Medical Consensus Must Be Unquestioned

Vienna: August 13, 1865

Controversial conspiracy theorist Ignaz Semmelweiss has died in the mental hospital where he was placed due to his irrational belief that childbirth fever could be reduced if the attending medical personnel would wash their hands.

Top medical doctors spoke out against his ridiculous assertion, saying that it would be dangerous to allow Semmelweiss to continue speaking out to the general public, who might lose faith in the medical scientific consensus that there is no connection between doctors performing autopsies and then delivering babies, and childbirth fever.

The general public is too uninformed and ignorant to be exposed to such lunatic ideas, respected authorities say. But Semmelweiss refused to submit to established medical opinion and continued to assert his wild conspiracy theory. He pointed to his research as ''proof'' that his theory was correct, but other doctors say that his research was faulty and the implications were insulting, and therefore he was removed from his position. Fact checkers have assured the public that the research results were Fake News and should not be believed.

Authorities regret that Semmelweiss was beaten by guards in the mental institution, dying 2 weeks later, but speaking on condition of anonymity, one top doctor said "It is better to have him dead than to have him spreading wild ideas and undermining scientific consensus".

Brandy Vaughan on intimidation and why she felt she had to speak out aga...

This woman was found dead by her little boy a couple of days ago.

Big Pharma Has 7 Ways to Sunday

A woman who worked as a detail person for Merck was shocked and awakened when the drug she was hawking-Vioxx- was pulled from the market because it increased the possibility of death for its users.

When she had a baby and took him to the pediatrician for his well-baby checkup, she asked to she the package insert for the vaccine before she would let him be jabbed, but the doctor refused.

She became an outspoken opponent of mandatory inoculations, speaking out against the California law that made it impossible for dissenters to refrain. She was found dead by her little boy, a couple of days ago, after weeks of intimidation and threats, which she detailed in a video, hoping that by telling the world about it, she would be safe.

The Newest Great Reset

"The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed." But what happens when the forms are changed? What happens when you are thrown from your house, the shops are closed, the jobs are not available, the mealtimes, visits and holidays are cancelled? What happens when the children are especially targeted? Adolph Hitler had this to say about that: My mother-in-law, an Irish Catholic living the USA, which means that her ancestors were forcibly converted to Catholicism at one point, and then starved into immigrating at another point, loved her religion. The only time she ever criticized it was when the Pope decided to allow priests to perform Mass in their own languages, instead of the language of the Roman Empire.

The idea of a Great Reset is not unprecedented. We are celebrating today the beginning of a Great Reset on this continent that started a few hundred years ago.

The New Normal for the survivors was completely different from the old normal, I think we can all agree.

The New Normal of feudalism was different for the tribes of Europe, and the New Normal of capitalism was completely different for the peasants thrown off their land and into the dark satanic mills of the infernal city.

Cheer up! Your kids won't know any differently and your descendants won't remember your travails.

How Burisma Grabbed the Pipeline in Ukraine

Nobody wants to acknowledge the elephant in the room:

Burisma represents US oligarchs who spent 5 billion dollars of US government money to regime change Ukraine by using self described Nazis to burn labor unionists alive and to exile at gunpoint former members of parliament who had refused to sell off the nationalized Ukrainian oil & gas pipeline so the US oligarchs used the Obama Biden State Department to arrange the 2014 Maidan Massacre coup d’état “And- you know- F—- the EU.” - Victoria Nuland

The subsequent US backed parliament sold off their national assets to US oligarchs And Joe Biden cashed in putting his son Hunter on the board of directors of the company that now owned the pipelines thanks to Obama Biden and their Nazi buddies in Kiev.

Oh by the way their Kiev puppet nazi air force also shot down that Malaysian airliner after the NATO commanded European Air Traffic Control redirected the flight over the Ukrainian civil war zone - to blame Putin so they could sanction Russia and stop their Nordstream pipeline project competitor to BURISMA.

The US gotta control the flow of energy from Russia to Europe any way they can. And if it means killing trade unionists and terrorizing antNazi towns and shooting down civilian airliners, they’ll do it.

So Hunter Biden cashes in with the US oligarchs. That’s just political corruption.

The real story is HOW DID HIS BURiSMA GRAB THE PIPELINES.

This was written by a facebook friend, using that horizontal media to fill in the information the top down media will not provide.

The Obama administration ruined the lives of millions of Ukrainians (as well as Libyans and Syrians), including the killing of over 15,000 eastern Ukrainians and the aforementioned trade unionists who were burned alive. All for control of fossil fuels.

The women and children Hunter Biden has been accused of trafficking were forced into poverty and misery by the coup. Sex trafficking is a lucrative side business of war and coups. That is why the wealthy elite are so determined to get their man Joe back into the White House.

21st Century Fascism

I read They Thought They Were Free many years ago, and assumed that it would go somewhat the same in the USA.

"The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.” ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45

And indeed, the forms did remain the same as the police state was ushered into America after 9-11. Sure, you had to take off your shoes and walk through a machine that showed your naked body to the new TSA employees, in order to travel to relatives for the holidays. And there is an entire generation who has grown to adulthood thinking that it is normal for the government and corporations to monitor your phone calls, emails and movement.

But most of it stayed fairly intact. No Child Left Behind was a disruption, but going to school remained customary. Medical care became more and more expensive, but the ritual of visiting the doctor was similar to the past, and medical care remained voluntary, with the concept of Informed Consent intact. Shops were open, even though credit card debt became more common than cash purchases. The Fear and Hate was rolled out in various waves, with various targets, at first foreign, but increasingly domestic as the decades rolled on.

Who would have predicted the massive disruption of the forms of society that has been implemented since March, 2020? The shutdown of jobs, shops, restaurants, schools, hospitals, concerts and cinemas? The canceling of holidays? The forbidding of get-togethers, now extended to family visits? The upcoming involuntary mandatory vaccinations. The ramping up of Hate and Fear so strong that Keith Olberman is emboldened to advocate that voters who don't vote for Democrats should be "removed from society".

Orwell told us that the future would be a boot stomping on a human face, fovever, but even he did not predict that the human face would be required to be masked at all times.

We live in interesting times. It will get worse.

The Boot Comes Down on The Human Face

War is Peace. Black is White. Men are Women. Biden did not have the Ukrainian prosecutor fired.

Human Evolution, Myth and Reality

Idiocracy is an entertaining movie, but its premise, although widely believed, is wrong.

We are not the evolutionary results of a long line of people smart enough to survive. We are the results of a long line of people who survived disease long enough to reproduce.

