Category: Children/Youth

  • CB is short for polychlorinated biphenyls — a group of manmade pollutants that were banned by the U.S. Congress in 1979. Despite this ban, the many PCBs that were used in the construction of school buildings from the 1930s to the 1970s are still exposing kids to a dangerous threat.

    PCBs are listed as a possible carcinogen in humans and have caused cancer in other animals. They were once widely used in products ranging from TVs and refrigerators to window caulking.

    In schools, PCBs in window caulking is typically activated by sunlight. This creates an invisible fog that permeates a classroom full of children all day, almost every day. U.S. school districts are required to test for asbestos and lead. There are no laws mandating any tests for PCBs.

    PCB exposure is linked with negative effects on the

    • endocrine system
    • immune system
    • nervous system
    • reproductive system

    It’s been associated with health effects like:

    • Permanently depressed IQ
    • Increased risk of attentional deficits
    • Hormonal and immune disruptions
    • Melanomas
    • Cancers of the liver, gall bladder, biliary tract, gastrointestinal cancer, and brain

    After the latest school shooting, plenty of parents expressed genuine concern about their children’s safety. Keep in mind: Almost certainly, as you read this, there is not a school shooting in progress. But, as you read this, innumerable school kids are being placed in harm’s way — day after day after day — thanks to corporate indifference and the ignorance of the general population.

    Speaking of ignorance… 

    Diisononyl phthalate (DINP) is used as a plasticizer (which means it makes products softer and more pliable). It impacts all of us but please allow me to stick with the theme of this post. DINP reaches our children before they are even born.

    It’s found in products like:

    • Cosmetics
    • Perfume
    • Nail polish
    • Hair spray
    • Soap
    • Shampoo
    • Skin moisturizers
    • Detergents
    • Food packaging

    When pregnant women use these ubiquitous products, DINP has been shown to impact babies in utero. This is associated with:

    • Learning, attention, and behavior problems
    • Lower IQ
    • Memory problems
    • Record rates of autism

    Once those children are born, they can again encounter dangerous DINP at home and in schools via:

    • Building materials
    • Flooring
    • Wire and cable insulation
    • Wood finishes
    • Plastic plumbing pipes
    • Adhesives

    DINP impacts the sexual development of children. For example:

    • Decreases sperm motility
    • Increases malformations of the testes and other organs
    • Feminizes boys in terms of their sex organ placement and size (e.g. smaller penises and testes)
    • Can make boys infertile when they reach adulthood

    More generally, DINP and other phthalates have been shown to cause:

    • Fertility issues
    • Miscarriages
    • Birth defects
    • High blood pressure and insulin resistance (can lead to diabetes)
    • Testicular, kidney, and liver cancers

    So, where’s the “March For Our Lives” for the victimized children?

    The information stated above offers just a tiny sampling of the world we’ve enabled while distracted by fake news, celebrities, sports, video games, reality TV, porn, etc.

    Suggestions:

    • Stop fixating on the problems (e.g. gun control, Ukraine, etc.) being marketed to you by the media
    • Do not EVER trust a corporation (Big Pharma, Big Tech, etc.) or any of their well-paid media shills
    • Recognize the two-party deception for the deadly con game it is
    • Rediscover the subversive pleasure of thinking for yourself.
    • Protect your children and all children by any means necessary

    (Related listening that inspired this post)

    The post For kids in schools, PCBs are more common and more dangerous than guns first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Apartheid Israel in its illegal, war criminal and 55-year occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory is among world leaders in “children killed per year per million of total territory population” with a value of  25.8 as compared to 75.7 (Honduras), 53.6 (Ituri Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo), 7.6 (the World), and 2.6 (Kashmir, India).

    In censorship by killing journalists in the Occupied Palestinian Territory Apartheid Israel leads the World in terms of “average number of journalists killed per 10 million of population per year”: in Occupied Palestine, over 6.164; Syria, 4.733; Afghanistan, 2.563; Israel-Palestine, over 2.190; Somalia, 1.751; Yemen, 1.278; Iraq, 0.897;  Mexico, 0.750; Colombia, 0.366; Philippines, 0.283; Pakistan, 0.152; World, 0.084; India, 0.027. On a per capita basis, the killing of journalists by Apartheid Israel in  Occupied Palestine  leads the World, and is 73.4 times greater than for the World as a whole. In contrast,  India scores 3.1 times lower than the World.

    Further, in addition to 54,000 violent deaths of children in the World each year,  presently 5.3 million under-5 year old infants (100 times more) die each year world-wide, overwhelmingly in non-European countries, and overwhelmingly  from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease. “Under-5 infant deaths per year per million of total population” (2020 data) is as follows: pro-apartheid Australia (43.8), Apartheid Israel (59.2), Europe (62.6), China (123.8), Honduras (421.0), Occupied Palestinian Territory (537.7), India (628.2), Non-European World (789.4), and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (3,869.7) (see Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, Korsgaard Publishing, Germany, updated second edition, 2022).

    Thou shalt not kill children. Decent people must (a) inform everyone they can, (b) condemn nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, genocidally racist, serial war criminal, human rights-abusing, international law-violating, child-killing, mendacious and journalist-killing Apartheid Israel, and  (c) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against  Apartheid Israel and all its supporters.

    For details and documentation see here.

    The post Nuclear terrorist, Genocidally Racist and International Law-violating Apartheid Israel among World Leaders for Killing Kids first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • So, good friend, Madu, who I met decades ago, at UT-El Paso. He was coming through buildings where part-time English faculty had offices. That big smile, that large voice, and an open hand. He was working the used/discount book gig: going to colleges to get books from faculty and bookstores that might have been extra copies from the respective publishers called review copies.

    So, part-time faculty like myself, in the 1980s, would order tons of these reviewer’s copies of grammar, lit, and survey collections. Then fellows like Madu might come by with hard cold cash to buy them up.

    The old days when students could find alternative prices (lower) than what college bookstores would charge. Madu has that service.

    We talked, and his Nigerian love, his Nigerian spirit, the fact he was in Houston, with a wife and three children, all of that, made the chats open and real. I had just had a baby girl, so we talked about her.

    Then politics, Africa, my own activism around Central America, the US-Mexico border, the environment, twin plants, militarization of campuses and the border, and my own work trying to unionize part-time exploited faculty.

    Global politics. Nigeria, Africa, Diasporas, evil US-backed dictators, colonialism, post-colonialism, the trauma, the long-term biopiracy of Africa, the theft of resources, and alas, imagine, 30 years later, almost, and African countries are in the grips of AFRICOM, the US vassals, the exploiters, the mining, ag, and oil thieves. Until, 2022, many are becoming failed states, famines, the entire world of data mining, Zuckerberg encircling the continent with his Metaverse, and on and on. The story of United Fruit Company, Coca Cola, Monsanto, Big Pharma, Hearts and Minds USA special forces, and proxy wars and Nationa ENdowmenr for Democracy/CIA fomenting hell.

    Oh, this devil USA:

    Phoenix Express 2021, the AFRICOM-sponsored military exercise involving 13 countries in the Mediterranean Sea region, concluded last week. While its stated aim was to combat “irregular migration” and trafficking, the U.S. record in the region indicates more nefarious interests. “AFRICOM military’s exercise: The art of creating new pretexts for propagating U.S. interests” (source)

    Go to MR Online, and then put in AFRICOM. Or, AFRICOM and Nigeria, or pick your country. Mark my words: Everything, I say EVERYTHING, tied to the USA and UK and EU when involving African nations now, well, pure evil:

    This is recent, as in Oct. 2021:

    Please join us for the launch of the international month of action by attending a webinar on October 1st, titled “AFRICOM at 13: Building the Popular Movement for Demilitarization and Anti-Imperialism in Africa.” Speakers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, and the African diaspora will discuss AFRICOM and what we can do to expel imperialist forces from the continent. Following the webinar, events will take place throughout October organized by various organizations on the African continent, in the U.S., and around the world to demand an end to the U.S. and western invasion and occupation of Africa.

    BAP makes the following demands in the U.S. Out of Africa!: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign:

    • The complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Africa,
    • The demilitarization of the African continent,
    • The closure of U.S. bases throughout the world, and
    • That the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) oppose U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and conduct hearings on AFRICOM’s impact on the African continent, with the full participation of members of U.S. and African civil society.

    Written by Tunde Osazua, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Africa Team and the coordinator of the U.S. Out of Africa Network.

    So, I was on Madu’s radio show, and he has run for Senate in Nigeria, and he wants to run for president. However, as he clearly states: “You have to have millions of dollars and militias to buy the votes.”

    This is his organization:

    Here’s a statement from Madu:

    Not rising up by Nigerians from within Nigeria and around the world beyond ethnic, regional, religious and partisan political boundaries to save Nigeria from the hands of her mostly visionless, ignorant, insensitive, inhumane, squandermanic and most painfully, corrupt and morally bankrupt drivers of government at all levels whose actions have significantly weakened her sovereignty and territorial integrity, and made her peoples so poor and vulnerable , is a sin against God and a grave infraction against humanity for which history and unborn generations of Nigerians will judge us all harshly if we fail today to act unconditionally to save the country from an imminent collapse.

    ….Smart Madu Ajaja

    This is a serious and long-term project, the decolonizing of the world, including all those countries’ economies, the land, the people, the cultures and the individuals:

    This Special Issue aims to explore the complex and contested relationship between trauma studies and postcolonial criticism, focusing on the ongoing project to create a decolonized trauma theory that attends to and accounts for the suffering of minority groups and non-Western cultures, broadly defined as cultures beyond Western Europe and North America. The issue builds on the insights of, inter alia, Stef Craps’s book, Postcolonial Witnessing, and responds to his challenge to interrogate and move beyond a Eurocentric trauma paradigm. Authors were invited to submit papers on the theorization and representation of any aspect of postcolonial, non-Western and/or minority cultural trauma with a focus predominately, but not exclusively, on literature. (SourceDecolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism … 200+ pages!)

    I talked with Madu on his radio show, and below, the show. I do cover a lot of philosophical territory, and alas, this is about Madu and his love of his country and how quickly the country of his birth has spiraled into a country of selling people as slaves, kidnapping people for organs, murder, rape, theft.

    So under the cover of counterterrorism, AFRICOM is beefing up Nigeria’s military to ensure the free flow of oil to the West, and using the country as a proxy against China’s influence on the continent. And that is the issue, too, that Madu is not happy with — his country being exploited by anyone, including China. I explained to him that the USA has the military bases, the guns, and China has the contracts, the builders. In fact, Madu is spiritually exasperated at how his own countrymen turn against their own countrymen, and how there is a overlay of trauma and laziness and desperation and inflicted PTSD, including the post-colonial trauma referenced above.

    USA is like a storm of ticks, locusts, mosquitos, viruses, as the syphilitic notions of Neocon and Neoliberal anti-diplomacy hits country after country like disease. A plague.

    The greatest threat looming over our planet, the hegemonistic pretentions of the American Empire, are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger, and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.

    –Hugo Chavez

    The United States Military is arguably the largest force of ecological devastation the world has ever known.

    –Xoài Pham

    Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.

    –Frantz Fanon (source)

    William Blum wrote about the illegality of the USA’s direct and indirect bombing and invasions.

    Here, a bit of an update:

    The Death Toll of U.S. Imperialism Since World War 2

    A critical disclaimer: Figures relating to the death toll of U.S. Imperialism are often grossly underestimated due to the U.S. government’s lack of transparency and often purposeful coverup and miscounts of death tolls. In some cases, this can lead to ranges of figures that include millions of human lives–as in the figure for Indonesia below with estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people. We have tried to provide the upward ranges in these cases since we suspect the upward ranges to be more accurate if not still significantly underestimated. These figures were obtained from multiple sources including but not limited to indigenous scholar Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology as well as Countercurrents’ article Deaths in Other Nations Since WWII Due to U.S. Interventions (please note that use of Countercurrents’ statistics isn’t an endorsement of the site’s politics).

    • Afghanistan: at least 176,000 people
    • Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000 people
    • Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000 people
    • Cambodia: 2-3 million people
    • Chad: 40,000 people and as many as 200,000 tortured
    • Chile: 10,000 people (the U.S. sponsored Pinochet coup in Chile)
    • Colombia: 60,000 people
    • Congo: 10 million people (Belgian imperialism supported by U.S. corporations and the U.S. sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba)
    • Croatia: 15,000 people
    • Cuba: 1,800 people
    • Dominican Republic: at least 3,000 people
    • East Timor: 200,000 people
    • El Salvador: More than 75,000 people (U.S. support of the Salvadoran oligarchy and death squads)
    • Greece: More than 50,000 people
    • Grenada: 277 people
    • Guatemala: 140,000 to 200,000 people killed or forcefully disappeared (U.S. support of the Guatemalan junta)
    • Haiti: 100,000 people
    • Honduras: hundreds of people (CIA supported Battalion kidnapped, tortured and killed at least 316 people)
    • Indonesia: Estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people
    • Iran: 262,000 people
    • Iraq: 2.4 million people in Iraq war, 576, 000 Iraqi children by U.S. sanctions, and over 100,000 people in Gulf War
    • Japan: 2.6-3.1 million people
    • Korea: 5 million people
    • Kosovo: 500 to 5,000
    • Laos: 50,000 people
    • Libya: at least 2500 people
    • Nicaragua: at least 30,000 people (U.S. backed Contras’ destabilization of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua)
    • Operation Condor: at least 10,000 people (By governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. U.S. govt/CIA coordinated training on torture, technical support, and supplied military aid to the Juntas)
    • Pakistan: at least 1.5 million people
    • Palestine: estimated more than 200,000 people killed by military but this does not include death from blockade/siege/settler violence
    • Panama: between 500 and 4000 people
    • Philippines: over 100,000 people executed or disappeared
    • Puerto Rico: 4,645-8,000 people
    • Somalia: at least 2,000 people
    • Sudan: 2 million people
    • Syria: at least 350,000 people
    • Vietnam: 3 million people
    • Yemen: over 377,000 people
    • Yugoslavia: 107,000 people (Source: The Mapping Project is a multi-generational collective of activists and organizers in the Boston area who are deeply engaged in Palestine solidarity / BDS work. For over a year, we’ve been tracing Greater Boston’s networks of support for the colonization of Palestine–and how these networks participate in other forms of oppression, from policing to U.S. imperialism to medical apartheid and privatization.)

    Madu and most activist Nigerians know these facts. Big global facts. The vices the United States of America has put the world in. The dirty Empire. The global cop. And, so, Nigerians in the USA number around two million, with a few hundred thousand. Now, of course, off camera, I repeated to Madu that most Americans, oh, 90 percent of the 355 million currently residing (most illegally) here do not care about Black, Africans, Chinese, and again one American is worth a million Nigerians. It is a juggling act, being part of the Diapora, and Madu is a nurse, and he like I said ran for Senate, and lost, and he has been inspired by some youth, but again, youth are being colonized by the ticks of data. Read below the YouTube window.

    So, Alison McDowell at Wrench in the Gears, and then Silicon Icarus and others are talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the next colonialization of Africa. Coltan and gold may be like gold to the Wall Streeters and Transnationalists, and water and food and good land may be like platinum to the same group of thieves, but data is worth its gigbytes/terrabytes in emeralds. “French Imperialism vs. Crypto Colonialism: The Central African Republic Experiment” and “Blockchain Technology & Coercive Surveillance of the Global South” both by Sebs Solomon

    So, Madu, and great honorable youth in Nigeria who want to have a free, open, clean, sustainable, cultural-centric, food security, self-imposing, country of healthy bodies, minds and ecosystems, I am sorry to report the devils wear skinny jeans, and many come to the USA from India with work permits to work and live in Seattle/Redmond to work for Microsoft/Google/Facebook and all the other devils helping put these systems in place:

    At the same time, SingularityNET partnered with UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (IBE) to establish a new curriculum for children and teens, with an emphasis on emerging technology to prepare the youth for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to UNICEF:

    There will never be enough money allocated in the budget, qualified teachers, or places in schools for the population we have; therefore, emerging technologies like Virtual Reality allow us to leapfrog these problems and offer the hope of more affordable, scalable and better quality education.

    It is striking to read that UNICEF doesn’t believe there will ever be enough money to help all of the children in the world receive a traditional, classroom, education; therefore, it’s better to invest and scale Virtual Reality education — a rather pessimistic take from the “children’s fund” arm of the UN. UNICEF Innovation Fund, has virtual reality education programs in ChileIndiaNigeria, and Ghana. In Ghana, they noted there are “challenges to accessing the necessary teaching and learning resources for students to receive quality education; which is compounded by the lack of necessary and up-to-date education materials, huge class sizes and the lack of necessary infrastructural facilities.” (source)

    How many more battlefields shall honorable people like Madu enter into with no money, no militias and the kings of capital weilding more powerful digital bombs than hydrogen bombs?

    For a rabbit hole or warren, go to: Silicon Icarus and see Alison McDowell’s work on the following: Alison McDowell. Or over at her blog: Wrench in the Gears. She’s expending lifetime hours looking into this evil web of Davos, WEF, the billionaires’ club, the taking over of humanity through transhumanism, blockchain, Singularity, and all the other topics the mainstream and leftstream media and blogs just won’t tackle.

    • Blockchain
    • Gamification
    • Genomics
    • Impact Finance
    • Smart Cities
    • Biosecurity State

    This is what the Fourth Industrialization devils want for all children on earth (minus their kids and their sychophants’ kids). Soylent Green be damned!

    The post Nigeria, Oh, Nigeria, Cry for me, Nigeria! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Updated: Mahmood AbdulJabbar Nooh was a 17-year-old minor when Bahraini authorities arrested him on 13 November 2019, after chasing him in the streets of AlKarranah Town without presenting any arrest warrant. During his detention, he was subjected to torture, electric shocks, and burning. He was interrogated without the presence of his lawyer and faced an unfair trial based on confessions extracted under torture. Additionally, he suffered from medical neglect. He is currently serving his sentence of 10 years in prison on politically motivated charges. He was transferred from the new Dry Dock Prison, designed for inmates under the age of 21, to Jau Prison after turning 21 years old.  

     

    On 13 November 2019, Mahmood was arrested by plainclothes officers who pursued him in civilian vehicles. They approached him in the street without presenting an arrest warrant or notifying him of the reason for his arrest. Although he was allowed to contact his family the same night of his arrest, any sort of contact was cut off from 8:30 P.M. onward. Throughout this period, his family continued to search for him in various centers and hospitals, only discovering later that he was being held at the Criminal Investigation Directorate (CID) building.

     

    At the CID, Mahmood was interrogated for around seven to nine days without the presence of a lawyer. Throughout the interrogation period, CID officers subjected Mahmood to torture in the form of electric shocks and burning, aiming to extract a confession from him. Despite having sustained injuries during the interrogation, Mahmood was denied treatment. The examining doctor asserted that the burn, located in a private area, was not a result of torture but rather occurred at the “crime scene” during Mahmood’s arrest. This explanation seems unrealistic, considering the absence of marks on any other part of his body. Mahmood’s coerced confession was subsequently used against him in court.

     

    Following his interrogation, Mahmood was brought before the Public Prosecution Office (PPO), which subsequently ordered his detention for two months. He was then transferred to the Dry Dock Detention Center. It wasn’t until a week after he arrived at the detention center that he was finally permitted to meet his family for the first time since his arrest. Throughout the initial months of Mahmood’s detention, his parents were kept uninformed of the charges of which he was accused.

     

    On 30 November 2020, the First High Criminal Court sentenced Mahmood to 10 years in prison, charging him with joining a terrorist cell. Despite the presentation of evidence in Mahmood’s defense, the court did not consider it.  Following unsuccessful appeals, both the Court of Appeal and the Court of Cassation upheld the judgment. Mahmood was then transferred to the New Dry Dock Prison to serve his sentence. Upon reaching the age of 21, he was later transferred to Jau Prison. 

     

    Mahmood suffers from sickle cell anemia and G6PD deficiency, and experiences pain in his feet and bones. The intensity of the pain increases in cold and wet climates. On 15 May 2022, he initiated a hunger strike in protest against the medical negligence practiced by the prison administration. He has consistently been denied treatment and is only taken to the clinic to take painkillers to stop the strong pain without being offered further treatment. Although the prison authorities have scheduled appointments for Mahmood at Salmaniya Hospital to receive proper medical attention, he was not taken to these appointments. On 18 May 2022, the public prosecutor met with Mahmood and promised to respect his right to treatment and transfer him to the hospital. Based on those promises, he decided to end his hunger strike. On 9 June 2022, the Ministry of Health website revealed Mahmood’s infection with COVID-19 while incarcerated in Dry Dock Prison among other prisoners.

