The Class Factor In Journalism

caitlinjohnstone  |  Iraq war cheerleader David Brooks has an article in The New York Times titled “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?“, another one of those tired old think pieces we’ve been seeing for the last eight years that asks “golly gosh could we coastal elites have played some role in the rise of Trumpism?” like it’s the first time anyone has ever considered that obvious point (the answer is yes, duh, you soft-handed silver spoon-fed ivory tower bubble boy).

One worthwhile paragraph about the media stands out though:

“Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.”

Brooks is not the first to make this observation about the drastic shift in the socioeconomic makeup of news reporters that has taken place from previous generations to now.

“The class factor in journalism gets overlooked,” journalist Glenn Greenwald said on the Jimmy Dore Show in 2021. “Thirty or forty years ago, fifty years ago, journalists really were outsiders. That’s why they all had unions; they made shit money, they came from like working class families. They hated the elite. They hated bankers and politicians. It was kind of like a boss-employee relationship — they hated them and wanted to throw rocks at them and take them down pegs.”

“If I were to list the twenty richest people I’ve ever met in my entire life, I think like seven or eight of them are people I met because they work at The Intercept — people from like the richest fucking families on the planet,” Greenwald added.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, whose father worked for NBC, made similar observations on the Dark Horse podcast back in 2020.

“Reporters when I was growing up, they came from a different class of people than they do today,” Taibbi said. “A lot of them were kind of more working class — their parents were more likely to be plumbers or electricians than they were to be doctors or lawyers. Like this thing where the journalist is an Ivy League grad, that’s a relatively new thing that I think came about in the seventies and eighties with my generation. But reporters just instinctively hated rich people, they hated powerful people. Like if you put up a poster of a politician in a newsroom it was defaced instantaneously, like there were darts on it. Reporters saw it as their job to stick it to the man.”

“Mostly the job is different now,” Taibbi said. “The fantasy among reporters in the nineties about politicians started to be, I want to be the person that hangs out with the candidate after the speech and has a beer and is sort of close to power. And that’s kind of the model, that’s where we’re at right now. That’s kind of the problem is that basically people in the business want to be behind the rope line with people of influence. And it’s going to be a problem to get us back to that other adversarial posture of the past.”

 

Why The West Is So Weak And Russia Is So Strong

gaiusbaltar  |  The main thing to understand is that western societies and economies have been put on an ideological footing. Productivity, competitiveness, technology and science are simply not priorities anymore in the West. Explaining the consequences of this process for the West would take many articles, or a book of several hundred pages. Still, let’s mention a few examples.

The inverse competence crisis – The goal of this entire project has been to place the ideologically pure in all positions of power at all levels of society. These positions are, in a normal and competitive society, occupied by the highly competent 1.5/8 group. The process has now reached near-completion with most positions of power occupied by the ideologically pure. Some of those people have high IQs but they are neither objective nor independent thinkers. The Ideology they must subscribe to is simply incompatible with those qualities. This has some serious consequences.

Remember that positions of power and influence are more likely to demand general competence than other positions (as opposed to specific competence). The greater the power, the more the position demands general competence. The people in these positions now are selected by ideological fervor and reliability – so the higher you go, the more ideologically enthusiastic the people who hold them. This means that the least objective and independent thinking people hold the positions which require the greatest objectivity and independent thinking. Therefore, in the West incompetence becomes greater and more common the higher you go. As someone said - “a general is an incompetent colonel.” This can be seen absolutely everywhere except in some holdout private companies. Those exceptions are of course being addressed as we speak.

The second problem is that many of the irrational/subjective people holding all the power have reasonably high IQs. That may seem to be a positive thing but it has a major disadvantage. Moderate to high IQ irrational/subjective people are the easiest to brainwash of all people. The reasons for that are complicated and need to be addressed in another article – but what this means is that the top tier in the West is not only the most incompetent it can possibly be in comparison to what their jobs require – but are also the most malleable and delusional.

The cost and debt crisis – The migration of the ideologically pure into the ideological power base and positions of influence has created millions of jobs in western societies which create no value. These jobs are much more numerous and more widespread than most people realize, and I wouldn’t be surprised if something like 20%-30% of the entire labor force of the West could be fired without any adverse effect. In fact, the effect would be positive, especially if those people could be made to work the (mostly menial) real-economy jobs they are suitable for.

Deindustrialization has been blamed for the extreme debt levels and tax burdens of the West. That is, as far as it goes, true – but maintaining this giant group of incompetents in their fake jobs is also placing an extreme burden on the West. Western societies are now completely unsustainable and cannot be run without constant debt increase.

The competition crisis – This crisis can be explained by the following example: Let’s say there are three companies with combined 100% market share in some sector. There is no real competition between them and everybody can just relax because the customers can’t go anywhere else. These companies can get away with absolute incompetence on most levels, including in management. They don’t need to think about efficiency, safety, productivity or costs, except on their websites and in annual reports. However, if a competitor with competent employees manages to infiltrate the sector, those three companies will hit a wall. There will be an enormous crisis and one or more of them will most likely go under.

This is exactly the situation in the western economies now. Monopoly and oligopoly is the rule and the main objective of most large western companies is to prevent anyone from infiltrating their sector – usually by bribing regulators or by buying the competition. This is a necessity because a huge number of western companies are now run by incompetent management and staffed by incompetent people, particularly in support and management functions. The immortal words of the nameless Boeing employee about the 737 MAX apply to most large western companies; “this airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.” Western companies are no longer competitive. They cannot compete with Chinese companies now and soon they won’t be able to compete with companies in general outside the West. They simply can’t function except inside an economic safe-space. In fact, the situation is such that the Chinese already do the real work for many of them and reshoring the work is problematic because of (surprise!) the human capital degradation in the West caused by the repurposing of its education system.

