Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.
The partner of a Dunedin man who died shortly after receiving the Covid-19 vaccine says getting the jab was the worst decision of their lives. (Source: 1News)
By Matty Lloyd
One News
A coroner has found a 26-year-old Dunedin man died of myocarditis, due to vaccination with the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.
Rory Nairn died at his home in November last year after receiving his first dose of the vaccine.
He had experienced myocarditis-like symptoms for nearly a fortnight following his jab, which he received on November 5.
Myocarditis is a rare side effect of the vaccine involving the heart.
Coroner Sue Johnson opened an inquiry into his death, not to determine civil, criminal or disciplinary liability but to establish when and where Rory died and the cause and circumstances around his death.
The inquest lasted three days in the High Court at Dunedin and heard from witnesses including Nairn’s fiancé Ashleigh Wilson, the person who vaccinated him, Medsafe and Te Whatu Ora Southern.
The inquiry was a fact-finding exercise to consider whether the coroner needs to make specified recommendations which may reduce the chances of further deaths in similar circumstances from happening again.
Johnson today released her findings into the cause of Nairn’s death in which she states “I am satisfied from the written evidence I have received, and the oral evidence heard at inquest that I have sufficient evidence to now establish the following: A. Where Rory died; B. When Rory died; C. The cause of Rory’s death”.
Vaccine caused myocarditis – coroner
After hearing evidence from pathologist Dr Noelyn Hung, Johnson said she is satisfied that the Covid-19 vaccine caused the myocarditis from which Nairn died.
Vote on strategically important province to start Friday.
Zaporozhye Region in northeastern Ukraine will hold a referendum from 23-27 September on whether its people want to secede from the country and join Russia, the local administration’s head has announced.
A petition calling on the region’s military-civilian administration to hold such a vote was issued on Tuesday by a local group tasked with representing the general public. They asked the region’s authorities “to immediately organize a referendum on the issue of joining our region to the Russian Federation.”
“We want certainty and a stable happy future for our homeland,” the civic body’s head, Vladimir Rogov, said during a gathering in the city of Melitopol. “We are ready to fulfill our right for self-determination and settle once and for all the issue of the territorial status of our region.”
Later in the day, Evgeny Balitsky, the head of the region’s military-civilian administration, issued an order to hold a general vote as requested, scheduling it for September 23 to 27.
Rogov acknowledged that people in the Kiev-controlled part of the region were unlikely to participate under the current circumstances. Voters there would risk retaliation from the Ukrainian government if they did, he explained.
The region is split between Russian-controlled and Ukrainian-controlled parts. The latter includes the provincial capital Zaporozhye, located near the northwestern border of the region.
Earlier on Tuesday, a similar initiative was issued in Kherson Region, which is mostly controlled by Russian forces. The local administration’s head, Vladimir Saldo, ordered on Tuesday to hold a general vote on whether or not to join Russia.
Saldo picked the same timeline as his counterpart in Zaporozhye Region. The same dates were announced by the leaders of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics on Tuesday for their respective referendums on joining Russia.
Kiev previously stated that it would not recognize the outcome of the proposed plebiscites. The Ukrainian government threatened any would-be voters with criminal prosecution and a prison term of up to 12 years.
Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian president Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.
The Dreadful Judgement: The True Story of the Great Fire of London
By Neil Hanson
Corgi Books (2001)
Book Review
Hanson begins this book with detailed historical background on the period in which the great fire of London occurred. In the century between 1566 and 1666, London’s population had quadrupled in 100 to 300,000. The poor areas within the city walls were extremely overcrowded. According to Hanson, as many as 2,000 tenants could be crowded into a single wooden tenement. In addition to overcrowding, the city was also in the grips of a 10-month drought and at the tail end of a plague epidemic. Fear of plague miasma* resulted in a May 1, 1666 law requiring all buildings to keep a fire burning during the day (which was believed to ward it off).
Even though house fires were fairly common in the capitol city, London’s fire fighting equipment, which hadn’t been updated since Roman times, was extremely primitive. Each of London’s 120 churches were required by (poorly enforced) laws to have leather buckets, axes and fire hooks** available at all times.
Hanson goes on to describe in excruciating detail how an easterly gale force wind whipped up a fire storm that expanded so quickly that it entrapped people who showed any hesitation in exiting the city walls. It continued to spread for four days until the gale abated, despite heroic efforts to contain the fire by pulling down and even blowing up buildings in its path. It’s believed the majority of residents evacuated the city to camp out in the fields surrounding the walls.
In all, five-sixth of the area within the London city walls was destroyed. This included 13,000 residential buildings, 87 churches and the halls of 852 livery companies.
Once the wind died down, it became possible to extinguish smoldering fires by creating fire breaks and via bucket brigades and residents’ efforts to smother them with long handled brooms. Under the direction of King Charles II, his brother the Duke of York, the army, navy and the King’s guard, 1,000 people who had fled the city returned to help extinguish fires that continued to burn.
