Category: Media

  • The royal family in Saudi Arabia has been routinely murdering people who are critical of the regime on social media, and a new lawsuit claims that Twitter, under the leadership of Jack Dorsey, was made aware that Saudis had actually infiltrated the company to send information about critics so the government could arrest them. Mike Papantonio & Farron […]

    The post Jack Dorsey Allowed Saudi Dictator To Infiltrate Twitter appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • MEDIAWATCH: By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter

    Aotearoa New Zealand’s public television broadcaster TVNZ is planning significant cuts to content production, programmes and operational spending in response to commercial clients’ reduced spending on advertising.

    Future projects are under review and pay rises for executives and top-earning staff have also been scrapped at the state-owned broadcaster.

    Staff were informed of the changes in a memo and video address today from acting chief executive Brent McAnulty.

    The memo says senior executives have identified “all the possible cost savings opportunities we have” in recent weeks.

    “Content budgets have been reduced, both for local production and international content. Remuneration reviews have been cancelled for our exec team and our other highest-earning employees,” it said.

    “There have been some really tough calls to make here, but we need to live within our means,” McAnulty told staff.

    “All projects are being reviewed to decide whether they should continue, be paused, or be cancelled for this financial year,” the memo said.

    Digital technology overhaul
    TVNZ currently has a tender out for a major overhaul of its digital technology and internet infrastructure.

    “We’re also putting tighter controls on capital expenditure and we’re looking at how we can reduce casual and contractor labour costs,” the memo said.

    “The TV advertising market is tough right now, and as the biggest player we are being impacted,” McAnulty told staff in today’s memo.

    “Local businesses have been reducing their advertising spend because of the economic conditions, and uncertainty in the lead up to the election,” it said.

    The memo urges staff to use up their leave this year.

    Recruitment for vacant roles is “paused until 2024” and TVNZ is “choosing not to fill some other vacant roles” and will defer the starting dates for some roles.

    TVNZ has more than 750 staff. More than 300 of them earn more than $100,000 a year.

    Annual allowance dropped
    An annual allowance of $350 paid to all staff — which was effectively a covid-19 relief initiative — will not be paid this year.

    TVNZ has “paused” all travel for 2024 except “business-critical travel related to newsgathering, commercial clients and content negotiations”.

    TVNZ will also spend less on social media and online marketing and promotion and market research, according to the memo.

    “We’re pausing all internal events — though we’re still hopeful that we’ll have Christmas celebrations in our three main offices,” the memo said.

    TVNZ reported revenue of $180.3 million in the six months to December 2022, but forecast a loss of $15.6m in the 2023/24 financial year.

    The broadcaster has previously signalled that it may need to respond to financial difficulties in the near future.

    TVNZ’s most recent Statement of Intent (pdf) says alignment of revenues and costs was under “increasing pressure”.

    A ‘dynamic approach’
    “We’ll adopt a dynamic approach to the allocation of business resources between investing to sustain our core TV business and accelerating the growth of our future online business. The stronger the commercial performance of our core business, the more actively we’ll be able to invest in shaping our future,” the document says.

    Brent McAnulty assured TVNZ staff in today’s memo that TVNZ still had a strong share of television audience and revenue and its online platform TVNZ+ had an “impressive growth trajectory.”

    Previous CEO Kevin Kenrick persuaded the government in 2019 to allow TVNZ to effectively forgo dividends to the Crown to allow it to invest in programmes and digital services.

    This angered rival commercial media rivals who could expect no such backstop, while also competing with offshore-owned streaming services as well other broadcasters for audience and revenue.

    TVNZ has invested heavily in TVNZ+ and recently launched live sport on the platform after securing rights held by Spark Sport until it ceased in July.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

  • Free speech advocate Hisham Kassem sentenced for defaming former minister Kamal Abu Eita

    A court in Cairo has sentenced a former newspaper publisher, free speech advocate and rights activist to six months in prison in a trial observers say constitutes an attack on a leading critic of the Egyptian state.

    Hisham Kassem, the former publisher of Al Masry Al Youm newspaper, received six months in detention and a fine of 20,000 EGP (approximately £523) for slandering and defaming Kamal Abu Eita. Abu Eita is a former minister and current member of Egypt’s presidential pardon committee, tasked with granting clemency towards some of the tens of thousands of detainees in the Egyptian prison system.

    Continue reading…

  • Corporate law firms have taught their wayward corporate clients how to use accretions of privileges and immunities to ward off or wait out the most devastating books, documentaries and media exposés. Corporate P.R. firms know that the media doesn’t follow the efforts of civic advocacy groups as a regular beat. Feature exposés are prime candidates for big journalistic awards like the Pulitzer Prizes. Reporters usually do not get awards for covering ongoing reform efforts, which require consistent media coverage to put heat on hesitant lawmakers or prosecutors – say on the push to make Congress increase corporate accountability.

    Here are some current examples of exposé-proof corporate crimes and outrages.

    1. Massive billing fraud, especially in the healthcare industry, has become a major contributor to the GDP. It probably exceeds one trillion dollars annually with healthcare over-billing amounting to at least $360 billion this year alone. The New York Times and other papers have written numerous page-one articles exposing raw gouging by hospitals. Nonetheless, the industry continues to expand its computerized, fraudulent overcharging year after year.
    2. Health insurers (such as Cigna) have been exposed for denying claims without even looking at the patient’s medical records. Hospitals are still charging uninsured patients higher prices than insured patients.
    3. Wage theft amounts to about $60 billion a year according to reports by the Economic Policy Institute. Despite exposés, corporations regularly rip-off low-wage workers.
    4. Huge fines are assessed against the reckless promotion of drugs by Big Pharma and chain pharmacies, while opioid-caused deaths in the U.S. are hitting record levels. No top corporate executive has been prosecuted to date.
    5. Years of documentation that over-prescription of antibiotics leads to antibiotic resistance, which causes about 100,000 deaths annually in the U.S. No matter, the toll continues to grow.
    6. Congressional hearings and reports document the giveaways allowed by the 1872 Mining Law, shielded from change ever since by the mining industry. The 1872 Act allows corporations, domestic or foreign, to discover hard rock minerals (e.g., gold, silver) on federal lands, and to mine and sell them without paying royalties to Uncle Sam. These corporate companies get the rights for this bonanza at a mere $5 an acre. Canadian Barrick Resources Corporation paid $5,190 for 1038 acres in Nevada and got the rights to $10 billion worth of our gold. Legalized theft by corporate plunder continues.
    7. Corporations contaminating drinking water with new deadly toxins regularly get headlines warning that PFAS are forever chemicals. However, companies continue to unleash silent violence that contaminates water and endangers people’s health.
    8. Congress’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) keeps publishing reports on boondoggle, wasteful weapons contracts by the Pentagon. Uh-huh, replies the Defense Department. But these contracts like the one for the dubious F-35 fighter aircraft keep humming along. The estimated cost for the F-35 program is $1.7 trillion!
    9. Boeing executives cut corners to produce a dangerous 737 MAX passenger plane that killed 356 people in two crashes in Indonesia (2018) and Ethiopia (2019). Very extensive, repeated reporting by mainstream media and Congressional hearings occurred. But Boeing is getting away with this crime, paying relatively small fines and tort claims that are insurable and deductible.
      Boeing’s top executives either got promoted or were given huge severance packages. Boeing also got a deferred prosecution deal with the U.S. Justice Department. So far, there has been very limited tort claim discovery and not one trial. Boeing’s defense law firms are making out like Croesus, the king of Lydia.
    10. The absence of big truck rear and side guards causes dozens of deaths a year. Over fifty years of disclosures coming from some members of Congress, the media and the families of the victims, also citing Western European requirements for these safety guards, have resulted in only flimsy rear guards and no side guards.

    If you wish to have more illustrations of the exposé-proof corporate state, I refer you to the joint project between Duke University School of Law and the University of Virginia Arthur J. Morris Law Library’s database. In addition, see the weekly Corporate Crime Reporter and my weekly columns at nader.org.

    The challenge is to stop these and other corporate abuses. The following Congressional oversight and action are needed.

    1. Both federal and state corporate criminal laws are too weak, and the budgets for the cops on the corporate crime beat are too minimal. Evasion of the law is routine. Just look at the vast sums of tax payments evaded by global corporations.
    2. Consumer protection laws are also weak and about 50 years out of date. Consumer advocates Harvey Rosenfield and Laura Antonini prepared an exhaustive model consumer protection bill last year, with 100 pages of backup justifications (Reboot Required: The Civil Justice System Has Crashed). Not a single state legislator has even introduced it in the U.S.
    3. Corporate campaign money and other insidious forces have either bought, rented or daunted our elected lawmakers, which produces dead zones in our local, state and national legislatures.
    4. Progressive candidates for public office fail to make corporate crime and corporate power campaign issues. Polls register over 70% of the American people believe corporations have too much control over their lives and a higher percentage want to crack down on corporate crooks. That’s a lot of liberal and conservative voters to mobilize. Unfortunately, candidates rarely talk about crime in the suites.
    5. These polls similarly do not prompt state and federal lawmakers to hold public investigatory hearings to inform the media and prod the public to demand action. In the 1960s and 1970s, hearings paved the way for consumer, environmental, and worker protection and freedom of information laws.
    6. Major public health groups and federal/state health departments are not making a national cause out of the 250,000 or more Americans dying in hospitals each year due to what a peer-reviewed Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Report termed “preventable problems in hospitals” (not counting clinics or physicians’ offices). Action here is long overdue.
    7. Finally, citizen groups and public health groups do not set their sights high enough. They should be pressing for structural corporate changes – such as the federal chartering of large corporations and upgrading law enforcement tools to combat corporate crime.

    Thomas Jefferson and other Founders believed our First Amendment would provide vehicles for a just society. Instead, an array of corporate power has taken away its wheels.

    Looking for your suggestions and civic energies, people. Send them to gro.lrscnull@ofni.

  • Pacific Media Watch

    A Radio New Zealand Pacific journalist has alleged that an Indonesian official attempted to both bribe and intimidate him following an interview at the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) leaders’ summit in the Vanuatu capital of Port Vila last month.

    The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and its affiliates, the Media Association Vanuatu (MAV) and the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) Indonesia, have condemned the attempted bribery and harassment of the journalist and urged the relevant authorities to thoroughly investigate the incident.

    On August 23, RNZ Pacific journalist Kelvin Anthony reported that a representative of the Indonesian government, Ardi Nuswantoro, attempted to bribe him outside Port Vila’s Holiday Inn Resort after Anthony conducted an exclusive interview with Indonesia’s Australian ambassador, Dr Siswo Pramono.

    According to Anthony, Nuswantoro had previously expressed the Indonesian government’s displeasure at RNZ’s coverage of ongoing independence efforts in West Papua, reported the IFJ in a statement.

    The journalist had advised him of the outlet’s mandate to produce “balanced and fair” coverage and was invited to the hotel for the interview, where he questioned Dr Pramono on a broad range of pertinent topics, including West Papua.

    Following the interview, Anthony was escorted from the hotel by at least three Indonesian officials. After repeatedly inquiring as to how the journalist was going to return to his accommodation, Nuswantoro then offered him a “gift” of an unknown amount of money, which Anthony refused.

    Anthony reported that he felt harassed and intimidated in the days following, with Nuswantoro continuing to message, call, and follow him at the conference’s closing reception.

    Interview not aired
    RNZ chose not to air the interview with Dr Pramno due to the incident.

    In response to the claims of bribery and intimidation sent to the Indonesian government by RNZ, Jakarta’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Asia Pacific and African Affairs director-general Abdul Kadir Jailani said, “bribery has never been our policy nor approach to journalists . . . we will surely look into it.”

    RNZ Pacific journalist Kelvin Anthony
    RNZ Pacific journalist Kelvin Anthony . . . “harassed” while covering the Melanesian Spearhead Group leaders’ summit in Port Vila last month. Image: Kelvin Anthony/X

    In a September 6 interview, New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins reiterated his government’s commitment to press freedom, stating the importance of free and independent media.

    Journalists and civil society in West Papua have faced increasing threats, restrictions and violence in recent years. Indonesian media has disproportionately reflected state narratives, with state intervention resulting in the censorship of independent outlets and effective barring of local or international journalists from Indonesian-administered Papua.

    In February, renowned Jubi journalist Victor Mambor was subject to a bombing attack outside his Jayapura home.

    MAV said: “The Media Association of Vanuatu (MAV) is concerned about an alleged bribery attempt by foreign officials at a Melanesian Spearhead Group regional meeting.

    MAV president Lillyrose Welwel denounces such actions and urges MAV members to adhere to the Code of Ethics, as journalism is a public service. She encourages international journalists to contact the association when in the country, as any actions that do not reflect MAV’s values are not acceptable.”

    AJI calls for ‘safety guarantee’
    AJI said:“AJI Indonesia urges the Indonesian government to investigate the incident with transparency. This action must be followed by providing guarantees to any journalist to work safely in Papua and outside.

    “The Indonesian government must also guarantee the protection of human rights in Papua, including for civilians, human rights defenders, and journalists.”

    The IFJ said: “Government intervention in independent and critical reporting is highly concerning, and this incident is one in an alarming trend of intimidation against reporting on West Papua.

    “The IFJ urges the Indonesian government to thoroughly investigate this incident of alleged bribery and harassment and act to ensure its commitment to press freedom is upheld.”

    Pacific Media Watch condemnation
    Pacific Media Watch also condemned the incident, saying that it was part of a growing pattern of disturbing pressure on Pacific journalists covering West Papuan affairs.

    “West Papua self-determination and human rights violations are highly sensitive issues in both Indonesia and the Pacific. Journalists are bearing the brunt of a concerted diplomatic push by Jakarta in the region to undermine Pacific-wide support for West Papuan rights. It is essential that the Vanuatu authorities investigate this incident robustly and transparently.”

    According to a CNN Indonesia report on September 6, Indonesian authorities denied the attempted bribery and harassment allegation.

    Jakarta's "denial" reported by CNN Indonesia
    Jakarta’s “denial” reported by CNN Indonesia. Image: CNN Indonesia screenshot APR
  • Pacific Media Watch

    A Radio New Zealand Pacific journalist has alleged that an Indonesian official attempted to both bribe and intimidate him following an interview at the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) leaders’ summit in the Vanuatu capital of Port Vila last month.

    The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and its affiliates, the Media Association Vanuatu (MAV) and the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) Indonesia, have condemned the attempted bribery and harassment of the journalist and urged the relevant authorities to thoroughly investigate the incident.

    On August 23, RNZ Pacific journalist Kelvin Anthony reported that a representative of the Indonesian government, Ardi Nuswantoro, attempted to bribe him outside Port Vila’s Holiday Inn Resort after Anthony conducted an exclusive interview with Indonesia’s Australian ambassador, Dr Siswo Pramono.

    According to Anthony, Nuswantoro had previously expressed the Indonesian government’s displeasure at RNZ’s coverage of ongoing independence efforts in West Papua, reported the IFJ in a statement.

    The journalist had advised him of the outlet’s mandate to produce “balanced and fair” coverage and was invited to the hotel for the interview, where he questioned Dr Pramono on a broad range of pertinent topics, including West Papua.

    Following the interview, Anthony was escorted from the hotel by at least three Indonesian officials. After repeatedly inquiring as to how the journalist was going to return to his accommodation, Nuswantoro then offered him a “gift” of an unknown amount of money, which Anthony refused.

    Anthony reported that he felt harassed and intimidated in the days following, with Nuswantoro continuing to message, call, and follow him at the conference’s closing reception.

    Interview not aired
    RNZ chose not to air the interview with Dr Pramno due to the incident.

    In response to the claims of bribery and intimidation sent to the Indonesian government by RNZ, Jakarta’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Asia Pacific and African Affairs director-general Abdul Kadir Jailani said, “bribery has never been our policy nor approach to journalists . . . we will surely look into it.”

    RNZ Pacific journalist Kelvin Anthony
    RNZ Pacific journalist Kelvin Anthony . . . “harassed” while covering the Melanesian Spearhead Group leaders’ summit in Port Vila last month. Image: Kelvin Anthony/X

    In a September 6 interview, New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins reiterated his government’s commitment to press freedom, stating the importance of free and independent media.

    Journalists and civil society in West Papua have faced increasing threats, restrictions and violence in recent years. Indonesian media has disproportionately reflected state narratives, with state intervention resulting in the censorship of independent outlets and effective barring of local or international journalists from Indonesian-administered Papua.

    In February, renowned Jubi journalist Victor Mambor was subject to a bombing attack outside his Jayapura home.

    MAV said: “The Media Association of Vanuatu (MAV) is concerned about an alleged bribery attempt by foreign officials at a Melanesian Spearhead Group regional meeting.

    MAV president Lillyrose Welwel denounces such actions and urges MAV members to adhere to the Code of Ethics, as journalism is a public service. She encourages international journalists to contact the association when in the country, as any actions that do not reflect MAV’s values are not acceptable.”

    AJI calls for ‘safety guarantee’
    AJI said:“AJI Indonesia urges the Indonesian government to investigate the incident with transparency. This action must be followed by providing guarantees to any journalist to work safely in Papua and outside.

    “The Indonesian government must also guarantee the protection of human rights in Papua, including for civilians, human rights defenders, and journalists.”

    The IFJ said: “Government intervention in independent and critical reporting is highly concerning, and this incident is one in an alarming trend of intimidation against reporting on West Papua.

    “The IFJ urges the Indonesian government to thoroughly investigate this incident of alleged bribery and harassment and act to ensure its commitment to press freedom is upheld.”

    Pacific Media Watch condemnation
    Pacific Media Watch also condemned the incident, saying that it was part of a growing pattern of disturbing pressure on Pacific journalists covering West Papuan affairs.

    “West Papua self-determination and human rights violations are highly sensitive issues in both Indonesia and the Pacific. Journalists are bearing the brunt of a concerted diplomatic push by Jakarta in the region to undermine Pacific-wide support for West Papuan rights. It is essential that the Vanuatu authorities investigate this incident robustly and transparently.”

    According to a CNN Indonesia report on September 6, Indonesian authorities denied the attempted bribery and harassment allegation.

    Jakarta's "denial" reported by CNN Indonesia
    Jakarta’s “denial” reported by CNN Indonesia. Image: CNN Indonesia screenshot APR
  • Penny Wong to announce the Albanese government’s new sanctions against those linked to the oppression of women and girls

    Australia will impose sanctions on Iranian state media for broadcasting forced confessions, with the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, vowing to take tougher action before the anniversary of Mahsa Jina Amini’s death in custody.

    Brushing off claims from the Coalition that the government has been slow to act, Wong will announce on Wednesday that she is introducing new sanctions against those linked to the oppression of women and girls.

    Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

    Continue reading…

  • Stuff

    New Zealand’s Stuff media group has joined other leading news organisations around the world in restricting Open AI from using its content to power artificial intelligence tool Chat GPT.

    A growing number of media companies globally have taken action to block access to Open AI bots from crawling and scraping content from their news sites.

    Open AI is behind the most well-known and fastest-growing artificial intelligence chatbots, Chat GPT, released late 2022.

