World News
Caitlin Johnstone: Secret, invisible evidence of Russian hacking is not actually evidence
If the public cannot see the evidence behind the claims being made by the powerful, then those claims are unproven.
Penned by Caitlin Johnstone at RT
We’ve landed in a world where diplomacy, sanctions, even war can be decided by mere claims, and evidence is optional. Yet those proudly displaying the badge of ‘public trust’ are the worst of the serial, politically-driven liars.
The Communist Party of China has been covertly sending arms to extremist Antifa militants in the United States in preparation for the civil war which is expected to take place after Joe Biden declares himself President for Life and institutes a Marxist dictatorship. The weapons shipments include rocket launchers, directed energy weapons, nunchucks and ninja throwing stars.
Unfortunately I cannot provide evidence for this shocking revelation as doing so would compromise my sources and methods, but trust me it’s definitely true and must be acted upon immediately. I recommend President Trump declare martial law without a moment’s hesitation and begin planning a military response to these Chinese aggressions.
How does this make you feel? Was your first impulse to begin scanning for evidence of the incendiary claim I made in my opening paragraph?
It would be perfectly reasonable if it was. I am, after all, some random person on the internet whom you have probably never met, and you’ve no reason to accept any bold claim I might make on blind faith. It would make sense for you to want to see some verification of my claim, and then dismiss my claim as baseless hogwash when I failed to provide that verification.
If you’re a more regular reader, it would have also been reasonable for you to guess that I was doing a bit. But imagine if I wasn’t? Imagine if I really was claiming that the Chinese government is arming Antifa ninja warriors to kill patriotic Americans in the coming Biden Wars. How crazy would you have to be to believe what I was saying without my providing hard, verifiable evidence for my claims?
Now imagine further that this is something I’ve made false claims about many times in the past. If every few years I make a new claim about some naughty government arming Antifa super soldiers in a great communist uprising, which turns out later to have been bogus.
Well you’d dismiss me as a crackpot, wouldn’t you? I wouldn’t blame you. That would be the only reasonable response to such a ridiculous spectacle.
And yet if I were an employee of a US government agency making unproven incendiary claims about a government that isn’t aligned with the US-centralized power alliance, the entire political/media class would be parroting what I said as though it’s an established fact. Even though US government agencies have an extensive and well-documented history of lying about such things.
Today we’re all expected to be freaking out about Russia again because Russia hacked the United States again right before a new president took office again, so now it’s very important that we support new cold war escalations from both the outgoing president and the incoming president again. We’re not allowed to see the evidence that this actually happened again, but it’s of utmost importance that we trust and support new aggressions against Russia anyway. Again.
The New York Times has a viral op-ed going around titled “I Was the Homeland Security Adviser to Trump. We’re Being Hacked.” The article’s author Thomas P Bossert warns ominously that “the networks of the federal government and much of corporate America are compromised by a foreign nation” perpetrated by “the Russian intelligence agency known as the S.V.R., whose tradecraft is among the most advanced in the world.”
Rather than using its supreme tradecraft to interfere in the November election ensuring the victory of the president we’ve been told for years is a Russian asset by outlets like The New York Times, Bossert informs us that the SVR instead opted to hack a private American IT company called SolarWinds whose software is widely used by the US government.
“Unsuspecting customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which included a hidden back door that gave hackers access to the victim’s network,” Bossert explains, saying that “The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate.” Its magnitude is so great that Bossert says Trump must “severely punish the Russians” for perpetrating it, and cooperate with the incoming Biden team in helping to ensure that that punishment continues seamlessly between administrations.
The problem is that, as usual, we’ve been given exactly zero evidence for any of this. As Moon of Alabama explains, the only technical analysis we’ve seen of the alleged hack (courtesy of cybersecurity firm FireEye) makes no claim that Russia was responsible for it, yet the mass media are flagrantly asserting as objective, verified fact that Russia is behind this far-reaching intrusion into US government networks, citing only anonymous sources if they cite anything at all.
