Tag: perpetual war

What’s actually IN the US “Covid Stimulus Bill”?

The US congress just passed their Covid stimulus bill, or the “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021” to give its official title. So what’s actually inside it? What has just been passed into law?

The answers to that is “nobody really knows”, least of all the members of congress, who passed the law without reading it, as they so often do. It’s the longest bill in US history, at over 5500 pages and it sailed through the voting mostly sight unseen.

We’ve downloaded a copy of the full document and will embed it below for those of you patient or masochistic enough to tackle the whole thing. We’ve read some already, and will point out the highlights:

  • “Foreign aid” is a big winner. Egypt is getting $1.3 billion, Sudan, Israel and Ukraine get over 500 million each, and many other countries around the world sizeable contributions, much of which will be spent on “defense”. Which is to say sent straight back to America via massive arms purchases.
  • Not all the money being sent overseas is for buying weapons, some is for backing coups. Venezuela and Belarus get special mention here, each getting their own section of the bill detailing how terrible their “illegal regimes” are. There’s also a large section on “combating Chinese influence”.
  • For some reason there’s another section on copyright law, which makes illegal streaming copyrighted content a federal crimes, punishable by up to three years in prison.
  • Nearly 300 million is put aside to develop influenza vaccines and prevent a future influenza pandemic.
  • 4 BILLION dollars for the Gates-funded GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.
  • Vaccine “misinformation” is also a concern, and the bill provides for a pro-vaccine propaganda campaign – or rather a “PUBLIC AWARENESS CAMPAIGN ON THE IMPORTANCE OF VACCINATIONS”

So – huge amounts of foreign aid, support for various coups, totally irrelevent copyright laws, provisions for pro-vaccine propaganda campaigns…it’s not your typical “stimulus bill” so far, is it?

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With Biden’s New Threats, the Russia Discourse is More Reckless and Dangerous Than Ever

To justify Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump, leading Democrats and their key media allies for years competed with one another to depict what they called “Russia’s interference in our elections” in the most apocalyptic terms possible. They fanatically rejected the view of the Russian Federation repeatedly expressed by President Obama — that it is a weak regional power with an economy smaller than Italy’s capable of only threatening its neighbors but not the U.S. — and instead cast Moscow as a grave, even existential, threat to U.S. democracy, with its actions tantamount to the worst security breaches in U.S. history.

This post-2016 mania culminated with prominent liberal politicians and journalists (as well as John McCain) declaring Russia’s activities surrounding the 2016 to be an “act of war” which, many of them insisted, was comparable to Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attack — the two most traumatic attacks in modern U.S. history which both spawned years of savage and destructive war, among other things.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) repeatedly demanded that Russia’s 2016 “interference” be treated as “an act of war.” Hillary Clinton described Russian hacking as “a cyber 9/11.” And here is Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on MSNBC in early February, 2018, pronouncing Russia “a hostile foreign power” whose 2016 meddling was the “equivalent” of Pearl Harbor, “very much on par” with the “seriousness” of the 1941 attack in Hawaii that helped prompt four years of U.S. involvement in a world war.

With the Democrats, under Joe Biden, just weeks away from assuming control of the White House and the U.S. military and foreign policy that goes along with it, the discourse from them and their media allies about Russia is becoming even more unhinged and dangerous. Moscow’s alleged responsibility for the recently revealed, multi-pronged hack of U.S. Government agencies and various corporate servers is asserted — despite not a shred of evidence, literally, having yet been presented — as not merely proven fact, but as so obviously true that it is off-limits from doubt or questioning.

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White House makes Friday afternoon announcement of what members of the Space Force will be called: reports

Vice President Mike Pence on Friday announced that members of the Space Force will be officially called “guardians.”

“Vice President Mike Pence announces that uniformed members of the U.S. Space Force will be called Guardians. [There] you have it: Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Guardians,” Defense One editor Marcus Weisgerber reported.

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