    “The scraping of any content from Stuff or its news masthead sites for commercial gain has always been against our policy,” says Stuff CEO Laura Maxwell. “But it is important in this new era of Generative AI that we take further steps to protect our intellectual property.”

    Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) is the name given to technologies that use vast amounts of information scraped from the internet to train large language models (LLMs).

    This enables them to generate seemingly original answers — in text, visuals or other media — to queries based on mathematically predicting the most likely right answer to a prompt or dialogue.

    Some of the most well-known Gen AI tools include Open AI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E, and Google’s Bard.

    Surge of unease
    There has been a surge of unease from news organisations, artists, writers and other creators of original content that their work has already been harvested without permission, knowledge or compensation by Open AI or other tech companies seeking to build new commercial products through Gen AI technology.

    “High quality, accurate and credible journalism is of great value to these businesses, yet the business model of journalism has been significantly weakened as a result of their growth off the back of that work,” said Maxwell.

    “The news industry must learn from the mistakes of the past, namely what happened in the era of search engines and social media, where global tech giants were able to build businesses of previously unimaginable scale and influence off the back of the original work of others.

    “We recognise the value of our work to Open AI and others, and also the huge risk that these new tools pose to our existence if we do not protect our IP now.”

    There is also increasing concern these tools will exacerbate the spread of disinformation and misinformation globally.

    “Content produced by journalists here and around the world is the cornerstone of what makes these Gen AI tools valuable to the user,” Maxwell said.

    “Without it, the models would be left to train on a sea of dross, misinformation and unverified information on the internet — and increasingly that will become the information that has itself been already generated by AI.

    Risk of ‘eating itself’
    “There is a risk the whole thing will end up eating itself.”

    Stuff and other news companies have been able to block Open AI’s access to their content because its web crawler, GPTBot, is identifiable.

    But not all crawlers are clearly labelled.

    Stuff has also updated its site terms and conditions to expressly bar the use of its content to train AI models owned by any other company, as well as any other unauthorised use of its content for commercial use.

    Earlier this year The Washington Post published a tool that detailed all major New Zealand news websites were already being used by OpenAI.

    OpenAI has entered into negotiations with some news organisations in the United States, notably Associated Press, to license their content to train ChatGPT.

    So far these agreements have not been widespread although a number of news companies globally are seeking licensing arrangements.

    Maxwell said Stuff was looking forward to holding conversations around licensing its content in due course.

  • By Henry Pope

    Fiji’s government has taken the local leader of an influential South Korean doomsday sect into immigration custody after he and several other members of the Grace Road Church were declared “prohibited migrants” based on charges filed in 2018.

    Fiji had announced last Thursday that it was taking steps to deport Daniel Kim and the other sect members who had been detained.

    The passports of the sect members had been annulled by the Korean government in 2021, and Interpol “red notices” were issued against them.

    Fiji Home Affairs Minister Pio Tikoduadua revealed that all of this had been ignored by the previous repressive Fiji government led by former prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama, according to Fijivillage News and other local media.

    Tikoduadua said two sect members had already been deported while the deportations of another two were temporarily halted by a court order.

    One more member was still at large.

    A joint investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Organising Project (OCCRP) and KICJ-Newstapa last year exposed how the secretive Grace Road became an economic powerhouse in Fiji during the 16-year rule of Bainimarama, who lost power in elections last December.

    Reporters discovered that the church was able to thrive in Fiji despite Kim and other key members being wanted on international warrants.

    The investigation also uncovered how the church expanded its empire, which included a farm, restaurants, petrol stations, and supermarkets, all while receiving millions in state-backed loans.

    Grace Road’s spiritual leader, Kim’s mother Ok-joo Shin, was arrested at Seoul’s international airport in 2018 and imprisoned for offences, including assault, child abuse, and imprisoning church members.

    Around the same time, South Korean police attempted to bring Kim and other church members back on similar charges in Fiji but were forced to return empty-handed after a court blocked their removal.

    Republished with permission from the Organised Crime and Corruption Organising Project (OCCRP).

  • SUNDAY TIMES EDITORIAL: By The Fiji Times editor Fred Wesley

    If there is a rise in robberies in some of Fiji’s urban areas, then something must be triggering it. Unless this is the norm, and robberies are part and parcel of life in these urban centres, something is amiss, and we need to get to the bottom of what’s causing it.

    Residents along Raiwaqa’s Falvey Rd, we learn, are living in fear as robberies in the area have become an almost daily occurrence. Biren Pal, 61, a resident of the area for more than six decades, claimed robberies and assaults were a norm.

    Last Sunday, Mr Pal was robbed and, in the process, was severely injured in the face when thieves mobbed him before fleeing with his mobile phone. He was walking to a friend’s house when he was pushed to the ground and knocked unconscious.

    The Fiji Times
    THE FIJI TIMES

    He only regained consciousness when his friends took him to the hospital. Southern Police Commander SSP Wate Vocevoce confirmed receiving a complaint from Mr Pal.

    He said in the past four months crimes committed in the area included four cases of assault, one of burglary and property damage and one case of theft.

    In the Lagilagi area in the past six months, police recorded 14 cases of assault, one case each of theft, assault, intimidation, and trespass and two cases of property damage. Now such robberies and assaults on people are harmful for many reasons.

    Aside from the pain and suffering it causes people like Mr Pal, there is the negative impact on life itself for those living in the area for instance.

    Fear, uncertainty and doubt
    There is fear, uncertainty and doubt cast over the area because of the actions of thugs.

    The ripple effect on businesses in the area is felt by everyone connected to it.

    And we are talking about stores operating in the area, shoppers, staff of these stores and residents living in the area.

    There is a sense of fear that may stick to the area because of the robberies.

    People will eventually hesitate to travel through the area, to shop there, or visit family and friends for instance. It breeds doubt, with only the brave who are willing to take their chances, visiting it.

    When High Court judge Justice Daniel Goundar sentenced a 19-year-old casual labourer for stealing a mobile phone recently, he mentioned that muggings were prevalent.

    In the Western Division, we learn that theft, assault, and burglary were among the most reported crimes in the division in the month of August.

    Decrease in overall crime
    Divisional police commander West senior superintendent of police (SSP) Iakobo Vaisewa said while these criminal acts were at the top of the list, their division has noted a decrease in the overall crime rate though.

    “Even if the smallest item is stolen, they are investigated,” he said.

    Now that’s a good thing because how else are we supposed to fight this? We look up to the police force to put in place measures that will empower people to assist it in the war against crime.

    Fiji needs people who are willing to put their hands up and accept responsibility for their actions. In saying that, we look up to the powers that be to lead the way.

    However, it is obvious that we need a united front.

    The flip side to that is more crime, and more uncertainty, insecurity, fear and doubt! And those who assault and rob people need to get a life!

    This editorial was published in Fiji’s Sunday Times today under the title “We need to work together”. Republished with permission.

  • RNZ MEDIAWATCH: By Colin Peacock, Mediawatch presenter

    The New Zealand Herald copped criticism for publishing a front-page attack ad targeting the National Party leader this week — but it was far from the first time ads like it have appeared in print.

    Meanwhile, questions were asked about other coverage that looked like it might be taking sides as the official Aotearoa New Zealand election campaign period begins.

    “You’ve got to survive in the media. You got to take the ads,” Newstalk ZB morning host Kerre Woodham told listeners last Monday, explaining the the controversial Council of Trade Union ad labelling the National Party leader Christopher Luxon “out of touch and too risky”.

    “You’ve got to survive in the media. You got to take the ads,” Newstalk ZB morning host Kerre Woodham told listeners last Monday, explaining the the controversial Council of Trade Union ad labelling the National Party leader “out of touch and too risky”.

    It was clearly an election advocacy ad — and it was identified as such in the Herald. But as soon as the ad came through the NZME ad department, the senior editors there must have known devoting the front page to it would become a news story.

    The afternoon host at the Herald’s NZME stablemate NewstalkZB, Andrew Dickens, certainly thought so.

    “I think this is news. This is why I’m talking about it on the radio. I’m not involved with this decision.  . . but I think they need to write about it and say how they actually determine who gets the ‘wraparound’,” he told his listeners.

    Blue sticker ads
    The Herald top brass wasn’t keen on that, but election ads on the front page aren’t entirely unprecedented.

    A former Herald editor, Tim Murphy, pointed out the Weekend Herald has allowed the National Party to add detachable blue stickers late in previous campaigns.

    And once papers opened the door to wraparound front-and-back page ads for retailers (who paid a pretty penny for them during the covid-19 crisis), it was only a matter of time before someone selling political messages rather than fridges took up the space as well.

    The CTU ad was within the rules for political promotion by third parties. As long as they registered, they can spend the thick end of $400,000 on ads doing down political opponents if they want to.

    Gordon Campbell on scoop.co.nz said that apart from the front-page spot, there was nothing really novel about an ad criticising a party leader who was actively campaigning as the embodiment of his party’s policies.

    And while the CTU’s campaign also appeared on billboards and social media platforms the same day, it was its appearance on the front page of a paper obliged to cover the campaign fairly which raised eyebrows.

    “This will probably backfire on the Herald,” Andrew Dicken told his listeners, at the same moment one texted in to say he had cancelled his subscription to the Herald because of it.

    ‘False’ ads not acceptable
    Andrew Dickens told his listeners NZME radio stations had rules too — and could not accept ads that are “false, wrong, or lies or defamatory.”

    Newstalk ZB found that out back in 2019, when it ran a political ad in which Auckland mayoral candidate John Tamihere said no suburb would escape Auckland Transport’s “crazy plan” to cut the speed limits on Auckland roads.

    The Advertising Standards Authority said that claim was false and the campaign ad, which had run for two weeks, should be dropped.

    The New Zealand Herald reports Newstalk ZB's ads for John Tamihere's election campaign were judged to be misleading.
    Misleading Newstalk ZB’s ads for John Tamihere’s election campaign. Image: RNZ Mediawatch

    NZME told the Authority it had presumed the client’s script and figures provided were correct.

    “Our team has been reminded to be vigilant when accepting advocacy advertisements to avoid this from reoccurring,” NZME said.

    In other words, they promised to do fact checks before cashing cheques from people peddling political propaganda at election time.

    But at that time, the Weekend Herald had just published another controversial political ad all about Christopher Luxon.

    The half page ad showed former Prime Minister John Key morphing into Christopher Luxon in the style of Dick Frizzell’s famous “From Mickey to tiki” illustration.

    Luxon was not even a member of the National Party at that point, let alone a candidate, but the client for that ad turned out to be property tycoon Steven Brooks, who really wanted Luxon to be the next party leader.

    His involvement should have been declared on the ad, which had the appearance of unauthorised party political advertising.

    Ads they didn’t want

    The ad is a reworking of Dick Frizzell's well-known artwork "Mickey to Tiki" showing John Key's face transforming into Christopher Luxon's.
    This ad was a reworking of Dick Frizzell’s well-known artwork “Mickey to Tiki” showing John Key’s face transforming into Christopher Luxon’s. Image: Weekend Herald

    While that’s all history now, Newstalk ZB listeners on Monday were also phoning concerns about ads that the Herald wouldn’t print in the recent past.

    They were part of a campaign from the lobby group Family First, which our three biggest newspaper publishers all declined to run.

    Family First leader Bob McCoskrie has accused them of colluding to cancel the ad, which had the slogan: “What is a woman?” and the website address for a campaign declaring it was “time to push back” against gender self-identification.

    MoCoskrie said the ad departments of each publisher initially accepted the ad but editors subsequently decided they weren’t fit to print.

    But while the paper publishers exercised their right not to print the ads, they did go up on billboards in public.

    Last month the Advertising Standards Authority complaints board upheld a complaint about them, ruling the ad was “misleading and not socially responsible,” but only because the identity of the advertiser — Family First — wasn’t sufficiently clear for an advocacy ad.

    From today, September 10, until the day before the election we are in the official election period overseen by the Electoral Commission.

    During this time special rules and a separate dedicated code of broadcasting practice apply to what are known as “election programmes”, defined as radio or TV advertisements by or for a party or candidate which encouraged voters to vote in particular ways or for particular parties or people.

    Broadcasters and publishers will be paying extra attention to balance and fairness now, with the watchdogs running a fast-track process for complaints about seriously misleading claims and serious allegations.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

  • Today, we are witnessing the nudging (manipulation) of the population to accept a ‘new normal’ based on a climate emergency narrative, restrictions on movement and travel, programmable digital money, ‘pandemic preparedness’ courtesy of the World Health Organization’s tyrannical pandemic treaty, unaccountable AI and synthetic ‘food’.

    Whether it involves a ‘food transition’, an ‘energy transition’, 15-minute cities or some other benign-sounding term, all this is to be determined by a supranational ‘stakeholder’ elite with ordinary people sidelined in the process. An undemocratic agenda designed to place restrictions on individual liberty, marking a dramatic shift towards authoritarianism.

    In the 1980s, to help legitimise the deregulation-privatisation neoliberal globalisation agenda, government and media instigated an ideological onslaught, driving home the primacy of ‘free enterprise’, individual rights and responsibility and emphasising a shift away from the role of the state, trade unions and the collective in society.

    We are currently seeing another ideological shift: individual rights and freedoms are said to undermine the wider needs of society and the planet – in a stark turnaround – personal freedom is now said to pose a threat to national security, public health or the climate.

    As in the 1980s, this messaging is being driven by an economic impulse. This time, the collapsing neoliberal project.

    In the UK, poverty is increasing in two-thirds of communities, food banks are now a necessary part of life for millions of people and living standards are plummeting. Indeed, the poorest families are enduring a ‘frightening’ collapse in living standards, resulting in life-changing and life-limiting poverty).

    In the US, around 30 million low-income people are on the edge of a ‘hunger cliff’ as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away. In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US. Small businesses are filing for bankruptcy in the US at a record rate.

    The Bank of England’s chief economist, Huw Pill, says that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. This is similar to the response of Rob Kapito, co-founder of the world’s biggest asset management firm, BlackRock. In 2022, the unimaginably rich and entitled Kapito said that a “very entitled” generation of (ordinary working) people who have never had to sacrifice would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives.

    While business as usual prevails in Kapito’s world of privilege and that of major arms, energy, pharmaceuticals and food companies, whose megarich owners continue to rake in massive profits, Kapito and Pill tell ordinary people to get used to poverty and the ‘new normal’ as if we are ‘all in it together’ – billionaires and working class alike. They conveniently use COVID and the situation in Ukraine as cover for the collapsing neoliberalism.

    But this is part of the hegemonic agenda that seeks to ensure that the establishment’s world view is the accepted cultural norm. And anyone who challenges this world view – whether it involves, for instance, questioning climate alarmism, the ‘new normal’, the nature of the economic crisis, the mainstream COVID narrative or the official stance on Ukraine and Russia – is regarded as a spreader of misinformation and the ‘enemy within’.

    Although the term ‘enemy within’ was popularised by Margaret Thatcher during the miners’ strike in 1984-85 to describe the striking miners, it is a notion with which that Britain’s rulers have regarded protest movements and uprisings down the centuries. From the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 to the Levellers and Diggers in the 17th century, it is a concept associated with anyone or any group that challenges the existing social order and the interests of the ruling class.

    John Ball, a radical priest, addressed the Peasants’ Revolt rebels with the following words:

    Good friends, matters cannot go well in England until all things be held in common; when there shall be neither vassals nor lords; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.

    The revolt was suppressed. John Ball was captured and hung, drawn and quartered. Part of the blood-soaked history of the British ruling class.

    Later on, the 17th-century Diggers movement wanted to create small, egalitarian rural communities and farm on common land that had been privatised by enclosures.

    The 1975 song ‘The world Turned Upside Down’ by Leon Rosselson commemorates the Diggers. His lyrics describe the aims and plight of the movement. In Rosselson’s words, the Diggers were dispossessed via theft and murder but reclaimed what was theirs only to be violently put down.

    Little surprise then that, in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher used the state machinery to defeat the country’s most powerful trade union and the shock troops of the labour movement, the National Union of Mineworkers – ‘the enemy within’. She needed to do this to open the gates for capital to profit from the subsequent deindustrialisation of much of the UK and the dismantling of large parts of the welfare state.

    And the result?

    A hollowed-out, debt-bloated economy, the destruction of the social fabric of entire communities and the great financial Ponzi scheme – the ‘miracle’ of deregulated finance – that now teeters on the brink of collapse, leading the likes of Kapito and Pill to tell the public to get ready to become poor.

    And now, in 2023, the latest version of the ‘enemy within’ disseminates ‘misinformation’ – anything that challenges the official state-corporate narrative. So, this time, one goal is to have a fully controlled (censored) internet.

    For instance, US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) recently awarded Accrete a contract for Argus to detect disinformation threats from social media. Argus is AI software that analyses social media data to predict emergent narratives and generate intelligence reports at a speed and scale to help neutralise viral disinformation threats.

    Accrete AI is a leading dual-use enterprise AI company. It deployed its AI Argus software for open-source threat detection with the US Department of Defense in 2022.

    In a recent press release, Prashant Bhuyan, founder and CEO of Accrete, boasts:

    Social media is widely recognised as an unregulated environment where adversaries routinely exploit reasoning vulnerabilities and manipulate behaviour through the intentional spread of disinformation. USSOCOM is at the tip of the spear in recognising the critical need to identify and analytically predict social media narratives at an embryonic stage before those narratives evolve and gain traction. Accrete is proud to support USSOCOM’s mission.”

    ‍This is about predicting wrong think on social media. But control over the internet is just part of a wider programme of establishment domination, surveillance and dealing with protest and dissent.

    The recent online article ‘How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics’ notes that, on any given day, the average person in the US is monitored, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways.

    The authors of the article ask us to consider some of the ways the US government is weaponizing its surveillance technologies to flag citizens as a threat to national security, whether or not they have done anything wrong – from flagging citizens as a danger based on their feelings, phone and movements to their spending activities, social media activities, political views and correspondence.

    The elite has determined that the existential threat is you. The article ‘Costs of War: Peterloo’, written by UK Veterans for Peace member Aly Renwick, details the history of the brutal suppression of protesters by Britain’s rulers. He also strips away any notion that some may have of a benign, present-day ruling elite with democratic leanings. The leopard has not changed its spots.

    As we saw during COVID, the thinking is that hard-won rights must be curtailed, freedom of association is reckless, free thinking is dangerous, dissent is to be stamped on, impartial science is a threat and free speech is deadly. Government is ‘the truth’, Fauci (or some similar figure) is ‘the science’ and censorship is for your own good.

    None of this was justified. It only begins to make sense if we regard the COVID restrictions in terms of trying to deal with an economic crisis by closing down the global economy under cover of a public health crisis (see the online articles ‘What Was Covid Really About? Triggering a Multi-Trillion Dollar Global Debt Crisis’ and ‘Italy 2020: Inside Covid’s Ground Zero’ which outline how COVID policies can be explained by economic factors not health concerns).

    The economic crisis is making many people poorer, so they must be controlled, monitored and subjugated.

    The transitions mentioned at the start of this article along with the surveillance agenda (together known as the ‘Great Reset’) are being accelerated at this time of economic crisis when countless millions across the West are being impoverished. The collapsing financial system is resulting in an interrelated global debt, inflation and ‘austerity’ crisis and the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in history.

