أزمة أوكرانيا ومؤامرة كورونا هل تمرّ بدون عقاب…؟!

الثلاثاء 29 آذار 2022

د. جمال زهران

يعتبر نشر فيروس كورونا، على مدار عامين، كان عمدياً وليس فجائياً أو صدفة. ولذلك منذ بداية سلسلة مقالاتنا، حتى آخر مقال بعد انفجار الأزمة الأوكرانية، كنا نؤكد أنّ هناك مؤامرة وراء نشر (كوفيد/ 19)، دون إنكار لوجود الوباء، ودون معرفة بالتفاصيل التي تعتبر سرية بطبيعة الحال. ولكن عملاً والتزاماً بقواعد البحث العلمي، وبالمنهج الاستنباطي، الذي من خلاله يتمّ اكتشاف ما وراء الأحداث الظاهرية، تمكنا من كشف أنّ هناك مؤامرة عالمية وراء نشر الوباء. وبالتعمّق في الخطب السياسية للمسؤولين، وقراءة ما بين السطور، فضلاً عن قراءة وتحليل الاتهامات الموجهة من أطراف دولية إلى أطراف أخرى، ومقاصد هذه الاتهامات، تمكنا أيضاً من تأكيد وجود المؤامرة، وأنّ صانعتها الأولى هي الولايات المتحدة. ولذلك سارعَت إلى توجيه الاتهام إلى الصين، باعتبارها الدولة المخيفة لها، حسب تقديرها وأنه يجب عزلها عن العالم، وضرب اقتصادها الذي بدأ في الوصول إلى الموقع الأول عالمياً من خلال المؤشرات المستقرة في عرف الاقتصادات المتقدّمة وقياساتها، مثلما حدث مع دول جنوب شرق آسيا، والمجرم (سوروس) الملياردير اليهودي الأميركي، الذي يتمّ توجيهه لتحطيم أيّ اقتصاد يبدو منافساً للاقتصاد الأميركي والرأسمالي عموماً. ومن ثم تأكدت المؤامرة، وأن صانعة هذه المؤامرة، هي أميركا، ولكن دون معرفة التفاصيل. وقد أوضحنا في المقال السابق دواعي التركيز على أنّ أميركا هي صانعة المؤامرة، من خلال التحليل الاستنباطي.

وكان للتدخل الروسي في أوكرانيا، أن اكتشف الروس معاملَ بيولوجية لتصنيع الفيروسات ومنها فيروس كورونا، ووضعت يدها، على أوراق رسمية تكشف المؤامرة الأميركية على العالم بتصنيع فيروس كورونا، ونشره في العالم لتحقيق أهداف سياسية. وفوجئ العالم بإعلان روسيا عن ذلك رسمياً. ولم تكتف بذلك، بل تقدمت بطلب لمجلس الأمن لعقد جلسة رسمية لمناقشة جريمة الحرب البيولوجية التي خططت لها الولايات المتحدة، وجعلت أراضي أوكرانيا هي المكان المناسب لشن حرب بيولوجية عالمية ضد أعدائها وضد البشرية عموماً.

وعقد مجلس الأمن جلستين في يومين متتاليين، شرح فيهما المندوب الروسي أبعاد الجريمة وأطرافها، وفي المقابل أنكرت أميركا ورفضت الاتهام ومعها بريطانيا. فما كان من روسيا أن طلبت جلسة ثانية بشأن تطوير أميركا لأسلحة بيولوجية على حدودها داخل أوكرانيا، وقام السفير الروسي بالأمم المتحدة، بتسليم وثائق وأدلة في مضبطة الجلسة، تؤكد:

ـ تمويل البنتاغون الرسمي لبرنامج أسلحة بيولوجية واضحة في أوكرانيا.

ـ أسماء الأشخاص والشركات الأميركية المتخصصة بالأدلة والوثائق المشتركة في هذا البرنامج.

ـ أماكن المختبرات في أوكرانيا، وما يتمّ حتى الآن من محاولات لإخفاء الأدلة.

ـ إعلان مفاجأة أخرى من مندوب روسيا، بأماكن المختبرات الأميركية، التي تعمل في تصنيع واختبار الأسلحة البيولوجية في (36) دولة حول العالم، بزيادة (12) دولة عن الجلسة السابقة.

ـ تحديد الأمراض والأوبئة ووسائل إطلاقها والدول التي تتمّ فيها تجربتها، ومتى وأين تمّت التجارب، وبعلم الحكومات في هذه الدول أو بدون علمها.

ـ تأكيد المندوب الروسي، علانية أنّ من ضمن التجارب والآثار، هو الفيروس المسؤول عن الجائحة الحالية، وكم هائل من الخفافيش المستخدمة في نقل هذا الفيروس.

ـ اكتشفت روسيا ضمن حملتها العسكرية في أوكرانيا، أنّ هناك طيوراً مرقمة أنتجتها المختبرات البيولوجية والجرثومية في أوكرانيا، التي تموّلها وتشرف عليها أميركا.

ـ أن هذه الطيور المرقمة، تتحدّد في ضوء دراسة هجرة الطيور، بعد مراقبتها طوال المواسم، ليصبح بمقدور الاخصائيين البيئيين وعلم الحيوان، معرفة خطوط السير التي تسلكها هذه الطيور كلّ سنة في رحلتها الموسمية، ومنها من يسافر من بلد إلى بلد، ومن قارة إلى أخرى. وهنا يأتي دور المخابرات أو التي تحمل خطة شريرة، فيتمّ القبض على مجموعة من هذه الطيور المهاجرة، ويتمّ العمل على ترقيمها وتزويدها بكبسولة جراثيم تحمل شريحة ليتمّ التحكم فيها عن بُعد، عبر كمبيوترات، ثم يعاد إطلاق سراحها لتنضمّ إلى الطيور المهاجرة إلى البلاد التي يتمّ التخطيط للضرر بها. وخلال طيرانها الطويل، يتمّ التقاط مسارها خطوة بخطوة عبر الأقمار الاصطناعية، ويتمّ تحديد مكانها بالضبط، فإنْ أرادوا مثلاً الضرر ببلد معيّن، يتمّ تدمير الشريحة عندما يصبح الطائر في سماء هذا البلد، فتقتل الطائر، ويسقط حاملاً الوباء، فتنتشر الأمراض في تلك البلاد المُراد الضرر بها، وهكذا يكون قد تمّت هزيمة البلد الخصم، من دون أية تكلفة عسكرية أو اقتصادية أو سياسية!!

ولا شك في أنّ هذه جريمة دولية، رفضت منظمة الصحة العالمية، معرفتها بذلك، كما أنّ الصين طالبت بالتحقيق في ذلك، أمام مجلس الأمن.

وبعيداً عن التفاصيل المريرة، فإنه قد تأكد أنّ نشر فيروس كورونا، كان مخططاً له، وعمدياً. ومن ثم فإنّ من ارتكبت هذه الجريمة هي الولايات المتحدة ومعها (36) دولة شاركتها في ذلك لا بدّ من الإفصاح عنها وفضحها، وإخضاع الجميع للمحاكمات جزاءً لما فعلوا، وفي المقدمة أميركا الظالمة، التي تمارس عملاً إجرامياً دولياً. ولا يجب أن تمرّ مؤامرة كورونا بدون جزاء أو عقاب. ومنذ الكشف عن المؤامرة، بدأ الجميع يتراجع عن الالتزام بالإجراءات الاحترازية، سواء الدول أو الأفراد، في أنحاء العالم.

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*أستاذ العلوم السياسية والعلاقات الدولية، والأمين العام المساعد للتجمع العالمي لدعم خيار المقاومة، ورئيس الجمعية العربية للعلوم السياسية.

“Events like this happen once a century”: Sergey Glazyev on the breakdown of epochs and changing ways of life

March 28, 2022

Original Link:  https://www.business-gazeta.ru/article/544773

Translated via Yandex

“Events like this happen once a century”: Sergey Glazyev on the breakdown of epochs and changing ways of life

Is it possible to stabilize the ruble in three days and why don’t the Ukrainian”zombies” give up?

“After failing to weaken China head-on through a trade war, the Americans shifted the main blow to Russia, which they see as a weak link in the global geopolitics and economy. The Anglo-Saxons are trying to implement their eternal Russophobic ideas to destroy our country, and at the same time to weaken China, because the strategic alliance of the Russian Federation and the PRC is too tough for the United States. They don’t have the economic or military power to destroy us together, not separately,” says Sergey Glazyev, an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and former adviser to the Russian President. Glazyev spoke in an interview with BUSINESS Online about what opportunities are now opening up for the Russian economy, whether the Central Bank is pandering to the enemy and whether a new world currency will replace the dollar.

“The new world economic order is ideologically socialist”

– Sergey Yuryevich, commenting on today’s tragic events, you wrote in your telegram channel that it was necessary to read your book about the” last world war”, written about 6 years ago. How did you manage to predict everything so accurately?

— The fact is that there are long-term patterns of economic development, the analysis and understanding of which allows us to predict events that are currently taking place. We are now experiencing a simultaneous change in technological and world economic structures, while the technological basis of the economy is changing, the transition to fundamentally new technologies is taking place, and the management system is also being transformed. This kind of event occurs about once a century. However, technological patterns change about once every 50 years, and their change is usually accompanied by a technological revolution, depression, and an arms race. And world economic patterns change once every 100 years, and their change is accompanied by world wars and social revolutions. This is due to the fact that the ruling elite of the core countries of the old world economic structure prevents changes, does not take into account the emergence of more effective management systems, tries to block the development of new world leaders using them, and tries to maintain its hegemony and monopoly position by any means, including military and revolutionary ones.

Say, 100 years ago, the British Empire was trying to maintain its hegemony in the world. When it was already losing economically to the combined resources of the Russian Empire and Germany, the First World War provoked by British intelligence was unleashed, during which all three European empires self-destructed. I am talking about the collapse of tsarist Russia, the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, but this also includes the fourth-Ottoman Porto. As for Britain, it held global dominance for a while and even became the largest empire on the planet. But due to the inexorable laws of socio-economic development, the colonial world economic system, based in fact on slave labor, could no longer provide economic growth. Introduced two completely new political models of Soviet and American — has demonstrated a much greater production efficiency, because they were organized on different principles: not for private family capitalism, and the power of large transnational corporations with centralized structures of economic regulation and limitless monetary emission using Fiat currency (paper or electronic means — approx. ed.). They enabled mass production of products much more efficiently than the control systems of the colonial empires of the nineteenth century.

The emergence of social states in the USSR and the United States with centralized management systems made it possible to make a sharp leap in their economic development; In Europe, the corporate governance system was formed, unfortunately, according to the Nazi model in Germany, and also not without the help of British intelligence. Hitler, backed by British intelligence agencies and American capital, quickly deployed a centralized corporate governance system in Germany, which allowed the Third Reich to quickly take over all of Europe. With God’s help, we defeated this German (or rather, European — taking into account today’s realities) fascism. After that, two models remained in the world, which I refer to as the imperial world economic order: the Soviet and the Western (with the center in the United States). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which failed to withstand global competition due to the fact that the directive management system was not flexible enough to meet the needs of technological progress, the United States for a while seized global dominance.

— But now this period of “American unipolar loneliness” is already passing, and probably not only thanks to Russia, but first of all to China and the Asian regions as such. Isn’t that right?

— Indeed, the hierarchical vertical structures characteristic of the imperial world economic system turned out to be too rigid to ensure continuous innovation processes and lost their comparative effectiveness in ensuring the growth of the world economy. On its periphery, a new world economic order has been formed, based on flexible management models, a network organization of production, where the state works as an integrator, combining the interests of various social groups around achieving one goal — raising public welfare. The most impressive example of such an integrated world economy today is China, which has been three times faster than the growth rate of the American economy for more than 30 years. At the moment, China already surpasses the United States in terms of output, exports of high-tech goods, and growth rates.

Another example of the model of the new world economic order, which we called integral (due to the fact that the state in it unites all social groups that differ in their interests), is India. It has a different political system, but it also has the primacy of public interests over private interests, and the State seeks to maximize growth rates in order to combat poverty. In this sense, the new world economic order is ideologically socialist. At the same time, it uses market mechanisms of competition, which makes it possible to ensure the highest concentration of resources for the technological revolution in order to ensure economic leaps based on a new advanced technological order. If we look at the growth rate since 1995, the Chinese economy has grown 10-fold, while the American economy has grown only 15 percent. Thus, it is already obvious to everyone that the pace of global economic development is currently shifting to Asia: China, India and Indochina countries already produce more products than the United States and the European Union. If we add Japan or Korea, where the management system is similar in its principles of integrating society around the goal of improving public welfare, we can say that today this new world economic order already dominates the world, and the center of reproduction of the world economy has moved to Southeast Asia. Of course, the American ruling elite cannot agree with this.

“Put up with it, I’d say…

– yes. They, like the British Empire once did, seek to maintain their hegemony in the world. The events taking place today are a manifestation of how the financial and power oligarchic elite of the United States is trying to maintain world domination. It can be said that for the past 15 years, it has been waging a global hybrid war, seeking to chaotize countries beyond its control and restrain the development of the PRC. But due to the already archaic management system, they cannot do this. The financial crisis of 2008 was such a transitional moment when the life cycle of the outgoing technological order actually ended and the process of mass redistribution of capital to a new technological order began, the core of which is a complex of nanobioengineering and information communication technologies. All countries started pumping money into their economies. The simplest thing a modern state can do is to give all businesses access to cheap long-term money so that they can adopt new technologies. But if in America and Europe such funds were spent mainly in financial bubbles and provided budget deficits, then in China this huge monetary issue was completely directed to the growth of production and the development of new technologies. There were no financial bubbles, while the ultra-high monetization of the Chinese economy did not lead to inflation, the growth of the money supply was accompanied by an increase in the output of goods, the introduction of new advanced technologies and an increase in public welfare.

Today, economic competition has already led to the fact that the United States has lost its leadership. If you remember, Donald Trump tried to contain China’s development through a trade war, but nothing came of it.

“The Americans opened a biological war front by launching the coronavirus in China”

— Why not?” Did Trump, who is used to taking risks and going all-in, not have enough determination?

— And even Trump couldn’t do it, because China has a more efficient management system, which allows us to concentrate the available production resources as fully as possible. At the same time, effective money management keeps the money issue in the contour of expanded reproduction of the real sector of the economy, focusing on financing development investments. China has reached the highest savings rate of any country: about 45 percent of GDP is invested, compared to 20 percent in the United States or Russia. This, in fact, ensures the ultra-high growth rate of the Chinese economy.

In general, the United States was doomed to defeat in this trade war, because the Middle Kingdom can produce products more efficiently and finance development cheaper. The entire banking system in China is state — owned, it operates as a single development institution, directing cash flows to expand output and develop new technologies. In the United States, the money supply is used to finance the budget deficit and is reallocated to financial bubbles. As a result, the efficiency of the US financial and economic system is 20 percent-there only one in five dollars reaches the real sector, and in China almost 90 percent (that is, almost all the yuan created by the Central Bank of the PRC) feed the contours of expanding production and ensure ultra — high economic growth.

Trump’s attempts to limit China’s development through trade war methods have failed. At the same time, they boomeranged on the United States itself. Then the Americans opened a biological war front, launching the coronavirus into China, hoping that the Chinese leadership would not cope with this epidemic and chaos would arise in China. However, the epidemic has shown poor health care effectiveness and has created chaos in the United States itself. The Chinese management system has also shown much greater efficiency here. In China, the death rate is significantly lower, and they coped with the pandemic much faster. Already in 2020, they even reached economic growth of 2 percent, while in the United States there was a decline of 10 percent of GDP (analysts noted the largest drop since World War IIed. ). Now the Chinese have regained growth rates of about 7 percent per year, and there is no doubt that China will continue to develop confidently, expanding the production of a new technological mode.

In parallel with the trade war against China, the US special services were preparing a war against Russia, since the Anglo-Saxon geopolitical tradition considers our country to be the main obstacle to the establishment of world domination by the power and financial elite of the United States and Great Britain. I must say that the war against the Russian Federation unfolded immediately after the annexation of Crimea and after the American special services organized a coup in Ukraine. They can be said to have tricked Russia into agreeing to the American occupation of Ukraine, considering it as a temporary phenomenon. However, the Americans took root in the Square, created not only strong points, raising Nazis under their wing, but also trained the Nazi armed forces, gave the Nazis the opportunity to get a military education, trained them in their academies, and “flashed” all the Armed Forces of Ukraine with them. And for 8 years, they prepared the Armed Forces of Ukraine to fight the only enemy-Russia. While the mass media, which is also completely controlled by the Americans in Ukraine, formed an image of the enemy in the public consciousness.

In addition, the United States used the currency and financial front of a hybrid war against the Russian Federation. Already in 2014, they imposed the first financial sanctions and knocked out a significant part of Western loans from the Russian economy. Now we are seeing the next phase, when they have effectively disconnected Russia from the global monetary and financial system, where they dominate. However, all this was predicted by me 10 years ago, based on the theory of changing world economic patterns and the specific logic of the US ruling elite, focused on world domination. Anglo-Saxon geopolitics is traditionally oriented against the Russian Empire and its successors, the USSR and the Russian Federation, because, since the time of the British Empire, Russia has been seen as the main opponent of the Anlo-Saxons. All the so-called geopolitical science that was written in London was reduced, in fact, to a set of recommendations on how to destroy Russia as the dominant force in Eurasia. I mean all sorts of speculative constructions like “countries of the sea against countries of the land” and so on.

— Why did Russia interfere with the “countries of the sea” so much? After all, geographically we have never bordered on the UK.

— In this regard, a formula was invented: whoever controls Eurasia controls the whole world. Actually, applied development has already gone further. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s famous theorem says that in order to defeat Russia as a superpower, you need to tear Ukraine away from it. All this political dogma, which, it would seem, has long gone down in history, is nevertheless reproduced today in the thinking of the American political elite. I must say that there are still courses in 19th-century geopolitics at Harvard and Yale University, sharpening the brains of future American politicians against Russia. So they, in fact, jumped on this old and time-tested Russophobic stream, which has always been characteristic of Anglo-Saxon geopolitics. And, considering Russia as the main opponent of its domination in the world, they used Ukraine as an outpost, or rather, as a tool for undermining Russia, weakening it, and in the future for destroying it as a sovereign state, in accordance with Brzezinski’s proposal.

So, what is happening today was easily predicted, based on a combination of long-term patterns of economic development, which actually condemned the world to a hybrid war, and the traditional Russophobia of the Anglo-Saxon political elite. After the weakening of the PRC did not turn out head-on through a trade war, the Americans transferred the main blow of their military and political power to Russia, which they see as a weak link in the global geopolitics and economy. In addition, the Anglo-Saxons seek to establish dominance over Russia in order to implement their eternal Russophobic ideas to destroy our country, and at the same time to weaken China, because the strategic alliance of the Russian Federation and the PRC is too tough for the United States. They have neither the economic nor military power to destroy us together, not separately, so the US initially sought to put us at odds with China. They didn’t succeed. But they, taking advantage of our, I would say, complacency, seized control of Ukraine, and today they are using our fraternal republic as a weapon of war to destroy Russia, and then-to seize control of our resources in order, I repeat, to strengthen their position and weaken the position of China. In general, all this is obvious, as twice two makes four.

“The Americans will not be able to win, just as the British did not succeed in their time”

— It’s probably obvious, but not for everyone. There are many opponents of an alliance with China among the Russian elite. At least before the special operation in Ukraine, it seemed to these people that American and Western culture were clearer and closer to us than Chinese hieroglyphic wisdom, and that we would always find a common language with our “Western partners”.

— You know, back in 2015 I wrote the book ” The Last World War. The United States starts and loses, ” which you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation — everything was thought out and justified there. The United States launched a global hybrid war-starting with the Orange revolutions – to disrupt those regions of the world that it did not control — in order to strengthen its position and weaken the position of its geopolitical competitors. After the famous Munich speech of President Putin (February 2007ed. they realized that they had lost control of Yeltsin’s Russia, and they were seriously concerned. In 2008, the financial crisis broke out and it became clear that the transition to a new technological order was beginning, and the old world economic order and the old management system no longer provide for progressive economic development. China takes the lead. Well, then the logic of the world war unfolds, only not in the forms that existed 100 years ago, but on three conditional fronts — monetary and financial (where the United States still dominates the world), trade and economic (where they have already lost the primacy to China) and information and cognitive (where the Americans also have superior technologies). They are using all three fronts to try to hold the initiative and maintain the hegemony of their corporations.

And finally, the fourth front — the biological one, which opened with the appearance of the coronavirus from the US-China laboratory in Wuhan. Today we see that a whole network of biological laboratories existed in Ukraine. So the United States has long been preparing to open a biological front for world War II.

The fifth, and most obvious, front is, in fact, the front of military operations-as the last tool for forcing the states they control to obey them implicitly. Today, the situation on this front is also getting worse. In other words, active operations are underway on all five fronts of the global hybrid war and it is possible to predict the result. The Americans will not be able to win, just as the British did not succeed in their time. Although Britain formally won the Second World War, they lost politically and economically. The British lost their entire empire, more than 90 percent of their territory, and 95 percent of their population. Two years after the Second World War, where they were the victors, their empire collapsed like a house of cards, because the other two winners — the USSR and the United States — did not need this empire and considered it an anachronism. Similarly, the world will not need American multinational corporations, the US dollar, US currency and financial technologies and financial pyramids. All this will soon be a thing of the past. Southeast Asia will become an obvious leader in global economic development, and a new world economic order will be formed before our eyes.

— To paraphrase Remarque, we can say that changes have finally come to the western front. But what signs do you see of this powerful global system’s imminent demise?

— After the Americans first seized the Venezuelan foreign exchange reserves and handed them over to the opposition, then-the Afghan foreign exchange reserves, before that — the Iranian ones, and now — the Russian ones, it became absolutely clear that the dollar ceased to be the world currency. Following the Americans, this stupidity was also committed by Europeans — the euro and the pound ceased to be world currencies. Therefore, the old monetary and financial system is living out its last days. After the US dollars that no one needs are sent back to America from Asian countries, the collapse of the global monetary and financial system based on dollars and euros is inevitable. Leading countries are switching to national currencies, and the euro and dollar are no longer foreign exchange reserves.

— How do you see the world after the disappearance of the dollar monopoly?

— We are currently working on a draft international agreement on the introduction of a new world settlement currency, pegged to the national currencies of the participating countries and to exchange-traded goods that determine real values. We won’t need American and European banks. A new payment system based on modern digital technologies with a blockchain is developing in the world, where banks are losing their importance. Classical capitalism based on private banks is a thing of the past. International law is being restored. All key international relations, including the issue of world currency circulation, are beginning to be formed on the basis of contracts. At the same time, the importance of national sovereignty is being restored, because sovereign countries are coming to an agreement. Global economic cooperation is based on joint investments aimed at improving the well-being of peoples. Trade liberalization ceases to be a priority, national priorities are respected, and each state builds a system for protecting the internal market and its economic space that it considers necessary. In other words, the era of liberal globalization is over. Before our eyes, a new world economic order is being formed — an integral one, in which some states and private banks lose their private monopoly on the issue of money, on the use of military force, and so on.

“The third scenario is catastrophic. Destruction of humanity”

— And why did you name your book “The Last World War?” What makes you hope that this global war is really the last?

— I called this world war the last, because we see that there are several scenarios of movement out of today’s crisis. The first scenario, which I have already described, is a calm and prosperous one. It consists in overcoming the US monopoly. In order to do this in the financial sector, you need to abandon the dollar. In order to overcome the monopoly in the information and cognitive sphere, we need to isolate our information space from the American one and switch to our own information technologies. Creating their own contours of economic reproduction, but without the US dollar and euro, and relying on their information technologies for managing money, the countries of the new world economic order ensure high rates of economic development, while the Western world collapses. There is a situation of collapsing financial pyramids, disorganization and a growing economic crisis, aggravated by rising inflation due to uncontrolled money issuance over the past 12 years.

The second scenario of possible development of events is similar to the one that Hitler wanted to implement during the change of previous world economic structures. This is an attempt to create a world government with a superhuman ideology. If Hitler thought of the German nation as superhumans, then the current ideologists of world domination impose a transition to a post-humanoid state on humanity. In contrast to the posthumanism of the West, the core countries of the new world economic order are characterized by a socialist ideology, albeit with respect for private interests, protection of private property and the use of market mechanisms. In China, India, Japan, and Korea, socialist ideology — or rather, a mixture of socialist ideology, national interests, and market competition-dominates. It is this mixture that forms a fundamentally new power and political elite, focused on economic development and the growth of the welfare of nations.

Western politicians, intellectuals, and businessmen have a different approach. What we are seeing today is an attempt to create a certain image of a new world order with a world government at the head, where people are driven into an electronic concentration camp. You can see from the example of restrictions during the pandemic, how it happened: all people are given tags, access to public goods is regulated by QR codes, and everyone is forced to walk in formation. By the way, in the Rockefeller Foundation scenario back in 2009, the pandemic and, in fact, everything that happened in connection with it was laid out in a stunning way — they actually predicted the future. This scenario was called Lock Step, that is, “Walk in formation”, and the Western world followed it. By sacrificing their own democratic values, people are being forced to obey commands. International organizations, including the World Health Organization, are used as a kind of base for assembling a world government that would be subordinate to private capital.