Although isolated areas continued to smolder until Mar 1667, a week following the fire, all evacuees had either moved to other counties or returned inside the walls to live in makeshift shacks and tents or to shelter in remaining churches, company halls, inns and taverns. Even though all the bakers and brewers had fled, there was plenty of food, thanks to supplies the King requisitioned from surrounding counties and the release of ship’s biscuit from the naval stores.
The immediate death rate is estimated at several hundred to several thousand. With 80% of the city left homeless and jobless, many thousands more died the following winter of starvation and cold.
The cause of the fire, which started in a baker’s home workshop was never precisely determined. There were powerful rumors it was started by Papists opposed to Protestant rule or hostile French or Dutch agents (England happened to be at war with with both countries). A mentally unstable Swedish naval officer was tried and hanged for starting the fire (based on confession under torture) for starting it, despite serious doubt (even at the time) of his guilt.
What I liked best about the book was Hanson’s exquisite depiction of daily life in 1666 London.
*Miasma – According to obsolete medical theory, infectious diseases such as cholera or the black death were caused by miasma, a noxious form of “bad air,” originating from rotting organic matter.
**A fire hook was a large hook on a long pole used to pull down wooden houses to create a fire break.
***Also known as hard tack needed to be soaked overnight or smashed with a hammer or rock to be edible.
In this lecture, Benjamin explores the effect of Korea’s geography and climate on its early development.
He credits Korea’s failure to be subsumed by its neighbor China to its rugged mountainous landscape. Seventy percent of Korea is covered in steep mountains, making navigation between the East and West coast extremely difficult. Moreover unlike the majority of modern nations, it remains heavily forested.
Located in the same temperate latitude as Denver, it’s the same size as Britain and Utah. Surrounded on three sides by water, it shares a border with both China and Russia. Although separated from Japan by the sea of Japan, the archipelago is visible from the east coast of Korea.
Blessed with rich mineral resources (mainly gold, copper, tin and iron), Korea was the world’s largest gold producer during the first half of the 20th century.
It has only one (extinct) volcano Baikdu, also it’s highest mountain, with a volcanic lake associated with early Korean deities.
Owing to the steep drop of its mountains along its coasts, it has no significant bays or harbors suitable to facilitate urban development. Its three main river systems (which gave rise to its major cities) are Taedong in the North (location of North Korea’s capitol Pyongyang) and the Han (location of South Korea’s capitol Seoul) and Kum in the South.
As in China, there is archeological evidence that pre-human hominids (Homo erectus) using hand axes, flake tools and fire also migrated from Africa to Korea 500,000 to 600,000 years ago. Owing to the wide land bridge connecting China, Korea and Japan before the last Ice Age ended (and sea levels rose), similar remains and tools are found in Japan.
Paleolithic* remains show early humans lived in extended families in small caves or small dwellings in simple villages. They foraged, fished and hunted deer, wild board and macaques.
The Neolithic period saw waves saw waves of migrants who crossed the Yellow Sea land bridge. They lived in small dwellings heated by a central hearth, used distinctive pots used to store food from domesticated plants and supplemented their diet by hunting (of dogs, cats, water buffalo, boor, deer, dolphins and whales).
Neolithic** Koreans were ritually buried with jewelry and masks suggesting they believed in an afterlife.
*The Paleolithic, aka the Old Stone Age, is a period in prehistory distinguished by the original development of stone tools. It extends from the earliest known use of stone tools by hominids 3.3 million years ago to around 10,000 BC.
**The Neolithic, aka the New Stone Age, refers to a period characterized by agriculture and fixed human settlement between 10,000 BC and around 3,300 BC when bronze tools were developed.
The worst that can happen to the human species, is happening.
The War Room/DailyClout’s Pfizer Documents Research Volunteers — a group of medical and scientific experts who have selflessly stepped up to analyze the tens of thousands of formerly internal Pfizer documents released under court order subsequent to a lawsuit by Aaron Siri’s firm, Siri & Glimstad, and a FOIA by Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency — have now fully demonstrated that Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines target human reproduction in comprehensive, likely irreversible ways.
Our 3,250 research volunteers, in 39 fully cited reports to date, have documented evidence of what I’ve been calling “360 degrees of harm” to reproduction.
The Pfizer documents reveal monstrous damage to menstruation, harm to the testes and epididymis, harms to the penis, horrible harm to the ova and ovaries, mechanisms for compromising the placenta, contamination of amniotic fluid, and damage to newborns. They reveal that four women’s breast milk turned blue-green. They reveal injuries to at least one newborn that extend to death (or murder) from ingesting tainted breast milk. They reveal horrific levels of miscarriages. They reveal that Pfizer defined “exposure” to the vaccine as including sexual intercourse, especially at conception. They reveal a weird focus on mammalian sexual and reproductive issues.
Soon humanity will realize that the worst thing ever to happen to it, has taken place.
Soon humanity will realize that the miscarriages and the drops in birth rate worldwide documented by Igor Chudov; the drop in life expectancy; the neonatal deaths; the ruination of eggs and ovaries; were done to them
with knowledge aforethought, and that, in many cases relating to fertility, the means for healing the bodies of women is not clear.