This also applies to western societies as a whole. The entire leadership and diplomatic classes of the West are no longer competitive against the rest of the world for exactly these reasons. They are being outmaneuvered by the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, and everybody else at every turn. Even African leaders are now more competent than western leaders. They have consistently made decisions that are better for their people than leaders in the West - for the last few years anyway.

The complexity crisis – Earlier in this article I stated that the 1.5/8 group is extremely valuable for modern societies and without it complicated modern societies cannot be managed. In the West this group has been successfully sidelined to a great degree and a good part of it doesn’t even bother with university education anymore. The situation, however, is even worse than that. The reconfiguration of the education system and the break between competence and reward in the job market has fundamentally changed the decision making process behind the selection of university education. Why study engineering (which is hard) when you can get an even better paying job with a degree in psychology (which is easy nowadays)? The reconfiguration of the western education system has changed the reward structure, encouraging young people to pursue easy and useless education – simply because the “system” will provide them with jobs.

This has already caused a major crisis in western societies, particularly in the US. The “maintenance” of complex aspects of US society needs a large group of engineers and people with related education. This maintenance is faltering now, and significantly relies on foreign engineers educated in US universities. You see, why would Americans study engineering in a system which doesn’t reward it? If China and India could somehow recall their engineers and others with hard education from the US, the US system could probably not be maintained, let alone advanced. This will get progressively worse and we will soon reach a point where complex systems which underpin society cannot be kept running. That will require some kind of “reset” to a less complex society, with less prosperity of course.

There are far more crises than those four, but I wouldn’t want to sound like a doomsayer by listing more.

Charles McCullough Had His Own Struggles With Whistleblower Retaliation

twitter | The following is an excellent take from comment on a Twitter post that explains and highlights some key things. Link is shared at the end.

You don’t know me, but I’m a retired Army JAG so I know about whistleblower stuff, and how IGs work and I hear people say he isn’t a whistleblower and he didn’t see the alien bodies himself and he doesn’t have any first hand evidence aliens exist—or it’s hearsay, these comments aren’t wrong, but he’s not whistleblowing by testifying aliens exist to congress and congress barely cares about aliens—if you listen closely to the comments of @timburchett, @aoc, and @mattgaetz, I’m sure they believe the part about aliens, but that’s not their big issue. They’re mad about how defense contractors are in control of our military.

Here’s the TLDR. Grusch perfectly meets the definition of a whistleblower because he got professionally crushed (I’m pretty sure) when he discovered and reported contract fraud around these SAPs).Bbut it’s funny because a lot of people are distracted by the sensational aspect of these special access programs—aliens and alien space ships. Remember, Grusch isn’t whistleblowing to you or to congress. He blew the whistle to the IG. The IG found this credible and told congress.

I suspect Grusch asked an SAP contractor for his contract statement of work to see what was being done for the SAP and they didn’t show him, then he probably said show me the invoices for your work so I can see what you do (because I do the oversight now) and they couldn’t show him invoices for the SAP work they were doing, so he probably brought one contractor in and put him under oath in the SCIF and he got him to confess that they overbill for hammers and toilet seats to launder money so they can pay saps under the table (by padding invoices for other legit service contracts) that aren’t authorized by contract to avoid congressional oversight. Then some General probably fired Grusch who uncovered this government contract fraud/waste/abuse.

So the IG checks the math and agrees, and they take it to congress because it’s DoD/pentagon senior leader misconduct that might indicate the defense contracting industry (military industrial complex) has bribed the most senior leaders of the pentagon with 7-8 figure salaries in post military retirement employment—so it’s getting gnarly fast and the fact that everything is to cover up the existence of aliens and alien space ships is just trivia at this point. Then Grusch’s life is threatened and @rosscoulthart steps in and offers him an interview to go public because once he does it makes no sense to kill him, it will only become more public—so he gives the interview.

But DOD approves it and they probably said ok, you can talk about aliens a little but you can’t talk about how the pentagon is corrupt. So he’s definitely a whistleblower and he s given all the evidence about that he needs to to the IG. He’s not whistleblowing to the public or congress to prove his claims—the IG has it and they believe him. But you feel like he’s trying to convince you aliens exist and we have recovered flying saucers—they do and we have them, but that’s what you care about, congress cares about the DoD corruption and the military industrial complex capture of the pentagon and them not being in control of how tax payer dollars are spent, Grusch doesn’t care what we believe, he says if you want to know—I told the IG where everything is—look for yourself. And he’s suing the military for firing him from his job in the military and federal government because he discovered fraud and he got hammered over it, which absolutely makes him a whistleblower.

That’s what I sorted out from everything that was said at the congressional hearing on July 26. Pretty sure that’s the situation. I hear Grusch saying believe what you want—I’m telling you they exist and if you don’t believe me I told the IG everything I know and you can go see for yourself—and he thinks the people should be told and the tech/knowledge doesn’t belong to these aerospace companies.

List Of Incredible People With Incredible Claims

 

As You Follow The UAP Disclosure Narrative What're You Following And What're You Reacting To?

askapol  |  Last Thursday, July 27, the day after UFO whistleblower David Grusch testified before the House Oversight Committee, Ask a Pol brought it up to Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-Chair Marco Rubio (R-FL) who hadn’t caught the testimony but was quick to say he wasn’t dismissing it. 

“We’re not ignoring it,” Rubio says, adding the Senate Intelligence Committee is trying to deal with it “in a very different way” than their House counterparts.  

Rubio also pulls the veil back a tad on his thinking as he describes the Senate focus on UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). 

“You have to bifurcate this issue. The stuff that they're seeing over restricted airspace, which everyone admits is real and needs to be addressed,” Rubio says. “And then the stories about historic programs. I mean, I don't know, that's gonna take—if that's even true—that's gonna take a long time to unpack. And I'm not ignoring that either.”

As for if their investigation is bearing any fruit? 

“Am I getting answers? Like are people—no. We're getting a lot of information, I'm not sure we're getting a lot of answers yet,” Rubio says. “But these things take time.”