But, I must say, Donald Trump strongly hindered these plans, because he stopped the signing of the transatlantic and trans-Pacific partnership agreements, where all countries participating in the treaties sacrificed national sovereignty in all disputes with big business. And you need to understand that today any multinational corporation can act as a foreign investor, including in the United States. According to these agreements, if foreign capital is present in a business, then in a dispute with the national government, an international arbitration court is formed, it is not clear how and by whom it was drawn up. And these unelected judges, appointed, in fact, by large international businesses, resolve these disputes. In fact, the point was that the state was losing all sovereignty in regulating relations with big business. However, Trump stopped the agreement — the United States did not sign it. Thus, the process of forming a world government was stopped. This is the second alternative, and it is currently experiencing a crisis due to the collapse of the idea of globalization and the gradual abandonment of “pandemic” restrictions.

We must understand that the world government option is incompatible with a sovereign Russia, with our independence and role in the world. In the globalist scenario, the Russian Federation is considered as a territory that is intended for exploitation by Western multinational corporations. At the same time, the” indigenous population ” should serve their interests. Under this scenario, Russia disappears as an independent entity, as does China. The Western world government may incorporate some of our oligarchs into its own version of the future, but only on the second and third roles.

The third scenario is catastrophic. The destruction of humanity…

— The apocalypse everyone’s talking about?”

— Well, not all of them… But everyone is definitely afraid. By the way, about American biolabs that synthesize dangerous viruses, it was said in another book of mine, published a little later: “The Plague of the XXI century: how to avoid disaster and overcome the crisis?”.

I remember that back in 1996, when I had to work in the UN Security Council, I proposed to develop a national biosecurity concept. Because even then, almost 30 years ago, genetics was a sufficiently advanced science to synthesize viruses directed against people of a certain race or a certain gender, a certain age. This has long been possible. You can create a virus that will work only against whites or, conversely, only against blacks, only against men or only against women. Now the Americans are going further — you can see that, according to the data of our Ministry of Defense, announced the day before, American biolabs were developing viruses aimed against the Slavs. Apparently, it is now possible to make a virus against some ethnic group that has its own genetic code.

What is happening in Ukraine today is an echo of the agony of the US ruling elite, which cannot accept that it will no longer be a world leader. This is becoming clear to everyone — at least to those who are not connected with Americans by their interests and are not subject to their cognitive influence.

Here is an example. When the United States imposed anti-Russian sanctions in 2014, I asked my Chinese colleagues: “Do you think the Americans can impose sanctions on China?” They were sure not. It was said that this was impossible, because the United States depends on China as much as China depends on the United States. That is, it will be more expensive for America. Two years later, Trump launched a trade war against China. And Beijing now understands that America is an enemy that will sink the Chinese economic miracle in any way possible. Before that, my Chinese colleagues were not very convinced by my arguments, just as my book mentioned by you did not greatly influence our political and economic elite. My arguments were dismissed. Although we have said for many, many years that the dollar should be abandoned. Foreign exchange reserves should have been removed from dollar-denominated instruments, from euro-denominated instruments to gold, they should have switched to their own currency and financial system, and developed their own settlements in national currencies with partners. We have been proposing all this since the noughties, when it was already clear what the global economic development was leading to. And only now, finally, everyone has seen the light.

“The Americans brainwashed the Ukrainians and turned 150-200 thousand people into a fighting machine that works without thinking”

— Judging by the heart-rending howl that comes from the camp of liberals, as well as the events in Ukraine, not everyone has seen the light yet.

— Yes, we are faced with the fact that the Americans have managed to fool the Ukrainian people so much in 8 years that the people who resist the Russian army, the so-called Armed Forces of Ukraine, look simply zombified. They are controlled like puppets. Not Zelensky commands the Ukrainian army, not even the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and the General Staff, but the Pentagon. He commands very effectively from the point of view of fighting “to the last Ukrainian soldier”, because these zombie guys do not give up. But they are in an absolutely hopeless situation. All experts have already recognized that Russia won the military special operation, that Ukraine has no chance of resistance, that the entire military infrastructure has been destroyed… the APU can only surrender in order to minimize human losses. However, Ukrainian officers (and especially, of course, nationalists) act like externally controlled zombies-they follow instructions from the Pentagon, which are received on their personal computers and special tablets.

Moreover, the Americans command their puppets from the APU, breaking them into the appropriate units. Each unit is assigned a number, and each number is assigned tasks by artificial military intelligence every day. They really turned 150-200 thousand people into a fighting machine that works without thinking, only stupidly follows all their orders. For 8 years, they have managed to force a significant part of the youth of Ukraine not just to join the ranks against Russia, but by brainwashing them into their own weak-willed tools. Not just cannon fodder, but controlled cannon fodder.

Being in an absolutely hopeless situation, surrounded, deprived of any supplies at all, they still continue a senseless war, condemning themselves to death, and dragging the surrounding civilians with them to the grave. This is a good example of how American modern technologies work. We must understand that we are facing a very powerful force. You know, we have previously heard from Russian experts and politicians that the Ukrainians themselves will suffocate economically and then crawl to us and in general where Ukraine will go without us. After all, it will not be able to ensure the reproduction of the economy without our resources and cooperation with us. Indeed, Ukraine has entered a state of economic catastrophe, as we expected, as we explained to our Ukrainian colleagues. The Ukrainian Republic has become the poorest state in Europe, along with Moldova. Due to the fact that Ukraine has severed ties with Russia, its losses amount to more than $ 100 billion. Nevertheless, this did not prevent American and British political strategists and instructors from forming a 200-thousandth army of thugs and murderers who completely inadequately represent reality and are an obedient tool of American interests.

— Aren’t there equally obedient American puppets in Russia? Was it only Ukrainians who were zombified?

— Yes, and here it should be noted that almost the same thing is happening with the Central Bank, but only on other issues.

— Before we move on to the Central Bank, let me clarify. You said that you are working on introducing a new currency. And in what format and with what team?

— We have been doing this for quite a long time, as a group of scientists. 10 years ago, at the Astana Economic Forum, we presented the report “Towards Sustainable Growth through a Fair world economic order” with a draft transition to a new global financial and monetary system, where we proposed to reform the IMF system based on the so — called special drawing rights, and on the basis of the modified IMF system-to create a world settlement currency. This idea, by the way, aroused great interest at that time: our project was recognized as the best international economic project. But in a practical sense, none of the states represented by the official monetary authorities were interested in this project, although the publications of Nursultan Nazarbayev, who proposed a new currency, followed. I think he offered altyn.

– Altyn? It is interesting.

— Yes, his article on this topic was published even in Izvestia. But negotiations and political decisions were not reached, and to this day it is more of an expert proposal. But I am sure that the current situation forces us to create new payment and settlement instruments very quickly, because the dollar will be practically impossible to use, and the ruble cannot find stability due to the incompetent policy of the Central Bank, which, in fact, acts in the interests of international speculators.

Objectively, the ruble could become a reserve currency along with the yuan and the rupee. It would be possible to switch to a multi-currency system based on national currencies. But you still need some equivalent for pricing… We are currently working on the concept of the exchange space of the Eurasian Economic Union, where one of the tasks is to form new pricing criteria. That is, if we want metal prices to be formed not in London, but in Russia, just like oil prices, then this implies the emergence of some other currency, especially if we want to act not only within the Eurasian Economic Union, but in Eurasia in a broad sense, in the center of a new world economic order, to which I refer China, India, Indochina, Japan, Korea and Iran. These are big countries that all have their own strong national interests. After the current history of confiscation of dollar reserves, I don’t think any country will want to use another country’s currency as a reserve currency. So we need some new tool. And such a tool, from my point of view, can first become a certain synthetic settlement currency, which would be built as such an aggregated index.

– Can I get some examples? What is it?

— Well, let’s say the ecu-there was such an experience in the European Union. It was built as a basket of currencies. All countries that participate in the creation of a new settlement currency must be granted the right to have their national currency in this basket. And the common currency is formed as an index, as a weighted average component of these national currencies. Well, to this we must add, from my point of view, exchange-traded commodities: not only gold, but also oil, metal, grain, and water. A sort of commodity bundle, which, according to our estimates, should include about 20 products. They, in fact, form global price proportions and therefore must participate in the basket to form a new settlement currency. And we need an international treaty that will define the rules for the circulation of this currency and create an organization like the International Monetary fund. By the way, we proposed reforming the IMF 15 years ago, but now it is already obvious that the new monetary financial system will have to be built without the West. Perhaps one day Europe will join it and the United States will also be forced to recognize it. But it is still clear that we will have to build without them, for example, on the basis of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. However, these are just expert developments that we will submit to the official bodies for consideration in the coming month.

— And at the level of the government or at the level of the president?

— We will first send it to the departments that are responsible for these issues. We will hold discussions, develop some common understanding, and then reach the political level.

“The central Bank continues its policy of pandering to the enemy”

— In your telegram channel, you write that all that remains is to nationalize the Bank of Russia. Why hasn’t it been completed yet? Here, for example, there is a point of view that Elvira Nabiullina remains in her post as a screen, but she will no longer manage anything serious. Can you refute or confirm this?

— You know, I don’t want to do conspiracy theory.

“Is this a conspiracy theory?”

— Yes, we can talk about the American deep state in conspiracy terms. In this case, conspiracy theory is a very appropriate line of thought, because in America, behind the screen of presidents and congressmen, there are some deep forces — special services. But in our Country, everything is simple. We have a president, a head of state, who has built a vertical of power. We absolutely understand how the parliament and the judicial system are formed. Here, in general, no conspiracy theory can be applied. The same goes for the Central Bank. Let me remind you that, according to the law on the Central Bank, all its property is federal property. Therefore, the Central Bank is a state structure, there is no doubt about it.

— And they always said that he was separated, as if on the sidelines.

— The Board of Directors of the Central Bank is appointed by the State Duma on the recommendation of the President. I have worked for many years as its representative in the National Banking Council, which oversees the activities of the Central Bank. I can say that there is no doubt that the Central Bank is the state body regulating monetary circulation, and it is also the main financial regulator in the country.

But there are nuances. The Constitution stipulates that the Central Bank conducts its policy independently, that is, it is independent of the government. But this does not mean that it is independent of the state. This is a government agency. Our judicial system is also officially independent of the government. Therefore, being an independent body, the Central Bank is nevertheless formed as a state regulatory body and must fulfill the tasks that are necessary for the development of our economy. To do this, it is necessary to involve the Central Bank in strategic planning. The classic theory of monetary circulation stipulates that the main goal of the monetary authorities, i.e. the Central Bank, should be to create conditions for maximizing investment. This is exactly what the banking system should do — maximize investment. Because the more investment, the more production, the higher the technical level, the lower the costs and lower the inflation, the more stable the economy. Macroeconomic stabilization in the modern economy can be achieved only on the basis of accelerated scientific and technological progress. Attempts to target inflation (such a buzzword), which the Central Bank has been practically imitating for the past 10 years, by manipulating the key interest rate against the background of the freely floating ruble exchange rate, are short — sighted, primitive and counterproductive. These measures are usually recommended by the IMF for underdeveloped countries that do not know how to think themselves.

What is inflation targeting in practice? This is an extremely primitive and internally contradictory set of measures, the application of which drives the economy into a stagflationary trap. The Central Bank threw the ruble into free floating, which is absurd from the point of view of targeting inflation in an open economy, where the exchange rate directly affects prices. And we see how the devaluation of the ruble periodically accelerates prices. In addition, they have reduced monetary policy to only one absolutely primitive tool — manipulation of the key interest rate. But the key rate is the percentage at which the Central Bank issues money to the economy and withdraws money from the economy. Its attempts to suppress inflation by raising the interest rate cannot succeed in the modern economy, because the higher the interest rate, the less credit, the less investment, the lower the technical level and competitiveness. A decline in the latter leads to a devaluation of the ruble in 3-4 years, after they raise the interest rate ostensibly to fight inflation. By letting the ruble exchange rate float freely, they essentially left it at the mercy of currency speculators.

Americans really like this policy, so they strongly praise the leadership of our Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance. After all, what is important to them? So that everything is pegged to the dollar, so that the ruble is a “junk” currency that is unstable. And this is a paradox, because the number of foreign exchange reserves of the Russian Federation has recently been 3 times more than the money supply in rubles! This means that the Central Bank could stabilize the exchange rate at any level. But he didn’t.

And who are the speculators to whom the Central Bank actually threw the ruble to the mercy? The main speculators are American hedge funds, which actually form the ruble exchange rate by manipulating the market. And the Central Bank does not notice this, or rather, it does not seem to notice. To keep them in the foreign exchange market by raising the interest rate, the Central Bank kills credit and makes our economy dependent on foreign sources of credit, and the foreign exchange financial system-dependent on the interests of speculators. It is in whose interests the Central Bank is working, hiding behind buzzwords like “inflation targeting”, which has shamefully failed in recent years in terms of real price dynamics. So we have the weakest point of the entire national security system in general — this is the Central Bank. His leadership is overwhelmed by the enemy’s cognitive weapons, in other words, zombified by them. In fact, our monetary authorities are doing what the enemy needs.

By the way, I proved mathematically and chronologically that the first wave of sanctions was imposed against Russia only after the Central Bank prepared the ground for this, namely, it let the ruble exchange rate float freely and announced that it would raise the interest rate if inflation started in the country. As soon as the Central Bank adopted this strange policy, the Americans immediately imposed sanctions. Their speculators ensured the collapse of the ruble exchange rate, which caused an inflationary wave, and the Central Bank, on the instructions of the IMF, raised the interest rate, which completely paralyzed our economy. The total damage caused by this policy has already reached 50 trillion rubles of unproduced products and approximately 20 trillion rubles of undeveloped investments. Now we need to add to this the $ 300 billion invested in foreign assets that are currently frozen — that’s the damage.

Therefore, when we talk about nationalizing the Central Bank, we are not talking about formally nationalizing it (it is already nationalized), but about bringing it into a policy that is consistent with national interests. Now his policy is contrary to the national interests. And there is no conspiracy theory here. We can see in whose interests such a policy is being implemented. The central bank raised the interest rate to 20 percent, giving bankers a dominant position in the economy. Having the most expensive and scarce resource, money, they determine which enterprise will survive, and which enterprise will die, go bankrupt, and so on. Rising interest rates make the entire Russian economy a hostage to a handful of bankers. This is the first one. Second, the Central Bank’s management allowed another collapse of the ruble exchange rate and closed the currency exchange. As a result, today banks have become the main currency speculators: they buy foreign currency for about 90 rubles per dollar, and sell it for 125 rubles. The difference settles for them as a super-profit.

— But why does the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, in your opinion, pursue a policy in the interests of the enemy?

— As I said, he does this on the recommendation of the International Monetary Fund. But his interests are also shared by our large banks, which objectively like this policy, as well as our currency and financial structures, which are also involved in manipulating the ruble exchange rate. Therefore, an influential lobby is formed around this policy, which supports this policy based on its private interests. These interests run counter to the interests of the country, they are directly opposite to them. And if you look at what the Central Bank is doing today, I have no doubt that it is continuing its policy of pandering to the enemy. It undermines macroeconomic stability by allowing international speculators to manipulate the ruble exchange rate and does not control the currency position of banks that have become currency speculators, although the Central Bank could easily withdraw banks from the foreign exchange market by fixing their currency position, prohibiting banks from buying currency. And secondly, by raising the interest rate, the Central Bank actually killed investments in the development of the Russian economy, which are very much needed right now, primarily for import substitution and for restoring economic sovereignty, while our leadership says that we should not be afraid of sanctions, because they create conditions for economic growth, for import substitution…

Look, about a third of the EU’s imports have left our market. These are huge opportunities for import substitution. If we assume that our enterprises will start developing these markets, then we will develop at a rate of 15 percent per year. But this requires loans. Import substitution cannot occur without credits. We need loans to set up production facilities, develop new technologies, and load idle production facilities. We have long developed such a strategy of advanced development at the Academy of Sciences, and we are promoting it. But, unfortunately, the Central Bank’s crazy policy, from our point of view, has quite specific influential structures that like it and they support it. That is why this policy is so stable.

“You can stabilize the ruble in three days”

– Sergey Yuryevich, if this is not a conspiracy theory, then why does the Central Bank continue to pursue such a policy? Only based on the interests of lobbyists?

– To whom the war, and to whom the mother is native. Commercial banks make a 40% profit on currency speculation. Bought for 90 rubles per dollar-sold for 125. 35 rubles — nothing easy! As a result, we are experiencing inflation, imports are becoming more expensive, and everyone sees this crazy exchange rate. Prices for all goods are rising, but banks are making super-profits.

Once again, a very influential lobby has formed around this policy, and for many people to admit the failure of such a strategy means, in fact, admitting their incompetence and even sabotage. And speculators with large banks are quite influential structures in our country that influence decision-making.

— Well, what if the first person does not get this information, it is blocked?

— When I was an adviser, I brought this information to you.

— Did they listen to you?

— Yes, there were discussions, discussed at the economic council, then it was closed so as not to annoy the officials. I don’t want to comment on it now. We see today that if we do not change monetary policy, it will be impossible for us to survive in this hybrid war. We need to counter economic sanctions now with a serious increase in domestic production. There are production facilities for this, people, raw materials, brains — too, but there is no money. Right now, the simplest thing that the state can give people is money.

— What’s your feeling?” Is there any understanding at the top?

— I think that you need to address this question directly to them.

— But many people call you almost the No. 1 person in the current situation — a public figure who can save Russia.

– Thank you for this review. I try my best.

— I just want to understand: if there was no prophet in our Homeland before, is there one now? Is this a temporary situation with the Central Bank?

— It is so prolonged, I would say, for 30 years. If we carried out a competent monetary policy in accordance with the requirements of the new world economic order, the integrated system, we would develop like China — by 10 percent a year. There were such opportunities. And we have been practically marking time for these 30 years. So it’s not even a question of whether they are listening or not, you just need to look objectively and see how China and India are developing and how we are developing. What prevented us from developing in the same way?

Moreover, the management system of the new world economic order, which I describe in my books, is universal. It worked successfully in Japan until the Americans disrupted Japanese economic growth. And even in Ethiopia, where they also began to form this management model (and achieved growth several times). In other words, this universal management model of the modern economy, focused on the growth of public welfare through investment in a new technological order, needs to be implemented. At the same time, of course, the targeted use of money implies high responsibility. Throwing money from a helicopter is not our thing.

“Not our way.

— We are talking about a targeted credit issue based on modern digital tools with a strict control system focused on investment in new technologies. We know how to do this, how to minimize the human factor by introducing digital technologies, including the digital ruble. But this is not profitable for those who still adhere to the previous strategies. They made a cash cow out of Russia, and they sucked $ 100 billion out of it to offshore companies. But now the Americans have closed offshorization for us. There is a real chance, we must use it.

— What would you advise people to do? Now the main query in Internet search engines is where to invest money in the era of turbulence. What should people do?

— First of all, do not make any sudden movements, I would say so. In any case, what exactly is not necessary — to run for dollars or euros. Because we don’t know what will happen to these currencies next. If our system is disconnected from the western one, then our banks cannot effectively invest dollars and euros anywhere, except in currency speculation. But I hope that our authorities will still curb the foreign exchange market.

In this context, what the banks did, raising the interest rate on foreign currency deposits sharply, turned out to be a clear overkill, which spurred panic. I think the ruble will stabilize if, of course, speculators are removed from the foreign exchange market and the currency is sold only to importers and people who transfer money abroad within reasonable limits to relatives or are going on a business trip according to the regulations. Otherwise, block the channels of currency leakage. Then the currency inflow will return to normal.

You know, we have a very positive trade balance. Mandatory sale of 80% of foreign currency earnings has been introduced. If you sell this revenue on the stock exchange, the volume of currency will be more than importers need. We will have a surplus of currency. This means that the ruble exchange rate will strengthen, that is, it will return to the old indicators-80 or even 70 rubles per dollar. But until the Central Bank removes speculators from the market and allows commercial banks to become such, the ruble exchange rate will not stabilize. So, unfortunately, the monetary authorities have not yet come to their senses and have not begun to implement the correct policy of macroeconomic stabilization, and I can’t give any advice other than how to invest in gold if possible (especially since the government has removed VAT from gold). There are no other real assets and safe havens.

“So you want to buy gold?”

– Buy basic necessities. Or invest in real estate, in something reliable. As for investing in dollars and euros… They have already ceased to be a currency for us. This is no longer a currency, but some obligations of other countries that may or may not be fulfilled. So we need to look for other opportunities. But I would like to emphasize once again that with the right policy, we can very quickly stabilize the ruble and even restore its purchasing power.

— And in what perspective, after all?

— It can be done tomorrow, you know? The Primakov and Gerashchenko governments did it in one week.

— Can the government do that?”

“Of course it can. To do this, in general, you need to make two decisions: fix the currency position of commercial banks and introduce currency sale standards for non-trading operations, and keep the freely convertible foreign exchange market only for trading operations. That’s all. You can write this in 15 minutes and announce it within a day, or enter it within three days, and the ruble will stabilize.

The Lesson of Covid: When People Are Anxious, Isolated and Hopeless, They’re Less Ready To Think Critically

January 05th, 2022

By Jonathan Cook

Source

The corporate media is not our friend. Its coverage of the pandemic is not there to promote the public good. It is there to feed our anxieties, keep us coming back for more, and monetize that distress. The only cure for this sickness? A lot more critical thinking.

When I criticize meddling in Syria by Britain and America, or their backing of groups there that elsewhere are considered terrorists, it does not follow that I am, therefore, a cheerleader for the dictatorship of Bashar Assad or that I think that Syrians should be denied a better political system. Similarly, when I criticize Joe Biden or the Democratic party, it does not necessarily follow that I think Donald Trump would have made a better president.

A major goal of critical thinking is to stand outside tribal debates, where people are heavily invested in particular outcomes, and examine the ways debates have been framed. This is important because one of the main ways power expresses itself in our societies is through the construction of official narratives – usually through the billionaire-owned media – and the control and shaping of public debate.You are being manipulated – propagandized – even before you engage with a topic if you look only at the substance of a debate and not at other issues: such as its timing, why the debate is taking place or why it has been allowed, what is not being mentioned or has been obscured, what is being emphasized, and what is being treated as dangerous or abhorrent.

If you want to be treated like a grown-up, an active and informed participant in your society rather than a blank sheet on which powerful interests are writing their own self-serving narratives, you need to be doing as much critical thinking as possible – and especially on the most important topics of the day.

Learning curve

The opportunity to become more informed and insightful about how debates are being framed, rather than what they are ostensibly about, has never been greater. Over the past decade, social media, even if the window it offered is rapidly shrinking, has allowed large numbers of us to discover for the first time those writers who, through their deeper familiarity with a specific topic and their consequent greater resistance to propaganda, can help us think more critically about all kinds of issues – Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Israel-Palestine, the list is endless.

This has been a steep learning curve for most of us. It has been especially useful in helping us to challenge narratives that vilify “official enemies” of the west or that veil corporate power – which has effectively usurped what was once the more visible and, therefore, accountable political power of western states. In the new, more critical climate, the role of the war industries – bequeathed to us by western colonialism – has become especially visible.

But what has been most disheartening about the past two years of Covid is the rapid reversal of the gains made in critical thinking. Perhaps this should not entirely surprise us. When people are anxious for themselves or their loved ones, when they feel isolated and hopeless, when “normal” has broken down, they are likely to be less ready to think critically.

The battering we have all felt during Covid mirrors the emotional, and psychological assault critical thinking can engender. Thinking critically increases anxiety by uncomfortably exposing us to the often artificial character of official reality. It can leave us feeling isolated and less hopeful, especially when friends and family expect us to be as deeply invested in the substance – the shadow play – of official, tribal debates as they are. And it undermines our sense of what “normal” is by revealing that it is often what is useful to power elites rather than what is beneficial to the public good.

Emotional resilience

There are reasons why people are drawn to critical thinking. Often because they have been exposed in detail to one particular issue that has opened their eyes to wider narrative manipulations on other issues. Because they have the tools and incentives – the education and access to information – to explore some issues more fully. And, perhaps most importantly, because they have the emotional and psychological resilience to cope with stripping away the veneer of official narratives to see the bleaker reality beneath and to grasp the fearsome obstacles to liberating ourselves from the corrupt elites that rule over us and are pushing us towards ecocidal oblivion.

The anxieties produced by critical thinking, the sense of isolation, and the collapse of “normal” is in one sense chosen. They are self-inflicted. We choose to do critical thinking because we feel capable of coping with what it brings to light. But Covid is different. Our exposure to Covid, unlike critical thinking, has been entirely outside our control. And worse, it has deepened our emotional and psychological insecurities. To do critical thinking in a time of Covid – and most especially about Covid – is to add a big extra layer of anxiety, isolation, and hopelessness.

