The Conspiracy to Subvert Conspiracy Theorizing

strategic-culture |  The first conclusion you would likely arrive at is that the United States government was just put through the first coup in over 58 years (yes, what happened in 1963 was a coup). Although it is becoming a bit prohibitive to speak such words aloud in polite society, Nancy Pelosi’s official biographer Molly Ball, recently penned a scandalous Time Magazine article entitled ‘The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Elections’ which admitted to this conspiracy saying:

“Even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream- a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” (Lest you think that this was a subversion of democracy, Ball informs us that “they were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”)

Another conclusion you might come to is that many of the political figures whom you believed were serving those who elected them into office, actually serve the interests of a clique of technocrats and billionaires lusting over the deconstruction of western civilization under something called “a Great Reset”. Where this was brushed off as an unfounded conspiracy theory not long ago, even Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister (and neo-Nazi supporting Rhodes Scholar) Chrystia Freeland decided to become a Trustee of the World Economic Forum just weeks ago. In this role, Freeland joins fellow Oxford technocrat Mark Carney in their mutual endeavor to be a part of the new movement to decarbonize civilization and make feudalism cool again.

Lastly, you might notice that your having arrived at these conclusions is itself increasingly becoming a form of thought-crime punishable in a variety of distasteful ways elaborated by a series of unprecedented new emergency regulations that propose extending the definition of “terrorism”. Those implicated under the new definition will be those broad swaths of citizens of western nations who don’t agree with the operating beliefs of the ruling oligarchy.

Already a 60 day review of the U.S. military is underway to purge the armed forces of all such “thought criminals” while McCarthyite legislation has been drafted to cleanse all government jobs of “conspiracy theorists”.

Another startling announcement from the National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin that domestic terrorists include: “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority [and] perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”

While not yet fully codified into law (though it will be if not nipped in the bud soon), you can be sure that things are certainly moving fast as, before our very eyes, the right to free speech is being torn to shreds by means of censorship across social media and the internet, cancelling all opinions deemed unacceptable to the ruling class.

Tryna Set Up Political Party BLM Global Gets Rejected By Elections Commission And Grassroots BLM UK

dailymail  |  The Electoral Commission has rejected a controversial application to set up a Black Lives Matter (BLM) political party in Britain because its name would be 'likely to mislead voters'.

The independent election watchdog argued that a 'reasonable voter could assume that the party represents, or is in some way associated with' the grassroots BLM movement and its official UK affiliate.

A spokesperson told MailOnline that the party's proposed constitution and financial scheme were 'incomplete' and also rejected, as the manifesto did not determine the structure and organisation of the party. 

The application was submitted to the election watchdog by applicants whose identities remain unknown just five months after the killing of black man George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis.

His death triggered a cultural revolution in Britain that began with a wave of statue toppling by protesters and culminated in the founding of a Commission of Diversity in the Public Realm by London Mayor Sadiq Khan. 

Tory backbenchers claimed the application to set up the party proved that BLM was a partisan political project with Left-wing objectives, including 'deconstructing the concept of "family" and defunding the police'.  

However, at the time the bid was lodged the main Black Lives Matter UK (BLM UK) group insisted it had no affiliation with the applicants. 

Pray To Gawd You Know This Post Ain't About These Woes....,

opendemocracy |  When asked to address philanthrocapitalism over the last 20 years, one of the first thoughts I had was how late-stage capitalism impacts sex workers. I entered sex work as a stripper in the United States at the age of 19 in 2007, and even then dancers at my club bemoaned how much earnings had dropped since the 1990s. In the 14 years since, even those of us who are relatively privileged have seen tuition and predatory student loan practices soar, employment rates/wages drop, and a continuing erosion of social safety nets. This has meant that many of us in a previous decade potentially could have quietly done sex work in our early 20s and moved on to other careers as we got older, but under current economic conditions we have simply never been able to afford to entirely leave the industry.

As the sex industry has grown oversaturated, managers of legal workspaces have become bolder in pursuing exploitive and discriminatory labour practices. This, in conjunction with Trump’s presidency and the passage of anti-sex work policies like SESTA/FOSTA, has pushed many of us into higher contact, more criminalised work that is still preferable to the majority of available waged jobs. Anti-trafficking crusaders often blame us for glamourising the industry, but the reality is that people of all genders and ages are entering into sex work because they are under increasing financial duress and experience a lack of other viable options under our current power structures.

As an administrator of the Lysistrata Mutual Care Collective & Fund, a mostly volunteer-run resource specifically by and for sex workers, our collective grounds its resistance to predominant modes of philanthrocapitalism by drawing on what grassroots organisers call the non-profit-industrial complex. Non-profits, especially in the anti-trafficking realm, often give lifetime positions of power to people outside of marginalised communities. They are accountable primarily to well-off board members and funders. Funding typically goes to their salaries rather than directly to individuals in the populations they claim to serve.

This dynamic is also found within the sex worker movement. Formally educated, white sex workers from middle class backgrounds are disproportionately able to transition to paid advocacy work and secure grant funding, while our peers who face greater risk of arrest and violence in every part of their existence are often additionally barred from transitioning to non-profit and academic employment.

Above All Else Patrice Cullors Comically "Secured The Bag!"

deadline |  CAA has signed artist, organizer, educator, and public speaker Patrisse Cullors for representation in all areas.

Cullors is known as the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network. In addition to her work with BLM, her advocacy shines through as a Chairperson of Reform LA Jails, and Founder and Board Chair of grassroots Los Angeles-based organization Dignity and Power Now.

On the TV side, Cullors is part of the writers’ room for the Freeform series Good Trouble. She initially served as a consultant for the first season of The Fosters spinoff to help with Malika (Zuri Adele) activism and social justice storyline. She joined the writers’ room for the second season.

Cullors also appeared in the Kenneth Paul Rosenberg’s documentary Bedlam, which sheds light on the state of mental health in the U.S. It premiered at Sundance earlier this year and Cullors’ family is one of four that share their personal stories about mental health. For her part, she shares the heartbreaking story of her brother Monte and his struggle with mental health. This opens the floodgates that unveil the country’s severely broken healthcare and prison system.

In 2016,  Cullors published her memoir When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir which wnet on to become a New York Times bestseller. She has directed and produced numerous theater and performance pieces as well as docu-series.

Cullors will continue to be repped by Keppler Speakers and Victoria Sanders & Associates.

