Dmitry Orlov

On Saturday night Washington launched 120 cruise missiles at what was declared to be the positions of pro-Iranian Shiite groups. This was intended as retribution for over 167 attacks on US military bases in Syria, Iraq and, most recently, Jordan, plus attacks on ships in the Red Sea. The attacks were very loosely attributed to unknown “Islamic Resistance Forces” (not an actual name of any armed group or groups) that the Washingtonians seem to have simply dreamt up. What provoked this most recent launch of a volley of cruise missiles was the death of three US servicemen, plus a much larger number of wounded, from an attack on the curiously named al-Tower logistical base in Jordan, close to the Syrian and Iraqi borders.

Why was this particular incident the one to provoke such a reaction? We don’t know. We also don’t know why the attack was attributed to some Iran-associated organization rather to the one that actually took responsibility for it — a Sunni group associated with Qatar. That’s like blaming Mormons for something that Jehovah’s Witnesses said they did. This may seem like a very odd thing to do, but only until one realizes that this is absolutely typical of the Washingtonians. What follows is an article I published in March of 2016 — eight whole years ago. As you read it, you will notice that nothing at all has changed.

There are numerous tactics available to those who aim to make problems worse while pretending to solve them, but misdirection is always a favorite. The reason to want to make problems worse is that problems are profitable — for someone. And the reason to pretend to be solving them is that causing problems, then making them worse, makes those who profit from them look bad.

In the international arena, this type of misdirection tends to take on a farcical aspect. The ones profiting from the world’s problems are the members of the US foreign policy and military establishments, the defense contractors and the politicians around the world, and especially in the EU, who have been bought off by them. Their tactic of misdirection is conditioned by a certain quirk of the American public, which is that it doesn’t concern itself too much with the rest of the world. The average member of the American public has no idea where various countries are, can’t tell Sweden from Switzerland, thinks that Iran is full of Arabs and can’t distinguish any of the countries that end in “-stan”. And so a handy trick has evolved, which amounts to the following dictum: “Always Attack the Wrong Country.”
Need some examples? After 9/11, which, according to the official story (which is probably nonsense) was carried out by “suicide bombers” (some of them, amusingly, still alive today) who were mostly from Saudi Arabia, the US chose to retaliate by attacking… Saudi Arabia? No, Afghanistan and Iraq.

When Arab Spring erupted (because a heat wave in Russia drove up wheat prices) the obvious place to concentrate efforts, to avoid a seriously bad outcome for the region, was Egypt — the most populous Arab country and an anchor for the entire region. And so the US and NATO decided to attack… Egypt? No, Libya.

When things went south in the Ukraine, whose vacillating government couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to remain within the Customs Union with Russia, its traditional trading partner, or to gamble on signing an agreement with the EU based on vague (and since then broken) promises of economic cooperation, the obvious place to go and try to fix things was the Ukraine. And so the US and the EU decided to fix the Ukraine problem by putting pressure on Russia, even though Russia is not particularly broken. Russia was not amused; nor is it a country to be trifled with, and so in response the Russians inflicted some serious pain on… the Washington establishment? No, farmers within the EU; that was more profitable. The Russians can play such games too.

Who was at fault became exceedingly clear once the Ukrainians that managed to get into power (including some very nasty neo-Nazis) started to violate the rights of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking majority, including staging some massacres, in turn causing a large chunk of the country to hold referendums and vote to secede. And so the US and the EU decided to fix things by continuing to put pressure on… the Ukraine? No, still on Russia.

When Russia started insisting on a political rather than a military resolution to the crisis in the Ukraine, and helped negotiate the Minsk agreements together with the Ukraine, France and Germany, a similar thing happened. These agreements obligated the Ukrainian government to pass constitutional reforms to grant autonomy to its Russian regions. The Ukrainian government refused to abide by these agreements. As a result, the US and the EU decided to put pressure on… the Ukrainian government? No, on the Russian government,again.

When a nasty terrorist group calling itself ISIS and composed of Islamic Salafi/Takfiri extremists started to seize power in large parts of Iraq, and then spread to Syria, something had to be done about it. These extremists were being financed by Turkey and Saudi Arabia with plenty of help from the CIA and the Pentagon. And so the US and NATO decided to put some pressure… on Turkey and Saudi Arabia? Or on themselves, perhaps? No, on Syria.

In response to all this foolishness, Russia decided to actually go and fix something that was broken: Syria. And now Syria is on the mend, and members of the Central Misdirectorate in Washington are left scratching their heads: someone actually fixing something? How is that even possible?