Covid has highlighted the difficulties of being insecure and vulnerable, thereby underscoring why critical thinking, even in good times, is so difficult. When we are anxious and isolated, we want quick, reassuring solutions, and we want someone to blame. We want authority figures to trust and act in our name.

Complex thinking

It is not hard to understand why the magic bullet of vaccines – to the exclusion of all else – has been so fervently grasped during the pandemic. Exclusive reliance on vaccines has been a great way for our corrupt, incompetent governments to show they know what they are doing. The vaccines have been an ideal way for corrupt medical-industrial corporations – including the biggest offender, Pfizer – to launder their images and make us all feel indebted to them after so many earlier scandals like Oxycontin. And, of course, the vaccines have been a comfort blanket to us, the public, promising to bring ZeroCovid (false), to provide long-term immunity (false), and to end transmission (false).

And as an added bonus, vaccines have allowed both our corrupt leaders to shift the blame away from themselves for their other failed public health policies and our corrupt “health” corporations to shift attention away from their profiteering by encouraging the vaccinated majority to scapegoat an unvaccinated minority. Divide and rule par excellence.

To state all this is not to be against the vaccines or believe the virus should rip through the population, killing the vulnerable, any more than criticizing the US war crime of bombing Syria signifies enthusiastic support for Assad. It is only to recognize that political realities are complex, and our thinking needs to be complex too.

Herd immunity

These ruminations were prompted by a post on social media I made the other day referring to the decision of the Guardian – nearly two years into the pandemic – to publish criticisms by an “eminent” epidemiologist, Prof Mark Woolhouse, of the British government’s early lockdown policies. Until now, any questioning of the lockdowns has been one of the great unmentionables of the pandemic outside of right-wing circles.

Let us note another prominent example: the use of the term “herd immunity,” which was until very recently exactly what public health officials aimed for as a means to end contagion. It signified the moment when enough people had acquired immunity, either through being infected or vaccinated, for community transmission to stop occurring. But because the goal during Covid is not communal immunity but universal vaccination, the term “herd immunity” has now been attributed to a sinister political agenda. It is presented as some kind of right-wing plot to let vulnerable people die.

This is not accidental. It is an entirely manufactured, if widely accepted, narrative. Recovery from infection – something now true for many people – is no longer treated by political or medical authorities as conferring immunity. For example, in the UK, those who have recovered from Covid, even recently, are not exempted, as the vaccinated are, from self-isolation if they have been in close contact with someone infected with Covid. Also, of course, those recovered from Covid do not qualify for a vaccine passport. After all, it is not named an immunity passport. It is a vaccine passport.

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has at least been open about the “reasoning” behind this kind of discrimination. “In a democracy,” he says, apparently unironically, “the worst enemies are lies and stupidity. We are putting pressure on the unvaccinated by limiting, as much as possible, their access to activities in social life. … For the non-vaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And we will continue to do this, to the end. This is the strategy.”

Notice that the lies and stupidity here emanate from Macron: he is not only irresponsibly stoking dangerous divisions within French society, he has also failed to understand that the key distinctions from a public health perspective are between those with immunity to Covid and those without it and those who are vulnerable to hospitalization and those who are not. These are the most meaningful markers of how to treat the pandemic. The obsession with vaccination only serves a divide and rule agenda and bolsters pandemic profiteering.

Crushing hesitancy

The paradox is that these narratives dominate even as the evidence mounts that the vaccines offer very short-term immunity and that, ultimately, as Omicron appears to be underscoring, many people are likely to gain longer-term immunity through Covid infection, even those who have been vaccinated. But the goal of public “debate” on this topic has not been transparency, logic, or informed consent. Instead, it has been the crushing of any possible “vaccine hesitancy.”

I have repeatedly tried to highlight the lack of critical thinking around the exclusive focus on vaccines rather than immune health, the decision to vaccinate children in the face of strong, if largely downplayed, opposition from experts, and the divisive issue of vaccine mandates. But I have had little to say directly about lockdowns, which have tended to look to me chiefly like desperate stop-gap measures to cover up the failings of our underfunded, cannibalized, and increasingly privatized health services (a more pressing concern). I am also inclined to believe that the balance of benefits from lockdowns, or whether they work, is difficult to weigh without some level of expertise. That is one reason why I have been arguing throughout the pandemic that experts need to be allowed more open, robust, and honest public debate.

It is also why I offered a short comment on Prof Woolhouse’s criticisms, published in the Guardian this week, of national lockdown policies. This evoked a predictably harsh backlash from many followers. They saw it as further proof that the “Covid denialists have captured me,” and I am now little better than a pandemic conspiracy theorist.

Framing the debate

That is strange in itself. Prof Woolhouse is a mainstream, reportedly “eminent” epidemiologist. His eminence is such that it also apparently qualifies him to be quoted extensively and uncritically in the Guardian. The followers I antagonize every time I write about the pandemic appear to treat the Guardian as their Covid Bible, as do most liberals. And they regularly castigate me for referring to the kind of experts the Guardian refuses to cite. So how does my retweeting of a Guardian story that uncritically reports on anti-lockdown comments from a respectable, mainstream epidemiologist incur so much wrath – and seemingly directed only against me?

The answer presumably lies in the short appended comment in my retweet, which requires that one disengage from the seemingly substantive debate – lockdowns, good or bad? That conversation is certainly interesting to me, especially if it is an honest one. But the contextual issues around that debate, the ones that require critical thinking, are even more important because they are the best way to evaluate whether an honest debate is actually being fostered.

My comment, intentionally ambiguous, implicitly requires readers to examine wider issues about the Guardian article: the timing of its publication, why a debate about lockdowns has not previously been encouraged in the Guardian but apparently is now possible, how the debate is being framed by Woolhouse and the Guardian, and how we, the readers, may be being manipulated by that framing.

Real, live conspiracy

Interestingly, I was not alone in being struck by how strange the preferred framing was. A second epidemiologist, Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician at Harvard who serves on a scientific committee to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), saw problems with the article too. Unfortunately, however, Prof Kulldorff appears not to qualify as “eminent” enough for the Guardian to quote him uncritically. That is because he was one of three highly respected academics who brought ignominy down on their heads in October 2020 by authoring the Great Barrington Declaration.

Like Woolhouse, the Declaration offered an alternative to blanket national lockdowns – the official response to rising hospitalizations – but did so when those lockdowns were being aggressively pursued, and no other options were being considered. The Guardian was among those that pilloried the Declaration and its authors, presenting it as an irresponsible right-wing policy and a recipe for Covid to tear through the population, laying waste to significant sections of the population.

My purpose here is not to defend the Great Barrington Declaration. I don’t feel qualified enough to express a concrete, public view one way or another on its merits. And part of the reason for that hesitancy is that any meaningful conversation at the time among experts was ruthlessly suppressed. The costs of lockdowns were largely unmentionable in official circles and the “liberal” media. It was instantly stigmatized as the policy preference of the “deplorable” right.

This was not accidental. We now know it was a real, live conspiracy. Leaked emails show that Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president, and his minions used their reliable contacts in prominent liberal media to smear the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet – is it underway?” a senior official wrote to Fauci. The plan was character assassination, pure and simple—nothing to do with science. And “liberal” media happily and quickly took up that task.

The Guardian, of course, went right along with those smears. This is why Prof Kulldorff has every right to treat with disdain both the Guardian’s decision to now publish Prof Woolhouse’s criticisms – so very belatedly – of lockdown policy and Prof Woolhouse’s public distancing of himself from the now-radioactive Great Barrington Declaration even though his published comments closely echo the policies proposed in the Declaration. As Prof Kulldorff observes:

Hilarious logical somersault. In the Guardian, Mark Woolhouse argues that [the] UK should have used focused protection as defined in the Great Barrington Declaration, while criticizing the Great Barrington Declaration due to its mischaraterization by the Guardian.”

Reputational damage 

If we put on our critical thinking hats for a moment, we can deduce a plausible reason for that mischaracterization.

Like the rest of the “liberal” media, the Guardian has been fervently pro-lockdown and an avowed opponent of any meaningful discussion of the Great Barrington Declaration since its publication more than a year ago. Moreover, it has characterized any criticism of lockdowns as an extreme right-wing position. But the paper now wishes to open up a space for a more critical discussion of the merits of lockdown at a time when rampant but milder Omicron threatens to shut down not only the economy but distribution chains and health services.

Demands for lockdowns are returning – premised on the earlier arguments for them – but the formerly obscured costs are much more difficult to ignore now. Even lockdown cheerleaders like the Guardian finally understand some of what was clear 15 months ago to experts like Prof Kulldorff and his fellow authors.

What the Guardian appears to be doing is smuggling the Great Barrington Declaration’s arguments back into the mainstream but trying to do it in a way that won’t damage its credibility and look like an about-face. It is being entirely deceitful. And the vehicle for achieving this end is a fellow critic of lockdowns, Prof Woolhouse, who is not tainted goods like Prof Kulldorff, even though their views appear to overlap considerably. Criticism of lockdowns is being rehabilitated via Prof Woolhouse, even as Prof Kulldorff remains an outcast, a deplorable.

In other words, this is not about any evolution in scientific thinking. It is about the Guardian avoiding reputational damage – and doing so at the cost of continuing to damage Prof Kulldorff’s reputation. Prof Kulldorff and his fellow authors were scapegoated when their expert advice was considered politically inconvenient, while Prof Woolhouse is being celebrated because similar expert advice is now convenient.

This is how much of our public discourse operates. The good guys control the narrative so that they can ensure they continue to look good, while the bad guys are tarred and feathered, even if they are proven right. The only way to really make sense of what is going on is to disengage from this kind of political tribalism, examine contexts, avoid being so invested in outcomes, and work hard to gain more perspective on the anxiety and fear each of us feels.

The corporate media is not our friend. Its coverage of the pandemic is not there to promote the public good. It is there to feed our anxieties, keep us coming back for more, and monetize that distress. The only cure for this sickness? A lot more critical thinking.

US Embassy in Beirut Donates Poisonous Vaccine to Lebanese People: Report

December 20, 2021

US ambassador to Beirut, Dorothy Shea, has been donating 360,000 shots of Johnson & Johnson vaccine which was castigated by the national public health agency of the United States as a cause of blood clots.

While CDC (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has been advising the Americans to receive Pfizer and AstraZeneca anti-coronavius vaccines, the US ambassador to Beirut, Dorothy Shea, has been donating 360,000 shots of Johnson & Johnson vaccine which was castigated by the national public health agency of the United States as a cause of blood clots.

What is remarkable in this story is that the US did not offer Lebanon any help in its fight against the coronavirus along with the advent of the pandemic when the Lebanese were in need of any related aid, especially in the field of securing the vaccine shots.

However, Lebanon is nowadays capable of securing the needed anti-coronavius vaccines in cooperation with the World Health Organization.

Moreover, the US administration has imposed a strict economic siege which led Lebanon to an unprecedented inflation crisis, pushing most the Lebanese down under the verge of poverty.

Besieging Lebanon economically and offering the Lebanese an anti-coronavirus vaccine that is rejected in Washington is a mere rudeness condemned by the Lebanese social media users via the hashtag, #US_Deadly_Vaccine.

Source: Al-Manar English Website

Now or Never: The Great ‘Transition’ Must Be Imposed

1 DECEMBER, 2021

By Alastair Crooke

A new wave of restrictions, more lockdowns, and – eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in prospect.

Were you following the news this last week? Vaccine mandates are everywhere: one country, after another, is doubling-down, to try to force, or legally compel, full population vaccination. The mandates are coming because of the massive uptick in Covid – most of all in the places where the experimental mRNA gene therapies were deployed en masse. And (no coincidence), this ‘marker’ has come just as U.S. Covid deaths in 2021 have surpassed those of 2020. This has happened, despite the fact that last year, no Americans were vaccinated (and this year 59% are vaccinated). Clearly no panacea, this mRNA ‘surge’.

Of course, the Pharma-Establishment know that the vaccines are no panacea. There are ‘higher interests’ at play here. It is driven rather by fear that the window for implementing its series of ‘transitions’ in the U.S. and Europe is closing. Biden still struggles to move his ‘Go-Big’ social spending plan and green agenda transition through Congress by the midterm election in a year’s time. And the inflation spike may well sink Biden’s Build Back Better agenda (BBB) altogether.

Time is short. The midterm elections are but 12 months away, after which the legislative window shuts. The Green ‘transition’ is stuck too (by concerns that moving too fast to renewables is putting power grids at risk and elevating heating costs unduly), and the Pharma establishment will be aware that a new B.1.1.529 variant has made a big jump in evolution with 32 mutations to its spike protein. This makes it “clearly very different” from previous variants, which may drive further waves of infection evading ‘vaccine defences’.

Translation: a new wave of restrictions, more lockdowns, and – eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in prospect. And what of inflation then, we might ask.

It’s a race for the U.S. and Europe, where the pandemic is back in full force across Europe, to push through their re-set agendas, before variants seize up matters with hospitals crowded with the vaccinated and non-vaccinated; with riots in the streets, and mask mandates at Christmas markets (that’s if they open at all). A big reversal was foreshadowed by this week’s news: vaccine mandates and lockdowns, even in highly vaccinated areas, are returning. And people don’t like it.

The window for the Re-Set may be fast closing. One observer, noting all the frenetic Élite activity, has asked ‘have we finally reached peak Davos?’. Is the turn to authoritarianism in Europe a sign of desperation as fears grow that the various ‘transitions’ planned under the ‘re-set’ umbrella (financial, climate, vaccine and managerial expert technocracy) may never be implemented?

Cut short rather, as spending plans are hobbled by accelerating inflation; as the climate transition fails to find traction amongst poorer states (and at home, too); as technocracy is increasingly discredited by adverse pandemic outcomes; and Modern Monetary Theory hits a wall, because – well, inflation again.

Are you paying attention yet? The great ‘transition’ is conceived as a hugely expensive shift towards renewables, and to a new digitalised, roboticised corporatism. It requires Big (inflationary) funding to be voted through, and a huge parallel (inflationary) expenditure on social support to be approved by Congress as well. The social provision is required to mollify all those who subsequently will find themselves without jobs, because of the climate ‘transition’ and the shift to a digitalised corporate sphere. But – unexpectedly for some ‘experts’ – inflation has struck – the highest statistics in 30 years.

There are powerful oligarchic interests behind the Re-Set. They do not want to see it go down, nor see the West eclipsed by its ‘competitors’. So it seems that rather than back off, they will go full throttle and try to impose compliance on their electorates: tolerate no dissidence.

A 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” by then dissident and future Czech President Vaclav Havel begins mockingly that, “A SPECTRE is haunting Eastern Europe: the spectre of what in the West is called ‘dissent’”. “This spectre has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting.” Well, today, as Michael Every of Rabobank notes, “the West has polarisation, mass protests, riots, talk of obligatory vaccinations in Europe, and Yanis Varoufakis arguing capitalism is already dead; and that a techno-feudalism looms”. Now, prompting even greater urgency, are the looming U.S. midterms. Trump’s return (even if confined just to Congress), would cut the legs from under BBB, and ice-up Brussels too.

It was however, precisely this tech revolution, to which Varoufakis calls attention, that both re-defined the Democrat constituency, and turned tech oligarchs into billionaires. Through algorithmically creating a magnetism of like-minded content, cascaded out to its customers, it has both smothered intellectual curiosity, and created the ‘un-informed party’, which is the today’s Managerial Class – the party of the credentialed meritocracy; the party, above all, smugly seeing themselves as the coming era’s ‘winners’ – unwilling to risk a look behind the curtain; to put their ‘safe space’ to the test.

Perversely, this cadre of professionally-corralled academics, analysts, and central bankers, all insist that they completely believe in their memes: That their techno-approach is both effective, and of benefit to humanity – oblivious to the dissenting views, swirling around them, down in the interstices of the internet.

The main function then of such memes today, whether issued by the Pharma Vaccine ‘Command’; the MMT ‘transition’ Command; the energy ‘transition’ Command; or the global managerial technocracy ‘transition’, is to draw a ‘Maginot line’ – a defensive ideological boundary, a “Great Narrative” as it were – between ‘the truth’ as defined by the ruling classes, and with that of any other ‘truth’ that contradicts their narrative. That is to say, it is about compliance.

It was well understood that all these transitions would overturn long-standing human ways of life, that are ancient and deeply rooted and trigger dissidence – which is why new forms of social ‘discipline’ would be required. (Incidentally, the EU leadership already refer to their their official mandates as ‘Commands’). Such disciplines are now being trialled in Europe – with the vaccine mandates (even though scientists are telling them that vaccines cannot be the silver bullet for which they yearn). As one high ‘lodge’ member, favouring a form of global governance notes, to make people accept such reforms, you must frighten them.

Yes, the collective of ‘transitions’ must have their ‘Big, overarching Narrative’ – however hollow, it rings (i.e. the struggle to defend democracy against authoritarianism). But it is the nature of today’s cultural-meme war that ultimately its content becomes little more than a rhetorical shell, lacking all sincerity at its core.

It serves principally, as decoration to a ‘higher order’ project: The preservation of global ‘rules of the road’, framed to reflect U.S. and allied interests, as the base from which the clutch of ‘transitions’ can be raised up into a globally managed order which preserves the Élite’s influence and command of major assets.

This politics of crafted, credentialised meme-politics is here to stay, and now is ‘everywhere’. It has long crossed the partisan divide. The wider point here – is that the mechanics of meme-mobilisation is being projected, not just in the western ‘home’ (at a micro-level), but abroad, into American ‘foreign policy’ too (i.e. at the macro-level).

And, just as in the domestic arena, where the notion of politics by suasion is lost (with vaccine mandates enforced by water-cannon, and riot police), so too, the notion of foreign policy managed through argument, or diplomacy, has been lost too.

Western foreign policy becomes less about geo-strategy, but rather is primordially focussed on the three ‘big iconic issues’ – China, Russia and Iran – that can be given an emotional ‘charge’ in order to profitably mobilise certain identified ‘constituencies’ in the U.S. domestic cultural war. All the various U.S. political strands play this game.

The aim is to ‘nudge’ domestic American psyches (and those of their allies) into mobilisation on some issue (such as more protectionism for business against Chinese competition), or alternatively, imagined darkly, in order to de-legitimise an opposition, or to justify failures. These mobilisations are geared to gaining relative domestic partisan advantage, rather than having strategic purpose.

When this credentialled meme-war took hold in the U.S., millions of people were already living a reality in which facts no longer mattered at all; where things that never happened officially, happened. And other things that obviously happened never happened: not officially, that is. Or, were “far-right extremist conspiracy theories,” “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever, despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.

Russia and China therefore face a reality in which European and U.S. élites are heading in the opposite direction to epistemological purity and well-founded argument. That is to suggest, the new ‘normal’ is about generating a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive ‘realities’, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … and which are intended to bemuse adversaries – and nudge them off-balance.

This is a highly risky game, for it forces a resistance stance on those targeted states – whether they seek it, or not. It underlines that politics is no more about considered strategy: It is about being willing for the U.S. to lose strategically (even militarily), in order to win politically. Which is to say gaining an ephemeral win of having prompted an favourable unconscious psychic response amongst American voters.

Russia, China, Iran are but ‘images’ prized mainly for their potential for being loaded with ‘nudge’ emotional-charge in this western cultural war, (of which these states are no part). The result is that these states become antagonists to the American presumption to define a global ‘rules of the road’ to which all must adhere.

These countries understand exactly the point of these value and rights-loaded ‘rules’. It is to force compliance on these states to acquiesce to the ‘transitions, or, to suffer isolation, boycott and sanction – in a similar way to the choices being forced on those in the West not wishing to vaccinate (i.e. no jab; no job).

This approach reflects an attempt by Team Biden to have it ‘both ways’ with these three ‘Iconic States’: To welcome compliance on ‘transition issues’, but to be adversarial over any dissidence to mounting a rules framework that can raise the ‘transitions’ from the national, to the supra-national plane.

But do the U.S. practitioners of meme-politics, absorb and comprehend that the stance by Russia-China – in riposte – is not some same-ilk counter-mobilisation done to ‘make a point’? That their vision does stand at variance with ‘the rules’? Do they see that their ‘red lines’ may indeed be ‘red lines’ literally? Is the West now so meme-addicted, it cannot any longer recognise real national interests?

This is key: When the West speaks, it is forever looking over its shoulder, at the domestic, and wider psychic impact when it is ‘making a point’ (such as practicing attacks by nuclear-capable bombers as close to Russia’s borders as they dare). And that when Russia and China say, ‘This is our Red Line’, it is no meme – they really mean it.

Mankind Must Put An End To War Before War Puts An End To Mankind

23 NOVEMBER 2021

Sonja van den Ende

Source

These are the historic words from John F. Kennedy which he spoke at the United Nations (UN) in 1961, two years before he was murdered on 22 November 1963. The murder was, as we know by now, most likely an inside job done by the CIA. Some high ranking generals and presumably his predecessor Lynden B. Johnson were also involved, but that’s another story.

We are now as a civilization on the crossroads of extinction like back in 1961, or we can make a better future for our children. It all depends which road we are going to walk. Unfortunatly, the so-called leaders of the richest countries choose the path of implementing the agenda of the deep-state, the real government, the one-world government, of President George Bush Sr., mentioned so many times  in his  speeches, his son President George Bush Jr,. was too dumb to speak about it or for that matter spoke noting about anything, he was a real warmonger and puppet. The deep-state is consisting of the large corporations, big Tech, Gun lobby, Pharma lobby, secret services around the world and most important the large institutions, like the WHO, IAEA, UN and the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is by far the most important one these days, it seems all the developed countries (rich) are under the umbrella of the WEF, from the EU to Russia  and China.

I don’t think I have to explain what the goals and agenda from the deep-state is, by now everybody is nearly awake, from north to south and east to west. Without the consent of the majority of the people on planet earth they go ahead with their treacherous plans, by locking up people, bullying them on demonstrations, even shooting them these days and conducting experiments with non-safe or poorly tested medicine like the C-19 jabs. They are not only conducting a medical experiment, but also a social experiment, by implementing a social credit system,  such a bad system, that the majority of the people are treated like cattle (as seen in the EU and Australia) , without having freedom of expression, without having anything to say and without having any freedom at all. First they used the fake pandemic and then they will use the climate to make life hell for most people (not the privileged of course, it’s their experiment), with all restrictions, they feel they are the masters of the universe, but after all they are still human, not transhuman, but maybe it’s better they will become transhuman, so that we the real inhabitants of mother earth can start a new civilization.

President John F. Kennedy was in my opinion, the last president of the “free” Western world, after that the Western world deteriorated and got involved in all sorts of “dirty” wars, from Vietnam to Syria. The numerous coup d’etats and murder of millions of people around the globe is horrendous, if you think about it. They still continue to do so even though they deny it, the robbery is  continuing also,  for their new project the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI),  which involves electrical cars . Lithium is needed for these cars and stolen from Congo and these days it’s clear the European Union (EU) will steal lithium from Serbia, or at least they try to, but don’t mess with the Serbian people, they have bad experiences with NATO and the EU, because of the bombing of former Yugoslavia in 1999. President Kennedy warned the US and then the “free” Western world about the escalation and the use of nuclear weapons against the then dispute with Cuba and indirectly Russia. We have two problems: the extinction with nuclear weapons and from AI.

President Kennedy delivered his famous speech at the United Nations in 1961

The problem is not the death of one man; the problem is the life of this organization (UN). It will either grow to meet the challenges of our age, or it will be gone with the wind, without influence, without force, without respect. Were we to let it die, to enfeeble its vigor, to cripple its powers, we would condemn our future.

For in the development of this organization rests the only true alternative to war — and war appeals no longer as a rational alternative. Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer concern the Great Powers alone. For a nuclear disaster, spread by winds and water and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war — or war will put an end to mankind, his speech .”

Such wise words, not listened to by the elites and politicians, who continued their wars and the UN, like the EU and the IAEA, is nothing more than a playground for the privileged, politicians, diplomats and some mad scientists , they play their dirty games and intrigues without worrying, as I experienced, about people like you and me!

Thank God , he JFK, saved the world from a nuclear disaster in 1961, but who is now going to save us from bad politicians, crazy diplomats, mad scientists and the deep state? Who is going to stop  this insanity? AI will leave one billion people unemployed and on the brink of starvation. AI will be used for new “space” wars, wars with robots, drones and God knows what else. When AI will live it’s own life, of which the mad scientist of big Tech companies, already warned,  it can take over and that will be the extinction of mankind. Why  do people, politicians and most of all scientists let this happen? They know this can be the end of human life. Like back then in 1961, it was the threat of a nuclear war, throughout the Cold war it was a threat. Now we have two threats a nuclear and a war conducted through AI, the institutions like the UN or IAEA did and will do nothing to prevent it and to repeat the words of JFK “For in the development of this organization rests the only true alternative to war — and war appeals no longer as a rational alternative”. But these days, war appeals to politicians, to scientists who develop dangerous stuff for mankind. War appeals  and foremost power, power to make and break the entire world population. The next weeks and months are crucial for mankind, a world revolution has already started. The nephew of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has taken over the task of his uncle to expose the deep-state and try to save the world from extinction even, like he said “I have  to die for it, I will die with my boots on the ground”. He is the icon of the new world revolution, the Kennedy’s always are at the forefront for peace.

