Clever Journeys

On July 20, Texas wisely became the eighth state to resign from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) in 2023, and the ninth state overall.

ERIC has been a powerful tool misused by Deep State operatives as data indicates it is another tool (like Dominion Voting machines, Runbeck Elections ballot printers, Konnech voting tabulation, running Mules, USPS Union, etc.) to control and manipulate elections.

ERIC was originally funded by the Soros Open Society to bloat the voter rolls. Evidence indicates ERIC is politically compromised. Although sold to states as a way to purge invalid and ineligible voters, facts show this is not so true.

Those ballots were filled out by many people who have moved from the state, choose not to vote, or had died.

The “who moved and who died” are the richest lists for fake ballot submission.

These phantom names show up on requests for mail-in ballots, mailing lists from state election officials, and even in the CVRs (counted vote records) after an election.

This is the kind of stuff put into voting drop boxes by the “Mules”on the midnight to 3 a.m. shift.

For instance, the number of Michigan’s registered voters climbed dangerously—and impossibly—to 104% of its Voting Aged Population (VAP).

After the suspicious 2020 Election, which placed Joe Biden in the White House, citizen’s groups, rightfully distrustful of mainstream media narratives and corrupted state elections, began performing their own investigation. They found thousands of votes mysteriously counted by people who had moved out of state, as well as ineligible and dead voters.

By June 17, 2022, Verityvote.us, led by citizen investigator Heather Honey, demonstrated that the left-wing organization had crossed a red line.

“The primary effect of ERIC is to grow the voter rolls by converting eligible-but-unregistered (EBU) persons into registered voters. States divulge to ERIC personally identifying information of unregistered residents, including people who have declined to register for privacy reasons. FOIAs reveal that ERIC is sharing EBU records with Zuckerberg-funded CEIR.”

At its height in 2022, 33 states were participating members in ERIC.

While ERIC describes its mission as “to assist states in improving the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increasing access to voter registration for all eligible citizens,” evidence has shown it is a tool to manipulate elections.

Alicia Pierce, a representative for Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, said compliance with Senate Bill 1070 was the reason for Texas’s withdrawal.

SB1070, which Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed on June 18, 2023, includes provisions that make compliance with ERIC’s bylaws effectively impossible and directs the Texas Secretary of State to develop a new voter registration data-sharing compact, or find a new program with annual dues less than $100,000.

The Texas State Senate approved SB1070 by a vote of 26-4 on April 12, and the Texas House of Representatives passed the bill 85-61 on May 23.

The withdrawal will become effective on Oct. 19.

The Texas Republican Party, which supports the state’s withdrawal from ERIC, said: “The ERIC membership agreement collects an extensive amount of personally identifiable information.”

These are the states that have so far withdrawn from using ERIC.

• Louisiana (Effective November 9, 2022)
• Alabama (Effective April 18, 2023)
• Florida (Effective June 3, 2023)
• Missouri (Effective June 3, 2023)
• West Virginia (Effective June 3, 2023)
• Iowa (Effective June 16, 2023)
• Ohio (Effective June 16, 2023)
• Virginia (Effective August 9, 2023)
• Texas (Effective October 19, 2023)

[…]

Via https://cleverjourneys.com/2023/08/03/texas-becomes-latest-state-to-withdraw-from-soros-zuckerberg-funded-corrupt-eric-voter-database/

©  AFP / Kirill Kudryavtsev

RT

Wikipedia is one of many tools used by the US liberal establishment and its allies in the intelligence community to wage “information warfare,” the site’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, has told journalist Glenn Greenwald.

Speaking on Greenwald’s ‘System Update’ podcast, Sanger lamented how the site he helped found in 2001 has become an instrument of “control” in the hands of the left-liberal establishment, among which he counts the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies.

“We do have evidence that, as early as 2008, that CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia,” he said. “Do you think that they stopped doing that back then?” 

Activity by the CIA and FBI on Wikipedia was first made public by a programming student named Virgil Griffith in 2007. Griffith developed a program called WikiScanner that could trace the location of computers used to edit Wikipedia articles, and found that the CIA, FBI, and a host of large corporations and government agencies were scrubbing the online encyclopedia of incriminating information.

CIA computers were used to remove casualty counts from the Iraq War, while an FBI machine was used to remove aerial and satellite images of the US prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. CIA computers were used to edit hundreds of articles, including entries on then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, China’s nuclear program, and the Argentine navy.

Some edits were more petty, with former CIA chief William Colby apparently editing his own entry to expand his list of accomplishments.

“[The intelligence agencies] pay off the most influential people to push their agendas, which they’re already mostly in line with, or they just develop their own talent within the [intelligence] community, learn the Wikipedia game, and then push what they want to say with their own people,” Sanger told Greenwald.

“A great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online,” he continued, “on websites like Wikipedia.”

