Covid in Perspective: “Accept Enslavement,” Banker said in 1999

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 “Does it not seem reasonable that you simply obey and serve us?”

We revisit the “Letter from Your Globalist Friend,” (1999) a chilling revelation of our true political status. This is the bass of the Covid scam & Great Reset.

” We want you … to become fully integrated into our new society. Your children are not yours. They are ours. You must inoculate them, you must bring them to our hospitals if we decree or we will take them from you.”

“We supply all the money you use. At any whim of our desire we can stop the money supply or cause a complete crash all together. We can then order the president to declare all money worthless and that we will have to have new money. All of your stashes of cash will go up in smoke in a moment’s time. Don’t you need food? If necessary, we can cause a trucker’s strike which would stop deliveries of food to your local store. We can starve you whenever we like.” 

(Slightly updated from May 19, 2006) 

By Henry Makow Ph.D. 

Current events are like a “Magic Eye” picture that you have to stare at for a long time. But if youknow what to look for, the picture emerges as plain as day.  

As incredible and bizarre as this sounds, a satanic (cabalistic) occult society has taken control of the planet through the central banking system. It seeks to impose its tyranny through the ruse of the coronavirus to impose world government.  The scamdemic is an audacious psy-op but no greater than the two world wars which were orchestrated to slaughter and brutalize humanity and to increase the wealth and power of the central banking cartel. 

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A confirmation of this disturbing truth  is a spine-chilling 1999 letter that dispels any illusions that we are free citizens living in a beneficent democracy. Signed,  “your globalist friend,” the letter advises citizens of the world, “you are our property” and must accept servitude “for your own good.” 

“The days of putting a stop to us have long since past,” he writes sounding like the author of the Protocols of Zion, also a banker. 

“We have full control of the earth and its finance, along with the major media propaganda, and there is simply no way any nation or power can defeat us… We can send American or European troops to wherever we like, whenever we like, and for whatever purpose we like, and you dutifully go about our business…How much more evidence do you need? …Does it not seem reasonable that you simply obey and serve us?” 

The six-page letter appears to have been written in the autumn of 1999.  I present the highlights here but urge you to read it in full.

The letter could be a hoax but I think it describes our present reality. It is consistent with what many conspiracy researchers have discovered independently, yet more vivid and insightful than anything they could fabricate. 

THE LETTER

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Our globalist friend says he wants to explain political reality to us so we “might know how to behave in the New Order now taking shape on the earth.” 

He exults in the fact that he represents a secret force that controls the world yet is invisible to all. 

“We run everything, yet, you do not know who to attack. I must say this hidden hand is wonderfully devised and without any known historical precedent on this scale. We rule the world and the world cannot even find out who is ruling them. This is truly a wonderful thing. In our media we present before you exactly what it is we want you to do. Then, as if in a flash, our little servants obey.” 

But he does identify himself. He clearly represents the central bankers: “Your own money has served to forge the chains we bind you with, since we are in control of all money.” 

The central banking cartel is the mainspring of the New World Order. By giving satanist Jewish private interests the power to create money based on our national credit, our predecessors doomed Western Civilization. These private interests naturally bought control of everything and everyone and now want to institutionalize their control globally. 


“Our kingdom is the kingdom of money,” our globalist friend writes. “We have given you a piece of paper or some numbers on a computer screen that we have termed ‘money.’ 

It is backed up by nothing and proven by nothing but what we say it is. We create it from nothing, we print it, we loan it, we give it its value, and we take its value away. All things that have to do with money are in our hands.”


Our globalist friend reveals that the bankers have a symbiotic relationship with us. We produce profits by borrowing from them. 

We want you to be in the system.When you are buying a house, we not only receive the tax revenue to use for our purposes, but we gain large increases from the interest on the loan. You may pay for your house two or three times over from the interest alone. The interest is also taxed which is again placed for use in those sectors of influence we choose. ” 

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One of those sectors of influence is education. He says our taxes pay for  “the indoctrination of your children in the public schools we have set up. We want them to grow up well trained into the system of our thinking. Your children will learn what we want them to learn, when we want them to learn it, and you pay for it.” 

 You are our property. We will not permit you to buy or sell unless you submit to our mark of authority. If you go to court against us, we will wear you out there and in the end you will lose. If you use violence, we will end up having you in one of our labor camps, more specifically called prison industries. You need our money, our entertainments, our fuel, and our utilities to function and if you don’t have them, you feel deprived. By this, you are made to yield to our will.” 

OUR LEADERS

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Our political leaders are chosen from the ranks of criminals and perverts because they can be made to obey using blackmail. Exposing President Clinton’s depravity was “very helpful in adjusting the moral habits of the youth downward.” 

He scoffs at attempts to impeach Clinton: “He is useful to us and he will not be removed by anyone until we are ready to have him removed…the leader we set up will be there until it serves us to have another. At that time we place our proposed leader before you and you vote for what we want. In that way we give you the vain voting exercise in the belief you had something to do with placing your president in office.” 

He cites Sadaam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic as leaders who refused to obey. “There is only glory in following our purposes and doing what we say. If one does not, there will be such a sad and tragic result. I would really have you spared of such an end.” 

