Category Archives: Police State

Why More Swine Flu Deaths in Bangalore?

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From Sify.com:

“State health commissioner P.N. Sreenivasachari told IANS: ‘It’s difficult to say why Karnataka, more precisely Bangalore, which is endowed with adequate healthcare facilities, is witnessing large number of swine flu deaths. We too are puzzled.

‘We can say the virus is already in the air and it’s time people became more aware and cautious to stop the spread of the virus. However, from the point of view of the administration, we have provided adequate healthcare facilities to treat swine flu patients,’ added Sreenivasachari.

Principal secretary (Health) I.R. Perumal said people should not get panicky.

‘People with swine flu like symptoms should immediately get themselves checked, as the city is well equipped to deal with the pandemic,’ added Perumal.

On Friday, two deaths were reported from Bangalore, one came from Bijapur.

My Comment

Why? I have no idea. More international travelers is one reason and a plausible one. But I confess  I couldn’t help thinking about this piece I wrote in 2005, “Terror Hits Bangalore.”

One result of swine flu scare-mongering  will be a shift of money to influenza research – hitherto absent in India. That means funding for drug trials. I wonder who the lucky drug companies are that will benefit?

The two states hit hardest are Karnataka (where Bangalore is) and Maharashtra (where Bombay is). Those are also the states that are the destinations of most foreign travelers and where India’s IT business and stock market are located. Bangalore is the home of a booming biotech business. And a locus of the anti-globalization movement as well. Just thinking out a loud…

Deaths so far are a hundred or less. That’s in a country of roughly a billion and a quarter where tens of thousands die from traffic accidents (300 a day or around 100,000 a year) and from water-borne diseases like diarrhea, typhoid, and jaundice. Hundred of farmers are committing suicide. None of that has qualified for the term pandemic….OR for the accompanying switch in research funding..

Here’s some information on malaria in India in 2008:

“While the official figures state that in 2008 India had 1.5 million malaria cases, resulting in 924 deaths, the real number of deaths is higher by several orders of magnitude.

“These numbers are a joke,” said Sunil Kaul, a doctor who works for a volunteer organization called the Ant that treats villagers. “In Assam alone we had at least 1,500 deaths last year.”

The real number of malaria-related deaths in India was closer to 40,000 in 2008, according to various non-governmental sources and some government officials who didn’t want to be named.”

Under-reporting and lack of knowledge about the disease are two of the main obstacles in retarding the spread of malaria. But interestingly, it’s also international organizations like WHO that obstruct progress in many ways:

“These problems are further complicated by foreign agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), which — under the influence of global lending agencies like the World Bank and big pharmaceutical companies — have pushed India to adopt prevention methods that don’t suit the local conditions and to initiate huge, ill-considered projects rather than targeted ones. ….”

More here at The Global Post.


Swine-Flu is a Man-Made Panic..

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My new piece on swine-flu is up at Lew Rockwell.

Please note, I have it as Harold Varnus in the piece. It should be Varmus, as in my previous blog post on the subject. In my defense, I wrote it mostly in very dim light…

“The latest in the barrage of media reports on swine flu is a Bloomberg news report (August 25, 2009) that it might hospitalize 1.8 million patients in the US and over-burden hospital intensive care units.

This comes from a planning scenario released by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology

The Bloomberg story cites some theatrical numbers:

  • Half of the US population infected (that is, over 150 million people)
  • 300,000 people in hospital intensive care units
  • 30–90,000 people dead
  • By-pass surgery emergency operations disrupted

But hidden in paragraph 5 of the Bloomberg piece is the most pertinent part:

These numbers are only “scenario projections” that were “developed from models put together for planning purposes only,” says a Centers for Disease Control spokesman.

So.

  • Statistical projections.
  • Projections from models of past pandemics. (And not the past, as in 1968 or 1957, but way back, as in 1918.)
  • Projections developed for planning purposes only.

That’s three stages removed from anything you could call reality.

But perish this tenuous link with facts, PCAST wants Obama to rush through vaccine production so that 40 million people can be infect – er – injected by mid-September.