Earlier this year, X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk released a trove of documents showing how the platform’s former executives colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden, assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns, and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also admitted that Facebook, the biggest social media platform on Earth, censored accurate information that was damaging to President Joe Biden’s 2020 election campaign at the direct request of the FBI.

Via https://www.rt.com/news/580735-cia-fbi-edits-wikipedia/

 Ron Clutz

The image above gets it right on the basics:  Eligible voters come to their voting station with valid ID and proot of residency, and paper trail exists to validate machine entry and processing.  But there are some subtleties around the edges requiring management.  For example, voter registration should be in advance of the voting process, and not on election day.  Why? Because there’s no time to check for fake ID or residency. Later on is a post on why there must be an election day deadline, beyond which votes cannot be added to the count.  But first a look at some international standards regarding elections and balloting.

A Practical Guide to Democratic Elections Best Practice from Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE).  Below is the section on Balloting.

Right:
To Universal Suffrage, To Equal Suffrage, To Secret Ballot, To Fair Elections
Which  Guarantee the Free Expression of the Will of the People

Balloting  Best Practices:

• Voting procedures must be understandable so that voters are able to vote without difficulty

• Voting should take place in a polling station; however, other means of voting are permissible for voters who are physically unable to attend a polling station, but only where there are safeguards in place to prevent fraudulent voting

• Observers and representatives of candidates and political parties must be permitted to observe the delivery of election materials, preparation of the polling place, voting, and counting of ballots

• Members of the military should vote in the place of their permanent residency, or in a polling station near their duty station

• Voting must be in person, by secret ballot

• Voters must present adequate identification information and sign register in order to vote

• Only the voter may mark a ballot, except that a voter who requires assistance for physical reasons may be assisted by another voter who is not a member of the election administration or an observer

• Ballots and voting materials must be securely maintained before, during, and for a sufficient period of time after an election

• The entire counting process must be conducted in a transparent manner in the presence of observers and representatives of candidates, political parties, and the media

• There must be procedures for, in the presence of observers, independent verification of all elements of the counting and tabulation

• All results of voting, tabulations, and protocols must be publicly posted at the polling station and copies given to representatives of observers, and transmitted to higher levels of election commissions in a transparent manner

• Intermediate tabulations and protocols must be publicly posted at intermediate election commissions and copies given to representatives of observers

• All final voting results must be published in media as soon as possible after elections in such a manner that voters are able to check results at their polling places

• Legal measures must be in place to deter electoral fraud in the voting, counting, and tabulation processes

Navarro Report On the 2020 US Presidential Election

There is extensive evidence that the US 2020 election did not respect the above best practices.  The 2021 Navarro Report (link in red above) provides the details summarized in this table:

The detailed report includes many documented events, including evidence under the heading Outright Voter Fraud:

Fake Ballot Manufacturing and Destruction of Legally Cast Real Ballots

Fake ballot manufacturing involves the fraudulent production of ballots on behalf of a candidate; and one of the most disturbing examples of possible fake ballot manufacturing involves a truck driver who has alleged in a sworn affidavit that he picked up large crates of ballots in New York and delivered them to a polling location in Pennsylvania.  There may be well over 100,000 ballots involved, enough fake ballots alone to have swung the election to Biden in the Keystone State.

Likewise in Pennsylvania, there is both a Declaration and a photo that suggests a poll worker used an unsecured USB flash drive to dump an unusually large cache of votes onto vote tabulation machines. The resultant tabulations did not correlate with the mail-in ballots scanned into the machines.

Arguably the most flagrant example of possible fake ballot manufacturing on behalf of Joe Biden may have occurred at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Georgia. The possible perpetrators were caught in flagrante delicto on surveillance video. In one version of this story, poll watchers and observers as well as the media were asked to leave in the middle of the night after a suspicious water leak. Once the room was cleared, several election officials pulled out large boxes of ballots from underneath a draped table. They then proceeded to tabulate a quantity of fake manufactured ballots estimated to be in the range of tens of thousands

Finally, as an example of the possible destruction of legally cast real ballots there is this allegation from a court case filed in the United States District Court for the District of Arizona: Plaintiffs claim that over 75,000 absentee ballots were reported as unreturned when they were actually returned. These absentee ballots were then either lost or destroyed (consistent with allegations of Trump ballot destruction) and/or were replaced with blank ballots filled out by election workers or other third parties.

And so on, and so on.  All of these worst practices were employed with impact because of a fundamental illegality that disqualifies any and all elections when it occurs.  Jonathan Gault explains the problem in his American Thinker article Beware the ‘Long Count’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Though barely campaigning, unable to speak, and drawing massive crowds, measured in dozens, waving to nobody, on the rare occasions when he was able to muster the energy to leave his basement, Joe Biden remarkably received the most votes of any candidate in US history. However, his historic popularity notwithstanding, his debatable victory nevertheless still required eking out miraculously close races in the hyper-partisan Democrat strongholds of Atlanta, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, each of which employed the Long Count.