We are not the evolutionary result of independent thinkers and actors. We are the result of people who huddled together for protection and support, and who gladly went to the Town Square to watch the burning at the stake of the one smart person in town as a heretic.

Therefore, we should not be surprised when people who refuse to go along with the mob now are attacked. It's part of our true evolutionary heritage.

It's still annoying, though

Fever Is Part Of Your Immune Response

If you respect your immune system, you must realize that your thermoregulatory center is an intregal part of your immune system.

When your body is under attack by a virus or bacteria, your leukocytes release pyrogens to increase your temperature, because your virus fighters work better at a higher temperature and the virus reproduces slower at a higher temperature. Most mammals have this ability to increase body temperature when under attack by pathogens.

Yes, I understand that it makes you feel bad. You are not supposed to feel good. You are sick, you are fighting off invaders, and your body needs to devote all of its energy to doing that. If you feel like you can't move around and you just want to sleep, that is the best thing you can do to help your immune system fight off the infection.

For some reason, there is a widespread belief that if you don't take drugs to lower the fever, your body will just keep raising your temperature until it kills you. That is an odd belief. Normally, the thermoregulatory center that keeps you at 37c all the time will not raise your temperature enough to harm you. If it can keep you at 37c, it can keep you at 40c. It's not suddenly going to malfunction.

All the years I worked in ER, I only worked with 2 doctors who were willing to go against the grain. Most of them would give antipyretics to children who came in with fevers. Then the kids would get up and run around and the parents would think that we cured them. Send them home with a script for amoxicillin and they thought we were miracle workers,

But, of course, all we were doing was improving the cellular environment for the virus or bacteria, while decreasing the ability of the immune system to fight it off.

We should be teaching our children about how wonderfully complex and well-functioning their bodies are, rather than telling them they are flawed, or "wrong" or need drugs and plastic surgery.

Your thermoregulatory center keeps your body temperature regulated all the time, day after day, year after year. No one ever worries about what kind of job it's doing, or if it is malfunctioning......UNTIL they are under attack and the hypothalamus cranks up the heat, to help your white blood cells function better and to put the heat on viral reproduction.

All of a sudden, people decide that they need to second-guess and micro-manage their hypothalamus. Nope, it doesn't know what it's doing, they decide. What if it gets carried away and cranks the heat too high? Better step in and throw some drugs into the body, to stop its functioning.

Netflix As Propaganda

Netflix, a company that went from a mail-order lending library of CDs to a major propaganda broadcasting network in a few years (and HOW did that happen) put out a new anti- social media documentary the other day, called The Social Dilemma. (Actually, the child porn movie they put out also had an anti-social media aspect). My friend's cousin was influenced by the propaganda and posted that she was going to close her Facebook account, so as not to be corrupted by communicating with other humans without the intervention of top down corporate media. (I paraphrase, of course). My friend wrote an eloquent response.

There is definitely an issue that too much of our time is spent on the internet. We need to get on with life. I too have seen this Netflix film and while I went along at first, at the end I felt I was being manipulated. Consider this if you will.

Social media has done some wonderful things in these last decades for millions of people. It has brought together old friends and family lost for years. I wouldn't know you at all, my beautiful cousin, or your brothers if not for Facebook. Neither would I have been able to reach out to the rest of the scattered family with social media. I have reunited childhood friends, old lovers, and made many, many new contacts around the world whom I never would have encountered any other way.

I have been exposed to ideas and opinions I never knew existed and learned more about almost every subject that interests me...which is a lot. I have met many people on FB who later became good friends in real life and have been to my home and I to theirs. We have been able to organize and mobilize politically in ways that were never possible before, and especially now during this time of curfew and lockdown.

Millions of people isolated and alone, depend on social media to keep in touch and give meaning to their lonely lives. Social media has changed my life for the better and millions of others too. It has made us smarter and wiser and more effective citizens of the world. In fact, last month I was a judge on a virtual international panel of artists for the Curfew Group International Group Art Exhibition in Saudi Arabia attended by the Royal Family.

And there is the fact that social media is a challenge to the mainstream media narrative that often intends to mislead, misinform and just plain lie to us for commercial and political reasons. Gore Vidal, the great intellectual and historian said, The US invented only one art form. Advertising. We use it to sell soap and presidents. The corporate grip on opinion in the US is a wonder of the Western world, he said. No first world country has managed to eliminate so entirely from media all objectivity, much less decent.

Social media is a challenge to that control of the narrative. Eyes have been opened, truths have been revealed, and opinions changed. People have become much more aware of what is truth and skeptical of the propaganda. Because the fact is that the US is the most propagandized nation on earth. In 2013, Obama signed an order that lifted the prohibition against propaganda directly aimed at the American people. Now, anything goes. Nothing we read or hear now on commercial media should be taken at face value anymore, but rather considered critically and verified if possible by other sources. That is what social media is helping us do.

New independent sources of information are rising up all the time and their only outlet is Facebook and Twitter and other social media. That is a good thing. Because we cannot have a democratic representative government without the informed consent of the people. The republic depends on that.

People around the world would be less informed and more vulnerable to tyranny without the discoveries and truths we find on social media.....and that scares the hell out of those who would rule us with fear and propaganda. ...and they are responding accordingly. Corporate gatekeepers with ties to nefarious federal agencies regularly censor views that challenge the official narrative. But that is not working. The truth has ways of revealing itself. So now, there is a campaign to get us to leave social media with all its inconvenient truths revealed and available. This film on Netflix is part of that effort, and a very clever one at that. The best PR money can buy, but it is not in the public interest.

Sarah, my dear. You are young and in love and have a whole life before you. You have wonderful things ahead of you, as do your beautiful brothers. You don't need social media now. You have important work to do in life. But you benefit from it in many ways whether you participate regularly or not.

Social media is a valuable communication tool in a world that gets smaller but more complicated by the day. Language, for the first time in history, is not a barrier to communication around the world between regular people like us. That has changed everything and authoritarian regimes in this world hate it but cannot stop it entirely no matter what they try to censor.

To sum up, I would caution you about being too impressed with this film about Social media. It has an agenda. Not a good one either. Don't close your accounts. Keep them open even if you don't go there often. For no other reason, than to keep in touch with friends and family, but also to keep a line of communication that is not filtered so totally by commercial media and for corporate interests.

But the old folks at home, like me, need this lifeline and it enriches our lives in many many ways. And we have things to teach you too. Lessons learned old and new. Do it for us too. We need your support.

I have never had a formal education, but I am, none the less, an intellectual. My friends here are professors, doctors lawyers, and other intellectuals. I learn from them, but they also learn from me. We have enriched each other's lives and we have important things to teach and share.

