Vaclav Havel: The Emperor Is Naked

“…the crust presented by the life of lies is made of strange stuff. As long as it seals off hermetically the entire society, it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, ‘The emperor is naked!’ – when a single person breaks the rules of the [totalitarian] game, thus exposing it as a game – everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.”

Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless

Cardinal Sarah: West’s Greatest Enemy Is Itself, Not Russia

From Lifesitenews:

In Russia, the Orthodox Church has to a great extent resumed its pre-1917 role as the moral foundation of society. This arouses political opposition, but also a deep hatred on the part of the post-Christian elites of the West, not only vis-à-vis Russia, but also against the Russian Orthodox Church and, by extension, against Orthodox Christianity itself. The overtly political attack that aims to pit Ukraine against the Russian Orthodox Church under the authority of Patriarch Cyril of Moscow is a dangerous, stupid provocation.

and the following:

John Paul II was convinced that the two lungs of Europe had to work together. Today, Western Europe is employing extraordinary means to isolate Russia. Why persist in ridiculing that great country? The West is displaying unheard-of arrogance. The spiritual and cultural heritage of the Russian Orthodox Church is unequaled. The reawakening of faith that followed the fall of Communism is an immense hope.

  

Mahavishnu: At the Lotus Feet Of the Lord

Andrei Martyanov, bless his soul, besides being a brilliant and informative analyst, has excellent musical taste.  In his latest talking head he mentions golden oldie, John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which took me back a long time…and inspired me to pull up this famous show with the fabulous Paco de Lucia. [just changed the version, which was too muffled]

Naked As We Are

Pravmir.com:

In such circumstances, I see myself as the fellow in the parable of the talents who received only one talent. The Land Owner tells him that the least he could have done, instead of burying the talent, was to give the talent to bankers so that it could collect interest. That’s me. I’m that fellow with the one talent. I cannot do what others do. I cannot invest and double my “talent of Grace,” as the hymns of Holy Week tell us to do. But I can at least do the least. That is, if I am going to break the fast because (well, because of any reason), then the least I can do is not give in completely to my craving: At least I can eat the cheese rather than the fish, or the fish rather than the chicken or the chicken rather than the steak. What is the least I can do? At least I can do that. And I have found that when I do this, when I offer to God the least, that God graciously accepts this.

I can imagine that some of you are screaming, or something inside you is screaming, “but we should give God our best, not our least.” And of course, you are right. But here’s the painful reality that we are not willing to accept about ourselves: often the least is our best. Best is not defined by the idealized picture we have in our head about ourselves. Best is defined by what we really are and what we really have and are able to do and offer God in the particular circumstances and reality of our life as it is, not as it should be or as we wish it were. What we really have to offer God comes from who we really are, not who we think we should be. And when we begin to offer to God the two widow’s mites of our reality, of who we really are, then we begin to really change. Then, I think, metamorphosis really begins. Up to this point everything has been getting us ready, ready to see ourselves as we are, ready to accept God’s love for us in our miserable condition, ready to offer to God, not what we should, but what we are.

And this experience, this movement from should to be, has been for me one of the more painful transitions of my spiritual life. And it is on going. I sometimes amaze myself at the depth of self delusion when I see anew the height of my arrogance, the breadth of my selfishness, and my unwavering good opinion of myself even in the face of daily, hourly, evidence to the contrary. Daily I have to return to myself. Daily I have to step out of the bushes naked before God. Daily I have to humble myself and offer to God the least, offer to God so very much less than what I should, so much less than I imagined I would. And yet, this is what I have and what I am. It’s not much, but at least what I have, what I am, at least this little bit I give to God. And God receives it, in his great love for mankind. And God receives it as he received the two copper coins of the widow. And God receives it, small as it is, taking the least and making it not just enough, but making it great, because that’s what God does.

Shroud Of Turin Dated To Christ’s Death & Resurrection

What a wonderful reinforcement of the Easter truth, coming as a timely riposte, as though by the divine hand, to the deluded men who tried to tarnish the glory of the cross through the Moskva caper [h/t to Lew Rockwell].

Working with a team of other researchers, Liberato De Caro of Italy’s Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council in Bari used a “Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering” method to examine the natural aging of cellulose that constitutes a sample of the famous linen cloth.

They concluded that their peer reviewed research shows the Holy Shroud is compatible with the hypothesis that it is much older than seven centuries old — the conclusion reached in 1988 using carbon dating techniques — and is around 2,000 years old.

The Philosopher Of Woke: Immanuel Kant

It all goes back to Prussia:

Kant argued that we can never perceive reality directly or know what things are “in themselves.” All we can perceive is things as they appear to us, through our eyes, ears and other senses—but those appearances, he asserted, are shaped and distorted by the nature of our senses. He posited that there are basic abstract “categories” built into our minds that impose themselves on our perception, that make things appear to us in a certain way, regardless of what things really are, independent of us. All our perceptions are shaped by “a priori concepts,” concepts formed not from observation and experience but implanted in our very nature, “to which all objects of experience must therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree.”