     

    Mahmood is still suffering from severe pain and serious health complications since his arrest in 2019, as a result of the severe torture and brutal beatings he endured during ten days of interrogation. He was subjected to kicking, punching, and electric shocks all over his body, particularly in sensitive areas. These actions caused him intense pain, leaving him unable to urinate normally and experiencing blood in his stool. After enduring prolonged suffering and making repeated demands during his time in the Dry Dock Prison, Mahmood was taken to the prison clinic on several occasions. At one point, he was transferred to the AlQalaa clinic, where a forensic pathologist examined him. Despite informing the doctor of his suffering, Mahmood did not receive proper treatment or any medication. Mahmood’s suffering persists even after his transfer to Jau Prison, where he continues to experience medical neglect and a lack of proper diagnosis for his health condition.

     

    On 19 January 2024, Mahmood experienced a health setback due to the policy of medical neglect. Consequently, he was transferred to the Jau Prison clinic. Facing challenges with the responsiveness of the clinic’s physician, Mahmood was urgently transferred to Salmaniya Medical Complex due to his deteriorating condition. X-ray images revealed that he had testicular torsion, requiring immediate surgery. The doctor asked him to inform his father due to his young age as he was only 21 years old, given the impact of this process on his life. Mahmood requested the police officers accompanying him to make a phone call to his father to obtain his opinion, because he was unaware of the seriousness of the surgery and its consequences and whether it would be beneficial for him or not. Also, he had no experience with surgeries and the healthcare system. However, Mahmood’s request was forcefully rejected by the police, compelling him to make the decision alone despite his young age and the impact of this surgery on his future life. Mahmood informed the doctor of his consent to undergo the surgery. Initially, the doctor hesitated to perform it because Mahmood was alone and needed his family’s presence during this period. However, due to the seriousness of his condition and the inability to delay the procedure, the surgery proceeded. As a result, Mahmood experienced psychological pressure during the surgery and his time at Salmaniya Medical Complex, as his family was unaware of his condition and the authorities refused to allow them to be informed about his deteriorating health.

     

    Despite the necessity for accurate follow-up regarding his health condition, Mahmood continues to suffer from medical neglect. He remains unaware of any updates regarding his health status post-surgery and has not been provided with the necessary medications. Instead of providing a wheelchair to assist him in walking, considering his inability to move long distances, he was sometimes forced to move through either a food distribution cart or on a makeshift bed for sleeping.

     

    Mahmood’s warrantless arrest on politically motivated charges, torture, and unfair trial constitute clear violations of the Convention against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), to which Bahrain is a party. Furthermore, the violations he endured as a minor contravene the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), to which Bahrain is also a party. 

     

    As such, Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls on the Bahraini authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Mahmood. ADHRB also urges the Bahraini government to investigate the allegations of arbitrary arrest, torture, denial of access to legal counsel during the interrogation phase when he was a minor and medical neglect. ADHRB further advocates for the Bahraini government to provide compensation for the injuries he suffered due to torture and hold the perpetrators accountable. At the very least, ADHRB advocates for a fair retrial for him under the Restorative Justice Law for Children, leading to his release. Additionally, ADHRB urges the Jau Prison administration to immediately provide Mahmood with the necessary health care to address the injuries resulting from torture, holding it responsible for any additional deterioration in his health condition.

    The post Profile in Persecution: Mahmood AbdulJabbar Nooh appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

    This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • See the source image

    These Op-Ed’s I pen in Newport News Times are my reckoning with loads of travel, plethora of spiritual work, and in-the-trenches journalistic forays dredging unimaginable but potent “land.”

    I muck around with smalltown newspapers, even when the gig pays zero shekels, because I have a thing for smalltown newspapers staying in business. REALLY. So here you go:

    I ended up in Spokane, years ago, near or around Father’s Day, 2001. Lo and behold, the story of the celebration is rooted there. A Spokane woman, Sonora Smart Dodd (man, I spent a lot of time in the Sonora – as diver, hiker, journalist), wanted to honor her Civil War vet father, who ended up raising her and five siblings after their mother died in childbirth.

    June 19, 1910 was the “first” father’s day (Spokane, WA). The official national holiday designation came from a very odd father indeed, Richard Nixon, as the third Sunday in June (1972).

    Much philosophical, political, sociological, and psychological territory has been traversed covering what it means to be a father, a son, an uncle, and a man. Oh, the dissertations that have been festooned dissecting intersections of American life with “the father.” We even have a bifurcation in politics around the father figure.–

    I had my college students look at narrative framing around Democrats and Republicans when it comes to the strict father ideology (conservatives) and the nurturing father (progressives).

    Two worldviews clash, as the strict father assumes that the world is inherently dangerous and difficult so children, who are born bad, must be made good. Whereas, the progressives see children born good, and parents can make them better.

    Lessons in right versus wrong and a moral authority – George H W Bush and Ronald Reagan – define the conservative father. Contrastingly,  nurturing empathy and responsibility for oneself and taking care of others – Jimmy Carter or Barak Obama – are characteristics of the liberal father. George Lakoff looked at this, as well as how conservatives use language to dominate politics.

    Here I was teaching at a university and community college in El Paso and adult professionals in Juarez, guiding them to consider the many sides of the male coin: Texas, a macho state governed by George W. Bush, and then for one term, Ann White. The town was more than 85 percent Latino, and my students (parents or grandparents from Mexico) were navigating what it means to be not just a college-educated person, but a high school graduate.

    I also had many artist friends, and others, like masons and auto body guys, on both sides of the border, who were products of gangs. Many an out-of-town intellectual or journalist has ventured to this bi-national area to study gangs.

    Many of my homies in and out of gang-life inked giant images of the Virgin de Guadalupe tattoos on their skin.

    Many of the gangs in LA were rooted first in El Paso. I worked in Segundo Barrio, with youth who were in gangs like Los Aztecas and Los Fatherless.  I worked in prisons as a college teacher where gangs influenced each writing session.

    I worked on military compounds – Fort Bliss, White Sands, even at the United Sergeants Major Academy.  Back then, very few women came through the Academy to get their last stripe, E-9. Many units were men’s clubs. Gangs, or sort.

    Even in that setting, I pushed combat-toughened students to think about the role of fathers now (1986 to 2000) and back in their grandfathers’ days.

    What is it to be a man in America? What is it to be a son or daughter in America? We went into the how’s and why’s of deadly violence in gang life, and we talked about the deadlier violence perpetrated by US military.

    Men are from Mars (Roman god of war, Ares) and women are from Venus (beauty, love and relationships, as it represents the sentimental, affective and sensitive side of the heart).  Right? Hard versus soft, right?  Should we allow females in combat? And, then shelves of books on rape culture and toxic masculinity.

    The landscape was mined with explosive topics from the get-go for me, as I got my classes rolling on debates and research projects around those controversial topics.

    What does it mean to be father? Definitions have morphed foundationally since I started journalism and teaching at age 21.

    I taught poet Robert Bly’s Iron John, and I had to defend that action since teaching “men to be men” in English departments seemed anathema to the “woke world.”

    In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building an emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.

    ― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men

    I taught the Fight Club, too, and had to defend that book choice as well. However, my reading list included Alice Walker (The Color Purple), Sapphire (Black Wings & Blind Angels), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) and so many others.

    I worked into syllabi Charles Bowden’s Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future and Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family to some consternation from female faculty in El Paso and Spokane.

    As a case manager for the houseless, just-out-of-prison, struggling with addiction, I found many a male figure, for sure, was either absent from the men and women’s lives, or that father was someone who’d easily occupy Dante’s Seventh circle of hell.

    There are many good men. Last month, I met a fellow who lives and works in Waldport. Eight years in the Marine Corps. He’s forty-five, and has 9 “kids” living with him: His own biological children, and those he has taken in from family members who have run away from their duties, to include mothers and fathers.

    He’s a living lesson for any man – he teaches respect for all people, including those living in vans or tents. He gives back to Waldport community with free clothes and furniture. He is navigating all the attention needed from those 9 youth, ranging from toddlers to 18 years old.

    Happy Father’s Day!

    In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.

    The Wild Man doesn’t come to full life through being “natural,” going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing, and being generally groovy. Ecstasy amounts to living within reach of the high voltage of the golden gifts. The ecstasy comes after thought, after discipline imposed on ourselves, after grief.

    ― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men

    The post Even the Fatherless Become Fathers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Societies generate their own economies of tolerable cruelties and injustices.  Poverty, for instance, will be allowed, as long a sufficient number of individuals are profiting.  To an extent, crime and violence can be allowed to thrive.  In the United States, the economy of tolerable massacres, executed by military grade weapons, is considerable and seemingly resilient.  Its participants all partake in administering it, playing their bleak roles under the sacred banner of constitutional freedom and psychobabble.

    Just as prison reform tends to keep pace with the expansion of the bloated system, the gun argument in the US keeps pace, barely, with each massacre.  With each round of killings, a script is activated: initial horror, hot tears of indignation of never again, and then, the stalemate on reform till the next round of killings can be duly accommodated. “It isn’t enough to reiterate the plain truth that the assault weapons used in mass shootings must be banned and confiscated,” observes Benjamin Kunkel.  “Instead, every fresh atrocity must be recruited into everyone’s preferred single-factor sociological narrative.”

    In Uvalde, Texas, a teenage gunman (they do get younger) made his way into an elementary school and delivered an unforgettable May 24 lesson.  When he had finished at Robb Elementary School, 19 children and 2 adults had perished.  But even this effort, in the premier league ranking of school killings, failed to top the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012.  On that occasion, 26 lost their lives.

    The horror and indignant tears were duly cued.  President of the United States, Joe Biden: “Why are we willing to live with this carnage?  Why do we keep letting this happen?” he rhetorically intoned at a press conference.  “For every parent, for every citizen in this country, we have to make it clear to every elected official in this country: it’s time to act.”  This would involve the passing of “common sense gun laws” and combating the gun lobby.

    The next day, Vice President Kamala Harris reiterated the formula.  “We must work together to create an America where everyone feels safe in their community, where children feel safe in their schools.”

    The politicians are duly accompanied by the talking heads, such as Ron Avi Astor, described by NPR as “a mass shooting expert”.  With this unsavoury appellation, we are told that this UCLA professor is puzzled as to why negligible changes to gun laws have taken place since Sandy Hook.  In coping with such puzzlement, he suggests an old academic trick: reframe the problem to lessen its gravity.

    With some gusto, Astor proceeds to say that schools in the US have been doing fabulously well in coping with violence – as long as you take the long view. “If you look over the last 20 years, really since Columbine, there’s been a massive, massive, massive … decrease in victimization and violence in schools.”  Diving into the silver lining in his own massive way, he finds “reductions” in violence in the order of 50 to 70 percent.

    It never takes long for the economy of tolerable massacres to generate the next round of scrappy arguments, with the corpses barely cold.  The common one is that of shooting frequency.  Was this a good year relative to the last?  This year, the United States has suffered 27.

    Since 2018, Education Week, showing how school deaths should very much feature in planning curricula, has taken a grim interest in the whole matter.  Reading its compiled figures – “heartbreaking, but important work”, the journal claims – is much like dipping into stock market returns with the requisite amount of sensitivity.  In 2021, there were 34 school shootings, a real bumper year.  In 2020, it was poor on that front: a modest 10.  Both 2019 and 2018 saw higher returns: 24 each.

    If you wish to be entertained by the ghoulish nature of it all, Education Week also gives us some infotainment with a graphic on “Where the Shootings Happened.”  Dots feature on a map of the country.  “The size of the dots correlates to the number of people killed or injured.  Click on each dot for more information.”  Where would we be but for such valuable services?

    To give credence to the seemingly immutable nature of this economy on shootings, platoons of commentators, equipped with various skills, argue about responses, most showing that common sense, in this field, is a noble dream.  The conservative National Review takes the view that “tougher background checks” would hardly have worked for the Uvalde shooter.  There was no paper trail flagging him as a threat, nothing to suggest that he should have been prevented as a “legal adult from purchasing a firearm.”  The implicit suggestion here: only nutters kill.

    The business of guns is the business of a particular American sensibility.  With the school shooting still fresh, various members of the GOP and Donald Trump affirmed their interest in appearing at a Memorial Day weekend event hosted by the National Rifle Association.  In a statement on the shootings, the NRA expressed its “deepest sympathies” for the families and victims of “this horrific and evil crime” but preferred to describe the killings as the responsibility “of a lone, deranged criminal.”  Leave gun regulation alone; focus on school security instead.

    With that brief formality discharged, the NRA expressed its delight at its forthcoming Annual Meetings and Exhibits event to take place at the George R. Brown Convention Center, Houston between May 27 and May 29.  “The Exhibit Hall is open all three days and will showcase over 14 acres of the latest guns and gear from the most popular companies in the Industry.”  It promises to be fun for the whole family.

    Then comes the thorny matter of definitions, a sure way to kill off any sensible action.  From boffin to reactionary, no one can quite accept what a “school shooting” is.  Non-profit outfits such as the New York-based Everytown for Gun Safety include any discharge of a firearm at school as part of the definition.  “In 2022,” the organisation claims, “there were at least 77 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 14 deaths and 45 injuries nationally.”

    Everytown for Gun Safety is keen to paint a picture of annual murderous rampage: 3,500 children and teens being shot and killed; 15,000 shot and injured.  Some 3 million children in the US are exposed to shootings each year.

    The tone underlying such a message is much at odds with the rest easy approach taken by Astor – what Australians would call the “she’ll be right, mate” caste of mind.  It is certainly Panglossian in nature, aligning with the views of cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, optimist extraordinaire on the human condition.  Taken holistically, he keeps insisting, we live in far better, less violent times than our forebears.  Such massacres as those at Sandy Hook should not be taken to mean that schools have become less safe.  “People always think that violence has increased because they reason from memorable examples rather than global data.”  For Pinker, the 2013 joint survey by the Departments of Justice and Education on such statistics as rates of victimisation since 1992 to non-fatal victimisations was sufficient rebuke against the pessimists and moaners.

    The Uvalde massacre will, in time, be absorbed by this economy of tolerable violence.  The anger will dissipate; collective amnesia, if not simple indifference, will exert its dulling sleep.  The dead, except for the personally affected, will go the way of others, buried in the confetti and scrapings of statistics.

    The post The Economy of Tolerable Massacres: The Uvalde Shootings first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • US and Australia react negatively to China signing a security pact with the Solomon Islands; China’s younger generation had greater confidence; Chinese female directors are having box office successes.

    The post News on China | No. 97 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Even if you still somehow believe the pandemic narrative, you surely recognize that the virus does not exactly threaten children. For example, in England, the child mortality rate from Covid-19 is 2 per million (0.0002%) across the whole population (assuming you also still somehow trust the insanely flawed PCR test).

    So… why the frenetic campaign to jab younger and younger humans with an untested experimental gene therapy meant for a disease that does not target them?

    Please allow me to introduce the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. This law states:

    No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988, if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings.

    The law also set up something called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program which created “an alternative remedy to judicial action for specified vaccine-related injuries.”

    Translation: Big Pharma is no longer liable for vaccine-related adverse events as long as the vaccine in question is “afforded the liability protections of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.”

    Surely you wonder: What vaccines are afforded such protections? Take a deep breath and read the primary requirement. The jab “must be recommended for routine administration to children or pregnant women by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”

    So, let’s recap: The current Covid injectible products are free from liability because they fall under “emergency use authorization.” When they are officially approved, the vaccine makers lose such protections — unless those jabs are “recommended for routine administration to children.”

    Once that happens, Big Pharma can stick anything they want into our bloodstreams without any fear of legal or financial repercussions.

    All they need now is to get the government and the general population to be comfortable with an untested experimental gene therapy getting “recommended for routine administration to children.”

    How will they do that? Take a good look around at your TVs, your news feed, your daily conversations, and so on. It’s happening 24/7 and so far, it’s working.

    The powers-that-shouldn’t-be are counting on you to remain too scared and too uninformed to get in their way. Meanwhile, the only thing that can stop your children from being used as laboratory rats in a deadly but immensely lucrative con game is YOU. It’s now or never…

    The post Exposed: Why the mad rush to jab kids? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • It has become common fare to read ghoulish stories of child abuse in institutions supposedly created to care for the vulnerable.  Orphanages, homes, religious orders have tended to feature, along with their assortments of innumerable sadists and pederasts.  But in December, another institution caused ripples for its alleged role in abusing children.

    A Danish Radio documentary series, The Search for Myself, did not hold back in levelling claims against the US Central Intelligence Agency that it had financially aided experiments on 311 Danish children in the early 1960s.  A good number of them were orphans or adopted.

    One such victim was the documentary maker Per Wennick, who claims that he was subjected to tests with no knowledge of their background in the basement of the Municipal Hospital in Copenhagen.  These were supposedly designed to investigate links between heredity and environmental factors in engendering schizophrenia, work inspired by the psychologist Sarnoff A. Mednick.

    Of particular interest in the experiment in question were the children of schizophrenic mothers.  Of the 311 children in question, 207 had such mothers, while the rest, who constituted the control group, did not.  Wennick was of the latter group.

    As with previous experiments of such ilk, Wennick received shallow enticements without information.  It was not difficult: he was 11, having grown up in the Godthåb orphanage with, he quipped, God and flogging.  He was promised something exciting at the Municipal Hospital.  For the pleasure of it all, he would also get 16 kroner.  He sat in a chair, had headphones placed upon him, and was subjected to statements, screams and noises designed to frighten.  Electrodes were placed upon his body, his heart rate, body temperature and sweat level measured.

    Interest from US authorities was piqued given the attractiveness of Denmark’s central population register, something lacking in the US.  The register enabled a tracking of individuals through the course of their lives, and led to a lengthy collaboration between Mednick and the Danish professor based at the Municipal Hospital, Fini Schulsinger.

    The latter would make much use of the project in his 1977 doctoral dissertation.  Unusually, Schulsinger’s thesis was not subject to the usual public defence, with the Ministry of Justice permitting it to be held behind closed doors.  The reasons were both disingenuous and dishonourable: preserving the anonymity of the children being used and ensuring their ignorance as to why they were being used as participants.

    Till now, Schulsinger’s contributions as founder and director of the Psykologisk Institut at that hospital  have been acknowledged with some admiration, with one author claiming he “made important contributions to the understanding of nature-nurture problems within psychiatry.”  This clearly did not include the field of medical ethics.

    The program Wennick participated in was almost certainly a violation of the Nuremberg Code of 1947, which stipulates that, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”  Consent can only be ethically obtained where the person has legal capacity to do so, has exercise of free power of choice, and has “sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable them to make an understanding and enlightened decision.”

    Disturbingly for Wennick, he remained a subject of interest for decades.  In 1974, he participated in what he thought was the last trial but received no answer on what sort of research was being conducted.  A decade later, seeking treatment for a skin condition in hospital, he discovered that he was the subject of interest to psychologists each and every time he used the health system.  “I think,” he reflected, “that this is a violation of my human rights as a citizen of this society.”

    An important source of funding for the Municipal Hospital project, supplied under the auspices of US health care, was the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA front overseen by Cornell University Medical School neurologist Harold Wolff.  The Fund, which supplied the Danish program some $21,000, proved a vital source for underwriting research projects to better inform the agency about the use of torture and interrogation techniques.

    Caught unawares by this rude revelation, unwitting CIA grant recipients Alan Howard and Robert Scott could only rue the circumstances and suggest that their work had been noble, even if the money source had not been. “All our contributions to the health and welfare literature have been written with the goal of alleviating human suffering, not using it to gain hegemonic advantage.”  Academics and researchers can be such blithely ignorant creatures.

    This has been a delicious revelation in the human rights propaganda wars fed by the Biden Administration in its battles against authoritarian demons and abusive bogeymen.  The Chinese Foreign Ministry was delighted in turning the tables on such cant, drawing upon the CIA-Danish project.  In January, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian pointedly remarked that the US both apologise and offer compensation to the victims of such “secret experiments”.

    Such compensation would lead to a hefty bill for the US treasury.  For decades, unethical and illegal experiments have been conducted by US authorities upon unsuspecting citizens.  In 1932, the Tuskegee Institute, working with the US Public Health Service, commenced work on the natural history of syphilis that would do much to foster perennial suspicion of public health authorities and their ignoble intentions.  The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male began with 600 Black men, 399 with syphilis, 201 without.  Informed consent was not sought, the men being told that they were being treated for “bad blood”.  Incentives were offered to the participants: free meals, burial insurance, gratis medical exams.