[…]

Via https://rclutz.com/2023/08/03/how-to-get-free-and-fair-us-elections/

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

There are currently over 32 million Americans using FDA-approved anti-anxiety prescription drugs (benzodiazepines), based on 2018 data. That includes almost 400,000 children under the age of 5 years old, and over 100,000 infants under the age of 1. (Source.)

According to a study published on the National Institute of Health (NIH) website in 2016, benzodiazepine prescriptions increased 4.1 percent in 1996 to 5.6 percent in 2013, a 37 percent increase, while deaths from benzodiazepine prescriptions increased from 0.58 per 100,000 adults to about 3 per 100,000 adults, or about 8,000 deaths per year, an increase of more than 500 percent. (Source.)

And these statistics are for just one class of anti-psychotic drugs, anti-anxiety (benzodiazepine) drugs. According to data from 2020, about 77 million Americans are taking some form of an anti-psychotic drug. (Source).

Over 100 people die every day in the U.S. from prescription drugs (pre-COVID, that number would be much higher today), and over 50% of all drug deaths in the U.S. are from prescription drugs. (Source.)

By way of contrast, about 52 million Americans use cannabis (marijuana), which is still illegal at the federal level and not FDA-approved, and to date there has not been a single death attributed to cannabis use, according to the NIH.

There are no reports of teens or adults dying from marijuana alone.

But the pharmaceutical companies are desperately trying to develop a drug to help people stop using cannabis, or what is referred to as “marijuana use disorder.”

That’s because the withdrawal side effects from trying to stop using cannabis are so horrible (sarcasm):

No medications are currently available to treat marijuana use disorder.

Many people who use marijuana long term and are trying to quit report mild withdrawal symptoms that make quitting difficult. These include:

• grouchiness
• sleeplessness
• decreased appetite
• anxiety
• cravings

(Source.)

Compare those cannabis withdrawal symptoms to the withdrawal symptoms of FDA-approved benzodiazepine prescription drugs:

Benzodiazepine withdrawal can bring about a wide range of symptoms such as:

• Sweating.
• Increased heartrate (greater than 100 beats per minute).
• Anxiety.
• Agitation.
• Insomnia.
• Hand tremor.
• Perceptual disturbances (i.e., hallucinations).
• Seizures.
• Delirium characterized by disturbances in consciousness and cognition, with visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations.

Some people also experience anxiety and depression for several weeks or months following acute withdrawal. In severe cases, especially when untreated, benzodiazepine withdrawal may be fatal. (Source.)

Gateway Drug?

The corporate media and Big Pharma have been saying for decades now that cannabis use is a “gateway drug” leading people to become addicted to more dangerous drugs.

Well, I think everyone agrees that marijuana is a “gateway drug”, but a “gateway” leading in which direction?

The evidence points to cannabis use as a “gateway” AWAY from deadly prescription drugs, such as opioids and anti-psychotics.

See some of our previous coverage on how opioid addictions DECREASE in states that legalize marijuana:

How Cannabis Can Be Used for Safe and Effective Opioid Drug Withdrawal

Opioid Pain Killer Drug Addictions Can Be Cured With Cannabis

Dr. Oz Looks at Medical Marijuana as a Potential Cure for Opioid Addiction

An article published in Boston Magazine last week interviewed educated, suburban mothers who were turning away from alcohol in favor of cannabis, referred to as “cannamoms”.

The Really High Housewives of MetroWest

Out with the chardonnay, in with the gummies—why a new generation of Greater Boston parents are choosing cannabis to cope.

How did we get from “wine moms” to “weed moms”? Obviously, the legalization of cannabis has been a key factor, leading to increased accessibility and acceptability.

We spend way more time actually caring for our children than our own parents ever did—in hopes that this highly involved approach will maximize our child’s chances of future success. But at what cost? Parents are exhausted and stressed out. Is it any wonder mothers—who still take on the majority of childcare responsibilities—need something to take the edge off at the end of a long day?

That “something” used to be alcohol. Once upon a time, my friends and I enthusiastically embraced wine-mom culture, hosting happy-hour playdates with juice boxes, Goldfish, and chardonnay. We’d giggle knowingly at memes like “Oops, did I buy wine instead of milk again?” and dab at our faces with cocktail napkins inscribed with, “Shh, it’s my turn to wine.” Mommy juice helped us cope with the stresses of parenting—but only just.

Then the pandemic hit, and our carefully crafted façades crumbled. Suddenly, our children and spouses were home with us 24/7, and our worlds were turned upside down. We were homeschooling, working, and trying to hold it all together. It wasn’t long before Wine Wednesdays were preceded by Margarita Mondays and Boozeday Tuesdays—followed by Thirsty Thursdays. Gathering for drinks around a fire pit, bundled up in winter parkas and boots, gave us something to look forward to during that particularly bleak period.