Yellow Vests ‘Season 2’ begins – are Season 1’s always better?

October 21, 2021

Yellow Vests ‘Season 2’ begins – are Season 1’s always better?

By Ramin Mazaheri posted with permission and cross-posted with PressTV

Last weekend, after more than one and half years away, the Yellow Vests hit the streets again for what they are calling “Season 2”.

You’re going to laugh and say, “But Season 2 of television programs are always worse!” Sure, for TV shows which turn out to be lousy. I find it hard to imagine that the Yellow Vests are going to sour into something unwatchable – in 2019 it was global can’t-miss politics.

The Yellow Vests poised to restart marching in Paris: The Bastille monument is in the background and a “Stop the genocide of the Gauls” sign is at the head of the demonstration. Photo Credit: Ramin Mazaheri

French President Emmanuel Macron may appreciate the coronavirus because it provided the only time in his term, other than his first several months when the streets weren’t swarming with protesters. There are self-centered Americans who claim that the corona hysteria was amplified in the West to push Donald Trump into losing re-election – some egotistical French say the hysteria was manipulated to get the Yellow Vests off the streets. Neither egos are totally out of control here, if you ask me.

Most everyone in France I talked with about the Vesters had the same response about Season 2: “The Yellow Vests still exist?” That’s fair – it has been a while.

I hate sounding like the perpetually self-referential Chris Cuomo of CNN, but no journalist in French or English attended more Yellow Vest demonstrations than I did… and even I had to catch up on what happened in the different epoch of 2019!

All I can say after doing so is – wow… France’s state-sponsored repression in 2019 boggles the mind and stuns the pen. It should not be forgotten, and someone needs to get it right.

Which is why at the end of 2019 I thought it was necessary journalism to compile this, A News Chronology of France in 2019: The Year of Yellow Vest Rebellion. I recommend it to anyone who wants to know exactly what happened in 2019, in what order, how, and why. It is 11,000 words but reviewing how the Yellow Vest phenomenon arose and exploded, and the depths to which France descended to repress it, make for astounding reading even if Chris Cuomo would have penned it.

To condense it all into two lines from the introduction: “The metronomic sadism of certain, massive state violence was not at all a normal state of affairs, and yet Parisians were expending all their psychic energy to convince themselves that everything was indeed ‘normal’. … The question that France cannot quite answer is: are they still the coloniser, or are they now colonised?

Disgusting Eric Zemmour, who has risen to third in the April 2022 presidential polls, will say that France is the colonised – by Muslims. Nonsense: somehow the lowest socioeconomic class is the one pulling the strings which gutted France’s middle class? Yet he still gets all the airtime in the world. The Yellow Vests, however, get it right – France has been colonised by the European Union, which is indeed a neo-imperialist project that is openly and repeatedly anti-democratic. For this Vesters get no airtime.

But they do get plenty of tear gas (a more powerful type began getting used in March 2019), and rubber bullets (or “flash balls” shot from “defense ball launchers” per the MSM), from a new police chief who was hired because the Prime Minister said that “Inappropriate orders were given to reduce the use of LBD (rubber bullets)” by the previous police chief, while protesters were forbidden from covering their face (are corona masks ok now?).

You really can’t make this stuff up: remember the “anti-Yellow Vest law”, the lockdowns, the deployment of the army, the reactionary and short-lived “Red Scarves”, the fake turnout numbers, the fact that Macron didn’t even utter the words “Yellow Vests” until April 25, the banning of rural demonstrations, the tear-gassed tourists on Bastille Day, Lobstergate, etc.

So, yes, Mr. and Mrs. Jean Q. Frenchy stopped going to protests around mid-May 2019. You can say the Yellow Vests grew unpopular but you’d be wrong – they were consistently around a 60% approval rating, which is a staggeringly high number for a protest movement, and a great score for a political party.

But don’t forget the victories: they stopped Macron’s privatisation of the airports, they forced him to back down on yet another austerity budget (thus ending 9 years of austerity), they got €10 billion in concessions (which was credited to raising France’s 2019 Q3 growth rate of 0.3% (remember how many years of awful quarters they had when 0.3% quarterly growth would be trumped up as proof of austerity’s success!)), they must get credit for inspiring the 2019/20 General Strike (France’s longest labor movement in history) and also – they refused to give up.

These are low numbers, because how many hurt protesters (including tourists) didn’t report their injuries, but the 1-year tally in late November was 11,000 arrests, 2,000 convictions, 1,000 imprisoned, 5,000 seriously hurt and 1,000 critically injured.

Incredible… and yet France continued to claim to be a leader in human and political rights all the while. As if Danton and Robespierre wouldn’t have guillotined themselves rather than be associated with the French government of today….

But we all know what happened right after the French union-led, which is to say incompetently-led, General Strike failed: ”2 weeks to flatten the curve!”

Well, at least it gave France a reason to have a new type of state of emergency. Recall that those started under Francois Hollande – executive branch power-grabs are not something started by Macron.

Season 2 of the West’s most advanced political group

Oh, wait – aren’t they Islamophobic, per the repeated accusations of the MSM? Well, then why did the head of the Paris demonstration feature a Muslim woman wearing a hijab?

Photo Credit: Ramin Mazaheri

In 2019 they marched against both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, by the way.

Nothing says, “The spirit of les Lumières (the Enlightenment)” like a machine gun at a peaceful, unarmed demonstration. Guess they don’t need to call out the army anymore?

Photo Credit: Ramin Mazaheri

I counted about 1,000 at one of the Paris protests on the opening act of Season 2, and I estimated there were 300 planned demonstrations nationwide. The Yellow Vests have always been a rural-based movement, and because the MSM dismisses and denigrates rural areas they have consistently undercounted Vester demos by a third. Here’s a shot of the Paris demonstration to see for yourself. Notice the Palestinian flag, even though Vesters are surely racist, Islamophobic, pro-imperialist, etc.?

Photo Credit: Ramin Mazaheri

Here’s the TV report we at PressTV did on Act 1, Season 2 – you may not find any others. I surprisingly did see a lone major French media there, which was a huge increase from the usual French media presence of “none”. An RT colleague was there, as always, so it was quite the same as it was from mid-May 2019 onwards – mostly just the Russians and the Iranians covering the Yellow Vests.

So what’s going to happen this season?

Well, the resumption of regular weekend repression of protesters would surely hurt Macron’s re-election chances, but will the average Jean and Jeanne Frenchy join them? Believe it or not, many people don’t like being tear gassed in 2021 as much as they didn’t like it in 2019. The massive state repression, the criminalisation, the tear gas, the beatings, the fines, the intrusive searches, the portraying of political protesters as mere rioters – the whole point was to scare away the average Frenchman, and it definitely worked.

People here tell me that Macron will just buy voters off with some one-off payments before the election, but Americans told me the same thing about Trump – I note that he did not.

The world is not going to lock itself down to sway the French election, like many said it seemed to do for the US election; the Western 1% really doesn’t care what happens to French protesters, and 2019 proved that emphatically.

If you’re going to pin me down for an early prediction, and fairly ask this foreign correspondent what exactly is going on in France, then at this point I’d say: Macron wins re-election regardless of how much petrol increases, inflation rises, the Vesters march, etc. for a simple reason:

The West postures on 18th century political and social achievements, largely disavowing 20th-century advances in political thought and anti-imperialism. Thus, France is a far-right country with a host of recent massacres, violence and repression which are forgotten or covered up as soon as the smoke clears – look at the Yellow Vests of 2019. The Yellow Vests are emphatically not poseurs, but they were and likely will be incredibly suppressed ahead of the presidential election.

Apathy is always the forerunner of catastrophe – however, perhaps France will grasp that and not cede the political field to the economic and social far-right (Macron, Le Pen, Zemmour)?

The story of French political modernity is not over – Season 2 has only begun.


Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of Socialisms Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

Photos by Ramin Mazaheri

The New Orwellian World Based On Control & Surveillance

14 OCTOBER 2021

Sonja van den Ende

Source

The New Orwellian World Based On Control & Surveillance

I wrote about it many times, we can see it’s progressing, but only in the so-called developed world. A dystopian society, which is doomed to fail, eventually. A world of surveillance, health-dictatorship, QR codes, cashless payments and for most people unlivable, it resembles the old systems like fascism or totalitarian communism, in a new outfit, which I will call a technocratic based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) totalitarian system, but all systems and ideologies that become totalitarian will fall, history has learned.

A lot of evidence about the dystopian new society, based on so-called pandemic, or as I would call it a new technocratic dictatorial, including health, system has been put in place in many parts of the developed world, tests for this new worldwide including social credit system has been performed in Africa, as I wrote before experiments are conducted in Africa to implement this social credit system, based on a pandemic, with the cooperation of GAVI, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and with the World Economic Forum. They ironically call it a “Wellnes-pass”, mind you in Africa, how utopian you can get! As we all know by now (I sincerely hope many are awake) it was never about a virus, but about control, smart cities, electrical cars, where Africa will be exploited again for Lithium, also Afghanistan, this is why the Western world had to withdraw, a geopolitical conflict is going on, not about Afghanistan as a territory, or pity the people, but about Lithium. Build Back Better, depopulation of the world, which Bill Gates and especially his father are experts in doing so are all part of the new dystopian world.

Even the Catholic Church is involved in this great experiment, in Africa of course since many years, but also in the Western world, after years of child abuse and pedophilia scandals, they are just continuing with their unchristian policies. But we must not forget that the Catholic Church is an outgrowth of the Roman Empire, or as many these days call it the British Empire, basically it’s the same, it’s all about the Western unipolar ideology and colonialism with all their excesses. So the church, i.e. the Catholic, is involved in this dystopian new world, because they have a lot of money and have their own state called the Vatican. The Protestant church is not in this position and is now seen as an ‘enemy’ of the state, especially in the Netherlands. The Dutch government has now started their ‘soft approach’ to persecute the Protestants, a deja-vu is emerging about the times of the Huguenots, it is actually the descendants of these Huguenots, who will suffer the same fate again, now in the countries they had chosen centuries ago, to be free and where people are tolerant. In the Netherlands these Protestants will be forced into lockdowns, because many of them, on religious grounds, won’t be vaccinated. Also, the Dutch government has started (with organizations) a research project, to establish if the Protestant church was involved into slavery in the Dutch East Indies. Of course they were, the whole of society was in these days, but the biggest criminals, just like now, are the rich, the elite and the Dutch royal family, who pretend to be Christian, but this Christianity is just a show, a performance for the ignorant citizens.

The Dutch parliament rejected a motion that various parties, including Forum for Democracy (FVD) submitted against the introduction of a social credit system in the Netherlands, the government can now legally introduce the social credit system, which they have already started, of course, by introducing the so-called QR Corona pass. The next step is the Co2 level and the measurement of eating meat and eventually censor the Internet, by introducing a digital pass, put on your existing pass to use the internet. The European Union (EU) Social Credit System will me much worse than the Chinese experiment, which was only conducted in a few cities. The EU social credit system is about total control, about your body, your behaviour, your private life and eventually about your physical life, when you don’t comply, there will be no mercy and no help, your life will be like a wanderer, without any benefits or life as you used to know it, be prepared.

In other parts of the Western world, like in Australia, the dystopian society has become reality already. Australia with its past and present and being part of the British Empire (BE) and under the influence of the US, preparing for a conflict with China, Australia is closest to China and we all know their new “AUKUS” a new so-called security pact between The UK, US and Australia, in what’s seen as an effort to counter China. To be prepared and outsmart China, they already started with their draconian social credit system and moreover and most worse their surveillance state has become reality, alarming reports come out of the country which was once called the land of the free is now the most repressive country in the Western world and I wonder where Amnesty International or Human Right are? Of course, they will not report, they are a tool from the same Western world, reporting only about non-complying countries like Russia, Syria or the underdeveloped countries. But Australia was always a ‘racist’ country built on the principles of murdering the Aboriginals and sending criminals to their conquered land. Canada is another example, in a different way than Australia but withe the same ideology. Of course, the uttermost worst country is the so-called democracy of Israel, where life is “hell” for most citizens, it was already worse for Palestinians, but now especially for the Orthodox Jews.

Conclusion

I would like to write a conclusion, but can we make a conclusion? I guess not, the world as we are experiencing it today, is unstable, full of conflict and polarization, with many geopolitical differences. I am afraid we are back, like the roaring twenties of the last century resulting in the grim thirties, unemployment, the introduction (by force) of a new system, designed by the elite of the Western world. Like now It’s ripe for conflict and most likely war, not like WWII but a different war, biological warfare (maybe we are already experiencing this), depopulation agenda, implemented by vaccinations and biological warfare and the introduction of AI. Eugenics (not new) is necessary according to the elite, like in the two world wars were eugenics happened through killing of soldiers on the battlefield and of course the holocaust. Now according to the elite there are too many mouths to feed and no jobs (AI) and of course the elite will not share their money with the poor. A dark time in human history has come again.

Ian Jenkins: “George Monbiot’s Far-Right Projection”

October 8, 2021

image via Off Guardian

Absolutely brilliant article by Ian Jenkins, published at Off Guardian.

“George Monbiot is shocked.

But what has shocked George is not the rising tide of poverty and starvation in the world or the unprecedented transfer of wealth to a tiny number of oligarchs.

He is not shocked by the practical collapse of the rule of law or by the brutal actions of police officers in nations claiming to be liberal democracies.

It is possible that these things shock him as well, but if so, there is no sign of this in his recent article for the Guardian.

No. Monbiot is shocked by “leftwingers” being “lured” to the “far right” by “conspiracy theories” in the context of resistance to state measures in relation to Covid-19, including opposition to lockdowns, removal of basic civil rights, mass vaccination with experimental mRNA technology and the prospect of vaccine “passes” or even mandatory vaccination.

In employing these terms Monbiot’s article is a distillation of the familiar techniques used to attack dissenting voices on Covid during the past 18 months and for a considerably longer time on other issues such as climate change, Brexit and globalisation.

This form of attack –always in defence of dominant or mainstream narratives and the actions of governments and their corporate “partners” and always expressed in terms of “concern” – employs pejorative terms such as “far right”, “white supremacist” without defining them adequately or at all.

We are never asked to consider what we understand by the term “far right” or how the label “conspiracy theory” – itself a category with a fascinating back story and history for employment by state powers to attack critics and deflect legitimate questioning – is being used and no attempt is made to define where the line lies between legitimate questions and analysis and more fantastical or “extremist” explanations of events.

A detailed discussion of these terms goes beyond the remit of this response to Monbiot’s article – but it is worth noting that, as would be expected, they are not defined with any clarity by Monbiot.

[Eva’s note: This is precisely what this immoral shill did re matters Syria: Smeared those of us who took principled stances against the war on Syria, called us names “genocide deniers”, “conspiracy theorists”, etc…, and served the dominant narratives & their murderous agenda in Syria.]

However, regardless of what he means by these labels, his piece is so fundamentally based on logically fallacies and so scattergun in the way he employs them that it is sufficient to confront his claims on their own lack of coherence.

Monbiot opens his article with an anecdotal warning that acquaintances of his within the “countercultural movements where my sympathies lie” are “dropping like flies” from the deadly plague of Covid.

This opens of the question of how this assertion matches current data and whether Monbiot’s experience matches those of the public at large.

Whether this perception of sweeping pestilence is borne out by statistics or not, Monbiot states that this is not a general plague, visited randomly on all such acquaintances, but is one only affecting those with “anti-vax” beliefs.

These are the crazy folk advocating outlandish ideas like the benefits of “natural immunity” (which Monbiot places in scare quotes, presumably in case his readers might think that the human immune system was a real thing) or “denouncing vaccines and refusing to take the precautions that apply to lesser mortals”.

As a result of their sins against “the Science”, regardless of readily available statistics on the inefficacy of these “precautions”, some have been hospitalised Monbiot tells us – though where this is happening and due what underlying or operating causes is unclear.

It is worth noting at this point that Monbiot is at pains throughout this article to locate himself as part of a “counterculture” or “alternative scene” while devoting the entire piece to repeating mainstream narratives and attacking those who oppose them.

Quite how a Brasenose-educated mainstream journalist (whose previous “activism” earned him a visiting fellowship at Oxford’s Green College at the behest of a former UK ambassador to the UN) qualifies as a figure on the “alternative scene” is a question that could quite legitimately be asked.

Not content to bemoan that his “countercultural” acquaintances are putting their own lives at risk – Monbiot then accuses them of “actively threatening the lives of others”.

This shifts these non-complying leftists from a state of recklessness regarding their own health and into the realm of criminal intent.

This is a technique that anyone who has been questioning the mainstream Covid narrative will be familiar with – having spent 18 months being accused of wanting to kill grannies and murder the vulnerable: even in the face of mounting evidence that it is the state that has been engaged in the culling of these groups and which has certainly been responsible for their immiseration.

The thought process for this imputation of homicidal intent runs like this: masks, lockdowns and vaccines prevent transmission, transmission equals disease and disease equals death.

There is, of course, ample scientific evidence to question each stage of this chain of causation [see here], but Monbiot merely asserts each causal step as unassailable truth sufficient to impute murderous intent to all who fail to comply with the edicts of the biosecurity state.

It could be said in response that it would be possible to lay similar accusation of “threatening the lives of others” against those, like Monbiot himself, who advance the ideology of “net zero” – which would likely result in innumerable deaths from starvation and exposure to cold – but that would be to adopt the tactics of one’s opponent and as Marcus Aurelius put it – “the best revenge is not to be like your enemy”.

Having attributed murderous intent on those holding “anti-vax beliefs” Monbiot now casts his net wider to bemoan the passage of “conspiracy theories travelling smoothly from right to left”, including the claims of “white supremacists”, which he states the misguided children of the left are repeating without knowing their origin.

Monbiot does not trouble himself to identify the nature of these white supremacist claims before moving swiftly on to decry the tragic situation in which:

hippies who once sought to build communities [are] sharing the memes of extreme individualism […] spreading QAnon lies and muttering about a conspiracy against Donald Trump

And bemoan that:

the old boundaries have broken down, and the most unlikely people have become susceptible to rightwing extremism”.

There is no attempt to define what is meant by “rightwing extremism” at this point, with Monbiot finding it sufficient to present anecdotal evidence of muttering QAnon hippies – a group I must confess to have never encountered in the ranks of those opposing the Covid agenda, where the QAnon psyop is more likely to be mocked than embraced.

The reader is left none the wiser as to what “extreme individualism” means either. Maybe these “hippies” are inventing their own personal languages or choosing to live as hermits?

But despite the absence of any concrete examples that might act as a warning to the unwary, Monbiot is still concerned that this is a sign of something going “badly wrong in parts of the alternative scene”.

In fact, Monbiot is merely employing the fallacy of composition – the logical fallacy so beloved of many on the modern so-called “left”, in which an entire, highly diverse, group of people advancing versions of a particular idea can be represented by the most extreme individuals also advancing that idea.

Presumably what we are to believe here is that if a Qanon placard, hastily scrawled in crayon by some fringe nutter, is sighted at a protest or if some misguided basement-dweller comments on a Facebook thread then all attending the protest or commenting on the thread are of one mind with these outliers.

Such shoddy thinking has been the mainstay of those employing agents provocateur to discredit movements and campaigns in the past.

It is at this point – perhaps inevitably given the general adherence to Godwin’s Law amongst his milieu – that Monbiot, in an attempt to tie the ideas of these misguided counter-culturalists to the “far-right”, embarks on a rather woolly, cherry-picking and historically inaccurate identification of an “overlap” between “new age” and “far-right” ideas – specifically with Nazi ideology.

There has long been an overlap between certain new age and far-right ideas. The Nazis embraced astrology, pagan festivals, organic farming, forest conservation, ecological education and nature worship.

Monbiot draws attention to the Nazis’ embrace of “pagan festivals, organic farming, forest conservation, ecological education and nature worship”. But then seemingly not quite sure where he is going with this line of thought, and perhaps perceiving the possibility that as a “green” activist himself he is in danger of associating himself with Nazi ideology, he quickly regroups and states that the Nazis also…

promoted homeopathy and “natural healing”, and tended to resist vaccination.

At this point, Monbiot at least has the decency to point out that just because someone believes in natural medicine and ecology, they are not necessarily a Nazi, which is very good of him and is no doubt a comfort to many of his readers who would identify themselves as being part of the Green movement.

However, it is what Monbiot fails to say about the Nazis that is most telling.

After all, at the Nuremberg Trials, it was not homeopathic practitioners who stood trial for crimes against humanity, it was the allopathic doctors who had carried out medical experiments on the inmates of concentration camps.

And the Nuremberg Code did not set out prohibitions against “natural healing”, but rather against the administration of experimental pharmaceutical products to individuals without their informed consent.

Monbiot also fails to address the Nazi belief in population reduction as central to their views of ecology – especially the targeted removal of those deemed to be inferior and whose presence within the borders of the Third Reich was routinely represented as that of vectors of infection, an unclean influence endangering the health of the Good Germans.

It would not be difficult to find echoes of this Malthusian and eugenicist philosophy today – but Monbiot fails to do so.

It is quite a feat to take the example of the centralised totalitarian state of the Third Reich, obsessed as it was with racial purity, racial “hygiene” and conformity through the process of Gleichschaltung (coordination of all arms of the state around central narratives), and associate it with those who have concerns about matters such as individual rights, the Rule of Law and constitutionality.

Is Monbiot unaware that Nazi ideology was diametrically opposed to these values?

Monbiot also points to a process by which European fascists sought to reinvent themselves in the 1960s and 70s by entering the ecological movement to promote ideas such as ethnic separatism or indigenous autonomy. Though he again fails to explain where, and by whom, these ideas are being raised in the current situation.

Monbiot frames the anti-vaccine movement as:

a highly effective channel for the penetration of far-right ideas into leftwing countercultures”.

He then goes on to provide possibly the most bizarre non-example of this that could be imagined – even in a piece as poorly constructed and logically fragile as this – citing the invitation of “anti-vaxxer”, and well-known liberal, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr to the Trump Whitehouse as his example.

For several years, anti-vax has straddled the green left and the far right. Trump flirted with it, at one point inviting the anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr to chair a “commission on vaccination safety and scientific integrity”.

One is left wondering at this point whether Monbiot even knows who RFK Jnr is – surely he does – and how on earth he thought this example would be the best one to present to a Guardianista audience (who still see Trump as the personification of right-wing evil), as evidence of right-wing “anti-vaxxers” influencing the left.

Monbiot’s article now dissolves into an ill-defined attack on ‘conspiracy theories’, which he claims are bolstered by Facebook directing vaccine hesitant people towards “far-right conspiracy” groups.

None of these alleged right-wing groups are named or their views described, with Monbiot being content, to:

  • a) make a link, without evidence, between “wellness” movements and antisemitism
  • b) mock the idea of bodily sovereignty (without defining or arguing this as a legal and/or ethical concept) and
  • c) make a vague derogatory reference to beliefs in a “shadowy cabal … trying to deprive us of autonomy”.

Here Monbiot blurs the concept of some form of biological purity with the legal idea of bodily sovereignty, a piece of linguistic and conceptual legerdemain that he employs again later in his conclusion.

To be fair, in his talk of “shadowy cabals” Monbiot doesn’t mention pan-dimensional lizards or the Illuminati – but he may have just run out space to include these.

He is also not clear on where there leads people criticising high-profile globalist organisations such as the World Economic Forum – who far from being “shadowy” publish all of their plans on a glossy website and upload talks and panel discussions from their glitzy annual meetings at Davos.

Of the censorship of legitimate opinion on Facebook, which will be far more familiar to most than being steered to a neo-Nazi group, Monbiot makes no mention.

Monbiot then surrenders any pretence at argument and reminds the reader that they “should never discount the role of sheer bloody idiocy” amongst critics of the biosecurity state and brings up the “Pureblood” meme.

There’s a temptation to overthink this, and we should never discount the role of sheer bloody idiocy. Some anti-vaxxers are now calling themselves “purebloods”, a term that should send a chill through anyone even vaguely acquainted with 20th-century history.

If you are unfamiliar with this fringe social media phenomena, it is one in which the unvaccinated borrow a term from Harry Potter to distinguish themselves from those who have received an mRNA injection. This is, without doubt, a distasteful and counterproductive meme – though its origin is difficult to establish – and provides an open goal for Monbiot (and others) to link those opposing vaccine mandates with the racial pseudoscience of the Nazis.

Ironically here Monbiot states that one cannot expect people this stupid to “detect the echo of the Nuremberg laws”, while being completely blind himself to the other striking contemporary echoes of these discriminatory laws.