How else could that happen except on Facebook?

There are sinister forces at work here that need us to stay ignorant and misinformed. It is why our school system ranks so poorly compared to the rest of the world. Americans are considered by much of the rest of the world and poorly educated and poorly informed and they are, for the greater part, absolutely correct.

As George Carlin said, The rulers of this country don't want us informed and educated, they want us to know just enough to do the work but not enough to know we are getting screwed. Well, as an old-time Labor leader, I can tell you that the working class is indeed getting screwed and has been from the beginning. No nation on earth has a more violent anti-worker Labor history than the US. Our labor laws are way behind those of all other industrialized countries and we have fewer benefits and entitlements, although we pay almost as much in taxes, we get nothing at all for it but more foreign wars.

I bet you were not aware of that until reading it here for here on facebook for the first time. Most people don't. Labor history is never taught in school. I have been fighting for that for years, and Facebook has put me in touch with other educators to advance that cause. We are making progress.

The truth about the failure of our profit-driven health care system (the most expensive and least effective in the world by every measure) has been driven home by this coronavirus crisis. The media would have us blame an unpopular president instead of the very fundamental problems with a system that does not have the health and safety of the American people as its priority, but rather the source of its profits. Social media has made a difference there too. Now, almost 70% of the American people want a universal single-payer nonprofit health care system like every other developed, and even some undeveloped nations already enjoy. We can thank social media for raising that awareness when commercial media would dismiss it as godless commie socialism...lol.

I'm sorry this is so long, I have been writing here for over two hours now. But I think this is important and that you may not hear this point of view from other sources, and you should hear it. I hope you will share my thoughts on this...which is another thing that social media allows us to do.

Crimes Not Prosecuted

Criminals flourish when law enforcement breaks down. The US deregulated the S&Ls in the 80s, and the bankers responded with a billion dollar crime wave. 1200 bankers went to prison. But when Clinton was elected in 1992, the regulators were told by Al Gore that their role was no longer to prosecute crime, but to be partners. (Per William Black, hobbled bank prosecuter.)

And now we watch as criminals who used the national security establishment to go after their political rival go free. Outrageous crimes are being committed, while Americans bicker about trivialities.

From Kunstler 9-11-20 "Ongoing sedition is the answer, with fetid slime trails across the political landscape everywhere you look. We’re informed hours ago, for instance, that the top lawyers in Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel operation wiped all the records from their cell phones before the DOJ Inspector General could collect evidence of their communications from the SC team’s three-year exercise in overthrowing a president. How is that not an obstruction of justice, and who will answer for it?

That’s on top of many other bits of essential evidence in the RussiaGate coup and other perfidious acts mysteriously gone missing — Special Agent Joe Pientka’s original “302” document from the Flynn interrogation, thousands of Strzok-and-Page’s text messages, official verifications of the Steele Dossier submitted to the FISA court, communications between the FBI “small group” (Comey, McCabe, Priestap, Carlin, McCord, Baker, et al.) plus CIA Chief John Brennan and DNI James Clapper with Senators Burr and Warner on the Senate Intel Committee, communications between “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella, Col. Alexander Vindman and House Intel Committee chair Adam Schiff, records of CIA prop Stephan Halper’s doings with the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, all communication records between State Department official Jonathan Winer and British ex-spy Christopher Steele….

And now, like a fever building to climax, comes the news right out-front that the Democratic Party intends to foment insurrection if the election goes against them."

For Women, All Towns Are Sundown Towns

To women, all towns are Sundown Towns. From girlhood, we are warned about the risks to our lives and safety of being alone, especially after dark, in towns, on streets, in parks, in stairwells, on paths or in our own homes.

This knowledge is part of the culture and is turned into entertainment for the masses. Murder mysteries go into grisly details, and movies and TV show it in color. Every episode of Law and Order, Special Victims Unit starts with a brutal murder, usually with rape and/or mutilation.

We don't have to be alone to be targeted. 8 nurses in Chicago, 14 female engineering students in Montreal, women in war zones everywhere are targeted for being women.

In a bizarre 21st perversion, though, the media and Social Justice Warriors now tell us that the most vulnerable of all women are not women at all, they are men in womenface. Yes, if a man puts on makeup and/or a dress, he instantly turns into a delicate Special Victim, whom actual women must protect by allowing into our hitherto safe spaces, where we are more vulnerable. This includes the spaces that 20th century women built for female victims of violence, like domestic violence and rape centers, now being forced open to allow men inside.

Women who object to these intrusions are insulted, harassed and threatened. The Special Victims specialize in issuing sexually specific threats, such as rape and forced fellatio. Odd, that. Women don't usually threaten other women with rape, but men in womenface sure do.

The Establishment also stomps down on dissenting women, with arrests, banning, censorship and firing.

Why is any of this acceptable?

Why Don't People Believe the Media About Covid?

What the media has told me since January. (Logical interpretations in parentheses.)

Mid Jan: There is a virus in China that started when a bat was in a crowded wet market in Wuhan, and its virions mutated with ferret and human virons. (Including an entire sequence in which a human-specific ACE receptor genome was added to the virus. Ain't Nature weird?). This is because wet markets are horrendous animal abuse (yes, they are) and make it very likely for viruses to jump species. It happens millions of time a year. (But not in factory farms in the US, where millions of chickens and pigs live in close contact with each other).

Late Jan: Trump shutting down travel from China is racist and xenophobic. Bad Orange Man must go. (But China shutting down all travel to Wuhan and cancelling Chinese New Year's will be ignored).

Feb: The virus has spread from China to Washington state, especially to the nursing homes. (But there will be no contact tracing to find out how it got from Wuhan to Washington so fast). This is a respiratory virus, but it is not spread from person to person. It is spread by the virus falling down onto various objects and then a person touches the object and then touches their face and then they get sick. (Any part of their face, including foreheads and chins, apparently). Wash your hands every 15 minutes and in between, use hand sanitizer. Buy lots of Lysol and disinfect everything in your house and everything you buy and don't bring in the mail. Also spread disinfectant all over you, your hands and your kids. Also don't touch anything in stores and don't bring your own bags to the store. Use plastic bags. This virus (unlike other viruses) can live for weeks on surfaces, so spray everything in your house every day.

March: Oh, wait, it is spread person to person. And probably from humans to dogs and cats and cats and dogs to humans. Don't pet your animal companions, they will kill you. But don't worry about catching it from other people. Go on a cruise (Fauci). And don't wear masks. (Also Fauci). They don't work, except for on medical personnel, and if you wear a mask, you are showing that you are a horrible selfish person who doesn't care about the frontline heroes. Also, we need more ventilators. It is Trump's fault that we don't have enough.