 

On BBC Radio: The Entire Five Eyes Alliance Participates In The Crash Retrieval Program

Full interview of David Grusch and his lawyer Charles McCullough (former ICIG) on BBC .
by u/Same-Intention4721 in UFOs

reddit  |  (BBC Host) : Officer by the name of David Grush caused quite a stir last week when he gave evidence at a Congressional hearing about UFO sightings. He claimed that the US government has away from the public, glare intact and partially intact alien vehicles, and you'll hear him repeat that claim in a moment because he's been speaking to this program. A recent poll found that about 42% of Americans believe in otherworldly UFO's or UAP's unexplained anomalous phenomena, and one in ten Americans reported they'd actually seen one.

Well, here's what Republican Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett said in opening last week's remarkable hearing into alien existence.

Rep Tim Burchett: I think it's time for this country to take back our country,we need to tell the folks at the Pentagon they work for us, that government. We don't work for them. We're not bringing little green men or flying saucers into the hearing,sorry to disappoint. We're just going to get to the facts. We're going to uncover the cover up and I hope this is just the beginning of many more hearings and more people coming forward about this.

(BBC Host) : Well, I've been speaking to David Rush and to his lawyer, Chuck McCulloch.

-Question(BBC Host):First, David, why did he decide to come to come forward and speak at the hearing?

-Answer (David Grusch) : It boils down to a sense of duty, you know, in an act of, you know, truth to power. And it seemed like me going public was the appropriates lever to pull. When it comes to public accountability and emphasizing the seriousness to, you know, different branches of U.S.goverment.

-Question(BBC Host) :the most eyecatching claim that you made during your evidence and and the one that made the most headlines was the claim that the US government has, quote intact and partially intact alien vehicles in its possession. In other words, it has them, but it isn't telling people about them. Why do you go public with that specifically?

-Answer(David Grusch) :I found that to be very important for, you know, the public at large to understand. You know, they're placing the cosmos, their place in the universe. And that's something, you know, I believe the US government should be, you know, held accountable for potentially over classifying or misclassifying basic science.

-Question (BBC Host): But how do you know they have these items?Because you've not seen them yourself, have you?

-Answer(David Grusch) :There's certain things that I have first hand access to that I can't publicly discuss at this time. However, myself and other colleagues interviewed, you know, 40 individuals. Both are current and former highly distinguished intelligence and military personnel that were specifically on these programs and those that were willing, I directed to the intelligence community Inspector General, so the Inspector General was able to interview these people that do have direct.First hand information, right.

-Question(BBC Host) :So, So they have that information directly.Have they actually seen these these vehicles?

-Answer(David Grusch):The individuals I interviewed that I directed to the Inspector General, yes, they have the first hand experiences, yes, right.

-Question(BBC Host) : Which is an extraordinary claim, as you would readily acknowledge.

Why, if it's true, has the government not acknowledged it?

Yeah, I mean, that's a multifaceted question.

-Answer(David Grusch) : You know, it goes back, you know, 8090 years ago and this was first created and they, you know, translated some of the secrecy from the Manhattan Project onto this subject because, you know, they weren't sure how ontologically shocking it was going to be to the world populace.

And then two, as you can imagine, you know it's a Pandora's Box for, you know, potential military and weapons development type reverse engineering activities.

So they decided to keep it under wraps for many years.

-Question(BBC Host) : But we're talking here just about the US government. If they've got these things hidden away, surely other governments around the world might have had a similar experience. So the the idea that it's a solely American thing is surely fanciful.

-Answer(David Grusch): It does cross into other countries and other other allies to include the The Five Eyes and Alliance, which is something I've already stated publicly. The, you know, the media reporting bias and societal transparency is a little different the US. That's the crux what most people hear, but it is certainly not an American issue.

-Question(BBC Host) : I want to put some of the the doubting voices to you in a moment, but I want to bring Chuck in first. I mean Chuck, as a lawyer working alongside David, what are the legal implications of what he is saying and what the government is denying?

-Answer(Charles McCullough) :Our government relies on congressional oversight, the checks and balances of congressional oversight. David's allegation at at its at its base is essentially that Congress does not have access to the information it needs to properly oversee things going on in the executive branch. That was his main concern,so he briefed both of the Intel committees and he's had a 2 hour hearing, two hours of testimony last week.

-Question(BBC Host) : David, can I go back to you with with some of the the responses that have been aired to what you said?

The head of the Pentagon's office in this area, Sean Kirkpatrick, issued a statement last week. You'll be aware of it calling your testimony insulting and saying that you were a never a representative to his unit.

-Answer(David Grusch): Dr.Kirkpatrick oversaw our activities and what we were doing and the money we were spending. I never said I was a part of the core team, so I believe it was just lost in translation or misconstrued

Sedge Masters: Fictionalized Disclosure From 25 Years Ago?

This set of "Sedge Masters" articles also had nearly the longest write-up of any "PUBLIC DOMAIN" story in the 177 page document that leaked last week, with five separate notes sections added to it. That 177 page document may have been associated with the Congressional hearings. Clipping of relevant portion of that document is available here.

Some notable claims from the first Sedge Masters article:

• Military in Europe was experiencing UAP sightings pre-World War II. The Nazis allegedly recovered a saucer-like craft of indeterminant origin in the days immediately preceding Germany's invasion of Poland. (aligns with some of the Europe/Italy claims)

• The program "has always been included within the classified mission statements of the various agencies and military branches comprising the intelligence community since before the formation of the Agency in 1947."

• Roswell was a UAP crash-recovery involving two distinct UAP. One was a "deltoid wing lifting body." The other craft had completely disintegrated either before or upon impact.

• Working theories for the craft at the time were: (1) secret Soviet craft, (2) craft from "some other dimension", or (3) craft from our own future.