Every day my inbox seethes with women asking, “Can the lipid nanoparticles be removed from the ovaries? My daughter miscarried right after receiving the Pfizer vaccine…” “My daughter-in-law was vaccinated while pregnant. What can be done for her?”
But mainstream news outlets, let alone our government agencies, are not helping women with this crisis. Rather, they are seeking to gaslight us about it, and to kill off reputationally or to censor those of us bringing this evidence to the light of day.
Here is just one example:
In one of the 39 War Room/DailyClout reports about the staggering harms and upside-down science in the Pfizer documents — a volunteer recently made a mistake.
In a post on August 12, 2022, the volunteer miscounted 11 miscarriages or spontaneous abortions of women who had been injected in Pfizer’s clinical trial, as 22. The miscarriages/spontaneous abortions were listed in two separate tables in the 3,645-page Pfizer document; but the subject codes revealed that some were duplicates. https://pdata0916.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/pdocs/070122/125742_S1_M5_5351_c4591001-interim-mth6-adverse-events.zip We learned of this error on August 17 due to work by Naked Emperor, on his Substack, and by Phil Kerpen, on Twitter. Of course, we immediately corrected the error. I also publicly noted the correction on every podcast on which I appeared.
Both the Associated Press and Reuters, two of the biggest newswires on
Both the Associated Press and Reuters, two of the biggest newswires on the planet, went after us.
Are those newswires who so aggressively assailed the credibility of a team of highly credentialed researchers doing a public service — themselves un-conflicted?
The Associated Press is conflicted in covering this story, via its direct financial ties to Xinhua News Agency, the official state news agency of the People’s Republic of China. Xinhua is also a ministry-level institution subordinate to the State Council of the Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”), and is the highest-ranking state media organization in China.
AP has a “memorandum of cooperation” (MOC) with Xinhua, which is an entity that Reporters without Borders calls “The World’s Biggest Propaganda Machine.” Members of Congress have asked AP to release documentation of the terms of this MOC. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/24/congress-demands-answers-aps-relationship-with-chinese-state-media/. As The Washington Post’s op-ed put it in 2018: “China’s state-run media companies are rapidly expanding their integration with Western news outlets, as part of Beijing’s worldwide foreign influence operations campaign. In Washington, lawmakers in both parties are calling out such arrangements and demanding U.S. media companies make sure they don’t become tools of Chinese government propaganda.” The goal of Xinhua’s and the CCP’s efforts to infiltrate Western news organizations is to suspend or weaken Western criticism of — the CCP.
There is no good reason to allow the evil empire to retain any legitimacy as the British royal family papers over the pillage it continues to benefit from.
The death of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-serving monarch of British royalty, has sparked global fascination and spawned thousands of clickbait reports of the details of her funeral. Americans, who centuries ago rejected monarchy, are seemingly obsessed with the ritualism, bizarrely mourning the demise of an elderly and fabulously wealthy woman who was born into privilege and who died of natural causes at the ripe old age of 96 across the ocean.
Perhaps this is because popular and long-running TV shows about British royalty like “The Crown” have convinced us that we know intimate details about the royals—and worse, they cause us to believe we should care about a family that is a symbolic marker of past imperial grandeur.
But for those who are descended from the subjects of British imperialist conquest, the queen, her ancestors, and her descendants represent the ultimate evil empire.
India, my home country, celebrated its 75th anniversary of independence from British rule this year. Both my parents were born before independence, into a nation still ruled by the British. I heard many tales while growing up of my grandfather’s absences from home as he went “underground,” wanted for seditious activity against the British. After independence in 1947, he was honored for being a “freedom fighter” against the monarchy.
Despite the popularity and critical acclaim of “The Crown” and movies and shows like it, I found a far stronger connection to the new superhero series “Ms. Marvel,” if for no other reason than the fact that it tackles the horrors of partition, a little-known (in the U.S.) legacy of the evil empire.
As Pakistani writer Minna Jaffery-Lindemulder explains in New Lines, “The British changed the borders of India and Pakistan at the eleventh hour in 1947 before declaring both nations independent, leaving the former subjects of the crown confused about where they needed to migrate to ensure their safety.” As a result, 15 million people felt forced to move from one part of the South Asian subcontinent to another, a mass cross-exodus with an estimated death toll ranging from half a million to 2 million.
Today, those contested borders, callously and recklessly drawn in 1947 by British officials acting at the behest of the crown, remain a source of simmering tensions between India and Pakistan that occasionally erupt into full-blown wars.
This is the legacy of British monarchy. The United Kingdom enjoys a hideous distinction in the Guinness Book of World Records, for “most countries [62] to have gained independence from the same country.”
One could argue that Elizabeth, who was gifted the throne and its title in 1952, did not lead an aggressive empire of conquest and instead presided over an institution that, under her rule, became largely symbolic and ceremonial in nature. And indeed, many do just that, referring to her, for example, as an “exemplar of moral decency.”
Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade, has a different opinion, referring in an interview to Elizabeth as a “morally unremarkable person with a job that involved doing extremely unremarkable things.”
Mahajan explains further, saying that this was “a highly privileged person, given an opportunity to influence world events in some degree, which she had to do nothing to earn, who never did anything particularly remarkable, innovative, or insightful.”