Mid March: Oh, wait, don't go on a cruise. Actually, don't go anywhere.

April: Omigod, a tiger in a zoo caught the virus from an asymptomatic zookeeper. Also, the ocean is full of virus, and is throwing it into the air, where you can definitely catch it. And tests show that in a gravity-free, air flow-free environment, it can float for 14 hours, so that is totally the same thing as conditions on Earth. Also, when told that the virus is killed in under a minute by sunlight, Trump asked if UV light could be used in the body to kill the virus. This was a dog whistle to his stupid followers, who know that what he actually meant was to inject Lysol and bleach. Boy, are they stupid! Also Trump talked about encouraging research with hydroxychloroquine. This means that HCQ is a Bad Drug, and must not be used. Some Democrat governors ban doctors from prescribing and pharmacists from dispensing. The experimental drug remdesivir, however, costing $3,000, is issued an emergency exemption by the FDA for experimental use.

Go ahead and wear face masks after all, by the way.

May: The Lancet runs a study on HCQ which says that this 70 year old drug is dangerous when used for covid (although it has been widely used for decades for other things. (Your body knows why you took it! And you will die if you take it for the wrong thing!) Two weeks, later, the Lancet has to retract the study, since it turns out it was fake. Whoops! (No matter, people still quote it months later.). Also, the face masks that were ineffective in February are now mandatory in public places.

June: Large public gatherings are signs of idiotic irresponsible behavior which will make the spread of covid much worse. Unless you are protesting George Floyd's death, in which case the public health benefits outweigh the tiny chance of spreading the virus. Actually, there is no chance of spreading covid if your heart is pure and your aims are just.

August: You must wear a mask everywhere, even if you are outside alone. Why? Because otherwise you are evil, and probably a Trump supporter. Just wear it, dammit!

Also August: Why are some people so distrustful of authority? What psychological defect do they have that makes them suspicous of changing narratives? I'll bet they won't line up for the Magic Vaccine either, the irresponsible creeps.

Wikipedia Post Copied

Seeing that the lawyer accused of killing the son and critically injuring the husband of the federal judge assigned to the Deutsch Bank case, where investors are suing about Jeffrey Epstein, I note that the accused is a lawyer named Roy Den Hollander, who had a case about the all-male draft in front of the judge. He is conveniently now suicided, but I note that he worked for Kroll Associates in the 90s, so I went to Wikipedia and will copy some info here, before it is scrubbed.

Kroll is a corporate investigations and risk consulting firm based in New York City.[3] It was established in 1972.
History

Kroll was founded in 1972 by Jules Kroll as a consultant to corporate purchasing departments.[4] The company focused on helping clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks, fraud or other forms of corruption.[citation needed]

Kroll began its line of investigative work in the financial sector in the 1980s, when corporations in New York City approached Kroll to profile investors, suitors and takeover targets, with special attention to any perceived connections to disreputable organizations, suspicious business practices, personality and integrity issues, or any kind of corporate malfeasance. In the 1990s, Kroll expanded into forensic accounting, background screening, drug testing, electronic data recovery and market intelligence.[citation needed]

In June 1993, A.I.G. "became one of the largest investors in Kroll, after it retained a minority interest in the firm."[5]

In 1997, with annual revenues of approximately $60 million, Kroll merged with vehicle armoring company O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt. The new entity, The Kroll-O'Gara Company, became a public company listed on NASDAQ as "KROG."[citation needed]

In December 1998, Kroll acquired Schiff & Associates, Inc., a small security engineering and consulting firm based in Bastrop, Texas just outside Austin. The name was changed to Kroll Schiff & Associates then Kroll Security Services Group and finally to Kroll Security Group.[citation needed]

In February 2001, Kroll expanded its working relationship with the insurance company, A.I.G., offering through their Private Client group personal security services to high-net-worth individuals and their families. "Under its working arrangement with AIG, Kroll is called in to supervise crisis management when an incident occurs. In its expanded role the company will now provide those services to private individual holders of AIG policies, providing global protection, for which there is an ever increasing need."[6]

In August 2001, the O’Gara vehicle armoring businesses were sold to Armor Holdings. The company name was changed to Kroll Inc. and its ticker symbol became "KROL." Kroll ended the year with more than $200 million in annual revenues.[citation needed]

In 2002, Kroll acquired Kelly McCann's firm Crucible. In September 2008, Crucible was acquired by its management and now operates privately.[citation needed] Earlier in 2002, "Kroll’s US corporate advisory subsidiary was given the monumental challenge of restructuring Enron."[7]

In July 2004, Kroll was acquired by professional services firm Marsh & McLennan Companies in a $1.9 billion transaction.[8] Over the next few years, Kroll began selling off subsidiaries in order to focus on its core business lines.[citation needed]

In June 2008, Jules Kroll left Kroll, Inc. He tried to buy Kroll Inc. back from MMC. When that bid failed, he launched in 2010 Kroll Bond Rating Agency (KBRA) and K2 Global Consulting with his son Jeremy.[9] Jules and Jeremy Kroll created K2 Intelligence in 2009.[10]

In August 2010, Kroll was acquired by Altegrity, Inc. in an all-cash transaction valued at $1.13 billion. Altegrity's family of companies also included USIS and Explore. It is principally owned by Providence Equity Partners.[11] Altegrity declared bankruptcy in 2015.[citation needed]

Kroll was bought by Corporate Risk Holdings, LLC,[12] which is also the parent company of two separately managed information service businesses: HireRight and Kroll Ontrack.[citation needed]

On October 21, 2016, Carlyle Group-owned LDiscovery acquired Kroll Ontrack in an all cash transaction valued at roughly $410 million,[13] from which time Kroll Ontrack operated as a separate company.[citation needed] In 2018, Kroll Inc. acquired the controversial cybersecurity firm Tiversa.

On March 13, 2018, it was reported that Duff & Phelps Corp. would buy Kroll, Inc.[14] On June 4, 2018, the transaction was completed.[1]
....
Historical cases
The Heroin Trail case

In 1987, in the prominent First Amendment case over The Heroin Trail stories in New York Newsday, attorney Floyd Abrams enlisted Kroll's help to find an eyewitness: "But was it conceivable that we could come up with an eyewitness who could be of help? I called Jules Kroll, the CEO of Kroll Associates, the nation's most acclaimed investigative firm, to ask him if he could inquire, through the extensive range of former law enforcement officials employed by him, whether Karaduman was known to be a drug trafficker in Istanbul."[19] Kroll came through: two weeks into the trial the firm produced Faraculah Arras, who was prepared to testify he was involved in one of Karaduman's drug deals. "I was stunned," recalled Abrams.