    It took four decades before an advisory panel established by the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs found, with few traces of indignation, that the study had been “ethically unjustified,” yielding results “disproportionately meager compared with known risks to human subjects involved.”

    Wishing to be a true international citizen in such matters, the US imperium proceeded to expand such experiments beyond its shores.  In 1946, the US government was involved in medical trials affecting at least 5,128 unconsenting and uninformed Guatemalans, including children, orphans, child and adult prostitutes, leprosy patients, prisoners, soldiers, mental patients and Guatemalan Indians.

    Of these, some 1,308 were infected with syphilis, gonorrhoea and chancroid.  Others had serology tests conducted upon them.  “The researchers,” write Michael A. Rodriguez and Robert García, “systematically and repeatedly violated profoundly vulnerable individuals, some in the saddest and most despairing states, and grievously aggravated their suffering.”

    A subsequent report on the experiments by the Guatemalan government, Consentir el Daño: Experimentos Médicos de Estados Unidos en Guatemala (To Agree to the Harm: Medical Experiments by the United States in Guatemala) found that such acts constituted “a crime against humanity”.  The US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues shied away from such language in its two reports but conceded that the experiments would be “impossible” to conduct under current ethical frameworks.

    The response from Washington to the survivors of the CIA-funded program at Copenhagen’s Municipal Hospital is unlikely to be much more than a barely audible apology.  Wennick and his similarly abused compatriots are probably best off focusing their interest closer to home, targeting the connivance and complicity of those Danish officials who enabled this sordid enterprise to go ahead in the first place.

    The post With Intent to Harm: The CIA, Schizophrenia and Denmark’s Children first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • In this episode: China encourages peace in Africa, does business around the world, regulates care of “left-behind” children, and works toward the common prosperity goal through the construction of affordable housing.

    The post News on China | No. 82 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Settlers enjoyed a seeming free permission: to dispossess natives at will of all the best land, turn them out of traditional fishing locations, disrespect elders, women, children and religion, leave whole communities without political representation and punish men for breaking laws which they could have no means of knowing existed. It was inconceivable that all this change could happen overnight without violence. Instead, there was the greatest imaginable violence: genocide.

    — Tom Swanky, The Great Darkening, 2012

    Somehow, even “genocide” seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country’s manifest destiny.

    — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, 2015

    Imagine, if you can, that someone would take almost everything from you — your home, your culture, your language, your spirituality, your connection to the past, your children, your elders — and render you spiritually, emotionally, and economically destitute. In subsequent years, the thief uses the purloined land and resources to amass enormous material wealth. While others around you have suffered injury and death, you are among those still breathing — a survivor? Sometimes the word survivor seems so inappropriate. Isn’t it possible to breathe the air and still feel as if you have not survived?

    Canada exists because it conducted a genocide. Canada prefers that the genocide have an adjective attached: cultural. A cultural genocide sounds like there were no bodies, that only some traditions were ripped away. But that is a lie. Many Indigenous children taken from their families did not return. Indigenous children with contagious tuberculosis were intentionally kept in dorms with otherwise healthy children. Smallpox is also known to have been deliberately passed on to First Nations. The purposeful propagation of lethal diseases is, first and foremost, biological not cultural. Land is a lot easier for the taking when there are no people on it.

    But history sometimes has a seemingly morality-attuned quirk for re-emerging and biting the backs of those, or their progeny, who reaped unjust fruits.

    Canadian society and its government have been dominated by European settler-colonialists. Many of the settlers denigrated Indigenous peoples, viewing them as savages, lazy, uncouth, and inferior. So the Indigenes were removed to postage-stamp sized reserves far from White society’s sensibilities. In the meantime, the plan to disappear Indigenous peoples, by way of assimilation, was being carried out by the church and state.

    The long-buried crimes would eventually resurface and set off a paroxysm of consternation in sensible society.

    One powder keg, was the launching of a national class-action lawsuit by Indigenous peoples concerning a long-standing human rights complaint over the underfunding of First Nations child welfare. The Canadian government fought it, but sometimes a form of justice prevails. Canada was found culpable for racially discriminating against First Nations kids living on reserves. Canada was ordered to pay the statutory maximum of C$40,000 to victims of discrimination and some family members.

    Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) reported: “The federal government is pledging up to $40 billion [approximately US$30 billion] to compensate First Nations kids and reform the child-welfare system.”

    What is a pledge from the Canadian government worth? After all, prime minister Justin Trudeau promised to lift all long-term drinking-water advisories by March 2021. Progress was made, but as of 9 December 2021 there are still 42 long-term drinking-water advisories in 33 communities.

    The Truth and Reconciliation Commission — whose raison d’être was to come to grips with the tattered legacy of forced assimilation and abuse in the residential school system — issued a report in July 2015 with 94 Calls to Action. As of 8 October 2021, 13 calls were completed, 29 had projects under way, 32 had projects proposed, and 20 calls had no action started. More than 6 years later, Canada has completed almost 14% of the actions. What does that indicate about fidelity to reconciliation?

    Then there is the question unexplored: from where did the Canadian government derive the money to “compensate” First Nations kids? Is the Canadian state not filling its coffers with resources extracted from First Nations, Michif, and Inuit land? Land, much of which is unceded or obtained through fraudulent treaty negotiations.

    Consider what reconciliation and compensation looks like to the Wet’suwet’en people who are facing militarized Canadian gendarmes helping force a pipeline route through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.

    What should be done?

    If someone (especially someone of means) steals something precious from you, don’t you want it returned? If someone unlawfully tosses you out of your home and off your property, don’t you want it back? There is an Indigenous-led movement calling for Land Back. If land was stolen should it not be returned to the original users? Users because many First Nations do not believe in ownership of the land, meaning that it cannot be bought or sold.

    The post What Does It Mean for the Dispossessor to “Compensate” the Dispossessed? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • It’s that crucial scene near the end of The Dead Zone. Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) has just bungled an assassination attempt, the bullet from his rifle missing Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen), a ruthless and ambitious presidential candidate. In panic and fear, Stillson wrenches a small child from the grasp of his mother and holds the boy before him as a shield to any other bullet that might follow.

    Today, in Texas and elsewhere, children are held aloft by pretentious adults. It’s meant to appear as a protective act, and it is, but it’s not the children that are being protected. In the manner of a cowardly Mr. Stillson, parents and politicians hide behind the amplified fragility of children to shield their own fears and political ambitions.

    It’s most evident in the brouhaha that school systems find themselves enmeshed in over the trope of “Critical Race Theory.” There’s an absurdity to the brawl: CRT doesn’t exist where it’s fought over most. “Critical Race Theory” is a graduate level study course (beyond K-12) that examines the presence and ramifications of institutional racism. That it does exist somewhere is enough for fear mongers to charge its presence in any K-12 book or classroom setting where the expected topic of race or racism might arise. Its phraseology unfortunately lends itself to an additional diversionary controversy. Use of the word “theory” is easily misappropriated to imply a minority’s experience is “theoretical” and that its inclusion in the presentation of history or current events will taint the “proven” experience of the larger population.

    So, we have parents, educators, and school board members screaming and threatening one another, primarily over the possibility of including a minority’s experience and perspective in history and sociology classes. It’s only just that, inclusion of a perspective that’s often gone missing. It’s not the introduction of a theory; it’s information; it’s knowledge; it’s data. Providing historical context to classrooms or libraries shouldn’t be cringe-worthy, but the triggered reaction is, “OMG, what are we subjecting our innocent little children to?” Politicians fan the flames and “heroically” propose laws that would prohibit schools from teaching lessons that might make students feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race.

    If you’ve ever had children in school, if you’ve ever been a child in school, you know that “psychological distress” is more likely to be experienced on the playground than in the classroom. When you were a child, did you even once feel “guilt” or “anguish” when history lessons touched upon topics like the institution of slavery or the annihilation of Native Americans? Probably not; in our young minds it was only “history” and it all happened like a million years ago. Anguish may have been experienced in our attempts to fit-in or to socialize with classmates, but do you recall ever feeling angst through exposure to a history book or a current event lesson? Books and lectures were either somewhat interesting or totally boring and held about as much threat to the psyche as did the description of a dangling participle. Those (it’s primarily white parents and politicians) who allege their fragile white children will be traumatized by classroom discussions of racial issues are either disingenuous or have forgotten how little they personalized their own exposure to history or sociology lessons as children.

    It’s not about the children, it’s the grown-ups, and it’s as much political as parental. Holding children aloft is a red herring, an attempt to draw attention away from the angst felt by parents and projecting it upon the children. The angst stems from fear of a challenge to comfortably held mindsets, fear that a child will learn a reality at school that challenges the accepted reality at home. Politicians seize the opportunity, stoke smoldering fears into raging flame, and everyone pretends it’s all about saving the children.

    By holding their children aloft, agitated conservatives have gained control of the school board in Southlake, Texas. In early November, Andrew Yeager became the third board member supported by Southlake Families PAC, a group formed by local Republican leaders. The PAC describes itself as “unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values.” Texas State Rep. Matt Krause, an ally of the PAC, recently proposed a list of 850 books to ban from school libraries. He also directed districts to identify any other books that could make students feel guilt or anguish because of their race or sex. Thus far, the Judeo-Christian Bible does not appear on the list of dangerous books. Why not? What could be more distressful to children than learning some of their best friends and perhaps a few relatives will be condemned to an eternity of pain and suffering in Hell? What book could possibly bring more anguish to the mind of an impressionable child? It certainly wouldn’t be a publication like “What is White Privilege” or any of the other 850 books deemed threatening to the comfort level of young children.

    It could be held that public schools are secular and the Bible wouldn’t be found in their libraries whether banned or not. That may be true, but the children are being held aloft by a PAC that is “unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values.” Is it possible to be rooted in Christian values and not have a Bible at home? Assuming its fixture in the home (and that it’s read), why would parents be so concerned with the presence of a book in school that might cause a child’s discomfort, but have no concern with the presence of a book at home that’s sure to cause anguish (if it’s read)? The answer of course, is that the discomfort of children is not really the issue; it’s the discomfort of adults.

    That the discomfort’s initial focus was on “critical race theory” is an indication of parental reluctance to disturb comfortably held sentiments on issues of race. The initial focus has expanded, but the same can be said for parental/PAC reluctance to have LGBTQ issues addressed in classroom settings. As with CRT, it’s not concern for what the children might feel; it’s concern for what the children might learn, and what the children might learn might make the parents feel challenged, and if the parents feel challenged, they might feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress.” Yes, it is about the fragility of vulnerable minds, but it’s the brittle minds of adults that feel threatened.

    Making it appear to be about the children allows parents, politicians, and a PAC rooted in Judeo-Christian values to hide their fear and ambition behind the pretense of a noble cause: It’s all about the children. Sure it is, Mr. Stillson; hold high the children; hold high the cross.

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  • In the twenty-four-hour news cycle, scraps of information become flecks of distracting gold.  Information sifters go through coverage with anorak enthusiasm.  Instead of good copy and measured consideration, journalists are encouraged to become manufacturers of news in the hope that what they produce lasts for posterity.

    For eighteen days, four-year old Cleo Smith could not be found.  She had gone missing from the Quobba Blowholes Shacks campsite north of Carnarvon in Western Australia, “last seen,” according to a notice, “at 1.30 am on 16th October 2021”.  The Western Australian government had promised a $1 million reward for information on her disappearance.

    There was a feast of coverage.  Google’s search engine was cluttered (the latest search reveals some 85.5 million results).  Bounty hunters, melting at the prospect of a reward, moved in.  There were stretched claims that 65,000 “average Aussies” were deployed in the search effort.  That number was taken from the Bring Cleo Smith Home Facebook group, established to drum up publicity for the cause.  In the social media age, such voyeuristic engagement can count as physical participation.  The administrators of the group were keen that only acceptable members join: anyone questioning holes in the account, inconsistencies and motives (the Daily Mail charmingly called them “liars and trouble-makers”) were blocked.

    With Smith’s discovery by police at a house in Carnarvon a mere seven minutes from the family home, every word, and detail, was documented with hagiographic attentiveness.  “My name is Cleo,” came the words of the child, according to a statement from Western Australia Police Force Deputy Commissioner Col Blanch.  Smith, at that point, had just been gathered into the arms of one of the officers, a point the WA Police were not shy in promoting.  The police had broken “into a locked house in Carnarvon about 1 am.”

    This moment proved heavily lachrymose for those covering it.  Nine News Perth reporter Lucy McLeod shed tears in describing the “ordeal”.  Usually more hardened ABC journalists were also barely able to suppress tears.  There was little evidence that the child had endured a traumatic ordeal – it was simply assumed she had.  A released image from the Western Australian police showed a girl, in bed, cheerily waving and ready to tuck into her frozen lolly.

    The police accounts, at best, suggested that the person who allegedly abducted her was “opportunistic”.  There are few other details supplied, including the nature of the “intelligence” received about Cleo’s location.  Suffice to say, the WA authorities were keen to inform the public that such an intelligence effort had been formidable, with the girl being deemed as difficult to find as a “needle in the haystack”.  According to the ABC, it did not involve “a tip-off”, “an accidental sighting” or “pure chance”.

    As for the alleged abductor, “There’s no family connection,” WA Police Commissioner Chris Dawson told ABC Radio Perth. “I’ll simply confirm, there’s a 36-year-old man in custody”.  The individual in question was not on a list for known sex offenders, despite prurient curiosity from some journalists that he had shown an “unhealthy interest in children”.

    When voracious news cycle moves to covering gruesome details – a murder, an abduction, an atrocity – the hunt for the explicating or revealing facts can become maddeningly obsessive.  But facts are often less important than the troubling narrative.  A telling of an incident can soon assume the nature of a myth.  In terms of the lost child, this is particularly pervasive.  This is even more notable for the fact that the lost child is often, at least in the disturbed public imagination, not so much lost as taken.

    In Australia, the motif exerts a particular hold.  The country’s cultural history, as Peter Pierce reminds us, “has long been gloomily fascinated with the figure of the lost child.”  The idea of loss features, at least to a degree, as part of the Anglo-European settler complex, a fear of “having sought to settle in a place where they might never be at peace.”

    In 1953, Clive Hamer would note with orthodox obviousness that “the story of a lost child occurs with remarkable frequency in early Australian fiction.”  The ingredients for this disappearance vary in terms of plot-line but the results are often the same: panic, anxiety, innocence lost.  The Australian expanse captivates; the child ventures off.  Initial excitement in free play turns to desperation and a yearning to return.  The absence of the child is noted by parents, the authorities.  Adults are mobilised, sightings sought and documented.  Often, the attempt at rescue is futile.  Most of the time, these lost children are Anglo-Australian.

    The Australian public’s matronly minded imagination has been particularly fixated with the vanishing child.  In 1966 on Australia Day, the Beaumont siblings Jane, Arnna and Grant vanished from Glenelg Beach, leading to such sweeping, unprovable assertions of a country’s loss of innocence.  (Is there such a thing as a country’s innocence lost?)  The widespread coverage of the children’s disappearance induced fear and panic.  Neighbours came to be suspected.  Decency came to be doubted.  A “slim man” of some 30 years was supposedly sighted with the children.  But the children were never found. Since then, tattling suppositions and tabloid journalism have served to revisit them with claims of a new “lead” or warming trail long left cold.

    Azaria Chamberlain’s 1980 disappearance from an Uluru campsite had it all, becoming the subject of a murder investigation, accusation, and an indigestible Hollywood portrayal by Meryl Streep of the distressed mother, Lindy.  Eventually, a coronial finding pointed the finger at the native dingo, another useful alibi for the Australian terror of the interior.

    In Western Australia, the disappearance of Smith caused heart wrenching despair, insomniac disturbances and a stretch of orgiastic intrigue.  She was spoken of in familiar, intimate terms: we know Cleo, our girl, our innocence lost.  There were the markings of old, jaded narratives: the car spotting; the sightings that seem to multiply with viral force.  In one news report, the child had been sighted some 200 times.

    As is sometimes the case, the more sightings, the less likely the figure will be found.  This was not to be.  Unlike any number of others such as William Tyrell, who vanished while wearing a Spiderman suit in 2014 from his grandmother’s Kendall house in New South Wales, Cleo was found.  The rest is emotive exploitation, social media shares and promotion.

    The post Cleo Smith and The Lost Child Syndrome first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Murad Subay (Yemen), Fuck War, 2018.

    In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – along with other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – began to bomb Yemen. These countries entered a conflict that had been ongoing for at least a year as a civil war escalated between the government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, the Ansar Allah movement of the Zaidi Shia, and al-Qaeda. The GCC – led by the Saudi monarchy – wanted to prevent any Shia political project, whether aligned with Iran or not, from taking power along Saudi Arabia’s border. The attack on Yemen can be described, therefore, as an attack by the Sunni monarchs against the possibility of what they feared would be a Shia political project coming to power on the Arabian Peninsula.

    That war has continued, with the Saudis and the Emiratis backed fully by the Western countries, who have sold them billions of dollars of weapons to use against the impoverished Yemeni people. Saudi Arabia, the richest Arab country, has now been at war for the past six and a half years without much gain against Yemen, the poorest Arab country. Meanwhile, Yemen, which has a population of 30 million, has lost over 250,000 people to this conflict, half of them to the violence of war and half of them to the violence of starvation and disease, including cholera. None of the military or political aims of the Saudis and the Emiratis have been attained during the course of the war (the UAE withdrew in 2020). The only outcome of this war has been devastation for the Yemeni people.

    Saba Jallas (illustration) / Mohammed Aziz (photograph), From Today’s Bombing on Sana’a, 7/3/2021 AD, Yemen, 2021.

    Since February 2021, the military forces of Ansar Allah have made a push to capture the central town of Marib, which is not only at the epicentre of Yemen’s modest oil refining project but is also one of the few parts of the country still controlled by President Hadi. Other provinces, such as those in the south, are in the hands of al-Qaeda, while breakaway factions of the army control the western coastline. The attack on Marib has opened the jaws of death even wider, creating in its wake a flood of refugees. If Marib falls to Ansar Allah, which is likely, the United Nations’ mission to maintain Hadi as the country’s president will fail. Ansar Allah will then move to reintegrate the country by making a push against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which remains in charge in the Abyan Province; AQAP is now being challenged by the newly formed Islamic State in Yemen. Punctual US strikes against AQAP come alongside reliance by the Saudi alliance on AQAP to battle Ansar Allah on the ground, including through the use of assassinations to intimidate civilians and advocates for peace.

    Fouad al-Futaih (Yemen), Mother and Child, 1973.

    On 19 October, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder briefed the press in Geneva after his return from Yemen. He wrote, ‘The Yemen conflict has just hit another shameful milestone: 10,000 children have been killed or maimed since fighting started in March 2015. That’s the equivalent of four children every day’. Elder’s report is shocking. Of the 15 million people (50% of Yemen’s population) who do not have access to basic facilities, 8.5 million are children. In August, UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore told the UN General Assembly, ‘Being a child in Yemen is the stuff of nightmares.’ ‘In Yemen,’ Fore said, ‘one child dies every ten minutes from preventable causes, including malnutrition and vaccine-preventable diseases.’

    This, friends, is the cost of war. War is an affliction, hideous in its outcomes. Rarely can one turn to history and point a finger at a war that was worth the price. Even if a list of such wars could be made, Yemen would not figure on it, nor would so many countries which have bled for other people’s failures of imagination.

    Millions of people have lost their lives while tens of millions have seen their lives destroyed. The blank stare of the person who has seen constant death and misery is what remains when the bombs stop falling alongside the blank stare of the hungry person whose country struggles to deal with the other quiet yet deadly wars of economic sanctions and trade disputes. Little good comes of this belligerence for the people who are its victims. Powerful countries might move the chess pieces to favour themselves and arms dealers might open new bank accounts to preserve their money – and so it goes.

    Ilham al-Arashi (Yemen), Nature is Beautiful, 1990.

    The war in Yemen is not only driven by the country’s internal politics; it is also largely a result of the terrible regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This rivalry appears to be due to the sectarian differences between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, while in fact the rivalry stems from something deeper: monarchical Islamic Saudi Arabia cannot tolerate a republican Islamic government in its neighbourhood. Saudi Arabia had no problem when Iran was ruled by the Pahlavi Shahs (1925-1979). Its animosity grew only after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when it became clear that an Islamic republic could be possible on the Arabian Peninsula (this was a repeat of the Saudi and British-inspired war between 1962 and 1970 against the republic of North Yemen).