What Would The Black Panthers Think Of Black Lives Matter?

truthdig  |  The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.—Martin Luther King Jr., 1968

You don’t have to be one of those conspiratorial curmudgeons who reduces every sign of popular protest to “George Soros money” to acknowledge that much of what passes for popular and progressive, grass-roots activism has been co-opted, taken over and/or created by corporate America, the corporate-funded “nonprofit industrial complex,” and Wall Street’s good friend, the Democratic Party, long known to leftists as “the graveyard of social movements.” This “corporatization of activism” (University of British Columbia professor Peter Dauvergne’s term) is ubiquitous across much of what passes for the left in the U.S. today.

What about the racialist group Black Lives Matter, recipient of a mammoth $100 million grant from the Ford Foundation last year? Sparked by the racist security guard and police killings of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown and Eric Garner, BLM has achieved uncritical support across the progressive spectrum, where it is almost reflexively cited as an example of noble and radical grass-roots activism in the streets. That is a mistake.

I first started wondering where BLM stood on the AstroTurf versus grass roots scale when I read an essay published three years ago in The Feminist Wire by Alicia Garza, one of BLM’s three black, lesbian and veteran public-interest careerist founders. In her “Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” Garza wrote: “Black lives. Not just all lives. Black lives. Please do not change the conversation by talking about how your life matters, too. It does, but we need less watered down unity and a more active solidarities with us, Black people, unwaveringly, in defense of our humanity. Our collective futures depend on it.”

Denouncing “hetero-patriarchy,” Garza described the adaptation of her clever online catchphrase (“black lives matter”) by others—“brown lives matter, migrant lives matter, women’s lives matter, and on and on” (Garza’s dismissive words)—as “the Theft of Black Queer Women’s Work.”

“Perhaps,” she added, “if we were the charismatic Black men many are rallying around these days, it would have been a different story.”

From a leftist perspective, this struck me as alarming. Why the prickly, hyperidentity-politicized and proprietary attachment to the “lives matter” phrase? Garza seemed more interested in brand value and narrow identity than social justice. Did she want a licensing fee? Wouldn’t any serious, leftist, people’s activist eagerly give the catchy “lives matter” phrase away to all oppressed people and hope for their wide and inclusive use in a viciously capitalist society that has subjected everything and everyone to the soulless logic of commodity rule, profit and exchange value? Who were these “charismatic Black men many are rallying around” in the fall of 2014?

And how representative were Garza’s slaps at “hetero-patriarchy” and “charismatic Black men” of the black community in whose name she spoke? Would it be too hetero-patriarchal of me, I wondered, to suggest that maybe a black male or two with experience of oppression in the nation’s racist criminal justice system ought to share some space front and center in a movement focused especially on a police and prison state that targets black boys and men above all?

I defended the phrase “black lives matter” against the absurd charge that it is racist, but I couldn’t help but wonder about the left-progressive credentials of anyone who gets upset that others would want to have a “conversation” (as Garza put it) about how their lives matter too. Is there really something wrong with a marginalized Native American laborer or a white and not-so “skin-privileged” former factory worker struggling with sickness and poverty wanting to hear that his or her life matters? For any remotely serious progressive, was there anything mysterious about the fact that many white folks facing foreclosure, job loss, poverty wages and the like might not be doing cartwheels over the phrase “black lives matter” when they experience the harsh daily reality that their lives don’t matter under the profits system?

My concerns about BLM’s potential service to the capitalist elite were reactivated when I heard a talk by Garza’s fellow BLM founder, Patrisse Cullors (another veteran nonprofit careerist). Cullors spoke before hundreds of cheering white liberals and progressives in downtown Iowa City in February. “We are witnessing the erosion of U.S. democracy,” she said, adding that Donald Trump “is building a police state.” Relating that she had gone into a “two-week depression” after Hillary Clinton was defeated by Trump, Cullors said she wondered if BLM had “done enough to educate people about the differences between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.” She described Trump as a fascist.

Remember When Hillary Clinton Clowned A Group Of Black Lives Matter Activists?

BAR  |  It is painfully evident from the video of last week’s meeting between a #BlackLivesMatter delegation and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton that the organization is philosophically incapable of making demands on the political representatives of the rulers of the United States. #BLM’s leadership is either confused as to the nature of political demands, or has decided to reject the most fundamental lessons of mass movement politics – indeed, of human social dynamics. Political movements are defined by their core demands. The video of #BLM’s closed-door encounter with Clinton in New Hampshire, August 11 – after the five activists had been prevented from attending and, presumably, disrupting her campaign event – should become a staple for future political education classes on what happens when would-be movement operatives enter the lion’s den unarmed with political demands: they are humiliated and eaten alive.

#Black Lives Matter does post a list of “National Demands ” on its website, including “that the federal government discontinue its supply of military weaponry and equipment to local law enforcement,” and that the U.S. Justice Department “release the names of all officers involved in killing black people within the last five years.” Mixed in with these demands are pledges to “seek justice for Michael Brown’s family,” to develop a network “aimed at redressing the systemic pattern of anti-black law enforcement violence in the US,” and to “advocate” for a decrease in federal spending on law enforcement, accompanied by an increase in social funding.

The commingling of demands and lists of future projects is, itself, indicative of lack of clarity on what constitutes a demand. However, it is clear that the organization’s campaign to disrupt presidential candidates involves only one demand: that representatives of the corporate electoral duopoly “acknowledge whether they believe that Black lives matter,” in the words of #BLM co-founder Alicia Garza, who interviewed on MSNBC on the same day as the New Hampshire debacle.

The main aim of #BLM, besides the huge airplay generated by the confrontations, is to elicit the candidates’ own proposals for changes in the criminal justice system. Julius Jones, founder of the Worcester, Massachusetts, chapter of #BLM and Clinton’s main interlocutor at the New Hampshire encounter, told The Daily Beast :

“Each one [of the candidates] is being made to offer their racial analysis in the United States. We require that they have an understanding so to that list we need to strongly add analysis because we live in a pluralistic society."

“The main aim of #BLM is to elicit the candidates’ own proposals for changes in the criminal justice system.”

In the logic of #BLM leaders, solicitation of reformist proposals from candidates of the two oligarchic parties constitutes a kind of demand. The group doesn’t even require that candidates endorse #BLM’s own posted, reformist demands, such as decreasing spending on police or releasing the names of killer cops. Instead, the candidates are “made to offer their racial analysis” and to produce proposals tailored by the candidate’s own staffs.