The advantage of this theory is that it allows us to confidently assert that our perceptions will always match our abstract assumptions, because they cannot do otherwise. The price, however, is that this theory cuts us off from reality, trapping us inside a delusion of our own making. There is no absolute truth, only our “perception” of the truth as shaped by who we are.

It’s a winding road from here to wokeness, but I think you can begin to see where it starts: with the idea that perception is more powerful than reality and that it all depends on your own identity.

In the 20th century, Ayn Rand summed up the contradiction in Kant’s philosophy: the idea that “man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.”

 

Zahir Ebrahim: What Happened To Your Plebian Antidote?

Where are you, Zahir Ebrahim?

You worked relentlessly, putting out article after deeply- researched article on your website, Project Humanbeings First. Articles on the forces shaping our world, the media, the dialectic, the Zionist project, politics in Pakistan, on political ideologues of all nationalities and stripes, letters from your correspondents.

Your were a fount of knowledge and insight, able to take me to task on everything from Vladimir Putin’s alleged financial assets to the posers and pretenders of dissentstream. Some thought you evil for this. You could be harsh, but you were not evil. A broken heart for your country drove you.

Your website now appears scattered over various archives. So much unpaid work over a decade or more, gone. Your books, in pdf form, are surely somewhere, right? You printed them out and preserved them, I hope. You are most welcome to put them here on my site for preservation, wherever you are. I didn’t agree with all your views, but I recognize a brave person struggling to say real things, letting his voice sound, even if only in echoes in the vast silence of the cyber gulag to which the untermenschen of the internet are consigned.

No email account seems to work for you, now that Google has wiped you off blogger. How does one get in touch? Are your wife and children safe? Where are you?

I remember how you teased me for my paranoia. Who’s interested in wiping out blogs like ours, you asked, with all the confidence of your PhD from MIT, your engineering patents, your work in defense technology in Silicon Valley.  Use blogger or free wordpress and save yourself the headache, you counseled.

You should have heeded me.

Poisoning Of Ukrainians/Roman Abramovich: False-Flag?

NY Post:

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and several Ukrainian officials were apparently poisoned while negotiating an end to Moscow’s invasion at a meeting where they were only served water and chocolate, according to reports Monday.

Abramovich, who accepted a Ukrainian request to help deescalate the warfare, and at least two senior members involved in negotiations suffered from peeling skin on their faces and hands, constant and painful tearing, and red eyes following a meeting in Kyiv earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The billionaire owner of the British soccer club Chelsea FC‘s eyesight also “completely disappeared” for several hours, while a member of the Ukrainian delegation, the parliamentarian Rustem Umerov, became partially blind, two sources told the Financial Times.

We are supposed to believe from this that Vladimir Putin poisoned Abramovich and did it so incompetently that not only did Abramovich and the other Ukrainian negotiators survive, but they figured out they were poisoned and they know from where the poison came, because there were only two items at the meal.

Does anyone think that a colonel of the KGB, who came up from a humble background in the dangerous, tough world of post-Soviet Russian politics to become one of the most powerful men in the world is that stupid?

Besides, what is not mentioned in the piece is telling. We are told that Zelensky invited Abramovich to participate in the negotiations, which reports as early as the end of February confirm,   but we are not told that Putin is also close to Abramovich. He certainly approved of his mediation.

And Putin would seem to have everything to gain from Abramovich’s help and nothing to gain from poisoning him. Indeed, he has everything to lose by a false step,  which accounts for  his restraint in the face of ever-more deranged denunciations emanating from the US President.

Putin has already accomplished most of his goals, from liberating the Donbas and taking Mariupol from Azov, to destroying most of Ukraine’s military infrastructure, turning water on for the Crimea, and securing evidence of war-plans and biological weapons manufacture that vindicate his decision to go in.

For an operation lasting more than a month, there are relatively few civilian casualties, and most of them are a direct result of the Ukrainian military/government/Nazi battalions giving weapons to civilians, firing on them, placing them intentionally in harm’s ways, refusing to allow them to use the humanitarian corridors, and using them as hostages/military cover. Russia has lost more soldiers than they need have in trying to minimize the damage to the Ukrainians. Had they gone in with full force, there would have been a far greater number of casualties.

Widening the war at this point would endanger all Putin’s gains and would be reckless. So far all the signs point to Putin being a  prudent, competent leader.

Not so Zelensky, who foolishly gambled on NATO troops on the ground in a reckless, double-talking game that he has lost.

Zelensky must know it too because he has already started talking about accepting neutrality for Ukraine and has given up on NATO membership.