While Elizabeth’s 70 years on the throne were mostly spent overseeing an ostensible unraveling of British Empire in a world less tolerant of occupation, enslavement, and imperial plunder, just a few months into her role as queen, the British violently put down the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. According to a New York Times story about how citizens in African nations today have little sympathy for the dead monarch, the squashing of the rebellion “led to the establishment of a vast system of detention camps and the torture, rape, castration and killing of tens of thousands of people.”
Even if Elizabeth was not responsible for directing the horrors, they were carried out in her name. Over the seven decades that she wielded symbolic power, she never once apologized for what was done during her rule in Kenya—or indeed what was done in her family’s name in dozens of other nations in the Global South.
It’s no wonder that Black and Brown people the world over have openly expressed disgust at the collective fawning of such an ugly legacy.
Professor Uju Anya of Carnegie Mellon University, who is Nigerian, is under fire for her frank dismissal of Elizabeth after posting on Twitter that she “heard the chief monarch of a thieving and raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”
Kehinde Andrews, a Black studies professor at Birmingham City University, wrote on Politico that he cannot relate to his fellow Britons’ desire to mourn Elizabeth, a woman he considered to be “the number one symbol of white supremacy” and a “manifestation of the institutional racism that we have to encounter on a daily basis.”
Elizabeth may have appeared a benign, smiling elder who maintained the propriety expected from a royal leader. But she worked hard to preserve an institution that should have long ago died out. She was handed the throne after her uncle, the duke of Windsor, abdicated in order to marry a twice-divorced American. Both the marriage to a divorcee and the fact that the couple turned out to be Nazi sympathizers marked a low point for the royals.
“The monarchy was in a really good position to fade away with this kind of clowning around,” says Mahajan. But it was Elizabeth who “rescued the popularity of the monarchy.”
Further, Elizabeth quietly preserved the ill-gotten family fortune that she and her descendants benefitted from in a postcolonial world. “One thing she could, and of course should, have done and said something about is the massive royal estate,” says Mahajan. Observers can only estimate the royal family’s worth (Forbes puts the figure at $28 billion), assets that include stolen jewels from former colonies, pricey art investments, and real estate holdings across Britain.
Britain’s new king, Charles III, now inherits the fruits of the evil empire. According to Mahajan, Charles “is apparently very bent on taking his fortune and investing it in such a way as to make himself as rich as possible.” According to the New York Times, “As prince, Charles used tax breaks, offshore accounts and canny real estate investments to turn a sleepy estate into a billion-dollar business.”
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2017 found that both Elizabeth and Charles were named in the leaked “Paradise Papers,” indicating that they hid their money in havens to avoid paying taxes.
Fleecing taxpayers and living off stolen wealth—monarchy’s original modus operandi appears to be central to Elizabeth’s legacy, one she passes on to her son (who also won’t pay an inheritance tax on the wealth she left him).
The British monarchy, according to Mahajan, “mostly represents a real concession to the idea that some people are just born better and more important than you, and you should look to them.”
Mahajan adds, “It’s a good time for the popularity of this institution to fade away.”
The public is being whipped up to observe emotional mourning for the late queen, while those who you would expect truly to be in grief are engaged in cold, political calculation.
When the so-called leader of the opposition opposes protest against a new unelected head of state, out of respect for the previous unelected head of state, you know you live under totalitarianism.
Except almost all dictatorships do at least have the form of an election. Indeed, some of the worst dictators in modern history have been genuinely elected, an unfortunate fact we generally prefer to elide.
Over a week of mob hysteria in the U.K. helps us to understand how.
The psychological phenomenon of societal emotional spasm is fairly well studied but still not necessarily fully explained. How we get to a stage where, in 2022, newspapers are seriously promoting as miraculous clouds that “look like the Queen,” double rainbows, or meteors, is a difficult question.
What is not in the doubt is the tendency of deluded mobs to turn on those who do not join in — and the capacity of the unscrupulous to exploit that power.
Attempts to intimidate people out of protesting against the monarchy appear broadly to have succeeded. We saw some hideous attacks on free speech over the last week, including people arrested for holding up placards, for peacefully expressing vocal dissent, or even for carrying eggs or blank pieces of paper.
A number of figures have stood up to come out arguing for freedom of speech – Andrew Marr, Martin Bell, John Sweeney, David Davis, Joanna Cherry, Michael Russell. These are all figures who broadly represent a liberal consensus in society that seems to have gone. As I know all but one of them, I hope they will forgive me for saying they tend to be slightly passé.
Nobody in power, in Westminster or in Scotland, has asserted the importance of freedom of speech, while Opposition Leader Keir Starmer has done the opposite, emphasising “respect” for authority as more important than freedom of speech, a position taken by anti-democrats everywhere.
There are two arguments used against freedom of speech at present:
1) We should honour the dead, and respect the sanctity of the mourning period.
I do not in general dismiss the value of all societal convention, and I have a certain sympathy for this approach. However, the difficulty is that the accession of a new monarch happens at the moment of death of the old monarch. The latter cannot be used to stifle all protest at the former.
