Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.
Isn’t it extraordinary what can happen when a truly curious man gets fired from a very well paid gig at a para-journalistic cable news network and just gets to talk to whomever he wishes, anywhere in the world?
The “powers that be” are becoming the “powers that were,” and they are surely on the ropes if Tucker Carlson has gone in there and gotten the voice they least want heard—possibly of anybody alive.
It means we will actually find out how Julian Assange is doing, and whatever is left of Julian, he will convey to Tucker, the essentials.
This we know. Julian Assange never wastes a single word.
If I were La Cabal, this would really, really freak me out.
Palestinians being displaced amid death threats made by Israeli settlers in Nablus area. Photo by OCHA, October 2023
UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
Nearly 2,000 Palestinians displaced amid settler violence since 2022; 43% since 7 October 2023
Shortly after armed Israeli settlers threatened to kill them if they did not leave, 24 Palestinian households totaling 141 people, half of whom are children, were displaced from Khirbat Zanuta in the southern West Bank. On 28 October 2023, the families dismantled about 50 residential and animal structures and vacated the area with their 5,000 livestock. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has previously documented settler attacks in this community, most recently on 12, 21 and 26 October. About two thirds of the families that comprised this community are now displaced.
“On 26 October, settlers attacked us, destroying our homes, water tanks, solar panels, and cars,” said 43-year-old Abu Khaled from Khirbet Zanuta. “I felt the presence of death so tangibly as if I saw it with my own eyes. I was torn between staying on or leaving the place I love, where I belong, where I may die. On 28 October, I made the hardest decision in my life: to leave Zanuta and leave everything behind, as memories. I did this to protect my children.”
These experiences are not unique to Khirbat Zanuta. In 15 herding communities across the West Bank, at least 98 households comprising 828 people, including 313 children, have been displaced amid settler violence or increased movement restrictions since 7 October. That was the day of Hamas’ attack in Israel, where Palestinians from Gaza killed an estimated 1,400 people, injuring others and taking hostages. Since then, Israeli settler violence has increased significantly, from an already high average of three incidents per day thus far in 2023 to a current average of seven per day.
Settler-related incidents per day (round average)
In this period, OCHA has recorded 171 settler attacks against Palestinians, resulting in Palestinian casualties (26 incidents), damage to Palestinian properties (115 incidents), or both (30 incidents). Cases of harassment, trespass, and intimidation are not included in these statistics when they do not result in damage or casualties, although they too increase the pressure on Palestinians to leave.
On 9 October, forty people were displaced from the herding community of Al Ganoub. Armed Israeli settlers had raided the community, threatening residents at gunpoint, saying they would kill them if they did not leave within an hour. Abu Jamal, 75, is one of those who were displaced. “Settlers set fire to our tent and stole my goats,” he told us. “They destroyed everything that had kept me here.” Another residential structure was also set on fire during this incident.
Since 7 October, access restrictions, typically imposed by the Israeli authorities, have intensified throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. These are particularly severe in areas near Israeli settlements and in the ‘Seam Zone,’ the Palestinian area isolated by Israel’s 712-kilometre-long Barrier in the West Bank.
Settlers too have imposed movement restrictions, blocking access roads to Palestinian communities. Such measures have limited Palestinians’ access to essential services and livelihoods. In some cases, settlers have also damaged water resources relied upon by herding communities, depriving them of a fundamental human necessity.
Palestinian herding communities are often highly dependent on humanitarian assistance, including health and education services. However, since restrictions intensified, many of the services have had to stop.
Using firearms to intimidate Palestinians
On 12 October, eight households, comprising 51 people, were displaced from Shihda WaHamlan herding community in Nablus, after settlers threatened them at gunpoint, saying they would kill them and set their tents on fire during the night. One of the family members, 52-year-old Abu Ismail, stated: “I had no choice but to leave everything behind to protect my children.”