The strategy – if one could dignify it as such – is inherently impotent, which is why corporate lawyer and war criminal Hillary Clinton found it so easy to reduce Jones and his colleagues to school children at an elementary civics class.

Although millions of people have already seen the video, it is important to carefully examine the exchange between Clinton and Julius Jones, since the meeting marks a crucial point in the trajectory of both #BLM and of the larger movement to which Alicia Garza and her colleagues contributed a name. The contradictions of #BLM’s strategy will have profound impact – at least in the near term – on the future of the struggle against state oppression of Black people in the U.S. We need to learn from this disaster.

The CIA Created Or Infiltrated Dozens Of Leftist Organizations...,

 off-guardian |  Just the other day The New York Times had this headline: 

Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims.

Notice the lack of the word alleged before “false virus claims.”  This is guilt by headline.  It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram’s ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook, Instagram’s parent company.

That ban should follow soon, as the Times’ reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she accusingly writes that RFK, Jr. “makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers” at Facebook. Jett made sure her report also went to msn.com and The Boston Globe.

This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow.  What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.

I think this is a half-truth that conceals a larger issue. The censorship is not being driven by power-hungry reporters at the Times or CNN or any media outlet. All these media and their employees are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled. 

These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so.  If they do not play their part in this twisted and intricate propaganda game, they will suffer. They will be eliminated, as are pesky individuals who dare peel the onion to its core.

For each media company is one part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus – a system, a complex – whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many.  The CIA and media as parts of the same criminal conspiracy.

To argue that the Silicon valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense.  These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc.  They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to control, use, and infiltrate the media.  Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.

In Surveillance Valley, investigative reporter Yasha Levine documents how Silicon Valley tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are tied to the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex in surveillance and censorship; how the Internet was created by the Pentagon; and even how these shadowy players are deeply involved in the so-called privacy movement that developed after Edward Snowden’s revelations. 

Like Valentine, and in very detailed ways, Levine shows how the military-industrial-intelligence-digital-media complex is part of the same criminal conspiracy as is the traditional media with their CIA overlords. It is one club.

Many people, however, might find this hard to believe because it bursts so many bubbles, including the one that claims that these tech companies are pressured into censorship by the likes of The New York Times, etc.  The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives it its marching orders.

That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon Valley monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.  All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.

But for whom do these intelligence agencies work? Not for themselves.

They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world’s wealth through the stories they tell.

It is a symbiotic relationship.

Warren Buffet's BLM Global Network Losing Its Grassroots Due To Lack Of Transparency And DNC Control

BAR  |  Black Lives Matter Inland Empire, in an open letter, last week announced its departure from the cash-heavy Black Lives Global Network.

“The issue of greatest concern for us is the relationship between the Global Network and the Democratic Party.”

To our community,

Recently, a group of BLM chapters known as the BLM 10 has come forward to voice their concerns and opposition to the Global Network. Those concerns, along with the egregious conduct the Global network demonstrated on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, have brought us to the conclusion that continuing to remain silent would be an act of betrayal. While the issues and problems that have been raised have been well known within our circle for years, it prompted many questions & concerns for us locally. We’d like to let the community know everything outlined in the statement put out by the BLM 10 is valid. We’ve also reached out to the BLM 10 and offered to sign on in support. Hopefully, we can provide insight and clarification into our chapter’s history, our relationship with the global network, and our commitments going forward. 

When BLM IE first started, we were originally known as the Black and Brown Underground (BBU). In 2015 we were approached by an individual named Patrisse Cullors, who offered us an opportunity to join the Global Network and organize as a Black Lives Matter chapter.  After hearing her proposal, we believed that our work, direction, and principles aligned and agreed to join the network; renaming ourselves Black Lives Matter Inland Empire in the process. We were told that the organization we were joining was decentralized and leaderless, but we quickly discovered that was not the case. The Global Network is a top-down dogmatic organization that promotes certain chapters that choose to align with their direction and sequester the ones that don’t. For us locally, that chapter has been Los Angeles.

“Continuing to remain silent would be an act of betrayal.”

For years, the leadership of the Los Angeles chapter has aligned with the Global network and One United Bank to impose on various chapters, particularly ours. We believe that while doing this they received substantial donations and funding, despite them continually soliciting the community for donations. Together, the Los Angeles Chapter along with the Global Network have consistently tried to strong-arm other groups and have worked to undermine a grassroots movement by capitalizing on unpaid labor, suppressing any internal attempt at democracy, commodifying Black death, and profiting from the same pain and suffering inflicted on Black communities that we’re fighting to end. In spite of being ostracised, receiving no financial support, and the maltreatment from both the Global Network and Los Angeles Chapter we’ve maintained our composure while working to the benefit of our community and victims of state sanctioned violence. 

Clearly, we do not have the same beliefs or sense of ethics. We no longer feel, as we initially did, that our politics align. As a result, we are announcing that we are no longer associated or connected to the BLM Global Network. As an attempt to distance ourselves, we have decided to rename part of our organization The Black Power Collective while we restructure. 

The use of the BLM name, which we believed was intended to unify our struggle, has been commodified and debased. It is now being used to sell products, acquire book deals, T.V. deals, and speaking engagements. We have no interest in these pursuits, and we are opposed to the movement to substitute Black capitalism for white capitalism. It has become clear that the Global network and certain figures have platformed our struggles with the sole purpose of exploiting our labor.

“The BLM name is now being used to sell products, acquire book deals, T.V. deals, and speaking engagements.”

 Furthermore, the issue of greatest concern for us is the relationship between the Global Network and the Democratic Party. This is hypocritical at best, as the Democratic Party has historically rejected and ignored BLM’s demands and has made it clear that they are pro-police, pro-prison, and committed to capitalism. From Obama’s support of police and his double-cross of Erica Garner, to “Top Cop” Kamala Harris’ denial of justice for Matrice Richardson, even going back to the 1994 Crime Bill authored by Joe Biden along with the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act that stripped basic human rights from countless Black people—the Democratic Party has literally created the conditions that led to the formation of this movement. Even now, the Democractic party continues to support imperialism, killing African heads of state, bombing Somalia, abusing immigrants (including those of the Black diaspora), and spreading the U.S. military throughout Black and Brown countries around the world. This is a party that is a threat both here and internationally. To ally with them is to ally against ourselves.