And of course where the media class goes so too does the barely-separate political class. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin told CNN in a recent interview that this invisible, completely unproven cyberattack constitutes “virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States.” Which is always soothing language to hear as the Russian government announces the development of new hypersonic missiles as part of a new nuclear arms race it attributes to US cold war escalations.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald is one of the few high-profile voices who’ve had the temerity to stick his head above the parapet and point out the fact that we have seen exactly zero evidence for these incendiary claims, for which he is of course currently being raked over the coals on Twitter.
“I know it doesn’t matter. I know it’s wrong to ask the question. I know asking the question raises grave doubts about one’s loyalties and patriotism,” Greenwald sarcastically tweeted. “But has there been any evidence publicly presented, let alone dispositive proof, that Russia is responsible for this hack?”
Perhaps they have information sources they can’t describe without compromising sources and methods?” chimed in Ars Technica‘s Timothy B Lee in response to Greenwald’s query, a textbook reply from establishment narrative managers whenever anyone questions where the evidence is for any of these invisible attacks on US sovereignty.
“Of course they can’t show us the evidence!” proponents of establishment Russia hysteria always say. “They’d compromise their sources and methods if they did!”
US spook agencies always say this about evidence for US spook agency claims about governments long targeted for destruction by US spook agencies. We can’t share the evidence with you because the evidence is classified. It’s secret evidence. The evidence is invisible.
Which always works out very nicely for the US spook agencies, I must say.
Secret, invisible evidence is not evidence. If the public cannot see the evidence behind the claims being made by the powerful, then those claims are unproven. It would never be acceptable for anyone in power to say “This important thing with potentially world-altering consequences definitely happened, but you’ll just have to trust us because the evidence is secret.” In a post-Iraq invasion world it is orders of magnitude more unacceptable, and should therefore be dismissed until hard, verifiable evidence is provided.
Isn’t it interesting how all the Pearl Harbors and 9/11s of our day are completely invisible to the public? We can’t see cyber-intrusions for ourselves like we could see fallen buildings and smoking naval bases; they’re entirely hidden from our view. Not only are they entirely hidden from our view, the evidence that they happened is kept secret from us as well. And the mass media just treat this as normal and fine. Government agencies with an extensive history of lying are allowed to make completely unsubstantiated and unverifiable claims about governments long targeted by those same government agencies, and the institutions responsible for informing the public about what’s going on in the world simply repeat it as fact.
Sure it’s possible that Russia hacked the US. It’s possible that the US government has been in contact with extraterrestrials, too. It’s possible that the Chinese government is covertly arming Antifa samurai in preparation for a civil war. But we do not imbue these things with the power of belief until we are provided with an amount of evidence that rises to the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world.
These people have not earned our trust, they have earned our pointed and aggressive skepticism. We must act accordingly.
Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz
World News
The CEO Of Blackstone Is Warning That “A Real Shortage Of Energy” Will Cause Social Unrest All Over The Planet
And as energy prices escalate, that will push all prices throughout our economic system higher and higher and higher.
We are facing an unprecedented global energy crunch. Demand for energy is continually rising, and the production of energy is not keeping pace. One of the biggest reasons for this is that large financial institutions have become extremely hesitant to fund any new energy projects that will add more carbon emissions to the environment. Instead, they want to fund projects that will help us transition to the new “green economy”, but meanwhile we are getting to a point where we will soon see widespread shortages of traditional forms of energy. So now we all get to suffer. A lack of oil is pushing the price of gasoline to alarming heights, shortages of natural gas are already causing tremendous disruptions in Asia and Europe, we are being told that we are facing a propane “armageddon” this winter, and supplies of coal have dropped to dangerously low levels around the world.
In other words, we are potentially heading into the most painful global energy crisis in modern history.
When CNN asked Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman about this, he openly admitted that we are “going to end up with a real shortage of energy”…
Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman warned Tuesday that high energy prices will likely set off social unrest around the world.