So far so good. But this method of pretending to be solving problems by making them worse has some definite downsides.

For one thing, eventually even the dimmest, most geographically challenged bulbs in the American general population might start to get a clue that such activities are an unproductive waste of their scarce tax dollars, and then they might start refusing to vote for the establishment candidates. Then it would becomes hard to continue with the misdirecting because the people doing the misdirecting would be voted out, and (horror of horrors!) somebody who might actually try to fix a problem or two might get voted in. But that’s not terribly likely because causing problems and then making them worse is so profitable that those who are profiting always have the surplus funds to buy whatever votes they need.

More significantly, continually making problems worse by attacking the wrong country tends to eventually make the sheer number problems get completely out of hand. Take the massive terror attack in Brussels, down the road from NATO headquarters, for which ISIS took credit. In recent years, Europe has been experiencing a large-scale influx of people from the Middle East and North Africa, who have been forced to flee their native lands because of all the previous acts of misdirection, and a fair number of these people are ISIS terrorists. And so, to protect itself, NATO is planning to fight ISIS… in Europe? No, in Syria. Also, it is well known that the influx into Europe has been orchestrated by Turkey. In response, the EU has decided to put pressure on Turkey? No, give billions of euros to Turkey and tell Turkey that it might at some point be welcome to join the EU. Makes perfect sense.

This pattern of misdirection has an overall momentum that, over time, becomes harder and harder to break. It starts out as just one group of plutocrats doing incredibly vile, underhanded but profitable things; later on, an even bigger group of plutocrats turns out to be doing equally vile but now completely idiotic, self-defeating, embarrassing things; and right near the end a really huge group of plutocrats does things that are absolutely suicidal — but they can’t stop themselves. For example, the Biden clan can’t bring itself to shut down the southern border because then it would lose all the bribe money coming to it from the Mexican narco cartels.

[…]

Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/91057189-aeb0-4b33-a982-d8a495eb3784

[Source: globalresearch.ca]

Jeremy Kuzmarov

Ukrainian Reconstruction Bank Set Up by BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase Has Secured at Least $500 Million in Capital

A key purpose underlying the Ukraine War was made clear at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January when Philipp Hildebrand, vice chairman of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, announced the start of a much-touted Ukrainian Reconstruction Bank in five to six months.

The Reconstruction Bank is being put together by BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase for the Ukrainian government.

Many of its initiatives will be overseen by Penny Pritzker, a banking heiress from a family with CIA and Mafia connections and a history of white-collar crime,^[1] who was appointed by the Biden administration as a special envoy for Ukrainian reconstruction.

The Reconstruction Bank has secured $500 million in pledges by foreign investors seeking to profit off of Ukraine’s reconstruction with the expectation that another $500 million will be secured in the next six months.

One of the potential investors is Robert Kraft, the billionaire paper manufacturer and owner of the New England Patriots, who has been part of JPMorgan-led discussions on rebuilding Ukraine for the past year, and is now seriously considering building paper manufacturing factories in western Ukraine.^[2]

The reconstruction of Ukraine is necessitated by a war manufactured by the U.S., which turned the Ukrainians against the Russians in order to draw Russia into a devastating conflict that held the prospects of weakening Russia and enriching U.S. corporations.

The elimination of a generation of Ukrainian and Russian youth and devastation of Ukrainian cities was “collateral damage” whose only utility lay in its propaganda value as the Russians have been blamed for all the carnage.

At the World Economic Forum, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and other senior JPMorgan executives, BlackRock’s top management, executives from Bridgewater Associates, Carlyle Group, a leading weapons contractor, Blackstone, Dell and ArcelorMittal, which all seek to grow rich in Ukraine.

Last January, Zelensky gave a speech before the Boca Raton Chamber of Commerce in which he boasted that BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs “have already become part of our Ukrainian way.”^[3]

When Dimon and other JPMorgan executives visited Kyiv in February 2023, they agreed that JPMorgan would not only help to raise private investment funds for Ukraine, but would also advise Ukraine on financial stabilization, sovereign credit ratings, and economic ties to Europe.

Dimon said the “full resources” of JPMorgan would be available to Ukraine as it “charts its post-conflict path to growth.” Earlier, Dimon had called Ukraine “an inflection point for the Western World for one hundred years.”

