The Chinese military is training kindergarteners to handle firearms and fight like soldiers in boot camps across China this summer, according to dozens of school social media accounts reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The boot camps feature combat training for boys and girls with a wide variety of toy weapons including knives, grenades, rifles and shoulder-fired missiles, and require the children to adopt military behavior, such as saluting, the schools’ social media posts show. The rise in the militarization of China’s youth appears to follow a 2019 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee push for increased “National Defense Education” and a related effort directing schools to hold National Defense Education activities in 2022, according to government documents.
“There’s sort of a ‘get ’em while they’re young’ mentality that has always been part of the communist ethos,” Brandon Weichert, a U.S. Air Force consultant, told the DCNF. “Xi Jinping is trying to inculcate not just a patriotic fervor among the next generation, but I think he’s trying to also create actual next soldiers for the inevitable campaigns that he plans on waging militarily.”
Uniformed People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers oversaw all of the kindergarten boot camps that the DCNF reviewed. The boot camps were located in major Chinese cities, such as Beijing, Nanjing and Shenzhen, and were also run in more than half a dozen provinces including Anhui, Fujian and Guangdong, according to the schools’ social media posts.
The programs featured roughly the same sequence of activities, according to a DCNF review of posts from the participating kindergartens.
The boot camps generally began with basic military etiquette and proceeded to teach various military skills ranging from combat to emergency medical training. Additionally, a number of these programs also taught the children about famous PLA heroes and martyrs, according to the schools’ accounts.
‘Swear To Love The Motherland’
In May 2023, faculty members and more than 80 children of the Xingtan Guanghui Kindergarten in Guangdong province assembled on the playground for the opening ceremony of their school’s week-long National Defense Education camp, all wearing matching camouflage fatigues, according to the school’s social media account.
“INHERIT THE RED GENE, CARRY FORWARD PATRIOTIC FEELINGS, LOVE CHINA, LITTLE SOLDIER,” declared a large PLA banner, which partially hid the kindergarten’s playset.
“Kindergarten momma encourages her children not to fear hardship, fatigue or strict training,” the school’s principal told the children during the opening ceremony, the school’s social media account reported. “Respect the instructors and obey all commands.”
Uniformed PLA soldiers then performed a flag-raising ceremony, with all attendants singing the Chinese national anthem, the social media post stated.
“We solemnly swear to love the motherland from now on, to dedicate our hearts to working together to build the dream of a powerful country,” the children then pledged, according to the social media post. “Even if I fall to the ground I will continue onward!”
PLA soldiers then taught the kindergarten recruits how to groom themselves and make their beds in accordance with military standards, before drilling them in how to stand at attention, stand at ease and salute, the school’s social media account shows.
Experts say recent efforts to militarize China’s youth are part of the CCP’s ideological goals.
“While these measures do appear intended to put the Chinese masses on a stronger military footing in the longer term, they are also directed at the CCP’s longstanding efforts to deeply embed itself in civil-military relations and as part of its broader push to shore up the CCP’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese masses through stoking nationalism,” Russell Hsiao, executive director of the Global Taiwan Institute, told the DCNF.
“The CCP has been hardening its ideological line over the past decade and these measures are indicative of this expanding ideological campaign undertaken by Xi Jinping,” Hsiao said. “Xi has long emphasized the importance of early political indoctrination of Chinese youths, so it is no surprise that the youths are also singled out as an important target of CCP’s National Defense Education program.”
‘If The Youth Are Strong, The Country Will Be Strong!’
After teaching the children how to follow orders and act as units, the various kindergarten bootcamps then typically graduated to weapons training, according to a DCNF review of the schools’ programs. A majority of the kindergarten boot camps provided a similar selection of toy weapons to the children.
The boot camps typically included some form of close combat training, and issued toy knives or toy batons and ballistic shields to the children. The various programs also usually taught the cadets “rifle tactics” with toy guns, according to the schools’ social media accounts.
Multiple programs used these toy guns for squad-based skirmish exercises, during which the children pretended to shoot each other, the posts show.
“If the youth are strong, the country will be strong!” children sang over footage of a skirmish exercise during the May 2023 Houjie Yazhi Kindergarten boot camp in Guangdong province, according to the school’s social media post.
WATCH:
The boot camps also frequently provided different types of toy high explosives to the “little soldiers,” the schools’ social media accounts show.
Some boot camps, such as the May 2023 Xingtan Guanghui Kindergarten program in Guangdong province, trained the children to use all three types of explosive weapons, the school’s social media account shows.
“They’re prepping for war, and now they’re getting their kids involved,” said Weichert, author of “Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life.”
“Their kids aren’t talking about boys becoming girls and vice versa. Their kids are talking about, ‘let’s go out with bayonets, play in the field and pretend like we’re killing Americans.’ That’s where this is headed,” Weichert said.
‘Little Heroes’
Several kindergarten boot camps reviewed by the DCNF taught children to emulate famous war heroes and PLA martyrs.
For example, a June 2023 National Defense Education event held by the No. 2 Experimental Kindergarten in Zhengzhou, Henan province, screened an episode of the computer-animated children’s series, “Long March Hero,” according to the school’s social media account.
Kung Fu Animation Studios and the Jiangxi provincial government co-created “Long March Hero,” which focuses on communist special forces prior to the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China, according to government records. Characters in “Long March Hero” frequently kill each other during battle sequences, according to a DCNF review of multiple episodes.
The Zhengzhou kindergarten’s social media account states that the children were allegedly riveted by the “Long March Hero” action scenes depicting the Red Army fighting Imperial Japanese forces.
Solomon Yue, co-founder of Republicans Overseas, an organization that advocates for Republicans living abroad, told the DCNF that while growing up in Shanghai during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the PLA subjected his class to a type of National Defense Education training called the “Long March Exercise,” which simulated “a retreat under attack by America.”
“Kids were asked to march 20 miles a day with food and blankets on ones’ backs for a week,” Yue said.
The Chinese government is also teaching kindergarteners to admire PLA martyrs this summer, the DCNF found.
In one instance, the Qingyuan Experimental Kindergarten boot camp in Zhejiang province showed children an animated video about Huang Jiguang, a celebrated PLA martyr who sacrificed himself for his military company during the Korean War by sacrificing his body to cover the opening of an enemy machine gun nest in 1952.
Likewise, “little soldiers” at a kindergarten boot camp in Guangdong province’s Longmen county, learned about PLA martyrs like Dong Cunrui, who sacrificed his life to blow up a key bridge while fighting the Chinese Nationalist army in 1948.
WATCH:
Yue told the DCNF that the CCP taught his class to revere PLA martyrs when he was growing up in China.
“PLA soldiers visited my school to brainwash the kids often,” Yue said. “The CCP wanted Chinese youth to believe that being PLA martyrs was glorious. A suicide attack against one’s enemy is to honor the CCP.”
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2023-07-10 07:52:052023-07-10 08:03:03The Chinese Military Is Training Kindergarteners For War In Bootcamps Across The Country
Facebook has spent $43.4 million on Mark Zuckerberg’s private security in just three years, but that reportedly has come as the family’s foundation is pumping millions into activist groups to support the defunding of police.
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has donated at least $5.5 million to liberal activist organizations that are tied to defunding, if not calling for the abolishment, of police, the New York Post reported.
Among the CZI donations to anti-policing activist groups, according to the report, are:
$3 million to PolicyLink, the organization behind DefundPolice.org, which seeks to “diminish the role of policing in communities and empower alternative visions for public safety.”
$2.5 million to Solidaire, which seeks to defund the police through its “Anti-Police Terror Project” and boasts it helped strip $18 million out of the Oakland Police Department’s budget.
Solidaire funds the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of 150 activist groups, which said in a press release: “[T]he police do not keep us safe, and they do not prevent nor stop crime.
“Pouring more money into the system of policing only threatens the very lives they’re purported to protect.”
Meta/Facebook representatives and CZI did not respond to the Post’s requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s Meta is raising its private security spending pre-tax from $10 million for the past few years to $14 million in 2023, according to the report, citing February company filings.
The Zuckerberg-Chan family, which includes three daughters, planned $27 million for their “overall security program” in 2021, the Post reported.
Anti-police protests and riots roiled American cities and culture before the 2020 presidential election, in which Republican Donald Trump, who in June 2020 referred to himself as the “president of law and order,” was running against Democrat Joe Biden.