“We’re going to end up with a real shortage of energy. And when you have a shortage, it’s going to cost more. And it’s probably going to cost a lot more,” the private-equity billionaire told CNN International’s Richard Quest at a conference in Saudi Arabia.
When the power goes out, people are not going to be happy.
And people are really not going to be happy if it goes out for an extended period of time.
According to Schwarzman, we will soon see “very unhappy people” all over the globe…
“You’re going to get very unhappy people around the world in the emerging markets in particular but in the developed world,” Schwarzman said at the Future Investment Initiative. “What happens then, Richard, is you’ve got real unrest. This challenges the political system and it’s all utterly unnecessary.”
Sadly, he is right that this global energy crisis did not have to happen.
If the global elite had continued to fund traditional energy projects at the pace that was needed, we could have avoided this nightmare to a very large degree.
But traditional forms of energy are now being shunned, and billions of people will suffer as a result.
Meanwhile, prices throughout our economic system continue to rise at a very alarming pace. Just check out what has been happening to the price of turkey…
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, released data recently showing the average wholesale price of Grade A frozen 8- to 16-pound turkey has spiked by 21.91% since last year. That means what cost $1.15 per pound a year ago will now ring at at $1.41. And just for context, the same would have cost 96 cents in 2019 and 84 cents in 2018.
If math isn’t your thing, that’s a 68% wholesale price increase in just two years.
Overall, we are being told that this upcoming Thanksgiving will be the most expensive Thanksgiving that any of us have ever experienced…
Matthew McClure paid 20% more this month than he did last year for the 25 pasture-raised turkeys he plans to roast at the Hive, the Bentonville, Arkansas, restaurant where he is the executive chef. And Norman Brown, director of sweet-potato sales for Wada Farms in Raleigh, North Carolina, is paying truckers nearly twice as much as usual to haul the crop to other parts of the country.
“I never seen anything like it, and I’ve been running sweet potatoes for 38 or 39 years,” Brown said. “I don’t know what the answer is, but in the end it’s all going to get passed on to the consumer.”
Unfortunately, more price hikes are on the horizon.
In fact, Kimberly-Clark is opening warning that they are going to be boosting prices even higher…
Prices of toilet paper, diapers, facial tissues and paper towels will likely rise in coming weeks as Irving-based consumer giant Kimberly-Clark warned Monday that inflation and supply chain concerns aren’t “likely to be resolved quickly.”
So I would stock up on paper products while you still can.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, inflation is eventually going to get far worse than what we witnessed during the 1970s.
At this point, even many top Democrats are warning that high inflation is with us to stay. Here is one recent example…
Former President Barack Obama’s chief of global development on Tuesday predicted inflation was here to stay, despite the Biden administration’s protestations to the contrary.
Prices “will go higher, and the Fed has misread the inflation dynamics in a big way,” former Global Development Council Chairman Mohamed El Erian said in an afternoon interview with Fox News’ Sandra Smith, adding that the Federal Reserve was “still hostage to this notion that it’s transitory.”
And the shortages that we are currently experiencing are ultimately going to get worse too.
Right now, we are already facing the worst shortage of alcoholic beverages since the 1930s. When asked about his empty shelves by a reporter, one gas station owner said that he has “never seen anything like this”…
Supply chain issues are impacting the alcohol supply in the U.S., and it’s making alcohol more expensive and difficult for bars and liquor stores to get.
“I have so many empty shelves. In the two years of doing this, I’ve never seen anything like this,” gas station chain owner Ali Ali said.
As I discussed yesterday, now Biden wants to take countless more truck drivers off the road, and that will make our supply chain headaches a whole lot worse.
And as energy prices escalate, that will push all prices throughout our economic system higher and higher and higher.
Yes, all of this is really happening.
This is not a drill.
We are in the early chapters of a full-blown economic meltdown of epic proportions, and nothing will ever be the same after this.
