I think the punters are stirring, getting ansty. Normally letting politics of either persuasion slide by as we just get…
I think the punters are stirring, getting ansty. Normally letting politics of either persuasion slide by as we just get…
How quickly the pose of determined rectitude melted into that of a political streetwalker.
operation ‘Grim Beeper’
Operation ‘Grim Beeper’, brilliant planning and execution.
Great stuff from the past. Visuals and audio are great. —— F r. David – Words Don’t Come Easy
Rednecker
This needs to be high rotation.
Rukshan Fernando
@therealrukshan
Breaking: President Trump becomes first man fined by a court for paying back loans on time with interest to banks that want to do more business with him.
Just walked past the ruins of a little church dedicated to Saint Lucy, building in 1169, then remodelled in 1606 it was partially demolished in 1947 despite only suffering minor damage after being hit by a bomb in WWII, only the sacristy and three side chapels remain.
It’s always curious as to why people do things.
Intended to be the site of future archaeological excavations, as there are expectations there will be Roman ruins at a lower depth.
Almost inevitable.
You do not traduce Miss Planet, I tells ya. 🙂
Miss Maggie Dodgers of Hollyweird showing how it’s done … 🙂
Dr. John Campbell with Richard Hershman, an embalmer from Alabama.
White clots USA
One comment which caught my eye –
Sorry Rabzter. It wasn’t doing it for me.
LOL – for good ol’ Pol Dot – don’t steal his sunshine, rare as it is while languishing in a Kampuchean Jungle … 😕
Zafs – you’ll live
another incident at Rafah where hamas ‘police’ kill a boy trying to obtain food aid
To be fair, let’s look at the coded, rather duplicitously worded, expansionist ideas Putin has said publicly:
In 1991, every single Ukrainian province voted for independence.
Calling Russia multinational is a tell. The RSFSR which became the Russian Federation, was largely based on ethnicity. The USSR was multinational. Most of the Soviet Republics largely were not.
A 2021 Presidential address, ignoring the 1991 vote or the two-year war he can’t win. What’s certain now is if Ukraine doesn’t lose its sovereignty now, reunification is off the table for a very long time.
In May 2024, he (rather embarrassingly) claimed that Ukraine didn’t exist – the map he used on Russian TV had Ukraine clearly marked. In his 2021 Presidential address, he claimed that the Ukrainians were vassals to Moscow because they allied with Moscow to fight off the Poles and forced conversion from Orthodoxy to Catholicism.
Why lie about this or be a bipolar psychopath about it?
The claims about Crimea always being Russian until 1954 are just part of the regular whinge fest. In 1940, the easternmost part of Ukraine SSR was given to the RSFSR.
Again from the 2021 Presidential address:
“Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years,”
“On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it…“
“He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was.”
Which also includes the Baltic States and parts of Finland.
In June 2022, the Duma considered a bill that would revoke Soviet recognition of the independence of Lithuania, raised by a United Russia MP.
Tom 17/2 @ 12:35pm
Agreed. Further more the Germans were in Papua New Guinea.
The arguement about sacrificing our people runs strongly amongst the Irish.
Keating had the strong Irish emotion of anti English.
He was the modern embodyment of Jack Lang.
You can hear Lang in the veracity of his verbal assaults.
Like many Irish, European migrants, with their anti English sentiment, and Catholics, went to far in panning the English to adopt socialism.
I met my father’s countrymen in England, many said they were British. They were well treated.
Dr. John Campbell interviews Ros Nealon-Cook, an Australian former psychologist.
COVID Psychological Manipulation: Unpacked
Keating was not a debt-dodging commo. Despite getting into a budget black hole, he never tried to default and threw pens at the dopey cabinet members who blew too much money.
Keating was mediocre at best. Lang is literally the worst politician we have ever had.
The modern lionisation of Lang by assorted left-wing idiots is hilarious and tragic.
She herself refers to her residence as being in Cremorne.
Okay, now that I type that I acknowledge she may well be in error since she gullibly believes whatever she imagines a lawyer says – the professional heft of a real estate agent would be from her muddled perspective position as dazzling as a lawyer. Even a barista…
Anyway, I was going to ask if you had been to Goddam Murphy’s lately.
Litt – many of us have English ‘eritage, I tells ya.
Hence my love of English Roses, being as they are, the best. 🙂
Re this mornings discussion of the Labor party personnel.
Wong went through Scotch on a scalar ship, Gillard went to eastern suburbs state school – traditional English population, – I do. Not know what it is amongst the higher income Conservative areas that they want to hide where they came from, esp their school.
One thing I have noticed is the international labor parties promote candidates from broken homes.
This is the norm.
The vulgarity in all of this is they live with their family, the children and a big neat house and send their children to an expensive private school while trashing these people who lived their lives like this.
The way Catholics are continually attacked by Labor, abc, channel 9 , smh – it good ol fashioned secularism. But at the moment it’s gone to far and it’s heading to propagandaism – this is where people are murdered.
Exotic propulsion. Reduce dimensions to zero!
There was that painting of a priest being shot after Pell was falsely gaoled.*
*His accuser committed perjury at least four times and the DPP argued at the High Court that the High Court should ignore his testimony but still find Pell guilty.
Hmmm
Fast Car Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs duet at the Grammzys. Sick as. Again thanks to Johanna back in the week for putting this on the radar.
Not to be missed.
Dr. John Campbell interviews Ros Nealon-Cook, an Australian former psychologist.
Dot 17/2 @ 12:52
Life with purpose. There is allways purpose to better ourselves. In Australia it’s for everyone who wants a 700m2 block should be able to afford one.
The houses should be beautiful and spacious leading into a cool garden.
We should be moving in land, greening the interior, having rivers running all year.
In Europe it’s beautiful housing as in the best streets, everyone with a socially productive job, continuing to write more symphonies, better books, better science, better cars and transport.
Totally agree Louis.
There is a peace dividend, if only we let ourselves have one.
Tracy Chapman has a beautiful soul and vibe. It is evident. Good on Luke Combs covering that Fast Car song and getting it back on the map.
BON 17/2 @ 1:13
Personally Milosovich plan has merit and would have stopped a lot of problems.
In Europe, such moves are the only humane option.
Moving people to their land or populations is the best alternative.
Violence and death is the other alternative.
I liked Slobodan Milosevic. He was fully onto shit. Shit Globalists threw him under a bus.
No, China is not going to do that. The rationale for the ‘nine-dash line’ claim, beyond the resources and the fact that it predates the PRC, is to make it able to interdict international shipping in those waters for the reasons provided by UNCLOS.
Interesting
More on the Budapest Memo.
https://www.city.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2022/03/ukraine-war-what-is-the-budapest-memorandum-and-why-has-russias-invasion-torn-it-up
Louis Litt
Feb 18, 2024 12:09 AM
BON 17/2 @ 1:13
The strange thing is what nobody talks about is that the opposite of moving out the Albanians happened.
The Kosovar Albanians moved out the genuine native Serbs after they have taken over.
The remaining Serbs living there under suffrage.
Thank you US.
That isn’t Navalny in the video but an associate of his, Vladimir Ashurkov.
And? Well, if you are meeting with intelligence operatives in order to gather support for a colour revolution you better make sure your life insurance is current. Or, in other words, playing these sorts of games has consequences.
And?
Yeah and?’
Seriously, you’re now defending Putin’s dictatorship by suggesting , and so, to Putin’s underhanded activities around the world while suggesting these games have consequences?
Really?
No, I’m saying that if you are engaging with foreign intelligence operatives so as to overturn the government, expect to be imprisoned at the very least if you are caught.
Was Lavrov around? I love that bloke. He does not take shit. I can see why Vlad Putin employs him. Lavrov and that Nuland hag a few years back. Funny as. He handed her ass to her.
Define what you mean by “overturning the government”?
Overturning the government at the ballot box?
You don’t meet with intelligence operatives if you plan to win at the ‘ballot box’.
The Tucker Carlson interview with Cyber Security expert Mike Benz is one of the most interesting if you want to know how US agencies get involved in misinformation and censorship etc.
Dover> does the rejection of this ruling contradict your statement above? What international law will China follow, if not the one used by its neighbours?
Seriously, you’re saying that? $20 million dollars would crash the Russian government?
Here’s the problem, Dover. Those of us who criticise Putin’s dictatorship also are critical of what the Demons are doing to the US.
You don’t have that luxury because by giving Putin a thumbs up, by default you’re also doing the same with respect to the demons. You can’t criticise the underhanded tactics of the demonrat party.
Observation.
Travelling by ferry Bonifacio Corsica (France) to Santa Teresa Gallura Sardinia (Italy) there was zero screening by government officials.
Sardinia to Sicily sniffer dogs for foot passengers and the vehicles were all being checked underneath with mirrors on sticks.
No idea what the security issues might be.
And in the endless quest for zero, plastic cabin keys are now replaced by paper.
Almost my entire music collection is now on my phone. The beauty of it is that I don’t need internet to play it.
Week In Pictures.
he Kosovar Albanians moved out the genuine native Serbs after they have taken over
Albanians. Interesting. While I was in Yugo many years ago the Abanians were buying up the land as the country became industrialised and the Yugos moved to the cities. The Yugos I mixed with hated the Albanians as they had converted to Islam under the Ottomans while the Serbs, Macedonians and Croats stuck to Christianity with all the killings and oppression by the Turks. I remember one commenting on the Macedonian traditional female attire of loads of metal and cloth as a way to make it difficult for the Turks to rape them. I’d be interested in any other views on all this.
Haha – excellent WIP. Thanks Tom.
Personally Milosovich plan has merit and would have stopped a lot of problems.
He was doing in the 1990’s what countries had done all around the world up until the 1970’s.
Forced relocation of a population & those who didn’t move were butchered.
Here’s the thing.
If he did it post Sept 11, the west would have run dead on it.
I’m still spinning out.
341 MPH: Bob Tasca III Shatters Own Record At PRO Superstar Shootout
It’s Remarkable
Multiple upticks – Indolent puts up stuff that comes from sites some don’t like – it’s not the message in that case, it’s the messenger.
There’s a bit of that around.
Back to bed.
Mornin’ all.
Jacksy’s reason for getting up in the morning. 😀
Not sure what show it is but Aaron Berg will be on one of those Foxnews Saturday night programs today, 2pm Sydney time.
Canadian born, NY based Jewish comic.
Funny bastard, does the crowd work since Patrice O’Neal.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/02/if-this-judgment-sticks-every-developer-must-be/
You’d think that Arfur would be able to afford a dentist once in a while.
Dot !
Reddit has entered into a $60mm licensing deal with an ‘unnamed large AI company’ allowing it to train its large language models using content published on Reddit’s platform. The news follows a wave of licensing deals struck by companies like OpenAI which aim to secure diverse, high-quality sources of information for their AI chatbots to provide more accurate and contextually-relevant responses.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-16/reddit-is-said-to-sign-ai-content-licensing-deal-ahead-of-ipo?srnd=premium&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Prepare for a lot of meme answers and answers written by brony pedo furries.
They really lowballed themselves.
“Buy ‘em out, boys!”
Yesterday Trump was down $350 million.
Today he’s up $6 billion.
SEC Clears Trump’s $10 Billion Social Media Deal (16 Feb)
This is going to produce some awesome head explosions in all the right places I should think.
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/02/esg-comes-undone-blackrock-jp-morgan-abandon-climate-action-100/
Rantz: Democrats add ‘Hamas amendment’ to Holocaust education bill
Tucker Carlson has just released a new interview which is quite explosive. It is with a security expert who reveals the extensive efforts of central intelligence organisations in the USA to control social media which is considered the greatest threat to centralised power. I will post it later when I am on another device.
