Gaza Fitna Eclipse Fallujah And Mariupol F'Sho (REDUX Originally Posted 9/15/20)

Gestapo Surveillance was invented during America's Conquest of the Philippines...,

Counterpunch |  Entitled Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025], the PowerPoint presentation anticipates: a) scenarios created by U.S. forces and agencies and b) scenarios to which they might have to respond. The projection is contingent on the use of hi-technology. According to the report there are/will be six Technological Ages of Humankind: “Hunter/killer groups (sic) [million BC-10K BC]; Agriculture [10K BC-1800 AD]; Industrial [1800-1950]; IT [1950-2020]; Bio/Nano [2020-?]; Virtual.”

In the past, “Hunter/gatherer” groups fought over “hunting grounds” against other “tribal bands” and used “handheld/thrown” weapons. In the agricultural era, “professional armies” also used “handheld/thrown” weapons to fight over “farm lands.” In the industrial era, conscripted armies fought over “natural resources,” using “mechanical and chemical” weapons. In our time, “IT/Bio/Bots” (robots) are used to prevent “societal disruption.” The new enemy is “everyone.” “Everyone.”

Similarly, a British Ministry of Defence projection to the year 2050 states: “Warfare could become ever more personalised with individuals and their families being targeted in novel ways.”

“KNOWLEDGE DOMINANCE”

The war on you is the militarization of everyday life with the express goal of controlling society, including your thoughts and actions.

A U.S. Army document on information operations from 2003 specifically cites activists as potential threats to elite interests. “Nonstate actors, ranging from drug cartels to social activists, are taking advantage of the possibilities the information environment offers,” particularly with the commercialization of the internet. “Info dominance” as the Space Command calls it can counter these threats: “these actors use the international news media to attempt to influence global public opinion and shape decision-maker perceptions.” Founded in 1977, the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command featured an Information Dominance Center, itself founded in 1999 by the private, veteran-owned company, IIT.

“Information Operations in support of civil-military interactions is becoming increasingly more important as non-kinetic courses-of-action are required,” wrote two researchers for the military in 1999. They also said that information operations, as defined by the Joint Chiefs of Staff JP 3-13 (1998) publication, “are aimed at influencing the information and information systems of an adversary.” They also confirm that “[s]uch operations require the continuous and close integration of offensive and defensive activities … and may involve public and civil affairs-related actions.” They conclude: “This capability begins the transition from Information Dominance to Knowledge Dominance.”

“ATTUNED TO DISPARITIES”

The lines between law enforcement and militarism are blurred, as are the lines between military technology and civilian technology. Some police forces carry military-grade weapons. The same satellites that enable us to use smartphones enable the armed forces to operate.

In a projection out to the year 2036, the British Ministry of Defence says that “[t]he clear distinction between combatants and non-combatants will be increasingly difficult to discern,” as “the urban poor will be employed in the informal sector and will be highly vulnerable to externally-derived economic shocks and illicit exploitation” (emphasize in original). This comes as Boris Johnson threatens to criminalize Extinction Rebellion and Donald Trump labels Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists.

In 2017, the U.S. Army published The Operational Environment and the Changing Character of Future Warfare. The report reads: “The convergence of more information and more people with fewer state resources will constrain governments’ efforts to address rampant poverty, violence, and pollution, and create a breeding ground for dissatisfaction among increasingly aware, yet still disempowered populations.”

DHS Just Handed Out $20Million To Grease Those Snitching Skids...,

leohohmann  |  The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced on September 6 that $20 million in federal grants (your tax dollars) will be handed out to 34 organizations to “prevent targeted violence and terrorism.”

Since today is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, you might think these 34 organizations will be focused on al-Qaeda, ISIS or the Iranian Republican Guard Corps. But you would be wrong. They are focused on Americans who dissent from the prevailing narratives coming out of the federal government and its collaborating partners in the corporate media and major social media platforms.

Whether it’s Covid and vaccines, the war in Ukraine, immigration, the Second Amendment, LGBTQ ideology and child-gender confusion, the integrity of our elections, or the issue of protecting life in the womb, you are no longer allowed to hold dissenting opinions and voice them publicly in America. If you do, your own government will take note and consider you a potential “violent extremist” and terrorist.

The $20 million is going to universities, behavioral and mental-health providers, youth services organizations, schools, churches and faith leaders, and state law enforcement agencies. Their job will be to identify political dissidents and foster interventions among those Americans considered to be “going down a path toward violence.”

This money comes from the Department of Homeland Security Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, or CP3. The program was started in fiscal 2020 and has to date awarded $70 million in grants to private nonprofits, state and local government agencies.

The following is from the Department of Homeland Security press release announcing the $20 million in new grants (notice the emphasis on public health, which is the same emphasis used by the U.N. World Health Organization, an emphasis also used by New Mexico Governor Michelle Grisham in her recent declaration suspending the Second Amendment).

“Created in 2021, CP3 is tasked with strengthening our country’s ability to prevent acts of targeted violence and terrorism nationwide. To help accomplish this mission, CP3 cultivates partnerships across every level of government and within local communities, provides grant funding and prevention training, and promotes greater awareness and understanding of TVTP (Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention) strategies and best practices.  Leveraging a public health-informed approach, CP3 brings together behavioral and mental health providers, educators, faith leaders, social service providers, nonprofits, law enforcement, and other state, local, and community partners to address systemic factors that can lead to violence while strengthening protective factors at the local level that support the safety, well-being, and resiliency of communities in the United States.”

