Remember What Happened Right Before 9/11? It's Happening Again.

  A black budget is simply not enough for the CIA. They need their own budget to finance their own independent policies. That in a nutshell resumes what international drug trafficking is all about. 

Source: James Corbett

Remember way back in the year 2000, when the Taliban took over large swaths of Afghanistan and set about eradicating the nation's poppy crop that feeds the world opium supply?

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Of course you do.

Well, guess what? It's happening again.

That's right. After Uncle Sam's ignominious retreat from the graveyard of empires in 2021, the Taliban infamously regained control of the country and set about reinstituting their campaign to ban the cultivation of opium poppies. And, once again, the results of that ban have been nothing short of remarkable.

In fact, the Taliban's latest anti-poppy campaign is already being hailed as the "most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history" by self-proclaimed Afghanistan experts, with the country's opium production down a jaw-dropping 90% this year.

And since you do remember the story of the Taliban's first successful poppy crop crackdown, then you'll also likely remember how it ended: namely, with the blank check of 9/11 being cashed in on NATO's invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, leading to the subsequent resurgence of poppy cultivation in the country.

So, are we likely to see history repeating with this next iteration of the Afghan poppy story? Let's find out.

THE PAST

 

The tale of the Afghan poppy war is one that can be read in the annals of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), one of the many bureaucratic arms of the UN's globalist octopus. Tasked with "helping make the world safer from drugs, organized crime, corruption and terrorism" (which apparently involves "supporting Member States in implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development," for some unexplained reason), the UNODC has diligently documented the ups and downs of the Afghan poppy crop and its contribution to the illicit opium market in recent decades. They publish the results of this research in the form of an annual "Afghanistan Opium Survey," which tells the story in plain numbers.

In 1999, for example, this UN office informed the world that, after years of warfare and internal strife (in which the US played an integral part), Afghanistan's annual raw opium production had risen to the unprecedented level of 4,600 metric tons. They were also quick to add that "97 per cent of cultivation in 1999 occurred in Taliban-controlled areas," implying that poppy cultivation was being actively supported and encouraged by the Taliban in order to fund illicit activities.

Strange, then, that by the time of their 2001 Afghanistan Opium Survey—compiled just before the NATO invasion and occupation of the country—the UNODC bean counters (poppy counters?) were able to report that the country's total raw opium production had dropped to 185 metric tons, a 96% reduction from the record 1999 level.

So, what had happened? The Taliban happened, that's what.

Specifically, in July 2000, Mullah Mohammad Omar issued a fatwa declaring the cultivation or trafficking of poppies to be "haram" (forbidden under Islamic law). The result of that decree and its subsequent enforcement was so undeniable that not even the arch-propagandists at the Old Gray Presstitute or the Big Brother Corporation could cover it up.

 

As the charts make clear, the Taliban's poppy ban was remarkably successful. In fact, it was too successful for those in the deep state who have been managing and profiteering from the global drug trade since the days of William Russell. Afghanistan was providing more than 70% of the world's heroin supply at that time, and the powers-that-shouldn't-be wanted those drugs flowing again.

And we all know what happened next: 9/11. And, as we also know all too well, 9/11 led directly to the (completely fraudulent) invocation of NATO's Article 5, the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, the overthrow of the Taliban and the resurgence of the Afghan poppy crop.

As I've been at pains to stress over the years, it would be far too simplistic to suggest that 9/11 was simply a plot to get the world opium supply growing and flowing again. But the post-9/11 boom in Afghan poppy production—reaching record high after record high after record high, as dutifully documented by the UNODC's narcotics number crunchers—was certainly more than just a happy coincidence for the 9/11 planners.

In fact, at a certain point, the blatant reality of what had just happened—namely, NATO's overthrow of a regime dedicated to eradicating the poppy crop and its installation of a puppet government dedicated to promoting it—became so undeniable that Uncle Sam's propagandists simply stopped denying it.

Who can forget that infamous 2010 Fox News clip in which the mustachioed mouthpiece of the money masters, Geraldo Rivera, interviews Lt. Col. Brian Christmas in Helmand Province about how, even though it "grinds his gut," the US military now has no choice but to guard the poor Afghan poppy farmers' precious crop?

Yes, life was pretty good for the profiteers of the drug trade in the deep state in the wake of 9/11. They had a plentiful, cheap supply of poppies to feed the global opium trade that they have been directing, protecting and profiting from since the days of the Golden Triangle. And what's more, the whole racket was being protected by the US military at US taxpayer expense! What could go wrong?

THE PRESENT

 

As we all know by now, the US military completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan on August 30, 2021. By that point, the Taliban—whose dramatic summer surge led to their seizing Kabul in mid-August—had already taken over the country. And so it was that 20 years of invasion, occupation, counter-insurgency operations, bloodshed and terror had accomplished precisely nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing. As we've seen, the NATO invasion and American occupation did afford the deep state drug runners another two decades of record poppy crops to feed the global heroin trade, with the UNODC reporting in 2010 that "some 90% of the world’s heroin comes from opium grown in just a few provinces in Afghanistan." It didn't take long, however, for the Taliban to bring that poppy-fueled drug money party to an abrupt halt.

In April of 2022, Haibatullah Akhundzada—the Taliban's current leader and the Supreme Leader of Afghanistan—issued a decree much like the one issued by Mullah Mohammad Omar in 2000:

All Afghans are informed that from now on, cultivation of poppy has been strictly prohibited across the country. If anyone violates the decree, the crop will be destroyed immediately and the violator will be treated according to the Sharia law.

Predictably enough, this fatwa was greeted with cynicism and outright disbelief in the West. Last November, the UNODC issued its annual opium cultivation report for the country, noting that "opium cultivation in Afghanistan increased by 32% over the previous year to 233,000 hectares – making the 2022 crop the third largest area under opium cultivation since monitoring began" and warning that "seizures of opiates around Afghanistan indicate that trafficking of Afghan opium and heroin has not stopped."

One had to read the report's accompanying press release, however, to discover that the 2022 crop had largely been exempted from Akhundzada's decree, and that the real results of the Taliban's poppy ban would not be expected to be seen until the 2023 crop was harvested.

This did not stop Washington Beltway establishment repeaters like Foreign Policy from immediately decrying the Taliban's poppy ban as mere political theater. "The Taliban that took over Afghanistan after a 20-year war largely funded by heroin trafficking have, after pretending to ban drugs, instead turbocharged the cultivation and sale of narcotics a year after their takeover," the propaganda rag—which, strangely, had never shown a particular interest in the practice of poppy cultivation before—wrote the day after the UN report's release.

This cynicism continued into 2023, with US state-funded outfit RFE/RL reporting in May that "Afghan Poppy Cultivation Jumps Despite Taliban Crackdown" and the UN blowing smoke up its own posterior by producing puff piece videos implying that the only way the poppy ban can possibly work is through the active engagement of the UN.

Imagine the Western establishment's collective shock, then, when the 2023 poppy cultivation numbers began to roll in.

The Taliban's ban, as it turns out, was not a charade. In fact, it has been, according to Graeme Smith, an Afghanistan "expert" with the Crisis Group, "the most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history, according to the volume of drugs taken off the market." And how much was that? Estimates indicate that poppy cultivation plummeted an astonishing 90% in the last year.

But, regardless of how it happened, the US/NATO PR flaks who have spent the last two decades pretending to care about the people of Afghanistan and pretending to worry about the country's opium problem must be rejoicing at this news, right?

THE FUTURE?

 

Wrong, of course.

No, believe it or not, the establishment is busy freaking out over the prospect of the Taliban actually achieving what the UN/US/NATO neo-colonizers only ever gave lip service to: eradicating Afghanistan's poppy crop.

And how, exactly, can they spin the Taliban's successful eradication campaign—the same campaign that they were calling a total sham just months ago, mind you—as a bad thing, you ask?

Well, the arch-conspirators at Chatham House (aka the CFR mothership in London) have attempted to spin away the Taliban's amazing accomplishment by arguing that, yes, the Taliban have accomplished the previously unimaginable in virtually eliminating poppy production in the country, but it's actually just a grand ploy by the Taliban to trick people into liking them by actually improving their country! The cads! Don't trust them! Besides, the last poppy ban didn't last very long because of . . . some unnamable reason . . . so this one probably won't either.