I believe it confirms the need to oppose the introduction of the ACMA legislation here which purports to control “ disinformation”, “misinformation” & the so-called “Mali formation”.
“Malinformation”
Bourne – I see that you have read the Mike Benz / Tucker Carlson interview. Yes – amazing & scary. Havnt noticed if it has been posted here yet – but will do it anyway later on today.
Okay, 60 mn per year.
Reddit has never turned a profit.
Let’s say that 60 mn per year is entirely profit, then they’re not really worth more than 1 bn USD.
That’s a way away from 15 bn.
Reddit has been around for 20 years.
Are you going to buy stock to wait X years when TikTok is eating their lunch and that of YouTube?
Back in June 2023, Reddit had 2000 staff.
I’ll keep on saying it – users are banned for having independent thought and there are hundreds of millions of inactive throwaway accounts.
Social media is the new control mechanism. Look up how many CIA associates are in social media (but also television and print).
I commend this work, but, well duhhhhhh.
Have you ever read how TIA works? It is Orwellian.
Those in need of some Sunday morning laughs, plus trenchant debunking of the cult of ‘experts’, will enjoy David Cole at Taki’s article here.
A sample:
Did I mention that it’s not very PC? 🙂
Self-reported Reddit salaries:
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Reddit-Salaries-E796358.htm
Which is actually defined as inconvenient truth.
ALX
@alx
Lawfare will backfire
Will Chamberlain
@willchamberlain
Remember when Ukraine had this trans psycho go out and gloat about how they were going to make Gonzalo Lira “pay for his crimes”
The crimes were speech, and he died for them
Not Jerome Powell
@alifarhat79
Show me a man that gets rich by being a politician and I’ll show you a crook. -Harry Truman
‘Mr. Wonderful’ slams Trump ruling: ‘You might as well find guilty every real estate developer on Earth’
It is with a security expert who reveals the extensive efforts of central intelligence organisations in the USA to control social media
This is a re-hash of what Taibbi & Shellenberger have reported on for the past 18 months.
Biden plots to deepen the deep state in a bid to ‘thwart’ a victorious Trump’s capacity to govern -report
Beyond Orwell’s 1984, 5G and the launching of 6G: “It’s Easy to Take Down a Society that is Digital”
In that case Trump must be the only honest politician in US. That must be why the rest of them cannot allow him back into the White House, the disparity would be too stark.
Thousands of wealthy Californians are fleeing to celeb haven dubbed the ‘Beverly Hills of Arizona’, where homes cost as much as $75 MILLION, to escape soaring crime and high taxes
johanna @ 08:05am
Hahaha. If only some could write similar about our injuns.
John LeFevre
@JohnLeFevre
Fani Willis has a room temperature IQ.
She makes $110,000 a year.
And yet, she is worth $8 million.
In court, she admitted to several finance-related felonies.
The DOJ could take her down in a day if they wanted to.
I was trying to find a chapter in one of the Putin books I have with referred to Khodorkovsky, the former Yukos chief.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky
Putin was doing a regular catchup with all the biggest robber barons when Khodorkovsky unexpectedly starts into a power point presentation.
He runs through a brief slide show on what steps Putin should take to transition Russia into a “real democracy”.
Some of the oligarchs nod with varying levels of enthusiasm.
Other go pale wondering WTF one of the richest amongst them is committing suicide.
Shortly thereafter his troubles begin.
This goes to show that nothing good comes from power point.
Nasrallah threatens Hezbollah rockets can reach ‘anywhere’ in Israel as IDF braces for war in north
The Tucker Carlson interview with Mike Benz:
(I will post this in two tranches)
Transcript of the video:
Tucker Carlson:
The defining fact of the United States is freedom of speech. To the extent this country is actually exceptional, it’s because we have the first amendment in the Bill of Rights. We have freedom of conscience. We can say what we really think.
There’s no hate speech exception to that just because you hate what somebody else thinks. You cannot force that person to be quiet because we’re citizens, not slaves. But that right, that foundational right that makes this country what it is, that right from which all of the rights flow is going away at high speed in the face of censorship. Now, modern censorship, there’s no resemblance to previous censorship regimes in previous countries and previous eras. Our censorship is affected on the basis of fights against disinformation and malformation. And the key thing to know about this is that they’re everywhere. And of course, this censorship has no reference at all to whether what you’re saying is true or not.
In other words, you can say something that is factually accurate and consistent with your own conscience. And in previous versions of America, you had an absolute right to say those things. but now – because someone doesn’t like them or because they’re inconvenient to whatever plan the people in power have, they can be denounced as disinformation and you could be stripped of your right to express them either in person or online. In fact, expressing these things can become a criminal act and is it’s important to know, by the way, that this is not just the private sector doing this.
These efforts are being directed by the US government, which you pay for and at least theoretically owned. It’s your government, but they’re stripping your rights at very high speed. Most people understand this intuitively, but they don’t know how it happens. How does censorship happen? What are the mechanics of it?
Mike Benz is, we can say with some confidence, the expert in the world on how this happens. Mike Benz had the cyber portfolio at the State Department. He’s now executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, and we’re going to have a conversation with him about a very specific kind of censorship. By the way, we can’t recommend strongly enough, if you want to know how this happens, Mike Benz is the man to read.
But today we just want to talk about a specific kind of censorship and that censorship that emanates from the fabled military industrial complex, from our defense industry and the foreign policy establishment in Washington. That’s significant now because we’re on the cusp of a global war, and so you can expect censorship to increase dramatically. And so with that, here is Mike Benz, executive director of Foundation for Freedom online. Mike, thanks so much for joining us and I just can’t overstate to our audience how exhaustive and comprehensive your knowledge is on this topic. It’s almost unbelievable. And so if you could just walk us through how the foreign policy establishment and defense contractors and DOD and just the whole cluster, the constellation of defense related publicly funded institutions, stripped from us,
Mike Benz:
Our freedom of speech. Sure. One of the easiest ways to actually start the story is really with the story of internet freedom and it switched from internet freedom to internet censorship because free speech on the internet was an instrument of statecraft almost from the outset of the privatization of the internet in 1991. We quickly discovered through the efforts of the Defense Department, the State Department and our intelligence services, that people were using the internet to congregate on blogs and forums. And at this point, free speech was championed more than anybody by the Pentagon, the State Department, and our sort of CIA cutout NGO blob architecture as a way to support dissident groups around the world in order to help them overthrow authoritarian governments as they were sort of build essentially the internet free speech allowed kind of insta regime change operations to be able to facilitate the foreign policy establishments State Department agenda.
Google is a great example of this. Google began as a DARPA grant by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford PhDs, and they got their funding as part of a joint CIA NSA program to chart how “birds of a feather flock together online” through search engine aggregation. And then one year later they launched Google and then became a military contractor. Quickly thereafter, they got Google Maps by purchasing a CIA satellite software essentially, and the ability to use free speech on the internet as a way to circumvent state control over media over in places like Central Asia and all around the world, was seen as a way to be able to do what used to be done out of CIA station houses or out of embassies or consulates in a way that was totally turbocharged. And all of the internet free speech technology was initially created by our national security state – VPNs, virtual private networks to hide your IP address, tour the dark web, to be able to buy and sell goods anonymously, end-to-end encrypted chats.
All of these things were created initially as DARPA projects or as joint CIA NSA projects to be able to help intelligence backed groups, to overthrow governments that were causing a problem to the Clinton administration or the Bush administration or the Obama administration. And this plan worked magically from about 1991 until about 2014 when there began to be an about face on internet freedom and its utility.
Now, the high watermark of the sort of internet free speech moment was the Arab Spring in 2011, 2012 when you had this one by one – all of the adversary governments of the Obama Administration: Egypt, Tunisia, all began to be toppled in Facebook revolutions and Twitter revolutions. And you had the State Department working very closely with the social media companies to be able to keep social media online during those periods. There was a famous phone call from Google’s Jared Cohen to Twitter to not do their scheduled maintenance so that the preferred opposition group in Iran would be able to use Twitter to win that election.
So free speech was an instrument of statecraft from the national security state to begin with. All of that architecture, all the NGOs, the relationships between the tech companies and the national security state had been long established for freedom. In 2014, after the coup in Ukraine, there was an unexpected counter coup where Crimea and the Donbas broke away and they broke away with essentially a military backstop that NATO was highly unprepared for at the time. They had one last Hail Mary chance, which was the Crimea annexation vote in 2014. And when the hearts and minds of the people of Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation, that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet in the eyes of NATO – as they saw it. The fundamental nature of war changed at that moment. And NATO at that point declared something that they first called the Gerasimov doctrine, which was named after this Russian military, a general who they claimed made a speech that the fundamental nature of war has changed.
(Gerasimov doctrine is the idea that) you don’t need to win military skirmishes to take over central and eastern Europe. All you need to do is control the media and the social media ecosystem because that’s what controls elections. And if you simply get the right administration into power, they control the military. So it’s infinitely cheaper than conducting a military war to simply conduct an organized political influence operation over social media and legacy media. An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into a organized political warfare outfit, essentially infrastructure that was created initially stationed in Germany and in Central and eastern Europe to create psychological buffer zones, basically to create the ability to have the military work with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda and then to censor domestic, right-wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.
So you had the systematic targeting by our state department, by our intelligence community, by the Pentagon of groups like Germany’s AFD, the alternative for Deutsche Land there and for groups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Now, when Brexit happened in 2016, that was this crisis moment where suddenly they didn’t have to worry just about central and eastern Europe anymore. It was coming westward, this idea of Russian control over hearts and minds. And so Brexit was June, 2016. The very next month at the Warsaw Conference, NATO formally amended its charter to expressly commit to hybrid warfare as this new NATO capacity. So they went from basically 70 years of tanks to this explicit capacity building for censoring tweets if they were deemed to be Russian proxies. And again, it’s not just Russian propaganda this, these were now Brexit groups or groups like Mateo Salvini in Italy or in Greece or in Germany or in Spain with the Vox Party.
And now at the time NATO was publishing white papers saying that the biggest threat NATO faces is not actually a military invasion from Russia. It’s losing domestic elections across Europe to all these right-wing populace groups who, because they were mostly working class movements, were campaigning on cheap Russian energy at a time when the US was pressuring this energy diversification policy. And so they made the argument after Brexit, now the entire rules-based international order would collapse unless the military took control over media because Brexit would give rise to Frexit in France with marine Lapin just Brexit in Spain with a Vox party to Italy exit in Italy, to Grexit in Germany, to Grexit in Greece, the EU would come apart, so NATO would be killed without a single bullet being fired. And then not only that, now that NATO’s gone, now there’s no enforcement arm for the International Monetary fund, the IMF or the World Bank. So now the financial stakeholders who depend on the battering ram of the national security state would basically be helpless against governments around the world. So from their perspective, if the military did not begin to censor the internet, all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the modern world after World War II would collapse. So you can imagine the reaction,
Tucker Carlson:
Wait, ask
Mike Benz:
Later. Donald Trump won the 2016 election. So
Tucker Carlson:
Well, you just told a remarkable story that I’ve never heard anybody explain as lucidly and crisply as you just did. But did anyone at NATO or anyone at the State Department pause for a moment and say, wait a second, we’ve just identified our new enemy as democracy within our own countries. I think that’s what you’re saying. They feared that the people, the citizens of their own countries would get their way, and they went to war against that.