Abrams used Kroll again in 1998 to investigate claims by CNN's Newsstand documentary that sarin nerve gas had been used in Vietnam in 1970 as part of Operation Tailwind.[20]
The John Fredriksen oil theft case

Kroll assisted in the trial of Norwegian shipping tycoon, John Fredriksen, at the end of the 1980s.
WTC and Sears Tower security

Kroll were responsible for revamping security at the World Trade Center after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.[21][22] They also took on responsibility for security at Chicago's Sears Tower following the September 11, 2001 attacks.[23] Just prior to the September 11 attacks, Kroll Inc., with the guidance of Jerome Hauer, at the time the Managing director of their Crisis and Consulting Management Group,[12] hired former FBI special investigator John P. O'Neill,[24] who specialized in the Al-Qaeda network held responsible for the 1993 bombing, to head the security at the WTC complex. O'Neill died in the attacks.
Capital outflows from the Soviet Union and Russia

In March 1992, the Yeltsin government contracted Kroll Associates to track down and find very large sums of money that had been removed from the Soviet Union prior to the August 1991 putsch on the Russian White House.[25][26] In 1992, First Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Timurovich Gaidar said, "Last year saw large-scale privatization by the nomenklatura, privatization by officials for their own personal benefit."[27] Gaidar called the Communists and KGB officials criminals and that a "a vigorous search" for the money trails from state-owned capital had flowed abroad virtually unchecked before the collapse of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1991.[26] On March 15, 1992, the Russian government froze all capital outflows from Russia.[26] In April 1992, Kroll Associates began their investigations with Joseph Serio heading the Kroll Associates efforts in Moscow.[28][a] Also, Joseph Rosetti, the vice chairman of Kroll Associates, was in Moscow to assist.[26] The Kroll Associates determined that more than $14 billion in 1991 real dollars had been transferred from Switzerland to New York prior to the August 1991 putsch.[27] Also, the Communist Party of the former Soviet Union along with other government agencies, such as the KGB, had transferred more than $40 billion in 2014 real dollars out of the country.[30][b] The assets of the Vneshekonombank were frozen during the investigation.[27] However, numerous transactions occurred to bypass the capital flow restrictions often with the British Barclays Bank in Cyprus acting a money laundering center for public officials from Saint Petersburg and Moscow.[27][c] According to Valery Makharadze, the government's chief inspector, many joint stock companies were formed to provide an illegal means for capital outflows from Russia, such as the Leningrad Association of Joint Ventures[d] and KOLO.[32][27][e] Numerous officials became wealthy Russian oligarchs including numerous former KGB officials, prominent Communists such as Oleg Belyakov and other former Communists who headed the party Central Committee department that dealt with the defense industry, as well as Leonid Kravchenko, who was the former head of the state television and radio company.[27] Jules Kroll, the head of the Kroll Associates, uncovered hundreds of illicit transactions with massive capital outflows.[33] This outflow of capital from the Soviet Union and Russia directly contributed to severe economic conditions in Russia during Boris Yeltsin's second term, leading to its collapse, and resulting in the age of Vladimir Putin as the President of Russia.[25]
Identity protection
Kroll entered into a joint marketing agreement with legal service plan provider LegalShield (formerly Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc.) in 2003, to distribute an identity theft product to consumers, called the Identity Theft Shield, the first time Kroll offered a service to individuals.[34] As of June 30, 2006, Kroll had over 560,000 customers, according to LegalShield's quarterly report.[35] In addition to the LegalShield subscribers, Kroll's Identity Theft Shield serves about 500,000 other consumers.

The Destruction Of Society Underway

"Slowly at first, and then all at once" Ernest Hemingway, on his bankruptcy

What if there is no plan?
When they burn down rainforests, do the creatures living there wonder why? We see the protest of the orangutan, but it is fruitless. The plan is to plant palm oil and the forest must go.
But what about when they blow up mountains to get the coal or the gold? There is no further plan. When they vacuum the ocean floor to get the fish, and destroy the coral reefs and other nurseries, there is no further plan. When they use up the topsoil and the water to grow wheat on the Great Plains, there is no further plan.
When they moved the factories out of Middle America, starting in the 80s, there was no further plan. Now called the Rust Belt, for the rusting remnants, whole cities have crumbled, storefronts boarded up, houses abandoned, downtowns empty except for the homeless, the pawn shops and the tattoo parlors.
It has been 40 years, and Flyover Country, as the residents of the coasts call us, is sparsely populated now, comparatively.
What is the plan now? The country was locked down for Shock Therapy, but for what? We speculate wildly. Some sort of Matrix society or Mad Max, or just destruction and abandonment, like an ocean floor or a fracked site.
Bars and restaurants are closed. Organized sports shut down. Department stores shuttered. Hospitals and schools closed. Police departments to be disbanded.
And now they are shutting down cash. Stores shuttered, but no yard sales or roadside produce stands possible. Evictions and foreclosures, but no panhandling for spare change. Wage labor impossible, but also odd jobs under the table.
Like orangutans fighting the bulldozers, we see the destruction of our society, but we are powerless to stop it.
And like the orangutans, we are collateral damage. We are of no interest to the Destroyers. There is no difference to them if we live or die. Their interest is in what they can strip from our environment, not whether we survive the destruction. Like thieves stripping a car for parts, they are not interested in the future function, only what they can get for the parts.
There seems to be no plan for our future survival.