• "It soon became clear that these craft were from some planet or solar system other than our own, as they were occupied by two kinds of beings which clearly were not of earthly origin."

• There were 5 occupants of the deltoid craft, all of whom were largely intact. Two occupants were alive initially, one died shortly after. The other survived thirty days. All efforts to communicate were inconclusive, although it appeared to understand it was being held in captivity by intelligent being like itself. The three other occupants were dead upon arrival. Their appearance fits with "recently published 'investigative' books" ("deltoid craft": greys?)

• The occupants of the second craft were longer in dimension than the ones of the deltoid craft, and all were dead when found. Animals that had eaten their corpses had also died. (fits with Varginha infection death?) It appeared the second group of aliens could not survive if exposed to Earth's atmosphere.

• "The autopsy of the deltoid craft's occupants showed they were of very light build, clearly not from this planet. The simplicity of their brain structures and non-communication in the face of stalwart efforts by researchers led investigators as the time to conclude that they were not the original designers and builder's of the craft involved in the incident. Rather, it seemed they were "biological robots," designed and bred for the purpose of undertaking such a dangerous missions as flying through the atmosphere of an alien world. The survivor finally died when its body accumulated toxic waste products from its metabolism. There were no apparent excretory system or sexual organs." (fits with some of the 4chan "leaker" narrative, as well as the r/aliens EBO narrative)

• Those in control of the information decided who to share it with, including sometimes choosing not to share it with certain Presidents, including Nixon and Ford. Jimmy Carter was kept well informed. (fits with what Ross Coulthart has claimed about some Presidents not being briefed)

• "The popular literature bandies about the name of 'Majestic 12' or 'MJ-12' for this special, secret task force formed by the President. Other names by which it has been identified in the public mind through disinformation programs are "Project Saucer" or "Aquarius." While it is possible that any one or more of these was the name of the group at one time, for most of it's existence the code name for the group and the extensive program which it spawned has been and still is "Zodiac," with each of its operational subdivisions known by the name of a different zodiacal sign, including Acquarius."

• As of the early 1980s, the Agency (CIA) exercised complete control over ZODIAC, with cooperation of the rest of the intelligence community and military branches, particularly the Air Force and the Navy. (notably, these two branches of the military seem to still be the most involved in disclosure [Navy] and lack thereof [Air Force] today)

• From 1947-1980s, ZODIAC recovered eleven other alien craft in various states of disrepair, from a diminutive single-seat flying wing to a rather large craft that had to be trucked into Wright Patterson by dead of night. (fits with the twelve craft claim from Grusch)

• Some craft were turned over to our government by friendly powers, most notably Denmark, which allowed the U.S. to retrieve a rather large disk that had submerged off the Danish coast.

• Occasionally, a live craft occupant was recovered as well (fits with Grusch claims)

• There seem to be at least four types of occupants, the two described previously, as well as "humanoids that appear to be almost human and Nordic in appearance," and "small, strong, hairy ones." It is possible that one or more of these type

  • s represent only a sub-type of the others. (fits with Grusch claims of multiple-NHIs)

  • There is no evidence of telepathic communication abilities of these creatures. There is some type of empathetic manipulation and thought control ability.

  • The crash-recovery team was composed of 67 well-trained men, as of the late 60s. By the late 70s they had "perfected the tasks of completely and thoroughly documenting all actions and cleaning up any debris remaining after these incidents."

  Some notable claims from the second Sedge Masters article:

• During one one of the crash-retrievals, a "big ship" "20 times larger than the one they were recovering" showed up overhead, hovered above, and tried to scare the retrieval team away from the wreck. They apparently did not want them recovering that wreck.

• The crash retrieval team claims they could "feel their hostility" even though it was "not telepathy." They describe it as "empathy."

• The big ship eventually flew away on its own, and the crash retrieval team proceeded with their recovery.

Some notable claims from the third Sedge Masters article:

• The crash retrieval program appears to be headquartered at Wright Patterson AFB

• "There are UFOs... the government was recovering them, had been doing so for decades, and that there was a secret network within the government, Zodiac, that seemed to be able to skirt the chain of command with impunity, spend money earmarked for other projects, and generally do whatever it damn well pleased, all in the name of UFOs and their importance to national security" (fits Grusch claims)

• The government was tapping the phones of UFO organizations to source leaks/research.

• Mentions an "underwater submerged object" off the coast of Palos Verdes, near Catalina island, where the USO had become a UFO and proceeded to fly over their heads (fits with the "water" connection which has frequently been coming up now, as well as the trans-medium claims from Grusch)

• "Trust me on this Sedge. They are not ours. Indeed, they are not anyone else's. They are something of a mystery, really."

• "They also told him that humankind is the product of millions of years of scientific experimentation." (note this is a claim made by two men who may have been on drugs)

• Wright Patterson has a database of over 2,000,000 reports starting in 1945 of UAP related sightings from the public. Many involve small glowing balls of various colors. They believed the balls are some sort of scanning device.

• Masters claims he was driven out to a full craft in a hangar at WPAFB. It had a small cockpit with a seamless clear canopy that would fit "a seven year old." It was allegedly a recovered craft from 1972. A single-seater flying wing craft, similar to the protype developed by the Germans and US during WWII. Just a wing, no tail, no fuselage, no props, no jets, no ailerons.

• "For all we know, that little guy was bred just to deliver this little plane to us. The way it's scaled down, some of the engineers have taken to calling it 'the Scooter.'" They speculate the intent of the craft is purely for one creature to come down to gather samples, but they are not sure. They claim they don't even know how to turn it off, and only accidentally turned it on in the first place.

• Masters was then driven to another hanger, with a 50 foot wide, and 23 foot tall "ovoid disc." He was told it was alien. This allegedly was the Denmark craft, where it had allegedly sunk in relatively shallow water. The Danish government cooperated with US, getting the thing out and to WPAFB was difficult. They had to 'truck it through the city on a lowboy in the dead of night, covered with a tarp and flanked by plenty of security.' The hull was smooth and cool to the touch, like a sculpture or porcelain."