It is clear that the current parallels with the Nuremberg Laws do not proceed from those using the “Pureblood” label, who do not seem in any way interested in discriminating against the vaccinated or in excluding them from normal participation in society or from accessing basic services.

In addition, though quick to raise the spectre of the Nuremberg Laws, it is worth observing that Monbiot appears have no interest whatsoever in the Nuremberg Code.

It is in the next section of his article that Monbiot comes closest to touching on something approaching truth, as he describes, without explicitly stating it to be the case, the breakdown in the relevance of a left/right divide experienced by so many over the past 18 months.

I believe this synthesis of left-alternative and rightwing cultures has been accelerated by despondency, confusion and betrayal […] there has been an almost perfect language swap. Parties that once belonged on the left talk about security and stability while those on the right talk of liberation and revolt.

He accurately describes the disillusionment of many who would have considered themselves to be on the ‘left’ as they watched “left-ish” political parties become acquiescent or even supportive of corporate power, while a libertarian right has arisen which rails against excessive corporate control, resulting in what he describes as a “perfect language swap” in which “parties that once belonged on the left talk about security and stability while those on the right talk of liberation and revolt”.

Putting aside the complete lack of evidence for this in the actions and language of the Conservative Party that governs his own country – there is still some truth to what Monbiot says here. In the past 18 months the most unquestioning and aggressive support for Covid policy has been found on the left, a position Monbiot proves as eager to defend as any other member of the “Lockdown Left” – as they have come to be known by many disappointed and outraged people of the left (myself included).

Monbiot then seeks to utilise necessity, the “tyrants plea” as Milton put it, to override the objections that some on the left may have to the criminal record of Big Pharma or their potential revulsion at the “coercive political control” of the responses to Covid.

Mass vaccination is “needed” and lockdown and other measures are “required to prevent Covid-19 spreading” – though ample data points to none of this being the case.

He then extends this free pass to tyranny to the fight against “climate breakdown” and the “collapse of biodiversity”, which he tells his reader have made “powerful agreements struck by governments” necessary – something which he admits can be hard to swallow for a left, particularly an environmental left, resistant to such power plays and instead focused on the “local and the homespun”.

Doubtless such cottage industry approaches to the environment do exist, but there is also a multi-billion dollar oligarch-funded environmental lobbying and PR industry which promotes the case for heavy-handed and society-changing ‘climate action’, and which has brought to the attention of the world such pre-fabricated prophets of doom as Greta Thunberg and funded astroturf movements such as Extinction Rebellion.

Notably Monbiot makes no mention of this whatsoever.

Feeling that he has made his case – though in fact no case has been made at all – Monbiot now arrives at his solutions, which he finds in the “hippie principle” of “balance”. (Though quite where this principle is expressed and who the particular “hippies” are Monbiot does not trouble himself to relate).

Monbiot is careful not to lose his “left” audience at this point, and emphasises that this “hippie principle” is not the ”compromised, submissive doctrine that calls itself centrism” as this leads to “extreme outcomes” such as the “Iraq war, endless economic growth and ecological disaster”.

Instead, he proposes the “balance between competing values in which true radicalism is to be found”.

Remarkably he locates this “balance” in “reason and warmth, empiricism and empathy, liberty and consideration” having demonstrated scant evidence of any of these values throughout the rest of his article.

Presumably it’s this ‘reason, warmth etc ‘ that leads to outcomes such as curtailment of civil liberties, mandatory vaccination and depopulation through pursuit of utopian goals such as zero carbon.

But it is Monbiot’s penultimate paragraph that contains his most dangerous piece of (un)reasoning. We might seek “simplicity” he regretfully opines, like some modern-day Mrs Merdle, but…

the human body, human society and the natural world are phenomenally complex and cannot be easily understood.”

All things which may be true, but which do not imply that we should not seek to understand them.

The conclusion that Monbiot draws from this is chilling:

Life is messy. Bodily and spiritual sovereignty are illusions.

The consequences of this statement cannot be overstressed. If bodily sovereignty is an illusion, where does the bar exist to the intervention of the state or any other coercive force on the individual?

There would, for instance, be no bar to rape, or to forced abortion, sterilisation or any other surgical or medical intervention on the human body.

After all, where there is no sovereignty there can be no consent.

It is to defend the idea of “bodily sovereignty” that the Nuremberg Code was drafted, and it was the discarding of this fundamental ethical concept that gave license to the experiments of Mengele.

Yet Monbiot does not pursue this idea to its logical conclusion, content to dismiss its potentially horrific consequences with a shallow and unsubstantiated statement: “there is no pure essence; we are all mudbloods”.

Here Monbiot, as he does earlier in his article, possibly wilfully, appears to confuse some biological idea of bodily purity (or absence of contamination), to which he attributes connotations of racial purity, with the legal/human rights notion of bodily sovereignty. What he means by “spiritual purity” is, again, anyone’s guess.

Monbiot concludes with a nakedly hypocritical recipe for “enlightenment” as coming from…

long and determined engagement with other people’s findings and other people’s ideas”.

Having displayed absolutely no interest in engaging in any such activities himself. “Self-realisation” he tells us, “requires constant self-questioning” – though he clearly deals in unchallengeable absolutes – and that

true freedom emerges from respect for others”.

Ignoring the inverse case that true tyranny comes from demonising, misrepresenting and disrespecting other people and their views, or by lotting together diverse individuals and ideas under ill-deserved labels such as “far-right” or “conspiracy theorist”.

It is hard to overstress how dangerous the ideas in Monbiot’s article are – a fact made worse by their seeming ubiquity in current mainstream publications and by the casual way they are introduced in relation to a range of issues to discredit legitimate questioning of dominant narratives.

The true danger we face comes not from those on the left being “seduced” by the ideas of the “far right” – a phenomena for which little evidence seems to exist. But rather that anyone would be seduced by the faux-left and superficially “spiritual” and “equitable” concepts offered by Monbiot and others.

Ideas which, when their ill-evidenced assumptions, spurious reasoning and hypocrisy are exposed, potentially light a path to horrendous destinations.”

Lab-Leak, Gain-Of-Function, and the Media Myths Swirling Around the Wuhan Institute of Virology

September 29th, 2021

By Joshua Cho

Source

The neverending accusations and assumptions that Chinese scientists are lying, without evidence, are rooted in Orientalist tropes of the “dishonest Chinese” based on centuries of Western propaganda, which is why some equate lack of evidence for a lab leak with evidence of a coverup.

UHAN, CHINA —In recent months, “gain-of-function” (GoF) research has been a topic of great controversy, the subject of intense and ongoing public disputes. With the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic under a powerful microscope, documents recently obtained through leaks or Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation have purported to show that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was engaged in dangerous GoF research. Many people appear, however, to be confused about what the term “gain of function” means and have been driven into mass panic over ordinary scientific research dealing with pandemic preparedness.

I previously investigated for MintPress News popular claims about the WIV, the Chinese research facility at the center of most of the lab-leak speculations, regarding its allegedly subpar safety standards. While these allegations have been uncritically accepted as true by both those who reject and those who subscribe to the hypothesis that Covid-19 originated in a laboratory, I found that there is little evidence for any of them.

Another of the most popular and explosive claims commonly accepted as fact is the charge that the WIV was doing controversial GoF research, lab work that is reasonably anticipated to make viruses more virulent and/or transmissible in people. In this article I will address more specifically the honesty and accuracy of those claims.

Did the NIH fund GoF research at the WIV?

In May, during a highly publicized confrontation between Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Anthony Fauci — director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the branches of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — Paul accused Fauci of being responsible “more than any other single living American” for the pandemic. Paul claimed:

To arrive at the truth, the U.S. government should admit that the Wuhan Virology Institute was experimenting to enhance the coronavirus’s ability to infect humans.

Juicing up super-viruses is not new. Scientists in the U.S. have long known how to mutate animal viruses to infect humans. For years, Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist in the U.S., has been collaborating with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to create super-viruses. This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH.”

In response, Fauci denied that the NIH funds GoF research in Wuhan, and claimed that the NIH had funded the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, which subcontracted part of its grant to the WIV, in order to better understand potential epidemic viruses and how to prepare for them:

Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect… [T]he NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology…

The SARS-CoV-1 originated in bats in China. It would have been irresponsible of us if we did not investigate the bat viruses and the serology to see who might have been infected in China.”

From this exchange, it’s clear that Paul and Fauci have different understandings of what constitutes GoF research since they disagree on whether the heavily scrutinized 2015 study led by virologist Ralph Baric — in collaboration with the WIV’s eminent virologist Shi Zhengli — counts as GoF research. However, when one reads many reports by journalists covering the topic, it is clear that they also don’t have a clear idea of what GoF research is.

For instance, when Newsweek’s Fred Guterl fact-checked the Paul/Fauci dispute, he not only reported the allegation that the WIV was conducting GoF research as a fact, he went further and claimed that scientists around the world do the same by collecting viruses and making them more dangerous with GoF research:

Scientists in laboratories all over the world have for the past decade been collecting dangerous viruses and making them even more dangerous by performing “gain-of-function” experiments on them — manipulating the viruses to make them more infectious or deadly or both…

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, under the direction of Dr. Shi Zengli, was clearly doing GOF experiments before the pandemic arose. But GOF work is now commonplace. The real scandal is not that the Wuhan Institute was doing GOF work, it’s that everyone does it. That, and not the Wuhan lab origin theory, is what we should all be arguing about.

Everyone involved with the WIV denies GoF research allegations

To be clear, it’s undeniable that some U.S. funding went to the WIV. What is disputed is whether the research the WIV conducted with that money constitutes GoF research. However, it is crucial to note that all parties involved reject the accusation that the NIH funded GoF research, and scientists who have worked at the WIV also claim not to have performed or seen any GoF research there.

Corroborating Fauci’s claim that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Francis Collins, director of the NIH, released a statement in support:

…[N]either NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported “gain-of-function” research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.

In email exchanges, Robert Kessler, a spokesman for the EcoHealth Alliance, told The Washington Post, “The NIH has not funded gain-of-function work… EcoHealth Alliance was funded by the NIH to conduct study of coronavirus diversity in China. From that award, we subcontracted work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to help with sampling and lab capacity.” Kessler added that “much of that work [described in the grant] wasn’t done because the grant was suspended. But GoF was never the goal here.” As he put it, “gain of function research is the specific process of altering human viruses in order to increase their ability (the titular gain of function) either to spread amongst populations, to infect people, or to cause more severe illness.”

Dr. Shi Zhengli also denied that her laboratory conducted GoF research in an interview with The New York Times.

Dr. Shi, in an emailed response to questions, argued that her experiments differed from gain-of-function work because she did not set out to make a virus more dangerous, but to understand how it might jump across species.

“My lab has never conducted or cooperated in conducting GOF experiments that enhance the virulence of viruses,” she said.

Dr. Shi’s testimony is corroborated by Australian virologist Danielle Anderson, who worked at the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory (the subject of many irrelevant speculations as the “source” of the pandemic) until November 2019. For Bloomberg, she testified that she never saw any evidence of GoF research being conducted there — while acknowledging that she wasn’t aware of what everyone was researching, owing to the WIV’s size — and supports further investigation into the WIV to rule out the lab-leak theory:

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is large enough that Anderson said she didn’t know what everyone was working on at the end of 2019. She is aware of published research from the lab that involved testing viral components for their propensity to infect human cells. Anderson is convinced no virus was made intentionally to infect people and deliberately released — one of the more disturbing theories to have emerged about the pandemic’s origins.

Anderson did concede that it would be theoretically possible for a scientist in the lab to be working on a gain of function technique, to unknowingly infect themselves, and to then unintentionally infect others in the community. But there’s no evidence that occurred and Anderson rated its likelihood as exceedingly slim.

It is quite striking that all of the parties directly or indirectly involved with the WIV have denied the allegations that the WIV was conducting GoF research, whether it was funded by the NIH or not. These statements should be given more credibility than hearsay or accusatory speculations from those not involved with the WIV, but one common tactic among lab-leak conspiracy theorists is to simply accuse those involved of “lying,” also without any evidence.

Unconfirmed allegations and sloppy reporting on GoF research

It’s not surprising that many people now seem to think they know what GoF research is, and believe that the WIV was performing GoF research, because sloppy reports earlier in the pandemic presented GoF in ill-defined ways, and reported the claims as if they were true.

Journalist Sam Husseini’s report for Salon characterized GoF research as work that “actually seeks to make deadly pathogens deadlier, in some cases making pathogens airborne that previously were not.” Husseini reported that the U.S. government issued a moratorium on GoF research in 2014 for “certain organisms” before lifting it in late 2017, though he stated that “exceptions for funding were made for dangerous gain-of-function lab work.” Husseini falsely claimed that the 2015 study cited by Rand Paul – a collaboration between the University of North Carolina, Harvard and the WIV — was among the exemptions to this “dangerous gain-of-function lab work” ban, when in fact it was not found to be GoF work at all.

An earlier alarmist Newsweek report, “The Controversial Experiments and Wuhan Lab Suspected of Starting the Coronavirus Pandemic,” also reported as fact that the WIV was engaged in GoF research:

… Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists have for the past five years been engaged in so-called “gain of function” (GoF) research, which is designed to enhance certain properties of viruses for the purpose of anticipating future pandemics. Gain-of-function techniques have been used to turn viruses into human pathogens capable of causing a global pandemic…

Some of this research involves taking deadly viruses and enhancing their ability to spread quickly through a population — research that took place over the objections of hundreds of scientists, who have warned for years of the program’s potential to cause a pandemic.

The Post published a report mischaracterizing both the WIV and the 2015 Baric study, while also reporting the claim that the WIV was engaged in GoF research as fact:

More controversial was the Wuhan institute’s 2015 research into creating a chimera, the hybrid virus that combined elements from two bat-borne coronaviruses, including one that causes SARS. The mutated virus that resulted was more easily able to infect human cells, making it more useful for lab experiments. Such “gain of function” experiments — which enhance a pathogen’s natural traits — have been a source of controversy in the West because of the potential for harm if an altered strain escapes the confinement of the lab, experts say.

Explaining relevant GoF terminology

Before attempting to explain GoF research and the Baric/Shi experiments, it is necessary to briefly explain some technical scientific terminology. In numerous reports on this topic, terms like “pathogenic,” “virulent,” “infectivity” and “transmissibility” are frequently misused to create the impression that the WIV was engaged in the controversial kind of GoF research.

Viruses are bits of genetic material and associated proteins that essentially do nothing but replicate themselves by hijacking a host cell to use its cell reproduction workshop to make copies of themselves. “Infectivity” refers to a virus’s ability to infiltrate a host cell and replicate once it does. However, just because cells can be infected doesn’t necessarily mean the host will suffer, as some viruses can infect cells without apparent harm to the host. Thus, some people infected with the virus SARS-CoV-2 are asymptomatic carriers who otherwise appear healthy, with little to no symptoms of the disease Covid-19.

A virus is either pathogenic or not, since “pathogenicity” refers to whether a virus is able to cause disease, whereas ”virulence” refers to the degree of disease caused to the host by the virus —  such that lethal viruses like Ebola are very virulent while common colds are less virulent. However, it is important to stress that many people use the terms “pathogenicity” and “virulence” interchangeably.

“Transmissibility” refers to the virus’s ability to pass from one person to another, and it is possible for a virus to be highly infective without also being highly transmissible, as there are viruses that can infect a member of another species without being able to transmit easily between members of that species. An example would be viruses that have limited human-to-human transmission, where outbreaks are primarily triggered by infections from animals but die out soon after infecting a few people, like MERS.

Changing definitions of GoF research over time

Plenty of scientists have already explained that “GoF” research can be a broad and vague term. Regarding GoF research, the Times reported:

“It’s a horribly imprecise term,” said Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Many gain-of-function experiments could never pose an existential threat; instead, they have provided huge benefits to humanity. In 1937, researchers found that when they passed the yellow fever virus through chicken cells, it lost the ability to cause disease in humans — a discovery that led to a vaccine for yellow fever. Likewise, herpes viruses have been engineered to gain a new function of their own: attacking cancer cells. They’re now an approved treatment for melanoma.

When Poynter reported on the spectacle between Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci in May, it cited biologist Alina Chan, one of the most prominent boosters of the lab-leak hypothesis, to make several important clarifications. She clarified that the lab-leak theory is “distinct from the hypothesis that gain-of-function research created the new coronavirus,” and that the lab-leak theory can be “as simple as a researcher being infected by an animal or even another infected person in remote areas, and then bringing it into one of the most densely populated cities on Earth.” She also explained that the definition of GoF changed over time, with the original definition including “any selection process involving an alteration of genotypes and their resulting phenotypes,” which is why subsequent definitions were narrowed to target obviously dangerous experiments that enhance the transmissibility and virulence of “potential pandemic pathogens,” as the broader definition “covers a ton of research that doesn’t even come close to risky pathogen research.”

The Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, is one of the few journalists who came closest to defining what GoF research is, according to the official 2017 definition under the P3CO framework (issued after years of deliberation on the risks and benefits of GoF research), which is research that is reasonably anticipated to enhance the virulence/pathogenicity or transmissibility of viruses in humans. In Kessler’s words:

“Gain of function” is one of those insider-y terms that are subject to different definitions… In many ways, it is basic biological research. It’s done all the time with flies, worms, mice and cells in petri dishes. Scientists create novel genotypes (such as arrangements of nucleic acids) and screen or select to find those with a given phenotype (such as trait or ability) to find new sequences with a particular function.

But it’s one thing to experiment with fruit flies and another thing when the research involves genotypes of potential pandemic pathogens and functions related to transmissibility or virulence in humans. That’s when “gain of function” becomes controversial.

Deflating ‘Gain-of-Function’ fearmongering

The popularized notion of all GoF research being “dangerous” stems from scientific illiteracy regarding how uncontroversial it is to do many experiments. The original definition was so broad that it covered many genetic modifications that pose no threat. This is why the NIH used a more narrow definition to capture only experiments with potential harm in its 2014 moratorium, and why entire panels were created to review whether an individual experiment qualifies as GoF. Some experts have proposed different names to distinguish between the potentially dangerous and safe kinds of GoF research because some of the studies affected by the 2014 moratorium on GoF research had no risk of setting off a pandemic.

However, many fearmongering reports on GoF research ignore the fact that many GoF experiments (including many of the most feared experiments alleged to be GoF) “often also lead to loss of function.” For instance, Husseini’s report erroneously described virologist Ron Fouchier’s experiments passaging the H5N1 virus through ferrets to make it more transmissible, as having made it “more virulent,” when the opposite was true. When one actually reads the study, although the H5N1 virus became airborne transmissible when it previously wasn’t, it also became less lethal, and therefore less virulent, which is why “[n]one of the recipient ferrets died after airborne infection with the mutant A/H5N1 viruses.” However, these crucial details are omitted from Husseini’s report.

Microbiologist Stanley Perlman at the University of Iowa explained to me that, under the broader definition of GoF research, certain aspects of the WIV’s research could appropriately be characterized as “GoF” even if scientists there weren’t trying to make viruses more virulent or transmissible. But he clarified that it is “nothing in the worrisome category” because “making a virus better able to infect mice while losing the ability to infect human cells is a gain of function of sorts.”

NIH grant was funding basic research, not GoF research

One of the most frequently cited bits of “evidence” for whether the WIV was engaged in GoF research are sections from grants for the fiscal years 2018 and 2019 referenced by the disgraced science writer Nicholas Wade, found in his influential Medium blog post, which was later reprinted by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Test predictions of CoV interspecies transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e., emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.

We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.

According to Wade’s fearmongering presentation of these selective quotes:

What this means, in non-technical language, is that Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells.

It is admittedly difficult for nonscientists to interpret what these grants mean, so I reached out to experts like virologists James Duehr at the University of Pittsburgh and Stephen Goldstein at the University of Utah to help interpret their language.

Dr. Duehr explained why Wade’s characterization of Dr. Shi’s work as trying to create the “highest possible infectivity for human cells” is ridiculous, and stated that it’s more accurate to say Dr. Shi was trying to test when an animal virus’s spike protein (“S protein sequence”) becomes sufficiently compatible with human ACE2 receptors (“receptor binding,” the cellular doorway that allows SARS-CoV-2 to bind to host cells). He confirmed that “% divergence thresholds” as described in the grant are actually about trying to figure out what is the smallest % change (the “threshold”) needed at the genetic level for an animal virus to diverge into becoming a human virus capable of starting a pandemic. Claiming that Dr. Shi was trying to create coronaviruses with the “highest possible infectivity” is not only false, but also pointless because it doesn’t answer any relevant questions described in the grants designed to predict when an animal virus becomes capable of starting an epidemic in humans (“spillover potential”).

Most importantly, Duehr specified:

[Shi] wasn’t trying to make the viruses more infectious, she was just trying to figure out how infectious they already were. That’s why it isn’t “gain-of-function” research in my eyes.”

Dr. Goldstein clarified that the portions of the grants Wade cites are actually describing standard and classical methods of doing biology and virology. Goldstein stated that it’s “ridiculous” to say that Dr. Shi or Dr. Baric were trying to create “superviruses” because they were “trying to see if different coronaviruses are able to infect humans, not make them more infectious.”

This is why virologist Kristian Andersen pointed out that news outlets like Fox are confusing “Gain of Function Research” and “Basic Research.” He explained:

The bat research performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology [of which] EcoHealth was a part, was basic research – and in fact, was instrumental in our ability to respond quickly when SARS-CoV-2 emerged.”

This is also why microbiologist Robert Garry stated that attempting to shut down basic research by confusing potentially dangerous GoF research with basic virology, where scientists “swap bits and pieces of viruses,” could backfire by endangering the world’s ability to study viruses that could be harmful to humans.

Why Rand Paul is wrong

With regard to the 2015 Baric experiments, in which chimeric viruses were created, both Dr. Goldstein and Dr. Perlman agreed with Dr. Baric’s statement denying that his study counts as GoF research, and confirmed that it is a misrepresentation to portray it as a nefarious attempt to create “superviruses,” as Rand Paul did in his confrontation with Fauci in May. Goldstein confirmed that it is “completely normal” for virologists to create chimeric viruses in a lab, and Perlman stated that the Baric experiments have no relevance to the Covid-19 pandemic because SARS-CoV-2 is not a chimeric virus.

Reading Dr. Baric’s study, one also discovers that the experiments were conducted in North Carolina, not China, with pseudoviruses that can’t cause pandemics, and that Dr. Shi had only provided the genetic sequence used in Dr. Baric’s experiments, as confirmed by an MIT Technology Review report.

Dr. Duehr explained that the Baric experiments also don’t count as GoF because taking bat virus spike proteins to facilitate the infection of human cells “isn’t increasing the infectivity of any virus, and indeed what they found is that it was very similar to the ability of the virus to infect the cell to begin with. None of their chimeras had increased ability to infect compared to the natural virus, which is why I wouldn’t characterize it as gain-of-function work.”

Although creating chimeric viruses may sound scary to some, Duehr, in a Reddit post for non-scientists, explained why virologists conduct this basic research:

If you want to show that a certain part of a virus is what allows it to infect a certain type of cells, you take that part, and you put it on a virus that, right now, can’t infect those cells.

Then, when you make the chimera, you try and infect the cells with it. If you’re successful, you’ve shown that the part you spliced in (the “spike” in this case) was sufficient for infection! And you can also go to the original virus, the one you stole the spike from, and trade its spike for the new one that couldn’t infect. And if, now, the old virus with the new spike can’t infect, then you’ve also shown the spike was “necessary.” Necessary and sufficient.

Along the way, you’ve demonstrated that part of the virus (the spike) would be a great target for a vaccine! And that drugs that inactivate this part of the virus could be very useful.

When one understands the science, it is clear why all the parties involved with the WIV deny that U.S. money was funding GoF research there, why WIV scientists claim they haven’t performed GoF research, and why there’s no evidence they’re “lying.”

It is also how we can confirm that Anthony Fauci is correct to say that Rand Paul is lying and doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he claimed that “all the evidence is pointing that it came from a lab,” when Paul falsely accused Fauci of lying about GoF during their second publicized confrontation in July.

Numerous scientists defended Fauci’s statements and explained that the 2017 paper Paul was citing in that confrontation does not count as GoF research because the viruses retained function: they were already capable of infecting human cells, and didn’t become any better at doing so afterwards.

GOF research on known viruses couldn’t create SARS-CoV-2

It should be deeply disturbing that much of the popularized evidence-free lab-leak speculations depended on the major premise that the WIV was engaged in GoF research, which is yet another set of evidence-free speculations. However, a much more potent argument is that GoF research couldn’t have created SARS-CoV-2 even if WIV scientists had tried.

There is a credulous belief among lab-leak theorists that GoF research can serve as some kind of deus ex machina to explain why their pet conspiracy theory can be true, but this is demonstrably false because such GoF experiments also have their limitations.

Novelist Nicholson Baker has published a lengthy speculation in New York Magazine arguing that SARS-CoV-2 was “designed,” and cites methods like “no-see’m” as ways for scientists to manipulate viruses without “any signs of human handiwork.” In contrast, prominent scientists like microbiologist Susan Weiss and virologist Linfa Wang have argued that they couldn’t create SARS-CoV-2, even if they tried.