The presstitutes at Time, Filter, The World and other pushers of approved propaganda, meanwhile, have all (by some remarkable coincidence or other) simultaneously hit upon the exact same talking point: if Afghan poppy farmers stop feeding the world heroin markets, then European junkies will turn to Fentanyl. So—wouldn't ya know it?—cheap Afghan opium was actually a good thing all along, and by cutting off its supply the Taliban are the bad guys once again!

But of all the pretzel-logic op-eds spewed out by the pro-opium, anti-Taliban crowd in recent months, by far the most chilling is "The Taliban’s Successful Opium Ban is Bad for Afghans and the World" by former World Bank economist William Byrd.

His commentary starts out by noting the remarkable success of the Taliban's poppy ban, acknowledging that it was accomplished by a "sophisticated, staged approach" that exempted the crop that was about to be harvested, and pointing out that the current ban is actually even more comprehensive than the Taliban's previous ban, as it prohibits the trade and processing of opiates, not just poppy cultivation.

But Byrd is quick to point out all of the ways that this remarkably successful narcotics eradication program is actually bad for Afghanistan (and the world!). The country's poppy farmers have lost $1 billion of revenue—revenue that, his analysis fails to spell out, those farmers could have earned by feeding the world heroin markets. This economic downturn, he writes, will cause a migration crisis, with poor farmers trying to cross the border in the hopes of making it to Europe. And this will all lead to more heroin overdoses in Europe as dealers adulterate their supply to offset rising costs.

So far, so boilerplate. It's where Byrd ventures into "solutions" to this "problem" of decreasing opium supplies that we start to see the dark specter of future intervention at play. In this final section, he raises the question of an "international response" and then proceeds to list all of the things that will not work.

The situation "may provide a well-grounded justification for more humanitarian assistance" in Afghanistan, but "this would just be a band-aid to provide temporary relief unless and until the opium ban is rescinded or undercut."

Programs offering rural development aid "could be helpful" but "the modest amounts of money involved will at best have a marginal impact."

And as for the expected migrant crisis? Well, there's no help there, either. "Trying to block people flows at the Afghan border will work only imperfectly, and to the extent it is successful will worsen privation and hunger within the country."

All of these negative points are meant to leave us with one overwhelming (and unstated) conclusion: this "problem" will not be "solved" as long as the Taliban are in power. If only someone could come along, depose the Taliban, and get the drugs flowing again . . .

Of course, this conclusion has to be left unsaid. After all, Byrd's analysis is being published by the "United States Institute of Peace," after all, a made-up, feel-good institution that, its "About" page informs us, was "founded by Congress and dedicated to the proposition that a world without violent conflict is possible, practical and essential for U.S. and global security." All of which sounds fine and dandy until you use the globalese decoder ring to discover what a "world without violent conflict" actually means to the Washington warhawks: a world in which every state in the world does what their US State Department overlords tell them to do, no questions asked.

It seems the Taliban haven't gotten the message. And so, around we go again on the seemingly never-ending regime change merry-go-round.

What provocation will be used this time to motivate the people of the world for another trip to the graveyard of empires? Another "catalyzing, catastrophic event" like 9/11 to pin on some Al-CIA-da patsies? Or something that can tie I-CIA-sis to Russian operatives to American homegrown domestic terrorists, perhaps? Whatever it is, you better believe it will be spectacular.

Those who are interested in learning about the possible next steps in this unfolding agenda may be interested in joining myself, video editor extraordinaire Broc West and Ryan Cristián of The Last American Vagabond for a live pirate stream watch along of COVID-911: From Homeland Security to Biosecurity this Sunday night (September 10, 2023) at 9 PM EDT.

Meanwhile, as always, the people of Afghanistan are dismissed by nearly everyone. They are treated as mere chessboard pawns who amount to little more than an afterthought in the great game of empire.

And now, on the verge of another 9/11 anniversary, here we are remarking yet again: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

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Subsidies Corrupt Economies, China, A Cautionary Tale

  And just like that: We are toast! 

 No this is not a cautionary tale about China. There is simply no difference now between China and the West, just scale. As mentioned in earlier posts, where China just arrived, we are on our way.

 Luckily, there is no climate emergency. Unluckily there are numerous misguided green policies which are going to fail miserably. The proposed solution, as usual, will be to double down on there policies along the well know explanation that they didn't work due to a lack of conviction. And that will be our downfall. Useless windmill and solar panels littering the countryside and producing almost no electricity for starved and dark cities. By then it will be too late to go back to reason. We will have neither the time nor money to do so. Literally, a new dark age will be upon us. 

 Over statement? Sit down and watch. We won't have to wait very long now...

Authored by Bruce Wilds via the Advancing Time blog,

China's economy is in trouble. After seeing a video claiming much of China's Electric Vehicle industry was built on subsidies that are now gone, I'm forced to ponder the legacy of these policies. It showed a factory in Chongqing, China, where a huge number of clean energy vans sit abandoned, covered in a thick layer of dust. This rendered their original appearances unrecognizable. Recently, aerial footage has also surfaced of vast grassy fields in Hangzhou littered with thousands of clean energy vehicles. This brings into question how this occurred.

Subsidies are more direct and worse than creating incentives or giving encouragement. Subsidies are a transfer of wealth. Without a doubt, many "false booms" are the result of scams created through subsidies. While it could be argued subsidies have moved the production and innovation in the EV industry forward, it brings up other issues.  A huge question is whether this has created a situation where other governments have strayed down the same wrong path in an effort to spur growth. This possibility should not be discounted. Consider for a moment that maybe EVs are not the answer to a more sustainable world.

The immense waste and the environmental problems and pollution resulting from improperly placed subsidies and regulations should be addressed. The big problem China now faces is that advanced economies are complex. When they start to shut down reversing the trend becomes difficult due to contagion. It is hard to build a machine when even a few parts are unavailable. This means the trend in China will not be easy to reverse.

China is now seeing the result of subsidies backfiring and the toll of reverse leverage is devastating both investors and its economy. After looking at the mess China has made out of building ghost cities, we must turn our attention to population control and demographics. China's poorly thought-out policies on these subjects feed into its current problems. The ramifications we are seeing play out are often referred to as unintended consequences. This is something we see far too much of.

China can no longer hide its growing problem of misallocating capital. This is coming back to haunt them. This is why many economists tout capitalism as the best economic system, it has proven to be more responsive to demand than planned economies which tend to go off track. The magnitude of China's problems is seen when viewing an ABC News In-depth piece covering the demolition of a huge number of large unfinished residential buildings in China.  This has revealed two issues, first, China was building residential buildings for "expanding future generations" that simply do not exist. The second was this resulted in rampant speculation driving prices through the roof. Now those prices are plummeting.

So, let's circle back to the question of whether this has created a situation where other governments have strayed down the same wrong path. Just because another government does something does not mean it would be good for us. Big governments are stupid and big companies are predatory. The thing they have in common is both want more control and power. In truth, we are the underdog in this ongoing struggle for control of our lives. This results in subsidies that tend to corrupt the direction capitalism takes if left alone. Unfortunately, the government is influenced by big company lobbyists that bend regulations strongly in their favor often at the expense of society at large. 

The energy sector and important decisions about our future have been hijacked by this trend. An example of how twisted things have become can be seen on America's roadways. Today millions of drivers zip down the road, the only occupant in oversized four-door trucks that get poor gas mileage. This is the answer lobbyists for the big auto companies and politicians arrived at to sidestep America's fuel efficiency standards enacted to save gas. Still, considering the political climate, China is crazy if it thinks the EU or America will throw open their borders to import Chinese-made cars. Both have their own auto industries to protect. 

Subsidies have led to many preposterous decisions, these include replacing all our current vehicles with EVs. It has resulted in America dropping tariffs on solar panels from China and spending billions of taxpayer dollars on them with the goal of rapidly reaching clean energy goals. even the rise of Amazon and its negative impact on the environment with its delivery to your door and high rate of returns or simply throw-away mentality falls into this category. Without subsidies such as the USPS delivering at a discount, even on Sundays and holidays, Amazon would not have become the giant force and destroyer of businesses it is today.

