State media demands investigation of U.S. bio-weapons facilities.
China has predictably blasted the COVID lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory,” with state media outlets demanding an investigation into U.S. bio-labs around the world.
The response came after the Biden administration was forced to task the U.S. intelligence community into investigating the issue having previously put a halt to a similar investigation started under Trump.
“Lately, some people have played the old trick of political hype on the origin tracing of [Covid-19] in the world,” said a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in DC. “Smear campaign and blame shifting are making a comeback, and the conspiracy theory of ‘lab leak’ is resurfacing,” he added.
The spokesman also said that focusing on the Wuhan Institute of Virology would make it “hard to find the origin of the virus” and would “seriously hamper international cooperation on the pandemic.”
The editor in chief of the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, responded to the issue by demanding an investigation into U.S. bio-weapons facilities such as Fort Detrick.
Antonio Brown, an Atlanta city councilman who voted to ‘defund the police’ last year, said he had his car stolen in the middle of the afternoon by a group of school-aged children.
The incident took place as Brown, who just joined the mayoral race in Atlanta less than two weeks ago, was meeting with community leaders at a ribbon-cutting ceremony around noontime.
“You don’t immediately think, ‘Oh, these kids are going to steal my car,’” Brown said, noting that one of the children “acted as though he had a gun.”
According to police the car, a Mercedes as described by WSB-TV 2, was stolen by “several males.”
Brown claims, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), that “he held onto the car and was dragged about a block down the road before letting go.”
If Karma exists…Atlanta 'defund the police' backer has car stolen — by kids in broad daylight: reports – Fox News https://t.co/JQuuKwNK8b
— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) May 27, 2021
Defund The Police In Atlanta
Brown is listed by Ballotpedia as non-partisan, but the AJC writes that he “pushes progressive policies.”
He joined six other city council members who voted in support of an ordinance described by Fox News as “to withhold $73 million of the Atlanta Police Department’s budget” last year.
“We need all of Atlanta to call in to every committee and full council meeting to demand we amend the budget and … reallocate $73M of police funds in order to reimagine public safety,” he said in an Instagram post at the time.
“We must stop the business of the city from moving forward until our demands are met.
The ordinance to defund the police in Atlanta was narrowly defeated.
Fake news is facilitating the destructive power of Western imperialism, according to a new book, ‘What Is Iran?’ In an exclusive interview with RT, author Arshin Adib-Moghaddam explains how the process works in practice.
Academic Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, professor in global thought and comparative philosophies at SOAS University, London, is the author of over 60 papers and six books on contemporary culture and politics.
In his latest work ‘What is Iran?’ he sheds fresh light on the title’s ever-burning question, along with analysis of Tehran’s history, domestic politics, international relations, and more. Along the way, Arshin identifies what he dubs the “fake news machinery” that oils the wheels of Western imperialism, and sells wars of aggression and plunder to the public.
RT spoke with him to discuss the concept in detail.
RT: How do you define “fake news machinery”?
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam: Fake news machinery is a powerful assemblage of right-wing institutions, their staff, social media accounts, their political representation and global following. Fake news is the staple of right-wing politics.
In our techno-society, technology acts as a great incubator and facilitator galvanizing the process of disinformation. Facebook, Twitter and soon Clubhouse are what the Volksempfanger radio was to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda. Some of the facts and the truths are drowned by an armada of well-connected activists whose aim is solely confrontational and aggressive – against peace, against diplomacy, against immigrants, homosexuals, Jews, intellectuals, Muslims and anyone else identified as the enemy.
As such, this system of irrationality churns out lies on a continuous basis. The ultimate aim is power, of course. But we are talking about a particularly vulgar and destructive kind of power which is inherently inhuman, violent, and abusive, physically and psychologically.
RT: How does this process work?
AA-M: Typically, a narrative is concocted in order to buttress a particular policy. It is then picked up by the various channels of the machinery.
This is how right-wing functionaries inscribe the narrative of war in international relations; via institutions, such as the so-called Foundation for Defense of Democracies; language, such as “America First;” mindsets, for example, “Why do they hate us?” and policies, for instance the doctrine of “pre-emption.”
Once a specific, right-wing project has bedded in, its supposed chivalry is loudly trumpeted, bundled up in a morally righteous and infallible narrative – in essence the legitimation of suppressive power – and stitched into the political fabric of world politics. It is in this sense that right-wing policy reveals itself as war – war continued by other means. The perverse irony of such ideology is, it makes some of us think it serves the liberation of mankind.