Mike Benz:
Yes. Now there’s a rich history of this dating back to the Cold War. The Cold War in Europe was essentially a similar struggle for hearts and minds of people, especially in central and Eastern Europe in these sort of Soviet buffer zones. And starting in 1948, the national security state was really established. Then you had the 1947 Act, which established the Central Intelligence Agency. You had this world order that had been created with all these international institutions, and you had the 1948 UN Declaration on human rights, which forbid the territorial acquisition by military force. So you can no longer run a traditional military occupation government in the way that we could in 1898, for example, when we took the Philippines, everything had to be done through a sort of political legitimization process whereby there’s some ratification from the hearts and minds of people within the country.
Now, often that involves simply puppet politicians who are groomed as emerging leaders by our State Department. But the battle for hearts and minds had been something that we had been giving ourselves a long moral license leash, if you will, since 1948. One of the godfathers of the CIA was George Kennan. So, 12 days after we rigged the Italian election in 1948 by stuffing ballot boxes and working with the mob, we published a memo called the Inauguration of organized political warfare where Kennan said, “listen, it’s a mean old world out there. We at the CIA just rigged the Italian election. We had to do it because if the Communist won, maybe there’d never be another election in Italy again, but it’s really effective, guys. We need a department of dirty tricks to be able to do this around the world. And this is essentially a new social contract we’re constructing with the American people because this is not the way we’ve conducted diplomacy before, but we are now forbidden from using the war department in 1948.”
They also renamed the war department to the Defense Department. So again, as part of this diplomatic onslaught for political control, rather than it looking like it’s overt military control, but essentially what ended up happening there is we created this foreign domestic firewall. We said that we have a department of dirty tricks to be able to rig elections, to be able to control media, to be able to meddle in the internal affairs of every other plot of dirt in the country.
But this sort of sacred dirt in which the American homeland sits, they are not allowed to operate there. The State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA are all expressly forbidden from operating on US soil. Of course, this is so far from the case, it’s not even funny, but that’s because of a number of laundering tricks that they’ve developed over 70 years of doing this.
But essentially there was no moral quandary at first with respect to the creation of the censorship industry. When it started out in Germany and in Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia and in Sweden and Finland, there began to be a more diplomatic debate about it after Brexit, and then it became full throttle when Trump was elected. And what little resistance there was was washed over by the rise in saturation of Russiagate, which basically allowed them to not have to deal with the moral ambiguities of censoring your own people.
Because if Trump was a Russian asset, you no longer really had a traditional free speech issue. It was a national security issue. It was only after Russiagate died in July, 2019 when Robert Mueller basically choked on the stand for three hours and revealed he had absolutely nothing. After two and a half years of investigation that the foreign to domestic switcheroo took place where they took all of this censorship architecture, spanning DHS, the FBI, the CIA, the DOD, the DOJ, and then the thousands of government funded NGO and private sector mercenary firms were all basically transited from a foreign predicate, a Russian disinformation predicate to a democracy predicate by saying that disinformation is not just a threat when it comes from the Russians, it’s actually an intrinsic threat to democracy itself.
And so by that, they were able to launder the entire democracy promotion regime change toolkit just in time for the 2020 election.
Tucker Carlson:
I mean, it’s almost beyond belief that this has happened. I mean, my own father worked for the US government in this business in the information war against the Soviet Union and was a big part of that. And the idea that any of those tools would be turned against American citizens by the US government, I think I want to think was absolutely unthinkable in say 1988. And you’re saying that there really hasn’t been anyone who’s raised objections and it’s absolutely turned inward to manipulate and rig our own elections as we would in say Latvia.
Mike Benz:
Yeah. Well, as soon as the democracy predicate was established, you had this professional class of professional regime change artists and operatives that is the same people who argued that we need to bring democracy to Yugoslavia, and that’s the predicate for getting rid of Miloševi? or any other country around the world where we basically overthrow governments in order to preserve democracy. Well, if the democracy threat is homegrown now, then that becomes, then suddenly these people all have new jobs moving on the US side, and I can go through a million examples of that. But one thing on what you just mentioned, which is that from their perspective, they just weren’t ready for the internet. 2016 was really the first time that social media had reached such maturity that it began to eclipse legacy media. I mean, this was a long time coming. I think folks saw this building from 2006 through 2016.
Internet 1.0 didn’t even have social media from 1991 to 2004, there was no social media at all. 2004, Facebook came out 2005, Twitter, 2006, YouTube 2007, the smartphone. And in that initial period of social media, nobody was getting subscriber ships at the level where they actually competed with legacy news media. But over the course of being so initially even these dissonant voices within the us, even though they may have been loud in moments, they never reached 30 million followers. They never reached a billion impressions a year type thing. As a uncensored mature ecosystem allowed citizen journalists and independent voices to be able to outcompete legacy news media. This induced a massive crisis both in our military and in our state department in intelligence services. I’ll give you a great example of this in 2019 at meeting of the German Marshall Fund, which is an institution that goes back to the US basically, I don’t want to say bribe, but essentially the soft power economic soft power projection in Europe as part of the reconstruction of European governments after World War ii, to be able to essentially pay them with Marshall Fund dollars and then in return, they basically were under our thumb in terms of how they reconstructed.
But the German Marshall Fund held a meeting in 2019. They held a million of these, frankly, but this was when a four star general got up on the panel and posed the question, what happens to the US military? What happens to the national security state when the New York Times is reduced to a medium sized Facebook page? And he posed this thought experiment as an example of we’ve had these gatekeepers, we’ve had these bumper cars on democracy in the form a century old relationship with legacy media institutions. I mean, our mainstream media is not in any shape or form even from its outset, independent from the national security state, from the state Department, from the war department, you had the initial, all of the initial broadcast news companies, NBC, ABC and CBS were all created by Office of War Information Veterans from the War department’s effort in World War ii.
You had these Operation Mockingbird relationships from the 1950s through the 1970s. Those continued through the use of the National Endowment for Democracy and the privatization of intelligence capacities in the 1980s under Reagan. There’s all sorts of CIA reading room memos you can read even on cia.gov about those continued media relations throughout the 1990s. And so you always had this backdoor relationship between the Washington Post, the New York Times, and all of the major broadcast media corporations. By the way, Rupert Murdoch and Fox are part of this as well. Rupert Murdoch was actually part of the National Endowment for Democracy Coalition in 1983 when it was as a way to do CIA operations in an aboveboard way after the Democrats were so ticked off at the CIA for manipulating student movements in the 1970s. But essentially there was no CIA intermediary to random citizen journalist accounts. There was no Pentagon backstop.
You couldn’t get a story killed. You couldn’t have this favors for favors relationship. You couldn’t promise access to some random person with 700,000 followers who’s got an opinion on Syrian gas. And so this induced, and this was not a problem for the initial period of social media from 2006 to 2014 because there were never dissident groups that were big enough to be able to have a mature enough ecosystem on their own. And all of the victories on social media had gone in the way of where the money was, which was from the State Department and the Defense Department and the intelligence services. But then as that maturity happened, you now had this situation after the 2016 election where they said, okay, now the entire international order might come undone. 70 years of unified foreign policy from Truman until Trump are now about to be broken.
And we need the same analog control systems. We had to be able to put bumper cars on bad stories or bad political movements through legacy media relationships and contacts we now need to establish and consolidate within the social media companies. And the initial predicate for that was Russiagate. But then after Russiagate died and they used a simple democracy promotion predicate, then it gave rise to this multi-billion dollar censorship industry that joins together the military industrial complex, the government, the private sector, the civil society organizations, and then this vast cobweb of media allies and professional fact checker groups that serve as this sort of sentinel class that surveys every word on the internet.
This is a re-hash of what Taibbi & Shellenberger have reported on for the past 18 months.
Yes – but many – like me – may not have read Taibbi et al.
Here is the second tranche:
Tucker Carlson:
Thank you again for this almost unbelievable explanation of why this is happening. Can you give us an example of how it happens and just pick one among, I know countless examples of how the national security state lies to the population, censors the truth in real life.
Mike Benz:
Yeah, so we have this state department outfit called the Global Engagement Center, which was created by a guy named Rick Stengel who described himself as Obama’s propaganda in chief. He was the undersecretary for public affairs essentially, which is the liaison office role between the state department and the mainstream media. So this is basically the exact nexus where government talking points about war or about diplomacy or statecraft get synchronized with mainstream media.
Tucker Carlson:
May I add something to that as someone I know – Rick Stengel. He was at one point a journalist and Rick Stengel has made public arguments against the First Amendment and against Free Speech.
Mike Benz:
Yeah, he wrote a whole book on it and he published an op-Ed in 2019. He wrote a whole book on it and he made the argument that we just went over here that essentially the Constitution was not prepared for the internet and we need to get rid of the First Amendment accordingly. And he described himself as a free speech absolutist when he was the managing editor of Time Magazine. And even when he was in the State Department under Obama, he started something called the Global Engagement Center, which was the first government censorship operation within the federal government, but it was foreign facing, so it was okay. Now, at the time, they used the homegrown ISIS predicate threat for this. And so it was very hard to argue against the idea of the State Department having this formal coordination partnership with every major tech platform in the US because at the time there were these ISIS attacks that were, and we were told that ISIS was recruiting on Twitter and Facebook.
And so the Global Engagement Center was established essentially to be a state department entanglement with the social media companies to basically put bumper cars on their ability to platform accounts. And one of the things they did is they created a new technology, which it’s called Natural Language processing. It is a artificial intelligence machine learning ability to create meaning out of words in order to map everything that everyone says on the internet and create this vast topography of how communities are organized online, who the major influences are, what they’re talking about, what narratives are emerging or trending, and to be able to create this sort of network graph in order to know who to target and how information moves through an ecosystem. And so they began plotting the language, the prefixes, the suffixes, the popular terms, the slogans that ISIS folks were talking about on Twitter.
When Trump won the election in 2016, everyone who worked at the State Department was expecting these promotions to the White House National Security Council under Hillary Clinton, who I should remind viewers was also Secretary of State under Obama, actually ran the State Department. But these folks were all expecting promotions on November 8th, 2016 and were unceremoniously put out of jobs by a guy who was a 20 to one underdog according to the New York Times the day of the election. And when that happened, these State Department folks took their special set of skills, coercing governments for sanctions. The State Department led the effort to sanction Russia over the Crimea annexation. In 2014, these State Department diplomats did an international roadshow to pressure European governments to pass censorship laws to censor the right-wing populous groups in Europe and as a boomerang impact to censor populace groups who were affiliated in the us.
So you had folks who went from the state department directly, for example, to the Atlanta Council, which was this major facilitator between government to government censorship. The Atlanta Council is a group that is one of Biden’s biggest political backers. They bill themselves as NATO’s Think Tank. So they represent the political census of NATO. And in many respects, when NATO has civil society actions that they want to be coordinated to synchronize with military action or region, the Atlantic Council essentially is deployed to consensus build and make that political action happen within a region of interest to nato.
Now, the Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on its board. A lot of people don’t even know that seven CIA directors are still alive, let alone all concentrated on the board of a single organization that’s kind of the heavyweight in the censorship industry. They get annual funding from the Department of Defense, the State Department, and CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy.
The Atlantic Council in January, 2017 moved immediately to pressure European governments to pass censorship laws to create a transatlantic flank tank on free speech in exactly the way that Rick Stengel essentially called for to have us mimic European censorship laws. One of the ways they did this was by getting Germany to pass something called Nets DG in August, 2017, which was essentially kicked off the era of automated censorship in the us. What Nets DG required was, unless social media platforms wanted to pay a $54 million fine for each instance of speech, each post left up on their platform for more than 48 hours that had been identified as hate speech, they would be fined basically into bankruptcy when you aggregate 54 million over tens of thousands of posts per day. And the safe haven around that was if they deployed artificial intelligence based censorship technologies, which had been again created by DARPA to take on ISIS to be able to scan and ban speech automatically.
