Tag: military industrial complex

A State of Martial Law: America Is a Military Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”—Thomas Jefferson

The government is goosestepping all over our freedoms.

Case in point: America’s founders did not want a military government ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

Most Americans seem relatively untroubled by this state of martial law.

Incredibly, when President Biden bragged about how the average citizen doesn’t stand a chance against the government’s massive arsenal of militarized firepower, it barely caused a ripple.

As Biden remarked at a fundraising event in California, “I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is—you know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16.  You need something else than just an AR-15.”

The message being sent to the citizenry is clear: there is no place in our nation today for the kind of revolution our forefathers mounted against a tyrannical government.

For that matter, the government has declared an all-out war on any resistance whatsoever by the citizenry to its mandates, power grabs and abuses.

By this standard, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning.

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Pandemic Leaders Were Biodefense Puppets and Profiteers

Scandalous incompetence. Profound stupidity. Astounding errors. This is how many analysts – including Dr. Vinay Prasad, Dr. Scott Atlas, and popular Substack commentator eugyppius – explain how leading public health experts could prescribe so many terrible pandemic response policies.

And it’s true: the so-called experts certainly have made themselves look foolish over the last three years: Public health leaders like Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci make false claims, or contradict themselves repeatedly, on subjects related to the pandemic response, while leading scientists, like Peter Hotez in the US and Christian Drosten in Germany, are equally susceptible to such flip-flops and lies. Then there are the internationally renowned medical researchers, like Eric Topol, who repeatedly commit obvious errors in interpreting Covid-related research studies. [ref]

All of these figures publicly and aggressively promoted anti-public health policies, including universal masking, social distancing, mass testing and quarantining of healthy people, lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

It seems like an open-and-shut case: Dumb policies, dumb people in charge of those policies. 

This might be true in a few individual cases of public health or medical leaders who really are incapable of understanding even high school level science. However, if we look at leading pandemic public health and medical experts as a group – a group consisting of the most powerful, widely published, and well-paid researchers and scientists in the world – that simple explanation sounds much less convincing. 

Even if you believe that most medical researchers are shills for pharmaceutical companies and that scientists rarely break new ground anymore, I think you’d be hard-pressed to claim that they lack basic analytical skills or a solid educational background in the areas they’ve studied. Most doctors and scientists with advanced degrees know how to analyze simple scientific documents and understand basic data. 

Additionally, those doctors and public health professionals who were deemed experts during the pandemic were also clever enough to have climbed the academic, scientific, and/or government ladders to the highest levels.

They might be unscrupulous, sycophantic, greedy, or power-mongering. You might think they make bad moral or ethical decisions. But it defies logic to say that every single one of them understands simple scientific data less than, say, someone like me or you. In fact, I find that to be a facile, superficial judgment that does not get to the root cause of their seemingly stupid, incompetent behavior.

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US to send $500 million in weapons, military aid to Ukraine, officials say

The Pentagon will announce it is sending up to $500 million in military aid to Ukraine, including more than 50 heavily armored vehicles and an infusion of missiles for air defense systems, U.S. officials said Monday, as Ukrainian and Western leaders try to sort out the impact of the brief weekend insurrection in Russia.

The aid is aimed at bolstering Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which has been moving slowly in its early stages. It wasn’t clear Monday if Ukrainian forces will be able to take advantage of the disarray in the Russian ranks, in the aftermath of the short-lived rebellion by Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner mercenary group that he has controlled.

An announcement on the aid package is expected Tuesday. This would be the 41st time since the Russian invasion into Ukraine in February 2022 that the U.S. has provided military weapons and equipment through presidential drawdown authority. The program allows the Pentagon to quickly take items from its own stocks and deliver them to Ukraine.

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‘Thermonator’ Robot Dog Shoots Flames As ‘Skynet Moment’ Nears

Remember those ‘cute’ dancing robo-dogs from (Japanese-owned) Boston Dynamics doing all sorts of tricks, like decorating a Christmas tree and opening doors? 

Even though Boston Dynamics has pledged not to weaponize robo-dogs, other companies have. 

China has made their version of ‘spot’ – except they strapped a gun onto it.

Another Chinese defense contractor showed off a drone deploying an armed robo-dog into a mock warzone. 

…which leaves us with yet another robo-dog that a US company called “Throwflame” has developed into “the first-ever flamethrower-wielding robot dog,” according to its website.

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Boeing Charges Pentagon $52,000 For Trash Can Previously Priced At $300

As Democrat and Republican members of the executive and legislative branches trip over each other trying to see who can jack up the Pentagon’s budget more, an investigation by Responsible Statecraft has uncovered some glaring examples of Department of Defense contractors raising the price of their products by astronomical multiples. 

Boeing used to charge about $300 for trash receptacles used aboard E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) planes, which use the chassis of a Boeing 707 airliner. After that aircraft vanished from civilian fleets, the trash can lost its status as a “commercial” item, freeing Boeing to stick it to American taxpayers. 

How badly? “In 2020, the Pentagon paid Boeing over $200,000 for four of the trash cans, translating to roughly $51,606 per unit,” reports Responsible Statecraft’s Connor Echols. The next year brought an apparent volume discount: In 2021, the Pentagon bought 11 trash cans at “only” $36,640 each. Together, the price on the two years of purchases represented a whopping $600,000 markup over previous prices.  

