server, which Trump said was in Ukraine. The Trump team was convinced that CrowdStrike planted evidence on the DNC server to frame Russia while covering up Ukraine’s own efforts to “weaken the Trump bandwagon” during the 2016 race. Democratic politicians and anti-Trump media dismissed the president’s suspicions as groundless.

The Trump-Zelensky phone call, in which he also asked Kiev to look into then former vice president Joe Biden’s role in firing of a prosecutor probing his son Hunter Biden’s alleged corrupt activities while working for Ukrainian energy company Burisma, wound up sparking the first Trump impeachment in 2019.

CrowdStrike was also one a handful of firms tapped by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2021 to work out a ‘whole-of-nation’ cyber defense plan. The initiative has been criticized as an attempt to strengthen the US intelligence and Big Tech’s surveillance powers using cybersecurity as a cover.

The same year, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz blamed Russian hackers for the 2020 SolarWinds hack attack on the US Federal Government, but curiously admitted the company had no information of its own “to corroborate that finding.”

‘PR Nightmare’

“The PR aspect is of course a nightmare for CrowdStrike,” veteran independent cybersecurity expert Lars Hilse told Sputnik, commenting on Friday’s outage and the impact it’s had on the company’s image and stock price.

CrowdStrike’s market cap plunged by $12.5 billion, and its CEO George Kurtz saw over $320 million shaved from his personal fortune. The company stock’s price fell from about $343 to $302 per share, signaling that about 12 percent of the company’s market value has been wiped out.

Interestingly, not everyone in the company came out of the outage in the red, with Chief Security Officer Shawn Henry selling off 4,000 shares of CrowdStrike Holdings’ common stock on July 15 for $371.32 per share, or $1.49 million total, according to Security and Exchange Commission data.

Hilse says the main “lesson” from the CrowdStrike mess will be the demand that cybersecurity companies improve testing before rolling out critical updates – something especially important if they’re done as “a single update being pushed to a plethora of customers running cloud-based solutions, including those responsible for the flawless operation of critical infrastructure like airports, banks, etc.”

“With increasing reliance on technology comes exponentially increasing impact on society if these technologies fail, whether through a deliberate/targeted attack, or a faulty piece of software, like in this case,” Hilse emphasized.

Russian cybersecurity specialist Alexei Lukatskiy told Sputnik Russia has been able to dodge the CrowdStrike bullet thanks to strong homegrown cybersecurity companies. Friday’s outages thus serve as another important “lesson” for Russia, which has been “gradually switching away from products by foreign vendors to Russian ones,” that it’s on the right track, he said.

Another important takeaway, according to Lukatskiy, is the modern world’s increasingly critical level of dependence on computers. “IT has penetrated into a wide array of different areas, and the owners of companies working in critical industries must understand all the consequences and evaluate the unacceptable events that may occur due to the seeming failure of an ordinary computer…,” he said.ia

[…]

Via https://sputnikglobe.com/20240720/from-clinton-fraud-to-trump-zelensky-call-recalling-crowdstrikes-shady-politics-amid-it-outage-1119442359.html

By Whitney Webb

After the recent revelation that Donald Trump had selected J.D. Vance as his Vice President, public attention not only turned toward Vance, but also to the billionaire Peter Thiel. Vance has been one of several prominent Thiel protégés whose profile has risen in recent years, with other protégés of the PayPal co-founder including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey.

Recent reports have also noted that Thiel first recruited Vance into his circle while Vance was still a student at Yale Law School. Shortly thereafter, Vance joined Thiel’s investment firm Mithril Capital, where he worked for two years before joining Revolution Ventures. Vance played a major role in Revolution’s “Rise of the Rest” seed fund whose major investors included Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and the Walton family of WalMart, who boast long-standing deep ties to the Clinton family. Vance later launched his own venture capital firm Narya Capital in 2020, which was heavily funded by Thiel as well as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

[…]

Thiel has donated heavily to Vance’s political career, giving $15 million to Vance’s successful Senate bid in the 2022 election cycle in what was then the largest donation ever given to one Senate candidate. Thiel also joined Vance, a former “Never Trumper,” on a visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago where Vance successfully won the former president’s blessing. Thiel also connected Vance to other members of the so-called PayPal mafia, like David Sacks who donated $1 million to Vance and hosted a fundraiser for him. Sacks, along with PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, were allegedly a key factor in Trump’s selection of Vance as Vice President as they ran “a secret lobbying campaign” for Vance that also included media presenter Tucker Carlson.