The energy sector and important decisions about our future have been hijacked by subsidies and regulations that have little basis. This trend does not bode well for creating a more productive future. China is growing proof that once a deep-seated fear of the future becomes ingrained in society people lose faith in the government's ability to turn things around. this is a lesson America learned during the Great Depression. One of the answers to forming better policies that benefit society is not to subsidize the projects of big businesses and politicians at the expense of organically grown solutions to our problems.

Message from a heretic

  This Google related platform has been useful for the last few years to share and discuss ideas and news with many people. Unfortunately, we are entering a new era of extreme censorship and I do not believe that the kind of ideas and documents I share here will be available for long.The censorship for now is mostly focused on people with a large following for maximum efficiency but the trend is clear. Soon absolutely everyone will be subjected to these rules thanks to efficient AI powered control tools. Eventually you will need a VPN to escape the censorship and then even that will not be enough. China being 10 years ahead in this respect, you do not need to be Bill Gates to know what the "road ahead" will look like!

  Reason why I have decided to migrate most of my posts to Telegram which for now seems to be much less censored than other platforms. Here's a link: 

 Link to Telegram

  Username: @Philjy

  My goal is to discuss ALL the censored subjects to the exclusion of the NON-censored hoax, flat earth, moon landing and other stupidities which are clearly absurdities and therefore obviously not censored. This does not mean that I believe all the tortuous and sometimes nonsensical explanations some people bring to the subject, just that legitimate questions can and should be asked. 

 This apply of course to the grandfather of all conspiracy theories: The Assassination of JFK in 1963. Many documents have been leaked since so that now most people in the US understand that the CIA probably played a role in the murder although all the key documents are still kept secret 60 years after the event.Here's a great video to get a better understanding about the case:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oVpt_I9iQQ

Everything is a rich man trick by Francis Richard Conolly

 Then of course there is 9/11 or rather 911 just to make sure that the joke is not lost. 4 planes superbly piloted by incompetent pilots, no military interception for over an hour in forbidden airspace, 3 towers falling at gravity speed in their own footprint (the only cases ever in the history of construction), no analysis or forensic done on-site, a war with Afghanistan and Iraq pre-arranged, the Patriot act enacted in short order... It actually requires some effort not to see anything wrong with all this!

 A superb plan about which we will probably never know the end story since everything was probably planned and managed from the WTC-7 building which had the good idea to fall in sympathy with the Twin Towers. How incredibly convenient!

There are still thousands of architects requesting a public inquiry on the subject 20 years later to understand how the impossible actually happened. The only thing we can wish them is: Good Luck!

 On this list, Corona Virus comes a close third. But here too, we'll never know for sure since almost instantly the Wuhan P4 laboratory was put under military supervision and all samples were officially destroyed. 

 It was obvious from the beginning (because so many eminent scientists said so and explained in details how) that the virus was man-made but who actually built it? China, the US? Then over the following months we saw the "plandemic" put in place with most governments acting as passive accomplices. 

 What is certain 3 years later is that the virus had an ultimate objective and that consequently we are still very far from getting rid of it, if ever!

 And finally this unbelievable fire in Lahanai in Maui which burned over two thousand houses almost laser-like at an unbelievable high temperature which could melt metal and glass. A town with no electricity, no Wi-Fi, no water, locked by the police for the duration of the fire. What else would you need to prove intent? A wall to make sure nobody can see what's happening afterwards and the recovery process? Sure enough, it is there!

 In all these case, you will find that an immediate explanation is provided from which no deviation is permitted later on less some doubts emerge. Almost no study or forensic is done and all questions are systematically referred to as supporting "conspiracy theories".  

 Well, could it be because the conspiracies are actually there? 

 Maybe, maybe not, but in any case the questions MUST be asked and proper answers must be given. Otherwise, we'll get more of the same. A society like the one we have now just only worse as we would deserve.

 

Escobar: No Respite For France As A 'New Africa' Rises

  Game over for France in Africa?

  Africa is still very far from true independence but for the first time in 60 years a light in shinning at the end of the tunnel. It could be another train since the continent still lacks the social infrastructure which helped Asia take off. So although it may or may not strengthen the continent, it will without doubt weaken Europe further. 

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

Like dominos, African states are one by one falling outside the shackles of neocolonialism. Chad, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and now Gabon are saying 'non' to France's longtime domination of African financial, political, economic, and security affairs.

By adding two new African member-states to its roster, last week's summit in Johannesburg heralding the expanded BRICS 11 showed once again that Eurasian integration is inextricably linked to the integration of Afro-Eurasia.

Belarus is now proposing to hold a joint summit between BRICS 11, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).  President Aleksandr Lukashenko's vision for the convergence of these multilateral organizations may, in due time, lead to the Mother of All Multipolarity Summits.

But Afro-Eurasia is a much more complicated proposition. Africa still lags far behind its Eurasian cousins on the road toward breaking the shackles of neocolonialism.   

The continent today faces horrendous odds in its fight against the deeply entrenched financial and political institutions of colonization, especially when it comes to smashing French monetary hegemony in the form of the Franc CFA - or the Communauté Financière Africaine (African Financial Community). 

Still, one domino is falling after another – Chad, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and now Gabon. This process has already turned Burkina Faso's President Captain Ibrahim Traoré, into a new hero of the multipolar world – as a dazed and confused collective west can’t even begin to comprehend the blowback represented by its 8 coups in West and Central Africa in less than 3 years. 

Bye bye Bongo 

Military officers decided to take power in Gabon after hyper pro-France President Ali Bongo won a dodgy election that “lacked credibility.” Institutions were dissolved. Borders with Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Republic of Congo were closed. All security deals with France were annulled. No one knows what will happen with the French military base.

All that was as popular as it comes: soldiers took to the streets of the capital Libreville in joyful singing, cheered on by onlookers.  

Bongo and his father, who preceded him, have ruled Gabon since 1967. He was educated at a French private school and graduated from the Sorbonne. Gabon is a small nation of 2.4 million with a small army of 5,000 personnel that could fit into Donald Trump’s penthouse. Over 30 percent of the population lives on less than $1 a day, and in over 60 percent of regions have zero access to healthcare and drinking water. 

The military qualified Bongo’s 14-year rule as leading to a "deterioration in social cohesion” that was plunging the country “into chaos."

On cue, French mining company Eramet suspended its operations after the coup. That’s a near monopoly. Gabon is all about lavish mineral wealth – in gold, diamonds, manganese, uranium, niobium, iron ore, not to mention oil, natural gas, and hydropower. In OPEC-member Gabon, virtually the whole economy revolves around mining.   

The case of Niger is even more complex. France exploits uranium and high-purity petrol as well as other types of mineral wealth. And the Americans are on site, operating three bases in Niger with up to 4,000 military personnel. The key strategic node in their ‘Empire of Bases’ is the drone facility in Agadez, known as Niger Air Base 201, the second-largest in Africa after Djibouti.  

French and American interests clash, though, when it comes to the saga over the Trans-Sahara gas pipeline. After Washington broke the umbilical steel cord between Russia and Europe by bombing the Nord Streams, the EU, and especially Germany, badly needed an alternative. 

Algerian gas supply can barely cover southern Europe. American gas is horribly expensive.

The ideal solution for Europeans would be Nigerian gas crossing the Sahara and then the deep Mediterranean. 

Nigeria, with 5,7 trillion cubic meters, has even more gas than Algeria and possibly Venezuela. By comparison, Norway has 2 trillion cubic meters. But Nigeria’s problem is how to pump its gas to distant customers - so Niger becomes an essential transit country.  

When it comes to Niger’s role, energy is actually a much bigger game than the oft-touted uranium – which in fact is not that strategic either for France or the EU because Niger is only the 5th largest world supplier, way behind Kazakhstan and Canada. 
Still, the ultimate French nightmare is losing the juicy uranium deals plus a Mali remix: Russia, post-Prighozin, arriving in Niger in full force with a simultaneous expulsion of the French military. 

Adding Gabon only makes things dicier. Rising Russian influence could lead to boosting supply lines to rebels in Cameroon and Nigeria, and privileged access to the Central African Republic, where Russian presence is already strong.  