That means two of the most important strategic goals of Putin are in the process of being wrapped up. Why would he jeopardize things at this stage?

An outright war with NATO would have no winners except the global elites. With Russians suffering enormously from the sanctions, as well as Russian partners like China and India, poisoning negotiators risks alienating allies and widening the war.

On the other hand, the wider the war, the better for Zelensky, who has every reason to manufacture a provocation to get what he now sees slipping from him, NATO admission and NATO intervention.

So Zelenksy does have a motive to create a false-flag.

And his behavior so far supports this theory. Zelensky has been warning almost daily of possible chemical strikes by Russia.  He recently repeated claims that strikes on chemical factories and the use of phosphorus bombs by Russia constitute a use of chemical weapons that warrants NATO intervention. But in truth neither constitutes chemical weapons usage. Phosphorus bombs are not even categorized as chemical weapons. They’re widely used by militaries all over the world, although they should never be used against civilians because of the hideous injuries they inflict. They were used indiscriminately by the US in Fallujah in Iraq, which did constitute a war crime, but Fallujah was a horror show that is very, very far from what is happening in Ukraine now, despite what the mainstream media psyops tells you.

Still, Zelensky keeps claiming such attacks, which means he thinks that a provocation has its uses.

And if he cannot find one, he has every reason to manufacture one. A poisoning is after all a “chemical attack.” If the poison used is a radioactive substance, then that is a “nuclear attack.” And haven’t we been warned by Zelensky that the Russians will commit chemical and nuclear attacks? Voila, here we have it.

Is there anything else that supports this argument? Yes.

Just recently it was Zelenksy who lobbied the West to exclude Abramovich from the economic sanctions that have hit Russians, ostensibly because he was helping the negotiations.

UK and EU officials are skeptical about the claim, which is from unnamed sources in the US government, but reports are that Biden and Zelensky have been on the phone. Remember Maidan and Biden’s instructions to the Ukraine government to get rid of the prosecutor before he investigated Hunter Biden and Burisma’s corruption?

Today we know Hunter Biden’s company Rosemont Seneca was directly funding US biolabs in Ukraine in violation of international conventions. We know there is evidence supporting ethnic cleansing/genocide directed against Russian-speaking Slavs that goes back directly to the Pentagon, to Metabiota, to Hunter Biden, among many others. All these are international crimes. Does Joe Biden’s increasingly hysterical pronouncements have anything to do with revelations about the Biden crime family’s dealing in the Ukraine? Does he stand to gain from a widening of the war which could distract and cover up his crimes? Did he and Zelensky work out a quid pro quo that might provoke such a widening?

Abramovich got his exemption. It must have been in return for something.

I suggest that it was for Abramovich agreeing to go along with this false-flag.

There is some further circumstantial evidence.

The alleged poisoning follows on J. K. Rowling’s recent high-profile attack on Putin, who had just defended her in a speech denouncing cancel culture in the West.

In her rejoinder to Putin, Rowling explicitly referred to Putin “poisoning” his opponents, charges that have been circulating in the West for a long time but have never been proved. [see below, for details.]

A further point is that Rowling’s allegations of poisoning were made in a speech blaming Putin alone for civilian deaths in the Ukraine, indicating that she is fully behind the mainstream narrative on the war.

Given the extraordinary media coverage given to this children’s writer and the manner in which that has been spun off into manufacturing her as a voice for establishment liberal  positions in the culture war, isn’t there a good chance that Rowling herself is an intelligence plant or at least coopted to play her part in intelligence operations?

Consider this: In 2016 the Russian orthodox church along with the Russian Ministry of Culture and the Military cast Harry Potter and NATO as the Satanically -inspired foreign powers threatening Russia in a cartoon called Kids Against the Sorcerers. They are defeated by Russian military school cadets in a story that according to the narrator  “takes place in the present, past and future”.

Not only is the story about “belief in God” against the occult, but also against the Western pursuit of wealth, propagated by an unnamed “enemy” army “seeking a rematch for its defeat during WWII” and about uniting “different people such as the Greeks and the Serbs by common faith and tradition.”

Apparently,  Mr. Putin was trolling J. K. Rowling. She fell into the role cast for her in the film perfectly.

Addendum:. 

The most notorious poisoning case was that involving Putin critic and ex-KGB spy turned British agent,  Alexander Litvinenko, who died in the UK  from radioactive polonium-210 poisoning.

A British court found two Russians, one a member of the Russian parliament, guilty, but the court used conjectural language in suggesting the crime had the Russian state and Putin directly behind it.

The two Russians, both of whom apparently didn’t know the nature of the poison they were carrying,  said Litvinenko did it to himself.

The poisoning was rather suspicious, to my mind.