    As a result, the powers that be fear that the masses might once again pick up their pitchforks and revolt. They are adamant that the peasants must know their place.

    But the flame of protest and dissent from centuries past still inspires and burns bright. So, with that in mind, let’s finish with Leon Rosselson’s lyrics in reference to the Diggers movement (Billy Bragg’s version of the song can be found on YouTube):

    In sixteen forty-nine
    To St. George’s Hill
    A ragged band they called the Diggers
    Came to show the people’s will
    They defied the landlords
    They defied the laws
    They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs

    We come in peace they said
    To dig and sow
    We come to work the lands in common
    And to make the waste grounds grow
    This earth divided
    We will makе whole
    So it will be
    A common treasury for all

    Thе sin of property
    We do disdain
    No man has any right to buy and sell
    The earth for private gain
    By theft and murder
    They took the land
    Now everywhere the walls
    Spring up at their command

    They make the laws
    To chain us well
    The clergy dazzle us with heaven
    Or they damn us into hell
    We will not worship
    The God they serve
    The God of greed who feed the rich
    While poor man starve

    We work we eat together
    We need no swords
    We will not bow to masters
    Or pay rent to the lords
    We are free men
    Though we are poor
    You Diggers all stand up for glory
    Stand up now

    From the men of property
    The orders came
    They sent the hired men and troopers
    To wipe out the Diggers’ claim
    Tear down their cottages
    Destroy their corn
    They were dispersed
    Only the vision lingers on

    You poor take courage
    You rich take care
    The earth was made a common treasury
    For everyone to share
    All things in common
    All people one
    We come in peace
    The order came to cut them down
    We come in peace
    The order came to cut them down

  • By Doddy Morris in Port Vila

    Vanuatu’s newly elected Prime Minister, Sato Kilman, has spoken out on the importance of preserving freedom of speech while cautioning against its “misuse”.

    Kilman shared his concerns after his election as the country’s new leader on Monday evening.

    He cited instances where criticism had crossed a “red line”, raising alarm over the tone of recent political discourse.

    In his address, the Prime Minister addressed the need to uphold respect for Vanuatu’s traditions and Christian faith, including the importance of immediately stopping behavior that tarnished individuals’ reputations.

    Prime Minister Kilman acknowledged the commitment to safeguarding democracy in Vanuatu and the importance of adhering to constitutional and legal processes when considering changes to the nation’s governance structure.

    He noted the recent parliamentary session, which included a motion of no confidence as mandated by the Constitution.

    The Prime Minister voiced his disappointment at lawmakers themselves for violating the laws they had enacted.

    Investigating allegations
    He conveyed his commitment to addressing these breaches and investigating allegations of threatening gestures and bribery.

    Kilman said that the motion of no confidence was fundamentally about safeguarding democracy in Vanuatu.

    He assured the public that the new government would prioritise delivering essential services to the people.

    The Prime Minister expressed gratitude to all the political parties that supported the government’s change and acknowledged the customary practice during a government transition.

    He thanked Vanua’aku Pati president Bob Loughman and Iauko Group leader Marc Ati for their support in electing him as the Prime Minister.

    Kilman also commended members from other sides of the political spectrum who proposed candidates for the prime ministership and participated in the democratic process, even though the outcome did not favour them, saying that such participation upheld democratic values.

    Doddy Morris is a Vanuatu Daily Post reporter. Republished with permission.

  • It’s been well over a year now since the health scare dubbed the Covid-19 pandemic has had any widespread impact upon the lives of the vast majority of humanity. Since the “fog of war” has lifted, so to speak, there has been very little introspection regarding the knee-jerk authoritarianism imposed upon humanity in the liberal press or mainstream academia. Eerie parallels connect the panic stirred up during the health crisis with the reaction to 9/11. There is also plenty of circumstantial evidence of prior knowledge and pre-planning for both of these events. In their wake, mass hysteria, government propaganda, tyranny, censorship, and irrational belief systems spawned out of each, supported by ruling class interests and mass media mouthpieces.

    Although many policies related to the global war on terror and the pandemic certainly have fascistic and totalitarian impulses, there are key differences. Whereas the fascist and totalitarian rely on a single despot, and the marginalization of minority groups, postmodern tyranny operates according to the flows of late capitalism: diversity and inclusion are encouraged; power is spread through a corporate oligarchy, as well as political, military, and now medical hierarchies; and devastating economic and social effects are engendered by “absent causes”; i.e., abstract engines of capital: stock fluctuations, algorithms, financial instruments and various Finance/Insurance/Real Estate (FIRE) sector bubbles and scams. The public is predictably bewildered by a revolving cast of bureaucrats and elites with varying amounts of sociopathic and narcissistic traits; however, the personal attributes of the cast members are extraneous to capital accumulation, imperialism, and the liquidation of nature. It is fine to use phrases like fascist or totalitarian in response to government policies for rhetorical effect; however, most Americans do not feel that way or use that terminology, which harkens back to a simpler era of boot stamping. We are rather enmeshed in a dictatorship of capital.

    A related aspect of what we may call postmodern tyranny is the absence of metanarratives. The establishment props up whatever narrative suits their interest in the moment, but is able to cast them off at the first serious grumblings from the public. From about 2001-2011, the global war on terror dominated; from 2011-2016, it was “regime change” in Syria and Libya with a little ISIS and feigned horror at Russia taking Crimea sprinkled in; from 2016-2020, the overblown Russiagate connection; from 2020-2022, Covid-19; and now the Ukraine-Russia war, in which we are told NATO and the US are completely innocent allies who did not start, provoke, and manipulate the geopolitical chessboard going back decades, and who only want to assist the helpless Ukrainians.

    Yet after two years of being subjected to the tyrannical orders of an authoritarian medical panic orchestrated by the ruling classes, transnational political puppets, as well as the establishment medical “experts” who espoused fraudulent and laughable claims over and over, people worldwide are waking up to the health scare as well as the US proxy war in Ukraine. There are many striking similarities between the 9/11 false flag attack and the Covid-19 global health freak-out. Both events led to mass hysteria and a globalized form of ostrich syndrome, where denial and collective hallucination became the norm, paving the way for deeper imperial tyranny and mass obedience. Recently, many who supported government policies and narratives including lockdowns, travel bans, vaccine mandates, and health passports are asking for “Pandemic Amnesty” regarding their panic-inducing and tyrannical behavior; and admitting they were dead wrong, even as they championed ridiculous and deadly policies and demonized anyone who tried to stand in their way.

    Revisiting the “Catalyst”

    The parallels between government reactions to 9/11 and the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic are uncanny. Prior to 9/11, a sizable chunk of US citizens would not have put up with domestic mass surveillance. Similarly, prior to the health crisis of 2020, populations would have been very skeptical of mandatory lockdowns, absurd masking rules, and coercive vaccine mandates and propaganda; as well as blocking off access to travel, public spaces, and businesses with vaccine passports. Most interpret this as government exploiting a crisis, rather than governments’ prior knowledge and pre-planning of the events. However, from the start, the ready-made, manufactured hysteria and propaganda suggests a collusion of military-intelligence, industrial, financial, and medical forces of industry and government.

    The economic indicators had been blinking red for months before even January of 2020, going back to the repo crisis of September 2019. Quoting an investor in CNBC from March 2020:

    The virus was the catalyst but it’s not the cause,’ said Christopher Whalen, founder of Whalen Global Advisors. ‘Both bonds and equities were inflated rather dramatically by our friends at the Fed. You’re seeing the end game for monetary policy here, which is at a certain point you have to stop. Otherwise you get grotesque asset bubbles like we saw, and the engine just runs out of fuel.’ [Emphasis mine]

    Reuters concurs, with a major figure at the Fed blurting the quiet part out loud: “Pandemic aid was also ‘banking bailout‘”. The liberal/left site The Intercept sums up the game quite well, explaining that the CARES Act of March 2020 allows for:

    Direct purchases of corporate debt — the first nongovernment bond-buying in the Fed’s history — would now be allowed. Companies have swelled their borrowing in recent years, and experts have identified this as a source of serious economic risk. A sudden shock like the pandemic that wiped out revenues would not only cause bankruptcies, but also accelerate bond defaults, broadening stress throughout the financial system.

    Further on in the piece, the author notes how the CARES Act calls for an “Exchange Stabilization Fund”. Worth 454 billion, the money is leveraged just like a major bank, allowing for:

    A $4.5 trillion slush fund would be created, equity markets ballooned. The total value of the stock market cratered to 103 percent of GDP, about $21.8 trillion, on March 23. By April 30 it was back to 136.3 percent of GDP, or $28.9 trillion. By that metric, $7.1 trillion in stock market wealth has been created in that period.

    In other words, the US saw the writing on the wall coming from China: the economic slowdown and shuttering of factories which began in January 2020 was finally affecting the US stock market, which had cratered by mid-March 2020. Only the exaggeration of a pandemic, a sloughing off of millions of jobs, and new spigots opening for the banking sector, would allow for corporations to maintain profitability. Debt restructuring was inevitable and the only way to accomplish this was to railroad legislation through Congress, not a difficult task considering our lawmakers are essentially lobbyists for major multinational corporations. Large companies got billions in aid while workers and small businesses fell into ruin.

    Once the medical agenda was set, panic set in, and it turns out overcrowding nursing homes, firing one million medical workers and 40 million total US workers, blaring apocalyptic propaganda non-stop, censoring any talk of vitamin and supplement use, imposing stressful lockdowns, and turning patients away from doctors can have an effect on worldwide mortality. Hardly anyone in the medical community was willing to confront those inconvenient truths, and those that did were censored further.

    It was known very soon after March 2020 what the infection fatality rate would be: a very low percentage, perhaps twice the rate from seasonal influenza. World elites did not care- they had an agenda in hand.  Regardless of the seriousness, capitalist elites wouldn’t have put 40 million Americans out of work and imploded the economy without a plan. And they had one ready-made: a 5 trillion dollar plan. Later on, US elites would not have advocated for coercive vaccine mandates – get the shot or lose your job – unless the word came down from the very highest echelons of the elite, and although many, if not most, of the establishment bought it wholesale, it’s clear that the federal government was not going to leave states to make decisions based off the inputs of local county and state health officials. The word came down from on high; there certainly was obvious collusion to centralize and organize the Covid dogma, yes, a “conspiracy”, because asking the public to “trust the science” only takes you so far when conflicting and contradictory data about the danger of the virus is staring them right in the face.

    Given the unreliability of the initial tests for Sars-CoV-2, the deliberate use of too many PCR cycles per test, and the simple fact that it’s quite probable that multiple benign strains and variants of coronaviruses resulted in positive tests, it’s easy to see how a global pandemic was manufactured at the outset. From the very beginning, government propaganda emanating from the medical, military, and intelligence establishments were obviously coordinated, centralized, and directed to coerce and cow citizens into submission to a globalized, medical cult. Local and national news all parroted the same line, and a global groupthink biosecurity agenda was pushed to the forefront of society. It’s important to remember that before the declared emergency, to “quarantine” involved restricting access to the sick, not the whole of society.

    The language was not only Orwellian, but was written from scripts in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community. We were told to “shelter in place”, and doctors and nurses were on the “frontlines” of the fight. These were certainly designed to conjure images of war and create an impassioned atmosphere where dissent was marginalized, repeating the lockstep ideological conformity that occurred after 9/11. Phrases like social distancing and contact tracing entered the lexicon with barely a grumble. Hilariously, after more than a year of putting up with absurd and ever-changing laws, Britain toyed with the idea of offering its citizens “Freedom Passes” for those compliant enough to test frequently, their reward being the “freedom” to leave their own home.

    Canadian and British reporting confirms the unethical propaganda to coerce, scare, and guilt-trip civilian populations. One UK psychologist dubbed their government program “totalitarian”. Every mainstream news outlet in the US from March 2020 to February 2022 resembled a liberal version of the Sinclair broadcasting scandal from 2018, where the media conglomerate, which has a known right-wing bias, made 193 local news anchors repeat the same minute-long script, word-for-word, warning of “false news” and “fake stories” proliferating on social media and mainstream news, echoing Trump’s rhetoric at the time.

    Natural immunity was scoffed at, gathering in public was outlawed, visitors to households were forbidden, a vaccine was deemed to be the only response to the threat, and even health advocates who gave common-sense reminders to take vitamins and supplements were derided as unserious crackpots.

    A pertinent question to think about is this: given the uptick in supposed deaths from Sars-CoV-2 around March 2020, was a global upheaval of lockdowns, travel restrictions, limited movement outside one’s home, and caps on gatherings justified? With hindsight, many if not the majority of Americans now say no. However, the fact remains that many astute observers were calling the bluff of the World Health Organization, the CDC, and the medical and national security establishments from the beginning. Those voices were censored and silenced by a corporatist oligarchy bent on imposing pain on small business and the average citizen. Millions lost their livelihoods and small businesses never recovered.

    Another related question: how and why was the medical establishment so driven to combat an acute health threat caused by the virus Sars-CoV-2, but lies dormant when global poverty is clearly the number one cause of death in the world, followed by cancer and heart disease? We were led to believe the world could be turned upside down to fight a virus, yet nothing can be done to alleviate the leading causes of death, poverty: structural, chronic health issues are off the table, as they are caused by capitalism’s inexorable drive to profit, pollute, and impoverish the majority of the Earth’s inhabitants.

    Even the WHO admits that ¼ of total deaths today are attributable to “unhealthy environments”; i.e., conditions of extreme poverty, preventable disease, starvation, and malnutrition. In 2012 that was 12.6 million deaths per year, but the total is undoubtedly higher today, probably about 20 million.  The WHO also concedes about 2 million people in China alone die from air pollution every year, with about 6.7 million deaths per year worldwide. Where is the outcry and global mobilization to stop these much deadlier problems?

    Could there have been a more rational path, where people over the age of say, 60 or 65, the most likely to be affected, could have been shielded with voluntary plans to restrict interpersonal contact, as well as given access to the best care and medicine, while the rest of the world would be allowed to carry on without draconian measures? Surely medical professionals in the US could have developed a plan in conjunction with governments which allowed for freedom of movement, as in Sweden and Japan. The path, however, was blocked by the national security state in conjunction with unelected health authorities, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and global capitalists eager to institute repressive measures and rake in trillions from a restructuring of the world economy. The global economy needed a “Great Reset” to centralize and buy-up small businesses for pennies on the dollar, and the financial system was reeling going back to September of 2019. Disturbingly, this sequence of events is reminiscent of the last time the national security state remade the world, after 9/11.

    The Mask Comes Off

    Many leftists pointed out that the work stoppage from the lockdowns would allow us time to reflect on the inhumanity, overproduction, alienation, and exploitation inherent to capitalism. No doubt this was true. What most overlooked, however, was the ridiculousness of having the poor and working classes keep on working while the remote-working, white-collar privileged classes were offered a respite from the grind of work culture. There was, and is, an inherent inequality and power imbalance in having restaurants and drivers deliver packages and food to one’s doorstep while chastising those same people who refused to mask (even outdoors, absurdly).

    The middle and upper class guilty pleasures of living in a consumerist society cocooned at home with streaming TV and take-out overwhelmed the need for solidarity with the poor and working classes, who were in many cases unable and unwilling to shelter or get an experimental injection from a government that has treated the poor and minorities as human guinea pigs or worse for the entirety of its history.

    The felt need for security against an acute contagion, while resisting to grapple with the complexities and culpability of being part of a global-imperial-capitalist death machine, epitomized the Western Left position. Other than the obvious responses: “This is why we need universal health care!” etc., there was barely anyone talking about the number one cause of real pandemics: our proximity to inhumane and unsanitary animal agriculture. The collective, fear-based knee-jerk response was to inhumanely slaughter tens of millions of animals: estimates suggest more than 10 million hens, perhaps 5-10 million pigs, and 17 million mink were killed due to “overproduction”, and in the case of mink, to the possibility of the spread of Sars-CoV-2.

    A Brief Recap of our 21st Century Dystopia

    Twenty three years ago, many people around the world had high hopes as a new millennium dawned. The year 2000 was ushered in, and to untrained eyes, the global outlook looked rosy. The Fukuyaman “end of history” narrative still dominated after nearly a decade of unopposed US dominance in world financial markets and military and political hegemony. There were no major wars among world powers and the global economy provided new avenues of wealth for the middle classes around the world.

    The party didn’t last long. It turned out that globalization, that catch-all term trotted out over and over by both liberal internationalists and conservative realists to defend the seemingly interminable reign of capitalists, had plenty of cracks in the foundation. The notion that Western states were “democratic republics” caring for citizens’ interests began to crumble. The diminishing returns of capitalism as well as brazen corporate and government corruption began to disrupt the confidence of the global middle classes. The consent of the governed could no longer be assured; and as the façade of democratic legitimacy collapsed, Western governments, headed by the US, began to look for a new ideological force to justify neoliberal capitalism.

    World events took a swift turn for the worse starting from the very first months of the new millennium. In March 2000 the dot-com bubble burst, with losses eventually reaching 1.75 trillion in the US alone; this rippled through the world economy. The total loss in market capitalization was estimated to be 5 trillion by the end of the recession in 2002. Over 2.2 million jobs were lost in the US and unemployment continued to climb into mid-2003.

    In November of 2000 the contested Bush-Gore election ran into a stalemate. A judicial coup in the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bush 5-4, effectively stopping the recount. There was relatively little public push-back, and the lack of any real resistance from the Democratic party machine solidified the coup, and the “Bush-Cheney junta”, as the late Gore Vidal called it, steamrolled into power.

    The true events of September 11th, 2001 may always remain partially shrouded in mystery, yet some tell-tale signs point to the obvious: a conspiracy in which the US government played an active role in orchestrating the sequence of events we call 9/11. Any cursory look at the “conspiracy theories” and the 9/11 truth movements’ findings shows the glaring holes in the official story. Examining and absorbing all the evidence leads to the inevitable conclusion- the events of 9/11 was a false flag, orchestrated by our own government, and the perpetrators are still at large, much like the JFK assassination.

    Most everyone over thirty remembers what came next, even though most are loath to recall. The Bush regime blamed Al Qaeda before the end of the night, news broadcasts showed the towers falling non-stop, and color coded terror alerts became our “new normal” (we’ll get to the next iteration shortly). An axis of evil was rolled out; any country who vaguely opposed US imperialism was put on the naughty list, and a new “crusade” was decreed, with explicit threats “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Shortly after, the mysterious anthrax attacks swept the nation, and captivated the US, even as it became crystal clear that the type of anthrax used was a highly weaponized version coming from a US biolab, which could only mean it was deliberately stolen and released by high elements within our own government.

    The state of emergency became normalized immediately. A new surveillance state was constructed, the Patriot Act and AUMF allowed for extra-judicial assassination, torture, and spy programs began to expand globally. Officially war was declared against Iraq and Afghanistan; unofficially, Special Forces and black ops spread to approximately 130 nations. The empire was expanding and on the move- especially in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa, where control over access to fossil fuels alongside the continuing supremacy of the petrodollar is paramount in maintaining global hegemony today.