The Establishment quite deliberately conflates the two in order to prevent protest. We have the extraordinary and macabre spectacle of the corpse of the late queen being carted around the country and her coffin put on public display.
If people really cared for her, I would have thought it much more respectful to bury her, but the monarchist hysteria has to be dialed up past 11 for the longest possible period, and the excuse for suppressing dissent has to be maintained.
[…]
The 22-year old Rory, who was viciously, physically attacked for heckling sexual abuser Prince Andrew at the Edinburgh procession and then arrested, handcuffed and charged, was widely condemned by the media for disturbing a funeral. But it was not a funeral. That funeral is still not until Monday, when this farce finally ends.
The correct word for what we have witnessed so far is not a funeral but a series of bizarre obsequies. The state is demanding that all citizens be obsequious.
There is a reason that word has such negative connotations, and if the U.K. had educated journalists rather than state stenographers they might explore it.
So much has been entirely irrational. One moment that stuck in my mind was criticism of the new prime minister, Liz Truss, for failing to curtsy to the coffin of the queen when it arrived at RAF Northolt. This was described as “grotesque” – as though curtsying to a corpse were not itself an image straight out of Edgar Allan Poe.
The concomitant of stretching out the period before poor Elizabeth is finally put to rest, is to use that period to maximum political advantage for the introduction of the new king, while his mother’s aura still shines.
We have the deliberate confusion of the two processes. Both the man in Oxford who merely asked “who elected him?” and the woman in Edinburgh who held the sign saying “Fuck imperialism, abolish the monarchy” were at the specific proclamation of the accession of King Charles III – events separate to the obsequies. Yet both were condemned for lack of respect for a dead queen.
We also have the extraordinary spectacle of Charles, immediately after the death of his mother, abandoning his mourning and bottling his grief while shuttling furiously around Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales for entirely political events.
This did not have to happen. This is absolutely not a tradition. Nothing remotely like it has ever happened before.
There was no reason whatsoever why Charles had to visit the Scottish parliament, the Welsh assembly or the assembly in the north of Ireland, now. This could have waited until after the funeral. He could even have had a week of rest and reflection after the funeral before embarking on a tour of the nations.
There was a deliberate decision to hold these political events in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff, aimed at strengthening the monarchy and union, while the corpse was still metaphorically warm, in order to maximise the political bounce for the monarchy from Elizabeth’s death.
Part of this calculation was that, if Charles’ first visit as king was after the funeral, there would be political protest at the accession in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, possibly quite substantial.
There is absolutely no modern precedent for a royal tour between the death and the funeral of the previous monarch. It is, when you think about it, disrespectful.
Edinburgh is explicable in terms of Elizabeth dying in Scotland, but Belfast and Cardiff?
Which tells us that “King Charles III” would have still taken advantage of the mourning period to make his power consolidation visit to Edinburgh, no matter where his mother had died.
There is nothing more cynical. We are whipped up to observe emotional mourning, while those who you would expect truly to be in mourning are engaged in cold, political calculation.
One of the darkly amusing things about the last few days was to witness all of the deluded monarchists on social media excusing Charles’ extraordinary tantrum in Northern Ireland about a pen, on the grounds that he must be exhausted making this tour when his mother had just died.
[…]
2) Protest may cause a breach of the peace.
This is a truly sinister argument. What it amounts to is this:
The mob is encouraged to beat up dissidents, so the expression of dissent is illegal.
It is quite literal fascism, the exertion of violent force by thugs in the street to quell dissent, with the state backing the thugs and criminalising the dissidents. That is precisely how all fascist regimes operate.
It is now being used shamelessly. None of the thugs who attacked Rory in Edinburgh has been charged. Rory has been charged with a breach of the peace.
If a breach of the peace is an action likely to provoke disorder, then the persons to be charged should be those who decided to put on display in positions of great honour a man who avoided a trial on sex trafficking by payment of £12 million pounds.
One sign of how emboldened the dregs of society are by this period of mob rule, is the quite extraordinary number of people on social media actively defending Prince Andrew, something that was extremely rare before the death of the queen.
On Twitter, it is interesting how many of those defending Andrew show the characteristics I identified of British government troll units. These are very low follower numbers for an account claiming to have been in existence at least 10 years, and a timeline consisting entirely of retweets.
The rehabilitation of Andrew is another of the political purposes to which Elizabeth’s death is being put, to which we are not allowed to object on grounds of “decorum” and “respect.”
Now I would not personally have done what Rory did, in the presence of a coffin. But that is a question of etiquette, taste and demeanour, not of the criminal law.
Anybody who had been paying attention ought not be surprised that the Scottish prosecutorial service is happily channeling this fascism and people are coming up for trial for breach of the peace, including the young woman who did nothing but hold up a placard at the outdoor, public proclamation ceremony.
[…]
But it will not be true that the replacement of a popular monarch by an unpopular one will, in the medium term, strengthen the monarchy. Public and press access will be stifled to suppress awareness of Charles’ appalling high-handedness and temper and the way he treats staff.
But you can’t make this man popular, and his queen consort will be a constant reminder of how he treated his unfortunate first wife.
