Mask, No Mask/

Jordan Davidson via: The Federalist

Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN last weekend that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to release new guidance suggesting relaxed outdoor mask policies.

“The risk when you’re outdoors – which we have been saying all along – is extremely low,” Fauci, who is notorious for flip-flopping on COVID-19 guidance, said. “And if you are vaccinated, it’s even lower. So you’re going to be hearing about those kinds of recommendations soon.”

While Fauci spent most of the last year drumming up media coverage, TV hits, and other opportunities to stay in the limelight, another health care policy adviser who sat on former President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force for more than 100 days warned that Fauci, the CDC, and others participating the scientific “groupthink” surrounding COVID-19 could be approaching the virus wrong.

Dr. Scott Atlas was one of the first and only voices in the COVID fight who pushed back on masking outdoors and questioned the dominant narrative that conquering the virus required a fear-filled approach.

“Why in the world would you wear a mask if you’re riding your bicycle all alone outside? Why in the world would you wear a mask if you’re in your own car driving? Why in the world would you wear a mask if you’re in the desert all alone?” Atlas told Real Clear Politics in October.

The mouthpieces at the CDC, however, were clearly opposed to Atlas’s thinking. During the 2020 lockdowns and reopening controversies, former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said that “everything [Atlas] says is false.”

Fauci also hinted that while most of the COVID task force seemed to be on the same page, there was an obvious “outlier.” The people lobbing these criticisms, Atlas said, are motivated by the attention they are granted by the media and are “simply used to groupthink and not to informed people who have a critical thought process.”

“The CDC has many fine scientists, I am sure of that, but when the head of the CDC held up a mask and said a mask is better than a vaccine, that is absurd. That is not science. That is contrary to all rational thought,” Atlas noted.

The left’s corporate media mouthpieces also took cues from these critics and repeatedly hammered Atlas for recommending schools and cities reopen amid the pandemic, avoiding masking except for in certain instances, and advocating against silencing scientific dissent. A former Obama official even called for Atlas to lose his medical license.

While Atlas repeatedly pointed to data that signaled “one of the biggest failures of the faces of public health in this country” was extended lockdowns, Big Tech also stepped into the fight to censor him for pointing out that evidence for widespread mask use was shaky and should only be applied in certain situations with high-risk situations individuals.Google-owned YouTube removed an interview with Atlas discussing how government-imposed lockdowns were doing more harm than good for allegedly violating its terms of service.

As the CDC continues to pull back on its recommendations, many of which have been scrutinized for lacking scientific evidence, Atlas’s claims that were once used by politicians, the corporate media, and other grifters to write off science are suddenly making a comeback.

Secret May 2009 Meeting of “The Good Club”. “Billionaire Club in Bid to Curb Overpopulation”

By John Harlow and Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research

Flash back to May 2009, the Billionaires held a meeting behind closed doors at the home of the president of The Rockefeller University in Manhattan.

This Secret Gathering was sponsored by Bill Gates. They called themselves “The Good Club”.

Among the participants were the late David Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey and many more.

The Secret Gathering was reported by the Sunday Times. as well as the Guardian.

“The fact that they pulled this off, meeting in the middle of New York City, is just absolutely amazing,” said Niall O’Dowd, an Irish journalist who broke the story on the website irishcentral.com.”

According to media reports, “The Good Club” focus was on the philanthropic mandate of the billionaires, using their money in support of poverty alleviation and “overpopulation”.

It is important to note that the Good Club meeting in NYC was held at the height of the H1N1 swine flu pandemic which turned out to be a scam. No doubt, the H1N1 pandemic was an object of discussion by the “Good Club”.

Barely a few weeks prior to this secret gathering, Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London who at the time was advising the WHO, stated with authority that “40 per cent of people in the UK could be infected [with H1N1] within the next six months if the country was hit by a pandemic.”

This is the same Niel Ferguson (generously supported by the Gates Foundation) who designed the coronavirus Lockdown Model which resulted in mass unemployment, poverty and the closure of 190 national economies as a means to combating COVID-19.

The media reports on the May 5, 2009 secret gathering focussed on the commitment of “The Good Club” to “slowing down” the growth of the World’s population.

Was an absolute “reduction” in World population contemplated at this meeting, –i.e. as a means to reducing “Overpopulation”? In this regard, Bill Gates in his February 2010 TED presentation pertaining to vaccination, confirmed the following;

“And if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that [the world population] by 10 or 15 percent”.

According to Gates’ statement, this would represent an absolute reduction of the World’s population of the order 680 million to 1.02 billion.

(See quotation on Video starting at 04.21. See also screenshot of Transcript of quotation)

TED Talk at 04:21:

“The Good Club” Then and Now

The same group of billionaires who met at the May 2009 secret venue, have been actively involved from the outset in designing the coronavirus lockdown policies applied Worldwide.

They are also the architects of the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset”.

Below is the complete text of the Sunday Times article (May 24, 2009) (emphasis added)

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, April 25, 2021

****

“Billionaire Club in Bid to Curb Overpopulation”

by John Harlow,

Sunday Times, May 24, 2009

***

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

These members, along with Gates, have given away more than £45 billion since 1996 to causes ranging from health programmes in developing countries to ghetto schools nearer to home.

They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan on May 5. The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires’ aides were told they were at “security briefings”.

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said.

Some details were emerging this weekend, however. The billionaires were each given 15 minutes to present their favourite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an “umbrella cause” that could harness their interests.

The issues debated included reforming the supervision of overseas aid spending to setting up rural schools and water systems in developing countries. Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority.

This could result in a challenge to some Third World politicians who believe contraception and female education weaken traditional values.

Gates, 53, who is giving away most of his fortune, argued that healthier families, freed from malaria and extreme poverty, would change their habits and have fewer children within half a generation.

At a conference in Long Beach, California, last February, he had made similar points.

“Official projections say the world’s population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive healthcare, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion,” Gates said then.

Patricia Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives more than £2 billion a year to good causes, attended the Rockefeller summit. She said the billionaires met to “discuss how to increase giving” and they intended to “continue the dialogue” over the next few months.

Another guest said there was “nothing as crude as a vote” but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.

“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” said the guest. “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.”

Why all the secrecy? “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government,” he said.

“Take These Masks Off My Child”

While Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter are chock full of virtue-signaling sheep declaring their double, triple, quadruple masking efforts; their personal sacrifices for the greater good of all mankind (against a virus that leave 99.7% of those infected unharmed); and blindly following the ‘science’ from political operatives who need a crisis to drive their agenda; one Georgia mom has had enough.