As for smaller fry, he says rebellion will merely serve as an excuse for more repressive laws.  They can tie dissenters up in court, which they also control. They can destroy people like David Koresh and discredit them at the same time. 

(Trump-Reagan – Masonic handshake)

He says Liberals and Conservatives “serve with the stamp of our approval but they are not allowed to present the real issues. By creating controversy on all levels, no one knows what to do. So, in all of this confusion, we go ahead and accomplish what we want with no hindrance.” (Emphasis mine) 

“It makes no difference to us but it serves to make you believe there are two sides struggling for their particular position. This helps to make things seem fair and free since everyone has a voice. Actually, there is only one side now with all kinds of masks on, but you are unable to penetrate our purposes. You see, we can do whatever we like and you can do nothing about it.”

“Does it not seem reasonable that you simply obey and serve us? Otherwise, you get eaten up in the resistance you suppose will liberate you. You cannot be liberated. Imagine how you can. We supply your fuel for your cars. We can turn it off whenever we like claiming that there is some sort of fuel shortage. What if your car breaks down? You cannot get parts for it without us. 

“We supply all the money you use. At any whim of our desire we can stop the money supply or cause a complete crash all together. We can then order the president to declare all money worthless and that we will have to have new money. All of your stashes of cash will go up in smoke in a moment’s time. Don’t you need food? If necessary, we can cause a trucker’s strike which would stop deliveries of food to your local store. We can starve you whenever we like.” 


He says the media occupy the masses with sex and violence so people are programmed to fight mindlessly and “do not have the integrity or brain power to deal with the really important matters which are left entirely in our hands.” 

China and Russia do not present a challenge: “We have no fear of Russia or China for we are already in full control of their system of things. China knows that we can freeze any number of its corporations in America and all of its capital at the stroke of a pen.” 


CONCLUSION 

We are taught that society is participating in an age of enlightenment and progress but this is a ruse. In fact, a crude satanist dogma reaches its sharp talons out of the past to impale mankind.

We are witnessing the culmination of a diabolical conspiracy against mankind. Human events only make sense when we realize disciples of Lucifer are establishing a global regime dedicated to Evil. I know this sounds too bizarre to be true. They count on that. 

The “Letter from Your Globalist Friend” is consistent with the other great revelations of the invisible government: the Harold Rosenthal Interviewthe House Reportthe Svali DisclosuresThe Soviet Art of Brainwashing: Quiet Weapons for Silent Wars; The Report from Iron Mountain, The Red Symphony and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

We are living in a fool’s paradise. Unfortunately people won’t wake up until they take away the goodies, and then it will be too late.

——–

Related, my “Central bankers seek Totalitarian Power”

—————   The Illuminati Plan to Enslave Americans (1969)

—————–Insider: Society is a jewish Psy Op (1976) 

More citations:

” We want you to be able to become fully involved and integrated into our new society. After all, this is for your best interest if you will do. Your children are not yours. They are ours. You must inoculate them, you must bring them to our hospitals if we decree or we will take them from you. You know this and we know this. Through our electronic commerce we are able to see where you are, what you are buying, and how much you have to buy things with. Where do you suppose we come up with our monthly financial statistics?

“We have so formed a picture of the labour camps in our prisons these days that no one seems to object to them. We tell people that murderers should pay for their own keep. No one seems to consider that we have the power to put tomato growers there also. We can pass laws that prohibit gardens and then make up some scientific reason why you may only buy food from our sources. If someone sees you growing tomatoes, they will report you to us and then we will have you in our fields working for us. Oh, silly nationalists, there is no escape for you, for since long before you were born, we were planning your capture. Your teachers and ministers have been forming your thoughts for us for generations now. You have no idea how to pull out of our influence short of suicide. Go ahead and commit suicide, it will only help us to deal with the excessive population. You cannot hurt us, find us, or even imagine what we are up to. I am throwing you these few crumbs only so that you may, if you have a little good sense, obey and follow our orders.

“We run Hollywood. The movies such as Terminator and Armageddon, along with a great host of others, were simply created to get you thinking according to our directions. You have been made to delight in violence so that when we send you off to kill some bad man we have put before you, you move without a whimper. We have placed violent arcade games in your malls to prepare your young minds in the art of battle. We have made you to view our armies and police as the good forces and you submit to things that were unthinkable just a few decades ago. Our artful programs, are all designed to help you submit and even help the New World Order. Star Trek, and other such creations, have taught you to simply obey orders from the new international rulers.

“YOUR SILLY REBELLION AGAINST OUR DOMINION: Some of you have thought you could stop us by placing a bomb in one of our abortion clinics or in a government building. Silly souls! How can that hurt us? All that does is give us an example to use so that we might place more controls and heavy burdens on the population. We love it when you rebel and blow something up. You are our reason for making more laws against all those things which might contribute to your freedom from us. If someone did not blow something up on occasion, we would have no justification in placing more hedges about you. Can’t you see how impossible it is for you to resist us? The more you wriggle, the more we squeeze. Our kingdom is the kingdom of money. Excuse me, but I must confess that we are the rulers of the kingdom of non-money.”

https://www.henrymakow.com

Flashback: How And Why The CIA Made Google

This masterful white paper documents the events and people surrounding the founding of Google. It should be read and understood by every American because it represents the greatest social engineering program of all time. Google was not accidental, nor was it simply fulfilling the needs of a new marketplace. ⁃ TN Editor

Part I

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, western governments are moving fast to legitimize expanded powers of mass surveillance and controls on the internet, all in the name of fighting terrorism.