More than one in every three settler-related incidents since 7 October has involved settlers using firearms to threaten Palestinians, including by opening fire. In almost half the cases, Israeli forces accompanied or actively supported the attackers. Many of the latter incidents were followed by confrontations between Israeli forces and Palestinians, where three Palestinians were killed, and dozens injured. Eight Palestinians were killed by settlers directly, as of the end of October. Damage or destruction was caused to 24 residential structures, 40 structures used for farming, 67 vehicles and more than 400 trees and saplings.
Settlements are illegal under international humanitarian law and, compounded by settler violence, they have for many years resulted in increased risks and heightened humanitarian needs among Palestinians.
Settler-driven displacement predates 7 October; those remaining are at elevated risk
While more intense, settler-driven displacement did not start with Hamas’ deadly attack. In September, OCHA revealed that 1,105 people from 28 Communities – about 12 per cent of their population – had been displaced from their areas of residence since 2022, citing settler violence and the prevention of access to grazing land by settlers as the primary reason. Four communities had been completely displaced and remained empty. In six other communities, over 50 per cent of the residents had left since 2022 and in seven additional communities more than 25 per cent had left.
Combined with the latest figures, the overall number of people displaced amid settler violence since 2022 has reached 1,933. Separately, OCHA reported in early October, before the current escalation, on the displacement of thirteen families comprising 84 people from Masafer Yatta; these people cited increased movement restrictions imposed by Israeli forces as the primary reason for their move. Additionally, home demolitions carried out by the Israeli authorities have displaced another 1,032 Palestinians in 2022 and 1,352 Palestinians so far in 2023.
At the same time, concerns are high over families who have remained and continue to endure attacks by settlers. Mohamad Abu Seif (Abu Khalid), 90, has been living with his family in the herding community of Ein Shibli for over 40 years. While they have remained, they are exposed to repetitive threats and harassment by settlers. “They prevent us from grazing our sheep,” he told us.
He and his family are among five Palestinian households, comprising 33 people, who remain in this community. All of them are at risk of displacement as grazing areas diminish by the actions of Israeli settlers. Eight families, comprising 51 people, have already left this area since the 7 October. While Abu Khalid is still there, he and his family have no assurances that they would be able to remain for much longer.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (Photo Credit: 360b/Shutterstock)
The Cradle
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to pressure Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to take in refugees from the Gaza Strip and has offered that the World Bank write off Egypt’s large foreign debt in return, Israel’s Yediot Ahronothreported on 31 October.
Recently, Israel also turned to international leaders and asked them to try to convince Egyptian President Sisi to accept refugees in Egypt’s Sinai. Sisi refused the idea, saying that Sinai would become a base for Palestinian resistance groups to attack Israel, creating security problems for Cairo.
Egypt is vulnerable to Israeli pressure as it has suffered from record inflation and foreign currency shortages in recent years, making it difficult for the North African country to repay its external debts and pay for crucial imports, including wheat.
“What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force citizens to take shelter and immigrate to Egypt – and we will not accept that,” Sisi emphasized.
Sisi said that if Israel wants to keep Palestinians in Gaza safe from an expected large-scale Israeli ground assault, they should be allowed to evacuate to Israel’s southern Negev desert region and then return after Hamas is defeated.
He added: “Egypt opposes any attempt to resolve the Palestinian issue through military means or through the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land – whatever will be at the expense of the countries of the region.” Sisi said that if his citizens were called upon to do so, millions of them would take to the streets and demonstrate against the passage of Gazans to Sinai.
About 2.4 million Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip. At the beginning of the war, many of them flocked towards the Rafah crossing, which was closed.
Netanyahu’s offer to Sisi comes after the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence recommended on 13 October that Israel use the war with Hamas to forcibly transfer Gaza’s 2.3 million residents to Egypt’s Sinai as refugees and prevent them from ever returning, in a repeat of the 1948 Nakba.
The plan was leaked by activists from the Likud party to gauge Israeli and international opinion over such a plan. The Ministry of Intelligence is headed by Gila Gamliel of Likud.