That year, Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life reportedly donated $350 million to 2,500 election departments in 47 states, as reported by National Review.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2023-07-10 06:43:372023-07-10 06:46:20Zuckerberg Spent $43 Million on Security, but $5.5 Million to Back Defund the Police
Russian media has published video and photos of a naked Hunter Biden in a den full of little girls. I wanted to see if there was corroborating evidence of pedophilia on Hunter’s laptop and his depravity wildly exceeded our worst imaginations.
Look for yourself. I did. I could only get through a third of it. This was deliberately kept from the American people by the Democrat media, social media platforms and a weaponized FBI, DOJ and every other government agency.
Evil prospers. In spades.
Hunters Young girls – scroll down for photos in just the first hundred photos of the over ten thousand pictures on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Russian TV showing a naked paedophile, Hunter Biden, snorting cocaine while in company of young girls.
Dr. Ali Ataie, who is an Islamic scholar and a professor at Zaytuna College in Berkeley, CA said at the Muslim Community Center in the San Francisco Bay Area that there is a “growing” flat-earther “movement” among the scientific community, and he said that footage that the footage of astronauts in space was visibly filmed in a pool. He questioned how there can be seas and oceans if the Earth is spherical, and he said that Sir Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity is bogus, referring to him as a Freemason and an occultists. He also said that if the Quran says that the Earth is flat, it therefore must be flat. In addition, he claimed that nobody has ever seen the dark side of the moon because the moon is a light and not a spherical object, and he said that the overwhelming majority of astronauts are Freemasons. He also said that American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is a Freemason. The lecture was part of a series of lectures about “Quranic Science” and it was uploaded to the YouTube account of the Muslim Community Center – MCC East Bay on June 10, 2023.
Dr. Ali Ataie: “Geocentrism is that the earth is stationary and that the heavenly bodies are revolving around the Earth. Nowadays, if you even suggest something like that, you will be crucified, basically. Not only that… There is a growing movement nowadays – this is not just among Christians, this is in scientific community – [who say] that the Earth is actually a plane, that it is a flat plane, that it is not globular, and it is stationary. This is a very popular movement now.”
[…]
Audience member: “But all the astronauts, who have gone up to the space stations and all that, they say it is round.”
Ataie: “Oh yeah, that’s what they say, but we haven’t seen a picture. I mean, we have these images of astronauts working in the space stations, with the Earth in the background, but look at the Earth, there are no satellites, which there are supposed to be 20,000 satellites – you don’t see a single one. You don’t see a single plane anywhere. And every so often in one of their videos, you will see bubbles come up, which means they are in a pool, in front of a green screen, and you can find these videos.
“So how does water convex itself? So if the Earth is round, water can bend itself. Can I do that, can I conduct that experiment? I can certainly pour water into a container and the water will take the shape of the container, but I am not talking about that. I am talking about pouring water out and making it into a convex sculpture, without it… Because water always finds a level.”
Audience member: “But it is the gravity, which is keeping it…”
Ataie: “That’s the whole answer, it is the catch-all, it is gravity. It’s gravity, don’t worry about it, it’s gravity… So people in Australia are walking upside down, and trillions of tons of water are sticking to the Earth upside down, because of gravity, but a bird flying over the ocean… So gravity is strong enough that it holds all this water, but just weak enough that a bird can fly over the ocean or a fish to swim through that water. So it’s very strange. A fickle thing gravity is.
[…]
“Sir Isaac Newton – a knighted Freemason, occultist – sitting around, an apple falls on him, [saying]: ‘Oh there is gravity, what an epiphany!’ No, it is called relative density. Initially this sounds like a totally ridiculous notion, right? But those who make this argument are saying that there is scientific backing for it, and that the vast majority of opinions of human beings throughout history, is that the earth is geocentric.
[…]
“You believe in gravity, I believe in God.
[…]
“Because if we are definitive on things… And I think it is a great wisdom that Allah doesn’t give us definitive answers, because the scientific community keeps changing their minds. So if we believe that the Quran is correct, even if the Quran says that the Earth is flat, then it has to be flat. And for 2000 years people are ridiculing the Muslims, saying: ‘You guys are barbarians, you are crazy, it is not flat.’ Then in 2000 years later they say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s flat.’
[…]
“Also another thing about the moon is that you never see the dark side of the moon. You never see the backside of the moon. So if it is orbiting, why don’t we ever see the backside? All it does is go like this… It just rotates like that, it never turns… There is not backside, it is a light, it is translucent. You can’t land on something like that.”
Audience member: “But then you don’t believe they landed on the moon.”
Ataie: “How do you get through the Van Allen Radiation Belts? Even right now, if you talk to modern scientists, and say: ‘What is the biggest challenge with space travel?’ We can’t even get out of low Earth orbit, 200 miles away from Earth, and they have massive radiation belts, we have to figure that out. This is 50 years after six moon landings? They can’t go 200 miles off the Earth, but 50 years ago, they went 500,000 miles round-trip, six times. You know, $19 billion they fleeced from the American public.
[…]
“Five hundred and fifty or so astronauts have been up in space – [of them] 94% or something are Freemasons, the secret society. It’s a fact, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, the first men on the moon [are] 33rd degree Masons. This is a fact. And secret societies keep secrets.
“Do you know Neil deGrasse Tyson? Have you ever heard of this guy? Also a Mason, he is sort of the go-to-guy of the modern scientific world.
[…]
“That is just what they said, ‘we found 70 planets, and they’re just like Earth…’ Sure they did… I don’t think so…”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2023-07-10 06:03:142023-07-10 06:03:14California: Islamic scholar says ‘if the Quran says that the Earth is flat, then it has to be flat’
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, long-secret archives of the Communist International were thrown open to western researchers for the first time. Many previously unknown details of communist history have been revealed–including the 1935 Comintern orders directing Communists to begin work in Hawaii. These were uncovered by veteran researcher Herbert Romerstein in Moscow.
The transcription is below, the pdf of the original as recovered is HERE (p 35-36).
Many of the names of the Comintern’s “Anglo-American Secretariat” members meeting about Hawaii on February 17, 1935 are aliases of British, Russian, and other European communists. Some are unidentifiable. But one, “Sherman”, was much closer to Hawaii and in a position to begin carrying out the Comintern dictates contained in this document.
Romerstein, author of The Venona Secrets, describes “Sherman” as: “William Schneiderman, who, in the 1930s, was an agent of the Soviet foreign spy agency NKVD, code-named “Nat” (Venona transcripts), with an alias of “Sherman.” He was later made head of the Communist Party of California, where he would come into contact with individuals as significant as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the chief scientist at the Manhattan Project. (Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets, Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000, pp. 258-68.)
The Comintern’s February, 1935 discussion was followed by a July 7, 1935 “Letter to the CPUSA on Hawaii.” That led to quick action on the part of American communists. Bob Krauss, in his book, “Johnny Wilson, First Hawaiian Democrat” (p 170) writes:
On the Honolulu docks, a tough little German-Hawaiian from Kalihi, Maxie Weisbarth, spoke for seamen as business agent for the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific. A six-page, free-swinging, semi-weekly newspaper called the Voice of Labor began publication on November 4, 1935.
One week before this date, a rawboned young seaman named Jack Hall landed in Honolulu from the Mariposa to begin a career as a union organizer that would make him the most powerful labor leader in Hawaii. He eked out a living on less that $20 a week working for Weisbarth distributing pamphlets….
Communist infiltration of labor unions apparently did not worry Johnny (Wilson), although Hall’s friends said Hall read nothing but Communist literature. Johnny said later, “I knew as far back as 1936 that there were Communists here in Hawaii….”
It was 3 ½ months from issuance of the Comintern’s “Letter to the CPUSA on Hawaii” to the arrival of Jack Hall in Honolulu. Koji Aiyoshi, who would go on to assist Mao Zedong as a spy in China during WW2, describes in his memoir “From Kona to Yenan” (p27), the beginnings of his recruitment to communism (without acknowledging it as such) in 1936 Honolulu.
Hall would eventually lead the ILWU which was controlled by the Communist Party and which would in turn control the Democratic Party. Ariyoshi would edit the ILWU’s communist-line Honolulu Record from 1948-58. Both Hall and Ariyoshi would be among the 1953 “Honolulu Seven” Smith Act defendants. In 1948 Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis would arrive from Chicago and become a Honolulu Record columnist under Ariyoshi. Davis would from 1970-79 become a mentor to the young Barack Obama.
In 1954 the Democrats took control of the Territorial Legislature. Between the 1950 beginning of the Korean War and 1959 Statehood, most Hawaii Communists would leave the Party, but not necessarily leave behind Stalinist organizational methods or socialist economic ideas.