The CP3 program, according to the release, “helps to prevent targeted violence and terrorism through funding, training, increased public awareness, and the development of partnerships across every level of the government, the private sector and in local communities across our country. Leveraging an approach informed by public health research, CP3 brings together mental health providers, educators, faith leaders, public health officials, social services, nonprofits, and others in communities across the country to help people who may be escalating to violence.”

This all sounds wonderful, until you figure out that it’s not focused on actual terrorists or drug cartel members who slip into our country every day from across wide-open borders with intent to harm Americans. It’s focused on spying on law-abiding Americans who the government considers dangerous simply because of their views on various political or social issues.

This program, administered by DHS and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with the full support of Congress, is “the only federal grant program solely dedicated to helping local communities develop and strengthen their capabilities in this area.” 

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.

What Un-Parasitized People-Centric Leadership Can Do

gzeromedia  |  With so many other international stories dominating the news these days – Russia’s war in Ukraine, US-China tensions, Iran’s nuclear program, etc. – it’s easy to lose track of more positive stories. And when it comes to Mexico, the headlines suggest the country is struggling.

And I could write that story too. In most media, today’s Mexico conjures images of violent drug cartels and other organized crime groups, trouble at the US border, or large-scale protests led by an opposition that accuses the country’s president of a power grab that threatens democracy.

Mexico has its share of problems. But today, I want to give you three reasons for optimism that, politically and economically, Mexico is strong and getting stronger.

The China substitute

First, Mexico’s economic success remains closely tied to economic growth in the United States. (In 2022, Mexico’s total trade with the state of Texas was five times higher than its total trade with all of Latin America.) Over the years, that’s been a mixed blessing. When the US economy weakens, Mexico’s export revenue takes a hit. There are fewer remittances flowing south from Mexicans working in the United States. There are few American tourists pumping dollars into Mexican cities, towns, and businesses.

But over the decades, the US economy has remained strong and is currently running hot. Even with high inflation and rising interest rates, the US job market is strong, consumers are spending, and pandemic-weary tourists are traveling.

Mexico’s exports are surging. The country’s consumer confidence is close to its highest point in a generation. Add the reality is that the war in Ukraine has put strong upward pressure on global energy prices, boosting Mexico’s oil revenue. As the war grinds on, that advantage is likely to continue.

But the factor that matters most for coming years is souring US sentiment on relations with China. The Biden administration, both Democratic and Republican members of Congress, and many US governors are pushing for a significant national security and strategic decoupling from China and Chinese companies. US businesses are increasingly less confident they can navigate complicated US-China politics, abrupt changes inside China like the 180-degree turn on COVID policy, and other factors to continue to do profitable business in China.

Who benefits? Mexico. Particularly as “nearshoring” becomes a much more familiar word for many Americans. Nearshoring is the practice of shifting investment in manufacturing, production, and business operations closer to home to avoid the problems that come with both political risk and dangerously long supply chains.

Mexico already has the world’s 15th largest economy. While China, much of Europe, and Japan are aging, Mexico also has excellent demographics. Its population tops 130 million; its median age is 29.

A cost-conscious populist

Then there’s the country’s president. Andrés Manuel López Obrador has his fans and his detractors. But overall, he’s remarkably popular. After four years in office, his approval rating stands at 63%. How has he accomplished that? Mexico’s chief executive has crisscrossed the country by car and commercial airlines, visiting people and places, particularly in southern states, where national politicians are rarely seen.

But, talented populist though he is, he hasn’t bought support by launching a state spending spree. Even after the pandemic, Mexico’s debt-to-GDP ratio still stands at a healthy 50%, because the leftist López Obrador, aka AMLO, has confounded critics by both expanding the country’s tax base and keeping government spending in check.

Nor does Mexico’s president face the problem of balancing relations with multiple other countries. AMLO understands that his country’s giant neighbor is its primary source of both opportunities and challenges, and he’s invested in pragmatic relations with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His economic ambitions center on strengthening and expanding the USMCA trade agreement (NAFTA 2.0) rather than on hedging bets on Europe and Asia.

Strong institutions

The one area where AMLO is picking a fight that won’t help Mexico is on the question of judicial oversight of government. At the moment, he’s going after Mexico’s National Electoral Institute, which administers elections, by trying to cut 80% of its funding. This plan has filled Mexico City streets with hundreds of thousands of angry protesters, who warn that if he succeeds, AMLO would undermine Mexico’s ability to hold free and fair elections.

But the president isn’t going to succeed. The country’s Supreme Court is going to rule against him, and though AMLO can (and probably will) call on his own protesters to block traffic, Mexico’s governing institutions are plenty strong enough to keep the country moving forward.

In fact, that’s the lesson from Mexico’s presidential election of 2006, which AMLO lost by the smallest of margins and then rallied his supporters to occupy the center of Mexico’s capital for many weeks. But as I wrote in September 2006, the country’s political institutions absorbed that shock with no great difficulty. Politics continued. The currency remained stable. The economy moved forward.