RT: What are some of the most egregious examples of fake news about the Middle East, and how does news media misreport the region more generally?
AA-M: Extremist politics, and I would count Trumpism as a part of this category, works with simple binaries as it reflects the uneducated and primitive mindset behind the right-wing world-view. Good versus evil, white against black, civilization opposing barbarism, and so on. The grey zones are denied, there is no complexity in the world of these people.
The so-called ‘Middle East’ comes in very handy in this dichotomization as the ultimate “other,” the black region full of Muslims that is ultimately unworthy of proper attention. Now the self-defeating irony of this type of world-view is that it leads to bad decisions. In the case of the neo-conservatives who gathered around George W. Bush, for instance, the process of myth making led to the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which gave impetus to the demise of US power in West Asia and North Africa and beyond.
Many people moving to Florida are registering as Republicans because lockdowns in blue states caused them to reevaluate being a Democrat, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Wednesday.
“So it’s interesting with Florida, like, the media at the beginning of this said, ‘Florida is bad,’ and I think it’s because they wanted to damage Trump in Florida, wanted to damage me, so they just kept saying it was bad, even though the facts didn’t say it,” he said during a town hall event on Fox News Channel’s Hannity:
Like, literally last April, they’re saying Florida’s doing worse than New York. New York was like, ten times worse. And so I think what it did is, the people that buy those phony narratives for these media, they probably aren’t coming to Florida. But most people see through it, but the people that see through it, they think like us. And so I think a lot of these people are coming. I think they’re registering as Republicans overwhelming. And I also have come across a lot of people who quite frankly were Democrats.
A professor at the renowned Johns Hopkins School of Medicine advised Americans recently to “ignore” guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention due to the public health agency’s puzzling refusal to recognize natural immunity from previous infection.
What are the details?
Dr. Marty Makary, who also serves as a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, suggested during a Tuesday appearance on “The Vince Coglianese Show” that 150 million Americans, or “half the country,” likely already have natural immunity to COVID-19 due to having been infected with the virus and then recovering.
Yet despite that staggering figure, Makary lamented the fact that the CDC, in concert with Biden administration officials, have neglected to recognize the reality of the situation. Instead, previously infected individuals who decline being vaccinated are routinely “demonized” by health officials who insist that virtually all Americans must be vaccinated before normal life can resume.
But “herd immunity” has already been reached, argued Makary, citing up-to-date vaccination and infection data to suggest that 80% to 85% of Americans are currently protected from the virus.
“I never thought I’d say this, but please ignore the CDC guidance,” Makary stated, advising Americans to “live a normal life, unless you are unvaccinated and did not have the infection, in which case you need to be careful.”
Only 5 to 10 people were attending once in-person services resume.
The Waldoboro United Methodist Church, a fixture on Friendship Road since 1857, will close effective June 30.
The final service will be June 27. Minister Greg Foster, who has led the church for the past three years, said it will be a gathering where people can share memories of the church community and how the church has been a blessing to them.
What can I say? I enjoy being vindicated. And I would like to thank Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director Rachel Walensky for making me feel as if I am. Earlier this week, I wrote about a study that demonstrated that prepositions matter when discussing hospitalizations for COVID-19 among children. There is a difference between getting hospitalized with COVID-19 and getting hospitalized for COVID-19 in the hospitals studied. Reported data does not capture this crucial distinction, which likely applies to hospitalizations of children and adults nationwide, given the testing protocols and reimbursement incentives.
I have been railing against the context-less reporting of death counts since the beginning of the pandemic. While writing for another outlet, I noted the bizarre instructions issued by the National Center for Health Statistics after CNN reporter Jim Acosta called any questioning of the counts a conspiracy theory. If Acosta is attacking an idea, there is almost certainly some truth to it. As testing protocols blossomed to the point where every inpatient received one, and the number of asymptomatic individuals who tested positive for COVID-19 became clear, there was even more reason to question the counts.
State Rep. Mary Franson and state Sen. Scott Jensen released a video last week revealing that after reviewing thousands of death certificates in the state, 40% did not have COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death.
“I have other examples where COVID isn’t the underlying cause of death, where we have a fall. Another example is we have a freshwater drowning. We have dementia. We have a stroke and multiorgan failure,” Franson said in the video.
She added that in one case, a person who was ejected from a car was “counted as a COVID death” because the virus was in his system.