And this gave rise to what I call these weapons of mass deletion. These are essentially the ability to sensor tens of millions of posts with just a few lines of code. And the way this is done is by aggregating basically the field of censorship science fuses together two disparate groups of study, if you will. There’s the sort of political and social scientists who are the sort of thought leaders of what should be censored, and then there are the sort of quants, if you will. These are the programmers, the computational data scientists, computational Linguistics University.
There’s over 60 universities now who get federal government grants to do the censorship work and the censorship preparation work where what they do is they create these code books of the language that people use the same way they did for isis. They did this, for example, with COVID. They created these COVID lexicons of what dissident groups were saying about mandates, about masks, about vaccines, about high profile individuals like Tony Fauci or Peter Daszak or any of these protected VIPs and individuals whose reputations had to be protected online.
And they created these code books, they broke things down into narratives. The Atlanta Council, for example, was a part of this government funded consortium, something called the Virality Project, which mapped 66 different narratives that dissidents we’re talking about around covid, everything from COVID origins to vaccine efficacy. And then they broke down these 66 claims into all the different factual sub claims. And then they plugged these into these essentially machine learning models to be able to have a constant world heat map of what everybody was saying about covid. And whenever something started trend that was bad for what the Pentagon wanted or was bad for what Tony Fauci wanted, they were able to take down tens of millions of posts. They did this in the 2020 election with mail-in ballots. It was the same. Wait,
Tucker Carlson:
There’s so much here and it’s so shocking. So you’re saying the Pentagon, our Pentagon, the US Department of Defense censored Americans during the 2020 election cycle?
Mike Benz:
Yes, they did this through the, so the two most censored events in human history, I would argue to date are the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, and I’ll explain how I arrived there.
So the 2020 election was determined by mail-in ballots, and I’m not weighing into the substance of whether mail-in ballots were or were not a legitimate or safe and reliable form of voting. That’s a completely independent topic from my perspective.
Then the censorship issue one, but the censorship of mail-in ballots is really one of the most extraordinary stories in our American history. I would argue what happened was is you had this plot within the Department of Homeland Security. Now this gets back to what we were talking about with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. You had this group within the Atlanta Council and the Foreign Policy Establishment, which began arguing in 2017 for the need for a permanent domestic censorship government office to serve as a quarterback for what they called a whole of society counter misinformation, counter disinformation alliance.
That just means censorship. To counter “miss-dis-info”. But their whole society model explicitly proposed that we need every single asset within society to be mobilized in a whole of society effort to stop misinformation online. It was that much of an existential threat to democracy, but they fixated in 2017 that it had to be centered within the government because only the government would have the clout and the coercive threat powers and the perceived authority to be able to tell the social media companies what to do to be able to summon a government funded NGO Swarm to create that media surround sound to be able to arm an AstroTurf army of fact checkers and to be able to liaise and connect all these different censorship industry actors into a cohesive unified hole. And the Atlantic Council initially proposed with this blueprint called Forward defense. “It’s not offense, it’s Forward Defense” guys.
They initially proposed that running this out of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center because they had so many assets there who were so effective at censorship under Rick Stengel, under the Obama administration. But they said, oh, we are not going to be able to get away with that. We don’t really have a national security predicate and it’s supposed to be foreign facing. We can’t really use that hook unless we have a sort of national security one. Then they contemplated parking it, the CIA, and they said, well, actually there’s two reasons we can’t do that. The is a foreign facing organization and we can’t really establish a counterintelligence threat to bring it home domestically. Also, we’re going to need essentially tens of thousands of people involved in this operation spanning this whole society model, and you can’t really run a clandestine operation that way. So they said, okay, well what about the FBI?
They said, well, the FBI would be great, it’s domestic, but the problem is is the FBI is supposed to be the intelligence arm of the Justice Department. And what we’re dealing with here are not acts of law breaking, it’s basically support for Trump. Or if a left winging popularist had risen to power like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbin, I have no doubt they would’ve done in the UK. They would’ve done the same thing to him there. They targeted Jeremy Corbin and other left-wing populist NATO skeptical groups in Europe, but in the US it was all Trump.
And so essentially what they said is, well, the only other domestic intelligence equity we have in the US besides the FBI is the DHS. So we are going to essentially take the CIA’s power to rig and bribe foreign media organizations, which is the power they’ve had since the day they were born in 1947. And we’re going to combine that with the power with the domestic jurisdiction of the FBI by putting it at DHS. So DHS was basically deputized. It was empowered through this obscure little cybersecurity agency to have the combined powers that the CIA has abroad with the jurisdiction of the FBI at home. And the way they did this, how did a cyber, an obscure little cybersecurity agency get this power was they did a funny little series of switcheroos. So this little thing called CISA, they didn’t call it the Disinformation Governance Board. They didn’t call it the Censorship Agency. They gave it an obscure little name that no one would notice called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) who his founder said, we care about security so much, it’s in our name twice. Everybody sort of closed their eyes and pretended that’s what it was. CISA was created by Active Congress in 2018 because of the perceived threat that Russia had hacked the 2016 election.
And so we needed the cybersecurity power to be able to deal with that. And essentially on the heels of a CIA memo on January 6th, 2017 and a same day DHS executive order on January 6th, 2017, arguing that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and a DHS mandate saying that elections are now critical infrastructure, you had this new power within DHS to say that cybersecurity attacks on elections are now our purview. And then they did two cute things. One they said said, miss dis and Malformation online are a form of cybersecurity attack. They are a cyber attack because they are happening online. And they said, well, actually Russian disinformation is we’re actually protecting democracy and elections. We don’t need a Russian predicate after Russiagate died. So just like that, you had this cybersecurity agency be able to legally make the argument that your tweets about mail-in ballots if you undermine public faith and confidence in them as a legitimate form of voting was now you were now conducting a cyber attack on US critical infrastructure articulating misinformation on Twitter and just like that.
Tucker Carlson:
Wait- in other words, complaining about election fraud is the same as taking down our power grid.
Mike Benz:
Yes, you could literally be on your toilet seat at nine 30 on a Thursday night and tweet, I think that mail-in ballots are illegitimate. And you were essentially then caught up in the crosshairs of the Department of Homeland Security classifying you as conducting a cyber attack on US critical infrastructure because you were doing misinformation online in the cyber realm. And misinformation is a cyber attack on democracy when it undermines public faith and confidence in our democratic elections and our democratic institutions, they would end up going far beyond that. They would actually define democratic institutions as being another thing that was a cybersecurity attack to undermine and lo and behold, the mainstream media is considered a democratic institution that would come later. What ended up happening was in the advance of the 2020 election, starting in April of 2020, although this goes back before you had this essentially never Trump NeoCon Republican DHS working with essentially NATO on the national security side and essentially the DNC, if you will, to use DHS as the launching point for a government coordinated mass censorship campaign spanning every single social media platform on earth in order to preens the ability to dispute the legitimacy of mail-in ballots.
And here’s how they did this. They aggregated four different institutions. Stanford University, the University of Washington, a company called Graphica and the Atlantic Council. Now all four of these institutions, the centers within them were essentially Pentagon cutouts you had at the Stanford Air Observatory. It was actually run by Michael McFaul, if you know Michael McFaul. He was the US ambassador to Russia under the Obama administration, and he personally authored a seven step playbook for how to successfully orchestrate a color revolution. And part of that involved maintaining total control over media and social media juicing up the civil society outfits, calling elections illegitimate in order to. Now, mind you, all of these people were professional Russia, Gators and professional election delegitimizes in 2016, and then I’ll get that in a sec. So Stanford, the Stanford Observatory under Michael McFaul was run by Alex Stamos, who was formerly a Facebook executive who coordinated with ODNI and with respect to Russiagate taking down Russian propaganda at Facebook.
So this is another liaison essentially to the national security state. And under Alex Stamos at Sanford Observatory was Renee Diresta, who started her career in the CIA and wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian disinformation, and there’s a lot more there that I’ll get to another time. But the next institution was the University of Washington, which is essentially the Bill Gates University in Seattle who is headed by Kate Starboard, who is basically three generations of military brass who got our PhD in crisis informatics, essentially doing social media surveillance for the Pentagon and getting DARPA funding and working essentially with the national security state, then repurposed to take on mail-in ballots. The third firm Graphica got $7 million in Pentagon grants and got their start as part of the Pentagon’s Minerva initiative. The Minerva Initiative is the Psychological Warfare Research Center of the Pentagon. This group was doing social media spying and narrative mapping for the Pentagon until the 2016 election happened, and then were repurposed into a partnership with the Department of Homeland Security to censor 22 million Trump tweets, pro-Trump tweets about mail-in ballots.
And then the fourth institution, as I mentioned, was the Atlantic Council who’s got seven CIA directors on the board, so one after another. It is exactly what Ben Rhodes described during the Obama era as the blob, the Foreign Policy Establishment, it’s the Defense Department, the State Department or the CIA every single time. And of course this was because they were threatened by Trump’s foreign policy, and so while much of the censorship looks like it’s coming domestically, it’s actually by our foreign facing department of Dirty tricks, color revolution blob, who were professional government toppers who were then basically descended on the 2020 election.
Now they did this, they explicitly said the head of this election integrity partnership on tape and my foundation clipped them, and it’s been played before Congress and it’s a part of the Missouri Biden lawsuit now, but they explicitly said on tape that they were set up to do what the government was banned from doing itself, and then they articulated a multi-step framework in order to coerce all the tech companies to take censorship actions.
They said on tape that the tech companies would not have done it but for the pressure, which involved using threats of government force because they were the deputized arm of the government. They had a formal partnership with the DHS. They were able to use DHS’ proprietary domestic disinformation switchboard to immediately talk to top brass at all the tech companies for takedowns, and they bragged on tape about how they got the tech companies to all systematically adopt a new terms of service speech violation ban called delegitimization, which meant any tweet, any YouTube video, any Facebook post, any TikTok video, any discord posts, any Twitch video, anything on the internet that undermine public faith and confidence in the use of mail-in ballots or early voting drop boxes or ballot tabulation issues on election day was a prima fascia terms of service violation policy under this new delegitimization policy that they only adopted because of pass through government pressure from the election integrity partnership, which they bragged about on tape, including the grid that they used to do this, and simultaneously invoking threats of government breaking them up or government stopping doing favors for the tech companies unless they did this as well as inducing crisis PR by working with their media allies.
And they said DHS could not do that themselves. And so they set up this basically constellation of State Department, Pentagon and IC networks to run this censorship campaign, which by their own math had 22 million tweets on Twitter alone, and mind you, they just on 15 platforms, this is hundreds of millions of posts which were all scanned and banned or throttled so that they could not be amplified or they exist in a sort of limited state purgatory or had these frictions affixed to them in the form of fact-checking labels where you couldn’t actually click through the thing or you had to, it was an inconvenience to be able to share it. Now, they did this seven months before the election because at the time they were worried about the perceived legitimacy of a Biden victory in the case of a so-called Red Mirage Blue Shift event.
They knew the only way that Biden would win mathematically was through the disproportionate Democrat use of mail-in ballots. They knew there would be a crisis because it was going to look extremely weird if Trump looked like he won by seven states and then three days later it comes out actually the election switch, I mean that would put the election crisis of the Bush Gore election on a level of steroids that the National Security state said, well, the public will not be prepared for. So what we need to do is we need to in advance, we need to preens the ability to even question legitimacy.