As Hawaii’s first elected Democrat State Governor Jack Burns would point out later:
“Every guy in the ILWU was at one time or another a member of the Communist Party of America. This is where they got their organizational information and how to organize, and how to bring groups together and how to create cells and how to make movements that are undetected by the bosses and everything else…I know what they were about. I said this was the only way they are going to organize.”
The document is transcribed below. Embedded links have been inserted to provide more information about organizations and individuals named in the document. Sections in [brackets] are not visible on the original and a presumed text has been inserted when possible based on context and spacing.
QUESTIONS DISCUSSED:
1. Hawaiian question.
Reporter: Flake.
Speakers: Sherman, Nehring, Mingulin, Naumann.
DECISIONS:
1. To discuss the question with the American and Japanese comrades. To draw up a document which analysis the situation and the revolutionary tasks in Hawaii.
Responsible: Commissor composed of comrades Flake, Mingulin, Porter, Sherman, representative of Eastern Secretariat.
Responsible for Commission: Com. Sherman.
Signed,
(Illegible)
July 7, 1935
LETTER TO THE CPUSA ON HAWAII
The growing discontent of the masses of the population in the Hawaiian Islands with the regime of colonial oppression and the exploitation of American imperialism with its policy of militarization of the Hawaiian Islands makes it essential for the CP USA to give every possible assistance to the development of the mass revolutionary movement in Hawaii, so that the foundations will be laid for the formation off a Communist party as the leader of the emancipation movement in Hawaii. Due to the altogether insufficient information at present available, it is not possible at present to completely formulate all of the tasks of the revolutionary movement, which further investigation and discussion of this question should be conducted by the American Party.
The political slogans of the Hawaiian revolutionary movement should be based on the developing of the agrarian, anti-imperialist revolution, the struggle against the yoke of American imperialism, and the bourgeois landlord system, and for a workers’ and farmers’ republic. Although the slogans of the national liberation struggle cannot be exactly predetermined and will have to grow out of the creation and development of the national liberation movement itself, it is the first and foremost task of the American party to assist this process and raise the slogan of “Right of Self-determination of the Peoples of Hawaii, up to the Point of Separation”, to demand the withdrawal of the US armed forces, and to expose the policy of the militarization of Hawaii as part of the war plans of American imperialism.
The CP USA should discuss with the Hawaiian comrades what are the basic tasks of the agrarian anti-imperialist revolution, especially the solution of the land question, which, according to the material available, presents itself as the task of destroying the semi-feudal remnants, the confiscation of the big plantations which predominate in Hawaii (and are mainly owned by foreign imperialists), and the division of the land among the people.
In addition to the main political slogans of the national liberation struggle, the Hawaiian revolutionary movement should consider raising the following immediate partial demands, the struggle for which should receive the full support of the CP USA:
1) Full democratic rights for the people — against the terror; freedom of speech, press, assembly, and the right to organize and strike; full electoral rights [for] the disenfranchised masses and the American soldiers and sailors.
2) Equal rights for all [nationalities and an end to] discrimination against the coloured people (Hawaiian, [Japanese], Filipino, etc.)
3) Eight hour day for industrial and agricultural workers
4) Abolition of the con.. .. ..labour.
5) Establishment of a .. .. ..ay for
…. the coloured .. .. ..
6) [Une]mployment and .. .. ..
7) Cancellation of [the debts of small farmers] and sharecroppers.
8) Reduction or can[-cellation of re-]nt for small farmers and share-croppers.
The CP USA should [make a prior]ity of establishing a central newspaper (by [combining] the central organs publish by various groups, or making one [of the existing newspapers into the] central organ),
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Hawaii Free Presshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngHawaii Free Press2023-07-10 05:39:222023-07-10 05:40:50July 7, 1935: Moscow Orders First Communists to Hawaii
Carbon neutrality refers to a product that has net zero carbon emissions. The manufacture and use of corn-based ethanol has expanded based on the assumption that it’s carbon neutral and therefore far better for the environment than gasoline. However, several studies have shown that such assumptions are categorically false
A 2016 study found corn grown for ethanol only offset 37% of carbon dioxide emissions produced by burning biofuels, resulting in net-positive carbon dioxide emissions that are greater than gasoline
One of the primary reasons why growing corn for ethanol has a net-positive CO2 impact is because farmers are plowing up native grasslands to make more room for corn; 60 tons of carbon dioxide are released into the environment per acre of grassland plowed
Ignoring water consumption further underestimates CO2 emissions from land-use change by 28%. When corn plants’ water needs are considered, corn ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline
A five-year study published in 2022 concluded the CO2 emissions from corn-based ethanol are at least 24% greater than that of gasoline. On top of that, it has led to increased fertilizer use, resulting in greater water pollution and a growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico
Carbon neutrality is the holy grail of the biofuel industry. It refers to a product that has net zero carbon emissions. In the case of ethanol, the corn or soybeans grown to produce it would have to remove as much carbon dioxide from the environment as is given off when the ethanol is burned.
The manufacture and use of ethanol in the U.S. has been allowed to expand based on the assumption that it’s carbon neutral and therefore far better for the environment than gasoline. However, a 2016 study1 by professor John DeCicco, Ph.D., at the University of Michigan, showed that such assumptions were categorically false.
Ethanol Is Far From Carbon Neutral
What DeCicco and his team discovered was that biofuels such as corn ethanol are associated with a net increase in carbon dioxide emissions — even more so than gasoline. It turns out that the crops only offset 37% of carbon dioxide emissions produced by burning biofuels. At the time, DeCicco explained:2
“The name of the game is to speed up how much CO2 [carbon dioxide] you remove from the air … The best way to begin removing more CO2 from the air is to grow more trees and leave them. Prior to settlement, Michigan was heavily forested.
A state like Michigan could do much more to balance out the tailpipe emissions of CO2 by reforesting than by repurposing the corn and soybeans grown in the state into biofuels. That is just a kind of shell game that’s not working.”
Granted, DeCicco’s study was funded by the American Petroleum Institute, which obviously has reason to want to discredit the sustainability of biofuels. However, the research reiterates what other, more independent researchers have found before.
Ethanol Raises Net Carbon Emissions
For example, in 2014, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a report titled “Ethanol’s Broken Promise,”3 which reached similar conclusions as DeCicco’s study. It too concluded that corn ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline.
One of the primary reasons why growing corn for ethanol has a net-positive carbon impact is because farmers are plowing up native grasslands to make more room for corn. The failure to take this change in land use into account is how proponents of biofuels have been able to perpetuate the myth that it’s carbon neutral.
According to EWG, more than 8 million acres of grassland and wetlands were converted to corn between 2008 and 2011 alone, and every time an acre of grassland is plowed, 60 tons of carbon dioxide are released into the environment.4
So, while the ethanol fuel program was designed to reduce carbon emissions, the loss of grasslands does just the opposite. Estimates showing corn ethanol’s positive influence on the environment have also failed to consider the water needed to grow the corn.
“Ignoring water constraints underestimates emissions from land-use change by 28%,” EWG reported.5 According to agricultural economists at Purdue University, when corn plants’ water needs are considered, corn ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline.6
The EWG also cited data debunking the false claim that ethanol has no impact on the price of corn and other agricultural commodities. According to scientists with the National Academies, the radical change in the proportion of corn used for ethanol resulted in the price of corn rising by 20% and 40% between 2007 and 2009 alone. This is partly why anti-hunger organizations have been so against corn-based ethanol.
The Many Downsides of Biofuels
A five-year study7,8 published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) in February 2022 also came down hard on corn-based ethanol, concluding its CO2 emissions are at least 24% greater than that of gasoline. On top of that, it has led to increased fertilizer use, resulting in greater water pollution and a growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. As reported by Civil Eats:9
“Despite the promise that the RFS [renewable fuel standard] would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a new study … finds that expansion of U.S. corn cultivation has come at eye-popping environmental costs.
Corn production expanded by 8.7%, or 2.8 million hectares (6.9 million acres), between 2008 and 2016. As a result, the researchers found that nationwide annual fertilizer use surged by 3 to 8% and water pollutants rose by 3 to 5%.
The sheer extent of domestic land use change, however, generated greenhouse gas emissions that are, at best, equivalent to those caused by gasoline use — and likely at least 24% higher.