On Sunday, Police Scotland have banned Yestival, an annual Independence rally in George Square, Glasgow, on the grounds that the queen’s funeral is on the next day, 400 miles away.
The organisers have quietly rescheduled the event, but I shall turn up anyway to bear witness to my beliefs, because I object to being told I may not express my political opinions. I don’t expect there will be more than a dozen of us and nothing in particular is organised to happen — no stage and no microphones. Unless the mere fact of my existence is held by the fascists to be a breach of the peace, I am not sure how it would be illegal. But they may find a way. This is Scotland 2022.
In the long term I am not downhearted. Propaganda works, and I have no doubt whatsoever that monarchism and even unionism will get a measurable opinion poll boost from the current shenanigans.
There were a couple of eye-raising moments this weekend during an interview of President Joe Biden and CBS’ “60 Minutes.” One was his continued blanket denial that his son Hunter had done anything that had any impact on him or the country. However, it was the President sudden announcement that the pandemic “is over” that may have taken some people by surprise, including Administration lawyers still using the pandemic as a basis for policies and programs. This includes a major appellate case this week.
The Administration relied on the pandemic to justify the massive loan forgiveness program at a cost of as much as $1 trillion. The move will be the subject of challenges and defended under the HEROES Act of 2003 as tied to a national emergency, ”when significant actions with potentially far-reaching consequences are often required.”
The President also heralded the remove of masks recently despite the continues requirement for some schools and other locations under pandemic rules (including at my own George Washington University). While at the Detroit Auto Show, Biden declared “If you notice, no one’s wearing a mask, everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.”
Biden’s statement on the end of the pandemic is likely to be cited in a variety of briefs in cases challenging emergency powers and policies used by the Administration. It was just a year ago, in September 2021, that the President imposes such rules to “ensur[e] the health and safety of the Federal workforce and the efficiency of the civil service.” President Biden announced a similar requirement for federal civilian employees. Exec. Order No. 14,043, 86 Fed. Reg. 50,989 (Sept. 14, 2021).
One such example could be the appeal now being considered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The issue of the sweeping pandemic authority being claimed by the Biden Administration is now going before the full court in an en banc rehearing.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown previously issued a nationwide injunction against the vaccination mandate in January. That was stayed and has resulted in a series of conflicted moves on appeal.
Yet, the Justice Department is still citing the pandemic authority and insisting that “if an employee chooses not to receive a COVID-19 vaccine (and is ineligible for an exception), he simply may no longer be permitted to continue in federal employment, just as an employee would be subject to termination if she chose to stop performing her job or chose to violate workplace policies.”
Now the President is declaring that the pandemic is over as the Justice Department is defending pandemic policies in various courts. Even if one were to argue that the policy should be reviewed as supported at the time, the continued viability of the policy can now be questioned in light of the President’s own statements. The President’s comments also highlight the fluidity of pandemic policies. While we often look to the CDC on such status statements, it is the President who ultimately decides federal policies on pandemic measures.
If the pandemic “is over,” some may question the continued uncertain status of military personnel and federal employees on vaccine status as well as lingering mask mandates being used in some states and by certain businesses.
In March 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a “hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system” in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine.
Guterres said food, fuel and fertiliser prices were skyrocketing with supply chains being disrupted and added this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.
We see an abundance of food but skyrocketing prices. The issue is not food shortage but speculation on food commodities and the manipulation of an inherently flawed global food system that serves the interests of corporate agribusiness traders and suppliers of inputs at the expense of people’s needs and genuine food security.
The war in Ukraine is a geopolitical trade and energy conflict. It is largely about the US engaging in a proxy war against Russia and Europe by attempting to separate Europe from Russia and imposing sanctions on Russia to harm Europe and make it further dependent on the US.
Economist Professor Michael Hudson recently stated that ultimately the war is against Europe and Germany. The purpose of the sanctions is to prevent Europe and other allies from increasing their trade and investment with Russia and China.
Neoliberal policies since the 1980s have hollowed out the US economy. With its productive base severely weakened, the only way for the US to maintain hegemony is to undermine China and Russia and weaken Europe.
Hudson says that, beginning a year ago, Biden and the US neocons attempted to block Nord Stream 2 and all (energy) trade with Russia so that the US could monopolise it itself.
Despite the ‘green agenda’ currently being pushed, the US still relies on fossil fuel-based energy to project its power abroad. Even as Russia and China move away from the dollar, the control and pricing of oil and gas (and resulting debt) in dollars remains key to US attempts to retain hegemony.
The US knew beforehand how sanctions on Russia would play out. They would serve to divide the world into two blocks and fuel a new cold war with the US and Europe on one side with China and Russia being the two main countries on the other.
US policy makers knew Europe would be devastated by higher energy and food prices and food importing countries in the Global South would suffer due to rising costs.
It is not the first time the US has engineered a major crisis to maintain global hegemony and a spike in key commodity prices that effectively trap countries into dependency and debt.