IN 2010, Gamliel and Netanyahu asked then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to implement the same plan. Mubarak rejected the idea and was deposed in January 2011 following street protests organized and supported by Egyptian activists working in concert with the US State Department.
Netanyahu made a similar request to Mubarak’s successor, Mohammad Morsi, in 2012, which Morsi also rejected.
Sisi then deposed Morsi in 2013. In 2014, Netanyahu made a similar proposal to Sisi in which Israel would annex settlements in the West Bank and Palestinians would receive part of northern Sinai.
Israel’s settlement movement has sought to reconquer Gaza and re-establish the Gush Katif settlement there ever since then prime minister Ariel Sharon ordered the evacuation of Jewish settlers from the strip in 2005. Israel has maintained a suffocating economic and military siege on Gaza since that time.
Lenin disguised with a wig to escape the secret police
Episode 6 The Making of Lenin
The Rise of Communism from Marx to Lenin
Dr Vejas Gabriel Liulevius (2019)
Film Review
Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyanov Ilyich to a middle class family in 1870. His father was a hard working school inspector who ultimately achieved the status of lower nobility. However following an older brother’s execution (as a terrorist) while a student in St Petersburg, the family was totally ostracized socially.
Lenin became a Marxist in 1889. Despite radical activities that led to his expulsion from Khazan Imperial University, he completed a law degree and worked as a public defender (in St Petersburg) while secretly participating in radical politics. Liulevius describes him as a disciplined and obsessively driven scholar and organizer, who spent most of his time studying, writing and annotating a number of international newspapers. Unlike his Marxist colleagues, he rarely smoked or drank and exercised daily “to be “eady for the revolution.”
Under continual secret police surveillance for his involvement with the Russian Social Democratic Party, in 1895 he traveled to Switzerland to meet with the socialist leader-in-exile Plekahanov.* He would be arrested later that year for his political activities and sent to Siberia. There he met and married a teacher and fellow revolutionary and wrote The Development of Capitalism in Russia. They went into exile following their release, with a brief stay in Munich and London before ending up in Switzerland.
There he worked with Plekanov on the Iskra (The Spark), the radical newspaper they smuggled into Russia. While in Switzerland, Lenin wrote What is to Be Done, which advocates for a new party that is more exclusive and less bureaucratic than the SPD. Lenin believed this elite vanguard was essential to lead workers into revolution. Without a vanguard, he argued, they were too likely to settle for short term gains rather than dismantling capitalism.
The new party he proposed would employ democratic centralism. In other words, it would allow massive debate until the central leadership made a decision. At that point, it would require total compliance. According to Liulevius, Lenin borrowed these ideas from 19th century Russian Nihilists and Narodniks, rather than Marx.
Lenin went on to force a major split in the Russian Social Democratic Party (SPD). Even though his supporters comprised only a minority of the SPD, he ingeniously named them the Bolsheviks (meaning majority) and his opponents the Mensheviks (meaning minority). The main difference between the two was that Bolsheviks no longer believed a society had to industrialize before true revolution was possible. Lenin also successfully portrayed the Mensheviks as sectarian splitters to distract from his own factional tactics.
In 1912 Bolshevik-Menshevik divide became permanent.
At a time when the czar had 20,000 secret police operating internationally, the Bolsheviks were hunted, arrested, with 17 executed prior to the October revolution. According to Liulevius, the Bolsheviks’ understandable paranoia had a major effect on their behavior. At one point, four out of five of the central committee members were police infiltrators. The czarist police were also extremely skilled at psychological operations, publishing the fraudulent anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion just prior to World War I.
Lenin perfected his theory of revolution to include temporary land reform in a effort to win over the peasants, who strongly favored the non-Marxist Socialist Revolutionary party.
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
While previous Israeli governments have tried to depopulate Gaza, today there is a growing momentum to carry out mass transfer—with American support.