That’s because the RFS caused corn prices to spike by 30% and soybean and other crops by 20%. As a result, farmers planted corn everywhere they could, replacing other crops and pastureland, and plowing up land that had previously been reserved for conservation purposes. They also often skipped the soybeans in their rotations, despite the potential impacts on their soil …
Previous studies … dramatically underestimated the impacts those land use changes had on carbon emissions; in fact, the models treated the land that was converted from conservation or pasture as if there was little change in the amount of carbon stored once it was planted with corn — which runs counter to existing empirical evidence10 …
In 2008 … Timothy Searchinger, a senior researcher at Princeton University’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, was one of several who predicted11 that using U.S. croplands for biofuels would increase greenhouse gas emissions through land use change.
Now, his assessment has been validated by the new study. Searchinger says the new study boils down to a simple, inescapable truth: Using land has a cost. And some uses simply don’t make sense because the cost is too high.
‘It’s crazy to use this very limited resource — highly productive land — for energy,’ he said. ‘It’s almost spectacularly inefficient.’ Corn ethanol converts 0.15% of solar energy into usable energy, while a solar cell today converts 15 to 20% of sunlight to energy. ‘And the good news is you don’t need to put a solar cell on the best available farmland.’”
Will Large-Scale Carbon Capture Worsen the Situation?
Fertile farmland may soon also be sacrificed for large-scale carbon capture and sequestration projects that are being implemented in South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska.
In a March 4, 2022, interview with SDPB Radio, Chris Hill, director of permitting for the Summit Carbon Solutions project, explained how they intend to capture and sequester the carbon emitted during the ethanol fermentation process:
“The science behind it is relatively straightforward … fermentation is not a new process … The bugs eat the sugars or the starches that are from the corn. They ultimately produce alcohols. They release CO2 in that process. That CO2 bubbles up through the fermentation tanks and ultimately leaves the tanks and it’s currently being emitted to the atmosphere. So that’s the science and where the CO2 is coming from.
We’ll be pulling the CO2 off its current emission point, which is the stack. And what we’re doing with that is, we’re going to use multistage compression to pressurize the CO2 into a dense phase …
After the CO2 is compressed into a dense phase … where it behaves similar to a liquid, it’s going to be injected into a pipeline that will range between 4 inches and 24 inches depending on where you’re at in the system, ultimately to transport that CO2 up to North Dakota, just west of Bismarck in the Oliver/Mercer county area, where it will be injected for safe and permanent sequestration …
The USGS’s study estimates that the state of North Dakota has a capacity to store approximately 250 billion metric tons of CO2 … And our annual capacity of 12 million metric tons. You can easily calculate … that there’s … over 100 years of capacity in that area …”
Summit Carbon Solutions is the largest of three companies seeking to pipe CO2 from ethanol-producing plants into porous rock, deep underground. The two others are Archer-Daniels-Midland and Navigator CO2 Ventures.12
What Can Go Wrong?
According to Hill, the science behind this ridiculous plan has been carefully analyzed and the process deemed 100% safe. Does that mean nothing can go wrong? Hardly. If history tells us anything, it’s that anything that can go wrong probably will, sooner or later, and when it comes to liquefied CO2 gas under pressure, it just so happens to be explosive when exposed to heat above 125 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees Celsius).13
Could liquefied CO2, under pressure, deep down in a rock formation, possibly get heated to combustible temperatures under extreme conditions? Something to ponder. Exposure to this CO2, say if a pipe were to bust a leak, also has severe health impacts, ranging from dizziness and increased heart rate to nervous system damage, frostbite and rapid suffocation.14
Aside from that, there’s the direct and immediate threat to farmers — and anyone who needs food — as usable farmland may be seized through eminent domain for these pipelines.15 Seizing the land of small farmers to install CO2 sequestration pipelines hardly seems to be a wise move, seeing how all the signs point to severe food shortages and, potentially, worldwide famine in coming years.
ESG Is a Complete Fraud
In late April 2023, Summit Carbon Solutions signed a multiyear agreement to sell Carbon Dioxide Removal credits (CDRs) to the NextGen, a joint venture between South Pole and the Mitsubishi Corporation.
According to PR Newswire,16 NextGen is seeking to create “one of the world’s largest diversified portfolios of CDRs, with plans to purchase over 1 million tons of CDRs by 2025.” While this may thrill investors, it won’t do a thing for our environment.
In fact, ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing is a complete scam, designed to inflate profits, not save the planet. As reported by the Harvard Business Review in August 2022,17 the trillions of dollars currently being pumped into ESG assets are “dedicated to assuring returns for shareholders, not delivering positive planetary impact”:
“The separation of profit and planet is by design. ESG ratings which underlie ESG fund selection are based on ‘single materiality’ — the impact of the changing world on a company’s profits and losses, not the reverse.
They also bear no connection to natural boundaries. According to Bloomberg,18 ‘[ESG] ratings don’t measure a company’s impact on the Earth and society. In fact, they gauge the opposite: the potential impact of the world on the company and its shareholders.’
Yet it’s hard to blame casual observers for believing that investing in an ESG investment fund is helping to save the planet. Marketing materials of ESG funds often make lofty statements about social or environmental aspirations, but the fine print reveals that the real goal is to assure shareholder profits.
For example, a prior statement from State Street’s ESG Investment Statement mentions the need to encourage a ‘transition to a low-carbon, more sustainable, resource-efficient and circular economy,’ but later it defines ESG issues as ‘events or conditions that, should they occur, could cause a negative impact on the value of an investment.’
According to Henry Fernandez, CEO of the leading ESG ratings provider MSCI, ESG doublespeak has confused most individuals, many institutional investors, and even some portfolio managers.”
In 2020, Social Capital founder and CEO Chamath Palihapitiya went even further, telling CNBC that ESG investing is a “complete fraud.”19 According to Palihapitiya, ESG “does not necessarily encourage best practices, nor does it move the ball forward on things like the climate crisis.”
Rather, it’s primarily a marketing ploy to sell potentially questionable investments and “a way for companies to get free money,” as having a high ESG means you can get negative-interest loans.
Rampant Greenwashing
Similarly, a March 2022 post titled “The False Promise of ESG” on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance20 noted that highly-ranked ESG businesses oftentimes are LESS socially responsible than companies with far lower scores. Indeed, several investigations have revealed rampant greenwashing, with many ESG-labeled funds being far from “sustainable.”
Take FTX, for example. FTX — the cryptocurrency exchange that went belly up overnight while its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried absconded with up to $2 billion of client funds — had a higher governance score than Exxon Mobil,21 despite having almost no corporate governance whatsoever.
It had no board of directors, an “irregular ownership structure,” was rife with conflicts of interest and self-dealing and had no financial controls. Bankman-Fried didn’t even keep an accurate list of accounts. If this doesn’t tell you that ESG is flawed at best, and a complete fraud at worst, I don’t know what will.
FTX isn’t alone in falling short of expectations, though. According to a September 2021 report by climate change think tank InfluenceMap, more than half the 723 funds marketed using ESG claims failed to meet the Paris Accord rules on carbon emissions and clean energy, and more than 70% of funds with broad ESG goals failed to meet global climate targets.22
ESG Is Another Globalist Takeover Tool
One glaring problem with ESG is the lack of regulations that define what qualifies a company as environmentally or socially responsible. It is this very lack of definition that allows the globalist cabal to use ESG to push their own self-serving ideologies on companies and consumers.
In a November 2022 Newsweek opinion piece,23 Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, Kathy Barnette, called ESG “a woke scam” that is changing our nation by forcing companies to embrace ideologies that most people would otherwise reject:
“ESG is the latest trendy acronym designed to empower the elites at the expense of us non-elites,” Barnette wrote. “It’s a wokeness scorecard for investors.
Think of the E in ESG as code for climate change activism. Think of the S in ESG as code for social justice — how open a company is to critical race theory, diversity mandates, and drag queen story hour in public libraries. And the G is all about how much power employees have to shake things up at a company …
Altogether, ESG investing insidiously changes traditional American values, all while never by having to stand before the American people and ask for their permission.
But the real danger is to society. ESG is a win-win for climate change activists and social justice warriors who can bypass the ballot box — and thus the will of the people — to implement policy that would have a very hard time getting passed in Congress.”
ESG Drives the Financial Great Reset
F. William Engdahl, a strategic risk consultant and lecturer who holds a degree in politics from Princeton University,24 has discussed how ESG investing fits into the globalists’ Great Reset more directly:25
“[BlackRock founder and CEO Larry] Fink … now stands positioned to use the huge weight of BlackRock to create what is potentially … the world’s largest Ponzi scam … Fink with $9 trillion to leverage is pushing the greatest shift of capital in history into a scam known as ESG Investing.