Such views correlated with Dimon’s self-interest; on top of the lure of reconstruction contracts funded by the Reconstruction Bank, JPMorgan held more than $2.5 billion in Raytheon stock, and over $1.3 billion worth of both Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics stock as of February 15, 2023, major weapons contractors that have made huge profits from the war with Russia.

Fittingly, during his visit to Kyiv, Dimon and other JPMorgan executives gifted Zelensky with a New England Patriots jersey with the number 91 on it for the year Ukraine gained its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Besides opening the floodgates to foreign capital, Ukraine continues to be valued by Dimon and his associates as a battering ram whose purpose is to weaken Russia and affect regime change so a new leader can allow Wall Street to penetrate Russia’s economy and gain ownership of its rich natural resources, as it was beginning to do under Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin’s predecessor.

Disaster Capitalism

Ukraine would provide another good chapter in Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, published in 2007, which showed how capitalist interests have deliberately manufactured crisis after crisis so that they could profit from the wreckage.

A key case study of the book is Iraq, where Klein shows how military contractors and oil companies that profited from the Bush administration’s shock-and-awe campaign sought to capitalize on the privatization bonanza and opening of the country to Western corporations under the direction of L. Paul Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) economic czar.

Klein reported that Bremer, a former managing director at Kissinger Associates, enacted a “radical set of laws described by The Economist in glowing terms as the ‘wish-list’ that foreign investors and donor agencies dream of for developing markets.”^[4] Iraq, however, was transformed under Bremer into a dystopia where the country relinquished its economic sovereignty.

Ukraine appears on the threshold of suffering the same fate.

Zelensky has already helped to establish a low-wage, low-tax economy conducive to foreign investors, while dismantling progressive labor laws, supporting land privatization and initiating attacks on unions and left-wing politicians and political parties, which have been banned.

Founder and chairman of a private investment firm, PSP Partners, and past member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, Wall Street’s think tank, Penny Pritzker visited Kyiv during her tenure as Commerce Secretary following the February 2014 Maidan coup and helped deliver a $3 billion loan that was contingent on the government adopting neo-liberal reforms beneficial to foreign corporations that had been resisted by Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian leader ousted in the coup.

As a result of the “reforms” championed by Pritzker, U.S. corporations such as Cargill, DuPont (a Delaware-based company which has long supported Joe Biden’s political career) and Monsanto have been able to invest heavily in Ukrainian agriculture and, according to a report in the Australian National Review, purchased more than 17 million hectares of Ukraine’s arable land—more than all the arable land that exists in Italy.

The main shareholders in these latter companies are Wall Street investment firms—The Vanguard Group, BlackRock and Blackstone—which donate heavily to both the Democratic and Republican parties and own major weapons companies like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin that have done brisk business contributing to the destruction of Ukraine.

An April 2021 report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) made the lifting of a moratorium on the sale of land to foreign companies a condition for the loan package that Pritzker helped to deliver.

A poll found that 81% of Ukrainians were against the sale of land to foreigners and lifting of the moratorium, while only 13% were in favor of it.

Geopolitical analyst Drago Bosnic wrote that “the Ukrainian people have not only been quite literally robbed of the lands their ancestors gave their lives for”; they are also “effectively dying in battle to make sure this theft continues unabated.”

At the World Economic Forum, Pritzker spoke about the interest of promising investors, who are ready for higher risk, which she said will have to be mitigated by donor countries (i.e., taxpayers), before wealth from pension funds managed by BlackRock can be mobilized.

About 280 projects have applied to the fund so far, with around 30 projects being considered by BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase.

Rostyslav Shurma, deputy head of Zelensky’s office, expects $1 billion commitments in “catalytic capital.” This term refers to capital-like investments, debt and guarantees in which the investor accepts higher risk for greater social impact, according to Reuters.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), of which the U.S. is the largest shareholder, wants to further “massively engage” in Ukraine.

Based in London, the EBRD was founded in 1991, to intervene with credit and projects to help former Soviet areas to “adjust” to Western ways after the Soviet Union dissolved.

For example, the EBRD worked overtime in Ukraine in the 1990s, to aid the global agricultural cartels to gain dominance in the country.

The EBRD plans to provide €7.5-15 billion in announced investments in the next five years, with special emphasis on “support for the private sector.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is “optimistic” that all 27 EU member states will agree to joint financial assistance for Ukraine—in 2024-2027 some €50 billion altogether.

The EBRD’s important role in the new Ukraine underscores the function of Western government institutions in facilitating shameless corporate war profiteering.

How much longer Ukrainians will put up with Zelensky’s brazen fealty to Western corporate interests is an open question, as signs of disaffection in the country continue to grow.