Tucker Carlson:
Out, wait, wait, may I ask you to pause right there? Key influences by, so what you’re saying is what you’re suggesting is they knew the outcome of the election seven months before it was held.
Mike Benz:
It looks very bad.
Tucker Carlson:
Yes, Mike. It does look very bad
Mike Benz:
And especially when you combine this with the fact that this is right on the heels of the impeachment. The Pentagon led and the CIA led impeachment. It was Eric ? from the CIA, and it was Vindman from the Pentagon who led the impeachment of Trump in late 2019 over an alleged phone call around withholding Ukraine aid. This same network, which came straight out of the Pentagon hybrid warfare military censorship network, created after the first Ukraine crisis in 2014 were the lead architects of the Ukraine impeachment in 2019, and then essentially came back on steroids as part of the 2020 election censorship operation. But from their perspective, I mean it certainly looks like the perfect crime. These were the people. DHS at the time had actually federalized much of the National Election Administration through this January 6th, 2017 executive order from outgoing Obama. DHS had Jed Johnson, which essentially wrapped all 50 states up into a formal DHS partnership. So DHS was simultaneously in charge of the administration of the election in many respects, and the censorship of anyone who challenged the administration of the election. This is like putting essentially the defendant of a trial as the judge and jury of the trial. It was
Tucker Carlson:
Very, but you’re not describing democracy. I mean, you’re describing a country in which democracy is impossible.
Mike Benz:
What I’m essentially describing is military rule. I mean, what’s happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of democracy itself. Democracy sort draws its legitimacy from the idea that it is ruled by consent of the people being ruled. That is, it’s not really being ruled by an overlord because the government is actually just our will expressed by our consent with who we vote for. The whole push after the 2016 election and after Brexit and after a couple of other social media run elections that went the wrong way from what the State Department wanted, like the 2016 Philippines election, was to completely invert everything that we described as being the underpinnings of a democratic society in order to deal with the threat of free speech on the internet. And what they essentially said is, we need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of democratic institutions and who are the democratic institutions?
Oh, it’s the military, it’s NATO, it’s the IMF and the World Bank. It’s the mainstream media, it is the NGOs, and of course these NGOs are largely state department funded or IC funded. It’s essentially all of the elite establishments that were under threat from the rise of domestic populism that declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. Because if you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you’re left with is essentially democracy is just the consensus building architecture within the Democrat institutions themselves. And from their perspective, that takes a lot of work. I mean, the amount of work these people do. I mean, for example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council, which is one of these big coordinating mechanisms for the oil and gas industry in a region for the finance and the JP Morgans and the BlackRocks in a region for the NGOs in the region, for the media, in the region, all of these need to reach a consensus, and that process takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of work and a lot of negotiation from their perspective.
That’s democracy. Democracy is getting the NGOs to agree with BlackRock, to agree with the Wall Street Journal, to agree with the community and activist groups who are onboarded with respect to a particular initiative that is the difficult vote building process from their perspective.
At the end of the day, a bunch of populous groups decide that they like a truck driver who’s popular on TikTok more than the carefully constructed consensus of the NATO military brass. Well then from their perspective, that is now an attack on democracy, and this is what this whole branding effort was. And of course, democracy again has that magic regime change predicate where democracy is our magic watchword to be able to overthrow governments from the ground up in a sort of color revolution style whole of society effort to topple a democratically elected government from the inside, for example, as we did in Ukraine, Victor Jankovich was democratically elected by the Ukrainian people like him or hate him.
I’m not even issuing an opinion, but the fact is we color revolution him out of office. We January 6th out of office, actually, to be frank, I mean with respect to the, you had a state department funded right sector thugs and 5 billion worth of civil society money pumped into this to overthrow democratically elected government in the name of democracy, and they took that special set of skills home and now it’s here, perhaps potentially to stay. And this has fundamentally changed the nature of American governance because of the threat of one small voice becoming popular on social media.
Tucker Carlson:
May I ask you a question? So into that group of institutions that you say now define democracy, the NGOs foreign policy establishment, et cetera, you included the mainstream media. Now in 2021, the NSA broke into my private text apps and read them and then leaked them to the New York Times against me. That just happened again to me last week, and I’m wondering how common that is for the Intel agencies to work with so-called mainstream media like the New York Times to hurt their opponents.
Mike Benz:
Well, that is the function of these interstitial government funded non-governmental organizations and think tanks like for example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council, which is NATO’s think tank, but other groups like the Aspen Institute, which draws the lion’s share of its funding from the State department and other government agencies. The Aspen Institute was busted doing the same thing with the Hunter Biden laptop censorship. You had this strange situation where the FBI had advanced knowledge of the pending publication of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and then magically the Aspen Institute, which is run by essentially former CIA, former NSA, former FBI, and then a bunch of civil society organizations all hold a mass stakeholder censorship simulation, a three day conference, this came out and yo Roth was there. This is a big part of the Twitter file leaks, and it’s been mentioned in multiple congressional investigations.
But somehow the Aspen Institute, which is basically an addendum of the National Security state, got the exact same information that the National Security State spied on journalists and political figures to obtain, and not only leaked it, but then basically did a joint coordinated censorship simulator in September, two months before the election in order just like with the censorship of mail-in ballots to be in ready position to screens anyone online amplifying, wait a second, a news story that had not even broken yet.
Tucker Carlson:
The Aspen Institute, which is by the way, I’ve spent my life in Washington. It’s kind a, I mean Walter Isaacson formerly of Time Magazine ran it, former president of CNNI had no idea it was part of the national security state. I had no idea its funding came from the US government. This is the first time I’ve ever heard that. But given, assuming what you’re saying is true, it’s a little weird or starnge that Walter Isaacson left Aspens to write a biography of Elon Musk?
Mike Benz:
No? Yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t read that book. From what I’ve heard from people, it’s a relatively fair treatment. I just total speculation. But I suspect that Walter Isaacson has struggled with this issue and may not even firmly fall in one particular place in the sense that Walter Isaacson did a series of interviews of Rick Gel actually with the Atlantic Council and in other settings where he interviewed Rick Gel specifically on the issue of the need to get rid of the First Amendment and the threat that free speech on social media poses to democracy. Now, at the time, I was very concerned, this was between 2017 and 2019 when he did these Rick Stangle interviews. I was very concerned because Isaacson expressed what seemed to me to be a highly sympathetic view about the Rick Stengel perspective on killing the First Amendment. Now, he didn’t formally endorse that position, but it left me very skittish about Isaacson.
But what I should say is at the time, I don’t think very many people, in fact, I know virtually nobody in the country had any idea how deep the rabbit hole went when it came to the construction of the censorship industry and how deep the tentacles had grown within the military and the national security state in order to buoy and consolidate it. Much of that frankly did not even come to public light until even last year. Frankly, some of that was galvanized by Elon Musk’s acquisition and the Twitter files and the Republican turnover in the house that allowed these multiple investigations, the lawsuits like Missouri v Biden and the discovery process there and multiple other things like the Disinformation governance board, who, by the way, the interim head of that, the head of that Nina Janowitz got her start in the censorship industry from this exact same clandestine intelligence community censorship network created after the 2014 Crimea situation.
Nina Janowitz, when her name came up in 2022 as part of the disinformation governance board, I almost fell out of my chair because I had been tracking Nina’s network for almost five years at that point when her name came up as part of the UK inner cluster cell of a busted clandestine operation to censor of the internet called the Integrity Initiative, which was created by the UK Foreign Office and was backed by NATO’s Political Affairs Unit in order to carry out this thing that we talked about at the beginning of this dialogue, the NATO sort of psychological inoculation and the ability to kill, so-called Russian propaganda or rising political groups who wanted to maintain energy relations with Russia at a time when the US was trying to kill the Nord Stream and other pipeline relations. Well,
Well, Nina Janowitz was a part of this outfit, and then who was the head of it after Nina Janowitz went down, it was Michael Chertoff and Michael Chertoff was running the Aspen Institute Cyber Group. And then the Aspen Institute then goes on to be the censorship simulator for the Hunter Biden laptop story. And then two years later, Chertoff is then the head of the disinformation governance board after Nina is forced to step down.
Tucker Carlson:
Tucker Carlson: Of course, Michael Chertoff was the chairman of the largest military contractor in Europe, BAE military. So it’s all connected. You’ve blown my mind so many times in this conversation that I’m going to need a nap directly after it’s done. So I’ve just got two more questions for you, one short one, a little longer short. One is for people who’ve made it this far an hour in and want to know more about this topic. And by the way, I hope you’ll come back whenever you have the time to explore different threads of this story. But for people who want to do research on their own, how can your research on this be found on the internet?
Mike Benz:
Sure. So our foundation is foundation for freedom online.com. We publish all manner of reports on every aspect of the censorship industry from what we talked about with the role of the military industrial complex and the national security state to what the universities are doing to, I sometimes refer to as digital MK Ultra. There’s just the field of basically the science of censorship and the funding of these psychological manipulation methods in order to nudge people into different belief systems as they did with covid, as they did with energy. And every sensitive policy issue is what they essentially had an ambition for. But so my foundationforfreedomonline.com website is one way. The other way is just on X. My handle is at @MikeBenzCyber. I’m very active there and publish a lot of long form video and written content on all this. I think it’s one of the most important issues in the world today.
Tucker Carlson:
So it certainly is. And so that leads directly and seamlessly to my final question, which is about X. And I’m not just saying this because I post content there, but I think objectively it’s the last big platform that’s free or sort of free or more free. You post there too, but we’re at the very beginning of an election year with a couple of different wars unfolding simultaneously in 2024. So do you expect that that platform can stay free for the duration of this year?
Mike Benz:
It’s under an extraordinary amount of pressure, and that pressure is going to continue to mount as the election approaches. Elon Musk is a very unique individual, and he has a unique buffer, perhaps when it comes to the national security state because the national security state is actually quite reliant on Elon Musk properties, whether that’s for the electrical, the Green Revolution when it comes to Tesla and the battery technology there. When it comes to SpaceX, the State Department is hugely dependent on SpaceX because of its unbelievable sort of pioneering and saturating presence in the field of low earth orbit satellites that are basically how our telecom system runs to things like starlink. There are dependencies that the National Security state has on Elon Musk. I’m not sure he’d have as much room to negotiate if he had become the world’s richest man selling at a lemonade stand, and if the national security state goes too hard on him by invoking something like CFIUS to sort of nationalize some of these properties.
I think the shock wave that it would send to the international investor community would be irrecoverable at a time when we’re engaged in great power competition. So they’re trying to sort of induce, I think a sort of corporate regime change through a series of things involving a sort of death by a thousand paper cuts. I think there’s seven or eight different Justice Department or SEC or FTC investigations into Elon Musk properties that all started after his acquisition of X. But then what they’re trying to do right now is what I call the Transatlantic Flank Attack 2.0. We talked in this dialogue about how the censorship industry really got its start when a bunch of State Department exiles who were expecting promotions took their special set of skills in coercing European countries to pass sanctions on themselves, to cut off their own leg off to spite themselves in order to pass sanctions on Russia.
They ran back that same playbook with doing a roadshow for censorship instead for sanctions. We are now witnessing Transatlantic Flank attack 2.0, if you will, which is because they have lost a lot of their federal government powers to do this same censorship operation they had been doing from 2018 to 2022. In part because the house has totally turned on them, in part because of the media, in part because Missouri v Biden, which won a slam dunk case, actually banning government censorship at the trial court and appellate court levels. It is now before the Supreme Court, they’ve now moved into two strategies.