US and European politicians have called to protect NSA-style snooping, and to advance the capacity to intrude on internet privacy by outlawing encryption. One idea is to establish a telecoms partnership that would unilaterally delete content deemed to “fuel hatred and violence” in situations considered “appropriate.” Heated discussions are going on at government and parliamentary level to explore cracking down on lawyer-client confidentiality.

What any of this would have done to prevent the Charlie Hebdo attacks remains a mystery, especially given that we already know the terrorists were on the radar of French intelligence for up to a decade.

There is little new in this story. The 9/11 atrocity was the first of many terrorist attacks, each succeeded by the dramatic extension of draconian state powers at the expense of civil liberties, backed up with the projection of military force in regions identified as hotspots harbouring terrorists. Yet there is little indication that this tried and tested formula has done anything to reduce the danger. If anything, we appear to be locked into a deepening cycle of violence with no clear end in sight.

As our governments push to increase their powers, INSURGE INTELLIGENCE can now reveal the vast extent to which the US intelligence community is implicated in nurturing the web platforms we know today, for the precise purpose of utilizing the technology as a mechanism to fight global ‘information war’ — a war to legitimize the power of the few over the rest of us. The lynchpin of this story is the corporation that in many ways defines the 21st century with its unobtrusive omnipresence: Google.

Google styles itself as a friendly, funky, user-friendly tech firm that rose to prominence through a combination of skill, luck, and genuine innovation. This is true. But it is a mere fragment of the story. In reality, Google is a smokescreen behind which lurks the US military-industrial complex.

The inside story of Google’s rise, revealed here for the first time, opens a can of worms that goes far beyond Google, unexpectedly shining a light on the existence of a parasitical network driving the evolution of the US national security apparatus, and profiting obscenely from its operation.

For the last two decades, US foreign and intelligence strategies have resulted in a global ‘war on terror’ consisting of prolonged military invasions in the Muslim world and comprehensive surveillance of civilian populations. These strategies have been incubated, if not dictated, by a secret network inside and beyond the Pentagon.

Established under the Clinton administration, consolidated under Bush, and firmly entrenched under Obama, this bipartisan network of mostly neoconservative ideologues sealed its dominion inside the US Department of Defense (DoD) by the dawn of 2015, through the operation of an obscure corporate entity outside the Pentagon, but run by the Pentagon.

In 1999, the CIA created its own venture capital investment firm, In-Q-Tel, to fund promising start-ups that might create technologies useful for intelligence agencies. But the inspiration for In-Q-Tel came earlier, when the Pentagon set up its own private sector outfit.

Known as the ‘Highlands Forum,’ this private network has operated as a bridge between the Pentagon and powerful American elites outside the military since the mid-1990s. Despite changes in civilian administrations, the network around the Highlands Forum has become increasingly successful in dominating US defense policy.

Giant defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and Science Applications International Corporation are sometimes referred to as the ‘shadow intelligence community’ due to the revolving doors between them and government, and their capacity to simultaneously influence and profit from defense policy. But while these contractors compete for power and money, they also collaborate where it counts. The Highlands Forum has for 20 years provided an off the record space for some of the most prominent members of the shadow intelligence community to convene with senior US government officials, alongside other leaders in relevant industries.

I first stumbled upon the existence of this network in November 2014, when I reported for VICE’s Motherboard that US defense secretary Chuck Hagel’s newly announced ‘Defense Innovation Initiative’ was really about building Skynet — or something like it, essentially to dominate an emerging era of automated robotic warfare.

That story was based on a little-known Pentagon-funded ‘white paper’ published two months earlier by the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington DC, a leading US military-run institution that, among other things, generates research to develop US defense policy at the highest levels. The white paper clarified the thinking behind the new initiative, and the revolutionary scientific and technological developments it hoped to capitalize on.

The co-author of that NDU white paper is Linton Wells, a 51-year veteran US defense official who served in the Bush administration as the Pentagon’s chief information officer, overseeing the National Security Agency (NSA) and other spy agencies. He still holds active top-secret security clearances, and according to a report by Government Executive magazine in 2006 he chaired the ‘Highlands Forum’, founded by the Pentagon in 1994.

Linton Wells II (right) former Pentagon chief information officer and assistant secretary of defense for networks, at a recent Pentagon Highlands Forum session. Rosemary Wenchel, a senior official in the US Department of Homeland Security, is sitting next to him

New Scientistmagazine (paywall) has compared the Highlands Forum to elite meetings like “Davos, Ditchley and Aspen,” describing it as “far less well known, yet… arguably just as influential a talking shop.” Regular Forum meetings bring together “innovative people to consider interactions between policy and technology. Its biggest successes have been in the development of high-tech network-based warfare.”

Given Wells’ role in such a Forum, perhaps it was not surprising that his defense transformation white paper was able to have such a profound impact on actual Pentagon policy. But if that was the case, why had no one noticed?

Despite being sponsored by the Pentagon, I could find no official page on the DoD website about the Forum. Active and former US military and intelligence sources had never heard of it, and neither did national security journalists. I was baffled.