About two years in, though, we began to feel pickled. Even one glass of wine gave me a headache or interrupted my sleep—and I wasn’t alone. Some of my friends were also begging off a second pour—it just wasn’t worth feeling like crap the next day. That’s when I first heard of cannabis gummies making the rounds in my cloistered suburban enclave. Word on the oak-lined street was that it gave you a nice buzz without the unpleasant side effects. Better yet, you could still carry out your duties as a parent—say, watching your daughter’s strings concert—and enjoy it a hell of a lot more than you would have otherwise.

That sounded enticing, but as someone who grew up in the 1980s with Nancy Reagan telling me to “Just say no” to drugs, I’d need a little extra push to convince me to give cannabis a go. (Full article.)

While I am not endorsing recreational use for drugs, or taking drugs at all to cope with “anxiety” in life, it sure looks to me that cannabis is being used as the new “gateway” drug OUT of dependence upon deadly prescription drugs, and also alcohol abuse.

Of course that means decreased revenues for Big Pharma, and not just for anti-anxiety drugs.

Learn more about the “other side” of cannabis that threatens Big Pharma. Some of our previous articles:

Study: Suicide Rates Lower in States with Legal Marijuana Sales – Medical Cannabis More Effective than Psych Drugs?<

New Studies Provide Hope for Using Cannabis to Treat Brain Injuries and Diseases

Medical Cannabis Has Potential to Help Arthritis Sufferers

More Seniors Rejecting Pharmaceutical Drugs for Medical Cannabis

Older Americans Turning to Medical Cannabis to Heal Cancer and Other Diseases

Study: Cannabis is Protective Against Alcoholic Liver Disease

Medical Cannabis is Healing Autism

How Medical Cannabis Changed Our Lives: A Testimonial

Can Cannabis Help Reverse Alzheimer’s?

Study: THC from Cannabis Helps Restore Memory Loss due to Aging and Dementia

Former Cancer Research Biochemist Cured His Cancer with Cannabis

Cannabis Treats Diabetes and Protects Against Obesity

Medical Cannabis and Other Natural Potential Life-Saving Remedies for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Study: Medical Cannabis Cures Inflammation in Gut – Hope for IBS, Crohns, Celiac Sufferers

[…]

Cannabis: The “Gateway Drug” Leading AWAY from Prescription Drug Addiction

Years ago, I heard the engineering principle that no technology is safe until proven safe. To prove safety, professional engineers (PEs) evaluate a proposed technology with due diligence: they study all questions—including ones from non-engineers like me. PEs carry liability for their reports about infrastructures like substations, water treatment facilities, buildings and bridges. After comprehensive due diligence, they certify that a technology’s hazards have been mitigated—or not.

Our techno-society’s safety and functioning depend on engineering due diligence.

In The EV Transition Explained (published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), Robert Charette reports that charging an electrical vehicle (EV) can overheat a transformer—and shorten its typically 30-to-40-year lifespan to three years. (Transformers reduce electricity’s voltage when it’s transmitted from a substation to a residence or business; above-ground transformers look like trash cans mounted on utility poles.) When I shared Charette’s report with an LA friend, he told me that the underground transformer 50 feet from his house exploded last April on a Saturday morning—a time he considered low-demand for electricity.

“Is it low-demand,” I wondered, “if a handful of neighbors charge their vehicles Friday night?”

“Our current grid,” BigBattery.com’s Eric Lundgren told me, “was not designed to have ten EVs chargers and ten air conditioners turn on at same time on one city block. It’s not designed to charge EV batteries on fast chargers.”

A few days after I talked with Eric, seven automakers announced they’ll collaborate to deploy 30,000 fast chargers around North America. These machines can recharge a drained EV in 30 minutes or less—while owners eat lunch or shop.

Who’s in charge of these chargers?

Grid safety

The electricity consumed by a business, household, appliance or electronic device is called power. Power is measured in kilowatt hours (kWh): the rate of flow times the amount of electricity consumed per hour.

A PE who evaluates substations before they go live explained to me that to deliver power safely, a utility determines the maximum kWh that a household requires; then, it provides correctly-sized wires and transformers. Designers always factor for future growth. Still, when an older house—let alone a dozen on one block—adds a major electrical load like an EV charger, the grid’s capacity probably needs to increase. The utility should recalculate the size of wires and transformers needed to manage and transmit power.

“Do they do this?” I asked.

“Probably not,” he said.

An increasingly complex grid

This PE added that rooftop solar systems contribute to the grid’s complexity. “Rooftop solar,” he explained, “moves power from the customer back to the transformer, back to the grid.”

The grid’s distribution system was not designed for this.

