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Some Links And An Open Thread 2024-146
From a recent email exchange with an MD:
Me: "How long will it take for me to get back into the saddle?"
MD: "Recovery time is often calculated as one month per decade of life."
Me: "Sigh!"
A few days ago a MoA reader I had not known of contacted me and offered to help. He is living in the same city as I do. I had thought that I would be able to do small stuff, like shopping, as soon as I was back home. Wrong – I didn't even make it half way :-(.
So yesterday Nico came by and did some grocery shopping for me. My fridge now filled! Great! Thanks!
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The issue below deserves a serious write up. Alas, I am currently not up to it. It was an incredibly irresponsible campaign and some people likely died over it.
Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic – Reuters
The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.
First thought: This wasn't a war. So why the f*** was the Pentagon at all involved in any such stuff?
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.
The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.
Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.
Note that the Chinese vaccine in question was not a 'dubious' mRNA vaccines from Pfizer or Moderna but a classic one consisting of attenuated viruses. Such a vaccine was/is very unlikely to cause harm. To claim otherwise will in the end have left vulnerable people without the protection a vaccine could have given them.
How much the anti-vax movement in the 'west' was a reaction to the anti-Chinese Pentagon manipulations in the Philippines and elsewhere? Such campaigns always 'leak' and have echoes.
Consider this the next time you read about defect or otherwise 'bad' Chinese products:
[T]he Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”
And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.
Then Special Operations Command Pacific General Jonathan Braga was at the head of the campaign. Braga is currently the commanding general of United States Army Special Operations Command.
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Sinovac hits back over reported US campaign to discredit China’s Covid-19 vaccine – SCMP
Chinese pharmaceutical company says Pentagon’s social media attack targeting its coronavirus jabs could lead to ‘enormous disaster’
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The above nonsense fitted into this larger strategy:
Xi Jinping claimed US wants China to attack Taiwan – (archived) FT
Chinese president told European Commission president that Washington was trying to goad Beijing into war
Xi issued the warning in a meeting with von der Leyen in April 2023 that was described to the Financial Times by several people. He said the US was trying to trick China into invading Taiwan, but that he would not take the bait. Another person said he had issued similar warnings to his officials.
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Some of these issues were new to even me:
What Western mainstream media won’t tell us about China – MR Online
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Sleepwalking Toward War – Foreign Affairs
Will America and China Heed the Warnings of Twentieth-Century Catastrophe?
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This week's Economist has a positive view on China ?!?
How worrying is the rapid rise of Chinese science? – Economist
If America wants to maintain its lead, it should focus less on keeping China down
America’s assassination attempt on Huawei is backfiring – Economist
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Wars are expensive:
Ukraine’s weapons bill soars as black marketeers cash in (archived) – The Times
The cost of some weapons has risen fivefold since Russia started the war — and in some ways Zelensky’s allies are to blame
bigger
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The Russian Defense Ministry currently lists in average some 2,000 Ukrainian casualties per day. That number is four to five times higher than was usual a year ago. Does Zelenski really believe he can sustain a war with such losses?
Ukraine-Russia Peace Is as Elusive as Ever. But in 2022 They Were Talking. – New York Times
Mr. Zelensky has pledged to keep fighting, describing his peace plan as one in which Russia withdraws from all of Ukraine’s territory, pays reparations and is punished for war crimes.
“If we don’t make progress this year, then we will try again next year,” Mr. Zelensky privately told a European counterpart recently, according to a European diplomat who was present. “And if we don’t make progress next year, we will try again the following year, and the one after that.”
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At the long end of a finally failed U.S. color revolution:
Georgia’s protesters vow to stay on streets until government falls – VOA
Collapsing Empire: Georgia and Russia Restore Diplomacy – Kit Klarenberg
Use as open thread …
Those following closely were aware of the gain of function sequencing of the virus well before lockdowns and mandates.