In the prologue to his 2007 book, A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity, John Clippinger, an MIT scientist of the Media Lab Human Dynamics Group, described how he participated in a “Highlands Forum” gathering, an “invitation-only meeting funded by the Department of Defense and chaired by the assistant for networks and information integration.” This was a senior DoD post overseeing operations and policies for the Pentagon’s most powerful spy agencies including the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), among others. Starting from 2003, the position was transitioned into what is now the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The Highlands Forum, Clippinger wrote, was founded by a retired US Navy captain named Dick O’Neill. Delegates include senior US military officials across numerous agencies and divisions — “captains, rear admirals, generals, colonels, majors and commanders” as well as “members of the DoD leadership.”

What at first appeared to be the Forum’s main website describes Highlands as “an informal cross-disciplinary network sponsored by Federal Government,” focusing on “information, science and technology.” Explanation is sparse, beyond a single ‘Department of Defense’ logo.

But Highlands also has another website describing itself as an “intellectual capital venture firm” with “extensive experience assisting corporations, organizations, and government leaders.” The firm provides a “wide range of services, including: strategic planning, scenario creation and gaming for expanding global markets,” as well as “working with clients to build strategies for execution.” ‘The Highlands Group Inc.,’ the website says, organizes a whole range of Forums on these issue.

For instance, in addition to the Highlands Forum, since 9/11 the Group runs the ‘Island Forum,’ an international event held in association with Singapore’s Ministry of Defense, which O’Neill oversees as “lead consultant.” The Singapore Ministry of Defense website describes the Island Forum as “patterned after the Highlands Forum organized for the US Department of Defense.” Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed that Singapore played a key role in permitting the US and Australia to tap undersea cables to spy on Asian powers like Indonesia and Malaysia.

The Highlands Group website also reveals that Highlands is partnered with one of the most powerful defense contractors in the United States. Highlands is “supported by a network of companies and independent researchers,” including “our Highlands Forum partners for the past ten years at SAIC; and the vast Highlands network of participants in the Highlands Forum.”

SAIC stands for the US defense firm, Science Applications International Corporation, which changed its name to Leidos in 2013, operating SAIC as a subsidiary. SAIC/Leidos is among the top 10 largest defense contractors in the US, and works closely with the US intelligence community, especially the NSA. According to investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, the first to disclose the vast extent of the privatization of US intelligence with his seminal book Spies for Hire, SAIC has a “symbiotic relationship with the NSA: the agency is the company’s largest single customer and SAIC is the NSA’s largest contractor.”

Richard ‘Dick’ Patrick O’Neill, founding president of the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum

The full name of Captain “Dick” O’Neill, the founding president of the Highlands Forum, is Richard Patrick O’Neill, who after his work in the Navy joined the DoD. He served his last post as deputy for strategy and policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence, before setting up Highlands.

But Clippinger also referred to another mysterious individual revered by Forum attendees:

“He sat at the back of the room, expressionless behind thick, black-rimmed glasses. I never heard him utter a word… Andrew (Andy) Marshall is an icon within DoD. Some call him Yoda, indicative of his mythical inscrutable status… He had served many administrations and was widely regarded as above partisan politics. He was a supporter of the Highlands Forum and a regular fixture from its beginning.”

Since 1973, Marshall has headed up one of the Pentagon’s most powerful agencies, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), the US defense secretary’s internal ‘think tank’ which conducts highly classified research on future planning for defense policy across the US military and intelligence community. The ONA has played a key role in major Pentagon strategy initiatives, including Maritime Strategy, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Competitive Strategies Initiative, and the Revolution in Military Affairs.

Andrew ‘Yoda’ Marshall, head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA) and co-chair of the Highlands Forum, at an early Highlands event in 1996 at the Santa Fe Institute. Marshall is retiring as of January 2015

In a rare 2002 profile in Wired, reporter Douglas McGray described Andrew Marshall, now 93 years old, as “the DoD’s most elusive” but “one of its most influential” officials. McGray added that “Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz” — widely considered the hawks of the neoconservative movement in American politics — were among Marshall’s “star protégés.”

Speaking at a low-key Harvard University seminar a few months after 9/11, Highlands Forum founding president Richard O’Neill said that Marshall was much more than a “regular fixture” at the Forum. “Andy Marshall is our co-chair, so indirectly everything that we do goes back into Andy’s system,” he told the audience. “Directly, people who are in the Forum meetings may be going back to give briefings to Andy on a variety of topics and to synthesize things.” He also said that the Forum had a third co-chair: the director of the Defense Advanced Research and Projects Agency (DARPA), which at that time was a Rumsfeld appointee, Anthony J. Tether. Before joining DARPA, Tether was vice president of SAIC’s Advanced Technology Sector.

Anthony J. Tether, director of DARPA and co-chair of the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum from June 2001 to February 2009

The Highlands Forum’s influence on US defense policy has thus operated through three main channels: its sponsorship by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (around the middle of last decade this was transitioned specifically to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, which is in charge of the main surveillance agencies); its direct link to Andrew ‘Yoda’ Marshall’s ONA; and its direct link to DARPA.