Sam Husseini criticized virologists like Kristian Andersen for supposedly not considering “other lab methods” that could have created coronavirus mutations without leaving behind any laboratory signatures in an influential Nature study, which concluded that they “do not believe that any laboratory-based scenario is plausible” for the Covid-19 pandemic. Husseini argued, implying Dr. Andersen’s naivete, that “other forms of lab manipulation” besides bioengineering — such as “serial passage,” where one passages a virus through animals (rather than cell culture) to induce mutations — could have created SARS-CoV-2.

Husseini credulously cites biologist Richard Ebright’s claim:

Very easy to imagine the equivalent of the Fouchier’s “10 passages in ferrets” with H5N1 influenza virus but, in this case, with 10 passages in non-human primates with bat coronavirus RaTG13 or bat coronavirus KP876546.

Plenty of things, however, are “very easy to imagine” without being plausible, as scientists like Dr. Garry and Dr. Perlman have clarified that in order to construct SARS-CoV-2 with GoF experiments one would need a virus backbone that matches at least 99% of its genome, if not as high as 99.9%. This is why Dr. Goldstein told me that the odds of someone creating SARS-CoV-2 from RaTG13 (previously the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2, with a 96% genome match, until Laotian and French scientists published a preprint this month, a study yet to be peer-reviewed, reportedly finding three bat viruses that are the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 in Laos) are “zero percent.”

review in a peer-reviewed journal by over twenty of the world’s eminent virologists argues that the 4% genetic distance between the SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 genomes (equivalent to approximately 1,150 mutations) reflects decades of evolutionary change, and that the discovery of other bat viruses — not collected by the WIV and sequenced after the pandemic began — which share a more recent common ancestor with SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13, demonstrates “beyond reasonable doubt that RaTG13 is not the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2, with or without laboratory manipulation or experimental mutagenesis.”

Dr. Perlman also explained that passaging a virus through non-human primates or humanized mice to make a virus more virulent or transmissible to those species doesn’t necessarily mean it would be capable of infecting humans, as many animal viruses aren’t capable of infecting humans.

This demonstrates that those claiming that GoF research on viruses like RaTG13 is capable of creating SARS-CoV-2 are either misrepresenting the capabilities of GoF research or are simply unaware of its limitations.

The Intercept’s dodgy reporting on “gain-of-function” research

In light of all this information, it becomes obvious why The Intercept’s latest reporting detailing research by the WIV based on an NIH grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation, is so misleading. I previously reported that The Intercept did not understand the significance of their own documents when they tried to misleadingly present them as “new” information that “raise[s] additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident,” when it is actually evidence against a lab leak.

The grant confirmed what we have already known since the beginning of the pandemic: that the WIV was merely doing research on viruses related to SARS-CoV-1, not SARS-CoV-2. SARS-CoV-1 is even more genetically distant from SARS-CoV-2 than is RaTG13, sharing only ~80% of its genome, which means that SARS-CoV-1-like viruses are even further removed than the minimal 99% genetic similarity required for a virus to plausibly serve as the backbone for SARS-CoV-2 being created from GoF experimentation. This may be why The Intercept clarified in a later incoherent and contradictory report, “NIH Documents Provide New Evidence U.S. Funded Gain-of-Function Research in Wuhan,” that the experiments with transgenic mice, which it cites as “new evidence” that the WIV was conducting GoF research, “could not have directly sparked the pandemic:”

None of the viruses listed in the write-ups of the experiment are related to the virus that causes Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, closely enough to have evolved into it.

However, when one reads the report carefully, it is clear that the documents don’t in fact provide “new” evidence that the WIV was engaged in GoF research. The Intercept actually notes that the experiments being discussed were already reviewed twice by the NIH and deemed not to be GoF, and even cites their explanations. The NIH argued that WIV research published in 2017 showed that in cells in a laboratory, similar chimeric viruses reproduced less effectively than the original, making it more appropriate to describe it as “loss of function,” not a “gain of function.” Yet another reason the NIH gave was that although the differences in the rates of viral reproduction were particularly pronounced two and four days after the mice were infected with the virus, the amount of virus produced by the parent and chimeric strains “evened out” by the end of the experiment.

In other words, the NIH’s rationale is that experiments with chimeric viruses created with WIV1 as the parent virus (a virus that hasn’t been shown to cause disease in humans) between 2017 and 2018 resulted in either a loss of function or retained function by the experiments’ conclusion. The Intercept actually cites the EcoHealth Alliance’s argument that the NIH grant being renewed in 2019 — despite being informed twice about the WIV transgenic-mice experiment briefly passing the official virus growth benchmark, where scientists have to cease experiments and inform relevant authorities, before subsiding below it by the end of the experiment — is evidence the organization did nothing wrong procedurally. Both Dr. Perlman and Dr. Duehr agreed that the EcoHealth Alliance was “following the rules.” Virologist Angela Rasmussen at the University of Saskatchewan added: “There’s no evidence of malfeasance here; this is evidence that they were reporting the work they were doing to program, exactly as they are supposed to.”

The Intercept tried to argue that the NIH was wrong not to deem the experiments GoF, such evidence notwithstanding, by citing the majority opinion among 11 scientists they selected to opine on their documents, which considers the experiments to be GoF based on two main arguments:

Scientists working under a 2014 NIH grant to the EcoHealth Alliance to study bat coronaviruses combined the genetic material from a “parent” coronavirus known as WIV1 with other viruses. They twice submitted summaries of their work that showed that, when in the lungs of genetically engineered mice, three altered bat coronaviruses at times reproduced far more quickly than the original virus on which they were based. The altered viruses were also somewhat more pathogenic, with one causing the mice to lose significant weight. The researchers reported, “These results demonstrate varying pathogenicity of SARSr-CoVs with different spike proteins in humanized mice.” 

However, The Intercept’s journalists don’t demonstrate a clear understanding of the significance of the “reasonably anticipated” clause in official definitions of GoF — or the significance of the fact that human beings are different animal species from transgenic mice — when they cite seven out of 11 scientists claiming the transgenic mice experiments meet the NIH’s criteria for GoF research, without including how each scientist defined GoF research.

The biggest clue showing The Intercept’s journalists don’t understand either of these crucial concepts is when they cite the sole dissenting scientist, Dr. Rasmussen, arguing that the experiments don’t meet the NIH’s criteria for GoF research (three out of the 11 scientists stated they didn’t have enough knowledge about U.S. policies to determine whether the WIV experiments met the NIH’s criteria), without ever explaining why they believe she’s wrong. Dr. Rasmussen argued that the experiment “absolutely does not meet the bar” for GoF research because “[y]ou can’t predict that these viruses would be more pathogenic, or even pathogenic at all, in people,” and since WIV scientists “did not study transmissibility at all in these experiments.”

Examining Dr. Rasmussen’s logic, it’s clear that reasonable anticipation of the viruses studied becoming more virulent or transmissible in humans is an essential component of her definition of GoF research, as she rejects that these experiments constitute GoF because WIV scientists weren’t studying transmissibility, and could not anticipate whether these chimeric viruses would be pathogenic or more virulent in people. This precludes the intentionality required to make viruses “more pathogenic or transmissible” in The Intercept’s own stated GoF definition.

Dr. Perlman (who does a lot of research with humanized mice) confirmed that The Intercept’s report contained “essentially no new information” and stated that “everything depends on how one defines gain of function,” and that one could potentially receive different answers depending on “whom you ask.” He stated that if one defines GoF as making something more virulent or transmissible in mammals like mice, then it “would technically count as gain-of-function.” But Perlman ultimately agreed with Dr. Rasmussen and the NIH’s rationale for not deeming those experiments GoF, and stated that “it’s gain-of-function for mice, but not for people” because making viruses more virulent or transmissible in mice doesn’t necessarily mean they would be in humans, since humanized mice aren’t humans.

As did Rasmussen, Perlman questioned the relevance of whether the WIV’s transgenic mice experiments constituted GoF research, and stated that a virus becoming more virulent or transmissible “in humans” is an essential component of his GoF definition, and clearly also a part of the NIH’s definition cited by The Intercept. The NIH told The Intercept that they never approved “any research that would make a coronavirus more dangerous to humans,” and that the changes to the chimeric viruses “would not be anticipated to increase virulence or transmissibility in humans.”

Perlman also cited The Intercept’s inclusion of microbiologist Vincent Racanellio’s statement that “[y]ou can do some kinds of gain-of-function research that then has unforeseen consequences and may be a problem, but that’s not the case here,” as evidence that some of the seven scientists arguing that the transgenic mice experiments constitute GoF research may not consider making a virus more virulent or transmissible in humans an essential part of their GoF definition.

Yet The Intercept omits the critical distinction between humans and mice as different species in their definition of GoF as merely “intentionally making viruses more pathogenic or transmissible.” They try to make it seem as if differing definitions of GoF aren’t important when they cite Jacques van Helden, a professor of bioinformatics at Aix-Marseille Université, arguing that debate over defining GoF “has been too much focused on technical aspects,” when those “technical aspects” could determine everything.

Dr. Duehr agreed with the NIH and Dr. Rasmussen’s arguments because he also considers “reasonable anticipation” of the viruses becoming more virulent or transmissible “in humans” to be essential components of his GoF definition. However, he does not consider the transgenic-mice experiments to be GoF, even for mice, because he argued “the most important part” to consider is that WIV scientists “weren’t passaging the virus in mice,” and “only infected them once” to measure the chimeric viruses’ effects on mice, not to intentionally make them more virulent (p. 298). Duehr explained that in order for a virus to reliably gain a function for a species, one would need to passage a virus multiple times through different individual members of that species, like Fouchier’s ferret experiments, because “one round of replication does not adaptation make,” since there’s “variation among members of animal species.”

The Intercept’s flawed methodology

Out of the 11 scientists The Intercept claims to have contacted, only six of them are identified, and their report omits critical information such as how each scientist defines GoF. We don’t know, for instance, whether The Intercept asked these scientists whether those experiments could be reasonably anticipated to enhance virulence or transmissibility of those viruses for humans. If some or all of the seven scientists who argued that the WIV experiments constitute GoF for mice would reject that they constitute GoF for humans, then that dramatically changes how worried people should be about those experiments, and raises the question of why The Intercept would omit such necessary information.

Even if one concedes, for the sake of argument, that the WIV experiments are GoF in mice, The Intercept doesn’t explain what relevance that would have for humans. If animals like transgenic/humanized mice could serve as perfect predictors for how viruses and drugs would behave in humans, then there would be no need for human research after animal research.

There’s reason to suspect that The Intercept’s methodology of arguing that the NIH’s decision was wrong — based merely on tallying up the opinions of the scientists they contacted, without refuting Dr. Rasmussen and the NIH’s arguments — is unreliable. Their first bad-faith report on the grant asked only scientists who have been promoting the lab-leak theory, Richard Ebright and Alina Chan, to opine on their documents — hinting that the lab-leak theory is a predetermined narrative for the report’s authors Sharon Lerner and Mara Hvistendahl — and it’s possible that The Intercept is engaged in similarly biased source selection with this report too. Dr. Duehr stated that if reporters really want to argue that the NIH was wrong by merely tallying the opinion of scientists instead of making their own argument, then the proper approach would be to “ask an unbiased large sample of people with relevant expertise, not just people who already agree with you, or [a] few people.”

The fact that Intercept journalists credulously cite biologist Stuart Newman’s irrelevant statements like “making chimeric coronaviruses, mixing and matching RBDs [a part of the virus that allows it to attach to receptors] and spike proteins” being “exactly the scenario imagined” by lab-leak theorists is proof that they don’t understand basic information about SARS-CoV-2 not being a chimeric virus, with no signs of human manipulation, acknowledged even by lab-leak boosters like Richard Ebright.

Even RaTG13, which shares a 96% genome match with SARS-CoV-2, has over a thousand nucleotide differences spread throughout its genome like raisins in a pudding, not just in the receptor binding domain and spike protein sequences, which means scientists can’t just “mix and match” RBDs and spike proteins, like cutting and pasting paragraphs of an essay, to create SARS-CoV-2 with chimeric experiments. If Intercept journalists don’t even understand basic information about SARS-CoV-2’s genome, what reason is there to trust their judgment on which scientists to contact or believe?

When I reached out to Dr. Rasmussen for comment, she confirmed that The Intercept’s Sharon Lerner and Mara Hvistendahl were explicitly informed that their methodology of presenting people like Richard Ebright and Alina Chan as experts equivalent with actual virologists like herself, or experts on dual-use research, is flawed because they don’t have the relevant expertise to assess whether a study presents an undue risk. Rasmussen also confirmed that they were explicitly informed that it is a mistake to call the hACE2 transgenic mice used in the WIV experiment “humanized mice” in their report (even if the grant itself referred to them as “humanized mice”) because “[e]xpressing a single human gene” does not “render a mouse analogous to a human,” and that they had the critical distinction between the “fundamentally different physiology” of different animal species explained to them. This means that they were not merely ignorant, but deliberately omitted critical information by creating the misimpression to a general audience that mice are analogous to humans and insisting on erroneously using the term “humanized mice” throughout their report despite correction.

After examining their email correspondence, I confirmed that Dr. Rasmussen was asked only general questions like “Did the work described below fit NIH’s definition of GoF research at the time?” instead of more precise questions referencing specific NIH documents containing definitions for GoF. She also clarified that her understanding of GoF research being lab work that’s reasonably anticipated to enhance the virulence and/or transmissibility of viruses in humans is not an arbitrary or idiosyncratic one. She answered the question of whether the 2017-2018 transgenic mice experiments met the NIH’s criteria for GoF according to the 2017 P3CO framework that defines potential pandemic pathogens, which was drawn up by the NIH, and even referenced by The Intercept in their own article.

If other scientists contacted by The Intercept were asked similarly vague questions like Dr. Rasmussen, this left more room for scientists to answer whether the transgenic mice experiments qualify as GoF in open-ended ways. Rasmussen also stated that criticisms of the U.S. government’s oversight process are a “separate question” from how GoF is “defined currently by the U.S. government.”

None of the other five named scientists explain why the NIH and Dr. Rasmussen’s arguments related to reasonable anticipation or relevance to humans are wrong and thus there is no logically necessary reason for readers to conclude that the NIH and Dr. Rasmussen are wrong. Certainly not based on a mere tally of a small and apparently arbitrary selection of scientists by The Intercept, especially when they omit necessary context such as how each scientist defines GoF.

Leaked EcoHealth Alliance grant not evidence of GoF research in Wuhan

Many of the same points made above apply to the latest Intercept report on a grant proposal from the EcoHealth Alliance rejected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018, which was leaked by DRASTIC, a group of internet activists pursuing the lab-leak theory. Assuming the documents are authentic, the grant proposed things like creating full-length infectious clones of SARS-CoV-1-like coronaviruses and inserting a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. One type of cleavage site was able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells, and has drawn attention because SARS-CoV-2’s furin cleavage site has never been seen before among sarbecoviruses (the category of viruses to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs), which is why some lab-leak theorists suspect it doesn’t have natural origins.

However, The Intercept omits that furin cleavage sites are “commonplace in other coronavirus spike proteins,” such as MERS and other endemic human coronaviruses. Virologist Stuart Neil’s Twitter analysis on the leaked documents noted that although the EcoHealth Alliance proposed what could appropriately be called GoF research, the important thing to note is that the SARS-CoV-1-like coronaviruses are too genetically distant and “can’t possibly be the source” of SARS-CoV-2.

He also noted that the proposal (which was never funded), would have been carried out in the U.S., not China, since the WIV’s major role in the proposal was to sample and sequence viruses, not do any molecular virology, consistent with the division of labor in previous collaborations with Dr. Baric. This is why Dr. Goldstein told The Intercept that it’s “hard to assess any bearing” the documents have on pandemic origins. SARS-CoV-2 is also not a chimeric virus, and inserting a furin cleavage site into SARS-CoV-1-like coronaviruses that haven’t been shown to cause disease in humans wouldn’t be able to create SARS-CoV-2 anyways.

The Intercept notes that scientists have argued that there’s “no logical reason” why an engineered virus would utilize such a “suboptimal” furin cleavage site, which would just be “an unusual and needlessly complex feat of genetic engineering,” since scientists can just insert furin cleavage sites known to be more efficient, and as there was “no evidence of prior research at the WIV involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.” However, it still implied that the WIV could have found other ways to “pay for the experiments” and do the work on their own, despite how unusual, or ethically out of character, that would be for someone like Dr. Shi Zhengli, who, according to Dr. Rasmussen, is “by all accounts [a] good collaborator.” Thus far, although the leaked documents may raise legitimate questions about transparency from the EcoHealth Alliance, there is no evidence the WIV was engaged in GoF research that is reasonably anticipated to enhance the virulence or transmissibility of pathogens in humans — only a lot of innuendo.

The ‘Lying Chinese’ redux

Ultimately, lab-leak conspiracy theorists resort to these ever-shifting appeals to possible explanations like “no-see’m” and “serial passage” (without arguing for a specific scenario), and reject the credibility of scientists, because there is no evidence for a lab leak or laboratory manipulation of SARS-CoV-2. Some even go so far as to speculate that Chinese scientists have been using U.S. grant money to conduct GoF research in secret, as when Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) questioned Anthony Fauci on whether “the Chinese” would “lie” to him, since the grants typically cited as “evidence” don’t prove that the WIV was doing GoF research.

GoF research is subject to intense government scrutiny and oversight and is hard to do under the radar. But even if it were true that the WIV was conducting GoF research, it has no relevance to the Covid-19 pandemic unless it can be shown that it possessed SARS-CoV-2, or an undisclosed virus that is genetically closer to it than is RaTG13, prior to the pandemic. GoF research on known viruses being unable to create SARS-CoV-2 may be why some accuse the WIV of possessing an undisclosed virus and hiding research on it from international scientists with whom they collaborate. However, Dr. Shi has denied that she conducted or collaborated on any GoF experiments on coronaviruses that weren’t published, and many scientists have also pointed out there’s “no evidence that the WIV sequenced a virus that is closer to SARS-CoV-2 than [is] RaTG13, and no reason to hide research on a SARS-CoV-2-like virus prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

These neverending accusations and assumptions that Chinese scientists are lying, without evidence, are rooted in Orientalist tropes of the “dishonest Chinese” based on centuries of Western Yellow Peril propaganda, which is why some equate lack of evidence for a lab leak with evidence of a “coverup.”

The Booster Scam

The Stephen Lendman Blog

The Booster Scam

by Stephen Lendman

Booster jabs boost illness. They accelerate health destruction.

The same goes for all flu/covid jabs — designed to harm, not protect.

It’s true as well about all things flu/covid.

Everything mandated and urged by US/Western regimes has nothing to do with protecting health and well-being.

Diabolical aims are all about abolishing free and open societies, along with mass-elimination of what Henry Kissinger once called “useless eaters.”

On Friday, an FDA advisory panel delivered a split decision.

It overwhelmingly rejected the Biden regime’s scheme to booster-jab Americans aged-16 and older.

The decision will likely be temporary.

It won’t likely halt planned forever-jabbing — once or twice annually — on the phony pretext of waning immunity.

At the same time, the FDA panel voted unanimously in favor of booster-jabbing Americans aged-65 and older, as well as others with weakened immune systems.

It also said that healthcare…

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How US Media Misrepresent the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Laboratories and Safety Protocols

September 15th, 2021

By Joshua Cho

Source

Lab Leak Media Feature photo
Even if we were to accept all the accusations against the WIV regarding their alleged subpar safety standards, none of it has any relevance to the Covid-19 pandemic unless it can be shown the WIV possessed SARS-CoV-2 in its lab before the outbreak, and there is no evidence of that.

WUHAN, CHINA — While many people have already criticized the lack of evidence and scientific basis for the hypothesis that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a laboratory, both critics and proponents of the lab-leak theory appear to have uncritically accepted false or unproven premises regarding work done at the laboratory most often implicated in these speculations, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Some of the most prominent accusations pointed at the WIV are that it was conducting research as part of China’s alleged biowarfare program, and was conducting its experiments in substandard biosafety conditions. The implication is that if the WIV lied about not having SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak, the virus would also be more likely to have originated from there owing to their inadequate biosafety standards. However, after investigating these widely circulated claims and contacting several scientists, it turns out there is actually little evidence for any of these allegations.

State Department cable a ‘nothing burger’

The claim that the WIV was conducting its experiments in substandard or unsafe working conditions started gaining mainstream acceptance when Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin published an op-ed based on redacted State Department cables from 2018. Rogin claimed that the redacted cables were evidence of “safety issues” at the WIV:

Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.

What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

Certainly, when reading Rogin’s contrived interpretations of the cables, it’s understandable why these characterizations of the WIV’s biosafety standards would create a sense of mass panic and hysteria among people unfamiliar with laboratory work. However, around the time of publication, Rogin’s opinion piece was already criticized by experts like virologist Angela Rasmussen at the University of Saskatchewan, who tweeted that Rogin’s claims were not only “extremely vague” — with the portions of the cables cited not demonstrating a “clear and specific risk” — but also highly inaccurate.

The sections Rogin cites from the January 19, 2018 cable are:

During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory…

Most importantly, the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.

Rasmussen pointed out the main takeaway is that the cables conclude “it’s important to continue working on bat CoVs because of their potential as human pathogens,” and that it “doesn’t suggest that there were safety issues specifically relating to WIV’s work on bat CoVs capable of using human ACE2 as a receptor.” Other critics at the time argued that if Rogin truly believed the State Department cable was as damning for Beijing as he claimed it was, there was little reason for him to refuse to release its full contents in his op-ed upon publication, or when people voiced their skepticism of his presentation of it afterward.


Rasmussen later remarked that the full cable is a “big old nothing burger,” because it doesn’t actually raise any concerns with the WIV’s work. Rather, the cable showed how the WIV “wanted to ensure staff working with dangerous pathogens were trained so they could do so safely.” This would explain why the cable requested further aid and training for the lab’s projects and personnel, instead of trying to cancel them.

The Post also pointed out that the lack of trained personnel is not a problem unique to the WIV, as it cited Rob Grenfell, the director of health and biosecurity at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (an Australian government biomedical research agency), saying “All [such] facilities around the world face this challenge.”

No proof WIV’s BSL-4 lab involved with bioweapons research

As confirmed by the release of the full cable, the “new lab” mentioned is the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory (the highest biosafety level), which first opened in 2018. Many irrelevant speculations have surrounded this BSL-4 facility, as it deals with the most dangerous pathogens, like smallpox and SARS-CoV-1, that cannot be handled at lower biosafety levels.

Journalist Sam Husseini, one of the biggest promoters of the laboratory origin hypothesis, has recounted his suspicions regarding the possibility of the SARS-CoV-2 virus originating from the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory when he asked a CDC representative about the facility:

I asked if it was a “complete coincidence” that the pandemic had started in Wuhan, the only place in China with a declared biosafety level 4 (BSL4) laboratory. BSL4 laboratories have the most stringent safety mechanisms, but handle the most deadly pathogens.

Husseini goes as far as to insinuate that the mere existence of a BSL-4 laboratory is evidence of China’s biowarfare program, largely based on his assertion that the concepts of “biodefense” and “biowarfare” are “largely indistinguishable:”

“Biodefense” implies tacit biowarfare, breeding more dangerous pathogens for the alleged purpose of finding a way to fight them….

The U.S. and China each have dual-use biowarfare/biodefense programs. China has major facilities at Wuhan — a biosafety level 4 lab and a biosafety level 2 lab. There are leaks from labs.

The talking point that the distinction between concepts like “biowarfare” and “biodefense” is merely a “rhetorical sleight of hand” is a popular assertion among journalists promoting the lab-leak theory’s legitimacy, as journalist Glenn Greenwald also claimed something similar:

But ultimately, that distinction barely matters. For both offensive and defensive bioweapons research, scientists must create, cultivate, manipulate and store non-natural viruses or infectious bacteria in their labs, whether to study them for weaponization or for vaccines.

These claims by journalists with no formal science background struck me as far-fetched, so I contacted microbiologist Stanley Perlman at the University of Iowa, virologist Stephen Goldstein at the University of Utah, and virologist James Duehr at the University of Pittsburgh, to check these assertions. Both Perlman and Goldstein simply rejected the assertion that “biowarfare” and “biodefense” are “largely indistinguishable” concepts, with Perlman stating that the claim “doesn’t make sense.” Duehr responded:

Saying that there is no difference between “biodefense” and “biowarfare” is like saying there is no difference between developing bullet-proof vests and armor-piercing bullets. Sure, knowing how one works helps you develop better versions of the other, but conflating them is really missing the point.”