This finding followed a study in New Jersey hospitals that found that almost 90% of patients who had COVID-19 listed as a cause of death had a Do Not Resuscitate Order in place before their hospitalization. From the study:
The significance of DNR status as an independent risk factor for mortality has not been documented previously in COVID19 patients. The present study analyzed data of 1270 patients with COVID-19, who were admitted to our institutions during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in New Jersey. DNR patients had higher hazard ratios for risk of death and lower survival outcomes compared to non-DNR patients. The association between DNR status and poor clinical outcomes remained independently significant after adjustment for important clinical factors, including age, gender, COVID-19 symptoms at the time of admission and comorbidities.
So, if your doctor felt your health was poor enough to determine that resuscitating you or using lifesaving treatment would not maintain any quality of life, no matter your age, primary diagnosis, or related symptoms, you were more likely to die with COVID-19 on your chart.
Information like this was never shared with the public by the vaunted experts preferred by the legacy media. That may have led to the wildly inaccurate assessments of personal risk for severe disease from COVID-19 among the public.
This month, the sometimes unintentionally too candid Walensky said something on CNN:
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, somewhat confusingly, says they are aware of 223 people who have died with covid after being vaccinated.
"Not all of those 223 cases who had covid actually died of covid. They may have had mild disease but died, for example, of a heart attack." pic.twitter.com/KmjbrXnd1k
President Joe Biden will unveil a federal budget totaling $6 trillion, according to documents seen by the New York Times. The splurge will further raise the US’ national debt and accelerate inflation.
Biden will propose his budget on Friday. A New York Times report on Thursday revealed that the Democratic president will ask Congress for $6 trillion, and to increase this to $8 trillion by 2031. Such a sustained level of government spending has not been seen in the US since World War II.
Biden’s plan would drive the US’ budget deficit to $1.8 trillion in 2022, per the Times’ reporting. The largest prior deficit was $1.4 trillion, following then-President Obama’s economic bailout after the 2008 financial crisis. National debt would grow to 117% of the size of the economy by 2031, and by the end of Biden’s first term in 2024, would reach its highest level in history, passing the previous WWII-era record.
Biden hopes to offset the spending hike with tax increases, particularly on corporations and wealthy Americans. However, raising taxes is a delicate balancing act, and a jacked up corporate tax rate could strangle economic growth and cost jobs, industry groups have warned.
After every election, pundits see the result as evidence of the terminal decline of the losing party. This is certainly the case in Britain, where the Labour Party suffered catastrophic defeat in the recent local elections and the by-election in Hartlepool, a solidly Labour seat that the Tories won.
There have been many columnsarguing that Labour has lost its core constituency and has little hope of commanding a parliamentary majority ever in the future. In the United States, such predictions routinely accompany Republican defeats in the polls, and this year is no exception.
What makes this year different is that we see diagnoses of a bleak future facing the Democrats, the winners who now control the presidency and both houses of Congress. Their supporters also dominate the commanding heights of the culture and economy, of the media, entertainment, education at all levels, Big Tech, Big Sport, Big Business, and Wall Street.
Is the triumph of American progressives built on sand? Is the Democrat glee at divisions in the GOP premature? Is the fate of the Labour Party in the UK a warning for the Democrats? The two parties are often compared in terms of their direction and demographics. Both have undergone profound shifts in ideology and base of support in recent years.
Is the Labour Party Dying?
Parties fade and die, sometimes unexpectedly and comprehensively. The Federalist party in the United States faded quickly in the 19th century; Britain’s Liberal party went into a sudden and comprehensive decline a century later. One of the reasons George Dangerfield cited for this collapse in his 1935 classic “The Strange Death of Liberal England” was the rise of the labor movement and a major political party based on it.
In the 20th century, the Labour Party gained the overwhelming support of the industrial workers and their unions. Important working-class leaders rose through the ranks. But in recent years, the party has gone through some demographic shifts. The leadership is all university-educated, the industrial union members are outnumbered by public sector unions, and government employees are a large part of the party and its financing.
In the biggest vote in British history, that of the Brexit referendum of 2016, and the rift between the governing elites—the media, big business, the financial sector, education, and entertainment—and the majority of the working class, the Labour Party sided with the elites and their characterization of those who voted for sovereignty and independence as uneducated and xenophobic.
In the recent by-election in the northern city of Hartlepool, a traditional Labour stronghold that had voted overwhelmingly for Brexit in 2016, Labour ran as their candidate for Member of Parliament (MP) a Remainer, a supporter of the UK’s remaining in the European Union. He lost.