Thiel had been a major donor to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and served on Trump’s transition team, with other Thiel-linked figures like Trae Stephens dramatically influencing Trump’s Pentagon appointments.

[…]

Anduril’s unmanned drones have also come to play a major role in Ukrainian military operations during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as have other controversial Thiel-funded companies like Palantir (a CIA contractor) and ClearView AI, which used mainly photos posted on Facebook (another Thiel-backed company) to develop its Orwellian facial recognition database. These companies’ close ties to the Ukrainian military may impact a second Trump administration’s policies as it relates to American support for Ukraine, particularly if Thiel is slated to hold significant influence. Beyond Ukraine, this network of Thiel-funded defense companies are remaking the face of warfare and slowly but surely replacing human decision-making with AI.

While these ties should be unsettling on their own, the potential influence of Thiel on the upcoming Trump administration should concern every American, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, due to Thiel’s efforts to rehabilitate and remake some of the intelligence communities’ most Orwellian and unconstitutional efforts to target domestic dissent.

Thiel Information Awareness

While Peter Thiel has long marketed himself as a libertarian, his track record from PayPal on has revealed him to instead be an architect of the modern surveillance state and a successor to the neoconservative cabal that had once tried (but failed) to do the same.

[…]

Unlimited Hangout has reported extensively on Thiel and Palantir for several years. As noted in past reports, the company was created to be the privatized version of a post-9/11 surveillance program that had been dreamt up by the Iran-Contra criminals responsible for the unconstitutional Main Core database. During the Reagan administration, the individuals at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal developed a database called Main Core, which firmly placed the US national-security state on its current, tech-fuelled path for crushing dissent. A senior government official with a high-ranking security clearance and service in five presidential administrations told Radar in 2008 that Main Core was “a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.”

[…]

The Social Media Panopticon

Not long after Thiel helped resurrect TIA as Palantir, another post-9/11 DARPA program was also seeking a private sector makeover. Developed by Douglas Gage, a close friend of Poindexter’s and a DARPA program manager, LifeLog sought to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence” that included an individual’s relationships and communications (phone calls, mail, etc.), their media-consumption habits, their purchases, and much more in order to build a digital record of “everything an individual says, sees, or does.” LifeLog would then take this unstructured data and organize it into “discreet episodes” or snapshots while also “mapping out relationships, memories, events and experiences.”

[…]

Critics in mainstream media outlets and elsewhere were quick to point out that the program would inevitably be used to build profiles on dissidents as well as suspected terrorists. Combined with TIA’s surveillance of individuals at multiple levels, LifeLog went farther by “adding physical information (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this transactional data.” One critic, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warned at the time that the programs that DARPA was pursuing, including LifeLog, “have obvious, easy paths to Homeland Security deployments.”

[…]

A few months into Facebook’s launch, in June 2004, Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz brought Sean Parker onto Facebook’s executive team. Parker, previously known for co-founding Napster, later connected Facebook with its first outside investor, Peter Thiel. As discussed, Thiel, at that time, in coordination with the CIA, was actively trying to resurrect at least one controversial DARPA program that had been dismantled the previous year. Notably, Sean Parker, who became Facebook’s first president, also had a history with the CIA, which sought to recruit him at the age of sixteen soon after he had been busted by the FBI for hacking corporate and military databases. Thanks to Parker, in September 2004, Thiel formally acquired $500,000 worth of Facebook shares and was added its board. Parker maintained close ties to Facebook as well as to Thiel, with Parker being hired as a managing partner of Thiel’s Founders Fund in 2006. Thiel left the Facebook board, which he had joined in 2005, in 2022 to focus on supporting “Trump-aligned candidates,” including J.D. Vance.