Since the October 7 Hamas attacks, Israel has sustained an unprecedentedly brutal assault on the Gaza Strip. The Israeli government has stated that its aim is to eliminate Hamas and seems to be preparing for a full ground invasion. But it is becoming increasingly clear that the war is in pursuit of a second goal: the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Israeli politicians and officials from the Israeli defense establishment have called for a second nakba and urged the military to flatten Gaza. Some suggest that Palestinians should flee Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and seek refuge in the Sinai Peninsula, including former Brigadier General Amir Avivi and the former Israeli ambassador to the United States Danny Ayalon.
Avivi and Ayalon insist that evacuating Palestinians out of Gaza is simply a humanitarian measure, protecting civilians while Israel conducts its military operations. But other reports suggest that Palestinians would be permanently resettled outside of Gaza, in an act of ethnic cleansing. On October 17, the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy—an Israeli think tank founded and led by former defense and security officials—published a paper urging the Israeli government to take advantage of the “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip,” and resettle Palestinians in Cairo with the assistance of the Egyptian government. Separately, a leaked document from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry recommended forcibly resettling 2.2 million Palestinians from Gaza in the Northern Sinai and constructing a buffer zone along the Israeli border to prevent their return.
The proposals are only the latest in a long history of Israeli plans to depopulate Gaza and resettle Palestinians in the Sinai. After the Six-Day war, the Israeli military launched a deadly campaign against Palestinian resistance movements in Gaza’s refugee camps; 16,000 Palestinians whose homes Israel destroyed were transferred to Israeli-occupied al-Arish, while 12,000 relatives of Palestinian fedayeen were moved to new camps in the desert. More recently, before Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the head of the Israeli National Security proposed that Egypt accept a large percentage of Gaza’s population in exchange for land in Southern Israel, which was rejected by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
But this time, the United States seems to be mobilizing political and financial support for Israeli transfer schemes. On October 11, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed that the United States was working with Egypt and Israel to create a “humanitarian corridor” in the Sinai for Palestinian civilians fleeing Gaza. Then on October 20, the White House sent Congress an official funding request to “address potential needs of Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries.” President Joe Biden has since stated that he recognizes the importance of preventing Palestinian displacement. But as one analyst noted, the funding request was a clear indication that the Biden administration was giving Israel a “green light” to carry out ethnic cleansing.
Today’s plans for mass transfer thus bear a closer historical resemblance to the 1948 nakba and its aftermath. After 200,000 Palestinian refugees had fled from historic Palestine to Gaza by March 1949, the United States pushed for a UN proposal to resettle tens of thousands in the Sinai desert. Led by John B. Blandford, a veteran American policymaker, the newly-established United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) conducted surveys in the early 1950s to explore desert reclamation schemes in the Sinai, immediately east of the Suez Canal, where resettled Palestinian refugees would participate in new agricultural development projects and “reintegrate” into the Egyptian economy. For Blandford, this plan would offer a shortcut to solve the Palestinian refugee problem: once they were economically secure, he believed, Palestinians would no longer want to return to their original homes. The United States allocated the bulk of the funding for the project, estimated at $30 million in 1955.
In public statements at the UN, Egypt and other Arab states rejected all “schemes for the settlement of Arab refugees involving the reclamation of deserts,” and insisted that the resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem must be “must be sought in Palestine, and nowhere else.” But behind the scenes, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government worked closely with UNRWA to advance the Sinai resettlement scheme, which they saw as in their own national interest: a large-scale agricultural development project, supported by foreign capital, that would significantly benefit the Egyptian economy at a time of financial and political instability.
Over the past few weeks, Egyptian President Abdelfattah El-Sisi has resisted Israeli and American pressure to allow Palestinians to evacuate through Rafah into the Sinai, affirming that Egypt rejects “the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land.” Egypt also fears that a large refugee encampment could become a new base for Palestinian resistance operations, which could drag Egypt into a potential military confrontation with Israel. But in exchange for accepting Palestinians from Gaza, the US has reportedly offered Cairo economic incentives at a time when Egypt faces an extreme debt crisis. It is hard to see how Sisi could help displace Palestinians without facing intense political blowback—and yet the prospect of debt relief is also difficult to ignore. And with recent crackdowns on local media outlets, it is clear that, at a minimum, the Egyptian government wants to stifle all domestic discourse about resettlement plans.
