Ali Halawi

Western naval forces’ repeated exposés in the Red Sea highlight NATO’s weak seaborne air defenses and the rising power of the Axis of Resistance in contested waters.r

The Red Sea has witnessed several developments that brought to light the West’s fading power, as its enemies simultaneously and continuously develop precision weapons and naval capabilities.

Although ongoing escort, air defense, and aerial attack operations in the Red Sea are viewed as uncostly, in terms of human capital, and training routines that will raise the preparedness of NATO forces in the region, they have also unveiled a quite unpleasant reality for Western navies. On the flip side, the aerial attacks of Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) on Israeli-affiliated ships, which were later expanded to include US-UK-affiliated ships in the Red Sea, add to an extended bill that NATO countries pay for securing the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people.

The weapons used in these operations are similar to Iranian-designed drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles and have been described as “cheap” yet effective weapons by US CENTCOM commanders. These precise guided munitions have been disseminated across factions in the Axis of Resistance, via direct armament or technology sharing. When put to the correct use the weapons have proven challenging for some of the world’s most well-trained and equipped forces.

West Asia casts a shadow over NATO military industrial complexes

Some weapons could have been transferred with the blueprints for the production of their main compartments and assembly at their final destination, bringing costs down and production levels up, further deepening the hole for Western counterparts. In the case of Ansar Allah in Yemen, the YAF owns and announces to locally produce a wide array of anti-ship weapons, as well as missiles, and drones that have been appropriated for attacking seaborne targets; currently being put to use to tighten a naval blockade on “Israel” through the Red Sea.

On the other hand, flailing Western military hegemony over the seas pushed the US and its allies to embark on a poorly planned campaign to protect Israeli shipping routes, forcing them to deal with these relatively low-cost weapons in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, where the YAF has dealt direct hits to multiple non-military vessels and threatened near hits some of the most advanced American military ships. This has been the case in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, where US military bases have suffered from the horrors of cheap low-flying, and ballistic weapons in more than 100 operations on US assets, which dealt precise hits to their targets on multiple occasions.

When countering these attacks, Western forces have utilized some of the most sophisticated anti-air surface-to-air missiles, which are estimated to cost millions of dollars of taxpayer money. In the Red Sea, the US-led Western alliance has relied on NATO-standard interceptors, each of which was developed to counter specific inbound aerial objects.

According to The Responsible Statecraft and news circulating on Western media outlets regarding the mishaps of air defense units, the Western coalition has depended on the use of a layered anti-air model, consisting of RIM-116 (RAM), RIM-66 (SM-2), RIM-174 (SM-6), RIM-162 (ESSM), and RIM-161 (SM-3) interceptors. Each interceptor has been developed to counter specific weaponry, however, they all share in common extremely pricey tags.

Price list for NATO’s Israeli maritime protection campaign

Below is a list of the cost of a single interceptor, excluding operational and battery costs, as of 2022:

• RIM-116 (RAM): $905,000
• RIM-66 (SM-2): $2,100,000
• RIM-174 (SM-6): $3,901,818
• RIM-162 (ESSM): $2,031,875
• RIM 161 (SM-3) Block IB: $9,698,617
• RIM-161 (SM-3) Block IIA: $27,915,625

The price list is retrieved from the US Department of Defense and military-industrial complexes’ official documents.

Germany’s Navy ridicules itself

Keeping the aforementioned price ranges in mind, an outrageous fluke that came as a result of a failed surface-to-air missile interception attempt by the German Navy’s Hessen frigate exposed the deep-lying issues for the US-led Naval alliance in the Red Sea.

What should have been a strike on a low-cost Yemeni drone turned into a shabby affair in which the German Navy misidentified the drone, launched a dual attack on an allied asset, failed to hit the aircraft, and suffered malfunctions that led to the destruction of two interceptors midflight.

At first glance, the attack underlines several glaring issues including, the under-preparedness of the German air defense crew, inadequate storage or production of interceptors, and poor communication between NATO allied forces at Sea. Some military-concerned outlets have attempted to shift the blame on outdated German comms, however, further investigation of the incident reveals an issue of economic cost that could tip the scale towards NATO’s enemies.

Germany’s embarrassing mishap would cost the country around $4.2 million, as the Hessen launched two SM-2s at a US MQ-9 reaper drone that it failed to identify.

No SM-2 batches produced since 2018

The cost of the failed operation should not be the only consideration here, as the last time Raethon sold a batch of its SM-2 Block IIIA interceptors was in a deal it signed with Denmark back in 2018. The deal was worth $152 million for 46 SM-2 Block IIIA interceptors and corresponding equipment for a couple of vertical launch systems. Now, the company has stopped producing the system, and the interceptors for lack of international orders and plans to resume production in 2035.