Thiel and Facebook co-founder Mosokvitz became involved outside of the social network long after Facebook’s rise to prominence, with Thiel’s Founder Fund becoming a significant investor in Moskovitz’s company Asana in 2012. Thiel’s longstanding symbiotic relationship with Facebook co-founders extends to his company Palantir, as the data that Facebook users make public invariably winds up in Palantir’s databases and helps drive the surveillance engine Palantir runs for US police departments, the military, and the intelligence community. Facebook data also feeds another Thiel-backed company, Clearview AI.

Notably, even LifeLog’s architect, Douglas Gage, has publicly commented on Facebook’s similarities to the program he had once hoped to lead. In 2015, He told VICE that “Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point.” He tellingly added, “We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked,” precisely because it is now a private company and not a project housed at the Pentagon’s DARPA.

Palantir and the Surveillance Agenda under Trump

During the Trump administration, Palantir enjoyed an even more privileged status than it had held under previous administrations, with Palantir gaining many new lucrative contracts, mainly with the military and intelligence, during Trump’s first term. This was likely influenced by Thiel’s presence on Trump’s transition teams and the role of close Thiel associates in choosing key Pentagon appointees.

Not only that, but the broader agenda behind Palantir – the decades-long effort to create a pre-crime, AI-powered surveillance system in the United States – also got significant boosts during Trump’s first term. For instance, Trump’s Attorney General William Barr quietly legalized pre-crime in the United States under the guise of detecting potential mass shooters before they commit any crime. The program, called DEEP, enables the DOJ and FBI to work with “private sector partners” to surveil people of interest that have committed no crime, but are “mobilizing towards violence.” At roughly the same time the program was announced, Barr was also pushing heavily for a government backdoor into consumer apps and devices, particularly those that utilize encryption. He also signed a data access agreement with then-UK Home Secretary Priti Patel that allowed both countries to “demand electronic data on consumers from tech companies based in the other country without legal restrictions.”

[…]

The Trump administration, during this same period, also mulled the creation of a new health-focused agency modeled after DARPA. The proposed “HARPA”, which was promoted extensively to Trump by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka as well as Trump’s close friend and former NBCUniversal president Bob Wright. HARPA’s proposed flagship program – “SAFE HOME” (Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes) – would use “breakthrough technologies with high specificity and sensitivity for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence,” specifically “advanced analytical tools based on artificial intelligence and machine learning.” The program would have cost an estimated $60 million over four years and would use data from Americans’ social media accounts as well as “Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home” and other consumer electronic devices. The program would also collect information provided by health-care providers to identify who may be a “threat.”

Though HARPA was not created under the Trump administration, Trump reportedly reacted “very positively” to the proposal and was “sold on the concept.” In addition, before the proposal was known publicly, Trump had called on Big Tech, and specifically social media to collaborate with the DOJ to create software that stops mass murders before they happen by detecting potential mass shooters before they can act. However, Trump ultimately passed on creating HARPA, which was ultimately created during the Biden administration as ARPA-H, underscoring the bipartisan nature of this agenda.

Are Peter Thiel-Backed Intelligence Contractors “MAGA”?

Despite many Thiel-backed or Thiel-founded companies describing themselves as “America First” and as defenders of “Western values,” a closer examination of those companies suggests this is not the case. One lesser known example of this is Palantir’s early role in developing a way for the US government to target Julian Assange, leaks-based journalism in the public interest, and what it called “The WikiLeaks Threat.” In looking at other Thiel-linked firms, it’s quite clear that at least some are more than willing to target Americans on either side of the political divide on behalf of their biggest client, the so-called “Deep State” that Trump supporters revile. Take, for example, the Thiel-backed Clearview AI – which claims to now be able to identify every person in the world using its advanced facial recognition system.

[…]

As its own CEO stated, Clearview AI was used extensively on January 6th and later boasted of its “potential for identifying rioters at the January 6 attack on the Capitol.”

[…]

Via https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/07/investigative-reports/the-man-behind-trumps-vp-pick-its-worse-than-you-think/

New Forensics Delineate Eleven Shots From Three Weapons

Stunning new forensic analysis if the Trump Assassination attempt indicates a total of eleven shots fired from three separate weapons, obliterating the “lone gunman” theory of the Trump Assassination.

The forensics speak for themselves, and the probability that the Crooks young sniper fired all three weapons after being shot is extremely unlikely. Audio analysis indicates at least two weapons being fired.