    The Permanent State of Emergency/Exception

    Power loves catastrophe: the running theme here being that when non-natural disasters occur, Western governments quickly rally and conspire in order to procure quick profits, maintain control, and flex power over weaker nations.

    In our era, authoritarian regimes have argued for the permanent suspension of the rights of their own citizens, as well as human rights and international law. This concept was popularized by Giorgio Agamben in his 2005 book, State of Exception. Agamben uses the example of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty: the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception. By abrogating the rights of their own citizens in response to an emergency, both nominally democratic and dictatorial regimes can use the threat of future catastrophes to install permanent police states, declare martial law, and normalize what used to be considered extralegal into the framework of law in the name of national security.

    The imperial core settled on a tried and true model: programming the public to accept that every catastrophe caused by the capitalist global system is an emergency that must be responded to with an increasingly authoritarian society. Police state tactics, lifted from Nazi Germany, became normalized as the economic, political, and ideological forces backing the War on Terror saw little resistance from a mystified and fearful citizenry. This process is known as a state of exception, originally codified in law by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. A succinct definition can be found here:

    [The state of exception] defines a special condition in which the juridical order is actually suspended due to an emergency or a serious crisis threatening the state. In such a situation, the sovereign, i.e. the executive power, prevails over the others and the basic laws and norms can be violated by the state while facing the crisis.

    Nearly every major significant political flash point of the last twenty two years was used as an excuse to broaden and deepen the national security state and corporate rule. This process has effectively disempowered the western masses to such a degree that the majority of Western populations, including many in the middle classes, have effectively neo-feudal, debtor relationships to state and market forces.

    The author Naomi Klein described the new, globalized, neoliberal model quite well in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, where disaster capitalism becomes a force for “creative destruction”, leading entire continents into debt spirals with World Bank and IMF loans while at the same time militarizing and financializing Western economies to serve the interests of Wall Street and the Pentagon while destroying small businesses and parasitizing off the working classes.  Soon after, President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, said the quiet part out loud discussing the financial crisis, when he referred to the trillions in public money used to prop up our unregulated banking system. He blurted out:

    You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

    How can we define our time? Again, the phrase postmodern tyranny fits better than describing the present moment as totalitarian or fascist. Those two words have become so overused, interchanged, that they’ve lost much meaning and luster for people today. Although many of the various government responses to 9/11 and Covid certainly have elements of totalitarian, fascist, and dictatorial regimes, the terminology is outdated in a sense. It no longer fits the historical moment and hardly anyone really sees Joe Biden or Emmanuel Macron as totalitarian leaders. No single despot is necessary for the system to continue. We are facing is a dictatorship of money, an oligarchy dedicated to ensuring the smooth movement of capital. We live in a pyramid scheme, economically and socially: a system of petty tyrants consisting of your boss, your mayor, your landlord, your HOA president, etc. In fact, added together there are millions of petty tyrants in the US alone; the bourgeoisie and their millions of enforcers: judges, the police and military, politicians, lawyers, all who serve private property, an unjust hierarchy of labor, and, as we’ve seen, most doctors who were eager to impose and rubber-stamp the petty diktats we’ve enshrined into law.

    2019: Global Protests Mushroom

    Besides well-documented evidence such as US funding of coronavirus research, Event 201, and many other suspicious activities, there is one other piece of circumstantial evidence that ties into prior knowledge and pre-planning the pandemic. In 2019, global protests reached a height unsurpassed in modern history, with one commentator dubbing that year “The Age of Mass Protests”. On December 30, 2019, Robin Wright published a column in The New Yorker entitled: “The Story of 2019: Protests in Every Corner of the Globe”. One highlight from the piece claims:

    “‘People in more countries are using people power than any time in recorded history. Nonviolent mass movements are the primary challenges to governments today,’ Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, told me. ‘This represents a pronounced shift in the global landscape of dissent.’”

    The Washington Post dubbed 2019 “The year of the global street protest”. Bloomberg proclaimed that “A Year of Protests Sparked Change Around the Globe“. Massive disruptions to governments occurred in Iraq, Iran, Hong Kong, Sudan, Algeria, Chile, and many other nations. Ordinary people were becoming a nuisance to the smooth movement of capital. Governments were forced to face challenges they’d been ignoring for decades, as rising food, housing, heating, and materials costs skyrocketed globally. All of a sudden, in January 2020, the looming specter of a “global pandemic” put a stop to all of it, instantaneously.

    The positives for governments were obvious. No more protests. No public gatherings. No more pesky citizens demanding lower prices on goods, for more social programs, and protesting unjust taxes and authoritarian rulers. Without any in-person organizing, the momentum of people power from 2019 quickly died out.

    Shifting the Goalposts: From “Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve” to Biosecurity State

    Similar to 9/11, the justification for and continued adherence to official government propaganda rested on total obedience and social conformity: peer pressure at the familial, community, workplace, and public levels all contributed to an atmosphere of hysteria, panic, and paranoia. Shortly after 9/11, the US government shifted priorities from an invasion of Afghanistan and ousting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, to an invasion of Iraq in 2003 which cost perhaps 1 million Iraqi lives, then to a global war on terror (remember US General Wesley Clark’s admission that the Pentagon’s intention was to invade nation’s dubbed as the “axis of evil” and take out “seven countries in five years”). Torture and mass surveillance was sanctioned and cheered, the Patriot Act and AUMF rammed through Congress.

    As soon as the pandemic was announced in March 2020, the goalposts kept moving, from a period where we were told two weeks of isolation would be enough to flatten the curve of infection to nearly two years of absurd rules for masking, lockdowns, public gatherings, household gatherings, vaccines, and passports. The hokum kept piling up, as increasingly illogical “expert opinions” were rolled out to “protect” us, or so we were told. It soon became clear that the lockdowns themselves were killing plenty of people. Many credible “medical experts” who believed in the seriousness of the pandemic were blunt about the lockdowns: they were a form of democide”, with many estimating that approximately one-third of the excessive deaths were caused by the lockdowns. Routine checkups were avoided, nursing homes were overcrowded, the elderly were being neglected, and unnecessary, and over a million healthcare workers were laid off precisely when they would have been most useful, at least according to the official narrative.

    The irrational masking mandates were completely unscientific, especially the outdoor masking requirements in major cities, and, ludicrously, beaches as well as various outdoor recreation areas. Regardless, it wasn’t until December 2021 that a major mainstream medical figure admitted the obvious: “cloth masks are useless” and little more than facial decorations. The mask was the signifier of the good citizen for two years; anyone who disagreed was tarred and feathered without regard for the actual science. Many analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were done with previous viruses. Not to mention the basic fact that the infection and fatality rates were basically the same for the 39 US states that imposed mask mandates versus the 11 that did not.

    The conflation of case fatality rate (CFR) with infection fatality rate (IFR) in the mainstream media made the disease appear far more deadly than it actually was. The actual chance of young and healthy adults dying from Covid-19 was minuscule.

    Social distancing became de rigueur among the ruling classes, as well as the upper-middle chattering class effete liberals (and sadly, many leftists) even as the chance of moderate to severe illness in health young or even middle-aged people was almost nil. The specter of the postmodern alienated, affluent Western subject, with all their bundles of anxieties and neuroses, began to unspool, implode; a process of involution nurturing the solipsistic narcissism inherent in late capitalism.

    The sociopathic tendencies of our elites, heightened and distilled through centuries of class war in Western culture, spilled out into the open. The upper-middle professional classes, alert to the tendencies of their overlords’ desires to distance themselves from the rabble, were eager to parrot the diktats of their rulers. The upper-class winners condemned themselves to a path of neo-Victorian purity politics. The clean must be segregated from the dirty. The educated believers in “science” are clearly rational; the anti-vax hordes certainly must be acting out of pure self-interest and resentment.  Needless to say, little to no self-examination was made of the panicked overreaction of the well-to-do liberal authoritarians, which frankly fell within a spectrum of agoraphobic and hypochondriac behavior.

    The death rates were complete junk science, overestimated for the sake of juicing up the atmosphere of pandemonium, not to mention the monetary rewards for hospitals and healthcare corporations. As many know by now, “dying with” Covid became conflated with “dying from” the virus, with doctors pressured to include Sars-CoV-2 on death certificates.

    Pushing the experimental vaccine onto healthy children and young adults was completely unnecessary, and harmful. The risks of heart problems outweighed the negligible benefits of the vaccine for the young. This was obvious from the beginning and the medical establishment continued its role as a propaganda arm of Big Pharma rather than objectively viewing the facts. One study showed a laughable, embarrassing efficacy of 12% for 5-11 year olds.

    UN Estimate of Extreme Hunger, Food Insecurity, and Starvation

    Shortly after the lockdowns began in March 2020, the UN World Food Program put out a warning:

    The number of people facing acute food insecurity (IPC/CH 3 or worse) stands to rise to 265 million in 2020, up by 130 million from the 135 million in 2019, as a result of the economic impact of COVID-19, according to a WFP projection. The estimate was announced alongside the release of the Global Report on Food Crises, produced by WFP and 15 other humanitarian and development partners.

    In effect, the government and private architects of lockdowns were fully prepared to sacrifice hundreds of millions of younger, poorer minorities in less-developed countries to shield older, richer, whiter populations in developed nations from the very low potential of sickness, and yes, possible death. While many leftists are quick to point out economic “sacrifice zones” where labor violations are the norm and economic exploitation is rampant, they were mainly silent regarding the potential of mass death, starvation, and the explosion of extreme poverty due to lockdown policies. In fact, many leftists gleefully supported lockdowns and restrictions against the unvaccinated; and were either completely unaware or feigned ignorance of the economic devastation they unleashed.

    The Africa  Paradox

    The obvious data sets to look at regarding the efficacy of the experimental vaccines would be the West, with very high levels of vaccination, versus Africa, which had extremely low percentages. While obviously many countries had incomplete information due to lack of resources, it becomes obvious that the vaccines had zero effect on transmission or reduction in deaths. In fact, the mortality rates in African nations are so low that experts simply shrug them off. A holistic view would put the excess deaths from “Covid-19” squarely on the unhealthy lifestyles, toxic food supply, the unregulated chemical industries, and stressful conditions endemic to Western living.

    Agamben’s Laments

    Right off the bat, Giorgio Agamben questioned the motives behind the lockdowns, rightly pointing out that the fear of death and the elevation of science as the new religion had reduced communities and governments to quantifying basic survival – “bare life” – as more valuable than tangible human freedoms. As he put it in a March 2020 blog post:

    Fear is a bad advisor, but it brings up many things you pretended not to see. The first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country clearly shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. It is clear that Italians are willing to sacrifice practically everything, normal living conditions, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections and religious and political convictions at the risk of falling ill. Bare life – and the fear of losing it – is not something that unites men, but blinds and separates them.

    In May 2020, Agamben expands on the notion of medicine as a modern cult- and its many parallels with Christian dogmas.

    It is immediately evident that we are dealing here with a cultic practice and not with a rational scientific requirement. By far the most frequent cause of mortality in our country is cardio-vascular disease and it is known that these could decrease if a healthier lifestyle were practiced and if one adhered to a particular diet. But it had never occurred to any doctor that this form of life and diet, which they recommended to patients, would become the subject of legal legislation, which decreed ex lege [as a matter of law] what one must eat and how one must live, transforming the whole existence into a health obligation. Precisely this has been done and, at least for now, people have accepted as if it were obvious to give up their freedom of movement, work, friendships, love, social relationships, their religious and political convictions.

    Even the mealy-mouthed World Health Organization was forced to admit in October 2020 that lockdowns were extremely detrimental to poor and minority communities globally and should be used as a “very, very last resort”. This did not stop governments and medical advisors from clamoring for more restrictions and shutdowns for seventeen more months, even as Agamben and many others, including many experts who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, were speaking out against political overreach.

    Latour’s Dress Rehearsal: Right for the Wrong Reasons

    In a widely cited article from March 2020, French sociologist Bruno Latour asked an interesting question regarding the lockdowns: “Is This a Dress Rehearsal?” The problem in his formulation, of course, is that he believes governments innocently imposed the lockdown protocols in response to a clear and present danger; as well as his belief that governments will, in the future, impose lockdowns in response to climate change with reductions in carbon emissions in mind. Rather, we should realize that governments, colluding with the mega rich and multinational corporations, imposed lockdowns in order to profit off the collapse and resurgence of the stock markets, discipline the public in order to accept draconian “new normal” policies, and accelerate the process of biometric IDs, all-encompassing surveillance, a drop in living standards, and advance a social credit system based on rewards and punishments.

    The old panem et circenses method of distracting the masses can no longer hold together an increasingly polarized society breaking into “post-truth” enclaves where distrust and paranoia spawn out of late-capitalist alienation and exploitation. A society in which two of the biggest overarching political narratives are as ridiculous as Q-Anon and Russiagate has no business dismissing the obvious conspiracy and collusion involved in promulgating an exaggerated and manufactured pandemic.

    Latour is correct in claiming that this is a sort of dress rehearsal. Sadly, like many a typical liberal, he assumes governments had our best interest at heart, and are reacting to objective facts and medical realities. In the near future, governments will probably enact travel restrictions and lockdowns not only to reduce carbon emissions, but rather to train citizens to accept food rations, lack of fossil fuels due to high prices and supply issues, lower living standards, and lack of goods and provisions. In this process of disciplining and punishing masses, many will be forced to accept whatever government edicts are enacted, at the risk of job loss, social isolation, or worse, just as we witnessed during the pandemic. The next lockdown could be designed and pre-planned precisely to stave off protests, rebellions, and revolutions which will spring up as the rot in capitalism deepens.

    Medical Tyranny? WHO’s asking?

    A recent report shows that a private foundation set up to finance the World Health Organization, called the WHO Foundation, explains that 40% of donations came from anonymous donors. The potential for conflicts of interest is inevitable, as obviously only individuals and groups connected to Big Pharma would want to anonymize where their slush funds go to.

    A global Pandemic Treaty is being formulated by the WHO in order to force nations to accept the next pandemic, if global elites are so foolish as to try and institute another round of medical authoritarianism.

    Much like 9/11, the lead-up to the Covid-19 “event” as well as its early stages remain clouded in secrecy, misinformation, and a web of lies. We were all shown images of dead Chinese citizens lying in the streets, although it’s unclear if this was from the virus, or even from the city of Wuhan or Hubei province in some cases. We were told the virus originated in a wet market in the city center, although now we know that link has never been proven, and was most likely thrown out as a hypothesis to satisfy public opinion, but more likely was a cynical intelligence ploy, a classic case of misdirection, especially since we know now that a secretive US medical intelligence unit admitted to tracking Covid in November 2019, and possibly much earlier.

    When a global pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, there were around 118,000 global cases and under 5,000 declared deaths. Relatively speaking those numbers were quite low and there was no reason to declare Sars-CoV-2 a public health emergency based on the figures. The estimated death rates were pulled completely out of thin air by a complete fraud, Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College of London, who broke lockdown rules which he helped to implement.

    PCR tests were declared the gold standard even though Kary Mullis, one of its inventors, declared publicly that the tests were not made to prove the existence of active infections. Further, the cycling for the tests was deliberately set too high, which resulted in untold amounts of false positive cases. Death rates miraculously shot up for “Covid-19” because doctors and coroners were pressured to list the disease as a cause of death even without a positive test; any “suspected case” could be listed. Flu, pneumonia, and every other respiratory disease magically disappeared and Covid filled in the gap, boosting the figures.

    Not to mention, the effect of declaring a global pandemic necessarily induced a stress response from the global population, which, along with the late-winter (March-April) time frame in the northern hemisphere, definitely contributed to the excess deaths. In fact, many established medical organizations freely admit that the lockdowns were responsible for a significant percentage (many say up to one third) of excess deaths, yet somehow have managed to absolve themselves of responsibility for clamoring for the lockdowns like trained seals. Along with the loss of jobs, home confinement, and lack of community, it should be noted that just as yelling fire in a crowded movie theater is almost certain to cause some sort of violent event, screaming “pandemic” through a 24/7 news cycle will do the same.

    Much like the daily reporting in the aftermath of 9/11, with nightly news explaining the nation’s risk of terror attacks as red, orange, or yellow, the daily cases, hospitalizations, and deaths; we all remember the 24/7 circus designed to frighten the population and maintain obedience. In this deliberately instilled, panic-stricken environment, the ruling class fundamentally altered the landscape: following a short downturn in the stock market, the digital economy and tech firms quickly rebounded and boomed- the tech sector, Big Pharma, web services companies, and basically all major corporations tangentially related to providing services on the internet struck gold.

    Within weeks, the need for a vaccine was trotted out. Many seasonal viruses come and go within months, yet somehow the medical establishment was able to figure out that only a vaccine would be able to stop this disease. The pharmaceutical companies were simply trying to profit off a new media-hyped and establishment-protected exaggerated pandemic. The fact that so many corners were cut, with no long-term studies, all to market unproven mRNA technology did not seem to faze at least half of the public, who openly clamored for lockdowns, vaccines, passports, and authoritarian measures which would be unthinkable a few years prior.

    Ridiculous masking mandates came into effect- masking outdoors was mandatory in many cities globally. No scientific basis was ever presented. Vaccine passports were likewise implemented even though natural immunity was found to be 27 times greater in some instances. Were health authorities simply trying to be overly cautious, or were there more sinister agendas at play? Were institutional medical practices imposed simply to make profits for pharmaceutical corporations?

    The simple fact that an unproven, dangerous vaccine was pushed and mandated at various levels- and that it was swallowed so comfortably by so many- simply shows how effective modern propaganda can be. No guns were needed- but you could lose your job, standing in the community, your friends, family, and social relations. A vast social experiment was conducted and anyone who dared to question “the science”, instead of blindly placing trust in a capitalist health system where profits have always taken precedence over people’s interests, was demonized.

    The frenzy around Covid-19 may indeed have had a bit of luck, at least here in the US. It was, of course, President Trump that downplayed the virus at the start. Therefore, anyone else aligning with his views on Covid was seen as a repugnant narcissist, an uncaring dullard willing to put corporate profits over human life. Imagine an alternate universe where Trump or a right-wing, authoritarian, US presidential figure like him took the virus extremely seriously, with Chinese-style lockdowns. Would people still have clamored for mandatory shots, and for friends, family, and co-workers to be excommunicated from society? Probably not, but we’ll never know.

    Vaccine passports threatened to segregate society based on a frankly fascist vision of the clean versus unclean. Anti-vaccine activists and regular people who refused to take an experimental injection were wrongly vilified. As many pointed out, the lack of reduction of transmission in the vaccinated made the whole prospect of compulsory vaccination pointless, unscientific, counterproductive, and just plain wrong.

    In November 2021, the conflict came to a head as Biden, speaking to the unvaccinated, remarked: “We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” He proposed a plan for weekly testing or vaccination of all workers in every US company with over 100 employees, as well as a mandate for around 17 million health care workers.

    The Postmodern Subject: Manufacturing the Hyperreal

    The parallels between 9/11 and Covid-19 go far beyond their initial propaganda campaigns. Ultimately, part of the reason contemporary propaganda is so effective lies in the psychological structure of postmodern consciousness. Safety, stability, and security are seen as the final end products of mass civilization. Even one of the great charlatans of the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama, was astute enough to note the parallels between the postmodern subject and Nietzsche’s notion of the “last man”.