Official Disclosure Documentation Thus Far 7/26/23

docs.house.gov | Hearing: “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency”

Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs (Committee on Oversight and Accountability)

Wednesday, July 26, 2023 (10:00 AM)

2154 RHOB
Washington, D.C.

Witnesses

Commander David Fravor (Ret.)
Former Commanding Officer, United States Navy

Added 07/21/2023 at 02:51 PM

• Witness Statement [PDF] Added 07/25/2023 at 02:21 PM
• Truth in Testimony [PDF] Added 07/26/2023 at 12:52 PM
• Bio [PDF] Added 07/25/2023 at 02:21 PM

Mr. Ryan Graves
Executive Director, Americans for Safe Aerospace

Added 07/21/2023 at 02:51 PM

• Witness Statement [PDF] Added 07/25/2023 at 02:21 PM
• Truth in Testimony [PDF] Added 07/25/2023 at 02:21 PM
• Bio [PDF] Added 07/25/2023 at 02:21 PM

Mr. David Grusch
Former National Reconnaissance Office Representative, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, Department of Defense

Added 07/21/2023 at 02:51 PM

• Witness Statement [PDF] Added 07/25/2023 at 02:21 PM
• Truth in Testimony [PDF] Added 07/25/2023 at 02:21 PM
• Bio [PDF] Added 07/25/2023 at 02:21 PM

Support Documents

• Notice [PDF]
• Memo [PDF] Added 07/21/2023 at 02:51 PM

Hearing Record

• Attendance Sheet [PDF] Added 07/26/2023 at 01:59 PM

True Facts: The Consequences Of Nuclear War Were Largely Unknown When It Happened

Japan wasn’t making earnest attempts at a reasonable surrender. It was hoping it could get a conditional surrender where it would be able to preserve at least some of its empire (the hyper focus on them supposedly merely wanting assurances they could keep their Emperor is really downplaying what they hoped to negotiate). It was still occupying large portions of East Asia by late 1945. That was simply unacceptable to the Allies, and very understandably so. Russia wouldn’t tolerate a conditional surrender either, and all of Japan’s hopes at such a negotiation were done via a Moscow that it turned out was just leading Japan on while assembling an invasion.

“There is a school of thought, and I don’t know how well accepted it is now, that the reason we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August despite Japan suing for peace through non-US diplomatic channels since IIRC April 1945 is we wanted to put the Soviets on the back foot by showing how far we had gotten with our nuclear program.”

There’s just no compelling historical evidence for this claim. The paragraph following it contains the actual explanation, and in fact is hard to square with any claims that it was a demonstration for the Soviets. It’s hard to square on the one hand the idea that mass casualties had been normalized, while also implying that the nukes were viewed as a uniquely horrible thing and everyone wanted to avoid personal responsibility while also sending a warning on the other.

The nukes were developed and deployed as an extension of the conventional strategic bombing program. Strategic bombing was the ultimate military fetish of the era. The Manhattan Project wasn’t the most expensive weapons project of the war: the B-29 bomber was, costing at least a third more. The Norden bombsight cost another 2/3 of the total budget for the nuclear bomb, only it never worked well, necessitating the use of mass bombing raids. Nukes were developed and deployed as a way to effect the same level of destruction with far fewer planes and bombs.

You could interpret the eschewing of responsibility as all the players knowing the horror they were unleashing and trying to avoid accountability, but another interpretation is that no one viewed the nuclear bomb as anything other than an especially powerful explosive, so it wasn’t something where anyone agonized over the first deployments. There’s a lot of evidence that the military was very slow to appreciate the uniquely dangerous aspects of nuclear weapons even after Hiroshima, as evidenced by the cavalier attitude towards testing right through the 1950s. When the military talked about how a single atomic bomb was as powerful as X amount of TNT, that’s genuinely how they were viewing and using them: as an easier way to get X amount of high explosive on target.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which was a backup target; Kokura was the original objective) were targeted because they were significant military targets that would have been bombed sooner or later anyway as part of the preliminary phase for the invasion of Japan (and contrary to revisionism that invasion was very much in the planning. In fact Japan was counting on it and hoping to bleed it dry on the beaches in order to force the US to agree to a conditional surrender).

Personally, I view the nukes as war crimes, but as sub-components of the overarching war crime that was strategic bombing in general. Ultimately there was a rationale that went into the development of the strategic bombing concept that stretched back to the interwar years. It turned out to be massively, horrifically wrong, but there was a coherent thought process to it.

The Day After Trinity (Watch On Youtube To Access The Whole Playlist)

NYTimes  |  One morning in the 1950s, Jon H. Else’s father pointed toward Nevada from their home in Sacramento. “There was this orange glow that suddenly rose up in the sky, and then shrank back down,” Else recalled.

It was, hundreds of miles away, an atomic weapon test: a symbol of the world that was created when a team of Americans led by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer exploded the first nuclear bomb a decade earlier on July 16, 1945.

Growing up in the nuclear age left an impression on Else, now 78.

He was later a series producer of the award-winning “Eyes on the Prize,” a program on the civil rights movement, and directed documentaries about the Great Depression and Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. But before all that, in 1981, he made a documentary about Oppenheimer, the scientist whose bony visage graced the covers of midcentury magazines, and the bomb. It was called “The Day After Trinity,” a reference to that inaugural detonation.

Decades later, viewers are flocking to Else’s film, a nominee for the Academy Award for best documentary feature, as a companion to Christopher Nolan’s biopic “Oppenheimer,” which grossed more than $100 million domestically in its opening week this month.

In a phone interview from California last week, Else, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, praised Nolan’s film, which he saw last weekend in San Francisco. (A spokeswoman for Nolan said he was not available to comment.)