The geometry of the assassination site also indicates two sources for shots fired as well.

The geometry aligns with at least two sources for the shots fired, one from the Crooks American Glass Research building and one source near the water tower.

The red firing line goes through Victim 1 in Blue and Victim 2 in Red, enabling the fast exit of four motorcycle police from Jill Biden’s motorcade that found their way into Trump’s motorcade on the way from Pittsburgh International Airport.

Seen from the reverse angle, clearly there is a second source of the shots in the assassination attempt. Two lines of fire means two shooters. Two shooters mean there is a conspiracy.

The two wounded people in the grandstand to Trump’s left allowed for the fast exit of Jill Biden’s four motorcade police. Jill Biden’s motorcade police took the two grandstand victims to Allegheny Hospital in Pittsburgh despite much milder injuries than the murdered Cory Comperatore.

The race here in Butler, PA, seems like a race between citizen journalism now to uncover evidence and the FBI destroying it.

Even published pictures make it look like Crooks was spotting for a sniper, not the actual shooter. His dead body lies a significant distance away from the gun he hauled up to the roof. Was he bringing a gun to a SWAT member? Why was he killed so far away from the weapon?

[…]

I have confirmed with the Butler Township Police that volunteers were part of the security coverage for “outside the perimeter” of the Secret Service, meaning the “Sniper Crooks” could actually just be the “Spotter Crooks.” That would explain Crooks’s three intercepts by law enforcement and then being allowed to proceed to the roof with range-finding equipment.

Why is there a SWAT ladder if there is no SWAT member? Does Thomas Crooks really need two ladders to climb on the roof at American Glass Research?

How did they know Yearick wasn’t the sniper he was supporting before opening his phone? How did they know he was a “lone gunman”.

Wouldn’t a spotter for Yearick go to the site to scope it out as a part of his job? Wouldn’t that explain how he was not stopped with a RangeFinder after being intercepted three times?

Neighborhood News citizen journalist Tyrone Sargent shows the two angles of fire from the forensic evidence.

We also have new evidence of four different motorcycle police leaving the Joe Biden motorcade to join the Trump motorcade in a very suspicious last-minute change of security assignments.

I am actually staying at a hotel with Police snipers and sharpshooters from all over the United States and Canada at my hotel, and to a man and woman, they are all shocked at the lack of security at the Trump Assassination attempt.

It is just a very odd coincidence we have a lot of Canadian snipers here in Butler this week, along with US snipers in sort of a sniper Olympics.

I took the liberty of going to the headquarters sign-in at the local Butler Community College to sign up for the Police sniper competition. I found that I only needed to complete an online registration and pay the entry fee.

Regarding the extended period to engage Thomas Crooks by the Secret Service, I also researched that topic. Here is a split-screen video highlighting the long wait to engage the shooters.

I confirmed this morning at Butler Township Police Headquarters that an officer did engage with the suspected shooter on the roof of the American Glass Research building.

The Butler Township Police Department would not answer follow-up questions about the officer who intercepted Crooks, and the Township told me the FBI is handling all public information releases now.

“Inside the perimeter” and “outside the perimeter” were the key phrases slung around Butler Township Police Department this morning. I had a feeling there were active discussions on assigning blame where these were the operative phrases. Clearly a ladder was used by the Crooks shooter to ascend to the roof. Elon Musk has tweeted out the location, which is very close to a SWAT ladder in the same building.

Fox Commentator Dan Bongino says an “unimpeachable source” says someone was assigned to the roof and did not show up for the job. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle says the pitch of the roof was the deciding factor not to put a Secret Service sniper on the roof (what about the water tower just beside the buildings?).

The pitch of the roof the snipers used to take out Crooks is actually much steeper, making Director Cheatle’s excuses almost appear comical.

Fox commentator Dan Bongino says he has an unimpeachable source that can identify who was assigned to the roof and that the assignee did not show up for the assignment (so don’t name a replacement?). I have publicly asked Dan Bongino to share the name so I can do a follow-up interview here in Butler.

In another troubling story about the Secret Service’s judgment, Jonathan Willis, reputedly a Secret Service sniper, had the Crooks roof shooter in his sights for three minutes and was not permitted to fire. Video evidence appears to bear this out.