Awwwww SNAP!!! Gov. Andrew Cuomo Done Fscked Up Now!!!

WSJ  |  Three months ago New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was awarded an Emmy for “his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic and his masterful use of TV to inform and calm people around the world.” Turns out the Emmys had the right actor—but the wrong performance. Increasingly it looks like Mr. Cuomo’s real act was to keep people from finding out how many people in his state’s nursing homes died from Covid-19.

On Thursday the New York Post reported that Melissa DeRosa, the Governor’s top aide, admitted to Democratic leaders that the state had deliberately kept the true numbers from them. In a Wednesday conference call, Ms. DeRosa told Democrats the Cuomo administration rejected a legislative request for the figures last August because Donald Trump was tweeting that “we killed everyone in nursing homes” and was directing “the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us.”

As Ms. DeRosa put it, “Basically, we froze.” The administration wasn’t sure, she said, if any information it released to state lawmakers or the Department of Justice “was going to be used against us” or “if there was going to be an investigation.”

Nursing home deaths are a sensitive issue for Mr. Cuomo because of a March 25 health department directive that barred these homes from rejecting people because they had Covid-19. The Associated Press reports that 9,056 recovering patients were sent into nursing homes after the directive, more than 40% higher than what the state had previously reported. 

In January state Attorney General Letitia James released a report on an investigation into complaints about how the nursing homes handled Covid-19. Two findings stand out. First, that “a larger number of nursing home residents died from COVID-19 than” the official data reflected. Second, that the March 25 directive “requiring the admission of COVID-19 patients into nursing homes may have put residents at increased risk of harm in some facilities and may have obscured the data available to assess that risk.”

Liberty! Fraternity! Hierarchy! Qualitative Spiritual Praxis Or Biologically Conceived Hierarchy?

gatestoneinstitute  |  China is in the process of creating the "perfect Communist," Weichert, also the author of Winning Space, told Gatestone. "China is run by a regime that believes in the perfectibility of mankind, and with the advent of modern genetic and biotechnology research, China's central planners now have the human genome itself to perfect according to their political agenda."

Chinese scientists already are on the road of "gene-doping" to make future generations smarter and more innovative than those in countries refusing to embrace these controversial methods. "What you are witnessing in China," Weichert has written, "is the convergence of advanced technology with cutting-edge bio-sciences, capable of fundamentally altering all life on this planet according to the capricious whims of a nominally Communist regime."

Shenzhen's He, after an international uproar caused by news of his dangerous and unethical work, was fined and jailed for "illegally carrying out human embryo gene-editing," but in the Communist Party's near-total surveillance state, he obviously had state backing for his experiments.

He's efforts are not isolated. Nature magazine's news team reported in April 2015 that Chinese researchers at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, in another world-first experiment, edited "non-viable" human embryos with CRISPR-Cas9. "A Chinese source familiar with developments in the field said that at least four groups in China are pursuing gene editing in human embryos," the magazine's website stated.

Beijing's prosecution of He, therefore, looks like an attempt to cool down the furor and prevent the international scientific community from further inquiry into China's activities.

Unfortunately, China's advances in gene editing human embryos for super soldiers is persuading others they must do the same. Soon, for instance, there will be "Le Terminator." The French government has just given approval for augmented soldiers. "We have to be clear, not everyone has the same scruples as us and we have to prepare ourselves for such a future," declared French Minister for the Armed Forces Florence Parly.

Michael Clarke of Kings College London told the Sun, the British tabloid, there is now a biological competition fueled by China. Will we soon have, as the International Society for Military Ethics has dubbed it, a race of "homo robocopus"?

Ahnenerbe The Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Organization

salon  |  There were three main categories of unethical medical experiments carried out by Nazi scientists, most of which were done under the supervision of Sievers and the Ahnenerbe (as well as, famously, by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz). Prisoners were used as some laboratories might experiment on animals.

The first category was survival testing. The idea was to determine the human survival thresholds for Nazi soldiers. One example was an experiment to determine the altitude at which air force crews could safely parachute. Prisoners were placed in low-pressure chambers to replicate the thin atmosphere of flight, and observed to see when organs began to fail. Sievers’ most infamous experiments at Dachau were to determine the temperature at which the human body would fail, in the case of hypothermia, and also how best to resuscitate a nearly-frozen human. A body temperature probe was inserted into the rectum of prisoners, who were then frozen in a variety of manners (for example, immersion in ice water or standing naked in the snow). It was established that consciousness was lost, followed quickly by death, when body temperature reached 25 C. Bodies of the nearly-frozen were then brought back up in temperature through a variety of similarly unpleasant manners, such as immersion in near-boiling water. Himmler himself suggested the most bizarre, but least cruel, method of reviving a hypothermic — by obliging him to have sex in a warm bed with multiple ladies. This was actually practiced (and seemed to work, at least better than the other methods). But the very idea that experiments were undertaken to kill or almost kill, humans through freezing, and then determine how best to resuscitate them, bring them back to life, is not a long leap to the reanimation of the clinically dead.

The second category of tests included those with pharmaceuticals and experimental surgeries, with inmates used like lab rats. Doctors tested immunizations against contagious diseases like malaria, typhus, hepatitis and tuberculosis, injecting prisoners and exposing them to diseases, then observing what happened. Procedural experiments, like those involving bone-grafting without anesthetic, which took place at the Ravensbrueck concentration camp, could also fall into this category. Antidotes were sought to chemical weapons like mustard gas and phosgene, with no regard for the well-being of those experimented upon. Keeping in mind the Nazi policy of using prisoners of “lesser” races for economic benefit (this is why concentration camp victims were often kept just alive enough to provide free labor, rather than universally being killed upon capture), this prisoner-as-guinea-pig approach fits into this perverse logic.

November 1944 saw an experiment with a cocktail drug called D-IX, at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. D-IX included cocaine and a stimulant called pervitine. The Luftwaffe (Nazi air force) had been supplied with 29 million pervitine pills from April-December 1939 alone, with the pill codenamed “obm.” Its use left the soldiers addicted, but did succeed in extending attention spans, reducing the need for sleep and food and giving a dramatic increase in stamina. 18 prisoners were given D-IX pills and forced to march while wearing backpacks loaded with 20 kilos of material — after taking the pills, they were able to march, without rest, up to 90 kilometers a day. The goal was to determine the outer limit of stamina induced by the pills. The D-IX pill proper, launched March 16th, 1944, included in each pill 5 mg of cocaine, 3 mg of pervitine, 5 mg of eucodal (a morphine-based painkiller) and synthetic cocaine. It was tested in the field with the Forelle diversionary unit of submariners. The experimentation and use of the pills, both on prisoners and soldiers, was considered very successful, and a plan was put in place to supply pills to the whole Nazi army, but the Allied victory months later stopped this. These pills sought to create super soldiers, in a contorted interpretation of the Nietzschean übermensch.