It's no wonder that Francophile Paul Biya, in power for 41 years in Cameroon, has opted for a purge of his Armed Forces after the coup in Gabon. Cameroon may be the next domino to fall.

ECOWAS meets AFRICOM

The Americans, as it stands, are playing Sphynx. There’s no evidence so far that Niger's military wants the Agadez base shut down. The Pentagon has invested a fortune in their bases to spy on a great deal of the Sahel and, most of all, Libya. 
About the only thing Paris and Washington agree on is that, under the cover of ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States), the hardest possible sanctions should be slapped on one of the world’s poorest nations (where only 21% of the population has access to electricity) - and they should be much worse than those imposed on the Ivory Coast in 2010.  

Then there’s the threat of war. Imagine the absurdity of ECOWAS invading a country that is already fighting two wars on terror on two separate fronts: Against Boko Haram in the southeast and against ISIS in the Tri-Border region.

ECOWAS, one of 8 African political and economic unions, is a proverbial mess. It packs 15 member nations - Francophone, Anglophone and one Lusophone - in Central and West Africa, and it is rife with internal division.

The French and the Americans first wanted ECOWAS to invade Niger as their “peacekeeping” puppet. But that didn’t work because of popular pressure against it. So, they switched to some form of diplomacy. Still, troops remain on stand-by, and a mysterious “D-Day” has been set for the invasion. 

The role of the African Union (AU) is even murkier. Initially, they stood against the coup and suspended Niger's membership. Then they turned around and condemned the possible western-backed invasion. Neighbors have closed their borders with Niger.  

ECOWAS will implode without US, France, and NATO backing. Already it’s essentially a toothless chihuahua – especially after Russia and China have demonstrated via the BRICS summit their soft power across Africa. 

Western policy in the Sahel maelstrom seems to consist of salvaging anything they can from a possible unmitigated debacle - even as the stoic people in Niger are impervious to whatever narrative the west is trying to concoct. 

It's important to keep in mind that Niger’s main party, the “National Movement for the Defense of the Homeland” represented by General Abdourahamane Tchiani, has been supported by the Pentagon – complete with military training – from the beginning.  

The Pentagon is deeply implanted in Africa and connected to 53 nations. The main US concept since the early 2000s was always to militarize Africa and turn it into War on Terror fodder. As the Dick Cheney regime spun it in 2002: “Africa is a strategic priority in fighting terrorism.” 

That’s the basis for the US military command AFRICOM and countless “cooperative partnerships” set up in bilateral agreements. For all practical purposes, AFRICOM has been occupying large swathes of Africa since 2007.

How sweet is my colonial franc

It is absolutely impossible for anyone across the Global South, Global Majority, or “Global Globe” (copyright Lukashenko) to understand Africa's current turmoil without understanding the nuts and bolts of French neocolonialism. 

The key, of course, is the CFA franc, the “colonial franc” introduced in 1945 in French Africa, which still survives even after the CFA - with a nifty terminological twist - began to stand for "African Financial Community". 

The whole world remembers that after the 2008 global financial crisis, Libya’s Leader Muammar Gaddafi called for the establishment of a pan-African currency pegged to gold. 

At the time, Libya had about 150 tons of gold, kept at home, and not in London, Paris, or New York banks. With a little more gold, that pan-African currency would have its own independent financial center in Tripoli – and everything based on a sovereign gold reserve. 

For scores of African nations, that was the definitive Plan B to bypass the western financial system. 

The whole world also remembers what happened in 2011. The first airstrike on Libya came from a French Mirage fighter jet.  France's bombing campaign started even before the end of emergency talks in Paris between western leaders. 

In March 2011, France became the first country in the world to recognize the rebel National Transitional Council as the legitimate government of Libya. In 2015, the notoriously hacked emails of former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton revealed what France was up to in Libya: "The desire to achieve a greater share in Libyan oil production,” to increase French influence in North Africa, and to block Gaddafi's plans to create a pan-African currency that would replace the CFA franc printed in France. 

It is no wonder the collective west is terrified of Russia in Africa – and not just because of the changing of the guard in Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and now Gabon: Moscow has never sought to rob or enslave Africa. 

Russia treats Africans as sovereign people, does not engage in Forever Wars, and does not drain Africa of resources while paying a pittance for them. Meanwhile, French intel and CIA “foreign policy” translate into corrupting African leaders to the core and snuffing out those that are incorruptible. 

You have the right to no monetary policy 

The CFA racket makes the Mafia look like street punks. It means essentially that the monetary policy of several sovereign African nations is controlled by the French Treasury in Paris.

The Central Bank of each African nation was initially required to keep at least 65 percent of their annual foreign exchange reserves in an “operation account” held at the French Treasury, plus another 20 percent to cover financial “liabilities.” 

Even after some mild “reforms” were enacted since September 2005, these nations were still required to transfer 50 percent of their foreign exchange to Paris, plus 20 percent V.A.T.

And it gets worse. The CFA Central Banks impose a cap on credit to each member country. The French Treasury invests these African foreign reserves in its own name on the Paris bourse and pulls in massive profits on Africa's dime.

The hard fact is that more than 80 percent of foreign reserves of African nations have been in “operation accounts” controlled by the French Treasury since 1961. In a nutshell, none of these states has sovereignty over their monetary policy. 

But the theft doesn't stop there: the French Treasury uses African reserves as if they were French capital, as collateral in pledging assets to French payments to the EU and the ECB. 

Across the “FranceAfrique” spectrum, France still, today, controls the currency, foreign reserves, the comprador elites, and trade business. 

The examples are rife: French conglomerate Bolloré's control of port and marine transport throughout West Africa; Bouygues/Vinci dominate construction and public works, water, and electricity distribution; Total has huge stakes in oil and gas. And then there’s France Telecom and big banking - Societe Generale, Credit Lyonnais, BNP-Paribas, AXA (insurance), and so forth. 

France de facto controls the overwhelming majority of infrastructure in Francophone Africa. It is a virtual monopoly. 

“FranceAfrique” is all about hardcore neocolonialism. Policies are issued by the President of the Republic of France and his “African cell.” They have nothing to do with parliament, or any democratic process, since the times of Charles De Gaulle. 

The “African cell” is a sort of General Command. They use the French military apparatus to install “friendly” comprador leaders and get rid of those that threaten the system. There’s no diplomacy involved. Currently, the cell reports exclusively to Le Petit Roi, Emmanuel Macron.  

Caravans of drugs, diamonds, and gold

Paris completely supervised the assassination of Burkina Faso's anti-colonial leader Thomas Sankara, in 1987. Sankara had risen to power via a popular coup in 1983, only to be overthrown and assassinated four years later. 

As for the real “war on terror” in the African Sahel, it has nothing to do with the infantile fictions sold in the West. There are no Arab “terrorists” in the Sahel, as I saw when backpacking across West Africa a few months before 9/11. They are locals who converted to Salafism online, intent on setting up an Islamic State to better control smuggling routes across the Sahel. 

Those fabled ancient salt caravans plying the Sahel from Mali to southern Europe and West Asia are now caravans of drugs, diamonds, and gold. This is what funded Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), for instance, then supported by Wahhabi lunatics in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. 

After Libya was destroyed by NATO in early 2011, there was no more “protection,” so the western-backed Salafi-jihadis who fought against Gaddafi offered the Sahel smugglers the same protection as before - plus a lot of weapons.

Assorted Mali tribes continue the merry smuggling of anything they fancy. AQIM still extracts illegal taxation. ISIS in Libya is deep into human and narcotics trafficking. And Boko Haram wallows in the cocaine and heroin market.  

There is a degree of African cooperation to fight these outfits. There was something called the G5 Sahel, focused on security and development. But after Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, and Chad went the military route, only Mauritania remains. The new West Africa Junta Belt, of course, wants to destroy terror groups, but most of all, they want to fight FranceAfrique, and the fact that their national interests are always decided in Paris. 

France has for decades made sure there’s very little intra-Africa trade. Landlocked nations badly need neighbors for transit. They mostly produce raw materials for export. There are virtually no decent storage facilities, feeble energy supply, and terrible intra-African transportation infrastructure: that’s what Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects are bent on addressing in Africa.  

