Ximena González is a freelance writer and editor based in Calgary. Her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail and the Sprawl.
Come Oct. 23, Shelley Bailey and her husband have nowhere to live.
Vancouver audiences are in for a treat this season with 11 unforgettable new performances.
In July, after nine years of renting at Varsity Estates Village, a townhouse complex in Calgary’s northwest, the elderly couple received a notice ending their month-to-month tenancy. And as rental rates skyrocket, the urgency of finding a place to live while on a fixed income is taking a heavy toll on the Baileys.
Shelley Bailey wants to stay in her community. “I can walk to my doctor’s, and go to infusions for my Crohn’s,” she says, pausing before breaking into tears. “This is just killing me. I don’t sleep. I’ve lost 15 pounds.”
The Baileys aren’t the only tenants at Varsity Estates who were asked to move out in July. Nicole and Ryan Stoneman, parents of four children, were also informed that their lease wouldn’t be renewed and that they should vacate their home by Oct. 31.
“We’re still confused why they’re not renewing our lease,” Ryan Stoneman says. “We’ve been living here seven years. We pay our rent every month.”
“The month of August was just a gong show,” Stoneman says, as he and his partner scrambled to find a new home. “We emailed tons of places [but] a lot of landlords out there don’t want to rent to a family with small children. They’re not supposed to discriminate, but they’re able to because there’s such a lack of housing.”
While Calgary city councillors debate the best ways to improve housing affordability and discuss the adoption of a new corporate housing strategy, many Calgarians lose their homes to rent hikes and renovictions.
Like the Baileys and the Stonemans, nearly 46,000 Calgary households are unable to afford housing that rents for more than $1,400 a month in rent. Yet, in August, asking rents reached a record high.
Tomorrow, the city council is holding a special meeting to decide what’s to be done about Calgary’s housing crisis. But even if the proposed housing strategy moves forward, the imminent needs of tenants will remain unaddressed.
#10 – Fauci now admits the COVID vaccines cause myocarditis.
#9 – Ivermectin is even safer than you think.
#8 – RFK Jr. identifies “the real shooter” behind his father’s death.
#7 – A German study exposes the dangers of masks and CO2 re-breathing.
#6 – Teachers are being decimated by aggressive metastatic cancers after vaccine mandates.
#5 – Unvaccinated children are healthier, according to studies they don’t want you to see.
#4 – The recent wave of forest fires is not due to climate change but something much more sinister. #3 – Excess mortality just got even worse — but don’t look at the vaccine.
#2 – First-ever published spike detox protocol details how you can get better after the COVID shots.
#1 – Viral RFK Jr. video gets censored by “X” after exposing what Pfizer doesn’t want you to know. Article links are included in the thread below:
The US is involved in all the wars on the planet and starts most of them. Meanwhile, it cannot take care of its own children. Cruel savage regime of dunces.
Lou
Child poverty in the US doubled in 2022 with the ending of expanded benefits
Child poverty in the United States more than doubled during 2022, according to new data from the Census Bureau. Child poverty increased from 5.1 percent of children in 2021 to 12.4 percent in 2022, or about 9 million children. At the same time, overall poverty increased by 4.6 percent to 12.4 percent, the first increase in the overall Supplemental Poverty Measure since 2010.
This sudden jump in child poverty was caused by the expiration of expanded benefits through the Child Tax Credit (CTC), which gave families up to $3,600 per child in monthly installments, as well as the elimination of expanded unemployment insurance and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments. Altogether, these programs, launched in response to the stay-at-home orders that were issued at the onset of the COVID pandemic, helped bring down child poverty from a rate of 12.6 percent in 2019.
The doubling of poverty is the direct result of a deal cut between President Joe Biden and congressional Republicans last year on a federal budget which protected massive military spending while slashing the limited social program expansions implemented at the outset of the pandemic.
On top of the end of these benefits, there has been a mass unwinding of Medicaid programs across the country, with millions of people kicked off of their Medicaid health insurance after the ending of the official COVID-19 Public Health Emergency by Biden earlier this year.
In March 2020 a continuous enrollment provision was created for Medicaid that prevented states from disenrolling Medicaid recipients. This provision ended on March 31, 2023, and states will continue to review the eligibility of the 94 million people who were enrolled in Medicaid coverage as of March.
At least 6.4 million people enrolled in Medicaid have been disenrolled as of September 13 of this year, about 36 percent of all people who attempted to renew their coverage. States run by Republican-controlled legislatures lead this trend, with Texas disenrolling nearly 900,000 people and Florida disenrolling 430,000.
Only 15 states reported data with breakdowns by age, but the trends from these states alone show a massive impact on children. Of those disenrolled, children made up 42 percent across the 15 states, totalling 1,278,000. In Texas, the share of children skyrocketed to 81 percent, while in Kansas, Idaho and Missouri the figure was 50 percent or greater.
For people who were able to re-enroll in Medicaid, only 55 percent were re-enrolled through an “ex parte” process by the state administration on behalf of the participant. The other 45 percent had to renew their coverage by themselves through a renewal form.
Compounding the evisceration of pandemic era benefits overseen by the Democratic Biden administration is a significant decline in household income as the cost of living continues to soar.
According to the Census, real median household income in the US fell by 2.3 percent from $76,330 to $74,580 in 2022, the largest decline since 2008. Since 2019, real median household income has fallen a total of 4.7 percent. Meanwhile, the cost of living rose by 7.8 percent between 2021 and 2022, the largest increase since 1980.
The data also showed that the percentage of women working full-time rose to 65.6 percent in 2022, the largest figure ever recorded, while the percentage of men who hold full-time jobs stood at 74.8 percent, potentially reflecting a rise in the number of families where both parents work (48.9 percent in 2022 compared to 46.8 percent in 2021).