The third category was racial, or ideological testing, famously overseen by Josef Mengele, who experimented on twins and gypsies, to see how different races responded to contagious diseases. Mass-sterilization experiments on Jews and gypsies provided a sort of photo-negative to one of Himmler’s pet projects, called Lebensborn. It was a breeding program in which racially-ideal Aryan men and women (tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, strong Nordic bone structure) were obliged to breed, in order to produce more, and purer, Aryan children. This was part and parcel with the belief that the Aryans of the 20^th century were descended from an ancient race with superhuman powers — and that these powers had been gradually lost through interbreeding with “lower” races. If the “pollution” of these other races could be bred out, through generations of Aryans mixing only with other Aryans, then perhaps these powers could be regained? This, too, has an echo of resurrection to it. Resurrecting the lost purity of the original Aryans from Thule, and bringing back their superhuman powers, through breeding programs with pure-blooded Aryans.

Comprehending Transcendent Levels Of Reality Through Concrete Phenomena

aaroncheak  |  The Lubiczs returned to France in the early 1950s, retiring to Mas du Coucagno at Plan-de-Grasse. In 1952, on the day of St. John the Baptist, Schwaller penned an intriguing text entitled Verbe Nature (Nature Word), perhaps one of his most deeply revealing works.[61] The subtitle of the work is: Quelques réponses de la Nature et de ses Sages aux questions de l’auteur, porte-parole des inconnus (Some responses from Nature and her Sages to the questions of the author, spokesperson of the unknown). Bearing the distinct stamp of Schwaller’s mysterious daimon, the premise of the text is the transcription of a series of answers given by ‘Nature and her sages’ to questions posed, but not recorded, by Schwaller. It is thus composed solely of responses. One of the more important features of the text is the insight it gives into Schwaller’s broader theories of biological and spiritual transmutation. Nature Word makes the startling claim that there is a fixed alchemical salt—an immortal mineral ‘nucleus’ that neither fire nor putrefaction can destroy—residing in the human femur.

 With unusual specificity, Schwaller held that the incorruptible salt in the human femur is the mineral ‘register’ upon which the most vital moments of human consciousness could be permanently ‘inscribed’. This salt or nucleus was, in comparison the chromosome,  ‘extremely fixed or even indestructible’.[62] Schwaller regarded it as more permanent than DNA and accorded it a key role in his esoteric theory of evolution (genesis). Contrary to the Darwinian theory (where only the characteristics of the species are able to be preserved through genetic transmission), Schwaller maintained that the fixed salt located in the femur is the precise mechanism by which individual characteristics—the vital modes of consciousness—are able to be preserved and transmitted beyond the death of the individual. This salt was therefore central to the alchemical process of rebirth (palingenesis). Within the wider framework of Schwaller’s cosmology—in which material genesis is conceived as the visible index of the evolution of consciousness—the alchemical salt forms the ‘magnet’ that draws primordial matter through the existential vehicles of the mineral, vegetable, animal and human kingdoms towards the ultima materia (or telos) of ‘spiritual concretion’. As such it formed the hidden link—the invisible bond in the chain of continuity—in the otherwise apparently discontinuous process in which the generation and corruption of evolving forms is situated.

In 1956, Schwaller published Le Roi de la théocratie pharaonique (The King of Pharaonic Theocracy), a work which, among other things, traces the deviation and distortion of Egyptian consciousness through Greek rationality, highlighting the Egyptian rather than Greek basis of the intellectual ‘miracle’ than transformed antique civilisation. In this work, Schwaller reveals important insights into the alchemical process of ‘qualitative exaltation’, a term he compares to the occurence of ‘teratological proliferation’ (mutational phenomena) in plants. Pointing to the images of the proliferous lotuses depicted on the ‘Botanical Gardens’ of Thutmose III at Karnak, he reveals how authentic alchemical mutation emerges not from the purification of the material body of an entity, but from the intensification of its spirit or consciousness.[63] In short, consciousness shapes form, and it was precisely the qualitative exaltations of consciousness that were registered in the immortal mineral remains (the fixed salt) and carried over between kingdoms and species, thus forming the Ariadne’s thread in de Lubicz’s esoteric theory of evolution.

 It was in Plan-de-Grasse, however, that Schwaller finally completed and published his three-volume magnum opus, Le Temple de l’homme (1957-8), the magisterial synthesis of his many years of on-site study in the temples of ancient Egypt. On the eve of Le Temple, Schwaller presented some papers at the Congrès des Symbolists in Paris.[64] Just after his chef d’œuvre appeared, a Belgian-American by the name of André VandenBroeck encountered Schwaller’s work and, over a period of eighteen months, became his last, and perhaps most important, ‘disciple’. The account that VandenBroeck left of this period (1959-60), published some twenty-seven years later on the centenary of Schwaller’s birth (Al-Kemi: Hermetic, Occult, Political, and Private Aspects of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, 1987), remains the single most important memoir of Schwaller de Lubicz to date.

 The final book published by de Lubicz was Propos sur ésotérisme et symbole (On Esotericism and Symbol, 1960), a short text actually written during the Christmas of 1947, and dedicated to his ‘friends from the Luxor group’. Propos sur ésotérisme et symbole distils many of the themes explored in the wealth of notes and unpublished papers that Schwaller wrote throughout the 1940s, and remains one of his most concise meditations on metaphysics, containing specific insights into the Hermetic mystery of salt.[65]

Human Beings DO Live In A Simplified Narrative-Dream World...,

NYTimes |  Relations between master and disciple were always difficult. Mr. VandenBroeck already had some background in the occultist philosophy of Ouspenkyism and in the hardly less bizarre Chicago-based general semantics movement, which opposed traditional Aristotelian logic. De Lubicz for his part was suspicious and cryptic. Knowledge had to be worked for.