Ukrainians at this time would do well to read the chapter in Klein’s book about Iraq and mobilize to prevent the same thing from happening to them, even if it is already far along.

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/01/31/disaster-capitalists-ready-to-descend-on-ukraine/

Episode 19: The Path to War with Europe

Living the French Revolution and Age of Napoleon

Dr Suzanne M Desan

Film Review

In October 1791, France became a constitutional monarchy, with the Legislative Assembly (with 745 new deputies) replacing the National Assembly. Of the new deputies one quarter were left wing Jacobins* who wanted a republic, one quarter wanted a constitutional monarchy and half were unaffiliated.

Aware that (former enemies) Prussia and Austria were conspiring with Louis XVI to overthrow the revolution, in late 1791 some deputies called for a preemptive strike against Austria.  Other deputies (including the Jacobins) opposed war because they feared it would increase the king’s power and possibly lead to dictatorship.

In March 1792, the Austrian monarch (and Holy Roman Emperor) Leopold II died suddenly, to be replaced by Marie Antoinette’s nephew Francis II. She wrote asking him to declare war on France, asserting (falsely) that the French communes were about to put the king and herself on trial.

On 12 April, Lafayette, leader of the national guard, ordered 50,000 reinforcements to the border with the Austrian Netherlands (modern day Belgium), and Louis XVI replaced his more moderate ministers with pro-war officials. On April 20, the king declared war against Austria, Bohemia and Hungary (the constitution gave him that power) and only seven deputies voted no. France would be continuously at war for the next 23 years.

Prussia, in turn, declared war on France.

*The Jacobins were so named because in Paris they met in a a former convent of the Dominicans, who also known Jacobins. Their official name was the Society of the Friends of the Constitution.

Film can be viewed with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/149323/149357

By Grant F. Smith | IRmep | February 2, 2024 

The looming threat to Middle East peace activism

As politicians and the Anti-Defamation League call for crackdowns on Middle East peace protesters, the ADL’s undue influence within the FBI as a trainer is finally exposed.

Basic Field Training Course

The Department of Justice released the Anti-Defamation League’s Basic Field Training Course (PDF). The course is mandatory for all FBI New Agent Trainees (NATs) and New Intelligence Analyst Trainees (NIATs). This release follows a decade of Freedom of Information Act requests and denials by the Department of Justice (PDF) and evasion by publicly funded content contributors.

The ADL course is developed and conducted by Anti-Defamation League (ADL) instructors. It selects materials from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. Marcus Appelbaum, Museum Director of Law, Justice and Society Initiatives in 2014 resisted any public review of the curriculum, stating, “Unfortunately we do not randomly send out the curriculum.” Appelbaum also denied that any of the large amounts of U.S. taxpayer funding supporting the museum paid for the curriculum.

[…]

Museum Director of Law, Justice and Society Initiatives Marcus Appelbaum denied curriculum release in 2014.

The ADL course facilitates a discussion of the USHMM video The Path to Nazi Genocide by asking trainees to watch and then consider “the challenges that police officers faced, and decisions they made in Germany during the Nazi era.” The video depicts the rise of Nazi Germany from WWI to the final WWII liberation of concentration camps replete with emaciated images of the dead and barely living.

The final question the video puts to agents in training is why the word “genocide” had to be coined in the aftermath. “As the world struggled to understand what had happened, a new word, genocide, was needed for these crimes — crimes committed by ordinary people from a society not unlike our own.”

The ADL training also requires viewing the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize: No Easy Walk. Supplemental reading exposes new FBI agents to the bureau’s past role undermining Martin Luther King Jr. and documents Bull Connor’s relentless fire hosing and mass arrests of black protesters engaged in civil disobedience. The video ends with the triumphant 1963 March on Washington and JFK’s proposal for a Civil Rights Act.

Taken in context, the entirety of the Basic Field Training Course makes it clear that FBI trainees are ADL subordinates who must strive to meet with its approval. Page 9 of the guide even states, “as a new hire, we would like you….”

The unstated purpose of the course is positioning Israeli activities in the US and the ADL itself outside the purview of law enforcement and especially FBI counterintelligence. The ADL today is framed as trusted trainers and civil rights partners. That was not always the case. The ADL’s current privileged insider role training all new FBI special agents is the result of a secretive influence campaign that began more than eight decades ago. Internal FBI files about that campaign reveal the ADL’s true reasons for infiltrating the FBI.