As the cost of living continues to rise and real wages are eroded, more and more people face destitution and poverty. Among those suffering from the decline in living standards are an increasingly large number of aging Baby Boomers—the generation born between 1946 and 1964—who are facing homelessness.
Since 2019, the percentage of people aged 55 and over living in homeless shelters has risen from 16.5 percent to 19.8 percent. This rapid rise in homelessness for older people has been described as a “silver tsunami,” as more people near retirement age without enough savings to pay their expenses. A typical cause of homelessness for older people is the death of a spouse or a medical emergency.
The average Social Security payment is just $1,781.63 a month, while the average cost of rent is $2,038 a month. Many Baby Boomers do not have adequate pensions after decades of pension fund mismanagement and concessions given to employers by the pro-corporate union bureaucracies.
In Vladivostok this week, the ‘Russian Far East’ was on full, glorious display. Russia, China, India, and the Global South were all there to contribute to this trade, investment, infrastructure, transportation, and institutional renaissance.
VLADIVOSTOK – Russian President Vladimir Putin opened and closed his quite detailed address to the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok with a resounding message: “The Far East is Russia’s strategic priority for the entire 21st century.”
And that’s exactly the feeling one would have prior to the address, interacting with business executives mingling across the stunning forum grounds at the Far Eastern Federal University (opened only 11 years ago), with the backdrop of the more than four kilometer-long suspension bridge to Russky Island across the Eastern Bosphorus strait.
The development possibilities of what is in effect Russian Asia, and one of the key nodes of Asia-Pacific, are literally mind-boggling. Data from the Ministry for the Development of the Russian Far East and the Arctic – confirmed by several of the most eye-catching panels during the Forum – list a whopping 2,800 investment projects underway, 646 of which are already up and running, complete with the creation of several international Advanced Special Economic Zones (ASEZ) and the expansion of the Free Port of Vladivostok, home to several hundred small and midsize enterprises (SMEs).
All that goes way beyond Russia’s “pivot to the East” which was announced by Putin in 2012, two years before the Maidan events in Kiev. For the rest of the planet, not to mention the collective West, it is impossible to understand the Russian Far East magic without being on the spot – starting with Vladivostok, the charming, unofficial capital of the Far East, with its gorgeous hills, striking architecture, verdant islands, sandy bays and of course the terminal of the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway.
What Global South visitors did experience – the collective west was virtually absent from the Forum – was a work in progress in sustainable development: a sovereign state setting the tone in terms of integrating large swathes of its territory to the new, emerging, polycentric geoeconomic era. Delegations from ASEAN (Laos, Myanmar, Philippines) and the Arab world, not to mention India and China, totally understood the picture.
Welcome to the “de-westernization movement”
In his speech, Putin stressed how the rate of investment in the Far East is three times the Russian region average; how the Far East is only 35 percent explored, with unlimited potential for natural resource industries; how the Power of Siberia and Sakhalin-Khabarovsk-Vladivostok gas pipelines will be connected; and how by 2030, liquified natural gas (LNG) production in the Russian Arctic will triple.
In a broader context, Putin made clear that “the global economy has changed and continues to change; the West, with its own hands, is destroying the system of trade and finance that it itself created.” It is no wonder then that Russia’s trade turnover with Asia-Pacific grew by 13.7 percent in 2022, and by another 18.3 percent in just the first half of 2023.
Cue to Presidential Business Rights Commissioner Boris Titov showing how this reorientation away from the “static” West is inevitable. Although Western economies are well-developed, they are already “too heavily invested and sluggish,” says Titov:
“In the East, on the other hand, everything is booming, moving forward rapidly, developing rapidly. And this applies not only to China, India, and Indonesia, but also to many other countries. They are the center of development today, not Europe, our main consumers of energy are there, finally.”
It is quite impossible to do justice to the enormous scope and absorbing discussions featured in the major panels in Vladivostok. Here is just a taste of the key themes.
A Valdai session focused on the accumulated positive effects of Russia’s “pivot to the East,” with the Far East positioned as the natural hub for swinging the entire Russian economy to Asian geoeconomics.
Yet there are problems, of course, as stressed by Wang Wen from the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University. Vladivostok’s population is only 600,000. the Chinese would say that for such a city, infrastructure is poor, “so it needs more infrastructure as fast as it can. Vladivostok could become the next Hong Kong. The way is to set up SEZs like in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Pudong.” Not hard, as “the non-western world very much welcomes Russia.”
Wang Wen could not but highlight the breakthrough represented by the Huawei Mate 60 Pro: “Sanctions are not such a bad thing. They only strengthen the “de-westernization movement,” as it is informally referred to in China.
China by mid-2022 slipped into what was defined by Wang as “silent mode” in terms of investment for fear of US secondary sanctions. But now that’s changing, and frontier regions once again are regarded as key to trade ties. In the Free Port of Vladivostok, China is the number one investor with its $11 billion commitment.
Fesco is the largest maritime transportation company in Russia – and reaches China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. They are actively engaged in the connection of Southeast Asia to the Northern Sea Route, in cooperation with Russian Railways. The key is to set up a network of logistic hubs. Fesco executives describe it as a “titanic shift in logistics.”
Russian Railways in itself is a fascinating case. It operates, among others, the Trans-Baikal, which happens to be the world’s busiest rail line, connecting Russia from the Urals to the Far East. Chita, smack on the Trans-Siberian – a top manufacturing center 900 km east of Irkutsk – is considered the capital of Russian Railways.
And then there’s the Arctic. The Arctic is home to 80 percent of Russia’s gas, 20 percent of its oil, 30 percent of its territory, and 15 percent of GDP, but consists of only 2.5 million people. The development of the Northern Sea Route requires top-notch high-tech, such as a constantly evolving feet of icebreakers.