And who should make that decision?

A doctor? The surgeon-general? A medical team?

Why, the homeland security adviser!

That’s John Brennan, a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, deputy executive director of the CIA under George Tenet, and the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (CTC) from 2004 to 2005 during the exact period when the CIA became most heavily involved in torture practices in Iraq and elsewhere.”

Note:

I wanted to state here that my social views are quite liberal, and I do not have any objection to voluntary family planning and contraception. I’m also firmly pro-choice. And in terms of the environment, I support far greater consideration by each of us, as individuals and as communities, for animal life, nature, and conservation.

But those are my personal views. Putting the legal and physical force of the corporate- state behind those preferences, in the form that Holdren apparently thinks will work, is, in my view, completely misguided.

Scientists Who Developed Vaccine Won’t Take It Themselves? (Correction added)

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— Wayne Madsen on Guillain-Barre syndrome and the swine flu vaccine

My Comment:
I’m hearing that I misunderstood this and it’s the makers of the small-pox vaccine who are baulking.
I’ll try to track that down.

Meanwhile, why would you trust a government that sends secretive letters to neurologists admitting fears it won’t admit to the public that’s getting the vaccinations?

Bill Lets President Seize Emergency Control of Private Cyber Networks

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In the news:

“Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.”

Read more here.

My Comment

Please note “behind closed doors.” This was supposed to be an ultra-transparent administration, right? To make up for the secrecy and tyranny of George Bush…..
Remember?

Gore Vidal On the Bridge to Fascism

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Gore Vidal on a bridge to somewhere bad :

“I went back to the lecture hall at Duke where I’d been speaking, and I chatted about the woods, about the bridge. Nobody seemed to have noticed it. I asked a politically minded professor, and he said, “Well, it’s a problem.” He said, “The government’s getting ready for something; we don’t know what it is, but something’s obviously on their minds that’s disturbing them.” And I said, “Revolution?” “Oh,” he laughed, “this is North Carolina, don’t bother about that, but whatever it is, they’re putting a lot of money into this bridge.”

A year or two later, I took the same walk again. There was a very large bridge of solid cement, and it looked entirely finished. I found another gentleman of the forest, and I said, “Well, can you find much use for this huge and expensive bridge?” He said, “It certainly was expensive, I can tell you that.” He had the happy look of someone who had benefited from the expense. We chatted about the government and what they were up to, and a certain wariness could be heard in our dialogue. We were puzzled; something unexpected had happened, something really unimaginable—a vast work had been constructed for imminent horrors, it would have seemed. I did ask here and there about it, but I was given no answer….”


Trauma and Brainwashing

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Since I’ve been posting about media spin and the brainwashing of the public, here’s an enlightening post at Humble Libertarian on post-traumatic stress disorder among vets, apparently at near-epidemic levels

What has that to do with brainwashing? Everything, as the video above shows.

Early victims of US brainwashing techniques were US army personnel, as experimentation in the CIA brain-washing program, MK-Ultra shows. They still continue to be victims of it.

Also read the CIA’s notorious Kubark manual on torture – which analyzes different techniques to induce compliance in subjects.

Repeatedly traumatizing someone (and sexual humiliation and violence are the easiest avenues to do this), breaks down their sense of identity. In all but the strongest people, it produces compliance, refusal to accept reality, escapism, psychosis, and addictions of all kinds.

In the strongest, it produces resistance. Either lawless resistance to the state, which is what we call criminal, or, in rare cases, the fierce concentrated resistance of the social or political activist, the revolutionary…and even the saint…

The victims produce the fodder that the state manipulates.
The survivors become the excuse for the state to ratchet up control.
Either way, the state grows.


Flight AND Fight..

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My latest piece at Lew Rockwell, answers some questions readers had asked me about leaving the US:

“My last piece, “Time to Run,” provoked a lot of reaction, almost all of it positive, but some negative.

The readers who liked it wanted advice on where to run. That’s a tall order and I’ll come back to them in another piece.

Those who didn’t like it brandished a few arguments that ought to have a stake driven right through them immediately.

Here goes, point by point.