“These stories have to be retold every generation,” Else said, “and they have to be told by new storytellers.”

Nolan’s three-hour opus, a Universal release shot on IMAX film with a lavish cast of brand-name Hollywood actors, shares much with “The Day After Trinity,” an 88-minute documentary financed by the public television station in San Jose, Calif., and various grants.

 

Not Long Ago You Couldn't See A Dying Relative In The ICU - Now It's A Covid Free-Fire Zone

BostonGlobe  |  On a recent warm and humid summer night, a group of public health colleagues and I were approaching a restaurant for dinner. “Inside or out?” I asked. Not long ago, COVID-19 would have decided — outside. But not that night. We ate inside, where it was cooler.

Like so many others, we are living with COVID. The virus isn’t going anywhere, but how safely we live with it has changed dramatically. Most Americans have resumed the full range of their pre-pandemic activities — concerts, parties, summer camps, and family events. But with the virus still circulating, many who have gone back to pre-pandemic life still worry if they are safe.

It makes sense to be wary. We have lived with these risk assessments and daily decisions for almost four years. And yet we are in a much different, much better place. We can protect ourselves with vaccines, which remain free and widely available. Treatments like Paxlovid are more accessible than ever. Innovative research continues, with an updated vaccine expected in the fall that will better target the circulating variant. Tests are available for those who still want to use testing, and surveillance, through wastewater and genomic sequencing, is much better than it used to be. Add in large investments in improving indoor air quality and the infrastructure to respond more effectively to future outbreaks and things are much better.

The truth is that we can now prevent nearly every COVID death. People who are up to date on their vaccines and get treated when infected rarely get seriously ill. Even for the vulnerable like my parents, who are in their 80s, vaccines coupled with treatments provide a very high degree of protection against serious illness. This is also true for most immuno-compromised individuals. The fact is, now a few basic steps mean you can ignore COVID safely — and get back to doing things that matter, even with COVID still around. Think of these safety measures like the routine check-ups that keep your car safe to drive.

What are these measures? The most important is making sure immunity is up to date. For most of us, this means one COVID booster shot annually. For high-risk people whose immune systems are less robust (like my parents and others over 65), two shots per year will help shore up waning immunity and avoid unnecessary vulnerability. The Biden administration has made a large investment in building vaccines that will stop infections and whose benefits will potentially last years. Until those vaccines arrive, an updated shot annually for most of us and two shots a year for the most vulnerable will keep most people safe from serious illness.

I get it — no one likes to get shots. But vaccines are the single greatest weapon we have to put the pandemic behind us. Getting a shot against the flu is already a regular part of the lives of many Americans, including those of us who work in health care. Vulnerable Americans will be safer if we all get both flu and COVID shots every year.

Second, if you do contract COVID, make use of the highly effective treatments. There are several available now and more coming soon. These treatments, like Paxlovid, are remarkable at preventing serious illness, with some preliminary evidence that they might also help reduce the risk of long COVID. While treatments are particularly important for those of us over 50, all adults should immediately explore treatments if they contract COVID.

 

Project Nextgen: Brandon Doubling Down On Unsafe and Inneffective Vaccine-Only Strategy...,

NEJM  | The development of safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines and treatments within a year after SARS-CoV-2 was first identified represents one of the great successes of modern science.¹ Thanks to the ingenuity of scientists, along with cooperation between the U.S. government and the private sector, these medical countermeasures changed the trajectory of the pandemic, saving millions of lives in the United States and tens of millions globally. Today, nearly 70% of Americans have received their primary vaccination series, including nearly 95% of those over 65 years of age.²

Although the numbers of deaths and hospitalizations due to Covid-19 have dropped by more than 90% since President Joe Biden took office, our fight against SARS-CoV-2 is not over. The virus continues to evolve rapidly³ and still causes substantial numbers of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths each day. The emergence of new variants is hard to predict and continues to threaten the ability of countermeasures such as monoclonal antibodies to protect vulnerable patients. Immunity from both vaccines and infection wanes over time. The only way to stay ahead of the virus is to continue to update the composition of our vaccines and administer them in a regular cadence. Although this strategy is critical, with our current generation of vaccines, it also requires immense resources for mounting frequent vaccination campaigns — at a time when antivaccination sentiment continues to grow and the public’s appetite for regular vaccinations has waned.

Next-generation vaccines and treatments are needed if we are to break the cycle of responding to new variants as they appear: we need tools that can improve our bodies’ ability to stop infections, reduce transmission, build longer-lasting immunity, and target parts of the virus that are less likely to evolve.⁴ Ideally, such vaccines and treatments would provide better protection, enabling us to avoid disruptions of our lives and continue to enjoy the activities we value.

Since it’s safe to assume that SARS-CoV-2 will continue to evolve, the goal for the next generation of vaccines and treatments is to be effective irrespective of that evolution — to protect against infection, transmission, and severe illness. This new approach is important for everyone, but particularly for the most vulnerable people — older adults and people who are immunocompromised, for whom infections can have more severe consequences.

The Biden administration has therefore announced Project NextGen, which will coordinate a whole-of-government effort to advance innovations from labs through clinical trials and safely deliver them to the public. It aims to bring new vaccines and treatments to market by investing in research and development, expanding manufacturing capability and innovation, and providing updated and streamlined regulatory guidance. This $5 billion investment will focus on three main areas: vaccines that provide broader immunity both against new SARS-CoV-2 variants and across the family of epidemic-prone sarbecoviruses, vaccines that generate effective mucosal immunity to block infection and transmission, and monoclonal antibodies that can weather viral evolution and serve as a basis for our arsenal against new threats from beta-coronaviruses.