A slide from Richard O’Neill’s presentation at Harvard University in 2001

According to Clippinger in A Crowd of One, “what happens at informal gatherings such as the Highlands Forum could, over time and through unforeseen curious paths of influence, have enormous impact, not just within the DoD but throughout the world.” He wrote that the Forum’s ideas have “moved from being heretical to mainstream. Ideas that were anathema in 1999 had been adopted as policy just three years later.”

Although the Forum does not produce “consensus recommendations,” its impact is deeper than a traditional government advisory committee. “The ideas that emerge from meetings are available for use by decision-makers as well as by people from the think tanks,” according to O’Neill:

“We’ll include people from Booz, SAIC, RAND, or others at our meetings… We welcome that kind of cooperation, because, truthfully, they have the gravitas. They are there for the long haul and are able to influence government policies with real scholarly work… We produce ideas and interaction and networks for these people to take and use as they need them.”

My repeated requests to O’Neill for information on his work at the Highlands Forum were ignored. The Department of Defense also did not respond to multiple requests for information and comment on the Forum.

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/04/22/flashback-how-and-why-the-cia-made-google/

Flashback: How And Why The CIA Made Google

This masterful white paper documents the events and people surrounding the founding of Google. It should be read and understood by every American because it represents the greatest social engineering program of all time. Google was not accidental, nor was it simply fulfilling the needs of a new marketplace. ⁃ TN Editor

Part I

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, western governments are moving fast to legitimize expanded powers of mass surveillance and controls on the internet, all in the name of fighting terrorism.

US and European politicians have called to protect NSA-style snooping, and to advance the capacity to intrude on internet privacy by outlawing encryption. One idea is to establish a telecoms partnership that would unilaterally delete content deemed to “fuel hatred and violence” in situations considered “appropriate.” Heated discussions are going on at government and parliamentary level to explore cracking down on lawyer-client confidentiality.

What any of this would have done to prevent the Charlie Hebdo attacks remains a mystery, especially given that we already know the terrorists were on the radar of French intelligence for up to a decade.

There is little new in this story. The 9/11 atrocity was the first of many terrorist attacks, each succeeded by the dramatic extension of draconian state powers at the expense of civil liberties, backed up with the projection of military force in regions identified as hotspots harbouring terrorists. Yet there is little indication that this tried and tested formula has done anything to reduce the danger. If anything, we appear to be locked into a deepening cycle of violence with no clear end in sight.

As our governments push to increase their powers, INSURGE INTELLIGENCE can now reveal the vast extent to which the US intelligence community is implicated in nurturing the web platforms we know today, for the precise purpose of utilizing the technology as a mechanism to fight global ‘information war’ — a war to legitimize the power of the few over the rest of us. The lynchpin of this story is the corporation that in many ways defines the 21st century with its unobtrusive omnipresence: Google.

Google styles itself as a friendly, funky, user-friendly tech firm that rose to prominence through a combination of skill, luck, and genuine innovation. This is true. But it is a mere fragment of the story. In reality, Google is a smokescreen behind which lurks the US military-industrial complex.

The inside story of Google’s rise, revealed here for the first time, opens a can of worms that goes far beyond Google, unexpectedly shining a light on the existence of a parasitical network driving the evolution of the US national security apparatus, and profiting obscenely from its operation.

For the last two decades, US foreign and intelligence strategies have resulted in a global ‘war on terror’ consisting of prolonged military invasions in the Muslim world and comprehensive surveillance of civilian populations. These strategies have been incubated, if not dictated, by a secret network inside and beyond the Pentagon.

Established under the Clinton administration, consolidated under Bush, and firmly entrenched under Obama, this bipartisan network of mostly neoconservative ideologues sealed its dominion inside the US Department of Defense (DoD) by the dawn of 2015, through the operation of an obscure corporate entity outside the Pentagon, but run by the Pentagon.

In 1999, the CIA created its own venture capital investment firm, In-Q-Tel, to fund promising start-ups that might create technologies useful for intelligence agencies. But the inspiration for In-Q-Tel came earlier, when the Pentagon set up its own private sector outfit.

Known as the ‘Highlands Forum,’ this private network has operated as a bridge between the Pentagon and powerful American elites outside the military since the mid-1990s. Despite changes in civilian administrations, the network around the Highlands Forum has become increasingly successful in dominating US defense policy.

Giant defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and Science Applications International Corporation are sometimes referred to as the ‘shadow intelligence community’ due to the revolving doors between them and government, and their capacity to simultaneously influence and profit from defense policy. But while these contractors compete for power and money, they also collaborate where it counts. The Highlands Forum has for 20 years provided an off the record space for some of the most prominent members of the shadow intelligence community to convene with senior US government officials, alongside other leaders in relevant industries.

I first stumbled upon the existence of this network in November 2014, when I reported for VICE’s Motherboard that US defense secretary Chuck Hagel’s newly announced ‘Defense Innovation Initiative’ was really about building Skynet — or something like it, essentially to dominate an emerging era of automated robotic warfare.

That story was based on a little-known Pentagon-funded ‘white paper’ published two months earlier by the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington DC, a leading US military-run institution that, among other things, generates research to develop US defense policy at the highest levels. The white paper clarified the thinking behind the new initiative, and the revolutionary scientific and technological developments it hoped to capitalize on.