In the first place, a state like Russia has ample resources to come up with an untraceable poison. If that were not possible, the Russians would have staged the poisoning so as to make it look like an illness or an accident, so that investigation would be delayed until the poison was no longer detectable. And even if they could not disguise the poisoning, the Russians would have disguised the source, perhaps by making sure the poisoning took place at a public event where there was so much food from so many sources and so many people became ill that no one could be sure where or when the poison had been administered, let alone by whom.

If Putin were the ruthless gangster the West says he is, it would have been nothing to kill innocent people to disguise an assassination. It’s done all the time in the West. Or if he wished to send a message, he could at least have disguised the proximate cause of the assassination.

The Litvinenko case instead has all the hallmarks of being cooked-up to attack Putin. Radioactive plutonium may have been a bad choice for a Russian poisoning, as it would point back to Russia instantly. But it was the perfect choice for a false-flag poisoning to blame the Russian government. Litvinenko’s handlers in the West or elsewhere could have set him up to get rid of him and at the same time blame  Putin.

 

 

Jacque Attali in 2009: Hopefully, A Pandemic Will Bring About World Government

Alex Jones cites a supposed quote from Jacques Attali.

A number of social and print media outlets are running with the same quote.

Poynter says the text that social media cites is fraudulent or a wild misinterpretation.  Now I accept that social media might be running disinformation on this, but I am pretty much 100 percent sure that Poynter is.

The text is from a book that is now unavailable and out of print so we have to take the word of third parties who claim to have copies of it.

As for Attali, as he is a plagiarist and liar, I am not really interested in anything he has to say.

I found this, via Poynter, from Attali’s  blog in l’Expres in 2009.

History teaches us that humanity only evolves significantly when it is really afraid: it then first sets up defense mechanisms; sometimes intolerable (scapegoats and totalitarianisms); sometimes futile (distraction); sometimes effective (therapeutics, discarding if necessary all previous moral principles). Then, once the crisis is over, it transforms these mechanisms to make them compatible with individual freedom, and to inscribe them in a democratic health policy.

The pandemic that is beginning could trigger one of these structuring fears.

If it is not more serious than the two previous fears linked to a risk of pandemic (the mad cow crisis of 2001 in Great Britain and the bird flu crisis of 2003 in China), it will first have significant economic consequences (fall in air transport, fall in tourism and the price of oil); it will cost about 2 million dollars per contaminated person and will make the stock markets fall by about 15%; its impact will be very brief (China’s growth rate fell only in the second quarter of 2003, only to explode in the third quarter); it will also have organizational consequences (in 2003, very rigorous police measures were taken throughout Asia; the World Health Organization set up global alert procedures; and some countries, particularly France and Japan, stockpiled considerable quantities of drugs and masks).

If it is a little more serious, which is possible, since it is transmissible by humans, it will have truly planetary consequences: economic ( models suggest that it could lead to a loss of 3 trillion dollars, that is to say a drop of 5% of the world’s GDP) and political ( because of the risks of contagion, the countries of the North will have an interest in the countries of the South not being sick and they will have to ensure that the poorest have access to the medicines that are currently stocked only for the richest); a major pandemic will then bring out, better than any humanitarian or ecological discourse, the awareness of the need for altruism, which is, at the very least, self-serving.

And, even if, as we must obviously hope, this crisis is not very serious, we must not forget, as with the economic crisis, to draw lessons from it, so that before the next, inevitable one, prevention and control mechanisms and logistical processes for the equitable distribution of medicines and vaccines are put in place. To do this, we will have to set up a world police force, a world stockpile and therefore a world tax system. We will then come, much more quickly than would have been possible on economic grounds alone, to set up the foundations of a true world government. It was through the hospital that the establishment of a real state began in France in the 17th century.

In the meantime, we could at least hope for the implementation of a real European policy on the subject. But here again, as on so many other subjects, Brussels is silent.

j@attali.com

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

I also ran into this explanation from dailyhunt.in:

Attali, a former adviser to late French president François Mitterrand, has written numerous books. However, none of them were called “The Future of Life”.

“Future Life”, published in 1981 in French as “L’Avenir du Futur” and later translated into English, was written by Michel Salomon and features an interview with Attali in which he answers the question “Is it possible and desirable to live 120 years?”

The book’s publisher, Seghers, sent AFP a copy of the passage in which Attali is quoted.


Excerpt featuring Attali’s interview in the original French version of “Future Life”

At one point in the interview, Attali says: “...as soon as a person gets to be older than sixty or sixty-five, and his productivity and profitability begin to slip, he costs society dearly.” And later: “Actually, from the viewpoint of the cost to society, it is much preferable that the human machine abruptly stop functioning than that it deteriorate very gradually.”

Which is considerably more sinister than the article that Poynter pulled up, which obscures Attali’s real position.