The War On Cash- Copied From The Internet

The war against cash is ramping up. The ''cash will kill you'' propaganda has been ongoing the last 4 months, and now they are telling us that they are out of coins.
They want to put us all on digital money, controlled by the banks. Who would want that?
''HERES WHAT NO CASH ACTUALLY MEANS:
A cashless society means no cash. Zero. It doesn’t mean mostly cashless and you can still use a ‘wee bit of cash here & there’. Cashless means fully digital, fully traceable, fully controlled. I think those who support a cashless society aren’t fully aware of what they are asking for. A cashless society means:
* If you are struggling with your mortgage on a particular month, you can’t do an odd job to get you through.
* Your child can’t go & help the local farmer to earn a bit of summer cash.
* No more cash slipped into the hands of a child as a good luck charm or from their grandparent when going on holidays.
* No more money in birthday cards.
* No more piggy banks for your child to collect pocket money & to learn about the value of earning.
* No more cash for a rainy day fund or for that something special you have been putting $20 a week away for.
* No more little jobs on the side because your wages barely cover the bills or put food on the table.
* No more charity collections.
* No more selling bits & pieces from your home that you no longer want/need for a bit of cash in return.
* No more cash gifts from relatives or loved ones.
What a cashless society does guarantee:
* Banks have full control of every single penny you own.
* Every transaction you make is recorded.
* All your movements & actions are traceable.
* Access to your money can be blocked at the click of a button when/if banks need ‘clarification’ from you which will take about 3 weeks, a thousand questions answered & five thousand passwords.
* You will have no choice but to declare & be taxed on every dollar in your possession.
* The government WILL decide what you can & cannot purchase.
* If your transactions are deemed in any way questionable, by those who create the questions, your money will be frozen, ‘for your own good’.
Forget about cash being dirty. Stop being so easily led. Cash has been around for a very, very, very long time & it gives you control over how you trade with the world. It gives you independence.
I heard a story where a man supposedly contracted Covid because of a $20 bill he had handled. There is the same chance of Covid being on a card as being on cash. If you cannot see how utterly ridiculous this assumption is then there is little hope.
If you are a customer, pay with cash. If you are a shop owner, remove those ridiculous signs that ask people to pay by card. Cash is a legal tender, it is our right to pay with cash. Banks are making it increasingly difficult to lodge cash & that has nothing to do with a virus, nor has this ‘dirty money’ trend.
Please open your eyes. Please stop believing everything you are being told. Almost every single topic in today’s world is tainted with corruption & hidden agendas. Please stop telling me & others like me that we are what’s wrong with the world when you hail the most corrupt members of society as your heroes. Politics & greed is what is wrong with the world; not those who are trying to alert you to the reality in which you are blindly floating along whilst being immobilized by irrational fear. Fear created to keep you doing & believing in exactly what you are complacently doing.
Pay with cash & please say no to a cashless society while you still have the choice.
-Rob Robson

Diffusing The Blame

The "we had help in the killing of General Soleimani" propaganda has ramped up since the assassination. This is in marked contrast to the decades-long program in which Americans were taught that we have no business knowing what our government or our spy agencies are doing, and that we must not ask for proof of any claims our rulers make, as that might "endanger sources" or "harm national security".
In May, 2017 there was an uproar when Trump warned Putin about an upcoming "ISIS" attack on a Russian airliner.
How dare he compromise sources!! He put spies at risk!! Better to lose an entire plane full of Russians than to lose one "source".
And now they blithely tell us that a "source" at the Lebanon airport let them know when the plane took off. Because that is apparently such valuable and unobtainable information that it was worth outing a source in Lebanon.

As a German explained it in "They Thought They Were Free", a book written in the 50s about how Hitler consolidated state power:
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it."

But the imperial media is now putting out article after article claiming that the US was helped by Israeli and other spies to pinpoint the general's whereabouts as he arrived at Baghdad Airport, on a diplomatic mission to negotiate peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The US had been informed of his itinerary and the time of his arrival, but the premise is that the US would be unable to blow someone up with a Hellfire missile (although they have been doing it for years) at the airport (which was one of the first places they seized in the invasion of 2003) without Israel providing the coordinates. This diffuses the blame, so that the US doesn't have to take sole responsibility for the atrocity they committed.

In September, 2016, the US attacked an outpost of Syrian soldiers who were protecting the airport at Deir Ezzor, which was used by Syria to bring food to the citizens under siege by ISIS. The US killed 100 Syrian soldiers, allowing ISIS to overrun their post. They also lied to Russia about it, which meant that the attack went on for an hour before the Russians got there to attack ISIS and drive them back, thereby saving the lives of the people of Deir Ezzor.

This was a horrendous war crime and caused a major uproar. Afterwards, the UK, Australia and Denmark came forward and confessed that they also had participated in the attack. All of them claimed that they "accidentally" had bombed the outpost for an hour without realizing what they were doing.

I find these confessions difficult to believe. It seems that American lackeys were used to diffuse responsibility for the war crime in Deir Ezzor.

And I find it equally difficult to believe that the US could not assassinate a general, at an airport they controlled, without help from Israel. This puts me at odds with people who cling to the belief that the US is a force for good in the world, (thereby agreeing with the US State Dept, see the letter they wrote to the Iraqi Parliament explaining why they would not comply with the unanimous vote that the US should withdraw from its occupation of Iraq), and would never think of committing assassinations, invasions, coups, sanctions, bombings, drone kills, or any other acts of aggression unless forced to do so by Israel. So be it. I refuse to believe absurdities, in order to support atrocities, and I don't care if other people prefer to cling to their comforting illusions.

Why Such A Public And Brutal Assassination?

It has been one week since General Soleimani was blown to bits and burned by a US drone strike, as he arrived at the Baghdad Airport as a diplomat conveying a response to Saudi Arabia from Iran. Iraq was facilitating peace negotiations between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
"“I was supposed to meet Soleimani at the morning the day he was killed, he came to deliver me a message from Iran responding to the message we delivered from Saudi to Iran” Iraqi PM,Adil Abdul-Mahdi, said.

Peace in the Middle East is an existential threat to what are euphemistically called "US interests". US interests are not just oil company and military-industrial complex interests. The US Empire's power over the world relies heavily on having the dollar as the world's reserve currency. The petro-dollar, initiated after the US dropped the gold standard in the 70s, means that every nation in the world that uses oil (that is, every nation) must obtain dollars in order to buy the black gold on which industry and transportation relies. This means that every nation must sell something of value to the USA, whether resources, labor or commodities, in order to get the dollars needed to buy oil.

Trump and the media tell us that the general was a threat to Americans, because fear is the strongest motivator of American's support for the murderous rampage of the US military around the world. But the general has been on the battlefield fighting actual terrorists who threaten the people of the Middle East for many years. Why kill him last week? If he had actually been a threat to the US for all those years, the US could have killed him on the battlefield, since the general was involved in many battles against ISIS and other vicious terrorists.

So why blow him up at the Baghdad airport, along with the head of the Iraqi PMU, which is also an effective fighter against ISIS and other terrorists? He was there as a diplomat, invited by the Iraqi government, and under their protection, which the US ignored in their brutal murder, (and is the reason why the Iraqi Parliament voted to tell the US to get their troops out of Iraq).

A week's worth of spin has been that this was Trump's impulsive decision. That doesn't fly, when you see the widespread support by Congress and the entire media for the assassination. The outrage from people in the Middle East and around the world has been censored by social media platforms. The entire McResistance supports the murder. This kind of united support for an action of Trump is unusual.