I have reached out to Willis here in Butler, PA, but he appears to be in fear for his life.

We are also working on the “ladder story” here in Butler, PA.

I am also following the fake lamp story, which appears to have been taken in a staged photo

We will continue reporting on this Trump Assassination attempt from here in Butler, Pennsylvania.

We are looking at Thomas Crooks range time with Antifa sniper Maxwell Yearick right now at the Clairton Sportsmen’s Shooting Range.

[…]

Via https://georgewebb.substack.com/p/new-evidence-points-to-multiple-shooters

Episode 1 The Mongols Place in World History

The Mongol Empire

Dr Craig Benjamin (2020)

Film Review

In this introductory lecture, Dr Benjamin gives a brief overview of the movement of the Mongols’ movement (led by Chinggis Khan) out of the east Asian steppes to conquer China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Armenia and much of eastern Europe, the Middle East and Persia. They were the last of a long series of pastoral nomads to use mounted archers to raid China for manufactured goods they couldn’t access on the steppes  (ie the Xiongu, the Gygihus, the Khitan, The Xiani, the Turks and the Jurchen).

Despite destroying hundreds of cities and killing millions of people, the Mongols played a vital  important role in spreading Eastern Ideas to the West. They also facilitated Eat-West trade by providing security for trade caravans and promoted religious tolerance in regions they conquered. Their social structure tended to be more egalitarian than settled communities and allowed women more power and influence.

Benjamin attributes their phenomenal military success to their advanced horse riding and ca;vary skills, their siege craft and their development of the composite bow.

Significant Mongol leaders

• Temujen (aka Chinggis Khan) 1162 -1227 Consolidated 42 warring Turkic tribes and invaded and subjugated northern China and the vast Islamic caliphate stretching from China’s western border to Persia.
• Ogidai – (1227-1241) Chinggis Khan’s third son was appointed chief Khan of an empire four times the size of the Roman empire (comprising Korea, Georgia, Armenia, Russia, Poland, Hungary)
• Mongke (1251) – appointed great Khan under a regime that divided the Mongol empire between Kubla Khan (who captured China’s Song dynasty in 1279 and created the Yuan Dynasty), Hulagu (who sacked Baghdad in 1258 and created the Ilkhanate Khanate in Persia), the Golden Horde (which controlled Russia until 1380), and the Mongol’s central Asian homeland under Chaggatai (the second son of Chinggis Khan)
• Tamerlane – (1336-1405) descendant of Chinggis Khan who conquered India and southern Russia
• Babur – (1526–30) descendant of both Chinggis Khan and Tamerlane who founded the Mughal Empire in northern India

Benjamin devotes the last third of the lecture to discussing the status of other world empires at the time the Mongol empire arose:

China: was in relative decline following the collapse of the Tang empire in 907 AD, which had reestablished the Silk Road (first developed by the Han Dynasty 202BC-220AD), as well as inventing gunpowder, printing and steel,

Middle East: the Dar al Islam Empire, controlling Persia, the Arabian peninsula, North Africa and Afghanistan and the Iberian peninsula, gave way first to the Unaayad Caliphate in 661AD and the Abbasid Caliphate in 750AD – at the time the largest  civilization ever.

Former Roman Empire: in 800AD Charlemagne unifies all of France, parts of Northern Spain and Northern Italy and much of Germany, only for his sons to split it up into smaller kingdoms.

Viking invasions: major role in shaping not only Britain, but France and Russia (where Viking invaders were known as Rus). The birth of the Norman empire (in Normandy) in the 9th century following the Viking invasion of northern France and Russia, following the Slav migration into Russia and Eastern Europe from the 5th to 10th centuries.

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

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/12373094/12373096

Ron Unz

Over the last couple of days the news cycle has been overwhelmingly dominated by a sniper’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a large campaign rally in western Pennsylvania, with the presidential candidate fortunate enough to escape with only a minor wound to his ear.

The former president holding his arm high even while streaks of blood trickled down his face has become an iconic global image somewhat recalling the historic scene of six U.S. marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima, and it fully solidified his front-runner status. Within a day or two, billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman endorsed Trump as did industrialist Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, with the latter promising to contribute a mammoth $45 million per month to a pro-Trump political committee.