Australian virologist Danielle Anderson, the only foreign scientist to work in the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory until November 2019, has attested that claiming “the Wuhan Institute of Virology as ‘one of only two bioweapons research labs in all of China’ is simply false,” undermining Husseini’s claim that the WIV’s BSL-4 lab is evidence of China’s alleged dual-use “biowarfare” program. Critics of Husseini’s allegation that the WIV is engaged in “biowarfare” research — one being Claudia Chaufan, director of the graduate program of health policy at York University — have punctured his logic on several grounds. Chaufan stated:

That linguistic sleight of hand in particular, the equivalence of biowarfare and biodefense, is factually not true, and is certainly not true in one very obvious way regarding the Wuhan lab: If there were a biowarfare arms race happening around the world, the countries putatively at war with each other — the U.S. and China — would not share or allow access to their labs to a competitor state, collaborate, or exchange their research and researchers.

But the fact is the U.S. was given wide access to the Wuhan Labs — not just scientists but also U.S. State Department functionaries — as were French scientists.  The Wuhan lab solicited U.S. aid and funding. (Husseini seems to believe that biowarfare labs openly solicit funding from other countries). Scientists in the U.S. and China collaborated and worked together collegially, trained each other, shared information, published papers and still maintain some relations.”

A view of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 lab after a visit by a WHO team on Feb. 3, 2021. Ng Han Guan | AP

It is true that the WIV has carried out unspecified classified research projects, and has heightened secrecy due to the inherent national security risks of handling dangerous pathogens. However, it’s also true that initial reports explained why WIV officials claimed that “transparency is the basis” for the BSL-4 lab, and why the WIV frequently collaborates with foreign scientists and openly publishes its research — further undermining the allegation that bioweapons research is being conducted there. According to the scientific journal Nature, when the BSL-4 lab was getting cleared to operate:

It will focus on the control of emerging diseases, store purified viruses and act as a World Health Organization ‘reference laboratory’ linked to similar labs around the world. “It will be a key node in the global biosafety-lab network,” says lab director Yuan Zhiming…

The opportunities for international collaboration, meanwhile, will aid the genetic analysis and epidemiology of emergent diseases.

The preventive (rather than militaristic) nature of the WIV’s research is also corroborated by the judgments of U.S. diplomats in the Post’s unredacted State Department cable when it described how the 2002-03 SARS outbreak “convinced China to prioritize international cooperation for infectious disease control:”

This state-of-the-art facility is designed for prevention and control research on diseases that require the highest level of biosafety and biosecurity containment.

WIV’s biosafety practices not substandard

For the sake of argument, even if one grants the unproven premise that the WIV’s BSL-4 lab was engaged in bioweapons research, it is still irrelevant to the question of whether SARS-CoV-2 originated there, since the WIV doesn’t conduct coronavirus research at a BSL-4 setting. Most coronavirus research around the world is conducted at BSL-2 and BSL-3 settings.

This demonstrates that those who suspect the pandemic originated from the WIV’s BSL-4 lab don’t seem to be aware of basic information about coronavirus research. Some notable examples are people like novelist Nicholson Baker citing Husseini’s suspicions of the WIV’s BSL-4 facility in a lengthy speculative piece for New York Magazine. Others include Josh Rogin citing similarly ignorant anonymous Trump administration officials to imply that the irrelevant State Department cable is “evidence” that supports “the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.”

However, lab-leak proponents like disgraced science writer Nicholas Wade — who penned an influential Medium blog post that was later reprinted by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — are also fond of moving the goalposts to argue their evidence-free conspiracy theory. Wade cites Rogin’s long-debunked and irrelevant op-ed to claim that the BSL-4 lab’s “state of readiness considerably alarmed the State Department inspectors who visited it from the Beijing embassy in 2018,” before going on to make an entirely separate argument that the WIV’s biosafety standards were substandard and amounted to professional malpractice:

The real problem, however, was not the unsafe state of the Wuhan BSL4 lab but the fact that virologists worldwide don’t like working in BSL4 conditions…. 

Before 2020, the rules followed by virologists in China and elsewhere required that experiments with the SARS1 and MERS viruses be conducted in BSL3 conditions. But all other bat coronaviruses could be studied in BSL2, the next level down. BSL2 requires taking fairly minimal safety precautions, such as wearing lab coats and gloves, not sucking up liquids in a pipette, and putting up biohazard warning signs. Yet a gain-of-function experiment [wherein a pathogen is reasonably anticipated to gain enhanced virulence and/or transmissibility] conducted in BSL2 might produce an agent more infectious than either SARS1 or MERS. And if it did, then lab workers would stand a high chance of infection, especially if unvaccinated.

Wade briefly explained biosafety levels to readers before taking a quote from Dr. Shi Zhengli — the renowned virologist at the WIV — out of context to maximize the impression that the WIV’s biosafety standards were unprofessional:

There are four degrees of safety, designated BSL1 to BSL4, with BSL4 being the most restrictive and designed for deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus….

Much of Shi’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science magazine that “[t]he coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.”

Dr. Shi Zhengli
Researcher Dr. Shi Zhengli is pictured carrying out research at a lab in the Wuhan Institute of Virolog, Feb. 23, 2017. Photo | Chinatopix via AP

Wade also seemed comfortable parroting molecular biologist Richard Ebright’s heavily disputed claim that BSL-2 conditions are about as safe as a “dentist’s office,” which has been uncritically parroted in other reports as well:

“It is clear that some or all of this work was being performed using a biosafety standard  —  biosafety level 2, the biosafety level of a standard U.S. dentist’s office  — that would pose an unacceptably high risk of infection of laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2,” Ebright says.

Although Wade provides the link to the Science interview, he omits crucial context that dramatically changes the impression of Shi’s answer and the professionalism of the WIV’s work. When one actually reads the interview, one quickly discovers that the interviewer takes it for granted that most coronavirus research is actually conducted in BSL-2 and BSL-3 settings:

Q: Given that coronavirus research in most places is done in BSL-2 or BSL-3 Labs — and indeed, your WIV didn’t even have an operational BSL-4 until recently — why would you do any coronavirus experiments under BSL-4 conditions?

University of Utah virologist Goldstein also explained why likening a BSL-2 lab to a dentist’s office is a “ridiculous comparison:”

In BSL2, experiments are conducted inside a class II biosafety cabinet. These have negative pressure, so air circulates within the cabinet but doesn’t escape, and the air is HEPA filtered as it circulates inside the cabinet. A dentist’s office has none of these critical safety controls.”

This helps prevent aerosol droplets or splashes of samples (like viruses) from traveling around inside the air of the cabinet — though one can simply see for oneself how a biosafety cabinet works, and the proper precautions scientists follow while using it, to confirm how it differs from a mere “dentist’s office.”

Wade actually provides yet another damning instance of misrepresenting sources — consistent with his history of misrepresenting scientists — when he critiques an influential Nature letter ( he mischaracterizes it as a mere “opinion piece,” instead of being a short report on original research for “an outstanding finding”), which corroborates the opposite of what Wade claims in his blog post. The Nature letter in question is a study by a group of virologists led by Kristian Andersen, and it states that the “possibility of an inadvertent laboratory release of SARS-CoV-2” must be examined because SARS-like viruses (not SARS-CoV-1) found in bats are often studied at BSL-2 settings:

Basic research involving passage of bat SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses in cell culture and/or animal models has been ongoing for many years in biosafety level 2 laboratories across the world, and there are documented instances of laboratory escapes of SARS-CoV.

The authors later concluded that they “do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” and the statements above undermine Wade’s depiction of the WIV’s professionalism.

When I asked Dr. Goldstein and Dr. Perlman (who both research coronaviruses) to confirm this information, they each agreed that most coronavirus research is done at BSL-2 and BSL-3 laboratories and that there’s nothing unusual about Chinese scientists also doing coronavirus research in those settings. Goldstein declined to specifically comment on the quality of the WIV because he has never visited, and Perlman suggested that some scientists were concerned about experiments with bat viruses being performed at BSL-2 settings, even if they were “all done following the precautions used at the time.”

However, Dr. Rasmussen clarified in a tweet that “many labs studied bat CoVs at BSL2 pre-Covid,” and that “there is no evidence that lab work was occurring with substandard containment,” further corroborating the claim in the Nature study, though she seemed to suggest that the practice “should be revisited.” Dr. Duehr also explained that “more biosafety controls are not always better,” and that “too many biosafety controls can also be dangerous,” because that can lead scientists to become fatigued and careless, as how scientists put on and take off gear are some of the most important moments in biosafety. This is why scientists use the appropriate amount of biosafety controls, rather than pointlessly using the most restrictive equipment for every experiment.

Experiments with bat viruses in BSL-2 labs

MIT’s Technology Review article “Inside the Risky Bat-Virus Engineering That Links America to Wuhan” cited a few scientists critical of the WIV conducting similar experiments to the heavily scrutinized 2015 Nature study, led by virologist Ralph Baric (which has frequently been misrepresented as “gain-of-function” research), at a lower biosafety setting than the ones conducted at the University of North Carolina:

The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+….

Today a chorus of scientists, including Baric, are coming forward to say this was a misstep. Even if there is no link to Covid-19, allowing work on potentially dangerous bat viruses at BSL-2 is “an actual scandal,” says Michael Lin, a bioengineer at Stanford University.

In response to the news that the WIV conducted more experiments with bat virus WIV1 at the BSL-2 level in another study published in 2017, Technology Review cited criticisms from other virologists like Ian Lipkin:

“That’s screwed up,” the Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin, who co-authored the seminal paper arguing that covid must have had a natural origin, told the journalist Donald McNeil Jr. “It shouldn’t have happened. People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”

However, Dr. Duehr explained to me that the U.S. CDC’s own Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories manual states that viruses related to “Risk Group 3” pathogens (the kinds typically handled at BSL-3), which lack the virulence in humans that the BSL-3 viruses have, can often be safely handled in BSL-2 or BSL-2+ settings (p. 307).

CDC’s Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories manual
Page 307 of the CDC’s Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories manual

This is precisely Dr. Shi’s explanation given to Technology Review for conducting experiments with the WIV1 virus in a BSL-2 lab:

In an email, Zhengli Shi said she followed Chinese rules that are similar to those in the U.S. Safety requirements are based on what virus you are studying. Since bat viruses like WIV1 haven’t been confirmed to cause disease in human beings, her biosafety committee recommended BSL-2 for engineering them and testing them and BSL-3 for any animal experiments.

Duehr also explained that the SARS-like bat viruses used in the Baric study appear to have previously infected humans, but that those persons didn’t recall any symptoms or worrisome illnesses. Given that data, it was reasonable to infer that any infection was likely either asymptomatic or extremely mild, so a similar rationale would explain why scientists inferred these viruses were less virulent and could be handled at a lower biosafety level. Duehr expressed agreement with Dr. Rasmussen’s statement that the scientific community should reconsider the practice of conducting experiments with bat coronaviruses that haven’t been shown to be virulent in humans in BSL-2 laboratories, but also stated that we “should not fault researchers at the WIV for doing what was common practice all around the world at the time.”

Intercept’s reporting is actually evidence against a lab leak

Two recent reports on a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the EcoHealth Alliance — detailing research by the WIV, following FOIA litigation by The Intercept — were misleadingly presented as “new evidence” that U.S.-funded experiments in China “posed biosafety risks” and constituted “high-risk research.” However, it is unclear whether Intercept journalists Sharon Lerner and Mara Hvistendahl understood the significance of the documents they obtained.

Soon after the publication of the first report, Dr. Goldstein argued that The Intercept actually provided evidence against a lab leak because they further confirmed what we have already known since the beginning of the pandemic: that the WIV was only working on “SARS1-like viruses,” with “not a hint of experimental work” on viruses related to SARS-CoV-2.

Virologist Stuart Neil stated on Twitter that there’s “absolutely nothing new here” apart from “disabusing everyone of the notion that animal experiments were carried out at BSL2” because they were carried out in a BSL3 animal facility at the Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, and not at the WIV as was previously assumed, which is “entirely appropriate for this work and should provide more than adequate containment.” Dr. Duehr added that the grant also shows us that WIV scientists were doing animal work with SARS-like bat coronaviruses at BSL-3 (not SARS-CoV-1 or 2) (p. 126), which is also how American scientists would handle these bat viruses.

The Intercept also credulously cites biologist and prominent lab-leak booster Alina Chan’s fearmongering and irrelevant speculations that WIV researchers potentially getting bitten by a bat during fieldwork could have led to the pandemic, citing a risk assessment of some of the WIV’s fieldwork:

The grant proposal acknowledges some of those dangers: “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.”

Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents show that EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab-leak theory seriously. “In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten — and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,” Chan said. “Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?

However, it would actually be more worrisome if there were no risk assessments for fieldwork to cite at all. Dr. Neil ridiculed Dr. Chan on Twitter for criticizing scientists for writing “a proper risk assessment” for fieldwork “after all the accusations of unsafe working.” Dr. Perlman stated that scientists “have to write risk assessments for their work” in order to get funded and that it was “the right thing to do.”

But perhaps more importantly, citing Dr. Chan’s speculations about the pandemic originating from a bat bite is proof that neither she nor The Intercept’s journalists are aware of basic information about SARS-CoV-2 being a respiratory virus.

In order for that scenario to have any basis, SARS-CoV-2 would also have to be a bloodborne pathogen because the virus from an infected animal bite would pierce the skin and enter the bloodstream, but there is no evidence of SARS-CoV-2 being a bloodborne pathogen. Dr. Rasmussen pointed out that there is no known case of anyone contracting a sarbecovirus like SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 from an animal bite, and that while it is “theoretically possible,” it does not actually happen in real life because, as the FDA’s own website confirms, respiratory viruses generally aren’t known to spread via blood-mediated transmission. Dr. Perlman agreed with Rasmussen’s statements and told me that if he were bitten by a bat during fieldwork, he’d “worry about rabies,” not SARS-CoV-2.

It’s also unclear why Dr. Chan is still repeating her baseless claims when Dr. Rasmussen had already criticized her “inexperience with virology” for speculating that it’s “plausible” for humans to be infected by a mouse-adapted strain of coronavirus if lab workers were bitten by mice back in January.

Perhaps The Intercept would not have presented their documents in a way that promotes the lab-leak theory despite it being evidence of the opposite, or published Dr. Chan’s embarrassing speculations, had they sought out other scientists who could have helped them understand their material. But the only scientists asked to opine on the significance of their documents in their bad-faith report were lab-leak boosters like Richard Ebright and Alina Chan.

second Intercept article cited virologist Jesse Bloom’s opinion that the WIV “creating chimeras of SARS-related bat coronaviruses that are thought to pose high risk to humans entails unacceptable risks.” However, the virus being discussed in the article is WIV1, which hasn’t been shown to cause disease in humans, which is why Dr. Perlman stated that he thinks it’s “not a risk” to study it and that some of the titles of Dr. Baric’s papers on the virus, like “SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence,” may have given the “misleading impression” that it was. Dr. Duehr also agreed that it isn’t a risk to study a SARS-like virus like WIV1, and told me:

The chimeric experiments that Bloom says we should not be doing, are how we find out whether it would pose a risk to humans. He’s assuming that we know the virus is high risk before doing them.”

Dr. Rasmussen disagreed with Dr. Bloom’s personal assessment of the WIV1 experiments and questioned why he thinks he should be the sole arbiter of whether the experiments posed an “unacceptable risk,” when the WIV’s work is subject to external oversight (which is how it was FOIA-ed), and showed that WIV scientists aren’t reckless and don’t singlehandedly decide what is an acceptable risk or not.

Judgments of scientists directly familiar with the WIV

Arguably, the opinions of scientists and biosecurity experts directly familiar with the WIV’s safety protocols should count more than others. And they paint a very different picture from the one painted by the critics, and argue that reports insinuating that the laboratory was operating under subpar safety conditions are misrepresentations.

French biosecurity expert Gabriel Gras — who oversaw safety standards at the WIV from 2012 to 2017, since the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory is a joint collaboration between China and France — dismissed the lab-leak theory and vouched for the WIV’s professionalism and safety standards. He also stated that a BSL-3 laboratory is usually used to study a coronavirus, as it made little sense to use BSL-4 facilities owing to the time and cost considerations. Dr. Danielle Anderson testified that the WIV was being misrepresented by critics and the media:

Half-truths and distorted information have obscured an accurate accounting of the lab’s functions and activities, which were more routine than how they’ve been portrayed in the media. …It’s not that it was boring, but it was a regular lab that worked in the same way as any other high-containment lab. What people are saying is just not how it is.”

American scientists who trained WIV staff attested that the safety protocols at the WIV are not only practiced by scientists all over the world, but that those safety protocols and practices were partly shaped by WIV scientists themselves, owing to their excellence. Some of the safety protocols include wearing safety equipment to prevent themselves from getting infected while doing field work, and making sure that the samples they handle in the lab are “inactivated,” and aren’t actually infectious, by using a chemical process that breaks apart the virus itself, while preserving its genetic material for study.

But even if we were to accept all the accusations against the WIV regarding their alleged subpar safety standards, none of it has any relevance to the Covid-19 pandemic unless it can be shown the WIV possessed SARS-CoV-2 in its lab before the outbreak, and there is no evidence of that either.

In hindsight, it seems there may be a legitimate debate to be had over whether certain experiments conducted at the WIV should have been handled at higher biosafety settings, even if they weren’t out of the ordinary. However, it’s clear that accusations of the WIV being a nefarious bioweapons lab conducting research in subpar safety conditions compared to the rest of the world at the time are misleading at best, and at worst unproven or false.

9/11 and the Politics of Fear and Self-Preservation

We will either be remembered as a country that took freedom and liberty for all seriously or we will be remembered as a nation of cowards who, driven by fear, were willing to deprive this group, then that group, of their freedom — before losing that freedom entirely.

September 10th, 2021

By Whitney Webb

Source

The 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is a particularly somber one, not just because of the horrific nature of events of that day reaching its second-decade milestone, but because of how little we seem to have learned in that amount of time.

The fear and trauma generated by the events of 9/11 were used by the U.S. national security state and its civilian allies to great effect to divide the American population, to attack independent reporting as well as independent thought, to gut the anti-war movement, and to normalize the U.S. government’s overt and persistent degradation of the country’s Constitution. This, of course, is in addition to the illegal U.S. occupations and drone wars in the Middle East and elsewhere that were also born out of this event.

The true beneficiaries of 9/11

As a nation, the U.S. populace has failed to grapple with these realities, and many others, in the two decades since the Twin Towers and WTC Building 7 fell. Far from bringing any benefit to the alleged masterminds of the event, the results of 9/11 instead overwhelmingly favored the ambitions of a powerful faction within the U.S. national security state that had long sought to bring the dissident-elimination efforts it spent decades implementing abroad – from the Phoenix Program in Vietnam to Operation Condor in South America – home to roost.

As a result, the response of the U.S. government to the attack supposedly launched by those “who hate us for our freedom” was to work to reduce our freedoms and civil liberties. Now, 20 years on, the sophisticated “War on Terror” apparatus has been fully turned into a “War on Domestic Terror,” with many of those who once opposed the war on terrorism abroad now cheering on the ratcheting up of its domestic equivalent.

Yet, the domestic terror apparatus being swiftly created and implemented very clearly targets individuals and ideologies on both sides of the political divide. It is also extremely vague, essentially leaving it up to those holding the reins of political power – whether Democrat, Republican or something else – to decide who is “terrorist” and who is not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Joe Biden back in the mid-1990s who introduced legislation that would have given the president sole and unappealable authority to define what constitutes “terrorism,” a fact that was omitted from media coverage of last year’s presidential campaign and the past several months of his presidency.

A crisis of courage

It seems clear at this point that one of the key reasons the U.S. continues to hemorrhage its remaining civil liberties, either as a result of the new “War on Domestic Terrorism” or as a response to COVID-19, is that it is undergoing a crisis of conscience and courage in grappling with not just the true nature of the events of 9/11 itself, but with the orthodoxy over the “official story” of those events.

Even two decades after the fact, it is still deemed too controversial or unthinkable to question whether the official story is an accurate portrayal of the events that transpired on and led to that day. This is despite the fact that the official story itself, presumably the same story told by the 9/11 Commission report, has been labeled incomplete, and unable to answer major questions about that day, by its very authors. In addition, the official story relies heavily on testimony obtained through extreme torture, meaning it is of questionable accuracy.

Many of those who have been quick and vocal to point out the lies of the U.S. government when it comes to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and other consequences of the War on Terror have been unable to even consider that the official story of 9/11 may not be legitimate and may indeed have been dealt from the same pack. This may be for a variety of reasons, including a strong desire to not be de-legitimized by their peers as bearers of the “conspiracy theorist” smear and an unwillingness to face a political reality where U.S. government officials may have been complicit in a deadly attack on American soil. In those two examples, however, the failure of such individuals, particularly in media, to even consider that there may be more to the story boils down to a desire for self-preservation in the case of the former and preservation of a particular worldview in the case of the latter. Yet, in both cases, the casualty is the truth and the cause is cowardice.

By failing as a society to thoroughly examine the events of 9/11 and why those events occurred, the American public has shown the powers that be that their desire to preserve a “safe” worldview — and to preserve their own careers, in the case of certain professional classes — is enough to keep people from questioning world-altering events when they emerge. Those powers are well aware of this refusal and have been using it to their advantage ever since.

The poison remains in our system

Today, with the COVID-19 crisis still dragging on, we are similarly immersed in a situation where nuance and facts are being cast aside, militantly in some cases, in favor of the establishment narrative. Is everyone who chooses not to take this particular vaccine a “conspiracy theorist” and “anti-vaxxer”? Does it really make sense to so dramatically divide the public into groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated through a new ID system when the vaccine claims to reduce the severity of illness but not to stop disease transmission? Should those that question the motivation of politicians, powerful pharmaceutical corporations and mainstream media “experts” be censored from expressing those views online?

You do not need to agree with those who hold such views, but what is wrong with hearing what they have to say and debating their evidence with your own? We are losing the ability to have rational public discourse about these issues — and losing it swiftly, at a speed comparable to what took place in the aftermath of 9/11, when questioning the motives of the Bush administration, U.S. intelligence agencies and other groups, as well as their proposed responses and “solutions,” was deemed “unpatriotic” and even “treasonous” by some. Calls were made to strip an entire class of Americans of their freedom for merely sharing the same ethno-religious identities as those we were told attacked us, and many went along with it. Freedom became treated as a privilege only for certain groups, not as a right, and this insidious fallacy has reared its head yet again in recent months in relation to the COVID-19 vaccine debate and also the war on domestic terror.

Our pandemic of fear

Though the failure to consider explanations for 9/11 that deviate from the official story can be called cowardice, the most enduring lesson 20 years on from 9/11 is perhaps that fear was and remains the most powerful tool that has been consistently used to whittle down our freedom and civil liberties. While the divide-and-conquer strategies have raged on from 9/11 to the present, the largest wealth transfers in history have occurred, creating an unaccountable and ultra-wealthy super-elite that dominates an ever-growing underclass.

The march towards this de facto neo-feudalism certainly didn’t begin on or after 9/11, but our collective failure to grapple with the narrative orthodoxies of that day have prevented us from fully understanding the big picture of that event as well as many subsequent and similarly consequential events. For too long, the desire to preserve our self-image, our reputation, and the worldview we are taught in school has all too often made hard, difficult truths a casualty.

In order to truly understand the War on Terror, the domestic surveillance state and our current reality, we must accept that we were lied to about 9/11. We must ask the hard questions and accept hard truths. We must put an end to the 20-plus-year-long pandemic of fear over “invisible enemies,” fear that has pushed us to surrender the very freedoms that we are told we are protecting.

The United States, and much of the world, is quickly becoming an unrecognizable and authoritarian dystopia. We cannot wait another two decades to grapple with the difficult questions and realities that arose after 9/11 and persist into the present. We will either be remembered as a country that took freedom and liberty for all seriously or we will be remembered as a nation of cowards who, driven by fear, were willing to deprive this group, then that group, of their freedom — before losing that freedom entirely.

The media’s addiction to Covid-19 ‘fear porn’ is perpetuating an ever-worsening cycle of societal damage across the world

 

Eva Bartlett

Aug 28, 2021, RT.com

moi

-by Eva K Bartlett

Over the past year and a half, hysterical media reporting on matters Covid-19 has reduced some people to a fearful state of unquestioning compliance – including a great number of otherwise critically-thinking journalists.

With screaming headlines in bold and large font such as, ‘Will this nightmare ever end?’ and ‘Mutant virus skyrockets…’ and ‘Fear grows across the country: VIRUS PANIC’, and ‘Coronavirus horror: Social media footage shows infected Wuhan residents ‘act like zombies’, it is no wonder many people are in a state of panic.

In times when many are suffering mentally and physically under unnecessary and prolonged lockdowns, the incessant fear porn is causing excessive anxiety, which in turn will affect the health & mental well-being of some, if not many. 

In government documents from the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) dated from March 2020 advice was given saying: “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging… This could potentially be done by trained community support volunteers, by targeted media campaigns, social media” 

I’d say the UK media campaigns certainly did the job, and other Western nations got similar directives. The UK government also became the nation’s biggest advertiser in 2020, make what you will of the potential ramifications that could have on cash-strapped newspapers and their supposed ‘independence’.