As Michael Hudson says: "The mainstream media are carefully sidestepping the method behind America’s seeming madness in assassinating Islamic Revolutionary Guard general Qassim Suleimani to start the New Year. The logic behind the assassination this was a long-standing application of U.S. global policy, not just a personality quirk of Donald Trump’s impulsive action. His assassination of Iranian military leader Suleimani was indeed a unilateral act of war in violation of international law, but it was a logical step in a long-standing U.S. strategy. It was explicitly authorized by the Senate in the funding bill for the Pentagon that it passed last year.
The assassination was intended to escalate America’s presence in Iraq to keep control the region’s oil reserves, and to back Saudi Arabia’s Wahabi troops (Isis, Al Quaeda in Iraq, Al Nusra and other divisions of what are actually America’s foreign legion) to support U.S. control o Near Eastern oil as a buttress o the U.S. dollar. That remains the key to understanding this policy, and why it is in the process of escalating, not dying down."

Oddly, the media is dropping it's usual "we can't tell you anything about our methods of information gathering or operational methods because you have no business knowing our sources" line, and bragging about spies in Lebanon and Iraq. This is ridiculous, of course, because the US military already knows the coordinates of the Baghdad Airport and Soleimani's flight on a commercial airline was no secret to them, since Iraq and Iran had notified them of his arrival. It is bizarre for the media to spin this knowledge into cloak-and-dagger fantasy, when they have spent so many years telling Americans that it is a major secret that we have spies and they do spy stuff.

So the spin is that the general was a Bad Guy and that he Deserved To Die and that killing him at the Baghdad Airport was a major success of the military, with help from our allies and spies.

Actually, to quote more from the Hudson article: "... without troops, it is not possible to invade a country to take it over.
The corollary of this perception is that democracies have only two choices when it comes to military strategy: They can only wage airpower, bombing opponents; or they can create a foreign legion, that is, hire mercenaries or back foreign governments that provide this military service.
Here once again Saudi Arabia plays a critical role, through its control of Wahabi Sunnis turned into terrorist jihadis willing to sabotage, bomb, assassinate, blow up and otherwise fight any target designated as an enemy of “Islam,” the euphemism for Saudi Arabia acting as U.S. client state. (Religion really is not the key; I know of no ISIS or similar Wahabi attack on Israeli targets.)
The United States needs the Saudis to supply or finance Wahabi crazies. So in addition to playing a key role in the U.S. balance of payments by recycling its oil-export earnings are into U.S. stocks, bonds and other investments, Saudi Arabia provides manpower by supporting the Wahabi members of America’s foreign legion, ISIS and Al-Nusra/Al-Qaeda. Terrorism has become the “democratic” mode of today U.S. military policy."

The peace mission of General Soleimani was a threat to the owners of the USA, because if Saudi Arabia stops being an enforcer of the petro-dollar, drops support of terrorists and makes peace in the Middle East, the US Empire will fall.

That is why the US blew him to charred bits, last Sunday at the Baghdad Airport.

The Plot So Far

The Exposition:
In Iran, the US overthrew their democratically elected president in 1953 and put a dictator into power, training his brutal police force, SAVAK. In 1979 the Iranians overthrew the dictator and religious fundamentalists took over, and have ruled since. The US began claiming in 1979 that Iran was 5 years away from having nuclear weapons. So far, they have been wrong.
In Iraq, the US backed Saddam Hussein in his rise to power. After the 1979 Iranian revolution, the US backed Iraq's attack on Iran and the 9 year war which followed, killing millions of Iranians and Iraqis. (The criminal Oliver North ran a guns-for-drugs operation out of the White House basement, though, which illegally supplied Iran with weapons, run through Israel, in return for money which he used to funnel to the death squads attacking the people of Nicaragua. Oliver North is still not in prison for these murderous and traitorous crimes.) In 1991, Saddam Hussein told the US ambassador, April Glaspie, that he planned to attack Kuwait to stop them from slant-drilling into Iraq's oil fields, and she gave him the go-ahead. The US then used his attack as an excuse to attack Iraq, killing thousands, and in the 90s maintained draconian sanctions on Iraq. Clinton's secretary Madeline Albright, explained that killing 500,000 Iraqi children seemed "worth it" to the US. However, in 2003, the US invaded Iraq and killed far more people. The US remains in Iraq, occupying military bases and an enormous embassy in Baghdad.

Recent Events:
Dec 29, 2019, a missile attack on a US-occupied military base in Kirkuk killed one American contractor. (The US refused to name the contractor for over a week, leading to widespread speculation that they were lying. They released his name Jan. 7, and it is now clear why they only referred to him as "an American" for over a week's worth of propaganda. His name is Nawres Waleed Hamid.)
The US responded by bombing Iraqi and Syrians 450 kilometers away, on the border of Iraq and Syria. They killed 32 Iraqis and injured 55 others. These were soldiers defending the border from ISIS.
Enraged, Iraqis stormed the US Embassy in Baghdad, setting fire to the reception area. They then left without harming any Americans. Trump is said to have called the leader of the PMU militia, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes, to thank him for helping to defuse the situation.
But on January 2, the US massacred a top general of Iran, who was a very effective fighter of ISIS, as he arrived in Baghdad to help negotiate peace with Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. General Soleimani had informed the US that he was arriving on a commercial flight to the Baghdad Airport on a diplomatic mission. The US used a drone missile, in a very cowardly act of murder. They also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes, and 6 other people.
First the US claimed that they had "evidence" that the general was making plans to "harm Americans", but they didn't actually have any evidence, so they changed the story to "he already killed hundreds of Americans". But only 89 Americans have been killed in all of Iraq and Syria since 2014, which is when ISIS rolled out and Soleimani began fighting them. So then they changed the story to "Americans killed in the original invasion of Iraq who we blame Iran for, and now switch the blame to General Soleimani". And they seem to be sticking to that story. They also told us that the murder would "make Americans safer" and then they told all Americans in the area, except for the cannon fodder, to leave immediately.

Then Pompeo went on TV and announced that they were done murdering and now wanted to de-escalate the situation.

General Soleimani was a hero in Iran (and in many other countries) and millions of people came out to mourn his death and to demand revenge.
The US media told Americans that people were dancing in the streets with joy, but that story didn't last, since thanks to social media (another reason our rulers want to censor it) people could see that the millions of people were not joyful. So then they told us that the people had been bribed with food to come out (see an Iranian ridicule that story). Clearly, though, there were not enough food trucks for the massive crowds, so the story the "legitimate" media has settled on is that Iranian Revolutionary Guards are going door to door with machine guns and forcing people into the streets to mourn. Sounds legit, legitimate media!
Meanwhile, terrorists in Idlib Province, were actually dancing in celebration, since the US had removed two of their biggest foes.