In March 2018, 44 heads of state came up with the African Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA) – the largest in the world in terms of population (1.3 billion people) and geography. In January 2022, they established the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) – focused on payments for companies in Africa in local currencies. 

So inevitably, they will be going for a common currency further on down the road. Guess what’s in their way: the Paris-imposed CFA. 

A few cosmetic measures still guarantee direct control by the French Treasury on any possible new African currency set up, preference for French companies in bidding processes, monopolies, and the stationing of French troops. The coup in Niger represents a sort of “we’re not gonna take it anymore.”

All of the above illustrates what the indispensable economist Michael Hudson has been detailing in all his works: the power of the extractivist model. Hudson has shown how the bottom line is control of the world’s resources; that’s what defines a global power, and in the case of France, a global mid-ranking power.

France has shown how easy it is to control resources via control of monetary policy and setting up monopolies in these resource-rich nations to extract and export, using virtual slave labor with zero environmental or health regulations. 

It's also essential for exploitative neocolonialism to keep those resource-rich nations from using their own resources to grow their own economies. But now the African dominoes are finally saying, “The game is over.” Is true decolonization finally on the horizon?

The Global War On Thought Crime

  I have spent the last 3 years warning about this and here we are.

  This is not yet 1984 but all the bricks are in place. A thought police which practically was impossible 10 years ago is now on the horizon with AI. A few more technical innovations and we have pre-crime, AI on drones and it's Terminator. The two together...

  Just as the war against terror had very little to do with mostly inexistant terrorists, the war on truth will have nothing to do with lies. The target in every case was and still is: YOU!

Authored by David James via The Brownstone Institute,

Laws to ban disinformation and misinformation are being introduced across the West, with the partial exception being the US, which has the First Amendment so the techniques to censor have had to be more clandestine.

In Europe, the UK, and Australia, where free speech is not as overtly protected, governments have legislated directly.

The EU Commission is now applying the ‘Digital Services Act’ (DSA), a thinly disguised censorship law. 

In Australia the government is seeking to provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with “new powers to hold digital platforms to account and improve efforts to combat harmful misinformation and disinformation.”

One effective response to these oppressive laws may come from a surprising source: literary criticism. The words being used, which are prefixes added to the word “information,” are a sly misdirection. Information, whether in a book, article or post is a passive artefact. It cannot do anything, so it cannot break a law. The Nazis burned books, but they didn’t arrest them and put them in jail. So when legislators seek to ban “disinformation,” they cannot mean the information itself. Rather, they are targeting the creation of meaning. 

The authorities use variants of the word “information” to create the impression that what is at issue is objective truth but that is not the focus. Do these laws, for example, apply to the forecasts of economists or financial analysts, who routinely make predictions that are wrong? Of course not. Yet economic or financial forecasts, if believed, could be quite harmful to people.

The laws are instead designed to attack the intent of the writers to create meanings that are not congruent with the governments’ official position. ‘Disinformation’ is defined in dictionaries as information that is intended to mislead and to cause harm. ‘Misinformation’ has no such intent and is just an error, but even then that means determining what is in the author’s mind. ‘Mal-information’ is considered to be something that is true, but that there is an intention to cause harm.

Determining a writer’s intent is extremely problematic because we cannot get into another person’s mind; we can only speculate on the basis of their behaviour. That is largely why in literary criticism there is a notion called the Intentional Fallacy, which says that the meaning of a text cannot be limited to the intention of the author, nor is it possible to know definitively what that intention is from the work. The meanings derived from Shakespeare’s works, for example, are so multifarious that many of them cannot possibly have been in the Bard’s mind when he wrote the plays 400 years ago. 

How do we know, for example, that there is no irony, double meaning, pretence or other artifice in a social media post or article? My former supervisor, a world expert on irony, used to walk around the university campus wearing a T-shirt saying: “How do you know I am being ironic?” The point was that you can never know what is actually in a person’s mind, which is why intent is so difficult to prove in a court of law.

That is the first problem.

The second one is that, if the creation of meaning is the target of the proposed law – to proscribe meanings considered unacceptable by the authorities – how do we know what meaning the recipients will get? A literary theory, broadly under the umbrella term ‘deconstructionism,’ claims that there are as many meanings from a text as there are readers and that “the author is dead.” 

While this is an exaggeration, it is indisputable that different readers get different meanings from the same texts. Some people reading this article, for example, might be persuaded while others might consider it evidence of a sinister agenda. As a career journalist I have always been shocked at the variability of reader’s responses to even the most simple of articles. Glance at the comments on social media posts and you will see an extreme array of views, ranging from positive to intense hostility.

To state the obvious, we all think for ourselves and inevitably form different views, and see different meanings. Anti-disinformation legislation, which is justified as protecting people from bad influences for the common good, is not merely patronising and infantilising, it treats citizens as mere machines ingesting data – robots, not humans. That is simply wrong.

Governments often make incorrect claims, and made many during Covid. 

In Australia the authorities said lockdowns would only last a few weeks to “flatten the curve.” In the event they were imposed for over a year and there never was a “curve.” According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2020 and 2021 had the lowest levels of deaths from respiratory illness since records have been kept.

Governments will not apply the same standards to themselves, though, because governments always intend well (that comment may or may not be intended to be ironic; I leave it up to the reader to decide). 

There is reason to think these laws will fail to achieve the desired result. The censorship regimes have a quantitative bias. They operate on the assumption that if a sufficient proportion of social media and other types of “information” is skewed towards pushing state propaganda, then the audience will inevitably be persuaded to believe the authorities. 

But what is at issue is meaning, not the amount of messaging. Repetitious expressions of the government’s preferred narrative, especially ad hominem attacks like accusing anyone asking questions of being a conspiracy theorist, eventually become meaningless.

By contrast just one well-researched and well-argued post or article can permanently persuade readers to an anti-government view because it is more meaningful. I can recall reading pieces about Covid, including on Brownstone, that led inexorably to the conclusion that the authorities were lying and that something was very wrong. As a consequence the voluminous, mass media coverage supporting the government line just appeared to be meaningless noise. It was only of interest in exposing how the authorities were trying to manipulate the “narrative” – a debased word was once mainly used in a literary context – to cover their malfeasance. 

In their push to cancel unapproved content, out-of-control governments are seeking to penalise what George Orwell called “thought crimes.”

But they will never be able to truly stop people thinking for themselves, nor will they ever definitively know either the writer’s intent or what meaning people will ultimately derive.

It is bad law, and it will eventually fail because it is, in itself, predicated on disinformation.

Victor Davis Hanson: What The Left Did To Our Country

  This is an interesting article by Victor Davis Hanson in which he predictably condemn the left for what is currently happening in America. There is certainly much to be discussed below but this is not what I am concerned about.

  Only in his conclusion does he mention that: "All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries."

  Well, is that so? And if this is the case doesn't it deserve a little more analysis that a single sentence? Why would people with power and money promote mayhem? For what purpose and with what goals in mind?

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence - the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.

With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to transform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bicoastal rich and subsidized poor - obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed.

The Obamas entered the presidency spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate (“spread the wealth,” “just downright mean country,” “get in their face,” “first time I’ve been proud of my country”) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized.

After getting elected through temporarily pivoting to racial ecumenicalism and pseudo-calls for unity, they reverted to form and governed by dividing the country. And then the two left the White House as soon-to-be mansion living, mega-rich elites, cashing in on the fears they had inculcated over the prior eight years.

To push through the accompanying unpopular agendas of an open border, mandatory wind and solar energy, racial essentialism, and the weaponization of the state, Obama had begun demonizing his opponents and the country in general: America was an unexceptional place. Cops were racist. “Clingers” of the Midwest were hopelessly ignorant and prejudiced. Only fundamental socialist transformation could salvage a historically oppressive, immoral, and racist nation.

The people finally rebelled at such preposterousness. Obama lost his party some 1,400 local and state offices during his tenure, along with both houses of Congress. His presidency was characterized by his own polarizing mediocrity. His one legacy was Obamacare, the veritable destruction of the entire system of a once workable health insurance, of the hallowed doctor-patient relationship, and of former easy access to competent specialists.