The co-author of that NDU white paper is Linton Wells, a 51-year veteran US defense official who served in the Bush administration as the Pentagon’s chief information officer, overseeing the National Security Agency (NSA) and other spy agencies. He still holds active top-secret security clearances, and according to a report by Government Executive magazine in 2006 he chaired the ‘Highlands Forum’, founded by the Pentagon in 1994.

Linton Wells II (right) former Pentagon chief information officer and assistant secretary of defense for networks, at a recent Pentagon Highlands Forum session. Rosemary Wenchel, a senior official in the US Department of Homeland Security, is sitting next to him

New Scientistmagazine (paywall) has compared the Highlands Forum to elite meetings like “Davos, Ditchley and Aspen,” describing it as “far less well known, yet… arguably just as influential a talking shop.” Regular Forum meetings bring together “innovative people to consider interactions between policy and technology. Its biggest successes have been in the development of high-tech network-based warfare.”

Given Wells’ role in such a Forum, perhaps it was not surprising that his defense transformation white paper was able to have such a profound impact on actual Pentagon policy. But if that was the case, why had no one noticed?

Despite being sponsored by the Pentagon, I could find no official page on the DoD website about the Forum. Active and former US military and intelligence sources had never heard of it, and neither did national security journalists. I was baffled.

In the prologue to his 2007 book, A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity, John Clippinger, an MIT scientist of the Media Lab Human Dynamics Group, described how he participated in a “Highlands Forum” gathering, an “invitation-only meeting funded by the Department of Defense and chaired by the assistant for networks and information integration.” This was a senior DoD post overseeing operations and policies for the Pentagon’s most powerful spy agencies including the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), among others. Starting from 2003, the position was transitioned into what is now the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The Highlands Forum, Clippinger wrote, was founded by a retired US Navy captain named Dick O’Neill. Delegates include senior US military officials across numerous agencies and divisions — “captains, rear admirals, generals, colonels, majors and commanders” as well as “members of the DoD leadership.”

What at first appeared to be the Forum’s main website describes Highlands as “an informal cross-disciplinary network sponsored by Federal Government,” focusing on “information, science and technology.” Explanation is sparse, beyond a single ‘Department of Defense’ logo.

But Highlands also has another website describing itself as an “intellectual capital venture firm” with “extensive experience assisting corporations, organizations, and government leaders.” The firm provides a “wide range of services, including: strategic planning, scenario creation and gaming for expanding global markets,” as well as “working with clients to build strategies for execution.” ‘The Highlands Group Inc.,’ the website says, organizes a whole range of Forums on these issue.

For instance, in addition to the Highlands Forum, since 9/11 the Group runs the ‘Island Forum,’ an international event held in association with Singapore’s Ministry of Defense, which O’Neill oversees as “lead consultant.” The Singapore Ministry of Defense website describes the Island Forum as “patterned after the Highlands Forum organized for the US Department of Defense.” Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed that Singapore played a key role in permitting the US and Australia to tap undersea cables to spy on Asian powers like Indonesia and Malaysia.

The Highlands Group website also reveals that Highlands is partnered with one of the most powerful defense contractors in the United States. Highlands is “supported by a network of companies and independent researchers,” including “our Highlands Forum partners for the past ten years at SAIC; and the vast Highlands network of participants in the Highlands Forum.”

SAIC stands for the US defense firm, Science Applications International Corporation, which changed its name to Leidos in 2013, operating SAIC as a subsidiary. SAIC/Leidos is among the top 10 largest defense contractors in the US, and works closely with the US intelligence community, especially the NSA. According to investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, the first to disclose the vast extent of the privatization of US intelligence with his seminal book Spies for Hire, SAIC has a “symbiotic relationship with the NSA: the agency is the company’s largest single customer and SAIC is the NSA’s largest contractor.”

Richard ‘Dick’ Patrick O’Neill, founding president of the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum

The full name of Captain “Dick” O’Neill, the founding president of the Highlands Forum, is Richard Patrick O’Neill, who after his work in the Navy joined the DoD. He served his last post as deputy for strategy and policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence, before setting up Highlands.

But Clippinger also referred to another mysterious individual revered by Forum attendees:

“He sat at the back of the room, expressionless behind thick, black-rimmed glasses. I never heard him utter a word… Andrew (Andy) Marshall is an icon within DoD. Some call him Yoda, indicative of his mythical inscrutable status… He had served many administrations and was widely regarded as above partisan politics. He was a supporter of the Highlands Forum and a regular fixture from its beginning.”

Since 1973, Marshall has headed up one of the Pentagon’s most powerful agencies, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), the US defense secretary’s internal ‘think tank’ which conducts highly classified research on future planning for defense policy across the US military and intelligence community. The ONA has played a key role in major Pentagon strategy initiatives, including Maritime Strategy, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Competitive Strategies Initiative, and the Revolution in Military Affairs.

Andrew ‘Yoda’ Marshall, head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA) and co-chair of the Highlands Forum, at an early Highlands event in 1996 at the Santa Fe Institute. Marshall is retiring as of January 2015

In a rare 2002 profile in Wired, reporter Douglas McGray described Andrew Marshall, now 93 years old, as “the DoD’s most elusive” but “one of its most influential” officials. McGray added that “Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz” — widely considered the hawks of the neoconservative movement in American politics — were among Marshall’s “star protégés.”