Instead of virtue-signaling to the world, Georgia mother Courtney Ann Taylor blasted Gwinnett County Board of Education members for requiring children to wear masks despite evidence that kids are largely safe from COVID-19, demanding, “take these masks off of my child.”

Taylor slammed the board who for months have proclaimed the importance of “social, emotional health” telling them, “if you truly mean that, you would end the mask requirement tonight. Tonight.”

“This is not March 2020 anymore,” the mom of a 6-year-old rage…

“We have three vaccines, every adult in the state of Georgia that wants that vaccine is eligible to get it, right now, and every one of us knows that young children are not affected by this virus.”

“They’re not,” Taylor said, as she began to get emotional, “and that’s a blessing.”

“But as the adults what have we done with that blessing? We’ve shoved it to the side and we’ve said we don’t care, ‘You’re still gonna wear a mask on your face every day, 5 and 6-year-olds, you still can’t play together on the playground like normal children, 7 and 8-year-olds,’” she said.

“We don’t care. We are still going to force you to carry a burden that was never yours to carry. Shame on us,” she said.

“It is April 15, 2021, and it’s time,” Taylor said angrily.

“Take these masks off of my child.”

If you’re a parent of a child in school, we dare you to watch this without becoming enraged… and emotional (perhaps it was allergies)…

Make it stop!

Is Pfizer Quietly Targeting Other Vaccines, While Holding Back on Its Own Safety Record?

via Sputnik

Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine entered the market in 2020, being advertised as an extremely safe product. However, recent jab-related data from around the world may very well put these statements into question when it comes to both side effects and fatalities.

As the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic hit the planet in early 2020, vaccine manufacturers immediately launched a pursuit of a product, which would thwart the disease quickly and efficiently. An alliance of Pfizer and BioNTech was one of the first to present its “weapon” against the pandemic in the form of a “revolutionary” mRNA vaccine, which received a brand name Comirnaty. The product was developed using a messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology, which was largely unheard of prior to that, and went into clinical trials in April of the same year. This technology was so new that no safety studies existed and no long-term effects of such vaccines have ever been assessed.

From day one Pfizer’s vaccine has been receiving a lot of praise from American, British and European mainstream media which coincidently didn’t shy away from apparent bias against other vaccine manufacturers.

But after the optimistic rollout came doubts about the product’s safety, as the number of deaths, some of which may have been caused by Pfizer’s jab, surpassed similar data from some other vaccines.

Comirnaty’s Death Count

Official government statistics from 12 countries: US, India, Brazil, Argentina, India, Chile, France, Germany, UK, Austria, Italy, Denmark and Russia, which was collected and analyzed as of April 19, 2021, show that in total there have been 2,485 deaths among Pfizer/BioNTech COVID vaccine recipients. Which in turn corresponds to a simple average death rate across the 12 countries of 39.4 deaths per 1 million doses administrated for Pfizer – some three to five times higher than that for AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson jabs.

COVID vaccines review 1

© SPUTNIK
COVID vaccines review 1

The worst wave of Pfizer deaths was registered in Norway, where the number of fatalities per 1 million administered doses hit 143. In the US 1,134 people lost their lives after receiving a jab of Comirnaty, as per data provided by the CDC Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The latter is more than 20 times higher than the numbers for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Data from Mexico’s Ministry of Health also shows significantly more side effects for Pfizer than AstraZeneca or other vaccines (as of April 17, there were 2.08 cases of serious adverse events per 100,000 doses for Pfizer vs 1.56 cases for AstraZeneca, and for cases supposedly attributed to vaccination the difference is even starker – 2.62 vs 0.38 per 1,000 doses).

COVID vaccines review 2

© SPUTNIK
COVID vaccines review 2

There has not been a clear link yet established between Pfizer deaths and its vaccines.

The Inconvenient Truth

Media outlets around the world reported dozens of deaths connected with Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine. But none of these cases appears to have been properly investigated.

In January this year, Norway raised concern over 29 Comirnaty-related deaths with Bloomberg journalists also warning about vaccination risks for sick patients over 80. Last week French reporters added more fuel to the fire, citing a doctor Michael Cohen, who said that “the side effects of Pfizer are more important than the side effects of other vaccines”. The context included mentioning the 386 deaths related to the Pfizer vaccine in France. The UK also became concerned about 314 fatalities related to Comirnaty jabs, but this time it wasn’t the media, but the government that raised the alarm.

COVID vaccines review 3

© SPUTNIK
COVID vaccines review 3

In the meantime, Oxford University recently released a study showing that the risk of portal vein thrombosis appears to be 30 times higher with mRNA vaccines than with AstraZeneca.

And while some eyebrows have been raised as Pfizer appeared completely unfazed by the revelations – it comes as little surprise, considering the company’s past long track record of aggressive marketing strategies and indiscretions.

The Core of the Problem

Even though the manufacturer does not seem to be eager to go into a lot of detail relating to the death count, recent data shows that high fatality rates may be caused by the flaws of mRNA technology, which hasn’t been widely used before the COVID-19 pandemic.

In early 2021 leaked documents from European Medicines Agency (EMA) servers described in Le Monde article revealed serious problems that Pfizer was facing while switching from lab tests to full-scale commercial production of its vaccine. According to the documents, there was a significant loss of RNA integrity during the process – from 78.1 percent to 59.7 percent, with some batches at 51 percent. In layman’s terms, “low RNA integrity” not only means that Comirnaty has a low concentration of the active substance but also that more than 40 percent of mRNA is unstable and can produce random and harmful instructions in the body. Leaked documents also show that Pfizer tried to overcome the problem by increasing the dosage, which led to a higher percentage of inflammatory cases, thrombophilia, paroxysm, and other adverse events.

COVID vaccines review 4

© SPUTNIK
COVID vaccines review 4

Despite the fact that EMA acknowledged this problem with the Comirnaty, emails from the regulator’s top officials – namely EMA Deputy Director Noel Wathion, show that they kept pushing the organization hard to accelerate the approval of the vaccine simultaneously with the FDA. If the leaked materials are authentic, one may only wonder why the European Agency would lobby the interests of a vaccine manufacturer despite obvious health risks connected to it.

What the Future Holds

While all of the above may already lead to serious discussions about Pfizer vaccine’s safety record, there is also the long-term effect issue – a factor which is yet to be explored.