    Today, the veneer of idealistic concepts such as freedom, democracy, and equality which were supposed to undergird and inspire the collective to greater heights is wearing off in the face of massive global inequality, environmental disasters, climate catastrophe, and vicious media propaganda campaigns. As material living standards stagnate and crumble even in the developed world, increasing numbers of people are forced to compete for the same resources, perpetuating a scarcity-based mindset in the populace. Nearly all socioeconomic questions are framed as zero-sum, binary, black-and-white contests between good and evil where little nuance or questions of morality are allowed into the public arena.

    In this fragile social environment, it’s not surprising that citizens flock to ready-made narratives and propaganda campaigns. Ruling class propaganda is swallowed uncritically, precisely because it obfuscates, masks, and numbs the pain of living in late-stage capitalist collapse. One of the reasons Western liberals and even most of the “Left” fell for the farce that was the over-hyped, medical global Psy-op we call the Covid-19 pandemic is because the postmodern subject has now delved so far into the hyperreal; where symbols, social relations, and even science become cheap imitations of themselves. This is precisely why so many people, at the beginning of the lockdowns in March 2020, remarked that they “felt like they were living in a movie.” Media-induced pseudo-events can no longer be distinguished from severe medical emergencies today, just as twenty two years ago the mass panic after 9/11 produced the same fog of war and irrational hatred of the other.

    Imbued with meaning and purpose, the mask-wearing, jab-taking, “papers-please”, vaccine passport-bearing citizen could now feel a common cause with others in the community; artificially induced feelings of well-being conjured up through media organs and distilled into catchy slogans like “trust the science”. The sign-value of “doing the right thing” became a potent force; and this was weaponized by the establishment to suit various agendas.

    Many of these agendas were, in fact, actual conspiracies to: establish a permanent biosecurity state; set up a soft version of martial law where people’s movements are restricted and tracked; manufacture a false narrative of safe vaccines to bankroll a new industry for mRNA technologies, create a pathway to health passports, digital IDs, central bank digital currencies, and social credit systems; destroy the working class and middle class small businesses, and psychically prepare the global populace for a fall in living standards, a fall in access to goods, services, and resources, as well as rationing; provide an excuse to ban protests; continue the broad militarization of society, as well as the implementation of a global regime of ideological compliance and obedience.

    Big Pharma, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the military and intelligence communities were colluding to fleece the poor and working classes- the fact that one can’t find a smoking gun for each of these interlocking and moving parts of the economy and government doesn’t refute this basic fact. All the while, corporate America continued enriching the one percent who gained trillions during the pandemic. Medical-authoritarian edicts were issued without any actual science behind them. Surveillance and population control have always been at the forefront of elite agendas for managing 21st century life. Global flows of people, information, goods, and revolutionary thought can no longer be stage-managed by tyrannical capitalist elites as conditions deteriorate around the planet. A show must be put on every ten to twenty years.

    The many faces and branding strategies of the global elite come into full view: the “new normal”, “own nothing and be happy”, “mask up”, “follow the science”, and the “lockstep” scenario for implementing planetary tyranny are seen by the ruling class as necessary steps to secure profits and control in increasingly unstable economic and political landscapes. Their techno-feudal dreams are our nightmares as the drudgery of capitalist labor and the vagaries of imperial war continue on. Our masters offer little respite for the masses of humanity, as they’ve imposed a totalizing spectacle. Cult-like behavior dominated after 9/11; overblown fears of terrorism and anti-Muslim racism permeated the country, just as a year or two ago, overblown fears of the virus and authoritarian-based dislike and instant dismissal of anyone skeptical of Big Pharma and the government continued to dominate.

    Even as the narrative has shifted, and the farce that was the reaction to a relatively mild virus receded, the potential for propaganda and fear campaigns against the global collective remains. It is precisely the qualities of postmodernity, such as the end of meta-narratives, de-realization of the subject, hyperreality, the nature of the spectacle, and pseudo-events, guided by ruling class interests, and imposed on us by capitalism, which allow for the recurrence of these paradigm-shifting forces to dominate social life. The parallels of two of the biggest geopolitical events of the 21st century, 9/11 and the Covid-19 health scare, reveal the foundations of global regimes of cruelty, domination, and oppression. And there certainly isn’t much “new” or “normal” about any of it.

  • Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, communicating with friends and family from a distance involved picking up the telephone and calling them. Before that, letters were the primary source of contact. Now, obviously, things are very different. We can all communicate with friends via instant messaging apps 24/7. But sometimes, you don’t even need to say anything at all to let someone know you’re thinking of them. These days, you can just send a meme.

    jump to the memes

    Defined as an image, video, or piece of text that is typically funny and spread across the internet, memes have become a source of not just humor, but also connection. They help us relate to each other, and give us a few laughs along the way. Whatever the subject, and whatever the community, you can usually find more than one meme page on social media that binds people together. And vegans are no exception.

    VegNews.LaughingPhone1.UnsplashUnsplash

    Memes help the world’s growing community of vegans (it’s estimated there are roughly 8 million globally) to bond and spread information, but also call out some of the world’s destructive industries, while still maintaining an air of humor. Here are some of our favorites on the internet right now. But first, for those who may be unsure, what is a vegan, anyway?

    What is a vegan, anyway?

    To put it simply, a vegan is someone who doesn’t eat, wear, or use anything that comes from an animal. So this means no meat, no dairy, no honey, no eggs, no fur coats, no leather, no wool … you get the picture.

    According to The Vegan Society’s official definition, veganism is “a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose … And by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans, and the environment.”

    VegNews.WomanEating.PeopleImagesGettyPeople Images/Getty

    People can follow a vegan lifestyle for many reasons. For most, it’s about reducing animal cruelty, as billions of animals die in the food system every year. But many people also care about reducing harm to the environment too. Animal agriculture is detrimental to the planet. It drives deforestation and water pollution, and emits 14.5 percent of global emissions. Some also choose to follow an animal-free diet for their health. But this is not always the same as going vegan. A person who eats only plant-based foods for their nutritional value may still opt to wear leather, for example.

    Why vegan memes are so funny

    Vegan memes are funny for the same reason that all memes are funny. They help us to look at situations that regularly occur in our everyday lives and find humor in them. For a vegan, it’s annoying and disappointing when you head to a restaurant with friends and the only option you can eat is some steamed vegetables. But by pairing popular culture moments or amusing images with a witty caption, memes make irritating situations like this entertaining. And, as the average meme is shared thousands of times, they also make us feel less alone and help us connect with other people who have the same struggles and anxieties.

    According to YPulse, 75 percent of people aged 13 to 36 regularly share memes. More than half send them once a week, while 30 percent send them once a day.

    The best vegan memes

    If you’re a meme-lover, we’ve rounded up some of the funniest and most relatable for you to send to your fellow vegans. Happy sharing!

    VegNews_veganmem-1@veganmemo/IG

    1Hidden milk powder

    You know the feeling. You find a tasty-looking snack that you’re sure must be vegan because there’s no reason for meat or dairy ingredients to be added. And then you check the back only to find the recipe contains 1 percent milk powder. Why?!

    VegNews_veganmeme-2@plantbasedlogic/IG

    2 Ordering too much vegan pizza 

    Vegetables are nutritious and delicious, don’t get us wrong. But when you can’t be bothered to cook, there’s only one solution: vegan pizza. Sorry, week-old broccoli. Looks like tonight is just not your night. Again.

    VegNews_veganmeme-3@thebestveganmemes/IG


    3 The vegan options emergency kit

    If you’re heading out with non-vegan pals, there’s always a risk they’ll pick a place with no designated vegan options. But don’t panic. As long as there are fries, salad, and a tasty (vegan) beer, you’ll get by.

    VegNews_veganmeme-4@plantbasedbantz/IG

    4 The death of the dairy industry

    Your time is up, dairy. It’s vegan milk’s time to shine. And oat milk, undeniably, reigns supreme in the taste wars.

    VegNews_veganmeme-5@brusswole_sprouts/IG

    5 Cruising the vegan restaurants on vacation

    Every time we book a vacation, we immediately research the best vegan restaurants in town. It would be devastating to miss out. Eiffel tower, who? If this is *literally* you right now, our travel guides have you covered.

    VegNews-veganmeme-6@veganmemesworld/IG


    6 Finding another vegan

    When you’re standing in line at the grocery store, and you hear the people in front of you discussing their vegan finds, you have to stay quiet, but really you just want to scream “be my friends!”

    VegNews_veganmeme-7@veganshumor/IG

    7 All the questions

    If you’re facing a round of questioning at the dinner table, there’s only one solution: honesty or run. And it would be a shame to waste food. “Sorry Aunt Margaret, that really is how milk is produced on factory farms.”

    VegNews_veganmeme-8@thehumaneleague/IG

    8 A chicken for dinner

    Chickens are intelligent, empathetic, and sentient beings. It makes no sense to eat them. But that’s not to say you can’t invite them over for a civilized meal. More corn all around.

    VegNews_veganmeme-9@vegan_sarcasm/IG

    9 “I have never eaten vegan food before”

    This one is always frustrating. You know those fruits, salads, soups, veggies, fries, and potato chips most of us all buy on a regular basis, regardless of ethics? Yep, mostly vegan!

    VegNews_veganmeme-10@veganshumor/IG

    10 The reality of the egg industry

    It’s certainly not an appetizing fact, but it is true. Male chicks are of no use to the egg industry, because they don’t have female reproductive systems. As a result, billions are slaughtered every year.

    VegNews_veganmeme-11@vegan_sarcasm/IG

    11 Watching the barista

    It really is brilliant that so many coffee shops now offer vegan milk alternatives. But until they get rid of cow’s milk too, we’ll be watching like a hawk while our coffee order gets made. 

    VegNews_veganmeme-12@hummusmem3/IG

    12 Dipping your finger in the hummus

    Hummus is the ultimate vegan snack. It’s creamy, it’s delicious, and we cannot, and will not, resist dipping our fingers into it. Sorry, Mom.

    VegNews_veganmeme-13@thebestveganmemes/IG

    13 Onions fight back

    Onions are the most rebellious vegetable in the game. But they taste good, so we keep chopping them up anyway, no matter how much they try to sabotage our eyes.

    VegNews_veganmeme-15@veganshumor/IG

    14 You’re doing amazing, sweetie

    Nothing beats the feeling of pride that washes over you when a loved one starts regularly making a vegan swap in their diet. It always makes us want to get the camera out and start channeling 2007 Kris Jenner.

    VegNews_veganmeme-16@veganmemesworld/IG

    15 Trying to cook the right amount of spinach

    Spinach may not rebel by making our eyes water, but it definitely tricks us into thinking we’ve made enough for dinner, when we never, ever have.

    VegNews_veganmeme-17Bored Panda

    16 Your favorite vegan restaurant

    And finally, is there another love like the love you have for your favorite vegan restaurant? We’ll answer for you: there isn’t. We’ll take one of everything on the menu, please. And we’ll be back tomorrow to do it all again.

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is surging in the polls, with some polls showing him knocking Ron DeSantis out of second place. And now his associates are saying that he was told by the president of conservative outlet Newsmax that if he wants some positive coverage on their network, he’s going to have to pay […]

    The post GOP Candidate Reveals Newsmax’s Quid Pro Quo Platform appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.

  • If you’re craving some screen-free content to keep your mind occupied, a vegan podcast can turn into your new best friend. From light-hearted roving conversations about plant-based food and pop culture to deep discussions on ethics and health, these 12 vegan podcasts will keep you company while you work, clean, or just go about your day.

    Why you should listen to vegan podcasts

    Whether you’re looking to incorporate more meatless meals into your diet or you’re a seasoned vegan, tuning into vegan podcasts is a great way to expand your knowledge about veganism. From animal rights to beginner tips, health, nutrition, sustainability, and more—these vegan podcasts leave no stone unturned.

    VegNews.VeganPodcasts.DimaBerlinDima Berlin

    Medical professionals Neal Barnard, MD, FACC of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and Yami Cazorla-Lancaster, DO, MPH each helm their own podcasts where they dive deep into a range of health topics including nutrition, habit changes, kid-friendly eats, and the connection between diet and chronic diseases.

    Others, such as The Plant-Based Morning Show, bring you the latest vegan news from around the world, and some, such as Our Hen House, highlight the animal activists working to create positive change for animals.

    But if lifestyle podcasts are your preference, there’s a plethora to choose from, all hosted by vegans. The Rich Roll Podcast and Are You Ready? are just two that, while hosted by vegans, touch upon everything from fitness and motivation to imposter syndrome and much more.

    12 vegan podcasts to listen to right now

    VegNews.Podcast.LandingPage.1

    1 The VegNews Podcast

    Okay, give us a moment to toot our own horn. In June 2023, we launched our highly-anticipated podcast, The VegNews Podcast, with celebrity guests, headlines of the week, cooking tips, new products, and much, much more. Hosted by our Editor at Large Jasmin Singer, it’s upbeat, it’s fun, and you’re guaranteed to take something valuable away from each episode you listen to. Our roster of inspirational guests so far includes Tabitha Brown, Pinky Cole, Joanne Lee Molinaro, Tig Notaro, Charity Morgan, and Miyoko Schinner, and we’re so excited for more to come. Find out more about how to listen and how to get involved (yep, you can ask us your burning questions about veganism!) below.
    FIND IT HERE

    VegNews.VeganPodcasts.RichRollRich Roll Podcast

    2 The Rich Roll Podcast

    The guest list sometimes strays from plant-based changemakers, but the host is as vegan as they come. Ultraman Rich Roll is a master interviewer and books the most awe-inspiring guests. 

    Those accomplished enough to grace the microphone of the Rich Roll podcast will enrapture you for the two-hour-plus duration of the show. Past vegan guests include tough-as-nails Navy Seal David Goggins, ultrarunner Fiona Oakes, punk rocker John Joseph, physician Michael Greger, MD, and more. Go for a long walk or run and settle in for some major plant-based motivation.
    FIND IT HERE

    OurHenHouse-NewLogoOur Hen House

    3 Our Hen House

    Go deep into the ethical issues surrounding the vegan and animal rights movements with animal law professor Mariann Sullivan and, again, our very own Jasmin Singer.

    The powerhouse activist duo touches on the latest news, issues, and triumphs of the vegan world, always complemented with a guest interview. You’ll hear from the vegan greats, such as Tofurky founder Seth Tibbot, but you’ll also discover advocates who typically fly under the radar such as Kelly Holt and Dan McKernan of Animal Planet’s Saved by the Barn series. 

    Finally, this podcast is immaculately consistent. No seasonal breaks or “Oops, we missed an episode, here’s a flashback.” Singer and Sullivan ensure their audience receives new content every single week. Pro-tip: Our Hen House also produces the monthly Animal Law Podcast, passionately hosted by Sullivan.
    FIND IT HERE

    VegNews.VeganPodcasts.BrownVeganMonique Koch

    4 Brown Vegan Podcast

    Vegan recipe developer Monique Koch, the force behind the YouTube channel and blog, Brown Vegan, hosts a podcast of the same name.

    The show covers a wide range of topics, from beginner tips to veganism to wellness to entrepreneurship and money talk. It’s easy listening, all centered around making information about veganism, money, and wellness more accessible to listeners. You can’t argue with that. 
    FIND IT HERE

    VegNews.VeganPodcasts.ThePlantBasedMorningShowThe Plant-Based Morning Show

    5 The Plant-Based Morning Show 

    Co-hosts Matt Frasier and Doug Hay, who also host the No-Meat Athlete Podcast, kicked off this daily vegan podcast in September 2022. In it, the pair go through all of the latest vegan news that’s circulating the world.
    FIND IT HERE

    VegNews.VeganPodcasts.NoMeatAthleteNo Meat Athlete Radio

    6No Meat Athlete Radio

    No Meat Athlete Radio, Fraiser and Hay’s other show, began as a running podcast in 2014 and has dipped into a number of topics throughout the years—from vegan parenting to habit change. It’s a lighthearted, family-friendly conversation that you’ll soon feel a part of. In each episode, expect to hear updates on Matt’s life, Doug’s latest garden adventures and ultramarathon goals, helpful tips on running and whole food nutrition, and a few good tangents.
    FIND IT HERE

    Vegnews.Switch4Good_Podcast_finalthumb_v1Switch4Good

    7Switch4Good Podcast

    This groundbreaking variety show covers everything from health to ethical fashion. 

    Co-hosts Olympian Dotsie Bausch and actress/activist Alexandra Paul hold meaningful conversations with everyone from plant-based doctors to professional athletes, and celebrities to chefs. Guests include former Brooklyn Borough President and now-mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, Adrian Velarde of Desserto (the vegan cactus leather brand), and Ironman Brendan Brazier. 

    The hour-long show is part self-help, part entertainment, and 100-percent engaging.
    FIND IT HERE

    VegNews.VeganPodcasts.VeggieDoctorVeggie Doctor Radio

    8 Veggie Doctor Radio

    Dr. Yami Cazorla-Lancaster, DO, MPH (aka Dr. Yami) is the vegan pediatrician we wish we had growing up. While geared towards parents, we can all learn more about health, nutrition, habit change, and psychology from this affable doc. Some episodes feature guests, but Dr. Yami isn’t afraid to fly solo either. One thing is certain: the content is always engaging, educational, and entertaining. 

    Favorites include episodes 107/107b “How to Eat More Plants Without Hating Your Life with Talia Pollock/How to Make 5 Familiar American and Kid-Friendly Dinners Plant-Based,” episode 106 “Gut Motility and Your Health with Dr. Supriya Rao,” and episode 102 “How Understanding Generations Can Add More Value to Your Life.” 
    FIND IT HERE

    Joanne L MolinaroJoanne Molinaro

    9 Are You Ready?

    New York Times bestselling cookbook author Joanne Molinaro, creator of “The Korean Vegan” blog, hosts this podcast about life. Topics range from life getting in the way of work to dealing with imposter syndrome. If you’re unfamiliar with Molinaro, she’s a former attorney whose rise to fame kicked off on TikTok, where she shares vegan versions of Korean recipes that she grew up eating.
    FIND IT HERE

    VegNews.VeganPodcasts.TheExamRoomPCRM

    10 The Exam Room Podcast

    Neal Barnard, MD, FACC, and the founder of the nonprofit group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), and co-host Chuck Carroll dive into the science of a vegan diet. 

    Episodes frequently feature doctors and other medical professionals who swear by the plant-based diet’s potential to help prevent chronic diseases. But, you can also expect news from PCRM, vegan recipes, and health topics that range from inflammation to combating high cholesterol.
    FIND IT HERE

    VegNews.FoodforThoughtpodcast.MariaVillanoPhotographyMaria Villano Photography

    11 Food for Thought

    Author, cultural commentator, and compassionate living expert Colleen Patrick Goudreau helms this aptly named podcast. Patrick Goudreau captivates listeners with engaging, thought-provoking episodes with deep dives into subjects such as zero-waste living, paying homage to animals, plant-based options at fast-food restaurants, and more. 