The UN ‘sustainable economy’ agenda is being realized quietly by the very same global banks which have created the financial crises in 2008.
This time they are preparing the Klaus Schwab WEF Great Reset by steering hundreds of billions and soon trillions in investment to their hand-picked ‘woke’ companies, and away from the ‘not woke’ … Oil companies like ExxonMobil or coal companies … are doomed as Fink and friends now promote their financial Great Reset or Green New Deal.”
The case of Tesla also shows how ESG can be, and is, used as a weapon. Elon Musk initiated his acquisition of Twitter in mid-April 2022. One month later, his company Tesla was removed from the ESG Index, despite its focus on creating environmentally conscious vehicles. Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil remained in the S&P 500 ESG Index top 10.26 Musk tweeted,27 “… ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”
Control by Allocation of Resources
In summary, the ESG system is an early phase of the new financial system envisioned by the World Economic Forum (WEF). Basically, a company’s ESG score decides its ability to obtain loans and investment opportunities, and in the future, the same “social conscience”-type scoring will apply to private individuals as well.
ESG is also a specific tactic to push the “green” agenda forward, and it too is part and parcel of the WEF’s Great Reset. While the notion of a pollution-free world is an attractive one, ESG investing isn’t about the environment, or social justice, or anything else it claims to stand for.
It’s all about creating a control system in which the world’s resources are owned by the richest of the rich, while the rest of the population can be controlled through the allocation of those resources, including energy. As explained in an anonymous Winter Oak article:28
“Under such an economic construct, asset holding conglomerates can redirect the flow of global capital by aligning investments with the UN’s SDGs [sustainable development goals] and configuring them as Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) compliant so that new international markets can be built … and eventually move populations towards a cap-and-trade system, otherwise known as a carbon credit economy.
This will centralize power in the hands of stakeholder capitalists under the benevolent guise of reinventing capitalism through fairer and greener means, using deceptive slogans like ‘Build Back Better’ without sacrificing the perpetual growth imperative of capitalism.”
The WEF itself also describes ESG as being part of its resource-based economic system:29
“Digital finance refers to the integration of big data, artificial intelligence (AI), mobile platforms, blockchain and the Internet of things (IoT) in the provision of financial services. Sustainable finance refers to financial services integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria into the business or investment decisions.
When combined, sustainable digital finance can take advantage of emerging technologies to analyze data, power investment decisions and grow jobs in sectors supporting a transition to a low-carbon economy.”
So, in closing, it’s important to be aware of the downsides of relying on suspect labels like ESG, which could ultimately tie the global population to a new form of data slavery.30
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MERCOLA Take Control of Your Healthhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMERCOLA Take Control of Your Health2023-07-10 05:24:332023-07-15 09:03:04The Rampant Greenwashing Destroying Our Planet
Heavily redacted documents from the National Security Agency tell at least part of the story of a final-month rush by the outgoing Obama administration to torpedo the incoming presidency of Donald Trump.
The Daily Signal obtained 217 pages of documents from the NSA through a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents reveal that Obama administration officials, from Vice President Joe Biden down to several ambassadors and many officials in the Treasury and Energy departments, gained access to secret information about President-elect Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
The documents obtained by The Daily Signal include raw information of requests and other messages from these officials to the National Security Agency in late November 2016 through early January 2017, as well as emails among NSA officials explaining why the information was shared.
Trump, a Republican, took over the presidency from Barack Obama on Jan. 20, 2017, after defeating Obama’s former secretary of state, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, in the November election.
In May 2020, then-acting Director of National Intelligence Rick Grenell declassified information and provided Congress with a list of names involved in the Obama administration’s “unmasking” of Flynn, Trump’s original pick for national security adviser. Senate Republicans Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin released the list.
“Unmasking” is the practice of disclosing to political appointees the identities of U.S. citizens referenced or recorded in intelligence surveillance of foreign nationals. Names of citizens typically are redacted, or obscured, from such reports, unless a specific request is made to “unmask” those citizens.
NSA emails about most such requests regarding Flynn bear this message: “The identities of the named U.S. persons and organizations is required for full understanding of the intelligence in the report.”
Several of the NSA documents note Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, including the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” The amendment to the Constitution also requires warrants “upon probable cause.”
Through the Freedom of Information Act, The Daily Signal sought records of requests by top Obama administration officials to “unmask” Flynn—that is, to disclose that the incoming national security adviser is a person mentioned in reports of foreign surveillance.
Flynn was the American whose phone conversation with the Russian ambassador between Trump’s November 2016 election and January 2017 inauguration had been intercepted by intelligence officials in the Obama administration.
The Daily Signal formally requested the National Security Agency documents in March 2021, two months after Biden’s inauguration as president; the NSA’s response, dated June 22, arrived June 30—more than two years later.
In its response, the NSA said The Daily Signal’s request for public records overlapped with other FOIA requests already being processed because of litigation from other parties.
Three top Obama administration officials who gained access to the Flynn information are now high-ranking officials in the Biden administration.
Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff for his entire second term, is now secretary of veterans affairs under Biden.
Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, made numerous requests for information on Flynn. In the Biden administration, Power is administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
And Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, deputy secretary at Obama’s Energy Department, has been Biden’s homeland security adviser since he took office.
The Flynn-related requests from Obama administration officials were all made during late November and December of 2016.
Trump chose Flynn to be his first national security adviser. Flynn’s “unmasking” at the request of some of outgoing President Barack Obama’s closest advisers set in motion events that led to Flynn’s resignation after only 23 days in office during the new Trump administration. It was also a key factor of the since discredited investigation of Trump-Russia collusion to win the 2016 presidential election.
Trump pardoned Flynn in late 2020, and a federal judge soon dropped charges alleging Flynn made false statements to the FBI in the early days of the Trump administration.
The documents obtained by The Daily Signal also show that at least seven U.S. officials working with NATO were provided with information on Flynn, including then-NATO Ambassador Douglas Lute.
John Tefft, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, as well as several members of his staff whose names were redacted, also sought and got information on Flynn.
Obama’s ambassador to Turkey, John Bass, obtained information on Flynn. NSA’s internal emails say the information was provided to Bass so he could “better understand and assess the foreign intelligence information contained therein.”
The NSA email goes on to say: “No further action may be taken on nor dissemination be made of this information [on Flynn] without prior approval of NSA.”
The FBI investigated Trump’s Russian ties and Flynn had done lobbying work for Turkey, which helps explain the involvement of those two ambassadors.
Obama’s ambassador to Italy, John Phillips, also gained access to information about Flynn, as did his top staff.
National security and law enforcement officials in the Obama administration—including FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and National Intelligence Director James Clapper—might be expected to have access.
Others who had access to the intelligence on Flynn are surprising, however.
Sherwood-Randall, then deputy energy secretary, got access. The NSA email on the requests by the Energy Department notes: “This information is crucial, as the Deputy Secretary of Energy continues to oversee the transition of the Department to the incoming administration.”
Also privy to the unmasking of Flynn was then-Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, along with other Treasury Department officials including Deputy Treasury Secretary Sarah Raskin, wife of Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.
In a joint session of Congress in January 2017, Jamie Raskin voted against certifying Trump’s Electoral College victory. The Maryland Democrat later would lead House lawmakers named as “managers” of Trump’s second impeachment in 2021.
One requestor granted access to the Flynn information is listed only as the deputy assistant director of NEMC. Although four federal agencies might use this acronym, it seems likely to refer either to the Army’s Network of Enabled Mission Command, since Flynn was an Army lieutenant general, or the National Election Monitoring Committee, since the outgoing Obama administration officials prepared to push the narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.
The name of the NEMC deputy assistant director is redacted in the documents provided to The Daily Signal, which would indicate a military affiliation. The NSA’s justification for granting this request was that the records are “to be used to better understand and assess the foreign intelligence information contained therein.”
CNN reported Friday that special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump’s possession of classified documents after he left the White House, is looking into a December 2020 meeting in the Oval Office.
That meeting, CNN reported, included Flynn, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, and the topic was challenging Trump’s election loss.
Participants allegedly discussed the options to impose martial law and seize voting machines to prevent Biden’s inauguration as president.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
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The Republican party’s first presidential caucus will be held in Iowa on Jan. 15, 2024, the Iowa GOP announced Saturday.
The Jan. 15 date, which is also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, was unanimously approved Saturday by the State Central Committee of the Republican Party of Iowa. Iowa’s caucus, scheduled weeks ahead of when it was during the last two election cycles, means the first official votes of the 2024 presidential election are now nearly six months away.