AMLO has continued to wage war on a political elite he believes is plagued with corruption and cost him victory 17 years ago. But now, as then, Mexico is politically mature enough to handle challenges even larger than we now see in the president’s standoff with courts.

Finally, AMLO has given no indication he wants to remove presidential term limits from the country’s constitution, and unlike former US President Donald Trump and Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, he and his party are genuinely popular and have no need to contest the next election outcome with violence. And all of AMLO’s likely successors agree with the merits of nearshoring and deeper integration with the US, reinforcing the country’s long-term economic stability.

Make no mistake: Mexico will continue to face major challenges in the years ahead. Mexico must continue to develop its infrastructure, energy, and water supplies to fully benefit from nearshoring opportunities. Crime, corruption, and the need to manage shifting US border politics will remain formidable obstacles to progress. But advantages both external and internal provide a solid foundation for progress.

Nice Little Country You've Got There AMLO, Shame If Something Happened To It....,

NC  |  “We will not allow any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less with armed forces,” AMLO told US neocons. 

Relations between US and Mexican lawmakers plumbed new lows this week, as a coterie of Republican senators, congressmen and a former attorney general called for direct US military intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels. They included Lindsey Graham, who has lent his support to every single US military intervention and regime change operation since becoming senator in 2003. Together with John McCain, he helped lay some of the ground work for the NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, famously telling Ukrainian soldiers: “your fight is our fight”.

Setting the Stage for US Military Intervention

Now, Graham wants to introduce legislation to “set the stage” for U.S. military force in Mexico, saying it is time to “get tough” on the southern neighbour’s drug cartels and prevent them from bringing fentanyl across the border. The senator’s intervention came just days after four US citizens were kidnapped in the northern Mexican city of Matamoros, two of whom were killed. It is not yet clear why the kidnapping took place, but all four of the victims had lengthy rap sheets, including for drug offences. Whether that has any bearing on the crime has not been confirmed.

Graham added he would “introduce legislation to make certain Mexican drug cartels foreign terrorist organizations under U.S. law and set the stage to use military force if necessary.” Graham escalated tensions on Thursday by describing Mexico as a “narcostate”. His  words elicited a furious response from Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador (AMLO for short), who said (translated by yours truly):

Once and for all, let’s set our position straight. We will not allow any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less with armed forces. And from today we will begin an information campaign for Mexicans and Hispanics that live and work in the United States to inform them of what we are doing in Mexico and how this initiative of the Republicans, besides being irresponsible, is an insult to the Mexican people and a lack of respect to our independence and sovereignty. And if they do not change their attitude and continue using Mexico for electoral propaganda… we are going to recommend not voting for this party.

This would be no small matter, given that 34.5 million Hispanic Americans were eligible to vote in 2022’s mid-terms, making Latinos the fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the U.S. electorate. According to Pew Research, the number of Hispanic eligible voters increased by 4.7 million between 2018 and 2022, accounting for 62% of the total growth in U.S. eligible voters during that time. And AMLO has significant influence over this demographic. But that is unlikely to have much of an effect on the Republican neocons pushing for direct US intervention against Mexican drug cartels.

They include, all too predictably, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Also on board are Reps. Dan Crenshaw and Stephen Walts, who in January presented a joint resolution in Congress seeking authorisation for the “use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for trafficking fentanyl or a fentanyl-related substance into the United States or carrying out other related activities that cause regional destabilization in the Western Hemisphere.”

Mexico’s “Narco-Terrorists”

Also along for the ride is former Attorney General (under both George HW Bush and Donald Trump), whom the late New York Times columnist William Safire used to refer to as “Coverup-General Barr” for his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s role in “Iraqgate” and “Iron-Contra.” In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Barr likened Mexico’s “narco-terrorists” to Isis and calls Reps. Crenshaw and Waltz’s joint resolution a “necessary step”:

What will it take to defeat the Mexican cartels? First, a far more aggressive American effort inside Mexico than ever before, including a significant U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence presence, as well as select military capabilities. Optimally, the Mexican government will support and participate in this effort, and it is likely to do so once they understand that the U.S. is committed to do whatever is necessary to cripple the cartels, whether or not the Mexican government participates.

Barr called AMLO the cartel’s “chief enabler” for refusing to wage war against the cartels with quite the same zeal as his predecessors:

“In reality, AMLO is unwilling to take action that would seriously challenge the cartels. He shields them by consistently invoking Mexico’s sovereignty to block the U.S. from taking effective action.”

Bizarrely, Barr makes this claim even as the US and Mexico are quietly intensifying their military cooperation. As the investigative journalism website Contralinea reports, one of the millions of documents leaked in a massive cyberattack on the Mexican Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena), in October revealed the extent to which the US and Mexican armed forces are deepening their collaboration on “shared security challenges” such as combating organised crime, arms, drugs and people trafficking.

According to the leaked GANSEG document, the objective going forward of the Armed Forces of Mexico and the United States is to interact (emphasis my own) “closely, efficiently and in an orderly manner to strengthen bilateral military cooperation in matters of protection and regional security, evaluating existing bilateral mechanisms in order to work with a common strategic vision.”