1. Running away doesn’t help

1. Actually, running away is often the best response to a bad situation.

Speaking practically, when a dump truck turns into your drive, mows down your rhododendrons and heads toward you, do you stand your ground yelling Sicilian imprecations at the driver until he rolls over you too? Or do you leap aside nimbly, take a photo, and call a lawyer? You have as much chance getting through to the poisonous shills in DC with constitutional arguments, as you have charming a rabid pit bull with Shakespeare.

Speaking theoretically, your body and brain are hardwired to either put up or shut up, a “fight or flight” response built into the structure of the autonomic nervous system. That is the physiological term for what you think of as your “lizard brain.” Fight or flight is the either/or response that helped your ancestors survive. It’s not the best way to tackle complex problems, but when it gets down to basic survival, it’s a handy guide.

And how do you know when your survival is at stake?

Check your gut response…..”

Read the rest at Lew Rockwell.

[I will be posting reader email on my blog  and will respond there, since my email is often compromised]

The Neurolinguistic Programming of Reality

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“An excellent example of globalist
redefinition of a common term
is the use of the word “state” in place of “country”
. When the media and leaders
refer to a country like Iran as a “state”
this has the same or similar effect as the
British globalists referring to the United States
as “the colonies”, which is off-handed at best.
This type of redefinition of terms is
designed to belittle the conception of a
supposed and/or perceived enemy by making
them appear less important and smaller in perspective
to the aggressors. Most soldiers would be
more willing to attack a “rogue state” than an “enemy
country”. The actual usage of this type of
terminology actually creates a mass perception
that the said country has already been assimilated
into the globalist empire and is simply acting out of
turn and is deserving of punitive damage whether
compensatory or offensive or both.
However, the true modus operandi
of the globalists is essentially Hegelian
in nature. Time and time again as a
species we can observe the workings of “thesis,
antitheses and synthesis”.

An excellent example would be the attacks on
the World Trade Center of 2001.
Thesis: “terrorists are a continual threat
to our liberty”. Antitheses: the
attack on the World Trade Center. Synthesis:
the Patriot Acts and Office of Homeland
Security, also known as: the loss of liberty
in the name of security…….

There are many conclusions to be drawn when
looking at the cycle of empires, but one
stands clearly: ruling is a science, and it
involves coercion whether via induced
suffering, psychological
torture and/or destabilization….”

— Max Mitchell, “Foundations of War:
Terminology of the New World.”

88-year old Gunman In Shoot-Out Inside Holocaust Memorial Museum

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In the news:

“An 88-year-old gunman with a violent and virulently anti-Semitic past opened fire with a rifle inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, fatally wounding a security guard before being shot himself by other officers, authorities said.

The assailant was hospitalized in critical condition, leaving behind a sprawling investigation by federal and local law enforcement and expressions of shock from the Israeli government and a prominent Muslim organization…….

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said von Brunn’s Web site has long been listed as a hate site.”

My Comment

It’s interesting how shootings in recent years have had some connection to the Holocaust (one heroic victim at Virginia Tech was a Holocaust survivor and a Holocaust survivor fell victim to the Mumbai attacks).

Von Brunn, according to reports, thinks “Jews control the Federal Reserve” and the banking system and are basically evil.  He has a long-standing relationship with Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby, a white supremacist and anti-Semite.

His is also one of many people who question President Obama’s birth certificate, a group that’s apparently been christened the “birther” movement by many of our liberal-left pundits. At TPM Cafe, Joshua Marshall hastens to let us know that your ordinary, garden “birther” (I first thought they meant some kind of natural child-bearing advocate) is only a harmless wing-nut, but alas, not Von Braun.

Note:

It seems very clear from his previous arrests, writings and statements, that Von Brunn is NOT harmless. While I certainly think the federal government isn’t above milking every bit of lawless behavior to impose further controls, the fact is bigotry does increase during times of stress.  And the most recent “hate crimes” legislation, does, in my estimate, try to deal with a broad range of victims –  including anti-Christian bigotry in its language.

That’s a decided improvement.