“Then,” he continued, “because solar power is a customer-controlled energy source, the utility no longer controls its power supply. Before homeowners covered their rooftops with solar panels, utilities should have studied how to make non-firm energy benefit firm energy. They should have studied the utility’s production pattern against the production pattern of customer-owned systems. They should have calculated the utility’s hourly cost of voltage control service, not just the cost of fuel.”

But they did not.

There’s more: Rooftop solar systems generate power mostly from 11am to 3pm on sunny days. But the greatest demand for power starts around 5pm, when people arrive home, turn on air conditioners, TVs, stoves—and EV chargers.

Peak demand for electricity and solar power generation do not match up. Since they provide intermittent power, solar (and wind) systems depend on fossil fuels or batteries for backup.

Yet other problems

I understand that manufacturing, operating and discarding gas-powered internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles ravage ecosystems.

But EVs are not clean, sustainable or zero-emitting, either. Not if we look past their tailpipes.

EVs depend on mining many more ores than ICE vehicles require. Mining and smelting ravage wildlife habitats, waterways, air and indigenous communities.

To make cars sold in the U.S. profitable, their raw materials (copper, lithium, quartz, tin, etcetera) must come from the U.S. (Therefore, expect increased mining in the U.S.—like at Thacker Pass, Nevada—not just in other countries and the deep sea.)

Gerry McGovern (author of Top Tasks, researcher of online meetings’ ecological impacts) reports that Ireland has turned its rural land into a green sacrifice zone and become one of the most mining-and-waste-friendly countries in the world.

Garbage

Different batteries have different constructs and chemistry. Tesla batteries are held together by “an almost indestructible polyurethane cement.” Nissan’s Leaf battery can take two hours to dismantle. Recycling batteries can release toxins and pose fire hazards. By 2035, we’ll have 150 million unusable, toxic EV batteries. If you own an EV, what will you do with your used battery—and its tires, computers and body?

Eric Lundgren considers recycling a last resort. “Still,” he thinks, “we should put old EV batteries in salt water, shred them to a black mass, extract the tin, cobalt, copper, manganese—and make new batteries.” While we don’t yet have enough waste to make this economically viable, soon enough, we will.

Increasing geopolitical conflicts        

The International Energy Agency expects demand for lithium to grow 40-fold by 2030. Graphite, cobalt and nickel mining will grow 20-25 times. In mineral-rich Afghanistan, the eightfold rise in lithium’s market price around the time of the Taliban’s 2021 takeover has enticed Chinese mining entrepreneurs to partner with Taliban leaders.

For now, China makes about 79% of all lithium batteries.

EV batteries pose fire hazards

Because of their fire hazards, some companies will not ship EVs.

Firefighters typically extinguish a gas-powered vehicle fire with 300 gallons (113 liters) of water. One fire truck holds 500 gallons (1893 liters). Extinguishing an EV fire uses 20,000 – 30,000 gallons (76,000 – 113,562 liters) of water. Tesla advises firefighters to watch it for 24 hours, since, like trick candles, EV batteries can re-ignite.

After several General Motors’ Bolts caught fire in 2021, GM told EV owners to park vehicles outdoors immediately after charging and not to charge them overnight.

Electric bikes’ exploding batteries also cause deadly fires.

What we need now

An engineer once told me that since most energy is guzzled and most waste is emitted during manufacturing, keeping an old, gas-guzzling car in good repair harms ecosystems much less than buying a new one.

Meanwhile, at least two of my neighbors (who believed that EVs help, ecologically) have their own chargers. Who evaluated and monitors these chargers? To prevent our neighborhood’s transformers from dying quickly and/or exploding, should EV owners hire a PE to coordinate charging times? Should owners and non-owners confer with the utility about upgrading wiring and transformers? Who will pay for the upgrades?

[…]

Via https://katiesinger.substack.com/p/ev-chargers

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 01.08.2023

Chinese export controls on germanium and gallium have stepped into effect amid fears that this will mean more expensive microchips, solar panels, cars, and even weapons. More significantly, the restrictions threaten to sink the Biden administration’s ambitious domestic microchip manufacturing goals, says China-US trade expert Thomas Pauken II.

China’s rare earths restrictions officially stepped into force on Tuesday, with the measures, announced last month after Beijing said it needed to protect its “national security and interests,” expected to cause a sharp jump in the cost of an array of advanced manufactured goods, particularly electronics.

The export controls, which will require companies seeking to export the pair of rare earth metals to apply for licenses, come in retaliation to a long list of US hostile measures, including restrictions on the import of Chinese high-tech goods.

“This is just the beginning,” former Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Wei Jianguo said last month, warning that “China’s tool box has many more types of measures available” should Washington try to retaliate to the rare earths semi-ban.

China produces upwards of 80 percent of the world’s gallium, and 60 percent of its germanium, with experts predicting that it could take “generations” for the US to replace lost Chinese capacity.

