Using a reverse image search shows that the image is actually from Ukraine and was first posted in 2014, during the revolution that overthrew the government. 

The security official pictured is in fact not a US police officer. That badge was worn by members of the "Internal Troops of Ukraine", a now disbanded section of the national military that also assisted with policing. 

The image is also on the Wikipedia page about the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, and says it shows events in February 2014 when security officials clashed with anti-government protesters. 

The old photo in the advert was picked up by a former Hillary Clinton staffer Jesse Lehrich in tweet that has been widely shared.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53500610

Is this a deliberate mistake? Ukraine in 2014 was a hotbed of protests and confused revolution where Nazi thugs, paid by the USA to sow discord, became a sort of paramilitary force. The Russian-friendly government was replaced by a Western-friendly corrupt government led by a "friend" of Joe Biden, Poroshenko, following a wave of disinformation about the then president. Porosheko has since been replaced by the more moderate Volodymyr Zelensky, a former (possibly still) comedian. 

see also: 

etc...

Meanwhile in Sydney...:

Police in Sydney asked a young woman to remove her tampon during a strip-search, a law enforcement review has found.

It was among instances of police misconduct uncovered in an investigation into five controversial strip-searches across Sydney last year.

Most took place at music festivals and left those searched feeling humiliated and degraded, the report said.

New South Wales Police said it would consider the findings of the report.

The Law Enforcement Conduct Commission report called on the police force to apologise to one of the young women involved, and noted in another case that an officer had been suspended from duty.

The cases were reviewed either after parents of the women complained or they received coverage in local media.

Questions over the legality of the searches - all targeting drugs - was a "recurring" issue, the report said.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-53495146

...

Leaders across the country are telling families to mask up because the data shows it is the best way to protect ourselves and one another from Covid-19. Wearing a mask has been proven to reduce the chance of spreading Covid-19 by about 70 percent. Modeling from the University of Washington indicates that more than 40,000 lives would be spared nationwide if 95 percent of the population wore a mask while in public.

Wearing a mask can also reduce the harsh economic impact the coronavirus has had on our country. A study conducted by Goldman Sachs concluded that a federal mask mandate could substitute for lockdowns that could cause a 5 percent drop in G.D.P. And if Americans do not mask up in public, cases could rise and we could be forced to close down more of our businesses — including the auto manufacturing plants that employ thousands of Michigan workers.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/opinion/gretchen-whitmer-trump-coronavirus-masks.html

----------------------

GloboCap Über Alles

By CJ Hopkins

So, how are you enjoying the “New Normal” so far? Is it paranoid and totalitarian enough for you? If not … well, hold on, because it’s just getting started. There is plenty more totalitarianism and paranoia still to come.

I know, it feels like forever already, but, in fact, it has only been a few months since GloboCap started rolling out the new official narrative. We’re still in the early stages of it. The phase we’re in now is kind of like where we were back in February of 2002, a few months after the 9/11 attacks, when everyone was still in shock, the Patriot Act was just a few months old, and the Department of Homeland Security hadn’t even been created yet.

You remember how it was back then, when GloboCap was introducing the official “War on Terror” narrative, don’t you?

OK, maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re too young to remember, or you were caught up in the excitement of the moment and weren’t paying attention to the details. But some of us remember it clearly. 

We remember watching (and futilely protesting) as GloboCap prepared to invade, destabilize, and restructure the entire Middle East, as countries throughout the global capitalist empire implemented “emergency security measures” (which, 18 years later, are still in effect), as the corporate media bombarded us with official propaganda, jacked up The Fear, and otherwise prepared us for the previous “New Normal” … some of us remember all that clearly.

Personally, I remember listening to a liberal academic on NPR calmly speculating that, just hypothetically, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we might need to sacrifice our principles a bit, and torture some people, to “keep America safe.” I recounted this to other Americans at the time, among my many other concerns about where the post-9/11 mass hysteria was heading. 

Most of them told me I was just being paranoid, or that they didn’t really care, because we needed to do whatever was “necessary” to protect Americans, and, in any event, “the terrorists deserved it.” Shortly thereafter, I started making plans to get the hell out of the country.

I mention that, not to signal my virtue — leaving the U.S.A. didn’t achieve anything, except for improving my standard of living — but to jog your memory, and maybe prompt you to compare that period to the one we are in now. 

The parallels are overwhelming. The “state of emergency.” The propaganda. The mass hysteria. The mob mentality. The exaggeration of the actual threat. The police-state atmosphere. The suppression of dissent. The constant repetition of the new official narrative. The exhortative catchphrases and meaningless slogans. The confusion. The chaos. The existential fear. And so on. It is all so very familiar.