    It is, therefore, a welcome development that high-ranking officials from both Iran and Saudi Arabia first met in Baghdad in April of this year and then again in September to set the table for a de-escalation of tensions. The discussions have already raised the issues of regional rivalries in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen – all countries afflicted by the problems between Saudi Arabia and Iran. If a grand bargain can be reached between Riyadh and Tehran, it could de-escalate several wars in the region.

    In 1962, Abdullah al-Sallal, a working-class military officer, led a nationalist military coup that overthrew the last ruler of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen. Many sensitive people rushed to staff the new government, including the brilliant lawyer and poet Abdullah al-Baradouni. Al-Baradouni worked at the radio broadcasting service in the capital, Sana’a, from 1962 till his death in 1999, lifting the cultural discourse of his country. His diwan (‘collection’) of poems includes Madinat Al Ghad’ (‘The City of Tomorrow’), 1968 and Al Safar Ela Ay Ayyam Al Khudr (‘Journey to the Green Days’), 1979. ‘From Exile to Exile’ is one of his classic verses:

    My country is handed over from one tyrant
    to the next, a worse tyrant;
    from one prison to another,
    from one exile to another.
    It is colonised by the observed
    invader and the hidden one;
    handed over by one beast to two
    like an emaciated camel.

    In the caverns of its death
    my country neither dies
    nor recovers. It digs
    in the muted graves looking
    for its pure origins
    for its springtime promise
    that slept behind its eyes
    for the dream that will come
    for the phantom that hid.
    It moves from one overwhelming
    night to a darker night.

    My country grieves
    in its own boundaries
    and in other people’s land
    and even on its own soil
    suffers the alienation
    of exile.

    Abbas al-Junaydi (Yemen), Adult Education and Workforce, c. 1970s.

    Al-Baradouni’s country grieves in its own boundaries not only for the destruction, but also for its ‘springtime promise’, for its lost histories. Like Afghanistan, Sudan, and so many countries across the world, Yemen was once a centre of Left possibility, home to the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) from 1967 to 1990 in the country’s south. The PDRY emerged out of an anti-colonial struggle against the British led by trade unions (Aden Trade Union Congress and its charismatic leader Abdullah al-Asnag) and Marxist formations (the National Liberation Front), which – after internal struggles – merged into the Yemeni Socialist Party in 1978 led by President Abdul Fattah Ismail. The PDRY attempted to enact land reforms and advance agricultural production, created a national education system (which promoted women’s education), built a strong medical system (including health centres in the countryside), and pushed through the 1974 Family Law that put women’s emancipation at the front of its agenda. All of this was destroyed when the PDRY was overthrown as part of the unification of Yemen in 1990. That socialist memory remains fragile in the corners of the bomb-torn country.

    The post Being a Child in Yemen Is the Stuff of Nightmares first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The only thing we have to fear…

    (the dude who signed Executive Order 9066)

    Halloween is an odd holiday. The ostensible concept — as it has evolved to become — is to shock, startle, frighten, petrify, horrify, and/or terrify… all while consuming enough high fructose corn syrup to keep the American Dental Association content for another century or two. Every year, as October 31 nears, loyal consumers squander a small fortune to adorn their soon-to-be-foreclosed-upon abodes with Made-in-China images of tombstones, skulls, ghouls, goblins, monsters, zombies, and even the occasional bloody severed limb or two. But let’s face it, none of these cardboard depictions remotely compare to the real-life horrors we passively accept as normal.

    Who needs Dracula when we’ve got ruling class vampires sucking us dry — stealing not only our blood but also our jobs, homes, health, autonomy, sovereignty, and future? Why bother with Michael Myers when legions of Y chromosome ghouls unleash far worse cruelty — every minute of every day — via male pattern violence? Never forget:

    • No zombie is more frightening than those stumbling around in masks and chanting “trust the science.” 
    • Never mind Jason and his hockey mask when you’ve got “Brandon” playing left wing. 
    • Bats, pumpkins, and skeletons vs. pornographers, pimps, and pedophiles? No contest
    • Elm Street’s Freddie ain’t got nothing on corporations transformed into “persons” — set free to pillage the ecosystem and co-opt our minds. 
    • And I’ll take Godzilla’s side over pesticide, genocide, and ecocide. 

    Here’s one more 24/7 real-life nightmare far more dreadful than anything the Halloween-Industrial Complex can conjure up: When all those kids come knocking on your door, expecting brightly colored toxins called “candy,” you might wish to remind yourself that across the globe, an estimated 10,000 extra children are dying each month thanks to unnecessary lockdowns and restrictions. 

    Cue the ominous music: 10,000 dead. Every single month. From preventable causes. Because most of the world bought into the Covid lies. The next time you’re at a sporting event or a concert (for the vaccinated-only, of course), take a good, slow look around you and get a feel for what 10,000 looks like. It’s a whole lot more terrifying than the whir of a chainsaw echoing down a desolate Texas highway. Remember: “We’re all in this together.”

    The post Planet of the Living Dead (Halloween 2021) first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Since the Sandinistas returned to power in January 2007, child malnutrition has dropped by 45% for children under five and by 66% for children ages 6-12.

    I’d like you to imagine for a moment that you are the parent of a child with asthma, living in Ciudad Sandino, just outside the capital of Nicaragua, in a barrio called Nueva Vida, which was recently founded after your family – along with 1,200 other families – was flooded out of your home along the lakeshore in Managua during Hurricane Mitch. The year is 2001, and although your family now has a concrete house and the bus runs regularly down your street in the daytime, nights are filled with rival gangs throwing rocks and bottles, and regular work has been nearly impossible to find. These days, you travel into the market in Managua before dawn to wash potatoes for a vegetable seller; with what you earn, you can usually bring home a little food for your family’s lunch.

    Although you have five children, it’s your middle child, the seven year-old, who worries you the most. She suffers from asthma, and you haven’t been able to save up to buy the expensive inhalers she needs to stop her persistent wheezing. Tonight, while your family is trying to sleep, smoke from burning trash in the nearby dump is heavy in your home, and your daughter can’t breathe. In the half-light you can see her eyes wide, struggling with an asthma attack. All you can think is that you have to help her. You don’t have a motorcycle, let alone a car, and the buses don’t run at this hour. You load your daughter onto the crossbar of your bicycle and ride through darkened streets – going around the long way to avoid the gangs – until you arrive at the Hospitalito. Although it’s called the little hospital, it’s really just a clinic. The doctor on duty is distressed when you arrive, he listens to your daughter’s lungs and sadly tells you that he has no medicine, no inhaler, no nebulizer, no tools to help you. Your daughter must go to a larger hospital in Managua, but there is no ambulance to take her. So you set her, weak and wheezing, on the curb, and begin to beg passersby for bus fare as light dawns over the useless hospital.

    Life under the neoliberal governments in Nicaragua – 1990-2006 – was exceptionally hard. In those years, the poor got poorer and the rich got richer and Nicaragua became one of the most unequal countries in the world. Lack of access to basic health care was one of the ways in which everyday people suffered.

    Health Care 1999

    Under the Somoza dictatorship in 1978, there were a total of 209 health units in the country – that is hospitals, health centers and health posts combined. After the Triumph of the Revolution in 1979, the new Sandinista government made health care free, and even in the midst of an economic embargo and fighting the Contra War during the 1980s, they managed to increase health units five-fold; by 1990 there were 1,056 units. But during 16 years, the neoliberal governments only managed to build 35 more health units, the majority of which were in rural areas and sat empty due to lack of personnel and materials.

    One of these units was our “Hospitalito,” in Ciudad Sandino. At that time, the public budget for medicines and materials was minimal: when the doctors who were working at our clinic during the day took the night shift at the Hospitalito, they had to turn sick people away because they didn’t even have gloves to examine patients or basic medicines. Even when patients managed to be seen by a doctor, they were given prescriptions for medicines they couldn’t afford. Imports of drugs were in the hands of foreign companies and production of generic drugs was restricted. Patients unfortunate enough to need surgery had to bring their own alcohol, gauze, sutures and sheets – oh, and also family members who could donate the blood they would need. Laboratory tests, specialized treatments, and surgeries were so expensive that poor families effectively could not access the service. During these years, patients literally died on the street outside hospitals for lack of basic medical care.

    Since the return of the Sandinista government in 2007, the difference in medical care is stark. Today, the Hospitalito is a fully equipped hospital with emergency care and admitted patient beds. There is outpatient care – general medicine, pediatrics, gynecology, psychology, natural medicine, a rehabilitation center, and a maternal wait home.

    Maternity Care

    Ciudad Sandino is just one city – public health care has been revolutionized all over the country, the entire structure and indeed culture of the health system has changed. Today, it is a more holistic system focused on families becoming active participants in their own health, and relying heavily on a small army of community workers doing everything from mosquito elimination door-to-door vaccination to health promotion and education.

    Since 2007, the largest public health infrastructure in Central America has been built, now with a total of 1,565 health units. In 14 years, Nicaragua has built 21 new hospitals and remodeled 46 more. It has built or remodeled 1,259 medical posts, 192 health centers and 178 maternity homes. In an effort to see patients who don’t normally go to health centers, MINSA also has 66 fully-equipped mobile health clinics. These are made from semi trucks that have been confiscated in drug busts, and converted into clinics; in 2020 these mobile clinics provided nearly 1.9 million consults. In the midst of the pandemic, MINSA rolled out the My Hospital in My Community program which sees patients at neighborhood health fairs with orthopedists, cardiologists, gynecologists and urologists and includes screening for prostate, breast and cervical cancers. Patients are then referred to a specialist at a hospital for follow up.

    Healthy Baby

    Access to specialized care has drastically changed – services such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy that were once only offered in the capital are now offered at regional hospitals. Prior to 2007, many surgeries were only performed by international brigades; last year 120 child heart surgeries and 4 kidney transplants were performed, all by local doctors. This year, Nicaraguan doctors became the first team in Central America to perform in-utero surgery, on a fetus with spina bifida.

    The list of improved health services is comprehensive by any standards: 260,000 cataract surgeries, care of 358,000 older adults and people with disabilities, three prosthetics and orthotics workshops, 91 centers for people with special needs, 265 free daycare centers, and 188 natural medicine clinics, 72 pain clinics, 34 mental health clinics integrated into existing public health centers.

    Nicaragua has made a long term financial investment in public health: in 2020, 40 cents of every dollar the government spent was for health care and education. Nicaragua now spends 476% more on health than previous governments, investing 5.2% of its GDP in the sector annually.

    In 14 years, total number of health care workers employed in the public sector is up by 66%, doctors up by 123%, free medical consultations are up by 329%, All this, combined with the school lunch program which guarantees a hot meal of beans and rice to 1 ½ million primary school children daily, has resulted in a 46% reduction in chronic malnutrition in children under five and a 66% reduction in chronic malnutrition in children six to 12 years old.

    School Lunch

    Investment leads to results: a 385% increase in pap tests plus equipping clinics with colposcopy and cryotherapy machines has led to a 25% decrease in cervical cancer mortality, previously one of the biggest killers of Nicaraguan women of child-bearing age.

    Both infant and maternal mortality have markedly dropped in the 14 years since the Sandinistas returned to power.

    A 212% increase in maternal wait homes has led to an 87% decrease in home births, followed by a 70% decrease in maternal mortality over the more than 1.5 million births attended since 2007, and a 61% reduction in infant mortality.

    Moving forward, Nicaragua plans to continue expansion – finishing five more new hospitals before the end of the year, building 12 more new by 2026 and continuing hospital remodeling as well.

    It is in this context of more than a decade of these revolutionary changes to the health care system that Nicaragua faced the coronavirus. When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Nicaragua was already prepared by having a healthier population with access to the best public healthcare in the region.

    Kids with Masks

    To date, it has seen fewer cases and fewer deaths than any country in the region; in fact, it compares favorably to the most developed countries in the world. Nicaragua has achieved this by refusing to carbon copy the approach of the developed world like the rest of the region has done – with lockdowns, strictly enforced curfews, and school closures – but rather choosing to fight the pandemic on its own terms, with a strategy devised for Nicaraguan reality. The government recognized that in a country where most people depend on daily earnings to survive, lockdown would result in hunger; that with children depending on their free school lunch for vital nutrition, school closures would result in hunger; and that with the economy already suffering from the failed coup attempt in 2018 (damages are estimated to be equivalent to that of 52 hurricanes like Eta and Iota which hit Nicaragua in 2020), forced economic shut down would cripple the nation. Instead, the government strategy to fight the pandemic played to Nicaragua’s strengths: its well-organized community health system and resilient population.

    From late March 2020 when the first coronavirus case in the country was confirmed, through mid-May when the first wave began to peak, lay health promoters carried out 5 million home visits to the country’s 1.3 million homes to share information on the virus, go through symptom checklists and identify possible cases. The public was encouraged early on to learn to live with the virus by going about their business safely, something the international scientific community is now also promoting as the world begins to recognize it is moving from pandemic to endemic COVID-19.

    Nicaragua’s adaptation has been agile and widespread: schools, markets, shops, taxis and bus cooperatives came up with creative hand-washing ideas right away. [Author’s note: This was when doctors still thought the virus could be passed through touching surfaces.] The population adapted to wearing masks in crowded areas early on, and we did not see a politicized mask debate. Unlike in countries where the government has made decisions for people what is safe and what is not, Nicaraguans have learned to judge for themselves what is safe, and life has continued.

    Cataract Surgery

    Nicaragua’s softer approach has resulted in fewer COVID cases than any country in the region, and its economy is in better shape. Nicaragua was forecast to have a 14% loss of its GDP in 2020, but managed only a 2% loss and was the only country in Central America to increase its exports in 2020. Even when adjusting for “excess” deaths – those above the expected death rate – Nicaragua has not only fared better in the pandemic than any other country in the region, but also larger countries like the U.S. and U.K.

    Unlike the developing world, the Nicaraguan response has never relied on testing – due to cost and lack of reagents, testing has been necessarily limited; but we also know that testing is also slow and unreliable. Although COVID tests are available – mostly for those who require it for traveling outside the country, at a cost of $150 per test – the current public health protocol calls for only testing at-risk patients: pregnant women, the elderly and healthcare workers. Rather than waiting for a test-confirmed diagnosis, any patient presenting even one symptom is treated as a suspected case. Recently, a member of our community got COVID, so we saw up close what happens when a patient is sick. When she first got a fever and aches, she called the free hotline to ask what to do. The doctors told her to go to the Hospitalito. She was examined and, like all patients with suspected COVID, was given two specific medications, plus others as needed in accordance with her own medical history. She was told to isolate at home for 14 days and come back if she presented more symptoms. Patients are also asked who they have been in contact with, and those contacts are then visited by health care workers, given a round of prophylactic medicines and told to come to see a doctor if they present more symptoms.

    Community Health Promoter

    In the area of prevention, Nicaragua is vaccinating against COVID-19, but the rollout has been slower than hoped for due to a lack of vaccines. This is especially frustrating because Nicaragua knows how to vaccinate: this country created the internationally used model for how to vaccinate in war zones when it eradicated polio and other childhood diseases with its vaccination campaign during the Contra war in the 1980s. Since 2007, Nicaragua has maintained a nearly universal vaccination rate, and public health workers participate in annual vaccination campaigns door to door throughout the country. Even in the first months of the pandemic, 2 million people were vaccinated against influenza and pneumonia with vaccines made at a lab in Nicaragua.

    But, as we have seen around the world, the COVID vaccine rollout is not equal and has been politicized with what is being called “vaccine diplomacy.” The United States – where to date 15 million unused vaccines have been thrown out, enough to vaccinate every Nicaraguan twice – has donated vaccines to every other Central American county except Nicaragua.

    Since March, Nicaragua has been vaccinating for free, starting with oldest population – those over 30 are currently eligible. So far, more than half a million people have been vaccinated, with the goal of doubling that by October 9th. Although there was initially some vaccine hesitancy in the older population, as COVID cases have risen in recent weeks, demand for the vaccine has also risen. Fortunately, the health care system’s organization is up to the task of dealing with long lines: I recently went to one of the five hospitals in Managua offering the vaccine. Although I was daunted by the snaking line outside the hospital, once I joined, it moved quickly. Despite the wait, there was a jubilant mood among us all and within two hours we were jabbed and done. We estimated 10,000 people got their vaccine at that hospital that day.

    Laboratory

    In Nicaragua we are currently experiencing a second wave – which is remarkable since other countries are already on their fourth wave. With this second wave, we are also fighting what Nicaraguan Vice President Rosario Murillo calls “health terrorism,” meaning disinformation about the pandemic situation, which has been widespread during both waves. Around the world, the pandemic has been politicized, and that is especially true in Nicaragua. The USAID “regime change” plan for Nicaragua, Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua, or RAIN, which was leaked in July 2020, specifically mentions exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic into a “humanitarian emergency” through what it calls Nicaragua’s “weak healthcare system.” Even before there were reported cases in Nicaragua, we saw this playing out through manipulation of international media, scare tactics via WhatsApp messages and Facebook, and even the creation of a parallel “authority,” the Citizens Observatory for COVID-19 in Nicaragua, an organization of anonymous “interdisciplinary volunteers” with a slick website. Throughout the pandemic they have reported exaggerated “parallel” numbers; and despite the fact that they admit one of their sources is “rumors,” international media have quoted Observatory counts as if they were official numbers.

    I personally have been told that hospitals have “collapsed,” there are bodies stacked in corridors, and patients being turned away, only to speak with someone who had been in that hospital or go myself and find out that simply wasn’t true. Unfortunately, this health terrorism has deadly consequences. The constant disinformation scares people, and understandably so – especially older people who remember the neoliberal years when patients did die for lack of care outside of hospitals. So instead of seeking medical care, patients are self-medicating at home, and too often go to the hospital too late and wind up much sicker or even die. To combat it, this week health care workers have again been deployed to go door-to-door checking on people, giving information, and convincing those who are sick to seek medical care.

    Nueva Vida 2000

    What does the future hold? Nicaragua will keep caring for its people, plugging away to reduce inequities in health and to eradicate poverty. As President Ortega said recently:

    The most terrible virus that exists on the planet is the one that causes poverty, because it is in the genes of those who dominate the world economy under capitalism. It is based on the principle of survival of the fittest, no matter how many dead it leaves in its wake.… That is savage capitalism, the most terrible disease on the planet.

    Sources: 1

    1. Gobierno de Reconciliación y Unidad Nacional: Plan Nacional de la Lucha Contra La Pobreza Para el Desarrollo Humano 2022-2026 ; Interview with Ivan Acosta, Nicaraguan Minister for Housing and Public Credit; Ministry of Citizen Power for Health Nicaragua: Advances in Health From 2007 to 2020.
    The post What Does Health Care For All Look Like in Nicaragua? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Becca Mohally Renk.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • All embarked, the party launched out on the sea’s foaming lanes while the son of Atreus told his troops to wash, to purify themselves from the filth of the plague. They scoured it off, threw scourings in the surf and sacrificed to Apollo full-grown bulls and goats along the beaten shore of the fallow barren sea and savory smoke went swirling up the skies.

    Homer, The Iliad (1.365-370)

    The Biden administration’s announcement that Americans employed in companies with over 100 employees would be compelled to take an experimental gene therapy in explicit violation of the Nuremberg Code has opened a new front in the biofascist assault on democracy. Businesses and government agencies that fail to enforce this mandate will potentially face draconian fines. Should the oligarchy succeed in completely weaponizing health care, vaccine passports would undoubtedly become both pervasive and mandatory, but as Tucker Carlson pointed out during one of his recent monologues, it is also likely that dissidents would be handed over to the Cult of Psychiatry. This is not an uncommon practice in police states, and the pathologization of dissent has been ongoing in the West for quite some time now. Only through knowledge, compassion, and camaraderie can the forces of neo-Nazi medicine be outflanked. The days of medical Armageddon are upon us.

    As the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and its European counterpart unequivocally demonstrate, the Covid vaccine program is causing tremendous harm and should have been terminated many months ago. Even the efficacy of the vaccines is very much in doubt, as evidenced by soaring Covid case numbers in some of the most vaccinated places on earth, such as the Seychelles (see here and here), Israel (see here, here, here and here), Gibraltar and Iceland. As physician assistant Deborah Conrad pointed out in her interview with The HighWire, VAERS is so dysfunctional that many doctors and nurses are only vaguely aware of its existence.

    Addressing the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Joseph Mercola, MD, writes on Mercola.com:

    In a June 29, 2021, interview, Fauci called the Delta variant ‘a game-changer’ for unvaccinated people, warning it will devastate the unvaccinated population while vaccinated individuals are protected against it. Alas, in the real world, the converse is turning out to be true, as the Delta variant is running wild primarily among those who got the Covid jab.

