MANY have asked themselves how policies so ineffective and yet damaging to so many people's lives and liberties could have been put in place so quickly, and seemingly almost on a global basis, in response to the Covid crisis.

Part of the answer has been provided by an investigation by German journalist and author Paul Schreyer. In an hour-long video, he tracks a series of pandemic simulation exercises conducted at the highest level over many years among the most influential industrial nations of the West.

Top officials were 'primed' to respond as they did, once the World Health Organisation declared the pandemic spread of a new coronavirus, SARS-COV-2, almost regardless of the nature of the virus or the degree of harm it was likely to cause.

This weakness can be seen as a huge obstacle to rational decision-making. It helps to explain how the views of thousands of doctors, scientists and others who have challenged the official, fear-based approach to the pandemic came to be ignored.

Schreyer maintains that political decisions during the crisis did not come out of the blue, but stemmed from a 'war on viruses' begun back in the 1990s, alongside the 'war on terror'.

It was as though a fresh enemy had to be brought into being, following the end of the Cold War era in which the superpowers Russia and America confronted each other with immense and potentially suicidal armaments and military budgets.

Much has been written about President Joe Biden's new Domestic Terror law, but nothing I have seen until now shows just how horrifying it is.

To say that the White House uses the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) like political puppets to push their own agenda would be an understatement. The New Yorker chronicled four DHS secretary's who were forced to resign by October 2019, and a fifth who resigned this January .

So when I heard about DHS counterterrorism chief John Cohen having a hard time containing his enthusiasm over Biden's new domestic terrorism law in a GW Program on Extremism webinar I knew it couldn't be good.

Ricardo Vazquez Garcia, from Homeland Security Today describes what happened.

Garcia does a great job of framing the Feds justification for creating a new War On Terror by targeting American citizens.

"A lot of progress was made by the U.S. government in dealing with the threat posed by foreign terrorist organizations and in particular dealing with the way those organizations operated, the way they recruited individuals, the way they communicated, the way they developed plans, the way they saw to introduce operatives into the domestic environment, the way they sought to recruit people here domestically," Cohen said. "I think it is safe to say that the U.S. created quite a robust counterterrorism capability. The challenge is the threat we face today is significantly different than the one we faced after Sept. 11," DHS counterterrorism chief John Cohen said.

The Russian Direct Line is a unique exercise in direct democracy: Russian citizens call up their president and he answers their queries and solves their problems, like a Nordic konung a thousand years ago. Russia came into being as a chain of Nordic princedoms that practiced this sort of direct access to their ruler; early Russian princes and Tsars posed themselves as an instance of last appeal and immediate access. Twenty years ago, Vladimir Putin resurrected this ancient practice, and once a year every Russian can appeal to him on any subject matter at all. A man of power and authority, he can override any regulation, cut through the bureaucratic red tape, and solve any conundrum by his almost-royal grace. In the heavily bureaucratised country, such an omnipotent yet benevolent ruler provides excellent solutions to problems that should never have arisen in the first place.

The majority of questions and answers deal with everyday Russian life; with the supply of gas, with water drainage, with prices for vegetables, or communal charges. But Putin also answered questions that dealt with real world politics, and provided a few scoops for us. (Here is the full transcript)

The HMS Defender raid into Crimean waters is still fresh in memory, so Putin was asked whether this confrontation could have led to the Third World War. "No", said Putin. "Even if we had sunk that ship, it wouldn't put the world on the brink of a third world war because they know they could not win the war. We would also suffer, but we were in the right, and on our own ground." This means that Russians are perfectly able to sink or capture the next NATO ship if she were to enter Russian waters.

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." — Friedrich Nietzsche

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry — purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure — has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Think about it.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

The Israeli parliament has voted down an extension to controversial legislation that bars Arab Israelis from extending residency or citizenship rights to Palestinian spouses, in an early blow to the country's new coalition government.

After a marathon all-night voting session that ended on Tuesday morning, the Knesset decided not to renew the law in a 59-59 vote. The outcome is widely seen as a stinging defeat for the prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who failed to unite the coalition's disparate ideological wings in what he reportedly himself referred to as a "referendum" on the new government.

The vote means the law will expire at midnight and could trigger as many as 15,000 citizenship applications from people living in the West Bank and Gaza - a development the legislation's supporters say poses security issues and threatens Israel's Jewish character.

The interior minister, Ayalet Shaked, tweeted after the vote that watching members of Likud, former prime minister Benjamin Neyanyahu's centre-right party, celebrate the vote's outcome, alongside the Religious Zionism party and the Arab Joint List, was "madness" and a "great victory for post-Zionism".