In 1940 the ADL launched an intense effort to liaise with the FBI by offering a list of undercover ADL investigators to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI was reluctant to accept the ADL list. One FBI special agent told Hoover he found a proposed investigator resource to be “mentally unbalanced.” Others offered up by ADL, such as longtime political campaign donation bundler Abraham Feinberg, was known to the FBI as a WWII surplus conventional weapons smuggler for Israel and alleged unregistered foreign agent. Feinberg later financed Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons program.

The ADL offered to investigate persons of interest to the FBI. FBI Assistant Director P. E. Foxworth nixed that idea, telling Hoover the ADL was engaged in “shakedowns” of “loyal and innocent” Americans and “interested only in their own material benefit…”

This did not keep the ADL from announcing in 1942 it had conducted “373 investigations” on behalf of the FBI. This prompted Hoover to respond that private investigative agencies had “no excuse for existence” and that the FBI “had never asked the ADL to conduct an investigation.” On June 30, 1943, Luigi S. Crisculo, an American investment banker involved in Italian American causes, reported being baited by Anti-Defamation League operatives who claimed to be “unofficial auxiliaries of the Department of Justice” and were attempting to link him to Nazism.

The ADL also wanted to directly seed its operatives into the FBI. Arnold Forster (AKA Fastenberg) began developing ADL’s legal team in 1938 while simultaneously applying to become an FBI special agent in 1937 and 1939. Forster was formally rejected because in the view of the FBI he “dressed poorly, did not appear resourceful and would probably not develop.” Forster then became ADL’s chief investigator in 1940 and held formal and informal positions until 2003. Another longtime ADL investigator and operative named Frank Prince even campaigned to replace Hoover as FBI director. When caught out in 1942, the ADL offered to “disband within 24 hours.” The FBI did not take the ADL up on this offer since “we [the FBI] are not running the Anti-Defamation League.”

Throughout the 1940s the ADL continuously lobbied FBI field offices for meetings and joint events which befuddled some bureau insiders. One special agent in command reported to Hoover he could not “understand the insistence of the ADL that a representative of this Bureau address this group.” He felt, “there is some ulterior motive that causes them to be so insistent.”

One ADL motive was gaining privileged access to FBI files. In 1944 ADL’s Nissan Gross asked to periodically check FBI files to avoid “duplication of investigation.” Special Agent in Command Drayton rebuffed the ADL because “under the procedure…ADL would have an opportunity to learn of the informants being utilized…and those under investigation.”

In 1968 FBI Director J Edgar Hoover finally dropped his longstanding opposition and ordered field offices “to immediately make certain that you have established liaison with the head of the ADL regional office in your territory…” Such liaisons continue to this day. Since then, joint public events, training sessions and even FBI director “love letters” to the ADL have been ongoing.

Given its insider status at the FBI, growing piles of Palestinian corpses in Gaza and resultant mass protests and civil disobedience in the U.S. may not be a challenge for the ADL which, along with other nodes of the Israel affinity ecosystem, works to censor open debate and protests of concern to Israel. As an FBI trainer, the ADL has finally transcended scrutiny. The FBI previously, acting on credible evidence, investigated ADL for domestic spying before political pressure on former Attorney General Janet Reno quashed the investigation. Such investigations of the ADL today would be unthinkable.

Even before the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s attack on Gaza and settler rampages in the West Bank, the ADL was seeding the FBI with false threat reports conflating peaceful US based Palestinian rights groups with white nationalist movements.

ADL statistics and reports also attempt to reframe pro-Palestinian protests and civil disobedience in the United States as Antisemitism and “hate crimes” rather than anything resembling legitimate Civil Rights era nonviolent action. Under its forced “liaison” with the ADL, the FBI must pay close attention to and respond to all the ADL’s false and misleading allegations lest other nodes of the Israel affinity ecosystem work in concert to threaten its funding, political appointees or mundane issues such as a new headquarters.

The ADL and Israel lobby ecosystem acted quickly to compel Congressional “genocide threat” hearings—focused not on the reality of tens of thousands of dead in Gaza, but rather the discomfort felt by American Zionist students at elite Ivy league universities encountering campus cease fire rallies.

Following the ADL worldview, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently alleged that pro-Palestinian protesters picketing her home were acting on behalf of Russia and China and demanded that the FBI investigate them as foreign agents.

It is ironic that Pelosi, who has benefited all her career from support from AIPAC, an Israeli foreign influence operation set up with $60 million in foreign funds laundered into the US in the 1950s and 1960s, hurls foreign agent accusations at peaceful protesters.