By now there have been no studies on the long-term safety of the vaccine, let alone studies about drugs and vaccines based on the new mRNA technology in general. Scientists and doctors have yet to explore the absence of any risks of carcinogenicity or a decline in fertility.

​Just like any other breakthrough technology, mRNA has been received worldwide with cheering, caution or with negative responses. Just like cloning, or any other inventions which dealt with human biology on a very deep level, it may need serious international monitoring and discussions about its safety, as well as about its mass applications. But whether it will be possible for scientists and doctors to fully investigate the effects of the Pfizer vaccine and other mRNA-based products without the enormous pressure and lobbying from the Big Pharma and political establishment, who seem to be involved in covering up rollout-related incidents – remains to be seen.

“Corona Unmasked” by Sucharit Bhakdi and Karina Reiss

This is a pre-publication of a chapter that will be finalized in the forthcoming book “Corona Unmasked” by Sucharit Bhakdi and Karina Reiss. – excerpts

Corona_Unmasked_engl

Anyone who has the slightest idea about infections and immune defense also knows that the mechanistic concept for the SARS-CoV-2 vaccination which is presented to the public is amateurish and naive from the start. The antibodies induced by the vaccination will circulate for the most part in the bloodstream. For an analogy, readers may imagine that they themselves are such antibodies, sitting together in the living room – which represents a blood vessel of the lungs. Now the virus comes to the house – not bothering to ring the bell, it just grabs the door handle and steps into the hallway: the lung cell. How could you possibly stop it from doing so, while sitting in the living room? You can’t.
Antibodies can basically only help prevent the further spread of an intruder through the bloodstream. But that is not the primary protection against an attack from the air against the lungs. And that is precisely why there is no truly effective vaccine protection against respiratory infections, including influenza.
[…]
All humans have had training rounds with coronaviruses, and thus they have lymphocytes that will recognize SARS-CoV-2 garbage. People without in-depth knowledge might counter that these cross-reactive killer lymphocytes were detected in only 40–70% of old blood samples, and they reacted only weakly against SARS-CoV-2 (27, 28). However, it is known that only a small proportion of all lymphocytes are in the blood at any given time. The others are just taking a break and resting in the lymphoid organs (including the lymph nodes).
Activated and combat-ready T lymphocytes were found in the blood of all people (100%) infected with SARS-CoV-2, regardless of the severity of the disease (29).

For context: during an initial confrontation of the immune system with a virus, the lymphocyte response will be sluggish. Rapid, strong reactions such as that documented by the Swedish team reveal that forewarned troops are already at the ready and can be mobilized on short notice. They will swarm out of the lymphoid organs to fight the enemy. Their main task: extermination of the virus factories – death to the body’s own cells that produce the virus particles.

And now back to the new reality: the large-scale experiment on humans. The injected gene packets are taken up locally in muscle cells, but a large part reaches first the local lymph nodes and, after passing through these, the bloodstream. The lymph nodes are where the immune cell team resides. When the viral gene is taken up by any cell there, production of the spike protein gets underway. The corona killer lymphocyte next door wakes up and springs into action – the brotherly battle begins! Lymph node swelling. Pain. The lymphocytes psyche each other up and then emerge from the lymph nodes to seek out more enemies.
Yes – over there – the muscle cells! There they are!!! Attack!!! At the injection site redness, swelling, bad pain.
But now the nightmare.
This is because the substances with small molecules – for example, blood sugar – can easily seep out of the blood into the tissue, whereas large molecules such as proteins cannot. For them, the vessel walls are tight thanks to the lining with a cell layer – the endothelial cells.
What are the gene packages like – large or small?

Right – compared to blood sugar, they certainly are large. Therefore, once they enter the bloodstream, they will remain in the closed network of vascular tubes just like the blood cells. A small part of them is taken up by white blood cells. Presumably, however, most of the virus factories will be established in the endothelial cells, that is, in the innermost cell layer of the blood vessels themselves. This would happen mainly where the blood flows slowly – within the smallest and smallest vessels – because the gene packages can be taken up particularly efficiently by the cells there (30).
The endothelial cells then produce the viral spike protein and place the waste at the door – on the side that faces the bloodstream, where killer lymphocytes are on patrol. This time, the fight is one-sided. The endothelial cells have no defense.
What happens then can only be guessed at. Injury to the vascular lining usually leads to the formation of blood clots. This would likely happen in countless vessels in countless places in the body. If it happens in the placenta, severe damage to the child in the womb could result.

Is there evidence that something like this is taking place? Yes, there is talk of rare blood disorders in which a possible link to vaccination would have to be investigated (31). Strikingly, there are reports of patients in whom a sharp drop in blood platelets (thrombocytes) was observed. This would fit the hypothesis put forward here, because platelets are activated and used up at the sites of blood clot formation.

[…]

Notes:
[…]
(29) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.08.017
(30) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/
adman.201906274
(31) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/health/immu-
ne-thrombocytopenia-covid-vaccine-blood.html

[…]

Yale Public Health Professor Suggests 60% of New COVID-19 Patients Have Received Vaccine

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut, April 21, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — An American Professor of Epidemiology at Yale University revealed that the majority of people now coming down with COVID-19 have been vaccinated against the virus.

“Clinicians have been telling me that more than half of the new COVID cases that they’re treating are people who have been vaccinated,” said Dr. Harvey Risch.

A professor at the Yale School of Public Health, Risch appeared on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” program and contrasted the public’s perception of the vaccines’ efficacy with that of the medical establishment.

“I think the American public has been sold on the vaccine by the research that shows that they reduce the infection of mild to moderate symptomatic infection by somewhere between 60-90% depending upon age and vaccine and so on and that is pretty good performance for an individual who wants to take a vaccine to protect himself,” Risch said.

“However, that is not the measure that public health infrastructure, administration, and Dr. Fauci are using to look at the efficacy of the vaccine.”

What the medical establishment is most interested in, Risch believes, is whether or not the vaccines prevent the spread of the infection. As Big Pharma has not provided this information, Risch recommends looking at the data from places where the vaccine has been used.

“For that the best place so far has been the mass rollout in Israel where the Pfizer vaccine was given to more than half the population now,” the epidemiologist said.

“And in Israel, the studies there show that it reduces the spread of the infection by somewhere around 50-60% so that contributes to herd immunity,” he continued.

“But it is not an overnight shutting down of the spread. It is a slow and continuing benefit for society to do that. But it is totally different than each individual’s protection of, say, 90%.”