Liquid and stable as vodka
All that transpired in Vladivostok connects directly to the much-ballyhooed visit by North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. The timing was a beauty; after all the Primorsky Krai region in the Far East is an immediate neighbor to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
Putin emphasized that Russia and the DPRK are developing several joint projects in transportation, communications, logistics, and naval sectors. So much more than military and space matters amicably discussed by Putin and Kim, the heart of the matter is geoeconomics: a trilateral Russia-China-DPRK cooperation, with the distinct outcome of increased container traffic transiting through the DPRK and the tantalizing possibility of DPRK rail reaching Vladivostok and then connecting deeper into Eurasia via the Trans-Siberian line.
And if that was not ground-breaking enough, much was discussed in several round tables about the International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC). The Russia-Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran corridor will be finalized in 2027 – and that will be a key branch of the INTSC.
In parallel, New Delhi and Moscow are itching to start the Eastern Maritime Corridor (EMC) as soon as possible – that’s the official denomination of the Vladivostok-Chennai route. Sarbananda Sonowal, the Indian minister of ports, shipping and waterways, promoted an Indo-Russian workshop on the EMC in Chennai from October 30 to discuss “the smooth and swift operationalization” of the corridor.
I had the honor of being part of one of the crucial panels, Greater Eurasia: Drivers for the Formation of an Alternative International Monetary and Financial System.
A key conclusion is that the stage is set for a common Eurasia payment system – part of the Eurasian Economic Union’s (EAEU) draft declaration for 2030-2045 – against the backdrop of Hybrid War and “toxic currencies” (83 per cent of EAEU transactions already bypass them).
Yet the debate remains fierce when it comes to a basket of national currencies, a basket of goods, payment and settlement structures, the use of blockchain, a new pricing system, or setting up a single stock exchange. Is it all possible, technically? Yes, but that would take 30 or 40 years to take shape, as the panel stressed.
As it stands, a single example of the challenges ahead is enough. The idea of coming up with a basket of currencies for an alternative payment system did not gather steam at the BRICS summit because of India’s position.
Aleksandr Babakov, deputy chairman of the Duma, evoked the discussions between the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and Iran on trade financing in national currencies, including a road map to look for the best ways in legislation to help attract investment. That’s also being discussed with private companies. The model is the success of the China-Russia trade turnover.
Andrey Klepach, chief economist at VEB, quipped that the best currency is “liquid and stable. Like vodka.” So we’re not there yet. Two-thirds of trade are still carried in dollars and euros; the Chinese yuan accounts for only three percent. India refuses to use the yuan. And there’s a huge Russia-India imbalance: as much as 40 billion rupees are sitting in Russian exporters’ accounts with nowhere to go. A priority is to improve trust in the ruble: it should be accepted by both India and China. And a digital ruble is becoming a necessity.
Wang Wen concurred, saying there’s not enough ambition. India should export more to Russia and Russia should invest more in India.
In parallel, as pointed out by Sohail Khan, the deputy secretary-general of the SCO, India now controls no less than 40 percent of the global digital payment market. It had a share of zero only seven years ago. That accounts for the success of its unified payment system (UPI).
A BRICS-EAEU panel expressed the hope that a joint summit of these two key multilateral organizations will happen next year. Once again, it’s all about trans-Eurasian transportation corridors – as two-thirds of world turnover will soon follow the eastern track connecting Russia to Asia.
On BRICS-EAEU-SCO, top Russian companies are already integrated into the BRICS business, from Russian Railways and Rostec to big banks. A big problem remains how to explain the EAEU to India – even as the EAEU structure is deemed to be a success. And watch this space: a free trade agreement with Iran will be clinched soon.
At the last panel in Vladivostok, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova – the contemporary counterpart of Hermes, the messenger of the Gods – pointed out how the G20 and BRICS summits set the stage for Putin’s speech at the Eastern Economic Forum.
That required “fantastic strategic patience.” Russia, after all, “never supported isolation” and “always advocated partnership.” The frantic activity in Vladivostok has just demonstrated how the “pivot to Asia” is all about enhanced connectivity and partnership in a new polycentric era.
If the Chinese decide to pull the trigger on an invasion of Taiwan, it will instantly become the biggest news story in the entire world. Because the moment that an invasion of Taiwan begins, the United States and China will be at war and nothing will ever be the same again. Of course, the Chinese would not consider an attack on Taiwan to be an invasion of a foreign country. The Chinese consider Taiwan to be part of their territory just like we consider Florida or Texas to be part of our territory. For a long time, the communist Chinese government had hoped to “reunify” with Taiwan peacefully, but now it has become clear that is never going to happen. The Taiwanese government continues to boldly declare that Taiwan is not part of China, and the Biden administration recently approved a 500 million dollar arms sale that is intended to help them prepare for a potential invasion. Needless to say, this arms sale greatly infuriated China, and it appears that the Chinese are gearing up for a big move.
In fact, Fox News is reporting that the Chinese are “continuously massing forces at its coastal military bases facing Taiwan”…
China is continuously massing forces at its coastal military bases facing Taiwan, the self-governing island warned Tuesday.
Taiwan said it is bolstering its own defenses in response. The island’s Defense Ministry issued a report on the expansion of Chinese airfields and military activity on Taiwan’s doorstep, saying China has begun probing Taiwan’s territory on a near-daily basis.
“This year, the Chinese Communist Party has aggressively expanded its armaments and continued to build various types of fighter jets and drones,” Maj. Gen. Huang Wen-Chi said of the report. “The information we have received is that all important military bases along the coast … are being continuously updated.”
This doesn’t mean that the Chinese will invade right away.
But they are obviously preparing for something huge.
And the Chinese have also been regularly probing Taiwan’s defenses.
Dozens of Chinese warplanes and 10 navy ships were detected around Taiwan, the Ministry of National Defense said yesterday, after warning that Beijing was conducting air and sea drills in the western Pacific.