Meanwhile, the ongoing efforts of various influential Democrats to pressure President Joseph Biden into dropping out of the race on grounds of mental incapacity completely vanished from the news, swamped by the dramatic account of Trump’s narrow escape from death. With the media no longer focusing on Biden’s problems, the chances that the DNC might be able to replace him with a stronger candidate may have been lost, further increasing Trump’s odds of regaining the White House this November.

I’ve only casually followed the story of this attempted assassination without spending much time investigating the details of the incident or the considerable number of conflicting theories floating around on the Internet. But various people have asked me for my opinion, so I might as well provide it, though my views should not be accorded any more weight than they deserve, especially since I lack any military expertise.

According to the media accounts, a young 20-year-old gunman named Thomas Matthew Crooks was somehow able to enter the vicinity of the Trump rally armed with an AR-15 rifle. He set himself up on the rooftop of a nearby building and fired several shots, one of which wounded Trump in the ear while another killed a bystander in the crowd, after which he himself was shot dead by counter-sniper fire from security personnel.

Allowing an armed gunman such an opportunity to potentially kill a leading presidential candidate obviously involved extremely serious lapses in security by the Secret Service agents guarding Trump and this has naturally provoked widespread suspicions that some sort of plot had been responsible. There have also been claims circulating on social media that bystanders noticed the gunman and alerted authorities, but instead of ordering the sniper shot or at least securing the candidate and taking him to safety, the security personnel waited until the prospective assassin had fired his potentially fatal shots before taking any action.

At the very least this is obviously a huge black-eye for our Secret Service and the other police agencies that were on the scene, supposedly protecting Trump.

Given the extremely strong emotions that Trump arouses in both his supporters and his opponents, it’s hardly surprising that this very strange and suspicious official story quickly inspired numerous conspiratorial narratives, which have widely circulated among both Trump-backers and Trump-haters.

For more than eight years, most American elites have expressed a seething hatred of Trump, doing everything they could to frustrate his presidency, ensure his defeat in 2020, and then prevent him from regaining the White House in 2024. Soon after a mob of outraged Trumpists stormed the DC Capitol on January 7, 2021, I published an article pointing to the overwhelming evidence that the American media and our Internet giants, assisted by numerous dishonest former intelligence officers, had combined to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump:

• American Pravda: Our Disputed Election
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 14, 2021 • 2,000 Words

Last year I discussed the extraordinary efforts of those same biased media outlets to hide the massive corruption scandal engulfing Joseph Biden and his family, doing so both prior to the 2020 vote and now leading up to the 2024 election.

• American Pravda: The Limits of Media Corruption
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 22, 2023 • 3,400 Words

More recently as Trump’s efforts to regain the presidency moved forward, his bitter Democratic enemies launched a series of outrageous political prosecutions hoping that felony convictions and possible imprisonment would destroy Trump’s popularity with voters. But instead Trump’s polling numbers continued to rise, and his Republican renomination became assured.

• American Pravda: Donald Trump, Eugene Debs, and AMLO
  The American Political System as Laughingstock or Trainwreck
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 7, 2023 • 4,900 Words

Having failed at every step to block Trump’s rise, his political enemies were left with few available options. Their dilemma eventually led Tucker Carlson to publicly speculate that they would finally conclude that orchestrating Trump’s assassination was their best chance of preventing his triumphant return to the White House.

So now with Trump leading in the polls and the desperate Democrats fearful that Biden would be no match for him in November, a sniper was allowed surprisingly easy access to the candidate at a rally, and if the trajectory of the bullet he fired had been an inch or two different, Trump could easily have been killed. Under these circumstances, only the most oblivious would fail to be highly suspicious of what happened.

Did Trump’s bitter enemies conspire to have him killed by an assassin’s bullet, as had happened more than half-century ago to President John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Robert? While that is certainly possible, unless much stronger evidence emerges, I will remain extremely skeptical.