The tactical-strategic bilateral military cooperation framework will also involve trilateral meetings between the defence ministers of Mexico, the United States and Canada. But that apparently isn’t enough for certain Republican neocons, who want the US government and military to take matters into their own hands.

While the growing influence of Mexico’s drug cartels is clearly a matter of vital import, not just for Mexico and the US but for the entire American continent, direct, overt US intervention on Mexican soil will make things a darn sight worse. If US citizens are worried about migrants amassing at the border, just wait until the US army begins ramping up the chaos and bloodshed in Mexico.

Also, conspicuously (albeit not surprisingly) absent from the debate in Washington is the central role US arms manufacturers and dealers play in facilitating a large part of the drugs-related violence on both sides of the border. Nor, of course, is their any reckoning with the now-indisputable failure of the US War on Drugs in stemming the flow of narcotics to the US. Even the NY Times recently ran an op-ed declaring that the global war on drugs had been a “staggering failure”.

Max Boot Wants To Reinstate The Draft So Soldier Citizens Can Reform America

WaPo  |  Fifty years ago, in early 1973, with U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War coming to a close, the Nixon administration announced the end of draft call-ups. The armed forces, which had been dependent on conscripts since 1940, had to become an all-volunteer force (AVF) overnight.

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America gained — and lost — a great deal in that wrenching transition: We gained a more effective military but opened up a new divide between service personnel and civilians.

Admittedly, it was hard to predict either consequence when the draft ended. By 1973, conscription had caused enormous discontent in U.S. society because so many of the well-off had been able to escape the Vietnam War with occupational or student deferments or bogus medical excuses.

Military leaders feared that few high-quality recruits would join voluntarily — and initially they were right. As recounted by James Kitfield in his book “Prodigal Soldiers: How the Generation of Officers Born of Vietnam Revolutionized the American Style of War,” “On standard military aptitude tests between 1977 and 1980, close to half of all the Army’s male recruits scored in the lowest mental category the service allowed. Thirty-eight percent were high school dropouts.” Drug abuse and racial tensions were rife. The all-volunteer force, combined with defense budget cuts, was producing a “hollow Army,” the Army chief of staff warned in 1980.

That changed in the 1980s when patriotism surged and popular culture began to depict the military in a more positive light — we went from “The Deer Hunter” (1978) to “Top Gun” (1986). Congress raised pay and benefits, and the services figured out how to attract recruits with slogans such as “Be All You Can Be.” By 1990, 97 percent of Army recruits were high school graduates and, thanks to mandatory drug testing, the number using illicit drugs plummeted.

The AVF went on to win the 1991 Gulf War and perform capably in a long series of conflicts that followed. The United States often did not achieve its political objectives (as in Afghanistan), but it wasn’t the fault of those doing the fighting. They turned the military into the most admired institution in U.S. society.

Now, however, one retired general told me, “The AVF is facing its most serious crisis since Nixon created it.” All of the services are struggling with recruiting. The crisis has been especially acute in the Army. Last year, it missed its recruiting goals by 15,000 soldiers — an entire division’s worth. That is a particularly ominous development given the growing threats from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

Military analysts point to numerous factors to account for the recruiting shortfall, the biggest being that the unemployment rate is at its lowest level since 1969. There is also widespread obesity and drug use among young people. Only 23 percent of Americans are eligible to serve, and even fewer are interested in serving. More than two decades after Sept. 11, 2001, and nearly two years after the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan, war weariness has set in.

Perceived politicization is another issue: While many right-wingers view the armed forces as too “woke,” many progressive Gen Zers view them as too conservative. The Ronald Reagan Institute found that the number of people expressing a great deal of trust and confidence in the military declined from 70 percent in 2017 to 48 percent in 2022.

Those poll numbers reflect a concern among many in the military that the AVF has created a dangerous chasm between the few who serve and the vast majority who don’t. The number of veterans in the population declined from 18 percent in 1980 to about 7 percent in 2018 — and it keeps falling, as the older generation of draftees dies off.

“The AVF has led us to become the best trained, equipped and organized fighting force in global history,” retired Adm. James Stavridis, a former NATO commander, told me. “But we have drifted away from the citizen-soldier model that was such a part of our nation’s history. The AVF has helped to create an essentially professional cadre of warriors. We need to work to ensure that our military remains fully connected to the civilian world, and to educate civilians about the military.”

The easiest way to bridge the civil-military divide would be to reinstate the draft, but there is no support for such a radical step in either the military or the country at large. David S.C. Chu, a former undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, points out that relying on draftees “creates morale and discipline problems” and is “increasingly inconsistent with a highly technological approach to warfare.” In most countries, conscripts serve only a year or two at most — barely long enough to master complex weapons systems. That’s why most nations, including Russia and China, have been relying more on professional soldiers like the United States does.

Yet, while we gained a more capable military with the advent of the AVF, we have to recognize that we also lost something important when the draft ended. Mass mobilization during World War II broke down religious, regional and ethnic barriers and paved the way for postwar progress on civil rights and an expansion of the federal government to address problems such as poverty. In the post-draft era, America has become increasingly polarized between “red” and “blue” communities.