Speaking at a low-key Harvard University seminar a few months after 9/11, Highlands Forum founding president Richard O’Neill said that Marshall was much more than a “regular fixture” at the Forum. “Andy Marshall is our co-chair, so indirectly everything that we do goes back into Andy’s system,” he told the audience. “Directly, people who are in the Forum meetings may be going back to give briefings to Andy on a variety of topics and to synthesize things.” He also said that the Forum had a third co-chair: the director of the Defense Advanced Research and Projects Agency (DARPA), which at that time was a Rumsfeld appointee, Anthony J. Tether. Before joining DARPA, Tether was vice president of SAIC’s Advanced Technology Sector.

Anthony J. Tether, director of DARPA and co-chair of the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum from June 2001 to February 2009

The Highlands Forum’s influence on US defense policy has thus operated through three main channels: its sponsorship by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (around the middle of last decade this was transitioned specifically to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, which is in charge of the main surveillance agencies); its direct link to Andrew ‘Yoda’ Marshall’s ONA; and its direct link to DARPA.

A slide from Richard O’Neill’s presentation at Harvard University in 2001

According to Clippinger in A Crowd of One, “what happens at informal gatherings such as the Highlands Forum could, over time and through unforeseen curious paths of influence, have enormous impact, not just within the DoD but throughout the world.” He wrote that the Forum’s ideas have “moved from being heretical to mainstream. Ideas that were anathema in 1999 had been adopted as policy just three years later.”

Although the Forum does not produce “consensus recommendations,” its impact is deeper than a traditional government advisory committee. “The ideas that emerge from meetings are available for use by decision-makers as well as by people from the think tanks,” according to O’Neill:

“We’ll include people from Booz, SAIC, RAND, or others at our meetings… We welcome that kind of cooperation, because, truthfully, they have the gravitas. They are there for the long haul and are able to influence government policies with real scholarly work… We produce ideas and interaction and networks for these people to take and use as they need them.”

My repeated requests to O’Neill for information on his work at the Highlands Forum were ignored. The Department of Defense also did not respond to multiple requests for information and comment on the Forum.

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/04/22/flashback-how-and-why-the-cia-made-google/

Go Green, Go Nuclear

Go Green, Go Nuclear

This Thursday, Earth Day, politicians and activists will shout more about “the climate crisis.”

I don’t think it’s a crisis. COVID-19, malaria, exploding debt, millions of poor children dying from diarrhea — those are genuine crises.

But global warming may become a real problem, so it’s particularly absurd that Earth Day’s activists rarely mention the form of energy that could most quickly reduce greenhouse gases: nuclear power.

When France converted to nuclear, it created the world’s fastest reduction in carbon emissions.

But in America, nuclear growth came to a near halt 40 years ago, after an accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.

The partial meltdown killed no one. It would probably have been forgotten had Hollywood not released a nuclear scare movie, “The China Syndrome,” days before.

“People saw that and freaked out,” complains Joshua Goldstein, author of “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change (with nuclear power).”

One of the people still freaking out is solar activist Harvey Wasserman. “I live in terror of the next accident,” he says in my latest video.

His anti-nuclear argument has basically won in most of the world. Nuclear plants are being shut down.

Why? I ask Wasserman. No one was hurt at Three Mile Island.

Wasserman replies that after the accident, he went to nearby homes and people showed him “their tumors, their hair loss, their lesions.”

“It’s bunk,” I tell him. “It’s been studied. People lose hair and get cancer and they attribute it to Three Mile Island, but it’s not true.”

“Having been there,” Wasserman responds, “It’s my clear assertion that people were killed.”

Actual scientists don’t agree. In fact, they find less cancer near Three Mile Island than in other parts of Pennsylvania.

But what about Fukushima? That was more serious. Today, clueless media quote Greenpeace claiming, Fukushima’s radiation could “change our DNA!”

Also bunk. “There was heightened radiation, but it was all at this low level below what we consider to be safe,” explains Goldstein.

The low level of radiation released at Fukushima was hardly a threat. What killed people was the panicked response.

“Everyone freaked out and ordered a massive sudden evacuation. That caused suicide, depression… Fear of radioactivity really did kill people.”

One nuclear accident, Chernobyl, did kill, and its radiation may still kill thousands more.

But Chernobyl was built by socialists cutting corners to please dictators. No Chernobyl-like plant will ever be built again. And even with Chernobyl’s deaths, nuclear power’s safety record is better than that of coal, oil, and natural gas.

“But what about the nuclear waste!” shout the activists.

“It’s a small problem,” says Goldstein. “All the nuclear waste from all America’s reactors for 60 years would fit into a Walmart.”

While the anti-nuclear movement has stopped nuclear construction in most of the West, “other places are building them like crazy,” says Goldstein. “China puts a nuclear reactor on the grid every two to three months.”

America may soon finish… one. It took Georgia Power Company six years just to get permission to build a plant. Regulation is so heavy that, 15 years later, it still isn’t operating.

Wasserman is proud he played a role in that. “If you want to accuse us of having raised the cost of building new nuclear plants by demanding more regulation, I plead guilty.”