The rare earths restrictions show that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s trip to Beijing last month to try to smooth over tensions clearly failed to get China to alter its position, with the Asian nation taking a harder line in retaliation to Washington’s tech and trade war, and attempts to box in Beijing in East Asia, earlier this year, starting by sanctioning US semiconductor giant Micron Technology in May.

Gallium and germanium are used in the manufacture of complex semiconductors, including chips with military applications, but also ordinary transistors, diodes, and other electronic components, for use in everything from smartphones and laptops to solar panels, vehicles, and medical equipment.

Move Could Sink Biden’s Semiconductor Scheme

“Obviously, these consequences are going to be devastating to US efforts to promote their manufacturing industry, to create these factories where they’re reshoring back home,” Thomas Pauken II, a veteran consultant and commentator on Asia-Pacific affairs, told Sputnik, referring to the $50+ billion push announced by the Biden administration last year to restore the US’ domestic electronics component manufacturing capabilities. “The thing is, you need these ingredients that are necessary for the chips and the semiconductors,” he said.

“So now I’m hearing that TSMC,” the Taiwan-based semiconductor giant, “is now having a rethink about doing their fab or semiconductor foundry that they were thinking about opening in Arizona. Also, there’s another story about Intel. They were going to open up this major chip manufacturing plant in Ohio, and now suddenly they’re saying, ‘Well, maybe we won’t open up this factory in Ohio because we lost all our Chinese customers. And because of these export controls we don’t have the ability to create all these chips,’” Pauken said.

US Caught Unprepared

Pauken believes the US and its allies may not have expected Beijing to go through with its rare earths export restriction threats, judging by the limited reporting on the matter, apart from specialized Washington-based think tanks warning about the “devastating impact” such export controls could have on the US, Europe, Japan, “and much of the world.”

“I think the real story is that the West maybe thought China was bluffing. Maybe they thought that China wasn’t being serious about these export controls. And now that they are starting to go into effect, they are realizing how destructive they can be. The fact of the matter is that the US has not done proper preparations to deal with the counter-sanctions or the counter-attacks led by China…They just thought that if they made all these announcements that they were going after China and all these other countries were following them, then somehow, China was going to wimp out, look scared, and then change their mind under the pressure. But in reality, what China has learned is that you cannot back down under peer pressure coming from Washington,” the observer said.

Pauken expects the export restrictions to put a “big hurt” on the global economy, but not so much on Beijing, which could even receive a boost to its domestic manufacturing industry as rare earths that once went to other countries will stay in China.

The expert stressed that if Washington were clever, it would “rethink” its China policy, and recognize that the get-tough approach to Beijing hasn’t been working, and won’t work, and has instead “been a disaster for the US economy.” Unfortunately, he added, “it doesn’t seem like the US has learned any lessons… so it seems as if they will just continue on with their anti-China legislation.”

“So basically it’s a case of if you’re tough to China, China will fight back just as tough. If you’re nice to China, then China will be nice. Right now, Europe decided they want to support the US and want to push back against China. So, of course, China is not only going after the US, but they’re also hitting Europe,” the observer said.

Options Limited

The escalating China-US tensions over rare earths has prompted US officials to begin a global search for alternatives, including Mongolia, a landlocked northeast Asian nation estimated to contain nearly 17 percent of global rare earths deposits.

“Mongolia is facing a generational opportunity. And that generational opportunity is a need for us to find critical minerals and rare earths in order to achieve our clean energy goals,” Under Secretary of State Jose Fernandez, who traveled to Mongolia in late June, recently told US media.

But it’s not as simple as investing in Mongolian rare earths production and extracting resources, Pauken said, pointing to the country’s landlocked status, and US efforts to irritate both of Mongolia’s neighbors, Russia and China.

“Obviously, you can’t go through Russia,” he said, citing anti-Russian sanctions. “So then they would have to go through China. And obviously, if Europe and the US decide to continue putting pressure on China, then they’re going to make it more difficult for the Mongolian miners to transport their products to the shipping ports,” the observer summed up.

Via https://alethonews.com/2023/08/02/chinas-rare-earths-export-curbs-may-sink-us-microchip-manufacturing-ambitions/

Michael P Senger

From an early date, commentators have noted that the response to COVID had all the look and feel of a coup attempt. The masks, the slogans, the symbols, the lies, the sudden inversion of long-cherished norms and values, the mindless acceptance of information from nefarious sources like the World Health Organization and China. Something was seriously off, and it all seemed so obvious.

Thus, one overarching question always lingered over the response to COVID. How were officials able to implement such destructive, totalitarian policies across the western world without intelligence authorities stepping in to stop them?

A detached review of the evidence leads to a chilling answer—though in hindsight, perhaps the only one that was ever really possible. Quite simply, the reason the western intelligence community never stepped in to stop this illiberalism is that virtually all the most illiberal aspects of the response to COVID lead directly back to the western intelligence community itself.