I’ve been looking over some sites and postings that I’d consider antisemitic (this applies to other forms of racism or bigotry) and here are some thoughts:

1. Noting the ethnicity/religion of someone (especially if it’s germane to the story) is not racism/antisemitism/bigotry

2. Drawing an ineluctable connection between the ethnicity/religion and the behavior is racism/antisemitism/bigotry (the operative word is ineluctable).

Of course, in ordinary life, people do generalize about other races, even if it’s only in their own minds. In a stressful situation that might be understandable. (You get hit by a car and the driver, from a different race, ignores your plight and speeds off…you react by saying, “all so-and-so always act like this…”).

This sort of reaction is a momentary generalization or simplification of the kind that the brain is actually biologically prone to make (creating a binary of us versus them).  The feeling crosses over and becomes racist when the reactive element in the response is deliberately cultivated and sustained through willfully ignoring all other factors, explanations, and theories.

Here’s what I mean.

It’s one thing to observe that there’s a high proportion of Jewish people working in finance and banking. There is. To deny that is to be out of touch with reality. The danger in trying to pretend this reality isn’t so deny reality is an obvious one. Uninformed people will then assume that every other part of what you’re saying is equally untrue and out of touch with reality. And they will assume every other thing they believe from appearances alone is true, even when in those cases, appearances are deceiving.

Now, if you are not a bigot, after that preliminary observation, several other things will (or should) occur to you. The first is that Jewish people are well-represented in practically all intellectually oriented professions.  This itself should dilute the strength of any argument tending in an anti-Semitic direction.

Perhaps the dominance of Jewish people in banking could then be attributed to other factors – historical and cultural, rather than to “Jewishness.”

Now, I realize I am on tricky grounds here, because sensibilities have become so over wrought that any misstatement can be construed as intentionally offensive. So, let me first say, if I do make a misstep, it’s not intentional and will be glad to restate my position, if someone points out why it might be offensive.

More later..

Meanwhile, Jeremiah Wright has gotten into hot water for saying “the Jews” have kept him from Obama.

And, the thought police (in this case Newsweek) is after Oprah as well. Turns out the Queen of Talk is sympathetic to the anti-vaccine folks – the ones who think that vaccines are often about big pharma’s profts more than about your health. The article also criticized Oprah on other grounds, but methinks that’s the crux of the matter.  The feds might have an interest in nixing any possible joining of forces between left-oriented alternative medicine advocates and right-oriented ones, in advance of selling swine flu vaccine to the public.

A swine flu pandemic also makes a convenient pretext to control the movement of people between countries.

Of course, it could all be coincidental, and I could just be another “wingnut” on the loose….

But so far, the wing-nuts are winning the credibility contest.

Time to Run

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My latest piece, “Time to Run”, at Lew Rockwell:

“Is it time to run?

That’s what I’ve been asking myself for three years now.

Before that, I thought it was simply a matter of finding a better place to live. A place that was quieter and cheaper. Where flippers and developers hadn’t taken over the neighborhood. Somewhere safe I could park my car on the street and not worry about it.

But by the time I found it, I also found that the thieves were inside the house, not on the street. There’s really no hiding from them. And no hiding from what they can do.
Our mene, mene, tekel upharsin is on the wall.

It’s time to run, not hide.
I mean that. We’re in the throes of an economic collapse of a kind last seen in the 1930s. The government is intent on grabbing control of whatever it can. American firms are dropping like flies. Unemployment is soaring. Debt is soaring. The money supply is soaring. Our foreign policy is a wreck – we have more enemies than we can count. We have a drug war on the borders, we have gang war in the ghettos, we have culture wars in the academy and media.

We have criminals in government.
The future isn’t any brighter. Subprime is only the first leg down. We still have a second wave of housing trouble in store, centering around commercial real estate and option ARM loans.

Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research, wrote a piece last year predicting that by 2012 there would be food riots, tax rebellion, and revolution across the country. Celente has a good track record in the forecasting business.

Experts predict a 100% rise in prices across the board. In the best-case scenario, it will happen over ten years. In the worst case, it might happen within months….”

Read the rest at Lew Rockwell