In response to Labour’s demographic and political shifts, culminating in the party’s massive defeat in the Hartlepool by-election and in local elections, Khalid Mahmood, a leader of the party and Parliament’s first Muslim MP, resigned from his ministerial position. He had this to sayabout what had gone wrong with his party:
“My view is simple: in the past decade, Labour has lost touch with ordinary British people. A London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors, has effectively captured the party. They mean well, of course, but their politics—obsessed with identity, division and even tech utopianism—have more in common with those of Californian high society than the kind of people who voted in Hartlepool yesterday. The loudest voices in the Labour movement over the past year in particular have focused more on pulling down Churchill’s statue than they have on helping people pull themselves up in the world. No wonder it is doing better among rich urban liberals and young university graduates than it is amongst the most important part of its traditional electoral coalition, the working-class.”
Does this sound familiar?
A Warning for the Democrats
In his recent article in the New Statesman, Britain’s most successful left-of-center politician, Tony Blair (prime minister 1997–2007), argued that the steep decline of the Labour Party is typical of what’s happening to center and center-left parties all over Europe, including the French Socialist Party, the German SPD, and of the Spanish and Swedish left.
The Democrats are in a much stronger position. Or so it seems. They won control over both Houses of Congress and the presidency. But, Blair argues, “The Biden victory was a heavy reaction not so much against the policies as the comportment of Trump. And in Biden, the Democrats nominated possibly the only potential leader who could have won.” Unlike Obama in 2008, Biden had no coattails and the party did poorly in state-level votes. The Democrats’ success in the 2020 election, however modest and whatever its causes, was the exception to the precipitous decline of such parties in the West.
We see in the United States a similar rift as in the UK and Europe, between the main center-left or progressive party and its working class supporters. Of the party’s program of Big State, tax, and spend, only the spending part is popular, and it’s what the Republicans also did under Trump. Its approach of expanding state regulation and control is unattractive. It’s an old-fashioned non-response to the fundamental economic transformation of our time, in internet technology, quantum computing, AI, financial payments, and defense.
This old-fashioned leftism, Blair argues, “is combined with a new-fashioned social/cultural message around extreme identity and anti-police politics which, for large swathes of people, is voter-repellent. ‘Defund the police’ may be the left’s most damaging political slogan since ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. It leaves the right with an economic message which seems more practical, and a powerful cultural message around defending flag, family and fireside traditional values. To top it off, the right evinces a pride in their nation, while parts of the left seem embarrassed by the very notion.”
The unions on which these parties rely for financing and political activity are in long-term decline. In the United States, public sector union membership rates are more than five times higher than those in the private sector, where only 6.3 percent of workers were union members in 2020.
A top Biden pick for Ambassador to India – Eric Garcetti – has collaborated with Chinese Communist Party influence groups and praised Chairman Xi Jinping as a “remarkable leader,” The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.
Joe Biden is expected to nominate current Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti for the role of Ambassador to India despite Garcetti’s long history of collaboration with groups tied to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department (UFWD).
The billion-dollar Chinese effort aims to “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign governments to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies,” according to the federal U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission. G
Garcetti has collaborated with them.
The Mayor visited China in 2014 at the invitation of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), dubbed the “public face” of the United Front influence group. It is described as “avowedly an arm of the party-state.”
Deputy Secretary-General of CPAFFC, Zhang Heqiang, authored an article for the group’s magazine entitled “Saying Farewell to Mayor Garcetti at Beijing Airport” where he reveals that Garcetti praised Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping as “remarkable”:
“He spoke of President Xi Jinping as a remarkable Chinese leader, whose foreign policy succeeded in helping China build an image of responsible major country in the international community.”
The article also describes how Garcetti visited with Chinese companies labeled “military collaborators” such as Huawei and “signed quite a few cooperation agreements.”
Zhang recounts how the pair messaged on WeChat – a Chinese platform identified as a national security threat by the Trump administration – and that Garcetti sent him a photo of Xi while lauding the CPAFFC official:
“I was surprised to know that Mayor Garcetti took the Beijing subway all by himself and that during his stay in China he even learned to use WeChat and built WeChat friend-groups. He praised WeChat instant messaging system as really good and more convenient than Facebook, and added me as a WeChat friend. Right away he sent a photo of President Xi Jinping waving his hand and jested with me saying that President Xi was very satisfied with my work and was waving hello to us.
On my way home, I unexpectedly received a voice message from Mayor Garcetti on WeChat: “Mr. Zhang, thank you for your hospitality. I look forward to seeing you again.”
Garcetti has collaborated with additional Chinese Communist Party influence groups, including the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF).