Reviewing the Evidence

The western intelligence community was behind the birth of “social distancing” as public health policy via Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher—operatives with deep ties to the highest levels of the intelligence and biosecurity communities—through their work on biodefense policy during the Bush administration. In what may be the mother of all COVID coverups, Hatchett and Mecher’s story that “social distancing” was based on a 14-year-old’s science project, as told through the New York Times and celebrity author Michael Lewis, appears to be nothing but an elaborate cover story for the fact that the concept was lifted directly from China’s longstanding policy of “lockdown” during SARS in 2003.

The intelligence community either planned or was in attendance at nearly all the pandemic simulations that began being held on a semi-annual basis beginning with Dark Winter in 2001. Current Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines was personally present and sat directly beside China’s CDC Director at the Event 201 simulation of a coronavirus pandemic which took place just weeks before COVID was revealed.

Michael Callahan, the federal government’s chief virus intelligence expert, told National Geographic that he began tracking the novel coronavirus in November 2019, and he was the US government’s only confirmed contact in Wuhan during the initial lockdown in January 2020. Upon returning from Wuhan, Callahan’s testimony was key to throwing the federal government into a state of emergency and the widespread adoption of mechanical ventilators which proved to be deadly. The federal government’s first impressions of COVID thus came from the western intelligence community via Callahan.

Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, one of America’s highest-ranking intelligence officials in 2020, arguably played the most important role of any individual in the initial months of the response to COVID, unilaterally ratcheting up alarm about COVID in the White House beginning in January 2020 and advocating mask mandates, quarantines, and shutdowns all based on his own sources in China, while breaching protocol on several occasions. Pottinger was also behind the appointment of White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx, and he selected Birx for this role as a “public health security advisor” as early as November 2019, the same time that Callahan began tracking the new coronavirus. Having been installed in the White House, Birx then went on to be the chief force orchestrating lockdowns across the United States.

The origin of the online videos of Wuhan residents falling to their deaths which went viral all over the world in early 2020 is disputed. The videos were carefully edited, suggesting a sophisticated state-sponsored disinformation campaign, and they directly contradicted the reality of what we now know was taking place in China at the time, suggesting the Chinese Communist Party either created or at least approved of them. However, the videos were generally released through Chinese dissident groups that claimed to be hawkish toward the CCP and thus also had the approval of the western intelligence community. While some of these were most likely CCP controlled opposition groups, regardless, the western intelligence community green-lit the dissemination of these videos.

The propaganda story about Li Wenliang, the eye doctor who was supposedly punished for warning his friends about an incidence of pneumonia in Wuhan in December 2019, appears to have in fact been invented by the venerated CCP propaganda outlet Beijing Youth Daily weeks after the events supposedly occurred. However, just days after being invented by the CCP’s propaganda machine, this absurd tale about Li Wenliang was featured in many of the western world’s most elite media outlets, including the New York Times, BBC, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and countless others, and it continues to be touted as true in elite policy circles to this day. This story, too, thus had the approval of the western intelligence community.

Prior to the lockdown of Lombardy, Italy, in February 2020, virtually no one in the world was publicly advocating or hoping that China’s lockdowns would come to be adopted as global policy. Yet in his book, Italy’s health minister Roberto Speranza recalls that he was well aware the concept of lockdown came from China and that the decision to adopt this policy in Lombardy was made based on information from Stefano Merler. A look at Merler’s work reveals that he spent 2020 stamping information from China as “science,” effectively running a propaganda laundering operation on behalf of the CCP. Yet Merler had also been praised by Bill Gates and was part of the western biodefense network. In 2013, Merler had authored Containing the accidental laboratory escape of potential pandemic influenza viruses; it appears the western biosecurity community deputized Merler for just this purpose in 2020. This decision for Italy to copy China’s lockdown policy thus appears to have been condoned by the western intelligence community as well.

Days after the lockdown of Lombardy, the WHO released a report gushing about China’s lockdown measures, telling the world, “China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of nonpharmaceutical measures to contain transmission of the COVID-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response.” As Assistant Director General Bruce Aylward reported, “What China has demonstrated is, you have to do this.” Apparently the western intelligence community either failed to notice or tacitly approved of this bizarre act of sycophancy to the CCP as well, rubber stamping China’s lockdowns into global policy.

In March 2020, hundreds of thousands of social media bots began touting China’s lockdown policy on Twitter using nearly identical language. Given these bots heaped praise on China while denigrating every other country in the world, including the United States, it’s long been quite clear that this was a CCP disinformation campaign. That said, these bots were permitted to perform their function and, incredibly, their pro-lockdown posts were not deleted from Twitter until well into 2021. Even as far back as 2014, millions of bot posts touted “lockdown”—specifically using the Chinese term instead of the western term of “social distancing”—in response to Ebola in Sierra Leone, and those bot posts remain intact to this day. These massive disinformation campaigns were allowed to take place and the posts were able to stay up for years despite social media being tightly monitored by the western intelligence community throughout this period.