That has led to renewed interest in expanding national service programs such as AmeriCorps; President Biden, for example, recently proposed creating a new Civilian Climate Corps. Congress should support such initiatives, but we shouldn’t have extravagant expectations for what they can accomplish. The young people who sign up for voluntary service are so civic-minded already that they are the ones in least need of what these programs teach.

To make a real difference, national service would have to be obligatory. Retired Gen. Charles C. Krulak, a former Marine commandant, told me he favors requiring every high school graduate to put in two years of community service out of state while living on current or former military bases.

He is undoubtedly right that such a program would produce young adults “better prepared to become useful citizens.” But there is no national emergency that would justify such a mobilization and no agreement on how we could usefully employ 12 million people (the number of Americans aged 18 to 20). Public employee unions would be sure to object, the cost would be prohibitive, and many would try to evade the service requirement. Obligatory national service is no more likely, in today’s climate, than a renewal of military conscription.

The likelihood is that the AVF can overcome its current problems with some tweaks such as a new Army program for pre-basic training to condition out-of-shape recruits. Presumably, once the unemployment rate rises, the military’s recruitment woes will ease. Bridging the fissures that divide our society will be much harder to achieve. I wish a national-service mandate were practical and possible, but it’s not. We will have to look elsewhere — for example, to expanded civics education — for solutions.

Americans Will Suffer Devastation And Hell Because Of Our Failure To Hold Anyone Accountable

kunstler  |   “The White House has taken the entire West in such a direction and speed of triumphalism, arrogance and “egregious” imbecility that there is no going back or reversal possible without a total defeat of the official narrative and the consequent eternal shame.” — Hugo Dionisio

The New York Times — indicted this week as a chronic purveyer of untruths by no less than their supposed ally, The Columbia Journalism Review — is lying to you again this morning.

        This whopper is an artful diversion from the reality on-the-ground that Ukraine is just about finished in this tragic and idiotic conflict staged by the geniuses behind their play-thing President “Joe Biden.” By the way, it’s not a coincidence that Ukraine and “JB” are going down at the same time. The two organisms are symbionts: a matched pair of mutual parasites feeding off each other, swapping each other’s toxic exudations, and growing delirious on their glide path to a late winter crash.

      The point of the war, you recall, is “to weaken Russia” (so said DoD Sec’y Lloyd Austin), even to bust it up into little geographic tatters to our country’s advantage — that is, to retain America’s dominance in global affairs, and especially the supremacy of the US dollar in global trade settlements.

     The result of the war so far has been the opposite of that objective. US sanctions made Russia stronger by shifting its oil exports to more reliable Asian customers. Kicking Russia out of the SWIFT global payments system prompted the BRIC countries to build their own alternative trade settlement system. Cutting off Russia from trade with Western Civ has stimulated the process of import replacement (i.e., Russia making more of the stuff it used to buy from Europe). Confiscating Russia’s off-shore dollar assets has alerted the rest of the world to dump their dollar assets (especially US Treasury bonds) before they, too, get mugged. Nice going, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, and the rest of the gang at the Foggy Bottom genius factory.

      All of which raises the question: who is liable to bust up into tatters first, the USA or Russia? I commend to you Dmitry Orlov’s seminal work, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects, Revised & Updated. For anyone out there not paying attention the past thirty-odd years, Russia, incorporated as the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991. The USSR was a bold experiment based on the peculiar and novel ill-effects of industrialism, especially gross economic inequality. Alas, the putative remedy for that, advanced by Karl Marx, was a despotic system of pretending that individual humans had no personal aspirations of their own.

    The Soviet / Marxist business model was eventually reduced to the comic aphorism: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It failed and the USSR gurgled down history’s drain. Russia reemerged from the dust, minus many of its Eurasian outlands. Remarkably little blood was shed in the process. Mr. Orlov’s book points to some very interesting set-ups that softened the landing. There was no private property in the USSR, so when it collapsed, nobody was evicted or foreclosed from where they lived. Very few people had cars in the USSR, so the city centers were still intact and people could get around on buses, trams, and trains. The food system had been botched for decades by low-incentive collectivism, but the Russian people were used to planting family gardens — even city dwellers, who had plots out-of-town — and it tided them over during the years of hardship before the country managed to reorganize.

      Compare that to America’s prospects. In an economic crisis, Americans will have their homes foreclosed out from under them, or will be subject to eviction from rentals. The USA has been tragically built-out on a suburban sprawl template that will be useless without cars and with little public transport. Cars, of course, are subject to repossession for non-payment of contracted loans. The American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies. These items can’t be grown in home gardens. Many Americans don’t know the first thing about growing their own food, or what to do with it after it’s harvested.

      There’s another difference between the fall of the USSR and the collapse underway in the USA. Underneath all the economic perversities of Soviet life, Russia still had a national identity and a coherent culture. The USA has tossed its national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which is actually just a hustle aimed at extracting what remains from the diminishing stock of productive activity showering the plunder on a mob of “intersectional” complainers — e.g., the City of San Francisco’s preposterous new plan to award $5-million “reparation” payments to African-American denizens of the city, where slavery never existed.

      As for culture, consider that the two biggest cultural producers in this land are the pornography and video game industries. The drug business might be a close third, but most of that action is off-the-books, so it’s hard to tell. So much for the so-called “arts.” Our political culture verges on totally degenerate, but that is too self-evident to belabor, and the generalized management failures of our polity are a big part of what’s bringing us down — most particularly the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their blunders and turpitudes.