That was washed over and the narrative has been controlled ever since, with only a few public dissenters being able to hold ground. These dissenters are most highly qualified and informed people, and I will not link them because others should start at the bottom of the pile and use their own discretion.
The rest is surreal, a mixture of social control, corruption of nation principles, profit and much else besides.
It is hardly relevant if the virus purposefully released or by error, because there is no way to ensure veracity of any story. Even if a nation eventually admits to an error it is equally a covering of purposeful release.
Reminder that these people do not think like other people. There is no moral code, the end justifies the means, the public are imbecilic. Any use of any story for whatever own ends will be used, whether to mislead or gain advantage.
Empire vs socialism, capitalism vs communism, east vs west, nation vs nation, left vs right has to be put aside here. It does not work like that at this level.
As Lavrov linked, the only front which is obvious and from which the public is able to act if it wakes from its own illusions, fears or slumber, is the legal erosion of what were once taken if not as rights, then as unquestioned traditional and natural status quo of societies in the west.
It is not about reconquering, renewing or progessing, it is about preserving and defending the most vital and normal of values in any society.
If what planners had in mind was so good, they would present it openly for debate and not sneak through endless destructive interventionist legislation to reinforce their own vision and authority.
Without knowing it they have already lost, that they overlay new perception while erasing existing structure is improvisation at its worse, because it will lead to a circumstance of no way forward and no way back, the resulting imbalance only serving a very few, and possibly not even.
With all the existing organisation and technical ability mankind has fallen into a well known trap.
At times some here have written about economic cycles as if the idea was new, but in fact the idea has existed at least since the 14th century. I choose a random link:
https://qcurtius.com/2015/05/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-empires-ibn-khalduns-theory-of-social-development/
Apart from description of evolutionary theory, Ibn Khaldun also noted social/economic cycles.
At present our western societies are the mentioned weak and spoilt, being asymetrically conquered by the modern day version of nomadic forces. Nomadic does not recognise national borders, call that deep state or elite or whatever you choose.
Vladimir Putin’s recent speach was an exercise in moderation, but he must know those he confronts are absolutely ruthless and driven, that they will shoot first, that they expect others to also. It is a dangerous time.
Bevin, the hatred towards Russia is more complex than 1918. Previously the empires/monarchies were often competitive, and the peoples wary of foreign influence or powers. The USA was (and remains) the nomadic counter-monarchy of the day, initially with French help, and unsurprisingly the French then had that visited on themselves. There are so many overlapping currents that we would not know where to start, even if main European distancing occured after the revolution and cemented after the second world war. As shadowbanned once explained, some of this is ancient.
Framaz, you noted the historical complicity between China and USA. I have had similar discussions with people who should know this well, but the moment you point out obvious ties they just completely blank. They refuse or are unable to consider what is being said. That is how strong propaganda is. That said, and the deception of any own population being obvious enough, it still does not answer exactly the nature of the ties. They could be limited opportunistic mutually beneficial to an elite, could be conspiratorial, could involve temporary undefined agreement between state and commerce and so on.
Sorry not conversing, too much.
b 🙂
Posted by: Ornot | Jun 16 2024 15:56 utc | 49
From a couple of days ago, Alistair Crooke at Strategic Culture Foundation: https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/06/14/european-mutiny-at-the-illiberal-order/
I have been writing for some time that Europe (and the U.S.) are in a period of alternate revolution and civil war. History warns us that such conflicts tend to be extended, with peak episodes which are revolutionary (as the prevailing paradigm first cracks); yet which, in reality, are but alternate modes of the same – a ‘toggling’ between revolutionary peaks and the slow ‘slog’ of intense cultural war.
We are, I believe, in such an era.
I also have suggested that a nascent counter-revolution was slowly gathering – one defiantly unwilling to recant traditionalist moral values, nor prepared to submit to an oppressive illiberal international order posing as liberal.
What I had not expected was that the ‘first shoe to drop’ would occur in Europe – that it would be France that would be the first to break the illiberal mould. (I had thought that it would break first in the U.S.)