Ten Chinese naval vessels and 68 aircraft were detected near the nation between 6am on Wednesday and 6am yesterday, the ministry said in a statement.
Forty of the aircraft had crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait and entered the southwest or southeast air defense identification zone (ADIZ), it said.
If my assessment of the situation is correct, I don’t believe that the Chinese will invade Taiwan right now.
But I do believe that an invasion is coming.
And U.S. military officials have been warning us over and over again about the possibility of such a conflict.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on Monday warned that China was building up its military to prepare for a potential war with the U.S., and he said America must optimize its forces to counter the rising threat.
Speaking at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfighter Symposium at National Harbor, Md., Kendall said the U.S. must be ready for a “kind of war we have no modern experience with,” though he stressed “war is not inevitable.”
“Our job is to deter that war and to be ready to win if it occurs,” Kendall said. “We’re all talking about the fact that the Air and Space Forces must change, or we could fail to prevent and might even lose a war.”
A decade ago, a war with China was unthinkable.
But now a war with China is a very serious threat, and U.S. Air Force officials want a lot more funding so that they can build air bases all over the Pacific…
The U.S. Air Force is finding ways to increase the number of airfields it can take off from in the Pacific—and wants more money to build out airfields and rebuild overgrown WWII airfields.
Adding bases is key to the service’s Agile Combat Employment concept, or ACE, which aims to keep combat aircraft flying despite enemy attacks, Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, Pacific Air Forces Commander, told reporters Monday at the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber conference.
The Air Force is currently clearing out a jungle on Tinian, a small island near Guam that was home to the largest B-29 bomber base during World War II and more recently has hosted ACE exercises.
Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine just continues to escalate.
Ukraine unleashed a barrage of ten cruise missiles along with kamikaze drones in a massive assault on Russia’s powerful Black Sea Fleet.
Vladimir Putin’s forces were rocked as a submarine and an assault ship were blasted during the onslaught on the Crimean port of Sevastopol.
British-made Storm Shadow missiles and explosive-packed drone boats are believed to have been used in the biggest attack of its kind on the fleet – marking the first time such weapons have been used in Crimea.
Shocking footage showed huge plumes of smoke and flames seen for miles around rising from the blitzed base. It is the latest blow to embattled Putin’s war effort – and was a major embarrassment for Vlad as he sat down with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un some 5,500 miles away.
When the Ukrainians use western-made weapons to strike targets deep inside Russian territory, the Russians consider us to be responsible for those attacks too.
We may not have fired those weapons, but we certainly gave them to the Ukrainians with the intention that they would be used in such a manner.
Giving the Ukrainians weapons that could potentially cause the hot phase of World War III to erupt is a very dangerous thing to do, because the Ukrainians are not exactly rational.
We should be trying to find a way to end the conflict in Ukraine, because if we do get into a direct shooting war with Russia that will be a nightmare scenario.
Unfortunately, leaders all over the world have come down with a really bad case of war fever.
The Russians are constantly provoking us, and we are constantly provoking the Russians.
In fact, it is being reported that the “biggest military exercises in Europe since the end of the Cold War” will be conducted very close to the Russian border in early 2024…
The upcoming Steadfast Defender NATO war drills, set for early 2024, are expected to be the biggest military exercises in Europe since the end of the Cold War, the Financial Times is reporting Monday.
At a moment the war in Ukraine grows more and more unpredictable, given neither Russia nor the West have shown any signs of backing down, the FT writes that “Nato is preparing its biggest live joint command exercise since the cold war next year, assembling more than 40,000 troops to practice how the alliance would attempt to repel Russian aggression against one of its members.”
Holding those exercises so close to Russia is not a good idea at all.
But it is going to happen anyway.
Earlier today, I came across a very odd story about some very foolish tourists that decided to sprint toward a mother bear and her two cubs…
A shocking video of tourists sprinting towards a bear at Yellowstone National Park has gone viral and prompted backlash on social media.
The clip shows a mother black bear and her two cubs sniffing around in the grass, alongside a road full of queuing cars.
Suddenly, a group of tourists jump out of their vehicles, point, and then begin to sprint towards the bears.
There are four men running, one of whom appears to be carrying a toddler in his arms, while a woman comes into shot approaching the animals with a camera.
What an incredibly stupid thing to do.
If a mother bear feels like her cubs are being threatened, she will do anything she feels is necessary to defend them.
Those tourists are very fortunate that they were not killed.
Unfortunately, we are doing a similar thing with the Russian Bear.
Instead of interacting with Russia shrewdly, we are sprinting toward conflict.
Joe Biden and his minions may truly believe that being “tough” with Russia is the right thing to do, but if they miscalculate and a nuclear war erupts it could result in the deaths of literally billions of people.
We are in the middle of a world-changing war. This is no ordinary war, however. Most of the victims of this warfare aren’t even able to identify it as war, nor do they understand that they are combatants in it. It’s called fifth-generation warfare, and I’m here to tell you all about it.
We are in the middle of a world-changing war right now.
Oh, I don’t mean the war in Ukraine, the one that all the media are asking you to focus your attention on. Yes, that conflict continues to escalate, and every day there are new stories about provocations and threats that could lead to a nuclear exchange . . . but that’s not the war I’m referring to.
No, the war I’m talking about is an even broader war. A war that is taking place everywhere on the globe, even as I speak, and that involves virtually everyone on the planet, young and old, male and female, military and civilian. It is the war of every government against its own population and every international institution against free humanity.
This is no ordinary war, however. Most of the victims of this warfare aren’t even able to identify it as war, nor do they understand that they are combatants in it.
It’s called fifth-generation warfare, and I’m here to tell you all about it.
I am James Corbett of The Corbett Report and this is Your Guide to Fifth-Generation Warfare
What Is Fifth-Generation Warfare?