Jacob Zuma, South Africa's leader for nine years, is an emblem of rogue leadership in an increasingly bankrupt country. If he succeeds in escaping imprisonment, a nation that was once a beacon of hope will fall further into ruin. South Africa is rushing like an out-of-control ox-wagon down the by-now familiar path of many post-colonial African countries into the heart of darkness.

South Africa's highest court last week ordered the imprisonment of the country's former president Jacob Zuma for 15 months for contempt of court. The decision stems from Zuma's refusal to appear at a commission to answer questions about his alleged involvement in corruption during his time as president between 2009 and 2018.

On Saturday, however, the constitutional court agreed to hear Zuma's urgent appeal on July 12 to rescind its order to sentence him to jail. If the court is gelded, the human rights so dearly won defeating apartheid will be lost.

Zuma, the former head of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), claimed that to jail him was akin to detention without trial, and that South Africa was sliding back to apartheid-type rule. Furthermore, he said that imprisoning him at the age of 79 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic amounted to a death sentence.

Thousands of his supporters traveled at the weekend to Zuma's home village of Nkandla in Kwa-Zulu Natal, to form a human shield to prevent him from being arrested "under any circumstances."

A hashtag on Twitter, #AllRoadsToNkandla, bristled with defiant statements.

Zulus wearing traditional garb and carrying shields and knobkerries toyi toyi-ed and sang 'struggle' songs.

But not all are in support. Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the traditional prime minister of the Zulu nation, said the regiments of Zulu warriors were acting in defiance of orders, and the royal household also distanced itself from the mob.

The fate of the very nation rests on the eventual result of this standoff. Constitutionalism is being challenged because it is incompatible with gangsterism.

The rule of law is being challenged as it is the number one enemy of those, like Zuma and his other corrupt ANC cronies, who have looted and robbed the country during their time in power. And hid both their crimes and their stupefying ineptness to rule behind the ANC's obsession with race and racism.

The ANC is now undergoing an internal battle for power... just as every gang is highly susceptible to internal struggles for more access and control of "turf" and "action" and, of course, the lucrative proceeds.

MP Pierre Poilievre (PC-Carleton) released a video Saturday where he announced that Bill C-10, the controversial bill that would have regulated Canadians' content online, has failed to pass through the Senate before summer break. He announced:

"We did it! We won a battle for freedom of expression! Remember Bill C-10, the censorship bill that would allow governments to control what you see and say online? Well, the Senate closed its doors for the summer without passing that bill."

"In other words, it is not the law today, and if Trudeau calls that early election he's been warning about, then the bill will die. Even if he wins that election, he'd have to re-introduce the bill from the very first stage and start all over again."

Everywhere in the media and in the halls of power, we hear that Israel has a right to self-defense. But when it comes to the question of whether Palestinians suffering under brutal occupation have the right to defend themselves, those same voices are conspicuously silent.

In a statement issued Monday, US State Department spokesperson Ned Price condemned "in the strongest terms" the rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. Urging "de-escalation on all sides," Price then delivered the standard recognition of "Israel's legitimate right to defend itself and to defend its people and its territory." When the Washington bureau chief for Al-Quds daily asked whether Palestinians shared in the right to self-defense, Price's response was equivocal, affirming that "the concept of self-defense," should apply "to any state." To the stateless Palestinians, one can then conclude, the State Department extends no such rights.

This is a double standard shared by much of the corporate media, as well as among politicians, across Western democracies. A search of the media aggregator Factiva finds that the five US newspapers with the highest circulation — the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times — have run 343 articles this century containing the phrases "Israel's right to self-defense," "Israel has a right to defend itself," or "Israel's right to defend itself."

The first entry in our new series looks at how the World Health Organization removed natural immunity from their definition of "herd immunity".

Ever since the beginning of the "pandemic", and its transition into the clear "New Normal" (or "Great Reset) agenda, the English language itself has become a battleground. Words and phrases are being stretched and twisted into new, bizarre or contradictory meanings, or weighted with implications that never existed before.

"New Normal Newspeak" is our attempt to catalogue these changes, and stop the real meaning of words being memory-holed forever.

Our first example is a very, very literal one.

The phrase "Herd Immunity" has existed for decades, and most of us had probably come across it at some point prior to March 2020. It had a clear meaning, which was available from (among other places) the World Health Organization website:

Herd immunity is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.

As demonstrations against the Palestinian Authority president grow, security forces are resorting to ruthless tactics to prop him up, including beating and killing dissenters, and stealing explicit photos of female protesters.

"I saw with my own eyes how [the security forces] were using explicit photos, from the girls' phones they stole, as blackmail," a Palestinian journalist tells me, speaking anonymously, hoping to expose a scandal. If true, it adds to the long list of damning accusations which seem to be leading inexorably to the downfall of the Palestinian Authority (PA).