R. A. Schwaller was born in 1887. In his youth he worked as a chemist and studied art and theosophy. The aristocratic Lithuanian poet and occultist Oscar Milosz conferred the title of de Lubicz on Schwaller. At around the same time, Schwaller de Lubicz claims to have met the enigmatic alchemist Fulcanelli. Fulcanelli later became famous for his book ''Le Mystere des Cathedrales'' (1925), an alchemical reading of the symbolism of Gothic cathedrals.

Soon afterward, Fulcanelli (certainly a pseudonym) vanished mysteriously. De Lubicz claimed that Fulcanelli had not only pirated his (de Lubicz's) ideas on the symbolism of cathedrals, but had also attempted to make gold without fully understanding the procedure. This last had fatal consequences, and Mr. VandenBroeck tells us that, when de Lubicz visited Fulcanelli on his deathbed, the alchemist had turned black.

After World War I, de Lubicz was largely responsible for the formation of the Veilleurs (the Watchmen), a group dedicated to preserving higher values in a demoralized postwar world. The higher values were those of hierarchy and discipline. The elite of the Veilleurs sought to evolve to a higher state of being. The group's ambitions were esoteric and protofascist. Subsequently R. A. de Lubicz went to Egypt, where he spent years studying the temple at Luxor. ''Le Temple de l'Homme,'' published in 1958, was his exposition of the inner meaning of Pharaonic architecture, which boring mainstream Egyptologists with their profane readings had failed to penetrate. Finally, de Lubicz moved to Grasse, where Mr. VandenBroeck found him a couple of years before his death.

This is all quite interesting, but the reader has to work hard to extract the interest. The book is clogged with abstruse lectures on secret harmonies, mystical chemistry and whatnot. The style is rigorous, but the content is ultimately meaningless.

Eventually, Mr. VandenBroeck left the temple of mysteries at Grasse. It is to his credit that an important motive for his doing so was that he found de Lubicz's political ideas objectionable. It would have been even more to his credit if he had gone further and had recognized that most of de Lubicz's theories were junk. His ''archeology'' at Luxor failed to take account of the ascertainable circumstances of the temple's building. His ''history'' was a farrago of nonsense about racial destiny and the secret histories of Templars, tarot cards and so on. His ''geography'' had space for a manmade Nile and a Sphinx up to its neck in seawater. His ''science'' was an ill-tempered polemic against Darwin and Einstein. It is odd, then, to find Saul Bellow's foreword giving endorsement to de Lubicz as ''a source of revolutionary insights.''

 

 

Social Media Is A Scam

idler |  From The Century of the Self to HyperNormalisation, the journalist Adam Curtis has consistently exposed stories and truths that lay hidden to others. His BBC blogs feature brilliantly researched articles on, for example, the history of think tanks and their relationship with battery farming and Google. Always entertaining and always a provocative, original voice, he refuses to spout liberal platitudes and makes up his own mind. This bold voice has found him millions of fans across the world, and he is gaining a new audience among the teens and 20-somethings.

I recorded two interviews with Curtis and what follows is edited highlights from our exchanges. We start by discussing the so-called power of the tech titans. Adam argues that a simple way to remove their grip on us would be to stop believing in their magic.

Adam Curtis: When we say: “Facebook is a dark, manipulative force”, it makes the people in charge seem extremely powerful. The truth is that people within the advertising and marketing industry are extremely suspicious about whether online advertising has any effect at all. The internet has been captured by four giant corporations who don’t produce anything, contribute nothing to the wealth of the country, and hoard their billions of dollars in order to pounce on anything that appears to be a competitor and buy it out immediately. They will get you and me to do the work for them – which is putting the data in – then they send out what they con other people into believing are targeted ads. But actually, the problem with their advertising is that it is – like all geek stuff – literal. It has no imagination to it whatsoever. It sees that you bought a ticket to Budapest, so you’re going to get more tickets to Budapest. It’s a scam. In a way, the whole Facebook/Cambridge Analytica thing played into their hands because it made it even more mystifying. I’ve always thought John Le Carré did spies a great service because he made it seem as if there were endless depths of mystery and darkness when in fact, if you’ve ever researched the spies, they are (a) boring and (b) useless. I mean really, really useless. I researched MI5 once and they hardly ever manage to capture any traitors… it’s usually someone else who points them in the right direction. And in a way I think that’s true of this. The tech companies are powerful in the sense that they’ve got hold of the internet, which people like me think could be a really powerful thing for changing the world and disseminating new ideas, and they’ve got it in this rigid headlock. To do that, they’ve conned everyone into thinking that their advertising is worth it. And in the process, they’re destroying journalism.

Tom Hodgkinson: Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are surely clever and manipulative though?

AC: I’m sure some really bad stuff went on. There’s no question about that. But where’s the evidence that it actually swayed elections? What we lost in the hysteria about it all, is the sense of: why did people really vote for Brexit and Trump? I maintain that all the evidence points to the fact that there is real anger and a sense of isolation in Britain and America. The results reflected that. For 20 years, they’ve been offered no choice between the political parties. They’ve been given this enormous button that says “Fuck off” and they’ve pressed it. That’s a rational thing to do. The problem with the professional classes is that they don’t know how to deal with that. Instead they turn to these other reasons, which of course are there. But it’s like they’re looking at a little part of something much, much bigger, which involves having to make political choices about what might have gone wrong in your society. Everyone goes: “Oh that’s magical!” about the internet, but so what? That’s actually just so banal. People go: “Oh it’s terrible, they’re manipulating us!” or: “They know so much about me!” Well, what do they know about you? Your shopping? That’s it? What they don’t know, actually, are all the things that you’ve forgotten which are your real intelligence, and that world that you live in your head, day by day – which is rich and extraordinary.

TH: That’s a lovely thought. So we should really be saying they’re stupid and they’re boring?

AC: Yes, and all they really know about you is your shopping.

TH: There are good things about the internet.

AC: The internet is all sorts of things. The real problem is that we’ve grown up in a period of high individualism and, in a period of high individualism, the one thing you don’t notice is power. You’re supposed to be an empowered individual yourself. What’s disappeared out of the language is power. We just don’t see it. We just blindly go through the world, not seeing that there are powerful forces.

Transcend Delusional Narrative Conditioning And Return To The Lucid Understanding Of Reality

caitlinjohnstone |  It’s easier to control people through the narrative world than the real world because the narrative world and its relationship with the real world is too complicated for most people to understand, whereas the real world is quite simple and straightforward. For this reason, a tremendous amount of energy goes into controlling the dominant narratives, the dominant stories that people tell about what’s going on in the world.