The European MEP election outcome may come to be viewed as the ‘first swallow’ signalling a substantive change in the weather. There are to be snap elections in Britain and France, and Germany (and well as much of Europe) is in a state of political disarray.
Have no illusions though! The cold reality is that western ‘Power Structures’ own the wealth, the key institutions in society and the levers of enforcement. To be plain: they hold the ‘commanding heights’. How will they manage a West edging towards moral, political and possibly financial collapse? Most likely by doubling-down, with no compromise.
And that predictable ‘doubling down’ will not necessarily be confined to fights within the ‘Colosseum’ arena. It will certainly impinge into high-risk geo-politics.
Undoubtedly, U.S. ‘structures’ will have been deeply disconcerted by the European election portent. What does the European anti-Establishment mutiny imply for those Ruling Structures in Washington, especially at a time when all the world sees Joe Biden visibly wobbling?
How will they distract ‘us’ from this first crack to their international Structural Edifice?
Already, there is U.S.-led military escalation – ostensibly connected to Ukraine – but whose objective clearly is to provoke Russia into retaliation. By incrementally escalating NATO violations of Russia’s strategic ‘red lines’, it seems that the U.S. hawks seek to gain the escalatory advantage over Moscow, leaving to Moscow the dilemma of how far to retaliate. The western élites do not fully believe the warnings from Moscow.
This provocation ploy might conceivably offer either a crafted image of the U.S. ‘winning’ (‘staring down Putin’), or alternatively, come to provide a pretext to postpone U.S. Presidential elections (as global tensions spike) – thereby giving the permanent state time to get its ‘ducks in lined up’ to manage an early Biden succession.
This calculus however, is contingent on how soon Ukraine implodes either militarily, or politically.
An earlier than expected Ukraine implosion might become the staging for a U.S. pivot to the Taiwan ‘front’ – a contingency that already is being prepared.
Why is Europe in mutiny?
The mutiny has arisen because many in the West now see only too clearly that the western ruling structure is no liberal project per se, but rather is an avowedly illiberal mechanical ‘control system’ (managerial technocracy) – that fraudulently poses as liberalism.
Clearly many in Europe are alienated from the Establishment. The causes may be multiple – Ukraine, immigration or falling living standards – yet all Europeans are versed in the narrative that history has bent to the long arc of liberalism (in the post-Cold War period).
Yet that has proved illusory. The reality has been control, surveillance, censorship, technocracy, lockdowns and climate emergency. Illiberalism, even quasi totalitarianism, in short. (von der Leyen took things further recently, arguing that “If you think of information manipulation as a virus, instead of treating an infection once it has taken hold … it is much better to vaccinate so that the body is inoculated”).
When then, did traditional liberalism (in the loosest definition) turn illiberal?
The ‘about-face’ came in the 1970s.
In 1970, Zbig Brzezinski (who was to become National Security Adviser to President Carter) published a book entitled: Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. In it, Brzezinski argued:
“The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society…dominated by an élite, unrestrained by traditional values…[and practicing] continuous surveillance over every citizen … [together with] manipulation of the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all people … [would become the new norm].”
Elsewhere he argued that “the nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organised life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state”. (i.e. Business cosmopolitanism as the future.)
David Rockefeller and the power brokers around him – together with his Bilderberg grouping – seized on Brzezinski’s insight to represent the third leg to ensuring that the 21st century would indeed be the ‘American Century’. The other two legs were control of oil resources and dollar hegemony.
Then followed a key report, Limits to Growth, (1971, Club of Rome (again a Rockefeller creation), which provided the deeply flawed ‘scientific’ underpinning to Brzezinski: It predicted an end to civilization, owing to population growth, combined with depleting resources (including, and especially, depleting energy resources).
This dire prediction was imputed to say that only economic experts, tech experts, leaders of multinational corporations and banks had the foresight and technological understanding to manage society – subject to the complexity of Limits to Growth.