      This unearned immunity  might change, at least a little bit, as the oppositional House of Representatives commences hearings on an array of disturbing matters. Meanwhile, be wary of claims in The New York Times and other propaganda organs that our Ukraine project is a coming up a big win, and that the racketeering operations of the Biden family amount to an extreme right-wing, white supremacist conspiracy theory. These two pieces of the conundrum known as Reality are blowing up in our country’s face. It will be hard not to notice.

 

What Exactly Is This SCORPION Unit - Will Those In Charge Be Held Accountable?

psrmemphis  |  Memphis police officers watched as a man with a handgun bulging from his right hip walked past them and into a convenience store where he attempted to make a purchase.

It was busy that Friday night in Parkway Village, the day before several of these same officers would become entangled in a deadly encounter with Tyre Nichols – a violent altercation that resulted in the 29-year-old motorist’s death in a hospital bed three days later.

The action grew intense – and violent – on this night, too.

Members of the Memphis Police Department’s SCORPION Team One swooped onto this gas station parking lot when they saw some young men loitering about.

After witnessing what they believed was a drug transaction, officers chased down one man and, during a struggle, pepper-sprayed him. They arrested another man who, like Nichols, had no criminal record. Carrying a pistol in his belt, he apparently violated the edges of Tennessee’s permitless carry law by entering a business displaying signs that guns are prohibited.

“Suspect … refused to cooperate and listen to detectives and immediately started screaming,’’ Officer Demetrius Haley wrote in a report charging the 22-year-old man with misdemeanor offenses of disorderly conduct and unlawfully possessing a gun.

An investigation by the Institute for Public Service Reporting found that Haley and four other officers terminated by MPD last week in connection with Nichols’ death were affiliated with a special unit called SCORPION, a data-driven initiative that identifies crime hotspots and attempts to suppress them with saturation patrols.

Records show the unit’s aggressive tactics often trigger volatile interactions with members of the public.

Launched in 2021 by MPD Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis as part of Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s war on crime, the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace In Our Neighborhoods, or SCORPION, unit identifies upticks in motor vehicle theft and violent crime and then targets those areas with patrolling SCORPION officers – at times in unmarked cars. An opens in a new windowMPD video promoting the unit appears to show some of the officers dressed in plainclothes.

Discussing SCORPION in a January 2022 address, opens in a new windowStrickland said the unit of “four, 10-man teams” had made 566 arrests in its first three months alone, seizing more than “$103,000 in cash, 270 vehicles and 253 weapons.”

The mayor said then the unit targets homicides, aggravated assaults, robberies and carjackings.

Yet dozens of reports reviewed by the Institute for Public Service Reporting found SCORPION officers also appear to engage in “zero-tolerance” or “proactive policing”-type activities, at times stopping motorists for tinted windows or for failing to wear seat belts and confronting or arresting others for loitering, gambling, drug possession and other low-level offenses – controversial tactics now at the heart of a national debate on how best to balance public safety and community trust.

A thorough analysis of SCORPION’s activities was not possible on deadline for this story. Some reports show officers removing dangerous individuals from the streets. Policy experts warn, however, that such aggressive tactics, if not properly supervised, can lead to discrimination and abuse, and can erode faith in police.

“They can be very effective,’’ said former Memphis Police Director E. Winslow “Buddy” Chapman. “But they must be very closely controlled and monitored.

“The danger is exactly what happened in this case,’’ he said, referring to the death of Nichols.

The West Is Weak Where It Matters And In Ways That It Cannot Fix

aurelian |   These problems are coming together, to some extent, with the widespread diffusion of automatic weapons, and the spread of ethnic organised crime groups in the suburbs of major European cities. Together with the increasing hold of organised Islamic fundamentalism on the local communities, this has created a series of areas where governments no longer wish to send the security forces, because of the fear of violent confrontation, and where these groups exert an effective monopoly of violence themselves. Again, it’s not clear what current military or paramilitary capabilities would be of any real use in dealing with such situations, and there is the risk of other, non-state, actors intervening instead.  (It’s worth adding that we are not talking about “civil war” here, which is a quite different issue)

So the existing force-structures of western states are going to have problems coping with the likely domestic security threats of the near future. Most western militaries are simply too small, too highly specialised and too technological to deal with situations where the basic tool of military force is required: large numbers of trained and disciplined personnel, able to provide and maintain a secure environment, and enforce the monopoly of legitimate violence. Paramilitary forces can only help to a certain extent. The potential political consequences of that failure could be enormous. The most basic political question, after all, is not Carl Schmitt’s infamous “who is my enemy?” but rather “who will protect me?” If modern states, themselves lacking capability, but also with security forces that are too small and poorly adapted, cannot protect the population, what then? Experience elsewhere suggests that, if the only people who can protect you are Islamic extremists and drug traffickers, you are pretty much obliged to give your loyalty to them, or if not, to some equally strong non-state force that opposes them.

In a perverse kind of way, the same issues of respect and capability also arise at the international level. I’ve already written several times about the parlous state of conventional western forces today, and the impossibility of restoring them to something like Cold War levels. Here, I just want to finish by talking about some of the less obvious political consequences of that weakness.