What is fifth-generation warfare, anyway? And, come to think of it, what were the first four generations of warfare?
WILLIAM S. LIND: This city and every capital in the world is completely oblivious to the fact that it is caught up in a change in warfare so great that it not only makes our current defense and foreign policies obsolete, it essentially makes obsolete the whole framework within which we think about defense and foreign policy.
[. . .]
The change is what I call the rise of fourth generation war and this is specifically the fourth generation of modern war. [. . .] We now think of foreign affairs and defense within the framework of the nation-state. Armed forces are designed to fight other state armed forces. But that reality is changing.
[. . .]
What’s happening around the world today in more and more places is that state armed forces find them find themselves fighting not other state armed forces, but fourth-generation forces. Non-state forces.
In a nutshell, Lind et al.’s thesis is that the “modern age” of warfare began with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which, Lind opines, “gave the state a monopoly on war.” From that point on, modern warfare went through three generations, namely:
First-generation warfare: the tactics of line and column, developed in the era of the smoothbore musket;
Second-generation warfare: the tactics of indirect fire and mass movement, developed in the era of the rifled musket, breechloaders, barbed wire and the machine gun; and
Third-generation warfare: the tactics of nonlinear movement, including maneuver and infiltration, developed in response to the increase in battlefield firepower in WWI.
This, according to Lind and his co-authors, brought us to the late-20th century, when the nation-state began to lose its monopoly on war and military combat returned to a decentralized form. In this era—the era of fourth-generation warfare—the line between “civilian” and “military” become blurred, armies tend to engage in counter-insurgency operations rather than military battles, and enemies are often motivated by ideology and religion, making psychological operations more important than ever.
But, some argue, we have now entered a new era of warfare, namely fifth-generation warfare.
There is still much debate about what defines fifth-generation warfare, how we know we’re engaged in it, or even if it exists at all (Lind, for one, rejects the concept). Various scholars have made their own attempts at defining fifth-generation warfare (5GW), like Dr. Waseem Ahmad Qureshi, who identifies it as “the battle of perceptions and information,” or Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui of the People’s Liberation Army, who write of the era of “Unrestricted Warfare” in which “a relative reduction in military violence” has led to “an increase in political, economic, and technological violence.”
But for the purposes of this editorial, I’m not interested in that debate. In fact, we’re going to use a decidedly non-academic definition of fifth-generation warfare from an Al Jazeera article as our starting point: “The basic idea behind this term [5GW] is that in the modern era, wars are not fought by armies or guerrillas, but in the minds of common citizens.”
There are two important things to note about this definition. The first is that fifth-generation warfare is not waged against either standing armies of nation-states or guerrilla insurgents but against everyday citizens. The second is that this war is not being fought in a battlefield somewhere, but in the mind.
I will expand the definition somewhat to include the fact that this war is being waged at all levels, not just the mental. The gist of it is this: Fifth-generation warfare is an all-out war that is being waged against all of us by our governments and the international organizations to which they belong. It is being waged against each and every one of us right now, and it is a battle for full-spectrum dominance over every single aspect of your life: your movements and interactions, your transactions, even your innermost thoughts and feelings and desires. Governments the world over are working with corporations to leverage technology to control you down to the genomic level, and they will not stop until each and every person who resists them is subdued or eliminated.
The most incredible part of all of this is that so few know that the war is even taking place, let alone that they are a combatant in it.
The best way to understand this war is to look at some of the ways that it is being waged against us.
Information Warfare
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but this is an infowar and the powers-that-shouldn’t-be are engaged in “a war for your mind.”
Of course, you have heard of “Infowars” if you’ve been in the alternative media space for any length of time. And for good reason: information warfare is an absolutely essential part of the war on everyone that defines fifth-generation warfare.
The most obvious way to understand this is to look at the actual military forces that are engaging in psychological operations against their own citizens.
“A letter from the Nova Scotia government sent out to residents to warn about a pack of wolves on the loose in the province was forged by Canadian military personnel as part of a propaganda training mission that went off the rails.
“The letter told residents to be wary of wolves that had been reintroduced into the area by the provincial and federal governments and warned the animals were now roaming the Annapolis Valley. The letter, which later became public, sparked concern and questions among residents but was later branded as ‘fake’ by the Nova Scotia government which didn’t know the military was behind the deception.
“The training also involved using a loudspeaker to generate wolf sounds, the Canadian Forces confirmed to this newspaper.”
Guys, let that sink in for a second. They created a fake letter from the government, put it out there saying that there’s dangerous wolves, and they set up loud speakers in the area projecting out wolf noises!
This isn’t just research, you know. This isn’t just a training exercise. They’re actively engaging in this psychological operation to scare people using loudspeakers.
But it’s not just out-and-out military operations by soldiers dressed up in camo fatigues that are part of this fifth-generation infowar. In the war on everyone, the establishment uses every means at its disposal to manipulate the public’s perception.
RICHARD STENGEL: Basically, every country creates their own narrative story. And, you know, my old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist job.
We haven’t talked about propaganda. I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it and they have to do it to their own population and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.
. . . who were retained by the WHO in 2020 to identify celebrity “influencers” who could be used to amplify the scamdemic messaging.
ANNOUNCER: The One World Together At Home event showcased a Who’s Who of top music stars and celebrities, who came together over the weekend for a special broadcast of music, comedy and personal messages, all in gratitude to those around the world on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.
MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: So what can we do? We’ve got to take care of our health workers and we’ve got to buy them time by taking care of ourselves.
ANNOUNCER: The event was led by the World Health Organization and the non-profit group, Global Citizen.
Perhaps the most insidious part of the fifth-generation infowar is that it has become so normalized that everyone knows it is happening, but no one thinks of it as warfare. Of course everything is “advertising” and “propaganda.” And of course it’s being used to manipulate our behaviour. That’s just how the world works, isn’t it?