I’m referring to the simulated pandemic, of course, but also to the racialized civil unrest and identitarian polarization that GloboCap has fomented throughout the United States, and, to varying degrees, the rest of the empire. I’ve been covering the War on Populism and GloboCap’s “Trump-is-literally-Hitler” propaganda since 2016, so the civil unrest isn’t terribly surprising. 

But, I confess, I did not see the fake plague coming. 

Running the two psy-ops together was brilliant. The effect on people has been devastating. Everyone is either depressed or enraged, or in some stage of paranoid paralysis. Some have been so thoroughly terrorized that they are literally refusing to leave their houses. Others are lining up at gun shops. White people are getting down on their knees and publicly washing Black people’s feet in “symbolic demonstrations of forgiveness.” Condiments are changing their names. It’s like we’re all trapped in a gratuitously didactic Netflix zombie-apocalypse series set in the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, written, directed, and produced by Spike Lee.

The official propaganda could not be more Orwellian, nor could people’s willingness to go along with it. It doesn’t even have to appear to make sense. Doublethink has taken over. For example, most of the developed world has been in some form of totalitarian lockdown, and subjected to other police-state measures (like being beaten and arrested for not wearing a mask), for no justifiable reason whatsoever, for going on the last five months, but, according to the corporate media (and the millions of people they have apparently brainwashed), it’s only now that Trump has sent his Homeland Security goons into Portland that, suddenly, “democracy is under attack!”

But wait … no, I take it back, the Orwellianism gets even more Orwellian. According to GloboCap and its sanctimonious minions, that sentence I just wrote about Portland is racist, because nearly everything you can imagine is racist, or is a potential threat to the public health. Calling riots “riots” is racist. Silence is racist. Free speech is racist. Refusing to wear a mask is racist. The BLM protesters are immune to the virus, but other large gatherings (which, it goes without saying, are probably racist) all have to be banned.

Normality, as Americans knew it, is over, and it is never, ever, coming back, because white supremacy caused the pandemic. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland (where life has been going on without mass hysteria) do not exist. They have never existed (and, if they ever did, they were probably racist). Talking on public transportation is deadly. Interacting with children is potentially deadly, as are most other forms of human interaction … unless you’re tearing down a racist statue, or burning down a local family business, while wearing a designer anti-racism mask.

Seriously, though, just like in 2002, when GloboCap was still rolling out the “War on Terror” narrative, the facts are all available for anyone who cares. The falsification of Covid statistics and hospital capacity figures, the unreliability of the tests, and so on … it has all been repeatedly documented. 

Anyone with a positive test result who later dies of any cause (including a fatal motorcycle accident) is counted as a “Covid death.” Anyone admitted to a hospital for anything who tests positive for the virus is a “Covid hospitalization.” And, I’m sorry to disappoint my liberal friends (assuming I have any left at this point), but systematic racism and police brutality did not suddenly begin in 2016.

What suddenly began in 2016 was a concerted effort on the part of GloboCap to put down a growing populist backlash against global capitalism and its soulless ideology. Yes, most of that backlash is neo-nationalist in character, but it also includes a significant number of old-fashioned lefty-types like myself, and a lot of other un-woke folks who aren’t quite ready to embrace their new identities as interchangeable human commodities.

We are experiencing the culmination of that effort (or what they hope is the culmination of that effort) to put down this motley populist insurgency, and ensure that it never happens again. GloboCap is teaching us a lesson. The lesson is:

“This is what you get when you fuck around with GloboCap. This is what voting for Trump, Brexit, and all the rest of that ‘populist’ nonsense gets you … global pandemics, civil race wars, riots, lockdowns, economic depression, societal collapse, chaos, fear. Go ahead, fuck around with us some more. We will make you wear ridiculous face masks forever. We will paint little arrows and boxes on the floor to show you where to walk and stand. We will bankrupt your businesses, shut down your schools, psychologically torture your children. We’ll inject them with any fucking thing we want. There is nothing you can do about it. We will make you get down on your knees and apologize for fucking with us, or we will stigmatize you as a ‘racist,’ sic our mobs of fanatics on you, and ‘cancel’ you and your entire family.”

This, essentially, is the message that GloboCap is delivering to disobedient populists (left or right, it makes no difference; GloboCap doesn’t care which political labels we cling to or slap on each other). It is our final warning to quit playing grab-ass, get with the global capitalist program, and start behaving and thinking as we’re told … unless we want to get locked down again, and ordered to wear things on our faces, and be otherwise ritually humiliated.

See, the so-called “New Normal” (i.e., the new ideological narrative that GloboCap is rolling out) is actually not that new at all … or, OK, the pathologization part is (and I’ll be paying close attention to that aspect of it), but, basically, it’s just plain old totalitarianism. 