IT'S OFFICIAL: the date for the 2024 Republican Iowa Caucus has been set for January 15, 2024!
“After our state legislature and governor took needed action earlier this year to preempt Iowa Democrats’ plans to derail the Iowa Caucus by running a de facto primary election instead, we are also proud to affirm that Iowa will continue to honor our half-century-old promises to the other carveout states,” Iowa GOP Chairman Jeff Kaufmann said in a statement. “We remain committed to maintaining Iowa’s cherished First-in-the-Nation Caucuses, and look forward to holding a historic caucus in the coming months and defeating Joe Biden come November 2024.”
The Democratic National Committee’s revised presidential primary schedule approved in February places South Carolina as the first, removing Iowa’s top spot. Iowa Democrats have not yet set a date for their caucus but have suggested holding it on the same date as Republicans, allowing voters to use mail-in ballots and delaying the release of results to comply with the new schedule, according to the Associated Press.
“No matter what, Iowa Democrats are committed to moving forward with the most inclusive caucus process in Iowa’s history,” Iowa Democratic Party chair Rita Hart said in a statement, according to NBC News. “We’re committed to doing what’s good for Democrats, what’s good for Iowa, and what’s good for democracy.”
The South Carolina GOP has set its 2024 primary date for Feb. 24, according to AP News.
Meanwhile, the Nevada Republican Party filed a lawsuit against the state in May to continue holding its presidential caucus after the legislature passed a law switching to a primary election following major issues during the 2020 Democratic caucus.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2023-07-09 14:40:352023-07-09 14:44:21The Countdown To The First 2024 GOP Caucus Begins
The raising of the issue of a constitution as a potential way out of the political impasseover the future of Israel’s legal system is nothing but a red herring on the part of the opponents of judicial reform.
I don’t think it is right for the Supreme Court to change fundamental things in accordance with what it refers to as the judgment of ‘the reasonable person.’ That’s an amorphous and completely subjective definition that the Knesset never introduced to the legal code –Yair Lapid, articulating his opposition to the reasonableness clause.
If the reasonableness clause is abolished, all lines will have been crossed. It will demolish the authority of the Supreme Court and our democratic structure—Yair Lapid, articulating his support for the reasonableness clause.
As the obsessive, borderline-maniacal Bibi-phobic opponents of judicial reform continue with their destructive and lawless demonstrations-cum-riots across the streets of Israel, protesting all—and any—government decisions of which they disapprove—whether major changes in the judicial system, minor changes in the judicial system, the dismissal of elected ministers or appointed bureaucrats—a new demand is emerging as a panacea-like balm for the nation’s tribulations. This is the idea of a Constitution for Israel. Usually touted as to be based on Israel’s Declaration of Independence, it is suggested that the formulation of such a constitution would placate the demonstrators opposing the coalition’s legislative initiatives.
Seductive & deceptive
A constitution for Israel is a seductive idea and gives the impression of adopting the example of the USA, the leader of the democratic world. But it is also a highly deceptive notion—being far more declarative than substantive in terms of being an effective template that determines the functioning of the political system.
For, the existence of a constitution is no guarantee of individual rights or civil liberties or any of the enlightened goals that the opponents of judicial reform profess to cherish. Indeed, a brief jaunt through Google would reveal that countries such as the USSR (and later, Russia), North Korea, and Upper Volta (later Burkina Faso) all boast constitutions that include(d) an array of lofty human rights. Yet the demonstrators are very unlikely to endorse any of these states as a model democracy for Israel to emulate. Thus, it should be clear to any serious student of political science that an authentically substantive constitution cannot, in and of itself, create societal values. On the contrary, it can only reflect them. For if it does not, it will remain nothing more than a worthless piece of paper, bearing meaningless words and empty promises.
Reflective not creative
Just how irrelevant the text of a constitution can be, when it does not rest on values a society embodies, is vividly portrayed by the words of the 1991 Rwandan Constitution, formulated just three years prior to the brutal genocide that ripped through that luckless country. It read: “The National Council for Development, meeting as Constituent Assembly …Faithful to democratic principles and concerned about ensuring the protection of human rights and promoting respect for fundamental freedoms, in accordance with the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’… Does establish and adopt this Constitution for the Republic of Rwanda…”
Of course, the terrible carnage that followed soon after the instatement of the constitution served to underscore the staggering distance that can separate noble words and benign intentions from the gory realities in several “constitutional democracies.”
To illustrate the point, consider Article 31, of Burkina Faso’s 2015 Constitution, which proclaims that “Burkina Faso is a democratic, unitary and secular State. Faso is the republican form of the State.” Yet, describing realities on the ground, Human Rights Watch paints a dour picture: “Burkina Faso’s human rights situation seriously deteriorated in 2022 as deadly attacks by Islamist armed groups against civilians surged, military forces and pro-government militias committed violations during counterterrorism operations, and political instability deepened as a result of two military coups.”
Accordingly, with religious radicalism, government abuses, and military rebellion, so much for a “democratic”, “unitary” and “secular” State as optimistically set out in the Constitution.
Structure vs. substance
This all goes to underscore the vast potential disconnect between the formal structure of a national polity and the mode of its substantive political routine.
Take Pakistan for example. The formal structure of the Pakistani political system has many similarities with that of the US.
Like the US, Pakistan has a bicameral legislature, a federal system of government, a president elected separately from parliament, and a constitution, which purports to ensure civil rights. Yet Pakistan is only in the 102nd place (out of a total of 164 counties) in the 2023 Democratic Index Rankings. Significantly, the US ranks 26th, below Israel in 23rd place! (This finding is not a quirk of this particular ranking system. Indeed, very similar results emerge from an alternative 2023 assessment, with Israel surpassing the US democracy score, while Pakistan—despite its president, bicameral legislature, federal system, and constitution—ranks far lower than both.)
Of course, the converse is no less telling. Just as a formal constitution is no guarantee of substantively democratic governance, so the lack of a formal constitution does not necessarily mean the lack of democratic governance. Thus, eminently democratic countries such as New Zealand, Britain, and Canada—like Israel—do not have a formal constitution. Yet this has not prevented them from providing their citizens with political freedoms and human rights that are among the most comprehensive on the face of the globe.
Constitution: Nothing but a red herring
Of course, the raising of the issue of a constitution as a potential way out of the political impasse over the future of Israel’s legal system is nothing but a red herring on the part of the opponents of judicial reform. A constitution has been an elusive ideal of Israel, literally from its very inception. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence, Israel’s founding document, stipulates that a constitution should be drawn up by October 1948—yet for three-quarters of a century it has not been formulated because of hitherto unbridgeable fissures in Israeli society.
However, despite not having a formal constitution, Israel has for almost eight decades, developed, progressed, prospered, and withstood changes of government, political assassination, grave external threats, and internal unrest, while managing to provide its citizens with domestic freedoms and material welfare among the highest in the world.
So while, in principle, a formal constitution may be a worthy objective, its absence has hardly precluded democratic governance or economic development. Moreover, the opponents of judicial reform know full well that just as no agreement could be reached with them on the reforms, no agreement with them will be possible on the content of an overarching constitution for the country, which would go well beyond the scope of the judicial system and extend to many other walks of life in Israel, over which there are also deep divides.
Accordingly, the offer of the advancement of a formal constitution for Israel in exchange for dialing down the maliciously and mendaciously choreographed protests against judicial reform is nothing but a devious deception to delay the advancement of the reform. Indeed it is an offer that those proposing it cannot deliver on—nor do they wish to.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Dr. Martin Shermanhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Martin Sherman2023-07-09 14:28:102023-07-09 14:28:10A Constitution -The ‘excuse du jour’
It is increasingly clear, the coup took place long before the 2020 election. Obama put the subversives in place. By the time the 2020 election rolled around the coup was complete.
Capitol Police Chief told Tucker that Jan6 crowd was filled With federal agents.. Tucker was NOT able to air this on Fox.
Did the establishment’s Jan 6 ‘Insurrection’ narrative just go the way of Keyser Soze?
In his first public interview since being fired from Fox News, Tucker Carlson sat down with none other than Russell Brand (on Rumble).
“I’m not working for Elon Musk… what he’s done is offered me is what he’s offered every other user at Twitter which is a chance to broadcast your views without a gatekeeper”
The whole interview is fascinating, but one section in particular is key, when discussed the events of January 6th.
As a reminder, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had released 40,000 hours of video footage from the riot – which Carlson had begun airing on Fox News – much of which suggested a different narrative than the craven mob of killers the Democrats (and the media) have maintained was unleashed on the Capitol by Trump’s words and actions.