[…]

However, the threat of looming FBI crackdowns, covert or overt, on protesters calling for Middle East peace should not be discounted given the ADL’s success infiltrating its worldview into the bureau. Although FBI Director Christopher Wray has promised the FBI will not investigate or surveil peaceful pro-Palestine protests, his promise leaves out entrapment operations. The pressure for the bureau to “get results” by seeding plots, weapons and entrap mentally unbalanced individuals in “Palestinian terror plots” may soon become overwhelming. Such “successes” would instantly gain uncritical, widespread mainstream media diffusion and touch off more congressional hearings for further operations and funds to Israel.

One certainty is that even as the International Court of Justice demands Israel refrain from violations of the Genocide Convention, the ADL will certainly not teach such relevant current day lessons to new generations of special agents.

[…]

Via https://alethonews.com/2024/02/02/adl-defines-genocide-and-civil-disobedience-within-the-fbi/

Dr Eddy Betterman

Is it bad for modern medicine to promote breastfeeding as the optimal way for a mother to feed her baby? According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a known pharmaceutical front group, the answer is yes.

In a recent announcement, the AAP criticized the leading medical and public health organizations for recommending that mothers exclusively breastfeed their babies for at least six months, this based on profuse evidence of breastmilk being the healthiest food for babies to grow and develop.

According to the AAP, a “spate of recent work challenges the extent of these benefits,” the suggestion being that there are other, perhaps better, ways to feed a baby without breastmilk.

The AAP insists that promoting breastfeeding is “stigmatizing,” its members claiming that they are “concerned about breastfeeding promotion that praises breastfeeding as the ‘natural’ way to feed infants.”

“This messaging plays into a powerful perspective that ‘natural’ approaches to health are better, a view examined in a recent report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics,” the AAP says.

“Promoting breastfeeding as ‘natural’ may be ethically problematic, and, even more troublingly, it may bolster this belief that ‘natural’ approaches are presumptively healthier. This may ultimately challenge public health’s aims in other contexts, particularly childhood vaccination.”

Breastfeeding provides natural immunization for babies – no vaccines necessary

It is that last little bit about “childhood vaccination” that cuts to the heart of what the AAP is really concerned about underneath all that feigned moral outrage: mothers not getting their children vaccinated because the breastmilk is doing all the vaccinating naturally.

You see, once a critical mass of the population figures out that breastmilk and other living foods are the real preventions and cures for life’s ailments, Big Pharma will lose its cash cow – and we can’t have that if Wall Street expects to keep reaching all-time highs.

When a mother breastfeeds her child, she passes on her adaptive immune system to her babies. This is what you might call “nature’s pharmacy,” and for all intents and purposes it is free as opposed to the “medicine” dispensed by the pharmaceutical and vaccine industries, with the blessing of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“All of the antibodies that the mother has accumulated through her life on Earth are gifted to her baby, to the obvious benefit of the child’s needy and developing immune system,” writes Ben Bartee for Armageddon Prose.

“Breastfeeding enhances the mother-child bond, the first and arguably most important social bond serves as the foundation for all others … Each of these effects of breastfeeding enhances the baby’s physical and psychological health and fosters a functional society. Conversely, neither enhances pharmaceutical profits or the social control of the state.”

Keep in mind that this is the same AAP that is pushing transgenderism on today’s youth with reckless abandon.

“Transhumanist ideology is hellbent on severing every physical and emotional tie that binds people – actual, biological, honest-to-God people – together and weaponizing human physiology for profit and social control,” Bartee further writes.

“The social engineers want us isolated, atomized, afraid, sick and sad. Ultimately, they want us dead. Anti-humanism is at the heart of their ethics.”

Commenters on Bartee’s story about the AAP’s insanity largely agree that “if ever there was proof of the anti-human agenda, this is it,” to quote one of them.

“The AAP doesn’t even bother to hide its goal, but segues straight to vaccine uptake and the promotion of all things technological and artificial. How anyone can read this and not have their eyes opened immediately is beyond me.”

[…]

Via https://dreddymd.com/2024/02/03/pharmaceutical-aap-condemns-breastfeeding-ethically-problematic/

Jeremy Kuzmarov

In the 1990 movie, Air America, Mel Gibson and Robert Downey, Jr., play two Air America pilots who smuggle heroin while supporting U.S. proxies in the Vietnam War.