In 1955, Palestinians across Gaza rose up, in what became known as the March Intifada, and forced UNRWA, the US, and Egypt to renounce resettlement schemes. Today, as Palestinians in Gaza struggle just to stay alive, and as American and European leaders turn a blind eye to their suffering, it is unclear whether any kind of political protest can prevent a second nakba.
Along with similar disasters at nuclear power plants at Chernobyl, Ukraine, and Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the destruction of reactors at Fukushima continues to threaten the environment. For more than 12 years, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has continuously poured cold water onto melted uranium and plutonium to keep those elements from overheating. That water, and the groundwater that runs through the reactor’s ruined foundation, poses an ongoing threat to surrounding communities and to fisheries.
In August, TEPCO began dumping millions of gallons of this radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. When that began, Robert Richmond, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii, told the BBC that he is “very concerned that Japan would not only be unable to detect what’s getting into the water, sediment and organisms, but if it does, there is no recourse to remove it.”
In other words, the ongoing contamination of the Pacific will be irreversible.
Perhaps the wastewater from Fukushima is of little immediate concern to Americans unless they live in Hawaii or possibly Alaska. Hopefully, the radioactive tritium will be diluted long before any currents reach our West Coast. Meanwhile, the decommissioned Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth, Mass., was blocked from dumping radioactive waste into Cape Cod Bay by state environmental protection regulators in July. The Pilgrim reactor is the same General Electric design as Fukushima, and has been an ongoing environmental threat to Boston and much of densely populated New England for decades.
Much closer to home is the aging nuclear reactor(seen above in a public domain U.S. Government photo posted in wikimedia commons) which is operated by Xcel along the Mississippi River near Monticello, Minn. Xcel, an electric utility which was formerly known as Northern States Power, serves the Sioux Falls area as well as much of Minnesota.
This reactor, which is also the identical General Electric design, has been in operation since 1971, so it is overdue for decommissioning. Its corroded pipes are buried underground, and have never been inspected. However, Xcel detected radioactive tritium in November 2022 in monitoring wells, a leak into surrounding groundwater that was 250 times the legal concentration for safe drinking water.
Unfortunately, Xcel neglected to inform the sometimes toothless Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) of this leak until March of this year. There is no suggestion that the reactor will be shut down soon, but it poses an ongoing threat to the Mississippi, which provides drinking water to millions of Americans.
Nuclear energy is still promoted as a climate-friendly alternative to fossil fuels. Before we allow very expensive investment in a new generation of nuclear reactors, it is well-advised to consider the long-term impact on the environment from all phases in the nuclear fuel cycle.
Here in South Dakota, old uranium mining sites near Edgemont and near Buffalo are still contaminated. America has yet to find a safe and appropriate place or method for the disposal of high-level nuclear waste that has been generated by our power plants.
Oncologist/Immunologist Dr William Makis, who explains the mechanisms of harm within the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, for example at his testimony to the National Citizens Inquiry in Canada, also writes daily about the resulting premature death, to help raise awareness to the still-unsuspecting public. Below is his X post about his most recent article, Actors Dying Suddenly.
NEW ARTICLE: ACTORS Dying suddenly – Matthew Perry (age 54), Tyler Christopher (age 50) are the most recent losses:
34 young Actors and Actresses who died suddenly in 2023 – many had autopsies done!
Vast majority were forced to take COVID-19 Vaccines to get or keep a job.
Autopsies yield interesting results:
14 died from cardiac events
4 died in their sleep
4 died from blood clots (2 strokes, 1 pulmonary embolus)
4 died from very aggressive cancers (Turbo Cancer) (1 glioblastoma, 1 bowel cancer – dead 4 days after diagnosis, 1 unknown – dead 1 month after diagnosis)
4 died by way of suicide (can’t exclude COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine neurological injury leading to increased suicide risk)
Oct.31, 2023 – 50 year old Tyler Christopher, ex-husband of Eva Longoria, star of “General Hospital” and “Days of our Lives”, died suddenly from a cardiac event in his San Diego Apartment.