    Pro-tip: Don’t miss her culinary exploration of Italian cuisine.
    FIND IT HERE

    VegNews.VeganPodcasts.PlantPoweredPeopleThe Plant-Powered People Podcast

    12 The Plant-Powered People Podcast

    Hosts Toni Okamoto and Michelle Cehn know what it’s like to be the only vegan in the family. The plant-powered authors and entrepreneurs tap into their expertise to help make your plant-based journey a little less lonely.

    Okamoto and Cehn sit down with guests to discuss everyday vegan living, from navigating theme park dining options to integrating cultural foods, composting, health, and more.
    FIND IT HERE

  • If you’re vegan but still enjoy mainstream food television, raise your hand. What vegan foodie doesn’t love to watch Master Chef or Sugar Rush and not think of ways to veganize all the dishes? If you love food, you’ll find a way. Of course, it’s always a thrill to see vegan cuisine represented in the big leagues, and slowly but surely, plant-based eats are integrating into primetime. Because there are so many ways to watch food television, we’re expanding this list to encompass Netflix hits as well as the indomitable Food Network. From underdog wins to vegan cooking competitions, here are 18 vegan food moments to stream again now.

    Where to find vegan cooking content on TV 

    Before the Food Network started to integrate vegan contestants and programming, plant-based creators took matters into their own hands. 

    Directors, writers, and producers placed their content on any streaming service that would have them or created their own digital space. Vegan chef and personality Jason Wrobel was one of the first to break through with his vegan Cooking Channel show, How to Live to 100, which enjoyed two seasons beginning in 2014. Former news anchor and current animal activist Jane Velez Mitchell launched her own vegan streaming service, Unchained TV, which streams the vegan cooking competition Peeled and plant-based cooking show New Day New Chef.

    VegNews.VeganDocumentaries.CottonbroStudios.PexelsCottonbro Studios/Pexels

    Finally, producer, director, and animal advocate Asher Brown partnered with vegan mixologist and restaurateur Jason Eisner to create High Cuisinea 12-episode competition series that challenged chefs to create mouthwatering vegan dishes after partaking in cannabis. The series originally aired on a now-defunct streaming service in 2017 but is now available on Amazon Prime. 

    Today, vegan content is making its way to the mainstream, not just on social media, YouTube, or niche streaming platforms, but on the leader of food television: the holy grail that is the Food Network. Netflix, too, has released a number of food-focused series, each captivating audiences worldwide—and luckily, vegan cuisine is showcased in more ways than one. 

    18 vegan Food Network and Netflix moments

    New vegan recipes, contestants, and episodes are continually in the works, so keep the television on and get inspired by this top-notch vegan content.

    VegNews.TabithaBrownVeganuaryTabitha Brown

    1 Tabitha Brown gets a Food Network show

    We’re not surprised this vegan entertainment maven was the first to secure a completely plant-based cooking show on the Food Network. It’s CompliPlated originally aired in 2022, and put professional chefs to the test to create vegan meals any picky eater would love. Brown served as both the host and judge along with celebrity chef Maneet Chauhan and a rotating cast of picky eater judges. The show is infused with Brown’s positive energy with just enough fun-loving competition to make you root for your favorite contestant.

    VegNews.TheEasyVegan.FoodNetworkFood Network

    2 Vegans win ‘The Great Food Truck Race’ back-to-back

    After a handful of vegan food trucks entered this televised Food Network competition, in 2022, Señoreata became the first to win it all. The Los Angeles-based, Cuban pop-up took home $50,000 along with the ultimate victory, beating out worthy competitors serving animal-based mac and cheese, homemade pasta, South African cuisine, and more. The following year, Denver, CO-based The Easy Vegan brought home the gold for team vegan once more, prompting host Tyler Florence to delcare “a new era of food here in America.”

    VegNews.Troy GardnerBobby FlayRachel KleinBeatBobbyFlay.FoodNetworkFood Network

    3 Vegan chefs beat Bobby Flay

    The longstanding Food Network show, Beat Bobby Flay kicked off 2022 with a pleasant surprise. After 29 seasons, the show’s first vegan episode aired in January, featuring chefs Tamearra Dyson of Souley Vegan and Adyre Mason of The Veggie. Dyson moved on to challenge Bobby in a plant-based burger competition. Despite the fact that Flay is known for his burgers and operates a burger chain, Dyson beat this celebrity chef titan. You could say that ultimately, Flay didn’t learn his lesson. The following year, chefs Rachel Klein of Miss Rachel’s Pantry and Troy Gardner of TLC Vegan Cafe went head-to-head for a chance to face off against Flay. In the end, Klein’s Philly cheesesteak impressed the judges far more than Flay’s own creation. Sorry for the spoilers—they’re still excellent episodes to watch.  

    VegNews.FreyaCox.CastleHoward.CarolePoirotCarole Poirot

    4Vegan Week and a vegan contestant on ‘The Great British Bake Off’

    Veganism is on the rise in the US, but the UK is leaps and bounds ahead. To keep up with the rapid uptick of plant-based viewers, The Great British Bake Off (available on Netflix) debuted its first Vegan Week in 2018. Each of the three challenges stripped contestants of their animal product go-tos and forced them to think like a vegan. Showstopping bakes such as fruit-adorned meringue crowns and tiered layer cakes proved that anything can be baked vegan. In 2021, the show welcomed its first vegan contestant, 19-year-old Freya Cox, who surpassed many of her omnivorous competitors.

    VegNews.MamaDutMama Đút

    5 Mama Đút on ‘Street Food: USA’

    In 2022, Portland-based Mama Đút became the first vegan restaurant to be featured on Netflix’s Street Food seriesChef-owner Thuy Pham instantly captivated viewers with her empowering story of survival, changing careers during the pandemic, and how making vegan pork belly on Instagram Live changed her life forever. While Pham has since shuttered Mama Đút, you can learn all about her journey on Netflix.

    VegNews.FoodNetwork.ChefChloe.ChefChloeChloe Coscarelli

    6 Chef Chloe Coscarelli wins ‘Cupcake Wars’

    This bubbly chef and entrepreneur set the stage for the future of vegan cuisine on network television when she not only competed on Cupcake Wars, but won. Since that seminal vegan victory in 2010, the show has featured a number of vegan bakers and even hosted an all-vegan episode in 2012. It’s true—the best way to change an omnivore’s perspective is to give them a Raspberry Tiramisu cupcake. 

    VegNews.FoodNetwork.TheHerbivorousButcherThe Herbivorous Butcher

    7 Vegan joints steal the spotlight on ‘Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives’

    The founder of Flavortown is always down for vegan food. Guy Fieri has parked his signature red Camaro in front of countless vegan eateries across the US. Minneapolis, MN’s The Herbivorous Butcher received a fair share of press, but other joints such as Modern Love in Omaha, NE; Cornbread Cafe in Eugene, OR; Tumerico in Tucson, AZ; and Pingala Café in Burlington, VT have also impressed this celebrity chef. The show runs repeats on the Food Network every Friday night so you never know when you’ll stumble across a new vegan hidden gem. 

    VegNews.vegancookingshowmoments.channel4Channel 4

    8 David Schwimmer gets a handshake on ‘The Great British Bake Off’ for a vegan pie

    Another special vegan moment on The Great British Bake Off happened on the show’s Stand Up to Cancer celebrity special, when David Schwimmer (aka Ross from Friends) impressed Paul Hollywood so much with his vegan vegetable and tofu curry pot pie he got a handshake. “I’ve never had tofu I’ve enjoyed before,” the judge said. “That is a fantastic pie.” Schwimmer replied that the comment “made [his] year,” and that he couldn’t wait to tell his daughter, who is vegan, the news.

    vegnews.foodnetworksluttyveganFood Network

    9 The Try Guys visit Slutty Vegan

    The summer of 2022 saw a number of new faces on the Food Network. Known for their popular YouTube channel, the Try Guys landed their own series on the iconic network, The No Recipe Road Trip. During the Atlanta episode, the guys visited Pinky Cole’s Slutty Vegan and faced off in a vegan food truck burger challenge. While the guys’ off-the-cuff creations were questionable at best with burgers named The Slutty Little Jew and the U-Daddy, Cole showed off her skills in the kitchen to demonstrate how a proper vegan burger is made. 

    VegNews.FoodNetwork.TheKitchenFood Network

    10‘The Kitchen’ finally uses the word “vegan”

    It took a while, but the hosts of this daytime talk-and-cooking-show mashup are finally using the word “vegan.” We’ve yet to see a vegan episode, but the hosts will occasionally drop lines such as “Or you could use vegetable stock to make it vegan” and “Or you could leave off the cheese to make it vegan.” We appreciate it! A few accidentally vegan recipes are also featured on the show such as Magic Mousse, Shoestring Carrot Fries, and Focaccia With Rosemary and Sun-Dried Tomatoes.

    VegNews.FoodNetwork.SugarRushSugar Rush

    11First vegan bakers appear on Netflix’s ‘Sugar Rush’

    After three seasons, the first vegan baker appeared on Netflix’s time-crunched baking show, Sugar Rush: Christmas. San Diego-based baker Anna Castellanos of Ámame Desserts attempted to wow celebrity judges Candice Nelson and Adriano Zumbo with her Mexican hot chocolate cupcake with a salted caramel date filling. Check out the series to see how she did! 

    VegNews.FoodNetwork.NadiyaBakesNadiya Bakes

    12 Nadiya Hussain bakes vegan on ‘Nadiya Bakes’

    This Brit loves her clotted cream, but Hussain’s baking-focused Netflix special offers a few recipes for her vegan fans. Watch and prepare to swoon over her blueberry compote-topped banana cheesecake and nutty tahini and turmeric traybake. As Nadiya would say, baking vegan is “easy peasy!”

    VegNews.FoodNetwork.ChefRichLandauFood Network

    13 Vegan chef wins ‘Chopped’

    This primetime Food Network competition show jumped early on the vegan bandwagon when it debuted its first vegan episode in 2013. In lieu of squirm-worthy animal products, this episode’s mystery baskets included a plethora of plant-based ingredients. Chef Rich Landau of Philadelphia’s Vedge took home the championship title with his Edamame Turnovers With Cranberry Sauce. 

    VegNews.FoodNetwork.NatashaKwanFood Network

    14 Vegan chef competes on ‘Guy’s Grocery Games’

    Natasha Kwan of the vegan-friendly Frida’s Deli in St. Louis, MO gave plant-based cuisine some screen time during the “All-Vegetarian” episode of this hit Food Network show. It would have been more thrilling to watch a completely vegan episode (other contestants made liberal use of eggs and cheese), but back in 2018, it was a win to even hear the words “plant-based” or “vegan” on network television. Keep an eye out for its re-run on the Food Network Monday evenings. 

    VegNews.FoodNetwork.ShoukFood Network

    15 Carla Hall gushes over vegan food on ‘The Best Thing I Ever Ate’

    Close-ups and big bites make up this Food Network show, and we were floored when we watched Carla Hall rave about the vegan burger at Shouk in her hometown of Washington, DC. The Mediterranean-style homemade veggie burger doesn’t try to imitate a beef patty, but according to Hall, it tops it. Dear Food Network producers, more vegan hot takes, please!

    VegNews.FoodNetwork.BrandonRogueBrandon Rouge

    16 Vegan wins  ‘Supermarket Stakeout’

    Gluten-free and vegan chef Brandon Rouge swept the competition on Alex Gurnascheli’s Food Network hit, Supermarket Stakeout. Based on ambushing grocery store shoppers and bargaining to purchase their cart, the ingredients come down to the luck of the draw, and Rouge is the first and only vegan to walk away with a win. Riding on the coattails of this victory, Rouge recently published a pay-what-you-can cookbook, Vegan AF. If you’re wondering, AF stands for “Allergen-Friendly.”

    VegNews.FoodNetwork.ChloeCoscarelliFood Network

    17 Chloe Coscarelli teaches Trisha Yearwood how to cook vegan

    Country music star Trisha Yearwood’s Food Network cooking show typically churns out full-hog Southern eats, but for the season seven “Recipe Swap” episode, she invited Chloe Coscarelli to whip up a few vegan stunners. The chef prepared a Black-Eyed Pea Stew with plant-based Buttery Biscuits and maple butter, of course. This is Trisha’s Southern Kitchen, after all. For dessert, the duo cut into a slice of Chloe’s Lemon Olive Oil Cupcakes with Coconut Whipped Cream. If you’re drooling, you can find all the recipes here.

    VegNews.FoodNetwork.CafeNoFurFood Network

    18 Vegan restaurant featured on ‘Restaurant Impossible’

    Vegan owners of Las Vegas’ Cafe No Fur faced the brute criticism of host Robert Irvine on a 2021 episode of Restaurant Impossible. The fast-food restaurant—co-operated by a former poker player and model—was seriously struggling after just two years of business until Irivne tough-loved them into turning it around. The eatery survived its rough patch and continues to serve customers who are in the mood for towering vegan burgers and fries.

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • The reality is that most of us are not ready for the truth. We want reassurance. We cling to our comfort blankets because the idea that we live in a world in which our and our families’ interests are not paramount is too disturbing.

    The idea that our fates are entirely dependent on a giant Ponzi scheme that might come crashing down at any moment from any one of multiple design flaws – an ecological crisis, a nuclear catastrophe, a pandemic or a hubristic mis-step with Artificial Intelligence – is simply too terrifying.

    So, even as we mock a figurehead like Donald Trump, Joe Biden or Boris Johnson, we remain deeply invested in the system that keeps producing them. We need to believe – and just as desperately as a child refusing, a little longer, to give in to suspicions that Father Christmas might not exist. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, our societies, we insist, are on a continuous upwards trajectory named progress.

    Few are willing to consider that we might actually be in a death spiral. So instead of doing something to change the world, we bury our heads. We ignore every sign, however blatant, of the system’s inherent dysfunction and corruption.

    These dark thoughts are prompted in part by the very belated concession from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – whispered by government lawyers in a court hearing – that for two years it has been peddling disinformation about both Ivermectin and the fact that doctors were not authorised to prescribe it in the treatment of Covid.

    Ok, let’s pause right there. Because already I sense you reaching for the remote to change channels. Isn’t Ivermectin a horse drug that only anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers ever talk about?

    Before I lose you entirely, let me hurriedly issue a disclaimer. This piece isn’t really about Ivermectin – least of all its efficacy in the treatment of Covid. I’m not a doctor and I’m not qualified to judge. I talk about things I am familiar with, that I have some insight on.

    I’m not interested in medical debates about Ivermectin. I’m interested in deconstructing the political debates around it – and what they tell us about the way medical matters, and much else besides, have been entirely captured by political and commercial interests.

    I can assure you I have no shares in Ivermectin and won’t profit either way, whether its use increases or declines. Unlike Big Pharma, that’s not the reason I’m taking an interest.

    It just so happens that Ivermectin is a particularly fascinating case study – both of the corruption of our governance and regulatory systems, and of our own unwillingness to recognise that corruption out of fear of what it might signify.

    Ivermectin provides one more data point that might help drag each of us out of our carefully constructed cocoon of ideological comfort.

    This article can be seen as a follow-up to my recent piece on the refusal by precisely the same actors – Big Pharma, medical regulators, the corporate media – to investigate why over the past two years far higher numbers of people than was to be expected have been dying across the Western world of unexplained causes not related to Covid.

    Both of these post-pandemic issues ought to make us angry, and more willing to fight for our species’ survival.

    ‘Merely quips’

    After all, the general assumption that Ivermectin is a horse dewormer didn’t come from nowhere. It was a view cultivated in us by the FDA and the corporate media. Here is the tweet the agency sent out exactly two years ago to persuade us that only dangerous nutjobs talk about Ivermectin:

    I am guessing that those 108,000 likes make it one of the most influential tweets ever by the FDA. There is a reason why it went so viral.

    The corporate media worked overtime to promote exactly the same messaging: that Ivermectin was only good for horses and cows. The media echoed the FDA in implying very strongly that the drug’s use in humans was not safe. There was not a late-night show host who did not mock Ivermectin as a horse drug and ridicule its supporters, even leading doctors.

    Super-star podcaster Joe Rogan’s admission that he had been prescribed Ivermectin by his doctor when he fell ill with Covid were enough to foment demands for his banning from social media for spreading misinformation.

    Social media giants like Youtube played their own part, treating any reference to Ivermectin, in pretty much any positive context, even by doctors, as “misinformation”. The algorithms were adjusted accordingly, which is why I will have to avoid mentioning Ivermectin when I post this story on social media.

    And yet now, two years on, the FDA is quietly admitting that it, not Rogan, outright lied. Ivermectin isn’t a medicine used only by vets. It’s a human drug that’s been prescribed billions of times – and so successfully that it won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2015. A leading science journal called it a “wonder drug” in 2017 – before the pandemic changed what could be said publicly – highlighting “its unexpected potential as an antibacterial, antiviral and anti-cancer agent”.

    It is the FDA – not Rogan – now admitting that Ivermectin is safe and that doctors, including Rogan’s, do indeed have the authority to prescribe the drug, not just to treat parasites but to treat Covid too.

    It was tweets like the one above that instigated a witch-hunt by US state medical boards against doctors who prescribed Ivermectin, the matter at the heart of the case currently before the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

    With the FDA’s statements about Ivermectin now being harshly criticised by the judges hearing the case, the US government has fallen back on the barely credible argument that its comments were meant as “merely quips”.

    So why would the FDA lie about Ivermectin – and maintain that lie for at least two years until forced to come clean under cross-examination by the courts?

    And why did all those expert medical correspondents working for Big Media, journalists who knew only too well that Ivermectin was a human drug, conspire with the FDA in promoting a blatant lie?

    Here, for example, is Dr Sunjay Gupta of CNN being put on the spot by Rogan when he appeared on his show. He is forced to admit, uncomfortably, that the media were not telling the truth about Ivermectin.

    Emergency use

    Which brings us to the politics surrounding Ivermectin – which is far more revelatory than any medical debate about it.

    Remember, the FDA’s drug division receives three-quarters of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry. That doesn’t just mean the continuing salaries of many thousands of government officials depend on keeping Big Pharma happy. It also ensures wider political pressures. Washington prefers not to alienate Big Pharma and then have to foot the FDA’s budget through higher taxes. And, as we shall see, leading politicians have every incentive to avoid picking a fight with a corporate America.

    The reality is that Ivermectin and other drugs that might have been repurposed for Covid posed an enormous threat in principle to the FDA and its funders in Big Pharma – completely aside from the practical question of whether those drugs actually work against Covid.

    The new, experimental mRNA vaccines could only be rushed out for use in humans on the basis of an emergency authorisation so long as no other drug could be shown to be an effective treatment for Covid.

    Well, that was a good thing, I hear you say. Those vaccines reduced the severest symptoms, even if sadly they didn’t actually stop transmission.

    Let’s pull back a second and try to see the bigger picture for a moment. Let’s do precisely what the FDA and Pfizer don’t want us to do: engage our critical faculties.

    Ivermectin has been off-patent for years. No one can make any serious money from it, and certainly not giant pharmaceuticals based in the United States. Any Indian factory with the right approvals can knock out the tablets for a few cents.