It isn’t state-totalitarianism, because our world isn’t ruled by nation-states. It is ruled by global capitalism. We are being reminded of that fact at the moment … and being shown what happens if we start to forget it.

Where we go from here is anyone’s guess. My hunch is, it is only going to get worse until they can get Trump out of office, which Americans are liable to help them do, simply to make the whole nightmare stop.

Once he’s gone, they’ll probably retire the fake pandemic, call off the riots, and stage some sort of international celebration of the Rebirth of Democracy, after which they can get finally back to the business of ruthlessly destabilizing, restructuring, and privatizing the planet, sanitizing history, curing humanity of racism, hate, and other pathologies, and otherwise enforcing rigid conformity to global capitalist ideology.

Maybe they could get the Hamilton composer to write them a hip hop Deutschlandlied to use as a supranational anthem. They could call it GloboCap Über Alles … it kind of has a ring to it, doesn’t it?

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/07/21/globocap-uber-alles/

Imagine being a progressive forced to vote for Joe Biden. There aren’t enough clothespins in the world to hold your nose. Biden has lately tried to make inroads with the left, jumping onboard the post-George Floyd campaign for racial justice and releasing an economic plan that encompasses many progressive priorities. But even that can’t mask the smell of his support for the Iraq war, his authoring of the 1994 crime bill, his backing of 1996 welfare reform legislation.

Oh, and he essentially wrote the Patriot Act too. Here he is bragging about that during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 2002, featuring, natch, a smirking Robert Mueller...

The bill Biden is boasting about was called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995, which itself contained two subsidiary bills dedicated to fighting domestic terrorism. Biden introduced the legislation in the Senate, while then-congressman Chuck Schumer introduced it in the House, with the Clinton administration in full support. The package was backed by other Democrats too, including Senator Dianne Feinstein, and opposed by civil libertarians and many Republicans who were worried it would be used to, as Biden said, target conservative groups.

Those concerns weren’t necessarily unjustified. Two months later, after a domestic terrorist named Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, President Bill Clinton made comments that seemed to blame conservative talk radio for the attack, which some on the right interpreted as a threat. At any rate, Biden’s legislation never passed. But the Patriot Act did, rushed through a jumpy Congress after 9/11. From there it was used to establish a pervasive surveillance regime that’s still in place today. (Interestingly enough, the Patriot Act’s most frequent targets haven’t been al-Qaeda or right-wing militias but domestic drug dealers.)

The Patriot Act was a deeply cynical and overly latitudinous piece of legislation. Fortunately efforts in Congress to curtail its surveillance procedures are ongoing, despite some setbacks earlier this year. As for Biden, Jack Hunter sums up just how bad his flip-flopping looks...

So in addition to Biden, the probable 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, having an illiberal record on mandatory minimum sentencing, the Iraq War, and marijuana legalization, he also bragged about authoring the Patriot Act, legislation that liberals nationwide marched in the streets to oppose in 2003.

My theory on Biden is that he used to be like the Bill O’Reilly of the United States Senate (stay with me on this one). In a 2006 profile of the former Fox News primetime host, New Yorker writer Nicholas Lemann described O’Reilly as less as a doctrinaire conservative than a police officer, a nightstick-wielding tough guy with a lantern jaw who hated deviance and disorder and loved patriotism and hard work. Biden’s mentality as a legislator was similar, that of the Irish beat cop. Law enforcement was to be trusted, the bad guys weren’t, and anything that empowered the former at the expense of the latter was worthwhile. Also: put down the bong, get your ass off of welfare, and don’t expect sympathy if you’re hauled down to the station.

This, of course, is how a lot of Democrats used to think. But that age has come and gone. America as world police did not pan out. The left is freshly skeptical of domestic law enforcement too. Joe Biden is at the moment on autopilot towards the White House thanks to discontent over Trump. Yet before the election, he ought to be grilled harder about his inconsistencies. What does he think of today’s mass surveillance? How would a President Biden handle the situation in Portland?

If he refuses to answer, I hear its really easy to tap someone’s phone these days…

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/in-which-joe-biden-brags-about-having-written-the-patriot-act/

Read from top.

"Wearing masks is as American as patriotism..." Gus Trump.

Covid-19 Live Updates: Trump Is Not Out of Danger, Official Says

The president, at the Walter Reed military hospital, is “improving,” Dr. Sean Conley said in an optimistic assessment that raised questions about when the virus was diagnosed. But his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, said Mr. Trump’s symptoms were “very concerning.”

RIGHT NOW: Leading independent doctors suggest there is reason to worry for Mr. Trump.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/03/world/covid-trump

Read from top. See also: as donald is coughing his lungs out... in the next battle -- gus makes a wild prediction...