Having myself been deeply focused on exposing war propaganda and other media lies around Syria, Palestine, Venezuela, and elsewhere over the years, my default position has become one of deep cynicism on mass media reporting. Yes, you can find nuggets of truth, or even excellent journalists in mainstream publications, honestly challenging the narratives.

But those are few and far between, generally you find copy-paste propaganda emanating largely from the bowels of the USA and the UK.

A study by Swiss Propaganda Research (SPR) noted“most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.” 

Those agencies are AP, Reuters, and AFP. SPR notes:

“The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.”

Given all of this, I’ve come to believe that with regard to media reporting on Covid-19, my cynicism is well-deserved.

Covid-19 reporting has increasingly been utterly absurd, with stories of people dropping dead in the streets, ice rink morgues to cope with the mountains of bodies, footage of an overcrowded New York hospital (that just happened to be of an Italian hospital), claims of animals testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, and more recently reports of people dying post-jab but we are told ‘it could have been worse!’

This campaign of fear caused the public to massively overestimate the lethality of Covid-19, which as un-alarmist voices note has a survival rate of over 99%. 

When months into the outbreak it became apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was far less lethal than first predicted, the media and talking heads moved from talking about ‘Covid deaths’ to ‘positive cases’. 

Although relatively early on a goat and pawpaw tested positive for Covid-19, instead of then scrutinizing the accuracy of the PCR test as a means of ‘detecting Covid-19’, the media continued to hype the rise in Covid ‘cases’. 

In lockstep, ‘Covid testing’ was increased dramatically using the PCR test (recently revoked by the CDC). This inevitably pumped up the number of ‘cases’, which mass media have in turn promoted non-stop, this in turn gave ammunition to those enforcing lockdowns and vaccines.

By now hundreds of vocal doctors, nurses, virologists, immunologists, and other professionals actually worth listening to, whose data and experience counter the hype pumped out in media have very quickly disappeared from social media, or otherwise deemed quacks, and are thus largely silenced. This leaves the general public mainly getting their information via hyped-up media. 

Alongside this, there have been relentless ad hominem attacks on journalists who pose legitimate questions and uncomfortable truths about the official narratives around Covid-19. 

For offering perspectives which contradict the standard narratives around Covid-19, journalists have been deemed conspiracy theorists, pandemic-deniers, right-wingers, selfish… I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few slurs. 

When it comes to matters Covid-19, it is suddenly unacceptable to question ‘The Science’, question the authorities, or question the same media that sold us WMDs in Iraq and chemical attacks in Syria.

Media are the drivers of Covid hysteria, and it is the daily bombardment of fear porn that confuses average people and enables tyrannical powers to be brought in, largely unchallenged. 

As it is the responsibility of journalists to expose lies around wars of aggression, it is also the duty of journalists to do so around Covid-19. For some journalists who have stubbornly refused to hold power to account, instead toeing the line on all things Covid, it appears their fear is of losing an audience and not of a virus.

Whether or not you agree with dissenting voices’ questions and criticisms, we have the right to ask and make them. We do so, knowing that remaining silent in the face of the brutal Covid measures is a guaranteed path to tyranny.

Mandating Tyranny

August 15, 2021

By Stephen Lendman

Source

The rule of law in the US/West no longer exists. 

It was abolished unannounced, unreported by establishment media press agents for diabolical interests.

Brave new world dystopia is unfolding in plain sight — wrapped in the American and other Western flags.

Tyranny is scheduled to arrive after alpha, beta, gamma, delta, lambda and other flu/covid scariants.

US/Western barbarians at the gates already instituted police state-enforced totalitarian rule — their societies unsafe and unfit to live in.

Once tyranny arrives full-blown, what little remains of free and open societies in the West no longer will exist.

Practically gone already, their elimination was planned long ago, dystopian tyranny in the wings to replace them.

Will deadly flu/covid jabs be mandated ahead with depopulation of unwanted billions of people in mind worldwide?

Will passports be required to access public places?

Will mass-jabbing refuseniks — wanting their health protected, not destroyed — be ostracized from society?

Will they be criminalized, perhaps isolated in internment camps?

Will truth-telling journalists and others be targeted for elimination?

According to MedPage Today, truth-telling doctors about all-things flu/covid — especially about health-destroying jabs — may be delicensed by state medical boards.

They may be charged with the crime of practicing medicine to protect health and heal by doing no harm as mandated by the Nuremberg Code, other international law, the US Constitution under its Supremacy Clause and Hippocratic Oath. 

According to the US Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB):

Truth-telling physicians on this most cutting-edge issue of our time — accused of “willfully generat(ing) and spread(ing) (what’s falsely called) misinformation or disinformation (on toxic flu/covid jabs) — are risking disciplinary action by state medical boards…”

It may “includ(e) suspension or revocation of their medical license.” 

“Due to their specialized knowledge and training, licensed physicians possess a high degree of public trust and therefore have a powerful platform in society, whether they recognize it or not.” 

“They also have an ethical and professional responsibility to practice medicine in the best interests of their patients and must share information that is factual, scientifically grounded and consensus driven for the betterment of public health.” 

“Spreading (truth and full disclosure on health destroying flu/covid jabs, falsely called) inaccurate information contradicts that responsibility (sic), threatens to further erode public trust in the medical profession (sic), and puts all patients at risk (sic).”

FSMB CEO Humayun Chaudhry threatened physicians, saying they “and other licensees (better) get the message.”

Instead of explaining that all flu/covid scariants are largely the same  — not a dime’s worth of difference of concern among them — he falsely claimed that “we may have a situation in hand where (jabs to be shunned aren’t) even effective.”

Designed to irreversibly destroy health, not protect it, Chaudhry ignored what’s most important about them.

He lied claiming that experimental, inadequately tested, rushed to market toxic jabs “are a key piece in preventing” flu/covid (sic), adding:

“When the state boards get a complaint, they will investigate and if they determine there’s grounds for taking action, they will” — including reprimands of physicians, suspending or revoking their license to practice medicine, for doing the right things.

Is that where things are heading?

Will doctors who prioritize health protection and healing be denied the right to treat patients?

Will Pharma-supporting medical professionals alone remained licensed?

Today’s brave new world dystopia exceeds the worst of what Orwell and Huxley imagined.

With the mother of all scams — elevated to the law of the land in the US/West and elsewhere — disappear free, safe and open societies altogether?

What was inconceivable pre-2020 is today’s reality — a nightmare with no awakening to end.

The only solution is popular revolution. Without it we’re doomed.

Enemy of Public Heath Counterpunch.org?

August 7, 2021

By Stephen Lendman

Source

Calling its agenda “muckraking with a radical attitude,” Counterpunch.org (CP) went off-the-rails on all things flu/covid.

Instead of “muckraking” reports on the mother of all state-sponsored scams with social control and mass-extermination in mind, CP allied with US/Western dark forces on this most cutting-edge issue of our time.

Followers of my writing need no elaboration of where I stand on this vital issue.

It’s available on stephenlendman.org

CP went another way — opposing preservation of public health instead of going all-out to help protect what’s too precious to lose.

Flu/covid mass-jabbing has nothing to do with protecting people from viral infection.

It’s all about state-sponsored social control and genocide on an unparalleled scale.

Not according to CP editor Jeffrey St. Clair, saying:

“The (mass-jabbing) program in the US has been one of the most successful government operations in decades (sic)” — with destroying public health in mind, not protecting it, he failed to explain.

Instead he called a flu/covid skeptic an “epidemiological renegade (who’s) the kind of person you d(on’t) want wandering the streets, malls and bars un(jabbed) (sic).”

After getting jabbed, “I felt ‘cured,’ ” he said, adding:

“Or at least 85% cured, until some mutant variant arrives to crash the system again (sic).”

St. Clair isn’t alone at CP in defying reality about all things flu/covid.

Self-styled “independent progressive policy researcher” Paul Street said the following in a mid-July CP article:

“Imagine a country so dumbed down that more than a third of its populace refuses to take” toxic flu/covid jabs he falsely claimed are designed “to protect” from a “deadly pandemic” that doesn’t exist.

Separately, he suggested that congressional legislation should mandate internment of “anti-vaxxers” to isolate them from society, adding:

“So, I am kidding not kidding here.” 

“(W)hen is someone going to draft legislation for internment camps and separate quarantined regions for Amerikaners who simply refuse (jabs) and masks?” 

“I’m sorry to have to say this but we get a big fourth wave because of this partisan and social Darwinian and individualist madness and I’ll draft the legislation myself.” 

“I am so not an anarchist and so much an authoritarian on this issue.”

“If they want to attain herd immunity through mass death, fine, that’s their choice, but maybe do (it) under lock and key in Covidiot Banustans under the coordinated control of the Department of the Interior, Homeland Security, CDC, Department of Defense, and Border Patrol.”

“Go ahead, call me a fascist, whatever. I can take it.”

Street suggested cordoning off “tens of thousands of acres (of) Western public lands” for mass-interning refuseniks.

On August 6, CP contributor Anthony DiMaggio deceptively headlined:

“Killer Disinformation (sic): How Anti-(Jabbing) Propaganda Hijacked American Political Discourse (sic),” saying:

“The Biden (regime gave) new life to a national discussion about the dangers of social media-induced misinformation (sic)” about all things flu/covid.

Biden’s double “lamented the proliferation of anti-(flu/covid) content (sic)” — truth-telling his regime wants censored, DiMaggio left unexplained.

Instead he slammed Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and other flu/covid truth-tellers, falsely calling their writing “disinformation (sic),” adding:

“(N)ational polling data reveal that the US is facing an epidemic of ignorance when it comes to mass opposition to (flu/covid jabs) (sic), and this willful ignorance (sic) is killing people in mass (sic).”

On August 6, CP contributor Anthony DiMaggio deceptively headlined:

“Killer Disinformation (sic): How Anti-(Jabbing) Propaganda Hijacked American Political Discourse (sic),” saying:

“The Biden (regime gave) new life to a national discussion about the dangers of social media-induced misinformation (sic)” about all things flu/covid.

Biden’s double “lamented the proliferation of anti-(flu/covid) content (sic)” — truth-telling his regime wants censored, DiMaggio left unexplained.

Instead he slammed Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and other flu/covid truth-tellers, falsely calling their writing “disinformation (sic),” adding:

“(N)ational polling data reveal that the US is facing an epidemic of ignorance when it comes to mass opposition to (flu/covid jabs) (sic), and this willful ignorance (sic) is killing people in mass (sic).”

“We are now facing a public health crisis of unprecedented proportions (sic), with reactionaries invoking the freedom to spread disinformation (sic) without penalty and the freedom to refuse (flu/covid jabs), which they believe supersede collective rights to combat a life-threatening pandemic (sic) that has claimed the lives of more than 600,000 Americans (sic) and more than 4 million people worldwide (sic).”

“(T)here is no end in sight to their disinformation, short of serious efforts to combat the anti-vaccination propaganda campaigns that are raging on social media.”

Shocking stuff showing profound ignorance about what’s going on.

Either that or allying with US/Western dark forces and their establishment media press agents — supporting social control and depopulation instead of going all-out to oppose what no one should tolerate.

The above CP rubbish resembles establishment media Big Lies and mass deception.

On the one hand, it proves the power of state-approved mass communication — a daily drumbeat of managed news misinformation and disinformation that overwhelms truth and full disclosure on all major issues.

On the other hand, it shows that the above CP writers abandoned due diligence in favor of official narrative Big Lies and mass deception on all things flu/covid.

Either way, CP readers are ill-served by fake news on this most vital issue of our time instead of full and accurate reporting.

Video: The 2021 Worldwide Corona Crisis. “The Worst Crisis in Modern History”

Global Research, July 31, 2021

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Ariel Noyola Rodriguez

First released on February 22, 2021

We bring to the attention of our readers this Global Research Video documentary produced by Ariel Noyola Rodriguez, featuring Prof. Michel Chossudovsky.

We are at the crossroads of one of the most serious crises in World history.

We are living history, yet our understanding of the sequence of events since January 2020 has been blurred.

Worldwide, people have been misled both by their governments and the media as to the causes and devastating consequences of the Covid-19 “pandemic”. 

“Planet Lockdown” is an encroachment on civil liberties and the “Right to Life”.

..

Entire national economies are in jeopardy. In some countries martial law has been declared.

Small and medium sized capital are slated to be eliminated. Big capital prevails.

A massive concentration of corporate wealth is ongoing.

Its a diabolical “New World Order” in the making.

Red Zones, the facemask, social distancing, the closing down of schools, colleges and universities,

no more family gatherings, no birthday celebrations, music, the arts: no more cultural events,

sport events are suspended, no more funerals, no more weddings, “love and life” is banned outright.

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Vaccine Passports: Another Conspiracy Theory Becomes Reality

By Sonja van den Ende

Source

Vaccine Passports: Another Conspiracy Theory Becomes Reality

People still think that the “green pass” is for a pandemic, or worse, they think it will be over soon and it’s a temporary thing. But it’s here to stay, just like the limitation of human rights, freedom of expression, freedom of education and freedom to movement unless we, the people, try at least to do something about it!

People, especially in Western countries, like many EU countries, still think that the pandemic that we can question will soon be over and we will get back to normal, but that is not the purpose. In the European Union (EU), they are transforming many EU countries into technocraticsurveillance states with no freedom, limitation of human rights and prohibiting of freedom of travel, movement and education. As an excuse they give you a pandemic and try to argue that you contaminate other people. This is ridiculous if, as they claim, 50% are fully vaccinated and many, especially young or healthy people, arenot falling sick or just slightly, like a bad flu. Many sovereign EU countries have a constitution which states that we have, according to the law, all these rights as I mentioned above: freedom of expression, travel and most of all education.

France is the country where once a revolution began in 1789 because the “people” did not accept the curtailment of freedom anymore and there was a lot of poverty at that time, which (poverty) is another sign of the new technocratic state which we are experiencing right now. In France they take away freedom from citizens, as the first state in the EU, and anyone who wants to stay in charge of their own body and don’t want to be vaccinated for whatever reason are now second-class citizens. A comparison can be made to Germany in the Nazi era. The Nazis established, back than, many new anti-Jewish laws. These laws were introduced slowly at first so that the civilian population would not realise the extent of the Nazi party’s anti-Semitism (like now the pandemic). About 2,000 Nazi anti-Jewish decrees passed between 1933-1945. It is uncertain whether Hitler planned to murder the Jews when he came to power. Originally it seems he and his government intended to force them out of Germany but this eventually led to the plan to exterminate the Jews. Many people would say, “oh no, you can’t compare the C-VI to these times”, but yes you can, because, slowly but surely, people who are not vaxxed are being deprived of human rights and for a technocratic regime, depending on Arificial Intelligene (AI) and incompetent leaders, it’s very easy as we saw the last year to make new emergency laws which replace the regular constitution and take away our basic human rights and expression of freedom. French high school students who are not fully vaccinated will have to stay home from the new school year during a new corona outbreak. French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer confirmed this on Wednesday. And France will not bethe only country depriving non-vaccinated children from education! It’s the start of something dark and sinister! In France and Germany, anti-vaxxers are now seen as terrorists.

Vera Sharav

Vera Sharav is a medical activist and a Holocaust survivor. In her testimony before the German Corona Inquiry Committee she draws comparisons to the Nazi regime and explains in the second half of the interview her theory why all this is happening.

After surviving the horrors of the Holocaust and finding refuge in the United States as an 11-year-old girl, she wondered how people could have allowed this to happen. She soon learned that there are many people who profit from wars. She decided not to look the other way if something like this ever happened again. “I have developed an antenna for this.” Also, she cannot understand, being Jewish herself, why the Israeli government has handed over medical data of the entire Israeli population to a company like Pfizer, which has committed countless crimes. This data is extremely valuable to pharmaceutical companies. The fact that they are exempt from liability in the event of vaccine damage should set alarm bells ringing, according to Sharav. She was therefore shocked that Israel introduced a “green pass”, which we will now get in Europe in the form of a digital green certificate, or an App on your mobile phone. This pass stands for apartheid and creates a divided society, says Sharav. Forced vaccination through the back door. “We are talking about a huge experiment here.”

The Pfizer Leaks

As Vera Sharav, the Holocaust survivor and medical activist, pointed out, Pfizer is a criminal organisation and she might be right. In recent days many alternative websites reported that they have read a tweet where a document is taken from a thread byEhden (@eh_den) / Twitter (account suspended). It is a copy of a leaked contract between Pfizer and, surprisingly, the country of Albania, a non-EU country. The contracts will all be the same. Perhaps the most damaging section is this:

Purchaser acknowledges.the long-term effects and efficacy of the vaccine are not currently known and that there may be adverse effects of the vaccine that are not known.”

Actually they say that it’s all anexperimental vaccine and they take no responsibility if there are deaths or side-effects. Pfizer is the most used vaccine in Israel and as many leaks come out of the State of Israel, many people who got vaccinated are getting the C-VI, and problems with side effects according to the Israeli government not known!

My guess is that it’s not only Pfizer, but also other pharmaceutical companies, like Moderna, Janssen & Janssen and BionTech, who are part of Pfizer. Their vaccines are all experimental (MnRA) and not tested properly, only on 30,000 people, but are now conducted on half of the world population as a medical experiment.

Conclusion

The world is in the grip of a pandemic, which was actually not a real ‘big’ pandemic, and opportunistsand the deep state had it all planned or took advantage of it to carry out their plans, to force the Fourth Industrial revolution upon the entirety of mankind. A problem which existed before, they had no answer on the many unemployed people which would lose their jobs due to AI. A pandemic, with a depopulationplan, would be the answer. I am not suggesting that it’s like that, but all evidence and developments point in that direction.

Also, the geopolitical C-war is part of the plan: the EU and US against China and Russia (and BRICS countries) where the vaccination plays a key role. As I said many times before, it’s has become a politized weapon and as the current developments in all parts of the geopolitical spectrum show, the evidence is clear that we are in for hypersonic weapon race. 5G is necessary for these weapons, and when you consider all this, it’s a sinister world, perhaps it’s the case that the human race is on the brink of extinction and also the deep state, which the Pentagon is part of, will be extinct as well. After all, the ones who invented all these horrors are human themselves. Even if they want to be transhuman like Elon Musk or Klaus Schwab, they are still human and AI can also destroy them as well. It’s a bad nightmare that the human race is facing, but they did it themselves. I am usually not very religious, but it’s said in the Bible that humans will destroy themselves. Let’s hope there will be some human with moral feelings among the ones who are going to destroy us or intend to do so!

The Disinformation Dozen?

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is StephenLindmanBW.png

By Stephen Lendman

Source

US/Western news consumers are carpet-bombed daily with state-approved managed news misinformation and disinformation.

Suppressing truth and full disclosure on vital issues, its disseminators are threatened by US/Western dark forces, wanting them silenced.

Calling itself “a UK/US” NGO (likely funded by Western dark forces and Pharma profiteers), the so-called Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) (sic) is an extremist group opposed to journalism as it should be and others involved truth-telling on what’s important for everyone to know.

Months earlier, CCDH published a fake news report on what it called “the disinformation dozen (sic),” saying the following:

“Just twelve anti-vaxxers are responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media platforms.” 

“(A) tiny group of determined anti-vaxxers is responsible for a tidal wave of disinformation (sic) — and shows how platforms can fix it by enforcing their (anti-truth-telling) standards (sic).”

“The majority of the Disinformation Dozen (sic) remain on major social media platforms, despite repeated violations of their (anti-truth-telling) terms of service (sic).”

The CCDH supports fabricated official narrative rubbish on all things flu/covid.

Its mission is all about wanting truth-telling content on the most cutting-edge issue of our time suppressed and eliminated.

It called for “deplatforming repeat offenders (sic),” adding:

It’s “the most effective way of stopping the proliferation of” essential to know information CCDH called “dangerous misinformation (sic).”

Saying it’s “tracking 425 anti-(flu/covid jabbing) accounts, its “disinformation dozen” involved in truth-telling on issues relating to health and well-being include the following:

“1. Joseph Mercola

2. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

3. Ty & Charlene Bollinger

4. Sherry Tenpenny

5. Rizza Islam

6. Rashid Buttar

7. Erin Elizabeth

8. Sayer Ji

9. Kelly Brogan

10. Christiane Northrup

11. Ben Tapper

12. Kevin Jenkins”

CCDH called for platforms to “do more” — to censor their truth-telling on all things flu/covid.

Speech, media and academic freedoms in the West are threatened by censorship, notably online.

Social media, gatekeeper Google, and other tech giants are allied with US/Western dark forces against digital democracy, wanting the last frontier of media freedom silenced.

They want Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights rescinded, stating:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

“This right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

These fundamental rights and values are increasingly eroding, totalitarian rule in the West replacing them. 

America’s First Amendment is most important. If lost — where things are heading — all other rights are threatened.

In cahoots with US/Western dark forces, Facebook, Twitter and other anti-social media go all-out to purge what conflicts with the official fabricated narrative.

If notions CCDH called for take hold, digital democracy no longer will exist.

Suppressing what’s vital for everyone to know is the hallmark of totalitarian rule.

That’s where things are heading, thought control becoming the law of the land in the US and West.

American exceptionalism and moral superiority never existed.

The nation has always been run by hostile to governance of, by and for everyone equitably oligarchs, plutocrats, and kleptocrats.

Operating today in cahoots with censors, they want dissent from the official fabricated narrative suppressed and eliminated altogether.

They want US/Western and other countries transformed into ruler-serf societies.

They want what just societies abhor and don’t tolerate.

The same goes for freedom-loving people everywhere who are willing to go all-out to preserve what’s too precious to lose.

Flu/Covid Jabs Spread Disease

 July 25, 2021 

By Stephen Lendman

Source

According to official data that represents a tiny fraction of the true toll, around 3.5 million people in the US, UK and EU experienced adverse events from flu/covid jabs since December.

Many thousands died. Minneapolis medical assistant Jummai Nache likely wishes she was among them.

After two toxic Pfizer mRNA jabs, she developed blood clots in her heart — requiring amputation of both legs and hands, her fate worse than death.

Yet establishment media keep beating the drum daily for refusniks to self-inflict harm like countless millions of others in the West alone.

Suppressed is that most flu/covid outbreaks occur among jabbed people, not the other way around as falsely claimed by US/Western dark forces and their media press agents.

Representing some of the worst, NYT fake news defied reality by calling flu/covid jabs “the only answer for fighting” the viral illness (sic),” adding:

“(W)e have more than one highly-effective (jab) available (sic).”

There are none. They’re all health-destroying and deadly. And you can take that reality to the mortuary.

Saying “almost the only people getting sick enough to be hospitalized at this point are those who have yet to” be jabbed is a bald-faced Big Lie and high crime against humanity, demanding accountability.

More Big Lies followed, the Times falsely saying millions of Americans “signed onto this (mass-jabbing) social contract…as a condition of a return to normalcy (sic).”

There’s nothing remotely normal about what’s going on with no end of it in prospect without mass rebellion.

Millions of Americans and others abroad were conned by dark forces, Pharma and their media press agents to believe what irreversibly harms health and kills is beneficial.

Refusniks should stay this way. Jabbed individuals should reject more of the same that will hasten loss of their health and lives.

WaPo keeps spreading fake news about the delta scariant that’s virtually no different from other flu/covid strains.

Ignoring science, it falsely claims that delta is increasing flu/covid outbreaks — a bald-faced Big Lie that’s all about pushing refusniks to self-inflict harm like their jabbed counterparts, adding:

White House officials “are growing increasingly anxious about the state of the (nonexistent) pandemic (sic) and are gravely concerned about the situation spiraling out of control in some areas of the country with low (jabbing) rates (sic).”

Suppressed by WaPo, other establishment media, and US/Western dark forces is that outbreaks are highest in areas with the greatest percent of jabbed people, not the other way around.

No evidence suggests that “hospitals are filling up in the West, another fear-mongering Big Lie.

Separately, WaPo falsely claimed that the flu/covid death toll may be double the artificially inflated official number.

No one knows the true toll.

Reported numbers are grossly inflated to scare maximum numbers of people to be jabbed with toxins no one should touch.

WaPo falsely claimed that over 4,140,000 reported flu/covid deaths are likely around half the true number (sic).

The real toll is a small fraction of the grossly inflated one.

Lying and mass deception in the West is a daily affair.

Saying the US flu/covid death toll exceeds 610,000 is likely around ten times the real number.

State-sponsored/media supported numbers otherwise are fabricated.

Pushing things for tyranny by draconian flu/covid mandates in France and Britain got tens of thousands in both countries to protest publicly against them.

Spreading throughout the West, life as existed pre-2020 is eroding toward disappearing altogether without mass-activism to prevent what’s happening before a rubicon of no return is crossed.

Media-supported, state-sponsored tyranny is the problem, not outbreaks of garden variety flu renamed covid in numbers similar to other years in modern memory.

Resistance against diabolical dark forces is the only option to protect and preserve what US/Western dark forces want eliminated altogether — the lives of billions of people worldwide.

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