Oct.28, 2023 – 54 year old Matthew Perry, star of NBC sitcom FRIENDS died suddenly around 4:10pm on Oct.28, 2023. “First responders found Perry unconscious in a hot tub at his Los Angeles house and were unable to revive him.” He had played pickleball for one hour, the morning before his death. His pickleball partner said he was fatigued and had been fatigued over past week.
Oct.17, 2023 – London, UK – 38 year old model and actress Tabby Brown, ex-girlfriend of Mario Balotelli, died suddenly and unexpectedly from a cardiac arrest. She had been absent from social media for 18 months. She appeared in ads for Canon and Virgin Atlantic.
Oct.5, 2023 – 53 year old Keith Jefferson, actor who played in “Django Unchained”, “the Hateful Eight”, and close friend of Jamie Foxx, died suddenly on Oct.5, 2023 after being diagnosed with cancer in Aug.2023. Diagnosis to death: approximately one month.
Sep.30, 2023 – 35 year old Egyptian actor, director Ahmed Samy El-Adl died suddenly on Sep.30, 2023 from cardiac arrest due to pulmonary embolism
Aug.15, 2023 – 40 year old Broadway actor and star Chris Peluso died suddenly on August 15, 2023. Cause of death not released but possible neurological injury as he recently sought treatment for schizoaffective disorder
Aug.3, 2023 – 47 year old actor Clifton Oliver died on August 3, 2023. He was battling “an illness” and had spent the last six weeks in a hospital and then hospice. His illness has not been revealed. Probably cancer.
July 28, 2023 – 56 year old actor Marc Gilpin died on July 28, 2023. He was diagnosed with glioblastoma May 5, 2022 with 2 inoperable tumors in his brain
July 21, 2023 – Nashville, TN – 44 year old Shonka Dukureh, actress who played in the new film Elvis, died July 21, 2023. She was found dead by one of her children at 9:30am and ran to a neighbor who called 911. Autopsy: death due to atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease
July 6, 2023 – 48 year old actor Jeffrey Carlson, who played one of the first trans characters on television as Zoe Luper on ABC’s soap opera “All my children” died suddenly on July 6, 2023. Medical Examiner: cause of death was dilated cardiomyopathy
June 25, 2023 – London, UK Actor 40 year old Nick Baldev, died 4 days after being diagnosed with bowel cancer and less than 24 hours after being told it had spread.
I present 34 cases in total with the most current information that is available.
The trend is accelerating, including injury and disability not resulting in death; seemingly due to ongoing, often unidentified, persistent harm from the toxic substances. To quote Mikki Willis, “We’ve all been scammed, lied to and coerced“. The enemy is not the messenger. Yet, whilst those doing this to humanity remain in control of the information most people access, they tell us to believe that people speaking out, such as Mikki Willis and Dr William Makis, are crazy and harmful and must be silenced. Are you really sure about that?
Washington has agreed to help offset a Chinese ban on imports following Tokyo’s release of nuclear wastewater into the ocean.
The US government has agreed to buy Japanese seafood for its military to help mitigate the economic fallout from Japan’s decision to release radioactive wastewater from its destroyed Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean.
The American armed forces will sign a long-term contract with Japanese seafood suppliers to help counter China’s ban on imports from Japan, US ambassador to Tokyo Rahm Emmanuel told Reuters in an interview on Monday. Japanese fish, scallops and other products will be served on US Navy ships and stocked in commissaries and mess halls at 17 American military bases in the region, he added.
Feeding Japanese seafood to US soldiers would not completely offset Japan’s loss of the massive Chinese market, Emmanuel conceded, but would make a statement about Beijing’s “economic coercion.”