Why is government investment needed at this time and for this effort? Although there is consensus that these tools are critical for our fight moving forward, current market forces have made development slow. Reduced interest in traditional vaccines has limited investments in this area. In addition, the science underpinning these efforts is difficult and requires work that is not guaranteed to pay off on the timelines that many private investors seek. There are also important scientific and regulatory challenges, such as determining how to best measure a new vaccine’s efficacy. Although companies may eventually bring the needed products to market, the current anticipated timelines could leave the public vulnerable, without additional tools, for many years. This prospect reflects a classic market failure: the costs of development have been left to private market forces that may not place adequate value on products’ broad benefits for the people of the United States and the rest of the world.

The U.S. government has committed to accelerating the science by streamlining development processes, using such strategies as standardizing assays, standardizing protocols, and providing timely regulatory guidance. This approach will build on years of success of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services), and it is designed to help ensure that new tools reach the American people in the shortest time possible.

Chase DeBanks Mercola: DeBanking As A Weapon To Punish Covid Dissent

amidwesterndoctor  |  •At the end of June, English Politician Nigel Farrage reported that his bank accounts had been closed due to him sharing political views that challenged the conventional narrative. Although his bank originally denied deplatforming him for political reasons, an about-face occurred and a few weeks later, the CEO resigned.

•On July 4th, a federal judge ruled that the Biden administration was illegally violating the first amendment by encouraging social media companies to censor anyone who questioned the flawed COVID-19 narrative. Prior to this ruling, the Biden administration was actively having critics of the pandemic policy be censored and de-platformed. Since this ruling, as best as I can tell, it is no longer as easy for them to de-platform political opponents on social media.

Note: In May, a moderately large regional bank collapsed and the Federal Government decided to address the bank failure by having Chase bank to take the failed bank over. This suggests that the Biden Administration is working hand in hand with Chase and may be able to make requests in return for deals (like the bank acquisition) it offered to Chase.

•On July 6th, the FDA gave full approval to the Alzheimer’s drug that had received a questionable backdoor approval in January (discussed below). This approval was based on a 1795 person trial (with 898 receiving the drug) where it was found the drug caused a small decline in the rate of developing cognitive decline over 18 months (based upon the results of a survey that could easily be prone to bias) while at the same time 21.5% of those who received the drug experienced brain bleeding and or brain swelling.

•On July 25th, Dr. Mercola announced not only he, but also his employees and their families had been abruptly deplatformed by Chase:

There are a lot of ways to interpret what happened. The most common interpretation has been that debanking dissidents is fast becoming the preferred way to suppress political opposition (e.g., do you remember last year when Justin Trudaeu had Canada’s banks close all the bank accounts of anyone who peacefully attended the Trucker protests against Canada’s vaccine mandates).

This is likely being pushed forward since debanking is a relatively easy way to create compliance in the population and there is an increasing risk of widespread political rebellion against the bad policies (e.g., the COVID-19 vaccine mandates) that have been pushed by governments around the world. Typically, when policies like these are done, initially small but visible tests are carried out (e.g., a lot of people can clearly see what was done to the families of Dr. Mercola’s employees was wrong) to gauge how the public will react to them and if that tyranny can be normalized. Much of this in encapsulated by a famous poem I live my life by:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

For example, during Obama’s presidency, I watched easy to disparage groups affiliated with the alt-right first be censored online and then be deplatformed by Silicon Valley payment processors (e.g., Paypal). Many of my left-wing friends who were worked in natural health applauded this persecution and could not process why it might not be in their best interests to promote it. That same censorship was then rolled out against them (at which point no one stood up for them) and not to long after that, against anyone who dissented against the COVID narrative.

Note: Since the Federal Government was recently forced to back off from overtly violating the First Amendment on social media, less overt ways of suppressing speech are likely becoming a more and more needed tool for those nonetheless wishing to do so.

However, while all of the above is likely true, there is another important facet to this entire story—antitrust violations.

After the civil war, the US economy was taken over by a group of conniving scoundrels who eventually came to be known as the Robber Barons. A key approach they all shared was creating absolute monopolizations of their respective industries, which allowed them to milk obscene amounts of money as possible from everyone else.

Eventually Theodore Roosevelt put a stop to this through the 1890 Sherman Antitrust act, and broke up their monopolies. I and many others believe that Roosevelt was not entirely successful, because he caused the Robber Barons to diversify into other areas (e.g., after Rockefeller had to break up Standard Oil, he bought out the medical industry).

Since Roosevelt’s time, efforts have been made to prevent big players from monopolizing their respective industries (e.g., in the 1990s, Antitrust Lawsuits against Microsoft revolved around Bill Gates having his Windows operating system not allow competitors software on it), but they have not been as successful. Since that time, Gates appears to have followed in Rockefeller’s monopolizing footsteps and has gradually bought out the global health industry through the leverage created by his foundation and its media advertising dollars (which became obscene during COVID-19).

During Obama’s presidency, we began to see a merger between Big Tech and Big Pharma (as each invested in the other)—discussed further here and here. This was then followed by a gradually increasing censorship of any information online which challenged the pharmaceutical industry’s narrative.

During COVID-19, this kicked into overdrive. First, people were denied access to information about numerous lifesaving therapies for COVID-19 (ultimately resulting in many of them instead being forced to succumb to the remdesivir-ventilator protocol). Following this, a blockade was enacted against any information even hinting at the widespread harm emerging from the COVID-19 vaccines, something most of us believe now caused even more harm than denying the public access to early treatment options for COVID-19. As you all know, many of the things Big Tech censored for being “misinformation” (e.g., COVID-19’s origin from a lab) have since been proven true.

Many have thus argued the Big Tech companies should be held accountable for the harms that resulted from their monopolistic censorship. Although their conduct is beyond egregious, it nonetheless makes a lot of sense if you consider how many investments each industry had in the other and the incentives they all had to monopolize the marketplace so they could all make astronomical amounts of money off COVID-19.

Strokes, Heart Attacks, Massive Infertility Resulting From mRNA Jabs

amidwesterndoctor  |  Reducing global population has been a consistent goal of the ruling class for centuries.  While many support the abstract idea of population control, no one wants to volunteer to be the ones who are culled.  The business of population control has hence been a very messy subject.