    As Dr. James Lyons-Weiler and other experts without ties to industry have noted, coronavirus vaccines have long had a poor safety record. Indeed, when scientists attempted to create a vaccine for SARS-CoV-1 the laboratory animals all died due to pathogenic priming.

    The vaccine mandates are causing middle class professionals to quit their jobs in droves, from highly trained fighter pilots, to large numbers of nurses leading to maternity wards being shuttered. In what is reminiscent of the anthrax vaccine (administered to the military despite the lack of both informed consent and FDA approval), army doctors are now observing serious adverse events in formerly healthy soldiers. The Covid vaccine drive has surpassed even the psychopathy of the Nazi doctors, as it would have been inconceivable to senior physicians in the Third Reich to give all of German society an experimental vaccine.

    In an incident that underscores how delusional the mass media has become, WXYZ-TV in Detroit, an ABC affiliate, reached out to people on Facebook for stories of Americans who died of Covid because they delayed getting vaccinated, but were instead inundated with thousands of stories of people who were killed or seriously injured by the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) gene therapies.

    Not only has a two-tier society emerged where the unvaccinated are being denied the right to work, attend university, eat out, go to sporting events, and enjoy the performing and visual arts; but another two-tier society has also emerged, one which has been evolving for quite some time now: the mega rich – for whom none of these draconian rules will apply – and everyone else. Video from a Democratic Party fundraiser hosted by Nancy Pelosi in Napa Valley has emerged showing affluent liberals rubbing shoulders unmasked while their brown servants wear masks. Masks and social distancing were apparently not required at the recent Met Gala in New York, where celebrities get to hobnob, have shallow conversations, and show off their outlandish costumes while millions of their countrymen wallow in unemployment, hopelessness, and despair.

    And it would seem that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio (whose real name incidentally is Warren Wilhelm Jr.) is not the only one who delights in imposing punitive measures on those who opt for the control group, with museums and concert halls enthusiastically embracing the heinous practice. The Guggenheim has even written on their website in conjunction with their vaccine requirement that “We focus on safety so you can immerse yourself in art.” (Thankfully, I have a lot of art books).

    What will transpire if the mandates remain in place? Will our leaders order their minions to shut off the water of the unvaccinated? Will workers and students be compelled to take an experimental AIDS vaccine or submit to weekly testing? These injunctions are unethical, discriminatory, and unconstitutional, as they transform inalienable rights into privileges which must be earned by participating in a dangerous medical experiment. Restaurants in Manhattan, which have some of the highest commercial rents in the world, are naturally reluctant to enforce these regulations, yet run the risk of being snitched on by Branch Covidian undercover operatives.

    Such an incestuous relationship has formed between the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID and the pharmaceutical industry, that going to the websites for these agencies invariably yields information that mirrors what is posted on the drug company websites. There is robust science indicating that natural immunity is stronger than vaccine-induced immunity. There is likewise compelling evidence that face masks do more harm than good, yet these facts continue to be ignored by the presstitutes – a gaggle of clowns also on industry payroll.

    When reporter Emerald Robinson asked White House principal deputy secretary Karine Jean-Pierre how doctors were testing for the Delta variant, Jean-Pierre became defensive, demanding that we stop asking questions and follow “the experts.” They know best after all, who when not registering vaccinated deaths as unvaccinated and artificially inflating the Covid death toll, are busy turning the country into a nation of opioid, heroin (the two are inextricably linked), fentanyl, barbiturate, benzodiazepine, and psychotropic drug addicts. (American doctors even once prescribed cocaine and heroin). Speaking at the Washington National Cathedral, our imaginary president, Dr. Fauci, said that he was sympathetic to Brits and Americans who are accustomed to certain post-Medieval rights and freedoms, “but now is the time to do what you’re told.”

    The FDA “approval” for the Pfizer Covid vaccine attempts to conflate EUA investigational agents with FDA-approved drugs, as FDA has not approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, which is still in use, but the Pfizer Comirnaty Covid vaccine, which isn’t even available. The FDA has argued that the two vaccines are indistinguishable from one another and that they can be used interchangeably, which is absurd. Any drug under the auspices of an EUA is by law experimental and cannot be mandated. Senator Ron Johnson wrote a letter to FDA Acting Commissioner Woodcock requesting clarification on this preposterous state of affairs.

    It is curious that Hydroxychloroquine is somehow safe as a maintenance drug for lupus, yet suddenly becomes dangerous when used to treat SARS-CoV-2, even if only taken for a very short period of time. Here is the website lupus.org:

    Given the drug’s many and varied beneficial effects and its excellent long-standing safety profile, most rheumatologists believe that Hydroxychloroquine should be taken by people with lupus throughout their lifetime. [Italics added]

    The FDA temporarily authorized the use of Hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 in March of 2020, but only with hospitalized patients. The FDA notice read as follows:

    Hydroxychloroquine sulfate may only be used to treat adult and adolescent patients who weigh 50 kg or more and are hospitalized with COVID-19, for whom a clinical trial is not available, or participation is not feasible.

    As Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, Dr. Peter McCullough, and others have noted, Covid protocols using Hydroxychloroquine and other zinc ionophores are most efficacious early in the disease process. In other words, the FDA denied permission for doctors to use a medication for outpatient care where it has been shown to significantly reduce hospitalization and death, but allowed the drug to be used for hospitalized patients where the disease has often spiraled out of control, thereby setting the drug up to fail. Dr. Simone Gold has argued that the prevalence of Hydroxychloroquine in Africa, where it is frequently obtainable as an over-the-counter drug for malaria treatment and prophylaxis, has played a significant role in protecting the continent from Covid.

    So eager were the Branch Covidians to torpedo Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for SARS-CoV-2 that they conducted dangerous and unethical trials where patients were deliberately overdosed and given toxic quantities of the drug, likely causing some of the trial participants to die, and causing even far more deaths when public health agencies around the world advised (or in some instances, ordered) doctors to stop using a life-saving medication as a treatment for COVID-19.

    Writing for The Defender, the newsletter for Children’s Health Defense, Jeremy Loffredo points out that in addition to threatening the profits of the mRNA vaccines, Hydroxychloroquine posed a threat to the profits of Gilead, the manufacturer of Remdesivir:

    Since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, dozens of new studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine and its first cousin, Chloroquine, against Covid. These studies occurred in China, France, Saudi Arabia, Italy, India, New York and Michigan. However, such proof of Hydroxychloroquine’s benefit to patients with Covid has posed an existential threat to Gilead sales throughout the Covid outbreak.

    Remdesivir costs over $3,000 per treatment and has been linked to serious and potentially life-threatening side effects. Nevertheless, if a drug is profitable safety, necessity, and efficacy are disregarded. It becomes “the standard of care.”

    Having had their fill of demonizing Hydroxychloroquine, the presstitutes and pharmaceutical sock puppets turned their vitriol on another unpatentable drug, Ivermectin. Described as “a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honoured distinction” by the journal New Microbes and New Infections, Ivermectin has played a critical role in combating onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness. Writing for The Lancet, Michel Boussinesq, MD, PhD, points out that “Ivermectin has been widely used for 30 years to combat onchocerciasis and is rightly considered a wonder drug.” In African countries where Ivermectin is regularly taken as an anti-parasitic Covid deaths have been negligible. Elaborating on this point, Kenyan doctors Stephen Karanga and Wahome Ngare pointed out in a Klartext podcast that due to Ivermectin’s effectiveness in treating Covid they weren’t worried about SARS-CoV-2; their real concerns lay with car accidents, HIV, and malaria.

    Meanwhile, the FDA refuses to even acknowledge that Ivermectin can be used in humans, tweeting “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” (Yes, those are some of the smartest people in the world). This villainy is not without precedent, as millions of Americans were prescribed highly addictive opioids as opposed to safer and more inexpensive over-the-counter pain medications. The sacking of Canadian emergency physician Dr. Daniel Nagase, who was found guilty of saving the lives of his Covid patients with Ivermectin, underscores the fact that the elites will stop at nothing to prolong the pandemic.

    In addition to fomenting the cult-like notion that a vaccine is a magical elixir for which no risk-benefit analysis is needed, the media has played a critical role in deceiving hundreds of millions of people around the world into believing that Covid is equally dangerous to all patients irregardless of age and preexisting conditions. This, in turn, has led to Black Death levels of hysteria, as evidenced by unvaccinated locals in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh being forced to wear placards displaying the skull and crossbones.

    Physicians who attempt to treat Covid early using Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) protocols are being vilified as quacks and snake oil salesmen, while doctors who are killing staggering numbers of people through a combination of nontreatment and dangerous experimental drugs are hailed as heroes. In many ways, this is the essence of biofascism: care patients desperately need is denied them, while dangerous care is imposed through coercion – both monstrous violations of the oath to do no harm.

    It is not uncommon for physicians to prescribe FDA-approved drugs to treat conditions that are different from what the drug was initially intended for. This is referred to as “off-label use” or “off-label prescribing.” How will a high-risk patient who contracts Covid benefit from masks, social distancing, lockdowns and vaccines (even if they were safe and effective)? They need something that will ward off the inflammatory phase of the disease and keep the ventilator at bay. This suppression of early treatment options has failed to escape the attention of the Indian Bar Association, which has sought criminal charges against WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan for making fallacious claims about Ivermectin to protect the Church of Vaccinology.

    A passage from the Rome Declaration, established at the Rome Covid Summit, and signed by over 10,000 doctors and scientists, states the following:

    WHEREAS, thousands of physicians are being prevented from providing treatment to their patients, as a result of barriers put up by pharmacies, hospitals, and public health agencies, rendering the vast majority of healthcare providers helpless to protect their patients in the face of disease. Physicians are now advising their patients to simply go home (allowing the virus to replicate) and return when their disease worsens, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary patient deaths, due to failure-to-treat;

    WHEREAS, this is not medicine. This is not care. These policies may actually constitute crimes against humanity.

    In the Age of Faucism, everyone who arrives at an American emergency room is being given a PCR test, and if it indicates that they have the virus (not unlikely considering the prevalence of false positives), their loved ones are summarily kicked out of the hospital, they are put into isolation, given drugs of dubious safety and efficacy, and even intubated. Dr. Jane Ruby has referred to these Covid obsessed hospitals as “the new ovens.” Furthermore, physicians are being threatened with revocation of their licenses should they be found guilty of “spreading misinformation” – a practice also commonly referred to as informed consent.

    Hitler’s physicians were fond of euthanizing the mentally ill, and it would appear that their heirs are equally enamored with the practice, as the mentally handicapped have been vaccinated by force and with armed police present in Los Angeles. Children in Toronto have been given the experimental jab, without parental permission, and in exchange for free ice cream, while irate parents were prevented from entering the grounds. Not to be outdone, whistleblowers from Aegis Living, an assisted living facility for the aged, have reported that residents have been “chemically restrained” and injected with the investigational mRNA biologicals without their knowledge. As Dr. Lee Merritt said in a talk with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, “We have a whole society doing what we tried the Nazi doctors for.”

    As evidenced by the CDC vaccine schedule (a growing list of mandates coupled with liability protection for the manufacturer), and the fact that parents can be charged with “medical neglect” should they object to their children being placed on psychotropic drugs, the American public school system has long been in the grip of late-stage biofascism. To add insult to injury, toddlers are now being forced to wear masks and the mRNA biologicals are being injected into minors. Children’s Health Defense has reported that “Pfizer’s Covid vaccine could be rolled out to babies as young as 6 months in the U.S. this winter — under plans being drawn up by the pharmaceutical giant.”

    Australia offers another window into our future should we fail to save humanity from the hordes of Faucism. Indeed, this has become a country where farmers’ markets are shut down by riot police, senior health officials tell their countrymen not to talk to one another so as to prevent transmission of a virus, pregnant women are arrested in their pajamas for attempting to organize anti-lockdown rallies on the Internet, women are violently choked by sadistic goons for leaving their homes unmasked, young children are pepper sprayed and brutalized for committing the aforementioned sin, citizens are committed (or “sectioned” as they say in Britain) for questioning the official Covid narrative, rubber bullets are fired into crowds of informed consenters, and extreme forms of violence are unleashed against elderly protesters – acts of barbarity that have enraged the citizenry. Melbourne in particular has lost all semblance of checks and balances, with storm troopers being unleashed on the population, in harrowing scenes reminiscent of the Wehrmacht’s storming of Prague. (Granted, without the live rounds).

    Convinced that anyone who questions the veracity of the liberal media and the public health agencies is a “conspiracy theorist” (really a euphemism for “mentally ill”), neoliberals have already crossed the Rubicon and taken up the truncheon of authoritarianism. Undoubtedly, the official Covid narrative is deranged. Yet is it any more inane than “Trump’s white supremacist insurrection,” “Russia invaded Ukraine,” “the Russians hacked the election,” “Trump is Putin’s puppet,” and NATO was compelled to bomb Libya to smithereens “to save Benghazi?”

    Trapped in a vortex of amnesia and unreason, the neoliberal has been hoodwinked into believing that whatever the medical mullahs say is “the science;” and whatever the liberal media says is incontrovertible, irrefutable, and infallible; i.e., “reality.” Fauci’s contradictory statements, particularly with regard to the virulence of COVID-19 and his stance on masks, fail to diminish their fervor as they cannot even remember what they had for breakfast, let alone the tens of thousands of Americans killed by Vioxx or the over 400,000 Americans that lost their lives to the opioid epidemic.

    The liberals of the 1960s, who genuinely believed in the Nuremberg Code, would have regarded the Branch Covidians with contempt. What a pity that the ranks of these medical brownshirts are dominated largely by those who once idolized the likes of Bobby Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, yet now wallow in a pitiable state of moral and intellectual bankruptcy. It is true that conservative publications, such as The Washington Post, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal are parroting similar propaganda with regard to Covid. However, as evidenced by Tucker Carlson’s show, the conservative media no longer speaks with one voice. Moreover, millions of conservatives no longer believe in the infallibility of the conservative media as liberals continue to believe in the infallibility of the liberal media.

    Ultimately, the Branch Covidians are the offspring of a union between a corporatized health care system that has grown increasingly hostile to informed consent, and a liberal class that stopped thinking when Bill Clinton was inaugurated and has come to regard senior officials in the liberal media and the public health agencies as gods. The mass psychosis of the Branch Covidians is inextricably linked with the mass psychosis of neoliberalism. Without the latter the former would have about as much societal impact as the Hare Krishnas.

    The Nazis divided humanity into the subhumans (Jews, Roma, political prisoners, and Slavs); the humans (allied European fascists and the Japanese); and the supermen (the Germans, or Aryans). For quite some time now, the American health care system has been mired in a multi-tier system which divides patients up into similar categories. In light of this boorishness, teaching hospitals have long been instructing trainees that care is to be doled out depending on what kind of insurance plan patients have. Privileged patients are granted the right to choose their own doctor while the less fortunate are confined to narrow networks. Humans are permitted to meet with an attending physician while the Untermenschen are sent to resident clinics. Unbeknownst to Nazi doctors, both past and present, there is no bioethics on-off switch. In what was foundational to the Blitzkrieg but could also explain their increasingly deranged decision making, much of the German military during World War II was regularly taking Pervitin, the predecessor to crystal meth, and doing so with the support of their own doctors.

    As the forces of darkness become increasingly desperate, liberals drown in an ocean of madness and sociopathy. Hypnotized by an oligarchy they have deified, while believing that they are still marching with Martin Luther King singing “Kumbaya My Lord” and “We Shall Overcome,” this faux-left movement bears a closer resemblance to the Democratic Party of the 1860s than the Democratic Party of the 1960s. Indeed, if the Branch Covidians succeed in destroying the citadel of informed consent, only one form of government will reign in the United States: slavery.

    The post The Branch Covidians are Waging War on Humanity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In November the latest book by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will be available to readers: The Real Anthony Fauci. In an address to a conference on the Covid-19 crisis held in Budapest, Hungary this past August, Robert Kennedy gave a preview of his research results to the participants. His “Historical and Legal Perspectives of the Pandemic” takes an unusually wide view of the context in which the past 18 months unfolded. As a conservative campaigner for healthcare safety, especially for children, and an environmental activist, Kennedy has concentrated on corporate malfeasance and regulatory capture by the pharmaceutical industry. In this talk he explains the relationship of the health crisis to the State, itself.

    It ought to be asked, for instance, “How much grant or budgeted money from the military establishment is needed before scientific research is called military or weapons research?” or “How much objective science is produced by people entirely dependent or whose salaries are determined by the amount of money donors contribute to buy results?” or “How many deceptions and frauds must be perpetrated before those responsible are deemed liars and criminals?” These are, of course, rhetorical questions. Where a significant majority has learned to accept that pay warrants obedience and profit is the highest form of success and virtue, these questions can mean little and their answers mean even less.

    Karlheinz Deschner wrote more than 10 volumes of historical research documenting from the records of the Roman Catholic Church, itself, all of its criminal activity since the very fraudulent founding of the Holy See in Rome. Yet none of this will alter the conviction of a true Catholic that he or she is adherent to a criminal organisation more than a thousand years old. Deschner includes all of Christendom, not just the Catholics, since the Reformation did not end the crimes.

    Here it might be worth noting that some of the most vicious enforcers of the medical martial law regime, Emmanuel Macron, Justine Trudeau, Gavin Newsom, and, of course, Anthony Fauci were Jesuit educated. The collaborationist pontiff, himself, is a Jesuit. The founder of the Society of Jesus understood his work as a military organisation for the aggressive propagation and defence of the holy church. It is a common place that Cecil Rhodes was inspired by the Jesuits when he created his Round Table movement for British imperial unity. The Jesuits enjoy the reputation within the espionage profession as an elite element of the Church’s notoriously wide-spun and efficient intelligence operation.

    So when Robert Kennedy explains the sources of Anthony Fauci’s funding, the integration of the military and intelligence organisations in the ostensibly civilian NIAID  (and hence NIH as a whole), he is scraping some of the veneer from a carefully created body of mythology about institutional medical research and major medicine.

    17-01 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (USA) – Greetings to Conference Participants. Historic and legal perspectives of the pandemic

    The story and context Kennedy presents in this talk will presumably be more detailed in his forthcoming book. However, it is useful to go back in history even further than Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech to which Kennedy refers.

    *****

    The following section is adopted from my March 5, 2021 article:

    The regimental genealogy of the NIAID can be traced to the War Research Service, the US regime’s secret biological and chemical weapons research office, run by George W. Merck, president of one of the largest pharmaceutical corporations in the world.

    In 1948, coincidental with the importation of Japanese and German war criminals with their cases of prison experimentation results, the War Research Service was transformed into the US Microbiological Institute. The War Research Service had been hidden in the Federal Security Agency, a Roosevelt organisation that included a variety of civilian programs deemed to have national security relevance. Federal security meant programs to protect against anything that could destabilise the US regime during the 1929 Great Reset.

    After 1945 and the adoption of the UN Charter, repeating the injunction of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and establishing the offense at Nuremberg of “crimes against the peace”, wars did not stop. Instead names were changed. Names make a difference. The Washington Naval Treaty (1922) restricted the tonnage and types of ships that could be built. Hence ship classes were also renamed. At the same time armament and displacement were reallocated among new ship classes so that construction could continue. The US sought not only to buttress its secret first strike strategy against the Soviet Union but also later to circumvent the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (starting 1972) by maintaining the same number of missiles and introducing the so-called MIRV, multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles. In other words, one missile was turned into a delivery system that could deliver the same number of warheads as additional missiles.

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), America’s Gestapo, could not have been sold to the states had it been called a police force.

    In 1947, the National Security Act was also a response to the need for new language. If war was illegal, then one could not have a “war department”. So the national military establishment was renamed the Department of Defence. After the ceasefire in Korea, the US was also forced to rebrand the programs developing weapons it denied ever having or using—namely, the chemical weapons, already prohibited and the biological weapons it had inherited from the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army and the Japanese war criminals of Unit 731 Douglas MacArthur hid from exposure or trials. The principal war criminals from this secret Japanese military research facility no doubt joined their German colleagues recruited through the good offices of Allen Dulles.

    Although military research continued under the auspices of the US Army’s Chemical Corps and biological weapons research was still conducted, mainly at Fort Detrick in Frederick, MD—with other major facilities such as Dugway Proving Ground, Wendover, UT—World War II had also raised the petrochemical industry and its sister pharmaceuticals to a major role in the military – industrial – complex. Atomic weapons had enormously expanded the already firm hold of DuPont on the munitions side. The Army Air Corps and the vastly expanded aeronautical and aerospace industry joined behind the new Air Force. Thus it should be no surprise that petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals needed their State bureaucratic partner for the massive post-war armaments program. It is important to remember here that one of the benefits of US strategic success in the war was the plunder of some of the most lucrative basic research and capture of the most ruthless research personnel available in Germany and Japan. When the leaders of the US regime whine about alleged intellectual property theft by China, they are merely sobbing at the inevitable trickle down from their historical larceny and brain draining.