Yet Obama’s unfufilled ambitions set the stage for the Biden administration—staffed heavily with Obama veterans—to complete the revolutionary transformation of the Democratic Party and country.

It was ironic that while Obama was acknowledged as young and charismatic, nonetheless a cognitively challenged, past plagiarist, fabulist, and utterly corrupt Joe Biden was far more effective in ramming through a socialist woke agenda and altering the very way Americans vote and conduct their legal system.

Stranger still, Biden accomplished this subversion of traditional America while debilitated and often mentally inert—along with being mired in a bribery and influence-peddling scandal that may ultimately confirm that he easily was the most corrupt president to hold office in U.S. history.

How was all this possible?

Covid had allowed the unwell Biden to run a surrogate campaign from his basement as he outsourced his politicking to a corrupt media.

Senility proved a godsend for Biden. His cognitive disabilities masked his newfound radicalism and long-accustomed incompetence. Unlike his past failed campaigns, the lockdowns allowed Biden to be rarely seen or heard—and thus as much liked in the abstract as he had previously been disliked in the concrete.

His handlers, the Obamas, and the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren radical Democrats, saw Biden’s half-century pretense as a gladhander—good ole Joe Biden from Scranton—as the perfect delivery system to funnel their own otherwise-unpopular leftwing agendas. In sum, via the listless Biden, they sought to change the very way America used to work.

And what a revolution Biden’s puppeteers have unleashed in less than three years.

They launched a base attack on the American legal system.

Supreme Court judges are libeled, their houses swarmed, and their lives threatened with impunity. The Left promised to pack the court or to ignore any decision it resents. The media runs hit pieces on any conservative justice deemed too influential. The prior Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer whipped up a mob outside the court’s doors, and threatened two justices by name. As Schumer presciently put it, they would soon “reap the whirlwind” of what they supposedly had sowed and thus would have no idea what was about to “hit” them.

Under the pretense of Covid fears, balloting went from 70 percent participation on election day in most states to a mere 30 percent.

Yet the rates of properly rejected illegal or improper ballots often dived by a magnitude of ten.

Assaults now followed on hallowed processes, laws, customs, and institutions - the Senate filibuster, the 50-state union, the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, Election Day, and voter IDs.

Under Biden, the revolution had institutionalized first-term impeachment, the trial of an ex-president while a private citizen, and the indictment of a chief political rival and ex-president on trumped up charges by local and federal prosecutors—all to destroy a political rival and alter the 2024 election cycle.

Biden destroyed the southern border—literally.

Eight million entered illegally—no background checks, no green cards, no proof of vaccinations. America will be dealing with the consequences for decades. Mexico was delighted, receiving some $60 million in annual remittances, while the cartels were empowered to ship enough fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year.

“Modern monetary theory,” the Leftist absurdity that printing money ensures prosperity, followed.

It has nearly bankrupted the country, unleashed wild inflation, and resulted in the highest interest rates in a quarter-century. Middle-class wages fell further behind as a doddering Biden praised his disastrous “Bidenomics.”

Biden warred on fossil fuels, cancelling federal leases and pipelines, jawboning lending agencies to defund fracking, demonizing state-of-the-art, clean-burning cars, and putting vast areas of oil- and gas-rich federals lands off-limits to drilling.

When gas prices predictably doubled under Biden and the 2022 midterms approached, he tried temporarily to lease out a few new fields, to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and to beg the Saudis, and our enemies, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, and the Russians, to pump more oil and gas that Biden himself would not. All this was a pathetic ruse to temporarily lower gas prices before the mid-term elections.

Biden abandoned Afghanistan, leaving the largest trove of military equipment behind in U.S. military history, along with thousands of loyal Afghans and pro-American contractors.

Biden insulted the parents of the 13 Marines blown up in this worst U.S. military debacle since Pearl Harbor. He lied to the parents of the dead that he too lost a son in the Iraq war, and when among them later impatiently checked his watch as he seemed bored with the commemoration of the fallen—and made no effort to hide his sense that the ceremony was tedious to him.

Vladimir Putin summed up the Afghan debacle - and Biden’s nonchalant remark that he wouldn’t react strongly to a “minor” invasion of Ukraine if it were minor - as a green light to invade Ukraine.

When Biden did awaken, his first reaction was an offer to fly the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the country as soon as possible. What has followed proved the greatest European killing ground since the 1944-45 Battle of the Bulge, albeit one that has now fossilized into a Verdun-like quagmire that is draining American military supply stocks and killing a half-million Ukrainians and Russians.

Suddenly, there are three genders, not two.

Women’s sports have been wrecked by biological men competing as women, destroying a half-century of female athletic achievement. Young girls in locker rooms, co-eds in sororities, and women in prison must dress and shower with biological men transitioning to women by assertion.

There is no longer a commitment to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union is a woke, intolerant group trying to ban free expression under the pretense of fighting “hate” speech and “disinformation.”

The Left has revived McCarthyite loyal oaths straight out of the 1950s, forcing professors, job applicants, and students applying for college to pledge their commitment to “diversity” as a requisite for hiring, admittance, or promotion. Diversity is our era’s version of the Jacobins’ “Cult of Reason.”

Race relations hit a 50-year nadir. Joe Biden has a long history of racist insults and putdowns. And now as apparent penance, he has reinvented himself as a reverse racial provocateur, spouting nonsense about white supremacy, exploiting shootings or hyping racial tensions to ensure that an increasingly disgusted black electorate does not leave the new Democratic Party.

The military has adopted wokeism, oblivious that it has eroded meritocracy in the ranks and slashed military recruitment. It is underfunded, wracked by internal suspicion, loss of morale and ginned up racial and gender animosity. Its supply stocks are drained. Arms productions is snail-like, and generalship is seen as a revolving door to corporate defense contractor board riches.

Big-city Democratic district attorneys subverted the criminal justice system, destroyed law enforcement deterrence, and unleashed a record crime wave.

Did they wish to create anarchy as protest against the normal, or were they Jokerist nihilists who delighted in sowing ruin for ruin’s sake?

Radical racial activists, with Democrat endorsement, demand polarizing racial reparations. The louder the demands, the quieter they remain about smash-and-grab looting, carjacking, and the swarming of malls by disproportionally black teens—even as black-on-black urban murders reach record proportions.

In response, Biden tried to exploit the growing tensions by spouting lies that “white supremacy” and “white privilege” fuel such racial unrest—even as his ill-gotten gains, past record of racist demagoguery and resulting lucre and mansions appear the epitome of his own so-called white privilege.

This litany of disasters could be vastly expanded, but more interesting is the why of it all?

What we are witnessing seems to be utter nihilism. The border is not porous but nonexistent. Mass looting and carjackings are not poorly punished, but simply exempt from all and any consequences. Our downtowns are reduced to a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” where the strong dictate to the weak and the latter adjust as they must. The streets of our major cities in just a few years have become precivilizational—there are more human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco than were in the gutters of Medieval London.

The FBI and DOJ are not simply wayward and weaponized, but corrupt and renegade. Apparently the perquisite now for an FBI director is the ability either to lie while under oath or better to mask such lying by claiming amnesia or ignorance.

Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.

In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist. Nothing escapes it—not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.

The operating principle is either to allow or to engineer things to become so atrocious in everyday American life—the inability to afford food and fuel, the inability to walk safely in daylight in our major cities, the inability to afford to drive as one pleases, the inability to obtain or pay back a high interest loan—that the government can absorb the private sector and begin regimenting the masses along elite dictates. The more the people tire of the leftist agenda, the more its architects furiously seek to implement it, hoping that their institutional and cultural control can do what  ballots cannot.

We could variously characterize their efforts as destroying the nation to save it, or burning it down to start over, or fundamentally transforming America into something never envisioned by the Founders.

Will their upheaval  succeed? All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.

9/11, 22 Years Later: Will We Ever Get the Truth?

   I am much too young to have cared or understood what happened when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. It is only later, much later that I came to understand history and the fact that eventually the praetorian guards always end up controlling the palace. But it took another event for me to understand that history is written in the present and does not necessarily reflect the facts. 

  Like everybody else on 9/11 I switched on TV (I still had one at the time!) to see smoke above the World Trade Center and soon after a second plane slice through the other tower. An hour or so later, both towers fell in a most spectacular way in what was then raw history in the making. 