Last Sunday, in response to the assassination on their soil, the Iraqi Parliament voted to have all American military to leave their country. The US Marine commander in Iraq responded by writing a letter to them saying that the US respects democracy and national sovereignty and they were making plans to leave.

Joke is on him! Clearly, he listened to the classes at West Point on democracy and national sovereignty, but missed the wink-and-nod part.

Pompeo and a general safely ensconced in Washington came out within the hour and announced that the letter was not sent, OK, it was sent, but it was a rough draft, and it wasn't even signed (it was), and the US had no intention of paying any mind to democracy OR national sovereignty, and the 5,000 US troops sitting (like ducks) in Iraq were not going to leave just because Iraqis think that democracy means they get to decide what the US does in their country. The US troops were left in Iraq as human shields, which must make them very happy.

Last night, Jan 7, Iran responded to the provocations by launching missiles into an US-occupied military base in Iraq.
First, the US announced that 30 Iraqi soldiers had been killed, but no Americans. (So that's all right, then). But now they are saying that no one was killed at all.
Iran says they killed 80 Americans, but you know how they lie. You can't trust them, you can only trust what our rulers tell us.

US war mongers are screaming for more Iraqi and Iranian blood, cause that is how they do, but so far, it looks like cooler heads will prevail.

Lies and Damned Lies - The Landscape of US Media

Three points of clarification, to push back on the disinformation that the Dems are pushing.

One: An illegal act of assassination does not become legal if one gang of criminals informs another gang of their intentions.

Two: Obama was NOT a force for peace. After Cheney was shut down by a NIE from all agencies in 2007 (a real NIE, not the Brennan Fake of Jan, 2017) and by CentCom Commander Admiral Fallon, who declared "No war on my watch", the US ruling class and the imperial media dropped the ''Iran is trying to make a nuclear bomb" fake news that the Bush administration had been pushing.
But when Obama came in in 2009, he picked up the gauntlet and started in talking the Cheney trash talk as if nothing had been disproven.
Admiral Fallon was gone and the media fell into line.

The nuclear deal was set up to fail. It was NOT a move of peace, since it was based on false propaganda in the first place.

Three: US imperialism is not based on the whims of the president, nor does the US go to war because of the personal desires of whatever puppet is in the White House.

The US did not destroy Yugoslavia (starting in 1991) because of a blow job in 1998, Bush did not invade Iraq because Saddam tried to kill his daddy, and the US did not assassinate Soleimani because of an impeachment (which is stalled in the House anyway).

US foreign policy is based on imperialism and control of resources, especially oil. It is simplistic to think otherwise.

The United States of Amnesia

Is it really amnesia, or is it programmed idiocy? How is it that humans, especially Americans, can be persuaded to forget the past in their analysis of current events?

The outrageous and criminal act of cold-blooded murder of the courageous General Soleimani by the jackals of the US military-industrial war mongers, apparently under the direction of Dominionist Mike Pompeo, is a blatant provocation and an invitation to a major war.

He fought ISIS valiantly, actually participating in the field, (unlike the cowardly generals of the USA, who sit safely in the US directing their criminal destruction of entire societies and peoples). And the way the Americans killed him, with a Hellfire missile shot safely from a drone, is equivalent to shooting a man in the back, an act of extreme treachery and cowardice.

But the reaction of many people is amazingly myopic and shallow. I am amazed to see so many commenters confidently announcing that this military operation was a one-man attempt by Trump to distract Americans from the impeachment circus and/or to win re-election.

How is it possible to live in the Imperial Center of the World, in the country which provides the military muscle to keep the global elite in wealth and power, to have a personal history of listening to talking heads pushing war after war, coup after coup, assassination after assassination, year after year, decade after decade.....and to treat each new Imperial Attack as something new and baffling? Why would the US attack another country? No one can explain such anomalies. It is a mystery, each and every one.

If people look into history at all, in this latest lead-up to war, they confidently assert that the bombing of Kosovo in 1999 was due to Clinton's 1998 impeachment, not the ongoing destruction of Yugoslavia the US had been engaged in since 1991, and so therefore, the assassination of the ISIS-fighting Iranian general must also have nothing to do with the long history of US attempts to control Iran, starting with the US-backed coup of the democratically elected president of Iran in 1953.

How can that coup, and the subsequent brutal reign of the US-backed Shah, until the revolution of 1979, be forgotten?
The US has wanted Iran and its oil back since that revolution, 40 years now. They got their puppet, Saddam Hussein, to attack Iran right after the revolution. A million dead, 10 years of war, but Iran did not fall.
In 2001, General Wesley Clark told us that Iran was on the list of 7 countries for the Pentagon to destroy.
When the US attacked Iraq in 2003, the saying was ”Real men go to Tehran”.
Bush, Cheney, Obama, Bolton and Trump have all been sabre rattling for decades, with sanctions, assassinations, cyber attacks and Color Revolution attempts.

But, yeah, this was a spur-of-the-moment decision by Trump, to avoid impeachment and/or get re-elected. Sure.
It’s all about the US political circus, right? Not Full Spectrum Dominance, or control of the world’s oil.

This would be a good time to review the importance of oil to industrial society, the previous wars fought over its procurement and the ongoing scramble for the last bits that has increased since the world hit Peak Oil, sometime in the last decades. Please review this one hour video, which is entertaining as well as informative, to understand why the US invaded Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, etc., and why the US killed the general who was so effective at saving the Middle East from the ISIS terrorists sent to destabilize so many countries.

New Year, New Push For Censorship

NPR has a serious-sounding expert telling us that we need alternative health websites shut down, because they are giving information that is unscientific and might cause people harm. For instance, telling people that echinacea can cure chlamydia.

Like when the World Health Organization convinced African men that if they submitted to circumcision of their penises, they would be immune from AIDS? Like that? And now the countries in which most men were convinced to go through with that particular mutilation are also the countries with the highest rate of AIDS? Like that?

You could make a case that the WHO waffled about their recommendations and didn't actually say that the men would be immune, rather like alternative medical sites usually waffle and say that people should consult their doctors for serious illnesses.

But I'm betting that millions of men who made the choice to have the tip of their penis removed, made it because they thought that it would make them immune, not "slightly less likely to become infected".

So who is the irresponsible vendor of Fake News?

The last 2 years of internet and social media censorship, onerous though it may seem to those targeted, were only the beginning of a mass shutdown of what may be put into one broad category "Information and Ideas Your Rulers Do Not Want You To Entertain".