As soon as lockdowns began, dissenting opinions were censored, with one prominent example being the censorship of Aaron Ginn for his original anti-lockdown article in March 2020. Worse yet, Twitter under its prior management gave prestigious “blue checks” to ridiculous users like nutritionist Eric Feigl-Ding, who sowed COVID hysteria on an almost daily basis from the earliest possible date. Even top scientists on the political left who generally supported lockdowns were so troubled by Ding as to jointly call him out as a charlatan. Yet astonishingly, Twitter ignored these bipartisan calls to rein Ding in and instead featured him prominently in its exclusive “COVID-19 experts” section. In light of revelations in the Twitter Files and Missouri v. Biden, we now know that the western intelligence community was steering these decisions on COVID by major social media platforms.

When the response to COVID began, the public health establishment, in accordance with its longstanding guidance, did not initially recommend masks. Weeks later, this guidance abruptly changed, and masks were mandated across the western world. Both Pottinger and Birx pushed for masks inside the White House based on their own information and experience from China. Simultaneously, Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard launched a bewilderingly-successful campaign to reverse the CDC’s longstanding mask guidance and push for mask mandates all across America—also based on information from China. The western intelligence community, through Pottinger and Birx, and perhaps through Tufekci and Howard, thus instigated this shift in masking guidance.

The intelligence community was also heavily involved in the development and push for COVID vaccines, with Michael Callahan and others playing leading roles in “Operation Warp Speed.”

The western intelligence community may also be behind some of the most prominent controlled opposition to the official response to COVID. Nearly every leading intelligence official in 2020 has endorsed the theory that COVID came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Matt Pottinger was instrumental in the initial push for that theory. One of the most prominent public advocates of the “lab leak theory,” Jamie Metzl, is a former member of the White House National Security Council. Some of the other most prominent public advocates of the lab leak theory have either now or in the past been directly employed by Sandia National Laboratories; Sandia National Laboratories was instrumental in the birth of “social distancing” as public health policy during the Bush administration.

Most importantly, the western intelligence community holds the keys to any serious investigation into any of these events. All over the world, across professions, citizens have been depending on the idea that if there was anything corrupt or rotten about the response to COVID, the western intelligence community would step in. Of course, that won’t happen, because as the above record makes clear, they’re the ones who planned it.

[…]

It explains why some leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson who weren’t initially keen on lockdowns have always seemed so confused; it seems the information they were being fed by the intelligence community on COVID may have been deliberately misleading.

[…]

Via https://www.michaelpsenger.com/p/the-unwitting-coup-was-the-response

Episode 22 The Mughals and Marathas

A History of India

Michael Fisher (2016)

Alamgir, son of Shah Jahan and also known as Aurangzeb, was the sixth emperor of the  Mughal Empire, ruling from July 1658 until his death in 1707. Under the skilled leadership of Alamgir’s famous general Shivaji, the Mughal empire eventually spanned most of the Indian subcontinent.

Alamgir was an orthodox Sunni Muslim, who regarded hunting, music, painting and poetry as frivolous. He also restored restraints on Hinduism and levied a tax on Hindu festivals. He only destroyed the temples of rebellious provinces and helped fund temples in regions that remained loyal to his regime.

In addition to fighting more or less continuous guerilla warfare in various Hindu regions, he also struggled to put down a Sikh* rebellion in the Punjab. The Sikhs eventually established their own independent state in the early 18th century.

Alamgir spent the last 26 years of his life fighting the Marathas in Deccan, while struggling with continuous raids by the British and Portuguese navy, as well as pirates, on his western coast. As the emperor had no navy, he was virtually helpless to prevent them raiding his merchant ships and coastal cities.

The Marathas started as independent Hindu farmers who attracted many followers after sacking the prosperous city of Sarat (in Gujarat). Alamgir’s campaigns against them were largely unsuccessful. Towards the end of his life, the empire’s growing indebtedness (owing to continual war) led to increasing political fragmentation. When he couldn’t pay his generals, they became warlords and began keeping tax revenues for themselves.

In 1674 Maratha leader Chhatrapati Maharaj carved out his own independent kingdom from sultanate of Bijapur and proclaimed himself emperor of the Maratha Empire. Renaming himself Shivaji, he replaced Persian with Barati as the official language. By the time of his death in 1680, he ruled over 50,000 square miles, enabling the Marathas to remain the predominant rulers in Deccan.

The Maratha generals eventually became the predominant ruling force in the Delhi region, as well. As such, they engaged in three major wars against the British (1775-1782, 1803-1805 and 1817-1818). The British victory in the final war ended the Marathas’ dream of controlling all of India.

* Sikhism, drawing on both Hindu traditions and Islamic monotheism, arose as a separate religion in the 16th century

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

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/366254/366215