    So in short, Big Pharma, which was poised to become fabulously enriched by its new vaccines, had every financial incentive imaginable to make sure there were no rivals in the stakes for a Covid miracle cure. The focus had to be entirely and exclusively on the vaccines.

    Endless profiteering

    The corporate media had exactly the same priorities. Why?

    A superficial, if truthful analysis is that companies like Pfizer subsidise the corporate media as heavily as they do the FDA. Just watch this short compilation video to get a sense of quite how complete Big Pharma’s stranglehold of sponsorship is on the main TV networks:

    But a deeper analysis is that Big Pharma and Big Media are just separate wings of the same Big Business empire headquartered in the US. What’s good for Big Pharma is good for Big Weapons is good for Big Farming is good for Big Food is good for Big Media, and so on.

    What is important for all of them is the maintenance of a political and economic climate that allows for Big Everything’s permanent profiteering. What is good for one of them is good for all.

    So Ivermectin was never going to be allowed a look-in, irrespective of whether it worked.

    But that doesn’t really matter, I hear you interject, because Ivermectin doesn’t work against Covid.

    And how do we know that? The anwer is we don’t. Our assumption that Ivermectin is useless against Covid is nothing more than that. It is an assumption. Some studies suggest it doesn’t help, while others suggest possible effectiveness.

    Medicine has an established way to deal with such uncertainties. It settles them with an expensive, large-scale, randomised, controlled study.

    In a time of profound crisis such as a pandemic, politics has an additional way to settle such questions: move heaven and earth to carry out emergency trials of drugs that look like they may be suitable for repurposing against the threat. Shift into a war footing.

    Which is exactly what would have happened – not just for Ivermectin but for other promising potential treatments like the mis-named sunshine hormone Vitamin D – if we lived in a world in which scientific principles, not profiteering by a tiny wealth-elite, guided our societies’ decisions.

    Instead, all of us – even children who were under no threat from Covid – were forced to worship exclusively at the altar of the novel vaccines.

    That should make your blood boil.

    Many millions of people died. Some of them might have been helped through the use of safe, potentially beneficial treatments before the vaccines were rolled out.

    Some of those who refused to take the vaccines – the heretics – might have had their lives saved through the approval of other treatments.

    Everyone, even the vaccinated and multi-boosted, might have had even better outcomes with the help of treatments to complement the vaccines.

    Instead, the response to the pandemic prioritised one thing only: not saving lives, but maximising to the greatest extent possible the profits of Big Pharma.

    I don’t know whether Ivermectin would have helped. You don’t know whether it would have helped. But what’s important – what is scandalous – is that the FDA doesn’t know either, and still doesn’t care to know whether lives would have been saved through the use of treatments in place of, or in addition to, the vaccines.

    That is a violation both of fundamental medical ethics and of the social contract. I can barely believe I need to spell it out – and even less that I will be called irresponsible for doing so by the vaccine cultists.

    Smears and insinuation

    The issue isn’t whether Ivermectin works against Covid. That narrow issue is the one Big Pharma, Big Media and the FDA want you focusing on. Because they have made sure the question will only ever be settled in the arena of official smear and insinuation, in misleading social media soundbites like the FDA’s horse drug one.

    That isn’t science, it’s propaganda.

    If the FDA has good arguments against Ivermectin, it needs to use them, not play mind games with us – games that can have only one possible outcome: further eroding public trust in our compromised, financially captured medical authorities. Revealingly, those most worried about the “Trump misinformation threat” are also the ones, it seems, least concerned about the FDA’s record of promoting falsehoods.

    To run a controlled trial of Ivermectin for treating Covid – even now, three years too late – costs a small fortune. One that can be afforded only by Big Pharma or governments. And in the circumstances, neither has any interest to find out.

    Why does this matter? It shouldn’t need stating. But from reactions on social media, I see that it very much does.

    It matters because it shows that we live in a world where “facts” are of no interest, where science is not followed, unless it can be monetised. Science is no longer for the benefit of all. It has become private property – the property of powerful, unaccountable corporations – like everything else in our societies. Science has been weaponised to further enrich a corrupt wealth-elite.

    It matters because, if we continue to resign ourselves so passively to these constant mind-games and manipulations, we must also accept that the profiteering they conceal should take priority over our health, over saving lives.

    Ivermectin isn’t the issue. It’s a waymark: to the depths of corruption to which our supposedly Enlightened, rational civilisation has been sunk by money and its worship.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • By Shailendra Bahadur Singh in Suva

    Conflict and insufficient social cohesion are the biggest challenges in Fiji, and all and any efforts to mitigate and address this situation are laudable.

    The research literature posits that while news media can exacerbate social and political conflicts through their reporting styles and focus, they also have the potential to alleviate tense situations by adopting conducive, conflict resolution methodologies.

    The Conflict-Sensitive Reporting Manual for Fijian Journalists includes guidelines to approach and report conflicts in a responsible manner by, among other things, conducting the requisite research, and avoiding unnecessarily inflammatory tones.

    Dialogue Fiji is the most active civil society in the “social cohesion” space and besides this manual, it published the proceedings of its first symposium on social cohesion in 2017 entitled Ethnic Relations in Fiji: Threats and Opportunities.

    The book, which I co-edited with Dialogue Fiji executive director Nilesh Lal, not only highlighted the challenges of social cohesion in Fiji, but also the reservoir of goodwill in our communities, despite everything that we have been through together.

    More than 50 years after independence we are still struggling with social cohesion, not the least because it is a complex problem given our context, with no overnight solutions.

    The problem requires commitment from every sector of our nation, the news media being no exception.

    National media’s contribution
    In this regard, conflict-sensitive reporting can be seen as the national media’s contribution to social cohesion and nation-building.

    To understand how conflict-sensitive reporting can contribute positively, we first need to look at the media-conflict dynamic, that is, how media conventionally report conflicts.

    According to critics, most violent conflicts are “rooted in resource or land disputes, but fought with strong references to ethnic, cultural, and religious identities”.

    The news media tend to focus on the manifestations of conflict, such as the tensions, violence, and damage, rather than the root causes, or possible solutions to any disputes. This lopsided approach risks feeding prejudices and fueling misconceptions.

    Conflict-sensitive reporting, on the other hand, takes a nuanced approach to the coverage of conflicts, in that it does not regard conflict as run-of-the mill, daily news reporting round, but something that needs extra care and attention.

    Conflict-sensitive reporting is an informed and considered approach, based on a commitment to understanding the roots of a conflict and reporting in an in-depth and circumspect manner.

    The idea is to not only “do no harm” but report stories with the aim of facilitating solutions to conflict.

    Fair and balanced?
    It should be pointed that conflict-sensitive reporting is an idea that is not fully accepted in the news media fraternity, which has traditionally espoused reporting the “facts” in a fair and balanced manner. But what is “fair”, “balanced” and “objective” is in itself heavily debated in the news media sector.

    Journalists and camera people at a Suva media conference
    Journalists and camera people at a Suva media conference . . . USP open to researching and experimenting with new and innovative concepts like conflict-sensitive reporting. Image: The Fiji Times

    As a university journalism programme, we at the University of the South Pacific are open to researching and experimenting with new and innovative concepts like conflict-sensitive reporting.

    The framework has been designed for developing countries with multiethnic communities at greater risk of conflict, than societies with greater ethnic homogeneity.

    Such countries are highly susceptible to movement towards civil conflict and/or repressive rule. If this sounds familiar, it is because “civil conflict and repressive rule” have been very much part of our existence in Fiji.

    Fiji, mired in ethnic tensions and political differences culminating in four coups fits the description of “fragile” or “vulnerable” societies”.

    Media have described Fiji’s coups as “short-lived”, “clean-up-campaign” or “coup-to-end all coups.”

    This terminology is regrettable because it grossly underestimates the lingering, sustained, pervasive and long-term damage of our coup culture.

    Infrastructure deficit
    For example, research published by professors Biman Prasad and Paresh Narayan in 2008 indicates a 20-year infrastructure deficit of $3.4 billion partly due to instability.

    Likewise, Professor Wadan Narsey in his 2013 article estimates that by 2011, Fiji had lost $1700 million because of the 2006 coup alone.

    This included $400 million in government revenue, which could have been used in education, health, infrastructure and public debt repayments.

    Because of just a few deaths due to the four coups in Fiji, media often describe these upheavals as “bloodless coups”.

    However, in social and economic terms, the coups caused a bloodbath.

    The expression “death by a thousand cuts” comes to mind. We do not feel the pain immediately because after the initial shock, there are smaller aftershocks that we feel and absorb over the course of years and decades.

    In time, these repeated blows add up to inflict deeper wounds that are more difficult to heal, but we adjust to the pain, normalise it, and learn to live with our situation, especially the poor and disadvantaged, who face the brunt of it.

    Low life expectancy
    In Fiji these wounds are manifest in the lack of services, dilapidated infrastructure, low life expectancy, lack of opportunities, low employment and high crime, brain drain, and so forth.

    Fiji gives meaning to renowned author Paul Collier’s words: “Wars and coups are not tea parties: they are development in reverse”.

    Some of the key underlying causes of our lack of progress are the lack of social cohesion and national unity, which equal unrealised potential.

    Since the 1980s there has been idle talk of turning Fiji into a Singapore, and more recently, political chatter about Fiji surpassing Australia and New Zealand

    In my opinion, this is a pipe dream unless and until we get social cohesion right, learn to resolve our differences without guns, and move together as a united force.

    This requires leadership and vision from the government, support and selflessness from citizens and professionalism and responsibility from the news media, with regards to taking it on themselves to understand the national context, and tailor their coverage accordingly 

    This is an edited version of Associate Professor Shailendra Bahadur Singh’s launch address for Dialogue Fiji’s Conflict Sensitive Reporting Manual for Fijian Journalists on 8 August 2023 at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. It was also published in The Fiji Times.

  • When players are piled on top of each other after a mad scramble for a loose ball, it’s a free-for-all. There are no rules.  Anything goes. That’s because there’s nobody in the pile to monitor what’s going on.

    — Mike Thomas, sports editor, Sportscasting, November 9, 2020

    What is playing out before our eyes right now should be familiar to any fan of football: it’s called the pile on, a brutal, frenzied, desperate play to seize control and gain power while crushing the opposition.

    In this particular analogy, “we the people” are trapped at the bottom of that pile, buried under a mountain of bread-and-circus distractions, economic worries, environmental disasters, power plays, power grabs, police raids, indictments and circus politics.

    The Maui wildfires. The Trump indictments. Hunter Biden’s legal troubles. The looming 2024 presidential election. The Ukraine-Russia conflict.

    In the midst of this pile on of woes, worries and semi-manufactured crises falling with sledgehammer-like frequency, monopolizing the media narrative and eclipsing all other news, it’s difficult to stay focused on what’s really going on, and yet something is brewing.

    Pay attention.

    Caught up in the partisan boxing match that is politics today, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s real.

    The indictments against Trump, the investigation of Hunter Biden, and the chatter of the political classes aren’t real; they are more sound and fury, signifying nothing in the end.

    As Aldous Huxley observed in Brave New World Revisited:

    Non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation… Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.

    So what is real?

    What’s real is the $5,000 fine and five-year jail sentence that could be levied against anyone found driving an illegal immigrant in their car in the state of Florida.

    What’s real are the hi-tech policing tools such as robotic dogs equipped with all manner of weaponry and surveillance technology that are rewriting the ground rules when it comes to privacy and security.

    What’s real is the North Carolina pastor who was fined $60,000 for ministering to the homeless on church property without a permit.

    What’s real is the revelation that Boston officials created and sent police a watch list of the mayor’s most vocal critics, not unlike the government’s own growing databases for anti-government dissidents.

    What’s real is what happened in Marion, Kansas, on Friday August 11, 2023, when police raided the office of the Marion County Record, blowing past the constitutional safeguards intended to safeguard the freedom of the press.

    Are you starting to get the picture yet?

    The manufactured media spectacles, piled on one after another, have a very real purpose, which is to distract us from the government’s constant encroachments on our freedoms.

    In the larger scheme of things, these individual incidents—the police raid of a small-town newspaper, a state ban on who gets to be inside your car, an outrageous fine for feeding the destitute, a politician’s use of an enemies list to silence critics—might easily go unremarked, yet they are all part of the police state’s tendency to pile on: pile on the distractions, pile on the retribution, pile on the show of force in order to completely eviscerate anything that even remotely resembles opposition.

    The police state has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on anyone who even questions its authority, let alone challenges its chokehold on power.

    “We the people”—the proverbial nails to the police state’s heavy-handed tactics—will be hammered into compliance, intimidated into subservience, and terrorized into silence.

    It doesn’t matter which party dominates in Congress or the White House: all of us are in danger from these fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics.

    In this way, anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.

    Day after day, the government’s crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the prison walls holding the American people captive become ever more inescapable.

    The upcoming election and its aftermath will undoubtedly keep the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats, so busy fighting each other that they never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.

    Yet the winner has already been decided.

    As American satirist H.L. Mencken predicted almost a century ago:

    All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

    In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, nothing will change.

    You cannot have a republican form of government—nor a democratic one, for that matter—when the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.

  • Exclusive: Media company recently signed lucrative deal with Saudi government-controlled MBC Group

    Vice has repeatedly blocked news stories that could offend the Saudi government, leaving its reporters unsure if they are still able to report freely on the kingdom’s human rights abuses, sources have said.

    The media company recently signed a lucrative partnership deal with the MBC Group, a media company controlled by the Saudi government, to establish a joint venture in the Middle Eastern country. Of the 29 jobs currently advertised on Vice’s careers page, 20 are based in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • By Kelvin Anthony, RNZ Pacific lead digital and social media journalist

    News media in Indonesia act as “government loudspeakers” by advancing a one-sided narrative regarding the conflict in West Papua, a new study reveals.

    The human rights abuses against indigenous Papuans, who have been under military occupation of the Indonesian armed forces since 1962-63 and their struggle for independence from Jakarta, remains a sticking point for the Indonesian government in the region.

    However, the Indonesian national media provides an unfair coverage on the plight of the West Papuans by only amplifying the state’s narrative, according to research published in Pacific Journalism Review.

    The latest Pacific Journalism Review . . . July 2023
    The latest Pacific Journalism Review . . . July 2023.

    The paper, which looks at how six dominant news media organisations in Indonesia report on the Free West Papua movement, found that they “tend to be only a ‘loudspeaker’ for the government” by using mainly statements issued by state officials when reporting about West Papua.

    The findings come from in-depth interviews that were conducted between 2021 and 2022 with six informants and journalists who have a history of writing on West Papua in the last five years.

    Additionally, the research analysed over 270 news items relating to West Papua issues that appeared in the six Indonesian online media — Okezone, Detik, Kompas.com, Tribunnews, CNN Indonesia and Tirto — in the week after the Indonesian government formally labelled the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement (TPNPB-OPM) as a terrorist group in April 2021.

    “The Indonesian media does not use a balanced frame, for example, in terms of explaining why and how acts of violence are chosen on the path to fight for West Papuan independence,” the author of the research from Universitas Padjadjaran, Justito Adipresto, writes.

    ‘Prolonging human rights violations’
    Non-state actors have acknowledged that “labelling West Papuan separatist groups as terrorist will not only not solve the problem, but that it also has the potential to prolong the human rights violations that have been taking place in West Papua,” Adipresto says.

    While some point to the economic disparities as a starting point to the West Papua conflict, the research shows that the media fall significantly short of providing a nuanced coverage by ignoring the “haunting track record of violence and militarism, ethnicity and racism” in their reports.

    “The imbalance of representation that occurs in relation to reporting on West Papua cannot be separated from Indonesia’s treatment of ethnic groups and the region of West Papua,” Adipresto says.

    He says the government’s labelling of the Free West Papua movement has “severe implications for the current and future situation and conflict in West Papua”.

    “Media in Indonesia is under the shadow of the state,” he said adding that reporting on West Papua lacks “explanation and sufficient context”.

    He said Indonesian media were “very concerned about the readers clicks”, and therefore on the quantity of reports rather than the quality.

    “The concentration of reporters in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, also leads to reporting from reporters not located in or never having visited West Papua, potentially reducing empathy and understanding of human rights or economic aspects in their reporting.

    ‘Quality, ethics of journalists are an issue’
    “The quality and ethics of journalists are an issue in reporting on West Papua, considering that journalists do not tend to cover the issue of labelling a ‘terrorist’ comprehensively.”

    The research shows Indonesian media place greater importance on comments from government officials, often ignoring or not providing space for other voices, in particular the West Papuan community.

    “It is necessary to develop a more systematic and consolidated strategy for the national media to cover West Papua better,” the author concludes.

    The full paper, titled “Government loudspeakers: How Indonesian media amplifies the state’s narrative towards the Free West Papua movement”, can be found at Pacific Journalism Review, published by the Asia Pacific Media Network. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

  • Pacific Media Watch

    A new media monitoring watchdog, Muslim Media Watch, published its first edition today featuring a cover story alleging that a Malaysian cult leader who was reportedly now in New Zealand could “create social unrest”.

    Named as Suhaini bin Mohammad, he was allegedly posing as a Muslim religious leader and was said to be wanted by the authorities in Malaysia for “false teachings” that contradict Islam.

    His cult ideology was identified by MMW as SiHulk, which was banned by the Johor State Religious Department (JAINJ) in 2021.

    The front page of the inaugural August edition of Muslim Media Watch
    The front page of the inaugural August edition of Muslim Media Watch. Image: Screenshot

    In an editorial, the 16-page publlcation said a need for “such a news outlet” as MMW had been shown after the mass shootings at two Christchurch mosques on 15 March 2019 and the Royal Commission inquiry that followed.

    Fifty one people killed in the twin attacks were all Muslims attending the Islamic Friday prayer — “they were targeted solely because they were Muslims”.

    The editorial noted “the shooter was motivated largely by online material. His last words before carrying out the shootings were: ‘Remember lads, subscribe to PewDiePie.’”

    “It is therefore disappointing that, while acknowledging the role of the media in the shootings, none of the 44 recommendations in the government’s response to the [Royal Commission] relate to holding media to account for irresponsible reporting, or even mention media; the word does not appear in any recommendation,” writes editor Adam Brown.

    Often not neutral
    “Indeed, the word Muslim appears only once, in ‘Muslim Community Reference Group’.
    It has long been acknowledged that media reporting of Muslims and Islam is often not neutral.”

    The editorial cited an Australian example, a survey by OnePath Network Australia which tallied the number, percentage and tone of articles about Islam in Australian media in 2017, in particular newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp: The Daily Telegraph, The Australian, The Herald Sun, The Courier Mail and The Advertiser.

    “Over the year, the report found that 2891 negative articles ran in those five newspapers, where Islam and Muslims were mentioned alongside words like violence, extremism, terrorism and radical. This equates to over eight articles per day for the whole year; 152 of those articles ran on the front page,” said the MMW editorial.

    “The percentage of their opinion pieces that were Islamophobic ranged from 19 percent
    to 64 percent.

    “The average was 31 percent, nearly a third, with one writer reaching almost two thirds. Also, as OnePath comment, ‘Even though they are stated to be “opinion” pieces, they are often written as fact.’”

    Editor Brown said the situation in New Zealand had not improved since the shootings.