At its simplest, relative military effectiveness influences how you view your neighbours and how they view you. This can involve threats and fear, but it doesn’t have to. It means, for example, that the perception of what regional security problems are, and how to deal with them, is going to be disproportionately influenced by the concerns of more capable states. (Thus the influential position enjoyed by Nigeria in West Africa, for example). This isn’t necessarily from a crude measure of size of forces either: in the old NATO, the Netherlands probably had more influence than Turkey, though its forces were much smaller. Within international groupings—formal alliances or not—some states tend to lead and others to follow, depending on perceptions of experience and capability.

Internationally—in the UN for example—countries like Britain and France, together with Sweden, Canada, Australia, India, and a few others, were influential because they had capable militaries, effective government systems and, most importantly, experience of conducting operations away from home. So if you were the Secretary-General of the UN, and you were putting together a small group to look at the possibilities for a peace mission in Myanmar, who would you invite? The Argentinians? The Congolese? The Algerians? The Mexicans? You would invite some nations from the region, certainly, but you would mainly focus on capable nations with a proven track record. But in quite complex and subtle ways, patterns of influence, both at the practical and conceptual level, are changing. The current vision even of what security is, and how it should be pursued, is currently western-dominated. That will be much less the case in the future.

This decline in influence will also apply to the United States. Its most powerful and expensive weapons—nuclear missiles, nuclear submarines, carrier battle groups, high performance air-superiority fighters — are either not usable, or simply not relevant, to most of the security problems of today. We do not know the precise numbers and effectiveness of Chinese land-based anti-shipping missiles for example, but it’s clear that sending US surface ships anywhere within their range is going to be too great a risk for any US government to take. And since the Chinese know this, the subtle nuances of power relations between the two countries are altered. Again, the US has found itself unable to actually influence the outcome of a major war in Europe, because it does not have the forces to intervene directly, and the weapons it has been able to send are too few and in many cases of the wrong kind. The Russians are obviously aware of this, but it is the kind of thing that other states notice as well, and then has consequences.

Finally, there is the question of the future relationship between weak European states in a continent where the US has ceased to be an important player. As I’ve pointed out before, NATO has continued as long as it has because it has all sorts of unacknowledged practical advantages for different nations, even if some of these advantages are actually mutually exclusive. But it’s not obvious that such a state of affairs will continue. No European nation, nor any reasonable coalition of them, is going to have the military power to match that of Russia, and the US has long been incapable of making up the difference. On the other hand, this is not the Cold War, where Soviet troops were stationed a few hundred kilometres from major western capitals. There will actually be nothing really to fight about, and no obvious place to do the fighting. What there will be is a relationship of dominance and inferiority such as Europe has never really known before, and the end of such shaky consensus as remains on what the military, and security forces in general, are actually for. I suspect, but it’s no more than that, that we are going to see a turning inward, as states try to deal with problems within their borders and on them. Ironically, the greatest protection against major conflicts may be the inability of most European states, these days, to conduct them. Weakness can also have its virtues.

One Hopes For "Dying American Influence" Rather Than "AMLO Dying"...,

CTH  |  Joe Biden and Canada’s Justin Trudeau are in ideological alignment, willing to destroy the entire North American economy as they construct the new climate change energy systems for the U.S and Canada.  However, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador (AMLO) has already indicated -including direct statements to Joe Biden at the White House– that he is not willing to put the Mexican economy into collapse and try to engineer an economic future on solar panels and windmills.

That puts Mexican President AMLO in the crosshairs of a unified climate change agenda as outlined by the World Economic Forum and western leadership under the guise of the Build Back Better agenda.  In essence, AMLO goes from socialist hero of the unionized left to becoming a target.  CTH has been saying we need to watch carefully how this plays out because a great deal of the western economic agenda hangs in the balance.

Now that AMLO has taken a pragmatic position on energy development {Go Deep} his lack of alignment means the apparatus of the United States government, the proverbial Eye of Sauron, will target him.  Not coincidentally, the public relations firm for the deepest part of the interventionist intelligence apparatus, the Washington Post, now outlines AMLO as the specific person responsible for the explosion in fentanyl use.

(Washington Post) – […] A new Mexican leader rejected the $3 billion anti-narcotics agreement that had spanned three U.S. presidencies, known as the Mérida Initiative. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a veteran leftist who took office in December 2018, argued that the drug war strategy had sent homicides spiraling in Mexico while failing to curb U.S. demand.

The sniffer flights stopped. Águila was sidelined and his battle-hardened commandos were reassigned. López Obrador rebuffed U.S. offers for new drug-detection technology. Mexico shut down a pivotal base where the special forces had worked with U.S. agents. It even took away the parking spot for the DEA’s plane at an airport outside Mexico City. (read more)

The Washington Post defining ALMO as “a veteran leftist” as if that is against their interests is rather funny. The article walks through AMLO, a devout Mexican nationalist, trying to remove the influence of the U.S. government, and by extension contributing to the explosion of cross-border drug trafficking.

To accept the ‘AMLO is the cause of U.S. drug deaths’ narrative is to ignore the Biden administration effort to weaken the Southern U.S. border, but that’s a mere detail when you are constructing a narrative that has deeper intentions than appear on the surface.   The bigger picture is shaping a narrative intended to create AMLO as an enemy of the American people.