This should be a wake-up call to people who think the vaccine will “free them up from all restrictions,” he said. This cannot happen because, although they might not get symptoms, the vaccine cuts the actual transmission of the virus only by a half. Risch said clinicians have told him that over half of new coronavirus cases have already had a vaccine.

“They’ve estimated that more than 60% of the new cases that they are treating – COVID cases – have been people who have been vaccinated,” Risch said.

The Unraveling Of The American Empire

Authored by Chris Hedges via ConsortiumNews.com,

America’s defeat in Afghanistan is one in a string of catastrophic military blunders that herald the death of the American empire. With the exception of the first Gulf War, fought largely by mechanized units in the open desert that did not — wisely — attempt to occupy Iraq, the United States political and military leadership has stumbled from one military debacle to another. Korea. Vietnam. Lebanon. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. The trajectory of military fiascos mirrors the sad finales of the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Russian, French, British, Dutch, Portuguese and Soviet empires. While each of these empires decayed with their own peculiarities, they all exhibited patterns of dissolution that characterize the American experiment.

U.S. Army helicopter near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, April 5, 2017. (U.S. Army, Brian Harris, Wikimedia Commons)

Imperial ineptitude is matched by domestic ineptitude. The collapse of good government at home, with legislative, executive and judicial systems all seized by corporate power, ensures that the incompetent and the corrupt, those dedicated not to the national interest but to swelling the profits of the oligarchic elite, lead the country into a cul-de-sac. Rulers and military leaders, driven by venal self-interest, are often buffoonish characters in a grand comic operetta. How else to think of Allen Dulles, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Trump or the hapless Joe Biden? While their intellectual and moral vacuity is often darkly amusing, it is murderous and savage when directed towards their victims.

There is not a single case since 1941 when the coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, U.S. sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars or military interventions carried out by the United States resulted in the establishment of a democratic government. The two-decade-long wars in the Middle East, the greatest strategic blunder in American history, have only left in their wake one failed state after another. Yet, no one in the ruling class is held accountable.

Quagmires

War, when it is waged to serve utopian absurdities, such as implanting a client government in Baghdad that will flip the region, including Iran, into U.S. protectorates, or when, as in Afghanistan, there is no vision at all, descends into a quagmire. The massive allocation of money and resources to the U.S. military, which includes Biden’s request for $715 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal year 2022, a $11.3 billion, or 1.6 percent increase, over 2021, is not in the end about national defense. The bloated military budget is designed, as Seymour Melman explained in his book, The Permanent War Economy, primarily to keep the American economy from collapsing. All we really make anymore are weapons. Once this is understood, perpetual war makes sense, at least for those who profit from it.

The idea that America is a defender of democracy, liberty and human rights would come as a huge surprise to those who saw their democratically elected governments subverted and overthrown by the United States in Panama (1941), Syria (1949), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Chile (1973), Honduras (2009) and Egypt (2013). And this list does not include a host of other governments that, however despotic, as was the case in South Vietnam, Indonesia or Iraq, were viewed as inimical to American interests and destroyed, in each case making life for the inhabitants of these countries even more miserable.

(Illustration by Mr. Fish)

I spent two decades on the outer reaches of empire as a foreign correspondent. The flowery rhetoric used to justify the subjugation of other nations so corporations can plunder natural resources and exploit cheap labor is solely for domestic consumption. The generals, intelligence operatives, diplomats, bankers and corporate executives that manage empire find this idealistic talk risible. They despise, with good reason, naïve liberals who call for “humanitarian intervention” and believe the ideals used to justify empire are real, that empire can be a force for good. These liberal interventionists, the useful idiots of imperialism, attempt to civilize a process that was created and designed to repress, intimidate, plunder and dominate.

The liberal interventionists, because they wrap themselves in high ideals, are responsible for numerous military and foreign policy debacles. The call by liberal interventionists such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Susan Rice and Samantha Power to fund jihadists in Syria and depose Muammar Gaddafi in Libya rent these countries — as in Afghanistan and Iraq — into warring fiefdoms. The liberal interventionists are also the tip of the spear in the campaign to rachet up tensions with China and Russia.

U.S. State Department staff en route to Tripoli, Libya, Oct. 18, 2011. (State Department, Flickr)

Russia is blamed for interfering in the last two presidential elections on behalf of Donald Trump. Russia, whose economy is roughly the size of Italy’s, is also attacked for destabilizing the Ukraine, supporting Bashar al-Assad in Syria, funding France’s National Front party and hacking into German computers. Biden has imposed sanctions on Russia — including limits on buying newly issued sovereign debt — in response to allegations that Moscow was behind a hack on SolarWinds Corp. and worked to thwart his candidacy.

At the same time, the liberal interventionists are orchestrating a new cold war with China, justifying this cold war because the Chinese government is carrying out genocide against its Uyghur minority, repressing the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and stealing U.S. patents. As with Russia, sanctions have been imposed targeting the country’s ruling elite. The U.S. is also carrying out provocative military maneuvers along the Russian border and in the South China Sea.

The core belief of imperialists, whether they come in the form of a Barack Obama or a George W. Bush, is racism and ethnic chauvinism, the notion that Americans are permitted, because of superior attributes, to impose their “values” on lesser races and peoples by force. This racism, carried out in the name of Western civilization and its corollary white supremacy, unites the rabid imperialists and liberal interventionists in the Republican and Democratic parties. It is the fatal disease of empire, captured in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.

Aug. 9, 1998: U.S. embassy after attack, Nairobi, Kenya, (IDF, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The crimes of empire always spawn counter-violence that is then used to justify harsher forms of imperial repression. For example, the United States routinely kidnapped Islamic jihadists fighting in the Balkans between 1995 and 1998. They were sent to Egypt — many were Egyptian — where they were savagely tortured and usually executed. In 1998, the International Islamic Front for Jihad said it would carry out a strike against the United States after jihadists were kidnapped and transferred to black sites from Albania. They made good on their threat igniting massive truck bombs at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that left 224 dead. Of course, the “extraordinary renditions” by the CIA did not end and neither did the attacks by jihadists.

Micro-Militarism

Our decades-long military fiascos, a feature of all late empires, are called “micro-militarism.” The Athenians engaged in micro-militarism during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) when they invaded Sicily, suffering the loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers. The defeat triggered successful revolts throughout the Athenian empire.