  Then again like everybody else I moved on. A month later I was in an eerily empty Maui (of all places!) and understood that things had changed forever. But the discussion was then focused on the coming wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and likewise I did not question the narrative. Why should I have? Wasn't the story clear-cut and the details sorted out? 

  The first sign that they were not was Building 7. In a little more than 100 years, not a single steel structure had imploded the way this building did after 9.11. Since, thousands of architects and engineers have requested a thorough investigation but to no avail of course...

Guest Post by Kevin Barrett

On June 6, Tucker Carlson, America’s most-watched TV pundit, launched a new show on Twitter. No longer reined in by Fox News executives, Carlson was free to ask a big, explosive question: “What exactly happened on 9/11?” He answered himself: “Well, it’s still classified.”

A few months earlier, Carlson had appeared on Clayton Morris’s podcast and brought up World Trade Center Building 7, widely viewed as the Achilles heel of the official story of 9/11:

“If you say, like, ‘What actually happened with building 7? Like that is weird, right? It doesn’t—like, what is that?’… If you were to say something like that on television, they’d flip out. You’d, like, lose your job over that. It’s an attack on my country. Can I ask? I don’t really understand. Do buildings actually collapse? No, they—maybe they do. I don’t know. But, like, why can’t I ask questions about that?”

Carlson’s words betray his cognitive dissonance. “Do buildings actually collapse (like that)? No, they—maybe they do.” He almost blurts out the obvious truth—“no, they don’t”—before correcting himself with the (possibly sarcastic) “maybe they do. I don’t know.”

Carlson built his career by cultivating a reputation for straight talk, unfazed by political correctness. But as he suggests, straight talk about 9/11 in general, and WTC-7 in particular, is unwelcome in today’s USA. In mainstream media, even asking questions in unacceptable.

Why can’t we ask questions about Building 7? Because the answers are all-too-obvious—and all-too-embarrassing to the rulers of the intertwined American and Israeli empires.

World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-story high-rise, collapsed into its own footprint at 5:21 pm on September 11, 2001, seven hours after the Twin Towers were destroyed. Numerous witnesses reported police and emergency personnel announcing that WTC-7 was about to come down. Seconds before it fell, witnesses overheard a countdown to demolition (“five-four-three-two-one”) on police radio, followed by the massive explosion that precipitated the “collapse.”

The building fell at absolute free-fall for the first two-and-a-half seconds, and near-free-fall thereafter. That means that all of WTC-7’s vertical supports had somehow been simultaneously and completely removed. The only known mechanism that can do that is professionally-prepared-and-timed explosives.

The obvious controlled demolition of Building 7 threw a monkey wrench into the US government’s official 9/11 narrative. WTC-7 had been one of the most important buildings in America. It housed the CIA’s second-largest headquarters after Langley, Virginia, as well as the Secret Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission with its Enron files, the Internal Revenue Service, and many of America’s biggest corporate heavy hitters. What’s more, WTC-7’s 23^rd floor was the home of New York’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM), where the local and federal governments would manage their joint response to any major disaster—like 9/11.

The OEM response to 9/11 should have been run from the 23^rd floor of WTC-7. But it wasn’t. Why not? In an ABC-TV interview with Peter Jennings conducted on the morning of 9/11, then-NYC-mayor Rudy Giuliani provided the answer: “We were told the World Trade Center was going to collapse,” so they moved to an alternate site. Giuliani’s confession of foreknowledge of the unprecedented and vanishingly improbable “collapse” of the Twin Towers raises the question of why the 343 firefighters who died on 9/11 didn’t get the same warning.

Giuliani wasn’t the only one with foreknowledge of a “building collapse” on 9/11. Both the BBC and CNN reported WTC-7’s “collapse” before it happened.

Though Building 7 was an obvious controlled implosion, it couldn’t be acknowledged. Obviously the none-too-competent alleged hijackers blamed for 9/11 were not plausible suspects in the highly professional implosion of one of the most secure buildings in America.

For seven years, the feds stalled and obfuscated. A 2002 FEMA report sidestepped WTC-7, admitting that any hypothesis the authors could imagine (not including the unthinkable one, demolition) had “only a low probability of occurrence.” The 9/11 Commission Report, issued in 2004, did not even mention the destruction of the WTC-7. Network TV imposed a blackout on footage of its “collapse.”

Finally, in 2008, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released its long-overdue report on WTC-7. According to the authors, a hitherto-unknown physical phenomenon, “thermal expansion,” had caused a beam to unseat itself, magically removing all of the building’s vertical support and setting off 2.5 seconds of absolute free-fall followed by about five seconds of near-free-fall.

The NIST report, of course, is ludicrous. For details, watch the film Seven featuring University of Alaska professor Leroy Hulsey, who led a detailed computer simulation of the building’s destruction.

But we didn’t really need to wait for Hulsey’s report. Just listen to Larry Silverstein, the close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu who bought the World Trade Center two months before 9/11, doubled the insurance, and fortuitously skipped his usual breakfast at the top of the North Tower that morning. In the PBS documentary America Rebuilds, broadcast in 2002, Silverstein confesses to “pulling” (i.e. demolishing) Building 7. He later collected roughly three-quarters of a billion dollars in insurance money on that very building, along with four billion for the rest of the World Trade Center—the fruits of his bizarre double indemnity claim that he had suffered two completely separate and unrelated terrorist attacks from the two planes.

The obvious fact that the authorities lied and are still lying about Building 7 raises the question of what else are they lying about—and points to the only slightly less-obvious demolitions of the Twin Towers. Like Building 7, the Twin Towers disappeared at near-free-fall acceleration into the path of most resistance, indicating that they too had had all of their vertical supports taken out with synchronic precision. Just as the sudden demise of Building 7 cannot be plausibly blamed on a few minor office fires of undetermined origin, the likewise sudden, symmetrical, and complete destructions of Towers 1 and 2 cannot possibly have been the result of random damage caused by relatively modest office fires kindled by kerosene (jet fuel).

But the Towers were “overkilled” in unconventional explosive demolitions quite unlike the implosion of Building 7. Indeed, so much explosive force was used to pulverize the Towers that most of the contents of the buildings, including more than 1100 human bodies, were apparently vaporized into nothingness. And of the 1,640-odd victims who did leave at least a sliver of fingernail or a splinter of bone to be recovered by the most meticulous sifting-and-bucketing operation in history, many were blasted to smithereens, leaving only a few bone fragments to be recovered years later from the rooftops of neighboring buildings: “For example, a search in 2010 found 76 more fragments of remains on the roof of the 40-story Deutsche Bank building 250 feet from the South Tower. Previously, over 750 human bone fragments, each less than a half-inch long, were collected from this roof.”* How the massively explosive destruction of the two Towers, and the vaporization of its occupants and their office equipment, could ever have been mistaken for a natural gravity-driven collapse is one of those mysteries that will leave future historians scratching their heads.

The explosive destruction of the World Trade Center, conducted in such a way that it could be (quasi-)plausibly blamed on plane crashes and fires, required immense amounts of money and expertise, as well as insider access to the buildings. One often-overlooked requirement was that the perpetrators, who had invested so much in their elaborate demolition plans, would have needed to be 100% certain that planes would hit the buildings to provide a pretext for the demolitions. So they could not have simply allowed radical hijackers to attempt to seize control of planes and try to fly them into the Towers. The odds of successful plane-into-building hits, given that there had been no successful hijackings in the US for decades, would have been near zero. So, the perpetrators must have controlled the aviation aspect of 9/11, presumably by flying planes into targets by remote control. That would explain why there is no evidence that any alleged hijackers were even on board the alleged attack planes, and abundant evidence to the contrary.

Obviously powerful insiders were responsible. The question is, which insiders?**

The short answer, to which most students of the issue would agree, is “the neoconservatives.” Fanatically loyal to Israel, and desperate to turn the US military against their Muslim enemies, the authors of Rebuilding America’s Defenses (September 2000) famously announced that their yearned-for “process of transformation … is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event–like a new Pearl Harbor.”