When the COVID vaccine program began, I—and likely many others—suspected the COVID vaccines would have an “unexpected” side effect of reducing fertility.  Early in their development, Mike Yeadon (and others) at great personal risk publicly warned regulators of a clear fertility danger inherent to the vaccine (found in section IX of their petition).

Subsequent regulatory document leaks from the European FDA revealed Pfizer exempted themselves from testing the key areas of concern (infertility, autoimmunity and cancer) in animals.  This highly unusual moved further suggested serious problems existed in these three areas (as you can’t find something if you don’t officially test for it).

Despite repeated denials, signs of each of these key complications from the vaccine have now emerged.  While I do not have every piece of the puzzle—there are likely many “population control initiatives” I’ve never heard of—I know enough to paint a clear picture of this dirty business. 

The first half of this two-part article will lay out the historical precedent of using any means necessary to reduce the population, while the second part will examine how this has been attempted with vaccinations. 

Cruel Philosophies

As best as I can tell, there are three overlapping schools of thought that have created the zealous belief in a need for population control. 

            1. Many governments, especially those in the East, have adopted the viewpoint that periodic wars are necessary for the stability of the society.  This viewpoint primarily arises from social instability caused by too many young adult males in the state coupled with the issues that occur when there is insufficient food available to the population. In turn, many wars have been fought specifically for this reason. (I am most familiar with this being a common theme in China, as they have observed over the centuries the one thing that will cause rebellions are famines.)

Following World War 2, the Western ruling elite came to a consensus that the war approach was no longer tenable due to the extreme collateral infrastructure and environmental damage modern weaponry (ie. nukes) created. I only know of two exceptions to this rule:

     Wars in third-world nations lacking advaced weaponry where the collateral damage those wars caused was inconsequential to first-world nations.

     Talks that occurred within the Chinese military leadership, but have so far not materialized, over starting a war with India so both countries could mutually alleviate their challenging population burden. For context, China has attempted population control with their “one-child” policy, but it has been met with mixed success and widespread social resistance.

The alternative to war is a multi-pronged attack that seeks every possible avenue to reduce fertility and accelerate aging, which many argue is the more humane option of the two.  One of the curious facts I have observed over the decades is how frequently an odd policy or environmental agent always seems to converge on the common pathway of reducing population.  Once or twice, you can write it up as a coincidence, but at a certain point, you have to wonder if it is all intentional.

When I studied the early history of infectious diseases (discussed in my previous articles on smallpox), one of the most striking things to me was the absolute squalor the serfs were forced into as the feudal lords kicked them off the land to live in the early cities.  It was much worse than most people of this modern era can even conceive of. 

When I first learned of this, I guessed the suffering that move caused for the lower class must have been viewed as a necessary trade off by the European rulership to facilitate the Industrial Revolution, something vital for national development.  After I learned about the Malthusian philosophy, I realized those abhorrent living situations was likely the goal in of itself. 

In 1798, Rev. Thomas R Malthus published the influential work An Essay on the Principle of Population, which argued that human populations tend to increase at a geometrical (exponential) rate, but the means of subsistence (food) grows at only an arithmetic (linear) rate.  "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man," according to Malthus, who therefore believed the standard of living of the masses could not be improved without the checks of war, famine, or disease. In their absence, population would increase by a geometric rate and lead to a catastrophic “Malthusian” food supply collapse. 

While there are numerous errors in his theory, Malthus was appointed to multiple important positions, and his ideas appear to have gradually become a prevailing conviction among members of the ruling classes in the 19th century. These ideas also influenced other key figures, such as Charles Darwin while he created his theory of evolution and natural selection. 

Numerous groups were founded over the decades, which emphasized birth control and increasing mortality of the poor.  These groups included Dr. George Drysdale's Elements of Social Science in 1854, the Malthusian League in 1877, and Margret Sanger’s National Birth Control League in 1915, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.  Initially these groups were domestic, but gradually they became global, at which point, they tied international aid and development to population control measures. 

The Malthusian and Darwinian ideals gradually gave birth to Social Darwinism and Eugenics, which were both widely adopted by the ruling elite.  Social Darwinism argued that class divisions were the will of nature and that this form of natural selection, rather than being evil, was necessary.  The most extreme version of this ideology, eugenics, appears to have arisen from two key factors:

1.     The tribal nature of human beings and the tendency to view all other tribes as inferior (the ruling class felt this way towards the poor).

2.     The advances of society were making it possible for many of the weaker members of society, who previously would have died off, to survive long enough to reproduce and, over time, significantly weaken the gene pool.

Eugenics in turn advocated preventing those who were less “fit” from breeding.  This has been responsible for horror upon horror since its inception, and it provided the theoretical foundation for why, among other things, the Nazis forcibly sterilized the mentally-ill.  When the Nazis eventually were tried at Nuremberg for their crimes against humanity, few know that that many cited the fact similar actions were first conducted by the “Great United States” as part of their defense.

Catastrophic Contagion Scenario - Here They Come Again

catastrophiccontagion  |  The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with WHO and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, conducted Catastrophic Contagion, a pandemic tabletop exercise at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Brussels, Belgium, on October 23, 2022.

The extraordinary group of participants consisted of 10 current and former Health Ministers and senior public health officials from Senegal, Rwanda, Nigeria, Angola, Liberia, Singapore, India, Germany, as well as Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The exercise simulated a series of WHO emergency health advisory board meetings addressing a fictional pandemic set in the near future. Participants grappled with how to respond to an epidemic located in one part of the world that then spread rapidly, becoming a pandemic with a higher fatality rate than COVID-19 and disproportionately affecting children and young people.

Participants were challenged to make urgent policy decisions with limited information in the face of uncertainty. Each problem and choice had serious health, economic, and social ramifications.