    It simply would have been impossible after the war in Korea to openly foster a biological warfare service in the US war machine. A solution was found. This was supported by trends already well established in the US. Since Frederick Taylor Gates assumed control over the General Education Board (GEB) within the Rockefeller tax dodge, the two largest tax dodges of the time, Carnegie and Rockefeller, had agreed to allocate the theatres of ideological warfare in defence of their fortunes, their class and the system that had come to be called capitalism. Rockefeller money would be devoted to manipulation of the domestic political environment and Carnegie money would be used to buy control of the international side.

    At the same time Gates advised Rockefeller to invest his loot in scientific medicine. Although Gates, like Rockefeller, came from a Baptist background, both had come to recognise that medicine is more powerful and intimate even than religion. Scientific medicine, based on the work of professionals operating with “security clearances”, could turn the laboratory into technology for social transformation. Just as John D. Rockefeller had legalised his criminal activities to establish the Standard Oil monopoly, Gates proposed a strategy for establishing an ideological monopoly on medicine and thus a practically invincible defence of the gangster class’ prerogatives to rule.

    Today’s complicity of the Johns Hopkins University (Bloomberg) School of Public Health should not be a surprise to anyone who recognises that history did not begin in 2019 or 2020. It was GEB money that founded the JHU School of Public Health (in 2001 named after the financial propaganda magnate, Michael Bloomberg, whose tax dodging has permitted him since 1995 to buy reputation at the nation’s premier population control academy).

    Corporate control over scientific medicine, especially through funding of medical schools and medical research laboratories, combined with the integration of the pharmaceutical industry into the military-industrial complex. This process reached its international apex when the Rockefeller tax dodge, which had already made substantial financial donations to the United Nations organisation (notoriously supplying part of its feudal estate in Manhattan to build a kind of international “Vatican City”), managed the foundation of the World Health Organisation (WHO). The chief US delegate to the 1946 International Health Conference was Thomas Parran, the US Surgeon General, who would also be credited with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on unwitting African-Americans (1932-1972).  Rockefeller sent five official observers to the conference. Without a doubt the most powerful delegation at the conference was on the side of corporate medicine and pharmaceutical weaponry.

    Recently those few critics of the WHO to be found complain about the amount of money it receives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. However, it is important to note that WHO was deliberately underfunded when it was started. A proposal that the organisation be funded by the United Nations was defeated in favour of separate contributions by members and a provision for financial gifts (bribes) from other sources.

    In 1955, the US Microbiological Institute was again renamed. It became the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In 1946, the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas, a military operation was renamed the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) and later becomes part of the US Public Health Service—itself a derivative of military/naval hygiene operations. In 1951, the CDC established its cadre program keeping with the ultimately military tradition to which it belongs. The Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) was intended to satisfy “the need for an adequate corps of trained epidemiologists who can be deployed immediately for any contingency, including chemical or biological warfare”. The Communicable Disease Center was later renamed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    *****

    While these institutions have been labelled and marketed as if they were public services and benign operations for the protection and preservation of a social good, namely, human health, they were created, and as Kennedy also shows, have been maintained for the purpose of supporting what is essentially a major arm of the US war establishment, the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry and its soldiers, the lab-coated officers of the medical profession, fight to control the greatest threat to international capitalism of all—free human beings. Since the start of the 20th century what most people call “science” was harnessed to augment, and where necessary, replace religion—not to liberate humans from superstition but to anchor them more firmly in it. Social sciences were promoted because they turned social movements and struggle into managerial problems. Medical sciences replaced the healing arts, first to exclude women who previously would have been burned as witches, and then to exclude any attempts to organise healing within healthy communities—by turning health into disease and the patient into an enemy.

    This pandemic of scientism also infected the humanities but for the most part by causing their atrophy. The imposition of science in its present form was forced by the Progressive movement in North America and the Fabians and Positivists in “Old Europe”. Their descendants today have stolen the language of popular struggle in the 19th and 20th century and wear it as a “lab-coat of jargon” with which they sell their 4th Awakening fanaticism to complement the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution.

    The old national military establishment that invented the national security ideology in 1947 to subjugate the peoples of the expanding capitalist empire after World War II, realised quickly that they could not “kill ‘em all”. They began quickly to improve on the technology first applied industrially to wage the Great War. The target of that technology was and remains the human mind itself. The body housing it was and is of collateral interest. The mission of the war departments in the Pentagon and elsewhere around the world is to control territory and resources, including populations. The mission of the National Institutes of Health is to conquer the human mind and destroy the will of capitalism’s greatest enemy, humans striving toward liberty.

    The post The Military and Intelligence Origins of Public Health first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • AP Photo / Kirsty Wigglesworth, File

    So a top US commander has come clean on primetime TV about the killing of 10 civilians in Afghanistan with a drone missile. Seven of the victims were children packed into a car.

    CentCom General Kenneth McKenzie said the deadly strike was a “tragic mistake” and he offered his “deep condolences”. In an unprecedented televised press conference, the general said he took personal responsibility for the atrocity and that there would be financial compensation paid out to the victims’ families.

    He didn’t offer his resignation though, which might seem appropriate for someone taking responsibility for such a heinous event. Neither did the Pentagon commander explain how compensation would be arranged given that the US evacuated from Afghanistan on 30 August with no officials now present in the country.

    General McKenzie went to great lengths in his press conference to claim that the vehicle was surveilled carefully for several hours before the drone missile was launched, killing all the occupants. He presented a graphic to illustrate the detailed movements of the targeted car near Kabul international airport on 29 August. This was the day after a suicide bomber killed 13 US troops at the airport along with over 100 Afghan civilians trying to join the frenzied American airlift.

    This handout photo courtesy of the US Air Force obtained on November 7, 2020 shows an armed MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV or drone) as it flies over the Nevada Test and Training Range on July 15, 2019. © AFP 2021 / Haley Stevens/US Air Force

    The general emphasised how his staff were under immense time pressure when they were assessing the target whom they believed was an ISIS terror team on its way to bomb the airport again.

    What is objectionable about McKenzie’s apology live on TV is the impression of an exceptional error by US forces.

    The reality is that civilians are routinely murdered by US drones in Afghanistan and several other countries where the Pentagon is operating, oftentimes illegally in violation of international law. Killing innocent people is not an “exceptional error” for US forces, it is the norm.

    Daniel Hale, a former US Air Force analyst who turned whistleblower, was imprisoned in July for revealing the horror of civilian casualties from drone strikes in Afghanistan. He told a judge that 90 percent of victims were innocent civilians. Hale said he was sickened by the indiscriminate slaughter. For his truth-telling, he is now behind bars.

    The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles was expanded under the Obama administration and they were deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Libya. Obama personally selected targets every week in briefings from the CIA in what became known as “Terror Tuesdays”.

    U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley discusses the end of the military mission in Afghanistan during a news conference at the Pentagon in Washington, U.S., September 1, 2021 © REUTERS / Evelyn Hockstein

    It was claimed that during the Obama drone assassination programme that the total number of civilians mistakenly killed was just 117. That figure was derided as a gross underestimate. The Bureau for Investigative Journalism puts a more accurate death toll at six times higher. Even the latter may be an underestimate.

    Hale, the whistleblower, was prosecuted and jailed by the Trump administration. Public calls for a pardon have been so far ignored by the Biden administration.

    The fate of truth-tellers who reveal the murderous nature of US military occupations in foreign countries is to be buried behind bars. Julian Assange’s biggest “crime” was showing to the world the systematic killing of civilians by US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Assange is being held in a maximum-security prison in England awaiting the outcome of an extradition order by the US where he faces 175 years in jail for “espionage”.

    People like Julian Assange and Daniel Hale are heroes who should be venerated publicly and given lifetime awards.

    Meanwhile, the real criminals are given primetime TV to parade their insipid apologies while taking no responsibility for the murder. Saying “sorry” means nothing when the killings will go on and on. It’s just a sorry cover-up for US imperialism and its routine war crimes.

    US soldiers stand guard behind barbed wire as Afghans sit on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul on August 20, 2021, hoping to flee from the country after the Taliban’s military takeover of Afghanistan © AFP 2021 / Wakil Kohsar

    Unlike many other US drone murders of civilians that are brushed away into oblivion, the killing of 10 civilians in Kabul only came to light because one of the victims worked for a US charity. Otherwise, the Pentagon would have ensured that the atrocity was buried in a bureaucratic cover-up. The innocent victims like the truth-tellers are always buried.

    General McKenzie’s “honourable” mea culpa is sick performance art. It is aimed at reassuring the American public that we really are the good guys who rarely commit atrocities. And when we do, then it is an exceptional “tragic mistake” for which we are truly “sorry”. That gives US imperialism a license to continue criminal wars, aggression, occupations and Mass Murder Inc.

    •  First published in Sputnik

    The post Sorry Cover-Up for US Mass Murder first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • There seems to be a glaring illogic to official arguments about the need to vaccinate British children against Covid that no one in the corporate media wishes to highlight.

    Days ago the British government’s experts on vaccinations, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, withstood strong political pressure and decided not to recommend vaccinating children aged between 12 and 15. That was because the JCVI concluded that vaccination could not be justified in the case of children on health grounds.

    The implication was that the known health risks associated with vaccination for children – primarily from heart inflammation – outweighed the health benefits. The JCVI also indicated that there might be unknown, longer-term health risks too, given the lack of follow-up among young people and children who have already been vaccinated.

    But while the JCVI defied the government, they did not entirely ignore the political demands of them. They offered the government’s four chief medical officers a get-out clause that could be exploited to rationalise the approval of child vaccinations: they conceded that vaccinations might offer other, non-health benefits.

    Utilitarian arguments

    Predictably, this utilitarian justification for child vaccinations has been seized on by the British government. Here is the Guardian uncritically regurgitating the official position:

    There have also been concerns about the indirect effects of the virus on children. The biggest has been the disruption to schools, which had a severe impact on their mental and physical health, as well as their education.

    That, essentially, is why the four CMOs have said children aged between 12 and 15 should be eligible for the jab.

    They believe that being vaccinated will reduce the risk of disruption to school and extracurricular activities and the effect of this on their mental health and wellbeing.

    Let’s unpack that argument.

    Covid poses no serious threat to the overwhelming majority of children, the JCVI and the chief medical officers are agreed. (Those few children who are at risk can be vaccinated under existing rules.)

    But, according to the government, Covid has inflicted physical, mental and educational suffering on children because classrooms had to be shut for prolonged periods to protect vulnerable adults in the period before the adult population could be vaccinated.

    Now most adults, and almost all vulnerable adults, are vaccinated against Covid, offering them a significant degree of protection.

    But still children need to be injected with a vaccine that may, on balance, do more harm to their health than good.

    If this is the official argument, we should all be asking: Why?

    Two scenarios

    There are two potential scenarios for assessing this argument.

    The first:

    The vaccine works against transmission and severe illness in adults. Schools therefore no longer need to be shut down to protect the adult population. Adults are now largely safe – unless they have decided not to get vaccinated. And that, in turn, means that “indirect” harm to children’s mental and physical wellbeing caused by school closures should no longer be a consideration.

    If this is the case, then there are no grounds – either health ones or indirect, non-health ones – to justify vaccinating children.

    The second:

    The vaccine doesn’t stop transmission and severe illness, but it reduces some transmission and mitigates the worst effects of Covid. This is what the evidence increasingly suggests.

    If this is the case, then vaccinating children will not only fail to stop a proportion of them catching and transmitting Covid but it will also fail in its stated purpose: preventing the future closure of schools and the associated, indirect harms to children.

    Worse, at the same time vaccination may increase children’s risk of damage to their health from the vaccine itself, as the JCVI’s original conclusion implies.

    Just to be clear, as the “follow the science” crowd prepare yet again to be outraged, these are not my arguments. They are implicit in the official reasoning of the experts assessing whether to vaccinate children. They have been ignored on political grounds, because the government would prefer to look like it is actively getting us “back to normal”, and because it has chosen to put all its eggs in the easy (and profitable) vaccine basket.

    If vaccines are all that is needed to solve the pandemic, then there is no need to look at other things, such as the gradual dismantling of the National Health Service by successive governments, very much including the current one; our over-consumption economies; nutrient-poor diets promoted by the farming and food industries; and much else besides.

    Unadulterated racism

    There are, in fact, much more obvious, unequivocal reasons to oppose vaccinating children – aside from the matter that vaccination subordinates children’s health to the adult population’s wellbeing on the flimsiest of pretexts.

    First, vaccination doses wasted on British children could be put to far better use vaccinating vulnerable populations in the Global South. There are good self-interested reasons for us to back this position, especially given the fact that the fight is against a global pandemic in a modern world that is highly interconnected.

    But more altruistic – and ethical – concerns should also be at the forefront of discussions too. Our lives aren’t more important than those of Africans or Asians. To think otherwise – to imagine that we deserve a third or fourth booster shot or need to vaccinate children to reduce the risk of Covid deaths in the west to near-zero – is pure, unadulterated racism.

    And second, a growing body of medical reseach indicates that natural immunity confers stronger, longer-lasting protection against Covid.

    Given that the virus poses little medical threat to children, the evidence so far suggests they would be better off catching Covid, as apparently half of them already have.

    That is both because it serves their own interests by developing in them better immunity against future, nastier variants; and because it serves the interests of the adults around them – assuming (and admittedly it’s a big assumption) that the goal here is not to have adults dependent on endless booster shots to prevent waning immunity and enrich Pfizer.

    Worst of both worlds

    By contrast, the approach the British government is pursuing – and most of the corporate media is cheerleading – is the worst of both worlds.

    British officials want to treat Covid as a continuing menace to public health, one that apparently can never be eradicated. A state of permanent emergency means the government can accrue to itself ever increasing powers, including for surveillance, on the pretext that we are in an endless war against the virus.

    But at the same time the government’s implicit “zero tolerance” approach to Covid – in this case, a futile ambition to prevent any hospitalisations or deaths from the virus in the UK – means that the interests of British children, and populations in foreign countries we helped to impoverish through our colonial history, can be sacrificed for the good of adults in rich western countries.

    The combined effect of these two approaches is to foster a political climate in which western governments and the corporate media are better placed to replicate the colonial policy priorities they have traditionally pursued abroad but this time apply them to the home front.

    The supposed war against the virus – a war that children apparently must be recruited to fight on our behalf – rather neatly echoes the earlier, now discredited and unravelling “war on terror”.

    Both can be presented as threats to our civilisation. Both require the state to redirect vast resources to corporate elites (the “defence” industries and now Big Pharma). Both have led to widespread fear among the populace, making it more compliant. Both require a permanent state of emergency and the sacrifice of our liberties. Both have been promoted in terms of a bogus humanitarianism. And neither war can be won.

    Dog eat dog

    Recognising these parallels is not the same as denial, though the government and media have every interest to cultivate this as an assumption. There were and are terrorists, even if the term readily gets mangled to serve political agendas. And there is a dangerous virus that vulnerable populations need protection from.

    But just as the “terror” threat arose in response to – and to mask – our arrogant, colonial control over, and plundering of, other people’s resources, so this pandemic threat appears to have arisen, in large part, from our arrogant invasion of every last habitat on the planet, and our ever less healthy, consumption-driven lifestyles.

    At the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote an article that went viral called “A lesson coronavirus is about to teach the world“. In it, I argued that our capitalist societies, with their dog-eat-dog ideologies, were the least suited to deal with a health crisis that required solidarity, both local and global.

    I noted that Donald Tump, then the US president, was trying to secure an early, exclusive deal for a “silver bullet” – a vaccine – whose first doses he planned to reserve for Americans as a vote-winner at home and then use as leverage over other states to reward those who complied with his, or possibly US, interests. The planet could be divided into friends and foes – those who received the vaccine and those who were denied it.

    It was a typically Trumpian vanity project that he did not realise. But in many ways, it has come to pass in a different fashion and in ways that have the potential to be more dangerous than I could foresee.

    Divide and rule

    The vaccine has indeed been sold as a silver bullet, a panacea that lifts from our shoulders not just the burden of lockdowns and masks but the need for any reflection on what “normal life” means and whether we should want to return to it.

    And just as Trump wanted to use vaccine distribution as a tool of divide-and-rule, the vaccination process itself has come to serve a similar end. With the quick roll-out of vaccines, our societies have almost immediately divided between those who demand vaccine passports and mandates as the price for inclusion and those who demand the protection of basic liberties and cultivation of social solidarity without conditions.

    In popular discourse, of course, this is being spun as a fight between responsible vaxxers and irresponsible anti-vaxxers. That is more divide-and-rule nonsense. Those in favour of vaccination, and those who have been vaccinated, can be just as concerned about the direction we are heading in as the “anti-vaxxers”.

    Fear has driven our division: between those who primarily fear the virus and those who primarily fear western elites whose authoritarian instincts are coming to the fore as they confront imminent economic and environmental crises they have no answers for.

    Increasingly, where we stand on issues surrounding the pandemic has little to do with “the science” and relates chiefly to where each of us stands on that spectrum of fear.

    Hoarding impulse

    The vaccination of children highlights this most especially, which is why I have chosen to focus on it. We want children vaccinated not,, because the research suggests they need it or society benefits from it, but because knowing they are vaccinated will still our fear of the virus a little more.

    Similarly, we want foreigners denied the vaccine – and that is the choice we make when we prioritise our children being vaccinated and demand booster shots for ourselves – because that too will allay our fears.

    We hoard the vaccinations, just as we once did toilet paper. We try to fortify our borders against the virus, just as we do against “immigrants”, even though the rational part of our brain knows that the virus will lap up on our shores, in new variants, unless poorer nations are in a position to vaccinate their populations too.

    Our fears, the politicians’ power complexes and the corporations’ profit motives combine to fuel this madness. And in the process we intensify the dog-eat-dog ideology we call western civilisation.

    We turn on each other, we prioritise ourselves over the foreigner, we set parent against child, we pit the vaccinated against the unvaccinated – all in the name of a bogus humanitarianism and solidarity.

    The post In the name of humanitarianism, Covid is crushing local as well as global solidarity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • When sex offenders can move more freely around New York City than someone who has chosen natural immunity, it’s time to get some things off my chest. And who better to talk with than the person I trust the most? To follow… is a self-interview.

    *****

    Mickey Z.: How’s it going with the mandate?

    Mickey Z.: Coercion is not consent, my friend. And if my hometown is so concerned about our collective health, why don’t they mandate a safe, affordable home for everyone? How about meaningful jobs that pay a living wage? Mandate less crime and more libraries. 

    MZ: I get the idea.

    MZ: If they wanna control what goes into our bodies, why not insist that organic produce be made available at affordable prices and be consumed every single day?

    MZ: I see what you mean.

    MZ: Mandate that all lawns be turned into organic vegetable gardens. Did you know that lawn is the single most irrigated crop in God’s Country™

    MZ: You’ve made your point. 

    MZ: Mandate people not commenting on social media until they’ve done some fuckin’ research. The next person who repeats the “ivermectin is horse dewormer” nonsense trope is the one who needs to be isolated from society.

    MZ: Wait… you’re not gonna defend ivermectin, are you?

    MZ: I’m not defending anything except adding facts to the conversation. Equine ivermectin — as the name implies — is made for horses. The FDA approved another kind of ivermectin for humans. It’s meant to treat infections in the body that are caused by certain parasites and was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015. 

    MZ: What has that got to do with COVID-19?

    MZ: You might wanna pose that question to the National Institutes for Health (NIH). They endorsed several studies showing ivermectin can be effective for treating Covid. For example, the American Journal of Therapeutics published a study that found: “Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of #ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.”

    If you’re interested in more reality, click here and here and here. Read those links closely and then congratulate yourself for knowing more about ivermectin than any corporate media outlet or reporter — from Fox to CNN.

    MZ: If ivermectin works, why is it being badmouthed by the mainstream?

    MZ: Possibly because, according to the FDA, the only way the Covid “vaccines” could qualify for emergency use authorization is if “certain statutory criteria have been met.” For example: “no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.” If doctors prescribe ivermectin, the jabs aren’t needed and thus don’t rake in billions for Big Pharma (and set the stage for endless boosters). Follow the money.

    MZ: Is this why you’re calling this the“Covid Twilight Zone”?