However, conflict in Ukraine, the war on Gaza, and tensions in East Asia may prompt reconsideration, especially as the genocide of Palestinian people drags on while their allies in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq tie their operations to the status of the aggression on Gaza itself.

[…]

One Yemeni strike was capable of sinking a bulk carrier in the Red Sea, while an attack on a secret US outpost on the Jordanian-Syrian border injured and killed more than a hundred US service people.

In a war of attrition, the Axis of Resistance’s factions will have the economic advantage of pumping out low-cost munition that targets multi-million systems and vehicles, the morale advantage of deep-rooted ideological motives related to religion and nativity to the lands they defend.

Another blunder: Denmark’s unreported defensive failure gets chief sacked

More recently, Denmark sacked its defense chief Flemming Lentfer after major faults were discovered in air defense systems on a frigate that it sent to the Red Sea earlier. Lentfer was axed on Wednesday night after failing to report to the Danish Defense Minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, that the Iver Huitfeldt vessel had experienced a 30 minutes-long malfunction in one of its missile and radar systems, during a drone attack in the Red Sea. The malfunction led Danish authorities to recall the frigate from its mission, marking the gravity of the faults.

[…]

Germany’s “Embarrassment” vs Yemen’s Victory

Back to Germany’s flop in the Red Sea, which was described by German media outlet BILD as an “Embarrassment to our (the German) Navy in the Red Sea”, the YAF had just marked another milestone by downing a US-operated MQ-9 Reaper Drone over Hodeidah a few days prior to the blunder.

Although both forces attempted to target different MQ-9-type drones using their own SAMs, the Yemeni Armed Forces were able to destroy the highly prized American drone with a “locally produced” air defense system while the Germans harrowingly failed. The Germans said that they mistakenly targeted a drone on February 28, 2024. However, their failure to down the then-unidentified object was due to unnamed technical malfunctions that led to the detonation of the two SM-2 missiles midflight, rather than active efforts to avert the disaster.

Interestingly, Sanaa had only unveiled two air defense systems capable of achieving such a hit. One of which is seemingly a copy of the Iranian-developed compact air-defense missile, dubbed Saqer-2. The missile can be easily transported and launched to take down close-range targets, flying at relatively slow speeds. The Saqer-2, a copycat of the Iranian so-called 358 surface-to-air missile reportedly functions like a one-way attack drone, reaching the required via a liquid fuel-propelled engine, to later hover near an aerial target, approaching it and detonating its warhead after being manually locked on to it by a ground operator, or by working in an autonomous mode.

However, footage published by the YAF’s Military Media indicated that the air defense system utilized in the incident was similar to traditional supersonic SAMs due to the speed at which it reached its target and the sound produced during its flight in the video.

Notably, the missile impacted the drone in a near direct trajectory and did not pause to hover nearby or for directions by operators. Examining the publicly revealed arsenal of the YAF, this likely indicates that the missile in use was the Bareq-1 or Bareq-2 SAM.

The missiles resemble the Iranian Taer line of missiles, which are used on a multitude of staple air defense systems. Digging deeper into the origin of the technology, it is clear that the Taer or Bareq lines of missiles are actually reverse-engineered models of the Soviet-era 3M9, incorporating certain elements from NATO Standard Missiles.

Presuming that the Bareq-2 was used by the YAF for the operation reveals an even deeper hole dug by Western military complexes for their own armies. Moreover, NATO’s SMs are much more developed than the YAF’s interceptors, as they incorporate a wide range of technological and hardware additions, putting them in a class of their own.

These additions allow for 360° scope for air defense teams allowing Hessen and other vessels to fire at any surrounding target within its range at any time without having to adjust their position while boosters on the SM-6 allow for longer-range targeting.

Still, the single-stage and aimed single launch conducted by the YAF achieved a direct hit to the 20 m-long US drone obliterating it to pieces that were scavenged by fighters on al-Hodeidah’s shore.

Yemen’s support to Palestine uncovers deep crises in NATO’s Naval power

Putting this series of unfolding events into the context of the Yemeni Armed Forces’ support to Palestine, as the Western-backed Israeli regime continues its genocidal war on Gaza, is key to not only regional security but global security as a whole.

The equations drawn by the YAF have been unprecedented in the history of the nation’s struggle against Western imperialism, as for the first time, an Arab nation has taken the responsibility of launching an expansive naval campaign to support a moral and national cause, whose result will alter the course of human history. By setting this historical precedent, Yemen has not only altered regional security to the favor of natives, but it has also exposed essential faults in NATO’s military and naval structure which can and will be taken advantage of by adversaries.

These events have not been limited to uncovering the flaws of Danish and German forces, but they have laid bare essential challenges for the far more superior American and British navies.