Convince people to accept the narrative that a government’s leader is an evil dictator in need of regime change, and you can trade that narrative for real world control over a crucial geostrategic region. Convince people to accept that the status quo is working fine and any attempts to change it are dangerous insanity, and you ensure that people will never rise up and take away your real world control. Convince people that anyone questioning your narratives is a conspiracy theorist or a Russian propagandist, and you ensure your continued hegemonic control over the narrative world.

The most powerful manipulators are the ones who have succeeded in exerting control over both the real world and the narrative world, and they pursue both agendas with equal emphasis. Populations in the real world who insist upon their own national, resource, financial, economic or military sovereignty are subject to real world attacks by bombs, starvation sanctions and special ops. Entities in the narrative world which threaten imperial narrative domination are attacked, smeared, marginalized and censored.

That’s all we are seeing with the increasingly shrill mainstream panic about disinformation, conspiracy theories, foreign propaganda and domestic extremism. Our rulers and their media lackeys are not compassionately protecting us from deception, they are ensuring that they remain the only ones authorized to administer deception. By golly the only ones allowed to deceive us should be our government, our news media, our teachers and our priests.

As China and its allies increasingly threaten the real world hegemony of the US and its allies, operations in the narrative world are getting increasingly heated and intense. Expect continued demonization of Russia, and expect anti-China propaganda to get more and more noisy. Expect people to be herded into partisan echo chambers with thicker and thicker walls in the narrative world, because dividing them up in this way makes it much easier to administer propaganda to them.

The narrative world is getting more and more frenzied while the real world is headed toward disaster due to the military and ecological pressures created by our status quo. There are only a few ways this can possibly break, with the most obvious being mass scale climate disaster or nuclear war.

Why Doesn't Matthew Rosenfeld Say A Word About The Origin Of Signal?

TAC |  Recent political turmoil has driven a stampede of smartphone users to encrypted messaging services, so much so that service providers are having a hard time keeping up with demand. The exodus to these digital havens might come across as reasonable given social media’s newfound penchant for censorship and deplatforming. However, the public record shows that encrypted messaging apps, despite the litany of high-profile celebrity endorsements, aren’t what they appear to be. Lurking beneath the assurances of confidentiality are unsettling facts that raise doubts about the wisdom of following the herd.

The mainstream press has been talking up apps like Signal and Telegram. The New York Times in particular. That, in and of itself, should set off alarm bells. Signal, for example, has received millions of dollars over the years from a bureaucratic spin-off of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Broadcast Board of Governors, rebranded as the U.S. Agency for Global Media, has been an ardent supporter of Signal through its Open Technology Fund. The U.S. Agency for Global Media is the foreign propaganda arm of the State Department and has historical links to clandestine regime-change operations.

The Signal project is run by a guy who won’t tell anyone his real name. Would you buy insurance from someone like that, much less trust them with your physical safety? Another indicator that something is amiss. Said guy goes by the handle of Moxie Marlinspike. He likes to create the impression of a radical anarchist who’s leading a noble battle against government surveillance. Which is unusual considering how acquainted Marlinspike appears to be with government officials. Indeed, they liked him so much they financed him.

Telegram likewise has some notable advocates despite its questionable security. Enrique Tarrio, who currently leads the Proud Boys, described Telegram’s platform as “the darkest part of the web.” Which sounds like a glowing testimonial by an ostensibly credible figure. Readers should note that based on court documents viewed by Reuters, federal officials indicate that Tarrio has worked with law enforcement as an informant on a number of cases. In an interview with Reuters Tarrio stated, “I don’t recall any of this.” Keep in mind that infiltration and subversion are genuine threats to secure messaging systems. In fact, online providers could even facilitate such monitoring by adding hidden members to messaging groups.

Don’t even ask about Facebook’s WhatsApp messenger. The company openly admits that it collects more than enough metadata to dispel any illusions about personal privacy.

All of this underscores an inconvenient truth about apps which Ken Thompson, the creator of UNIX, spelled out nearly four decades ago. In his excellent Turing Award Lecture Thompson warned, “You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself.” Primarily because, as the SolarWinds debacle illustrated, backdoors are a grave threat. And it just so happens that the American intelligence community has a heavily documented record of planting backdoors in software, one that goes all the way back to the beginning of the Cold War, with global business interests like Crypto AG that outwardly appeared to be legitimate. The Swiss are neutral, right? Nope, not when they’re in bed with the CIA. Please understand that the organizations which deployed the compromised encryption technology sold by Crypto AG mistakenly believed that it was going to make them more secure. Allied governments naively trusted state secrets to gear that they didn’t design, giving spies a perfect opportunity.

 

Floridians Thank God Every Day Mayor Q Andrew Gillum Didn't Get Selected Governor...,

turcopolier  |  Republican governors need to go on the offensive. They should require every hospital to collect and publish data along the lines of what Sarasota Memorial Hospital puts out every day. Those numbers should be posted on a website that all citizens can read. But additional data is needed. What are the ages of the people dying? Florida is called God's waiting room by some wags because of the swarm of elderly that have put down roots here to avoid shoveling feet of global warming in such charming iceboxes as Massachusetts, Minnesota and Iowa. Guess what? Old people die. Not just from COVID.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that COVID is not a real, serious disease. But it is not the only disease that threatens life and we should not be bullied into sacrificing our Constitutional rights just because some out of touch bureaucrats buried in the bowels of Washington try to tell you where you can worship and who you can hang out with.

I believe information is power and we need to put more of the correct information into the hands of each and every American. You are more trusted to run your life than letting slow Joe do it.

Sarasota Memorial Hospital	17-Nov	15-Dec	10-Feb
Today’s patient census:	678	757	718
COVID-positive patients total	57	78	45
% of Covid Patients in Hospital	8.41%	10.30%	6.27%
ICU census:	51	57	55
CoVID-positive patients in ICU	12	9	10
% of Covid Patients in ICU	23.53%	15.79%	18.18%
Total Hospital Beds	839	839	839
Total ICU Beds	62	62	72
7-Day SMH positivity rate	5.40%	4.63%	3.20%
Patients who tested positive	1348	1701	2811
Patients who tested negative	32011	38265	52510
% of Patient who tested positive	4.21%	4.45%	5.35%
Patients hospitalized since outbreak began (Mar 2, 2020)	1134	1410	1999
Patients treated/discharged	1233	1548	2304
Patient Deaths	112	140	203

Empty StoreFronts Put The Lie To Quinton Lucas' Broke Kansas City Buck-Passing

kansascity |  Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas is proposing a $12 million cut to the budget of the Kansas City Police Department, and that’s not going to be painless, either practically or politically.