    MZ: It’s one of many reasons. The biggest might be the charade of PCR tests.

    MZ: Please elaborate.

    MZ: The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test works by converting the virus’s RNA into DNA (coronaviruses don’t have DNA). The PCR process makes millions of copies of the manufactured DNA by running it through “cycles” in a process called amplification. The more cycles run, the more the DNA can be copied. If no copies can be made, theoretically, no virus is present. The test provides a yes-no answer rather than any indication of how much virus was found, how old the virus is, or whether or not the virus is even capable of infectivity. 

    The test is so flawed that in Tanzania, it returned positive results for a goat and a piece of fruit! 

    The post Welcome to the Covid Twilight Zone: Mickey Z. interviews Mickey Z. first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs, across from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. We had been fasting from solid foods for a month, calling for an end to brutal economic warfare waged against Iraq through imposition of U.N. sanctions. Each Friday of our fast, we approached the entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations carrying lentils and rice, asking the U.S. officials to break our fast with us, asking them to hear our reports, gathered after visiting destitute Iraqi hospitals and homes. On four successive Friday afternoons, New York police handcuffed us and took us to jail.

    Two days after the passenger planes attacked the World Trade Center,  U.S. Mission to the UN officials called us and asked that we visit with them.

    I had naively hoped this overture could signify empathy on the part of U.S. officials. Perhaps the 9/11 attack would engender sorrow over the suffering and pain endured by people of Iraq and other lands when the U.S. attacks them. The officials at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations wanted to know why we went to Iraq but we sensed they were mainly interested in filling out forms to comply with an order to gather more information about U.S. people going to Iraq.

    The U.S. government and military exploited the grief and shock following 9/11 attacks to raise fears, promote Islamophobia and launch forever wars which continue to this day. Under the guise of “counter-terrorism,” the U.S. now pledges to combine drone attacks, surveillance, airstrikes, and covert operations to continue waging war in Afghanistan. Terror among Afghans persists.

    I visited Kabul, Afghanistan in September 2019. While there, a young friend whom I’ve known for five years greeted me and then spoke in a hushed voice. “Kathy,” he asked, “do you know about Qazi Qadir, Bahadir, Jehanzeb and Saboor?” I nodded. I had read a news account, shortly before I arrived, about Afghan Special Operations commandos, trained by the CIA, having waged a night raid in the city of Jalalabad at the home of four brothers. They awakened the young men, then shot and killed them. Neighbors said the young men had gathered to welcome their father back from the Hajj; numerous colleagues insisted the young men were innocent.

    My young friend has been deeply troubled by many other incidents in which the United States directly attacked innocent people or trained Afghan units to do so. Two decades of U.S. combat in Afghanistan have made civilians vulnerable to drone attacks, night raids, airstrikes and arrests. Over 4 million people have become internally displaced as they fled from battles or could no longer survive on scarred, drought stricken lands.

    In an earlier visit to Kabul, at the height of the U.S. troop surge, another young friend earnestly asked me to tell parents in the United States not to send their sons and daughters to Afghanistan. “Here it is very dangerous for them,” he said. “And they do not really help us.”

    For many years, the United States claimed its mission in Afghanistan improved the lives of Afghan women and children. But essentially, the U.S. war improved the livelihoods of those who designed, manufactured, sold and used weaponry to kill Afghans.

    When the U.S. was winding down its troop surge in 2014, but not its occupation,  military officials undertook what they called “the largest retrograde mission in U.S. military history,” incurring enormous expenses. One estimate suggested the war in Afghanistan, that year, was costing $2 million per U.S. soldier. That same year, UNICEF officials calculated that the cost of adding iodized salt into the diet of an Afghan infant, a step which could prevent chronic brain damage in children suffering from acute malnourishment, would be 5 cents per child per year.

    Which endeavor would the majority of U.S. people have opted to support, in their personal budgets, had they ever been given a choice? Profligate U.S. military spending in Afghanistan or vital assistance for a starving Afghan child?

    One of my young Afghan friends says he is now an anarchist. He doesn’t place much trust in governments and militaries. He feels strong allegiance toward the grassroots network he has helped build, a group I would normally name and celebrate, but must now refer to as “our young friends in Afghanistan,” in hopes of protecting them from hostile groups.

    The brave and passionate dedication they showed as they worked tirelessly to share resources, care for the environment, and practice nonviolence has made them quite vulnerable to potential accusers who may believe they were too connected with westerners.

    In recent weeks, I’ve been part of an ad hoc team assisting 60 young people and their family members who feel alarmed about remaining in Kabul and are sorting out their options to flee the country.

    It’s difficult to forecast how Taliban rule will affect them.

    Already, some extraordinarily brave people have held protests in in the provinces of Herat, Nimroz, Balkh and Farah, and in the city of Kabul where dozens of women took to the streets to demand representation in the new government and to insist that their rights must be protected.

    In many provinces in Afghanistan, the Taliban may find themselves ruling over increasingly resentful people. Half the population already lives in poverty and economic catastrophe looms. In damage caused by war, people have lost harvests, homes and livestock. A third wave of COVID afflicts the country and  three million Afghans face consequences of severe drought. Will the Taliban government have the resources and skills to cope with these overwhelming problems?

    On the other hand, in some provinces, Taliban rule has seemed preferable to the previous government’s incompetence and corruption, particularly in regard to property or land disputes.

    We should be honest. The Taliban are in power today because of a colossal mess the U.S. helped create.

    Now, we U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations for destruction caused by 20 years of war. To be meaningful, reparations must also include dismantling the warfare systems that caused so much havoc and misery. Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars.

    My young friend who whispered to me about human rights abuses in 2019 recently fled Afghanistan. He said he doesn’t want to be driven by fear, but he deeply wants to use his life to do good, to build a better world.

    Ultimately, Afghanistan will need people like him and his friends if the country is ever to experience a future where basic human rights to food, shelter, health care and education are met. It will need people who have already made dedicated sacrifices for peace, believing in an Afghan adage which says “blood doesn’t wash away blood.”

    Essentially, people in Afghanistan will need U.S. people to embrace this same teaching. We must express true sorrow, seek forgiveness, and show valor similar to that of the brave people insisting on human rights in Afghanistan today.

    Collectively, recognizing the terrible legacy of 9/11, we must agree:  To counter terror, abolish war.

    This article first appeared at Waging Nonviolence

    The post To Counter Terror, Abolish War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Let’s imagine a hypothetical scenario. What if there was a time when the general population was being relentlessly coerced into taking a particular drug? How would you know what to do? Where would you turn for the necessary context? Surely you wouldn’t just take the shot without doing your homework… right? That would be irrational. And you wouldn’t ostracize others for being hesitant… right? That would be even more irrational. Logically, you’d look up a relatively recent, similar scenario to see what you can learn from it… right? Well, in case you wind up in such an ugly situation, I’m happy to share such relevant context in advance:

    The human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted infection. There are over 200 types of HPV and virtually everyone who has had sex will get it. HPV has no cure but it self-clears at least 98 percent of the time. In rare instances, it can cause cancer — particularly cervical cancer. However, such an outcome can be prevented through regular pap smears. Even with this proven method of prevention, a vaccine was developed anyway. Since cancers usually take years to develop, the vaccine’s effectiveness is unclear at best. As for safety, take a look at the photo up top… and I think this would be a good time to introduce Josh Mazer of Maryland.

    Josh is not a radical and certainly not an “anti-vaxxer.” He wrote in a 2018 Capital Gazette article: “A properly administered, robust vaccine policy is instrumental in promoting the public welfare. I am concerned about the marketing strategies being used statewide to aggressively promote Merck’s HPV vaccine. In January, a career public school nurse approached me to discuss her role in promoting the vaccine. She said that was being ‘forced’ to market it to 11- and 12-year-old kids at her school. She produced a set of letters outlining the policy, one on Maryland Department of Health (DOH), the other on Montgomery County Schools, letterhead.”

    Slide from HPV Symposium Ten Oaks, Maryland: March 2018

    Mazer went to work and learned that every school superintendent in Maryland received the DOH letter. It included phrases like:

    • “There is a critical public health issue of under-vaccination Maryland’s adolescents against Human Papillomavirus (HPV)” 
    • “14 million people get infected each year posing a significant public health risk” 
    • “It is imperative for age-eligible children to complete the HPV vaccination series while obtaining school-entry required vaccinations”
    • “There are 13,248 females and 13,796 males in Montgomery County that are of eligible age, 11 to 12 years old”

    Mazer was told that “the letters are supported by data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)” but the CDC denied any knowledge of the letters. Mazer filed a Public Information Act request with the Prevention and Health Promotion Administration and here is some of what he learned:

    • Maryland’s rates of cervical cancer were in decline for years prior to the introduction of the vaccine
    • The vaccine itself has never been proven to prevent cancer
    • The vaccine — if it worked — would only protect against only 9 (out of 200+) strains of HPV
    • Cervical cancer incidence in Maryland is up 8 percent since the vaccine policy was enacted
    • 44 percent of girls who get the shot are more likely to develop cervical lesions than those who do not

    Finally, Mazer learned that the state health department received $91.6 million just since 2012 from pharmaceutical-funded non-profits to promote the HPV vaccine in Maryland. Take a second and go back to read that last sentence one more time: The state health department received $91.6 million just since 2012 from pharmaceutical-funded non-profits to promote the HPV vaccine in Maryland.

    Big Pharma bribed Maryland officials to use an “anti-cancer” vaccine that INCREASES the chances of young girls getting cancer. Using “non-profits” to do the funding allowed for tax breaks and a semblance of distance. Related: A couple of the images I placed in this article are slides from a 2018 Maryland HPV Symposium. They show how physicians are financially rewarded for pushing the HPV “vaccine” on children. 

    Slide from HPV Symposium Ten Oaks, Maryland: March 2018

    Here is Mazer speaking at a Maryland school board meeting in late 2019 (3 minutes):

    So, just a heads up: If you — by some unexpected fluke — find yourself being coerced into taking a vaccine, you might wanna ask a few questions before lining up for the jab. It seems major pharmaceutical corporations along with licensed physicians are capable of lying to you — even if it can damage your health. Who knew? Again, just keep it in mind. You’ll probably never have an injection imposed upon you in a Free Country™ you but hey, ya never know. 

    The post Remember the HPV vaccine scandal of 2018? (Of course, you don’t) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The need to protect workers from overwork in China, and the need to protect youth from an overly competive system.

    The post News on China | No. 66 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Reason can wrestle and overthrow terror.

    — Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis

    Medical ethics in the West has long been predicated on informed consent, the oath to do no harm, the notion that good health care is a human right, and the search for scientific truth free from skullduggery and censorship. These tenets are not only integral to a sound health care system but are foundational to a civilized society. Lamentably, each of these sacrosanct principles is anathema to the medical industrial complex. For we have entered the Age of Faucism.

    In “Why do patients hate going to the doctor?” by Maheswari Raja, MD, the author reiterates the establishment medical narrative, that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with our health care system, and that the problem is the American patient:

    And the truth is that the doctor’s office is an uncomfortable place. It is where one answers the most intimate questions and speaks their most intimate fears — where they have to face the reality of the consequences of their behaviors and misjudgments.

    Will physicians devoid of a moral compass, the private health insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical industry ever face the consequences of their “behaviors and misjudgments?” No less delusional and absurd, Dana Hassneiah, MD, writes in KevinMD:

    Most people in other jobs would probably not care to help a person who is indifferent and doesn’t want to help himself. But in medicine, your knowledge and morals make you the desperate person in the encounter.

    These superior morals were on display in the Covid vaccine propaganda video where doctors tell patients to “Just grow the f**k up and get the vaccine,” an obscenity emblematic of the growing push towards severing ties with the Hippocratic Oath.

    Embedded in Faucism are three cults: the Cult of Psychiatry, the Church of Vaccinology, and the Branch Covidians. These branches of American pseudo-medicine inhabit a world of authoritarianism, zealotry, and unreason, and are anchored in a deep-seated contempt for informed consent and the oath to do no harm. Just as Europeans who were suspected of deviating from a once supremely powerful church were labeled heretics, necromancers, and accused of witchcraft and sorcery, those that have the temerity to question the pharmaceutical priesthood are denounced as “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vax,” and “anti-science.” Whether it be Wahhabism, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Nazis, or the Christian fundamentalists of 16th and 17th century Europe, tyranny needs a dogma, and the rapacious corporatization of medicine coupled with the neoliberal belief in the infallibility of the liberal media have spawned Faucism.

    The Cult of Psychiatry is grounded in despotism and dogmatism, as virtually all of the diseases in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) can neither be scientifically tested nor proven. (Consider how depraved a physician would have to be to genuinely believe that “oppositional defiant disorder” is a real medical diagnosis). The more mental illnesses are invented, the more psychiatrists are able to create drug addicts for the pharmaceutical industry. Undoubtedly, there are sinister elements within the intelligence services that are delighted with this Huxleyan state of affairs. While there will always be some good people in psychiatry such as Peter Breggin, MD, the field is infested with sociopaths that regard every human emotion as a disease. Indeed, the Britney Spears tragedy offers a harrowing example of psychiatric sadism and cruelty.

    When a new vaccine is in production, one should always ask three questions: Is the vaccine necessary? Is it safe? And is it efficacious? The Church of Vaccinology is founded on the notion that every vaccine is necessary, safe, and effective, and history has repeatedly shown this to be a myth going back to the Cutter Incident. Since vaccination constitutes a significant medical intervention which poses an element of risk, why should a vaccine be produced for an illness which is treatable? And if vaccines are unfailingly innocuous, why is there a need for coercion? Alas, wherever there are insatiable pharmaceutical cabals one is sure to find marketing masquerading as science.

    The Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) granted for the mRNA vaccines is contingent on there being no treatments for Covid. Yet this claim is fallacious, as Ivermectin (see herehere, here and here) and Hydroxychloroquine (see hereherehere, here and here) have indeed shown efficacy in the treatment of COVID-19, particularly if these regimens are deployed early in the disease process. Moreover, unlike with the mRNA vaccines, Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin have a strong safety profile, the former being approved by the FDA in 1955, and the latter being on the World Health Organization Model List of Essential Medicines. (The CDC’s website states that “Hydroxychloroquine can be prescribed to adults and children of all ages. It can also be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mothers”). Those who spurn the studies which demonstrate that Covid is treatable because this would contradict the pharmaceutical priesthood are no less indoctrinated than those who once insisted that the Earth couldn’t possibly go around the Sun because this contradicted the teachings of the church. Terrified of excommunication, the proselytized refuse to look through the telescope. They refuse to see.

    Unlike the mRNA hucksters, the physicians of the FLCCC Alliance and America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) have treated thousands of Covid patients and have real-world experience in successfully treating COVID-19. Does this mean that they will be able to save every life? No, it does not. There are Americans that die every year from influenza and pneumonia. Has that led to calls to turn the country into an enormous prison?

    The “vaccines” have not been proven to prevent transmission and there have been thousands of so-called “breakthrough cases.” In “Are vaccines driving the surge in new Covid infections?” Marco Cáceres points out that “In the UK, Israel, Chile and other countries with high vaccination rates, Covid infections among the fully vaccinated are outpacing those in the unvaccinated….” Israel’s Channel 13 has reported that in the Herzog Medical Center in Jerusalem the overwhelming majority of hospitalized Covid patients are fully vaccinated. Perhaps we can take delight in knowing what the vaccines have been proven to do: inflict staggering amounts of pain and suffering.

    It is likely that FDA, CDC, and NIH have known for quite some time about the efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine, as an article about SARS-CoV-1 appeared in Virology Journal titled “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread,” and was published in 2005. Of course, when science gets in the way of profit-making, one can always publish fraudulent papers which later have to be retracted. As Dr. Peter McCullough has repeatedly emphasized, the public health agencies instructed doctors to send patients home without treatment when they were sick with Covid, as opposed to establishing protocols for how to treat patients early and aggressively with drugs that were already FDA approved. How many thousands died as a result of this malfeasance?

    The 1976 swine flu vaccine program was terminated after it caused the death of dozens of Americans and gave hundreds of Americans Guillain-Barré syndrome. Data on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) indicate that there have been thousands of Covid vaccine deaths in the US, and yet the authorities continue with this unprecedented push to get the entire planet vaccinated. It is important to note that VAERS is notoriously dysfunctional and captures only 1% to 10% of the actual data. Interestingly, the CDC recently decided to slash the VAERS death toll for Covid vaccines from 13,068 to 6,018 citing “foreign reports.”

    Distinguished scientists and physicians such as Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, Dr. Ryan Cole, Dr. Sucharit BhakdiDr. Harvey RischDr. Mike YeadonDr. Roger HodkinsonDr. Tess Lawrie, and doctors Stephanie Seneff and Greg Nigh have expressed concern over the growing number of mRNA vaccine adverse events and the lack of long-term safety data. The cultlike notion that one must submit to the collective through masking and vaccination is antithetical to the principle of bodily autonomy and mirrors the sophistry used to defend female genital mutilation. It is also scientific hogwash, for if the vaccine confers immunity what difference does it make if one’s friends, colleagues, and neighbors are vaccinated or unvaccinated?

    Branch Covidian dogma mirrors the Nazi medical ethos, which maintained that any medical atrocity can be justified if done for the “greater good.” For instance, if an SS doctor were to place a Russian prisoner of war in a tub of ice water, monitor his vital signs and note how long it took for him to die, and then autopsy the body, all in an attempt to glean information that could ostensibly be used to aid German pilots and sailors, this would be justified by the medical community of the Third Reich as acceptable and executed within their medical guidelines. In this same vein, Branch Covidians would argue that the catastrophic impact of the lockdowns, the growing numbers of Covid vaccine deaths and injuries, and the deleterious consequences of the mask mandates are justified, as these measures represent inevitable collateral damage integral to “flattening the curve” and “preventing emergency rooms from being overwhelmed.” (A remarkable case of sophistry, particularly when one considers the fact that Ivermectin can be used prophylactically). According to Children’s Health Defense, “Nearly 67 million [Americans] lost work between Mar. 21 and Oct. 7, 2020.” And this, for a virus which is treatable and has a 99.7% survival rate! As the public health agencies of FDA, CDC, NIH, and NIAID (which should really be called corporate health agencies) have long fallen victim to regulatory capture, they have no incentive to impose stringent safety guidelines.

    In England, more minors have been lost to suicide than to “the coronavirus,” while thousands of American children have suffered serious adverse events from the experimental inoculations (see herehere, here, here and here), even as their risk of dying from Covid is almost statistically zero. Clearly, the Nuremberg Code is being egregiously violated, as EUA biologicals are by definition experimental. Bemoaning this deterioration of bioethical norms, one of the inventors of mRNA technology, Robert Malone, MD, writes in TrialSite News that “The Geneva Convention, the Helsinki declaration, and the entire structure which supports ethical human subjects research requires that research subjects be fully informed of risks and must consent to participation without coercion.”

    When a powerful pharmaceutical company is impatient to unleash a blockbuster drug they are invariably indifferent to safety, necessity, and efficacy. This apathetic attitude towards basic principles of medical ethics has been glaringly on display with regard to the overprescribing of benzodiazepines, the Vioxx disaster, the opioid epidemic, the psychotropic drug epidemic, anthrax vaccine (also an EUA), Gardasil vaccine, the 2009 Pandemrix vaccine for H1N1, and fen-phen, drugs and vaccines which have destroyed countless lives and some of which are still on the market. Bear in mind that the medical institutions that are responsible for these drug regulatory catastrophes – some of the worst in human history – are “the experts.”

    College students are generally kept in the dark about the many illegal wars of aggression, both covert and overt, that have been perpetrated by the CIA and the Pentagon. This is even more common with the indoctrination of military academy cadets and political science majors. Likewise, most medical graduates know nothing about the history of the pharmaceutical industry, rendering them incapable of placing contemporary events in their appropriate historical context. This intellectual amnesia explains how we ended up with an army of doctors that will happily hand out opioids, psychotropic drugs, benzodiazepines, and Covid vaccines as if they were gummy bears. Those among us that can no longer distinguish between real medical care, rooted in informed consent, the oath to do no harm, and medical scientific integrity, and Nazi medical care, where the powers of modern medicine are weaponized and used to enslave, debase, and violate have lost their humanity.

    Parents are consistently told by pediatricians that every vaccine is “safe and effective” and that no risk-benefit analysis is needed. As the ghosts of history emerge from the shadows, these claims ring hollow. Granted, this may be true with regard to certain immunizations, but the dramatic surge in the number of mandatory vaccines on the CDC schedule, combined with the treasonous behavior of the public health agencies, and the broad immunity granted for the vaccine manufacturers, has brought us to a precipice from which we are staring at an abyss of tyranny. Indeed, the Church of Vaccinology isn’t interested in public health. They are interested in money and power.