One of them is state level censorship laws. California just passed a new law, which the censorship industry totally drove from start to finish around, they call it platform accountability and transparency, which is basically forcing Elon Musk to give over the kind of narrative mapping data that these CIA conduits and Pentagon cutouts were using to create these weapons of mass deletion, these abilities to just censor everything at scale because they had all the internal platform data. Elon Musk took that away.
They’re using state laws like this new California law to crack that open. But the major threat right now is the threat from Europe with something called the EU Digital Services Act, which was cooked up in tandem with folks like NewsGuard, which has a board of Michael Hayden, head of the CIA NSA and a Fourstar General. Rick Stengel is on that board from the state department’s propaganda office. Tom Ridge is on that board from the Department of Homeland Security. Oh, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen – he was the general secretary of NATO under the Obama administration. So you have NATO, the CIA, the NSA four star General DHS, and the State Department working with the EU to craft the censorship laws that now are the largest existential threat to X other than potentially advertiser boycotts. Because there is now disinformation is now banned as a matter of law in the EU.
The EU is a bigger market for X than the us. There’s only 300 million in the USA. But there is 450 million people in Europe. X is now forced to comply with this brand new law that just got ratified this year where they either need to forfeit 6% of their global annual revenue to the EU to maintain operations there, or put in place essentially the kind of CIA bumper cars, if you will, that I’ve been describing over the course of this in order to have a internal mechanism to sensor anything that the eu, which is just a proxy for NATO deems to be disinformation. And you can bet with 65 elections around the globe this year, you can predict every single time what they’re going to define disinformation as. So that’s the main fight right now is dealing with the transatlantic flank attack from Europe.
Tucker Carlson:
This is just one of the most remarkable stories I’ve ever heard, and I’m grateful to you for bringing it to us. Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, and I hope we see you again…..
The only thing the GOP has going for it in Georgia is the civil war within the DNC in that state.
The establishment Stacey Abrams faction is out of money & on the way out while newer, younger factions are duking it out to see who controls the grift in the state.
If the DoJ was serious (many many lols) they could flip a range of DNC operatives with regards to the straight out fraud during the 2020 election.
Please elucidate. They want to be able to interdict international shipping? For what reasons? Interdict is not the same as divert around rousorce mining or drilling.
… resource mining …
Does Victoria Nuland count as an “intelligence operative”?
That isn’t the point though the amount isn’t inconsiderable and likely not the last. The point is that a meeting with foreign operatives involving a request for money was had.
Dear oh dear.
The End of Democracy: “What I’m Describing is Military Rule”
I am about 50 minutes into Dr. John Campbell’s interview with Ros Nealon-Cook. I started watching late last night and had to literally tear myself away to go to bed. They hadn’t mentioned military at that point but seemed to be skirting it a couple of times. She is really amazing. A genuinely nice, kind hearted woman who seems to have been hit over the head with a two by four of truth.
One thing they did mention is that people from traumatic backgrounds, such as Eastern Europe, are much less inclined to accept what they’re told at face value. This describes me to a tee. I had no trouble seeing incipient tyranny more than a quarter of a century ago with the climate scam, which I didn’t believe for one second.
“Asseptable” wordwalling.
No punishment due, no bolded reposting.
Week in pictures. The electric sheep is worth a look!
I think of it more in terms of a counter balance against each other.
“Asseptable” wordwalling.
No punishment due, no bolded reposting.
Thank God for that. You sometimes make me nervous, Dot.
Is vaccine shedding possible? Over 1,000 reports say it’s real and it’s happening
And many have suspected for decades. Still it’s good to have move people calling it out.
Does Victoria Nuland count as an “intelligence operative”?
Yes but not sure about the Warpig’s intelligence.
Chicago1Ray
@Chicago1Ray
I’ve been on the radio for over an hour and I’ve talked to at least (10) Truckers who are gonna start refusing loads of Monday for (NYC) …I talked to (3) guys that I work with who texted the boss and told him no (NYC)
Truckers are (95%) Trump… it’ll get overturned on appeal but you know how f*cken hard it is to get one of these mfrs into (NYC) cut the bullshit
I’ll cya down the road
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene??
@RepMTG
You want to know one of the BIG reasons why I fight so hard to force a peace deal in Ukraine?
Here you go
Look at the what you can do if the area is your territorial waters vs if they are not under UNCLOS.
I find it fascinating that the one agency that there is no proof (yet) that they participated in the US shenanigans (get Trump, free speech censorship, COVID shit etc) is the NSA.
Maybe they just guard their secrets better post Snowden.
The rest:
CIA.
FBI.
DHS.
CISA.
DIA.
ODNI.
DARPA.
IRS.
All participated in one way or another.
Looks like the Coast Guard are the only ones you can trust.
NSA at the very least knows what the others are doing, bern.
Very shady and we don’t know the half of it.
I’ve been wondering what Lidia Thorpe was promised in return for her vote against an inquiry into Australia’s excess mortality rate post-covid?
Meanwhile, in the UK…
Skin cancer diagnosis delays caused by lockdowns led to 12,000 years of life lost
Very shady and we don’t know the half of it.
Yeah we do.
He was up to his neck in the post Soviet Union theft.
Was rich beyond his wildest dreams because of a corrupt system.
Then wanted to change that corrupt system.
Then corrupt system bit him on the bum.
Similar but different to Browder.
Knew Russia was thoroughly corrupt.
Was making gazillions.
Corrupt system bit him on the bum.
Fled the country & used poor old Magnitsky to gloss over his own terrible behaviour.
And found the willing idiot McCain to promote it.
Browder rehabilitated.
Magnitsky still dead.
Russia still corrupt.
Let’s hope the same doesn’t happen to Musk.
Your basic point seems to be an acceptance that the South China Sea is Chinese territorial waters. China’s claim that the Nine-Dash-Line makes most of the South China Sea territorial waters is dubious at best and farcical at worst. It has already been rejected by a court.
Now you seem to be accepting that China has the right to interdict (your word) all international shipping through the Nine-Dash-Line area, something that you implied previously would not be a problem to international trade. What only yesterday was a simple dispute about resources has now become a means to control international trade.
As I asked, please elucidate.
Indeed. The then-Director of the NSA made a personal visit to Trump in NY, to caution him about probable bugging of (IIRC) Trump Tower.
Depressingly, this applies equally to our once great country.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/02/please_spare_me_the_outrage_over_navalny.html
Reddit sells its content for $60m to train OpenAI models. Next Chat GPT 6 offers a better Reddit. Reddit will be worth 0 soon. And its full of crappy content, yes, but the sub-grouping is valuable now. Same applies to Stack Overflow, some useful content & grouping info now but no big future.
Yes, you don’t have that luxury because you basically support Putin.
Here’s the point about Navalny. He wanted to contest Putin in a free election, but you appear to have an issue even with free elections. Some rabbit hole you’ve entered.
Oh no. I’ve incurred the burden of a supreme gentleman.
I think we’re arguing a false dichotomy in not wanting to differentiate between Putin and US Democrats. For a start, it’s not just the democrats, it’s both parties signing up with the globalists (or China) for their own advantage, whether control, money or both.
That’s not to say that Putin hasn’t feathered his own nest, interfered in other countries or taken some people out along the way as well, just that his underlying driver appears to be nationalistic ‘Russia First’. I don’t think you can say the same about the US, where outside of Trump/MAGA, they are falling over themselves to tear the country down.
Globalism is dying.
Davos is now just an excuse to party.
China is the bigger concern.
Bern, I put it to you that he wanted to game that system to his own advantage under the banner of ‘reform’ and ‘democracy’.
If there was a AI built reddit or stack exchange clone, what could they do to counter this?
Let’s say they don’t have the issues with moderators that Reddit does. They can cut down on staff and any demands of unpaid volunteers to be staff.
They could even integrate it to be more like Wiki, Youtube, FaceBook and Tik Tok and offer site hosting & web commerce.
Hell, it might become the Killer App of all time.
Bern, I put it to you that he wanted to game that system to his own advantage under the banner of ‘reform’ and ‘democracy’.
Possibly.
That could have been the next derivative.
I traw the net in all manner of dank places to find insights.
Anyone got any details on the pro Israeli get together in Sydney today?
Would like to show my support but have heard nothing.
trawL
Yep, a big L for me.
No, my basic point is let the various parties to that dispute settle it themselves.
No, I said it is probably also wanting to enjoy the rights it currently has in its accepted waters extended to those bounded by the nine-dash line. That line predates the PRC. None of this means it wants to control trade through those waters, it does however mean it would like to exclude activities listed in Article 19 section 2 from those waters if it can.
This America.
The good news is that Hernandez and his partner, who both fired multiple shots at the guy in the cruiser’s back seat, missed with every shot.
No it’s not, Roger. Only the elites interpretation (world government) and that’s not close to being to being defeeted yet.
Trade, collaboration and mixing of cultures is unavoidable.
Vicki
Feb 18, 2024 8:30 AM
The Tucker Carlson interview with Mike Benz:
(I will post this in two tranches)
Transcript of the video:
Explosive stuff and now we know. Trump needs to win and then dismantle these evil censorship groups asap.
Uptick that one, Dot
Long but inspiring and an alternative to gloom and doom.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/cracking-the-shell-of-a-dead-future
The ‘You can’t criticise the Dems if you support Putin’ is a weird argument.
Navalny had limited support in Russia and in his own constituency. He wanted to contest an election with the support of foreign governments. He got found out. The MSM’s Western Intelligence -curated view of Navalny was almost pure confection. You can characterise it as benignly as you like but those are the facts.
They did. The parties to the dispute have tried adjudication, which China signed up to, and it failed, because China won’t accept the decision.
Deserving of a liberty quote, Dot.
Interconnectedness has always existed and has been a fruitful source of the exchange of ideas and technology.
By globalism I mean neo-liberal imperialism (which in its later stages has proven itself to be quite illiberal).
That’s no way to speak of Bellingcat.
We are on the same page then, Roger.
Home births should be illegal.
The child has the right to immediate medical care.
Nice troll, bern.
Thanks to Vicki for posting the transcript of the Carlson Benz interview.
Matt Taibbi and Mike Shellenberger have been covering this issue but Benz is an expert in the field and listening to him rattle off so much information and all the connections was more compelling.
Some random thoughts.
“And this gave rise to what I call these weapons of mass deletion. These are essentially the ability to sensor tens of millions of posts with just a few lines of code”
Under either Carlson or Benz Twitter somebody posted a GCHQ letter, obtained by FOI, authorising the British to spy on associates of Trump. The letter approved the extension to include period after Trump had won 2016 election.
Senator Canavan had Tweeted underneath a clip of him last week asking DFAT about whether Australia had received a similar request. He mentioned Alexander Downer giving information to USA at that time. DFAT pointed out it was a different Government then (ie. Coalition) and Canavan well aware.
It has already been established that the Australian Government was active in censoring online discontent relating to Covid. Benz mentions similar in USA. Federal Health outsourced online monitoring and then they kindly informed social media companies of inappropriate contents that breached their rules. Mere coincidence that those rules helped the Government. Craig Kelly and others including Vax injured had content taken down.
Unfortunately you have to recall who was the Home Affairs Minister at that time. Perhaps why now you never see him engaging in these topics.
It came out recently that the Vax producer Mod had hired an outside IT company to monitor all adverse online comments. That requires a huge level of capability.
If you pay much attention to Twitter you will note many say they believe their content is being suppressed. Bret Weinstein mentioned this to Joe Rogan and said Musk had noted it prior to his purchase of Twitter. Cafe Locked Out just made a post about this directed at Musk and saying his reach being suppressed. Plenty of others say similar.
Then we have the Misinformation Bill coming in May where you can see great enthusiasm for shutting down dissent.