Limits to Growth was a mistake. It was flawed, yet that did not matter: President Clinton’s adviser to the UN Rio Conference, Tim Wirth, admitted the error, yet cheerfully added: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory is wrong, we will be doing the ‘right thing’ in terms of economic policy”.
The proposition was wrong – but the policy was right! Economic policy was upended, based on faulty analysis.
The ‘godfather’ to the further pivot to totalitarianism (apart from David Rockefeller), was his protégé (and later, Klaus Schwab’s ‘indispensable adviser’), Maurice Strong. William Engdahl has written how “circles directly tied to David Rockefeller and Strong in the 1970s birthed a dazzling array of élite (private-invitation) organizations and think tanks”.
“These included the neo-Malthusian Club of Rome; the MIT-authored study: ‘Limits to Growth’, and the Trilateral Commission”.
The Trilateral Commission however, was the secretive heart to the matrix. “When Carter took office in January 1976, his Cabinet was drawn almost entirely from the ranks of Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission – to such an astonishing degree that some Washington insiders called it the ‘Rockefeller Presidency’”, Engdahl writes.
Craig Karpel, in 1977, also wrote:
“The presidency of the U.S. and the key cabinet departments of the federal government have been taken over by a private organization dedicated to the subordination of the domestic interests of the United States to the international interests of the multi-national banks and corporations. It would be unfair to say that the Trilateral Commission dominates the Carter Administration. The Trilateral Commission is the Carter Administration”.
“Every key U.S. Government foreign and economic policy post, since Carter, has been held by a Trilateral”, Engdahl writes. And so it continues – a matrix of overlapping membership that is little visible to the public, and which very loosely may be said to have constituted the ‘permanent state’.
Did it exist in Europe? Yes, branches across Europe.
Here lies the root to last weekend’s European ‘mutiny’: Many Europeans refuse the concept of a controlled universe. Many are defiantly unwilling to recant their traditional ways of life or their national allegiances.
The Rockefeller Faustian bargain of the 1970s had one narrow segment of the American ruling cadre seceding from the American nation to occupy a separate reality in which they disassembled an organic economy to the benefit of the oligarchy, with ‘compensation’ coming only from their embrace of identity politics and the ‘just’ rotation of some diversity into corporate executive suites.
Looked at in this way, the Rockefeller deal can be viewed as a parallel to the South African ‘arrangement’ that ended Apartheid: the Anglo-élites held onto economic resources and power, whilst the ANC, on the other side of the equation, got a Potemkin façade of their taking political power.
For Europeans, this Faustian ‘arrangement’ degrades Humans down to identity units occupying the spaces between markets, rather than markets being the ancillary to an organic human-centred economy, as Karl Polanyi wrote some 80 years ago in The Great Transformation.
He traced the turmoil of his era down to one cause: the belief that society can, and should, be organised through self-regulating markets. For him, this represented nothing less than an ontological break with much of human history. Prior to the 19th century, he insisted, the human economy had always been “embedded” in society: it was subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations.
The converse (Rockefeller’s technocratic illiberal cum identity paradigm) leads only to the attenuation of social bonds; the atomisation of community; to the lack of metaphysical content and thus to an absence of existential purpose and meaning.
Illiberalism is unfulfilling. It says: You don’t count. You don’t belong. Many Europeans evidently now get it.
Which somehow takes us back to the question of how the western strata will react to the nascent mutiny against the International Order that has been accelerating across the globe – and which has now surfaced in Europe, albeit with diverse colorations and some ideological baggage.
It is not likely – for now – that the Ruling Strata will compromise. Those who dominate tend to fear existentially: Either they keep dominating, or they lose all. They see only a zero sum game. Each side’s status becomes frozen. People increasingly meet only as ‘adversaries’. Co-citizens become dangerous threats, who must be opposed.
So, consider the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Leaders in the U.S. ruling strata comprise many zealous supporters of a Zionist Israel. As the International Order starts to crack, this segment of structural power in the U.S. is likely to be uncompromising too, fearing a zero-sum outcome.