    The notion of vaccine inviolability is laid to rest in Dr. Richard Moskowitz’s masterpiece Vaccines: A Reappraisal. Concluding chapter 9, he writes:

    Population-based surveys have shown a linear, directly proportional relationship between the number of vaccinations administered in the first year of life and the infant mortality rate, as well as the rate of hospitalizations and emergency room visits during the same period. Other surveys have shown that children vaccinated according to the CDC schedule exhibit higher rates of asthma and other childhood diseases and generally have poorer health than those who were ‘undervaccinated,’ while those children who were never vaccinated at all seemed by far the healthiest in a number of typical parameters.

    As discussed in The Virus and the Vaccine, by Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher, millions of Americans were given polio vaccines tainted with the monkey virus SV40, a contaminant initially dismissed as incidental by our public health agencies, but which was later shown to be oncogenic. There is also the unresolved yet compelling hypothesis of Edward Hooper, laid out in his tome The River, where he argues that the HIV pandemic began when the CHAT oral polio vaccine was deployed in the Belgian Congo, an apartheid state, and that chimpanzee kidneys contaminated with SIV, the cousin to HIV, were used in this process, meaning that the origins of HIV would be iatrogenic. Nevertheless, we mustn’t listen to heathens like Hooper who “spread misinformation,” are likely working for the Russians, and are possibly even terrorists.

    The totalitarian mentality of the medical establishment is evidenced not only by their lack of humanism and compassion, but by their disdain for checks and balances. Consider the bizarre language on the CDC’s website, where they repeatedly speak of “orders” that they allegedly have the authority to hand down. And who, pray tell, do they take “orders” from? As Senator Ronald Johnson pointed out in his discussion with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in affiliation with Children’s Health Defense, the government’s response to SARS-CoV-2 has been marked by a dangerous censorship and a growing antipathy towards openness and debate.

    The term “anti-vaxxer” is designed to disparage and denigrate those who reject biofascism. In actuality, these people are “pro-informed-consenters.” (Were those who expressed outrage over thalidomide-induced teratogenesis “anti-drug?”) They also resent the fact that the drug companies cannot be sued should their vaccines inflict long-lasting harm, which has been the case in the US since the passage of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, a dastardly piece of legislation which gave the drug companies permission to use children as laboratory ferrets. Furthermore, the drug companies have liability protection for any adverse event caused by a Covid vaccine under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP), providing the pharmaceutical industry with multiple layers of immunity. The drug companies were afforded no liability protection for opioids and Vioxx, yet when it comes to vaccines where they are indemnified “they suddenly find Jesus,” as Robert Kennedy Jr. is fond of saying.

    For decades, informed consent has been under a sustained and ruthless assault. From threatening to call Child Protective Services should parents not want their children on psychotropic drugs, to failing to communicate the dangers of opioids and benzodiazepines, to practice pelvic exams performed on anesthetized patients by trainees, to the imposition of unwanted observers during physician office visits, to the violation of do-not-resuscitate orders, to the nondisclosure of long-term chemotherapy side effects, to the growing list of mandatory vaccines of dubious safety and efficacy, informed consent is being systematically and methodically dismantled. The mask mandates, lockdowns, and the relentless pressure to participate in a dangerous medical experiment are merely a perpetuation of this barbarism. Moreover, masks and vaccines are inextricably linked, for if a restaurant, bar, library, museum, school, or workplace has the power to deny you entry due to being unmasked then they will have the power to deny you entry should you be unvaccinated (an unfolding reality in New York City), as a critical precedent for medical martial law has been established.

    As pediatrician and pulmonologist Sterling Simpson, MD, pointed out in his interview with The Last American Vagabond, the majority of masks people are using are not FDA approved, which underscores the fact that they do not constitute a real medical device. In other words, the risks, such as extreme isolation, sensory deprivation, mass hysteria, traumatized children (some of whom are showing signs of cognitive impairment), and people becoming acidotic, can easily outweigh the benefits. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test is likewise not FDA approved. McBride and Locricchio write for The Defender:

    All COVID vaccines, COVID PCR and antigen tests, and masks are merely EUA-authorized, not approved or licensed, by the federal government. Long-term safety and efficacy have not been proven.

    EUA products are by definition experimental, which requires people be given the right to refuse them. Under the Nuremberg Code, the foundation of ethical medicine, no one may be coerced to participate in a medical experiment. Consent of the individual is ‘absolutely essential.’

    To underscore the dangers of rushing a vaccine to market in under a year, it took Sanofi Pasteur twenty years to create the dengue vaccine, Dengvaxia, which ultimately led to antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a phenomenon whereby vaccination inadvertently facilitates viral replication. The formalin-inactivated (FI) Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) vaccine used in the 1960s is another example of ADE. Dr. Malone and Doctors for COVID Ethics have warned that this very scenario could unfold with the mRNA vaccines. (A new vaccine for RSV is expected to be extremely profitable and pharmaceutical companies are presently jockeying for position). Perhaps it is those who are responsible for pushing inadequately tested vaccines that are responsible for “spreading misinformation” and “stoking vaccine hesitancy.”

    If a government can force you to take an experimental drug, what will prevent them from forcing you to have exploratory brain surgery, a tracheotomy, or gender reassignment surgery? The Nazification of American medicine is magnified tenfold in the public schools, where sorcery has usurped science and the three death cults are bludgeoning minds, bodies, and spirits, and doing so in an environment of brutality and unmitigated lawlessness.

    The interminable fearmongering about all the different variants is simply a more rabid and maniacal version of what precipitated the 1976 swine flu, 2003 smallpox, and 2009 H1N1 vaccination programs. Keep that in mind the next time you’re told to “follow the science.” Another preposterous canard being parroted by the media is that naturally acquired immunity is somehow inadequate and pales in comparison with vaccine-induced immunity. As Dr. Charles Hoffe has pointed out, patients that have immunity for SARS-CoV-1 have immunity for SARS-CoV-2, despite the fact that there is a 20% difference between these two viruses, while the different Covid variants have less than a 1% difference between them.

    Can any amount of money restore fulfillment and tranquility to a perfidious soul? Let us reflect on the words of Imogen in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline:

    Thus may poor fools
    Believe false teachers: though those that are betray’d
    Do feel the treason sharply, yet the traitor
    Stands in worse case of woe. (III.iv.)

    A collection of clowns, witch hunters, Eichmanns, and snickering snake oil salesmen, the Branch Covidians, together with the Church of Vaccinology and the Cult of Psychiatry, are hammering away at two of the most vital, indispensable, and irreplaceable pillars of democracy: informed consent and the First Amendment.

    As relationships crumble and the pressure to succumb to the primordial darkness grows, the chasm inexorably widens between the moral and the amoral, the sentient and the nonsentient, the wise and the wicked. Should the citadel of liberty fall to the hordes of Faucism, we will descend into a long and terrible night before our descendants reclaim its resurrection.

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  • Nuclear Weapon Test, Bikini Atoll, 1954

    In 2020, Harvard University’s T. C. Chan School of Public Health began a five-year study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, that will examine the connection between early life exposure to toxic metals and later-life risk of neurological disease. A collaborator with Harvard, the Radiation and Public Health Project, will analyze the relationship of strontium-90 (a radioactive element in nuclear weapons explosions) and disease risk in later life.

    The centerpiece of the study is a collection of nearly 100,000 baby teeth, gathered in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information.

    The collection of these teeth occurred during a time of intense public agitation over the escalating nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Soviet governments that featured the new hydrogen bomb (H-bomb), a weapon more than a thousand times as powerful as the bomb that had annihilated Hiroshima.  To prepare themselves for nuclear war, the two Cold War rivals conducted well-publicized, sometimes televised nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere—434 of them between 1945 and 1963.  These tests sent vast clouds of radioactive debris aloft where, carried along by the winds, it often traveled substantial distances before it fell to earth and was absorbed by the soil, plants, animals, and human beings.

    The hazards of nuclear testing were underscored by the U.S. government’s March 1, 1954 explosion of an H-bomb on Bikini Atoll, located in the Marshall Islands.  Although an area the size of New England had been staked out as a danger zone around the test site, a heavy dose of nuclear fallout descended on four inhabited islands of the Marshall grouping and on a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon—all substantially outside the danger zone—with disastrous results.

    Criticism of the nuclear arms race, and especially nuclear testing, quickly escalated.  Prominent individuals, including Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, and Benjamin Spock, issued spirited warnings.  New mass membership organizations arose, among them the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in the United States, the National Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons Tests (which morphed into the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) in Britain, and the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs.

    The public grew alarmed, particularly by the fact that strontium-90 from nuclear tests was transmitted from the grass, to cattle, to milk, and finally to human bodies—with special concern as it built up in children’s bones and teeth.  By the late 1950s, polls found that most Americans considered fallout a “real danger.”

    Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, emerged as one of the most trenchant and effective American critics, circulating anti-testing petitions signed by thousands of U.S. scientists and even larger numbers of scientists abroad.  Pauling charged that the nuclear bomb tests through 1958 would ultimately produce about 1 million seriously defective children and some 2 million embryonic and neonatal deaths.

    Determined to maintain its nuclear weapons program, the U.S. government was horrified by the popular uproar and anxious to suppress it.  U.S. intelligence agencies and congressional investigations were unleashed against groups like SANE and antinuclear leaders like Pauling, while U.S. information agencies and government officials publicly minimized the dangers of nuclear testing.  In a Life magazine article, Edward Teller, often called “the father of the H-bomb,” insisted that nuclear test radiation “need not necessarily be harmful,” but “may conceivably be helpful.”

    Even so, public concern grew.  In August 1958, Herman Kalckar, a biologist at the National Institutes of Health, published an article in the journal Nature, calling on public health agencies in multiple nations to engage in large-scale collection of baby teeth. Kalckar proposed testing teeth for strontium-90 from bomb fallout, as children are most vulnerable to the toxic effects of radioactivity.

    Washington University scientists recognized that a tooth study could change public policy. In December 1958, they joined with leaders of the Committee for Nuclear Information, a citizen group opposed to nuclear war and above-ground bomb tests, and adopted a proposal to collect and test teeth for strontium-90 concentrations.

    For the next 12 years, the Committee worked furiously, soliciting tooth donations through community-based institutions like schools, churches, scout groups, libraries, and dental offices. A total of 320,000 teeth were collected, and a Washington University lab measured strontium-90.

    Results clearly showed a massive increase in strontium-90 as testing continued. Children born in 1963 (the height of bomb tests) had an average of 50 times more than those born in 1951 (when large-scale tests began). Medical journal articles detailed results.  Information on the tooth study was sent to Jerome Wiesner, science advisor to President John F. Kennedy.

    Kennedy, already seeking a test ban treaty, was clearly influenced by the uproar over the fate of children.  In his July 1963 speech announcing the successful conclusion of test ban negotiations by the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, he argued that governments could not be indifferent to the catastrophe of nuclear war or to “children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs.”  The outcome was the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water.

    According to the ongoing tooth study, the average strontium-90 in baby teeth dropped by half in just four years after the test ban. With their goal apparently accomplished, the Committee on Nuclear Information and the University halted tooth collection and testing.  Soon thereafter, the Committee dissolved.

    Three decades later, Washington University staff discovered thousands of abandoned baby teeth that had gone untested. The school donated the teeth to the Radiation and Public Health Project, which was conducting a study of strontium-90 in teeth of U.S. children near nuclear reactors.

    Now, using strontium-90 still present in teeth, the Radiation and Public Health Project will conduct an analysis of health risk, which was not addressed in the original tooth study, and minimally addressed by government agencies.  Based on actual radiation exposure in bodies, the issue of how many Americans suffered from cancer and other diseases from nuclear testing fallout will be clarified.

    The post Children’s Teeth, Collected Decades Ago, Can Show the Damage of Nuclear Testing first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Lawrence Wittner and Joseph Mangano.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Exactly two years ago, I walked with my colleagues from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research through the Camp Marielle Vive (‘Marielle Lives’) outside of Valinhos in the state of São Paulo, Brazil with a great sense of déjà vu. The camp resembles so many other communities of the desperately poor on our planet. The United Nations calculates that one in eight people on our planet – one billion human beings – live in such precariousness. The homes are made of a jumble of materials: blue tarpaulin sheets and bits of wood, corrugated iron sheets and old bricks. A thousand families live in Camp Marielle Vive, named after the Brazilian socialist Marielle Franco, who was assassinated in March 2018.

    Camp Marielle Vive is not an ordinary ‘slum’, a word with so many negative connotations. The mood in many slums is desolate, criminal gangs and religious organisations providing them with fragile social glue. But Camp Marielle Vive exudes a different aura. Flags of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) are everywhere. The residents give off a quiet and friendly dignity, many of them wearing t-shirts or caps from their organisation. They have an air of preparation: prepared to defend their camp from eviction by the local authorities and prepared to build a genuine community for themselves.

    Community kitchen at Camp Marielle Vive, 2019

    At the centre of the camp is a community kitchen where some of the residents eat their three meals. The food is simple but nutritious. Nearby is a small clinic that is visited by a doctor once a week. Outside the homes are flower beds and vegetable gardens. The municipal authorities of the adjoining town stopped allowing the school bus to pick up children from the camp and transport them to the town’s school. As parents struggled to get their children to school every day, Camp Marielle Vive built an on-site classroom for after-school activities, which has continued during the pandemic.

    Tassi Barreto of the MST told me in early August 2021 that the camp has had no deaths to COVID-19 because they have ‘taken firm action to avoid the spread of infection’. The local municipality denied the camp water, which is – as Barreto says – ‘a human rights crime’. The residents continued developing their collective work, strengthening the community kitchen and the community health centre, and advancing agroecological production in the vegetable garden, which is built in the shape of a mandala. The garden has been so productive that the camp has been able to sell baskets of produce in the nearby cities of Valinhos and Campinas.

    The classroom sits in a prominent part of Camp Marielle Vive. But, Barreto told me, ‘the children and young people of school age had great difficulty because there were no face-to-face classes [at the municipal school] and there were virtual activities in which they could not participate’. The camp’s leadership had to innovate: worksheets had to be printed and distributed to the students each fortnight and – since the public school teachers could not review them – the camp turned to educators from the UNICAMP, a nearby public university, to supervise their work. Education for the children has been a serious challenge.

    From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research comes a dossier, CoronaShock and Education in Brazil: One and a Half Years Later (August 2021), that goes into depth about the crisis of public education as a result of the pandemic. Our dossier cites a UNICEF study that shows that, by the end of 2020 in Brazil, roughly 1.5 million children and adolescents had abandoned their studies and 3.7 million were formally enrolled but were unable to access remote classes.

    The United Nations estimates that 90% of students across the world – 1.57 billion children – were unable to attend in-person schooling during the length of the pandemic, many of them told to go online. However, a recent UNESCO study shows that half of the world’s population does not have an internet connection. That’s 3.6 billion people with no internet access. According to the study, ‘At least 463 million or nearly one-third of students globally cannot access remote learning, mainly due to a lack of online learning policies or lack of equipment needed to connect from home’. Half the global population has no internet, and many of those who are able to access the internet cannot afford the technologies and tools required to participate in distance learning. The digital divide is even more sharp along gender lines: in the less developed countries, only 15% of women used the internet in 2019, compared to 86% of women in the so-called developed world.

    The turn to digital education has emboldened mega-corporations to enclose the commons of public education, making it harder and harder for the masses of children to have access to any education at all. Big business sees the opportunity clearly. As Microsoft explained, ‘The fallout from COVID-19, continuing advances in digital technology, and intensifying pent-up demand for student-centred learning have combined to present an unprecedented opportunity to transform education across whole systems’. As Bia Carvalho of Brazil’s youth movement (Levante Popular da Juventude) told us for our dossier, ‘For these businessmen, distance education is more profitable because it allows them to cut a part of their expenses and it gives them access to a much larger number of students. From the point of view of [looking at] education as a commodity, where they sell classes, distance education makes a lot more sense’. Public funds have already been used to underwrite the massive expansion of private digital education systems.

    Our dossier closes by highlighting three key issues: the need to increase investment in public educational infrastructure (while ensuring no stealth privatisation of education); the need to value, train, and support the professional development of teachers; and the need to struggle for a new educational project. The latter is of great importance. It asks questions about the purpose of education, which sets the stage upon which young people learn to ask questions about their society, about their values, about the discrepancy between their values and their social institutions, and about what one can do about that discrepancy. There is a direct line from the student protests that convulsed Chile in 2011, in South Africa in 2015, and India in 2015-16 to the sentiment in our dossier. This new educational project needs to be elaborated. It is a necessity.

    After-school classroom in Camp Marielle Franco, 2021 (photograph by the Communication Sector, MST–Sao Paulo)

    When we walked through the Camp Marielle Vive in 2019, two young women, Ketley Júlia and Fernanda Fernandes, joined us. They told us about their schooling, including the English classes they were taking at the camp’s classroom. In the past two years, Ketley joined other women in the camp as a key leader in her community. She coordinates the mandala garden, helps at the storeroom, and organises the donations of clothes and blankets, all of this despite fighting off challenges to her own health.

    ‘In the midst of the barbarism’, Barreto told me, ‘hope always has a way of appearing’. Ketley is now pregnant, ‘a joy that encourages us in our struggle’, Barreto said. Fernanda now lives in Camp Irmã Alberta near São Paulo, where she continues in the MST as she raises two children. Fernanda’s children and Ketley’s child provide hope, but they also need hope to be fashioned through a world with a humane and hopeful educational project.

    In 1942, the English poet, socialist, and pacifist Stephen Spender wrote ‘An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum’. The children in the slum school, Spender wrote, have a future ‘painted with a fog’, their maps ‘slums as big as doom’. We must break the windows of that slum, Spender wrote,

    And show the children to green fields, and make their world
    Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues
    Run naked into books the white and green leaves open
    History is theirs whose language is the sun.

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  • If you’ve been following any of my stories — from juvenile delinquency to street activism — you know by now that confrontation interactions with the NYPD were not uncommon in my life. I remember a time when my entire crew (ages 12 to 15) was hanging out in L.I.C. High School yard, watching a YMCA touch football game in the snow. The game was fun but the itch for trouble was calling. A group of us wandered off and we soon got into an epic snowball fight. My side was bombarding some of our friends who happened to be standing in front of a two-family house.

    Inevitably, some of our snowballs hit the house behind them and the owner came out. When he called us names, we pelted him and his house with snowballs until he went back in. Bored with this diversion, we returned to watching the game — not knowing this guy had called the cops. They arrived. He identified a few of us, including me. Sensing trouble, I went into little kid mode.

    Tears welled in my eyes as I was tossed into the back seat of the car. I pleaded my case, explaining how the snowball fight was just harmless fun and we sincerely didn’t mean to hit the house. To appease the homeowner, the cops drove me around the corner and let me out where he couldn’t see. One of my mother’s friends did see, however, and I was soon in big trouble with my parents. They were harder to convince than the cops that it was all innocent fun. 

    Not long after that, an encounter with the cops took things to a much different level. Me, Capo, Boch, and Buse had figured out how to get into the cigarette machine at the local taxi stand (more about that venue here). Each of us grabbed a carton or two. Since none of us smoked cigarettes, our plan was to sell them to the older guys. We were carrying our booty as we walked down 28th Street. A police car pulled up and the cops eyeballed us, as they always did, so we hid the cartons under our jackets. The car came to a stop and we tried to look calm. That’s when Boch dropped a carton and we panicked. We all dropped our cigarettes and took off running with the cop car eventually following us in hot pursuit — as they say. (Buse looked back and saw them first collecting the cartons of cigarettes.)

    The four of us reached Big Pri’s building at approximately the same time and followed Capo’s lead in climbing up the fire escape. We scrambled about three floors up when the cops found us. One of the cops got out of the car and yelled: “Stop!” Buse and Boch swore he drew his gun but I can’t vouch for that. But hey, it sure does spice up this story to believe he did, huh? One thing for sure: He loudly warned us to stop.

    We stopped… for about two seconds and then we continued up, faster than ever. Big Pri let us in his fourth-floor apartment but herded us out the front door and into another apartment one flight down. We hid out in closets and under beds while the cops questioned some of the tenants. They didn’t bother going door-to-door. The fact that they were able to recover all the stolen cigarettes probably worked in our favor. By the time we exited the building, one at a time, about 10 minutes apart, the coast was clear (as they also say). Take-home message: Cigarettes really can be hazardous to your health. 

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