Some may have heard of the official secrets Act case against ex military lawyer David McBride. He leaked information to the ABC about SAS activities in Afghanistan. His defence was going to be in the public interest bit the judge rejected that and said official secrets overuled that. Good luck to any future whistleblowers as that was the signal you won’t be protected.
We now have Government using their capabilities to shut down online comments on a mass scale and needless to say this is not good for democracy. Need more politicians to stand up but unfortunately many are only too happy to use such power.
Dangerous times ahead.
BoN and other sci fi fans here – get a load of this:
and
If you RTWT, the worst part of the story (if true) is that the judges self-censored to avoid annoying their Chinese government hosts.
For non sci-fi fans, the Hugos are the most venerated awards in the genre. If you are a newbie and want to dip your toe into sci-fi, pick something by a Hugo winner.
But, like the Academy Awards and the Nobels, they seem to have been hollowed out by leftists and cowards draped in the skinsuits of the old institution.
Electronic samizdat, anyone?
But but the west is kno better move along nothing to see.
/sarc
We now have Government using their capabilities to shut down online comments on a mass scale and needless to say this is not good for democracy. Need more politicians to stand up but unfortunately many are only too happy to use such power.
Dangerous times ahead.
Yes, Bourne. The proposed ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) Bill just hasn’t received the attention – from the public & certainly not from the MSM – that it desperately needs. How many here have submitted comments on the proposal?
Without pushback, we will lose the rights to personal freedom the we take for granted. When you get words escaping from the mouths of medical bureaucrats – such as the reference to the “New World Order” during a presser by the NSW chief medical officer during Covid – you SHOULD know what is ahead.
We are already there.
One of our problems in Australia is that without a Bill of Rights* many of the personal freedoms we take for granted are not guaranteed and not adequately protected in the constitution.
* Think of a Bill of Rights not as a panacea but as the first line of defence against government overreach.
Johanna – my impression is the Hugo and Nebulas went woke a while ago. I don’t notice such awards anymore – like the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Lefties love giving each other awards, and righty writers know they wouldn’t ever win one. So why waste time and energy on something so discredited?
It’s amusing that the Chinese are as far behind the times as to get their knickers in a twist about this. Ironic seeing that they’ve been encouraging the epidemic of woke so assiduously.
One of our problems in Australia is that without a Bill of Rights* many of the personal freedoms we take for granted are not guaranteed and not adequately protected in the constitution.
The arseholes, including the Supreme Court, tore up the Constitution during Covid, what makes you think they would not tear up a Bill of Rights?
my impression is the Hugo and Nebulas went woke a while ago.
Much of SF itself has gone woke. Can’t be bothered with most of the modern stuff.
I did, Vicki. Also, at the time of submission release – in tranches, there were well over 20,000 submissions. Knowing what we are dealing with, that is probably a rather large understatement.
It would have to be drafted to be as bullet proof as possible.
As I said, not a panacea but a first line of defence.
At present, as the only common law jurisdiction without such a Bill, we are entirely at the mercy of legislators and their judicial interpreters.
A young man makes a good argument that we’re already in the mouse utopia or Kali Yuga.
How Degeneracy will kill Civilization
See also total lack of interest by so called Human Rights Commissions in Oz regarding Vax mandates.
I guess we are the lucky country as our Esafety Commissioner will protect us. You know, the lady who is ex Twitter and never misses the annual Davos get together.
Best to assume the various human rights commissions at federal and state level in Australia are run by cabals of the enemies of human rights.
(h/t Robert Conquest)
James Allan argues strongly against a Bill of Rights.
Eyrie – I’m still reading my way through Jerry Boyd’s books. Light and entertaining and very very unwoke. Probably not to your taste but I find them a lot of fun.
At present, as the only common law jurisdiction without such a Bill, we are entirely at the mercy of legislators and their judicial interpreters.
As deliberately designed by the Founders. They thought Parliament would never go off the rails.
Thanks BoN. I’ll give Bob’s Saucer Repair a go.
Chris Hadfield (the Canadian astronaut) has written a couple of thrillers I’ve just finished: The Apollo Murders and The Defector. Not bad.
When you get words escaping from the mouths of medical bureaucrats – such as the reference to the “New World Order” during a presser by the NSW chief medical officer during Covid – you SHOULD know what is ahead.
I thought health hazzard let that one slip- how I despise these rubbish people
James Allan argues strongly against a Bill of Rights.
Yes – I do recall that. But can’t recall his reasons – can you, Make Siccar?
Coronavirus treatment
Scientists grapple with long Covid puzzle as millions fall sick
Fears condition’s range of symptoms and link to chronic diseases will have lasting impact on health systems
Two months after contracting Covid-19 in August 2021, Heather Marti, a university programme administrator from West Virginia, began to experience a terrifying array of symptoms that have changed her life.
The 52-year-old describes agonising muscle pain, gastrointestinal problems, weeks-long migraine-like headaches, brain fog and “extreme mental fatigue similar to what has been described after a traumatic brain injury” among a litany of other problems.
Grasping for an image to explain the devastation, she said: “All of the wires in my body are crossed — if you turn the water faucet on, the door would open. There isn’t a system in my body that has not been impacted.”
Marti is far from alone in her search for answers. Four years after the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, the quest to uncover the causes of long Covid, and develop treatments for the condition, continues.
The World Health Organization this month estimated that about 6 per cent of those who contract the disease end up with long Covid, defined as the continuation or development of symptoms three months after initial infection with Sars-Cov-2, with these symptoms lasting for at least two months.
The global health body estimated that at least 17mn people joined the ranks of the “long-haulers” in Europe alone in the first two years of the pandemic.
“We are not expecting a simple cure, a silver bullet, because we know from other complex illnesses that that’s rarely achieved,” said Melissa Heightman, who opened one of the first specialist long Covid clinics at University College London Hospitals in the UK, pointing to the multiple factors behind the condition.
For experts striving to unravel its causes, one of the biggest shocks has been that many who have suffered from long Covid were never badly sick with the virus in the first place.
Walter Koroshetz co-chairs a nationwide research programme at the US National Institutes of Health, designed to uncover the “biologic mechanisms” behind long Covid and potentially develop a cure.
He said hospitals had set up clinics to support those who had ended up in intensive care, believing only the severest Covid cases would need continued attention.
But “people started to come who?.?.?.?were never in the intensive care unit” — the first sign of the risk of prolonged after-effects even in cases of mild or moderate infections.
Although the high number of sufferers may have been unexpected, the notion of a puzzling constellation of symptoms coming hard on the heels of a viral infection was all too familiar to infectious diseases experts.
Koroshetz said the NIH’s Recover Initiative, in which Marti is one of almost 30,000 participants, also hoped to provide answers to those living with myalgic encephalomyelitis, another post-viral condition commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome.
Researchers believe long Covid sufferers, at least those who experienced severe infections, may never have managed to fully rid their bodies of the virus, allowing it to continue to replicate, or pieces to be retained, even after they had tested negative.
This may lead to “persistent activation of the immune system and cause all these chronic symptoms”, Koroshetz said.
An NIH study, based on autopsies, found evidence that some who had lost their lives up to 280 days after becoming infected with severe disease had died with active traces of the Covid virus.
A longer course of antiviral drugs could help to wipe out any remaining pockets of the virus.
Some patients in the Recover trial are now receiving Paxlovid for up to 28 days — far beyond the customary five-day course prescribed for higher-risk patients when they contract Covid-19.
A second approach is based on the theory that long Covid is primarily an autoimmune disorder.
This suggests sufferers’ immune systems “rev up” to the point where they move from protect to attack mode, weakening healthy cells.
Recover investigators will be testing an autoimmune treatment called intravenous gamma globulin (IVIG), which Koroshetz said “resets the immune system and is kind of an immune suppressant”.
Janet Diaz, a critical-care leader for the WHO, noted that alongside these approaches, metabolic drugs such as Metformin, used in diabetes, and dietary supplements were being tested in long Covid sufferers to see if they alleviated symptoms.
Research published last month in the journal Science, and led by Professor Onur Boyman of Zurich university, reported that changes in blood protein had been found in people suffering from long Covid, offering another avenue for research.
Heightman and her UCLH colleagues have focused on helping patients to cope with symptoms such as disordered breathing, and techniques to manage fatigue and the psychological impact of the condition.
The extreme tiredness that characterises long Covid seems to be one of the most important indicators of how quickly a patient will recover, experts have found. “When they have severe fatigue, recovery can be extremely slow,” Heightman said.
While classic long Covid is associated with a particular constellation of symptoms, the mysteries of which scientists are still trying to fathom, some researchers are focused on an apparent link between infection and a rise in all too familiar conditions such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
Ziyad Al-Aly, R&D chief at Veterans Affairs St Louis Health Care System and clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St Louis, discovered that patients in the VA’s extensive database who had recovered from Covid were significantly more likely than those who had not contracted the disease to suffer heart attacks and strokes, or to develop diabetes.
A similar picture was evident in data from countries including Germany and the UK. “The global evidence woven together suggests that Sars-Cov-2 infection leads to an increased risk of chronic disease,” he added.
However, Al-Aly and colleagues are examining whether people infected with Omicron, the dominant variant since the end of 2021, are less likely to face a heightened health risk than those contracting earlier versions of the virus — whether because of mutations, the protection offered by widespread vaccination, or an unknown factor. They plan to publish their conclusions later this year.
Heightman said the original “wild type” of the virus “seems to be the worst”, while vaccination not only seemed to reduce the chances of developing long Covid in those with breakthrough infections but “we have increasing signals that it can reduce the severity of [the condition] as well”.
While researchers hope this points to an eventual easing of the long Covid burden, Al-Aly fears that Covid’s enduring impact on health is such that the incidence of some diseases such as strokes has now permanently risen.
There are few signs that governments have fully grasped the costly implications for healthcare systems, he warns.
“We have almost accepted as a fact of life that it is going to be like that,” he said, adding that there is “not a lot of concern as to the level of spending [required] on healthcare resources. People are at a stage where they want to really move on.”
https://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/DeakinLawRw/2001/17.html
This is James Allan’s rationale for cautioning against a Bill of Rights.
From the Oz below. How soon before the page is shut down?
“Donald Trump supporters are tipping tens of thousands of dollars into a GoFundMe page to help pay over $US500m in penalties the former president owes after stinging losses in fraud and defamation cases in Manhattan, as Nikki Haley warned Republicans against becoming Mr Trump’s “piggy bank”.
See also post earlier this morning about truck drivers discussing not making deliveries to NY.
That is how to fight back but unfortunately who controls the internet now wins.
Interesting that the foul little buttplug mediocrity ‘worked’ for McKinseys. Why the buggery would any business want input from that little PoS on how there should operate?
You have rights.
You have the right to do what gubbmint tells you.
Alternatively, gubbmint will crush you.
Now go away and be good peasants.
Refreshing to see a country’s leader not falling for the bullshit:
Yes they do, and any glib, dishonest, allegedly ‘caring’ commenter who denies that is anti-Semitic. This is not the view of a few extermists. It is the mainstream view of Palestinians and their supporters. What they seek is genocide.
I know that Israeli politics are turbulent, but hope that Netanyahu remains in the job long enough to wipe out the threat from Hamas for a generation. It’s unlikely that anyone could achieve it forever, short of exterminating the entire population of Gaza and the West Bank.
He’s standing firm and ignoring the hand-patters and bedwetters, something rarely seen in modern politics.
Go Benny!
Meanwhile in Oz there is a group of scientists who were involved in the Covid origin cover up but no Government body seems interested. Perhaps because they know of their connections to Wuhan and how bad it looks.