The Roman empire, which at its height lasted for two centuries, created a military machine that, like the Pentagon, was a state within a state. Rome’s military rulers, led by Augustus, snuffed out the remnants of Rome’s anemic democracy and ushered in a period of despotism that saw the empire disintegrate under the weight of extravagant military expenditures and corruption.

The British empire, after the suicidal military folly of World War I, was terminated in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Britain was forced to withdraw in humiliation, empowering Arab nationalist leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and dooming British rule over its few remaining colonies. None of these empires recovered.

“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power: “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micromilitary operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”

The worse it gets at home the more the empire needs to fabricate enemies within and without. This is the real reason for the increase in tensions with Russia and China. The poverty of half the nation and concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny oligarchic cabal, the wanton murder of unarmed civilians by militarized police, the rage at the ruling elites, expressed with nearly half the electorate voting for a con artist and demagogue and a mob of his supporters storming the capitol, are the internal signs of disintegration. The inability of the for-profit national health services to cope with the pandemic, the passage of a Covid relief bill and the proposal of an infrastructure bill that would hand the bulk of some $5 trillion dollars to corporations while tossing crumbs — one-time checks of $1,400 to a citizenry in deep financial distress — will only fuel the decline.

February 2018: Die-in demonstration by Teens For Gun Reform in wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. (Lorie Shaull via Flickr)

Because of the loss of unionized jobs, the real decline of wages, de-industrialization, chronic underemployment and unemployment, and punishing austerity programs, the country is plagued by a plethora of diseases of despair including opioid addictions, alcoholism, suicides, gambling, depression, morbid obesity and mass shootings — since March 16 the United States has had at least 45 mass shootings, including eight people killed in an Indiana FedEx facility on Friday, three dead and three injured in a shooting in Wisconsin on Sunday, and another three dead in a shooting in Austin on Sunday. These are the consequences of a deeply troubled society.

The façade of empire is able to mask the rot within its foundations, often for decades, until, as we saw with the Soviet Union, the empire appears to suddenly disintegrate. The loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency will probably mark the final chapter of the American empire. In 2015, the dollar accounted for 90 percent of bilateral transactions between China and Russia, a percentage that has since fallen to about 50 percent. The use of sanctions as a weapon against China and Russia pushes these countries to replace the dollar with their own national currencies. Russia, as part of this move away from the dollar, has begun accumulating yuan reserves.

The loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will instantly raise the cost of imports. It will result in unemployment of Depression-era levels. It will force the empire to dramatically contract. It will, as the economy worsens, fuel a hyper-nationalism that will most likely be expressed through a Christianized fascism. The mechanisms, already in place, for total social control, militarized police, a suspension of civil liberties, wholesale government surveillance, enhanced “terrorism” laws that railroad people into the world’s largest prison system and censorship overseen by the digital media monopolies will seamlessly cement into place a police state. Nations that descend into crises this severe seek to deflect the rage of a betrayed population on foreign scapegoats. China and Russia will be used to fill these roles.

The defeat in Afghanistan is a familiar and sad story, one all those blinded by imperial hubris endure. The tragedy, however, is not the collapse of the American empire, but that, lacking the ability to engage in self-critique and self-correction, as it dies it will lash out in a blind, inchoate fury at innocents at home and abroad.

* * *

This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column twice a month.

The Covidian Cult Exposed: Six Conditions Of Mind Control

Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Back in October of 2020, I wrote an essay called The Covidian Cult, in which I described the so-called “New Normal” as a global totalitarian ideological movement.

Developments over the last six months have borne out the accuracy of that analogy.

A full year after the initial roll-out of the utterly horrifying and completely fictional photos of people dropping dead in the streets, the projected 3.4% death rate, and all the rest of the official propaganda, despite the absence of any actual scientific evidence of an apocalyptic plague (and the abundance of evidence to the contrary), millions of people continue to behave like members of an enormous death cult, walking around in public with medical-looking masks, robotically repeating vacuous platitudes, torturing children, the elderly, the disabled, demanding that everyone submit to being injected with dangerous experimental “vaccines,” and just generally acting delusional and psychotic.

How did we ever get to this point … to the point where, as I put it in The Covidian Cult, “instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it?”

To understand this, one needs to understand how cults control the minds of their members, because totalitarian ideological movements operate more or less the same way, just on a much larger, societal scale. There is a wealth of research and knowledge on this subject (I mentioned Robert J. Lifton in my earlier essay), but, to keep things simple, I’ll just use Margaret Singer’s “Six Conditions of Mind Control” from her 1995 book, Cults in Our Midst, as a lens to view the Covidian Cult through. (The italics are Singer. The commentary is mine.)

Six Conditions of Mind Control

1. Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how she or he is being changed a step at a time. Potential new members are led, step by step, through a behavioral-change program without being aware of the final agenda or full content of the group.

Looking back, it is easy to see how people were conditioned, step by step, to accept the “New Normal” ideology. They were bombarded with terrifying propaganda, locked down, stripped of their civil rights, forced to wear medical-looking masks in public, to act out absurd “social-distancing” rituals, submit to constant “testing,” and all the rest of it. Anyone not complying with this behavioral-change program or challenging the veracity and rationality of the new ideology was demonized as a “conspiracy theorist,” a “Covid denier,” an “anti-vaxxer,” in essence, an enemy of the cult, like a “suppresive person” in the Church of Scientology.

2. Control the person’s social and/or physical environment; especially control the person’s time.

For over a year now, the “New Normal” authorities have controlled the social/physical environment, and how New Normals spend their time, with lockdowns, social-distancing rituals, closure of “non-essential” businesses, omnipresent propaganda, isolation of the elderly, travel restrictions, mandatory mask-rules, protest bans, and now the segregation of the “Unvaccinated.” Basically, society has been transformed into something resembling an infectious disease ward, or an enormous hospital from which there is no escape. You’ve seen the photos of the happy New Normals dining out at restaurants, relaxing at the beach, jogging, attending school, and so on, going about their “normal” lives with their medical-looking masks and prophylactic face shields. What you’re looking at is the pathologization of society, the pathologization of everyday life, the physical (social) manifestation of a morbid obsession with disease and death.

3. Systematically create a sense of powerlessness in the person.

What kind of person could feel more powerless than an obedient New Normal sitting at home, obsessively logging the “Covid death” count, sharing photos of his medical-looking mask and post-“vaccination” bandage on Facebook, as he waits for permission from the authorities to go outdoors, visit his family, kiss his lover, or shake hands with a colleague? The fact that in the Covidian Cult the traditional charismatic cult leader has been replaced by a menagerie of medical experts and government officials does not change the utter dependency and abject powerlessness of its members, who have been reduced to a state approaching infancy. This abject powerlessness is not experienced as a negative; on the contrary, it is proudly celebrated. Thus the mantra-like repetition of the “New Normal” platitude “Trust the Science!” by people who, if you try to show them the science, melt down completely and start jabbering aggressive nonsense at you to shut you up.

4. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments and experiences in such a way as to inhibit behavior that reflects the person’s former social identity.

The point here is the transformation of the formerly basically rational person into an entirely different cult-approved person, in our case, an obedient “New Normal” person. Singer gets into this in greater detail, but her discussion applies mostly to subcultural cults, not to large-scale totalitarian movements. For our purposes, we can fold this into Condition 5.

5. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote learning the group’s ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviors. Good behavior, demonstrating an understanding and acceptance of the group’s beliefs, and compliance are rewarded, while questioning, expressing doubts or criticizing are met with disapproval, redress and possible rejection. If one expresses a question, they are made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with them to be questioning.

OK, I’m going to tell you a little story. It’s a story about a personal experience, which I’m pretty sure you’ve also experienced. It’s a story about a certain New Normal who has been harassing me for several months. I’ll call him Brian Parks, because, well, that’s his name, and I no longer feel any compunction about sharing it.

Brian is a former friend/colleague from the theater world who has gone full “New Normal” and is absolutely furious that I have not. So outraged is Brian that I have not joined the cult that he has been going around on the Internet referring to me as a “conspiracy theorist” and suggesting that I’ve had some kind of nervous breakdown and require immediate psychiatric treatment because I do not believe the official “New Normal” narrative. Now, this would not be a very big deal, except that Brian is impugning my character and attempting to damage my reputation on the Facebook pages of other theater colleagues, which Brian feels entitled to do, given that I am a “Covid denier,” a “conspiracy theorist,” and an “anti-vaxxer,” or whatever, and given the fact that he has the power of the state, the media, etc., on his side.

This is how it works in cults, and in larger totalitarian societies. It isn’t usually the Gestapo that comes for you. It’s usually your friends and colleagues. What Brian is doing is working that system of rewards and punishments to enforce his ideology, because he knows that most of my other colleagues in the theater world have also gone full “New Normal,” or at least are looking the other way and staying silent while it is being implemented.

This tactic, obviously, has backfired on Brian, primarily because I do not give a fuck what any New Normals think of me, whether they work in the theater world or anywhere else, but I am in a rather privileged position, because I have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish in the theater, and would rather stick my hand in a blender than submit my novels to corporate publishers for review by “sensitivity readers,” so there isn’t much to threaten me with. That, and I have no children to support, or administrations to answer to (unlike, for example, Mark Crispin Miller, who is currently being persecuted by the “New Normal” administration at NYU).

The point is, this kind of ideological conditioning is happening everywhere, every day, on the job, among friends, even among families. The pressure to conform is intense, because nothing is more threatening to devoted cultists, or members of totalitarian ideological movements, than those who challenge their fundamental beliefs, confront them with facts, or otherwise demonstrate that their “reality” isn’t reality at all, but, rather, a delusional, paranoid fiction.

The key difference between how this works in cults and totalitarian ideological movements is that, usually, a cult is a subcultural group, and thus non-cult-members have the power of the ideology of the dominant society to draw on when resisting the mind-control tactics of the cult, and attempting to deprogram its members … whereas, in our case, this balance of power is inverted. Totalitarian ideological movements have the power of governments, the media, the police, the culture industry, academia, and the compliant masses on their side. And, thus, they do not need to persuade anyone. They have the power to dictate “reality.” Only cults operating in total isolation, like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple in Guyana, enjoy this level of control over their members.

This pressure to conform, this ideological conditioning, must be fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences, both publicly and in our private lives, or the “New Normal” will certainly become our “reality.” Despite the fact that we “Covid deniers” are currently outnumbered by the Covidian cultists, we need to behave as if we are not, and hold to reality, facts, and real science, and treat the New Normals as exactly what they are, members of a new totalitarian movement, delusional cultists run amok. If we do not, we will get to Singer’s Condition 6 …

6. Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval or executive order. The group has a top-down, pyramid structure. The leaders must have verbal ways of never losing.

We’re not there yet, but that is where we’re headed … global pathologized totalitarianism. So, please, speak up. Call things what they are. Confront the Brians in your life. Despite the fact that they tell themselves that they’re trying to help you “come to your senses” or “see the truth,” or “trust the Science,” they are not. They are cultists, desperately trying to get you to conform to their paranoid beliefs, pressuring you, manipulating you, bullying you, threatening you. Do not engage them on their terms, or let them goad you into accepting their premises. (Once they’ve sucked you into their narrative, they’ve won.) Expose them, confront them with their tactics and their motives. You will probably not change their minds in the least, but your example might help other New Normals whose faith is slipping to begin to recognize what has been done to their minds and break with the cult.

On The Shocking 2025 ‘Deagel’ Forecast: War, Population Reduction, & The Collapse Of The West

Via InternationalMan,com,

International Man: Deagel is a private online source for the military capabilities of the world’s nation-states. It recently released a shocking five-year forecast.

The report analyzes countries by projected population size, GDP, defense budget, and more.

In it, they predict a 70% reduction in the size of the United States population.

This is a bold prediction. What are your thoughts on this?

Doug Casey: I’ve got to say that I wasn’t familiar with Deagel – it keeps a low profile. Deagel is in the same business as Jane’s—which has been in the business of analyzing weapons systems for many decades.

A look at the Deagel website, which is quite sophisticated, makes it clear we’re not dealing with some blogger concocting outrageous clickbait. It seems to be well-connected with defense contractors and government agencies like the CIA.

They’ve predicted that about 70% of the US population, and about the same percentage in Europe, is going to disappear by 2025. It’s hard to believe that anybody in their position would make a forecast like that. There’s no logical business reason for it, especially since it was done before the COVID hysteria gripped the world. It stretches a reader’s credulity.

Could it possibly happen? It would be the biggest thing in world history. Does it have a basis in reality, or is it just some bizarre trolling exercise? I’m not sure—it’s hard to take almost anything from any source at face value these days. But for the last several years, I’ve been saying that World War III would basically be a biological war. Of course, it will have substantial conventional, nuclear, space-based, and AI/computer elements as well, but its most serious component will be biological. Essentially, it will involve the use of bacteria and viruses to wipe out the enemy. The odds are that it will be between the US and China. But since anyone with a CRISPR in their garage can hack the genome and DNA of almost anything and anybody… there are no limits to the possibilities.