Air America was an airline run by the CIA previously called Civil Air Transport (CAT), which had been formed by General Claire Chennault and Whiting Willauer^[1] to ferry supplies to the Chinese Guomindang (GMD) in its war against the Chinese Communist Party in the 1940s.

Known as the “Flying Tigers” because of the insignia that they crafted on their planes, CAT pilots provided combat support to U.S. and allied troops in the Korean War and carried out clandestine intelligence operations over China.

In the Indochina War in Laos, Air America played a key role in supplying the CIA’s Hmong clandestine army and ferrying troops involved in clandestine operations.

The airline became known as “Air Opium” for its role in trafficking drugs grown in the Golden Triangle by the Hmong, whose chief Vang Pao was arrested but never prosecuted for drug smuggling.

After the Indochina War ended, Air America pilots continued to smuggle drugs from the Golden Triangle to help fund CIA black operations, laundering their money through the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia that was set up by a Laos secret war veteran.

New Legislation

Glenn Grothman is a Republican House representative from Wisconsin and critic of the so-called “deep state” who is currently sponsoring legislation that would guarantee retirement benefits and official recognition for the 1,000 U.S. citizens who worked for Air America.

Air America pilots killed in action would be included on the CIA’s Memorial Wall (the so-called “Wall of Stars”) which memorializes agency employees who died in the line of service.

Hired as covert operatives, Air America employees were not provided standard government forms and are unable to prove their federal employment status, which is necessary to qualify for retirement benefits. However, Grothman said that “these patriots risked their lives fighting communism in the same way members of the Air Force did.”

Grothman’s sentiments are echoed by Mark Warner (D-VA) who is sponsoring a Senate version of the bill with Marco Rubio (R-FL), the vice chair of the Senate intelligence committee.

Warner said: “I’m proud to introduce this legislation to provide well-earned benefits and formally recognize the courage of Air Americans during the U.S. war effort in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.”

While CovertAction Magazine concedes that Air America pilots should receive government pensions (like any government employee), the magazine objects to the characterization of Air America veterans as heroes.

In an article about the Air America pension legislation in The Intercept, Tim Weiner, author of a CIA history called Legacy of Ashes, is quoted, saying that “the whole point of Air America was to kill communists.”

In the opinion of CovertAction Magazine, this was not a heroic undertaking.

The Communists in Southeast Asia were at the vanguard of national liberation struggles and often the primary political group promoting land reform, and government investment in education, literacy and health care.

The U.S. objectives in stamping out communism related largely to threats of communist regimes undercutting foreign investment opportunities for U.S. corporations through nationalization policies, closing down U.S. military bases and undercutting U.S. global power.

Air Opium

In The Intercept article, Weiner dismisses the idea that Air America pilots smuggled drugs, stating that “there were rogue Air America pilots, but the story that the CIA was smuggling dope for profit or political advantage [in the Indochina War] is almost entirely a canard.”

Weiner is wrong, as opium is a vital cash crop in Southeast Asia that was grown by the Hmong in Laos and was a key means of raising black funds in the U.S.-led secret war.

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had first engaged in the opium trade in Burma and China during the Pacific War, recognizing that opium in the region was a substitute currency.

General William “Ray” Peers, commander of OSS Detachment 101 in Burma, confessed in his autobiography: “If opium could be useful in achieving victory, the pattern was clear. We would use opium.”

After the triumph of the Maoists in China’s civil war in 1949 (known as the “loss of China” in the U.S.), General Peers, as CIA station chief in Taipei, arranged for CAT (aka Air America) to support incursions by defeated GMD soldiers from Burma into China’s Yunnan province, thus enabling the GMD to bring to market one-third of the world’s illicit opium supply.^[2]

The CIA also set up a front corporation, Sea Supply, that built airstrips so CAT planes could fly opium out of Thailand, where the drug trade was run by CIA assets such as police chief Phao Sinyanon.

In a June 1968 exposé in Ramparts magazine, University of California at Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott wrote that the CIA was flying opium on behalf of its Laotian clients “in harmless looking suitcases” in Air America planes to heroin-processing laboratories in Hong Kong.

In, “Air America: Flying the U.S. into Laos” (Ramparts, February 1970), Scott estimated that, at the peak of the Vietnam War, Air America flew around 6,000 tons of opium per month.