In 2009, Andrew Gavin Marshall described how in 1973 – not long after coming off the gold standard – Henry Kissinger was integral to manipulating events in the Middle East (the Arab-Israeli war and the ‘energy crisis’). This served to continue global hegemony for the US, which had virtually bankrupted itself due to its war in Vietnam and had been threatened by the economic rise of Germany and Japan.
Kissinger helped secure huge OPEC oil price rises and thus sufficient profits for Anglo-American oil companies that had over-leveraged themselves in North Sea oil. He also cemented the petrodollar system with the Saudis and subsequently placed African nations, which had embarked on a path of (oil-based) industrialisation, on a treadmill of dependency and debt due to the spike in oil prices.
It is widely believed that the high-priced oil policy was aimed at hurting Europe, Japan and the developing world.
Today, the US is again waging a war on vast swathes of humanity, whose impoverishment is intended to ensure they remain dependent on the US and the financial institutions it uses to create dependency and indebtedness – the World Bank and IMF.
Hundreds of millions will experience (are experiencing) poverty and hunger due to US policy. These people (the ones that the US and Pfizer et al supposedly cared so much about and wanted to get a jab into each of their arms) are regarded with contempt and collateral damage in the great geopolitical game.
Contrary to what many believe, the US has not miscalculated the outcome of the sanctions placed on Russia. Michael Hudson notes energy prices are increasing, benefiting US oil companies and US balance of payments as an energy exporter. Moreover, by sanctioning Russia, the aim is to curtail Russian exports (of wheat and gas used for fertiliser production) and for agricultural commodity prices to therefore increase. This too will also benefit the US as an agricultural exporter.
This is how the US seeks to maintain dominance over other countries.
Current policies are designed to create a food and debt crisis for poorer nations especially. The US can use this debt crisis to force countries to continue privatising and selling off their public assets in order to service the debts to pay for the higher oil and food imports.
This imperialist strategy comes on the back of ‘COVID relief’ loans which have served a similar purpose. In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. The world’s poorest countries are due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports.
Oxfam and Development Finance International have also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next five years.
The closure of the world economy in March 2020 (‘lockdown’) served to trigger an unprecedented process of global indebtedness. Conditionalities mean national governments will have to capitulate to the demands of Western financial institutions. These debts are largely dollar-denominated, helping to strengthen the US dollar and US leverage over countries.
The US is creating a new world order and needs to ensure much of the Global South remains in its orbit of influence rather than ending up in the Russian and especially Chinese camp and its belt road initiative for economic prosperity.
Post-COVID, this is what the war in Ukraine, sanctions on Russia and the engineered food and energy crisis are really about.
Back in 2014, Michael Hudson stated that the US has been able to dominate most of the Global South through agriculture and control of the food supply. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has transformed countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.
The oil sector and agribusiness have been joined at the hip as part of US geopolitical strategy.
The dominant notion of ‘food security’ promoted by global agribusiness players like Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus and supported by the World Bank is based on the ability of people and nations to purchase food. It has nothing to do with self-sufficiency and everything to do with global markets and supply chains controlled by giant agribusiness players.
Along with oil, the control of global agriculture has been a linchpin of US geopolitical strategy for many decades. The Green Revolution was exported courtesy of oil-rich interests and poorer nations adopted agri-capital’s chemical- and oil-dependent model of agriculture that required loans for inputs and related infrastructure development.
It entailed trapping nations into a globalised food system that relies on export commodity mono-cropping to earn foreign exchange linked to sovereign dollar-denominated debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives. What we have seen has been the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.
And what we have also seen is countries being placed on commodity crop production treadmills. The need for foreign currency (US dollars) to buy oil and food entrenches the need to increase cash crop production for exports.
The World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) set out the trade regime necessary for this type of corporate dependency that masquerades as ‘global food security’.
This is explained in a July 2022 report by Navdanya International – Sowing Hunger, Reaping Profits – A Food Crisis by Design – which notes international trade laws and trade liberalisation has benefited large agribusiness and continue to piggyback off the implementation of the Green Revolution.
The report states that US lobby and trade negotiations were headed by former Cargill Investors Service CEO and Goldman Sachs executive – Dan Amstutz – who in 1988 was appointed chief negotiator for the Uruguay round of GATT by Ronald Reagan. This helped to enshrine the interests of US agribusiness into the new rules that would govern the global trade of commodities and subsequent waves of industrial agriculture expansion.
The AoA removed protection of farmers from global market prices and fluctuations. At the same time, exceptions were made for the US and the EU to continue subsidising their agriculture to the advantage of large agribusiness.
Navdanya notes:
“With the removal of state tariff protections and subsidies, small farmers were left destitute. The result has been a disparity in what farmers earn for what they produce, versus what consumers pay, with farmers earning less and consumers paying more as agribusiness middlemen take the biggest cut.”
‘Food security’ has led to the dismantling of food sovereignty and food self-sufficiency for the sake of global market integration and corporate power.
We need look no further than India to see this in action. The now repealed recent farm legislation in India was aimed at giving the country the ‘shock therapy’ of neoliberalism that other countries have experienced.
The ‘liberalising’ legislation was in part aimed at benefiting US agribusiness interests and trapping India into food insecurity by compelling the country to eradicate its food buffer stocks – so vital to the nation’s food security – and then bid for food on a volatile global market from agribusiness traders with its foreign reserves.