Assassinating a former president who is leading in the current polls is a very serious undertaking, and Trump’s lucky survival has drastically strengthened the support he enjoys both from the voters and from the billionaire donor class while his security will also surely be massively increased. I think it quite unlikely that any future sniper will have as easy a time gaining access to him at a rally or anywhere else. As Emerson said, “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”

So if Trump’s enemies had decided to have him killed, I doubt they would have selected an untrained 20-year-old nursing home worker as their assassin, a choice that resulted in the failure that occurred. Surely a far more professional sniper would have been employed, a sniper who never would have missed his target. Arranging for the Secret Service agents and the local police to stand down and provide an opening entailed enormous political risks, and what good would that do if the gunman selected couldn’t shoot straight? If any powerful organization or individual had been behind the assassination plot, Trump would be dead and Americans would be arguing about a successful rather than a botched assassination.

The dozens of security personnel who left Trump vulnerable are now being denounced as grossly negligent in the media, and if any of them had been given suspicious orders responsible for that debacle, they will surely soon come forward and defend themselves by explaining what had happened and implicating those responsible. If none of them do so, then the likelihood of any anti-Trump plot begins to dissipate, and the explanation of sheer incompetence becomes the most plausible theory.

One claim I’ve seen is that the gunman was wearing some sort of military-themed shirt and casually carrying his rifle in plain sight, leading most onlookers to assume that he was a member of one of the various different organizations tasked with ensuring Trump’s safety. This seems like exactly the sort of stupid bureaucratic mistake that can easily occur when multiple government agencies are involved in a common project.

Meanwhile, some anti-Trump circles have naturally promoted their own contrary conspiracy theories. They have suggested that the attack was a daring false-flag operation organized by Trump or his close allies, intended to only slightly wound the candidate and thereby greatly bolster his political campaign, just as has now happened.

However, I think this scenario is even less plausible than the other one. Once again, we must realize that the shooter selected for this dangerously lethal operation was an untrained 20-year-old firing from a distance of 400 feet, a sniper who hit Trump’s ear rather than his head. Thus, any such plan to boost Trump could very easily have ended up killing him instead, and it’s difficult to believe that any rational Trump supporter would have taken such a gigantic risk.

Perhaps some of these conspiracy advocates believe that the wound itself was somehow faked, and that all the Secret Service agents who saw the injury at close range and hustled Trump away were conspirators in the plot. But lacking any evidence, these sorts of theories grow ever more complex and unlikely.

My own reconstruction of what happened is different and much simpler.

When I first heard that Trump had survived an attempted assassination, my surprise was not that it had occurred but that there hadn’t already been a dozen or more previous attacks. I doubt that any political figure in modern American history has ever been so massively demonized by our mainstream media as Donald J. Trump during the last eight or nine years. He’s been vilified as a fascist, a Hitler, a traitor, a Russian stooge, a rapist, a racist, a swindler. Trump was endlessly portrayed as a fiend absolutely determined to destroy American freedom and democracy, someone who represented our country’s deadliest human enemy.

Our media creates our reality and for most of the last decade, hundreds of millions of Americans have been completely blanketed by these unrelenting waves of ferocious anti-Trump propaganda, so surely many thousands of them would have been unbalanced enough to consider saving our country by taking the law into their own hands and patriotically risking their own lives to eliminate that deadly human menace. The media had spent all these years painting a very bright target on Trump’s back, and I’ve been astonished that until a couple of days ago no American had yet taken aim at it.

Consider an analogous case from a few years ago. For many years, anti-immigration activists loudly proclaimed that our country was being “invaded” by hordes of hostile Mexican immigrants. Therefore, I was hardly too surprised that in 2019 a very patriotic but somewhat dim-witted 21-year-old named Patrick Wood Crusius took that heated political rhetoric a little too literally and decided to shoot as many of those foreign invaders as he could, killing a couple of dozen Hispanics at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. I strongly suspect that the young gunman who tried to kill Trump acted out of roughly similar motives.

Finally, I was generally pleased to see that Trump named Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate. Although I’m not exactly thrilled with many of Vance’s positions, notably his extremely aggressive rhetoric regarding Iran and the Middle East, he seemed like the least bad choice among the several names under consideration, and we have to settle for what we can get.

[…]

Via https://www.unz.com/runz/the-attempted-assassination-of-donald-trump/