    “Biased and unfair reporting on Muslim matters continues, and retractions are not always forthcoming,” he wrote.

    Examples highlighted
    The editorial said that the purpose of MMW was to highlight examples of media reporting — in New Zealand and overseas — that contained information about Islam that was not
    accurate, or that was not neutrally reported.

    It would also model ethical journalism and responsible reporting following Islamic practices and tradition.

    MMW offered to conduct training sessions and to act as a resource for other media outlets.

    On other pages, MMW reported about misrepresentation of Islam “being nothing new”, a challenge over a Listener article misrepresentation about girls’ education in Afghanistan, an emerging global culture of mass Iftar events, an offensive reference in a Ministry of Education textbook, and the ministry “acknowledges bias in teacher recruiting”, an article headlined “when are religious extremists not religious extremists”, and other issues.

  • Earlier this year, members of the News Enlightenment Initiative (NEI-Germany) and Project Censored partnered to recruit an international jury of news professionals and media scholars to identify and highlight “News…

    The post Media Freedom Matters: Exposing International News Neglect, Censorship, and Agenda Cutting Across the Globe appeared first on Project Censored.

    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

  • By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter

    A review of RNZ’s online news has called for greater oversight and enforcement of standards after a crisis sparked by a single staffer making “inappropriate” edits to international news online.

    RNZ Mediawatch asks RNZ’s chief executive if this was the result of a digital shift done on the cheap — and how he’ll put right what he himself called “pro-Kremlin garbage”.

    “An RNZ digital journalist has been stood down after it emerged they’d been editing news stories on the broadcaster’s website to give them a pro-Russian slant,” host Jeremy Corbett told 7 Days viewers back in June when the story first hit the headlines.

    “You’d never get infiltration like that on 7 Days. Our security is too strong. Strong like a bear. Strong like the glorious Russian state and its leader Putin,” he said.

    It’s never good for a serious news outlet when comedians are taking aim.

    '7 Days' comedians have a laugh at RNZ against the backdrop of the Kremlin in last Thursday night's episode.
    7 Days’ comedians have a laugh at RNZ against the backdrop of the Kremlin in last Thursday night’s episode. Image: Screenshot /Thre

    It was just a joke of course, but at the time some wondered whether Kremlin campaigns could have been behind the unapproved editing of RNZ’s online world news.

    Pro-Russian perspectives and some loaded language inserted into news agency stories relating to the war in Ukraine were first spotted overseas.

    RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson called it “pro-Kremlin garbage” and some politicians asked if RNZ might be carrying foreign propaganda.

    RNZ tightened editorial checks and stood down one online journalist, who later resigned. He told RNZ Checkpoint that he had edited news reports “in that way for years” and no one had ever queried it or told him to stop.

    An RNZ audit of stories he edited eventually discovered 49 — mostly supplied by Reuters — which RNZ deemed to be inappropriately edited.

    External experts were then appointed to look at the problem and how RNZ should respond.

    Former RNZ political editor Brent Edwards, currently political editor at NBR, drew on his experience as RNZ’s newsgathering chief to pinpoint a key problem.

    “I technically had no responsibility whatsoever for what went on the web. I always thought that that news should have run ‘Digital,’” Edwards said.

    “Maybe one of the recommendations  . . . would be that ‘Digital’ should be integrated into the news division – and therefore a lot more editorial control imposed on what goes on the web,” he said

    That was indeed a key suggestion when the expert panel reported back this week.

    What the independent experts found
    The Independent External Review of RNZ Editorial Processes (PDF) confirmed once and for all it was just one journalist — who mostly worked remotely — responsible for the breach of standards. But RNZ was responsible too.

    “What we found was a journalist who acted in breach of both editorial standards and RNZ’s contract with Reuters — and an organisation that facilitated the conditions for a journalist to do so,” the panel concluded.

    It also cited poorly-resourced digital news team members not adequately supervised or trained, outdated technology and organisational silos as factors that “reduced the oversight of editorial standards.”

    “The training materials we reviewed were basic and staff had not engaged with them. Training in editorial standards  . . . lacked consistency and effectiveness,” the report said.

    “I have empathy for the journalist and his situation. He felt that he was doing the right thing he’d been doing for a long period of time,” RNZ’s chair Dr Jim Mather told Checkpoint on Wednesday when asked if the journalist was ‘a fall guy’.

    “The report clearly identifies he didn’t receive the required level of training, support and oversight. So I think there’s some significant questions that we need to be asking ourselves,” he said.

    The co-editor of Newsroom.co.nz Mark Jennings — formerly the long-serving news chief at TV3 — was not so forgiving.

    “(The panel members) seem to believe that he was a misguided soul with no deliberate intent to breach editorial standards,” he told RNZ’s Morning Report on Thursday.

    “He was inserting his own opinions. I’ve got no doubt about that. And it wasn’t just pro-Kremlin. It was pro-China. It was anti-America and anti-Israel,” he said.

    This week RNZ said it has accepted the panel’s 22 recommendations, including a new role focused on editorial standards and building trust. It also said it was already planning some of the changes, such as updating aged in-house editorial technology.

    In the end, the panel didn’t agree all 49 of the stories RNZ identified were inappropriately edited. It also said there was no intention to misform or propagandise, but RNZ’s reputation for accurate and balanced journalism had been damaged.

    “That has to be a concern. When there is a breach, it really hurts to go backwards a little bit in the estimation of some of the public,” RNZ CEO Paul Thompson told Mediawatch.

    “But it was 49 stories and in the end — and it was one person. If we get those things in place . . . I think that the trust will be there,” he said.

    The report said Thompson himself amplified the alarm and perception of damage to trust by calling the stories “pro-Kremlin garbage”.

    “The panel is entitled to its opinion on my use of language, but my view of what happened and the panel’s view is the same – the editing was inappropriate and it affected the balance. It introduced unreliable information and there was a pro-Russian bias in the copy. They didn’t like the fact that I used a very strong term to describe it,” he told Mediawatch.

    Putting it right

    RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson
    RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson . . . “This division [between news and digital] . . . was common in many organisations, particularly public broadcasters, in the early days of the internet.” Image: RNZ

    Paul Thompson confirmed online news would now be under the supervision of RNZ’s news division, as the report recommended.

    “This division . . . was common in many organisations, particularly public broadcasters, in the early days of the internet. Online news was a new emerging area but those days are long gone,” the report says.

    Thompson is an experienced newsroom leader. Shouldn’t he have addressed this earlier?

    “We’re integrated across RNZ. Everyone works across platforms — that’s how we do podcasts and social media and have a functioning website,” he said.

    “So what we’re talking about is that function of editing news and the benefits of that being brought together where everyone is editing news. In May we wrestled with this and decided it was time to make that change — and within a couple of weeks we were thrown into this crisis,” he said.

    “Should we have got on to it sooner? Probably. And I’ll take responsibility for that,” he said.

    The report also says the journalist responsible for the inappropriate editing had himself suggested additional editing positions to ease the workload and improve oversight.

    “In both cases one of the key factors cited and not proceeding was a lack of funding and resources,” the report said.

    Thompson championed online expansion as soon as he took over at RNZ in 2013, setting stretch goals to attract new and bigger audiences.

    Yet it wasn’t until 2017 that RNZ emerged from a lengthy funding freeze. Was this crisis a consequence of a digital transition done quickly and on the cheap?

    “We have been constrained on funding and we just couldn’t ‘magic’ up those positions. Even if we agreed with his suggestion . . . it probably wouldn’t have stopped him doing what he did — and he’s the one who did the editing,” Thompson told Mediawatch.

    “We have been stretched  – but the counterfactual is if we hadn’t pushed ourselves to move into those areas, even though it has been hard, we’d be way behind where we need to be in terms of looking after audiences,” he said.

    “It’s a fair comment. But the good part is that we’ve now received that material funding increase. It kicked in a month ago and it will mean that we can resource digital for the first time to the level that it needs to be,” he said.

    A big bill
    RNZ’s chair has said the bill for the review is around $230,000.

    Broadcasting minister Willie Jackson told Newshub Nation on Saturday the government had no regrets.

    “We had no choice. You’re almost talking about national security here. I don’t think it’ll happen again. They’re going to cover the gaps,” Jackson said.

    “It’s the only way that you can remove any doubt that there’s any lingering issues that we haven’t resolved. It’s all being flushed out.

    “The recommendations  . . . are sensible and pragmatic. We need to make sure we use this as an opportunity to make ourselves even stronger,” Paul Thompson told Mediawatch.

  • Toxic chemicals have been found in ALL brands of toilet paper all across the globe – raising alarming concerns about the dangers that consumers are exposing their bodies to on a daily basis. And, legislation is making its way through Congress that could give the government unprecedented power to snoop on your internet activity – […]

    The post Toilet Paper Found To Contain Toxic Chemicals & The Patriot Act Getting Put On Steroids appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • The Paradise Bombed documentary about West Papua by Kristo Langker.

    Asia Pacific Report

    A new documentary and human rights report have documented savage attacks in 2021 by Indonesian security forces on a remote West Papuan village close to the Papua New Guinea border as part of an ongoing crackdown against growing calls for independence.

    The documentary, Paradise Bombed, and the research report made public yesterday allege that six Papuan villagers were killed in the initial attacks, a further seven were killed later when fleeing to safety, and 284 people were recorded by witnesses to have died from starvation in the months since then.

    The researchers also allege that the security forces used bombs and rockets fired by helicopters and drones in the Indonesian attacks.

    An estimated 2000 people were forced to flee into the forest and have remained in bush camps ever since, fearful of returning to their homes.

    “From 10 October 2021, there have been ongoing attacks on the Ngalum Kupel
    community by the Indonesian National Armed Forces,” said the researchers, documentary filmmaker Kristo Langker, and Matthew Jamieson of the PNG Trust.

    “The continued aggravated attacks by Indonesian military forces and apparent complicity of Indonesian authorities have profoundly impacted on the community [until] July 2023.

    “The Ngalum Kupel people have evidence that the Indonesian National Armed
    Forces are targeting the whole of the Ngalum Kupel community with modified Krusik
    mortars and Thales FZ 68 rockets.”

    Targeted villages
    The military aerial attacks were reported to have targeted a series of villages which
    are adjacent north and northwest of Kiwirok, the regional and administrative centre.
    This includes the Kiwi Mission station.

    Four community members of the Nek-speaking Ngalum Kupel ethnic tribe were eyewitnesses to the airborne rocket and bombing attacks on their villages around Kiwirok.

    “They described a drone dropping bombs together with four or five helicopters firing rockets at houses, food gardens, pigs and chickens,” the report said.

    The cover of the PNG Trust human rights report
    The cover of the PNG Trust human rights report. Image: Screenshot APR

    The witnesses named the dead victims and the displaced survivors.

    “The witnesses collected shrapnel and bombs from the initial series of attacks,
    bringing this evidence to Tumolbil in PNG,” the report said.

    “The shrapnel and bombs collected indicate that Thales FZ 68 rockets and modified Krusik mortars were used as the munitions in the military aerial attacks. The witness accounts detail the Indonesian military forces using a drone/UAV armed with modified Krusik mortars, Thales rocket FZ 68 weapon systems and military attack helicopters against an Indigenous community.”

    The report authors concluded that the Indonesia National Armed Forces — which were
    understood to be equipped with Airbus Fennec attack helicopters and Thales
    rockets systems — were “likely responsible for the helicopter components of the attacks.”

    Ngalum Kupel villagers who fled from the attacks show some of the bombs that we fired on them
    Ngalum Kupel villagers who fled from the attacks show some of the unexploded bombs that were fired on them. Image: PNG Trust report

    Wenda praises researchers
    United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) president Benny Wenda has praised the researcher and documentary maker in a statement yesterday:

    “These courageous filmmakers, Kristo Langker and friendlyjordies, have shown how bombs made in Serbia, France, and China were used to massacre my people. What happened in Kiwirok is happening across West Papua.

    “We are murdered, tortured, and raped, and then our land is stolen for resource extraction and corporate profit when we flee.

    “My heart was crying as I watched this documentary, as I was reminded of the Indonesian attack on my village in 1977. My early life was like the Kiwirok children shown in the film: my village was bombed, my family killed and brutalised, and we were forced to live in the bush for five years.

    A Ngalum Kupel village under aerial bombardment attacked by Indonesian forces on 12 October 2021
    A Ngalum Kupel village under aerial bombardment attacked by Indonesian forces on 12 October 2021. Image: PNG Trust report

    “The difference is that in 1977 no one was there with a camera to interview me — no one knows what happened to my mum, my aunt, my grandfather. But now we have video proof, and no one can deny the evidence of their own eyes.

    “Aside from the number of Kiwirok people killed by Indonesian troops — ranging between 21 and 72 — witnesses from the village say that hundreds have died of starvation while living in the bush, where they lack food, water, and adequate medical supplies.

    “Villagers attempting to return to Kiwirok have been attacked by Indonesian soldiers – shot at close range, with sniper rifles, and tortured. The names of Kiwirok residents are now added to the 60,000 — 100,000 who have been forcibly displaced by Indonesian militarisation since 2018.

    “The international community knows this is a grave humanitarian crisis, and yet still refuses to act. Why?

    “I want to alert all our diplomatic groups, the International Parliamentarians for West Papua (IPWP), the International Lawyers for West Papua (ILWP), and all West Papuan solidarity activists around the world. You must ask your governments to address this, to stop selling arms to Indonesia.

    “I also want to thank Kristo Langker and friendlyjordies for making this important documentary, and to Matthew Jamieson for producing the report on the attack. You have borne witness to the hidden genocide of my people.

    When we are finally independent, your names will be written in our history.”

    There has been no immediate response by Indonesian authorities.

    Australian academic Professor Clinton Fernandes of political studies at the University of New South Wales . . . providing context in an interview in Paradise Bombed
    Australian academic Professor Clinton Fernandes of political studies at the University of New South Wales . . . providing context in an interview in Paradise Bombed. Screenshot APR
  • The AUSMIN 2023 talks held between the US Secretaries of State and Defense and their Australian counterparts, confirmed the increasing, unaccountable militarisation of the Australian north and its preparation for a future conflict with Beijing.  Details were skimpy, the rhetoric aspirational.  But the Australian performance from Defence Minister Richard Marles, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, was crawling, lamentable, even outrageous.  State Secretary Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III could only look on with sheer wonder at their prostrate hosts.

    Money, much of it from the US military budget, is being poured into upgrading, expanding and redeveloping Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) bases in the Northern Territory city of Darwin, and Tindal, situated 320km south-east of Darwin, the intended to “address functional deficiencies and capacity constraints in existing facilities and infrastructure.”  Two new locations are also being proposed at RAAF Bases Scherger and RAAF Curtin, aided by site surveys.

    The AUSMIN joint statement, while revealing nothing in terms of operational details or costs, proved heavy with talk about “the ambitious trajectory of Enhanced Force Posture Cooperation across land, maritime, and air domains, as well as Combined Logistics, Sustainment and Maintenance Enterprise (CoLSME).”  Additionally, there would be “Enhanced Air Cooperation” with a rotating “US Navy Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Aircraft in Australia to enhance regional maritime domain awareness, with an ambition of inviting likeminded partners to participate in the future.”

    Further details have come to light about the money being spent by the Pentagon on facilities in Darwin.  The unromantically titled FY22 MCAF Project PAF160700 Squadron Operations Facility at the RAAF Darwin base “includes the construction (design-bid-build) of a United States Air Force squadron facility at the … (RAAF) in Darwin, Australia.”  The project is deemed necessary to add space “for aircrew flight equipment, maintenance and care, mission planning, intelligence, crew briefings, crew readiness, and incidental related work.”  Some of the systems are mundane but deemed important for an expanded facility, including ventilating and air conditioning, water heating, plumbing, utility energy meters and sub-meters and a building automation system (HVAC Control system).

    Correspondents from the Australian Broadcasting have gone further into the squadron operations facility, consulting US budget filings and tender documents to reveal cost assessments of $26 million (A$40 million).  A further parking apron at RAAF Darwin is also featured in the planning, estimated to cost somewhere in the order of $258 billion.  This will further supplement plans to establish the East Arm fuel storage facility for the US Air Force located 15 kilometres from Darwin that should be able to, on completion by September this year, store 300 million litres of military jet fuel intended to support US military activity in the Northern Territory and Indo-Pacific region.

    According to the tender documents, the squadron operations facility also had a broader, more strategic significance: “to support strategic operations and to run multiple 15-day training exercises during the NT dry season for deployed B-52 squadrons.”  The RAAF Tindal facility’s redevelopment, slated to conclude in 2026, is also intended to accommodate six B-52 bombers.  Given their nuclear capability, residents in the NT should feel a suitable degree of terror.

    Michael Shoebridge, founder and director of Strategic Analysis Australia, is none too pleased by this state of affairs.  He is unhappy by Canberra’s reticence on US-Australian military arrangements, and none too keen on a debate that is only being informed by US-based sources.  “A public debate needs to be enabled by information and you can’t have a complete picture without knowing where the money is being spent.”

    While it is hard to disagree with that tack, Shoebridge’s outfit, in line with such think tanks as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, is not against turning Australia into a frontline fortress state ready for war.  What he, and his colleagues take issue with, is the overwhelmingly dominant role the US is playing in the venture. Those in Washington, Shoebridge argues, seem to “understand the urgency we don’t seem to.”  Rather than questioning Australia’s need for a larger, more threatening military capability to fight phantoms and confected foreign adversaries, he accepts the premise, wholeheartedly.  Canberra, in short, should muck in more, pull its weight, and drum up Australian personnel for the killing.

    Anthony Bergin, a senior fellow of Strategic Analysis Australia, teases out the idea of such mucking in, suggesting a familiar formula.  He insists that, in order to improve “our national security, we should be looking at options short of conscription which wouldn’t be as hard to sell to the Australian people.”  He thought the timing perfect for such a move.  “There’s now a latent appetite for our political leaders to introduce measures to bolster national resilience.”

    This silly reading only makes sense on the assumption that the Australian public has been softened sufficiently by such hysterical affronts to sensibility as the Red Alert campaign waged in the Fairfax Press.

    Options to add padding to Australia’s military preparedness include doubling or tripling school cadets and cadet programs of the “outdoor bound” type based in the regions.  But more important would be the creation of a “national militia training scheme”.  Bergin is, however, displeased by the difficulty of finding “volunteers of any kind”, a strange comment given the huge, unpaid volunteer army that governs the delivery of numerous services in Australia, from charities to firefighting.

    Alison Broinowski, herself formerly of the Australian diplomatic corps, safely concludes that the current moves constitute “another step in the same direction – a step that the government has been taking a series of for years; accepting whatever the United States government wants to place on Australian soil.”  More’s the pity that most details are to come from Washington sources, indicating, with irrefutable finality, Canberra’s abject subordination to the US imperium and its refusal to admit that fact.

  • Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is in over his head, and a recent string of train derailments has shown that he can’t handle the job. Plus, the FBI has a new way of getting their hands on your personal data, without having to go through the court system. Instead of getting warrants, they are just buying […]

    The post Incompetence Leads to MORE Train Derailments & FBI Turns To Corporate America For Tracking Data appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.