If you want to keep waiting for conditions to “return to normal”, you are going to be waiting for a really, really long time.
We have entered a truly horrible nightmare, and there will be no waking up from this.
World News
Georgian Protesters Storm LGBT Office, Tear Down Pride Flags And Replace Them With National Flag
Will Biden target them with drone strikes in order to spread “our values?”
Georgian protesters on Monday forced the cancellation of an LGBT pride march after storming the office of an LGBT lobby group, tearing down their pride flags and replacing them with Georgia’s national flag.
This is what anti-imperialism looks like:
#Georgia 🇬🇪: a man on a scooter reportedly tried to drive into a group of journalists as they were reporting on the anti-pride violence in #Tbilisi.
— Thomas van Linge (@ThomasVLinge) July 5, 2021
Source: https://t.co/SpUIIzAzRa pic.twitter.com/HSffPvAoVL
From Reuters, “LGBT+ campaigners in Georgia call off pride match after office attack”:
LGBT+ campaigners in Georgia called off plans to stage a pride march on Monday after violent groups opposed to the event stormed and ransacked their office in the capital Tbilisi and targeted activists and journalists.
Activists launched five days of LGBT+ Pride celebrations last Thursday and had planned a “March for Dignity” on Monday in central Tbilisi, shrugging off criticism from the church and conservatives who said the event had no place in Georgia.
[…] Video footage posted by LGBT+ activists showed their opponents scaling their building to reach their balcony where they tore down rainbow flags and were seen entering the office of Tbilisi Pride.
[…] Campaigners said some of their equipment had been broken in the attack and that they had been forced to cancel.
Will Biden target them with drone strikes in order to spread “our values?”
World News
Pfizer vaccine losing effectiveness amid Delta variant surge, Israeli Health Ministry says as it mulls 3rd shot & new restrictions
In addition to booster shots, health officials are also mulling whether to revive some pandemic restrictions.
Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine has dropped to 64% effectiveness in preventing infection amid the spread of the Delta variant in Israel, the Health Ministry said, as officials consider the need for booster shots and new restrictions.
The vaccine fell to 64% effectiveness in preventing symptomatic infection over the last month, the Health Ministry reported on Monday, noting that the decrease coincided with the rapid spread of the more contagious Delta variant across Israel. However, health officials said the Pfizer shot still offers strong protection against severe illness and hospitalization, reporting 93% efficacy.
While the ministry did not give the previous figures in its statement, a report published in May said the Pfizer vaccine was 97% effective against severe illness after two doses. In March, private Israeli researchers also found the immunization to be 91.2% effective against any level of symptomatic infection.
The new data comes amid a small surge across Israel, where the number of active cases hit 2,766 on Monday after 369 new infections, with the Delta variant believed to make up more than 90% of the overall total. As of July 4, around 70 patients were hospitalized, half of them in serious condition, compared to 21 with severe illness on June 19.
The fast spread of the Delta variant, which was first observed in India, has prompted Health Minister Nitzan Horowtiz to order two medical studies looking at the need for a third vaccine dose, saying they would provide “vital information” to policymakers. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s office added that the studies will “evaluate the efficacy of the vaccine and the rate at which it wears off over time.”
While nearly 60% of Israel’s population of 9.3 million have received at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine – helping to bring daily infections down from their peak of around 10,000 in January – cases are still cropping up among the immunized. Last Friday, more than half of the new infections reported were in patients that had been vaccinated, according to Ynet, underscoring the need for further study.
In addition to booster shots, health officials are also mulling whether to revive some pandemic restrictions, most of which were lifted in March, as well as bringing back some version of its coronavirus ‘passport’ system, the Jerusalem Post reported. An indoor mask mandate had previously been dropped, but was brought back in late June as daily cases began to accelerate.
Foreign travelers could also face additional testing and quarantine protocols in the coming weeks, though the Health Ministry has yet to make a decision.
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