He claims countries can power themselves with rooftop solar panels and wind. Technology improvements did lower their prices, but what happens when the wind doesn’t blow? Or the sun doesn’t shine?

Store energy in batteries! replies Wasserman. “We are having a major technological and industrial revolution in battery capacity.”

Goldstein scoffs in response, “The idea that a miracle battery is going to come along and save us is completely untested.”

By contrast, nuclear energy has been tested. It could reduce greenhouse gasses, and provide reliable energy, if only we didn’t fear it so much.

“The whole regulatory system is crazy,” Goldstein concludes. “We’re regulating this energy source as though it were the most dangerous thing out there, and it’s actually the safest thing!”

John Stossel is author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/04/21/go-green-go-nuclear/

Putin’s SOTU … he has a RED LINE also

The link below contains both the video and transcript.  It’s a long speech. Some of it is boring … stuff that deals with Russia’s internal politics. some of it is far from boring … like international relations.  Might be worth your time to speed read through the transcript because, you know, a nuke war with Russia is increasingly being bandied around.  Here are some highlights:

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The vast majority of the country’s Soviet-era atomic stockpile will soon be replaced by modern weapons. Putin said, Russia;

“wants to have positive relationships with everyone on the international stage, including those with whom relations have broken down recently. We really don’t want to burn bridges.”

But, he cautioned that;

“those who mistake this stance for weakness need to know that Russia’s response to any aggression will be asymmetrical, swift and harsh.”

Sounds like a harsh warning. Anyone planning  provocations;

“will regret their deeds in a way they have not regretted anything else for a long time.”

Lots of new military hardware … two thirds of all Russian equipment will be new within the next 3 years, as well as 88% of its nukes;

—  advanced heavy ICBM RS-28 Sarmat missile, 15 warheads directed against individual targets and each deliver 350 kilotons, already being deployed

— ship-mounted missiles and other  next-generation projectiles

— a laser cannon which can shoot down both enemy aircraft and incoming missiles … already being deployed …. and more secret hypersonic and laserarmaments the West doesn’t know about

Putin says Russia developing high-tech nuclear & laser weapons, warning ‘provocateurs’ will regret crossing country’s red lines

Putin had a Red Line In The Sand … but, he ain’t saying what it is;

“We have patience, self-confidence and righteousness on our side. I hope no one will think of crossing red lines in their relations with Russia. Where that line sits is ours to determine.”

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/04/21/putins-sotu-he-has-a-red-line-also/#more-237986

WHY IS OUR CULTURE FALLING INTO CHAOS?

In 1996, Pastor John MacArthur preached a number of sermons called The Fulfilled Family. I quoted one in a post a few days ago. The first sermon in the series is called “A Plan For Your Family.” Feminism’s goal was to destroy the family, and they have been successful at doing this. When the family is destroyed, the nation is destroyed. We can’t expect to wander far from God’s design for us and have anything good come from it. Here’s a quote from the sermon:

“Dr. Armand Nicolai II, of Harvard Medical School, sees the trend to destroy the family as a devastating trend. He points to married women with children working outside the home. The tendency for families to move frequently, almost constantly. The dominance of television in the home. The lack of controls in society. The chaos of moral confusion, the lack of communication among families and divorce and all of those things, he says are threatening the very life which we live. Let me quote from him.

“He says, ‘These trends will incapacitate the family, destroy its integrity and cause its members to suffer such crippling emotional conflicts that they will become an intolerable burden to society. What about the future? First the quality of family life will continue to deteriorate, producing a society with a higher incidence of mental illness than ever before. Ninety five percent of our hospital beds may be taken up by mentally ill patients. This illness will be characterized by a lack of self-control. We can expect the assassination of people in authority to be frequent occurrences. Crimes of violence will increase, even those within the family. The suicide rate will rise, as sexuality becomes more and more unlimited and separated from family and emotional commitment, the deadening effect will cause more bizarre experimentation and wide spread perversion.’

“A frankly frightening picture and we are watching it being painted right before our very eyes. There is no question about the fact that the family is under a major assault that people want to redefine family in absolutely any terms they want. There is no question that we are watching a generation of young people rising up who have no socialization skills and no moral sense at all. There is chaos. There is murder. There is crime at a rampant level. There is even pleasure in shooting people incidental to you, just for the sheer thrill of killing.

“Sociologists, psychologists, analysts, and so called marriage and family experts, psychiatrists and all the rest are scrambling all over the place to try to come up with some kind of solution, and they have been doing that now for a couple of decades with absolutely no impact on the slide. Nothing that they are doing seems to slow down the process of the disintegration of human relationships at the very core of life which is the family. You can tamper with society in a lot of places, but if you destroy the family, you destroy society.”

God’s design for marriage is perfect. He created marriage and said it was good. It was not good for man to live alone, so He created a help meet for him. They are to become one flesh and raise godly offspring. The wife is to submit to the leadership of her husband and be a keeper at home. The husband is to protect and provide for his family. Sadly, many of those who claim to love Jesus Christ are not obeying His commands concerning family life. Older women need to teach young women biblical womanhood. We must go back to the old paths that God has laid out for us. In this way, we are lights in a crumbling, chaotic world.

Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.
Jeremiah 6:16

Why is Our Culture Falling Into Chaos?