Admitting he was “appalled” by some of the events of that day, the former Fox News anchor said the reason he “got involved in commenting on it” was because “the lying about it was immediate: ‘This was a racist, white-supremacist insurrection.’”
“I interviewed the chief of the Capitol Police, Steven Sund, in an interview that was never aired on Fox, by the way — I was fired before it could air, I’m gonna interview him again,” Carlson said.
“But Steven Sund was the totally non-political, worked for Nancy Pelosi, I mean, this was not some right-wing activist. He was the chief of Capitol Police on January 6, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that crowd was filled with federal agents.’ What? ‘Yes.’ Well he would know, of course, because he was in charge of security at the site.”
“So, the more time has passed… it becomes really obvious that core claims they made about January 6 were lies,” Carlson explained.
“The amount of lying around January 6, and it was obvious in the tapes that I showed, is really distressing.”
Carlson’s comments fit with whistleblower and witness statements on the day.
Carlson’s comments fit with whistleblower and witness statements on the day.
As The Daily Caller reports, defendant Dominic Pezzola’s lawyer, Roger Roots, argued there were “at least 40” undercover informants at the riot. Roots alleged there were eight FBI human sources embedded among the Proud Boys on Jan. 6, along with 13 undercover plain-clothes DC Metro Police agents. FBI whistleblower George Hill alleged during a February interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government that the field office in Washington may have had “undercover officers” and “confidential human sources” inside the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Carlson also discussed his views on Donald Trump:
“I think looking back on this ten years from now, assuming we’re still around, I think we’re going to see Trump’s emergence as the most significant thing that happened in American politics in 100 years, because he reoriented the Republican Party against the wishes of Republican leaders.”
“I’m struck by his foreign policy views. You know Trump is the only person with stature in the Republican Party really who is saying wait a second why are we sending an endless war in Ukraine. Leaving aside whether Trump is going to get the nomination or get elected President or would be a good President, I can’t even asses that, all I can at this point is I’m so grateful he has that position. He’s right and everyone in Washington is wrong, everyone. And Trump is right on that question and it’s a big question. That war is reshaping the world. It’s reshaping the economy of the world. It’s reshaping populations.“
“Europe will never be the same because of this war and it really matters, and Trump alone among popular figures in both parties understands that and I’m grateful for that.”
“Whether he gets the nomination or gets elected, words really matter. Saying something true out loud matters, and he is saying true things about Ukraine and God bless him. That’s how I feel.
🔥🚨DEVELOPING: I just found out that the media wants us to forget about the Georgia Grand Jury lady who practiced witchcraft on Etsy that was going to “put Trump behind bars” pic.twitter.com/zQ6cH5Z2lM
— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) July 10, 2023
Tim Pool on Jan 6 following claims by Tucker Carlson that the riots were "filled" with feds:
"By the time we're at the general election next year, it will be common knowledge that it was largely a federal operation, and [Democrats] will be saying it was a good thing." pic.twitter.com/8jk71KgDTp
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) July 8, 2023
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Friday that Washington is giving Ukraine a new $800 million military aid package, including cluster munitions.
The Biden Administration is on record (Jen Psaki) stating that the use of cluster bombs should be considered a war crime.
What the hell are we doing in Ukraine? I do not recognize my country. We should have negotiated for peace, it would have been easy. Instead we are marching to WWIII.
Biden Once Opposed Cluster Bombs when Israel Used Them; Now Ships to Ukraine
President Joe Biden will be sending cluster bombs to Ukraine to use in its war against Russia, the White House confirmed Friday. But he has opposed their use in the past, especially by Israel in the Lebanon War in 1982.
Last year Jen Psaki said Russia using cluster bombs was a war crime
The Washington Post recalled Biden’s “complicated history” — i.e. flip-flopping — on the issue of cluster bombs, which are larger bombs that release many bomblets. Some remain unexploded and can threaten civilians.
The Post noted that Biden offered stern criticism of then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in an episode often cited by pro-Israel critics of Biden as evidence that he has never been as supportive of Israel as he claims.
At the time, Israel was fighting Palestinian guerillas in Lebanon, who had been shelling communities in northern Israel for years. Israel’s invasion drew sharp international criticism, as well as domestic protest.
The Post recalled:
Amid reports that Israel had used cluster bombs in its invasion of Lebanon, some Democrats went so far as to push for cutting off aid to Israel.
According to a contemporary UPI report, Biden said that if those reports were accurate, then Israel was clearly in violation. He said the United States should respond by “cutting off the ability to get access to that kind of weaponry in the future.” But he cautioned against making a “final judgment” and again called for hearings on the subject.
Democrats also expressed such concerns during what the New York Times labeled “a highly emotional confrontation” on Capitol Hill with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in June 1982. Sen. Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.) highlighted the cluster bomb reports while saying he had “never seen such an angry session with a foreign head of state.”
The latter argument reportedly concerned Israeli settlements, not cluster bombs. During the Second Lebanon War in 2006, when Israel was again accused of using cluster bombs (this time against Hezbollah guerillas), then-Sen. Biden (D-DE) opposed a bill that would ban the use of cluster munitions in populated areas.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2023-07-09 12:57:092023-07-11 06:26:25War Crimes: Biden Regime Sending ‘Cluster Bombs’ to Ukraine Despite Previously Stating Using Them Is a ‘War Crime’
Ben & Jerry’s parent company has lost roughly $2.5 billion in market cap amid calls to boycott the Vermont-based ice cream maker over a July 4 tweet condemning the US for existing on “stolen Indigenous land.”
Shares of Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch multinational firm, slid as much as 1% at Thursday’s opening bell after closing down .5% the previous day.
The company’s stock price has fallen to roughly $51 after closing at $52.28 during Monday’s shortened trading — and the day before Ben & Jerry’s posted its unpatriotic tweet.
The result has seen its market cap drop to $131 billion from the roughly $133.5 billion on Monday.
This 4th of July, it's high time we recognize that the US exists on stolen Indigenous land and commit to returning it. Learn more and take action now: https://t.co/45smaBmORHpic.twitter.com/a6qp7LXUAE
An April 11, 2023 written report by the Executive Director of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI (SOFSA), Nancy Savage, reflected that on that date, several Society Chapter Chairs from around the country visited the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia. Savage and SOFSA President Dennis Lormel were also present. They attended a New Agents Graduating class and also met with FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Wray claimed that much of what was being written about the Bureau were opinions and not facts. He asserted that “the FBI brand is strong around the country,” that it is important to do the job with honesty and integrity, and “acknowledged that the FBI receives political fallout from Congress at times.”
The takeaway from the written report of the event was that all is A-OK with the FBI. This is, however, contrary to fact. There were evidently no hard questions posed to Wray from this “diverse” group. It was not evident that any of these subject were discussed: FBI whistleblowers; the Crossfire Hurricane corruption hoax; the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Inspector General (OIG) report; the Democrat Party/DOJ/FBI Reichstag Fire-style railroading of patriotic American citizens known as the J6 “insurrection”; the FBI collusion with Twitter to affect a Presidential election; the successful social engineering of the Bureau; or anything concerning Hunter Biden. Are we, then, to conclude that SOFSA is all in with the FBI being used as the enforcement arm of an anti-American political party?
The FBI is the “tip of the spear,” as one might conclude here, for government wide corruption. An apparently oblivious or delusional FBI Director meets with apparently equally oblivious or delusional retired agents and delivers the usual pablum to these gullible agents, who willingly lapped it up. But hey, they each received a Training Division Challenge Coin.
The SOFSA website states here that the organization was founded in 1937 to “preserve the mutuality of interests of the Agents, the memories of pleasures enjoyed and adversities shared. It was formed as a fraternal, educational, and community minded organization composed of former FBI Special Agents who had served with fidelity, bravery, and integrity in the defense of America.” They would also like you to know that they are “inclusive.” Forgive me if I suspect that the word “inclusive” was not in the original founding document(s).
It became evident to me over the last ten years or so that many of my retired colleagues took an oath to an agency instead of to the U. S. Constitution. The motto “protect the Bureau at all costs” is apparently alive and well.
Except for a handful of retired agents, no organization of FBI agents has come out in support of the recent FBI whistleblowers, three of whom have testified before Congress. SOFSA is crickets, which tells me that they apparently are O.K. with the Stasi/KGB tactics that the Bureau is employing against them, as is highlighted here.