Scott wrote that “the use of illegal narcotics networks to fight communism seems to have been sanctioned inside the United States. With the maturation of both capitalism and Third World nationalism, wealthy U.S. interests have resorted systematically to organized outlaws to pursue their operations.”^[3]

Alfred W. McCoy’s 1972 exposé, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,^[4] provided extensive documentation of the CIA’s coordination of the Southeast Asian drug trade, which has since been bolstered by further evidence.^[5]

CIA officers admitted to journalist Douglas Valentine that they ran the drug traffic in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

In an exclusive interview with CovertAction Magazine, Valentine said that Weiner is “a lying sack of shit,” pointing to different passages in his books that disproved his analysis.

In Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire (2023), Valentine quotes CIA officer William Young, who said that an Air America pilot named Robert “Dutch” Brongersma was a key figure who oversaw CIA involvement in the Southeast Asian drug trade in collaboration with Thai military intelligence.^[6]

CIA operative Anthony Poshepny told Valentine that C-47 Air America planes flown by Taiwanese pilots would fly for 13 hours out of the Lao-Thai border town of Houei Sai with opium packed in Styrofoam drums, and that the CIA gave Vang Pao, whom Poshepny referred to as a “crook,” his own planes with crews of GMD mercenaries who flew narcotics to cash customers around Southeast Asia.^[7]

In The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (2003), Valentine quoted John Evans, deputy to Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) enforcement chief John Enright in 1966, who said he saw documents that proved that, using Air America, the CIA underwrote the entire Guomindang drug network throughout Southeast Asia.

Enright said that that was why they called Air America “Air Opium.”^[8]

In my own research in the FBN records at the National Archives, I found files referencing drug smuggling by Air America planes and its Lao subsidiary, Air Vientiane, and arrest records for Air America pilots caught smuggling drugs in Indochina, including a major bust at the Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon.^[9]

Major Stanley C. Hobbs was caught smuggling 57 pounds of Burmese opium from Bangkok in August 1964 to a clique of South Vietnamese officers. His punishment was being forced to pay a small fine as the FBN was thrown out of Laos to prevent the compromising of “national security” operations.

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/01/29/new-legislation-supports-doling-out-money-to-cia-drug-runners-from-indochina-war/

The Burning Platform

When you read quotes from H.L. Mencken and John D. Rockefeller from over a century ago describing how government schools, in conspiracy with Big Business, had the sole purpose of matriculating non-thinking, non-questioning, standardized robotic workers into the workforce, you understand why the country is in such a state of degeneracy, degradation, debt, and dumbed down state of infantilism. This didn’t happen over night.

It was a plan implemented methodically over the last century by those controlling the levers of society. They were described succinctly by Edward Bernays in his 1928 book Propaganda as:

“Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

These men operate in the shadows; have enormous wealth which they use to buy politicians, academics, government bureaucrats, the media, international organizations, and technological platforms; and have a primary objective of increasing their wealth, power and control, while enslaving the working class in debt, and keeping them distracted with high tech bread and circuses. Even though a few slip through their net, educate themselves, think critically, question everything, and distrust their government, they probably comprise less than 5% of the population.

After decades of government indoctrination, propaganda, disinformation, and Big Corporation poisoning of mind and body, the ignorant masses have become so mentally and physically debilitated they are incapable of comprehending how they have been manipulated and misled and unequipped to revolt against their captors. The covid/vaccine scamdemic was the ultimate test, and the ignorant masses failed miserably. The noose is tightening and they are still focused on Taylor Swift, the stock market, climate change, border invasion, and ongoing presidential political clown show.

The Great Taking/Great Reset is real. They want it all and they will take it, if we let them. You will own nothing, if they have their way. They have the power and will not relinquish it willingly. The power will need to be reclaimed through the use of force, cunning, and surprise. We can’t let them set the rules of the conflict. The 5% constituting the critical thinkers will need to convince a portion of the ignorant masses to start thinking. We will need to throw sand into the gears of their machinery. The middle level bureaucrats doing the bidding of the elite ruling class, will need to worry about whether they will make it home at night to their families. Removing ourselves from their system will further degrade their system.

Apathy and passivity are no longer possible when they are trying to strip you of your wealth and force you into their digital gulag of CBDCs and social credit scores. Obedience to corrupt, powerful, psychopaths who want us dead is an unacceptable choice for me. Voting is absolutely worthless at this point. The politicians are not running anything. The system has been rigged to benefit the few, while impoverishing the rest. When they pull the plug on this system, they have “legally” arranged for all the wealth to be consolidated in their hands. We know what they want. The question is whether we allow it to happen.

[…]

Via https://www.theburningplatform.com/2024/02/01/they-dont-want-a-nation-of-critical-thinkers/