“The best way we have proven in all the instances to kind of wear out China’s economic coercion is come to the aid and assistance of the targeted country or industry,” he said.
China, formerly the largest importer of Japanese fish, banned all seafood imports from Japan in August, citing concern over possible radioactive contamination. Beijing slammed the Japanese government’s decision to start dumping Fukushima wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, calling the move “extremely selfish and irresponsible.” Russia followed suit earlier this month, suspending its imports of Japanese seafood.
The Japanese government has repeatedly defended its wastewater discharges as safe, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) backed the plan. China’s Foreign Ministry responded to the IAEA’s claims by suggesting that those who think the releases are safe should “drink or swim in” Fukushima wastewater themselves.
Emmanuel has mocked Chinese leaders on social media and claimed in an interview earlier this month with Japan’s Sankei newspaper that Beijing lacked any scientific basis for raising concerns over the Fukushima discharges. He told Reuters that despite China barring imports of seafood harvested by Japanese fishermen, it has continued to allow sales of fish caught by Chinese crews in Japanese waters.
Asked whether he was “hawkish” on China, Emmanuel told Reuters that he was merely being honest and realistic. “Maybe honesty is painful, but it’s honest,” he said.
“The responsibility of diplomats is to promote friendship between countries, rather than smearing other countries and stirring up trouble,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters on Monday, in response to Emmanuel’s latest comments.
Reuters said the first purchase under the US military’s new seafood deal with Japan will total less than one metric ton of scallops. By comparison, Japan exported more than 100,000 metric tons of scallops to China last year.
Do authoritarians deserve a chance to be treated with grace and forgiveness? The question is circulating regularly these days in the wake of the complete failure of covid pandemic response and the victory of the anti-mandate movement. The answer relies on a series of counter-questions based on logic and predictable outcomes. It’s the kind of discussion that covid cultists don’t want to have; they just want everyone to forget because they now have something to lose politically
Scott Galloway, Professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and member of the World Economic Forum’s “Global Leaders Of Tomorrow” list, is one of the cultists that now wants to be given a free pass as he debates the issue on Real Time with Bill Maher.
"I was on the board of my kids' school during COVID. I wanted a harsher lockdown policy. In retrospect: I was wrong. The damage to kids of keeping them out of school longer was greater than the risk. But here's the bottom line: We were doing our best. But let's give a little… pic.twitter.com/8Vt2NujNKl
The question that we need to ask Galloway is: How forgiving was he when confronted with people who opposed his authoritarianism? Galloway was rabidly pro-mandate. He consistently called for harsher punishments for people refusing to comply and he demanded that the unvaccinated be treated as second tier citizens banned from places of business. As he argued in his blog titled ‘Half Of America Has Its Head Up Its Ass. It’s Time For A Vaccine Mandate’:
“Enough already. Federal law should require any citizen who wants to cash a government check, use public transport, or enter a place of business to show proof of vaccination…”
Galloway cited the ever present inflated CDC data on covid deaths in America as the justification for his authoritarian position. Of course, data was available not long after the spread of covid indicating that the Infection Fatality Rate of the virus was a tiny 0.23% and that 99.8% of the population (including the unvaccinated) had nothing to fear. Not only that, but the CDC has recently and quietly published information showing that around 95% of people who died with covid also had one or more comorbidities and 75% had at least four – Meaning, if you did not have multiple comorbidities your chances of dying from covid were incredibly small.
Do Galloway and those like him deserve a clean slate? No, they don’t, and here’s why…
No Apologies
We hear many covid authoritarians talk about forgiveness but very few of them actually apologize for their behavior. Galloway calls for “grace”, perhaps trying to appeal to the Christian notion of “turning the other cheek.” He admits he was wrong on the mandates (because the data forces him to), but he doesn’t actually apologize for his behavior. In fact, he excuses his behavior and the behavior of leftist politicians as them doing the best they could do given the imperfect information they had at the time. This is a common tactic of misdirection.