Yet further evidence has surfaced of the FBI targeting Catholics, as reported here. Communism and other evil forces target religion. “Satan will deceive nations; he will viciously persecute believers.” Here is an article published at the New English Review, in which I allege that Communism has indeed affected and influenced the FBI.
More evidence of subversion can be found here and here. These Bureau agents are obliviously joining in solidarity with Communism, a Communist cop killer, the Defund the Police effort, and jihadis, including the kidnappers of one of their own. I set forth the following to a separate group of retired agents last year to make the aforementioned point:
Black Lives Matter (BLM) has Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ties. Its leaders are self-professed Marxists. Co-founder Patrisse Cullors has praised cop killer Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur, of Black Liberation Army (BLA) 1970’s fame. Being Marxists, they are behind the Defund the Police effort.
In 2015, the Iranian mullahs voiced support for BLM to Mandela Barnes, Democrat candidate for U. S. Senate in Wisconsin. This would be the same regime that is suspected of the kidnapping of former FBI Agent Robert Levinson.
Likewise, the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA), an organization of active-duty agents, of which incidentally I was once a Chapter Chair, reportedly rewarded the agents $100.00 each for their alleged “professional judgement.”
Here and here is more of that strong FBI brand that Wray must be talking about, and below is the same FBI executive, then a Special Agent in Charge (SAC), aiding and abetting jihadis and jihad sympathizers.
Apparently SOFSA is A-OK with all of this, too?
I recall as a young agent reading several items that circulated among the agent ranks comparing the Bureau to the KGB. I recall them being tongue-in-cheek write-ups; at least that is the way I took them. Maybe the FBI agent author(s) knew more then than I and others had ever imagined. And just maybe I was delusional about what I thought the FBI was or was supposed to be.
After that April meeting with Wray, I feel confident that there will be a smiling photograph of the attendees with Wray in their monthly publication, the Grapevine. Why not? After all, James Comey, an admitted Communist, had his smiling picture on the cover after he was rightly fired by Donald Trump.
A Max Frisch play entitled The Firebugs (Herr Biedermann und die Brandstifter) here, is about arsonists who disguise themselves as traveling salesmen, gain entry to homes from unsuspecting homeowners, and proceed to burn the houses down. Biedermann reads about them in a local paper, and just then his doorbell rings; two traveling salesmen are at his door asking if they can spend the night. He has just read about the ploy, but allows them in anyway, and gives them a place to stay in his attic. Of course, they proceed to set fire to his attic and the whole town burns down. The evidence was right there staring Biedermann in the face, yet he failed to see it.
Both the FBI’s attic and SOFSA’s attics are on fire, but they apparently choose to look the other way and ignore the flames.
Does the “enemy within” now include by their silence the FBI retired Agents Association? Maybe Lormel will consider this another one of those “unfounded and reckless” attacks on the FBI?
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2023-07-09 12:30:242023-07-09 12:32:28The Delusional Sycophants of the FBI Retired Agents’ Association: A ‘Fire in the Attic?’
Whatever you may think of either of these men, this interview is important and needs to be seen and understood. We certainly have our own misgivings about both of them. But the information in this interview is invaluable and contains both ideological and technical central truths. A couple of times I was tempted to stop listening when I heard things that where annoying. But continuing on one hears the mitigation for these annoyances. When Russell was not sure if Trump was banned from Twitter when he was president that felt like moving the muzzle so to speak. It was a critically important point that Twitter banned Trump when he was in fact president of the USA, and during an election. This all by itself is tantamount to election rigging. The Biden laptop is also discussed and the answers are worth hearing. The answers by Dorsey are informative, even when unsatisfying. Hearing Dorsey speak about Musk is very encouraging. Most certainly its critical to watch with eyes wide open and critical faculties on. Not Critical Theory, meaning simply to manufacture attacks on these men or the interview for the sake of it. Let’s leave that to the communists since that in essence is their one weapon to destroy reason and truth altogether. I mean critical faculties in the Socratic sense. Check for truth, and try and determine where an error is on their part or ours, and if theirs then is it a mistake or disinformation.
When Brand makes a condemnation of “hate speech” and then a half hearted defence of freedom of speech in that context, its a major red flag. To be extremely clear here, “hate speech” is the chief dialectical weapon against all liberty. It is essentially the same as Islamic blasphemy laws, but far more wide reaching and infinitely interpretable. The purpose of hate-speech regulations is to obliterate all individualism. To criminalize things that are TRUE but go against the accumulation of all power to and of the state. For brand not to know this is a problem. Either you believe in the right to speak your mind or you do not. And some speech will always be offensive to someone else. But truth can never be known if it isn’t an unfettered playing field. To demonstrate the dialectical nature of the concept, one needs look no farther than the many Nazi websites that seem to operate with impunity online. Or even the example given in the interview, that Trump was banned (while president and during an election campaign) but ISIS was not, or many other Islamic terrorist groups. At 58 minutes, Brand revisits the concept but in a somewhat ambiguous way, both condemning hate speech, but also seemingly condemning the use of it to silence people. He equates hate speech with child pornography in this case. It feels more like a naïve approach to the issue than one of controlled opposition. But either way be aware of it as you listen is good practice.
Even so, this is very worth watching and Dorsey is correct about what is needed and possibly about the past in that we may now be noticing what has always been in place because of decaying systems and we may have always been under far more control than we were aware of.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Vlad Tepes Bloghttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngVlad Tepes Blog2023-07-09 12:13:092023-07-09 12:13:09Very important and reveling interview of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey by Russell Brand
UPDATE 7/10/2023: The Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced this morning that he will leave politics after the elections that are scheduled for this fall. Yes, I’m very glad.
Rutte was a professional in the game of politics. He had his way of being able to deal with any criticism, or any difficult question from the media. He always stayed calm and kept his eye on staying in power.
I will remember him as a cold bureaucratic Leftist, very fond of strengthening the European Union. He has similiarity to Macron in France and Trudeau in Canada. They all share an intense disgust of nationalism and patriotism.
There are people in conservative circles that call men like Rutte “WEF puppets”. That is underestimating them! Rutte certainly feels comfortable in his friendship with Klaus Schwab, whom he has a lot of respect for, but he called his own shots. Rutte is nobody’s puppet but believes in the policies that the international Leftist elites propagate out of free will and conviction.
The damage that Rutte has done during the past 13 years to my beloved country the Netherlands is immense.
Let me explain to you in this short article what happened in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and what the prospects are.
Last Friday, the four ruling parties in the Netherlands were unable to reach an agreement about how to do something against the tsunami of asylum seekers. The largest party, the fake conservative VVD, under the leadership of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, has played a smart political game, in which his party appears as tough on immigration. This is fake! They demanded a minimal change in the policy regarding accepting asylum seekers. The Christian Democrats agreed with this move, but the Christian Union party and the devilish D66 party refused any concession.
Only if the Netherlands leaves the European Union, we can get serious about ending the tsunami of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, for judicial reasons. The VVD absolutely doesn’t want to leave the EU!
The fact that we will get new elections should in itself give the Dutch patriots hope. But the largest party, the VVD, has stated already that they will never cooperate with Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom. That hit me hard, for it means that after the general elections, which will take place this fall, we will again get a government consisting of Leftist parties.
The replacement of the Dutch native people will continue, the farmers will have to fear the worst, climate hysteria will not be calmed down.
In all, the Netherlands is marked for destruction.
We might just as well dig holes in the dykes right now, for the outcome will be the same!
The Dutch government collapsed on Friday after failing to reach a deal on restricting immigration, which will trigger new elections in the fall.
The crisis was triggered by a push by Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s conservative VVD party to limit the flow of asylum seekers to the Netherlands, which two of his four-party government coalition refused to support.
“It’s no secret that the coalition partners have differing opinions about immigration policy. Today we unfortunately have to conclude that those differences have become insurmountable. Therefore I will tender the resignation of the entire cabinet to the king,” Rutte said in a televised news conference.
Tensions came to a head this week, when Rutte demanded support for a proposal to limit entrance of children of war refugees who are already in the Netherlands and to make families wait at least two years before they can be united.
This latest proposal went too far for the small Christian Union and liberal D66, causing a stalemate.
Rutte’s coalition will stay on as a caretaker government until a new administration is formed after new elections, a process which in the fractured Dutch political landscape usually takes months.
News agency ANP, citing the national elections committee, said elections would not be held before mid-November.
A caretaker government cannot decide on new policies, but Rutte said it would not affect the country’s support for Ukraine.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Matthys van Raaltenhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMatthys van Raalten2023-07-09 11:52:512023-07-10 14:02:21The Collapse of the Dutch Government