Certainly, from the Chinese point of view, a biological war makes all the sense in the world. That’s because the Han Chinese share a lot of genetic similarities. Presumably, a bacteria or virus can be bred to favor the Chinese and take out most everybody else. The fact is that anything that can be done eventually will be done. It’s just the law of large numbers.

Somebody might respond, “Well, that’s horribly racist.” Of course it’s racist. Notwithstanding rational and philosophical arguments against it, all ethnic groups and countries are quite naturally racist. A fear of different racial and ethnic groups has been bred into humans, as a survival mechanism, over the hundreds of thousands of years since we became biologically modern.

All races and ethnic groups like to think that they’re “the best” or the most worthy, and that non-members are “other”, perhaps only marginally human. Biological warfare plays directly into feeling.

Americans who—like everybody else—see themselves as “the good guys”, believe we’re immune to that. However, don’t forget that the US pioneered modern biowarfare. Fort Detrick, Maryland, has been an epicenter of it for over 70 years, and there are undoubtedly many other more clandestine sites where US government agencies are working on biological warfare. No doubt the Chinese and other major powers are working clandestinely as well. It’s not something anybody wants to advertise for many reasons.

What shocks me is not that a biowar is being researched or even actively wargamed, but that a connected organization like Deagel is actually saying it publicly. It’s not like what goes on in the spook community is an open book.

Deagel doesn’t explicitly say what, exactly, will cause the great die-off. But there are many advantages to biological warfare over other types of warfare, so it will probably be featured. It’s probably inevitable, now that the technology has made it practical.

What are the advantages of biowar? What might wargaming generals like about it?

  • First, it doesn’t destroy materiel. That’s a huge plus. After all, what’s the point of conquering a country if all you have to show for it is a smoking radioactive ruin? That’s the major advantage of the neutron bomb, of course; it kills the people but limits damage to buildings. Bioweapons essentially make atomic weapons obsolescent.
  • Second, bioweapons can be structured to attack only certain racial groups. That’s potentially either a big advantage or disadvantage to China. The diverse population of the US could also be either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on who strikes first. But, on the bright side, you can perhaps immunize your own population, or at least the military and “essential” workers, to control the damage.
  • Third, bioweapons are very cheap and easy to fabricate. Anyone with access to a good high school chemistry lab is in business. There’s no need for expensive and tricky U-235 or, for that matter, any of the junk toys the Pentagon spends hundreds of billions on.
  • Fourth, bioweapons don’t need sophisticated delivery systems; again, no need for B-2s, B-52s, cruise missiles, ICBMs, or any of that. A sick tourist or two, or a few packages sent in the mail, can get the job done.
  • Fifth, bioweapons, whether they’re viruses or bacteria, not only offer plausible deniability but the potential to blame a third party. You can launch an attack, and nobody can really be sure who did it. Or even that an attack is, in fact, being launched.

There’s every advantage to biological warfare from an aggressor’s point of view. And, the aggressor doesn’t even have to be a nation-state, which is, of course, another excuse for governments to further clamp down on their populations, as COVID has shown. Guns are good self-defense weapons, and governments are trying to eliminate them; basement biowar labs are strictly offensive. Imagine the bureaucratic enforcement possibilities.

International Man: In addition, Deagel included a lengthy disclaimer, which states:

“After COVID, we can draw two major conclusions:

  1. The Western world success model has been built over societies with no resilience that can barely withstand any hardship, even a low-intensity one. It was assumed, but we got the full confirmation beyond any doubt.
  2. The COVID crisis will be used to extend the life of this dying economic system through the so-called Great Reset.”

Doug, you’ve written extensively about the economic, political, cultural, and social decline in the US—long before it became a popular topic of discussion.

Has anything changed in your perspective on the future of the US?

Doug Casey: No. I’m afraid the election of actual Bolsheviks in 2020—and I don’t use that term lightly—has sealed its fate. Not to mention that the nomenklatura in most major cities and states are cut from the same cloth.

In point of fact, the US is on such a self-destructive path that the Chinese don’t have to do anything in order to win. All they need to do is lay back and be quiet. The West is destroying itself.

As for this COVID crisis, it impresses me as 80% hysteria, a bad flu season that has been blown out of proportion. It’s well known (insofar as anything can be known, considering the abysmal quality of reporting and the extreme politicization of the issue) that COVID mainly affects the elderly, the sick, and the obese. The average age of descendants is 80; however, the ages of those who die are rarely mentioned. The media reports the number of COVID cases constantly, but that’s as meaningless as counting who gets a common cold. Anyway, aren’t all those who get infected become immune? A virus—like the Hong Kong flu, the Asian flu, the Bird flu, and the Swine flu—goes viral, then goes away. Even the Spanish flu, which was actually serious, came and went without destroying the economy. Nonetheless, the public has been so terrorized that they’re panicking to take potentially dangerous experimental injections. Even though there are numerous cheap drugs that can mitigate the virus after diagnosis, they’re never prescribed. The opinions of physicians and world-class scientists who differ with Fauci—an overpaid lifelong government employee—are actively suppressed. However, this is a whole different subject.

There is one thing I question about Deagel’s statement that you quoted: “The COVID crisis will be used to extend the life of this dying economic system through something called the Great Reset.” That’s a very odd statement because the crisis isn’t extending the life of the dying economic system. It’s putting the final nail in its coffin. It would be nice to hear how they figure that out, as COVID seems to be medically vastly overblown. The Great Reset has nothing to do with preserving the current economic system; it’s about formalizing a new one.

Here’s a wild and crazy thought. What if the real problem isn’t so much the COVID virus itself.

What if the real problem is the new vaccines. What if, after X number of months or years, they turn out to have very deadly effects? There’s a reason new drugs are tested over a period of years, which is far from the case here. Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and numerous others who think they’re “elite” have long said that the earth’s population ought to be reduced radically, perhaps by 80%. Is it too shocking to believe that some group would take advantage of this to cull the human population? It’s something that would be hard to believe even in a science fiction novel. But it now appears to be technically feasible. History is replete—overrun, actually—with psychos who try to destroy everybody once they get in power.

In point of fact, science fiction is a much better predictor of the future than any think tank has ever been. So maybe there’s a Dr. Evil at large, anxious to eliminate deplorables and other undesirables. If he exists, I doubt today’s woke transgender version of James Bond can counter him. Who knows where this is going? But it’s the wrong direction, and the trend is still accelerating.