But given that so much of our city budget is spent on public safety, there is no way, in the middle of this pandemic that won’t be over until most of us get vaccinated, that the KCPD could or should be spared this 4.3% cut.

As Lucas has been saying for months, it was the refusal of congressional Republicans to send any pandemic relief to cities that will now necessitate some degree of “defunding” all over the country. 

Because it’s cities, of course, that actually fund our local police.

“We hear all the time about irresponsible cities” that because they’re run by Democrats deserve no COVID-19 relief, the mayor said in a Tuesday night interview. But “if we’d received CARES Act funding that allowed for revenue replacement, there would be no cuts to the police department.” 

This is a little bit like those in the pro-Donald Trump mob at the U.S. Capitol who were carrying Blue Lives Matter flags — while attacking police officers. It doesn’t track, does it?

It’s “because of our Republican defunding of government,” Lucas said, that “we’re being forced to reevaluate” how to keep the city as safe as possible with less funding for police officers.

So what might that look like? “In budgets past, we said there’s one way to address violent crime,” and that was by hiring more officers. Last year’s budget did that, and for a lot of reasons, we still had our most violent year ever.

Now, “rather than being afraid” because that’s not even an option, “rightsizing gives us the opportunity” to look at alternatives, Lucas said. Like “better collaboration with social services.”

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article249204540.html#storylink=cpy

 

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article249204540.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article249204540.html#storylink=cpy

Whether He Intended To Or Not - Trump Put Himself In Direct Opposition To The Great Reset

thescrum |   There are rumblings among the Right and Libertarian factions of Western politics about a horrific plan that Davos Man intends to unleash upon mankind: The Great Reset! While Western conservatives and libertarians depict this as some sort of globalist attempt to take advantage of the disruption caused by the Covid–19 pandemic to impose a global, eco-socialist system of governance, this assessment is incomplete. At bottom, the Great Reset is the expression of a movement based on greenwashing, the fetishization of digital technology, and a neoliberal conceptual nucleus: a corporate structural “reform” called stakeholder capitalism. 

Let us be wary.

If one scratches the surface of the Reset movement one can see why it should be viewed with skepticism and caution. It has many questionable boosters. Credibility is not strong when one’s movement is composed of such figures as Tony Blair, famous for foolishly lending British support to the 2003 Iraq war, or corporations such as Nestlé, notorious for taking worldwide advantage of lax tax laws and, further back in history, its disgraceful exploitation of mothers in developing nations in what is known infamously as “the baby formula scandal.” Indeed, the danger here is that corporations are hurtling towards a complete usurpation of national sovereignty, a global corporate coup intended not to impose a global Green New Deal but to maintain the neoliberal order.

The Reset crowd’s roots in Davos are not to be overlooked. Two prominent apostles of the movement, economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, have a strong Davosian pedigree. Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in Davos 40 years ago. He is a former member of the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group, an organization dedicated to defending “free” market Western capitalism, and helped create the concept of stakeholder capitalism. Malleret is a former investment banker and founded/headed the Global Risk Network at the World Economic Forum. 

To add further fuel to the skepticism fire, TIME recently partnered with the WEF and interviewed a number of Reset advocates, ranging from Doug McMillon, the CEO of Wal–Mart, a company notorious for its poor treatment of employees, to Kristalina Georgieva, the current director of the International Monetary Fund, an organization notorious for inflicting austerity and privatization programs upon nation after nation as conditions for needed multilateral financial assistance. The founders of this movement, Schwab and Malleret, claim in their book, Covid–19: The Great Reset, that this movement is “an attempt to identify and shed light on the changes ahead, and to make a modest contribution in terms of delineating what their more desirable and sustainable form might resemble.”   

“Stakeholder capitalism,”… positions private corporations as trustees of society, and is clearly the best response to today’s social and environmental challenges…There is the prospect, however likely or unlikely, that corporations will eventually be persuaded that stakeholder capitalism is ultimately beneficial to their bottom lines—in effect a new profit-maximization strategy with the added benefit of preserving the social order—and enter in enthusiastically.

The problem I have with the article is that the author seems to discount the full extent to which the ruling elites have already positioned themselves as the “trustees” of the “social order.” It’s as if this were hypothetical planning for the future whereas in it is clearly underscored in a recent Time article, referenced in below link, that the “Shareholders” (aka ruling elites) came out and boasted how they took measures to determine the 2020 Presidential election outcome.

The “great reset” is an ongoing process whose various machinations are documented in many places, including here, at NC. Cloaking it in terms of “Stake Holder” vs. “Shareholder”, in my opinion, masks the more fundamental questions regarding human freedom, agency, and what it means to be human. When making statements that pertain to the relationship between the individual and society without reference once to “class” and or incorporating elements of class analysis, seems odd in an article that seeks to examine structural changes in capitalism

“…It is hard to see corporations voluntarily switching to a stakeholder model after being accustomed to forty years of rapacious shareholder capitalism. What non-corporate entity could possibly force corporations to transform? Governments come to mind as they have, in the past, acted as shapers and regulators of capitalism…”

“…Schwab nonetheless (and very ironically) makes the familiar claim we have come to call TINA since Margaret Thatcher made the phrase familiar—“there is no alternative”—and specifically dismisses state capitalism as a rival: “But while state capitalism may be a good fit for one stage of development, it, too, should gradually evolve into something closer to a stakeholder model, lest it succumb to corruption from within.”

The fundamental requirement of this global neoliberal project is to destroy the capacity of nation-states to regulate economic activity. Perry Anderson’s recent three part opus on the EU illustrated this well. Ideologically, the fundamental requirement is the absolute demonization of “nationalism” and also “populism” as synonymous with fascism. This is why the Establishment reaction against Trump is so ferocious. This is also why the example of China is so threatening, and must be undermined at all costs.
Neither Trump nor China represent my ideal exemplars. But both challenge the TINA arguments of the global elite that “stakeholder capitalism” our only real future.

  

The Conspiracy To Take The 2020 Presidential Election

Time |  There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.” His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics. Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.

The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. “Every week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,” says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. “We can look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.”

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.