As noted above, within months of covid becoming active in the US, the data was already available showing that the virus was not a legitimate threat. So the claim that their information was “the best they had at the time” does not hold water. There was more than enough evidence to warrant opposition to unconstitutional policies (frankly, even if covid had been more deadly it doesn’t justify violations of the Bill of Rights). Millions of Americans tried to explain the truth to those panicking over covid, and they chose not to listen, calling us “selfish conspiracy theorists.”
But the greatest trespasses were among those analysts and “influencers” who used covid as an opportunity for political gain, knowing that there was information that debunked government and media spin. The worst people are those that have no intention of making amends because they plan to try again. People who do wrong and refuse to give a legitimate apology are the kinds of people that are likely to commit similar offenses in the future.
Mad With Power
The covidians were primarily from the left side of the political spectrum and wherever leftists were most concentrated is where the most egregious violations of liberty took place. The political left went absolutely mad with power, with a large number of Democrats supporting Orwellian controls to punish people refusing to submit to the mandates.
There were calls to fine the unvaccinated, imprison people who question the vaccine, put the vaccinated on home lockdown and even take away their children. In some states, like New York, there was active legislation put forward to create detention facilities for people that did not comply (covid camps). That is some serious Stalinist behavior and we are still waiting for it to be addressed and for certain political leaders to be punished.
As the old saying goes: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” We have now seen the character of the political left. We have seen the character of people like Galloway, and they have been found untrustworthy.
It Can And Will Happen Again
The covid event was really a litmus test for authoritarian tendencies in the US. At least half the public failed that test miserably. We may not see another pandemic agenda in our lifetimes, but that doesn’t really matter. There will be many other opportunities in the future for ignorant people and sociopathic people to act out on their darker impulses. It is important to make a note of how the individuals around us behave when they think it’s safe to be evil, and we must remember who they are. These are not people that should be given “grace” or trust down the road when the next crisis strikes; they have shown themselves to be unworthy of that.
A 15-minute drive from the Camp David presidential retreat, a low-rated zoo gave the National Institutes of Health several bats to infect with a coronavirus from the same Chinese lab that some federal agencies believe is responsible for the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, according to a new investigation and published research.
The White Coat Waste Project, which fights taxpayer funding of “wasteful government animal experiments,” said Monday it’s using Freedom of Information Act requests to get more details about the taxpayer-funded experiments documented in a 2018 paper in the journal Viruses.
The Viruses paper, authored by Montana lab researchers and Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborator Ralph Baric, of the University of North Carolina, determined that the “SARS-like WIV1-coronavirus” first isolated from Chinese rufous horseshoe bats could not cause a “robust infection” in the 12 Egyptian fruit bats from the zoo. Four were euthanized and tested.
The paper doesn’t say which zoo employee signed off on the bats’ transfer to NIH, but WCW suspects Hahn played an instrumental role.
WCW used screenshots of her LinkedIn profile but did not name her in a blog post on its investigation “to protect privacy and instead focus on government bureaucrats because they are ultimately the ones who should be held accountable,” Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy Justin Goodman wrote in an email.
Hahn has been frequently identified as the “curator” of the zoo going back to 2017, a role that encompasses “acquiring animals, transferring animals, research, and other duties related to managing the zoo’s population of animals,” Goodman said.
Her involvement is especially likely “in this case where they have a personal history with the recipient,” Hahn’s former employer NIH.
WCW provided Just the News an Agriculture Department of inspection report from April that shows the zoo had 241 bats, 41 of them the Egyptian fruit bats used in the NIH research.
Its blog post notes USDA fined the zoo $12,000 in 2012 for five years of violations including poor treatment of animals and failure to adequately train a zoo worker who was mauled as a result.
Charity Navigator, which rates nonprofits based on several metrics, gives the zoo a 56% rating and one out of four stars due to missing “accountability metrics” among other lapses.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (Photo Credit: 360b/Shutterstock)
by 
The Most Revolutionary Act 
.jpg){kind=link}