We already have some constitutional rights and limited rights from legislation at a treaty level, on top of any common law rights that have not been abrogated away with dithering levels of State-level protection or abuse.
We should have voted YES. Probably the dumbest vote by the Australian electorate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Australian_referendum_(Rights_and_Freedoms)
It would have killed any prosecution in the name of the rainbow serpent in the shell and thrown a spanner in the COVID police state.
s 80 (5) (c) should have been struck out though…and replaced with s 80 (6) banning such provisions.
Funniest book I have read is A Clockwork Orange. Once you pick up the slang it is mad. Weirdo William S Burroughs agrees
I appreciate Allan’s contrarianism, but there’s not much left of his constitutional originalism post-covid.
johanna
✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
A succinct summary of James Allan’s position on a Bill of Rights:
Given we live in an age of identity politics and with a widely politicised legal system – I can’t think of a reasonable reason to disagree with him.
Also Wake in Fright is a ripper.
It’s to late for a Bill of Rights in Australa as contemporary thinking is a right to free stuff and the freedom to identify as a unicorn. Not saying people can’t identify a unicorns just I have the same right to call them nutters.
After voting for Whitlam, yes…probably.
Friends, Romans, Countrymen lend me your ticks.
Do you?
That’s the question, absent a Bill of Rights.
joh and other sci-fi fans,
Gene Wolfe (1931 – 2019 was a target of the left/feminists of sci-fi fandom for most of his career.
He was a Catholic Christian, a self described “Buckley style conservative” and his works mostly dealt with religious and mythological themes.
The feminists hated his guts, very few of his books had fully realised female protagonists with agency to put it mildly.
Never got within cooee of a Hugo!
Scientists grapple with long Covid puzzle as millions fall sick
Thanks for posting that, Ol Ozzie.
To begin with, I doubt whether accurate differentiation has been made by “medical authorities” between the long term effects of Covid19 itself & the mRNA vaccines. It is just not in their interest (given the implications) – nor do they have they processed the relevant data – to distinguish.
My “gut” feeling is that the vast majority of cases of Long Covid have been motorised by the spike protein in the vaccines which is produced in the body for some time.
On the other hand, my personal experience of a second dose of Covid (following initial minor few day infection in 2022) has convinced me that the damn pathogen is capable of upsetting the functioning of some organs it affects. My Eustachian tubes were affected by the last infection & 4 months later I still have some intermittent “muffled” hearing issues in the right ear. ENT bloke reckons both ears seem fine on examination. But there you are. I suspect that the virus – like Epstein Barr & other nasties – can cause various symptoms – commonly lumped together as “Post Viral Syndrome”.
The response to SARS 2 was OTT & has brought misery to a lot of people via lockdowns etc – not to speak of the untrialled ( a derisory trial by Pharma – NOTHING like the 5-10 year RCTs) vaccines. But the wretched virus fashioned by Wuhan with the help of US outfits like Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance is certainly a nasty entity not to be taken lightly.
You accept that China should be able to exercise territorial rights over waters which are disputed? Be careful that you don’t fall over backwards.
That the Nine-Dash-Line predates the PRC is not definitive. Japanese rule over Taiwan also predated the PRC (and no government based in mainland China has ever ruled Taiwan). Does that produce a definitive answer to the Taiwan issue?
Letting the parties settle the dispute is essentially telling them to fight China, or to accede to its bullying tactics.
Bourne1879
Feb 18, 2024 12:07 PM
From the Oz below. How soon before the page is shut down?
“Donald Trump supporters are tipping tens of thousands of dollars into a GoFundMe page to help pay over $US500m in penalties the former president owes after stinging losses in fraud and defamation cases in Manhattan, as Nikki Haley warned Republicans against becoming Mr Trump’s “piggy bank”.
Bourne1879,
habing read an article about Trump attending Sneakers Convention – “Sneaker Con”
I thought I like them, I will buy a Pair – Sold OUT
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Format fail.
Any attempts at a ‘Bill of Rights’ in the current climate would quickly degenerate into a laundry list of all the things that Leftists want (paid for by others.)
What might be achievable is a focus on a single Constitutional amendment like the right to free speech.
Oh, and I’m not sure that the interpretations of some commenters re English law vis a vis not having a Constitution are correct. The Common Law provided, for a long time, a formidable barrier between the individual and the State.
After all, every banana republic and other kind of dictatorship has a Constitution brimming over with platitudes about all the things the regime is against. Doesn’t mean a thing.
Interesting time line wrt Navalny’s death announcement.
14.19. Navalny’s death is placed on the internet. (I think it was the gaol where he was captive, that put it up).
14.35 Norway and Sweden both show commiseration for his demise, …….., and more importantly, state that “Putin did it”. 16 mins after the initial posting.
Wow. They must have a lot of evidence, ……., right?
14.41 Latvia FM Rinkevich states: “Whatever you think about Navalny as a Politician, he was just brutally murdered by the Kremlin. This is a FACT, ……..”
14.50 Czech FM Lipavsky said: “Russia still treats Foreign Policy like it treats it citizens.
14.51 French FM Sejournet: “Navalny paid with his life for his fight against the system of oppression.”
15.02 Pres of EC Michel: “The EU holds the Russian regime solely responsible for “this” tragic death.”
15.10 The heavy hitter, St Volodymyr the Pure: “Obviously, ….., he was killed by (the) Putin.”
15.16. (In the media), NATO Secretary Stoltenberg, (finally out from under his desk):
“Russia must establish all the facts, answer very serious questions.”
15.20. Dutch PM Rutte: “Navalny’s death illustrates the unprecedented cruelty of the Russian regime”.
etc etc etc.
Now, it is certainly possible, that (the) Putin had Navalny killed, that is true.
What would he gain from this act. Even at the peak of his popularity, Mr N had way less than 5% support, so calling this chap an opposition leader, is an exercise in bow drawing. A very large one indeed.
Oh, ….., I forgot that (the) Putin blew up his own gas pipeline and he is irrational.
Sorry.
I could just as easily say that Dot, having an irrational, pathological hatred of anything Russian, killed the unfortunate Mr N, in a fit of pique.
I have as much evidence for that accusation, as anyone has against (the) Putin, at this stage.
I look forward to seeing all of this evidence, obviously held by all of these countries, against the accused.
Joe “Obama” Biden, leader of the free world, made a statement.
“We don’t know exactly what happened, but, ….., we know that Putin did it.”
Regrettably, as usual, he adopted speaking in tongues, up to the point where the now common malfunction, stopped him mid thought. (He was storming the Fuehrer Bunker, 1945, …..)
He was asked whether his statement from several years ago, about:
“If anything happens to Navalny, Russia will pay a very heavy price.”
Evidently, Russia has suffered enough, no action will flow from this news.
Interesting.
Why lie like this? If you want to knock my block off, we can meet at the Garrvelly Breach Road Pub at 8:30 PM this Wedensday.
Of course, Saint Gonzalo Lira was MURDERED AND TORTURED BY SBU NAZIS but Navalny was simply a traitor who died in prison after falling on an ice pick with the back of his head 87 times, etc.
Totally rational and not a shill, Colonel Bat Guano.
Here’s the truth:
Navalny was Arkancided, we know Putin secretly wanted Hillary to win.
The neocons in the West and Russia are the enemy of the Ukrainians.
That leaves the other claimants with the choice between surrender and war?
How about a Bill of Obligations?
The opportunity is diminishing exponentially, Roger.
I’m not even sure the way we deal with intergovernmental immunities is the right way.
Confederalism would make this clearer.
Why lie like this? If you want to knock my block off, we can meet at the Garrvelly Breach Road Pub at 8:30 PM this Wedensday.
Rufus Firefly & Dot in a punch up! Makes the Russia stuff a bit tame!
The English most certainly have a constitution but it is uncodified.
Abusus non tollit usum.
I reckon Lavrov personally took care of that Navalny fiend. Lurrve the Lav!
lhIngan Hol: tugh qoH nachDaj je chevlu’ta’
Ok you live and learn – reading on Calibre e Book-Viewer – The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer on page 4% the following statement
he stood in far greater danger (Mr. Wychbold said) of being mistaken for a Yahoo.
Bard Q – 1800s what did statement “being taken for a yahoo” mean
A. Contrary to what the modern meaning of “yahoo” might suggest, in the 1800s, being “taken for a yahoo” had a completely different connotation. Here’s what it meant:
The Original Yahoo:
The term “yahoo” originated from Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726).
It referred to a race of crude, filthy, and bestial creatures encountered by Gulliver in his travels.
Shifting Meaning:
Over time, the term transitioned from its literal meaning in the book to become a pejorative term in the real world. It started indicating someone:
Rude and uncultured: This was the primary meaning in the 1800s.
Someone “taken for a yahoo” was considered uncouth, lacking manners, and behaving boorishly.
Simple-minded or easily fooled:
The association with the naivete of the Yahoos in the book led to this secondary meaning. It implied someone easily tricked or manipulated.
Context is Key:
However, it’s important to note that the specific shade of meaning depended on context. It could range from a playful jab at someone’s manners to a harsh insult suggesting gullibility.
Modern Comparison:
Though the term itself went out of fashion, the sentiment behind it persists. Today, similar insults might involve calling someone “uncultured,” “unrefined,” or a “country bumpkin,” depending on the situation.
Important Note:
It’s crucial to remember that the term “yahoo” had racist and classist undertones, particularly in the 19th century. It was often used to denigrate people from lower social classes or rural areas. While understanding the historical context, it’s important to avoid using the term today due to its offensive nature.
I hope this clarifies the meaning and historical context of “being taken for a yahoo” in the 1800s.
We’re trying to limit the power and authority of government and its control over our lives, not expand it!
Is that a South African dialect?
Fani Willis body language: she’s a lying, corrupt, aggressive kunt!
Almost Roger.
Klingon.
The second part of Dr. John Campbell’s interview with Richard Hershman (only about 7 min). Hard to believe some of the things he shows.
White clots USA, Part 2
That scowl says it all
Roger
Feb 18, 2024 1:00 PM
lhIngan Hol: tugh qoH nachDaj je chevlu’ta’
Is that a South African dialect?
Kilngon Hol
Bard Q. – lhIngan Hol: tugh qoH nachDaj je chevlu’ta’
A. Sure, here is the translation of “tugh qoH nachDaj je chevlu’ta’” in Klingon Hol:
tugh qoH – “to be taken for”
nachDaj – “yahoo”
je – “by”
chevlu’ta’ – “someone”
So, “tugh qoH nachDaj je chevlu’ta’” literally means “to be taken for a yahoo by someone.”
In other words, it means to be mistaken for a rude, uncultured, or simple-minded person.
Here is an example of how the phrase might be used in a sentence:
meymeymey tlhIHngan Holmeymeymey. (The human took me for a yahoo.)
I hope this helps!
Jan Jekielek
@JanJekielek
A year ago, @MikeBenzCyber blew my mind when he explained the “foreign/domestic switcheroo” he describes in his definitive interview with @TuckerCarlson.
Check out PART 1: The West’s Burgeoning Censorship Industry & the Gov’t Funds Pouring In. Mike digs deep. Highly recommended!
Yeah that would be fab. Climate Change, COVID, EVs etc. The list goes on.
What is in the pipeline should be some fairly easy extrapolation. Physical revolt will be the only solution. But when you remember 99% of people at the supermarket wearing masks, that won’t happen.
1-2% of people are still wearing masks.
Most of them boomers.
I always thought there was something odd about Bespoke, but I put it down to the Woodstock swill he imbibes, now the truth comes out.
He is a Klingon in disguise infiltrating the blog.
LOL!