There is an Israeli narrative to the war and a ‘rest of world narrative’ – and they don’t really meet. How to arrange things? The transformative effect of seeing ‘others’ differently – Israelis and Palestinians – presently is not on the table.
That conflict has the potential to get much worse – and for longer.
Might the ‘Ruling Strata’ – desperate for a certain outcome – seek to fold (and try to conceal) the horrors of this west-Asian struggle within a wider geo-strategic war? One in which greater multitudes become displaced (thus dwarfing a regional horror)?
Posted by: Jeremy Rhymings-Lang | Jun 16 2024 16:48 utc | 60
JR-L @1648
Many thanks for sharing Crooke’s astute analysis of the underpinnings lying beneath the surface of geopolitical reality. It was indeed a tour de force.
One small nitpick: As a semantic warrior, a recovering journalist, an historian by background education and consistent delving; my perspective is not quite puerile or juvenile as some would insist. So here goes: Crooke often pinions America’s leading Crime Clan…the Rottenfellers.
Okay, so denigrate this perspective as “non-professional”. The name Rockefeller, long past the time when Ida Tarbell presented her diagnosis of John D. Rottenfeller, the original and primary Robber Baron; that surname has taken on a veneer of respectability and even a status of honor.
Do we, as cultural warriors, need to maintain bourgeois standards of presumed decency?
In 1931, a lead article in a New York daily, celebrated enthusiastically that J.D. was America’s first billionaire…as he tossed dimes to Depression era children from his open luxury vehicle.
In ca 1920, the original Rottenfeller, the apotheosis of materialist values; donated mega-millions to Columbia University in order for that Manhattan Ivy institution to establish a template for other institutions of “higher” learning by establishing a college of education. Within a matter of just a few years, various private and public colleges and universities embraced the Columbia template and established their own “state normal schools” and similar institutions.
A veneer of philosophical and old Yankee ingenuity was created in the persons of John Dewey, an alleged “philosopher” and James Bryant Conant, of Puritan stock…to head up that new establishment.
In one of his more to the point statements, slightly paraphrasing here; Rottenfeller remarked: “We do not need these people (the underclasses) to learn Latin, Greek, serious history, geography, calculus and all of that. We merely need them to work in our factories, shops and offices as well as providing food”.
Precisely, the preferable sobriquet for the Rottenfeller Crime Clan, now numbering over 200 direct descendants of the old bass-turd himself; is based upon the Real-Eye-Zation that J.D.’s scheme was the DELIBERATE DUMBING-DOWN of the American people.
Edumacasion, any more is focused upon fun n’ games jocktivities, pep-rallies, study-halls along with “new” math, demolition of cursive writing and no longer even useful courses such as shop and home-ec courses. The administration of public schools is primarily in the hands of former jock-coaches, while the average teacher in all levels “sport” I.Q’s which only rarely surpass the 110 level and frequently do not even achieve that status.
Why?
As in the old Russian proverb that the fish rots from the head down; the “educators” themselves have been intellectually degraded in those Rottenfeller created teachers colleges and more plangently, by the U.$. Department of Education at the “zugspitze”; the various state Depts. of ed and downwards to the consortiums of selected superintendents of fake educations.
Some years ago, I chanced upon a 1906 Kansas testing regimen for candidates to graduate from EIGHTH grade. So I “took” that test, likely emerging by the proverbial skin of my teeth. Needles to say, that 8th grade achievement test for a mostly rural, one-room schoolhouse student body…was almost two decades before Rottenfeller’s scheme was fully developed.
So, even to Alistaire Crooke, a Brit, to judge by the given name; my suggestion is to begin employing the semantic weapon of “name calling” for the primary crime clan perps and their various minions, stooges and go-along to get-along types.
We The People need to take up those semantic cudgels against the enemies of humanity. Destroy their assumed dignity. Call a spade, a spade and “Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead”.
Posted by: aristodemos | Jun 16 2024 17:46 utc | 69
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