Nice country you got there AMLO, it’d be a shame if something happened to it… Now, about that oil, coal and natural gas use…

Without a doubt this narrative building will escalate, step by step until pressure mounts and AMLO acquiesces to join the economic model demanded by the WEF as executed by the United States through Biden energy policy.   There are trillions at stake and multinational corporate laundry operations to maintain.

Just keep watching… look for how the Biden administration specifically messages toward and around Mexico.

Mexico.

Mexico is in a position to get Brazil’d.

I’m fairly confident we are going to hear a lot more about Mexico very soon.

 

 

Graham Hancock's Banned War On Consciousness TED Talk

grahamhancock  |  What is Western civilization all about? What are its greatest achievements and highest aspirations?

It’s my guess that most people’s replies to these questions would touch—before all the other splendid achievements of science, literature, technology, and the economy—on the nurture and growth of freedom.

Individual freedom.

Including, but not limited to freedom from the unruly power of monarchs, freedom from the unwarranted intrusions of the state and its agents into our personal lives, freedom from the tyranny of the Church and its Inquisition, freedom from hunger and want, freedom from slavery and servitude, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to elect our own leaders, freedom to be homosexual—and so on and so forth.

The list of freedoms we enjoy today that were not enjoyed by our ancestors is indeed a long and impressive one. It is therefore exceedingly strange that Western civilization in the twenty- first century enjoys no real freedom of consciousness.

There can be no more intimate and elemental part of the individual than his or her own consciousness. At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are—to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either. So it has to be highly significant that, far from encouraging freedom of consciousness, our societies in fact violently deny our right to sovereignty in this intensely personal area, and have effectively outlawed all states of consciousness other than those on a very narrowly defined and officially approved list. The “War on Drugs” has thus unexpectedly succeeded in engineering a stark reversal of the true direction of Western history by empowering faceless bureaucratic authorities to send armed agents to break into our homes, arrest us, throw us into prison, and deprive us of our income and reputation simply because we wish to explore the sometimes radical, though always temporary, alterations in our own consciousness that drugs facilitate.

The reason the anti-marijuana campaigns have failed is that millions of users know from their own direct, long-term experience that marijuana does not do them any great harm and (with reference to the most recent anti-marijuana propaganda) most definitely does not drive them mad.

Other than being against arbitrary rules that the state has imposed on us, personal drug use by adults is not a “crime” in any true moral or ethical sense and usually takes place in the privacy of our own homes, where it cannot possibly do any harm to others. For some it is a simple lifestyle choice. For others, particularly where the hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, and DMT are concerned, it is a means to make contact with alternate realms and parallel dimensions, and perhaps even with the divine. For some, drugs are an aid to creativity and focussed mental effort. For others they are a means to tune out for a while from everyday cares and worries. But in all cases it seems probable that the drive to alter consciousness, from which all drug use stems, has deep genetic roots.

Other adult lifestyle choices with deep genetic roots also used to be violently persecuted by our societies.

A notable example is homosexuality, once punishable by death or long periods of imprisonment, which is now entirely legal between consenting adults—and fully recognized as being none of the state’s business—in all Western cultures. (Although approximately thirteen US states have “anti-sodomy” laws outlawing homosexuality, these statutes have rarely been enforced in recent years, and in 2003 the US Supreme Court invalidated those laws.) The legalization of homosexuality lifted a huge burden of human misery, secretiveness, paranoia, and genuine fear from our societies, and at the same time not a single one of the homophobic lobby’s fire-and-brimstone predictions about the end of Western civilization came true.

Likewise, it was not so long ago that natural seers, mediums, and healers who felt the calling to become “witches” were burned at the stake for “crimes” that we now look back on as harmless eccentricities at worst.

At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are—to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either.

Perhaps it will be the same with drugs? Perhaps in a century or two, if we have not destroyed human civilization by then, our descendants will look back with disgust on the barbaric laws of our time that punished a minority so harshly (with imprisonment, financial ruin, and worse) for responsibly, quietly, and in the privacy of their own homes seeking alterations in their own consciousness through the use of drugs. Perhaps we will even end up looking back on the persecution of drug users with the same sense of shame and horror that we now view the persecution of gays and lesbians, the burning of “witches,” and the imposition of slavery on others.

Meanwhile it’s no accident that the “War on Drugs” has been accompanied by an unprecedented expansion of governmental power into the previously inviolable inner sanctum of individual consciousness. On the contrary, it seems to me that the state’s urge to power has all along been the real reason for this “war”—not an honest desire on the part of the authorities to rescue society and the individual from the harms caused by drugs, but the thin of a wedge intended to legitimize increasing bureaucratic control and intervention in almost every other area of our lives as well.

This is the way freedom is hijacked—not all at once, out in the open, but stealthily, little by little, behind closed doors, and with our own agreement. How will we be able to resist when so many of us have already willingly handed over the keys to our own consciousness to the state and accepted without protest that it is OK to be told what we may and may not do, what we may and may not explore, even what we may and may not experience, with this most precious, sapient, unique, and individual part of ourselves?

If we are willing to accept that then we can be persuaded to accept anything.