Boeing isn’t the only one sticking it to taxpayers. For starters:

  • In 2022, New York-based Jamaica Bearings Company sold the Pentagon 13 radio filters. While it had previously priced them at $350 each, this time Jamaica Bearings charged $49,000 each.
  • Lockheed Martin jacked up the price of an electrical conduit for the P-3 Orion anti-submarine and maritime surveillance plane by upwards of 1400%, raking in an extra $133,000 from 2008 to 2015. 

In the wake of a May 60 Minutes investigation into defense contractor price-gouging, five senators sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin asking for the Pentagon to perform its own follow-on inquiry.

“These companies have abused the trust government has placed in them, exploiting their position as sole suppliers for certain items to increase prices far above inflation or any reasonable profit margin,” wrote Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Mike Braun (R-IN) and Ron Wyden (D-OR).  

Consolidation of the defense industry is one factor feeding the price-gouging. “In the 1990s, there were more than 50 ‘prime’ DoD contractors capable of competing for major contracts. Now, there are only five,” writes Echols. 

Per the latest iteration of the National Defense Authorization Act, the federal government will spend over $850 billion on “defense” in the 2023 fiscal year, roughly half of which will be devoured by contractors.

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HOW AN “AVERAGE” YOGA COACH MANAGED TO BECOME A HEAD OF THE CIA DIVISION RESPONSIBLE FOR ARMS TRANSFERS TO MILITANTS IN AFRICA AND MIDDLE EAST

“America is the land of opportunity” – this phrase fully describes our nation. America gives an opportunity for every person not only to achieve anything they put their mind to, but also reach a mighty power and get filthy rich. Despite the fact that it is not customary to speak about it, but in most cases people assume such power through deception and hypocrisy. They serve as heads of serious departments, using their post to manipulate the American taxpayers’ money.

Today we’d like to tell you a dizzying story about a yoga teacher, Chanda Creasy, whose enlightenment path took her to a top-secret CIA unit responsible for weapons supplies to militants in Africa and Middle East, receiving millions of dollars in kickbacks.

But first let’s start our story with Chanda’s yoga personal website where she tells fascinating fairy-tale about her meeting with yoga while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia. You probably didn’t know that Ethiopia is the best place to experience yoga, as well as meditations under scorching African sun without a hat will make you reach Satchidananda in a fastest way.

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Your Tax Dollars at Work: Military Monitors Social Media for Mean Posts About Generals

The U.S. Army’s Protective Services Battalion (PSB), the Department of Defense’s equivalent of the Secret Service, now monitors social media to see if anyone has posted negative comments about the country’s highest-ranking officers.

Per a report by the Intercept, the PSB’s remit includes protecting officers from “embarrassment,” in addition to more pressing threats like kidnapping and assassination.

An Army procurement document from 2022 obtained by the Intercept reveals that the PSB now monitors social media for “negative sentiment” about the officers under its protection, as well as for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats.

“This is an ongoing PSIFO/PIB” — Protective Services Field Office/Protective Intelligence Branch — “requirement to provide global protective services for senior Department of Defense (DoD) officials, adequate security in order to mitigate online threats (direct, indirect, and veiled), the identification of fraudulent accounts and positive or negative sentiment relating specifically to our senior high-risk personnel.”

Per the report, the Army intends not just to monitor platforms for “negative sentiment,” but also to pinpoint the location of posters.

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Aliens Or Not, Secret Crash Retrieval Programs Are A Very Real Thing

News first broke just over a week ago that a former career American intelligence officer is alleging the U.S. government is concealing a decades-long top-secret ‘crash retrieval’ program that has overseen the recovery of otherworldly flying machines and their pilots. There remains no hard evidence available to the public to substantiate these claims. Yet the U.S. military and intelligence community’s shadowy crash retrieval programs are a very real thing, although the ones we know about are focused on foreign, not alien, technology.

These secretive endeavors are part of a larger ecosystem focused on gathering intelligence — through examining, reverse engineering, and testing — non-U.S. weapon systems and other equipment through so-called Foreign Materiel Exploitation, or FME. This extensive espionage ecosystem, honed over nearly a century of operations, lives in the shadows, but remains an indispensable discipline that has paid off massively time and time again.

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Ukraine Situation Report: U.S. Sending More Bradleys

The Pentagon tomorrow will announce a new aid package that will include additional Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Stryker Armored Vehicles, a U.S. official tells The War Zone.

“I can confirm that the next Presidential Drawdown Package (expected tomorrow) contains roughly two dozen Bradleys and Strykers,” a U.S. official said in a statement to The War Zone.

The official, confirming earlier reporting by The Voice of America about the types of vehicles to be included, did not know the exact number of each vehicle.

The news about the additional donated armor vehicles comes as the open source tracking group Oryx said that Ukraine has lost 16 Bradleys so far in its counteroffensive. The group, which only tabulates vehicles for which is can visually confirm, does not mention Strykers damaged or destroyed in its latest assessment.

You can read much more about how Ukrainian troops performed in breaching operation that led to a bulk of the destroyed Bradleys in our story here.

To date, the U.S. has donated 109 M2A2-ODS Bradley variants and four B-FIST variants as well as as 90 Strykers.

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