A photo published in 2004 purports to show prisoners being abused by US guards at Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad. ©  API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

RT

Two decades after a US torture scandal made headlines, a lawsuit against the military contractor involved is going to trial

Twenty years on from reports that the US military was torturing prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, three survivors will finally get a chance to bring their claims before an American jury.

A trial in the civil lawsuit filed by former Abu Ghraib inmates against the US military contractor that they blame for their suffering is scheduled to begin on Monday in a federal court near Washington. The private security contractor, CACI International, has strung the case along for 16 years by making over 20 unsuccessful attempts to have the lawsuit dismissed.

CACI, which supplied the interrogators who worked at Abu Ghraib, has insisted that its employees weren’t accused of abusing detainees. The Virginia-based company also has argued that as a Pentagon contractor, it should be protected by the government’s sovereign immunity against the torture allegations.

However, the plaintiffs claimed that CACI set the conditions for their torture by directing or encouraging abuses by military guards, at least partly to “soften up” prisoners for interrogations. All three of the former detainees are Iraqi civilians who were held at Abu Ghraib until eventually being released without charges.

The trial will be “an exceedingly rare opportunity for accountability for the egregious harms suffered by Iraqis after the US invasion in 2003,” according to a statement earlier this month by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a US group that is representing the plaintiffs. “In fact, this is the first lawsuit where victims of US post-9/11 torture will get their day in court.”

The Abu Ghraib scandal first came to public attention in April 2004, when photos of abused prisoners and their smiling US guards were published. At the time, CBS News aired a report describing the abuse and showing American soldiers taunting naked prisoners. The abuses included stacking nude prisoners in pyramids or dragging them by leashes around their necks. Others were threatened by dogs or hooded and attached to electrical wires.

One of the plaintiffs, former Al-Jazeera reporter Salah Al-Ejaili, claimed he was forced to wear women’s underwear, terrorized by dogs, deprived of sleep, and put in stress positions that caused him to vomit black liquid. Another survivor, Suhail Al-Shimari, has claimed that he suffered beatings, electrical shocks, and sexual assaults.

CACI has argued that its employees weren’t in a position to give orders to military police and that the US government was responsible for setting the conditions at Abu Ghraib. The company has continued to receive lucrative US government contracts for the past two decades, and only low-level soldiers were criminally prosecuted for the abuses.

Image: Creative Commons

Zero Hedge

When asked about the request by reporters at the White House on Wednesday, President Joe Biden said “we’re considering it” – comments described as “encouraging” by Mr Assange’s lawyer.

Wednesday saw a rare and unexpected positive development in the Julian Assange extradition case. President Joe Biden has affirmed the US is “considering” dropping its prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder.

Currently, Assange is awaiting a final ruling from the UK high court over his possible extradition to the US, coming at the end of a lengthy appeals process.

Biden issued the response in a press briefing while hosting Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida for an official White House visit, where the two leaders are expended to deepen defense ties.

It is widely perceived this was all set in motion when in February Assange’s native Australia saw its parliament vote to issue formal request that charges against Julian Assange be dropped by the US. The motion adopted by parliament emphasized “the importance of the UK and USA bringing the matter to a close so that Mr. Assange can return home to his family in Australia.”

The country’s prime minister Anthony Albanese immediately backed the motion calling for his return to Australia.

Amnesty International also recently renewed its call to drop the charges against Assange. “The risk to publishers and investigative journalists around the world hangs in the balance. Should Julian Assange be sent to the U.S. and prosecuted there, global media freedoms will be on trial, too,” a statement said.

We detailed in March that the Biden administration might be looking for a way to bring the 14-year long legal drama to an end. A WSJ report at the time said, “The U.S. Justice Department is considering whether to allow Julian Assange to plead guilty to a reduced charge of mishandling classified information, according to people familiar with the matter, opening the possibility of a deal that would end a lengthy legal saga triggered by one of the biggest classified intelligence leaks in American history.”

A plea deal means the whole crisis for him and his family could finally come to an acceptable and peaceful end after all of these years. But Assange’s legal team never gave any level of confirmation to the prior WSJ reporting.

However, this fresh Biden statement seems to confirm the reporting that a plea deal could be on the table.

A May 20 hearing which has been scheduled by the UK High Court and is expected to take up whether the US ‘assurances’ that Assange would not face either the death penalty or torture if transferred to US custody are satisfactory. His lawyers have long argued that confinement in a US federal ‘Supermax’ facility would indeed be torturous and would also severely degrade his mental health.

[…]

Via https://www.zerohedge.com/political/us-considering-dropping-prosecution-assange-biden-says

Reclaim the Net

The largest US bank, and the world’s largest by capitalization, JP Morgan Chase, is going forward with another way to monetize their clients – by giving access to their spending data to be used for targeted ads.