But we ignore the real nature of the infowar at our own peril. After all, I have often observed that this is a war for your mind and that the most contested battlespace in the world is the space between your ears. You might have thought I meant that metaphorically, but actually, I mean it quite literally. Which brings us to . . .
Neurological Warfare
If you listen to Dr. James Giordano speak without listening to what he’s saying, you get the impression he is merely an articulate, well-informed scientist who is passionate about his research. When you dolisten to what he’s saying, however—or even just look at his PowerPoint slides, like the “NeuroS/T for NSID” slide—you realize that he is Dr. Strangelove. Or, if not Dr. Strangelove himself, then at least Dr. Strangelove’s spokesman.
But it’s not nuclear Armageddon that motivates Giordano, it’s what he calls “weapons of mass disruption”—the various technologies for neurological intervention that the US military and militaries around the world are developing.
These include (in Giordano’s well-rehearsed patter) the “drugs, bugs, toxins and devices” that can either enhance or disrupt the cognitive functions of their target, like the “high CNS aggregation” nanoparticulates that, according to Giordano, “clump in the brain or in the vasculature” and “create essentially what looks like a hemorrhagic diathesis.” As sci-fi as this sounds, he insists these nanoparticulates (and many, many other horrific neurological weapons) are already being worked on:
JAMES GIORDANO: The idea here is that I can get with something called high CNS aggregation material that is essentially invisible to the naked eye and even to most scanners because it is so small that it selectively goes through most levels of filter porosity. These are then inhaled—either through the nasal mucosa or absorbed through the oral mucosa. They have high CNS affinity. They clump in the brain or in the vasculature and they create essentially what looks like a hemorrhagic diathesis; in other words, a hemorrhage predisposition or a clot predisposition in the brain. What I’ve done is I’ve created a stroking agent, and it’s very, very difficult to gain attribution to do that.
I can use that on a variety of levels, from the individual to the group. Highly disruptive. And, in fact, this is one of the things that has been entertained and examined to some extent by my colleagues in NATO and to those who are working on the worst use of neurobiological sciences to create populational disruption. Very, very worried about the potential for these nanoparticulate agents to be CNS aggregating agents to cause neural disruption.
And just in case you didn’t get the point, you’ll notice he illustrates his slide with an image of a human brain in the crosshairs of one of these neurological weapons. There’s nothing hard to understand about the picture that is being painted here: we are at war with an enemy who is literally targeting our brains.
But yet again, it isn’t just the literal use of neurological weapons by conventional militaries in conventional warfare settings that we—the largely unwitting combatants of the fifth-generation war on everyone—have to worry about. As my listeners already know, avowed technocrat Elon Musk is trying to sell his Neuralink brain chip technology to the hipster crowd as a cool and sexy way to upgrade your cognition . . . or so that the coming AI godhead will have mercy on us. Or something like that. Anyway, you should totally stick the Neuralink in your head at your earliest opportunity! And definitely don’t ask any questions about why so many of the macaque monkeys and other test animals that Neuralink was using as test animals in their “brain-machine interface” experiment have dropped dead.
To anyone not yet a victim of the information warfare operation designed to prepare humanity for the coming transhuman dystopia, all of this sounds insane. But for those who have fallen for the infowars psyop of the enemy, these types of mind-altering technologies are exactly as advertised: exciting opportunities to “upgrade” the feeble biological wetware we call our brain.
But if you think you can avoid the biological aspect of the fifth-generation war by simply avoiding the brain chip, you’re out of luck. You’re also going to have to deal with . . .
Biological Warfare
The biowarfare narrative is, understandably, back at the forefront of the public consciousness in recent years, not just because of the scamdemic but also because of the questions being raised about the US-backed Ukrainian biolabs and whatever work they may or may not be doing on Russia’s doorstep.
This picture, for example, comes straight from Army.mil, which was only too happy to brag as recently as last July [2021] that US soldiers were conducting “hands-on training and field training exercises with Ukrainian troops in laboratory and field environments” that included ensuring the readiness of “deployable mobile laboratories.” Nothing to see here, folks. (Perhaps the only surprising thing about the article is that they haven’t scrubbed it from their website . . . yet.)
Yet, once again, if we are only thinking of biowarfare in conventional military terms, we neglect the much, much wider operation to manipulate, control and weaponize all aspects of our environment, our food supply and even our genome itself for the purposes of the ruling oligarchs. This fifth-generation biological warfare being waged against us includes:
The mRNA and DNA and genetically-modified adenovirus vector “vaccines” that have been “normalized” over the past two years and which, as the miraculously “lucky” companies that bet it all on this technology like to brag, is re-programming the “software of life.”
The push toward synthetic, lab-based “food” that is being funded by the usual eugenicist billionaires and which threatens to sever humanity from the natural abundance of the earth, make us dependent on an increasingly shrinking number of companies for our food supply, and, ultimately, to drive us toward a Soylent Green-style future.
I’m sure you can fill in the blanks with myriad other examples of the attacks upon the world’s air, water and biome that constitute this unconstrained fifth-generation biological war being waged against us.
When and if you do put the pieces of this puzzle together and seek to warn people en masse that they are under attack, your ability to resist this agenda will be predicated on your ability to use your accumulated resources (your wealth) to foster communities of resistance. Don’t worry, though; the enemy has that domain covered, too. . . .
Economic Warfare
Given the events of recent weeks, even the sleepiest of the sleepy now realize that we are in a period of economic warfare.