9/11 was the neocons’ new Pearl Harbor. 9/11’s shocking imagery and 2000+ casualties closely resembled the original 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, whose psychological impact transformed an 80%-antiwar opinion into an angry hornets’ nest of warmongers. But 9/11 was not merely designed to launch the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, or even the destruction of “seven countries in five years.” Its less-obvious but more important purpose was to implant Islamophobia deeply and permanently into the western subconscious mind. By equating Islam with terrorism, 9/11 hoodwinked the west into viewing Israel’s enemies as its own. The 9/11-triggered Islamophobia epidemic will probably continue to fester and spread for decades to come. Indeed, it will likely outlast the zionist entity itself.

But despite PNAC’s prognostications, 9/11 failed to contribute to the establishment of a “new American century.” Though the US military was successfully hijacked and turned against Israel’s enemies, the cost to the empire itself was astronomical, not only in terms of dollars but also in reputation and soft power.

While the US was bogged down in West Asia, fighting countries it should have befriended, peer competitors Russia and China arose to challenge America’s imperial dominance, and the BRICS alliance emerged heralding a multipolar world. When the dust settles, it is likely that 9/11 will be seen to have hastened the demise of the US empire by two or three decades. And the zionist entity, too, will soon be relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history, 9/11 or no 9/11.

So, the whole murderous hoax—a vivid display of the evil men are capable of—will turn out to be futile. As the Qur’an tells us, “They plot and Allah plans; and Allah is the best of planners.”

Covid Restrictions Are Returning Fast. Here’s What We Can Do.

  Was this the plan all  along? Hard to say. I now believe the strategy is decided by some groups of people without much discussions about tactical details to achieve the goals in order to keep maximum flexibility.

  If this is correct then likely we are in for some kind of trouble next year. Masks may or may not be reimposed, it really doesn't matter that much. Their acceptance or not will be a precious indicator for the next stage: What level of shock doctrine implementation is needed to reach the goal of complete control. In which case, whatever we do is bound for failure. We'll see!

Guest Post by Marie Hawthorne

We like to say that conspiracy theorists are just ahead of the curve, and we’ve recently gotten evidence that arguably the biggest conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, has been right about the story of a lifetime.  Covid restrictions are returning.

A TSA whistleblower told Alex Jones that by mid-September TSA managers and airport employees will be wearing masks, by October flyers will be masking again, and sometime in December, we can expect a full return to the 2021 Covid protocols.  After hearing this, Jones reached out to a manager within Border Patrol to see if he had heard anything about a return of Covid protocols, and he confirmed this.

Official channels have been quick to deny the return of any restrictions, and because Alex Jones said it, the average citizen dismissed it, too.

But let’s look around.

Are Covid restrictions really coming back?

Well, Epoch Times reported this week that UMass in Massachusetts; Kaiser Permanente in California; and United Health, Auburn, and University Hospital in New York have brought back mask requirements for staff and physicians.

Lionsgate Studios reinstated their mask mandate last week.  The Los Angeles County Dept. of Health told them they had to reinstate the mask mandate after several employees had been diagnosed with Covid.

The overwhelming majority of universities had strict vaccine and masking requirements during 2021 but gradually dropped those requirements over the past two years. There were still about 100 colleges and universities requiring proof of vaccination, but those were overwhelmingly medical schools in a handful of states.

However, Morris Brown, a small historically black liberal arts college in Atlanta, asked students to wear masks for the next two weeks despite no cases being reported on campus.

People love to hate Alex Jones, but it’s hard to prove him wrong sometimes.

There’s no rational explanation for the return of Covid restrictions. 

While the number of hospitalizations due to Covid is technically increasing, this past week in August still has the 22nd-lowest amount of Covid cases in the 160+ weeks since we began tracking cases. There’s no health emergency here (at least not due to Covid).

Some people are speculating that the new round of Covid alarmism has to do with the rollout of the latest Covid vaccine, which will most likely hit the market in mid-September.

More people are speculating that this is in preparation for the election next year.  In 2020, record numbers of people voted by mail, and there is some speculation that, if lockdowns return, this will be another reason to not have in-person voting in 2024, either.

Or maybe it was the plan all along.

It’s also possible that this was the plan all along, to have a society used to rolling lockdowns and constant new requirements for vaccine uptake.  I realize how far-fetched this sounds, but let’s look at some behind-the-scenes information.

This last January, Moderna signed a deal in the UK to build a facility capable of producing up to 250 million doses of mRNA a year.  Moderna’s Australian facility, capable of producing 100 million doses per year, will come online in 2024, as will their facility in Canada.  And these facilities all offer peanuts next to Moderna’s Massachusetts facility, which has a production capacity of 3 billion mRNA doses per year.

Governments around the world have invested colossal sums of money in the Covid response; they can’t walk away from it.  Too many powerful people are too invested.  75 members of Congress were trading stock in pharmaceutical companies in 2021, right in the middle of the first round of Covid.

Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, cofounded a hedge fund more than ten years ago that invested $500 million in Moderna.  He refuses to say whether or not he still has a financial interest in that particular hedge fund, but looking at the Moderna facilities popping up in the Commonwealth nations, I think it’s safe to assume he does.

The Covid response led to an unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of billionaires and they are not going to let that advantage go.

We’ve talked before about the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Treaty.  If this gets ratified next year, which it probably will, the head of the WHO will be able to declare pandemic protocols when and where he wants.  This won’t be something people can vote their way out of because the decisions will be made outside the U.S.  And international treaties supersede the Constitution.

Get ready for an information blackout.

Powerful interests obviously want to keep Covid going, but there’s no reason to assume the playbook will be exactly the same this time around.  I strongly suspect that, this go-around, information will be far more tightly controlled.

In response to public outrage surrounding the Twitter Files, social media companies have gotten sneakier in the way they control what people see.  Outright bans are out. Burying information from non-mainstream sources is in.  This has been profoundly noticeable for anyone that does internet research.

Linda Yaccarino, X’s new CEO, has really gotten behind this.  We’ve written about her before, too.  She’s a big fan of “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” and that’s exactly what’s happening now.  The politically convenient aren’t being banned; they’re just not being seen.

Laws have been passed in various places to facilitate this.  We wrote about Europe’s Digital Services Act a few months ago, which has now come into law.  Under this, large online platforms will be regularly audited to make sure they are not violating any of the EU’s guidelines, some of which have to do with spreading information that may be harmful to people’s health.

American laws are not quite as strict (yet), but YouTube has voluntarily adopted the WHO’s guidelines, which means that it’s about to get a lot harder to view videos about alternative or natural health information.

And this would almost be forgivable if it seemed like any of it was actually helping.

But in all these discussions of reining in health “misinformation,” it really seems like they’re simply attacking anything that won’t generate revenue for Big Pharma.  If you look at Biden’s Covid Preparedness Plan, not once in the 100-page document does he address any natural immunity boosters like improved diet, exercise, and sunshine.  Even though, up until five years ago, it was well understood by physicians all over the world that improving diet and exercise offers low-cost, dramatic results.

And The Science™ seems almost aggressively sloppy.  The CDC’s V-Safe app stopped collecting data on adverse events following Covid vaccinations.  If you try logging in, a message pops up saying that data collection for Covid vaccines ended June 30, 2023.

And yet, people are still being actively pushed to get more shots.

There’s something we can do.

Having said all this, I don’t think it’s time to despair.  Both Kaiser Permanente and Lionsgate Studios dropped their mask mandates this week after the public began paying attention. Bringing these practices to light really does make a difference.

I am happy to have people call me a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist if the end result is that it becomes harder to implement mandates.

Aggressive narrative control is not a sign of strength. It’s a sign that the people in power are afraid of their subjects.  It’s easy to fire one person at a time for noncompliance. It’s a lot harder to lay off entire teams, though, and I’m hoping that’s what the public begins to realize.

Look at how you can quietly refuse to comply.

We live in a strange time.  Technology has made possible a concentration of power that previous tyrants could only have dreamed of.  If we don’t pay attention to the actions of the people behind these gigantic tech and pharmaceutical companies and the supranational government organizations like the WHO they all seem to be hopping into bed with, we may slide into that dystopian nightmare faster than we realize.

Open defiance will bring down the hammer.  But quiet nonconformity is a lot harder to punish, especially if large enough groups of us band together to do it.