One would have thought that something of the kind was already in full swing. But given the glacial speed at which giant financial institutions move when it comes to introducing any new features, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that only now, Chase is allowing businesses to make ad money directly off of the data belonging by the bank’s 80 million customers.

To make this possible, a platform called Chase Media Solutions is now available to brands who want to utilize transaction data the bank harvests from customers, to “fine tune” campaigns, such as “personalized” offers and incentives.

Customers of massive banks are now apparently treated as no more than a commodity – otherwise why would Chase feel confident in marketing its platform as an “at scale” solution for brands. According to reports, that would be about six million “small” businesses, also the bank’s clients.

It doesn’t help matters that the financial institution’s pitch to businesses says that the differentiating factor between just any bank, and a behemoth like Chase is – “the unrivaled scale and insights from our customers – having long-served as a trusted guide for their financial decisions.”

The first part of the statement is difficult, if not impossible to argue against – but what about the latter? What happens to that “trust” once clients realize their data is being re-monetized in this particular way?

After all, everybody loves “the experience” of being targeted by ads based on their personal information. /s

On top of that, it might hit a little different when its coming from YouTube, etc. – as opposed to your bank.

Still, Chase is, pun intended, banking on the appeal of it all, and all this is not happening haphazardly. Two years ago JPMorgan Chase & Co. bought and “integrated” Figg, which is said to be a leading card-linked marketing platform.

Meanwhile, what’s known as “retail media” is an industry now valued at $61 billion, and projected to grow 10% per year over the next two years.

So it’s clear what’s in it for Chase, and its business clients. Not so clear, though, how “ordinary” ad-targeted clients benefit.

[…]

Via https://reclaimthenet.org/jp-morgan-chase-cashes-in-on-customer-data

Source

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

In 2021 we saw private companies and local governments all throughout the United States mandate COVID-19 “vaccines” as a condition for employment, and many of those mandates are still in place today.

But there is another mandate that could soon be required as a condition for employment and receiving government aid, and that is the mandate to not criticize or say anything negative against Israel.

In fact, there are already laws on the books in 38 states that prohibit you from receiving government contracts or public investment funds, unless you agree to not participate in any anti-Israel activities.

They are called “Anti-BDS laws”, and they have bipartisan support.

The State Power to Boycott a Boycott: The Thorny Constitutionality of State Anti-BDS Laws

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (“BDS”) Movement, a global effort to oppose the State of Israel in its actions toward Palestine, is one of the most divisive topics in global politics.

Since it began in 2005, BDS has also been legally divisive in the United States. U.S. states began passing anti-BDS laws in 2015, and twenty-seven states (38 today) have since passed legislation or executive orders restricting the state governments’ commercial dealings with entities that participate in BDS activities against Israel.

Though the specific provisions of anti-BDS laws vary widely, they have taken two primary forms: (1) contract-focused laws that condition the receipt of government contracts on an entity certifying that it is not boycotting and will not boycott Israel; and (2) investment-focused laws that mandate public investment funds to divest from entities involved in boycotts of Israel. (Source.)

Attempts have been made by the U.S. Congress to make this a federal law, but those efforts have stalled, so far, due to First Amendment concerns about Free Speech.

To date, 38 states have adopted laws, executive orders, or resolutions designed to discourage boycotts against Israel.

Separately, the U.S. Congress has considered anti-boycott legislation in reaction to the BDS movement. The Senate passed S.1, which contained anti-boycott provisions, on January 28, 2019, by a vote of 74-19. The House passed a resolution condemning the boycott of Israel on July 24, 2019, by a vote of 398-17.

No federal law was adopted. (Source.)

There has been debate over whether the laws violate the right to free speech and organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) have challenged many of them in court cases. (Source.)

And even though these State laws have broad bipartisan support among politicians, about 80% of the public oppose them, even among Zionists who support Israel, due to concerns about Free Speech. (Source.)

The main lobbying group supporting Anti-BDS laws in the U.S. and around the world, is Israel Allies Foundation, whose Chairman of the Board is Evangelical Christian Dr. Dave Weldon, who previously served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995-2008, representing Florida’s 15th district. (Source.)

Many other pro-Zionism organizations are well-funded by Evangelical Christians, such as Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ), Day of Prayer for the Peace of Jerusalem (DPPJ), and hundreds of others.

Other mega Christian organizations that do not focus solely on Zionism but also promote Zionism, include the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), Focus on the Family (FOF), the Family Research Council (FRC), and many, many others.

[…]

Via https://healthimpactnews.com/2024/will-mandatory-support-of-israel-soon-replace-mandatory-covid-vaccines-as-a-condition-for-employment-support-for-israel-already-mandated-in-38-states/

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/