This war, too, has its conventional aspects. On the 2D board, we’ve seen the NATO empire launch its Weapons of Financial Destruction at Russia in recent weeks, and, exactly as predicted, it has resulted in the consolidation of a convenient geopolitical bogeyman bloc and a gigantic loss of faith in the international monetary system itself. And, also as predicted, it has supplied the “Problem” and “Reaction” needed for the technocrats to present their pre-determined “Solution” of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Just ask Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock:
The war will prompt countries to re-evaluate their currency dependencies. Even before the war, several governments were looking to play a more active role in digital currencies and define the regulatory frameworks under which they operate.
This is not merely a battle between nation-states or even competing power blocs. This is a battle being waged by every authoritarian power structure and every government (but I repeat myself) against their own citizens for control of the most important resource of all: their wallets.
Yes, we are seeing the beginning of a truly world-historic moment: the collapse of Pax Americana, the death of the dollar reserve system, and the beginning of an entirely new monetary paradigm, the “Central Bank Digital Currency” system of programmable money that will be able to algorithmically control when, how and if you are allowed to transact in the economy at all. We only have to look to recent events in Canada to understand what this will look like.
This perfect control of humanity down to the level of being able to witness and, ultimately, to allow or disallow any transaction between any individuals at any time, represents the apotheosis of technocracy and one of the key objectives of the fifth-generation war itself. As this nightmare comes closer and closer to reality, all seems hopeless.
But then again, that’s exactly the point. . . .
The Real War
I could go on. And on and on and on. But hopefully you get the point by now: There is a world war happening right now. It is a fifth-generation war (or whatever you want to call it). It is being waged across every domain simultaneously. It is a war for full-spectrum dominance of every battlefield and every terrain, from the farthest reaches of the globe (and beyond) to the inner spaces of your body and even to your innermost thoughts. And it is a war on you.
Recognizing this, the task we face seems nearly insurmountable. How are we to fight back in a war that the majority of people don’t even recognize is taking place? How do we fight back against an enemy that has spent decades refining its weapons of economic and military and technological and biological control? How do we fight back in a war that is not taking place on two fronts or even three fronts, but in every domain and battlespace simultaneously?
Framed like this, our prospects do indeed appear hopeless. But therein lies the key: our perception that it is our duty to “fight back” against the enemy in their war on their battlefield on their terms of engagement is itself a narrative frame. And that narrative itself is a weapon that is being wielded against us in the battle for our minds.
You’ll allow me space here to quote myself at length because this is a point I have made many times before, perhaps most notably in my conversation on “The Anatomy of the New World Order” that I had with Julian Charles on The Mind Renewed podcast ten years ago:
I’m intrigued by the idea that we’ve been given false templates to follow in terms of solving our problems—one being to “fight our enemies”—templates provided for us through so much social conditioning and the media. Here, the idea is that we must find the heart or the head of the organization and somehow kill that person or that group, or whatever it is; eliminate that, and everything will magically turn to the better!
Thinking in broad terms, that false template appears in virtually every science fiction dystopia you’ve ever seen: if it turns out well in the end, it’s only because they have managed to decapitate the Head of the Beast, whether it be The Lord of the Rings or Tron, or any such movie. I think that’s fundamentally and completely the wrong way to look at it, because at the end of the day the particular individuals who may or may not be holding the ‘Ring of Power’ are replaceable. Indeed, there are very many people who would be chomping at the bit to get into that position of power should that old guard be swept away for whatever reason.
I think what’s needed is a more fundamental revolution: not of overthrowing a specific instantiation of this idea, but of overthrowing the idea altogether. And that can only come, I think, from building up an alternative system to which people actually want to apply themselves. I think we have to detach ourselves from this system that we’ve been woven into. Unfortunately that’s probably as difficult to do as that analogy would make it sound, because we are so woven into the fabric of society that it’s difficult to imagine extricating ourselves from all these processes.
We rely for so many of our daily needs on this vast, unwieldy corporate system that ties into these very organizations that pull the strings of governmental institutions, that it can seem quite overwhelming. How can a single individual affect this? But I think we have to look for any and every possible point at which we can start to detach ourselves from those systems of control, and to start to reassert some kind of independence. That can be an extremely small thing like, just for example: instead of buying groceries at the grocery store, perhaps buy them at a farmers’ market, or at least some of your groceries. Or perhaps you could grow them yourself in a vegetable garden. Something of that sort is a tiny thing on the individual level, but I think it’s the only thing in the long run that can lead to the type of society we want to bring to fruition. Again, I think it’s small things like that, if we start to apply ourselves with diligence and perseverance, that will eventually be able to overthrow this. But, unfortunately, as I say, we are on the cusp of this scientific revolution which makes scientific dictatorship possible, so unfortunately we don’t necessarily have generations of time. That gives a time perspective to all this—I won’t say it’s a time bomb—but you get the idea. We don’t have a lot of time to waste.
We have a choice. Either we continue going into this technological, corporate matrix—which involves even things like buying the next generation of iPhone, which they’re already saying is going to have its own fingerprint scanning technology, and all of these corporate, military, Big Brother elements to it that we’re willingly signing up to every day of our lives, and actually paying money for—or we start to create alternative structures which don’t rely on that system. It’s a choice that we have to make in our lives, I would say more quickly than has been apparent at any other time in human history.
My regular viewers will understand what I am proposing here: the creation of a parallel society. We will not achieve this by asking for more scraps from the master’s table, or by gently complying as we are herded into ever more constrictive technological pens, or by thinking that we can win this war by engaging the enemy in their controlled domain. We can only achieve this by creating our own table, our own economy and our own communities of interest. This will require the long and difficult task of increasing our independence from the authoritarian systems in every domain: the information domain, the food domain, the health domain, the monetary domain, the mental domain and every other contested battlespace in this all-out, fifth-generation war.
Easier said than done, of course. But there is no alternative.
Some will say “But won’t they come after that parallel society?” as if that is a rebuttal to what I have laid out here. The point is that you are already the target of the enemy in a war that most people but dimly understand is happening. Yes, the enemy will come after you. But they are already dominating you in more ways than any one person can fully understand. That does not stop just because you comply with their demands or take part in their system.