International Man: The disclaimer in the Deagel report goes on to say,

“The collapse of the Western financial system – and ultimately the Western civilization – has been the major driver in the forecast along with a confluence of crisis with a devastating outcome. As COVID has proven Western societies embracing multiculturalism and extreme liberalism are unable to deal with any real hardship.”

Is the Western civilization seeing a confluence of crises coming together in a perfect storm?

Doug Casey: That’s a very good point. It seems like everything is starting to happen at once and at a hyperbolically accelerating rate. While the worlds of science and technology are approaching Ray Kurzweil’s utopian Singularity, the worlds of politics and sociology are approaching a dystopian anti-Singularity.

Let’s briefly look at the financial, economic, social, and political aspects of the potential collapse.

We’re absolutely en route to a gigantic financial crisis, featuring the destruction of the US dollar. And with it, the savings of a large percentage of the planet’s people will be impoverished because their savings are in dollars. Much of the value people thought they had in stocks, bonds, real estate, pensions, and insurance could disappear.

That’s bad enough, but what’s worse are the economic consequences. We’re likely to see wholesale unemployment, a collapse in business activity, and corporate bankruptcies, even while taxes go up radically. I’m increasingly of the opinion there will be a crack-up boom along the way; however, we might be entering that as we speak.

What’s even worse are the social ramifications, such as critical race theory, which emphasizes the differences between race groups, creating actual race hatred. One consequence of the financial and economic upsets will be riots like those of 2020. The mass migration of people from alien cultures who don’t share Western values into the US and Europe is destabilizing. The US has, in fact, become a multicultural domestic empire.

The political consequences are evident. The Biden people in Washington, D.C. are exactly the same personality types who took over Russia in 1917 or France in 1789. They aren’t going to let go of the apparatus of power now that they’ve got it. They will find a way to re-install themselves in 2024.

What about the military? The US spends something like $1 trillion on defense annually, but nobody knows for certain. These budgets are complicated; military spending is hidden here, there, and everywhere. It doesn’t defend the United States; it just antagonizes foreigners. It’s also interesting that the Department of Defense is now trying to root out conservative political views from the rank-and-file soldiers.

But let’s get back to what could collapse the populations of North America and Europe by over 50%. Perhaps Deagel is anticipating a serious collapse of complex society because food won’t be grown, processed, and sent to cities. Maybe COVID is seen as just a catalyst. Most people in today’s highly urbanized world, from cubicle dwellers to ghetto rats, are incapable of surviving for more than a week if supply chains break.

International Man: The report also discusses a prediction regarding a potential war that involves Russia and China against the US.

What are your thoughts on this? Is it likely that we’ll see a conflict of this kind during the 2020s?

Doug Casey: As I said earlier, a war, at least with China, seems inevitable. It will likely be fomented by the US because, as the economy goes bad, governments always look for somebody else, an outsider, to blame.

At this point—and I recognize this will outrage jingoists and nationalists—the US government is actually the most dangerous force on the face of the planet. Much more dangerous than the Chinese, the Russians, or anybody else. Why? The US government is unique in actively and aggressively looking for trouble absolutely everywhere, sticking its nose into everything. Only the US has troops in a hundred other countries and is fighting hot wars in several more.

It’s said, for instance, that the Russians are aggressors because they may retake the Crimea and the Donbas region. Most Americans, who can’t even find these places on the map, are unaware that Crimea had been part of Russia since it was taken from the Ottomans in the 18th century and is mostly populated by ethnic Russians. Nikita Kruschev arbitrarily transferred it from the Russian SSR to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954 for personal political reasons shortly after Stalin’s death. The current problem started only after the US fomented a coup d’etat, a so-called color revolution, in Ukraine in 2014. It then made sense for Putin to retake it, much like the US tried to overthrow Castro after he ousted Batista.

In any event, it’s a problem between Russia and Ukraine and none of our business. The Biden regime butting in is somewhat analogous to Russia threatening war over the US owning Puerto Rico. We don’t need a serious war with Russia over nothing.

Taiwan is similar. Historically, it’s just a secessionist Chinese province—or not. Perhaps it’s a government in exile. But no matter; these are meaningless legalisms. Frankly, I’m on the side of Taiwan, but it’s none of our business whether they go to war with each other. US government intervention could easily start a conflict with China. It might end with the sinking of a couple of US carrier groups, or it might evolve into World War 3.

And, of course, we’re still in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Plus Africa and God knows where else. The US is unnecessarily and stupidly whacking hornet’s nests everywhere in the world, bankrupting itself and making enemies, setting the stage for something really significant.

The US Gov’t Has $6 Trillion in Assets and $130 Trillion in Unfunded Liabilities

by Michael Maharrey via: Schiff Gold

Through the first six months of fiscal 2021, the US government ran a record $1.7 trillion budget deficit. And there is no end in sight to the borrowing and spending. Just last month, the national debt eclipsed $28 trillion for the first time. But it’s even worse than that.

A lot worse.

When you include unfunded liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare, that actual US debt stands at $123.11 trillion, according to the Financial State of the Union 2021 published by Truth in Accounting.

In order to pay off all of Uncle Sam’s liabilities, every taxpayer in the US would have to write a check for $796,000.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have it.

The federal government has $5.95 trillion in assets and $129.06 trillion in liabilities. If it were a private company, the US government would be bankrupt.

Here’s a breakdown of Uncle Sam’s liabilities in broad categories.

  • Medicare benefits – $55.12 trillion
  • Social Security obligations – $41.2 trillion
  • Publicly held debt – $21.08 trillion.
  • Military and civilian retirement benefits $9.41 trillion
  • Other liabilities – $2.25 trillion

According to Truth in Accounting’s analysis, the US government’s financial situation has deteriorated over the last year. Based on the latest available audited financial reports, its financial condition worsened by $9.84 trillion in 2020.

Interestingly, the Treasury Department only includes $175.30 billion of Social Security and Medicare liabilities on the federal balance sheet; according to government documents, recipients do not have the right to benefits beyond the benefits currently being paid and laws to reduce or stop future benefits can be passed at any time. Truth in Accounting assumes no changes in the current Social Security or Medicare schemes. This is a pretty safe assumption considering these programs are generally considered the “third rail” of politics. In other words, politicians dare not touch them.

Truth in Accounting’s conclusion feels a lot like an understatement.