The Indian government was only prevented from following this route by the massive, year-long farmer protest that occurred.
The current crisis is also being fuelled by speculation. Navdanya cites an investigation by Lighthouse Reports and The Wire to show how speculation by investment firms, banks and hedge funds on agricultural commodities are profiting off rising food prices. Commodity future prices are no longer linked to actual supply and demand in the market but are based purely on speculation.
Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus and investment funds like Black Rock and Vanguard continue to make huge financial killings, resulting in the price of bread almost doubling in some poorer countries.
The cynical ‘solution’ promoted by global agribusiness to the current food crisis is to urge farmers to produce more and seek better yields as if the crisis is that of underproduction. It means more chemical inputs, more genetic engineering techniques and suchlike, placing more farmers in debt and trapped in dependency.
It is the same old industry lie that the world will starve without its products and requires more of them. The reality is that the world is facing hunger and rising food prices because of the system big agribusiness has instituted.
And it is the same old story – pushing out new technologies in search of a problem and then using crises as justification for their rollout while ignoring the underlying reasons for such crises.
Navdanya sets out possible solutions to the current situation based on principles of agroecology, short supply lines, food sovereignty and economic democracy – policies that have been described at length in many articles and official reports over the years.
As for fighting back against the onslaught on ordinary people’s living standards, support is gathering among the labour movement in places like the UK. Rail union leader Mick Lynch is calling for a working class movement based on solidarity and class consciousness to fight back against a billionaire class that is acutely aware of its own class interests.
For too long, ‘class’ has been absent from mainstream political discourse. It is only through organised, united protest that ordinary people will have any chance of meaningful impact against the new world order of tyrannical authoritarianism and the devastating attacks on ordinary people’s rights, livelihoods and standards of living that we are witnessing.
Clockwise from top left: The “Blind Sheikh,” attorney Lynne Stewart, singing Attorney General John Ashcroft, Enron defendant Ken Lay
On Monday, August 8, Justice Department officials spent nine hours raiding the Mar-a-Lago home of Donald Trump, carrying out 12 boxes of material. When criticism ensued, FBI spokespeople in wounded tones insisted the press eschew the harsh term “raid,” and use “execution of a search warrant” instead.
“Agents don’t like the word ‘raid,’ they don’t like it,” complained former assistant FBI counterintelligence director turned MSNBC analyst Frank Figliuzzi. He added with unintentional irony: “It sounds like it’s some sort of extrajudicial, non-legal thing.”
But it was a raid, as the surprisingly enormous number of people who’ve been on the business end of such actions since 9/11 will report. The state more and more now avails itself of a procedural trick that would have horrified everyone from Jefferson to to Potter Stewart to Thurgood Marshall. Investigating, say, one lawyer, prosecutors raid a whole firm, taking everything — emails, client files, cell phones and personal computers — then have a supposedly separate group of lawyers, called a “taint” or “filter” team, examine it all. In this way they learn the private details of hundreds or even thousands of clients in a shot, all people unrelated to the supposed case at hand.
But, they say, don’t worry, we’re not using any of those secrets, you can trust us. After all, we’re United States Attorneys.(And their paralegals. And legal assistants. And, perhaps, a few IRS or DEA or FBI agents, whose only job is to make cases against the types of people in those files. But still, don’t worry). Just because the whole concept of attorney-client privilege, as well as the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments — guaranteeing rights to free speech, against unreasonable searches, and to due process and legal counsel, respectively — were created to bar exactly this kind of behavior, they insist the state would never abuse this authority.
Taint team targets are unpopular. They’re accused drug dealers, terrorists, corporate tax cheats, money launderers, Medicare fraudsters, and, importantly of late, their lawyers. You can add Trump administration officials to the list now. In cases involving such people government prosecutors have begun making an extraordinary claim. As a citizen cries foul when the state peeks at attorney communications, the Justice Department increasingly argues that affording certain people rights harms the secret objectives of the secret state.
The Trump case is almost incidental to this wider story of extralegal short-cuts, intimidation, improper searches, and especially, a constant, intensifying effort at discrediting the adversarial system in favor of an executive-branch-only vision of the law, in which your right to stand before a judge or jury would be replaced by secret bureaucratic decisions. “Trump has become the way they sell this,” says one defense attorney. “But it’s not about Trump. If you focus on Trump, you’ll miss how serious this is. And it started a long time ago.” When? “Go back to 9/11,” he says. “You’ll see.”
What follows is a brief history of the cases leading to the controversial decisions in Donald J. Trump v. United States of America, as told by some of the key figures in those episodes. TV experts have told you Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to appoint a Special Master in Trump’s case is an “atrocious,” “shady as fuck,” “utterly lawless” ruling by a “stupid” and “profoundly partisan” jurist, placing Trump “above the law.” Have you noticed these analyses almost always come from ex-prosecutors, that you’ve been trained to not even blink at headlines like, Ex-CIA officer calls judge’s ruling in Trump case “silly,” and that defense attorneys on television are rarer than pearls?
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