We must stop playing their game. We must stop fighting their war. We must stop ceding our power, our authority, our time, our attention, our energy and our resources to engaging the enemy in their terms in their battlefield.
We must create our own parallel society on our own terms.
And so we rediscover an old piece of wisdom. To paraphrase: “Fifth-generation warfare is a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
The mainstream media is now downplaying the new variants saying that there is not need to worry about the recent COVID-19 outbreaks. But even so, they still need you to get injected upon command.
The Pirola Covid variant has an alarming number of mutations, but it doesn’t seem to be taking hold or causing severe illness. But the Food and Drug Administration “approved” new shots anyway for a variant that’s not dominant in circulation anymore and they expect everyone to rush to get it.
A new offshoot of Omicron, BA.2.86—nicknamed Pirola—has popped up in Israel, the US, South Africa, and the UK after it was first recorded in Denmark in late July. Pirola initially set off alarm bells because it was spotted in four countries at the same time—and because, having majorly curtailed our viral surveillance systems, we don’t know how long it’s been making the rounds. Plus, the sheer number of mutations it has was reason enough to be spooked—BA.2.86 boasts more than 30 new mutations, compared to the most recently dominant variant, XBB.1.5. -Wired
Earlystudies suggest that Pirola isn’t much better at evading immunity than previous variants, despite all of its mutations. The protection offered by vaccines should hold up, and if you’ve been naturally exposed to the XBB variant, you should be better equipped to fight off this new variant, according to the mainstream media.
Anna Bershteyn, an assistant professor and co-lead of the Covid modelling team at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, agrees, with the media’s assessment. “As far as we know, it doesn’t seem likely that this is going to be one of these huge waves of hospitalizations and deaths, the kind that have overwhelmed the health system in prior epidemic waves,” she said.
Pirola is shaping up to be the scariant used by the media and ruling class to convince people to get more injections.
The Australian multimillionaire said, “We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40-50%, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.” This extreme statement reflects the fact that class warfare is very real – and it’s not workers starting it.
Tim Gurner, founder of the real estate company Gurner Group, with an estimated net worth of $584 million, has gone viral after a comment he made at the Financial Review Property Summit.
The Australian multimillionaire said, “We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40-50%, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.” This extreme statement reflects the fact that class warfare is very real – and it’s not workers starting it.
He also said that workers have been “paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years,” which is certainly not true. In the Western world, wages have been decoupled from productivity for decades, with the latter soaring while the former has stagnated. Any modest gains made during the Covid-19 pandemic have mostly evaporated.
As the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said in a July report, “Employment has fully recovered since the COVID-19 crisis and unemployment is at its lowest level since the early 1970s. While nominal hourly wages have risen, to date they have not kept up with inflation, leading to a drop in real wages in almost all OECD countries.”
On the topic of the tightened labor market now known as the ‘Great Resignation,’ there are a number of theories, but two are the most salient. First, the obvious: A lot of people have died from Covid-19 (over a million in the US alone), including many workers. An August 2022 piece by Brookings suggested that as many as 4 million Americans were kept out of the workforce due to ‘long Covid’, i.e., long-term disability brought on by the disease.
Second, and no doubt related, people just got fed up with their dead-end jobs. A Pew Research poll of Americans from March 2022 found, “Majorities of workers who quit a job in 2021 say low pay (63%), no opportunities for advancement (63%) and feeling disrespected at work (57%) were reasons why they quit, according to the Feb. 7-13 survey.” Since employers lobbied against paying for personal protective equipment, maintaining air quality standards, and successfully absolved themselves of any Covid-related liability, it’s no wonder people didn’t want to risk their lives or health for meager pay and long hours.
While these two points mostly refer to the US, the point still applies to virtually every other developed country. The incongruence in power between workers and employers has been so biased in favor of the latter for so long that workers getting a little bit of leverage during the pandemic was an extremely minor, hardly detectable move toward rebalancing the scales. Naturally, the ultra-wealthy see this as an attack because it is against their interests – but they’re the ones launching a perennial class war against workers.
In fact, Gurner’s comments on unemployment draw almost directly from one of the core tenets of Marxism, i.e., the idea of the reserve army of labor. Karl Marx argued (seemingly paradoxically) in ‘Capital: Critique of Political Economy’ that, as capitalism develops, the need to squeeze more labor out of a smaller group of workers, thus creating a redundant group of workers (the reserve army), becomes more imperative. This reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers will expand or contract depending on the state of the economy and the needs of capital accumulation.
The common idea goes that the more the economy develops, the more jobs are created; everyone benefits from capital accumulation and it trickles down from employers to workers. Marx argues, however, that capital will find new ways to maximize productivity with fewer workers (increase exploitation) and leverage the reserve army of labor (the unemployed) to suppress wage growth. By arguing for increased unemployment to dampen workers’ leverage, Gurner is essentially arguing for exactly what Marx said the capitalists would do in his magnum opus.
Gurner, and other multimillionaires who might be thinking like him but at least have the sense to not say it out loud, should take a step back, breathe, and adapt their line to the 21st Century rather than something out of Charles Dickens’ era. Concepts like the 40-hour work week, the weekend, labor rights, raises, and a livable minimum wage have been standard for about a century. Gurner should remember that the things workers are demanding today, which are rooted in 20th-century social democracy, are not principally designed to help employees – rather, they are designed to save people like him from the wrath of the disaffected working class.
It’s also important to realize that there are people behind unemployment figures; human beings with lives, families, and an experience as lucid as that of Gurner and his friends. To even suggest increasing unemployment as policy is extraordinarily cruel and patently anti-human. Given the fragility of Western democracy today, people in high places who are even conceiving of such things need to remember that it’s only possible to push people so far.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone