This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

“PCR is separate from that. It’s just a process that’s used to make a whole lotta somethin’ outta somethin. That’s what it is.”

— Kary Mullis, inventor of PCR test

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” So the saying goes.

The idea is found in a book written by Anthony Weldon in 1651 titled The Court and Character of King James. Weldon writes, “The Italians have a Proverb, ‘He that deceives me once, it’s his fault. He that deceives me twice, it’s my fault.’”
— Don McMinn

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has determined that the upsurge of mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and a growing number of countries in Africa constitutes a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) under the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR).

— “WHO Director-General declares mpox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern,” WHO, 14 August 2024

On July 23, 2022, the WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus went against the majority vote of the WHO expert committee (9 against 6 in favor): The committee was AGAINST the calling of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PEIC).

— Michel Chossudovsky, “Towards A Worldwide Monkeypox Pandemic? Big Money behind ‘Fake Science,’” Global Research, 17 August 2024.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Photograph Source: anyaka – CC BY-SA 2.0

As scientists continue to research the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, one fact has become clear: Deforestation is linked to emerging diseases. When humans destroy forests to create land for human use, whether it’s for farming, mining, logging, infrastructure development, or urban expansion, biodiversity is diminished. And as some species go extinct, the ones that remain and even flourish in degraded forest ecosystems—like bats, rats, and birds—are those that are more likely to be hosts for deadly viruses that can jump to humans.

COVID-19, SARS, and Ebola—three infectious diseases that spread across national borders since 2002—share one thing in common: They were transmitted to humans from wild animals living in tropical forests, which are losing more than 100 trees per second due to rampant, unsustainable deforestation. It is also important to note that cutting down trees negatively impacts not only biodiversity and human health but the climate: Deforestation is responsible for 30 percent of global carbon emissions.

Human Activity Creating Reservoirs of Zoonotic Disease

Researchers in England examined over 6,800 ecological communities across six continents and found trends connecting disease outbreaks to regions where biodiversity has been diminished due to human activity. Their study, published in the journal Nature in August 2020, concluded that “global changes in the mode and the intensity of land use are creating expanding hazardous interfaces between people, livestock and wildlife reservoirs of zoonotic disease.”

Some scientists had been sounding this alarm for many years, but it had fallen on deaf ears. “We’ve been warning about this for decades,” said Kate Jones, an ecologist at University College Londonwho was one of the study’s authors. “Nobody paid any attention.”

Calls to Maintain Healthy Forests

Now is the time for governments to pay attention to the science: To prevent the next pandemic, efforts must be made to rein in rampant deforestation. In an essay published in the journal Science in July 2020, a group of scientists made the case that reducing both deforestation and the wildlife trade would result in a lower risk of future pandemics. “The clear link between deforestation and virus emergence suggests that a major effort to retain intact forest cover would have a large return on investment even if its only benefit was to reduce virus emergence events,” they write.

Epidemiologist Ibrahima Socé Fall, who heads emergency operations at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, echoes that call. “Sustainable development is crucial,” he said. “If we continue to have this level of deforestation, disorganized mining, and unplanned development, we are going to have more outbreaks.”

Sustainable Development Means Sustainable Livelihoods

Investing in sustainable solutions also means investing in sustainable livelihoods. And so part of reducing deforestation is understanding the needs of rural communities living in or alongside forests, including providing economic incentives to protect the natural ecosystems around them. Giving Indigenous groups legal rights to their land is one way. In 2009 in India’s Narmada District, for example, villagers were able to secure legal rights to their land and resources, which led to more sustainable land management.

“Being secure in the knowledge that they own their land has meant that these communities have an incentive to protect and improve it for the future,” writes Edward Davey, the international engagement director of the Food and Land Use Coalition, an initiative to improve the world’s food and land use systems. “Villagers can now invest in actions like leveling, terracing, and irrigating farmland for greater productivity. Some villages are also taking steps to prevent illegal forest clearing and forest fires, by patrolling the forest and brokering community agreements to manage fire.”

In addition, research indicates that improving rural healthcare can lead to a reduction in illegal logging. In one study conducted by researchers from the United States and Indonesia, villagers in rural Borneo were given discounts on health clinic visits, which offset the medical costs that were often paid for by illegal logging. “The greatest logging reductions were adjacent to the most highly engaged villages,” write the study authors. “Results suggest that this community-derived solution simultaneously improved health care access for local and indigenous communities and sustainably conserved carbon stocks in a protected tropical forest.”

Advocacy Groups Call for Action

In early 2021, several environmental groups and advocacy organizations co-sponsored a public petition—signed by more than 87,000 people as of July 2023—urging the Biden administration and Congress to curb deforestation in an effort to lower the risk of the next pandemic. Specifically, the petition calls for $2.5 billion in the next COVID relief bill to “support healthcare and jobs training for indigenous people in every tropical rainforest community, and support impoverished nations to build the healthcare systems to stop outbreaks before they spread.”

The petition’s sponsors, which include Brazilian Rainforest Trust, Endangered Species Coalition, and Mighty Earth, argue that “[e]nding deforestation is our best chance to conserve wildlife, one of the quickest and most cost-effective ways to curb global warming, and absolutely crucial to prevent the next deadly, global pandemic.”

“We are all interconnected,” famed primatologist Jane Goodall told PBS NewsHour. “And if we don’t get that lesson from this pandemic, then maybe we never will.”

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Reynard Loki.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

It’s a great piece here, at Gray Zone — Amid rising reports of vaccine-related menstrual disruptions, the CDC and FDA are dismissing women’s concerns and denying them information while corporate media pathologizes them in sexist fashion.

The writer drills down into the vaccine loving industries (ipso facto, thoughtful and investigative critical thinking maligning industries), and how women were not a big part of the mRNA trials (sic), and that the disruption of the reproductive system of a female ain’t no big thing, according to the FDA and Saint Fauci and Company. Imagine, the adverse effects of these shots, on everyone, and no fetuses. This Gray Zone article focuses on women, and the writer, Marcie Smith Parenti, looks from a feminist point of view, albeit, one flawed since she equates feminism USA style with supporting the Democratic party, AKA, War-Banking-Poverty Pimping Party, as equal in its profane treatment of humanity as the Republican party. Here, a quote:

I have five female friends who, after receiving Covid-19 vaccines, experienced disruption to their menstrual cycles. Their symptoms have included hemorrhagic bleeding lasting more than a month; heavy intermittent bleeding for four months; passing golf-ball size clots of blood; and extreme cramping, serious enough to land one friend in the ER.

Most of these women are in their 20s and 30s, and at least one of them thinks she might want to have children. She now worries that her symptoms might be the harbinger of long-term fertility problems. At least two of my friends have symptoms that have not resolved. All are feminists and have throughout the years been consistent Democratic Party voters.

Other women of childbearing age have reported becoming temporarily “postmenopausal” after their second mRNA shot; conversely, women in menopause are reporting suddenly beginning to bleed again; trans men on hormone therapy have also reported sudden bleeding. Apparently, the number of vaccinated women around the world reporting alarmingly disrupted menstruation is, to be conservative, in the tens of thousands.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), however, does not warn women who get the shots that they may experience a disrupted menstrual cycle.

The big issue and concern with this piece is that Parenti does not go into detail around the OTHER jabs that do not use mRNA DARPA-Mengele wizardry as the undergirding of the treatment protocols–

The Mayo Clinic lies here about the mRNA vaccine, and even this site doesn’t give the information on the alternative “vaccines.” But here, on this flagging blog, more information in a short screed than all of Mainstream Mush and Murdering Media:

1) WHOLE VIRUS VACCINE

Vaccines include: Sinopharm, Sinovac

Number of doses required: 2 doses, intramuscular

Other licensed vaccines that use this type of technology: Hepatitis A, polio, rabies (all inactivated type)

What to know: The whole virus vaccine uses a weakened or deactivated form of the pathogen that causes COVID-19 to trigger protective immunity to it.

The two vaccines mentioned above – Sinopharm and Sinovac – both use inactivated pathogens, therefore they cannot infect cells and replicate, but can trigger an immune response.

3) NON-REPLICATING VIRAL VECTOR

Vaccines include: Oxford-AstraZeneca, Sputnik V (Gamaleya Research Institute)

Number of doses required: 2 doses, intramuscular

Other licensed vaccines that use this type of technology: Ebola

What to know: This type of vaccine introduces a safe, modified version of the virus – known as “the vector” – to deliver genetic code for the antigen. In a COVID-19 vaccine, the “vector” is the spike proteins found on the surface of the coronavirus.

Once the body’s cells are “infected”, the cells are instructed to produce a large amount of antigens, which in turn trigger an immune response.

Benefits: Viral vector-based vaccination is another well-established technology that can trigger a strong immune response as it also involves both B cells and T cells.

4) PROTEIN SUBUNIT

Vaccines include: Novavax

Number of doses required: 2 doses, intramuscular

Other licensed vaccines that use this type of technology: Hepatitis B, meningococcal disease, pneumococcal disease, shingles

What to know: The protein subunit vaccine contains purified “pieces” of a pathogen rather than the whole pathogen to trigger an immune response. It is thought that by restricting the immune system to the whole pathogen, the risk of side effects is minimised.

Benefits: The protein subunit vaccination is also a well-established technology that’s advantageous for those with compromised immune systems.

But reading Parenti’s piece, you can sense her socialism, her radical (root, fair, smart) belief that the wool has been pulled over the eyes of USA and Western societies Big Time by the war profiteers, and in this case, the war profiteers are those in this so-called war against a virus — Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Double Dealing. The planned pandemic that is, thanks to DARPA and the gain of function viral Mengele shit, is now an endemic — variants will come hell or highwater. What are we going to do about that? Boosters, straightjacket medicine — the resisters are the enemy. One Minute of Hate by Biden, that’s the ticket!

To many, this probably seems wrong-headed; and indeed, growing “scientific evidence” indicates it is a mistake. A recent University of Chicago and UC-Berkeley study found that women suffer higher rates of adverse reactions to pharmaceutical products than men, even when dosage is calibrated for differences in body weight. This is likely due to the more subtle dance of hormones that dictate women’s well-being, but the issue is very rarely studied.

It was not until 1993 that the federal government began requiring pharmaceutical companies to include women in their drug studies. And only in 2016 did the NIH begin to formally request that researcher grantees consider “sex as a biological variable” and specifically report on such findings.

Yet the fast-tracked Covid vaccine research skipped these provisions. Women were included in the initial Covid vaccine trials, however, none of these studies disaggregated research findings by sex.

Unfortunately, this is all tied to mind-stripping, and that Google guy, that celebrity in the movie, The Social Network, is being paraded around by lefties like Russel Brand. In that interview, Brand or the celebrity don’t look at what mind-stripping really does — not just scraping data and thoughts and emotions from people, the targets, but using that data to sway entire sectors of our lives, changing up to down, reality to fiction when it comes to regime change, the lies of Empire, the financial-AI-Wall Street thugs who want Cuba do go down, want Syria in flames, want Iran imploded by Israel’s nukes and alleged biological/viral/chemical bombs.

Russel Brand sometimes appears to be milquetoast, maybe, I don’t know, part of his UK roots, really, and this dude, Tristan Harris. You may recognize him from the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.

Here Tristan explains how our attention is being mined and that we have now become the product.”

I watched the The Social Network. Bad all around, geared to a 6th grade reading level, really, and this Harris guy is quite the multimillionaire charlatan. He’s in the film, about 1/3 of the total running time. Now, big tech is a million times worse than this shit-show demonstrates, and then when you see take-downs on Harris, on the film, we get those other misanthrope elite thinking Ayn Rands piling on their own libertarianism, and some equate questioning the main thrust of The Social Network — that big tech kills — to those who pushed the movie, Reefer Madness — trying to emote fear into citizens against pot smoking fellow citizens. Wrong comparison — apples to pig skins.

Techies are more than just smart arbiters of tech-surveillance capitalism; there is something highly broken in many of them, and they should never be in a position of power, legal or otherwise, that is, many of us believe. They are their own demigods, and they believe that Digital Tech is no different than the technology that brought us the bicycle. Look at this mind numbing stuff here criticizing the documentary for all the wrong reasons, I believe — “The Social Dilemma Manipulates You With Misinformation As It Tries To Warn You Of Manipulation By Misinformation.”

Note: Netflix, the company which produced, distributed and widely promoted the documentary, is also arguably the first big internet company to spend time, money, and resources on trying to perfect the “recommendation algorithm”! That’s capitalism, folks!

Taking this to the next stage, Ollie, the violent video games.

Yeah, so violent, murder-seeped, war-mongering, racist interactive X-box games, come on, they have zero effect on the brains of punks and not-so-punky kids and adults who play them, and live them, and spend countless human life hours joy sticking with them (Not). Look at this spin, “We present you our “TOP 10 Brutal FPS Games of 2021 & 2022” for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, STADIA & PC” ranking list. Hope you enjoy it!”

That is the big smoke and mirrors, propaganda, lie of capitalism. This is not a lie:

The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression; normative beliefs about aggression had a mediation effect on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, while family environment moderated the first part of the mediation process. For individuals with a good family environment, exposure to violent video games had only a direct effect on aggression; however, for those with poor family environment, it had both direct and indirect effects mediated by normative beliefs about aggression. This moderated mediation model includes some notions of General Aggression Model (GAM) and Catalyst Model (CM), which helps shed light on the complex mechanism of violent video games influencing adolescent aggression. (“The Relation of Violent Video Games to Adolescent Aggression: An Examination of Moderated Mediation Effect”)

Yeah, so 4 G, cell phones to the ear, all the EMF’s, now Internet of Things, Internet of Nano-Things, Internet of Biological Things, none of that create negative effects on humans, plants, animals. This is how these charlatans of the Mengele Brand work. However, let’s see where this takes us, RFK Jr.:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit published its decision Aug.13. The court ruled that the FCC failed to consider the non-cancer evidence regarding adverse health effects of wireless technology when it decided that its1996 radiofrequency emission guidelines protect the public’s health.

The court’s judgment states:

“The case be remanded to the commission to provide a reasoned explanation for its determination that its guidelines adequately protect against harmful effects of exposure to radiofrequency radiation…”

CHD Chairman and attorney on the case Robert F Kennedy, Jr. said:

“The court’s decision exposes the FCC and FDA as captive agencies that have abandoned their duty to protect public health in favor of a single-minded crusade to increase telecom industry profits.” (Source)

So, now, break out the masks, in my state, Oregon. Absurdity, and I have volunteer jobs, and the mandate is to have the masks on at interpretive centers, everywhere the public may walk into. I know for a fact after thousands of hours of research on the topic of mask efficacy and tertiary topics that these masks do not stop a virus. Truly. Alas, though, I can chuck everything by sticking to my guns and my knowledge base, or put up with a mask that I pull over (off of my nose) to breathe. Now, just applying for work, the vaccine passport will be mandatory. No passport, no job, no food, nothing. And these  Democrats didn’t see this coming (bs), and now that it is here, Bring on the Stasi. No different than the white supremacist Republicans and their stupidity about racism, structural racism, structural violence, and the mis-history of their pathetic souls believing Young George Shall Not Tell a Cherry-Tree Chopping Lie. This country is diseased with infantilized thinkers, and putridity on both sides of the Apple Pie Red-White-Blue manure pile of political parties wafts in my air.

Danny does it well here, in the article at Black Agenda Report, “Critical Race Theory Debacle Signals the Collapse of the American Empire.” Old Stan and Ollie would be proud:

The GOP’s entire identity is shaped by white supremacy.

The question that must inevitably be answered is: where do correct ideas come from? It is clear they do not come from General Mark Milley. The U.S. military will not become less racist if it studies “white rage” because white supremacy is baked into the fabric of its very purpose as an institution. Correct ideas also do not come from the GOP, as its opposition to Critical Race Theory is based on the equally faulty and racist premise that “culture wars” are destroying what makes the United States “special.” Correct ideas are inevitably lost on dueling sections of a ruling class seeking to stabilize an illegitimate empire.

The people’s struggle to liberate themselves from systems of exploitation is the primary generator of correct ideas. Critical Race Theory’s growing influence correlates with the emergence of Black Lives Matter protests dating back to the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2011. The growth in the popularity of “socialism” can be traced back to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the struggle against union busting and austerity in Wisconsin, Chicago, and elsewhere. The history of class struggle, whether in the case of Black America or liberation movements abroad, is characterized in part by masses of people being propelled into a lifelong search for the correct alignment of ideas and actions that will bring qualitative changes in their conditions of life.

“Critical Race Theory’s growing influence correlates with the emergence of Black Lives Matter protests.”

The debate over Critical Race Theory will not resolve the contradictions that ensure Black Americans make less than sixty cents for every white American dollar , the U.S. military receives trillions to bomb Black and brown people abroad, and racist New Cold War tropes continue to be recycled to justify policies such as the extremely counterproductive sanctions on China’s solar energy sector . Super exploitation and war are all the American Empire has left to offer. A huge challenge for the class struggle in the United States is the fact that there are more corporate consultants and Democratic Party operatives posing as “anti-racist” than grassroots leaders and organizations prepared to take on the urgency of the political moment. Liberal elites, even when they tolerate criticisms of capitalism and racism, ultimately suppress or smear the revolutionary leaders and movements that inform revolutionary struggle. This is why establishment adherents to Critical Race Theory can offer anti-capitalist critique while scantly supporting organizations fighting to free U.S. political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal whose activities remain criminalized by the state.

The collapse of the condominium in Florida serves as an apt metaphor for the system of imperialism as a whole. Our search for correct ideas exists within the confines of the crumbling edifice of the American Empire. Conditions continue to worsen for the majority, which will inevitably lead to graver and more acute crises as demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The American Empire offers no answers, just platitudes and lies. Social transformation rests upon the ability of the oppressed to look beyond the narratives of their oppressor, seek truth from facts, and build a mass movement that can sustain radical and revolutionary debate and organization.

Of course, the word “critical” comes from a bedrock of critical thinking, looking beyond the looking glass, tossing all those the rose tinted shit Capitalism glasses to the crusher, and stopping the feeding tube filled with lies and historical fictions into our babies on through the K12 system. The amount of stupidity coming from many K12 teachers and administrators and curriculum dictators is reflected in the amount of deficits in thinking and knowledge and compassion and ethics and vital questioning of authority many of these 18 year old’s are plagued with once they graduate (sic). Yep, you are what you do not know, what you do not think, what you do not speak, what you do not hope for, what you are not exposed to, what you do not eat, drink, breathe, consumer, buy, do, believe, hope for, imagine, create, grow, what you do not read or discuss or debate.

Here it is, black and white, what you do or do not ask, what you do or do not investigate, what you do or do not study scientifically, what you do or do not engage in, that’s the Kurtz horror in our Heart of Darkness. These elite MDs, et al. are Mengele on a very sophisticated level.

When it comes to the Covid-19 vaccine and “fertility,” the official talking points have been dizzyingly contradictory. On the one hand, one regularly encounters passionate and categorical insistence that there is no evidence of any negative impact on fertility, short or long term, attending any Covid-19 vaccine. As of yesterday, the CDC now states, “There is currently no evidence that any vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines, cause fertility problems in women or men.”

In the Guardian article from April, Dr. Gunter sneeringly invokes the age-old, disingenuous, sexist, and murderous conflict between male “scientists” and female “witches,” saying, “No, the Covid-19 vaccine is not capable of exerting reproductive control via proxy. Nothing is. This is because it is a vaccine, not a spell.” Brumfiel of NPR asks, “Can vaccines cause infertility, miscarriages? The answer to all this is no.” Concerns to the contrary, he says, are nothing more than “a persistent set of lies.” The New York Times states, “Scientists have said there is no evidence that the vaccines affect fertility or pregnancy.” Dr. Brian Levine, founding partner of a reproductive health clinic, says, “No one has been able to say that there are any untoward outcomes on anyone’s reproductive potential or reproductive future as a result of receiving the Covid-19 vaccine or the sequence of vaccines.”

A widely quoted male gynecologist told the BBC that there was “no evidence to suggest that COVID-19 vaccines will affect fertility.” Alan Copperman, MD, of the Mt. Sinai Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Science, claims “the evidence shows that the vaccines will not affect anyone’s fertility.”  Just yesterday, from the Boston Globe, we are told there is “conclusive evidence that the vaccine has no negative impacts on reproduction.”

Such statements give the unmistakable impression that the matter of Covid-19 vaccination and fertility is resoundingly decided.

But, here’s what is confusing. The menstrual cycle – and please, someone do correct me if I’m wrong – is a fertility cycle, consisting of a follicular phase, the ovulation phase, the luteal phase, and then the passing of the menses itself. If a woman accepts a Covid-19 vaccine and begins to suddenly and hemorrhagically bleed, for weeks or months or end,  this by no means necessarily suggests she is permanently sterilized, but nevertheless indicates her cycle has been thrown off track, which is a fertility-related side effect – one which is particularly salient to a woman trying to conceive.

Indeed, when one reads the medical literature and official corporate and government statements with the uncharitable eye of a lawyer (which I am), the medical establishment’s position on Covid-19 vaccination and fertility is strikingly more circumspect than that which appears in the press.

It turns out that the lack of “scientific evidence” that Covid-19 vaccines affect fertility has at least something to do with the lack of actual scientific research on the question.

Again, Capitalism runs on chaos, confusion, patriotisms, false gods, scientism, divide and conquer technique, and much much more, but also relies on the head in the sand proposition; on overload, general anxiety disorder on steroids; and through the super-charged world of Social (sic) Media. To the point of most humanity in these United States of America having no conversations about masks, the mRNA, vaccinations forced while you are held down by the thugs of capitalism: banks, mortgage holders, landlords, employers, the cops/pigs, authorities, state, local and county boards. Mandates are marching orders. Mandates are, well, this: “If you don’t see, hear or speak the evil, then, we are dead, the living dead, when the evil is in the corporations, in the courtrooms, in the cop shops, in the various branches of government, in the military, in the Social Network brain zapping, mind stripping systems of oppression.”

There are evil forces out there, Mister Ostrich, and I ain’t talking lions and leopards. The evil is the banality of it, the Eichmanns, the folks wearing lab coats, the uniformed military, civilians and such in DARPA who are just regular people working on the next and the next evil virus that can’t be taken down by normal methods.

Now this is evil  suppression of a theraputic — SaNoTize, it should have been approved March 2020! Imagine that, nasal spray, to cut down on viral load. Guaranteed to work better than social distancing, masks and endless antimicrobial spays and foams that are not creating AMR — antimicrobial resistance on steroids.

The self-administered nitric oxide spray, developed by Vancouver biotech firm SaNOtize, is said to have yielded promising results in its UK and Canada clinical trials, including against the UK variant. The company is preparing submissions to worldwide regulators for emergency approval.

“We are currently working to find the right partner in India and hoping it will be approved as a medical device in India to prevent Covid-19,” said CEO and co-founder of SaNOtize Dr Gilly Regev.”What I would have loved right now is to go and give this to a whole town in India and show that everyone using it is not getting infected,” she said. “We would have saved millions of lives if we could have brought it to market last year.”

Again, you are what you are not allowed to see, not allowed to read, not allowed to hear, not allowed to watch, not allowed to speak:

Mere discussion of the drug has resulted in big-tech censoring or deplatforming thought leaders in collaboration with the Biden administration.

Meanwhile, Merck Co. – which manufactured the drug in the 1980s, has come out big against the use of ivermectin to treat Covid-19. In February, the company’s website read: “Company scientists continue to carefully examine the findings of all available and emerging studies of Ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 for evidence of efficacy and safety. It is important to note that, to date, our analysis has identified no scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies; no meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and a concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.”

As the Post points out – Merck has not launched a single study of its own on ivermectin.

“You would think Merck would be happy to hear that ivermectin might be helpful to corona patients and try to study it, but they are most loudly declaring the drug should not be used,” said Schwartz.

“A billion people took it. They gave it to them. It’s a real shame.”

In closing, the research team writes that “Developing new medications can take years; therefore, identifying existing drugs that can be re-purposed against COVID-19 [and] that already have an established safety profile through decades of use could play a critical role in suppressing or even ending the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.”

“Using re-purposed medications may be especially important because it could take months, possibly years, for much of the world’s population to get vaccinated, particularly among low- to middle-income populations.“

‘Oh say can you say, by the dawn’s early propaganda/censoring/book-internet burning’: You can’t view this on YouTube or Facebook. Now that’s a crime against humanity.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Author and researcher Robert J Burrowes says: “… if we were seriously concerned about our world, the gravest and longest-standing health crisis on the planet is the one that starves to death 100,000 people each day. No panic about that, of course.”

No panic because the controlling interests of the global food system have long profited from a ‘stuffed and starved’ strategy that ensures people unnecessarily go hungry when corporate profit rather than need dictates policies.

US social commentator Walter Lippmann once said that ‘responsible men’ make decisions and must be protected from the ‘bewildered herd’ – the public. He added that the public should be subdued, obedient and distracted from what is really happening. Screaming patriotic slogans and fearing for their lives, they should be admiring with awe leaders who save them from destruction.

During COVID, Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern urged citizens to trust the government and its agencies for all information and stated:  “Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.”

In the US, Fauci presented himself as ‘the science’. In New Zealand, Ardern was ‘the truth’. It was similar in countries across the world – different figures but the same approach.

Like other political leaders, Ardern clamped down on civil liberties with the full force of state violence on hand to ensure compliance with ‘the truth’. Those who questioned the COVID narrative – including world-renowned scientists – were smeared, shut down and censored.

It was an internationally orchestrated campaign involving governments, the big tech companies, media and the WHO, among others.

The EU Times reported on 17 December 2022 that the US Centers for Disease Control worked with social media to censor facts and information about COVID that ran afoul of official narratives.

The organisation America First Legal noted in a press release that the fourth set of documents it released – obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – revealed: “… further concrete evidence of collusion between the CDC and social media companies to censor free speech and silence the public square under the government’s label of ‘misinformation’.”

Twitter ran a ‘Partner Support Portal’ for government employees and other ‘stakeholders’ to submit posts that it would remove or flag as ‘misinformation’ on its platform.

The US government was actively working to ‘socially inoculate’ the public against anything that threatened its narrative. Big tech corporations monitored and manipulated users for the purposes of censoring unapproved information and pushing government propaganda. Facebook sent written materials to the CDC in which it talked of censoring more than sixteen million ‘pieces of content’ containing opinions or information the government wanted suppressed.

AFL noted that the CDC was “collaborating with UNICEF, the WHO and IFCN member and leading civil society organisation Mafindo” to mitigate ‘disinformation’. Mafindo is a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner based in Indonesia and funded by Google.

AFL states: “What is clear is that the United States government, big tech platforms, and international organizations were fully entangled in an intricate campaign to violate the First Amendment, to silence the American people, and to censor dissenting views.”

The CDC’s mask guidance policies for school children were also shown to be driven by politics rather than science.

Across all the major Western nations, there was a clamp down on dissent and a massive censorship campaign to justify a policy framework of social and economic lockdowns, masking, distancing and state intrusion into almost every aspect of private life.

The findings of AFL indicate how centres of power can and do act in unison when they need to. The fact that it involved a worldwide campaign shows something huge was at stake.

The official narrative was about protecting populations from a deadly virus. And any dissent that did seep into the edges of mainstream discourse (like Tucker Carlson on Fox News or a few presenters on Talk Radio in the UK, for instance) tended to focus on politicians going too far on lockdowns and restrictions and being caught up in their egotistical lust for power and control.

Such a superficial explanation avoided a deep, critical analysis of the situation. Indeed, any focus on big finance’s – Wall Street and the City of London – role in this was conspicuous by its absence.

In March 2022, BlackRock’s Rob Kapito warned that a ‘very entitled’ generation of people would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives as some goods grow scarce because of rising inflation. BlackRock is the world’s most powerful investment fund. 

Kapito talked about the situation in Ukraine and COVID being responsible for the current economic crisis, conveniently ignoring the inflationary impact of the trillions pumped into imploding financial markets in 2019 and 2020 (dwarfing the crisis of 2008).

The war in Ukraine as well as COVID are being used to explain the roots of the current economic crisis. But COVID policies were a symptom not a cause of the crisis – they were used to manage what by late 2019 was regarded as an impending economic meltdown. Draconian COVID policies had little to do with a public health emergency.

That much is made clear in the article “A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation” by Professor Fabio Vighi.

On 15 August 2019, BlackRock issued a white paper instructing the US Federal Reserve to inject liquidity directly into the financial system to prevent “a dramatic downturn”. The message was unequivocal: “An unprecedented response is needed when monetary policy is exhausted and fiscal policy alone is not enough. That response will likely involve ‘going direct’.” It also stated the need to find ways to get central bank money directly in the hands of public and private sector spenders while avoiding hyperinflation.

Six days earlier, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) had in a working paper called for “unconventional monetary policy measures” to “insulate the real economy from further deterioration in financial conditions”.

Vighi’s shows why the hegemonic class reacted so severely to a public health issue that impacted a minority of the population. This response only makes sense when viewed within the context of economics.

Come late 2019 and especially 2020, pumping trillions into the financial system followed by lockdowns (to prevent hyperinflation) were used as the “unconventional monetary policies” that the BIS had called for on 9 August 2019.

Did you really think the authorities cared so much about something that mainly affected the over-80s and those with severe co-morbidities that they would lock down the entire global economy?

Did they really care so much about ordinary people, especially unproductive labour – the working class old and working class infirm – when through the years of imposed austerity, we saw the working classes being treated with utter contempt?

And did those who imposed restrictions and lockdowns really believe there was a ‘deadly’ virus on the loose?

Think of booze parties at Downing Street, Neil Ferguson’s breaking of lockdown rules to carry on an extra-marital affair, Matt Hancock breaking his own COVID rules with his lover, maskless world leaders gathering in London while their servants wore masks, various US political leaders ignoring their own rules and the public theatre of Fauci et al masking up for TV cameras then maskless as soon as they were off camera.

While such people tyrannised populations with fear and lockdowns, it is clear they themselves were unworried about ‘the virus’.

After embarking on a massive anti-Russia media propaganda campaign earlier this year to garner public support for Ukraine, the centres of power in the West are now sending billions of dollars of the public’s money into the coffers of the likes of weapons manufacturers Raytheon and Boeing.

Such corporations are more than happy to profit from sacrificing the lives of ordinary Ukrainians in the geopolitical quest to weaken and balkanise Russia so that US interests can gain a dominant, strategic foothold on the Eurasian landmass.

And while billions of dollars are being spent to achieve this, a wholly unnecessary ‘cost of living’ crisis (resulting from reckless economic neoliberalism which has finally imploded) is being imposed on working people in the Western countries – regarded as mere collateral damage when it comes to economic policies, war and corporate profit. The result is misery and poverty and the demonisation of some of the (now striking) workers who were lauded as ‘heroes’ during COVID.

But – of course – the powers that have so much demonstrable contempt for the lives of ordinary people at home and abroad will close down the entire global economy to protect their health!

Those who believe this are testament to the power of propaganda.

COVID-related policies were wholly disproportionate to any risk posed to public health, especially when considering the way ‘COVID death’ definitions and data were often massaged and how PCR tests were misused to scare populations into submission.

And the big winner has been Big Pharma, an industry with a track record of dirty tricks, false advertising and death and injury resulting from its products. If, say, Pfizer were an individual, given its corporate crimes, it would be serving a lengthy prison sentence with the proverbial key being thrown away.

But corporations with lengthy corporate rap sheets across many sectors are promoted to the public as being trustworthy and dependable. When governments partner (conspire) with such enterprises, they are conspiring with criminal recidivist companies. And when people purchase stock in them, the same applies.

Given the reference to the global food system at the beginning of this article, of particular interest are the crimes of Dupont and Bayer (see the Powerbase website), and Monsanto and Cargill (see the Corporate Research Project (CRP) website).

And, of course, Pfizer and its disturbing corporate rap sheet also appears on the CRP site.

These immensely wealthy corporations spend millions each year funding various groups and lobbying governments and international bodies. Little wonder that they wield tremendous influence and, in one way or another, become ‘trusted partners’ of governments, the WHO, the WTO and the like.

In Pfizer’s case, trusted so much as being granted ‘emergency use authorisation’ to have its ‘vaccines’ brought to market and then forced on the public via the coercive policies of governments.

Returning to Lippmann, since early 2020 so many people have feared for their lives and have admired with awe leaders who supposedly saved them from destruction. Even now as reports on vaccine injuries, vaccine inefficacy and increased mortality rates since the jab rollouts are largely taboo within the mainstream media, the public are being kept on message as the WHO and Big Pharma work towards a global treaty that will strip all their rights come the next economic meltdown or ‘pandemic’.

This article was written over the Yuletide period, an increasingly secular celebration stripped of religious connotation. These days, ‘in Big Pharma we trust’ might be more apt along with blind faith in a Zuckerberg-esque fantasy metaverse where Facebook is fact, government is truth and Big Pharma is God.

Because (heaven help us) that we should be left to think for ourselves!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Am I just outright stupid, or is something seriously wrong with the majority of people? Bill Gates had his summit on overpopulation and how this is a serious crisis. Yet then he claims he can reduce disease and save the population with vaccines. Gates especially seems to want to save humanity which he on the other hand says is the problem. Something is just not right.

— “The Hypocrisy behind the Vaccines.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Together, with a huge propaganda and brainwashing effort, the entire world – 193 UN member countries were called a covid risk – and WHO declared a pandemic — as we later found out, it was a plandemic — on 11 March 2020. Imagine! With only about 4,600 “cases” worldwide, the World Health Organization calls it a pandemic.
…
The entire UN system was, and is as of today, part and parcel of this worldwide fraud. Indeed, those government leaders, who did not follow the narrative, who defied the plandemic, risked severe ‘punishment’.

— Peter Koenig, “The Big Picture is Ignored in the Covid Debate,” Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

“Lockdown Wasn’t Imposed to Protect the World from a New Virus but Because the Real Economy Had to Be Shut Down”

“Why Vaccine Passports Are Not Going Anywhere”
If you thought Vax Passports were over — think again — they’re just getting started.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

While public health experts—nearly three years after the coronavirus was first reported in China—are brainstorming how health systems and governments can prevent future disease outbreaks from becoming major pandemics, scientists at Cornell University published a study Tuesday showing human activity more respectful of the natural world could prevent most pathogens from reaching people in the first place.

Researchers examined the behavior of fruit bats in Australia, combining numerous datasets collected between 1996 and 2020.

The data described population levels and reproduction rates, the landscape where the fruit bats foraged for food, food shortages, and habitat destruction over more than two decades.

"We show that when remaining habitat produces food, spillover stops, and therefore a sustainable way to stop these events could be to preserve and restore critical habitat."

According to the research published in Nature, in years when the fruit bats were able to find abundant food in their natural habitats during winter months, they were far less likely to spread the Hendra virus to horses, which can then spread the deadly infection-causing pathogen to people.

The spreading of pathogens from one species to another is called "spillover," and has been the source of every viral pandemic affecting humans since the 1990s.

The researchers "discovered two factors driving spillover: habitat loss pushing animals into agricultural areas and climate-induced food shortages," according to the study. "In years following an El Niño event (high temperatures in the Pacific Ocean), buds of trees that bats depend on for nectar failed to produce flowers in the subsequent winter, leading to a food shortage."

The study also pointed to deforestation, which was identified by the World Wildlife Fund in 2021 as a major problem in Australia, as a driver of spillover: "Human destruction of forest habitat for farmland and urban development has left few forests that produce nectar for bats in winter."

When the fruit bats were unable to find food in their native habitats, they spread out into agricultural areas, where they were able to spread the Hendra virus to horses through urine and feces.

"We show that when remaining habitat produces food, spillover stops, and therefore a sustainable way to stop these events could be to preserve and restore critical habitat," said Raina Plowright, a professor in Cornell's Department of Public and Ecosystem Health, who led the study.

Plowright was also the lead author of an earlier study published last month in Ecology Letters, which found that when the bats were facing a lack of food, they were more likely to shed virus.

"Right now, the world is focused on how we can stop the next pandemic," said Plowright. "Unfortunately, preserving or restoring nature is rarely part of the discussion. We're hoping that this paper will bring prevention and nature-based solutions to the forefront of the conversation."

The research represents "an enormously impressive undertaking," Dr. Aaron Bernstein, the interim director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the New York Times.

"These scientists have essentially traced the dots across a bunch of the factors that we know can drive emerging infections," said Bernstein, who was not involved in the study. "I think it points to how critically important it is to focus on prevention upstream to really prevent spillover."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

“… Public Health administrators [are] being obscenely compensated for their efforts in purportedly fighting Covid.” See “Public Health Officials Cash in on Covid“

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

A novel coronavirus, deadly and unnecessary lockdowns, civil unrest, political division, economic crises, a rise in mental health issues — the list goes on and on and on.

Since March 2020, most of the world has suffered immensely in one way or another. But, amidst the madness, there is room for gratitude. More specifically, I’m suggesting we should be grateful for what and who has been exposed over the past 32 months or so.

6 Reasons to Feel Grateful for the “Pandemic”

1. Exposed:  Science and Medicine

If you ever had a doubt that these two “institutions” were hotbeds of corruption and greed, the response to Covid-19 surely cleared things up for you. Everything — from social distancing to masks to vaccines to other treatments being demonized to deadly protocols — was a poorly constructed lie.

2. Exposed:  Corporations

If you ever had a doubt that these two “institutions” were hotbeds of corruption and greed, the response to Covid-19 surely cleared things up for you. Everything — from social distancing to masks to vaccines to other treatments being demonized to deadly protocols — was a poorly constructed lie.

3. Exposed:  Government

It’s a well-worn script: A crisis unfolds and elected officials — across the ideological spectrum — exploit it to enhance their power. Were you unsure whether or not any politician could be trusted? If so, you now have your answer.

4. Exposed:  The #woke Left

The same clowns who once marched against Monsanto are now shilling for Moderna. Plus: Censorship, support for mandates, hypocrisy, thought control, groupthink… need I go on?

5. Exposed:  Media and Social Media

All media outlets and social media platforms — regardless of their ostensible “narrative” — are nothing more than AI-assisted stenographers to power.

6. Exposed:  The General Population

Did you ever wonder how your friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, etc., would respond to a genuine (or manufactured) crisis? Well… take a good look around. Most of them, it seems, will follow orders and respect authority without question, willingly surrender their autonomy, volunteer to be lab rats, and gleefully turn on anyone who doesn’t march in lockstep. Now you know.

I’m so thankful that so many people and institutions in my life have openly clarified who they are and how they behave under duress. To connect with like-minded and open-minded comrades, you are required to first move on from those seeking to harm you or, at least, hold you back.

If you wish to continue growing, learning, and evolving, you must be willing to relentlessly see and accept what’s going on.

Translation: You must reclaim the subversive pleasure of thinking for yourself.

#gratitude

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

“There is an urgent need to improve health policy to reduce corruption in the health sector during times of crisis.”
— Gonzalez-Aquines A and Kowalska-Bobko I¹

COVID-19 pandemic “highlight[s] potential risks and opportunities for corruption — corruption that may undermine the response to the pandemic and deprive people of health care.”
— “Corruption and the Coronavirus,” Transparency International

1. Addressing health corruption during a public health crisis through anticipatory governance: Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. Front Public Health. 29 July 2022;10:952979. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.952979. PMID: 35968489; PMCID: PMC9372614.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Hart Island is located at the western end of the Long Island Sound, off the coast of the northeastern Bronx. Despite being only one mile long and 1/3 mile wide, it’s home to more than one million souls. It could be the tenth most populous city in the U.S. — ranked above teeming metropolises like San Francisco, Denver, DC, Boston, and Detroit.

I say “could” because Hart Island, as a potter’s field for New York City, is actually the largest tax-funded cemetery in the world. And, until 2019, it was manned by grave-digging inmate labor shipped over from nearby Rikers Island.

(credit: Claire Yaffa)

Generally speaking, a potter’s field is where any city buries the bodies (and body parts) of those not claimed by any family members or unable to afford a private funeral. This typically includes the homeless, indigent, and people who live alone and below the poverty line. Low-income victims of epidemics and pandemics are often buried in such a location.

Near the very end of his life, my grandfather would half-jokingly implore my mother to abandon him in the hospital. “They’ll put me in a potter’s field,” he explained, “and you won’t have to waste money on a funeral.”

For the record, Mom did not take Grandpa up on his suggestion.

My maternal grandfather with me and my older sister, approximately 200 years ago.

Why “Hart” Island, you wonder? Like so many other Big Apple tales, there are a couple of interesting but questionable origin stories. The Middle English word “hart” means “stag.” This kinda-sorta makes sense when you consider that the island was once used as a game preserve. Also, deer did migrate from the mainland when ice covered this geographic region way back when.

The yarn I prefer, for its poetic license, is that British cartographers originally called it “Heart” Island due to its shape. To believe this story is to assume the cartographers to be quite inept as the island’s shape is not exactly like something you’d see in a cardiology textbook. But I’m going with it.

(credit: Claire Yaffa)

Besides being a game preserve, over the centuries, Hart Island was also, um… multi-purposed? It’s been a potter’s field since 1875, of course, but here are just a few of the many other uses the “Island of the Undesirables” has served:

• Training ground for the “United States Colored Troops” during the Civil War
• Civil War prison camp (235 Confederate prisoners died and were buried on the island)
• A special hospital was built on the island during the 1870 yellow fever epidemic
• Tubercularium
• Reformatory for delinquent boys
• A women’s “lunatic asylum”
• Homeless shelter
• The base for Nike surface-to-air missiles during the Cold War

In the 1960s, Phoenix House even ran a drug rehabilitation program on the island. They’d hold annual sober music festivals there (one year’s headliner was the Velvet Underground).

At one point, plans were made to erect an amusement park on the island but somehow, that was never built. It’s not hard to discern why so many believe Hart Island to be haunted.

Despite the myriad uses, Hart Island seemed resigned to its destiny as a potter’s field and that’s what it is full-time now. The list of famous individuals interred on the island includes:

• Leo Birinski (playwright, film screenwriter, and director)
• Dawn Powell (novelist)
• Bobby Driscoll (1950 Academy Award-winning actor in the juvenile category)
• T-Bone Slim (labor activist, songwriter, and Wobbly)

During the 1980s, far too many of what came to be called “crack babies” died alone in hospitals or in other settings — often diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. These unfortunate souls were frequently laid to rest on Hart Island, lined up in tiny coffins.

(credit: Claire Yaffa)

Fear, prejudice, paranoia, and Fauci/Big Pharma criminality helped shape the heartless response to the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s. This reality was manifest on Hart Island with inmate workers being required to wear protective outfits when handling body bags containing those who were said to have died from AIDS.

Eventually, when it was accepted that no one could “catch” AIDS from a corpse, those bodies were buried in mass graves along with all the others. You can use an interactive map here to identify them.

In 2008, it was decided that Hart Island would be used for mass burials should there be something like an extreme flu pandemic on the horizon. Some 20,000 slots were made available, just in case. Twelve years later, this planning would go into effect.

Drone picture show bodies being buried on Hart Island where the Department of Corrections is dealing with the COVID-19 “outbreak” in New York City, U.S., April 9, 2020. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)

In 1992, a Rikers Island inmate named Michael Roman was part of a work crew assigned to bury bodies on Hart Island. Roman called the location, “an island of poor unfortunate souls, buried here in the unknown to others.”

He bemoaned: “If only I had the power to help this lost island.”

With that in mind, I urge you to please take another moment to peruse the images that accompany this article. Honor them and the anonymous victims they represent. Ponder how many unrealized moments are also buried on those 101 acres. And what about the children and all the chances they never had? Who will remember these lost souls?

Vicki Pavia, whose baby is buried on Hart Island. ©1994 Joel Sternfeld

This is where the Hart Island Project comes in. Here’s a little from their mission statement:

The Hart Island Project maintains an online database of people buried between 1980 and the present as well as maps of their grave locations. This database is the foundation for a system of storytelling and visualization called the Traveling Cloud Museum in an attempt to preserve the histories of who is buried for present and future generations. The Hart Island Project advocates for increased transparency of New York City burial procedures and assists individuals in gaining access to actual graves and information.

Click here to learn how you can help them.

(credit: Claire Yaffa)

Maybe you’ll feel inspired by what you’ve learned about Hart Island — inspired to not assume you’ve got things all figured out. No one ever imagines they’ll be that person who ends up buried in a plain wooden box among a pile of such boxes in a mass grave that almost nobody is ever allowed to visit. But it can and it does happen, even amidst the best-laid plans.

Perhaps the best way to venerate the virtually anonymous million-plus humans laid to rest on Hart Island is to not take our own lives or the people in our lives for granted. To live today with compassion and self-compassion, because tomorrow is never guaranteed.

There’s nothing we can do for those buried on the “Island of the Undesirables” except to remember them and mourn them. But, a bigger question remains: What are we doing right now for those who are still here among us?

As Mary Harris “Mother” Jones urged: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

Milgram experiment, remember?

The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question:

‘Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?’ (Milgram, 1974).

Some of the aspects of the situation that may have influenced their behavior include the formality of the location, the behavior of the experimenter and the fact that it was an experiment for which they had volunteered and been paid.

Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being.  Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.

Authority, fear, bandwagon, transfer, glittering appeal, etc., in the propaganda, Mad Men arena:

• Bandwagon propaganda
• Card Stacking propaganda
• Plain Folk Propaganda
• Testimonial Propaganda
• Glittering Generality Propaganda
• Name Calling Propaganda
• Transfer Propaganda
• Ad nauseam propaganda (source)

To the point of an apartheid state, Israel, with its deep roots in terrorism against the British and then mass gulag incarceration for the indigenous people, being not only called a great democracy, but one where it has a shadow government in the USA-UK-Canada-EU, in the form of Israel-Firsters of both the Jewish and non-Jewish persuasion.

Israel’s Secret Poisonings in 1948: New article by Benny Morris and Benjamin Kedar indicates that well before the botched assassination attempt 25 years ago on Hamas’ Meshal, Israel attempted mass poisoning during the war in 1948 [so, this comes out October 6, 2022, in  Haaretz, but there will never be a documentary on Netflix or dramatization on Hulu covering this one of a million stories of Israel’s pogrom]

Now? Check out the flip-side of flipped-out propaganda and truth: “Israel Is Arming Ukraine’s Blatantly Neo-Nazi Militia, the Azov Battalion.” USA-Israel has been for years:

What is going wrong with the so-called mainstream journalism tied to Ukraine is what was/is wrong with the MSM and left-wing narratives around masks, lockdowns, obeying the marching orders of corrupt Big Pharma, and listening without pushback against faux scientists, while allowing for the silencing of medical experts, and public health experts who had/have a different analysis of SARS-CoV2. Hook, line and sinker:

We’ll get to the Covid test for journalists in a minute, but the idea of exacting image management and agnotology and black is white, lies are truth mentality has taken off with algorithms and censoring and the onslaught of Google and Deep State and Corporate State seeding the world with a system of dumb-downing by 1,000,000,000 managed internet hits and mass hysteria.

Zelenskyy has been using 3D imagery to deliver speeches all over the world by using a hologram.

Zelenskyy’s “participation” in world events using a hologram has been reported by several renowned media outlets, as can be seen below.

A hologram is created through holography, a photographic technique which records the light scattered from an object and displays it three-dimensionally.

Images, and the Mass Incarceration Media Management Show:

Oh, these image management boys and girls:

It’s taken off like gangbusters with the few and the mighty controlling 90 percent of “media,” i.e. publishing (including k12 books) and radio and TV and cable and the Holly-Dirt manufacturers of lies, half-truths, multimillionaire thespians who end up acting in politics. All the world’s a stage for coiffing the reality of the poor masses, us, we useless eaters-breeders-breathers-shitters.

Then, with this total absorption of Hollywood images, the marketing ploys, the perceived, planned, hoped for complete transition from citizens to consumers to data zombies to useless to nobodies, we can have this sort of audacity, in my local rag. All full-page rainbow colors and all:

Imagine that, driving in Newport, while seeing all those employee solicitations plastered up on the local Burger King and Pizza Hut billboards, seeking drive-thru help or pizza dough assistants, for $16 an hour plus signing on bonuses and a 30 percent discount on fat, salt and sugar, man.

I’m not sure what the Burger King/Pizza Hut Covidian Madness Requirements are for those teens or Baby Boomers lining up for this gig, to actually get hired with background checks, drug checks, and vax checks, but I know the school district requires SARS-CoV2 experimental jabs, and CDC proof of it, to walk the halls of the school or help those kids on the teether ball court.

Note, the hourly wage for substitutes has been set by a staffing agency working hand in glove with the district — $14.07 an hour. When I was substituting, well, I’d get $18 an hour, and that included pay for a full day if I pinch-hit a couple hours after the morning bell rang. That was $140 for six hours work! Not anymore!

I’d meet the school secretary, get signed in, and then that was it —  look at the absent teacher’s notes for the day and then greet the 3rd graders and the math classes in the high schools, music room sub, or special education sub. Even PE and even all sorts of classes K12.  Now, the poor souls getting $14 an hour have to jump through the staffing agency hoop, a company out of Tennessee:

And this another aspect of the smoke and mirrors game of Western Society — the staffing agencies, the middlemen and middlewomen just making bank by adding on to all the daily costs of living, of surviving, with their powerful Salesforce apps and servers, all of that, taking over teaching, for the time being, until it all goes on-line, in home “learning”:

Over the last 22 years, we have innovated education staffing to provide dynamic solutions to school districts and professional opportunities to passionate educators. Our team serves over 4.5 million students with a pool of 80,000 substitute and permanent employees throughout 33 states. Internally, the ESS team is comprised of 650 individuals with a passion for education working together to ensure our 900 partner districts experience valuable education every day.

This is the big rip-off, the taxpayers’ spending trillions over the years to establish/prop up public education, schools, buses, college prep programs, all those state colleges and junior colleges, all those school districts throughout the land, so that one day the PT Barnums’ of the world can come in and swoop up and take some munches out of that public-private partnership bs.

I have never seen journalists question this rip-off scheme because (a) journalism has always been on life-support, always there as a town barker and nice guy in the business story realm, and (b) because “going deep” journalistically means going deeper into how immersive the rip-off schemes are in U$A.

I’ve written about my bad times here in Lincoln County, about the spinelessness of ESS, and, well, each criticism of these systems puts another nail into my useless eater-breather-shitter life:

Again, I think the biggest question in maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people?

The problem is more boredom and how what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life, when they are basically meaningless, worthless?

My best guess, at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for [most]. It’s already happening…

I think once you’re superfluous, you don’t have power.

– from a transcript at Rielpolitic Alexandra Bruce, “Brave New World: Yuval Noah Harari asks, “What to do with all these useless people?”

Harari goes on to outline a transhumanist vision of the future in which brain-computer interfaces make our footedness in the material world obsolete, human relationships become meaningless due to artificial substitutes, and the poor die but the rich don’t.

Wesley J. Smith points out:

Transhumanism, boiled down to its bones, is pure eugenics. It calls itself “H+,” for more or better than human. Which, of course, is what eugenics is all about.

Alarmingly, transhumanist values are being embraced at the highest strata of society, including in Big Tech, in universities, and among the Davos crowd of globalist would-be technocrats. That being so, it is worth listening in to what they are saying under the theory that forewarned is forearmed.

“Transhumanism is pure eugenics” at Evolution News, April 27, 2022

Big issues, no, for the 21st Century of Fourth Industrial Revolution, Web 3.0, Social Impact Bonds, pay for success, blockchains, twinning, and so-so much more that the average gumshoe journalist just can’t dig deep because it will upset the entire playing field they so badly need to get a sense of sanity from the insane. But reporting on insanity is what we need in a time of Transhumanism and Covidian Cults?

Try this out for size:

When you enter the “invest in kids bonds” door knowing there are plans to create asset-backed securities in toddlers and trade them (and perhaps short them) on global markets, the single-minded interrogation of cryptocurrency exchanges and NFT rip-offs feels woefully inadequate. If the stakes weren’t so high, it might be amusing to watch folks who’ve been swimming in the shark-infested waters of financial derivatives for years point fingers decrying crypto-Ponzi-schemers. Calls for better regulation and professed empathy for those who lost their savings to fraudulent digital money schemes ring a bit hollow once you realize many of the panelists’ livelihoods are intertwined with the same financial interests, journalism outlets, and think tanks that were enmeshed in the crash of the global economy via toxic-real estate debt products. These are the same folks who are now in the process of developing the risk modeling, tokenomics, and APIs needed to run the smart “Ricardian” contract, “sustainably resilient,” open-air prison. — Alison McDowell, Wrench in the Gears

“What Stage Are We On? Immersive Storytelling, Hegelian Dialectic, and Crypto-Spectacle“

Read what the billionaire class and the techno gurus are after, and it’s data, man, tracking us, every blink, twitch, hiccup, burp, step, defecation as well as every purchase, every debt, every desire, to create the ultimate robotics, AI. It’s universal basic chump income blathering, man, and it is that World Economic Forum adage on steroids: “You’ll own nothing but be happy.”

Go here, too, for more:

So, as a real journalist, I have experienced that old time religion of lack of bandwidth, lack of humane reporting, the lack of looking at many sides, and coming out the other end of a story with, well, some solutions that are not the black-and-white game of divide and conquer. False balance, equivocation, relying on diploma-ed and credentialed sources, fear of litigation, the whole nine yards of mainstream journalism requiring an inverted triangle of information; i.e., the lede and important stuff at the top, and the superfluous and unimportant stuff (sic) at the bottom. Of course, it is the stuff at the bottom that IS important.

Case in point: I did the story on 13 Salvadorans found dead in the Organ Pipe National Monument along the US-Mexico border. Newspaperman. Yeah, the hurly burly of all those cops, helicopters, forensics wagons, and a young reporter who happened to have friends working with refugees of El Salvador (and Chile and Guatemala) and who actually did some assistance with the so-called underground railroad. You know, assistance that would have gotten me fired and banned from journalism, even got me arrested, as in, well, helping undocumented folk get from point A to point B in my pick-up truck.

When the grisly scene came into play, and with my background in that work, of course I got a hold of some folk working to assist those coming into the USA for sanctuary and political asylum. Of course, I knew a few academics and authors who had been writing about the dirty schemes of the Salvadoran government, businesses, military and police who were exacting hell on common people, on farmers, and on labor unionists with the material support and intellectual help of USA!

That bottom-of-the-inverted triangle “stuff” was fought over, parsed, edited out, and eventually cut, as the newspapers I worked for was all about the facts, ma’am, if it bleeds, it leads, just get the information from the officials on the spot.

You know, don’t upset the local readers, don’t go into “that” political stuff, and don’t bring in guys and gals from universities all the way from Cochise County, Arizona, to Chicago in your stories?

That was in the early 1980s.

It’s gotten worse. And, I have found over the years that journalists are intimidated by or enamored by the scientists, the reef biologists, the astrophysicists, the dudes and gals mixing up the chemicals, designing the motherboards, and trading derivatives.

Journalists are also tone deaf to history, to backgrounding, and, alas, if the motherships are New York Times and Washington Post and another dozen or so papers sprinkled around the U$A, then that modelling has what has tainted the media, The Press.

How disturbing it is to see the fornication of corporations and media, how disgusting it is to see what is and is not off limits in the reportage arena.

Source: Sheepdog Bernie Sanders site!

Then, in book publishing? Fewer and fewer books of importance.

This prefatory bit I’m etching in hyperbole before introducing a piece on how the “left” failed the Covid reporting test big time is my angst, for sure, and my ability to see the big picture(s), even if they are holograms and 4 D chessboards in the entire propaganda game. Systems thinking, and while much about capitalism is boorish and raw and just plain usury and scamming and parasitic, there are some complicated and very technical aspects of how finance is moving into your local community, your neighborhood, your lives. BlackRock? Who controls the world?

CEO Larry Fink built a shadow government of former agency officials in a bid to become Hillary Clinton’s Treasury secretary. That didn’t stop Fink from becoming part of the main private-sector advisory organization to Donald Trump until that panel disbanded after Charlottesville.

Alas, though, we’d expect that non-legacy journalists, or those who were once in the Mainstream who are now leftist, supposed anti-monopoly, anti-corporation, skeptical beyond skeptical of any governmental narrative reporters, that they would have peeled back the onion peels on this SARS-CoV2 bioweapon, and then question the funny juiced-up cocktails that we call the mRNA jab.

You’d think that the censoring of doctors, scientists, just plain deep thinkers and activists on the lockdowns, the mandates, the failure to get the data from the Moderna’s and the Pfizer’s on these bizarre untested and rapidly released jabs would pique their interest.

Instead, many went blank, called millions of us as poorly informed, conspiracy theorists, anti-this and anti-that dupes. Imagine that, journalists who question empire, question the United Fruit Company, question authority, Vietnam, Weapons of Mass Destruction, the MIC, FIRE, and who want to look deep into the well that is American Manifest Destiny and Exceptionalism, that they would flip like dying dogs, or either go blank on the virus front, or even patronize those of us who have the gumption to look into the origins of that “virus” and who have the interest in understanding what a great reset is, and how a pathogen and mass hysterical and controlled media on that front can compel people to submit to these fascist things. Typical leftist yammering:

“I got my vaccinations, but I understand that some people who might have personal or whatever beliefs have the right, I guess, to not get forcefully jabbed. Well, yeah, I got the jab because the information just came to me in a dream -haha. I understand science and I understand how much smarter these virologists are, and, heck, a conspiracy of them producing products that would be bad for us, or cause deaths, or that the decent governmental employees would cook up fakes on all this, get real? I get why people might not want to have blood transfusions because of their religion, or not get this vaccine, but for the greater good of all, really, this is a pandemic. We have to follow the science. Sometimes the government-law has to intervene if the Jehovah Witness parent is putting their kids in jeopardy with this inane superstition about blood transfusions and keeping them on life support. Get real, and be part of our collective society.”

So, yes, I only have a BS in marine biology from a long time ago, and, yes, only a masters in Rhetoric and another one in urban and regional planning, and only years underwater diving, and decades as a many-venue journalist, and many decades teaching college, and many years as a sustainability coordinator, and, well, so, if I doubt the narratives around Event 201 and Gates and gain of function lies and what those bio-labs in Canada and USA and even Ukraine and former Soviet Union region are actually up to; and if I delve into many many sources tied to what the hell is going on with corona virus, bats, civets, and SARS, and what the history of Japan’s Unit 731 is, and what the history of biological warfare (ARPA and DARPA) and what is in the minds and labs (Plum Island, Fort Detrick) of U$A, well, again, lefties, liberals, Democrats: “Shut the f#@% up and just do what a good citizen should do . . . your commie countries are doing it too . . .  China, Nicaragua, Cuba . . . so take off that tin foil hat and just relax and take it as it is: these scientific things, these mRNA clipping things, this incredible advancement in the science of working with RNA and DNA, well, it supersedes your ability to understand where these big Pharma outfits are coming from. Shut up, and if you doubt any of this, then you are, well, akin to a Trumpian or Q-Anon or just a plain wacko antivaxxer, man. Embarrassing.”

Sure, everything else written about exposures of this bizarre multiple front narrative is verboten:

No Doubting Thomases here:

RNA for Moderna’s Omicron Booster Manufactured by CIA-Linked Company

Since late last year, messenger RNA for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, including its recently reformulated Omicron booster, has been exclusively manufactured by a little known company with significant ties to US intelligence. (source)

Like every other important social phenomenon, propaganda regimes have historical genealogies. For example, a very strong case could be made that the ongoing, and sad to admit, largely successful Covid propaganda onslaught under which we now live can trace its roots back to the two so-called demonstration wars (the Panama Invasion and the First Gulf Conflict) waged by George Bush Sr.

The American elites were badly stung by the country’s defeat in Vietnam. In it, they rightly saw a considerable curtailment of what they had come to see as their divine right since the end of WWII: the ability to intervene as they so fit in any country not explicitly covered by the Soviet nuclear umbrella.

And in their analysis of that failure, they correctly alighted to the role that the media—by simply bringing the tawdry and ignoble reality of the war into our living rooms—had played in undermining citizen willingness to engage in such fruitless, costly and savage adventures in the future.

But his piece could have been titled: “Why did the Left, Right, Middle Fail the, now, fill in the blanks, Vietnam-Korea War Test? The Chemical Corporations Polluting Us Test? Why did they, the left, right, middle, fail to go after Carter for mining Nicaragua, for the Gulf of Tonkin Affair, for Vilifying Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader?” Harrington discusses the failure of left-wing writers who have failed to dig deep and parse through the entire reason, pretext for, history of, practice games with, this Planned Pandemic.

It is the failure of actually sticking to your guns; i.e., question EVERYTHING corporations do, sell us, tell us, connive with government to hide from us.

The price? Ending careers, and PayPal shut downs, and bank accounts seized, and endless ghosting and libeling on social media. Infinite social media assaults for anyone who might want to look into SARS-CoV2, the culprits in those biolabs, why the gain of function experiments were continued, why Fort Detrick was shut down months before the media wave of SARS-CoV2 hit? Why there are so many bio-labs at universities in USA and Canada and, well, in former Soviet Union; i.e., Ukraine.

Again, his, Harrington’s, hard-edged words, but real words, with the context, with the history and backgrounding to support what he is saying:

Reading this final flourish while remembering the lamb-like silence of John Pilger in the face of the sustained Covidian onslaught of institutionalized lies and Soviet-grade censorship, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

And when considering that virtually all those he endorses as exemplars of propaganda-savvy journalism—people such as Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone all of whose work I have frequently and enthusiastically championed over the years—took the same cud-chewing path, the sense of farce only grows.

Go to Harrington’s piece and the piece Pilger wrote which Harrington references. You decide yourself how the left failed the Covid Narrative Badly.

John Pilger, “arguably one of the brightest and more persistent leftist analysts of establishment propaganda,” published “Silencing the lambs: How propaganda works” on his website and then a number of progressive news outlets.

[Leni Riefenstahl, center, filming with two assistants, 1936. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)]

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Yellow Fever hit New York City in the late eighteenth century. The Big Apple population at the time was 60,000 and over the course of five years, eight percent of those New Yorkers succumbed to the disease (or related malfeasance).

Adjust that ratio for 2022 and the death count would approach 675,000.

Yellow fever is described by the always trustworthy World Health Organization as “an acute viral hemorrhagic disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes.” It can incubate in your body for up to 6 days but is often asymptomatic. If symptoms do arise, mild to moderate cases last for 3 or 4 days and present with:

• Fever
• Headache
• Nausea
• Vomiting
• Muscle pain (usually a backache)
• Decreased appetite

For some patients, there is a secondary toxic phase that occurs very shortly after they recover from the above symptoms. This phase typically commences with a return of the high fever but things quickly escalate from there, e.g.

• Kidney damage
• Liver problems
• Jaundice (the yellowing of skin and eyes is where this disease gets its name)
• Abdominal pain
• Dark urine
• Steady and extreme vomiting
• Internal bleeding
• Bleeding from the mouth, nose, or eyes

Roughly 50 percent of those who enter the toxic phase are dead within a week.

Sad reality: Pandemics and epidemics are often handled in an inexplicable, inefficient, greedy, and lethal manner. Here’s how the Museum of the City of New York described the scene more than two centuries ago:

By 1795, yellow fever was making its way through New York City. The true cause of yellow fever was unknown at the time. Many thought the disease was spread by consuming or inhaling the fumes of rotting food or coffee. Others believed the illness was imported from the West Indies. The press was reluctant to publish the extent of yellow fever due to fears of people leaving the city and the economy suffering. New Yorkers falsely believed the disease was not contagious, and by 1798, the dispersion of yellow fever had reached epidemic proportions claiming the lives of thousands. Various efforts were made to clean up certain neighborhoods most widely affected by the disease, but other than quarantining infected ships, the newly formed health department did little to prevent the sickness from spreading.

As you well know, this type of scenario is nothing new within our culture — regardless of which technology delivers the narrative.

Keep your guard up…

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

Over two years into the Covid-19 pandemic and amid a worsening climate emergency, researchers released a study Wednesday warning that glacier melt in the Arctic could unleash frozen viruses that lead to new global health crises.

"Obviously we've seen in the past two years what the effects of spillover can be."

While human activities such as burning fossil fuels heat the whole world, studies have shown that the Arctic is warming roughly four times faster than the rest of the planet. The new research exposes how sea-level rise isn't the only danger posed by the region's rapidly melting glaciers.

For the paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, a team from Canada's University of Ottawa focused on Lake Hazen, the largest lake by volume in the High Arctic region.

The researchers took samples of both soil that serves as a riverbed for melted glacier water and lake sediments to study the risk of viral spillover, or the transmission of a virus from one host species to another.

The team found that "spillover risk increases with runoff from glacier melt, a proxy for climate change. Should climate change also shift species range of potential viral vectors and reservoirs northwards, the High Arctic could become fertile ground for emerging pandemics."

As ScienceAlert detailed:

In line with previous studies, which show how degraded landscapes can thrust pathogens, parasites, and hosts together in new ways, the researchers suggest that increased glacier runoff leads to greater chances of viruses jumping over into eukaryote hosts.

The increased spillover risk differed, though, in the soil and lake sediment samples. In soil, with high glacial melt flows, the spillover risk increased to a point before declining, whereas the risk continued rising in lake sediment samples.

One explanation put forward by the researchers is that increased runoff means more organic material—and the organisms in it—gets washed into the lake rather than remaining on land.

The paper points out that "Lake Hazen was recently found to have undergone a dramatic change in sedimentation rates since 2007 compared to the previous 300 years." Lead author Audrée Lemieux explained that water from melted glaciers depositing more sediment into the lake is "going to bring together hosts and viruses that would not normally encounter each other."

While recognizing that the researchers provide "a novel approach to assessing spillover risk," the study also states that "this is not the same as predicting spillovers or even pandemics, first because we rely on known virus/host associations, and also because as long as viruses and their 'bridge vectors' are not simultaneously present in the environment, the likelihood of dramatic events probably remains low."

For now, "the only take-home that we can confidently put forward is that as temperatures are rising, the risk of spillover in this particular environment is increasing," co-author Stéphane Aris-Brosou told The Guardian. "Will this lead to pandemics? We absolutely don't know."

However, the study notes, "as climate change leads to shifts in species ranges and distributions, new associations can emerge, bringing in vectors that can mediate viral spillovers, as simulations recently highlight."

"This twofold effect of climate change, both increasing spillover risk and leading to a northward shift in species ranges, could have dramatic effect in the High Arctic," the paper warns. "Disentangling this risk from actual spillovers and pandemics will be a critical endeavor to pursue in parallel with surveillance activities, in order to mitigate the impact of spillovers on economy- and health-related aspects of human life, or on other species."

Echoing the study, Lemieux stressed that "the likelihood of dramatic events remains very low" but also that new hosts can emerge as the region warms up. These hosts, she said, "could be anything from ticks to mosquitoes to certain animals, to bacteria and viruses themselves."

"It's really unpredictable... and the effect of spillover itself is very unpredictable, it can range from benign to an actual pandemic," she added. "Obviously we've seen in the past two years what the effects of spillover can be."

Though researchers have not yet determined when and how the virus that causes Covid-19 transferred to humans, it has killed over 6.5 million people and generated warnings from experts worldwide about the need for humanity to repair its exploitative relationship with nature to prevent future pandemics.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

It started out with a fake virus, never isolated, a tremendous fear campaign, lockdowns, forced wearing of dangerous, denigrating, face-disfiguring masks, social separation and division of societies, families and kins, followed by a coerced “vaccination” campaign, better called forced “vaxxing” – injection of a poisonous killer substance under the pretext of preventing a pandemic that never was a pandemic, but rather a “plandemic” – designed for a massive population decimation program.

Simultaneously it was a test to what extent people may be manipulated to obey, when exposed to fear-fear-fear and coercion. Lying has become the “rule of law”. As we are witnessing, the combination of fear and threat is quite successful.

People out of fear and total submission accepted basically a “suicide vaxxination”, beginning with the elderly and infirm, those who are an “unproductive burden” on society, or as Klaus Schwab’s top advisor, the Israeli “genius” Yuval Noah Hariri calls them, including most of Us, The People – the “Useless Eaters”.

The first article, short whistleblower videos and interview with Reiner Fuellmich, of the German “Corona Ausschuss” (Corona Commission), deals with the extreme form of vaxx-eugenics which is clearly homicide, or first-degree murder.  See:  Video: The Corona Crisis: “We’re Dealing with Homicide, Maybe Even Murder”, Forced Vaccines in Nursing Homes, September 13, 2022.

The second article attempts to provide a historic perspective on mind manipulation. It is going back more than hundred years, demonstrating on how our minds were consistently and persistently maneuvered to allow this Diabolical Cult to finally carry out their – what they would like to see – Final Agenda, or Great Reset, a new One World Order, a society reigned by a small ultra-wealthy elite, served by chipped and 5G-controlled, insect-eating transhuman serves, who own nothing but are happy.

That’s their vision – the WEF’s Schwab cum Hariri couldn’t present it better. They clearly show us what they are up to – and this in full execution of their sinister program – and a vast majority of Us, the People, still ignore it. look the other way. Can’t accept the hard and miserable truth.  See:  Torn Jeans and “The Great Reset” – A History of Mind Manipulation, 13 September 2022.

The third article is about the up-and-coming Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) – “Owning the Weather”, causing severe and lasting droughts, hurricanes and floods of never-before seen proportions and ice-age type cold spells, massively destroying food crops, infrastructure and human lives. This has been in the making for the last at least 60 years.

Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD)  constitute instruments of “weather warfare”. They are an integral part of the US military arsenal. A 1996 Study Commissioned by the US Air Force: Weather as a Force Multiplier, Owning the Weather in 2025 says it all.  See:  Does the Military “Own the Weather”? “Weaponizing the Weather” as an Instrument of Modern Warfare, August 31, 2022.

Although plenty of publications on the subject, including by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), are available, the topic is taboo among environmentalists and Climate Change freaks.  As you may imagine, they are an integral part of the intense and ongoing mind manipulation.

Time is running out! WAKE UP, People!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Koenig.

Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.

― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

Sure, Gabor has a way with trauma, and his own life as a Jew in Hungary, young, and his mother giving him to a neighbor for a few weeks to protect the young Gabor from the Nazis, that is what Gabor sees as both early childhood trauma and epigentic trauma.

The documentary focusing on the Canadian is good. Alas, he is also part of a group attempting to heal, but for a fee. All sorts of access to Gabor, extended conversations, and ways to work with trauma.

Here’s a list on the resources link/drop down: The Wisdom of Trauma.

• Adverse Childhood Experience short video explaining toxic stress (by KPJR Films)
• ACE Study (by Academy on Violence and Abuse)
• Breakthrough: The Trauma Chaser
• Cormac Russell on Asset Based Community Development (Podcast)
• CRACKED UP
• Former Jail Warden Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia | We Are Witnesses
• Gabor Mate & Adyashanti: Emotional and Spiritual Maturity
• Hannah Beach, trauma work with students using movement and stories, Each of Us Has a Story
• Higher Practice (Podcast)
• How childhood trauma effects health across a lifetime (TED talk with Nadine Burke Harris)
• Is Your Story Making You Sick?
• Oprah reports on Childhood Trauma’s long term effects
• Paper Tigers: One High School’s Unlikely Success Story
• PBS Newshour: Childhood Trauma
• Professor Julianne Holt Lunstad on the the amazing impact of social relationships on health and longevity (Podcast)
• Professor Steve Cole on human social genomics amongst many others with fantastic insight into the power of community (Podcast)
• Reasons I Drink (Alanis Morrissette)
• Reclaiming Our Students, 12-session online educational series for educators
• Resilience: The Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope
• Step Inside the Circle
• Surgical Empathy
• Tashi and The Monk (Film)
• This Might Hurt (Film)
• Trauma and The Nervous System: A Polyvagal Perspective

There are other ways to also see how the world works, how people in both the West and the Global South are dealing with microaggression and macroaggression after aggression. Of course, patriarchy, capitalism and many variations on that theme are killing the human soul, the human body, from pre-birth to seven generations out. Trauma is also the synergy of chemical x mixed with chemials a,b,c onward. Imagine that, a world where we barely talk about Rachel Carson, why the eagle egg thins out and why the sperm counts drop, but then, we are in a world of constant organic chemistry alchemy. The countless science experiments on humanity and ecology focused on products to make them sleeker, thinner, cooler, softer, harder, bigger, smaller, less flammable, more flammable, more slippery, less stinky, more glowing, better looking, easier to digest, more aromatic, less shiny.

That is the Faustian Bargain we all have engaged in, for our new species, Homo Consumopithecus, Erectus Plasticus. That bargain also involved a world of more complicated diodes and self-replicating genetically engineered stuff, one where computing and virtual reality and augmented reality and artificial intelligence and machine learning, all of that, has colonized us daily . . . . We have accepted that stuff in our toys and our mundane jobs, but we sometimes shudder (as in a Philip K Dick book-movie) to think of the truly monsterous matrix and biopiracy we have allowed the data hogs and the surveillance soldiers to deploy in order to control our lives.

So, yes, adverse childhood experiences make sense, and it is a scale, a way to look at children who are struggling in school, and sometimes as a predictor of what might befall a student who has seen daddy put in jail, mommy hooked on booze, seen the repo man come into the home, found the beat up Ford Taurus hooked up to a tow truck for lack of payment. You know, just what happens in a home with chaos, violence between parents, and then add up homelessness, and their own abuse; i.e., physical and sexual. The reality, though, no looking at the cause of those terrible events, Cause-effect/effect-turned-to-cause/ cause-the-effect of another cause and effect. The daisy chain!

The devil, though, is in the details of what ACEs really mean to the titans of finance, to the masters of social impact investing to the Fourth Industrial Revolutionaires:

“Factors associated with adverse childhood experiences in Scottish children: a prospective cohort study” (source)

Pay for success or social impact partnership: Return on investment for social impact, as in the cost of special education, or what is the cost of depression. All that money attached to human issues, but they (money hoarders) want to tie in money and making money to those profiles — pre-crime — to preemptively fix you when you ARE not even broken! Investing on disaster (disaster capitalism) or investing on your childhood or household or prison sentence. Scary stuff.

Beware of Kaiser and Silicon Valley and Futures Markets and Hedge Funds and Human Capital Markets. Making money on trauma? Prenatal shit, too.

These are nefarious human beings. These are the Inquisition’s offspring, in skinny jeans and fancy pant suits. The human capital market is contradictory in terms of health and mental care. Making money, man. No healing comes from making money!

Here, Alison:

What concerns me about ACEs is the “scoring.”

Why should a standardized rubric developed under the auspices of one of the largest managed healthcare systems, Kaiser Permanente, label clients and structure the way a doctor, therapist, social worker, or educator can care for them? How did this tool come to have such a far reach, and whose interests will it ultimately serve?

Is a reliance on “scores” an intentionally-constructed framework that allows providers to limit their scope to “fixing” individuals and families rather than advancing a more radical approach whereby systemic causes of community trauma, trauma rooted in our country’s deep racist history, can be acknowledged, holistically assessed, and begin to be ameliorated?

And finally, will this “scoring” system be used to transform the treatment of childhood trauma into a machine for “pay for success” data speculation?

I believe it will.

A September-October, 2017 article for Academic Pediatrics, “Financing Mechanisms for Reducing Adversity and Enhancing Resilience Through Primary Prevention,” shows why ACE interventions will be an extremely attractive investment option for predatory social entrepreneurs. The authors note interventions that “prevent or mitigate the effects of ACEs can have impact across multiple sectors including: behavioral health, general health, child welfare, and “future criminal justice.” Every sector represents potential profit for investors. It appears there’s a lot of money in trauma remediation.

The paper references work done by the Washington State Institute on Public Policy (WSIPP) in which sophisticated cost/benefit models were created that estimate future cost savings across sectors so that the savings can be used to repay investors. WSIPP is one of eight data labs, operating under the purview of the NYU Gov Lab. Among the policy recommendations presented in this paper were: 1) setting “a conceptual framework to understand and account for outcomes across a broad range of public and private investment” 2) “validating metrics to estimate society costs and benefits” 3) adopting integrated budgets that combine health and social welfare finance and 4) disseminating information about innovative policies and finance mechanisms like “pay for success.”

The bottom line is that investors see children who have been harmed as potential sources of vast quantities of “impact” data, since the damage inflicted upon them extends across so many domains. The fact that the harm is so pervasive is, sickeningly, what makes so profitable. Interoperable databases are key to the program. All the data must be pooled in data lakes to claim the future cost offsets that enable the profit taking. WSIPP and its counterparts have been key collaborators in developing a national data architecture upon which impact investment markets will be built. More details in my post “Interoperable Data To Fuel Human Capital Hedge Funds.” (Adverse Childhood Experience Scores: Part of the “Pay for Success” Plan?)

More on this in a later article. But for now, it comes back to MY ground truthing. The father-in-law tipped over at home, had a headache, slurred speech, so 911 was called, EMT’s came out, and the idea was maybe a stroke. He’s been captive in a hospital bed for a month.

He already had ambulatory issues with a genetic disease tied to his feet’s weakness and curling and bad legs (he’s 79, was a truck driver, and he is in his Seventh Day Adventist world); and he had a hip replacement that went south six years ago, both because of that traumatic sawing of bone event, and I suppose because he didn’t “do” the hard end rehab program. He is in constant leg and hip pain.

He is also a military veteran, so he loves the VA since just four years ago, at my urging and assistance, got on that welfare-socialist gravy train. Good resources for equipment, rehab, and a listening nurse or PA.

That EMT call was a month ago, and they found the 2 inch mass in his frontal right lob, and he went under the knife a week ago, and the glioblastoma was the result. Stuck in a Kaiser hospital, and alas, he “tested” positive for the Bioweapon Covid19, so did his wife and his visiting son (from American Somoa) and grandson (from Texas).

Stuck in a hospital, and no visitors, and there you have it. Now, he has been shifted to a rehab place, and he again, tested positive for Bioweapon Covid19, and so, two days barely there, and now no visitors because he is in a “Covid19 wing” of the national for-profit rehabilitation unit (Regency).

My wife and I live three hours from Portland area, and we wanted to visit her mother and this husband, but the lockdown is in effect (he’s been jabbed four times, his wife three but is Jonesing for the 4th one).

My fear is the reality of 2020 and 2021. The horror stories of families separated from loved ones who ended up dying alone in a hospital. This is the madness of these mandates and these rotten dictatorial systems. ALL of it.

The trauma (mental) of this fellow in a rehab clinic, locked down, and he has opted for chemo therapy and radio therapy, big time issues without the support of a wife by his side some part of a day. The predicted lifespan for this 79 year old, according to surgeon and cancer specialists and his primacy care doctor is a year. That’s optimistic.

One year lifespan. Do not return to sender. Do not expect a refund. And, the radiation, and the poison pills or IVs, those treatments (they will have to be at the VA, so transportation is an issue, as in $), what will those medical interventions do to his mind, to his mental capacity, to his neuro net? What about the gut and the pain and confusion and amazing body’s complete aches and heaves from head to toe?

Yeah, we all say we would not do this, go through this hell, for another 12 months on planet Blackrock? Or, really, the diagnosis is one year without the poisons? I am not sure they have had that conversation — you have a choice NOT to poison and irradiate yourself —  since I am not a lynchpin in their lives.

Of course, the father-in-law is looking toward getting back to his small apartment with his fragile wife helping with the catheter and comode and transfering from chair to toilet to shower to bed.

It aint going to happen. He thinks he’ll be back on his scooter and tooling around Costco, etc. He believes he’ll be back dragging his legs and feet using a walker, to the curb, to the family handicap van, etc.

This is trauma, for me and for my wife and for his wife and for the grandson who had never met the granddaddy for his 24 years of life until the cancer diagnosis and his father footing the bill to have him come out to Sandy, OR. The son, 53, did not spend much time with this father, who is now ailing and has an expiration date, AKA medical diagnosis.

I get why people who read my stuff all over the internet, including at Dissident Voice, might not get into the nitty-gritty of personal lives, my own vagaries of living, or the ground truthing I attempt to traverse while still tying into that truthing with my belief that we as a nation and globe have to throw off the chains and do some hard hard work about getting back to our tribal selves, the neo-tribal selves. Oh, yes, eco-socialism, retrenchment, global thinking, global cooperation, true human to human work. Away from the elites, the rich (there shall be no billionaires or multimillionaires).

It’s getting complicated, though, not going along with the so-called progressives who want mandates, forced vaccinations, and, of course, these social impact bonds, these systems of holding poor people and struggling people accountable vis-a-vis the investors and the social impact pogroms. On Dissdient Voice, we have those who think carbon dioxide that we spew has no effect on climate, and then we have others talking about the climate emergency.

We have so many emergencies, and these medical issues will be hitting more and more people, not just indirectly with the aging Baby Boomers, but with the anxiety, self-harm, the childhood trauma leading to destructive behavior, addiction, obesity, workaholic behavior. The constant stream of negative news, the war drums, the incompetent Western governments, the Nazis and right wing conservative anti-human, anti-ecology movements, the openly dumb censoring and cognitive dissonance of the fake progressives wanting control, mandates, and pushing techno fascism of the Google Types onto everyone, but themselves!

We will not see the revolution televised:

Poverty, sickness, community decay, environmental disaster will not be solved by the billionaires, the investors, the bloody idiots investing in “the developing child.”

And, more people moving to Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona will not solve a bloody thing: Imagine that, one generation’s damming of the river, flooding the desert for unchecked growth is another generation’s major- major problem. Water, baby, water, and Lake Mead! The largest reservoir in the United States, is a critical source of water for 25 million people across seven states as well as some of the country’s largest agricultural valleys.

Here are the 10 states with the fastest growth rates:

1. Utah (1.53%)
2. Idaho (1.45%)
3. Texas (1.35%)
4. North Dakota (1.35%)
5. Nevada (1.28%)
6. Colorado (1.27%)
7. Washington (1.26%)
8. Florida (1.25%)
9. Arizona (1.05%)
10. South Carolina (0.95%)

And, the Gates Formula is for land grabbing. These are real struggles: “This website [Farmland Grab] contains news about the global rush to buy or lease farmlands by agribusiness, governments and financial investors — and people’s resistance against it. Its purpose is to serve as a resource for those monitoring, researching or organising around the issue, particularly activists, non-government organisations and journalists. It was initially set up by GRAIN, to share evidence of the new global farmland grab documented in Seized: The 2008 land grab for food and financial security.”

It all comes down to family, no, the battered family, the epigenetic trauma, the cities and towns flagging, the infrastructure crumbling, the fires and droughts, the heat waves, the inflation, and, of course, broken medicine, and the for-profit model of everything. And the question: Who will undergo the chemo and radiation and bed-riddennes and non-ambulatory life stuck in a hospital bed and rehab clinic or hospice center for that one year lifespan?

The costs, man, mental, familial, the community impact. And, just the bills, man, the hospital bills.

How much? How much money does a brain tumor surgery cost? For patients not covered by health insurance, the typical cost of brain tumor treatment can range from less than $50,000 for a small benign tumor in an accessible location that can be treated with surgery alone up to $700,000 or more for a malignant tumor that must be treated with some combination of surgery, radiation ….The median total direct cost of patient care was $91,000, with radiotherapy and imaging costs being the most expensive (approximately $14,000 each). The majority of direct costs were incurred in the first four months of treatment with a plateau in costs beyond 1 year, reflecting the poor survival of this disease.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

The government forced the mandates through, and as the effects of these turned out to be more damaging than the virus, large-scale protests broke out. Politicians warned of the danger to our democracy from right-wing fanatics whom they claimed had taken over the protests. To defend democracy by disrupting the rallies, groups of Antifa tried to drown out speakers by shouting, “Halt die Fresse!” – “Shut your mouth!” Of course, the real danger to democracy comes from trying to silence or exclude anyone, right or left.

Establishment media refused to publish reports of severe side effects from the vaccines. A government statistician who gave evidence that the mandates and vaccines were ineffective and harmful was removed from duty, as were police officers who took part in peaceful rallies. Professors who spoke at demonstrations were shunned by their colleagues and passed over for promotion. Doctors who certified that their patients didn’t need to wear masks were suspended from practice. Some careers were destroyed, many damaged.

People were stunned by the savagery of the response to their demand for more public input into virus policies. They discussed possible reasons for the government’s attack. Conspiracy theories began to circulate, some of them quite wild.

The government broadened its attack. The press was full of interviews with psychiatrists discussing the dangerous psycho-pathology of conspiracy theorists. Wherever vaguely possible, parallels were drawn to Nazi Germany. Aged Holocaust victims were interviewed about their trauma caused by such people. One victim, though, Vera Sharav, made a video saying the government was behaving like the Nazis, but her statement was ignored by the mainstream and appeared only in the alternative media.

Rationality disappeared from public discourse. A seething polarization began to spread. The government recognized a growing threat of losing its hold on the people.

It cut back on testing. The “pandemic” faded. Russia invaded the Ukraine. A new enemy replaced the “killer virus” as a focus for fear.

The government’s campaign of forced lockdowns, masks, vaccines, and repression has unnecessarily and massively damaged millions of people, far more than what the virus has done. But on the positive side it has also turned millions of people against the government, a prerequisite for real change. The next step is ours.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William T. Hathaway.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

The 54th anniversary of the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., just passed. Dr. King was shot down while organizing low-wage sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. At that time, he was building the Poor People's Campaign, an effort to organize America's poor into a force to be reckoned with. In his opposition to the Vietnam War and his promotion of a campaign to lift the load of poverty, he suggested that racism, poverty, and militarism could only be dealt with by uniting millions of poor people to change the very structure of our national life.

You need only check out the conditions of life for the 140 million Americans who are poor or low income to recognize how relevant King's message still is.

More than half a century later, his message remains tragically relevant in our seemingly never-ending pandemic-ridden moment, still rife with racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. Indeed, today, 60% more Americans are living below the official poverty line; racialized laws to suppress their votes have been passed in dozens of states; and the longest war in our history, the 20-year disaster in Afghanistan, only ended late last year, while globally conflict and bloodshed still swirl around us.

You need only check out the conditions of life for the 140 million Americans who are poor or low income to recognize how relevant King's message still is. Today, the poor live at the crossroads of injustice, hurt first and worst by the interlocking evils of climate change, militarism, and racism, as well as other forms of violence and inequality. With gas prices ever higher, food shortages on the rise, and a possible recession (or worse) looming, those who continue to suffer the most will be those most affected by whatever is to come.

A Poor People's Pandemic

A new report about the disproportionate effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on poor communities has just been issued by the Poor People's Campaign (which I co-chair with Reverend William Barber) and the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The Poor People's Pandemic Report connects data about Covid-19 deaths at the county level with other demographic information to demonstrate that, during the pandemic so far, poor counties have experienced twice the number of deaths as higher-income ones—and up to five times the number at the height of various waves of the disease. It reveals that Covid-19 has, in fact, been a poor people's pandemic, one that exposes the depth of the racism, poverty, and ecological devastation that preceded it in poverty-stricken communities. That should be shocking news, don't you think? But throughout the pandemic, the story of its unequal impact has largely not been covered by the mainstream media.

Quite the opposite. Over the last two years, there have been countless stories about how Covid-19 was the great equalizer—how, unlike us, pandemics and plagues don't discriminate. All too sadly, the new report shows clearly that, though a virus may not be able to discriminate, our society has in fact discriminated in the most virulent ways. Consider it an outright indictment of a society that allowed the deaths of almost 250,000 poor and low-income people in the year 2000 alone, two decades before the pandemic even hit our shores. It should be a wakeup call for a society that has become far too accustomed to death, at least when it's poor people who are dying.

As Reverend Barber, who came up with the idea for the new report, explained, "The finding of this report reveals neglect and sometimes intentional decisions to not focus on the poor. There hasn't been any systemic or systematic assessment of the impact of Covid-19 on the poor and low-income communities." Indeed, to date, the government hasn't even collected data on the impact of the pandemic based on income levels, leaving us to do the necessary detective work.

Importantly, the report's findings can't be explained by vaccine status alone. The disproportionate death rate among poor and low-income people is the result of a complex combination of factors, including work and life conditions that long predated the pandemic. For example, 22% of Native Americans, 20% of Hispanics, 11% of Blacks, 7.8% of Whites, and 7.2% of Asians didn't have health insurance in 2019 just before the pandemic hit. Not surprisingly, perhaps, preexisting disparities in healthcare access, wealth distribution, and housing security yielded disastrous effects once it did so.

If you were to hold up a collective mirror to us, you would see a nation in which there were 87 million uninsured or underinsured people and 39 million workers who made less than a living wage before the pandemic struck. You would see a government that refused to either expand health care (even during the worst public-health crisis in generations) or raise wages for the very workers who can't afford the essentials of life. You're talking about a country in which, again before the pandemic arrived, 14 million families couldn't afford to pay their water bills and more than half of our children lived in food-insecure homes. Is it any wonder that so many poor and low-income people suffered and died with the arrival of the virus?

Sacrifice Zones of the Poor

That toll from Covid-19 is, however, only one way to understand the recent impact of policy choices related to the poor. It was all too symbolically on target that immediately after releasing the Poor People's Pandemic Report, the Poor People's Campaign kicked off a Moral March on West Virginia that was to go from Harper's Ferry to one of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin's congressional offices in Martinsburg. Poor moms, former coal miners, labor organizers, and climate activists from West Virginia hiked 23 miles to call on "their" senator to begin actually addressing the needs of his constituents—to expand voting rights, raise the minimum wage to a living one, extend the Child Tax Credit, protect this planet, and invest in education, health care, and programs of social uplift.

In reality, by blocking the passage of even a watered-down Build Back Better bill in Congress, Manchin refused to legislate in the interest of the majority of his constituents, especially the 710,000 poor and low-income West Virginians. He has similarly blocked bills to restore and expand voting rights protections through the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Meanwhile, by refusing to vote to end the filibuster in the Senate or enact a fairer taxation system, Manchin continues to ensure that policies benefiting millions of Americans and the planet writ large will once again be left at the side of the road. He's repeatedly chosen to side with the greed of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest lobbying group in the country, and the fossil-fuel industry against the needs of the people. And such stances have been disastrous. Figures compiled by the Institute for Policy Studies last year showed that in West Virginia, the $3.5 trillion version of the Build Back Better bill would have created 17,290 new jobs, benefited 346,000 children by extending the expanded child tax credit, and allowed an additional 88,050 West Virginians to take paid leave each year.

To make matters worse, in the northern panhandle of West Virginia, there's the Rockwool Ranson Plant, an insulation manufacturing factory set up in a poor community. Our Moral March made its way through Ranson. While there, we heard about a mother whose children go to a school just blocks from the plant, which is within two miles of four public schools that house 30% of the county's student population (as well as several daycare centers). Scientists tested the blood levels of kids at North Jefferson Elementary School before the plant opened in 2021. Just a year later, there were already higher rates of asthma and toxins in their blood. Indeed, the very placement of that plant goes against the recommendations of the Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization (WHO), both of which assert that heavy industry should not be located near schools. (WHO has specifically stated that industrial plants shouldn't be located within two miles of schools.)

We heard testimony from horse breeders who claimed they could no longer raise thoroughbreds because of the changing air quality and bee farmers who, after generations of family farming, said they can no longer make a living. Not surprisingly, it's a poor community with a high percentage of Black residents. No public hearings were even held before the plant's opening, which Senator Manchin attended. Still, local resistance to it has been strong and continues to grow.

The Vulnerable Suffer the Consequences

Such suffering and resistance are realities not just in the hills and hollows of West Virginia. At the very time when West Virginians were rallying against the Rockwool Ranson Plant, for example, protests broke out in New York City against Mayor Eric Adams' crackdown on the unhoused, including police sweeps of homeless encampments.

No wonder we in the Poor People's Campaign travelled from that Moral March on West Virginia directly to New York to hold a Moral March on Wall Street. And just as Joe Manchin has gotten away with attacks on the poor while styling himself a populist hero, so Eric Adams has insisted that the sweeps he ordered are what's best for New Yorkers, including the unhoused. Yet the true depth of homelessness there belies the cruel measures Adams is pursuing.

In a city that spends more than $2 billion a year on homelessness, roughly 47,000 people—more than 14,500 of them children—sleep in its homeless shelters each night. Rather than address the scourge of poverty and the homelessness that goes with it, Adams has chosen to destroy more than 200 homeless encampments, while all-too-symbolically cutting the city's homelessness budget by one-fifth. Like Manchin, he's pursuing an all-too-familiar path in twenty-first century America: punishing the poor for their poverty while further gentrifying the city as a playground for the rich.

This is not, however, happening without a fight from the unhoused, local grassroots organizations, and even some politicians. The majority of New York's City Council, for instance, has denounced his encampment demolitions. In a letter of opposition, they pointed out that "these sweeps will not end homeless[ness]; they will only put people in further harm."

Amid all of this, one comment by Adams stopped me in my tracks. While meeting with a group of clergy, he argued that the disciples of Christ would have supported his homeless encampment sweeps, saying, "I can't help but to believe that, if Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were here today, they would be on the streets with me helping people get out of encampments."

As a Christian preacher and biblical scholar, I should note that such a statement is not simply wrong or insensitive; it's heretical. The Bible is clear that the rich and powerful are to blame for poverty, abuse, and injustice, not the poor themselves. And not surprisingly, throughout the ancient scriptures, those who hoard the wealth of the world also twist the words of the prophets to their own advantage at the expense of the poor and exploited.

But, as the story goes, just as Jesus was crucified and died, the tombs of the freedom fighters who came before him were opened and they were revived to continue the fight for justice. Hate and death, we are reminded, never have the last word.

Building Movements Not Monuments

Three years after Martin Luther King's assassination, Carl Wendell Hines penned this poem about him entitled A Dead Man's Dream:

"Now that he is safely dead let us praise him
Build monuments to his glory, sing hosannas to his name.
Dead men make such convenient heroes.
They cannot rise to challenge the images we would fashion
from their lives.
And besides,
it is easier to build monuments
than to make a better world.
So now that he is safely dead
We, with eased consciences, can teach our children that he
was a great man,
Knowing that the cause for which he lived is still a cause
And the dream for which he died is still a dream
A dead man's dream."

Jesus Christ was killed by the Roman Empire for building a movement of the abused and excluded, only to have his memory distorted by hateful and sacrilegious theologies throughout the ages. King was murdered as he fought poverty, racism, and militarism, only to later be quoted and canonized by those who despised him. Indeed, as Hines points out, it is far "easier to build monuments than to make a better world." But as those in power like Joe Manchin and Eric Adams continue to find comfort in their (bad-faith) praise of prophets like Jesus and King, poor and dispossessed people in places like Ranson and New York continue to carry on the work of justice.

Yes, the organizing of the poor and dispossessed should be considered at least one antidote to the pandemics, literal and figurative, plaguing our society as we grieve for almost one million Americans dead of Covid-19 and more than six million people globally. Even if many of us don't always either see or hear it, the leadership of those most affected by poverty and injustice is crucial to our future. They are what King once called "a new and unsettling force" capable of transforming "our complacent national life."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis.

The visit, which will take place between July and August, was made at the invitation of a high-level delegation from Ladakh, a strategically sensitive area where thousands of Indian and Chinese troops clashed in June 2020, with deaths reported by both sides in the fighting.

News of the trip was announced on Monday by delegation members Thiksey Rinpoche, a former member of the Indian parliament’s upper house, and Thupten Tsewang, also a former Indian MP and now president of the Ladakh Buddhist Association.

“We made the request during our special audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and he agreed to visit and bless devotees in Ladakh this summer,” Thiksey Rinpoche said following an April 18  meeting at the spiritual leader’s residence in Dharamsala, India, the seat of Tibet’s exile government, the Central Tibetan Administration.

The Dalai Lama, who last visited Ladakh in 2018 and spent 19 days there, had been unable to visit again in recent years because of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Thupten Tsewang, also a member of the delegation. “Now, the people of Ladakh will be very happy to hear this news, and we are all very delighted,” Tsewang added.

Banned by Chinese authorities in Tibet, celebrations of the Dalai Lama’s July 6 birthday have been held by large gatherings in Ladakh in recent years, sources say.

Concerns have been raised over the advancing age of the now 86-year-old spiritual leader, with Beijing claiming the right to name a successor after he dies, and the Dalai Lama himself — the 14^th in his line — saying he will be reborn outside of areas controlled by China.

Formerly an independent nation, Tibet was invaded and incorporated into China by force more than 70 years ago, and the Dalai Lama and thousands of his followers later fled into exile in India and other countries around the world following a failed 1959 national uprising against China’s rule.

Tibetans living in Tibet frequently complain of discrimination and human rights abuses by Chinese authorities and policies they say are aimed at eradicating their national and cultural identity.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Yeshi Dawa.

Greg Pulles is a retired attorney in Minnesota. As anyone with the capacity for critical thought would be, Pulles is skeptical about the pandemic narrative. Unlike most, however, he’s set out to do something about it.

Pulles and his team analyzed 10,984 Minnesota death certificates that bear the ICD code (International Classification of Diseases) U071 as assigned by the CDC for COVID-19.

Here is just some of what they found:

• 69.29 percent of “COVID” death certificates listed at least three co-morbidities
• 50 percent listed at least four co-morbidities
• 34 percent listed at least five co-morbidities
• 21 percent listed at least six co-morbidities

In total, only 2.67 percent of the 10,984 certificates they examined were “COVID only” — with no comorbidity listed.

Some of the co-morbidities listed were:

• Hypertension and throat cancer
• Pulmonary embolism during an elective surgery
• Sepsis-like syndrome
• Traumatic brain injury caused by a pedestrian being struck by a car
• Essential hypertension, GERD, dementia, cerebral infarction
• Blunt force craniocerebral injuries caused by a fall
• Acute kidney injury with hyperkalemia, and congestive heart failure
• Emphysema, congestive heart failure, hypertension, and advanced age
• Peripheral vascular disease and uncontrolled type 2 diabetes

In addition, Pulles’ team took a close look at the ages of the deceased:

• For those who died in 2020 with COVID-19 as the cause of death on their certificate, the average age was 80.84
• In 2021, the average age was 74.07
• 20 percent of Minnesotans listed by the state as COVID deaths were over the age of 90
• 50 percent over the age of 80
• 74 percent  over the age of 70
• Only 209 COVID deaths occurred in those under the age of 40
• Only eight COVID deaths occurred in those under the age of 20

In addition, over 5,500 of those classified as having died from COVID-19 were in a nursing home. (For context, remember that at least 50 percent of people die within six months upon entering a nursing home.)

I’ve told you about the flawed PCR test.

I’ve told you about the deadly but lucrative COVID protocols in hospitals.

I’ve been telling you for a long time: There is no pandemic.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

Children process grief differently than adults, but signs of emotional suffering are easy to miss when you don’t know what to look for. Nelson believes the longer a child has to wait for help, the harder the treatment will be. Lack of early intervention may account for social, emotional, and cognitive challenges down the road and can also lead to childhood depression and anxiety. The physiological effects of trauma and stress can be equally devastating, often causing chronic conditions. While these are all highly sought out issues to aid in America, only ten percent of bilateral funding, one government transferring funds to a recipient country, is invested toward vulnerable and orphaned children.

Nelson maintains that it’s ultimately up to government municipalities to address and determine the needs of COVID orphans, such as counseling and long-term treatment plans. In the meantime, building a support system is crucial.

“Any time that child cries out for help or shows any sign of needing help, the adult needs to be available,” Nelson told WBUR. “Because if too much time goes by and the child’s needs are not attended to, that feeling of abandonment is just going to get overwhelming for that child.”

In July 2021, Myles and Marina Daniel’s world was turned upside down. Their father, Martin, died at home of COVID-19, and just 24 hours later, their mother Trina was rushed to the hospital, struggling to breathe, and later died of COVID in the ICU. In an instant, teenagers Myles and Marina lost both of their parents. That’s when their cousins Cornelius and Melanie, already parents of three, decided to take them in.

“This is bigger than us,” Cornelius Daniel said. “God has given us a bigger purpose, and we’ve stepped into that moment and walked into it with that focus, making sure these young people have the opportunities they need to move forward in life.”

Still, the Daniels told WBUR they worry for grieving children just like Myles and Marina who may not have access to this type of emotional and financial support. The family wrote a letter to Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in their home state of Georgia proposing legislation that would expand support for families who have opened their home to COVID orphans. The Daniels have yet to receive a response.

These concerns aren’t without merit. A 2021 study by Susan D. Hillis for The Lancet revealed, the US is home to more than 113,000 COVID orphans. According to Hillis’ research, from March 1, 2020 to April 30, 2021, an estimated 1,134,000 children worldwide experienced the death of at least one primary caregiver. The New York Times, NPR and The Washington Post separately published articles about COVID orphan displacement specifically within India, misrepresenting the global nature of this issue and ignoring its impact in the US.

Source: Tonya Mosley and Allison Hagan, “An Overlooked Consequence of COVID-19: The Hundreds of Thousands of Orphans Left Behind,” WBUR, January 13, 2022.

Student Researchers: Liz Wagner and Claire Roth (North Central College)
Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)

The post Global Displacement of COVID Orphans: The Pandemic’s Hidden Consequence appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

With the global surge of SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, there were early signs that saving money, notably for large corporations, and earning greater revenue from such a lethal crisis, was possible.  Work remotely as Zoom zombies – if you can.  Retreat to the second or third abode, preferably in a remote location – if you have them.  The sardine-packed proles toiling and providing essential services could endure the heavier burden of suffering.

Other historical periods also suggest sharp social inequalities in the face of disease and despair.   That sublime Italian writer, Giovanni Boccaccio, who wrote The Decameron, a collection of 100 tales, gives us more than just a bird’s eye view into the horror of plague and affliction.  The Black Death gathered somewhere between 40% to 50% of the European populace between 1347 and 1351.  While Boccaccio cites the proverb that, “It is inherently human to show pity to those who are afflicted”, his colourful spread of characters suggests something quite different.  The wealthy find fine seclusion amidst their provisions; the essential workers of the time go about their doomed labours, contracting the plague and dying in the process.

In October 2021, Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality (IPS) found that billionaires in the US had seen their wealth balloon by 70%, or a mighty $2.1 trillion.  The number of billionaires in the country had also spiked: from 614 to 745.  During that same time, there were 89 million job losses among the less fortunate, 44.9 million attributable to COVID-19 illness, not to mention 724,000 deaths.

The culprits for such a huge wealth distortion are now familiar to us.  The burgeoning online market during times of lockdown and stay-at-home orders enormously enriched the megalomaniacs of Silicon Valley and other industries.

There were some in the same income bracket who did not even need to lift a finger before seeing eye-wateringly improved accounts; asset prices shot up with jittery regularity, occasioned by enormous injections of taxpayer cash.  In some cases, with the knowledge of government financial support, figures such as Australian billionaire Kerry Stokes could rake in corporate welfare while cutting the wages of workers.  The spirit of pandemic generosity is rarely invoked.

In December 2021, the World Inequality Report, authored by a number of social scientists, estimated that the share of global household wealth owned by billionaires had risen that year from 2% at the start of the pandemic to 3.5% that year.  “Contemporary global inequalities,” the authors of the report suggest, “are close to early 20th century levels, at the peak of Western imperialism.”

The one ray of reassurance in the otherwise discouraging report is the fact that government support, notably in wealthier states, did mitigate the more brutal effects of impoverishment.  As lead author of the report, Lucas Chancel remarks, “in rich countries, government intervention prevented a massive rise in poverty”.  The pandemic had demonstrated “the importance of social states in the fight against poverty.”

Oxfam has now added more material to the heaving shelves of inequality with a report released to coincide with that gathering of wealthy natterers known as the World Economic Forum.  Not a smidgen of Oxfam’s dark revelations are original, but this does not make them any less relevant.  The picture, filled in, shows a world of brutal, stratified inequality that promises to grow.

The opening is dramatic enough. “The wealth of the world’s 10 richest men has doubled since the pandemic began.  The incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off because of COVID-19.”  Good to throw the men into this, but it is also worth noting that there are some worthy representatives of the female sex, not least Australia’s wealthiest figure, iron ore magnate Gina Rinehart.  This most unsympathetic of characters saw her own wealth soar from AU$16 billion to AU$36 billion.  Not a bad return for someone who specialises in ruthlessly renting the earth while attributing this to hard work and genetic ingenuity.

All in all, 2,755 billionaires are raking it in globally, having received more in terms of their fortunes in the past two years than the previous 14 combined.  “This is the biggest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began,” the Oxfam report notes glumly.  No wonder the hot-headed conspiracy theorists are champing at the bit, feverish at the prospect that plots have been hatched, and are being acted upon, in Davos and other champagne drenched venues.

The Oxfam account adds more texture to the arguments.  As with other accounts about the increasing wealth disparity in pandemic times, the rise in revenues have occurred because of dizzying rises in stock market prices, “a boom of unregulated entities,” a greater prevalence of monopoly power, ongoing privatisation and that ongoing pattern of lower corporate tax rates and easing regulations.  Workers’ rights and wages have also suffered, though Oxfam also makes the point that “the weaponization of racism” has its role to play.

Another parallel of the Black Death is worthy of note.  The plague was so disruptive as to cause its own alterations of the feudal order.  The wealthy might have scurried to their places of ornate and padded seclusion, but they were by no means guaranteed survival.  Around them, aggressive depopulation fed the fulcrum of change.  It emboldened the peasantry, resulting in a range of riots and a challenge to social and economic circumstances.

The likes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have yet to see a modern version of a peasant insurrection.  Perhaps it’s time they did.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Only two years ago most people understood “bodily autonomy” to be a fundamental, unquestionable human right. Now it is being treated as some kind of perverse libertarian luxury, as proof that the “deplorables” have been watching too much Tucker Carlson or that they have come to idealise the worst excesses of neoliberalism’s emphasis on the rights of the individual over the social good.

This is dangerous nonsense, as should be obvious if we step back and imagine what our world might look like had the principle of “bodily autonomy” not been established through centuries of struggle, just as were the right to vote and the right to health care.

Because without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be dragging virgins up high staircases so that they could be sacrificed to placate the sun gods. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be treating black people like animals – chattel to be used and exploited so that a white landowning class could grow rich from their enforced labours. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have doctors experimenting on those who are “inferior” – Jews, Romanies, Communists, gays – so that “superior races” could benefit from the “research”. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have the right of men to rape their wives as one of the unwritten marital vows.

Many of these battles and others were won far more recently than most of us care to remember. I am old enough to recall listening in the car on the way to school to “serious” debates on BBC Radio 4 about whether it was justifiable for the courts to presume a husband’s right to rape his wife.

Arguments about whose bodily autonomy has primacy – a woman’s or the foetus she is carrying – are at the heart of ongoing and inflammatory abortion debates in the United States. And protection of bodily autonomy was the main reason why anyone with an ounce of moral fibre opposed the US torture regime that became normalised in the war on brown people known as the “war on terror”.

Bad faith

There is good reason why, in western societies, vaccination uptake is lowest among ethnic minorities. The clues are embedded in the three preceding paragraphs. Powerful nation-states, run by white elites for the benefit of white elites, have been trampling on the bodily autonomy of black and brown people for centuries – sometimes because those elites were indifferent to the harm they were causing, and sometimes because they professed to be helping these “inferior” peoples, such as in the “war on terror’s” promotion of neoliberal “democracy” as the grounds for invading countries whose oil we coveted.

The pretexts change but the bad faith is the same.

Based on their long histories of suffering at the hands of western, colonial states, black and brown communities have every reason to continue assuming bad faith. It is not solidarity, or protecting them, to ignore or trivialise their concerns and their alienation from state institutions. It is ugly arrogance. Contempt for their concerns will not make those concerns evaporate. It will reinforce them.

But, of course, there is also something arrogant about treating the concerns of ethnic minorities as exceptional, patronising them by according them some kind of special dispensation, as though they need indulging on the principle of bodily autonomy when the rest of us are mature enough to discard it.

The fact is each generation comes to understand that the priorities of its ancestors were misplaced. Each generation has a powerful elite, or a majority whose consent has been manufactured, that luxuriate in the false certainty that bodily autonomy can be safely sacrificed for a higher principle. Half a century ago the proponents of marital rape argued for protecting tradition and patriarchal values because they were supposedly the glue holding society together. With 50 years’ hindsight, we may see the current debates about vaccine mandates – and the completely unscientific corollary that the unvaccinated are unclean and plague carriers – in much the same light.

The swelling political consensus on vaccine mandates intentionally ignores the enormous spread of the virus after two years of pandemic and the consequent natural immunity of large sections of the population, irrespective of vaccination status. This same consensus obfuscates the fact that natural immunity is most likely to prove longer-lasting and more effective against any variants of Covid that continue to emerge. And the consensus distracts from the inconvenient fact that the short-lived efficacy of the current vaccines means everyone is potentially “unclean” and a plague carrier, as the new variant Omicron is underscoring only too clearly.

No solidarity

The truth is that where each of us stands on the political divide over bodily autonomy says less about how much we prioritise human rights, or the social good, or solidarity with the weak and powerless, and much more about other, far less objectively rational matters, such as:

• how fearful we are personally about the effects of Covid on ourselves or our loved ones;
• whether we think the plutocrats that run our societies have prioritised the social good over the desire for quick, profit-making technological fixes, and the appearance of strong leadership and decisive action;
• how sure we are that science is taking precedence over the interests of pharmaceutical corporations whose profits are booming as our societies grow older and sicker, and whether we think these corporations have captured our regulatory authorities, including the World Health Organisation;
• whether we think it helpful or dangerous to scapegoat an unvaccinated minority, blaming it for straining health services or for the failure to eradicate a virus that is, in reality, never going away;
• and, especially in the left’s case, how reassured we are that non-western, official “enemy” governments, such as Cuba, China, Russia and Iran, have thrown most of their eggs into the vaccine basket too – and usually as enthusiastically as western societies.

It is possible, however, that the way our technological, materialist world has evolved, ruled by competitive elites in nation states vying for power, means there was always likely to be a single, global conception of how to end the pandemic: through a quick-fix, magic bullet of either a vaccine or a drug. The fact that nation states – the “good” and “bad” alike – are unlikely to think outside this particular box does not mean it is the only box available, or that this box must be the one all citizens are coerced into.

Basic human rights do not apply only in the good times. They can’t just be set aside in difficult times like a pandemic because those rights are a nuisance, or because some people refuse to do what we think is best for them. Those rights are fundamental to what it means to live in a free and open society. If we get rid of bodily autonomy while we deal with this virus, that principle will have to be fought for all over again – and in the context of hi-tech, surveillance states that are undoubtedly more powerful than any we have known before.

Coerced vaccination

It is wrong, however, to focus exclusively on bodily autonomy. The undermining of the right to bodily autonomy is slipping into an equally alarming undermining of the right to cognitive autonomy. In fact, these two kinds of autonomy cannot be readily disentangled. Because anyone who believes that people must be required to take a vaccine will soon be arguing that no one should be allowed to hear information that might make them more resistant to vaccination.

There is an essential problem about maintaining an open and honest debate during a time of pandemic, which anyone who is thinking critically about Covid and our responses to it must grapple with every time they put finger to keyboard. The discourse playing-field is far from level.

Those who demand vaccine mandates, and wish to jettison the principle of bodily autonomy as a “medical” inconvenience, can give full-throated voice to their arguments in the secure knowledge that only a few, isolated contrarians may occasionally dare to challenge them.

But when those who value the principle of bodily autonomy or who blanch at the idea of coerced vaccination wish to make their case, they must hold back. They must argue with one arm tied behind their backs – and not just because they are likely to be mobbed, particularly by the left, for trying to widen the range of arguments under consideration in what are essentially political and ethical debates masquerading as scientific ones.

Tonight I will oppose both compulsory vaccines for NHS staff, and the introduction of vaccine passports. Both measures are counterproductive and will create division when we need cooperation and unity.

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) December 14, 2021

Those questioning the manufactured consensus – a consensus that intentionally scapegoats the unvaccinated as disease carriers, a consensus that has once again upended social solidarity among the 99 per cent, a consensus that has been weaponised to shield the elites from proper scrutiny for their profiteering from the pandemic – must measure every word they say against the effect it may have on those listening.

Personal calculations

I place a high value on autonomy, of both the cognitive and physical varieties. I am against the state deciding for me what I and you are allowed to think and say, and I am against the state deciding what goes into my and your body without our consent (though I also recognise that I have little choice but to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, and eat chemically altered food, all of which have damaged my and your immune systems and made us more susceptible to viruses like Covid).

But at the same time, unlike the vaccine mandate mob, I never forget that I am responsible for my words and that they have consequences, and potentially dangerous ones. There are a significant proportion of people who almost certainly need to be vaccinated, and probably regularly, to avoid being seriously harmed by exposure to the virus. Any responsible writer needs to weigh the effect of their words. I do not wish to be responsible for making one person who would benefit from a vaccine more hesitant to take it. I am particularly wary of playing God during a pandemic.

However, my reluctance to pontificate on a subject on which I have no expertise – vaccine safety – does not confer a licence on others to command the debate on other subjects about which they appear to know very little, such as medical and political ethics.

The fact is, however much some people would be best advised to take the vaccine, there is a recognised risk involved, even if we are not supposed to mention it. The long-term safety of the vaccines is unknown and cannot be known for several more years – and possibly for much longer, given the refusal of the drug regulators to release vaccine data for many more decades.

The vaccine technology is novel and its effects on the complex physiology of the human body and the individual vagaries of each of our immune systems will not be fully apparent for a long time. The decision to take a new type of vaccine in these circumstances is a calculation that each individual must weigh carefully for themselves, based on a body they know better than anyone else.

Pretending that there is no calculation – that everyone is the same, that the vaccines will react in the same manner on every person – is belied by the fact that the vaccines have had to be given emergency approval, and that there have been harsh disagreements even among experts about whether the calculation in favour of vaccination makes sense for everyone, especially for children. That calculation is further complicated by the fact that a significant section of the population now have a natural immunity to the whole virus and not just vaccine-induced immunity to the spike protein.

But stuffing everyone into a one-size-fits-all solution is exactly what bureaucratic, technocratic states are there to do. It is what they know best. To the state, you are I and just a figure on a pandemic spread-sheet. To think otherwise is childish delusion. Those who refuse to think of themselves as simply a spread-sheet digit – those who insist on their right to bodily and cognitive autonomy – should not be treated as narcissists for doing so or as a threat to public health, especially when the immunity provided by the vaccines is so short-lived, the vaccines themselves are highly leaky, and there is little understanding yet of the differences, or even potential conflicts, between natural and vaccine-induced immunity.

Perpetual emergency

Nonetheless, parts of the left are acting as if none of this is true, or even debatable. Instead they are proudly joining the mob, leading the self-righteous clamour to assert control not only over the bodies of others but over their minds too. This left angrily rejects all debate as a threat to the official “medical” consensus. They insist on conformity of opinion and then claim it as science, in denial of the fact that science is by its nature disputatious and evolves constantly. They cheer on censorship – by profit-driven social media corporations – even when it is recognised experts who are being silenced.

Their subtext is that any contrary opinion is a threat to the social order, and will fuel vaccine hesitancy. The demand is that we all become worshippers at the altars of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, at the risk otherwise of being denounced as heretics, as “anti-vaxxers”. No middle ground can be allowed in this era of perpetual emergency.

This is not just disturbing ethically. It is disastrous politically. The state is already massively powerful against each of us as individuals. We have collective power only in so far as we show solidarity with each other. If the left conspires with the state against those who are weak, against black and brown communities whose main experiences of state institutions have been abusive, against the “deplorables”, we divide ourselves and make the weakest parts of our society even weaker.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn understood this when he was one of the few on the left to publicly resist the recent move by the UK government to legislate vaccine mandates. He rightly argued that the correct path is persuasion, not coercion.

But this kind of mix of reason and compassion is being drowned out on parts of the left. They justify violations of bodily and cognitive autonomy on the grounds that we are living in exceptional times, during a pandemic. They complacently argue that such violations will be temporary, required only until the virus is eradicated – even though the virus is now endemic and with us for good. They silently assent to the corporate media being given even greater censorship powers as the price we must pay to deal with vaccine hesitancy, on the assumption that we can reclaim the right to dissent later.

But these losses, in circumstances in which our rights and freedoms are already under unprecedented assault, will not be easily restored. Once social media can erase you or me from the public square for stating real-world facts that are politically and commercially inconvenient – such as Twitter’s ban on anyone pointing out that the vaccinated can spread the virus too – there will be no going back.

Political instincts

There is a further reason, however, why the left is being deeply foolish in turning on the unvaccinated and treating the principles of bodily and cognitive autonomy with such contempt. Because this approach  sends a message to black and brown communities, and to the “deplorables”, that the left is elitist, that its talk of solidarity is hollow, and that it is only the right, not the left, that is willing to fight to protect the most intimate freedoms we enjoy – over our bodies and minds.

Every time the left shouts down those who are hesitant about taking a Covid vaccine; every time it echoes the authoritarianism of those who demand mandates, chiefly for low-paid workers; every time it refuses to engage with – or even allow – counter-arguments, it abandons the political battlefield to the right.

Through its behaviour, the shrill left confirms the right’s claims that the political instincts of the left are Stalinist, that the left will always back the might of an all-powerful state against the concerns of ordinary people, that the left sees only the faceless masses, who need to be herded towards bureaucratically convenient solutions, rather than individuals who need to be listened to as they grapple with their own particular dilemmas and beliefs.

The fact is that you can favour vaccines, you can be vaccinated yourself, you can even desire that everyone regularly takes a Covid vaccine, and still think that bodily and cognitive autonomy are vitally important principles – principles to be valued even more than vaccines. You can be a cheerleader for vaccination and still march against vaccine mandates.

Some on the left behave as if these are entirely incompatible positions, or as if they are proof of hypocrisy and bad faith. But what this kind of left is really exposing is their own inability to think in politically complex ways, their own difficulty remembering that principles are more important than quick-fixes, however frightening the circumstances, and that the debates about how we organise our societies are inherently political, much more so than technocratic or “medical”.

The right understands that there is a political calculus in handling the pandemic that cannot be discarded except at a grave political cost. Part of the left has a much weaker grasp of this point. Its censoriousness, its arrogance, its hectoring tone – all given cover by claims to be following a “science” that keeps changing – are predictably alienating those the left claims to represent.

The left needs to start insisting again on the critical importance of bodily and cognitive autonomy – and to stop shooting itself in the foot.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

This vaccine card, below, is not really a joke, hence, the Omega Variant, and the SARS-CoV2 Endemic, and the new and beautiful new gain of function viruses coming to a local county/country soon.

Yet, how many times does it take to repeat — Zinc, Vitamin C, E, and other highly needed anti-oxidants and other amazing natural products, synthesized, yes, like Thiamine, TTFD being the higher potency, and more, as in open windows, piped in breezes and a product called SaNoTize, the nitric oxide nasal spray, that should be in everyone’s lunchbox.

Yet, we have Fauci the Faustian Mafioso, and the concomitant of scientism lovers, all those germ theory scared cats, running the show. Any news about other disease pandemics, or global threats to humankind, well, nope, not on the playbill.

You think of forced chemical jabs, you think of forced travel restrictions, forced nasal tests, forced urine tests, blood tests, hair tests, corneal scans, fingerprints, and the like, until you go back and see how human beings have been passported into various forms of hell by the overlords of empire, resource theft, war, financial loansharking, and more.

Then, all that Big Brother/Big Nanny Gestapo in our lives, yet, yet . . . diets. All those full-spectrum empty calories, all those dyes, synthetic brews, added salts, sugars and fats, all those preservatives and enhancers and flavor poppers. That, of course, is LEGAL, accepted, taken for granted by the Capitalists, and Fauci’s job is all about Why there are so many chronic illnesses, so many gut and brain diseases, so many allergies, so many ticks, tremors, jerks, pacing, foggy brains, nervous blurts. He’s failed us, but he is a hero of the Capitalists. Nope.

So, where are the parallels to the Big Pharma Giveaway-Grand Vaccine Theft-Perennial Gouging-Endless Non-cures in other arenas of this sick society?

Well, it is the brain, but it all starts in the gut. You know that, the Madmen sell that, and the MDs and scientists have tested that. But simple rules and regulations — brakes on more disease pandemics — not possible in the disease management/disease profit industrial complex.

As a nutritional psychiatrist, faculty member at Harvard Medical School and author of “This Is Your Brain on Food,” I study how our gut bacteria can trigger metabolic processes and brain inflammation that impact memory. Existing studies point to the idea that we may be able to reduce the possibility of dementia by avoiding foods that can compromise our gut bacteria and weaken our memory and focus.

Well, this is on NBC, no less, in between the newsfeeds on NFL wins and losses, new Omni Variant, money thrown at this or that undeserving sociopath-coach-athlete-movie star, all the flooding and fires and bus-plane-train crashes. All those stories of passengers on planes going drunken berserk, and well, there are still dog trick stories in between 20 or 30 refugees drowning in the Channel and all the anti-China news (sic) shit.

Fried Foods, Added Sugars, High Glycemic Load Carbohydrates, Alcohol, Nitrates. She’s a Harvard (big effing deal) Med School nutritional psychiatrist. All those potatoes, those hot dogs, those beers, those frosted flakes, those fried clams and shrimps, darn, adding to depression, bipolar disorders, dementias, and constant brain fog and lethargy and then, well, obesity, all of that, could be reversed if we, well, reversed the social contract that capitalism has in place for the profiteers, the making money any way you can philosophy.

Choice, that’s what they will say. We have choices to grab an apple or a McDonalds deep-friend fritter. Choices, right? As the advertising is a constant overt and subliminal and habituating frame for us, from cradle to grave.

Now, we know about strokes, diabetes and cardio vascular disease. We know that that triumvirate is the real Monster on the Block. Here, good scientific reading, not on Fauci’s or Trump’s or Biden’s of CNN’s or FOX’s reading list:

Abstract

Atherosclerosis is considered a chronic inflammatory disease and an intervention targeting the inflammatory process could be a new therapeutic strategy for preventing atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases (CVD). We hypothesized that the intestine, which is considered the biggest immune organ in the human body, could be a therapeutic target for preventing CVD. We demonstrated that oral administration of anti-CD3 antibody or an active form of vitamin D3 reduced atherosclerosis in mice via induction of regulatory T cells and tolerogenic dendritic cells in the gut-associated lymphoid tissues. Similar to regulatory immune responses achieved by oral tolerance, our method had systemic effects that ultimately contributed towards atherosclerosis reduction. Recently, we have been interested in the gut microbiota, which have been reported as highly associated with intestinal immunity and systemic metabolic disorders, including obesity and diabetes. Notably, the guts of obese individuals are predominantly colonized by Firmicutes over Bacteroidetes. The association between atherosclerosis and microbiota has been attracting increased attention, and gut microbiota have been shown to participate in the metabolism of a proatherogenic compound called trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO) and aggravate CVD. Our investigation of the relationship between susceptibility to CVD and the gut microbiota revealed a characteristic flora type. Here, we discuss the evidence for the relationship between the gut microbiota and cardiometabolic diseases, and consider the gut microbiota as new potential therapeutic targets for treating CVD. (Intestinal Immunity and Gut Microbiota as Therapeutic Targets for Preventing Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Diseases)

And it’s that simple, that complicated — gut-brain science, and naturopathy:

The case has been made that the microbiome constitutes an endocrine organ in itself due to its ability to produce a wide range of compounds that regulate distant cells, organs, and systems. These compounds include neurotransmitters and short-chain fatty acids, in addition to regulators of cortisol, ghrelin, leptin, secondary bile acids, and others. Further, the microbiome can make changes in its composition that are adaptive for the host – changes that can take place within a single day of altering the macronutrient content of the diet. It will revert back to its original composition within 2days of ending the trial diet. There are numerous examples of the microbiota remodeling itself in order to utilize dietary constituents for the benefit of the host . (SIBO as an Adaptation- A Proposed Role for Hydrogen Sulfide)

Then, we have to wonder where those Fauci Types are in the realm of inflammatory diseases, all the pathogens and toxins from industrial and internal combustion processes, all those additives and pesticides and fungicides and the like in baby’s food and mamma’s milk? What’s up with all that brain power on all those patents Fauci has his fingers wrapped around (3,500)? How is that concern for public health, how is that the definition of a servant of the people? Here, RFK, Jr. and Dr. David Martin: Watch. Or, watch this: The REAL Anthony Fauci with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Read Chandler Marrs, PhD., over at Hormones Matter, a place for which I have published lightly: Paul Haeder.

Going back a few years — FOUR! Falling into the Planned Parenthood Gardasil Snake Pit. And, then, Chandler’s came out a week ago — Piled Higher and Deeper: Vaccine Industry Shills

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Sure, this is a trending story, in California, tied to the vaccine mandate, the hysteria, the fascism:

The University of California, Irvine has placed their Director of Medical Ethics, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, on ‘investigatory leave’ after he challenged the constitutionality of the UC’s vaccine mandate in regards to individuals who have recovered from Covid and have naturally-acquired immunity.

Last month Kheriaty, also a Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine, filed a suit in Federal court over the mandate.

“Natural immunity following Covid infection is equal to (indeed, superior to) vaccine-mediated immunity. Thus, forcing those with natural immunity to be vaccinated introduces unnecessary risks without commensurate benefits—either to individuals or to the population as a whole—and violates their equal protection rights guaranteed under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment,” Kheriaty wrote in a Sep. 21 blog post.

“Expert witness declarations in support of our case include, among others, a declaration from distinguished UC School of Medicine faculty members from infectious disease, microbiology/immunology, cardiology, endocrinology, pediatrics, OB/Gyn, and psychiatry,” the post continues (click here to read the rest).

…there is now considerable evidence that Covid recovered individuals may be at higher risk of vaccine adverse effects compared to those not previously infected (as seen in studies here, here, and here, among others). -Dr. Aaron Kheriaty

This issue, though, is more important on a local level for schmucks like me, who are overeducated, aging in a hateful society, left of left in a centrist and capitalism hard left/right contradictory world. I am back at a job, and the pay is embarrassing, and the fact that I am in a rural county with rural thinkers and with a service economy tied to beach combing, fishing, crabbing and vacation rentals also contributes to precarity.

You think I am ready to leave to go somewhere else, to some big sophisticated city, some harbinger of high tech and military industrial complex to find more sustainable and lucrative work? Each day, my skill sets, my background, all the ground-truthing and other on the job training, all the travel, all those deep learning moments in my life in several fields, all of that is mush to the masters of academia, the masters of companies that are small and large, getting on the gravy train of city, county, state, national and international money. Tax cheats and welfare queens and kings are those in the complex, the big C for the CRC, Corruption Racket Complex — military-banking-ag-energy-prison-pharma-education-medicine-mining-chemical-AI-surveillence-real estate-insurance-prison-legal-media-entertainment.

Yep, bad that an environmental lawyer was under ankle bracelet house arrest for more than two years and faces six months in jail for contempt as a lawyer who sued the pants off of Chevron for killing and polluting communities south of this border. Sure, the hellfire and brimstone of this rotting empire is addictive, with all these blogs and newsfeeds and whatnot tapping into the lizard part of the collective American brain.

Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.

Preska’s caustic outbursts — she said at the sentencing, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law” — capped a judicial farce worthy of the antics of Vasiliy Vasilievich, the presiding judge at the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union, and the Nazi judge Roland Freisler who once shouted at a defendant, “You really are a lousy piece of trash!”

So, note the “proverbial two-by-four between the eyes” comment from this judicial devil . . . . From a multimillionaire “judge.” Imagine that! If I told a pig that exact same thing, after stopping me for a dangling mud flap on my minivan, just think what might happen to me. Or if I told that she needed a proverbial two by four between the eyes to a judge during my trial or someone else’s? Or, to the boss, uh? Or to the teacher if I was an 11th grader. Or, to the drill sergeant? Or the TSA guy smelling my feet at the airport.

This judge is human scum, and while this is of national and international importance, I have been in courtrooms (local, small and midsized town) where women lost their children, where drug addicted got the book thrown at them, where homeless rough sleepers were fined and incarcerated, where people more sane than this judge were committed to mental ward. This is the truth about systems of oppression, about modern white civilization, a fucked up rule of law lawlessness. This is it in our world. But it happens every day a few ten thousand times. To we the small ass people.

Now, multiple that by a factor a ten thousand — try suing Boeing, or Pfizer or FDA, or Ford, or General Mills, or Bayer, or Trump Towers or Bank of America, or Amazon, or Google, or the manufacturer of the air bag in the minivan or the pretzel maker  your kid is choking on.

Now, bring it back to a real perspective. Local, where cities have no money for infrastructure, where medical systems are threadbare at least, or missing altogether. No country for old men, for young people, for the sick, disabled, poor, mentally challenged, psychiatrically impaired. This is a country for no regular people.

Yet, we will hear the media mental midgets yammer on and on about us bumkins, us flyover fucks, deplorables, or deploying any other laundry list of pejoratives or socio-psych mumbo jumbo for their elite brains to find more ways to subjugate the many in the name of profits, and in the words of their deep alter egos — “The world of elites and beautiful and worthy and good members of society have to deal with these useless breeders, breathers and eaters. Really, all we want is what’s best for the masses, for these misbegotten, less than high IQ, and multiple-dysfunctional people who in some cases, well, don’t mean to be useless eaters, breeders, breathers, existers. But we can corral them into good deeds, and we can make so much money from their faults, chronic illnesses, their low IQ’s, their inbreeding, their constant bad bad bad decisions in life. Their mistakes and pain and dysfunction are our opportunity to make society the way we want it designed, with a few trillion of profits in greenbacks to boot. But we would never say this outright to Anderson Cooper or Oprah or NPR or what not.”

But reality is always local, no matter how much bullshit college sports and pro football teams and idiotic Republican and Democrat lying and spewing interferes with their noggins. For example, the outfit I work with, as a social services guy, doesn’t ask our clients — developmental and intellectual disabled adults — if they have had “the jab,” but rather, they ask: “If an employer asks you to provide proof of vaccination, will that be a problem?”

That is the reality now — adults barely surviving, after their whole lives have been spent in special ed programs and being evaluated, separated, roomed, housed and institutionalized, and many coming from proverbial messed up families, dysfunction being the functional word — I have to navigate more of the same systems of oppression-poverty inducing-safety net fraying eating at our communities’ very souls. The chances of getting part-time work in a field tied to the five F’s (food, fur, factory, filth, foliage — restaurants, dog cleaning, warehouses, janitorial, and landscaping) are already slim, as so much is stacked against these folk. Think about the propaganda around “those with developmental disabilities are more vulnerable to the covid so they need to be vaxxed first” ideology.

Many clients were so scared that they were more or less forced into getting the Pfizer or J & J, both mRNA biomedical experimental treatments. Most live in supported housing, and most of these in group homes, sanctioned by the state, so the vaccine mandates are not just inferred, but demanded. Boosterism (booster x, y, z, omega) will continue to run rampant. More will be sick. Some will die, or course.

The reality is I know people who are losing jobs, and they are not sitting on piles of cash like a lot of professionals you might read about that are opting out of the forced chemical jabs. These people do not have the luxury of taking a stand with unlimited credit card limits, or fully owned homes, or hobby gardens out back with the swimming pool. These are people who read up about this planned pandemic, who take precautions, who listen to experts. Their choice is to not get jabbed.

Imagine, being a teacher, PhD in physics, after  20 years, and you have 130 accrued sick days (paid) and you refuse to do the jab but accept the draconian test and mask. You are still going to be fired, or put on unpaid leave, and those PTO days you have accrued, well, forget about them.

“LEAKED GRANT PROPOSAL DETAILS HIGH-RISK CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH
The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.” (source)

This is reality for one of my friends. Forget about the death proclamations of the Death Cult of Fauci. This guy is criminal, and he has sold millions a bill of goods. This bill of goods is dangerous, deadly, injurious.

A bill of goods, man, the lies, the continuing criminal enterprises, and then, remade, make overs, etc. Take these middle of the road news sites: Robert Scheer is not my favorite, but this takes the cake, no, as he appears as Mister New York Times and Most About USA is Good Scheer. So, no doubts about this fellow joining up with the CIA, and then now in Holly-Dirt?

This is the very celebrity culture that Chris Hedges rails against. This is a sick little blurb here promoting Scheer’s podcast of this criminal — CIA is a criminal outfit of the highest order.

A former CIA officer and Emmy award-winning creator of the hit FX series “The Americans” about two Soviet agents living secretly in Washington during the Cold War, Weisberg offers a refreshing perspective on the tense relationship between the two countries throughout his work. He joins Robert Scheer on this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” to talk about his latest book, “Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War,” in which he examines how he, like so many Americans, got Russia wrong.

The author tells Scheer about his childhood growing up in a liberal Jewish household in Chicago, Ill. before studying Soviet politics at Yale University and joining the CIA, eager to do his “duty as an American” and fight what he considered then to be the “evil” Soviet empire. Now, after years of writing fiction about the Soviet Union in novels and TV scripts, Weisberg has decided to reflect on the historical events that he briefly played an active role in during his brief time at the CIA as the Soviet Union was collapsing through a more critical, factual lens. Based on both his personal experience as well as detailed research, Weisberg dispels common misconceptions about Russia that he once held to be true in “Russia Upside Down.”

Here we go: More meaningless Hollywood-CIA-millionaire stuff that the average Joe in Tucson or Portland, in Kansas or Utah has zero connection to. But we get he is Jewish (hmm, why this?) a Yale graduate (Yale being a CIA-Imperialist school), and lover of CIA and USA (when he was young — what puke). Fiction writer, and now a book writer and TV series producer, wow, what a radical.  This is the upper echelons of America Putridity, and you couple that with his millions thrown at him as a Holly-Dirt thing, and we have the mini-Celebrity fawning.

Scheer Intelligence Is America’s View of ‘Evil’ Russia Merely Projection?

I was at a hospital two weeks ago, and the nurses must have thought I wasn’t awake (I never sleep in a hospital, in jail, or on a plane). They talked about the Samaritan Hospital system they work for introducing a “no vaccine, no medical service” protocol. They did not sound happy about it. And here we have it yesterday:

Leilani Lutali, foreground, and Jaimee Fougner pose for a photo, Thursday, Oct. 7, 2021 in Colorado Springs, Colo. Lutali recently found out her hospital wouldn’t approve her kidney transplant surgery until she got the COVID-19 vaccine. Even though she has stage 5 kidney disease that puts her at risk of dying without a new kidney. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) — source

A hell of a country, and a hell of a “follow the science” kind of messed up system, no? Idiots of the Biden-Obama variety, like Thom Hartman, are yammering on and on about how these hospitals have a right to refuse un-jabbed folk. This is it for the liberals — you eat junk food, you drink booze, you suck on fags, you drive recklessly, you think this or that anti-Democratic Party thought, then we, the good beautiful, Hillary-Obama-Harris have a right to cut you off, cut you down, chop you off at the knees!

Many people I speak with and communicate with are tired of the pro-pro-pro forced jab perspective we are getting from the leftist Counterpunch, and from St. Clair.

I am referencing “Roaming Charges,” Counterpunch, 10/8/2921, from the anti-science pro-some-science get-out-of-that-science’s way thinking coming from some of the articles posted on the site. Very sad in many ways, so sad that there is not a robust discussion of the vaccination that we see on Dissident Voice, even Mint Press, and especially Off–Guardian and Left Skeptics. Here, bullet points, direct quoting from “Roaming Charges”:

+ I’m against any exemptions (our social contract should require either all of us to get it or that the jab be completely voluntary ), but if there’s a religious exemption there should be one for philosophy, too. “Dr. Anthony Fauci says he’s worried that people resisting COVID-19 vaccine shots based on religious grounds may be confusing that with a philosophical objection.”

+ Merck is selling its high-touted new Covid pill Molnupiravir, whose development was federally financed by NIH and the Department of Defense,  back to the U.S. government for 40 times what it costs to make.

+ These people, if you want to call them that, seem to have taken their “tactics” from the Westboro (“God Hates Fags”) Baptist Church which used to (and I suppose still does) scream their godly obscenities at mourners during the funerals of people who died of AIDS.

+ Anti-vaxism is itself a kind of brain-eating virus…A Cumberland, Maryland man murdered his brother and sister-in-law in their Ellicott City home last week because his brother, a local pharmacist, had administered COVID-19 vaccines.

+ Cuba began vaccinating its population 150 days ago. In that time, it has administered 192 doses per 100 people. In contrast, the US began its vaccination program 297 days ago and has managed to administer only 119 doses per 100 people. The Covid death rate in Cuba is: 684 per million. The death rate in the US is: 2190 per million. This seems to provide pretty clear evidence that the embargo has been placed on the wrong country for the last 60 years. (end quote)

And therein lies the problem with fake leftists — attacking even doctors and virologists and journalists and educated/educators who have doubts about the entire pandemic and mRNA and coronavirus multiplicity of very pro-pro Capitalist and pro-pro Authoritarian and pro-pro Government Bureaucracy rhetoric. The reality is Cuba is not jabbing its people with mRNA: “All of Cuba’s vaccine candidates—Abdala, Soberana 1, Soberana 2, Soberana Plus, and Mambisa, are subunit protein vaccines, like the Novavax vaccine. Crucially, the vaccines do not require extreme refrigeration, are cheap to produce, and are easy for the country to manufacture at scale. They are made by fermentation in mammalian cells, a process Cuba already uses for monoclonal antibodies.”

Now, we are worried about more of the celebrities, this time, a professor who was sacked —

Now, think about any criticism against any university, when you are employed by the institution. I was employed by the University of Texas at El Paso. I was an English Department faculty, part-time, a radical, and I fought like hell for adjuncts, for students, etc. I was part of a group of students as a faculty member who made a human chain to stop the group of overweight sheriff posse dudes dressed up as Conquistadors on horses strutting on campus. That was 1992, the 500th anniversary of that evil contact we call Columbus Day. The El Paso Times ran a front page photo of these undercover cops jumping out of the bushes, and wrangling students, clobbering male and female with forearms to the neck. I was right in the middle, and I had to answer for myself to the Provost and president.

This is what a university, then, in 1992, was encapsulated inside, under a rich white president, a campus that was and still is 80-plus percent Mexican-American, Latinx, now. You can’t protest without our permission and our approval of signs!

This was a campus that introduced a free speech zone out of the way of foot traffic. A state sponsored school, with a limited small postage stamp of land near dumpsters where people can gain the public square for protesting. And the campus Nazis demanded permission, permits, and full written details of the “protest” or “information gathering.” Now, sure, talk about Covid, about Nuremburg protocol, about mandates, about those who have the jab and those who do not. Talk about NIH and Fauci and the shadowy origins of the SARS-CoV2, or the doctors who have protocols to stop not only Covid patients getting on ventilators, but getting patients out of the hospital and back home in recovery zone. Not allowed.

These articles are verboten on campuses:

And, if I was still on that campus, how quickly would I be sacked for criticizing a campus– that pushes the Hispanic University of the World theme while colonizing Hispanics (mostly Mexican Americans) — for lock-step falling into the fold of the Corruption Racket Complex — military-banking-ag-energy-prison-pharma-education-medicine-mining-chemical-AI-surveillence-real estate-insurance-prison-legal-media-entertainment? This campus is the whoring field of military, aerospace, drone and weapons makers, and even more nefarious. What ugly optics! Four Star Murder Bomber Air Force General all smiles and the PhD’s just lapping up the uniform!

So, back into that ground-truthing — try being a radical, a revolutionary, a critic of bureaucracies and corporate mandates and this sort of bullshit on a local level. UTEP is a sell-out, an embarrassment, but so are most all the colleges and universities in this shit hole. (Source) I have gone up against every single college and university I have taught in. EVERY ONE.  Can you imagine bringing this into the classroom — anti-war, anti-military, anti-corporation discourse and readings and critical thinking debates? Shit! Then, this? Pfizer Exposed! 

And while the big house is for us in the 80 percent, the ground-truthing in your neighborhood is littered with the poisons of that Complex, the Continuing Criminal Enterprise called capitalism.

[The aim of the international bankers was] nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.

— Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope, p. 324 (source)

Finally, another point from a friend: “Fishy Felonious Fraudulent Fauci: Read Whitney Webb’s latest.”

During the panel, the moderator—Michael Specter of the New Yorker—asked the question: “Why don’t we blow the system up? Obviously, we just can’t turn off the spigot on the system we have and then say ‘Hey! everyone in the world should get this new vaccine we haven’t given to anyone yet,’ but there must be some way.” Specter then mentioned how vaccine production is antiquated and asked how sufficient “disruption” could occur to prompt the modernization of the existing vaccination development and approval process. Hamburg responded first, saying that as a society we are behind where we need to be when it comes to moving toward a new, more technological approach and that it is now “time to act” to make that a reality.

Several minutes later, Anthony Fauci stated that the superior method of vaccine production involves “not growing the virus at all, but getting sequences, getting the appropriate protein and it sticking in on self-assembling nanoparticles,” essentially referring to mRNA vaccines. Fauci then stated: “The critical challenge . . . is that in order to make the transition from getting out of the tried and true egg-growing [method] . . . to something that has to be much better, you have to prove that this works and then you have got to go through all of the critical trials—phase 1, phase 2, phase 3—and show that this particular product is going to be good over a period of years. That alone, if it works perfectly, is going to take a decade.” Fauci later stated that there is a need to alter the public’s perception that the flu is not a serious disease in order to increase urgency and that it would be “difficult” to alter that perception along with the existing vaccine development and approval process unless the existing system takes the posture that “I don’t care what your perception is, we’re going to address the problem in a disruptive way and an iterative way.”

During the panel, Bright stated that “we need to move as quickly as possible and urgently as possible to get these technologies that address speed and effectiveness of the vaccine” before discussing how the White House Council of Economic Advisers had just issued a report emphasizing that prioritizing “fast” vaccines was paramount. Bright then added that a “mediocre and fast” vaccine was better than a “mediocre and slow” vaccine. He then said that we can make “better vaccines and make them faster” and that urgency and disruption were necessary to produce the targeted and accelerated development of one such vaccine. Later in the panel, Bright said the best way to “disrupt” the vaccine field in favor of “faster” vaccines would be the emergence of “an entity of excitement out there that’s completely disruptive, that’s not beholden to bureaucratic strings and processes.” He later very directly said that by “faster” vaccines he meant mRNA vaccines.

The Bright-led BARDA and the Fauci-led NIAID in just a few months’ time became the biggest backers of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, investing billions and co-developing the vaccine with the company, respectively. As will be explained in Part II of this series, the partnership between Moderna and the NIH to co-develop what would soon become Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine was being forged as early as January 7, 2020, long before the official declaration of the COVID-19 crisis as a pandemic and before a vaccine was proclaimed as necessary by officials and other individuals. Not only did the COVID-19 vaccine quickly become the answer to nearly all Moderna’s woes but it also provided the disruptive scenario necessary to alter the public’s perceptions of what a vaccine is and eliminate existing safeguards and bureaucracy in vaccine approval. (Watch the 2019 Universal Flu Vaccine event here.)

As Part II of this series will show, it was an alleged mix of “serendipity and foresight” from Moderna’s Stéphane Bancel and the NIH’s Barney Graham that propelled Moderna to the front of the “Warp Speed” race for a COVID-19 vaccine. That partnership, along with the disruptive effect of the COVID-19 crisis, created the very “Hail Mary” for which Moderna had been desperately waiting since at least 2017 while also turning most of Moderna’s executive team into billionaires and multi-millionaires in a matter of months.

However, Moderna’s “Hail Mary” won’t last – that is, unless the mass administration of its COVID-19 vaccine becomes an annual affair for millions of people worldwide. Even though real-world data since its administration began challenges the need for as well as the safety and efficacy of its vaccine, Moderna – and its stakeholders – cannot afford to let this opportunity slip through fingers. To do so would mean the end of Moderna’s carefully constructed house of cards.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

NOTE: In April of this year, my family had a medical emergency that required most of my time and attention. The result is that I am now the sole legal and physical guardian of two young children with significant needs. I hope to return to writing a regular newsletter now that they are in school. There is a lot going on and a lot to do. Solidarity, Margaret Flowers

This month, the Sanctions Kill coalition (Popular Resistance is a member) released its report: “The Impact and Consequences of US Sanctions.” The 35-page report was written in response to the Biden administration’s January call for a review of the US sanctions to determine if they ‘unduly hinder’ the ability of targeted nations to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

To date, there is no word on whether that review has been conducted, but given that the State Department and Treasury are tasked with conducting it, the same institutions that impose sanctions, the Sanctions Kill coalition had no confidence their report would challenge the US’ current foreign policy path of escalating economic war on 39 countries, or a third of the world population.

The Sanctions Kill report found that sanctions, which are being increasingly imposed by the United States in lieu of or in addition to military aggression, cause tremendous suffering and death, violate international laws, harm US industries, place the US in a position of civil and criminal liability and are isolating the US from the community of nations. The corporate media are silent on these harmful effects and criticism of sanctions.

Venezuelan UN Ambassador Samuel Moncada described the impact of sanctions this week at The People’s Forum (view the event here):

Sanctions are killing us…. They are homicidal. One of the awful effects of sanctions as a weapon, because it’s a kind of war, is that you don’t feel it here. You don’t even realize that sanctions are acting abroad…. You don’t feel it in any way. But we feel them…. That’s why they are so insidious and dangerous. [The US] is waging economic war against millions of people.

The sanctions imposed by the United States include restrictions on financial transactions, trade and travel, blockades on foreign loans and aid and the seizure of assets. The Sanctions Kill report found these measures violate the human rights of people in affected countries because they block access to basic necessities such as food, medicines and fuel and they prevent maintenance of important infrastructure such as water services, power generation and transmission and transportation. The so-called humanitarian exceptions that are supposed to prevent sanctions from blocking food and medicine don’t work – banks won’t allow the sales and shipping companies won’t transport the goods.

Technically what the United States is doing are not sanctions but are unilateral coercive measures (UCMs), which violate international law because they operate outside the structure provided by the United Nations. Legal sanctions are used as a punishment after a legal process determines a country violated a law. Unilateral coercive measures are imposed by the US and its western imperialist allies based on lies and without due process in order to effect a desired political outcome, such as regime change or retaliation.

For example, following the failed US-backed coup attempt in 2018 against Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, the United States Congress passed the NICA Act, which began an economic war against socialist Nicaragua. With presidential elections being held this November, the United States has ramped up both a propaganda campaign against the popular Ortega, who is expected to win, and Congress is in the process of passing the RENACER Act, which will impose more UCMs against Nicaragua.

Here is what US activists are saying about the RENACER Act and what you can do to stop it. If you want to learn more, BreakThrough News recently interviewed Jill Clark-Gollub of Friends of Latin America about the RENACER Act.

The Sanctions Kill report also found that the US is imposing secondary sanctions on countries that do business with sanctioned countries, another violation of international law, and is using sanctions to target business people, such as Meng Wanzhou of Huawei, and diplomats, such as Alex Saab. Saab is being held in Cabo Verde where he stopped last year on his way to Iran to negotiate the purchase of food and medicines for Venezuela. The US is working to extradite him while international support for Saab, whose imprisonment violates the Vienna Convention, is growing. Clearing the FOG spoke earlier this year with Roger Harris of Task Force on the Americas after he traveled with a delegation to Cabo Verde to visit Alex Saab. Click here to take action.

In front of the United Nations after the People’s Mobe rally and march.  (September 2019. By Yuka Azuma)

Clearing the FOG spoke with two of the authors of the report, international lawyer John Philpot and Latin American solidarity activist David Paul. Philpot predicts a day of reckoning is coming for the United States because the UCMs violate multiple international laws, including the United Nations charter. They are a form of collective punishment, which is a crime against humanity.

As the United States’ status as a global hegemon declines, targeted countries are finding ways to work together to resist the brutal economic wars being waged by the US and build power. For years now, countries have worked on alternative financial instruments to bypass US sanctions in order to do business. One example is INSTEX, a trading mechanism developed by European nations and Iran.

One of the first major acts of defiance against US UCMs was in the spring of 2020 when Iran sent four tankers of oil and equipment to Venezuela despite a large US military presence in the surrounding waters. Recently, Iran defied US UCMs again when it sent a convoy of oil trucks through Syria to Lebanon, which is suffering greatly from an economic crisis and fuel shortage.

Cuba has been under a US economic blockade for more than 60 years but it continues to be a model of international solidarity, especially during the pandemic. Henry Reeves Medical Brigades have been sent to numerous countries to assist them in caring for COVID-19 patients. Now Cuba is in need of aid and Mexico is stepping up to provide it using its naval ships since commercial ships face many barriers due to the UCMs. People and organizations outside Cuba also worked to supply millions of syringes so Cubans can receive vaccinations against COVID-19.

Mexico was the host of the recent CELAC (the community of Caribbean and Latin American states) meetings where leaders openly criticized the Organization of American States as a tool of US imperialism and called for its reform or the creation of a new body. CELAC countries are working on ways to practice greater solidarity in the face of the pandemic, climate crisis and debt.

Similarly, the first African/CARICOM summit was held virtually earlier this month. A third of the countries being targeted by the US’ economic war are in Africa. In fact, almost all of the countries being sanctioned by the US are majority black or brown. Don Rojas covered the summit for Black Agenda Report, writing:

“The Summit was also a recognition of the political and economic imperative that the governments of Africa and the Caribbean must succeed in restructuring if our black and brown people and nations are ever going to assume their rightful place in the world.”

And this week, during the United Nations general assembly meetings, the foreign ministers of 18 countries met as the Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations and released a statement pledging to work together. They wrote, “…we convey our support to nations and peoples subjected to unilateral and arbitrary approaches that violate both the purposes and principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the basic norms of international law, and renew our call for the full respect to the inalienable right of peoples to self-determination, as well as the territorial integrity and political independence of all nations.”

By Medea Benjamin

Those of us who live in the United States and its allied imperialist nations that enable these serious violations of human rights and international law have a responsibility to act to stop the use of economic warfare through unilateral coercive economic measures. Global power is shifting and we face multiple worldwide crises. It is imperative that imperialist nations change their foreign policy from death and destruction to diplomacy, solidarity and cooperation.

An important step is education so people understand that UCMs are as lethal as bombs and that they affect the whole world, including people living in countries that wage economic war. The SanctionsKill.org website contains numerous resources to help with this including a toolkit that provides you with a power point and script so anyone can give a presentation on sanctions. The toolkit informs about what UCMs are and the specific harms they do.

You can also send the new Sanctions Kill report to your members of Congress and demand they end them now or publicize the report in any way you can – use social media, local or independent media outlets, your organization’s website, etc. We must break through the media blockade and demand the truth be told about the illegality of UCMs and their devastating impact on people in targeted countries. Write letters to the editor when you see articles about sanctions.

Take action to stop the RENACER Act and join the call to free Alex Saab. There are many solidarity organizations that are working to support people in countries attacked through economic measures. One example is the Saving Lives Campaign, a joint effort by people in the US and Canada to provide aid to Cuba.

Ending sanctions will save millions of lives and move us forward on the path toward a world of cooperation, peace and solidarity. Nations like the United States use sanctions because their deadly impacts are not as visible as dropping bombs. We must expose this brutal economic warfare and demand an end to it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Margaret Flowers.

These days, things appear to be happening at an accelerated pace. It can be challenging to keep up as a writer. Meanwhile, some events are interesting but may not warrant a full article of their own. Therefore, I will occasionally compile a few stories into one piece… starting with these three right here:

If you’ve watched any television or YouTube videos over the past decade or so, you’ve likely seen ads for Chantix featuring Ray Liotta. Chantix is a Food & Drug Administration (FDA)-approved prescription pill designed to help users quit smoking — but not without a shit load of side effects. Well, last week, the FDA announced a “Nationwide Recall to include All Lots of CHANTIX® (Varenicline) Tablets Due to N-Nitroso Varenicline Content.” N-nitroso-varenicline, it turns out, is a suspected carcinogen.

Taking a Look Around in The Home of the Brave

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

Google’s co-founder was granted residency under New Zealand’s wealthy investors scheme, requiring an investment of at least NZ$10 million (US$5 million) over a period of three years.  Immigration New Zealand enthusiastically promotes the “Investor Plus” visa as giving the applicant a chance “to come to New Zealand with your family and enjoy our unique lifestyle”.  The successful applicant is also permitted “to bring your car, boat and household items to New Zealand, free of customs charges.”

Page’s application was lodged in November, though it could not be processed as he was offshore at the time.  This changed in January, when he was permitted to land in New Zealand because his son faced a medical emergency.  “Once Mr Page entered New Zealand, his application was able to be processed and it was approved on 4 February 2021,” Immigration New Zealand stated.

Both Page and his son were based in Fiji at the time, and were reportedly evacuated aboard a New Zealand air ambulance.  Details of an operation with all the trimmings of bought favouritism were supplied to members of Parliament by Health Minister Andrew Little.  “The day after the application was received, a New Zealand air ambulance staffed by a New Zealand ICU nurse-escort medevaced the child and an adult family member from Fiji to New Zealand.”

On arriving in New Zealand “the child and adult”, as a privacy conscious Little described them, “were taken immediately to an isolation environment in the hospital.  In the event of discharge within 14 days, the child and the adult would have been required to be transferred to managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ), and I am advised that all COVID-19 orders in this respect were complied with.”

The inevitable insinuation here was that Page and his progeny had received exceptional treatment.  The New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, canonised by popular press and supposedly decent organs of opinion, preferred to shift the scrutiny to medical expertise.  “With all (medevac) cases, those are decisions for clinicians, and I absolutely trust our clinicians to make decisions.”

The Health Minister gave his own special gloss to the issue, never once mentioning the economic nature of the visa.  The issue was less one of singular treatment than singular circumstances.  Only 99 patients had been accepted under the medevac scheme in the previous financial year, the majority of whom had come from the Pacific Islands.  Individuals who received treatment covered their own costs if not eligible under publicly funded services; costs for the evacuation were covered by government agreements, private insurance or direct payment.

Brooke van Velden, deputy leader of ACT New Zealand, a party of the right self-described as a protector of free trade and the rule of law, was unimpressed by the explanations.  The applications for emergency MIQ spots by 190 people had been declined “despite having no option but to return to New Zealand”.  Little reiterated that this had been a medical emergency that had met all the “standard conditions” though he refused to confirm whether Page had actually paid for it: “[P]eople who come here for medical reasons [who] have the benefit of our medical services are entitled to medical privacy, and I intend to observe that.”

Fiji had also closed its borders to foreign travellers, but made an exception to Page and his ilk, who found themselves in the Pacific country as part of its Blue Lanes initiative.  The programme has been used to approve the entry and passage of super yachts and private jet owners as part of its COVID Safe Economic Recovery Framework.  In March, Fiji’s Minister for Commerce, Trade, Tourism and Transport, Faiyaz Koya, described the scheme as giving “yachters from around the world the chance to join Fijians in COVID-Contained paradise.  With more than 330 days since the last local case of the coronavirus in Fiji and more than 100 vessels approved, Fiji’s Blue Lanes represent the safest and most sustainable tourism pathway in the world.”  Sustainability and the stinking rich seem something of a mismatch, but countries remain desperate to bring in the lucre, even if this comes with spades of hypocrisy.

Isolated, secure countries tend to attract the wealthy, notably in desperate times.  Those fretting about imminent apocalypse and global collapse have seen New Zealand as the ideal retreat, an insurance of perfect insularity.  The billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and early Facebook investor, declared in 2011 that he had found “no other country that aligns more with my view of the future than New Zealand”.  Despite never living in the country, he was granted citizenship by Nathan Guy, a minister of internal affairs besotted with his record as “a great ambassador for New Zealand” who had “invested a lot in New Zealand” and had “great reach into the US”.  Thiel did not even have to leave California for the ceremony, being given permission to conduct it at the New Zealand consulate in Santa Monica.

Five years later, Thiel revealed to the New Yorker that both he and programmer and entrepreneur Sam Altman would fly to the former’s New Zealand residence in the event of a crippling global event. “Sam is not particularly religious, but he is culturally very Jewish – an optimist yet a survivalist, with a sense that things can always go deeply wrong, and that there’s no single place in the world where you’re deeply at home.” Well, perhaps apart from the Land of the Long White Cloud.

Van Velden is certainly suspicious that the Page Affair is merely another instance of fond favour to those with deep pockets.  New Zealand may pride itself as a model of COVID-19 suppression with punitive protections and restrictions but dispensations can be made.  “The government,” she claimed in a statement, “is sending a message that money is more important than doctors, fruit pickers and families who are separated from their children.”  Got it in one.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

“Last month, I was chatting with an Iraqi taxi driver in Berlin. My 12 year old son and I took a cab from the Museum for Contemporary Art to our hotel. I couldn’t help but ask the cab driver why he ended up in Berlin. He said it was something to do with the availability of the visa. He stressed that he had to leave because he didn’t like Islam. He said Muslims were killing each other.

I felt very slightly sad because he sounded like he had to say that to prove that he wasn’t a “terrorist”. I told him that it was the US that supported Saddam when it was convenient. Then, the US flipped, changing its policy, as doing so became more convenient. I asked him, Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS, same old story, no?

Then he said something unexpected. He said it was a “people’s revolution”. “We stood against Saddam”.  He was referring to the first gulf war in 1991. He went on to describe how it didn’t go as people wished, and it brought about the devastating trade embargo, more war, ISIS and so on.  His voice was passionate.  I felt the anger and frustration against war and imperialism that I also feel myself, in his voice.”

The imperial war against countries that defy the US hegemonic imperatives involves a few steps.  The target population is deprived of their basic necessities by economic embargo, trade sanctions, travel restrictions and demonization of its leader.  The society is destabilized by the lack of resources and economic activities.  The opposing forces in the country are generously funded by the empire to build a momentum against the defying “regime” in the name of “revolution,” “democracy,” “freedom”, etc. The communities are divided. The institutions are compromised to serve capital, adding more confusions and predicaments to the population.

Quite often this is sufficient enough to silence those who defy such interventions and it results in an overthrow of the existing order.  The society is transformed to suit the colonial policies concocted by western industries, which result in resource extraction, privatization, financialization, exploitation of cheap labor, construction of US military bases and so on.

Quite a few middle eastern countries have defied such interventions resulting in proxy wars and western military interventions.

That was the war on terror which continues to this day as the US forces are freely employed against the world according to its “war on terror legal framework,” while its measures are still in place as restrictions against our legal rights as well as restrictions at airports and so on.

Many of us raised our voices against the obvious crime of invading other countries, colonizing them and subjugating them.  To my surprise there were people who objected to our assertion saying that if we didn’t invade them, they would have invaded us, they were “terrorists,” and so on.

Enormous profits were generated by this huge public project, war, at the expense of the people in the war torn countries as well as oppressed people in some of the richest countries of the world. No one was held accountable for deaths and destruction.  The war to save people from terrorists was a huge capitalist project to expand the power and wealth of hardened criminals who call themselves politicians, philanthropists, businessmen, intellectuals, patriots, academics, and so on.

The underlining mentality of neo-colonial violence is based on prejudice against the peoples of the targeted countries.  Those peoples, who reside within countries governed by “leaders” who have sworn to obey imperial policies, are subjected to tighter measures of exploitation and subjugation in order to serve the interests of the imperial institutions. The predicaments of the subject population—poverty, social unrest, and corruption, which stem from the economic subjugation, justify the mental superiority among westerners, falsely proving the inferiority of the “barbaric” population which must be “assisted” by westerners.  If the leader of a colonized country attempts to amend the unfair situation by implementing policies that serve that country’s own people, the western authority would mobilize policies to remove such an element.  The policies are firmly backed by the prejudice amongst the imperial population. Simple slogans and key words such as “he is killing his own people,” “save the children,” “regime,” “dictatorship” and “genocide” can trigger the colonial mentality as well as the white savior mentality in the imperial population.

Fast forward to 2021 — the era of war on virus. We are experiencing a massive wealth transfer to the rich and powerful, which can be best described by Jeff Bezos thanking his workers and customers for his rocket ride. The cynical exploitative violence inflicted against workers is found in all sectors across the country, creating destruction of small community businesses, massive homelessness, suicide surge, spike in drug related deaths.  Lockdown measures are wreaking havoc in vital social relations, which must now be reorganized.

The virus event has turned the dwindling healthcare system into mask wearing, social distancing and getting injected with extremely lucrative experimental GMO drugs—which are surrounded by  unprecedented numbers of injuries and deaths, far surpassing all combined prior vaccine injury and death reports to the CDC reporting system VAERS.  The lockdown measures and profit oriented measures against the virus further narrowed the capacity of the general healthcare system, resolution in huge numbers of patients without vital care for their urgent conditions. Destroying the healthcare system for the sake of saving lives is only an aspect of the current mobilization.  The education system, which has been under attack for generations by corporate forces, has received a blank check to fire faculties, turn classes into online tutorials, and pursue a new mission to create obedient workers for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The financial institution has accelerated its herding of the population into the digital realm where people are conditioned, commodified, and exploited as data.  In every industry, a massive restructuring process for profit is occurring in the name of Covid measures.

Now, I understand that respiratory illnesses can be very dangerous.  If you look up articles from pre-Covid time, you find desperate calls from healthcare professionals screaming about the risk of flu epidemics due to the lack of facilities and resources. This has become reality after Covid, as massive death tolls have resulted from nursing home lockdowns.  Profit oriented treatment options have been promoted while effective options were restricted, resulting in yet even more deaths and hospitalizations.  But statistically, all these deaths in the US had not exceeded the range of year to year variation in death rate.  This crucial fact has been observed in various countries.  The Covid situation, if anything, is very much a manmade event. It can not be described as a deadly pandemic comparable to the bubonic plague. This should shatter virus event narratives propped up by “cases“ concocted by unreliable PCR tests—its inaccuracy has been highly criticized by many scientists—including the inventor of the PCR test himself–due to its arbitrary results depending on the degree of amplification in search of the targeted DNA fragments.

The above observation is strictly based on the opinions of numerous healthcare professionals, doctors, and scientists across the globe. At the very least, it must be recognized that there are significant disagreements within the field of science on every aspect of Covid-19, its treatments, and lockdown measures.

However, none of those are examined in a serious manner by the establishment.  In fact, there are many instances of healthcare professionals being disciplined for reporting cases of vaccine injury, speaking against the treatment policies, and questioning the prevalent assumptions regarding the virus.  Healthcare professionals are actively forced to play along with the official Covid narrative.

For the general public the mixed emotions over the contradictions have turned to frustration, and the frustration has turned to anger as if we are stuck in a pressure cooker made with official narratives and structural impediments of lockdowns and forced vaccine injection. The heat and pressure have broken down the social fabric as our daily routines are dictated by “new normal.”

So many things have happened since last year.  But somehow things don’t seem to fit in right places in our heads.

We mark our sense of time and space with traditional events, daily routines and our common knowledge.  When we lose those, we are left with a series of elements and dynamics without those markers.But alternate markers have been provided by those who have deprived us of the markers.  Our lives are marked with lockdowns, masks and social distancing — the “new normal”.

Now we mark our lives with it.

We are told that there is a deadly disease out there and the only solution is to vaccinate.  Our life and death are determined by one of the largest corporate entities, the medical industrial complex.

Just as the war on terror was described as a “crusade”—legitimizing the twisted religious and cultural superiority of the colonizers, disguising white man’s burden as humanitarian obligation — the war on virus crowns “science” as its guiding force.  However, needless to say, the credibility of the “science” is proportional to the accompanying might of wealth and power—just as the facts of war are bought and sold as “journalism”. Propaganda lies fill the air as those who oppose are marked as “others” who  deserve to be castigated as being outside of the protection of the gated community.

This way of framing—the medical industrial complex—is useful in understanding the dynamics within the capitalist hegemony. However, such an entity is also a part of the media industrial complex, non profit industrial complex, political industrial complex, and, of course, military industrial complex.  In short, our lives are dictated by multiple dynamic forces of oligarchs, orchestrating a “reality” which firmly manifests as a capitalist framework—a cage to condition our lives based on its imperatives.

As the current virus mobilization reframes our society, obliterating existing values, norms and beliefs, the corporate institutions and their owners are consecrated as absolute beings which determine our life and death. This is why decrees legitimated by the “emergency”  are acceptable political means now.  This is why large corporations have gained enormous wealth.  This is why our lives are herded into the digital realm where we are commodified, conditioned to be exploited, and truncated to be stripped of the mystery of life and the unknown.

But where do the anger and frustration go?

The US establishment is well aware of the boiling anger and frustration over the situation.  The momentum of anger is cultivated and it is being shaped to put the people against each other—an old corporate duopoly trick, which has grown steadily as a dynamic tool of social engineering in the US.  The ghosts of the Civil War still determine the means of enslavement, while allowing the ruling class to preside over the theater of “democracy,” “freedom” and “humanity”—a manufactured “reality.”  Individualism, self-determination and a sense of freedom based on the sacrifices of many oppressed people are a privilege only allowed to people with economic security.  This is a part of the reason why the resistance against the Covid lockdown measures encompasses a reactionary element.  In particular, erroneously defining the trajectory as “socialism” or “communism”.  This ironic twist, the capitalist oppression being blamed on the enemy of capitalists, once again reveals the mechanism of the imperial duopoly as well as the expansion of the exploitative violence against a formerly economically secure segment of the population, which will require tighter measures of draconian restrictions.

It is not a coincidence that the red states have embraced the opposing positions while the blue states firmly adhere to the official narratives on vaccines and lockdown measures.  The subject populations are allowed to choose the mode of enslavement, but the slight differences in the choice are big enough to activate colonial hatred toward each other.  The unresolved historical pain, emotion and grudge have found urgent expression against “enemies” among us.  A fight between teeth baring wolves and cunning foxes, as Malcom X would call it, channels the anger and frustration safely within the capitalist framework.  The media, politicians and major institutions carefully instigate conflicts among the people by demonizing opponents over vaccines and lockdown measures, while protecting “pandemic” narratives one way or the other.

Some people might think that things must get worse before it gets better. Things can certainly get worse but it looks like it only means more fragmentation of communities and destabilization of institutions, which allows further erosion of people’s interests by the capitalist domination along with justifications for its draconian measures.  This probably gives a comfortable feeling for those privileged ones in gated communities. This also accompanies the exacerbation of fascist momentum, which always justifies the forces of western imperial hegemony—remember how the Trump phenomenon pushed neoliberal policies, which are embraced by both corporate parties, while justifying anything else to oppose Donald Trump, who was largely perceived as an obvious caricature of the narcissistic failing empire?  The US capitalism moves forward while oscillating left and right within the acceptable spectrum of imperialism.

In short, everything is under control according to those who destroyed the middle eastern countries.  The only difference is that now the target is us.  We are under attack.  Some of us are demonized by the establishment to play the role of scapegoats.  Some of us are praised as heroes saving lives and sacrificing themselves. Our communities are being destroyed to be further consumed by the colonizers of humanity and nature.

The war on virus is meant as a crucial background of destabilization and fear which helps extract huge amount of public spending in the name of saving lives, saving environment and saving people’s livelihoods—which are all under attack by the savagery of the very capitalist domination.   Since the war on virus is largely targeting the public money, we are bombarded with an unprecedented amount of wholesale propaganda narratives, as if we are thrown into the process of corporate electoral process—we are supposed to vote yes to those lucrative capitalist fixes for the capitalist problems by going along with the narratives.  Public outcries against the policies are safely consumed among the populations as people are forced to fight among themselves.

Moreover, the war on virus is meant to be a perpetual war.  Inconceivable “mistakes” will be made, victories would be declared here and there, facts will be revealed when convenient, while much of the facts are distorted to prop up the pretense of this vast protection racket scheme by the oligarchs.  One step forward, and one step backward, our lives swirl within the torturous theater of the “medical crisis,” but the real solution is never to be found within it.  The empire can not lose the war but the empire has no intention of winning the war either, for the winning can destroy the domesticated momentum of the in-fighting among the people, as well as an assortment of “activism” backed by the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, which effectively drives capitalist agendas in the name of “our democracy”. After all, we are many. The oppressors are not.  The mechanism of the domestication must be kept in place to tame the masses within the feudal hierarchy of money and violence.  Meanwhile, fear, doubt and real threat against our livelihood in the form of economic strangulation continue to force us to swallow the protection racket deal with the criminal enterprise.

Ultimately, the trajectory points to a complete domestication of our species through management of all means of production, its products, and the distribution system.  As the peoples become products themselves with biotech procedures, the social relations within the digital realm seamlessly merge with the fabricated reality, virtually cementing the feudal hierarchy of the absolute power.

As we operate within social media outlets, as we present our identities within their frameworks, and as we are injected with GMO drugs to modify our physical response to the natural world, we have already stepped into a dangerous stage which might very well spell the end of our species as we know it.

What could Iraqis do as they suffered the deadly embargo and invasions?  The question is ours now.  Unfortunately, many of those who stood with the empire are still insisting on fighting the imperial war as we have become the targets of the war, demonizing our community members as enemies, repeating slogans and talking points to justify the imperial restructuring, as our communities fall apart to be devoured by the colonizers.  It is no coincidence that those who oppose the current mobilization are accused of being racists, conspiracy theorists, or fascist worshippers—just as not agreeing with bombing brown people would be accused of letting brown children die by the hand of a “dictator.”

Our real enemy is not the “antivaxxers,” or the gullible people swallowing the corporate propaganda.  The real enemy is the imperial oligarchs who are shaping our society in order to continue their ways of exploitation and subjugation.  They are shaping the capitalist cage to squeeze the last remnants of our imagination and our connection to humanity and nature.  How can we defy the colonization of humanity and nature?  How can we be a part of the resistance against the criminal pyramid scheme which is bound to implode with its destructive nature?  How can we build our ways to be in harmony with ourselves, with each other and with nature?  We are a part of the countless people who have held the dream of such a harmony.  We stand strong with them in solidarity.  We are many. The oppressors are not.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Hiroyuki Hamada.

The United States is losing the ability for rational political debate and respect for science. Politicians, media and public discourse have been infected by lies, conspiracies, racial stereotyping of nations like China, and rampant hostility.

The World Health Organization seems to have succumbed to U.S. pressure to falsely incriminate China over the Covid-19 global pandemic.

The United Nations-affiliated body has called for a Phase Two study of laboratories and markets in the Chinese city of Wuhan where early Covid-19 cases were detected in December 2019. Beijing has rebuffed the call, saying that the proposed investigation is a cover for politicizing the pandemic along the lines pushed by Washington.

What has happened at the WHO? An earlier survey by WHO and Chinese scientists published in February this year concluded it was “extremely unlikely” that the novel coronavirus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But now the WHO is recommending a follow-up study as if casting doubt on its previous findings. Beijing says this is an undue sole focus on China.

Two factors seem relevant here. Under President Joe Biden’s administration, the United States has rejoined membership of the WHO. His predecessor Donald Trump had pulled the U.S. out of the international body, claiming that it was too close to China and was concealing the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. The United States is the main source of funding for the WHO, so its return will be a welcome move and no doubt has influenced the executive to be more favorable to American claims about the pandemic.

Biden and the U.S. media have remarkably revived the baseless conspiracy theory instigated by Trump and his rightwing Republicans that China was the origin of Covid-19 through a “leak” of the virus from the Wuhan institute. Biden has tasked U.S. intelligence agencies to report back in the coming weeks. It’s not hard to imagine how the intelligence will be made to fit the political agenda of smearing China.

Beijing says, with fair reason, that the Americans are putting politics above science in order to undermine China in the greater scheme of geopolitical rivalry. The Chinese are calling for an international and cooperative investigation to objectively determine the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic which has resulted in over four millions deaths worldwide over the past year.

Washington is coming from the premise that the disease is China’s fault, and so it is pushing the focus of investigation entirely on China and locations in Wuhan. This prejudice is unscientific and seems geared to consolidate the conspiracy theory that the Wuhan laboratory was the source of the pandemic through a release of the virus.

The political atmosphere in the U.S. has become extremely toxic. Last week during Senate hearings, the top American expert on infectious diseases Anthony Fauci was assailed by reckless accusations that he was complicit in the alleged Wuhan “lab leak” and responsible for all deaths.

The United States is losing the ability for rational political debate and respect for science. Politicians, media and public discourse have been infected by lies, conspiracies, racial stereotyping of nations like China (Russia, Iran and others), and rampant hostility. America’s much-vaunted democracy is a scrap heap of seething enmity which blocks any reasonable solutions to its many domestic social challenges as well as the conduct of civil international relations.

Obscene social inequality, lack of political leadership and lack of public trust in governance have resulted in the most shameful record. The U.S. death toll from the pandemic is over 620,000 – way above any other nation. That is an indictment of the failure of “American democracy” and its capitalist-oligarchic society.

Yet the Americans keep pushing the conspiracy that it’s all China’s fault. That country with nearly four times the U.S. population has incurred a tiny fraction (less than 1 percent) of the American death toll from Covid-19. That success is down to good centrally planned governance of China’s socialist system and national unity of purpose to contain the disease. Chinese people don’t question basic science such as efficacy of wearing face masks in public spaces or availing of vaccines. By contrast, American society is riven and racked by ignorance, selfishness and loony irrationality about so-called “freedoms”.

A productive, genuinely international effort to locate the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic would be open to all leads for inquiry.

The unilateral demands by Washington to limit the investigation to the facilities in Wuhan are based on conspiratorial thinking and motivated by an effort to incriminate China.

Admittedly, the first reported cases of Covid-19 were detected in Wuhan in December 2019. But that does not necessarily mean the pandemic originated there. There are reports of the disease emerging weeks before that date in North America and Europe. But these cases were either misdiagnosed or under-reported. During 2019 there was a surge in seasonal influenza deaths in the United States. Perhaps some of these cases were not due to the normal flu virus but rather to Covid-19 which has similar symptoms.

China is calling for a wider investigation in which biomedical samples in the U.S. and Europe are retrospectively analyzed for possible infection with Covid-19.

Another major factor deserving international scrutiny is Fort Detrick, the U.S. military biowarfare laboratory in Maryland. This facility is believed to experiment with lethal pathogens, including novel coronaviruses.

Fort Detrick has a notorious record for safety failures going back to the Cold War decades. In August 2019, the laboratory was forced to shut down for several months after it was discovered its waste disposal processes had been compromised by failure. It is still not clear what that failure was due to exactly or what pathogens may have escaped.

But think about that. Such a grave breakdown in one of the most toxic centers on the planet preceded by only a few months the global pandemic. To a rational mind, that fact merits an international investigation for possible role in the origin of Covid-19. China’s government and many other nations have called on the WHO to open a probe into Fort Detrick. But the Americans point-blank refuse.

American arrogance and provocative politicization over the pandemic is endangering international relations and preventing an effective scientific approach towards eradicating a disease that has wrought so much misery on its own nation. The ultimate downfall from such hubris is the self-inflicted damage.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Finian Cunningham.

Please allow me to introduce a brief recap before I get to the latest news. I’ve already told you how and why the Covid rules make no sense and should not be trusted. Click here to read more. I also explained how Covid deaths are counted using vague criteria like “may have been caused by” or “was likely a result of COVID-19 or COVID-19-like symptoms.” Click here to read more. 

More recently, I highlighted a study (pre-published in the journal, Hospital Pediatrics) that reported hospitalization rates “greatly overestimate the true burden of COVID-19 disease in children.” Summing up, the study’s authors logically noted that their findings clearly illustrate the need to perform similar retrospective chart reviews for COVID-19-coded adult hospitalizations and overall mortality. Click here to read about that. 

Then came the very recent news that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) will “withdraw the request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay first introduced in February 2020 for detection of SARS-CoV-2 only” as of December 31, 2021.

PCR (polymerase chain reaction) has been the official test of choice for Covid. Its failings as a test have become the source of the outrageous statistics that continue to scare us into submission. This includes dramatically over-counting Covid cases and dramatically undercounting flu cases. According to the World Health Organization, the flu seems to have magically disappeared. There were about 38,000,000 reported cases during the 2019-2020 flu season. In 2020-21, the number was 1,822. Sure, a small dip might be expected due to Covid mitigation tactics. But virtually every single case? Is it not rational to wonder how many flu cases and deaths have been incorrectly added to the Covid lists? (For context, there were 34,200 flu-related deaths in the U.S. in 2019-20 but the yearly flu-death average ranges from 12,000 to 61,000 deaths.)

Skeptics questioned the validity of the PCR (in the context of Covid) from day one. More importantly, the creator of the test — the late Kary B. Mullis, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his PCR work — was quite outspoken on the topic: “This man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope and if it’s got a virus in there, you will know it. He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.”

The man Mullis was talking about is a five-decades-and-running unelected technocrat who is the highest paid out of all four million federal employees (earning $417,608 — an annual salary higher than that of the president) and runs a government department with a budget over $6 billion.

Yep, you guessed it. Mullis was talking about Tony Fauci. Fauci holds no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry. He is not a virologist. The highly decorated and celebrated Mullis was hip to Fauci and would frequently challenge him to public debates. Fauci never accepted. Sadly, Mullis died shortly before this latest pandemic. We could’ve used his voice of reason amidst the political pandering and science-as-religion fervor. 

According to Mullis, bureaucrats like Fauci have a “personal kind of agenda. They make up their own rules as they go. They change them when they want to.” Furthermore, “Tony Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people, face out, and lie directly into the camera.” 

“He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine.”

Please allow me to introduce another recap. False numbers — like the Covid deaths and cases count — have been used to impose deadly lockdowns upon us. They have also been the driving force behind a massive campaign to vaccinate billions with experimental gene therapy. For 16 months and counting, we’ve been conditioned to fear a virus based on numbers: cases and deaths.

You may think knowing the exact numbers doesn’t matter. You may think it’s heinous or “anti-science” for anyone to even question the official count. If that’s what you’re feeling right now, I invite you to explain your perspective to some of the humans impacted by the lockdowns, e.g.

• 72 million children pushed into illiteracy
• The famine-stricken residents of Yemen, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, and northeastern Nigeria
• 9.3 million wasted and 2.6 million stunted children
• 15 million girls and women now dealing with unintended pregnancies
• 13 million girls who might be forced into child marriages
• 2 million girls enduring genital mutilation without campaigns in place to protect them
• All the Japanese women caught up in an 83 percent increase in suicide
• 10,000 additional children dying each month from hunger

The numbers matter immensely but very few people seem to want to hear anything that challenges their acceptance of the “official” narrative (or their beloved Dr. Fauci). Every time you mock or ignore well-documented writing on this topic, you are showing ZERO concern for the tens of millions whose lives have been devastated thanks to lies and propaganda. 

If you’re going to mourn those who died from Covid, you must also grieve for the tens of millions more who have been callously left to suffer and die by the disproportionate lockdowns based on woefully flawed data. Perhaps the best way you can honor such horrific, ongoing, and unnecessary losses would be to finally start questioning everything you are being told — especially if it comes from the mouth of Tony Fauci. I strongly suggest you give it a try…

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

We began the journey with a cool launch as version 2.0 of the roaring twenties commenced, but that quickly gave way to the Age of  Terror in which the villainous machinations of mad scientists were revealed as they unleashed their plagues, which in turn brought us face to face with the next stage of Orwell’s fevered dream that has manifested in the form of draconian lockdowns, suppression of effective medical treatments, massive censorship, propaganda campaigns, forced inoculations in many parts of the world, and the rise of globalist-inspired technocratic tyranny.

It’s created one hell of a whirlwind thus far, so I can’t say I’m surprised that so many peoples’ heads are still spinning and that they can’t make heads or tails of what’s being imposed upon them as the jewels of liberty are methodically stripped away. But, even so, there’s really no excuse for not being informed and having a strong sense of discernment at this point in the process. It’s all been prophesized and warned about enough, no doubt.

Thankfully, it does seem as though some of the heralded signs have been taken to heart.

Protests in Cuba? Beautiful to see. Protests in the UK? Wonderful to behold. Protests in France? Glorious to witness.

Did the World Economic Forum and the Fortune 100 corporations and the United Nations and the World Health Organization and Big Pharma and the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation and the Big Tech oligarchs and all the minions of these authoritarian governments across the globe that are continually imposing increasingly despotic edicts outside of natural and common law think that humanity was going to just collectively roll over, assume a fetal position, and suck their thumbs without putting up any resistance when the “build back better” and “great reset” and “sustainable development” and “Agenda 2030” bullshit hit the fan?

Not a chance.

Well, of course, they understood quite well that a large swath of the sheepish population would do just that. But, hell, a lot of people at this point would put a bullet in their own brain or jump off a thousand foot cliff if certain experts that they worship as false idols informed them that such actions were the scientifically proven methods toward achieving radiant health and immortality (or even just simple immunity from a souped-up, bio weapon virus). That’s perfectly evident at this point of the game, and such behavior is no different than the people who gleefully lined up to turn their babies over to be sacrificed atop the Aztec pyramid when the priest class of that era convinced them that the sun had disappeared in a fit of anger when really it was just catching some shade during an eclipse and would pop back out at any moment without the need for slitting any throats.

That lemming-mimicking segment of society has never been concerned much with the precepts of common sense, critical analysis, or free thinking throughout the ages, and so their current fear-induced hysteria is no different in the modern epoch we’re currently living through.

But that doesn’t account for a solid 25% of people (or, if we’re fortunate, even more) who do care, greatly, about maintaining their own sovereignty. And so they won’t go down without questioning the so-called authority figures who are pulling all these heinous stunts. And, in the long run, it’s this courageous minority who will be victorious. Though it’s certainly going to be a bumpy ride along the way to reach that point down the line. So be it. The principles of autonomy are well-worth the effort to preserve, and a bit of discomfort in the short term sure beats the hell out of the Satanic one world government system of the beast being offered as an alternative path with an endgame of complete destitution and neo-feudalistic nonsense that will only bring about total enslavement of the species.

So it’s encouraging to watch the resistance as it mounts and grows by the day. It’s no doubt true that order arising out of chaos is a real principle that plays out in nature, society, and individual psychology. It’s just not going to be the type of manufactured decline of civilization that these transhumanist demons at the top of the scam are hoping for so they can offer their depraved solutions after the crash. It is their plans, ultimately, which are destined to fail, fall, and burn. Magnificently. Then the phoenix of renaissance can take flight.

I guess the big question that looms in the air before us now is: when does the Nuremberg Trial redux begin? Because I know that karma weaves its web and works its wiles on its own terms and in its own mysterious ways, but I’m sort of keen on the concept of justice being rendered swiftly and served in a timely fashion at this stage of the plot.

I’ve no doubt it will happen. For though it may seem as if darkness and deception have taken the upper hand and garnered dominion across the earth, there are always reciprocal forces at work behind the scenes keeping the overall energy in balance; and so, as the lies spewed forth from the mud-caked lips of swine become intolerably blatant, truth is risen up more quickly to breach the surface of the collective consciousness.

In fact, that’s why the authoritarians have taken their gloves off. They didn’t foresee in their algorithmic equations that resistance to their schemes would be so large, or how vehement certain folks would be in the desire to keep their freedoms intact. The control freaks feel their grip loosening and losing sway, and so they are doing everything they can in a hurried, bumbling, blundering fashion to try and keep hold of their tenuous grasp.

But we all know how sand slips through the fingers of a closed fist, and we’ve all heard tell about the genie that can’t be shoved back in the bottle once released. Yeah, Pandora is out and about, and there’s no turning back the clock now, darling.

The times have never been more interesting, and I’ve never been more thankful to be alive. The show must go on, and though the action might get a bit more perilous and sketchy as we reach the climatic scenes of this drama, there’s a big bright light shining from the other side pulling us forward with a magnetic tug of love.

So walk steady with a straight, sturdy spine in high spirits. Hallelujah.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Scott Thomas Outlar.

According to the government, the decision to lift most restrictions on July 19 was reached because four tests had been satisfied.  Ongoing vaccine deployment was proving a success, having “broken the link between infection and mortality.”  (Step 4 had been delayed by a month to enable more adults to be vaccinated.)  Gathered evidence showed that “vaccines are sufficiently effective in reducing hospitalisations and deaths in those vaccinated.”  Infection rates did not pose a risk to a surge in hospitalisations that would place intolerable pressure upon the National Health System (NHS).  The emergence of new COVID-19 variants did not pose a threat.

In his July 15 speech, Johnson accepted that hospitalisations and deaths would endure.  A calculus of risk was at play.  The days and weeks ahead would be “difficult” with “more hospitalisations and … more deaths but with every day that goes by we build higher the wall of vaccine acquired immunity, a wall that is now higher and stronger in this country than almost anywhere else in the world”.

The promise of Freedom Day had the effect of setting a good number of health professionals on edge.  Arthur Hosie, a Staffordshire University microbiologist, took the view that the government was essentially disarming the populace from non-pharmacological protections.  “This is a new virus to which we have had no exposure over previous years.  Mask wearing and social distancing are important – to remove them is to remove the tools we need to live with the virus.”

Authors of a July piece for The Lancet, many members of the Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, excoriated a strategy that still tolerated “natural infection for others (predominantly the young)” alongside a partially vaccinated population.  “The link between infection and death might have been weakened, but it has not been broken, and infection can still cause substantial morbidity in both acute and long-term illness.”

The authors offered a range of grave scenarios.  Unvaccinated children and young people risked being disproportionately affected.  Schools faced high rates of transmission that would cause education disruption and endanger “clinically and socially vulnerable children.”  Preliminary modelling data suggested that the opening up strategy “provides fertile ground for the emergence of vaccine-resistant variants.”  The strategy would also deplete the country’s already exhausted health services and staff.  Finally, and as has always been the case, deprived communities would continue to be disproportionately affected.

With these loud warnings come a rather troubling set of statistics.  According to the Office of National Statistics one in 95 people in England has COVID.  In Scotland, the number is one in 90.  More than half a million people find themselves in isolation and infection levels lie at over 50,000 a day.

The Delta variant is also posing challenges to the wall of immunity Johnson has been promoting.  Certainly, it does not promise to be impervious, though the figures are nonetheless impressive in preventing serious illness and hospitalisations.  While the Pfizer vaccine does pack a punch in being 88% effective in stopping symptomatic disease arising from the Indian-origin strain, AstraZeneca’s offering comes in at 60%.  Public Health England has put this down to an issue of timing, as the effectiveness of the latter vaccine requires a longer interval between first and second doses.

The country’s third COVID-19 wave is causing jolts of dysfunction, largely due to the test and trace system that continues to operate.  Marks & Spencer is considering reducing opening hours to cope with staff shortages arising from infections and self-isolation directions.  A number of factories and work sites face the prospect of shutting for similar reasons.  Parts of the London Underground were closed because of the number of staff made to self-isolate after being notified via the NHS COVID-19 app.  The Rail, Maritime and Transport union secretary Mick Lynch had predicted the previous week that the capital would face “a surge in workers pinged with self-isolation instruction next week.”  A pingdemic is upon the population.

When Freedom Day came, it did not exactly arrive with a celebratory canter.  It had a very Johnsonian air of ramshackle contradiction jammed with misrepresentation, confusion and even a sense of terror.  Physician Gabriel Scally could recall no other “episode in history where a government has willingly aided and abetted the spread of a dangerous infectious disease among its own population.”

This was also freedom of a different sort.  Hundreds of thousands of people are in mandated isolation; the Prime Minister is himself isolating after his health secretary, Sajid Javid, had tested positive for COVID-19 on Saturday.  “For these people,” wrote a bleak Ross Clark for The Spectator, “it is no freedom day – it is a return to the darkest hour of lockdown.”  In fact, suggested Clark, this was worse.  “At least during lockdown we were all allowed to go to the shops, or for exercise.”

For those wishing to travel, there were also disappointments.  Travellers to so-called amber designated countries can avoid the ten day isolation requirement upon their return but must pay for testing and get a test within 72 hours of their return.   The onus is on packaged tour operators to foot that bill, should they wish to.  Independent travellers will simply have to lump it.

Jeremy Hunt, chairman of the Commons health select committee, dreads the coming autumn.  “The warning light on the NHS dashboard is not flashing amber,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, “it is flashing red.”  As William Hanage of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston observed with sharp disapproval, “The decision [to open up], and the way it has been presented, repeats a pattern of foolishly promising an outcome when dealing with a highly infectious agent.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Don’t think that because I’m not there with you in the Occupied Zone, I don’t get what’s going on. I see things more clearly because I’m here, free of the hysteria. You shouldn’t underestimate the pull of the herd. Its force is hypnotic, especially when we’re afraid. A child in danger doesn’t wonder whether he should listen to his mother. Threatened, he obeys her warnings. The words that she speaks go straight past his thinking mind, free of scrutiny, and get lodged in his subconscious. If they didn’t, he would soon end up dead. But the same thing happens when a child is told how to be a good boy and fit into the herd. Afraid of being left out, he doesn’t ask whether what he is told makes sense. He believes it. That’s how hypnosis works. Fear induces a trance that lets anyone with authority tell us what to do without us questioning the truth of what it is said. Once implanted, the commandments become dogma.

When the World Health Organization announced that the spread of the virus was a global emergency, I was in a small town full of travellers from all over the place. If the virus was afoot, it was already here or would be soon. Called home by their government leaders, most people left. But some of us stayed. To me, it looked like we were going to watch flu deaths in real time that winter. Some nasty people wanted us all to be very afraid. Of course, it was too early to know whether the virus would be worse than the flu, and you might think that I was wrong. But all-cause mortality was no higher in 2020 than in recent years. Replaced by Covid-19, not only did the flu season vanish in many parts of the world, but most causes of death, from pneumonia to heart disease, were also blamed on Covid-19. You want to ask, what about the crowded hospitals? You want to scream, real people died, you know! I don’t deny that. Like its sister, SARS, this virus has killed people who would not otherwise have died, some of them young. I also know that in cities with bad smog like New Delhi and on Native reservations polluted by the mining industry, the virus has been especially deadly. But the numbers don’t lie. There was no global pandemic in 2020.

Last spring, after the town here emptied out, local vigilantes started manning checkpoints on the access roads to keep away travellers. With all the restaurants and hotels closed, families went hungry for lack of work. Twice a week, I made pots of lentils and rice to serve at a food giveaway near the plaza, where the lines got longer as the pandemic wore on. You might say that all of this suffering was necessary to flatten the curve. But that doesn’t explain what has happened since then. You’ve been under curfews and lockdowns there and cut off from your friends. Masks are still de rigueur. Haven’t you wondered why I have it so much easier than you do? I can leave the house whenever I want. The town is overrun with tourists again and life is back to normal. Why should that be? The answer is simple: this is a second-world country without much of a middle class to destroy through bankruptcy. Put another way, most people here are too poor to steal from. This pandemic is about the transfer of wealth from the many to the few, also called piracy. Yes, the world’s overlords are pirates before anything else.

In the first-world countries, we don’t live with our hands in the soil anymore. We stopped fighting for our land long ago. We are born on this planet but can’t claim a bit of it to put a roof over our heads. We’re all renters and borrowers in the grand scheme of things. Here, people still own the earth. It supports families across time. People are dollar-poor but land-rich, even if they have only a scrap that is their own. So they are hard to push around. There is still a lot of the Wild West here. The police have a role to play, but they are not the authority. It was the Cartel that decided when it was time to open the town again, not the state. The Cartel may be thugs, but they are part of the fabric of the culture. They are the blue-collar equivalent of our white-collar criminals. The difference is that the Cartel does not murder by proxy. It’s personal with them. When two of the vigilantes beat up a guy who had Cartel friends, the Cartel executed the leader of the vigilantes, and the rest of them disbanded and melted away. That was when the roadblocks came down and businesses started to open, including the Cartel’s many pharmacies, where it launders most of it money.

Early on, a friend of mine wrote a message in the dust that coated the back windows of his van: Fear the vaccine, not the pandemic. And he was right. The vaccine is far worse than the pandemic. From the start, vaccination has been the goal. For that, the pandemic had to be dragged out. First, they exaggerated the number of Covid-19 deaths. The true survival rate is over ninety-nine percent for anyone younger than seventy and over ninety-five percent for the elderly. Then, when the number of deaths dropped, they wildly inflated case numbers by using a rigged test. Here, the test is too expensive, so only the tourists get it. Without mass testing, there were no false positives to shore up the panic. Another piece of the puzzle was to deny the existence of treatments so that the vaccines could be approved for emergency use. When Mexico City started treating patients with these known drugs, hospitalizations plummeted. You’re thinking, who would start a pandemic just to sell vaccines? But surely you have realized by now that the vaccines are not only about profit. Yes, our overlords are pirates, but they are also dictators. They want control. It stared with the masks, the curfews, and the lockdowns, and now they have us lining up to be injected with a potion that is outright killing people and injuring others. Next, they will force vaccine passports on us. Those who refuse vaccination will be excluded from the workplace and the marketplace. We will be cast as pariahs.

Maybe you were hoping that the vaccines would set us free and that things would go back to normal. That is only because you can’t accept that people would be so evil. The players in this catastrophe held an event in 2019 that simulated the pandemic. You say that it was just a coincidence. They profited madly from the lockdowns and the vaccines. You say that they were being opportunistic. They published a book about how they are going to use the pandemic to enslave us. You say that I’m overreacting. But I’ve also heard you say that absolute power corrupts absolutely. If you can agree that there are people with absolute power afoot in this pandemic, then you must concede that they are absolutely corrupt. Because they have enough money to oversee unelected bodies like the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum, they have enough power to dictate the policies of our elected governments and to strip us of our rights. Make no mistake, these people have absolute power, and their plans for us are beyond evil. The next piece of the puzzle will be variants of the virus so that the emergency can be extended long enough to bankrupt the middle class, defeat our spirits, and soften us up for the fascist world order that is coming.

I said that we have to find our way back from this madness. But I don’t know what steps are possible when most of the people who should be resisting don’t realize that they are under assault. At the same time, perhaps I should be optimistic since censorship is now so commonplace that it can’t be denied. Controlling the Covid-19 narrative by suspending social media accounts and deplatforming websites is as totalitarian as any tactic ever used by the Soviets or East Germans. People can see what is happening. It’s all out in the open. To be branded a conspiracy theorist is no longer to be identified as a lunatic but to be recognized as someone who can see the obvious: the Covid-19 narrative cannot brook descent and debate because it is built on lies.

If we don’t resist now, our only hope is that the human spirit will save us. It will take time for that to happen, but no tyranny has ever withstood it. When things get bad enough, our souls will rebel. As Cohen wrote,

Any system you contrive without us
will be brought down
We warned you before
and nothing that you built has stood
— Leonard Cohen, The Energy of Slaves (1973)

It will be so again.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Sean Lewis.

There are many ways to do it.

According to health practitioner and writer Craig Stellpflug in his article ‘Big Pharma: Getting away with murder’ (2012), the strategy is to get in quick, design the study to get the result you want, get out fast and make lots of money.

Stellpflug says:

If a study comes up negative for your favorite drug, just don’t publish it! 68 per cent of all drug studies are swept under the carpet to keep those pesky side effects from being reported. Only 32 per cent of studies come up positive and a lot of those studies are ‘shortened’ to limit the long-term findings. Studies cut short were found to overestimate the study drug’s effectiveness and miss dangerous side effects and complications by an average of 30 per cent. This would explain the amazing 85 per cent drug study success rate in the hands of Big Pharma according to the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Of course, it helps to get the regulatory agencies on board and to convince the media and health officials of the need for your wonder product and its efficacy and safety. In the process, well-paid career scientists and ‘science’ effectively become shaped and led by corporate profit margins and political processes.

And what better way to make a financial killing than by making a mountain out of a molehill and calling it a ‘pandemic’?

COVID-19 vaccine concerns

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article by two health professors who said politics — not science — is behind the failure of health officials and the media to fully inform the public about the potential risks associated with COVID vaccines.

Although the article is available in full to subscribers only, the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) website provides an informative summary.

The CHD notes that Dr Joseph A Ladapo, associate professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine, and Dr Harvey A Risch, professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, wrote that while prominent scientists have raised concerns that the safety risks of Covid-19 vaccines have been underestimated, the politics of vaccination has relegated their concerns to the outskirts of scientific thinking.

The two professors noted that clinical studies do not always tell the full story about the safety of medications and that the health effects often remain unknown until the medicine is rolled out to the general public. Examples include Vioxx, a pain reliever that increased the risk of heart attack and stroke; antidepressants that appeared to increase suicide attempts among young adults; and an influenza vaccine used in the 2009-10 swine flu epidemic that was suspected of causing febrile convulsions and narcolepsy in children.

The authors added that clinical trials often enroll patients who are not representative of the general population and more is learnt about drug safety from real-world evidence. With this in mind, they said the large clustering of side effects following COVID vaccines is concerning as is the silence around these potential signals of harm.

Serious adverse events reported by the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System include low platelets, heart inflammation, deep-vein thrombosis and death. However, the two scientists argue this is likely to be a fraction of the total number of adverse events.

They criticise the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for ignoring the reported serious COVID vaccine side effects.

The authors acknowledge the risks of COVID vaccines in certain populations, not least children, may outweigh the benefits. They also state that not a single published study has demonstrated that patients with a prior infection benefit from COVID-19 vaccination. Something which is not readily acknowledged by the CDC or Anthony Fauci, an indication, according to the authors, of how deeply entangled pandemic politics is in science.

They conclude that public health authorities are making a mistake and risking public erosion of trust by not being forthcoming about the possibility of harm from the vaccines.

Merck and Vioxx

It is revealing that the two scientists refer to Vioxx, which was once popular for treating the symptoms of arthritis. It was removed from the market in 2004 after concerns that it may have injured hundreds of thousands of patients, while possibly killing tens of thousands in the US.

Dr David Graham, whistleblower and senior FDA investigator, criticised the FDA’s approval process of Vioxx (rofecoxib), an anti-inflammatory drug administered orally. In various interviews and congressional hearings, he described the outcome of Vioxx as disastrous and unparalleled in the history of the US. He added that the saga surrounding Vioxx had constituted an unprecedented failure of the nation’s system of drug approval and oversight.

In 2004, Graham argued that the painkiller had caused 88,000 to 139,000 heart attacks in the US – 30-40 per cent of which were fatal – over the previous five years. Nevertheless, manufactured by Monsanto (a company with a proven track record of corrupt practices) and co-marketed by Merck, Vioxx became a leading drug in providing pain relief from the symptoms of various forms of arthritis.

Research presented to the FDA in early 2001 showed that patients taking Vioxx had a higher risk of heart attack compared to those taking some of the older alternatives.

However, the real game-changer came in 2004 when Dr Graham released the findings that found Vioxx increased the chance of heart attack and death from cardiac arrest significantly more than its biggest rival on the market. Dosages of Vioxx in excess of the recommended daily dose of 25 milligrams were also found to more than triple a patient’s risk compared to those who had not taken painkillers.

In September 2004, Vioxx was pulled from the market. But in 2006, more damning findings were revealed by a study that showed that some patients had likely suffered from a heart attack much sooner after starting treatment with Vioxx. Appearing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the study showed that 25 per cent of the patients who had heart attacks while taking Vioxx did so within two weeks of starting the drug. This indicated that Vioxx-related cardiovascular risks may occur much earlier than previously thought.

The FDA was criticised for its close relationship with Merck and witnesses at a senate finance committee hearing described how danger signals of Vioxx went ignored. Indeed, a 2007 article published by the National Institutes of Health alleged that even though scientists at Merck knew that the drug might adversely affect the cardiovascular system, none of the intervention studies submitted to the FDA in 1998 were designed to evaluate such risk.

Robber barons and guinea pigs

Merck reported over $11 billion in Vioxx sales during the five years the drug was on the market. To date, the company has paid nearly $6 billion in litigation settlements and criminal fines over Vioxx. Still, in hard-nosed commercial terms, it was a massive success, resulting in a $5 billion gain for the company.

In May 2021, it was reported that Covid-19 vaccines had created at least nine new billionaires. According to research by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, the new billionaires included Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel and Ugur Sahin, the CEO of BioNTech, which has produced a vaccine with Pfizer. Both CEOs were then worth around $4 billion. Senior executives from China’s CanSino Biologics and early investors in Moderna have also become billionaires.

Although the nine new billionaires are worth a combined $19.3 billion, the vaccines were largely funded by public money. For instance, according to a May 2021 report by CNN, BioNTech received €325 million from the German government for the development of the vaccine. The company made a net profit of €1.1 billion in the first three months of the year, largely thanks to its share of sales from the Covid-19 vaccine, compared with a loss of €53.4 million for the same period last year.

Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine sales reached $1.7 billion in the first three months of this year and it had its first profitable quarter ever. Moderna is expected to make $13.2 billion in Covid-19 vaccine revenue in 2021. The company received billions of dollars in funding from the US government for development of its vaccine.

Big Pharma has every reason to perpetuate the notion of a deadly global pandemic and to inflate the efficacy of and need for its vaccines. And it, along with its associates in government and at the WHO, has every reason to discredit alternative and arguably more effective treatments like Ivermectin (see the online article ‘The Campaign against Ivermectin: WHO’s Chief Scientist Served with Legal Notice for Disinformation and Suppression of Evidence‘).

There is no need to cover ground here that has been covered extensively elsewhere but it is now abundantly clear that many continue to question the overall official COVID-19 narrative, the fear propaganda, the specific data, the PCR testing protocols, the apparent conflicts of interest and vaccine efficacy.

Moreover, a group of 57 leading scientists, doctors and policy experts recently released a report calling in to question the safety and efficacy of the current Covid-19 vaccines. They are calling for an immediate end to all vaccine programmes.

There are hundreds of scientists who have questioned government and WHO strategy and who have brought attention to the extremely low risks posed by COVID to the bulk of the population as well as the destructive (ineffective) policies and decisions pertaining to lockdowns and other restrictions.

There are many other top scientists who are questioning the need for mass vaccination and who have also pointed out credible and extremely disturbing side effects (real and potential) of such a strategy, not least Dr Robert Malone, credited with developing mRNA vaccine technology, Dr Byram Bridle, a viral immunologist, and Dr Geert Vanden Bossche, a prominent virologist and vaccine expert.

Unlike Merck and Vioxx, it will be governments (the public) that foot any future indemnity costs of these experimental vaccines that have escaped proper (long-term) testing. And given the scale of the rollout, the damage caused could make the adverse effects of Vioxx seem a mere blip.

Vaccines that were brought to market via emergency authorisation use for an ‘emergency’ constructed on the basis of deaths so often wrongly attributed to COVID-19.  Brought to market on the basis of flawed PCR test protocols with magnification cycles primed to create a ‘casedemic’.

To borrow from Dr David Graham: are we currently witnessing something more disastrous and unparalleled in the history of the world, let alone the US: an unprecedented failure of global drug approval and oversight?

In the meantime, while billions of vaccinated people serve as human guinea pigs, the newly crowned vaccine kings will make hay while the sun shines (and the fear continues).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

In the UK, Germany, and many other countries, and in numerous states throughout the US, a “state of emergency” remains in effect. An apocalyptic virus is on the loose. Mutant variants are spreading like wildfire. Most of society is still shut down or subject to emergency health restrictions. People are still walking around in public with plastic face shields and medical-looking masks. The police are showing up at people’s homes to arrest them for “illegally gathering outdoors.” Any deviation from official reality is being censored by the Internet corporations. Constitutional rights are still suspended. Entire populations are being coerced into being injected with experimental “vaccines.” Pseudo-medical segregation systems are being brought online. And so on … you’re familiar with the details.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, and a few other countries, and in various other states throughout the US, there is no apocalyptic pandemic. People are just going about their lives as normal. OK, sure, there is a nasty virus going around, so people are taking common sense precautions, as people typically do for any nasty virus, but there is no “state of emergency” in effect, and no reason to radically transform society into a paranoid, pathologized-totalitarian dystopia.

This state of affairs, in which two contradictory, mutually-exclusive realities exist, is … well, it’s impossible, and so it cannot continue. Either there exists a devastating global pandemic that justifies a global “state of emergency,” the suspension of constitutional rights, and the other totalitarian “emergency measures” we have been subjected to since March of 2020 or there doesn’t. It really is as simple as that.

Except that it isn’t as simple as that. It is easy to forget, given the last 16 months, that people have been bitterly divided, and inhabiting mutually-exclusive realities, and regarding people who don’t conform to their realities as enemies for the last five years. I’m not talking about political disagreements, or even socio-cultural differences. I’m talking about contradictory realities. Things that actually happened, or didn’t happen. Things that exist, or do not exist.

I’m not going rehash the whole War on Populism — I covered it extensively at the time — but that’s when the current global-capitalist War on Reality was officially launched. It wasn’t just the usual lies and propaganda. It was a full-scale ideological assault. By the end of it, people actually believed that (a) Donald Trump was a Russian agent, (b) that he was literally Hitler, and so was going to stage some sort of “coup,” declare himself American Führer, and launch the “Trumpian-White-Supremacist Fourth Reich,” and (c) that he had actually attempted this by sending a few hundred unarmed protesters — violent domestic extremist grandmothers, father-and-son kill squads, and bison hat loonies — to “storm the Capitol” and overthrow the government during the so-called “January 6 Insurrection.”

So, when GloboCap rolled out the “New Normal” reality, they weren’t exactly starting from scratch. Millions of people — not just Americans, because the War on Populism was a global campaign — were already living in a new 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, or were “far-right extremist conspiracy theories,” “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever, despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.

But the goal of GloboCap’s War on Reality isn’t simply to deceive the masses and divide them into opposing camps. Rulers have been deceiving the masses and dividing them into opposing camps since the dawn of human civilization. This time, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

OK, bear with me now, because this gets kind of heady.

The War on Reality is not an attempt to replace reality with a fake reality. Or it is that, but that is only one part of it. Its real goal is to render reality arbitrary, to strip it of its epistemological authority, to turn it into a “floating signifier,” a word that has no objective referent, which, of course, technically, it already is. You cannot take a picture of reality. It is a concept. It is not a physical object that exists somewhere in time and space.

But let’s leave that last point for a later discussion. This is not the time to get lost in semiotics. For most people, for most practical purposes, reality is … well, reality. It’s objective. Material. It actually exists. It exists independent of our beliefs. It isn’t just an arbitrary, empty signifier that doesn’t actually refer to anything, but which we use, strategically, to assert authority, or to impose ideology on society. If that were the case, there would be no reality. Nothing would be true, everything would be permitted … which is a bunch of postmodern Marxist nonsense.

But just imagine, for a moment, if that were the case … if what determined reality was actually just a question of power rather than facts. Imagine that reality was just a concept that we used to mark the current limits of our knowledge and ideological beliefs. Our doctors — oncologists and virologists, for example, but they could be any kind of doctors or scientists — would be not all that different from medieval alchemists, who totally believed in their reality at the time, as did the patients they were treating, but which we know now was not reality at all, because our reality is the real reality. I mean, it’s not as if people, five hundred years from now, are going to look back at our medical practices and scientific knowledge, and laugh, like we do at those medieval alchemists, right?

Sorry, I got a little off track there. I was trying to explain the ultimate purpose of this global-capitalist War on Reality, and I wandered off into an ontological swamp, which isn’t going to get us anywhere. So, let’s get back to imagining reality, not as what we all know it is (i.e., an actual, material thing that exists), but as a construct people use to validate certain officially-sanctioned beliefs and perceptions and invalidate other beliefs and perceptions, more or less like a system of morals, except instead of dividing things into to “good” and “evil,” it divides things into “real” and “fake.”

Now imagine that you were an immensely powerful, globally hegemonic ideological system, and you wanted to impose your ideology on as much of the entire world as possible, but you didn’t have an ideology, per se, or any actual values at all, because exchange value was your only real value, and so your mission was to erase all ideologies, and values, and truths, and belief systems, and so on, and transform everything and everyone in existence into de facto commodities that you could manipulate any way you wanted, because they had no inherent value whatsoever, because their only real value was assigned by the market.

How would you go about doing that, erasing all existing values, religious, cultural, and social values, and rendering everything a valueless commodity?

Well, you wouldn’t want to destroy reality completely, because people wouldn’t stand for that. They would freak right out. Things would get ugly. So, instead, you might want to go the other way, and generate a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive realities, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … which would still freak people out pretty badly.

Naturally, there would be one official reality that you would force everyone to rigidly conform to at any given moment in time, but you would change the official reality frequently, and force everyone to conform to the new one (and pretend that they’d never conformed to the old one), and then, once they had settled into that one, you would change the official reality again, until people’s brains just shut down completely, and they gave up trying to make sense of anything, and just tried to figure out what you wanted them to believe on any given day.

If you repeated that process long enough, eventually, nothing would mean anything anymore, because everything could potentially mean anything … at which point, you could basically tell people anything you wanted and they would go along with it, because what the hell difference would it make? A narcissistic billionaire ass-clown could be a Russian agent and literally Hitler. A half-assed riot could be an “insurrection.” Children could be born “systemically racist.” Men could menstruate. But wait … it’s gets better.

You could stage an apocalyptic global pandemic that only happened in certain countries, or in certain parts of certain countries, and that more or less mirrored natural mortality, and that didn’t drastically increase historical death rates, but was nonetheless totally apocalyptic.

Perfectly healthy people could become “medical cases.” You could count anyone who died of anything as having died of your apocalyptic virus. You could tell people in no uncertain terms, that medical-looking masks will not protect them from viruses, and then turn around and tell them that they will, and then, later, publicly admit you were lying in order to manipulate them, and then deny you ever said that, and tell them to wear masks.

You could experimentally “vaccinate” millions of people whose risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from your apocalyptic virus was minuscule or non-existent, and kill tens or hundreds of thousands in the process, and the people whose brains you had methodically broken would thank you for murdering their friends and neighbors, and then rush out to their local discount drugstore to experimentally “vaccinate” their own kids and post pictures of it on the Internet.

At that point, you wouldn’t really have to worry about “populist uprisings,” or “terrorism,” or any other type of insurgent activity, because the vast majority of the global population would be scramble-headed automatons who were totally incapable of independent thought, and who had no idea what was real and what wasn’t, so just repeated whatever new script you fed them like customer-service representatives on Haldol.

It doesn’t get much better than that for globally hegemonic ideological systems!

OK, sorry, I think I got lost there again. I’m not sure what I was trying to say. I’ve been a little foggy lately. I’m not sleeping so well. It’s probably Long Covid. Or maybe it’s just that time of month. Whatever. It’s not like it matters anyway. Still, I think I’ll go down to my former local bookshop and get myself tested.

Have a nice day in … you know, reality!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by C.J. Hopkins.

While the corona virus has created a menace seemingly beyond what was already becoming obvious about the end of private profit domination of earth, it also unleashed the greatest outpouring of high, low and no IQ speculation, charges, countercharges and more surpassing past reactions at times of great crisis with moments of extreme fantasy bordering on dementia being experienced and practiced both by people of supposed expertise and higher education in the sciences to folks who may still dance under a full moon with their bodies covered in slime as a way to avoid cancer. Sadly, so far the slime-covered dancers are making about as much sense as the allegedly more critical gang.

The horrendous death toll inflicted by the virus is thought by many to be the work of a Chinese plot to exterminate everyone on earth but the Chinese and blame it on America, an American plot to exterminate everyone on earth but Americans and blame it on China, and assorted tales of twitness and omni-anti-social media to make those two sound relatively thoughtful. The fact that capitalism has transformed nature and made it far more easy to spread a lethal virus than to feed, clothe and shelter billions of people has escaped many, even some critics of capital who seem shocked that big pharma profits from illness. Hello? As does every and all other business entities and aspects of free market private profit pursuit which has less to do with evil individuals and far more to do with a corrupt debased system controlled by minorities at ever great cost to the majority. Dog food, bombs, broccoli, burgers, health food, high fashion, health care, garbage, death and every other aspect of life are all subject to market forces creating private profit at the mall, school, factory, lab, convenience store and all other venues where goods are exchanged by one and all except for those without enough market force, and they can just drop dead.

And this is only a small part of the dis-mis-cis mind attacks on the population to assure mass confusion that doesn’t notice billions the world over, and hundreds of thousands in America, unable to afford food, clothing, and shelter while a relatively tiny number increase their wealth to become the equal of gods while their subjects cringe at threats to what is called “our” democracy originating from people with little to no political economic power save to vote for candidates mostly bought, rented and leased by the richest of the rich who look down on them lined up at the polls, malls and battlefields from their wealth created mountain-top fortresses and smile at the blessings of capitalist democracy.

What’s a failing empire to do but continue failing, as in rushing to increase aid to Israel when a global majority has reacted in critical anger over its most recent abuse of the indigenous people whose land was taken on behalf of Europeans and the Palestinians were made to pay and are still paying for European atrocities? While the new American CEO leads a struggle to return to a form of social democracy that spreads a few more loans among the barely surviving and more taco-pizza-burgers to the fast food hungry while assuring that the system responsible for creating hunger is maintained and billions of American tax dollars continue to be rewarded to a colonial apartheid nation? And this while decent Americans in great numbers are enraged by the conditions of life of America’s indigenous people robbed of their land, culture and heritage long before Israel or the Middle East occupied any of the consciousness of Americans.

Confusing?

Like the humanitarian decency at the root of all Americans when reaching out to immigrant populations having the usual difficulties of discrimination inflicted first by their cheap labor exploiters and later by the native people whose jobs they take and at whose expense they frequently survive. Not to mention the difficulty of having to step over the bodies of Americans reduced to sleeping in the street while on our way to rescue an animal to save it from, um, having to sleep in the street. Are we confused? Does a snake have wings? Is a bluebird blue?

Of course, all of these systemic curses of inhumanity and often near madness can be written off as Russian and Chinese assault on our sacred democracy, enshrined in the constitution-bible, written by slave owners and others of the 1% who believed the common people should leave the important business of ruling to those with the most money, purchased knowledge and sanctification by those biblical gifts handed down – or up? – by an invisible force called god, or later, high finance.

The financialization of capitalism has cursed the world with worse contradictions than existed in the time of the system’s birth when Marx pointed out most of them. Now, money makes money without the production of anything but more money which may soon lead to much of humanity with indoor toilets eating bitcoins and excreting buttcoins while trying to live with junk filled oceans, overflowing sewers and forests turned to deserts while praying that nobody pushes the nuclear button. On the hopeful side, workers here and all over the world are acting up, unionizing and fighting for democracy in political economic dictatorships worshipped as democracies by Wall Street and its wholly owned subsidiary: the American government.

Time is growing short for Americans to get beyond symbolic challenges to capitalism that merely offer more profits by “branding” various movements with marketplace stature assuring that Gay Inc., Feminist Inc., Black Lives Matter Inc., and Latino-a-x Inc.  do not, perish the thought, turn into American Democracy Inc. That is still to come and as always, we’d better hurry to join up with much of the world our media mind managers don’t tell us about but which is setting an example for everyone by opting for a system that puts the public good before private profit. So far, as expected, the American regime of warfare, petcare and egomaniacal behavior personified by Trump – which is why they had to get rid of him for exemplifying what the nation really is – has succeeded in keeping division, individual mental illness and group therapy uppermost in consciousness while social reality sinks more deeply into a massive sea of moral sewage.

The “memes” of an all too often me-me-me-me culture need to and will soon become a plural “we “encompassing all of us and leaving no one out. Capitalism cannot be saved but humanity must be, from the social pandemic of private profit first, humanity later, if ever. The viral brain surgery performed on our collective consciousness by our rulers is an aspect of capitalism and could not exist without market forces under minority and anti-democratic control. The sooner “we” understand that, the sooner “we” end pandemics and thought control on our way to real democracy in a collective human environment favoring the best for all and leaving no one out.

You gotta problem with that?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Frank Scott.

Oh, the time I have, putting in application after application, for a job. A job, that’s a double-edged word. What is that job without a jab. Now, one year-plus, perfectly accepted that the restaurant or retail outlet or any manner of “job” can require you to submit to the jab. Make that jabs. This is the continuing criminality of a rigged system.

Unfortunately, the entire globe has sucked that mRNA potion. That mRNA cleanser was only possible after how many years? The atomic bomb, splitting of the atom, orbital flight. It hasn’t been long, civilization wise, but so long evolution wise, since that lovely scientific lovely was born. Make no bones about it — science was bad before that, but the atomic era heralded in the complete prostration to the “experts,” or to the “MD,” or “engineer.” With all that education, all those cohorts, the amazing jet-jetting of these virologists and hard rock geologists, the entire crew, popping off into orbit, space station and undersea world station, it doesn’t matter.

The PhD’s and post docs (along with drop-outs like Gates) have it.

Regulatory agencies not keeping pace

Scientists and companies keep tweaking our plants and animals and even our pets but our regulatory agencies are not keeping pace. We don’t have adequate rules about how to release genetically engineered plants and animals into the environment. Businesses still introduce new plants, seeds and animals without making adequate information available to the public about what they are or where they are. And no single federal agency has responsibility for assuring the safety of genetically engineered plants and animals.

The glowing fish are shedding some light on an important problem. We don’t have sufficient oversight in place to make sure that the new animals and plants that result from genetic engineering are really safe for us and the environment. We need Congress to assign clear responsibility for genetically engineered plants and animals to one federal agency. And that agency needs to make sure that the rules for release and standards of safety glow brightly for both business and the public.

Arthur Caplan is director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Please note that this Caplan is a capitalist, one of those dangerous scientists, all-knowing types, and this site, is anything but ethics and pushback. This place pushes mandatory vaccine passports, pushes these jabs for children, pushes the idea that youth 15 or older do not need parental consent to get jabbed.

These are the masters, the controllers — another site of madness dressed up as science and open-discourse —

by Brian M Cummings M.D. and John J. Paris S.J.

Vaccine passports are likely to become a necessary part of our lives until we achieve herd immunity and no longer need worry about contracting a potentially life-threatening virus from strangers. Such ‘passports’ might not be the first item on our wish list. But the arguments for their use are basic and compelling. As Gostin and colleagues’ recent article notes, vaccine passports encourage people to be vaccinated and allow a reopening of the economy. For those who want—as much as possible– to recover life as it was prior to the pandemic, they will become a necessity.

Vaccination is not a risk-free action; it involves an assessment of both risks and benefits. Individuals whose position does not significantly impact public safety are free to decline to be vaccinated. With the adoption of a vaccine passport requirement, such declinations may cost people opportunities for social interaction and economic engagement. Such is their choice. The benefit calculation of vaccination increases the prospect going to a restaurant, sporting events and to other unrestricted activities. Vaccine passports simultaneously encourage vaccination and provide a quick way to assure a public concerned about Covid they can safely enter public venues. (source)

They control the narrative frames, the entire mix of thought. They are the shamans, the arbiters of good sense, future knowledge, and interpretations of human and non-human kind, throughout the ages.

There is no debate, really around how dictatorial and patronizing the entire project is in Capitalism, from book writing/publishing, to how you get your prostate analyzed, to how you are supposed to take those classes and lift off with a degree. Until we have reached, 2021, the massive unethical, illogical, and propagandistic level of forced jabs.

It is amazing, really, that we have let this happen — no choice, no pushback (real pushback). Those who are putting their lives at risk, who have fought the jab, have submitted. You can’t get a cappuccino or rental car without the jab passport. This is the most amazing time for the flagging masses. Even communist Cuba is into this Genetic Engineered jab. Imagine that, dark age thinking with high-tech manipulation.

So, the body can’t fight this off, or, well, 92 percent can, without major issues, or, well, we mostly can fight it off to the point of no hospitalization, incubation, but in the end, we are living caldrons for this SARS-2 to set off on variant after variant, attacking heart, lungs, liver, more, until we might be permanently damaged by the virus.

A novel virus, indeed. Those novels I have piled up as manuscripts were inventions of my own, time honored hard work, crafting, editing, cutting, and adding. Building characters, detailing settings, regulating pitch in language. All that hard work of imagination put to crafting.

Here, bio(unethical) — their Covid page:

Source They call it a toolkit, and yep, no contrarian, no pushback.

Bioethics.net and the American Journal of Bioethics have assembled a bioethics toolkit for people dealing with COVID-19.

We have a collection of important blogs from around the internet that you can find here. We also highly recommending our growing catalog of our original blog posts by leading scholars writing on bioethics in pandemics.

Other compendium resources

• The Hastings Center has assembled a number of reports and resources.Thomas Cunningham at Kaiser-Permanent has put together a comprehensive resource of academic articles, government plans, and allocation frameworks.AMA COVID-19 Ethics Resource Center

• For the best scientific information:

• For policies, protocols, and practices:

• For ethical guidelines on vaccines & allocation:

• For ethical guidelines for responding to crisis:

• For plans on triage:

• For clinical algorithms for making allocation decisions

• For CPR/DNR with COVID protocols

• For communicating with patients and others

• VitalTalk: Communication skills and sample scripts

• Communicating in a crisis

• Special journal issues/articles

Oh those scientists, working on gain of function, tweaking viruses, super-charging them, creating chimeric madness, testing a bat virus by bulking it up and putting it to the test on humanized mice. Working the spiked proteins and the messenger genes to go for the heart, lungs, vital organs.

For Christ’s sake, we get ad nauseum articles on research into coffee — too much bad for you, or a few cups a day, amazing? Cures for cancer, or cancer causing? We have every manner of deep research into whether dairy is good or bad, whether sugar is good or bad. Yet, this sticky wicket, well, we can’t even dare ask the questions around how/why/who/when/what/where have these experiments been conducted. Instant open records for the background on all the military involvement with virus research, all the 13,000 USA researchers on gain of function, all those other countries’ researchers and facilities. And, what are the effects of the mRNA and recombinant DNA molecules mucking about. Imagine, these recombinant DNA molecules are formed by laboratory methods of genetic recombination that bring together genetic material from multiple sources, creating sequences that would not otherwise be found in the genome.

Not found in nature, that is.

There are no questions, no challenges, and so we get forced jabs, globally, and no other forms of dealing with, a, this zoonotic jump of a bat virus to human (there are not bats found yet to have this SARS-2 virus; or, b, that this is man-lab made, hands down, and all of that crafting of novelty has created an out-of-control genetically engineers virus that does double, triple and quadruple duty to various humans.

To the point that St. Fauci isn’t sure about a booster, or when, but the three big Pharma Boys, already have their boosters manufactured and at the ready, in a few months.

This is not questioned — how it was anticipated, that SARS-CoV2 is now in need of double or yearly boosters.

In all manner of thinking this through, we have no agency, no collective group of people to count on who might question the narrative. We just get plowed over by history and move forward — no questions asked, or too many questions to ask.

Ahh, try finding articles and debates within mainstream journals, etc., on anyone questioning mandatory vaccine passports, and the very idea of it being wrong for this philosophy (sic) of “no jab, no job.” It is utterly disgusting how the internet has shaped up. Good luck looking for deep discussion on why mandatory vaccination programs are wrong in this day and age, and exactly, what sort of vaccine (sic) is being mandated, that is never a question in the mainstream. Of course, we have other sources that question the entire narrative, the entire issue of this novel virus, and, alas, what the chemicals they are delivering through the needle really are and what they really do. But again, passports are digital, a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle for the master race — the rich, the elite, the (point).zero-zero-zero-One percent. Oh, the war criminal, Tony Blair. This mumbo-jumbo is doublespeak, marketing emptiness, and a huge campaign for a deeper and darker agenda:

Meanwhile the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change – headed up by former UK Prime Minister Blair, a strong proponent of passport tech – lays out a five point plan for how to design an equitable scheme, arguing they need to be:

Equitable. Health passes should be available to all citizens, including people who have not been vaccinated – for reasons of not being eligible yet, for medical reasons or through personal conviction – and not forgetting the needs of non smartphone-users.

Adaptable. A pass should be able to be updated as understanding of the virus changes and as wider circumstances alter.

Seamless. It needs to be easy and quick to use to encourage adoption and be as frictionless as possible in terms of the administrative burdens on businesses or health organizations.

Transparent. Data collection and retention policies and parameters need to be strictly defined and completely open to users.

Reliable. Passports must be designed with security and privacy at their core. (Source)

These are monsters, and yet, in capitalism, in this totalitarian, or inverted totalitarian state, this is it —

Salesforce’s long game –The pandemic response has also seen cross-industry alliances between tech firms and this is continuing around the concept of health credentials. Salesforce, for example, has committed to integrating the IBM Digital Health Pass into its work.com safe return to the workplace platform offering. The cloud leader is also a founding member of the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI), alongside arch-rival Oracle and a host of healthcare organizations. The VCI aims to develop a standard model for organizations administering COVID-19 vaccines to make the immunization data available in an accessible, interoperable, digital format.

For its own part, Salesforce’s internal Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology has been heavily involved in the specifics of work.com and in considering the wider complexities of Vaccine Passports, although this last is a term that Yoav Schlesinger, Principal of Ethical AI Practice, doesn’t use, preferring to talk about the broader idea of digital health credentials:

“From our perspective, one of the most critical elements of this safe return back to ‘normal’ is that digital health credentials incorporate much more than just vaccine status. Digital health credentials need, from an equity standpoint, to allow people to demonstrate their health status through a negative COVID test, through proof of recovery and antibody tests etc, so there needs to be multiple ways to present that information, so that we can all be assured of a safe return to whatever locale and location we’re talking about, whether for travel or returning to work or attending a concert, etc.”

He adds that proof of vaccination is not the only way to establish that a workplace is safe:

“Relying exclusively on proof of vaccination status may or may not be the strategy that an employer wants to employ. I think it’s critical that employees, and anyone else, are able to also establish that we can return to work through a negative COVID test or proof of recovery as well. There will certainly be circumstances and situations where people can’t be vaccinated, because of health conditions or because of a religious conviction. We want to ensure for the sake of equity that people are able to present their health credentials and their health status in multiple formats and through multiple avenues.”

Human scum. Whitney Webb reported about the plans for expansive data collection through Vaccine Passports. Webb wrote about the Vaccine Credential Initiative’s SMART Health Cards, which were developed by governments working alongside Microsoft, Oracle and MITRE. According to Webb the developer of the cards, Josh C. Mandel, listed ‘Name, gender, birth date, mobile phone number, and email address in addition to vaccination information’, specifically as a ‘Starting point.’ (Source)

Here, the January 2021 article —

“Silicon Valley and WEF-Backed Foundation Announce Global Initiative for COVID-19 Vaccine Records” — Silicon Valley’s most influential companies, alongside healthcare companies, US intelligence contractors and the Commons Project Foundation, recently launched the Vaccination Credential Initiative. The initiative’s ambitions reach far beyond vaccines and will have major implications for civil liberties. BY WHITNEY WEBB

We can’t have these ethical discussions with philosophers, gurus, all those groups spewing “we are medical and biological ethicists.” This is contradictory, and they are in no way acting as oversight folk, or ombudsmen. They are part of the colonized, and any discourse outside their frame is labeled, mostly, unworthy, uninformed, out of place, radical for radical sakes, contrarian, reckless, dangerous, and to be ignored. “We have toolkits for stopping this mindset. We have our ways. We know how to extract and inject.”

The agenda is not hidden, in the shadows, but for most in the world, they have no bandwidth or willingness to question.

The effort to manufacture consent for an all-encompassing digital identification system is notable given that its main selling point thus far has been coercion. We have been told that without such a system we will never be able to return to work or school, never be able to travel, or never be allowed to participate normally in the economy. While this system is being introduced in this way, it is essential to point out that coercion is a built-in part of this infrastructure and, if implemented, will be used to modify human behavior to great effect, reaching far beyond just the issue of COVID-19 vaccines. — Whitney Webb

What got me onto the computer was reading Max Forte’s blog piece, ‘Race,’ ‘Diversity,’ and the University‘. He’s writing, Zero Anthropology.

Through a continual succession of fear campaigns, Canadian universities are being intellectually sanitized to suppress, marginalize, and ideally to banish contrary thought. It is all done under the banner of familiar “good intentions”. In 2018, the panic was about “rape culture”. In 2019, it was about the “climate emergency”. In 2020, it was of course about “the pandemic”. In 2021, it is about “systemic racism”. What will it be next year? An outbreak of neo-fascist cannibalism?

At least in a formal way, since 2007 (when ZA was launched as “Open Anthropology”) I have been studying the history and political-economy of academic knowledge production. When turning to the Canadian university, one learns of the “Canadianization” movement that gathered steam and strength in the 1970s and 1980s, which emphasized Canadian content in research and teaching, and Canadian hiring. At that time, Canadians were very aware of the country’s status as a dependent appendage of the US. It is a dependency that is enforced, from the top down, and where the dependency turns into cultural and political forms it can be most acutely observed in Anglophone Canada. That dependency has in fact increased: the law requiring that qualified Canadian applicants should get first preference, is routinely skirted by university departments and administrations. Our content is directly imported from the US: we are mere retail sales staff; we are spectators to knowledge production; we are, essentially, just an audience. To be deemed a serious and respectable academic in Canada, one must show advanced imitation skills in knowing how to synthesize and combine pieces of work produced by this or that prominent American/British/French scholar. Preparing a “literature review” is our favourite sport. We excel as consumers—much like regular Starbucks customers who invent complex and convoluted demands for how their “coffee” (i.e., liquid dessert) should be mixed. Our “signature” contribution involves the creative mixing of elements we had no hand in creating in the first place.

Living in an officially approved “Monkey See, Monkey Do” culture, I would inevitably become attuned to patterns of importation and imitation sweeping “Canadian academia”. It is a determined mimesis; just as it banishes integrity and originality, it now silences dissent…where what one would expect academics to do as part of their job (doubt, question, debate) is what now constitutes “dissent”. We are meant to act as bobbleheads, perpetually nodding to uphold this virtual reality of uniformity, to pretend unanimity lest the spectre of “disagreement” should rear its ugly head.

He’s spot on in so many ways, but in the end, he is parsing about diversity programs/training/ brainwashing. Absolutely, much of the diversity training is infantilized, and retrograde. I think in many ways, though, Max misses the point of academia — or the way it is set up, and has been. It is a training camp, mostly, for the colonized, the believes in Western Civilization, in discourse and knowledge in a most empirical way, and also, it is a place of disgusting hierarchies, and lock-step. Yes, the new in thing, the new normal, is diversity training, and LGBTQAI+ work. This stuff is fluff, window dressing, and alas, the corporation, THE CORPORATION(s) have colonized higher education, and K12 is a boot camp for compliance, follow the crowd, believe in authority, go the way, not against any grain.

I’ve been on many mandatory diversity trainings, and yes, some content is childish, touchy feely, pop psychology, and, to be honest, yes, we need to tear down the entire system, and having LGBTQAI+ and BIPOC in the chambers of power, that is it, no, the Black Misleadership Class, as Glen Ford calls this reality.

By 1970, the Black Radical Tradition lay mostly in the graveyard, and the way was clear for the Black Misleadership Class to monopolize Black politics on behalf of their corporate overseers. The first act of the first big city Black mayor, Cleveland’s Carl Stokes, was to put the police under the command of a Black retired general, whose first act was to issue the cops flesh- and bone-destroying hollow point bullets.

The rise of the almost entirely Democrat-allied Black Misleadership Class is perfectly coterminous with construction of the Black Mass Incarceration State. The “New Jim Crow” was a bipartisan project, initiated under Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which vastly increased the manpower and funding for local police departments, and was put on hyper-drive by Republican President Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs”–a War on Blacks that never ended but was re-declared by Republican President Reagan and reinforced by Democrat President Bill Clinton. At the local level, the exponential growth of the Mass Black Incarceration regime was administered by increasingly Black city governments, which oversaw and processed the deportation of millions of Black men, women and children to the Prison Gulag. Virtually all of these Black operatives of race and class oppression are Democrats. And all of them are celebrating their own political ascension as the wondrous outcome of Dr. King’s “dream.”

By 2014, 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus was voting to continue the Pentagon 1033 program that funnels billions of dollars in military weapons and gear to local police departments. Four years later, 75 percent of the Black Caucus voted to make police a “protected class” and assault on cops a federal crime. (See BAR, “Black Caucus Sells Out Its Constituents Again–to the Cops.”)

The Black misleaders are as silly as they are shameless, but they are not ineffectual. No white man could eviscerate Dr. King’s radical legacy, or make Malcolm X appear harmless to the imperial order–that’s a job for the Black Misleadershsip Class. While Dr. King rejected an alliance with the “triple evils,” Black Democratic misleaders describe their deal with the Devil as smart, “strategic” politics. They whip up war fever against small, non-white nations that seek only the right to govern themselves, behaving no differently on the world scene–and sometimes worse–than Donald Trump.

They shame and weaken Black America, and have joined the enemies of life on Earth. King would shake his head, mournfully. Malcolm would keep his tight smile, doggedly. Then both would organize to expose and depose the Black Misleadership Class.

Interesting, how one guy’s blog precipitates this loose ends response. There are corollaries, to the Forced Jab, the Forced Digital Gulag, the Forced Surveillance State up our asses, to what happened to MLK and Malcolm X. They were outliers in this country, but not worldwide, not surprisingly. Not sure what the Canadian Max Forte has to say, but in the end, I believe the white race, even those believing in good intentions, are flawed, to the max. Now, white race means European whites, Catholic Church white, Jewish white, so-so many (most all) billionaire white, millionaire white.

The Life and Times of Hubert Harrison: A Forgotten Synthesis of African-American Socialism and Black Nationalism, Review of Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 by Jeffrey B. Perry (Columbia University Press, 2009). In the first quarter of the 20th century, the major, competing trends of Black American political thought were already in vivid evidence: Black nationalist and socialist tendencies vied with corporate-backed accommodation. In Harlem, an extraordinary St. Croix-born activist-thinker named Hubert Harrison emerged on the scene, described as “more race conscious than [A. Philip] Randolph and more class conscious than [Marcus] Garvey.”

In the following presidential election year of 1912, Perry explores the evolving political thought of Harrison in a discussion of a new set of articles by Harrison which appeared in the Chicago based International Socialist Review amid a growing, but not fully manifest tension between Harrison and the Socialist Party, which masked his simmering disillusionment with the party. In an article taking off on Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” Harrison’s “Black Man’s Burden” depicted the suffering of African-Americans under white over-lordship. Over eight million African-Americans were disfranchised in sixteen Southern states by fraud and force, lacking political rights to protect their economic rights (i.e. property and jobs). Part two of the “Black Man’s Burden” demonstrated how the southern state school segregation laws contributed to the underfunding, creation of industrial education or “labor-caste schools” and miseducation of African-Americans. In these two articles, Harrison aimed a devastating critique at the accommodationist philosophy of Booker T. Washington, which publicly eschewed voting rights and a liberal arts college/​university education. Washington’s lieutenants had successfully conspired to obtain the removal of Harrison from his $1,000 a year job at the post office for two anti-Washington articles in the New York Sun newspaper, thus causing great economic hardship to Harrison’s family. Harrison’s final article in the International Socialist Review, “Socialism and the Negro,” was based on an earlier pro-IWW speech, in which he asserted African-Americans rather than constituting a reactionary hindrance to socialism, as some socialist theorists like Algie Simmons and Charles Vail claimed, were indeed the key component in the struggle by the American proletariat without which socialism in America stood little chance. (Source)

I have a deep suspicion that we dissenters, dissidents, oppositional types, questioners, doubters of the official histories/narratives/sciences, and those of us who have a compunction to not trust the bloody intercourse of brute capitalism-militarism-government, that we are in one way or another, in the process of being exterminated. We are the brutes to heads of those Fortune 5000 Corp./LLC/Wall Street devils. We represent everything wrong with free-thought.

Raoul Peck’s HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes isn’t easy to watch — but it’s important popular education on the 600-year development of the concept and system of white supremacy associated with colonialism, slavery, and genocide.

Within the film, Peck addresses the complexity of his own project, including its rhetorical implications for an intended audience, in a risky but interesting way. After providing a four-hour alternative history — alternative to the traditional mainstream education provided in America, at least — Peck concludes that it’s not really education that’s needed:

“The educated general public has always largely known what atrocities have been committed and are being committed in the name of progress, civilization, socialism, democracy, and the market.”

Mike Hale of the New York Times found this conclusion maddening:

“He closes with a reproving phrase that echoes through the film: “It’s not knowledge we lack.” But he declines to say what it is we lack — compassion? Willpower? If there is something we possess that could have made history different, either he doesn’t know or he’s not telling.”

But Peck’s conclusion is the most interesting aspect of the film. The implication seems clear: the majority knows the history, but doesn’t care, at least not enough. Peck’s jarring effects, in keeping with the groundwork laid by liberation cinema, seem designed to make us feel so sick of the history we’re part of and the system we’re in, we’ll actually lash out and try to destroy it.

One docuseries isn’t nearly enough, obviously. It’s going to take a lot of furious filmmaking, and organizing, and speechmaking, and protesting, and marching, and fighting, to get a revolt going. Peck’s doing his part. (Source)

That is the maddening aspect of today, that for most, they do not know the history of the USA and the White Race and Civilization and what they have all done to imprison, poison, indenture, shackle, co-opt, colonize, erase, flood with fear our own ability to see through the madness. This culture and capitalism have always been a punishing thing, and a giant psychological operation, way before Edward Bernays or PT Barnum . . . way back to the plagiarists and fabulists of those Abrahamic religions.

Between 2011 and 2020, Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet (the owner of Google), Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft — known as the “Silicon Six” — paid roughly $219 billion in income taxes, which amounts to just 3.6% of their more than $6 trillion in total revenue, according to the Fair Tax Foundation. Income tax is paid on profits, not total revenue, and researchers said these tech giants are adept at reducing their tax liabilities by shifting profits to offshore tax havens.  (Source)

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Censuring the truth. What a pity! What can now be called “Covid Deep State” – the same “superior and super-rich elite” buys practically all the mainstream media – television, radio and print – in basically all the 193 UN member countries. Looks like there is no escape. That’s what they would like. That’s why the entire world had to be locked down for the virus at once on or around the 15th of March 2020.

It is an epidemiological impossibility that the entire world at once is affected by a virus, let alone by what WHO then dared to call a “pandemic”. However, the truth always seeps through, sooner or later. Just think of Leonard Cohen’s extraordinary anthem “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. The truth will always sooner or later penetrate the darkness.

Right now, it looks like the time is coming when the huge heavy vessel that carries this somber elite’s lies and deceits straight ahead, ignoring all objections and arguments, and as if there were no obstacle to hold it back – as money buys everything – this vessel is slowly but gradually and it seems unstoppably turning. People are awaking around the globe.

Independent scientists, virologists, medical doctors with integrity and the warmth of true humanity have abandoned the matrix and taken the Red Pill. This is in reference to the 1999 movie, The Matrix, where taking the red pill means the willingness to learn a potentially unsettling or life-changing truth, or remaining in contented dark ignorance with the blue pill. Amazingly, the movie has not yet been banned and “fact-checked” off the screens and internet.

And so, the study referred to by Nature.com of acquired immunity – probably for life – makes vaccination not only redundant, but outright dangerous. The text is also available in German. The study has revealed that after 11 months of infection antibodies are still present.

Dr, Mike Yeadon, former Vice President of Pfizer and Chief of Science at Pfizer, a top virologist, has studied SARS cases in 2019 from the SARS outbreak in China of 2002/2003. He found antibodies still in all of his examined former SARS-infected people. He concludes that SARS, alias covid, antibodies are therefore effective for at least 17 years and following his experience he assumes for life. See here

This actually means that all those who have had the covid infection have developed various degrees of antibodies which make vaccination not only unnecessary, but dangerous, as the vaccine, especially the mRNA-type “emergency gene therapy” – never approved by CDC / DFA as a vaccine – could affect and destroy a person’s naturally acquired immune system, not only against covid, but against a wide range of diseases. Therefore, coercing people with natural antibodies into taking the jab is a crime. So-called mRNA “scientists” know exactly what they are doing.

Dr. Mike Yeadon goes a step further, claiming that the mRNA-jab contains a spike protein, called syncytin-1, vital for the formation of human placenta in women. If the “vaccine” – or rather the CDC-called emergency gene therapy – works, Yeadon says, “we form an immune response against the spike protein, then we are also training the female body to attack syncytin-1 which could lead to infertility of women of an unspecified duration.” In other words, likely for the rest of their child-bearing life.

On 1 December 2020, Dr. Yeadon and German Doctor Wolfgang Wodarg wrote to the European Medicines Agency (EMA), urging them to carry out vaccine trials, including for their effect on women’s infertility. They never received an answer.

In an article published by Global Research on 22 April, here, Nathaniel Linderman referred to a study by Dr. Bart Classen, claiming that mRNA Pfizer jabs – allow me to repeat: Not vaccines but emergency gene-therapies – caused different kinds of neurodegenerative diseases, including the risk of Prion disease.

Dr. Bart Classen’s research indicates that the Pfizer untested mRNA vaccine creates new proteins that can actually integrate into the human genome as reported by the National Library of Medicine. In other words, degenerative brain conditions may appear at any time in your life after receiving the vaccine.

The Pfizer vaccine is, however, not the only type of untested inoculation that causes neurodegenerative defects, many of them deadly and most of them unreversible or only partially curable. There are Moderna, J&J, AstraZeneca and more.

Founder Robert Kennedy Jr. of Children’s Health Defense – The Defender – reports on 2 June 2021 about a 38-year-old woman, who nearly died after a J&J covid-vaccine. She suffered various organ failures. The woman was healthy until she received the J&J untested covid “vaccine”. Within a week, she started experiencing headaches, abdominal pain and nausea and was eventually diagnosed with severe blood clots that caused most of her vital organs to fail. Only intense medical treatment, 33 days of hospitalization, of which 22 days of intensive care, saved her life – and left her with a medical bill of over a US$ 1 million – for which nobody admits responsibility. See here.

God only knows how many unreported cases there are – some very likely even worse and many deaths. And more injuries and death may be expected by vaccinated people as time goes on – see Dr. Yeadon’s suspicion that we may be set up for mass depopulation .

The young lady, who received the untested J&J covid “vaccine”, is now in occupational and physical therapy. She has to learn basic motor skills, including writing and using a fork, and she had to relearn how to walk. However, she will never again be the same as before the disastrous jab.

And there is as of yet no relief for her one-million-dollar medical bills.

Since the government shields vaccine makers from law suits under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 which effectively granted vaccine manufacturers freedom from civil tort liability. Instead, several years later, the US government established the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICO), which turns down most of the applicants; i.e., fewer than one in ten injured people receive compensation. And this is in the US. In other countries such compensation does not exist, unless the government assumes the risks which is not (yet) formalized in most countries, if in any.

For example, in Europe, no EU country has declared assuming the covid-vaxx injury compensation risk. When not too long ago a journalist asked the Swiss Health Minister, what about compensation for vaccination injuries? He was taken aback by the question and stuttered something to the effect, “We haven’t thought of it yet, but there are unlikely going to be injuries.”

In the meantime, by the end of May 2021, the EU recorded more than 12,000 deaths related to covid vaccines and more than 100,000 serious injuries and these figures may be vastly underreported. Yet, no official compensation scheme has been established. And governments who follow the Covid Deep State orders on fulfilling quotas of vaccinated people are quiet and ignore the topic.

No wonder, the Covid Cabal, those ultra-rich who claim to call the shots on covid and its eugenist agenda, are getting nervous. With such messages of immediate vaxx-injuries and predictions of mass depopulation within the next 3 to 4 years, people may wake up and start resisting. See here and here and this by Dr. Joseph Mercola and Dr. Mike Yeadon.

In the heat of the vaxx-haste and people becoming increasingly alert, representatives of the Deep Dark Covid State, the instigators of the crime of recent human history, have to take recourse to threats. The Editor in Chief of the reputed Natur.com online research paper claimed having recently received two anonymous calls from people who pretended to work for the US government – is it true? – saying that they are themselves not taking the vaccination, but there was a quota that on average 70% of the world population had to be vaccinated by 2022.

See this testimonial video (28 May 2021) from Natural News:  – the Vaccine Deep State issues a DIRECT THREAT to Natural News – “you follow our orders or else…”.

Something to think about but always with the premise they will not win. Our human spirit and will power to resist is much stronger than their Luciferian plan.  We must wake up in solidarity, and we will. That’s why they are so desperate to “vaccinate” as many people as possible. 70% of the world population is their target – as fast as possible, before we wake up. Once you are vaccinated it’s too late to change. The effects may be irreversible.

But we are already awake – right?

As of 2 June 2021, according to WHO, a worldwide total of 1 581 509 628 have been vaccinated. See this . Out of an estimated 7.8 billion (2020), that’s about 20%. There is a long way to go to 70%, notwithstanding the hundreds of millions, if not in the billions, who outright refuse the jab. And if 70% is really their target, then coercion might have just begun.

But not to worry.

People are just about to wake up, as they start realizing that there is a much more sinister agenda behind the forced and coerced vaccination, and especially as their injury and death rates increasingly surface and are becoming known. Our human mind and collective will-power is much stronger than their diabolical darkness  no matter the money they put behind their sinister objective.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Koenig.

But at some point, markets become saturated, demand rates fall and overproduction and overaccumulation of capital becomes a problem. In response, we have seen credit markets expand and personal debt increase to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages have been squeezed, financial and real estate speculation rise (new investment markets), stock buy backs and massive bail outs and subsidies (public money to maintain the viability of private capital) and an expansion of militarism (a major driving force for many sectors of the economy).

We have also witnessed systems of production abroad being displaced for global corporations to then capture and expand markets in foreign countries.

The old normal

Much of what is outlined above is inherent to capitalism. But the 1980s was a crucial period that helped set the framework for where we find ourselves today.

Remember when the cult of the individual was centre stage? It formed part of the Reagan-Thatcher rhetoric of the ‘new normal’ of 1980s neoliberalism.

In the UK, the running down of welfare provision was justified by government-media rhetoric about ‘individual responsibility’, reducing the role of the state and the need to ‘stand on your own two feet’. The selling off of public assets to profiteering corporations was sold to the masses on the basis of market efficiency and ‘freedom of choice’.

The state provision of welfare, education, health services and the role of the public sector was relentlessly undermined by neoliberal dogma and the creed that the market (global corporations) constituted the best method for supplying human needs.

Thatcher’s stated mission was to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit by rolling back the ‘nanny state’. She wasted little time in crushing the power of the trade unions and privatising key state assets.

Despite her rhetoric, she did not actually reduce the role of the state. She used its machinery differently, on behalf of business. Neither did she unleash the ‘spirit of entrepreneurialism’. Economic growth rates under her were similar as in the 1970s, but a concentration of ownership occurred and levels of inequality rocketed.

Margaret Thatcher was well trained in perception management, manipulating certain strands of latent populist sentiment and prejudice. Her free market, anti-big-government platitudes were passed off to a section of the public that was all too eager to embrace them as a proxy for remedying all that was wrong with Britain. For many, what were once regarded as the extreme social and economic policies of the right became entrenched as the common sense of the age.

Thatcher’s policies destroyed a fifth of Britain’s industrial base in just two years alone. The service sector, finance and banking were heralded as the new drivers of the economy, as much of Britain’s manufacturing sector was out-sourced to cheap labour economies.

Under Thatcher, employees’ share of national income was slashed from 65% to 53%. Long gone are many of the relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs that helped build and sustain the economy. In their place, the country has witnessed the imposition of a low taxation regime and low-paid and insecure ‘service sector’ jobs (no-contract work, macjobs, call centre jobs – many of which soon went abroad) as well as a real estate bubble, credit card debt and student debt, which helped to keep the economy afloat.

However, ultimately, what Thatcher did was – despite her rhetoric of helping small-scale businesses and wrapping herself in the national flag – facilitate the globalisation process by opening the British economy to international capital flows and allowing free rein for global finance and transnational corporations.

Referring to the beginning of this article, it is clear whose happiness and well-being counts most and whose does not matter at all as detailed by David Rothkopf in his 2008 book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making. Members of the superclass belong to the megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world and come from the highest echelons of finance, industry, the military, government and other shadow elites. These are the people whose interests Margaret Thatcher was serving.

These people set the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, G-7, G-20, NATO, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.

And let us not forget the various key think tanks and policy making arenas like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institute and Chatham House as well as the World Economic Forum (WEF), where sections of the global elite forge policies and strategies and pass them to their political handmaidens.

Driven by the vision of its influential executive chairman Klaus Schwab, the WEF is a major driving force for the dystopian ‘great reset’, a tectonic shift that intends to change how we live, work and interact with each other.

The new normal

The great reset envisages a transformation of capitalism, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as livelihoods and entire sectors are sacrificed to boost the monopoly and hegemony of pharmaceutical corporations, high-tech/big data giants, Amazon, Google, major global chains, the digital payments sector, biotech concerns, etc.

Under the cover of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, the great reset is being rolled out under the guise of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in which smaller enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies. Economies are being ‘restructured’ and many jobs and roles will be carried out by AI-driven technology.

The WEF says the public will ‘rent’ everything they require: stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.

At the same time new (‘green product’) markets are being created and, on the back of COVID, fresh opportunities for profit extraction are opening up abroad. For instance, World Bank Group President David Malpass has stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various lockdowns that have been implemented in response to the Covid-19 crisis. This ‘help’ will be on condition that neoliberal reforms and the undermining of public services are implemented and become further embedded.

Just a month into the COVID crisis, the IMF and World Bank were already facing a deluge of aid requests from developing countries. Scores of countries were asking for bailouts and loans. Ideal cover for rebooting the global economy via a debt crisis and the subsequent privatisation of national assets and the further ‘structural adjustment’ of economies.

Many people waste no time in referring to this as  some kind of ‘Marxist’ or ‘communist’ takeover of the planet because a tiny elite will be dictating policies. This has nothing to do with Marxism. An authoritarian capitalist elite – supported by their political technocrats – aims to secure even greater control of the global economy. It will no longer be a (loosely labelled) ‘capitalism’ based on ‘free’ markets and competition (not that those concepts ever really withstood proper scrutiny). Economies will be monopolised by global players, not least e-commerce platforms run by the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Facebook and Google and their multi-billionaire owners.

Essential (for capitalism) new markets will also be created through the ‘financialisation’ and ownership of all aspects of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the fraudulent notion of protecting the environment.

The so-called ‘green economy’ will fit in with the notion of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’. A bunch of billionaires and their platforms will control every aspect of the value chain. Of course, they themselves will not reduce their own consumption or get rid of their personal jets, expensive vehicles, numerous exclusive homes or ditch their resource gobbling lifestyles. Reduced consumption is meant only for the masses.

They will not only control and own data about consumption but also control and own data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved. Independent enterprises will disappear or become incorporated into the platforms acting as subservient cogs. Elected representatives will be mere technocratic overseers of these platforms and the artificial intelligence tools that plan and determine all of the above.

The lockdowns and restrictions we have seen since March 2020 have helped boost the bottom line of global chains and the e-commerce giants and have cemented their dominance. Many small and medium-size independent enterprises have been pushed towards bankruptcy. At the same time, fundamental rights have been eradicated under COVID19 government measures.

Politicians in countries throughout the world have been using the rhetoric of the WEF’s great reset, talking of the need to ‘build back better’ for the ‘new normal’. They are all on point. Hardly a coincidence. Essential to this ‘new normal’ is the compulsion to remove individual liberties and personal freedoms given that, in the ‘green new normal’, unfettered consumption will no longer be an option for the bulk of the population.

It has long been the case that a significant part of the working class has been deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ – three decades ago, such people were sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. They lost their jobs due to automation and offshoring. They have had to rely on meagre state welfare and run-down public services.

But what we are now seeing is the possibility of hundreds of millions around the world being robbed of their livelihoods. Forget about the benign sounding ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and its promised techno-utopia. What we are witnessing right now seems to be a major restructuring of capitalist economies.

With AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision (3D printing/manufacturing, drone technology, driverless vehicles, lab grown food, farmerless farms, robotics, etc), a mass labour force – and therefore mass education, mass welfare, mass healthcare provision and entire systems that were in place to reproduce labour for capitalist economic activity – will no longer be required. As economic activity is restructured, labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed.

In a reorganised system that no longer needs to sell the virtues of excessive individualism (consumerism), the levels of political and civil rights and freedoms we have been used to will not be tolerated.

Neoliberalism might have reached its logical conclusion (for now). Making trade unions toothless, beating down wages to create unimaginable levels of inequality and (via the dismantling of Bretton Woods) affording private capital so much freedom to secure profit and political clout under the guise of ‘globalisation’ would inevitably lead to one outcome.

A concentration of wealth, power, ownership and control at the top with large sections of the population on state-controlled universal basic income and everyone subjected to the discipline of an emerging biosecurity surveillance state designed to curtail liberties ranging from freedom of movement and assembly to political protest and free speech.

Perception management is, of course, vital for pushing through all of this. Rhetoric about ‘liberty’ and ‘individual responsibility’ worked a treat in the 1980s to help bring about a massive heist of wealth. This time, it is a public health scare and ‘collective responsibility’ as part of a strategy to help move towards near-monopolistic control over economies by a handful of global players.  

And the perception of freedom is also being managed. Once vaccinated many will begin to feel free. Freer than under lockdown. But not really free at all.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

Boiling down some points of the Cummings show: there was a failure on the part of the Johnson government to respond to the pandemic.  Johnson was unfit for office.  The Health Secretary Matt Hancock should have been sacked for any number of decisions.  Lockdown measures were imposed too late to prevent the surge of infections.  There was simply no overall master plan to cope with a pandemic.

The political strategist apologised for the various tiers of decision makers and advisers, including himself, for falling calamitously “short of the standards that the public has a right to expect”.  He apologised to those families who “unnecessarily” lost loved ones and confessed that “lots of key people were literally skiing” instead of moving to a “war footing” in January and February last year.

The portrait of Johnson is superbly unsympathetic.  The prime minister’s clownish credentials come blundering through.  The novel coronavirus was dismissed as “the new swine flu”, a mere “scare story”.   He even suggested receiving an injection of the virus live on television “so everyone realises it’s nothing to be frightened of”.  Bodies piled up high was a preferable outcome to imposing a third lockdown in the autumn of 2020.  And as for information, the PM could not take himself away from the Daily Telegraph’s view of events.

The Cummings-Johnson relationship duly atrophied. “The heart of the problem was, fundamentally, I regarded him as unfit for the job.  And I was trying to create a structure around him to try and stop what I thought would have been bad decisions, and push things through against his wishes.”

Some of the choicest blows are reserved for the Health Secretary, who “should have been fired for at least 15 to 20 things”.  Hancock held back the testing regime and interfered in the development of a mass testing system, conduct Cummings found “criminal” and “disgraceful”.  Hancock was mendacious in meetings held in the cabinet room of Downing Street, assuring those in attendance that people “were going to be tested [for COVID-19] before they went back to care homes [from hospitals].”  He also used health experts such as the chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and chief medical adviser Chris Witty as shields for government incompetence.

Cummings delighted the political science fraternity with his display in the Attlee suite in Portcullis House.  He was, Matthew Flinders of the University of Sheffield, asserted, “at his most magnificent and Machiavellian: a quite beautiful case study in the art of planting seeds and laying traps.”  The Spectator, a magazine once edited by Johnson, was blind to the retributive nature of the testimony.  “His decision to identify the many mistakes made at the start of the pandemic is not about seeking vengeance; it is a vital process to ensure that errors are identified and not repeated.”  How noble.

To a degree, the Cummings account is useful in pointing out administrative failings.  The pandemic blueprint was inadequate, developed to fight influenza rather than respiratory variants in the form of coronavirus.  Dissenting views were not countenanced.  “It was a classic historical example of groupthink in action,” assessed Cummings. “The more people from outside attacked, the more internally said, ‘They don’t understand, they haven’t got access to our information.’”

The response from Johnson to such accounts and depictions is crudely simple: remind voters that Britain’s vaccination effort has been stellar.  The UK is one of the leading countries in the mass vaccination programme.  Specifically regarding Cummings’s testimony, the “commentary”, claimed Johnson, did not “bear relation to reality”.

Hancock’s approach was much the same: stay focused on the vaccination drive.  Forget past crimes and misdemeanours.  He also denied that he lied about patients being sent from hospital to care homes without being tested first.  “My recollection of events is that I committed to delivering that testing for people going from hospital into care homes when we could do it.”  The relevant factor was the timing of it; the capacity for testing had to be built up.

And there is the obvious point that Cummings, despite blaming Johnson and seeking his own restoration, remains chipped and damaged.  The display by the senior strategist in the rose garden of No 10 last year featuring an apologia for his infamous trip to County Durham in breach of lockdown laws was a hard one to efface.  He did concede that doing so had “undermined public confidence”.  But he was ready with an explanation.  Moving his family out of London took place after his wife received death threats from people gathered outside the home.  “The whole thing was a complete disaster and the truth is… if I just basically sent my family back out of London and said here’s the truth to the public, I think people would have understood the situation.”

When asked whether the additional trip by Cummings to Barnard Castle from the family home in County Durham was actually for reasons of testing his eyesight, the dark eminence returned to form.  “If you’re going to drive 300 miles to go back to work, popping down the road for 30 miles and back to see how you feel… it didn’t seem crazy.”  It was not, as committee chair Jeremy Hunt suggested, a birthday celebration for his wife.  “If I was going to make up a story I would come up with a better one than that.”

Patrick Diamond of Queen Mary, University of London, identifies the central paradox of British government that proved so detrimental to the pandemic response.  The British state might be highly centralised but “the centre of government lacks capacity.”  Policymaking by the core executive has also been undermined by the altering of relations between the ministerial group and the civil service. Then comes the “growth of territorial conflict with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.”  The result of this: a failure of coordination of governments across the UK in responding to COVID-19.  What Cummings did was render such dysfunctions flesh and folly.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Almost nothing in the main report could be seen as remarkable in these jaded times.  It reads like a sharp vision of looking backwards, a history of folly and stumbles.  The protagonist, SARS-CoV-2, proved wily, moving more rapidly than surveillance could detect it, ducking the monitors and seducing the examiners.  The rest of the actors in the show proved, to varying degrees, to be inept, indifferent and even callous.

Such attitudes were shared in a climate of prior warning.  Humanity has already faced events of mass viral mortality.  That there would eventually be a pandemic of this scale was being discussed well ahead of the novel coronavirus march.  But governments, planners and policy makers seemed unmoved.  When action took place, it was tardy.  “Although public health officials, infectious disease experts, and previous international commissions and reviews had warned of potential pandemics and urged robust preparations since the first outbreak of SARS, COVID-19 still took large parts of the world by surprise.”

The WHO itself is not spared a few chastising blows by the panel members.  The organisation’s Emergency Committee should have, they argued, declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern a week earlier than it did: on January 22, at its first meeting, rather than January 30, by which time there were already 98 cases in 18 countries outside China.  Not doing so also caused critical delays in mustering a global response.  “The meeting of the WHO IHR Emergency Committee called to discuss the outbreak on 22-23 January was split on whether to recommend that the outbreak be declared a PHEIC.”

A central theme emerges: communication.  And it is rather unsatisfactory.  “It is glaringly obvious that February 2020 was a lost month,” the report states.  Various Asian countries speedily responded, introducing intense testing and tracking regimes. But the WHO remained tentative.  Evidence was weighed, balanced, and considered.  Standard and sober as this was, the WHO did not consider convincing material that would prove to be beneficial.  One was the importance of wearing masks.

The result: a pandemic that busily infected 150 million people, killed over three million people, and exposed deep inequalities.  (Pandemics remain, historically, the great unmaskers.)  “Division and inequality between and within countries have been exacerbated, and the impact has been severe on people who are already marginalized and disadvantaged.”

The report, and its authors, are stern in mood. “If travel restrictions,” former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and panel co-chair combatively insists, “had been imposed more quickly, more widely, again that would have been a serious inhibition on the rapid transmission of the disease that remains the same today.”  Clark, for all the merit of that assertion, ignores the logistical nightmares, hub routes, transit points and freedom of movement principles of such blocs as the European Union.

Not all actors in the COVID-19 disaster show receive a lashing.  The conduct of clinicians within the last two weeks of December 2019 and January 2020 receives a nod of approval.  They showed “diligence” in noticing “clusters of unusual pneumonia”.  They sent samples for screening and “escalated their concerns about this cluster of unexplained disease to local health authorities.”

The panel also makes an assortment of recommendations.  They call “for an all-out-effort to reach the world’s population with vaccines within a year and set in place the infrastructure needed for at least 5 billion booster doses annually.”  They urge the application of “non-pharmaceutical public health measures systematically and rigorously in every country at the scale the epidemiological situation requires.”  High income countries should commit “at least one billion vaccine doses no later than 1 September 2021 and more than two billion doses by mid-2022” through the GAVI COVAX Advance Market Commitment.

The conventional model behind the making of vaccines is also challenged, with the panel insisting on establishing “a truly global end-to-end platform for vaccines, diagnostics, therapeutics, and essential supplies”.  Rather than leaving innovation to the market, vaccines and related products should be seen as public goods.  Unequal access to such products could be overcome through technology transfer, voluntary licensing and financing of regional manufacturing capacity.

Other suggestions point to a broader, health surveillance system that will not be hostage to national interests and clunky sovereignty.  “The emergence of COVID-19,” the report notes, “was characterized by a mix of some early and rapid action, but also by delay, hesitation, and denial”.  From this, an epidemic grew; from that, a pandemic.  To that end, it was suggested that “surveillance and alert systems at national, regional and global levels must be redesigned”, all should be “able to function at near-instantaneous speed.”  The WHO should be given greater powers and a higher budget.  Its officials should be permitted access with minimal notice.  Many governments are unlikely to agree.

Of some interest is the suggested Global Health Threats Council.  Stacked with former presidents and prime ministers of various high-, middle- and low-income countries, it would perform the role of moralising guardian, taking governments to task for not preparing for, or responding to, the public health emergencies as designated by health specialists.  Such a body, however, risks becoming a toothless entity with a megaphone.

The panel’s report has a title that sounds much like previous inquiries drawn from despair and destined to be lost: COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic.  It will be filed in the vault of aspirations along with those noble wars that went wrong with criminal stupidity, the victory by Christmas that never took place, and efforts of failed solidarity in sharing scientific discoveries.  “They are trying to grab a moment that everyone knows will pass pretty fast,” suggested Stephen Morrison of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.  Global public health responses, sporadic, erratic and politically divided, will do everything to impair any such realisation.  Nationalism continues to throb and disrupt.  However well contained the novel coronavirus is, another threat to public health will be lurking.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

How did we ever get to this point … to the point where, as I put it in The Covidian Cult, “instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it?”

To understand this, one needs to understand how cults control the minds of their members, because totalitarian ideological movements operate more or less the same way, just on a much larger, societal scale.

“The Covidian Cult (Part II)” by C.J. Hopkins

I had a job helping people get jobs. Individuals with developmental disabilities. Brain injured, too. That job ended because I sent in a bunch of grievances about hostile work environment, a supervisor who threatened me and yelled at me, and an amazing half year of the most unprofessional work atmosphere I have ever experienced!

With the Covid Madness in my state, in this county, some of these clients landed jobs as janitors/custodians in the schools in Lincoln County.

Oregon is one of those states that is full of trembling “liberals” and “holed up 2nd Amendment lovers.” The state is in an economic spiral, and like Washington State, run by the new dictators of the Democratic Party breed.

It’s the state with a history of Sundown Towns, and one that has a governor who touts herself as being bi-sexual and ready to slay those anti-LGBTQA dragons, but when it comes to the citizens of Oregon now in lockdown hell, with suicide rates doubling for young people, businesses going belly up, housing shortages, evictions on the horizon, you can just hear Kate Brown’s smarmy ameliorating.

Here’s another fascist at the Washington Post, yammering away:

The solutions to the problem of heightened risk among unvaccinated people range from very difficult to extremely easy. Very difficult: Convince unvaccinated people that — notwithstanding the general optimism — they may, in fact, be at higher risk than before. Particularly if they’re planning to be vaccinated, now is the worst possible time to let down their guard. They should continue to wear their masks, keep their distance and avoid risky situations — even as they see their vaccinated brethren enjoying their newfound freedom. Equally challenging: Require proof of vaccination (so-called immunity passports) to access places that don’t require masks and social distancing.

Easy: Everyone gets vaccinated when their number comes up. Problem solved.

This is the way of Washington State’s governor, Inslee, and our state’s, Brown.

So, fires, or, Covid Cult? This is the state of Capitalism, where criminal operations — Big Pharma — have got the ear of Gods like Fauci and the boot-lickers like our governors. All governors when it comes to the rapacious stupidity of believing in privatizing everything, throwing profits (taxpayer money) at the corporations, and then tying up the purse strings (taxpayer money, and uncollected millionaire and billionaire illegal loot) when it comes to housing and food and medical clinics for all.

The world’s largest firefighting plane has been shut down just as Western states prepare for a wildfire season that fire officials fear could be worse than the average year.

Tara Lee, a spokeswoman for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, said via email Friday that the state’s Department of Natural Resources was alerted to the shutdown of the worlds’ largest firefighting plane called the Global SuperTanker.

— Source

This is one fat example (one of a million) of the fall of the capitalist empire, that is, the fall of one million people and hundreds of communities at a time. A firefighting tanker, privately owned, costing taxpayers up to $250,000 a day. Imagine that, our fire season is now 12 months, and we are in megadrought 3.0 here, and the governors are mandating those Covid shots, but imagine this — smoke, particulates, evacuations, immolation. In this great trillion-dollar-a-year-thrown-at-the-military mighty country, we pay for one effing jet. We get fire fighters from Australia, man, and Mexico. Use prisoners to be on-the-ground hot-shots. All those jets and planes and copters, and we have one privately held jet that now is out of service.

This hubris of it all. Yes, this all ties into the Covid Cult and the trillion-dollar giveaway to the Covid War Profiteers.

Back to my Oregon, the Intel and Nike State.

Old Nike, you know that Nike, the one run by Phil Knight.

[embedded content]

The New Rulers Of The World: Through secret filming, Pilger shows how cheap labour in an Indonesian sweatshop produces goods such as Nike, Adidas, Gap and Reebok running shoes that are sold for up to 250 times the amount received by workers, about 72p a day. Almost 70 million Indonesians live in extreme poverty, many in labour camps housing the workers, where children are under-nourished and prone to disease. Inside the sweatshops, mostly young women are crowded together under the glare of strip lighting in temperatures of up to 40°C, some doing 24-hour shifts.

Observing the parallel between modern-day globalisation and old-world imperialism, Pilger recalls that Indonesia has been “plundered by the West for hundreds of years”. Globalisation in Asia began in Indonesia, where Western governments backed dictator General Suharto after he seized power in the mid-1960s. “Within a year of the bloodbath,” says Pilger, “Indonesia’s economy was effectively redesigned in America, giving the West access to vast mineral wealth, markets and cheap labour – what President Nixon called the greatest prize in Asia.” In 1997, the World Bank had called the country a “model pupil” of the global economy.

I bring this up because, well, the people who I landed jobs for within the school system arem of course, exploited by the Lincoln County School District and the contractor, Sodexo. Nike or Sodexo, all those transnational and sweatshop condition loving companies are all the same — socialism for the CEOs and stockholders, capitalism (low wages, whatever the market can bear) for the workers! Profits for Nike, and hell for the foreign workers, the foreign economies, the foreign soil! Nike swoosh!

THAT Sodexo —

For around ten years, Sodexo, a French company that is one of the world’s largest multinational corporations, has provided Saint Peter’s with cafeteria food. But Sodexo does more than just provide food services to universities— they also run private prisons and detention centers abroad.

Up until 2001, Sodexo owned one of the largest stakes in the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a company that now controls nearly half of the private prisons in the United States.

After Sodexo’s ties with CCA were made public, six universities dropped their contracts with Sodexo, and continued activist pressure led Sodexo to sell its shares in CCA.

But since then, Sodexo has vastly expanded the number of detention centers it operates overseas. As of 2016, Sodexo managed 122 prisons in eight countries, including Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. They also run prisons and immigrant detention centers in the United Kingdom.

— Source

So, because of the Covid Cult, the Oregon Health Authority, and the Governor who is Ms./Mr. Kate Brown, these jobs at $12 an hour are not being filled by many job seekers (low pay) but are getting scarfed up by adults living with developmental and intellectual disabilities.

The jobs are absurd — spraying down/wiping off walls, handles, desks, everything, even on the days no students were attending classes. One of my former clients had to use a metal saw and saw off all the book baskets that are on some of the desk-table combinations. That was 34 in one day.

You know, the jumping Covid-19 Fort Detrick Virus.

Social “distancing” makes the schools create six foot lines in the sand, and then three foot separations as schools came back in full-force (sic).  Still, with three feet between desks, 360 degrees around, that is, not all returning students can be accommodated in the classroom.

My clients were so hyped up that they constantly asked me about “the shot”, “the vaccine”, and when it might be coming to the county and town near them. They asked me about my opinion about the shots. They have to wear masks on school property doing their tasks, and even going outside, as well as taking a smoke break and Rockstar drink break on a slab of land just outside the view-shed of the school. Mask madness.

My clients have been so worked up into a lather of fear, with stories saying, “Adults with Developmental Disabilities Have Three Fold Higher Risk of Getting Covid-19”; “Adults with Developmental Disabilities Have a Higher Rate of Death with Covid-19.”

The rush to get jabbed has been on, and Oregonians like my former clients rushed to the clinics and pharmacies to get something that definitely is not a vaccine. A chemical shot, sure. And, of course, they asked me about my take on things, and I had to thread the needle, balance my learned opinion with their frightened take on things.

There were teachers who used the tattletale method of complaining to my clients’ leads if a little bit of dirt was left on the floors. Some teachers resorted to their own classroom stings, putting tiny itsy-bitsy piles of sugar on desks to see if the entire surface had been wiped down.

The clients have less than 15 minutes to clean a classroom, and that can be tough with food and drink messes on floors, and all the garbage. This is the state of paranoia and Nazism.

Oh, those runners. Imagine, the extreme stupidity and compliance of Oregonians, having cross-country student athletes wear heavy masks during their runs.

Here, from a column in the Oregonian, from parents and others complaining about the Governor and his/her health authoritarians mandating masks for outdoor, even solo, sports:

Thank you so much for your column highlighting the ridiculousness and dangers of masks on youth runners. As parents of a ninth grade cross country and track athlete, we have been extremely frustrated with this rule. Our child was told that if she pulls the mask down for a minute just to get some air, she will be DQ’d and possibly kicked off the team if it’s a repeated ‘offense’. We are forced to make a decision to either keep her on the team for her emotional and social well-being while jeopardizing her physical health with lack of oxygen, or pull her off the team and back into social isolation and inactivity. I feel the state is abusing our children.

So, we have Nike, with Knight funding in the tens of millions, cancer research and with that company, NIKE, doing the dirty deeds of not only employing sweatshop slavery, but supporting violent military thugs in those respective “developing south” countries. Watch John Pilger’s short documentary above.

We get to all sorts of inanities in this Covid-19 mess. More and more conversations get shut down, when someone like me questions that “I got my jab and why haven’t you” bullshit that comes out of people’s mouths —  friends and foes alike, family and co-workers, too.

And those masks, man. Every teacher, student and custodian I was around did everything 100 percent wrong in terms of keeping the germ theory in place — noses exposed, sides of masks leaking, taking them off and leaving them face-out touching surfaces. People with a blue plastic mask on, running their hands through thick strands of their own hair, and then touching everything.

You know, Ebola, man. That SARS-CoV2 thing, man. Antibacterial fluids on everything, on hands 20 times a day. Masks off to chew up a Subway sandwich, but masks on for 16-year-olds running through the woods fox X-Country practice.

Yet, the trust, again, in those jabs, those companies producing those jabs —

It’s been eight months since Big Pharma executives faced a grilling by the Senate Finance Committee over their pricing decisions. But the scrutiny is far from over—and now, the committee is digging into pharma funding for patient advocacy groups, which have been known to speak in tunes that are music to the industry’s ears.

Emergent BioSolutions has faced a number of back-to-back PR crises since production issues at its Baltimore facility placed the company under intense scrutiny. The CDMO’s stock price has tumbled as a result, but it appears CEO Robert Kramer cashed out some of his shares just in time. — Source

That company, the dirty one, producing contaminated and brown sediment laced J&J “vaccines.” That one where 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 hypodermic chemical has to be dumped because of “an ingredient mix-up” at its Baltimore plant. J&J has since taken control over the facility and AstraZeneca, which was also making its vaccine there, was forced to move out.

That Johnson and Johnson —

AbbVie, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Merck & Co., AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson together contributed more than $680 million to hundreds of patient groups and other nonprofits last year, according to a Bloomberg examination of data the companies sent to the Finance Committee.

The total tally more than doubled the $321 million the six companies handed out in 2015 and significantly exceeded what the industry itself spent on lobbying. In 2018, the entire pharmaceutical and health products industry—including pharmaceutical benefit managers—spent $283 million in lobbying U.S. lawmakers, according to the independent research group OpenSecrets.

—Source

Oh, that Big Bad Pharma Company, J&J —

J&J has faced hundreds of thousands of lawsuits over claims its products are defective.

Lawsuits point to internal documents showing J&J and its subsidiaries knew about problems with their products but sold them anyway.

In addition to individual product liability lawsuits, individual states who say Johnson & Johnson helped fuel the opioid crisis are suing the company for millions of dollars.

— Source

But all’s well, uh? Big Pharma is one of the most powerful industries in the world. The global revenue for pharmaceuticals was over $1 trillion in 2014. But nowhere else in the world do the drug and medical device industries have as much power and make as much money as in the U.S.

Six of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies for 2017 have their headquarters in the U.S. These include Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, Gilead, Amgen and AbbVie.

Back in the good old days, oh, March 2020, just 28 percent of Americans polled had a good opinion of Big Pharma. Big Pharma is the second most hated industry in America: second to none, but right behind the tobacco industry and the oil, gas and chemical industries.

Add to the criminal enterprises Big Pharma is embroiled in, it is also the biggest defrauder of the Federal Government under the False Claims Act, according to consumer watchdog group Public Citizen.

Sure, a history of fraud, bribery, lawsuits and scandals is the American way, for sure, and also, despite criminal charges and fines, no less, Big Pharma companies continue to do business. To the tune of a trillion a year, or more, in profits.

Pablo Escobar is rolling in his grave in envy.

I have had some close relationships with people in the “drug” business, and that includes Merck, when it was MSD. And a friend of my mom’s who was a Pharm D working on all sorts of research on the drugs that drug companies came out with that either did not work, or did their damage in spades.

I taught English classes in Juarez, and I toured the Johnson and Johnson twin plant and talked to workers there. Like everything else in American Capitalism, the Mexicans were treated like crap, from the fabricators to the technical engineers. The reason J & J was sited there was for the profit margin, man, low pay, no unions, no taxes, desperate Mexican women (mostly) workers, and the ability to skirt environmental and OSHA laws. Each year I went by the maquiladora, more and more security was posted outside. Photos of J&J by me (a journalist) were questioned, until a series of “no photo” signs were posted all over.

Then, of course, the Gates Foundation and Planned Parenthood. Who would have thought I’d be up against Planned Parenthood, up against Gates and Merck and the HPV vaccination?

Here, a story, mine,  “Death by a Thousand Cuts: Vaccines, Non-Profits, and the Dissemination of Medical Information.”   The crux of which is that I was kicked out of day two of a mandatory sex ed class for things I did not do, but for positing a few questions to the instructors. Then, the nonprofit I worked for summarily made up their mind to pink slip me. You see, I was at the training in Seattle, at the Planned Parenthood headquarters, and the nonprofit I was working for was located hundreds of miles and a state away, south of Portland, Oregon.

I asked the trainer what might happen when some of my rural clients’ parents and the young clients themselves personally just Googled “Gardasil and vaccine injuries” and then confronted me, case manager and now a sex ed trained trainer, and others with the evidence. This colonized trainer got mad, raised his voice, and stated, again, the voice of God, here, “The Jury is Out on Gardasil. It is one hundred percent safe.” Here at Dissident Voice, “My Fate as a Social Worker Sealed by a Vaccine named Gardasil.”

Just read on, and see how Planned Parenthood gets money from the Gardasil makers (Merck) and gets money from Gates Foundation for the youth vaccination (HPV especially) propaganda machine, also called, instruction.

This madness is ratcheting up, and, oh, that supposed rough, rugged, independent American is caving and caving to the most crass and simplistic propaganda. My wife’s daughter, at Oregon State University, is being bombarded (she and the entire student body, the staff, the faculty, and, yes, the food service and custodial staff) with messages, emails and bulletins — “Well, we want all of the OSU (Beavers) Family safe, and while we are not making the vaccination mandatory now, but, but, but . . . .”

Those but’s are indeed not just but’s;  rather, they are mandates, as this school, like the rest of the country’s schools, mostly, will make that “deadly” shot mandatory, err, the Covid-19 shot. OSU makes students show proof of the meningitis vaccination, so Covid-19 shots are the next logical step in this Sundown law state. This list is big, and expanding as of today: What Colleges Require the COVID-19 Vaccine?

Oh, that is it, no, laws, mandates, community “standards,” what goes goes, and what isn’t allowed, isn’t allowed here. More on the Oregon racism.

Oh, I know about mandatory medical laws, mandatory medical procedures, which the Covid-19 shot is, a medical experiment procedure. Oregon and forced vaccinations, err, I mean, forced sterilizations:  In 1917 the Oregon State Legislature, in Salem, Oregon, passed a bill titled, “To Prevent Procreation of Certain Classes in Oregon.” Passage of the bill created the Oregon State Board of Eugenics.

“We can and must protect our nation from insanity, epilepsy, and the varied train of abnormalities that follow in their wake.” Dr. Bethenia Adair Owens said in 1915.

Oregon’s 1923 law targeting people deemed “feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sexual perverts.”

The state set up a Board of Eugenics that had the final decision over who would be sterilized. The board ordered its last forced sterilization in 1981. In 1983, Oregon’s eugenics law was repealed.

—Source

Oh, that Oregonian, still around, supporting the Governor’s forced “vaccination” and lockdown mandates —

The largest newspaper in Oregon, the Republican-controlled Oregonian, supported Eugenics and used its power to inflame public opinion. In a news article headlined “Fecund Mental Derelicts of Oregon Called Menace by State Health Official,” Dr. Floyd South, a member of the Oregon State Board of Health and the Board of Eugenics, stated on June 17, 1938, “Feeble-minded, insane, and otherwise mentally and physically incompetent persons in Oregon are reproducing twice as fast as normal persons.” He went on to state that within 200 years half the state’s population would be confined to public institutions if rigid sterilization laws were not enforced. This applied to the insane as well as “mentally weak persons.”

And, lest I leave out the “scientists” and medical experts (sic):

In 1940 Dr. Richard B. Dillehunt, dean of the University of Oregon Medical School and chairman of the committee appointed by Governor Charles H. Martin to analyze Oregon’s responsibility to the insane, wrote a series of articles for the Oregon Journal reporting his findings. He believed mental illness could be prevented by marriage laws and sterilization. He stated, “Idiots, imbeciles and morons are singularly moved by the primitive biologic impulses and spawn prodigiously. Here is a place where social groups and others might get together and make an effort: for, mark my word, with the prolificacy and multiplication of the feeble-minded, such social groups might soon find themselves on the defensive instead of in a position to help.”

Forced experimental and untested and unapproved shots, or maybe shots that have the gifts that keep on giving: sterilization, blood clot-inducing, heart attack-creating, miscarriage-providing,  total immune system compromising Pizer and J&J madness.

The propaganda, the arm twisting, oh, the fancy foot PhD wording, but still, a forced chemical shot, and who knows what the medical consequences shall be (read, COVID-19 Vaccine Reactions):

Again, regardless of whether OSU implements a vaccination requirement, we hold an expectation that each of us will take every precaution to increase the level of community protection from COVID-19, which includes each of us obtaining the vaccine as soon as possible.

Sincerely, Dan Larson, Vice Provost for Student Affairs, OSU Coronavirus Response Coordinator

The unvaccinated cannot marry the vaccinated! The new normal!

This article was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2021 at 11:10pm and is filed under Bill Gates, Capitalism, COVID-19, Education, General, Masks, Medical Apartheid, Pandemics, Patient Rights, Pharmaceuticals, School Yard Fights, Science/Technology, The “Great Reset”, The New Normal, Totalitarianism, Vaccines, World Health Organization (WHO).

This while more than half a million Americans have died in a pandemic that has already wreaked economic havoc among almost all the general population while some millionaires have become multi millionaires, some multi millionaires have become billionaires and some billionaires approach becoming trillionaires. As this market “normality “awaits the hopeful arrival of a Green New Deal, named after the world war two version which created a middle class by spending billions of public dollars to aid survival of the richest while allowing enough of their money to trickle down to pass for a welfare state form of capitalism, it now actually threatens to bring on even more dreadfulness to an even greater population.

A couple of trillion in government spending is proposed now when tens of trillions are needed but will never be found under the market forces of private profit normalcy. The goal must be a radical restructuring of the political economic value system that treats earth, air, water and human beings as commodities to be bought, sold and rented in pursuit of enormous private profit for an ever shrinking number as hundreds of millions diversely sink lower in class status under the burden of bearing the staggering public loss of dollars, humanity and nature itself.

While this seemingly hopeful program of another new deal for domestic progress is proposed in order to save capitalism once again by muffling if not smothering calls for more radical change, the old deal of the murderous warfare state is even more dangerous than ever, with the amateurs of the Trump regime replaced by more experienced creators of policies of mass murder to preserve the alleged chosen people status of American capital and its servant class of more diverse than ever professionals who arrange minority rule and convince people it‘s democracy.

The old cold war against communism and socialism in Russia and China is more fervently being waged against those now capitalist nations offering a greater menace to what is called “western civilization”. This is defined as peace, democracy and humanism to disguise its base on colonialism, slavery and the mass murders of world wars one, two and the great slaughters that followed in Asia and the rest of the world not worthy enough to be rated as civilization by creatures who would make savage predatory beasts seem humanitarians, poets and lovers by comparison.

Naturally, this new Chinese and Russian capitalism is treated as massive terror and desperately in need of trillions spent on the military, which adequately protects the American troops ringing the Russian border and American ships sailing the South China Sea but is helpless to protect Americans being murdered in America by neighbors, workmates, the police and other patriots.  Nor are they/we protected by having tens of thousands of military personnel at hundreds of military bases thousands of miles from America’s shores. This is sold to a mentally imprisoned population as a defense of America and rationalized by a brilliant leadership that might have trouble understanding that it should put its socks on before not after its shoes while spending trillions on warfare and offering no help at all to tens of millions of Americans without health care or shelter.

Despite the unrelenting intellectual and moral sewage being forced into the mental diet of innocent participants in what is called our sacred democracy, newer generations contain more critical numbers than ever speaking out, organizing and showing signs of no more tolerance for this weaponized mass murdering drivel. Even while under assault reducing the common needs of all to alleged minorities by our ruler imposed doctrines of identity to reduce a majority to squabbling over which group has suffered more with least suffering getting the most, far more are resisting that divide and conquer program to save the system by divisive race, ethnic and sexual bigotry.

Current mind mashing daily bulletins about Putin’s being a murderer and Chinese preforming genocide on Islamic people are part of  the daily diet of intellectual sewage that passes for reporting in the news marketplace, more minds are being destroyed while more wealth is created by the media servants of capital. Daily bulletins inform (?) us that China is brutalizing Islamic Chinese and committing “genocide”, the popular term to use when anybody dies anywhere but where the term and the idea were born, while we lecture them on how to destroy the Islamic world for Israel and capital, commit mass murder and slaughter tens of thousands, destroy nations and reduce millions to poverty. If there were a judgmental, righteous and vindictive deity such as the one created by the more sadistic episodes of Old Testament mythology that had one destroy the planet because of false worship or a bad migraine, there might be a cataclysmic explosion, earthquake, holocaust and plague every fifteen minutes until our nation was obliterated. Luckily, we only have to deal with the largest population of earth dwellers growing fed up with a material reality forced on them by allegedly higher forms of humans practicing a form of political economics that might create a Department of Rape and call it a Ministry of Love

Rather than having to deal with a strengthened coalition of nuclear armed nations sick and tired of suffering abuse from an international bully and able to respond to any attack with their own powers of mass murder, we can only hope that Eastern Capitalist media may soon retaliate by offering lessons in humanity to the western civilization (?) by describing how it is possible to end poverty by investing in people rather than murdering them.

In China, a nation of nearly one and a half billion people, nearly 90% of them own their own homes. In Russia, another brutal capitalist horde assaulting our mythological democracy, which has never elected a president by majority of the electorate, 80% of the people own their homes. Worst of all, the savage state of communist Cuba has 90% of its people in homes they own, and this accomplished under years of brutal economic assault by an alleged  “great power” 90 miles away. Isn’t that terrifying?

A part of Islamic teaching claims there is no god but god, which is a belief system that can work for good or bad because it’s a faith-based belief. Material reality says that there is no race but human and that is a material fact, a scientific reality and not simply a belief. The sooner we rise above good or evil teachings about cultural truths  (?) and face material reality which is just that, we who identify as human beings can create democracy, the best deal for humanity.

In the words of an anonymous Vegas dealer, we don’t need a new deal: we need an entirely new deck. To bring that about, the people will have to take ownership of not just the gambling casino but every aspect of material reality that affects the public good. That sounds strange because it represents democracy, a deal we’ve never had as a people but only a charade of our rulers and their professional – and more “diverse” than ever – servant class. We need to give meaning to the word, and very soon, which means we need a political party that represents the public good, and an economy that does the same. Give that whatever label makes you feel best, but do it soon or we might not have much of a later.

This article was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2021 at 3:29am and is filed under China, Civil Unrest, Democracy, Disinformation, Economic Inequality, Housing/Homelessness, Militarism, Opinion, Pandemics, Propaganda, Resistance, Russia, Unemployment, US Media, US Military, US Military Bases, US War Crimes, Vladimir Putin, War.

White Washing: According to one Merriam-Webster definition, to whitewash is to “gloss over or cover up,” which, in a sense, is what the racial form of whitewashing does. It creates a White world where sins against people of color, including Blacks, Native Americans, Asians, Latinos, and other minority groups cease to matter because, in revisionist history and reality, those minority groups barely exist.

Here’s one example believe it or not which ties into my neck of the woods on the Central Oregon Coast, and even Portland, OR: ‘Daniel Boone was a man. Yes a big man. With an eye like an eagle and as tall as a mountain was he. Daniel Boone was a man. Yes a big man. He was brave, he was fearless and as tough as a mighty oak tree. The rippin’est roarin’est fightin’est man the frontier ever knew.’

We get to Boone in a moment, and all the mythology and falsified history of his very existence.

There are all sorts of ways to wash away complicity or guilt, and the color wheel is just one way to describe this highly sophisticated form of propaganda-marketing-PR spin-Revisionist history/thinking/mythology. Whitewashing is a form of fabrication.

Part of the fabrication are those scared cows like “we support our men and women in uniform.” I personally have a few hundred examples of going up against many armies of the lie, or battalions of the bullshit.

There are good journalists and good teachers, for sure, but the majority, for the most part, are not sacred or holy or fool-proof agents of democracy. There are many ways I have been hobbled for not supporting the illegal wars of this country, especially Bush’s “declared victory” in the Middle East. Hobbled by fellow journalists and educators.  I was living in El Paso, and Cocaine and Southern Comfort W Bush was the governor of that Tex-ass state. El Paso is a huge arena for military and retired military. The Mexican-Americans (88 percent of the population in El Paso/El Paso County) may have voted straight democrat on their ballots (Bush and other retrograde redneck vicious governors have come to town courting that vote), but many Latinx love their USA flags and military men and women from their ranks. So, going against Reagan’s wars in Central America or Bush I’s against Panama, Malvinas and his Desert Shield, I was up against supposed liberal left fellow teachers and journalists. Even supposedly disenfranchised Latinx.

Once the Prez or Congress or whomever (CIA, NSA) gets us into a war, we all must support the troops, no, tie a yellow ribbon on the chain-link fence sort of thing . . .  support the mission, support whatever the Commander in Chief does with his tin soldiers. How many times have I gone up against college/university presidents and provosts and department chairs and even my own fellow faculty when I questioned the veracity of rationales for bombing other countries. As Kim Peterson illustrates in his recent DV article, “North Korea Steadfastly Resisting US Hegemony,” by illuminating A.B. Abrams “… comprehensive book, Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years at War with American Power, there is a whole lot of rooting for war and destruction by the average North American:

US wars are not only a function of its government and military. It is important to realize that the US carries out it warring and provocations against foreign countries often with overwhelming approval of the American populace. Abrams writes that the majority of American citizens supported using nukes against North Korea. (p 131) American public support for warring was also evident by support for intensified bombing by the US during armistice negotiations. (p 224) That this American public support for militarism was not an anomaly was revealed during the US attacks on Muslim nations following 9-11, with 70% of Americans indicating a belief in Saddam Hussein being connected to Al Qaeda. (p 390)

You can fiddle with terms like illegal alien, positing that no human being is “illegal,” or debating how the term “alien” ascribes more than a negative otherness to the person — it dehumanizes the person.

These are important discussions, especially in politics, in journalism and in educational circles. Yet, these discussions have lingered in academia, and have withered at the root of American enlightenment.

I’ve had to confront people about what it means to be humanistic and abiding by the Earth Charter and Dignity and Rights of All People. You know, that socialistic and humanistic and democratic and communist set of principles of for-by-with-because-of the people:

• pinko
• self-loathing white
• un-American
• anti-American
• anti-patriotic
• traitor
• love it or leave it
• bleeding heart liberal

These are terms of vile against me and others for fighting for the simple rights of people — some of the most able, of the land and poor village people and farmers whose lives are torn up, destroyed, disposed of, displaced through the strong arm and long arm of economic-cultural-political-military warfare.

You can be labeled “anti-American/anti-business/anti-poor” for questioning Walmart. You can be called a “traitor” for questioning bombing, chemical spraying, immolating, polluting, imprisoning, permanently displacing people the USA deems enemies, supportive of enemies of the state, or collateral damage.

Proportionality when discussed by the average American is questioning the very fabric of our way of life, our leadership and our own form of enslavement and dictatorship. The military is right, and whatever they need to intervene or overreach, they know the deal.

Proportionality in international law, however,  is not about equality of death or civilian suffering, or even about equality of firepower. Proportionality weighs the necessity of a military action against suffering that the action might cause to enemy civilians in the vicinity.

Under international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute, the death of civilians during an armed conflict, no matter how grave and regrettable does not constitute a war crime…. even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur. A crime occurs if there is an intentional attack directed against civilians (principle of distinction) or an attack is launched on a military objective in the knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage (principle of proportionality). — Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor, International Criminal Court.

The above Moreno-Ocampo statement is more or less memory-holed, erased largely from discourse, and hardly every cited in educational circles. This form of washing away knowledge is called agnotology – a concerted effort to wash or erase facts, history. The white wash cited above, as in support the troops right or wrong, is well, pretty obvious in the K12 textbooks, or watching those crocodile-teared GOP or Democrats with their metal USA flag lapel pins, shakily saluting while death jets like F-15, 16, 18 models zoom above inebriated football fans. Hourly fuel costs —

Fighters:
F-15C Eagle Fighter — $41,921
F-16C Viper Fighter — $22,514
F-22A Raptor Fighter — $68,362

$1,500 – Predator drone
$11,500 – A-10
$70,000 – V-22
$32,000 – F-35
$44,000 – F22
$135,000 – B-2
$5,000 – F-16
$17,000-$30,000 – F-15C
$19,000-$30,000 – F-22

VIP transport:
C-20B VIP Plane (Senior Pentagon Officials) — $32,212
C-32A VIP Plane (Vice President, Cabinet Officers) — $42,936
VC-25A Air Force One — $161,591
E-4B Flying Headquarters — $163,485

Operating expenses total $206,337 for every hour the president’s plane is in the air.

Which brings us to more than just white washing, or blood money trading. Imagine the US military is the biggest single source of pollution in the world, and imagine creepy politicians and GS-18’s and highflying ex-four star generals and CEOs of the mercenary companies like Raytheon and Aerodynamics, just getting their free air time spewing lie after lie about a more sustainable US military — mean, green, lean fighting machine.

Greenwashing is a whitewash or green sheening by corporations to promote themselves as “environment friendly.” It also encompasses that environmentally and socially responsibility flim-flam, full of the PT Barnum deceptive promotion to lie through their teeth. Key concepts for all washing it marketing and advertising themselves as environment friendly. Spend money on the Mad Men and Mad Women, rather than actual actions, is called greenwashing.

Add to the wash of the green, blue-washing:  a technique deployed by corporations and companies to form collaborations and associations with various United Nations agencies to portray themselves as being compliant of the ten principles of United Nations Global Compact, while not being so in actuality.

Advertising spin of the blue wash variety is supposedly showing congruence with these principles above, to include actions against child labor, slavery and corruption, safeguarding human rights.

Then, well, we get into the latest arena of washing, bullshitting, lying, mind manipulation, closely linked to the fearful majority who would dare speak out against Zionism as a massively inhumane belief and operating system, one counterpoint to the 10 Principles illustrated above. You are, in a nutshell, pigeon-holed as anti-Semitic if you criticize these aspects of Zionism or the country (sic) of “Israel.” Washed out of existence, another form of washing. Akin to being memory-holed  as a non-human, a nobody.

Who would have thought Pink-washing would be tied to “Israel,” but . . . .

[Below: Anarcho-queer collective Mashpritzot hold a “die-in” protest against Israeli pinkwashing and the perceived homonormative priorities of the LGBT support centre in Tel Aviv]

Over a decade ago, activists adopted the term “pink-washing” to describe the Israeli propaganda tactic of washing away the oppression of Palestinians by painting Israel as a gay-friendly and liberal state. Israeli pink-washing tries to win the hearts and minds of international audiences and prevent solidarity with the Palestinian struggle

Reversing back to this screed’s start

We’ll get to Ralph Nader’s Radio Hour in a second. We’ll get to Daniel Boone too, in a second, tied to the white-washing pulled quote above.

First, a little bit of my work again in social services, a field that is for the most part vastly underpaid, with workers who are dedicated at first, highly motivated to help people, and whose lives are in many cases the epitome of sacrifice — student loan debts, master’s degrees for $17 an hour work, and mandatory several thousand hours of unpaid clinical hours.

Think about that for a moment — pre-Covid-19, a society fraught with trauma, fraught with chronic physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual illnesses. People who are left alone, left out to dry, folks who are traumatized by family, by neighborhoods, by circumstances. People who were already damaged in many ways in utero, and after birth, well, the society in general and at large, eating away at the typical American soul. Tape worms of the soul: Capitalism. Pin worms of the heart: Consumerism. The giant proverbial leech sucking people dry in this economic gulag: Market Driven Madness.

Some of the people I serve have head injuries. Traumatic Brain Injuries. That act of “god” or “fate” can alter a person completely for life. In most cases, there is a lot of physical impediment, or some, but the memory is shot-through, many times. Spotty short-term and long-term memory. Swiss cheese of the brain in many cases.

Then a head bash-trauma can also strip away a person’s emotional and empathetic cores. They just can’t feel the normal range of human emotions. No tears when a loved one dies. Little joy. Even brain injured children are considered low on the person’s emotional totem pole.

On the job, a person in this situation needs accommodations, needs personal support workers to help the injured person just do the basic activities of daily living/survival.

It isn’t an easy life — going from a perfectly healthy and active 15-year-old thriving teen, to a paralyzed, comatose and soon recovering brain injured human being.

My job is to support these sorts of people in getting work, and in getting to first base in the first place by coaching interview techniques, by helping contextualize life gaps, such as the years after a brain injury.

The emotional complexities of the human species are many times missing, and so I have to act as the bridge and interpreter as this person attempts to navigate integrated employment.

The problem is that this sort of survival is a growing concern. Emergency Medicine can keep people alive after horrific accidents, accidents which just a few years ago would have been a death sentence.

Now, what do the “recovered” do to survive, to find some niche in society by working and carrying on? When the society in general is still fifty years behind the times?

Many of the people with a TBI live a life surrounded by/surrounding themselves with mythology, sacred cows, propped up belief systems. They many times want to believe in “normal/normalcy” in a world where that — normal — is an ever-moving target.

The “new normal” is no normal.

Which leads us back to the entire white washing of USA, of this country’s past, this country’s under girder and foundations of, well, theft.

Brains and Daniel Boone

I write, participate in revolutionary activism, muckrake, and work in social services, as I have laid out in DV many times in the past 11 years, grappling with many different challenges in those gigs or jobs I’ve had assisting people — people in distress, traumatized, in full-blown crisis, a la PTSD. Brain injured as adults (war time, too), born with Down Syndrome, dementia and Alzheimer’s, mentally retarded (according to various school districts and Special Ed programs), with drug affected conditions leading to all manner of learning and developmental disabilities. Old and young, functional in terms of our “normal” society, or highly impacted by fetal alcohol syndrome or cerebral palsy, and the like.

I’ve worked with folks living with psychological disabilities, like schizophrenia. With full-blown mental breakdown caused by bad families, bad circumstances, bad drugging, bad war experiences, bad people. Everyone of the military women I have worked with were victimized by rape. Brutal. Many women in general I have worked with have been sexually assaulted. And with all of the psychological tears and battering those rapes do, there are also physical issues tied to pounded faces, pounded necks, and, thus, we have bad backs and necks and all the other secondary and tertiary things associated with violent attacks on bodies.

I’m working with what the people who come to me have, helping them enhance the positives and push down some of the barriers. And the barriers are more than just their own, their own families’, their own community’s. The barriers are cultural. Many Americans want “them” to maybe be seen but not heard. Many do not want them to be seen, either.

Another threadbare existence for tens of millions of people. Maybe more. And there will be more on the horizon with more and more people surviving crashes and accidents, left with major mental-psychological-neurological-physical disabilities. The handicapping comes from policies, legislation, lack of housing, lack of real support teams. Just one of a million things lacking in this Corrupt and Criminal Capitalism.

Funny stories arise, though. One fellow I work with read the local paper, Newport News Times. I’ve written for the twice-a-week rag. On homelessness and environmental stuff.

He was excited to know that the Oregon timber town where he lives once had a fellow and his brood there, on an island, whose family line included that fellow, Daniel Boone:

‘The history of McCaffrey Island’ —

Van Daniel first homesteaded the island in 1897 but never owned the property, according to James’ correspondence with Van Daniel’s daughter, Carol Holbrook. The family first moved into an abandoned shed on the island but built a full home there by 1901. Nine of their 10 children were born on the island, and they went to school by rowing to Oysterville.

The family made its living harvesting oysters and raising pigs. On the upper tier of the island was a waterfall and garden. Holbrook said there were no trees on the island when they first moved there, but they later planted many, including an apple and plum tree.

Holbrook said Indigenous people often visited the island, and her father hired them to help the family shuck oysters. One of Van Daniel’s sons also found arrowheads and beads on the island while they lived there.

When Van Daniel’s wife fell ill with tuberculosis in 1917, the family moved from the island to an abandoned house on the mainland. They didn’t sell the island because they didn’t own it. They never learned who owned the abandoned house they moved into on the mainland either.

So, of course, my friend/client got all excited because of that famously present seeding of lies the US school system and Holly-Dirt have perpetuated since that old cherry tree was chopped down, or that first “thanksgiving” with the Puritans and Pokanoket Wampanoag.

We talked about the old TV show the 35-year-old client watches — Fess Parker as Boone in the 1964-1970 TV series. Strange how these racist old series still float around the ether.

“Man, I always wanted to be like Daniel Boone when we watched that show. I watched the show when I was young. What was it, fifteen years or whatever after the show was cancelled.”

So, with his permission, we looked at the Boone myth which was precipitated by an innocuous piece in the local rag on some pioneer (sic) families and others who had that island.

Boone has been portrayed in books and in movies and TV shows as a regular tough guy, all-American, the new Adam paving the way for Manifest Destiny and land claims for a beginning white nation. Here is a decent two paragraphs that put the white washing in the context of Boone and his modern-day worshippers:

In 1992 Native people in KY and allies during the 500th anniversary of Columbus decided to correct local historic monuments to alleged heroes of colonialism in the Ohio Valley. The picture you see above is one example. It was a statue of Daniel Boone at the entrance to? “Cherokee Park”. There are 4 parks in Louisville named after the people driven from this land. Cherokee, Shawnee, Chickasaw, and Iroquois. Of course there are monuments all over this city to Confederate Generals, Indian killers, slave owners, and the like. There are absolutely none to Tecumseh, Blue Jacket, Harriet Tubman, or any native or African-Americans. A couple of streets that is it. So as I was watching Tecumseh’s vision, the PBS special last night, I was reminded of several things that deserve exploring. So once again I am going to poke holes in “American History” and saw the legs off of statues to genocidal murderers. Sorry. — Source.

To begin with let us be clear, the colonial Americans never had any desire to live harmoniously with their Indian hosts and in fact Thomas Jefferson explicitly ordered their removal and extermination, owned slaves, and was aside from his humane policies toward his fellow colonists was a rapist, slaving, ethic cleansing murderer. So was Boone. So let us be exactly and historically honest shall we? Let us start with Daniel Boone as he was the “Indian Fighter” exemplar. Now let us remember Tecumseh was born in 1768. Boone was killing Indians and escorting colonists as Tecumseh drew his first breaths and Boone then became an elected official and presided over the ethnic cleansing of the Delaware, Shawnee, Cherokee, and all the indigenous people in the way of “progress” till his retirement. Many would say he just did what was expected of him in that time. OK? What was expected of him was that he kill Indians and escort colonists to steal lands that belonged to someone else.

The fine line I have to toe is that I am there for my clients on many social services levels — the official duties — but I am also more importantly an advocate, a teacher, a model, a mentor, and someone they can relate to who happens to have years working with “disadvantaged” but who himself thus far has had or currently has none of the disadvantages they have had to bear (yet). Sure, we are all in this predatory, insanity called United Snakes of America together, but unfortunately (and for obvious infantilizing reasons) we do not have the same depth of research, life experiences, multiple perspectives, and worldly views. When I am with the average Biden Boy or Obama Yes We Can Cultist, I know I am with someone who is ultra conservative, ultra pro-money, ultra stupid when it comes to history and facts. That is the very nature of those millions of gears working to “white” wash or “green” wash or “pink” wash the world.

When it comes to sacred cows, well, the discussion turns interesting. And for many people, with or without trauma and disabilities, very uncomfortable.

Weight of Rape, the Weight of Racism

The reality is that the average “dude” or “gal” who may be coming at things with a less severely redneck or reactionary point of view, well, they either can’t fathom the number of people in the USA (no, I am not getting into other societies with just as bad situations) who have been violently raped as adults or sexually assaulted as underage humans. Mostly women, but not exclusively. In 2021, I still get people with or without college degrees, telling me, that “this is not a rape culture.” Telling me “many women are faking it.” Telling me that “Trump is a target because he is famous and has money . . . there is no way he did that . . . he has children, man, and what would his wife say if it was true?”

That white washing is a unique sort of push back against women.

Then, well, many just can’t take the Portland uprising anymore, as if Portland is this huge Fallujah bombed out metropolitan area. They can’t take “black lives matter” anymore. They can’t take the crescendo of news stories of more pigs/cops getting accused and acquitted of murder. The white washing of our murderous men (and women) in uniform is just so complete that the few that want to defund the military and the police, well, they are propagandized into people who are not true Americans, rabble, provocateurs.  “All those statues coming down, what do you think, Haeder? Isn’t that erasing history?” I just got asked this question. Again, people on their duffs, consuming main-line TV as if it’s crack.

So the beat goes on and on, to explain to them, that Andrew Jackson or Daniel Boone or even Honest Abe, coming down, well, isn’t it obvious that the disenfranchised and basically helpless people of this predatory land have to release something symbolic to show their disgust of this country’s white washing? I attempt to explain, yes, a better reaction and process would be to put a mural around each bloody statue, with just the head of the white murderer sticking out as he sits upon his horse. On that mural, well, the real history of this person’s contribution to Indian killing, Slave owning, Black murdering. Of course there are a million teachable moments, but in a country that doesn’t do nuance well, one that is all about flash in the pan, all about spasms of this or that reaction to the zeitgeist, we are not going to see those sorts of responses to the racist monuments. And yes, many of those confederate monuments were put up AFTER the south lost the war. Decades after. Tin monuments for tinhorn racists and rapists. They are not sacred monuments, in the true sense of the word. Sacred Racist Monuments.

Does Anyone Not Get Why a Democrat Would NOT Hire One Nader?

So, I do encourage folks to listen to Black Agenda Report, or to read Mother Jones, In These Times, The Progressive, Mint Press News, Consortium News, Counterpunch, DV, and others, for sure. But for most, I get them to listen to a bastion of powerful knowledge and real on-the-ground activism. Someone who actually ran for president of the US of A. Twice!

Simple stuff, not exactly radical Black Panthers or anarchy —

Ralph welcomes the former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray, to talk about how this important agency – created in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown and moribund in the Trump years – needs to start protecting consumers again. Plus, Ralph pays tribute to the late great muckraking journalist, James Ridgeway.

Richard Cordray is the founding director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he served from 2011 to 2017. He is the author of Watchdog: How Protecting Consumers Can Save Our Families, Our Economy, and Our Democracy.

“Every aspect of our legal system has been turned around by financial companies to oppress individual consumers. And yet, individual consumers are not permitted (often by these arbitration clauses) to band together to seek collective justice against the company.” [ Richard Cordray].

So we talk about this issue, with me pointing out that antigovernmental entitlements or antigovernmental this or that is actually anti-public, anti-people thinking. The corporations — all of them, with the unholy facilitation of  banks, credit companies, tech companies — they are the enemy. And each and every politician they have in their back pockets is the enemy, but the public realm, the public potential for true democratic socialism, that is not the enemy. AT& T, Wells Fargo, Safeway, Amazon, Walmart, Walgreens, and a few million other corporations are the true enemy. They have cooked the books, stacked the deck, and conspired to rip-off the public. Listen to just this one episode of Ralph, and when I ask people who are skeptical of my criticism of all corporations, they have a bit more to deal with here: Finances.

Listen to the beginning, where Nader talks about the death (and work of) the great American journalist, James Ridgeway. Note that this man was a muckraker, a man who looked for truth, and never tired of investigative reporting, never jading himself to the people’s needs. He did die, as Ralph states, a poor man.

Here’s a Mother Jones article on Jim when he worked for MoJo —

Jim Ridgeway—who leaves MoJo’s staff roster this week to become a contributing reporter—is, though he’d never put it this way, one of the legends of modern muckraking. Back in 1965 he helped establish the nascent field of consumer reporting when he revealed that GM had run a dark-ops campaign against a young Ralph Nader, whose book Unsafe at Any Speed detailed how automakers had knowingly sacrificed safety for sales. He went on to break more stories than we can count, digging into everything from energy politics to national security to the sex industry. MoJo co-founder Adam Hochschild remembers becoming a Ridgeway reader in 1968, when Jim and the late Andrew Kopkind started a newsletter called first Mayday and later Hard Times.

‘I still remember the yellow paper it came on, how eagerly I waited for each issue to arrive, and the pleasure of instantly knowing we shared a view of the world if I found that a new acquaintance was also a reader. It is sobering, in a way, to see how many of the problems Jim wrote about half a century ago are still with us. But it’s inspiring to see someone keep the faith all these years, especially someone who could have very easily had a successful and doubtless much more lucrative career writing unthreatening stories for the mainstream media. That, in fact, is where more than of few of the dissenters of the 1960s ended up.’

Most people I interface with do not know of Jim Ridgeway, and those that know about Nader, still incorrectly and stupidly think “he’s the guy that got Bush into office.” More white wash and agnotology:

It is true that approximately 95,000 Florida ballots were cast for Nader in 2000, and assuming every single one of those votes went instead to then-Vice President Al Gore (which is an incorrect assumption, but we’ll get to that later), Gore would have been easily able to supplant the 537 vote differential in the Sunshine State that gave Bush the presidency.

What that oft-cited factoid leaves out are the inconvenient truths laid out by Jim Hightower in Salon way back when, including the fact that only about 24,000 registered Democrats voted for Nader in Florida, whereas about 308,000 Democrats voted for (wait for it…) Bush! Further, approximately 191,000 self-identified “liberals” voted for Bush, as opposed to the fewer than 34,000 who went with Nader.

The conventional thinking goes like this: Nader voters lean left and Gore is to the left of Bush, therefore votes for Nader would have gone to Gore. But leftist academic Tim Wise pushed back on this summation in 2000, writing that “Exit polls in Florida, conducted by MSNBC show that Nader drew almost equally between Gore, Bush, and ‘None of the above,’ meaning his presence there may have been a total wash.” — Anthony Fisher

Covid-19 Fears, Fools, Fascists 

Hyper paranoia, misinformation, one bad leader leading a bunch of bad leaders. One man’s science, isn’t another 10,000 scientists’ and journalists’ science.

Everyday, a few dozen pleas by clients and their charges and their families about what to do next with lockdown A, B and C done, and more cases (maybe) of Covid-19 (many articles being scrubbed from the WWW about faulty tests for CoV2).

Amazing how many bad mask wearers I run into — literally, 90 percent of the masks out there in la-la land do not stop exhales from hitting the common air locations, whether it’s the grocery store, restaurant, liquor store, or on the beach.

The dichotomy of American thinking is the dangerous thing now, and the retribution, the white washing and green washing and blue washing and vaccine washing and the science washing, all of it, now, we have many new normal’s tied to more scrubbing (agnotology) and banning and outright fascistic attacks on people, like, well, Robert Kennedy Junior.

Agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. It was coined in 1995 by Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford University professor, and linguist Iain Boal. The word is based on the Neoclassical Greek word ἄγνωσις, agnōsis, “not knowing” (cf. Attic Greek ἄγνωτος “unknown”), and -λογία, -logia. Proctor cites as a prime example the tobacco industry’s advertising campaign to manufacture doubt about the cancerous and other adverse health effects of tobacco use. More generally, the term also highlights the condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before.

David Dunning of Cornell University warns that “the internet is helping propagate ignorance,… which makes [users] prey for powerful interests wishing to deliberately spread ignorance”. Irvin C. Schick refers to unknowledge “to distinguish it from ignorance. He uses the example of “terra incognita” in early maps, noting that “The reconstruction of parts of the globe as uncharted territory is … the production of unknowledge, the transformation of those parts into potential objects of Western political and economic attention. It is the enabling of colonialism. — Source.

Check out Chapter One, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. That is, in a nutshell, something I have been battling since day one as a journalist (I was 19) and day one as a college part-time faculty (I was 26).

This is not child’s play, this entire game of narrative framing, myth-making, mind scrubbing, brain washing, collective Stockholm Syndrome, Collective Abused Spouse/Worker/ Student/Consumer/Citizen Syndrome. It infects our culture of words, books, TV, movies, mass education, media, social digital networks, Madison Avenue, history book creation, and the marketing that is the way of Capitalism. Mediums are the Message, but then, how the child is wired in utero, and then right out of the womb. Bombarded by ignorance in the culture and brain washed parents. Bombarded by images and sounds and the smells of consumerism, there to draw in newer and younger and more buyers of the junk, the dangerous products, the more dangerous ideology of the masters in this complex.

Learned helplessness is nothing compared to learned and gloating ignorance. And here we are, even here with the author attempting to be “objective” with a piece in Town and Country Magazine on RFK, Jr. Imagine what this writer says, doubting the veracity and the validity of Kennedy’s research into vaccines over a sordid historical record. Imagine, thousands of journal articles parsed by RFK, Jr., thousands of books annotated, thousands of people interviewed by Kennedy on the many troubling things around pharmaceuticals, drug makers, scientists using people as Guinea pigs and around vaccines. That’s Kennedy, man. Yet, the elite author of the more elitist rag (Town and Country)  has to put in his pretty shallow and sallow two cents.

The room that Kennedy, who is 66, uses as an office is walled with books on shelves stacked six high from floor to ceiling, hundreds and hundreds of books. On top of those: a long line of framed photos like cars on a freight train—old ones, recent ones, black-and-white, color. A sprawling L-shaped sofa with blankets and pillows, a big TV.

On this subject, I think he is dangerously wrong. But that’s not the most interesting thing to talk with him about, nor is it the subject of this story. You can judge his arguments for yourself on your own time. The debate about whether vaccines are safe rages every day, and you can go online and read studies and opinions on every side. You can read almost any story by or about Kennedy and you will encounter the substance of his beliefs in detail. There aren’t many doctors in the world who think it’s a debate at all, of course.

A deeper question than whether he’s right or he’s crazy is why Bobby Kennedy Jr. is doing any of this. There was a time when he was almost universally admired, a fighter for conservation and the environment—perhaps the dominant issue of our time—and a shining figure worthy of his family’s legacy. Now he is shunned by many of his former allies and admirers, ignored by much of the once fawning media, and just tuned out by many who are uncomfortable with his sometimes hectoring obsessiveness.

Look, I am in the process of writing my memoir/anti-memoir (sounds pretentious, but . . . really, does the world need Epstein’s madam’s book, another Trump tell-all, all the creepy stuff from the rich and famous, more crap from actors and musicians?). I have a wheelbarrow’s worth of novels (unpublished but hawked by my deceased NY agent) and plays and a teleplay and other such stuff. I’m 64, and, well, some things in my life have been amazing full circle existential wheels through the magic of ecology and meeting fellow man/woman in fellowship.

Drinking from the spring where Winona LaDuke’s father, Sun Bear, had his gatherings, sure, that was another wheel of life I have written about. I have hundreds of these moments, with a ship-load of connectivity to the circle of life.

For now, though, it’s Kennedy. Our two lives are so different in so many ways, that the circle, the multiple circles of connectivity, well, maybe it takes a working class fool like myself to really drill down on that stuff.

I am not taken by money, and in fact, I am anti-money, anti-rich, anti-famous. Celebrity culture is to me worse than the guys and gals I used to run with who were hooked on lines of coke and drams of Scotch.

However, here’s the interesting thing. Make that a decade ago when I heard RFK, Jr. speak. I got to take him aside, and talked with him, but that is another story. He was in Spokane as President of the international Waterkeeper Alliance. We already got our Spokane Riverkeeper, and Kennedy was in town  helping with fundraising for Spokane Riverkeeper and Lake Pend Oreille Waterkeeper. Kennedy was at the Fox Theater in downtown Spokane. I also met him afterwards.

Here you go — if you get any sense of Kennedy from the Vanity Fair article cited, you can see a real battler (that’s the epigraph to this essay above). He certainly came from a famous family. Our two lives are diametrically different.

But the circles, man, those five or 10 degrees of separation. I had an aunt who owned– with two other immigrant (Scotland) women — The Whale Inn, in Northampton, Massachusetts. An amazing restaurant and B & B. I had relatives (aunts, uncles, cousins) who lived in Short Hills, NJ. My uncle was a well-known surgeon and did stints for Columbia University as an MD. Now, I was back east a few times, spending time at the Whale Inn, and in Short Hills, in the City, in Boston, and at Cape Code. Poor kid of the military man dad, and I got a taste of East Coast.

So, get this, I also had a mother who worked for an advertising agency in Albuquerque and part of that was some publicity for John and Jackie Kennedy when they came to New Mexico.  When we lived in Germany and France, many people thought my mom looked like Jackie.

Okay, so let’s get real — I have worked around people with developmental disabilities for a long time, officially the past decade. RFK, Jr. also spent time around disabled people —  “When not at school Bobby used to spend a lot of time at the house of his Aunt Eunice—his father’s sister, and Bobby’s godmother. She ran a camp for children with intellectual disabilities, and she founded the Special Olympics in 1968, and Bobby remembers there always being people at her house who had Down syndrome, ‘at every meal, virtually. I was always around people with intellectual disabilities.’”

He also to this day does animal rescuing and wildlife recovery. He drives a mini-van that has the stench of pit bull rescue pets and road kill he finds and takes back to boil and articulate or at least display the skull.

[Kennedy in 1972, around age 18, at a tennis tournament named for his father. Even in his late teens, Kennedy was battling drug addiction, which he would eventually beat. — Ron Galell photo]

He was hooked on heroin until he was 30. He was and still is an avid adventurer. Much of that above I related to directly. Not heroin, but other drugs. The road kill? Yep. Animal rescue? Yep. Mini-vans? Yep.

[In the early 1980s Kennedy teamed with John Cronin, right, to revitalize the Riverkeeper Association, which routinely sued large polluters. The group spurred the creation of the international Waterkeeper Alliance, of which Kennedy is president. — Ted Thai photo]

Here’s my piece on the second Riverkeeper for our Spokane River, after the first one (Mike Chappell, 44) unexpectedly passed away — “A River for Fish, Kayaks, Swimmers”

[In 2014 Kennedy edited Thimerosol: Let the Science Speak, about mercury and vaccines. Cindy Ord photo]

The point I am trying to make in this essay is that the circles I recognize and write about are as real as anything on planet earth. What RFK, Jr. and I talked about back then, well, I will write about at length later. I did mention to RFK, Jr. how burned out I was getting being with the greenie weenies, the so-called sustainability wonks and their pandering to corporations … and not just through green washing. We are talking about eco-pornography. Kennedy got a kick out of that terminology — eco-porn. You know, Shell Oil or Exxon or Monsanto running multimillion dollar ad/PR/public disservice campaigns to sell their idea of snake oil to the global public. That those companies are the best and the brightest hopes for stewardship of the environment. Now that’s pornography of the utmost degree.

I mentioned how another state eco group was taking money from Proctor Gamble or CocaCola, for what I call blood money from those corporations. Lots of blood money in the game of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. We also talked about science gone awry, science for-by-because of  the profit motive, science in the name of Imperialism and Corrupt Capitalism. We also talked about vaccinations.

The circle I am drawing it that I was a young guy who did all sorts of adventurous stuff in the Sonora Desert catching rattlesnakes, Gila Monsters, scorpions. Lots of crazy cool stuff scuba diving (roughing it) in the Sea of Cortez. Lots of crazy stuff on my own on Baja, diving and free diving and camping alone.

Another point is, while our lives are so different, there are things that connect us, in my mind. Kennedy was pretty jazzed about my writing, my activism and my ability to go for the underdog over any hubris or placating. He was definitely in favor of my concepts of fighting white washing, green washing and agnotology (he hadn’t heard of that concept).

Here’s the title to that six-month old Town and Country article —

What is Robert Kennedy Jr. Fighting For?

It’s no surprise he gets into battles. Kennedys seem to be born with their chins out. But why does the 66-year-old scion of America’s most prominent political family take his crusades—the environment, vaccines, you name it—to places where very few people want to go?  By Ryan D’Agostino, OCT 19, 2020

Note: Several months after the publication of this story, Instagram deactivated RFK Jr.’s Instagram account. “We removed this account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, said in a statement.

Here he is, now part of the systematic suppression of debate, discourse, ideas counter to the prevailing winds, the current paradigms. He’s questions Fauci, Gates, 5-G, and the motives of Big Tech and Big Pharma. What we all are supposed to do, no?

And yet, those people I support with developmental/intellectual/TBI disabilities, they want to know, they want answers, they want to understand how someone like me, or someone like Kennedy is looking beyond the parables of propaganda and virtue signaling and systemic silencing of countervailing thought and opinions.

I wish I had Bobby Kennedy’s email or physical mailing address to exchange words and ideas. That is another circle that may or may not come to fruition, though circles are really never complete or ending or beginning, now are they? I know he probably saw this documentary, probably saw my review of it in Hormones Matter — “Injecting Aluminum: Documentary Questions Vaccine Safety” 

The piece also appeared in Dissident Voice — “The Jury Has Been Out on Vaccines: Harm to the Brain, Immune System, Limbic System, Life”

[In 2014, Kennedy married the actress Cheryl Hines, whom he met through his friendship with Larry David. “I have an amazing wife and amazing kids,” he says. “I have everything.”  — Emma McInty photo]

In that regard, the circles are still being shaped, huge veronicas in the sky, throughout our collective consciousness. At least for those who are willing to fight for the underdog. RFK, Jr., now counted as one of the underdogs. My whole life, while still in a category of white privilege in this racist country, I too have been an underdog. The grace of rebellion and revolutionary thinking has given me more privilege of knowing when the jig is up than I can actually express in a short essay here.

This article was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2021 at 8:13pm and is filed under Anti-war, Assassinations, Big Pharma, Bill Gates, Bio-warfare, Censorship, Consumerism, Corporate Globalization, COVID-19, Disinformation, Drug Research, Freedom of Expression/Speech, General, Global Capitalism, Health/Medical, Heroes, Language, Medical Ethics, Narrative, Pandemics, Pharmaceuticals, Propaganda, Robert F. Kennedy, Vaccines, World Health Organization (WHO).

*****

Picture the prince, as most of them are today: a man ignorant of the law, well-nigh an enemy to his people’s advantage, while intent on his personal convenience, a dedicated voluptuary, hater of…freedom and truth, without a thought for the interests of his country, and measuring everything in terms of his own profit and desires.

— Erasmus

Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom…She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934).

A Blood Poisoning of the Body Politic (Foul Deeds Arising)

In an early essay “Symbols of Transformation“, archetypal ‘poster-boy’ of the collective unconscious Carl Jung noted:

There’s no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals [and] whole nations is a psychic danger.

Though history is littered with the mortal remains of the countless victims of such dangers, it’s hard to recall an event in recent times where Jung’s insight has carried such portent. The much-touted microbial perils aside for now, possibly not since September 11, 2001 have we witnessed or experienced such a sweeping psychic contamination of the global body politic implicit in Jung’s maxim, as with the emergence of the Coronavirus (or Covid-19). Both events were game changers: disparate to be sure yet ‘transformative’; both have underscored the man’s insight indubitably. It informs much of what follows.

With uncertainty, fear, anxiety, suspicion, hysteria, intolerance, paranoia, and panic in the ascendancy, infecting ever more deeply our already ‘overloaded’ psyches, and some of our most basic, hitherto presumed freedoms and liberties abruptly curtailed or suspended ostensibly for the greater good (by some earnest accounts, temporarily), all of us have been affected in some measure. For the most part and for most people, this has not been in a good way. The true calculus of the effects will be some time in coming, if, in fact, we can expect such. (See here, here, and here for just a few examples of the widely reported mental health impact of Covid and its attendant, bespoke insanities.)

Irrespective of whether one views Covid (and mooted mutations thereof) as a) as bad as we’re told it is or could be; b) [as] real an existential threat to humanity as our established and establishment sources of news and information would have it; or c) whether it is even real at all*, it is the all too human propensity for irrational thought and illogical action that gives rise to the psychopathology implicit in Jung’s assessment. (*See here and here for further information.)

This is decidedly the case when such propensities are combined with our easy willingness to accept prima facie the proclamations of our ruling elites, fuelled as they are by their own hubristic ambitions, almost all of which are fiercely echoed and mirrored by their news and information intermediaries. All this brings to mind that memorable couplet via Hamlet: ‘Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.’

Whilst it seems the global populace has stoically accepted the official narrative of ‘experts’ in such matters, there is all the same a highly credible, eminently qualified, and eclectic mix of folks who’ve declared themselves at least quite sceptical of the whole business. As events and developments triggered by Covid unfold, significantly more individuals and groups are coming forward and crying ‘foul’, about the severity—indeed the very authenticity—of the crisis, and the official responses to it. Indeed, there’s credible evidence the virus was not a naturally occurring phenomenon, but man-made.

To understand why this acceptance has been so ‘contagious’, a slight digression at this point is useful. In his slyly subversive 1995 tome The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, philosopher John Ralston Saul offers us a useful view: he presents doubt as ‘the only human activity capable of controlling power in a positive way’. For the eminent Canadian, doubt is ‘central to [our] understanding’. Ralston Saul also suggests: ‘…it is curious just how easily [our elites] set about serving only themselves, even if it means…they or the society will self-self-destruct’. For his part British philosopher John Gray had this to say:

When belief systems are contradicted by facts, beliefs are rarely renounced…More often they’re reinterpreted and thereby reinforced. Humans are more interested in preserving an internally coherent worldview than in testing their view of things against events. Nearly always, faith trumps facts.

As with Jung’s earlier insight, such musings are crucial to our fuller understanding of what’s taking place at present. They’re further critical to providing an insight into the implications of ignoring the portents therein. In the Age of The ‘Coronapocalypse’—with doubt amongst the populace an increasingly rare commodity—it seems clear we’re not only ‘over’ it as an instinctive response to the machinations of our political, economic, media, technocratic, financial, and intellectual power elites. To the extent we do embrace doubt, we’re doing so inwardly, not outwardly. In the wrong direction as it were!

All of which is to say, it is our own judgment we more readily apply such doubts to than [to] those who govern us. In its place, we’re second-guessing our “aggressive common sense”, substituting a misplaced trust in authority. These wielders of great power known and unknown, elected and unelected, for whom the quaint notion ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ is both anathema and risible, know this: as such, they leverage—politicise, weaponise and/or monetise—our (self) doubts, our fears, insecurities, anxieties, even our primal instincts against us in the service of their own agendas and individual and collective self-interest.

It is said: ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste…’. Putting aside the inherent ambiguity of this trope and the fact that the precept itself has been doing the rounds for some time in one form or another, it not by chance shoehorned itself into the political lexicon in the wake of 9/11. Yet the subtext of this meme was then and remains now, ‘if we get tired of waiting for one to show up, go the extra mile and have one tailor-made and fit-for-purpose…’. That this possibility should be apparent to all is, well, without doubt! To re-mint an old adage, we don’t need to be paranoid to see this. In any case, it may even be too late to help us. Such are the stakes with this particular crisis, such is the zeitgeist. This is not idle hyperbole.

And for those who might be tempted to view this as bordering on conspiratorial musing, as  author Lance deHaven-Smith has suggested, our ready acceptance of the edicts from on high is predicated on a misplaced ‘sentimentality’ about our political leaders, public figures and institutions ‘rather than’ he says, ‘on any unbiased reasoning and object observation. One supposes here, then, we’re talking about the benefit of a reasonable doubt versus the disadvantages of unreasonable suspicion or even unreasoned certainty.

It’s difficult, though, reconciling such “sentimentality” with any known, rational reason for it being so. For those of us not naturally inclined towards sentiment when we contemplate the general character, mindset, integrity and scruples of our average political and public figures, this especially might be the case.

Here’s the thing: If we don’t use doubt—a measure of political agnosticism wherein we question that misplaced trust—to control the psycho-pathologically derived misanthropy and the collective totalitarian mindset of these people, they’ll have little compunction in using our inability, refusal, or unwillingness to doubt [to] control us. As indeed they are, and will continue to do! (See here and here.)

Picturing the Prince (The Ballad of ‘Bogus Bill’)

We’ll return to these themes later. But any meaningful discourse of Covid requires us to critically examine the integrity of the chief architect of the existential milieu in which we find ourselves. For those looking into our current malaise (how did we get here?), it is to Bill Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates (BMG) Foundation we must turn our attention.

In reporting on his much-touted philanthropic endeavours, James Corbett of The Corbett Report is one who’s nailed the essence of Gates, and dared to challenge the accepted narratives of the public relations exercise which has crafted them. For those who haven’t seen Corbett’s expose, suffice to say there are many takeaways, most of which may be difficult to digest for those disinclined to doubt. But essential viewing it is. Along with being an admirer of the man’s work, it’s worth noting I’ve rarely seen him as animated as he has been about the Covid agenda. This in itself is a most telling observation.

From Microsoft to microbes of the life-threatening kind, from viruses of the digital to the less metaphorical variety, Corbett’s own finely tuned doubt receptors have rendered us a compelling portrait of Gates and his backstory, along with the myth, his agenda, and his ‘business model’ for humanity. Once such are revealed, doubt impels us to question many aspects of the Covid phenomenon, not least the disruptive and destructive impositions, edicts, and directives we’ve come to blithely accept from those purporting to manage the ‘crisis’ in our best interests. The wearing of masks, social distancing, lockdowns, border closures, self-isolation, and draconian penalties for infringements of any of the above are just a few of the countless examples.

To be sure, this purportedly philanthropic—and on its face off-piste—career ‘redirection’ for one of the world’s richest and most ruthless of capitalists had many folks reassessing their views of the man. After experiencing a ‘come to me Lord’ moment, Gates had recalibrated his values, mended his ‘wicked ways’, and set out on the road to redemption. Doubtless it was one he presumably felt would, like St Paul’s, in the fullness of time lead him to a higher moral ground and a ‘salvation’ of sorts. And one expects, an immortality of the type few folks might reasonably aspire to much less anticipate.

Sounds fair enough. Using one’s massive, somewhat ill-gotten fortune to eradicate the world’s diseases, reduce poverty along with economic and social inequality, and in general make the planet a better place for the masses (of whom there are far too many in the ‘gospel’ according to Gates), sounds like a grand idea, a selfless goal, taking the whole concept of noblesse oblige to another stratosphere entirely. Some might say it is quixotic, though in his case absent ‘the Don’s’ altruism, the windmills, suit of armour, sceptical off-sider, and trusty steed. It seems to have worked a treat.

To reiterate, there are many who didn’t buy Bill’s ‘bill of goods’ from the off, and remain consistent still; as noted even more now are, if not rejecting it outright, applying suitable mechanisms of doubt. For those doing so, the Covid agenda has revealed Gates’ apparent Damascene conversion all those years ago to all-round good guy, the prince 0f the pathogenic epoch as it were—in his case, the penultimate humanitarian of our era, making John D Rockefeller look like a curmudgeonly ‘scrooge’ even after his not dissimilar re-baptism back in the day—as a fraud, a phony, a chimera of charitable intent.

The Parasitic Profiteers of Adversity

Few people one imagines have transformed the act of giving away their money such a consummately profitable business model. We only need follow the money, or ask: Who benefits? Cui bono? as we say. As with 9/11, the dramatis personae in Covid’s ‘cattle-call’ of beneficiaries is a ‘cast of thousands’, and then some! The parasitic profiteers of angst, adversity and misfortune are rarely in short supply!

And whilst a more complete picture of the ultimate goals of the BMG Foundation, along with the agendas of its various ‘franchisees’ and subsidiaries, might remain unclear for some, it’s enough to say that if its much-touted altruistic aims are to be accepted, there is much more work to be done. In the PR domain that is. This even if the results thus far are quite impressive to say the least.

Public relations (one of whose notable pioneers was no less than Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, who leveraged then monetised his uncle’s conclusions about the inner working of the human mind to stunning effect), doesn’t as a rule seek to provide objective insights into contemporary events. It is about manipulating and moulding (sorry, “managing”) our perceptions of people, situation and circumstance, and doing so by deception, either by omission or commission, by misinformation or disinformation, or both, in each case! This ‘alchemical’ myth-making aims to poison—indeed mutate—the core narrative of our history, as well as the more contemporary political and civil discourse.

Now I feel I can say all this with some measure of authority as I’ve an insider’s grasp of how PR works, a previous life having afforded me such. Being able to match one’s own knowledge of history in general with the history of PR and how it has become such an omnipotent force governing the management of our political economy and our society provides such insight. For those who might challenge the substance of Freud’s own ‘warts ‘n all’ insights into the human condition, the effectiveness of PR is the best evidence we have that the fabled former Viennese ‘shrink’ knew his id from his superego.

We might even go so far to say that whatever values remained of the heritage bequeathed to us by the so-named age of enlightenment, were subverted by Freud’s conclusions around two hundred odd years later. More accurately, it was their application in the real world for purposes and motives that had little to do with enlightenment, reason and rational thinking and much to do with their antithesis, that may have been the real fly in the ointment.

 True, one does not need a post-doctoral degree in Freudian psycho-analytical theory to decide when the forces of PR are in effect. A modicum of “aggressive common sense” will do it. Yet as the American author H.D. Thoreau once mused, ‘…there is such a thing as circumstantial evidence, as when you find a trout in the milk’. Sadly, our “common sense” is not as ubiquitous as we give ourselves credit for, even less “aggressive” as it needs be.

What Gates and Co. have presented thus far is a masterclass in PR’s preternatural capacity to induce the desired doubts in the populace, and from there, mould opinion and/or manufacture out of thin air the credulous acquiescence of the misgoverned. In the view of many (nowhere near a critical mass to be sure), humanity’s ‘crisis’ du génération has ‘unmasked’ the Gates’s real motives and their earnest, over-arching game-plan. Put another way, we don’t need to wait for the lab results to tell us there are rats in the gravy!

In squarely assessing the Covid phenomena, one is struck by any number of conclusions—as inescapable as they’re disturbing—about the forces driving it, and about our collective surrender to these forces. As noted (but cannot be overstated), the first is our recidivistic disposition to, like sermons upon the mount, internalise ‘fashionable’ ideas in the deeper recesses of our cognitive backyards. We continue to embrace such edicts from on high, without a great deal (if any) of critical thought, analysis or again, simple, homespun doubt. Our belief in, and acceptance of, such edicts are little more than faith-based.

In this, our education system is to be sure, a principal culprit. As someone who’s spent (another) previous life as a professional educator, for this writer that much is a given. Whilst this’ll be the subject of a future, deeper reflection on the root causes of our contemporary malaise, suffice to say there’s little provision within the modern school curriculum for the encouragement of critical thought (in this writer’s view, the opposable thumb of the intellect), the terrain having been purposely—yet covertly—well-tilled and seeded to this end over several decades. Beyond formal education itself, other forces come into play to be sure, not least our media.

Thus our “worldview” remains forever unchallenged, unchanged. It needs be noted that along with positioning himself amongst the medical and health fraternity as the ‘go-to’ global guru on public health policy in general and the dangers of contagious diseases in particular, Gates has cemented this reputation with the broader public by assiduously courting the mainstream (corporate) media and the reigning political classes and their unelected patrons in unstinting support of the BMG Foundation’s agenda.

And though the COVID thing represents the best evidence we have of how we’re being misinformed—and from there (mis) governed—in the here and now, it serves as a reliable index of how we might be so governed in the future. This much is clear: they’ll keep ‘pushing the envelope’ here until our mailboxes are full. A casual scrutiny of some of history’s most consequential events, developments and turning points is enough for the discerning doubter to appreciate this. Though it might go without saying, as indicated by then it most likely will be too late. Even if the truth of events comes out, the damage has already been done. No collective, belated epiphany upon the part of the public can undo it. Here we might recall John Gray’s earlier point about beliefs being “rarely renounced” when “contradicted by facts”.

In the Land of the Infected (None so Blind)

Now those not persuaded by the preceding views may need to ‘get out more’, to use the vernacular. Which is to say we need to wake up to the brain-numbing barrage of propaganda on the one hand and stifling censorship on the other to which we’ve been subjected for many years: this Orwellian milieu has expanded greatly since the emergence of this so-called crisis. It’s tantamount to psychological warfare of the asymmetrical kind, where the stronger power determines to have the upper hand, and is well positioned to achieve and maintain it.

As Vanessa Beeley from 21C Wire reveals, this trend towards increasing censorship, surveillance and secrecy is very much an exponential work in progress, with the latter possibly not being the most appropriate word given the zeitgeist. To the degree notions of transparency and accountability are in play, the miscreants driving these developments are now more open (or less embarrassed or apologetic) about being caught out, and ever more immune when they are called out. Any sense of embarrassment, guilt or shame their ilk might have been prone to back in the day has long since been surgically removed as if it were a ruptured appendix. (See here, here, here, here, and here for more on this.)

The perpetrators and sources of propaganda and censorship are many and various: They run the gamut from global and regional foundations, commissions, movements, and assorted agenda-driven organisations to national, state and provincial governments; [to] the corporate (mainstream) media along with the intelligence and security agencies; lobby groups, think tanks, NGOs; Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Arms et. al.; and myriad other private and public institutions and vested interests, including even our regulatory bodies and legislative assemblies. If only we could have a vaccine to inoculate us against this cognitive onslaught, this pernicious societal and political virulence!

This operant conditioning (or programming), a euphemism for old-school brainwashing, albeit utilising more sophisticated technological and psychological instruments, is designed to elicit a false consensus effect (or bias) in people, whereby they ‘see their own behavioural choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances’. In other words, we accept our personal beliefs, values, perceptions, and attitudes as relatively widespread through the general populace, and we react in kind, something of a herd mentality one suspects. Once the herd mentality is in play, there is no herd immunity. (Think wildebeests here, or maybe lemmings).

Jung, himself, warned of the ‘politico-social delusional systems’ and ‘monkey tricks’ politicians use to ‘poison the utterly incompetent mind of the masses.’ Less lofty in tone, yet perhaps more pithily, the popular British satirist and fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett acutely observed: ‘…the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters’. Aristotle’s oft-cited postulate that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ may have its discontents; what is inarguable is that this is where stupidity finds its natural habitat, and ignorance its idyll.

Such acquiescence on our part can be aroused by sub rosa, beguiling means, like predictive programming. This is very much a forte of the film and television business to be sure. According to Alan Watt, ideas which might otherwise be seen as undesirable, bizarre, vulgar or impossible ‘are inserted into films [as] fantasy. When the viewer watches these films, his/her mind is left open to suggestion and the conditioning process begins.’ Hollywood has been called the ‘dream factory’, ironic on many levels, especially as it is no slouch in the fabrication of nightmares. That it does so purportedly for our ‘entertainment’ is doubly ironic. (Here we might again think of the events of 9/11. See here also.)

Predictive programming is usually deemed the domain of the “conspiracy theorist”, Watt and his ilk being dismissed as such. The epithet has always been and remains the de rigueur response from those who like to ‘man the barricades’ at any hint the official narrative of events past and present may not be kosher. As with such theories, whether they turn out to be true or not (we know many do, in fact; see here, here, and here just for starters), coincidence plays a key role in how we determine what’s a conspiracy and what’s not.) Again, as Gray’s previous observation underscores, even then, such revelations rarely deliver an appropriate corrective to the accepted narrative.)

Though by no means the best or the only one, an exemplar of such programming (akin to ‘tilling the soil’), is the 2008 British film Doomsday—a dystopian, nihilistic, viral-apocalypse gore-fest of the first order. The central ‘character’ in this film is the aptly named “Reaper” virus, the arrival and impact of which decimates the population and splits the UK in two under martial law. It then ‘disappears’, only to ‘mysteriously’ resurface thirty years later. By this time, we’re living the nightmare! Cue the darkness, in the land of the infected.

Slickly made—with a plot that on its face stretches plausibility and replete with over-the-top action scenes rivalling the Mad Max (aka Road Warrior) films and their ilk, only with lethal badass germs and a cast of infected zombie-like thousands a la The Living Dead roaming the desolate landscape, the film does what it says on the box. Although I didn’t see Bill Gates’ name in the credits (OK, I didn’t check; but ‘creative consultant’ or ‘technical adviser’ anyone?), it was like so many others of its ilk, scripted and produced to transcend mere edge-of-your-seat, pop-corn entertainment. (See here for the “Top Ten” in the genre; and yes, it is a “genre”.)

There was a message in the film to be sure, and it wasn’t necessarily a cautionary tale about capricious microbes waiting to bush-wack us on our evolutionary path and eradicate us all before we do same to ourselves by other means. What makes this film relevant herein is the subversive political agenda that drives much of the action. (As fictional fare, everyone, man and his dog, loves a good conspiracy theory it seems. It’s only when we step back into the real world that we have trouble entertaining, less so accepting, such possibilities. What makes us think Covid might just be different? This question need not be simply rhetorical.)

Yet for apocalyptic prescience of the pathogenic kind in fictional conspiratorial plotting, it is Israeli Hamutal Shabtai who gets the nod. Over 23 years ago she wrote a book—largely unnoticed it appears—about the emergence of a Covid-like pandemic, set in 2020. Not so imaginatively titled 2020, this novel was apparently only published in Hebrew, and according to Raul Diego of MintPress News, originally written as a film script. Diego:

Shabtai…predicts the state of the world today as a result of the counter-measures with uncanny accuracy and foretells of a society ravaged by a virus, which ushers in a “global health dictatorship”.

Rats in the Gravy

And for those unaware of the origins of the “conspiracy theory” construct as used in the pejorative (it almost always is), it’s time to bring oneself up to speed. Look no further than the CIA’s infamous Operation Mockingbird, the most enduring, successful, well-documented, psychological operation (aka ‘psy-op’) ever concocted by The Company, one promiscuously embraced by all Western intelligence and security agencies and their governments. They’ve been dining out on it for over seventy years. And we’ve been picking up the tab.

The phrase “conspiracy theorist” itself was a purpose-built initiative of OpMock and its attendant illusions and shell-games. So effective has this meme been, it has prevailed against our political enlightenment over three generations, shows no sign of approaching its use-by date, and provides us more evidence if required that Freud knew his stuff.  It has been the perfect vaccine against authentic doubt (or “aggressive common sense”), the latter being the virus that most scares our political and power elites. For his part Gates appears increasingly unhinged by all the Covid naysayers, recently decrying “conspiracy theorists” and their “crazy, evil” accusations. One marvels as to why he took so long to ‘sound the alarm’! (For more information on OpMock, see here, here and here).

And this is without mentioning MK-ULTRA (aka Artichoke), the same agency’s diabolical mind-control and brainwashing plots, programs, experiments and schemes. This is a program the records of which the CIA reportedly destroyed (at least by some accounts) in the early seventies. But this author doesn’t buy that theory. (See here, here, and here.)  Even if the names might’ve changed, that the overarching (and overreaching) goals of both programs could still be in play is something we should take as a given.

We are then via real-time surveillance faced with the prospect of more and more intrusions into, and dispossession of, our privacy—propelled by frontal attacks on our presumed entitlements in this respect. This is especially so with the advent of artificial intelligence, genetic modification (GM) and 5G intelligence and data mining and manipulation technologies: I’m reliably informed of such prospects by an associate, a long-time career computer engineer no less, who sees a dark future for humanity herein. The increasing sophistication of, and both ubiquitous and iniquitous (increasingly untested, unregulated), application of AI/GM/5G control tools and power-wielding processes makes this a given.

In this Brave New World meets 1984 future, such technologies will come to rule, direct, psychologically orchestrate, socially engineer, behaviourally manage, and genetically manipulate every aspect of our lives. One can reasonably surmise this is one of the key motives for—and objectives of—those associated with its rollout. Human nature has a track record of going off-track, and it is not one overly imbued with circumspection, erring on the side of caution, forward thinking, altruism, or broad consideration of the public weal. If it can all be monetised along with being weaponised all the better. Which it is and will continue to be. Of that we can be sure.

Though space prohibits an in-depth discussion of such, it’s worth mentioning at this point the widely perceived connections between the timing of the rollout of 5G and the arrival of Covid. It’s enough to say that one credible observer—Robert F Kennedy Jr.—foresees a “catastrophe” for humanity. For him, there are no ‘mights’ or ‘maybes’ about it. It is instructive that he made this comment in the context of talking about pandemics, vaccines and the like. But he was clearly alluding to the possible environmental and health blow-back from rolling out this scandalously untested technology. (See also here.)

And it would seem that Covid has brought into sharp relief the corruption and avarice of our once trusted medical science and health professions. In this writer’s ‘humble’ opinion, Kennedy is one of the most articulate and principled advocates for more accountability and transparency within and across the broad medical, pharmaceutical, healthcare, health insurance, health science and scientific research and associated regulatory domains. He attends his message with a no punches pulled indictment of the widespread, deep-seated conflicts of vested interests therein, and the rampant abuse and neglect of the public trust he sees as being out of control in these spheres.

In a lengthy interview last year, Kennedy gave vent to all of the above and then some. Whilst the main focus was on Covid and the disturbing implications for our future, his views extended to the numerous issues which attend Covid. There are any number of reveals in this wide-ranging discussion and RFK’s son—a litigation lawyer, safe vaccine advocate, and environmental activist—was ‘all over his brief’ as it were. Like the Corbett revelations on Gates, this interview provides valuable insights. (Similar to many who share his beliefs, Kennedy maintains that he is not against vaccines but wishes that they be more thoroughly tested and investigated.)

One striking illustration (countless others abound) providing further evidence of the misinformation and disinformation that has become the hallmark of the perpetual motion propaganda and censorship machine that has been purpose built to keep the official narrative on track is the following. Dr. Roger Hodkinson is Chairman of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons committee in Ottawa, and also CEO of a large private medical laboratory in Edmonton, Alberta. He’s also Chairman of a medical biotechnology company seeking to enter the vaccination market.

On its face this looks a typical conflict of interest of the type referred to earlier. Yet in a video (originally posted on Youtube, but tellingly removed by YT gatekeepers shortly thereafter), Hodkinson decried the ‘utterly unfounded hysteria’ surrounding Covid, which he said was ‘driven by the media and politicians’. Along with calling it ‘the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspected public’, Hodkinson declared the ‘crisis’ as nothing more than ‘a bad flu season. It’s politics playing medicine and that’s a very dangerous game.’ He further added:

There is no action needed…Masks are utterly useless. There is no evidence whatsoever they are even effective. It is utterly ridiculous seeing these unfortunate, uneducated people walking around like lemmings obeying without any evidence. Social distancing is also useless… [T]he risk of death under 65 is 1 in 300,000…the response utterly ridiculous.

 Quarantining Humanity (Useless Eaters and Useful Idiots)

To sum up: If we relinquish our freedom of action, choice and movement to the pandemic priesthood and supplant our individual thoughts and speech with the accepted narratives of their agendas, we do so at our own peril. We are in effect dispensing with one of the most effective tools of defence in the smoke-filled ‘wilderness of mirrors’ (located as it is inside a cacophonous echo chamber) that passes for reality, one in which we all too readily assume will present greater opportunities for us, our families and descendants to pursue, attain, then lead full, free, productive, meaningful—and better; i.e., improved—lives.

This illusory construct has been purpose-built to reflect and echo a reality of their own making. Such pseudo-realities have been with us for some time and remain extant, a work in progress. One hardly needs to be a political philosopher or logician to detect the vicious circularity of this existential malaise, and we are but bit players performing in this post-modern danse macabre, this cosmic, mordantly ironic, nihilistic opera of the absurd, one directed by criminal sociopaths and choreographed by the certifiably insane.

We sacrifice all this for what is rapidly approaching in extremis, something of a devolution of humanity, marked by soulless economic determinism, technological tyranny, social engineering, genetic manipulation, political absolutism, psychological alienation, and an ineradicable spiritual ennui unimagined of in the most conceivable of pessimistic, dystopian futures. The mythical deities of Grecian antiquity combined, from Zeus himself on down the mountain, might hardly have marshalled, much less manifested, this much narcissistic hubris towards, and disdain for, their mortal constituents and/or presumed omnipotence over them.

Brought into sharp relief by Covid, this entrenched institutional corruption, deception and fraud alone is prevalent and ongoing at the highest levels in both the private and public realms of our global political economy. As always seems to be the case, the corporate media—the glue that holds the monolithic capitalist, free market, globalist, free trade, neoliberal construct in place—have outdone themselves in this regard; after all the Russia-gate farce, some folks might’ve expected this to be a hard act to follow.

But follow it they did, doubling down and being even more brazen about it. Whilst a story for another time, they seem to have outdone themselves once more with their reportage on the conduct and outcome of the 2020 election. On both counts this has no precedent in American history, with the lies, damned lies, and dodgy statistics that underpinned their election coverage and the preordained narrative embedded therein being key to the stand-out nature of the poll.

With each passing day, though it may be too little too late, more high-profile and/or authoritative folks are beginning to speak up about the challenges and variegated dangers posed by the COVID crisis, and the manner in which it has been managed. One such person is the erudite German author Eckhart Tolle. During a recent lecture on the subject of adversity (an apposite title for the age in which we live perhaps?), Tolle delivers some poignant, yet still portentous comments on the Coronavirus hysteria.

In this two-parter, “Awakening Through Adversity,” the following are just a few of the points he covers:

• Collective ‘hive mind’ and the spread of ‘mind viruses’;
• How the collective mind is projected through social and mainstream media;
• How sensationalism in mainstream media drives the ‘crisis’ narrative; and,
  
• How to be more conscious of mainstream media manipulation.

 In these uncertain times, Tolle’s views on the Covid upheaval are especially worth listening to.

As a fitting coda to our ruminations then, the following might be appropriate. Insofar as COVID goes—and any plot dreamed up by hidden agenda-driven intriguers and schemers designed to serve their own interests or those in whose service they’re being amply rewarded—we’re looking down the barrel of not so much a medical, health, and/or social crisis (as bespoke as it is). We’re facing nothing less than what we might term a blood poisoning of the body politic.

It’s all but a fait accompli that we now accept it is their interests that will always come first. Although to some extent trust in our political, public and private institutions has declined precipitously, this half-assed realisation is too little, too late. We rarely seem to stop what we’re doing and consider the implications of that. Until that mistrust is converted into critical mass action, we’re on a hiding to nothing.

Which is to say, we’ll face two choices, both of which are something of the Hobson’s variety. We either become one of Vladimir Lenin’s “useful idiots” in the service of this all-out assault on democracy, the public weal, and humanity. Or we end up one of Henry Kissinger’s “useless eaters“. The ‘choice’ is ours (or not).

Or like Henry Ford once reportedly opined, ‘you can have any colour you like, as long as it’s black!’

If only we could embrace doubt with as much enduring enthusiasm and commitment as we do the purported good intentions of those who rule over us. If only…

This article was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2021 at 10:33am and is filed under 9-11, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Pharma, Bill Gates, Biotechnology, CIA, Conspiracy Theories, COVID-19, Disinformation, Economy/Economics, Fearmongering, Lockdown, Media, Mental Health, Mind Control, Narrative, Opinion, Pandemics, Pharmaceuticals, Propaganda, Propagandists, Psychology/Psychiatry, Psychopathology, Ruling Elite, Society, Surveillance, The “Great Reset”, Totalitarianism, Transparency/Secrecy, Vaccines.

Some of the truths the COVID-19 pandemic is exposing about the United States are its racial disparities in health and access to health care. Black and Indigenous people are more likely to be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 than white people. They are two to three times more likely to be hospitalized and two to two and a half times more likely to die than white people. There are a number of factors that contribute to this.

Another related truth that is being exposed by the pandemic is the relative failure of capitalist countries to contain the virus and limit deaths when compared to socialist countries. Even some relatively poor countries, many of which are targeted by the US’ illegal economic warfare, are outperforming wealthy countries because they have socialized systems.

This shouldn’t be surprising because capitalism as a system is designed to profit from emergencies, not provide for people’s needs. The response, or lack of it, to the winter storms in the South last week was a stark example. Millions of people froze without power and water because Texas failed to invest in its infrastructure to prepare for an emergency and those who had electricity are now facing energy bills of thousands of dollars because the market prices for energy soared.

But all in all, the Global South, mainly composed of Indigenous, Black and other people of color, is struggling during the pandemic as are their brothers and sisters in the United States. Wealthy western nations are hoarding more supplies than they need. They are protecting the profits of their corporations at a cost of human lives and allowing the pandemic to rage across the planet, mutating into more infectious and deadly strains as it goes.

People are organizing to end this medical apartheid. This is an important opportunity to address the longstanding causes of these disparities and build systems that uphold all of our human rights to health. This is a struggle that calls for solidarity from people in the US with the Global South.

People hold up a banner while listening to a news conference outside San Quentin State Prison Thursday, July 9, 2020. (ERIC RISBERG AP.)

The COVID-19 pandemic is taking a toll on the overall health of people in the United States, but Indigenous, Black and Latino people are impacted the most. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that life expectancy in the United States fell by a year in the first half of 2020, and it is likely to be a larger decline once the data for the entire year has been analyzed. Black people lost almost three years and Latino people lost almost two years of life while the decline for white people was less than a year. The CDC did not report on the life expectancy of Indigenous people.

There are multiple reasons for the disparity. As the Economic Policy Institute found last year, Black workers are suffering more during the pandemic in part because they are less likely to be able to work from home than white workers. Black people are more likely to have lost their job or to be an essential worker where they risk contracting COVID-19 and introducing it to their families and communities.

Prisons, where Black people are more likely than white people to be incarcerated, are sites of a high proportion of COVID-19 cases. As Marc Norton writes, prisons are super spreader sites infecting not only inmates but the surrounding community as well. One inmate who was involved in protests over the conditions at the Justice Center in St. Louis Missouri explains that inmates are not being tested, are not being given adequate access to what they need to protect themselves and are being housed with infected people. Although it is difficult to find data for prisoners who have COVID-19 categorized by race, the ACLU of West Virginia reports that the percent of Black inmates with COVID-19 in a number of states is nearly twice as high as the percentage of them in the prison population. For example, in Missouri, Black people are about a third of the prison population but are 58% of the COVID-19 cases.

Racial disparities are present in long term care facilities too, another site of high numbers of COVID-19 infections. Less than one percent of the population is in a long term care facility, but that is where five percent of the infections are occurring. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that there were more COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes with a high percentage of non-white residents than in nursing homes with a low percentage of non-white residents.

And rural areas, which in the South and Southeast tend to be majority Indigenous, Black and Brown, also contribute to the racial disparities in COVID-19 cases and deaths. For the last decade, rural communities have been losing their hospitals and with that, their health professionals. There is also less access to telehealth services. But cities are problematic too.

The authors of this article in the Gothamist explain that, in New York City, “Black and Latino residents by and large suffer the highest death rates, which are attributable to inequitable access to health care and housing.” They also find great disparities in vaccination rates. White residents are being vaccinated at three times the rate of Black and Latino residents.

Disparities in vaccination rates exist elsewhere too. In Philadelphia, 44% of the city residents are black but they make up only 12% of those who have been vaccinated. To change this, the Black Doctors COVID-9 Consortium is taking vaccines directly to Black neighborhoods to immunize people. In Baltimore, while more than 60% of the people living in the city are black, only 5% of the people who have been vaccinated are black.

In the United States, a big reason for the racial disparities in who is being vaccinated has to do with the lack of a coordinated plan to make sure that those who are most impacted are vaccinated first. The US lacks the public health infrastructure to administer a mass vaccination campaign. There are different guidelines and methods of getting vaccinated in different parts of the country.

If the United States had a universal healthcare system like national improved Medicare for all, then vaccination programs could be run through primary care practices where the patients and health professionals know each other. Practices would know who in their patient population needs the vaccine most and could contact them. In the current environment, people have to sign up online, which disadvantages those who do not have access to the internet, and in some areas people can only get vaccinated in drive-through centers that exclude people without cars.

Instead of primary care practices doing the vaccinations, vaccines are being distributed through for-profit pharmacy chains. In California, healthcare workers have to go to a pharmacy chain or Costco to get vaccinated instead of getting the vaccine at work. This creates another barrier for workers. In Florida, the Governor has politicized the vaccine rollout by prioritizing zip codes that are mostly Republican and allowing the grocery chain Publix to be the sole distributor. Publix donated heavily to the Governor’s campaign.

As Margaret Kimberley explains, the underlying problem is capitalism. She writes, “Donald Trump was blamed for the poor response in 2020 but it is clear that Americans are in trouble regardless of who occupies the White House because profits determine the response to a health care crisis.”

Funk Rally in DC (Nicolas Moreland)

Recently, Popular Resistance co-hosted a webinar called “COVID-19: How Weaponizing Disease and Vaccine Wars Are Failing Us.” It featured some of the authors and editors of the book, “Capitalism on a Ventilator,” who gave an update to it. It is clear that countries that treat health care as a public good and that have socialized governments, such as China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Nicaragua, were able to take immediate steps to control the pandemic. They had the healthcare system and infrastructure in place to get information to people about how to protect themselves, to identify people who were infected and to provide what they needed to quarantine or receive medical treatment. They were able to coordinate getting health professionals and supplies to the areas where they were needed. And they are treating immunization as a public health necessity instead of a profit-making venture.

The situation in the United States has been the opposite. There was no centralized plan. City and state governments scrambled to put in place what was needed and engaged in bidding wars with each other for basic supplies and equipment. Some areas were overwhelmed and could not provide necessary care to everyone. Health professionals and others on the front line worked in hazardous conditions. People who needed care delayed seeking it out of fear of the cost. Hunger and poverty are now growing as the government failed to provide needed support financially and in other ways such as housing, health care and food.

In the United States, immunizations are being treated as a profit-centers instead of public goods. The United States government spent $12.4 billion on “Operation Warp Speed” to produce vaccines using private corporations that are now reaping the profits. Spending on the vaccine delivery side was only in the hundreds of millions while the actual cost is billions of dollars. States are struggling to afford their vaccine programs as they wait for Congress to pass another spending bill. This is likely a factor in driving states to turn to for-profit entities like pharmacy chains to administer the vaccines.

The United States and other wealthy western nations have also been acting on a global scale to thwart the efforts of other countries to handle the pandemic. Early on, as countries worked together by sharing information, supplies and health professionals, the United States withdrew from these efforts and increased its economic warfare in the form of sanctions on countries such as Venezuela and Iran. The results have been devastating.

This week, the United Nations special rapporteur on the impact of unilateral coercive measures on human rights, Alena Douhan, released her preliminary report on the dire situation in Venezuela. In an interview with Anya Parampil, Douhan said that the economic blockade shrunk Venezuela’s government revenue by an astounding 99%. On top of that, the United States, United Kingdom and Portugal are withholding $6 billion of Venezuela’s assets, money that Venezuela had agreed to use to purchase food, medicine and other necessities from the United Nations. The sanctions are also preventing Venezuela from purchasing vaccines through the COVAX program. Douhan is calling on the US and others to end the sanctions and give Venezuela access to its money, but so far the Biden administration has refused.

Sign the petition telling the Biden administration to end the sanctions. Register for the Sanctions Kill webinar to learn more about what sanctions are, who they impact and what we can do to end them at bit.ly/SKtoolkit.

When Russia announced its COVID-19 vaccine last August, a vaccine produced by state agencies, the United States quickly moved to impose economic sanctions on those research centers seemingly out of spite. Similar sanctions were forced on China, which has produced five different COVID-19 vaccines and plans to share its vaccines with less developed countries at a low cost to them.

The United States and other wealthy western nations are responsible for the global vaccine apartheid. Instead of putting policies in place to make sure that all people, especially in the vulnerable Global South countries, have vaccines, they are buying up the vaccines in quantities greater than they need, causing scarcity and driving up prices.

In These Times reports that ten wealthy countries have administered 75% of the vaccine doses given so far to their people while 130 countries have not given any doses. African countries are struggling to buy vaccines even through the COVAX program, which is short on supplies. Hadas Thier writes, “AstraZeneca, despite claiming a ​’no-profit’ pledge during the pandemic, is charging South Africa $5.25 per dose and Uganda $7 per dose. The European Union, by contrast, has paid just $2.16 per dose.” Doctors who are on the front lines are dying from COVID-19 because they aren’t protected, leaving African countries that already lack sufficient doctors in a worse situation.

Another issue that is driving the vaccine apartheid as well as limiting access to lifesaving medications is corporate monopolization of patent information. If other countries had access to that information, they could produce the vaccines and therapeutics themselves. Pressure is being put on the World Trade Organization (WTO) by 40 countries and 200 organizations to exempt COVID-19 medications and vaccines from patent restrictions, called a “TRIPS waiver,” at their meeting next month but the US and other wealthy nations are blocking it. Your organization can sign onto their letter here (deadline is Feb. 24).

The G7 nations met on Friday and agreed to provide a small portion of their vaccines to developing nations. Global Justice Now, one of the organizations pushing for open access to the patents for medicines and vaccines, says the G7 nations’ offer is a ‘fig leaf’ that is inadequate to address the problem: “Promising donations ‘at some point in the future’ fails to tackle the real problem: urgent lack of supply caused by Big Pharma’s patents.”

A stark example of vaccine apartheid is occurring in the Occupied Palestinian Territory where Israel, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, is refusing to give the vaccine to Palestinians. The United States could use its power to pressure Israel to stop this practice, but it isn’t. The United States has been a strong supporter of Israel’s genocidal actions.

The People’s Vaccine Alliance, a group of organizations pressuring the WTO to lift the patents, states that if the situation doesn’t change, “90% of people in poor countries won’t be able to get the vaccine in 2021.” Some countries in Latin America are taking matters into their own hands. Cuba is developing its own vaccine, the Sovereign 2, and plans to produce 100 million doses this year, far more than it needs, so that it can make it available to other countries at no or low cost. Argentina and Mexico are working with Astra Zeneca to start producing its vaccine together. The manufacturing process will begin in Argentina and be finished in Mexico.

Nurses and health care workers outside at a hospital in New York City demand better protection against the COVID-19 virus (Giles Clarke)

The COVID-19 pandemic and global medical apartheid affect all of us. The more the virus is allowed to proliferate, the more likely there is to be mutations, like the ones in the strains coming from the UK and South Africa. The UK strain is more infectious than the original strain and appears to be more lethal. It is widespread in the US now and may cause another surge of cases in the coming weeks or months. The South African strain is also in the US. It is more infectious and seems able to evade the body’s immune system.

If the world does not get the pandemic under control, all of our lives are at risk. It is in our interest to make sure that enough people are vaccinated quickly to stop the spread before new strains arise that are resistant to the vaccines. It is also critical that people who need medications to treat COVID-19 have access to them no matter where they live.

The Biden administration claims to be concerned about racial inequities. If that is the case, it must address these inequities wherever they occur or be called out for failing to do so. The COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to transform the world in a way that ends the great inequities that exist.

• Health care must be viewed worldwide as a public good, not a profit-making venture.
• Instead of competition, there must be an open sharing of information to tackle the healthcare crises we face.
• The Global South, which comprises the most vulnerable populations, must be prioritized for access to medications and vaccines so it can resolve the crisis quickly with less impact on its struggling economies.
• And, the United States must end its illegal actions around the world including economic sanctions, military interference and support for major human rights abusers such as Israel.

We in the United States can hasten this transformation by putting pressure on our government to change. This is a way to show solidarity with people around the world who, like us, are struggling for the right to a life of dignity and prosperity. What our government does abroad, it also does at home because we all suffer under the capitalist system. Together, we can create a better world.

This article was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2021 at 9:33pm and is filed under Africa, Capitalism, China, COVID-19, Cuba, Equal Rights, EU, Israel, Joe Biden, Marginalism, Medical Apartheid, National improved Medicare for all (NIMA), Neoliberalism, Nicaragua, Palestine, Pandemics, Protests, Racism, Russia, Sanctions, Unemployment, United Kingdom, Vaccines, Venezuela.

It is time to speak out forcefully now that a new, large-scale Spanish study demonstrates not a just a correlation but a causal relationship between high-dose Vitamin D treatment of hospitalised Covid patients and significantly improved outcomes for their health.

The pre-print paper in the Lancet shows there was an 80 per cent reduction in admission to intensive care units among hospitalised patients who were treated with large doses of Vitamin D, and a 64 per cent reduction in death. The possibility of these being chance findings are infinitesimally small, note the researchers. And to boot, the study found no side-effects even when these mega-doses were given short term to the hospitalised patients.

Those are astounding figures that deserve to be on front pages, especially at a time when politicians and doctors are uncertain whether they can ever find a single magic-bullet vaccine against Covid as new variants pop up like spring daffodils.

If Vitamin D can approximate a cure for many of those hospitalised with Covid, one can infer that it should prove even more effective when used as a prophylactic. Most people in northern latitudes ought to be taking Vitamin D through much of the year in significant doses – well above the current, outdated 400IU recommended by governments like the UK’s.

This is a very important study on vitamin D and Covid-19. Its findings are incredibly clear. An 80% reduction in need for ICU and a 60% reduction in deaths, simply by giving a very cheap and very safe therapy – calcifediol, or activated vitamin D. https://t.co/lB7sYxDQfn

— David Davis (@DavidDavisMP) February 13, 2021

Knee-jerk dismissals

This new study ought to finally silence the naysayers, though doubtless it won’t. So far it has attracted little media attention. What has been most troubling over the past year is that every time I and others have gently drawn attention to each new study that demonstrated the dramatic benefits of Vitamin D, we were greeted with knee-jerk dismissals that the studies showed only a correlation, not a causal link.

That was a deeply irresponsible response, especially in the midst of a global pandemic for which effective treatments are urgently needed. The never-satisfied have engaged in the worst kind of blame-shifting, implicitly maligning medical researchers for the fact that they could only organise small-scale, improvised studies because governments were not supporting and funding the larger-scale research needed to prove conclusively whether Vitamin D was effective.

Further, the naysayers wilfully ignored the fact that all the separate studies showed very similar correlations, as well as the fact that hospitalised patients were invariably deficient, or very deficient, in Vitamin D. The cumulative effect of those studies should have been persuasive in themselves. And more to the point, they should have led to a concerted campaign pressuring governments to fund the necessary research. Instead much of the medical community has wasted valuable time either ignoring the research or nitpicking it into oblivion.

The evidence grows ever more overwhelming that good Vit D levels offer significant protection against Covid with little risk of adverse effects, experts tell Haaretz, Israel’s version of the NYT https://t.co/zep2HPh8iq

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 9, 2020

There should have come a point – especially when a treatment like Vitamin D is very cheap and almost entirely safe – at which the precautionary principle kicked in. It was not only foolhardy but criminally negligent to be demanding 100 per cent proof before approving the use of Vitamin D on seriously ill patients. There was no risk in treating them with Vitamin D, unlike most other proposed drugs, and potentially much to gain.

Stuck in old paradigm

Already the usual voices have dismissed the new Barcelona study, saying it has yet to be peer-reviewed. That ignores the fact that it is an expansion on, and confirmation of, an earlier, much smaller study in Cordoba that has been peer-reviewed and that similarly showed dramatic, beneficial outcomes for patients.

In addition to the earlier studies and the new one showing a causal link, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to bolster the case for using Vitamin D against Covid.

For many years, limited studies – ones that Big Pharma showed no interest in expanding – had indicated that Vitamin D was useful both in warding off respiratory infections and in treating a wide variety of chronic auto-immune diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis by damping down inflammatory responses of the kind that often overwhelm hospitalised Covid patients.

But many doctors and politicians were stuck in an old paradigm – one rooted in the 1950s that viewed Vitamin D exclusively in terms of bone health.

The role of Vitamin D – produced in the skin by sunlight – should have been at the forefront of medical research for Covid anyway, given that the prevalence of the disease, as with other respiratory infections, appears to slump through the sunny, summer months, and spikes in the winter.

And while the media preferred to focus exclusively on poverty and racism as “correlative” explanations for the disproportionate number of deaths among BAME doctors and members of the public, Vitamin D seemed an equally, if not more plausible, candidate. Dark skins in cloud-covered northern latitudes make production of Vitamin D harder and deficiency more likely.

Magic bullet preferred

We should not be surprised that Big Pharma had no interest in promoting a vitamin freely available through much of the year and one they cannot license. They would, of course, rather patent an expensive magic bullet that offers the hope of enriching company directors and shareholders.

‘There are no clinical trials of Vit D to prevent Covid ongoing anywhere in the world.’

Yet many doctors endorsed it at the pandemic’s start and the Lancet backed its use a month ago. Yet more evidence of Big Pharma’s malign hold on our health services https://t.co/Sv7iI4R9FZ

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 18, 2020

But that is why we have governments, isn’t it? They could have stepped in to pick up the bill for the research after profit-motivated firms had refused to do so – if not to safeguard the health of their populations, at least to keep their health budgets under control. Most developed countries, even those with lots of sunshine, have large sections of their population that are Vitamin D deficient, especially among the elderly and housebound, the very groups most affected by Covid.

But governments shirked their responsibility too. Most have not offered supplements beyond measly and largely useless 400IU tablets to the elderly, and they have failed to fortify foods. Those taking small doses are unlikely to significantly and quickly address any deficiency they have or maximise their resistance to Covid.

To give a sense of what was potentially at stake, consider the findings of one of last year’s correlative studies, done by a team in Heidelberg. Their work implied that, had the UK ensured its population was not widely Vitamin D deficient, many tens of thousands of lives might have been saved.

Headline: Heidelberg study suggests there might have been 93,000 fewer deaths in UK from Covid had Vit D deficiency been corrected in the population.

Subhead: Nothing likely to change till governments fund an interventional study to confirm findings https://t.co/qtcJuzMinS

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 4, 2021

Science not ‘followed’

There are lessons – ones we seem very reluctant to learn – from the catastrophic failures of the past year. And they aren’t just lessons for the politicians.

If doctors and medical organisations had really been “following the science”, they would have led the clamour both for properly funded Vitamin D research and for its early use, if only on the precautionary principle. The reality is that very few did. In the UK it was left to MP David Davis, who trained as a molecular scientist, to take up the cause of Vitamin D and badger a government that has shown no inclination to listen.

I’ve been beating the drum on this since early summer. Time to listen. The case for Vitamin D offering significant protection against Covid, and having wider health benefits, is growing overwhelming. So overwhelming even corporate media is taking note https://t.co/qIi3Hc6xRp

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 11, 2021

Instead, “follow the science” became a simple-minded mantra that allowed scientists to ignore the medical science when it did not lead them in the direction they had been trained to expect. “The science” told us to stay indoors, to minimise our contact with daylight, to limit our exposure to fresh air and exercise. We were required to abandon all traditional wisdom about our health.

If one wants to understand at least some of the resistance to lockdowns, it might be worth examining that instinct and how deeply – and rightly – ingrained it is in us.

Scientific arrogance

If we learn anything from the past year it should be that the current, dominant, mechanistic view of medical science – one that too often disregards the natural world or even holds it in contempt – is deeply corrupting and dangerous.

This is not intended as a rant against science. After all, the mass production of Vitamin D – in the absence of useful sunshine in northern latitudes for much of the year – depends on scientific procedures.

Rather it is a rant against a blinkered science that has come to dominate western societies. Put simply, most experts – scientists and doctors – have not taken Vitamin D seriously, despite the growing evidence, because it is made in the mystical touch of sun on skin rather than by white-coated technicians in a laboratory.

Just as most army generals are invested in war more than in peace because they would be out of job if we all chose to love one another, most scientists have been successfully trained to see the natural world as something to be interfered with, to be tamed, to be dissected, to be reassembled, to be improved. Like the rest of us, they have a need – a very unscientific one – to feel special, to believe that they are indispensable. But that arrogance comes at a cost.

Unhealthy lifestyles

The default assumption of many medical scientists was that any claim for Vitamin D – sunlight – having curative or protective properties against Covid-19 needed not urgent, further investigation but dismissal as quackery, as snake oil. How could nature possibly offer a Covid solution that scientists could not improve on?

Unpopular as it may be to say it, that arrogance continues with the exclusive focus on vaccines. They will prove part of the way we emerge from the Covid winter. But we will be foolish indeed if we rely on them alone. We need to think about the way our societies are structured and the resulting unhealthy habits cultivated in us: the sedentary lifestyles many of us lead, the lack of exposure to nature and to sunshine, the gratuitous consumption on which our economies depend, and the advertiser-driven urge for instant gratification that has led to a plague of obesity.

There is no vaccine for any of that yet.

Already we are being forced into what are deeply troubling political debates – not scientific ones – around vaccines. Should vaccinations be made compulsory, or the vaccination-hesitant shamed into compliance? Should those who have received the vaccine be given special privileges through an immunity passport?

The reality is that whenever we try to “defeat” nature, as if our scientists were military generals waging war on the natural world, we are forced on to new and difficult ethical terrain. As we seek to “improve on” the natural world, we must also remake our social worlds in ways that invariably move us further from lifestyles that we have evolved to need, both physically and emotionally.

Magic of the stars

This is not a call to ignore science or reject Covid emergency measures. But it is a call to show a lot more humility and caution as we ponder our place in the natural world – as well as our constant urge to “fix” what the rest of the planet does not regard as broken. A year of Covid has shown how disruptive our meddling can be and how fragile the systems of progress we think we have permanently created really are.

My latest: The response of leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson to the coronavirus crisis has shed a troubling light on the twisted priorities long cultivated in our societies https://t.co/YNDYawpBbY

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 17, 2020

When our politicians and regulators agitate for tough new restrictions on the public’s right to free speech, claiming fake news and misinformation about Covid, maybe they should remember that trust has to be earnt, not mandated through laws. A world in which profit and power rule is also one in which the likely response from those who are ruled is doubt, scepticism or cynicism.

Maybe I should not have written this while I was so angry. Or maybe others ought to be angry too – angry about the fact that many, many lives were almost certainly lost unnecessarily, and may continue to be lost, because those who profit from disease have no incentive to protect health.

We ought to be angry too about how in a better-ordered, more caring society, we might have found ways to avoid the worst excesses of lockdowns that have deprived our children of an education, of friendships, of play, of life in all its variety and excitement, and of sunshine. They lost all that while our politicians and their scientist enablers poured huge sums into labs, into test-tubes and into man-made magic bullets while contemptuously ignoring sunlight because it is free and everywhere and because it is a different kind of magic – the magic of the stars.

UPDATE:

There has been the expected social media backlash from some quarters against this post. I even appear to have angered the odd white-coated lab technician! Some doubtless did not actually read beyond the soundbite I offered on social media. But sadly, others seem to be highly invested in deflecting from the central argument I am making. So here it is in a nutshell:

The only sane response to the Vitamin D medical studies showing dramatic benefits for those hospitalised with Covid is to demand urgent government funding of further research to test those findings and to use Vitamin D in hospitals in the meantime on the precautionary principle, given that it is very cheap and has proven to be completely safe.

If you are trying to obscure that point, you should do so only if you are absolutely certain that these medical studies are wrong. Otherwise your behaviour is, on the best interpretation, shamefully irresponsible.

This article was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2021 at 7:04pm and is filed under COVID-19, Disinformation, Drug Research, Health/Medical, Medical Ethics, Narrative, Pandemics, Pharmaceuticals, Science/Technology, Spain, Vaccines.

Further, telemedicine was catapulted from mere novelty to reality as the medical community realized that simple follow-up appointments did not require brick and mortar (B&M) office visits. Corporations like Amazon saved billions, according to CNBC, on travel expenses by halting the practice of needlessly sending employees to conferences and trade shows that could just as easily be conducted online. Families were forced to spend time together maybe getting to know one another better.  Businesses that survived during the Pandemic were forced to make hybrid arrangements for employees so they could care for their children while staying physically distanced from the workplace. Americans had time to think in isolation and perhaps, for a moment, they became bored with all the technological gadgets and networks that blur, rather than educate.

Was it really all that bad? Can’t the nation wean itself off of industrial capitalism? Do we have to go back?

Yes, no doubt, suffering was real. Millions went unemployed and the destruction wrought by the Pandemic was revealed in the numbers filing for unemployment claims, food assistance, rent/mortgage and student loan forbearance. Homelessness increased. Surplus labor skyrocketed. Indeed, according to the human resources consultancy Adeccogroup.com, the top five jobs set for the post-Pandemic chopping block are in higher education, sales, administration and office support, construction, air travel and the hospitality industry. What now?

Never Forget

It was in this that the Pandemic exposed the sheer ruthlessness of American industrial capitalist governance and its homicidal policies. Even as 500,000 Americans died from complications of COVID-19, Americans would watch as the US government—through its elected representatives, simply told the people to go pound sand. Watching the mostly wealthy entrenched ideologues in the US Congress bicker, or vacation, while COVID-19 was causing America to eat itself has to stand as one of the more sickening events in American history. Indeed, stock prices soared at many points during the Pandemic even as a modern day plague ravaged the land.

No one should ever forget it.

The Pandemic caused American government to buckle on its knees. It was a horrific structural failure and the wreckage is there for all Americans, and the world, to see. It is there in the COVID-19 KIA body counts, a flimsy healthcare system ravaged by privatization, logistical impasses in transporting vaccines and, in the midst of it all, the US Congress—while in session affirming the electoral vote count for president Joe Biden—was overrun by an ignorant mob. And now those at the apex of industrial capitalism, here in the United States, and those at the bottom of it, want to move back to the standard industrial model that has left a path of death, suffering and waste in its wake. “Build Back Better,” US president Joe Biden says. Back to what?

Yes, our deadly friend COVID-19 showed that Americans are made of the stuff of ignorance, fear, complaint and irresponsibility. The Pandemic caused Americans not to adapt and put on a brave face, but rather exposed the flimsy myth of America as exceptional. Oh, first responders and frontline medical workers have great courage, of course, and so do many US soldiers that experience combat, but those individuals are small in number in a nation of 335 million people.

It is strange that the Pandemic pushed the Internet/WWW to be used for what it was initially meant for: research, learning, work, and video/voice communication in a time of isolation. It was a far better use of the medium as opposed to  24 hours news casts, Tik-Tok videos and perpetual head-down positions required by the handhelds; all accompanied, of course, by loud, tractor-pull mutilated language or techno pop. With 100 places to turn for electronic stimulation— and the fear of missing a call, video or text—it’s no wonder attention spans for the young and old have become so irreparably damaged that recalling sentence number one at the end of a four sentence paragraph is a challenge of the highest order.

Lobotomy Please, Not Reality

But perhaps there is a ghost in the machine type of logic to it all. The network connected American has come to forget in the evening what was purchased in the morning. It is certainly good for business. History is what happens in the future, not the past. The past needs to be wiped away so the future can appear. The unintended use of the Internet/WWW and communications technologies/gadgets, have caused in-depth, critical thinking to be wiped away in the United States. The Pandemic has shown that Americans do not want to slow down or spend time apart from their handheld which is, of course, connected to the Internet/WWW.

With the Internet—the cables, links, routers, switches and other machinery upon which content (voice, images, video, text, software) travels the World Wide Web, Americans became easily blinded into thinking that they were living out some novel, fantastical existence in a technologically sophisticated, forward thinking society. It was all cosmetic gloss, a techno-veil, one which we all donned because we really believed that by doing so we were moving in some direction to a sort of new American Nirvana.

It is tempting to refer to the artsy-tech movie The Matrix and the scene where Morpheus shows Neo that the world he thought he knew has been destroyed. “Welcome to the world of the real,” Morpheus says as Neo looks on and goes into shock, vomiting.

But the world of 2021 is no special effects movie.

Americans are eager to get back to the way things were, in their world of the real. To get back on the road to commute to work/school; that is, increase pollution, vehicle accidents. To be relieved of parenting, that is, using schools/teachers as a babysitting service and prisons for prepubescent adolescents and/or maturing teenagers. Why does the United States want to rush back into the B&M model? Consider building construction, or, better still, phrase it as building empty, wasteful spaces. Elementary and high school buildings remain largely empty during a 24/7, 12 month cycle (after hours they remain largely vacant). The sports fields, running tracks and basketball courts that accompany each structure are only partially used. The same can be said for sky-scraping office buildings that, over the same 24/7 hour, 12 month cycles, remain empty. Meanwhile, taxpayer funded sports stadiums are never fully used. It is reminiscent of cathedrals and mosques built at great expense on the backs of the poor that become tourist attractions more than places of worship. Or think about military bases, factories and housing projects abandoned, rotting away. These are the wasteful byproducts of industrial capitalism still existing and perpetually constructed in what is wistfully called “The Information Age.”

The Human Condition has hardly changed at all.

Warehouses for the Young

The Pandemic showed that the Internet—those land, seafloor and space-based communications networks, combined with the content and software of the World Wide Web (WWW), could be effectively used to teach students online, at home, and in virtual classrooms. As it is, America warehouses K-20 students; separating, or rather protecting them, from the messy society adults have created. Students are taught — what exactly? How to master a college entrance exam? To memorize Algebraic equations they will forget in a year?

The Pandemic of 2020-21, showed just how archaic B&M education is. Let’s face it, isn’t distance learning/work the way the United States was supposed to evolve even minus COVID-19?

Prognosticators claimed the greatest technological powerhouse on the planet was going to push ahead building pipelines to carry and host vast stores of knowledge content via the Internet and WWW for learning. No more bulky, out of date textbooks. Students, parents, teachers and local-state-federal government officials (in that order) would work together to develop an educational plan based on the student’s primary interests which would likely be demonstrated by 12th grade, perhaps, with second and third interests in the pipeline if the student’s subject matter area changed.

Course tracks would be customized by downloading, largely free, content from the WWW. The teacher would become more like a tutor and the student would have many of them with perhaps a learning coordinator/advocate constantly tweaking the course menu. Since performance data on students in K-12 in the USA is tracked anyway; for example—including absent/sick days, suspensions and legal problems— career path/trend analyses based on grades and other statistics could be implemented to assist the student in selecting a field of study-employment.

Chained to the Bicycle Rack

“It’s nice to know things. I like to know things. You like to know things,” said Professor David Perkins of Harvard University in the 2015 issue of Harvard Ed Magazine. “But there are issues of balance, particularly in the digital age. The information in textbooks is not necessarily what you need or would like to have at your fingertips…Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack…It sits solidly in the minds of parents: I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it? The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out…the life worthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty, it seems not to have been thought through very carefully.”

It is often necessary to visit the past for a solution to the present. Consider the following from 1971. It is excerpted from Between Two Ages: The Technetronic Era, by Zbigniew Brzeziński.

The following would be a good start for Americans to set about changing their views of learning, working and being.

In America higher education is carried on within a relatively self-­contained organizational and even social framework, making for a protracted period of semi­-isolation from problems of social reality. As a result, both organizationally and in terms of content, a divorce between education and social existence has tended to develop…extending education on an intermittent basis throughout the lifetime of the citizen, society would go a long way toward meeting this problem. The duration of the self­-contained and relatively isolated phase of initial education could then be shortened. Taking into account the earlier physical and sexual maturation of young people today, it could be more generally pursued within a work ­study framework, and it should be supplemented by periodic additional training throughout most of one’s active life.

A good case can be made for ending initial education—more of which could be obtained in the home through electronic devices, somewhere around the age of eighteen. This formal initial period could be followed by two years of service in a socially desirable cause; then by direct involvement in some professional activity and by advanced, systematic training within that area; and finally by regular periods of one and eventually even  two years of broadening, integrative study at the beginning of every decade of one’s life, somewhere up to the age of sixty. For example, medical or legal training could begin after only two years of college, thus both shortening the time needed to complete the training and probably also increasing the number attracted into these professions. Regular and formally required retraining—as well as broadening—could ensue at regular intervals throughout most of one’s professional career.

By now you are wondering: So what is my solution? I don’t have an adequate response to that question, but I do know that national and transnational cultural education has to be connected to any answer or plan that sets America—and the world, for that matter, on a path to a post-industrial capitalist society. The country isn’t even close to it now. The Pandemic has shown that. It just does not seem likely that returning to the industrial capitalist, B&M norm—or the model of governance as it is run by officials now in power—will move the country any closer to change. The wars go on, weapons are more lethal and will soon be operated by AI programs, racism still exists, ignorance is bliss, corporations are people, pollution continues, wasted spaces are good for business, and education is awash in a mishmash of learning methodologies, software applications and a war between parents, teachers and administrators.

Perhaps—like the US military as it seeks to stand down to contemplate the problem of extremism in its ranks—American civil society needs to stand down for some period of time to reassess learning, work and being.

This article was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2021 at 6:35pm and is filed under COVID-19, Education, Industsrial Capitalism, Internet, Lockdown, Opinion, Pandemics, Society, Technology.

The assets of Charles Johnson, the controversial chief owner of the San Francisco Giants, increased by $815 million during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, his net worth was a mere $4.2 billion dollars. By January 2021 he commanded a fortune of $5.015 billion, an increase just short of 20%.

Workers at Oracle Park, where the Giants play, have been taking it on the chin during the pandemic, but the pandemic apparently hasn’t taken any skin off Johnson’s nose.

These numbers come from a February 2021 report by the Institute for Policy Studies (ITEP), aptly titled Pandemic Super Bowl 2021: Billionaires Win, We Lose.

The ITEP report states that “No matter who wins Super Bowl LV, the big winners in our COVID-ravaged economy include dozens of billionaire sports-team owners.”

Sixty-four sports billionaires, the owners of 68 professional sports teams, “have seen their wealth increase by over $98.5 billion, or 30 percent, over the last 10 months,” based on data from Forbes Magazine.

If that isn’t shocking enough, the report drives the point home even further:

The wealth increases of billionaire sports-team owners is just part of the dominance of a national dynasty of 661 U.S. billionaires whose wealth has grown by $1.2 trillion, or 40 percent, during the pandemic, climbing from $2.9 trillion… to $4.13 trillion.

The old adage about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer has never been more true.

Johnson’s wealth has ballooned even though he donated FIVE TIMES as much as any other single sports team owner to the Republicans during the 2016-2020 election cycle, almost $11 million dollars, giving aid and comfort to some very crazy Republicans, as well as to “Dark Ages” Donald Trump as he was preparing to send his fascist mob into the halls of Congress.

Back home in San Francisco, the last time food concession workers like myself had a raise at the Giants ballpark was March 2018, nearly three years ago. Our UNITE HERE Local 2 contract expired in March 2019, a year before the pandemic shut the place down. Of course, almost everybody has been laid off for the last year, and your guess is as good as mine as to when we will be going back to work, and how many of us might get that opportunity.

The Giants, in their magnanimity, granted us $500 checks back in April 2020. I hope that didn’t put out Mr. Johnson too much.

In August, Local 2 held a couple of well-attended demonstrations at the ballpark, demanding that the Giants do something more for their laid-off workers, many of whom have worked at the ballpark, and Candlestick Park before that, for decades. The San Francisco Labor Council also sponsored a Labor Day march and rally that ended up at the ballpark.

Despite all, the Giants refused to even talk to Local 2. Perhaps Johnson was too busy counting his ever-growing pile of dough.

The Giants are building a massive development project just south of the ballpark, on what used to be the main parking lot. They are expected to make umpteen millions from new office buildings and homes there.

A few days ago the Giants announced, as part of their media blitz around Black History Month, that they are going to name a couple of streets in this new development after Black folks. One of these streets will be named for Maya Angelou, the famous writer, poet and civil rights activist. The other will be named for Toni Stone, who played in the Negro Leagues and was the first woman to play on a professional men’s baseball team.

Naming streets after Black leaders is great, but it won’t put any food in the mouths of the many laid-off Black workers at the ballpark.

Mr. Johnson, can you spare a dime?

• This article was first published by 48 Hills.

This article was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2021 at 6:06pm and is filed under COVID-19, Pandemics, Sports.

The ruling elite have repeatedly shown their inability to tackle any serious problems effectively. They are at a loss for how to deal with current problems and refuse to consider any alternative to their obsolete economic system. The best they can do is recycle old ideas to maintain their class power and privilege. Their efforts to block the New focus mainly on promoting disinformation about “new and better forms of capitalism,” including oxymorons like “inclusive capitalism,” “responsible capitalism,” and “ethical capitalism.”

Since the outbreak of the “COVID Pandemic” in March 2020 every week has been a roller coaster for humanity. The economy and society keep lurching from one crisis to another while incoherence and stress keep amplifying. It is said that 1 in 6 Americans went into therapy for the first time in 2020.

Unemployment, under-employment, inequality, mental depression, anxiety, suicide, environmental decay, inflation, debt, health care costs, education, and poverty are worsening everywhere. Thousands of businesses that have been around for years keep disappearing left and right.

Top-down actions in response to the “COVID Pandemic” have made so many things worse for so many people. Many are wondering which is worse: the covid-19 virus or the top-down response to the pandemic. Governments everywhere have steadfastly refused to mobilize the people to solve the many problems that are worsening. The moral climate is low and more people are worried about the future.

An atmosphere has been created whereby people are supposed to feel like the exhausting “COVID Pandemic” will last forever and we can all forget about getting back to any normal healthy non-digital relations, activities, and interactions. No society in history has worn face masks for an entire year. We are told over and over again that there is no returning to anything called “normal.” Moving everything online and repeatedly asserting that this is great, “cool,” and wonderful is proving to be unsatisfactory and unfulfilling. People want and need real, direct, non-digital connections and interactions with other human beings. Life behind a screen is not life.

Even with all the restrictions and shutdowns the virus, according to the mainstream media, continues to wreak havoc at home and abroad. It is almost like none of the severe restrictions on people’s freedoms made any difference. People have had to endure this humiliation while also not being permitted any role in deciding the aim, operation, and direction of the economy or any of the affairs of society; they are left out of the equation every step of the way and not even asked for superficial “input” that always goes unheeded anyway. Existing governance arrangements are simply not working to empower people or affirm their rights. The people’s interests and will are blocked at every turn by an outdated political setup that advances only the narrow interests of the rich.

Despite intense pressure to blindly rely on the rich and their political representatives to “figure things out,” this is not working. Nor does it help that the mainstream media approaches multiple crises and issues with endless double-talk, disconnected facts, catchy sound-bites, dramatic exaggerations, angry voices, political axe-grinding, and lots of confusion. Coherence and a human-centered outlook are avoided at all costs. People are constantly left disoriented. Jumping arbitrarily and rapidly from one thing to another in the most unconscious way is presented as useful analysis and information. This is why sorting out basic information has become a full-time job for everyone. People are understandably worn-out and overwhelmed. Disinformation overload degrades mental, emotional, and physical health.

The world has become an uglier and gloomier place—all in the name of “improving health.” It is no surprise that a recent Gallup Poll shows that the majority of Americans are extremely dissatisfied with government, the economy, the culture, and the moral climate.

In this hazardous unstable context, there are two ever-present key pieces of disinformation operating side by side. Both are designed to deprive working people of any say, initiative, outlook, or power.

First there is the “once everyone is vaccinated things will be much better” disinformation. This ignores the fact that capitalist crises have endogenous causes not exogenous causes and that the economic crisis started well before the “COVID Pandemic.” More than 150 years of recessions, depressions, booms, busts, instability, chaos, and anarchy have not been caused by external phenomena like bacteria, germs, and viruses but by the internal logic and operation of capital itself. A so-called “free market” economy by its very nature and logic ensures “winners” and “losers,” “booms” and “busts.” It is called a “dog-eat-dog” fend-for-yourself competitive world for a reason. The modern idea that humans are born to society and have rights by virtue of their being is alien to “free market” ideology.

Despite the fact that millions have been vaccinated at home and abroad, poverty, inequality, unemployment, debt, and other problems continue to worsen. Businesses continue to suffer and disappear. Hospitality, leisure, recreation, and other sectors have been decimated in many countries. Air travel is dramatically lower. So are car sales. It is not enough to say, “Yes, the next few months will be rough and lousy economically speaking but we will get there with more vaccinations. Just be patient, it will all eventually work out.” This is not what is actually unfolding. The all-sided crisis we find ourselves in started before the “COVID Pandemic” and continues unabated. Such a view also makes a mockery of economic science and the people’s desire to decide the affairs of society and establish much better arrangements that exclude narrow private interests and do not rely on police powers.

In the coming months millions more will be vaccinated but economic decline and decay will continue. Both the rate and amount of profit have been falling for years. And owners of capital are not going to invest in anything when there is no profit to be had and when it is easier instead to balloon fictitious capital and pretend everything is a stock market video game. The lack of vaccinations did not cause the economic collapse the word is currently suffering through, nor will more vaccinations reverse economic decline and decay. The “COVID Pandemic” has largely made some people vastly richer and millions more much poorer. The “COVID Pandemic” has significantly increased inequality. Unfortunately, the so-called “Great Reset” agenda of the World Economic Forum and Pope Francis’s recent call for a “Copernican Revolution” in the economy will make things worse for millions more because they will perpetuate the existing moribund economic system. Such agendas are designed to fool the gullible, block working class consciousness and action, and keep the initiative in the hands of the global oligarchy.

The same applies to so-called “stimulus packages.” Various versions of these top-down monetary and fiscal programs have been launched in different countries, and while they have assuaged some problems for people, they have not been adequate or fixed any underlying problems. They have not prevented poverty or mass unemployment. Economies remain mired in crisis. In most cases “stimulus packages” have made things worse by increasing the amount of debt that many generations will have to repay. This is in addition to the many other forms of debt Americans suffer from and rent payments that will one day have to be paid.

Many are also wondering why trillions of dollars can be printed and instantly turned over to the banks and corporations with no discussion but the same cannot be done for social programs, public enterprises, and the people. Why, for example, can all not get free healthcare or have taxes eliminated? Why can’t various forms of personal debt be wiped out instantly? If the government can print money for “them” why can’t they print money for “us”? Who is government supposed to serve? Billionaires?

Nether the CARES Act of 2020 nor the stimulus package passed in December 2020 nor the one President Biden is pushing for in March 2021 will be adequate or solve any major problems. Many felt that the $600 stimulus checks that went out in December 2020 were pathetic and insulting.

The problem lies with a socialized productive economy run by everyone but owned and controlled by a tiny handful of competing private interests determined to maximize profit as fast as possible regardless of the damage to the social and natural environment. There is no way for the economy to benefit all individuals and serve the general interests of society so long as it is dominated by a handful of billionaires. The social wealth produced by workers cannot benefit workers and the society if workers themselves do not control the wealth they produce and have first claim to.

The outlook, agenda, and reference points of the rich must be rejected and replaced by a human-centered aim, agenda, direction, and outlook. The current trajectory is untenable and unsustainable. The situation is dangerous in many ways, but perhaps one good thing to come out of the accelerated pace of chaos, anarchy, and instability are the contradictions that are presenting new opportunities for action with analysis that favors working people.

This article was posted on Sunday, February 14th, 2021 at 8:28pm and is filed under Capitalism, COVID-19, Debt, Economic Inequality, Economy/Economics, Environment, Evictions, Fearmongering, Federal Reserve, Free Market, Health/Medical, Masks, Media, Mental Health, Neoliberalism, Pandemics, Propaganda, Rent/rent strikes, Ruling Elite, Surveillance, Unemployment, Vaccines, Working Class, World Economic Forum (WEF), World Health Organization (WHO).

Amnesty International, among many organizations, condemned the Israeli government’s decision to bar Palestinians from receiving the vaccine. The rights group described the Israeli action as evidence of the “institutionalized discrimination that defines the Israeli government’s policy towards Palestinians.”

The Palestinian Authority was not expecting Israel to supply Palestinian hospitals with millions of vaccines as it hopes to receive two million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in February. Instead, the request made by PA official, Hussein al-Sheikh, Coordinator of Palestinian affairs with Israel, was a meager 10,000 doses to help protect Palestinian frontline workers. Still, the Israeli Health Ministry rejected the request.

According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, 1,629 Palestinians died and a total of 160,043 were infected with the deadly COVID-19 disease as of January 4. While such dismal numbers can also be found in many parts of the world, the Palestinian coronavirus crisis is compounded by the fact that Palestinians live under an Israeli military occupation, a state of apartheid and, as in the case of Gaza, an unrelenting siege.

Worse still, starting early last year, the Israeli military conducted several operations in various parts of the occupied territories to crack down on Palestinian initiatives to provide free COVID-19 testing.  According to the Palestinian rights group, Al Haq, as early as March 2020, several field clinics were shut down and medical equipment confiscated in the Palestinian town of Khirbet Ibziq in the Jordan Valley, in the occupied West Bank. This pattern was repeated in East Jerusalem, Hebron and elsewhere in the following months.

There is no legal or moral justification for Israel’s action. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 asserts that an Occupying Power has the “duty of ensuring and maintaining … the medical and hospital establishments and services” with “particular reference” on taking the “preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics.”

Even the Oslo Accords, despite their failure to address many crucial topics pertaining to the freedom of the Palestinian people, oblige both sides “to cooperate in combating epidemics and to assist each other in times of emergency,” the New York Times reported.

Not all Israeli officials deny that Israel is legally compelled to provide Palestinians with the help required to contain the rapid spread of the pandemic. This admission, however, comes with conditions. Former Israeli Ambassador, Alan Baker, told NYT that, while international law does “place an obligation on Israel” to help in the provision of vaccines to Palestinians, Palestinians must first release several Israeli soldiers who were captured in Gaza during and after the 2014 war.

The irony in Baker’s logic is that Israel holds over 5,000 Palestinian prisoners, including women and children, hundreds of whom are imprisoned without trial or due process.

The captured Israelis are held in Gaza as a bargaining chip, to be exchanged for the easing of Israel’s hermetic blockade on the densely populated Strip. One of the Palestinians’ main demands for the release of the soldiers is that Israel allows for the transfer of medical equipment and life-saving medication to the two million people of the Gaza Strip. International and Palestinian human rights groups have long reported on many unnecessary deaths among Palestinians in Gaza because Israel deliberately prevents Gazan hospitals from acquiring cancer medications.

Long before the onset of the coronavirus, Israel has weaponized medicine, and Gaza’s dilapidated health sector is a standing testimony to this injustice.

Perhaps, the overcrowded Israeli prisons remain the glaring testimony of Israel’s mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak. Despite repeated calls by the United Nations and, particularly, the World Health Organization, that states should take immediate measures to help ease the crisis in their prison systems, Israel has done little for Palestinian prisoners. Al Haq reported that Israel “has taken no adequate measures to improve provision of healthcare and hygiene for Palestinian prisoners” in line with the WHO “guidance for preventing COVID-19 outbreak in prisons.” The consequences were dire, as the spread of COVID among Palestinian prisoners continues to claim new victims at a much higher ratio compared with Israeli prisoners.

Israel’s intentional hampering of Palestinian efforts to fight COVID is consistent with a trajectory of racism, where colonized Palestinians are exploited for their land, water and cheap labor, while never factoring as a priority on Israel’s checklist, even during the time of a deadly pandemic.  Israel is an Occupying Power that refuses to acknowledge or respect any of its basic obligations as an Occupying Power under international law.

The Israeli attempt at manipulating Palestinian suffering as a result of the pandemic should also challenge our view of the fundamental relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. Frequently we speak of Israel’s apartheid in Palestine, often illustrating that assertion referring to giant walls, fences and military checkpoints that cage in Palestinian communities and segregate them from one another.

This, however, is merely the physical manifestation of Israeli colonialism and apartheid. In Israel, apartheid runs much deeper as it reaches almost every facet of society where Israeli Jews, including settlers, are treated as superior, while Palestinian Arabs, whether Christian or Muslims, are denied their most basic rights, including those guaranteed under international law.

While Israel’s behavior is not entirely surprising, it being consistent with the sordid reality of military occupation and institutional racism, it is also self-defeating. Despite the obvious imbalance in the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, they are in constant contact, not as equals but as occupier and occupied. Since the coronavirus does not respect Israel’s matrix of control in Palestine, it will travel across all of the physical divides that Israel has created to ensure permanent oppression of Palestinians. Hence, there can be no containing of COVID-19 in Israel if it continues to spread among Palestinians.

Long after the deadly pandemic is contained, the tragedy of occupied Palestine will, sadly, continue unhindered, until the day that Israel is forced to end its military occupation of Palestine and the Palestinians.

The post Covid-19 under Apartheid: How Israel Manipulates Suffering of Palestinians    first appeared on Dissident Voice.

It was ten years ago last week that the Arab Spring began. I recall it well as the day before Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia and ignited a revolutionary movement, I stood in the snow for hours protesting outside the White House with hundreds of veterans against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Inside the White House, President Obama was telling the press how well the wars were going. Outside, soldiers who fought in those wars told a different story.

Tired of symbolic actions, many involved in that protest held a series of meetings afterwards that resulted in organizing the occupy encampment on Freedom Plaza in October 2011. It was a time when occupations of public space were happening around the world, inspired by the uprising in Tunisia, and in state capitols, such as Madison Wisconsin in the United States. People were waking up to the fact that the problems are systemic and not their fault, as they were told. They recognized that the traditional tools of activism were not enough to confront the power holders. We needed to be more resolute, more militant and to strike at the roots, the systems that create the crises we face.

The protests in late 2010 and 2011 occurred because people saw, as Vijay Prashad writes, “the futility of voting for evils and lesser evils; these people were now seeking something beyond the horizon of the election games which seemed to bring so little change. Politicians ran for elections saying one thing, and then did the exact opposite when they took charge.” It was time for people to assert their power and create systems that were participatory and democratic. As I wrote last week, if we want to solve the current crises, it will take a revolution.

Dance party during the occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC. October, 2011.

The situation now is as bad as, or worse than, it was during the Occupy Movement. Tens of millions of people have lost their jobs, and millions have lost their health insurance too. Tens of millions more people may lose their homes. Businesses are closing and Congress refuses to take adequate action to ameliorate this. The bill finally agreed upon by Congressional leaders Sunday night is far from what is needed.

The Democrats caved in to Republican demands, as Matt Taibbi describes, so the bill leaves out new funding for local and state governments and gives employers legal immunity for failing to protect their workers from COVID-19. It only extends the eviction moratorium one more month.

Perhaps members of Congress were more concerned about spending the holidays with their families than they were about the lives of the people they are elected to represent. Imagine in a hypothetical world where Democrats fought for the things they pretend to support what would have happened if they had held out. They may have missed Christmas, but the Republicans would have come under increasing pressure to budge and the bill might have been better.

As Jack Rasmus writes, these crumbs offered by Congress will only kick the can of economic collapse a little farther down the road. According to the Kairos Center, before the recession and pandemic occurred, 140 million, or 43.5%, of people in the United States were living in poverty. Since then, an estimated 25 million people have lost their jobs.

The problems we face are systemic in nature and they require systemic changes. The bill now going through Congress is a tiny bandaid on a gaping wound. People are demanding more – a universal basic income to end poverty, national improved Medicare for all, affordable housing, free education and an end to student debt, and a Green New Deal that builds clean energy infrastructure and provides millions of high quality jobs. To pay for these programs, we need to cut military spending, create public banks as China has and tax the wealthy.

A new study confirms what we all know, trickle down economics in the form of tax cuts for the rich just make them richer and don’t help the economy. We have to build from the bottom up by getting money, debt relief and free services to the people. We have the money. It is time to be bold in our demands and to reimagine what we want our world to look like.

Lee Camp writes that an evolved society would celebrate the shedding of “meaningless jobs, profoundly redundant tasks, excessively bureaucratic nonsense, woefully vapid spectacle production, joylessly soulless drudgery.” He envisions a world where people can survive without being forced to work in low-wage, unfulfilling jobs.

Protesters gather at Foley Square as part of a demonstration to protest the death of George Floyd in New York (Yuki Iwamura/AP/Shutterstock)

To win the changes we need will take a shift in our thinking. We have to know what we are fighting for and have a strategy to win. Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace provides the necessary framework in the concept of People(s)-Centered Human Rights (see the webinar embedded in the linked article for more information). Baraka was the founding director of the US Human Rights Network, which was the first body to apply a human rights framework to policies and practices in the United States.

People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR) comes from the Black Liberation Movement. It recognizes that human rights should be determined by the people and that to win will require struggle. PCHR require systemic changes. These rights cannot exist where there are oppressive systems such as capitalism, neoliberalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and imperialism. And they are internationalist in nature; they connect us with peoples throughout the world because these rights supersede the state. Baraka defines PCHR as:

Those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and secure for themselves through social struggle.

PCHR are different from the liberal notion of human rights that are determined by the state and that have been weaponized as a justification for ‘humanitarian war.’ It is not up to an outside body, such as the US government, to decide what rights a population needs and to impose them. PCHR are based on what people decide for themselves are their needs. Self-determination is a fundamental principle. And PCHR are won through organizing and mobilizing to build what is needed or to force the state to give in to the people’s demands.

The struggle of drivers in New York City to create their own cooperative so they control their work environment and earn living wages is a struggle for PCHR. They are liberating themselves from the exploitative model imposed on drivers by corporations like Uber and Lyft.

Another example of the fight for PCHR is the current campaign to force a vote on the Medicare for all bill in the House of Representatives. We are in a moment where Congress members who have endorsed the Medicare for all bill in the House have the political leverage to bring it to a vote, something that is wholly within the power of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, to do.

Pelosi has said throughout her 30-year career that she supports single payer health care but “now is not the time for it.” If a raging pandemic that has killed 325,000 people so far and a prolonged recession where 14 million people have lost their health insurance is not the time, then there will never be a time. The campaign is asking Medicare for all supporters in the House to withhold their vote for Pelosi as Speaker if she refuses to allow the floor vote on Medicare for all.

This is an example of a PCHR demand because the Medicare for all bill came from the people and it takes healthcare decision-making away from the corporations. In the current legislation, people have input into how the healthcare system is structured, although it could go farther and create community-control of the healthcare system as defined in the platform of former Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins.

The original bill, HR676, was based on the Physicians Working Group recommendations and was championed by social movements as the model bill. The newest bill is HR1384, sponsored by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, which used much of HR676. Senator Sanders refused to introduce a companion bill to HR676 or HR1384 and instead wrote a weak version, sacrificing policy for the temporary support of Senators like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris.

It was popular demand that drove Congress members to sign on to the bill, but although they campaigned and won based on their endorsement, they have done little to nothing to advance it. So, this campaign is requiring them to show their true position. Will they side with the popular demand (72% of people across the political spectrum want Medicare for all)? Or, will they side with their corporate donors?

The response from members of Congress has either been silence or, in the case of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, to tell people this is not the time and to fight for something less that they can win. She sounds more like Nancy Pelosi than the change agent she claims to be. Power holders always tell the movement to ask for less, but we cannot compromise on something as basic as health care in a pandemic, which means life or death for people.

The hashtag for this campaign is #ForceTheVote. People are calling and writing to their members of Congress to push them to withhold their support for Pelosi unless there is a vote. As Briahna Joy Gray wrote, “A floor vote on Jayapal’s bill could capitalize on the public’s overwhelming approval for Medicare for All, and expose the chasm between the policies Democratic voters want and the positions their elected representatives are willing to take. It’s difficult to imagine a better historical context for this fight.”

Democrats will never fight for what the people need unless they are forced to and are held accountable for their actions. As we go into a new Congress and administration, where progressives believe they can push the Democrats to the left, no time can be wasted. If the Democrats can’t act now, when they have an opportunity to flex their power, then they won’t act in the people’s interests in the future. They will be further exposed as the oligarchic party they are and more people will understand why the expression exists that “the Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements.”

Our struggle must be independent of the capitalist political parties and rooted in what all liberation movements seek, shifting power to the people to build, as Ajamu Baraka says, “social relations and institutions that reflect a real commitment to human dignity and social justice.”

This article was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2020 at 8:12pm and is filed under Activism, COVID-19, Democrats, Health/Medical, Human Rights, National improved Medicare for all (NIMA), Occupy movement, Pandemics, Revolution.

For an entire year, wealthy celebrities and government officials have been reminding us that “we are in this together”, that “we are on the same boat”, with the likes of US singer, Madonna, speaking from her mansion while submerged in a “milky bath sprinkled with rose petals,” telling us that the pandemic has proved to be the “great equalizer”.

“Like I used to say at the end of ‘Human Nature’ every night, we are all in the same boat,” she said. “And if the ship goes down, we’re all going down together,” CNN reported at the time.

Such statements, like that of Madonna, and Ellen DeGeneres as well, have generated much media attention not just because they are both famous people with a massive social media following but also because of the obvious hypocrisy in their empty rhetoric. In truth, however, they were only repeating the standard procedure followed by governments, celebrities and wealthy ‘influencers’ worldwide.

But are we, really, “all in this together”? With unemployment rates skyrocketing across the globe, hundreds of millions scraping by to feed their children, multitudes of nameless and hapless families chugging along without access to proper healthcare, subsisting on hope and a prayer so that they may survive the scourges of poverty – let alone the pandemic – one cannot, with a clear conscience, make such outrageous claims.

Not only are we not “on the same boat” but, certainly, we have never been. According to World Bank data, nearly half of the world lives on less than $5.5 a day. This dismal statistic is part of a remarkable trajectory of inequality that has afflicted humanity for a long time.

The plight of many of the world’s poor is compounded in the case of war refugees, the double victims of state terrorism and violence and the unwillingness of those with the resources to step forward and pay back some of their largely undeserved wealth.

The boat metaphor is particularly interesting in the case of refugees; millions of them have desperately tried to escape the infernos of war and poverty in rickety boats and dinghies, hoping to get across from their stricken regions to safer places. This sight has sadly grown familiar in recent years not only throughout the Mediterranean Sea but also in other bodies of water around the world, especially in Burma, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have tried to escape their ongoing genocide. Thousands of them have drowned in the Bay of Bengal.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated and, in fact, accelerated the sharp inequalities that exist in every society individually, and the world at large. According to a June 2020 study conducted in the United States by the Brookings Institute, the number of deaths as a result of the disease reflects a clear racial logic. Many indicators included in the study leave no doubt that racism is a central factor in the life cycle of COVID.

For example, among those aged between 45 and 54 years, “Black and Hispanic/Latino death rates are at least six times higher than for whites”. Although whites make up 62 percent of the US population of that specific age group, only 22 percent of the total deaths were white. Black and Latino communities were the most devastated.

According to this and other studies, the main assumption behind the discrepancy of infection and death rates resulting from COVID among various racial groups in the US is poverty which is, itself, an expression of racial inequality. The poor have no, or limited, access to proper healthcare. For the rich, this factor is of little relevance.

Moreover, poor communities tend to work in low-paying jobs in the service sector, where social distancing is nearly impossible. With little government support to help them survive the lockdowns, they do everything within their power to provide for their children, only to be infected by the virus or, worse, die.

This iniquity is expected to continue even in the way that the vaccines are made available. While several Western nations have either launched or scheduled their vaccination campaigns, the poorest nations on earth are expected to wait for a long time before life-saving vaccines are made available.

In 67 poor or developing countries located mostly in Africa and the Southern hemisphere, only one out of ten individuals will likely receive the vaccine by the end of 2020, the Fortune Magazine website reported.

The disturbing report cited a study conducted by a humanitarian and rights coalition, the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA), which includes Oxfam and Amnesty International.

If there is such a thing as a strategy at this point, it is the deplorable “hoarding” of the vaccine by rich nations. Dr. Mohga Kamal-Yanni of the PVA put this realization into perspective when she said that “rich countries have enough doses to vaccinate everyone nearly three times over, whilst poor countries don’t even have enough to reach health workers and people at risk”. So much for the numerous conferences touting the need for a ‘global response’ to the disease.

But it does not have to be this way.

While it is likely that class, race and gender inequalities will continue to ravage human societies after the pandemic, as they did before, it is also possible for governments to use this collective tragedy as an opportunity to bridge the inequality gap, even if just a little, as a starting point to imagine a more equitable future for all of us.

Poor, dark-skinned people should not be made to die when their lives can be saved by a simple vaccine, which is available in abundance.

This article was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2020 at 9:08pm and is filed under Africa, Classism, COVID-19, Crimes against Humanity, Discrimination, Economic Inequality, Global Inequality, Human Rights, Hypocrisy, Pandemics, Poverty, Propaganda, Racial Justice, United States, Vaccines.

COVID-19 is not just a disease; it is also a state of mind, a psychosis, a fear. It is an event that, all over the world, unleashed irrational behavior by the governments, individuals, and media. It triggered speculations, bizarre analyses, and selective ‘cut-and-paste science.’

Result: while there are, undeniably, few optimistic success stories, including the Russian vaccine, China’s and Vietnam’s ability to contain the pandemic without ruining the economy and livelihood of the citizens, the great majority of the world is undoubtedly in disarray. Hundreds of millions of people are literally tossed into a gutter. Other billions, all over Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and to some extent, the United States and the U.K. are locked in, unable to travel abroad, and unwilling to accept visitors from other countries.

All this is pure insanity. Families are divided, broken apart. People are locked out of their homes in other countries. Lovers are told they cannot see each other, perhaps for years.

Extreme right-wing governments that are ripe to fall, like those in Thailand or Chile, are hiding behind the COVID-19, not allowing anyone to enter and face their downfall.

International life patterns of billions of people are ruined. Which leads to suicides, deep depressions, violence, as well as COVID-19 unrelated but lockdowns-related health issues.

In brief: The world is screwed! Most likely, billions of human lives are.

Apart from my work in several parts of the United States after the murder of George Floyd, and then in Aruba, from where the NATO is threatening Venezuela, I spent almost five months in a brutal lockdown in Chile. Truly brutal, because I arrived there after covering several conflict zones in Asia, with the COVID-19 at my heels. One airport after another was closing behind me after my departure. A journey took eight days: Hong Kong to Bangkok, then Seoul, Amsterdam, Suriname, Brazilian Belem, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, and finally, Santiago.

At the conflict zones, including when I was filming in devastated Borneo, my guts and eyes got attacked by some vicious parasites (or was it COVID-19, after all?), and something happened to my feet; I could hardly walk. Well, once in a while, I have this tendency to run myself to the ground, after the excessive doses of Afghanistan, Syria, Indonesia, Iraq, DR Congo, Kashmir, Gaza… I never stop until it is too late, or more precisely, until I fall on my face.

But then, after I do, after I find myself flattened on the ground, I know precisely what to do. Which is: a few months of rest, rigorous exercises, foot massages, sea, diet, sun. Until I can move again, and return to performing duties I have towards humanity.

But this time it was different. With a single digit of popularity, Chilean Pinochet-style regime utilized COVID-19 in order to stay in power, to crack on the opposition and to rob indigenous people of that little they still had left. Result: bizarre, total lockdowns with tanks on the streets, with the meaningless curfews, with even a small park at the back of my building out of reach to the tenants.

My only ‘walks’ were inside the apartment. I needed to get to my place in Bangkok; small, but with a gym and pool and with a garden. But Thailand’s rulers made sure to keep the foreigners out, too. Clearly, for political reasons.

And so, I was forced to spend the longest time in my life in one place. The longest since I was 15 years old if I remember correctly.

And instead of improving, my health deteriorated in that monstrous lockdown where I was facing bare, depressing winter Andes, and the 160-average pollution levels (US AQI). When I was finally departing, I could hardly walk and had to use a cane.

*****

I ran away on one of the first re-introduced non-stop Iberia flights to Madrid. I was lucky that I could as one of my passports was that of the EU.

It had to be Madrid or Italy. I would also happily run to Russia, but in August, it was still closed.

When I was very young, I used to escape to Madrid in order to be as far away as possible from New York. I despised my life in the United States. I couldn’t write there. In Italy and Madrid, I could easily. For months I would be saving, and then disappear from the United States for 5-6 weeks. My plan was to travel all over Spain, but Madrid was so absorbing, so fascinating that in the end I lost all my desire to leave it. Cafes on Plaza de Olavide were where I used to write my fiction.

And now, beaten, hardly able to move, I returned. Before my interviews in Turkey and Serbia, and before at least some parts of Asia would be re-opening, Madrid became my logical destination.

*****

I anticipated what would be waiting for me here. And all of my expectations came through.

In Madrid, life didn’t stop. It slowed down, to some extent, yes. Some visible and invisible barriers were erected. Many precautions have been taken. But there was no ‘full stop.’ Unlike in New York and Santiago, colors were everywhere, and so was beauty, elegance, and harsh Castellan sense of humor.

In anticipation of music in old Botanical gardens

First of all, Madrid was clearly demonstrating that life is much stronger then death, but only if life is pitched against death, and lived with unwavering strength and passion.

In Prado Museum, I rediscovered one of the greatest and most frightening artworks of all times: Pieter Bruegel’s the Elder: “The Triumph of Death.” I searched for it, and I found it in one of the main halls.

Here, in this surreal, powerful, and highly perverse artwork, it was depicted all. Yes, Death is frightening. Yes, it has tremendous strength, and it has its own ‘army of skeletons.’ And, yes, in the end, it always wins.

But you look out through the windows of Prado and you see the ancient, green, and beautiful trees, you see the splendid architecture, and lovers holding hands. Death may have the last word for all human beings, but life goes on too. It never gets defeated, and it never surrenders. There is time to live and time to die.

Bruegel, who painted his macabre masterpiece c. 1562, wanted us to live in constant fear of death.

Today’s Madrid, with its passion, wants us to forget about death, at least for that short but brilliant moment which is called life.

This new and hopefully short-lived era of COVID-19 terror is throwing us, human beings, back to the middle ages, where continuous anxieties and images of horrors were masterfully manufactured, even mass-produced, in order to poison our existence and strip us of dreams, of power, and joy.

Throughout the middle ages, at least in Europe, suffering and fear were habitually glorified. Joy and desires were suppressed, often chastised.

In the middle ages, Christianity reached perfection in scaring humans to death, in stripping life of almost all delights, and in administering brutal, grotesque punishments. And this is when the Muslim armies arrived, liberating a large part of Spain from the religious fundamentalism. Glorious Caliphate of Cordoba was erected, synonymous with the Golden Age of Islam; Caliphate admired for knowledge, poetry, playfulness, eroticism, the quest for freedom and beauty.

Used to be Grand Mosque of Cordoba

There, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together; they freely mingled together, building one mighty, tolerant, and creative society. It was a society without fear, society full of hope.

Caliphate of Cordoba also defeated Death, at least from one’s birth till demise. Great Pakistani thinker, Tariq Ali, wrote beautifully about that era many years before COVID-19 appeared on the horizon.

I took Talgo, highspeed train, to Cordoba. I had to revisit the old mosque where the fight for tolerance began. All this was now relevant. It was not just the medicine, not just the science, which had to be mobilized.

The battle against COVID-19 has to be also fought by thinkers, by artists, by all those who can make life meaningful, or at least bearable.

*****

Spain and its capital Madrid can easily ‘go either way.’ The city can be oppressive and harsh when it goes through the ‘bad wave.’ It can ruin millions of lives, as it did when it embarked on the horrid colonialist expeditions, religious fundamentalism, or fascist dictatorship.

But Madrid can also be highly enlightened, creative, and forward-looking. It can be light and reasonable, embracing life.

In the age of COVID-19, Madrid decisively refused to lock up millions of people in the proverbial cages.  Few weeks of confusion and enough! The government tried, half-heartedly, but failed to impose full oppressive order.

By the middle of August 2020, the number of Covid-19 cases was higher in Spain than in many other EU countries. Madrid made it to the ‘red list’ in such countries as Germany and the U.K.

Madrid still life

But walk through the streets of the city, sit in its cafes, look at children playing in the elegant parks, and then compare all this with terrible stress in those societies full of rules and regulations, such as Germany or Macron’s France.

Brueghel’s skeletons are clearly depicting destruction and death. Scenes are full of nihilism. They fit perfectly well into the devastated landscapes of the excessively locked down, terrified cities.

Some cities with a relatively small number of infections, like Bangkok, already died. How come? They lost, they handed victory to Death. They threw up their hands without the battle. They surrendered, offering to Death precisely what she has been demanding: Voluntarily, they stopped living.

In the United States or such places like Southeast Asia, Facebook, Amazon, Apple have been making fortunes. Bookstores, museums, theatres all surrendered; they closed down.

Madrid introduced social distancing, imposed masks regulations, a limited number of visitors, but rapidly reopened cinemas, gardens, galleries. Cafes are functioning, too, and so are the restaurants. Soon, after the summer holidays end, the city’s theatres and concert halls will reopen.

It is not because the city is reckless. Not at all. Disinfectants are everywhere, and when walking or in public places, people are wearing masks. The streets of Madrid are meticulously clean. Various safety regulations are imposed. But life goes on. Airplanes are taking off towards many parts of the world. Madrid is an open city. Not yet to all, but at least to many.

And as a reward, there are smiles. There are politeness and kindness. People do not look suicidal. They do not explode at the slightest conflict. No honking, no shouting. No animalistic, all-consuming fear.

Madrid understands that there is a certain degree of danger. But it deals with this state of siege with admirable dignity and courage.

After the panic and ugly behavioral patterns that I observed in the United States and Chile, Madrid impressed me enormously. COVID pandemic brought economic and social hardship to some, but there was no national agony so clearly noticeable in New York, Washington D.C., or Santiago.

Even if they struggled, people made sure to put on their best, to behave with dignity, and confront danger with both strength and heart.

When my still weak feet let go on the third day, when I stumbled and fell on an ancient sidewalk, several people immediately ran to my rescue. They fought for me. In my own way, I came here in order to fight for them, too.

*****

Madrid is not a perfect city. Actually, I keep repeating it again and again: there are no ‘perfect cities’ in this world.

And Madrid’s way is not the only example of how to fight and defeat the latest deadly pandemic.

Plaza de Olavide

But perhaps it is the most agreeable one: full of smiles, support from friends and families, with the exposure to the sun, to excellent food, nature, culture, and arts.

It is the Latin spirit, joie de vivre, which is put to work here, in order to overpower Brueghel and his army of skeletons, together with the excessive religious asceticism of El Greco.

We still don’t know how to defeat COVID-19, scientifically, but in such places as Madrid, we are learning how to prevent it from defeating us.

Nine days in Madrid did not fully ‘cure me,’ but it gave back the optimism to my scarred soul. It gave me the strength to fight again. As well as the desire to walk forward!

• First published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook  (a journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences)

• Photos by Andre Vltchek

This article was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2020 at 4:22pm and is filed under COVID-19, Health/Medical, Lockdown, Pandemics, Spain.

On August 2, lockdown measures were implemented in Melbourne, Australia, that were so draconian that Australian news commentator Alan Jones said on Sky News: “People are entitled to think there is an ‘agenda to destroy western society.’”

The gist of an August 13th article on the Melbourne lockdown is captured in the title: “Australian Police Go FULL NAZI, Smashing in Windows of Civilian Cars Just Because Passengers Wouldn’t Give Details About Where They Were Going.”

Another article with an arresting title was by Guy Burchell in the August 7th Australian National Review: “Melbourne Cops May Now Enter Homes Without a Warrant, After 11 People Die of COVID — Australia, This Is Madness, Not Democracy.” Burchell wrote that only 147 people had lost their lives to coronavirus in Victoria (the Australian state of which Melbourne is the capital), a very low death rate compared to other countries. The ramped up lockdown measures were triggered by an uptick in cases due to ramped up testing and 11 additional deaths, all of them in nursing homes (where lockdown measures would actually have little effect). The new rules include a six week curfew from 8 PM to 5 AM, with residents allowed to leave home outside those curfew hours only to shop for food and essential items (one household member only), and for caregiving, work and exercise (limited to one hour).

“But the piece de resistance,” writes Burchell, “has to be that now police officers can enter homes with neither a warrant nor permission. This is an astonishing violation of civil liberties…. Deaths of this kind are not normally cause for government action, let alone the effective house arrest of an entire city.” He quoted Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews, who told Victorians, “there is literally no reason for you to leave your home and if you were to leave your home and not be found there, you will have a very difficult time convincing Victoria police that you have a lawful reason.” Burchell commented:

[U]nder this new regime you can’t even remain in your house unmolested by the cops, they can just pop ‘round anytime to make sure you haven’t had Bruce and Sheila from next door round for a couple of drinks. All over a disease that is simply not that fatal….

Last year more than 310,000 Australians were hospitalised with flu and over 900 died. By all metrics that makes flu a worse threat than COVID-19 but police weren’t granted Stasi-like powers during the flu season. Millions of people weren’t confined to their homes and threatened with AUS$5,000 fines for not having a good reason for being out of their homes.

At an August 19th press conference, Australia’s second most senior medical officer said the government would be discussing measures such as banning restaurants, international travel, public transport, and withholding government programs through “No Jab No Pay” in order to coerce vaccine resisters.

An August 13 article on LifeSiteNews quoted Father Glen Tattersall, a Catholic parish priest in Melbourne, who said the draconian provisions “simply cannot be justified on a scientific basis”:

We have a curfew from 8 pm to 5 am, rigorously enforced including by the use of police helicopters and search lights. Is the virus a vampire that just comes out at night? Or the wearing of masks: they must be worn everywhere outside, even in a park where you are nowhere near any other person. Why? Does the virus leap hundreds of metres through the air? This is all about inducing mass fear, and humiliating the populace by demanding external compliance.

Why the strict curfew? Curfews have been implemented recently in the US to deter violence during protests, but no violence of that sort was reported in Melbourne. What was reported, at least on social media, were planes landing in the night from ‎the Chinese province of Guandong carrying equipment related to 5G and the Chinese biometric social credit system, which was reportedly being installed under a blanket of secrecy.

Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus at Boston University, concluded in an August 13th article, “We are living through a coup d’état based on the oldest of ploys: declaring emergencies, suspending law and rights, and issuing arbitrary rules of behavior to excuse taking ‘full powers’.”

Questioning the Narrative

Melbourne has gone to extremes with its lockdown measures, but it could portend things to come globally. Lockdowns were originally sold to the public as being necessary just for a couple of weeks to “flatten the curve,” to prevent hospital overcrowding from COVID-19 cases. It has now been over five months, with self-appointed vaccine czar Bill Gates intoning that we will not be able to return to “normal” until the entire global population of 7 billion people has been vaccinated. He has since backed off on the numbers, but commentators everywhere are reiterating that lockdowns are the “new normal,” which could last for years.

All this is such a radical curtailment of our civil liberties that we need to look closely at the evidence justifying it; and when we do, that evidence is weak. The isolation policies were triggered by estimates from the Imperial College London of 510,000 UK deaths and 2.2 million US deaths, more than 10 times the actual death rate from COVID-19. A Stanford University antibody study estimated that the fatality rate if infected was only about 0.1 to 0.2 percent; and in an August 4th blog post, Bill Gates himself acknowledged that the death rate was only 0.14 percent, not much higher than for the flu. But restrictive measures have gotten more onerous rather than less as the mortality figures have been revised downward.

A July 2020 UK study from Loughborough and Sheffield Universities found that government policy over the lockdown period has actually increased mortality rather than reducing it, after factoring in collateral damage including deaths from cancers and other serious diseases that are being left untreated, a dramatic increase in suicides and drug overdose, and poverty and malnourishment due to unemployment. Globally, according to UNICEF, 1.2 million child deaths are expected as a direct result of the lockdowns. A data analyst in South Africa asserts that the consequences of the country’s lockdown will lead to 29 times more deaths than from the coronavirus itself.

Countries and states that did very little to restrict their populations, including Sweden and South Dakota, have fared as well as or better overall than locked down US states. In an August 12th article in The UK Telegraph titled “Sweden’s Success Shows the True Cost of Our Arrogant, Failed Establishment,” Allister Heath writes:

Sweden got it largely right, and the British establishment catastrophically wrong. Anders Tegnell, Stockholm’s epidemiologist-​king, has pulled off a remarkable triple whammy: far fewer deaths per capita than Britain, a maintenance of basic freedoms and opportunities, including schooling, and, most strikingly, a recession less than half as severe as our own.

Not restraining the populace has allowed Sweden’s curve to taper off naturally through “herd immunity,” with daily deaths down to single digits for the last month. (See chart.)

The Pandemic That Wasn’t?

Also bringing the official narrative into question is the unreliability of the tests on which the lockdowns have been based. In a Wired interview, even Bill Gates acknowledged that most US test results are “garbage.” The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology used in the nasal swab test is considered the “gold standard” for COVID-19 detection; yet the PCR test was regarded by its own inventor, Nobel prize winner Kary Mullis, as inappropriate to detect viral infection. In a detailed June 27th analysis titled “COVID-19 PCR Tests Are Scientifically Meaningless,” Torsten Engelbrecht and Konstantin Demeter conclude:

Without doubt eventual excess mortality rates are caused by the therapy and by the lockdown measures, while the “COVID-19” death statistics comprise also patients who died of a variety of diseases, redefined as COVID-19 only because of a “positive” test result whose value could not be more doubtful.

The authors discussed a January 2007 New York Times article titled “Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t,” describing an apparent whooping cough epidemic in a New Hampshire hospital. The epidemic was verified by preliminary PCR tests given to nearly 1,000 healthcare workers, who were subsequently furloughed. Eight months later, the “epidemic” was found to be a false alarm. Not a single case of whooping cough was confirmed by the “gold standard” test – growing pertussis bacteria in the laboratory. All of the cases found through the PCR test were false positives.

Yet “test, test, test” was the message proclaimed for all countries by WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom at a media briefing on March 16, 2020, five days after WHO officially declared COVID-19; and the test recommended as the gold standard was the PCR. Why, when it had already been demonstrated to be unreliable, creating false positives that gave the appearance of an epidemic when there was none? Or was that the goal – to create the appearance of a pandemic, one so vast that the global economy had to be brought to a standstill until a vaccine could be found? Recall Prof. Codevilla’s conclusion: “We are living through a coup d’état based on the oldest of ploys: declaring emergencies, suspending law and rights, and issuing arbitrary rules of behavior to excuse taking ‘full powers’.”

People desperate to get back to work will not only submit to a largely untested vaccine but will agree to surveillance measures that would have been considered a flagrant violation of their civil rights if those rights had not been overridden by a “national emergency” justifying preemption by the police powers of the state. They will agree to get “immunity passports” in order to travel and participate in group activities, and they will submit to quarantines, curfews, contact tracings, social credit scores and informing on the neighbors. The emergency must be kept going to justify these unprecedented violations of their liberties, in which decision-making is removed from elected representatives and handed to unelected bureaucrats and technocrats.

A national health crisis is also a necessary prerequisite for relief from liability for personal injuries from the drugs and other products deployed in response to the crisis. Under the 2005 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREPA), in the event of a declared public health emergency, manufacturers are shielded from tort liability for injuries both from the vaccines and from invalid or invasive tests. Compensation for personal injuries is a massive expense for drug companies, and the potential profits from a product free of that downside are a gold mine for pharmaceutical companies and investors. The liabilities will be borne by the taxpayers and the victims.

All this, however, presupposes both an existing public health emergency and no effective treatment to defuse it. That helps explain the otherwise inexplicable war on hydroxychloroquine, a safe drug that has been in use and available over the counter for 65 years and has been shown to be effective in multiple studies when used early in combination with zinc and an antibiotic. A table prepared by the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (below) found that the US has nearly 30 times as many deaths per capita as countries making early and prophylactic use of hydroxychloroquine.

The latest international testing of hydroxychloroquine treatment of coronavirus shows countries that had early use of the drug had a 79% lower mortality rate than countries that banned the use of the safe malaria drug. Lowering the US mortality rate by 79% could have saved over 100,000 lives. But an effective, inexpensive COVID-19 treatment would mean the end of the alleged pandemic and the vaccine bonanza it purports to justify.

The need to maintain the appearance of a pandemic also explains the inflated reports of cases and deaths. Hospitals have been rewarded with increased fees for reclassifying cases as COVID-19.  As deaths declined in the US, the numbers of cases reported by the Centers for Disease Control were also gamed to make it appear that America was in a “second wave” of a pandemic. The reporting criterion was changed on May 18 from people who tested positive for the virus only to people who tested positive for either the virus or its antibodies. The exploding numbers thus include people who have recovered from COVID-19 as well as false positives. The Loughborough and Sheffield researchers found that when controlling for other factors affecting mortality, actual deaths due to COVID-19 are 54% to 63% lower than implied by the standard excess deaths measure.

Ushering in “The Great Reset”

Forcing compliance with global vaccine mandates is one obvious motive for maintaining the appearance of an ongoing pandemic, but what would be the motive for destroying the global economy with forced lockdowns? What is behind the “agenda to destroy Western society” suspected by Australian commentator Alan Jones?

Evidently it is this: destroying the old is necessary to usher in the new. Global economic destruction paves the way for the “Great Reset” now being promoted by the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Monetary Fund and other big global players.

Although cast as arising from the pandemic, the “global economic reset” is a concept that was floated as early as 2014 by Christine Lagarde, then head of the IMF, and is said to be a recharacterization of the “New World Order” discussed long before that. It was promoted as a solution to the ongoing economic crisis triggered in 2008.

The World Economic Forum – that elite group of businessmen, politicians and academics that meets in Davos, Switzerland, every January – announced in June that the Great Reset would be the theme of its 2021 Summit. Klaus Schwab, founder of the Forum, admonished:

The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.

No country will be allowed to opt out because it would be endangering the rest, just as no person will be allowed to escape the COVID-19 vaccine for the same reason.

Who is behind the Great Reset and what it really entails are major questions that need their own article, but suffice it to say here that to escape the trap of the globalist agenda, we need a mass awakening to what is really going on and collective resistance to it while there is still time. There are hopeful signs that this is happening, including massive protests against economic shutdowns and restrictions, particularly in Europe; a rash of lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the lockdowns and of police power overreach; and a flood of alternative media exposés despite widespread censorship.

Life as we know it will change. We need to ensure that it changes in ways that serve the people and the productive economy, while preserving our national sovereignty and hard-won personal freedoms.

All over the world, as this essay is being written, well over 17 million COVID-19 cases have been reported, and 676,000 people died. And instead of concentrating on serious research, trying to save human lives and attempting to stop the global calamity, ‘residents’ of the White House are spending all their energy on their own political survival, as well as on the survival of the regime.

In the U.S., both the establishment and opposition are buzzing with phantasmagoric conspiracy theories. Everyone is shouting, and no one is listening.

COVID-19 has been dangerously politicized. In order to ‘save its skin,’ the White House has been relentlessly blaming China for the origin and handling of the pandemic. Various U.S. government officials have been pointing fingers, irresponsibly, at Beijing. Some have been going as far as claiming that the pandemic was manufactured in one of the laboratories in the city of Wuhan. A bit like a ‘Frankenstein theory,’ fit for a comic book or a horror movie, but not for any serious analysis.

Serious analyses are, however, often neglected by mainstream media. Although they do get picked up by those who are interested and unbiased.

The Telegraph reported on 5 July 2020:

Senior CEBM tutor Dr. Tom Jefferson believes many viruses lie dormant throughout the globe and emerge when conditions are favourable.

Coronavirus may have lain dormant across the world and emerged when the environmental conditions were right for it to thrive rather than starting in China, an Oxford University expert believes.

Dr. Tom Jefferson, senior associate tutor at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM), at Oxford and a visiting professor at Newcastle University, argues there is growing evidence that the virus was elsewhere before it emerged in Asia.

Last week, Spanish virologists announced that they had found traces of the disease in samples of waste water collected in March 2019, nine months before coronavirus was seen in China.

Italian scientists have also found evidence of coronavirus in sewage samples in Milan and Turin in mid-December, many weeks before the first case was detected, while experts have found evidence of traces in Brazil in November 2019.

It appears that several countries in Europe had actually been suffering from the novel coronavirus cases long before they emerged in China. Europeans just did not know that they were dealing with ‘the new and deadly type of flu.’ Or they did not have the capacity or willingness to detect and define the new pandemic as fast as the Chinese doctors and scientists did.

On 20 June 2020, The Independent addressed precisely this issue:

The novel coronavirus – Sars-Cov-2 – may have been in Europe for longer than previously thought. Recent studies have suggested that it was circulating in Italy as early as December 2019. More surprisingly, researchers at the University of Barcelona found traces of the virus when testing untreated wastewater samples dated 12 March 2019.

The study was recently published on a preprint server, medRxiv. The paper is currently being subject to critical review by outside experts in preparation for publication in a scientific journal. Until this process of peer review has been completed, though, the evidence needs to be treated with caution.

So, how was the experiment conducted and what exactly did the scientists find?

One of the early findings about Sars-Cov-2 is that it is found in the faeces of infected people. As the virus makes its way through the gut – where it can cause gastrointestinal symptoms – it loses its outer protein layer, but bits of genetic material called RNA survive the journey intact and are “shed” in faeces. At this oint, it is no longer infectious – as far as current evidence tells us.

In May 2020, the BBC simply reported, without drawing any ‘political conclusions’:

A patient treated in a hospital near Paris on 27 December for suspected pneumonia actually had the coronavirus, his doctor has said.

This means the virus may have arrived in Europe almost a month earlier than previously thought.

Dr. Yves Cohen said a swab taken at the time was recently tested, and came back positive for Covid-19.

The patient, who has since recovered, said he had no idea where he caught the virus as he had not travelled abroad.

Knowing who was the first case is key to understanding how the virus spread.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says it is possible more early cases will come to light, and spokesman Christian Lindmeier urged countries to check records for similar cases in order to gain a clearer picture of the outbreak.

France is not the only country where subsequent testing points to earlier cases. Two weeks ago, a post-mortem examination carried out in California revealed that the first coronavirus-related death in the U.S. was almost a month earlier than previously thought.

These are only three examples, carried by three separate reports.

There is more and more evidence suggesting that China was actually not the country where the COVID-19 originated, but the country where novel coronavirus was first and decisively identified, confronted, and to a great extent, defeated. Quite amazing, considering that China, at least for some time, stood totally alone against this dangerous pandemic, which since then managed to, fundamentally, change the world!

But the more all this appears to be the case, the louder is cacophony coming from Washington; more vitriolic becomes the anti-Chinese propaganda.

It is clearly done in order to cover up the ineptness of the U.S. government’s response to the calamity. If the system in a grotesquely turbo-capitalist country like the United States collapses, just blame it hypocritically on the Communists, or go racist and start insulting Asians. Or if you run out of earthly enemies, just blame it on extra-terrestrials.

*****

Predictably, President Trump does not enjoy much support from the ranks of the scientific community. Some even poke fun, openly, at him and his deputies. Others are trying to argue with him, presenting facts.

After Washington’s COVID-19-related anti-Chinese attacks intensified in April 2020, Professor Edward Holmes, an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and a Fellow of the Royal Society in London, decided to speak up, disputing with scientific arguments the propaganda theories:

There is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans, originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

Coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 are commonly found in wildlife species and frequently jump to new hosts. This is also the most likely explanation for the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

But Washington is brutal and vindictive. When it is caught lying, when the simple, even primitive plans and designs get confronted, it retaliates disproportionally and swiftly. That is precisely what happened to the World Health Organization (WHO) and its Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. WHO was seen by Trump and his hawkish lieutenants as being “too close to China,” and that is an arch ‘crime’ in this time and age! On top of it, Mr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was pressing for global cooperation instead of confrontation. But the United States is simply unable to cooperate anymore. It only knows how to dictate.

Rapidly and wickedly, the U.S. ejected itself from the WHO, right in the middle of the global pandemic, leaving huge unpaid bills. This, most likely, cost tens of thousands of human lives, particularly in the poorest parts of the world. Not that Washington cares!

*****

Attacks against China by Trump, Rubio, Bannon, Pompeo, Navarro, and others in the U.S. government and establishment, are thoroughly ludicrous and get regularly strongly rebutted in the United States itself, but also its satellites.

White House accusations regularly degenerate to extremely low levels of discourse.

As mentioned above, U.S. officials, including President Trump, himself, frequently insinuate that the pandemic originated, or was even manufactured, in one of Wuhan’s labs.

Such insults get confronted by counter-insults, like those shot by Peter Davidson, who recently declared that: “Covid19 originated in CIA Fort Detrick lab, brought to Wuhan to blame it on China!”

 *****

Once again, the United States refused to cooperate with the rest of the world. Instead, it is spoiling all efforts to create a united front against the pandemic, which is frightening the Planet, killing tens of thousands of human beings, and destroying the lives of billions.

Since the beginning of this unpredictable and still largely unresearched virus, I have been monitoring, first hand, all fears and frustration of the people: in Asia, North and South Americas, as well as Europe. I have been observing how COVID-19 brought the Planet to a standstill. This fear is real. The consequences of the pandemic are awful, and they include misery, unemployment, even hunger, and homelessness.

This terrible attack of new illness was an opportunity for our civilization to unite, to show that we, as human beings, are able to cooperate, fight for the survival of all, and smash this dreadful enemy. Together, all of us, side by side, regardless of race, nationality, or culture.

The opportunity was missed. And the result is not only bitterness. The result is counted in hundreds of millions of newly poor.

China actually tried to forge a global alliance against COVID-19, and so did Russia. Also, Cuba, as always. Hundreds of heavy lift aircrafts were heading from Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, to help people who were in dire need, in all corners of the world. Hands were extended.

We all know how these efforts ended: with insults, and unprecedented propaganda coming from Washington. Not one heartfelt “Thank you!”. Not one. And then, even foreign aid directed towards dozens of countries, coming from China, got literally stolen from the tarmacs, by the United States government.

The countries which were suffering the most, from embargos and sanctions and needed resources to manage the COVID-19, countries such as Iran and Venezuela, got brutalized even further, sadistically and shamelessly.

This does not look like a good world. And the ‘mightiest country on earth’ does not look like a good leader, either. In fact, it does not look like a leader at all. And with this attitude towards the Planet, it should never again be allowed to lead.

COVID-19 ruined countless lives. But at least now it is clear, who is who, what is the gangrenous essence of corporatism and imperialism.

While China, Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, Iran, and others are fighting for human lives, Washington is struggling to preserve the global status quo for its own unsavory purposes. It does not want to save or improve the world. It wants to control it. And it wants to own it. Nothing else. Full stop.

• First published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook (a journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences)

This article was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2020 at 3:54am and is filed under China, COVID-19, Disinformation, Donald Trump, Economy/Economics, Europe, Fearmongering, Lies, Media, Media Bias, Mike Pompeo, Opinion, Pandemics, Peter Navarro, Propaganda, Sanctions, United States, US Hypocrisy, World Health Organization (WHO).

Our landlord doesn’t read my letters, as far as we know, but it feels like it’s only fair to write a letter each month, if we’re not going to be paying the rent.

Well, hello again. This is the fifth full month in the pandemic, and the fifth month of the suspension on evictions here in Oregon, the fifth month that we’re not paying our rent, and the fifth month that I’m writing you a letter, instead of giving you another check.

I say I’m writing “you,” and “you” is a convenient word in the English language, since it can be either singular or plural. I might be writing to an individual, or to a corporate board, or even to thousands of investors, and I can still address this entity as “you.”

As it is, I have no idea who you are. Which seems odd, doesn’t it? Maybe even odder is the fact that I’m addressing you as if you might be reading this letter. What we both know is that you’re not. If anyone is reading this letter, other than people who read my blog, it is some employee in the property management company that does all your dirty work for you, so you can sleep at night. You know, like raising the rent on a family like mine almost 250% over the course of a decade. You wouldn’t want to do that to anyone you actually knew, so it’s best to remain totally anonymous, right?

Anyway, putting aside the question of the profoundly unethical behavior you have exhibited towards your tenants through such rent-gouging practices over the past decade or so, let’s center our attention on the current historical moment, shall we? You’re not reading this, so I’ll just take that as an enthusiastic “yes, let’s.”

Before the pandemic hit, Portland, Oregon was the most rent-burdened city in the United States. You were already actively creating this situation through the political lobbying groups you fund, who long ago bought our legislature, and by so many other means. You were already actively cleansing the city of its Black population, and of its artists, service sector workers, and everyone else who can no longer afford to live in this increasingly expensive metropolis. We were all leaving the city, month by month, over the course of many years now, as you know, if you’re paying any attention at all.

But now, with the sudden loss of jobs for so many of us, with those of us who managed to get past the busy signals and actually get any money from the state now having those benefits cut off (I’ve personally never managed to get any in the first place), with the pandemic spreading across the country in a form that the scientists are calling “out of control,” as we’re looking at an estimated 28 millions evictions in the US between now and the end of September, according to the business press, I wonder what your game plan is?

Because so far as I can tell, your game plan is to just keep going like you’ve been doing since I moved in to this apartment in April, 2007. Oh and as you probably don’t know, I paid the rent on time every month from then until March, 2020. You kept raising the rent every year, sending a letter through your property management company, thanking us for our tenancy and letting us know, incredibly, that the rent is going up and if we don’t like it we can move out whenever we like (I’m paraphrasing), and never once giving us even the beginnings of an explanation for why the rent has had to double and more over such a short period of time. And then, weeks into the pandemic, on March 25th, you announced yet another rent increase.

OK, so maybe it takes more than a few weeks for a big, important landlord like you to realize something is happening in the world and half of your tenants have just become unemployed, so we can’t expect you to move your big corporate ship so nimbly. But now it’s been almost half a year, and still not a single word from you. Not even anything like, “hey, I exist, I’m your landlord, I feel your pain, and hey, you don’t have to pay rent for the month of April.” A lot of other landlords, big and small, wrote their tenants notes like that, across the country – but not you.

But the obvious reality is, at least if you read the business press, as I’ll bet you do (whether “you” is singular or plural, in this case), things are not going to be going back to any kind of pre-pandemic “normal” anytime soon. And “normal” was untenable in the first place, as the business press was telling us last year, too. I mean, there are only so many tech millionaires from San Francisco and New York City you can hope to replace the rest of us with, as you systematically drive us out of this city. You’ll eventually run out of them, and then what? And what about your tenants like me, who were already long ago priced out of New York City, San Francisco, Boston and Seattle, too? Do you think we’ll all just leave quietly, again? Where should we move next, any suggestions? Where’s the next town you plan to re-shape in the image of Silicon Valley?

No, the old normal wasn’t working, and the new normal is Great Depression Chapter 2. I’m sure you know this, because, like I mentioned before, it’s not just your struggling artist tenants who read the business press – you do, too. You make big investments in real estate, not because you are interested in housing people, but because it’s an extremely profitable thing to invest in. Now, maybe less so. So then the question is, are you going to make the kinds of adjustments in your profit-uber-alles business model in time to save your precious capitalist system? Or are you going to just zombie on, making as much money as possible, until the riots get bigger? And then, you got insurance, so who cares if the riots get bigger, right? But eventually society becomes ungovernable if you let it go like that. That’s why the governor, despite the fact that she rules on your behalf, for the most part, saw fit to suspend evictions for the time being. As a representative of your class, she’s scared of your renters, even if you’re too busy looking at your stock portfolio to pay attention to the real world, struggling to breathe, under the pressure of your unfettered capitalist knee.

If you have children that you care about, if you are indeed human, or even if you as a collective board of corporate investors are, somewhere in the equation, human, and have children, or maybe just nieces and nephews that you care about, maybe you want to consider the future? What kind of world, and what kind of assets, will they be inheriting from you? Will they require armed guards when they walk down the sidewalks of this city? Will they have to put a tall gate around their homes to keep out the impoverished masses like the rich have to do in Mexico or Kenya? Will there be any money left in the public coffers to increase the police budget enough to defend your assets from the people who use your assets, otherwise known as us renters, living in what we sometimes, foolishly, in our more deluded moments, refer to as “our homes”? Is it maybe not time to shift direction here, to realize your business model and the economic system you and your corporate lobbyists have brought into existence is totally unsustainable?

Out of the goodness of my heart, and because me and my children would really prefer not to take you up on your invitation to spend the rest of our lives fighting the class war with the likes of you and your heirs, I’ll give you some advice: stop.

Write your renters a letter, tell us who you are. Explain to us what your expenses are, lay it out, and be completely transparent. Did you apply for any of those trillions of dollars of forgivable loans that the government has just issued to corporations just like yours? Tell us about that. Then charge us rent that is equal to your expenses, plus a little extra. Let that formula determine “the market rate,” rather than your current formulation of the market rate as “whatever the market will bear.” Behind that door lies the end of society. Behind that door lies fascism, for no democracy can survive such ponzi scheme, kleptocratic corruption and still have a population that believes it’s ruling on behalf of the citizens, rather than just the citizen-capitalists like you and your heirs. Is that the future you want?

Well, I just thought I’d give a little communication another shot. My mother always said it was good to talk it out, but it’s hard when the communication is only one-way. Is this how you conduct your other relationships? Anyway, I’d say this letter is easily worth $1,175 for a two-bedroom for the month of August. I’ll write an even more eloquent letter for September, I promise. It’ll be worth even more. Not that you’ll read it, either, whoever you are.

Sincerely,
David Rovics
Francis Park Apartments
Portland, Oregon

This article was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2020 at 12:00am and is filed under COVID-19, Evictions, Housing/Homelessness, Pandemics, Protests, Rent/rent strikes.

This is a year unlike most we have ever seen. Few could have predicted the continuous impacts of the coronavirus, a struggling economy, the civil unrest in the streets, and deeper conversations about race and civil liberties. On top of all of that, our businesses are beginning to reopen, and the masses are returning to work.

This is not a process that will happen overnight and for good reason. Before a business can reopen, considerations need to be made regarding the employees. They are going to have a lot on their minds, and to prioritize their health and continue effective business practices, new processes should be enacted to ensure the safety of every worker and manager in your organization. Here are some considerations that all businesses should make during these strange times.

Communication is Key

To make this return to work as smooth as possible, your company will have to be in constant communication with the workers. This can start before the employees even return by sending a communication to their home that details how the transition back to work will flow and the safety measures that have been put in place. Once you do open for business, continue these briefings on a daily or weekly basis.

It is also important to listen to employee feedback. Human Resources should have an open-door policy where employees can come in and express any health issues or ask questions about the pandemic or any safety policies/problems in general. Some workers may not feel comfortable coming to management in person, so consider sending out anonymous surveys where they can list their concerns and questions without feeling like they are in the spotlight. Don’t just go through the motions here. Review all received surveys and take action, so the workers know you are listening.

If you work with customers daily, communication will also be a necessary tool for them as well. If your state requires face masks in your establishment, put a sign at the front door, so customers know before they enter. Once inside, put stickers on the ground or signs around that inform customers of the need for social distance at six feet apart. Taking these precautions will protect your employees as well.

Manage Employee Stress

While people are excited about the prospect of returning to work, many external factors may be in the back of their minds. After all, it is almost impossible to just go about your day without thinking about the prospect of getting sick or watching the news and losing sleep thinking about what tomorrow will hold. Because of all of this, it is important that a company accounts for employee stress and creates a helpful environment, so everyone feels comfortable at work.

Your policies should allow two breaks and a lunch every day because this gives your staff a chance to recharge their batteries and come back energized for the next task. In some states, these breaks are legally required. In the case of a pandemic, an overcrowded workplace can cause additional stress, so your company may have to consider adding different shifts throughout the day and night so fewer people are working at once. Keep in mind that your company will have to pay accordingly, especially with overnight shifts where a wage increase may be necessary.

A business doing its part to ensure a stress-free and safe environment is not only the right thing to do, but it may also be a legal necessity. For instance, if an employee says that they feel sick or their child is ill, and they have met certain requirements, they have the right to a leave of absence for family support. If the employee cites this need, do not fight back. Instead, show your support and guide how to set up the leave. This way, you will have an employee who will come back when things are settled instead of a worker who is over-stressed in a potentially unhealthy environment.

Preparing Your Work Environment

While mental health and communication are essential, you also need to provide a safe physical environment during these tough times. If the pandemic has kept you out of your office for a while, then you must ensure that the structure is maintained properly for the return. If the water lines haven’t been used in a while, they may have to be flushed to avoid dangerous toxins. You should also consider deep cleaning the upholstery, drapes, and carpets to remove dust and debris.

In the case of a pandemic like COVID-19, you will want to follow the guidelines provided by government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control. This begins with having health and temperature checks before anyone enters the building, and if you are requiring masks, ensure that they have them before starting work. If anyone reports that they feel sick, they should be sent home until they are medically cleared. If you can afford to do so, offer paid sick days, and hold off on attendance violations during these trying times.

Finally, provide a clean workspace for your employees and ensure that they have the tools they need to remain as germ-free as possible. Every night, all desks and common break areas should be cleaned and disinfected. The bathrooms should have full soap dispensers, and there should be hand sanitizer stations throughout the office.

The health and safety of your employees should be the priority of every corporation, especially during times of unrest. When you have happy and successful employees, your business will thrive.

This article was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2020 at 10:09pm and is filed under Civil Unrest, COVID-19, Health/Medical, Pandemics, Workers’ Safety.

Today Cuba celebrates the 67th anniversary of the assault on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks that mark the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. From this beginning, Cuba’s altruistic view of making the world safer and healthier began.

It has developed into a society that gives everything it has without expecting credit. There are hundreds of examples of this; for instance, what took place in 1986, after the nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl, when blockaded Cuba took in over 20,000 young cancer victims and their family members from 1989 to 2011 providing medical care, schooling, clothing, food, accommodation, playgrounds – all free of charge.

Another story worth remembering is one of forgiveness in 2007 when Mario Terán, the Bolivian sergeant who murdered Che Guevara on October 9, 1967, was operated on for free by Cuban doctors who restored his vision in a hospital donated by the Cuban government to Bolivia and inaugurated by President Evo Morales in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

And now Cuba is on the world stage in the midst of this dangerous global Pandemic and Cuba is continuing to save lives, while the US government and its media, instead of being constructive in the battle, have intensified the campaign to discredit Cuba’s collaboration. The misinformation is not surprising from a country whose president’s main vocation is preaching an endless stream of lies.

Even Trump’s faithful followers must be starting to see that there is a contradiction in how the richest country in the world has not been able to put any brake on the virus, is accumulating the highest number of infections and deaths, with no end in sight, while attacking Cuba, a nation that not only has been able to control the pandemic but has extended their full solidarity to other nations.

Why the Trump administration puts priority on discrediting Cuba’s international missions abroad that save lives instead of focusing on the social and human cost in the US is mindboggling and criminal. Trump, his anti-Cuba friends in Florida, and the mainstream media are mixing up a concoction of ignorance with malicious intention, never mentioning that Cuba has flattened the curve of the virus and has had only one death in three weeks.

All the empty words we hear about the Cuban Medical Brigades going to other countries being forced labor is not only without proof but fails to explain why there are many more medical professionals who volunteer to go than openings. Furthermore, the White House, the State Department, and the media fail to mention one word about the 60-year-old US blockade and its impact against the island that causes unnecessary suffering for the Cuban people. As we have become accustomed, the Trump Administration likes to throw things at the wall to see what sticks.

A few days ago, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, an organization with a long history of parroting the official line of the US,  jumped on the bandwagon with a tweet, “Cuban doctors deployed abroad offer valuable service but at the expense of their freedoms”. At least Mr. Roth admitted that Cuban doctors offered valuable services but Roth offered no proof about what he meant. He continues, “They can be disciplined for being friends w/ people who hold hostile or contrary views to the Cuban revolution and face prosecution if they “abandon” their jobs. This is the Executive Director of an international so-called human rights organization talking with no examples.

Cuba, with a little more than 11 million people, has more than 95,000 doctors, 9 for every 1,000 inhabitants, and more than 85,000 nurses that are part of the 492,000 Cuban health professionals according to the latest Statistical Yearbook at the beginning of 2019.

According to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the first brigade of Cuba health professionals to provide services abroad was in Algeria in 1963. Since then, more than 400,000 professionals have served in 164 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and even Portugal.

These services, popularly known as “medical missions,” include sending health professionals to countries that officially request them from the Cuban government. And those who go do so voluntarily because they are part of a society that puts human lives at the center. They leave their families behind for a just cause but they also know that the Cuban government will take care of them.

Cuba is so respected around the world that recently eight Cuban Scientists were chosen as Advisors for the World Struggle against COVID-19 as part of an Inter-Academy Panel (IAP). In 2000, the IAP founded the Inter-Academy Council (IAC) and the Inter-Academy Medical Panel (IAMP).  Currently, membership includes 140 national and regional Academies of Science, including all branches of science, engineering, and medicine from around the world.

Despite the slander, Cuba continues to extend its solidarity with great pride. Currently, there are three thousand members of the Henry Reeve medical brigades (designed to fight pandemics and natural disasters) who are on the front lines of the pandemic in 37 countries with 43 brigades.

But the attacks never quit.  On May 8, 2020, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) added another $2 million to undermine the work of the brigades and a month later, head Cuba hater Marco Rubio joined other Republican Senators and presented a bill to “punish” countries that sign agreements with the Cuban government to receive this support. Rubio’s credibility has been suspect ever since he was caught in his own lies by claiming his parents ‘came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover’ of Cuba when, in fact, they came to the US in 1956, three years before the revolution during the repression of the US-backed Bautista regime.

One would think that government officials in Florida like Rubio would be focused on containing COVID-19 in their state that has become an epicenter of infection rates and deaths instead of being fixated on tarnishing the success that Cuba is having in beating back the pandemic.

Some of the medical personnel are now returning to Cuba from their missions and have been telling their experiences in their own words to the people through video conferencing, welcomed by President Miguel Diaz Canel.

Dr. Edelsy Delgado, an Intensive Care specialist from the Gustavo Aldereguía Hospital in Cienfuegos, kept a journal during the three months he spent in Andorra. He said upon his return “Believe me, we represented Cuba at the highest level.”

Leidisbet Lopez Cantero, a nurse from Camaguey, was the flag-bearer who couldn’t hold back her tears when she got off the airplane that brought her to Havana and saw her mother and son speaking of her in the welcoming video.

Dr Michael Cabrera Laza, head of the group of five distinguished consultants in Nicaragua, was deeply moved as he spoke of traveling through all 17 regions of Nicaragua, and finding in absolutely all of them the marks left by some Cuban doctor or teacher or the presence of some community leader trained in Cuba. “And in every action that we carried out, Fidel was there.”

Nurses Francisco Gonzalez Prada of Sancti Spiritus, Liliana Martinez of Holguin, and Aldo Moreira of Camaguey, who were all part of the Antigua and Barbuda brigade testified about their own feelings when they saw the positive changes in how their patients felt when they found out they were being cared for by Cubans. “I didn’t make a mistake; I am right where I should be.”

Cuba is right where it should be without hesitation.

This article was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2020 at 9:35pm and is filed under COVID-19 (coronavirus), Cuba, Health/Medical, Humanitarianism, Lies, Media, Pandemics, Patient Rights, Revolution, Sanctions, Solidarity, United States, US Hypocrisy.

Virus control, absent a vaccine, is entirely dependent on the ability of a society to prevent its spread from its point of origin. The new coronavirus, as we have painfully learned, is not an exception. This is the context for the lessons noted here. Scientists studying the transmission of the coronavirus estimate that without any travel or social distancing restrictions, one infected person on average transmits the virus to 2.5 others daily. Roughly estimated, this means if there were 10 cases on day one, in seven days about 10,000 people could be infected.

However, this depends on the individual’s activities. In April, an outbreak in Minnesota occurred in which one person infected 14 others at a house party attended by dozens of people. This outbreak was quickly contained, but had it not, those 14 infected could have increased to hundreds in a few days. In the US, the inability to prevent transmission meant that infections climbed exponentially from 710 confirmed cases on March 14, one day after the national emergency was declared, to 20,000 just 14 days later on March 28.

Social distancing guidelines aim to bring the transmission rate below 1.0, a rate at which any infected persons on average would only infect only one other person per day. At this rate, the virus spread plateaus. Yet, to successfully quarantine the virus, instead of the virus quarantining society, requires pushing the rate down to 0.30, the point at which three infected people on average would only pass the virus on to one other person. Put another way, dramatically reducing the rate of infection entails preventing transmission about 60­–70 percent of the time. At these rates the virus can be managed, perhaps even extinguished over time.

As a nation, we have been reluctant to accept what the virus requires of us in order to put it in check. Deaths and infections, though less than that at the peak, continue at about one thousand deaths and nearly 20,000 new cases daily. At this rate, estimates show at least 100,000 more people will die by Election Day. The director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, Ashish K. Jha, called this stark trajectory “unconscionable.” Jha said, “It’s stunning to me that we have just decided that it’s okay for tens of thousands of Americans to die and we aren’t going to do what we know we can do to prevent those deaths.”

The following lessons speak for themselves. However, the nation’s institutions and political and corporate leaders are still reluctant to heed them. Americans must demand they do their jobs. If, as predicted, the virus persists and reasserts itself during the upcoming flu season fall the nation must be prepared. Americans should accept no excuses.

Lesson number one

For decades political and corporate forces plotted to cut health care budgets, downsize health facilities, and privatize hospitals and health care systems to make a profit. In this pandemic Americans are reaping the deadly consequences of their scheming. The result is a fragmented US corporate health care system, comprised of a myriad of private for profit hospitals and other medical delivery systems, that was unprepared, under-resourced and under-staffed to effectively respond to the virus.

Correcting this will require bringing all major health care providers into the public domain and replacing the inefficient private insurance system with national health insurance – Medicare for All. We need a system where all are insured in a seamless, efficient, service-focused public health care program. This is lesson number one and requires a systemic solution. The critique and lessons that follow are specific to the shortcomings and failures of the past five months.

Delaying quarantine actions was costly

The US was slow to identify the New York City (NYC) area as an epicenter of the infection. The evidence was in sight but was overlooked or ignored. A study released in early April from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NYC found that the high traffic volume from Europe and, to a lesser but still significant extent, travel directly between the US and China imported the virus to NYC. As the infection began to rage in Italy by mid-February, typical volumes of passengers were arriving at NY-area airports until the federal government blocked most travel from Europe on March 11. By then the damage had already been done, seeding as many as 10,000 cases before the first person tested positive for COVID-19 in NYC.

Even as deaths mounted in NYC, New York political leaders rejected adopting quarantine-level travel restrictions in and out of the NYC region. Instead, travel continued, and tens of thousands of New Yorkers traveled out of the city, spreading the virus further into the region and nationally.

A recent Yale University genetic epidemiological study confirmed this. Within the US, the coronavirus traveled largely from the NYC region to other parts of the country. A smaller portion traveled from Washington State, where the virus arrived with travelers directly from China, seeding infections in California and Oregon and a few other locales. Surprisingly, the study showed an estimated 50 percent of the California cases resulted from travelers transiting through or arriving from NYC.

Restricting travel in or out of the NYC area, except for essential goods, may still have been effective had a quarantine action been taken when Italy locked down its infected northern cities on March 8, an action restricting the movement of 16 million people.

On March 22, when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo issued the stay-at-home order for NYC, tens of thousands of passengers had already returned from Italy and Spain and other EU countries. Between these two dates, thousands more were infected in the NYC region and beyond. According to media accounts, few passengers were screened upon arrival. Yet, passengers reported they were only asked if they had been to China, Iran, or South Korea, not France, Italy or Spain.

A Columbia University study showed that had tighter nationwide control been put in place on March 8, fewer than 4,300 would have died by May 3. Instead the tally rose to 21,800. A little arithmetic would lead to conclude, then, that instead of 1,000 dying daily today in May it could be under 100. Restricting unnecessary domestic travel to and from NYC on March 8 in conjunction with enforcing strict quarantine rules and contact tracing for those returning from Europe would also have limited the spread of the virus to uninfected areas. In Minnesota, where I live, 72 percent of the virus cases were transited from the NYC area, while just 15 percent were transmitted from the West Coast. Passengers arriving in Minnesota were screened if they transited from China or Europe but not domestic travelers from New York airports. A costly omission.

A point of origin quarantine model proved effective in Wuhan, China, even once the virus had spread in small numbers to other cities. A modified version of China’s lockdown regime was adopted by France, Spain, and Italy, after other measures failed. By March 1, Italy banned travel in and out of infected areas with the aid of law enforcement and succeeded in minimizing the virus spreading to southern Italy.

The difference between US results by late May and those of Italy is astonishing. In Italy, new daily infections dropped from a high of 6,000 to 1,000 over a period of just one month, an 80 percent decline. In sharp contrast, in mid-May, 115 days into the pandemic, US daily infections fell just 33 percent, from about 30,000 to 20,000. With the virus still not under control states began to open their economies. The result: 50,000 plus cases a day by late June. Until these lessons are heeded disastrous consequences lie ahead.

In recent weeks, new daily cases in Italy, France, and Spain have averaged under 500. The total population of the three countries is 172 million, roughly one-half of the US. A little math shows that if the US had deployed a national coordinated response following these nations’ protocols, new daily US cases would now average just 1,000, not 50,000. What we are witnessing is a national failure. Neglect, denial and unpreparedness has cost tens of thousands of lives, several million to be needlessly infected and incalculable economic suffering. US scientists predicted in March that if the virus is allowed to rule as many as a million may die. Countless others are likely to have scarred lungs and damaged organs after recovering. Learning from these lessons is the only means to avoid such consequences.

Testing, contact tracing and a quarantine regime

Robust contact tracing regimes must be in place, not invented on the fly. Five months after the virus first appeared in the US, we are still implementing a program of testing and isolation. South Korea had such a program in place and quickly implemented it and contained the virus. Those individuals testing positive who could not safely quarantine at home were provided lodging for 14 days. Tracing and health monitoring were done via cell phones. Americans may be reluctant to be monitored like this, but the alternative is to let the virus monitor us. So long as such a regime is not in place, the virus will rule.

Isolating hot spots

In Minnesota and elsewhere, we have heard a lot about hot spots in meat processing plants. In April, a lack of foresight and the capacity to respond caused the virus to travel from a Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to the JBS plant in Worthington, Minnesota. Since the plants are only an hour’s drive apart, workers employed at one plant often have relatives and friends working at the other. The virus was identified at the Smithfield plant the second week in April and two weeks later at the Worthington JBS plant. Could this have been avoided or at least minimized? If a quarantine practice were in place, travel between the two areas would have been prohibited immediately after the Smithfield report (even proactively in March). JBS would have been shut down for cleaning and for testing of workers. JBS workers had earlier expressed concern among themselves the virus would spread from Smithfield. They were not heard.

Nursing homes: again a quarantine regime is needed

Testing residents does not solve the problem unless all staff are deemed virus-free and remain virus-free. Once staff leave a COVID-free workplace, they are susceptible to contracting the disease during their daily activities. Extraordinary precautions are the only means to prevent a virus that has a high mortality rate among the elderly. How might this be possible? Medical and all other staff need to be isolated from public interactions. One trip to the grocery store could infect residents the next day. One option is to rent hotel rooms paid for by COVID-allocated funds. Staff who are mothers with infants should be paid to stay at home. Food and other essential needs for quarantined workers should be delivered.

These measures would not only protect residents but also the health care workers’ families and coworkers. Given what we see unfolding daily, it appears that if dramatic steps are not taken, we can expect more infections and a steady stream of deaths arising from nursing homes and assisted living facilities month after month.

Testing failure

Clearly, the US was unprepared to implement a testing regime. Wholly inadequate supplies of fast and reliable testing made effective contact tracing out of reach until recently and even now cannot meet demand. The federal health administrative system and pharmaceutical firms lacked stores of reagents, testing swabs, and equipment. This was inexcusable negligence at the outset and five months later is still causing illness, death, and economic hardship. So long as we cannot test, track, and isolate, we will be forced to stay at home or, as we are now doing, opening the economy facing high rates of infection and deaths.

Public mandate to wear face masks

The failure to immediately mandate wearing face masks in public spaces and for front-line workers clearly increased the spread of the virus. For yet inadequately explained reasons, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and scientists on the president’s coronavirus task force delayed recommending this preventive measure until April 3rd, weeks after the national emergency was declared. The effectiveness of mask wearing to prevent spread is well established. Asian nations with experience managing epidemics immediately require anyone in public or providing a public service to wear a mask. Why such a logical, well-established preventive measure was not immediately mandated here demands an investigation. Come fall and winter, quality masks for everyone will be needed to prevent the spread of both the coronavirus and new strains of the flu. According to infectious disease control officials in Taiwan, if everyone wears the proper mask, the spread of infection could be reduced by as much as 99 percent.

Are we prepared for fall?

Clearly, not yet. In an interview in May, Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, suggested we are lagging behind the virus. “We have to stop promising people everything will be okay, because that’s not going to be the case,” he said. In other words, so long as the virus dictates our future, we are all in jeopardy.

Five months after the pandemic began, production of personal protective equipment (PPE) still lags behind the need. Firms are still unable to provide frontl-ine medical personnel with adequate PPE, unable to produce tens of millions of high-quality masks for public use and unable to produce sufficient materials needed for mass testing. By fall they must be ready. They dare not fail again.

Collective action is the only remedy we have until a vaccine is available. Any institution, business, and governmental entity impeding taking effective action must be forced to measure up to the challenge. State and federal political leaders found wanting and beholden to profiteers, beginning with the current president, need to be swept out of office. If the top management of private health systems and pharmaceutical firms cannot meet the nation’s needs, they should be replaced. Profit is irrelevant; we need performance. We need cooperation between firms, not competition. The lessons described here require collective cooperation and effective leadership. If one or the other falls short, the virus will prevail.

This article was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2020 at 9:06am and is filed under COVID-19 (coronavirus), Lockdown, Masks, Pandemics, Pharmaceuticals, United States.

One of the initial red flags surrounding the events of 9-11 was NORAD’s failure to scramble a single interceptor in response to the attacks. It was later claimed that they were conducting a ‘training exercise’ at the time which created confusion. Strange how these training exercises always seem to take place during major crises. Event 201, a joint venture of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum hosted by Johns Hopkins University in October 2019 was billed as a simulation response to a novel disease pandemic. Was this also a training exercise which went live? Mike Pompeo’s remarks during a White House press conference in March would seem to suggest so:

Pompeo: “This matter is going forward — we are in a live exercise here to get this right.”

Trump (under his breath): “You should have let us know.”

The case for conspiracy in the events of 9-11 is easily made when we allow our reasoning to be guided by the principle of cui bono. Who has benefited from two decades of regime change wars in the Middle East and North Africa? Arms manufacturers and their many private investors? Big Oil? International finance? The Zionist occupation state?

The question of who was responsible for 9-11 doesn’t hinge on whether or not jet fuel can melt steel beams (it can’t.) It hinges on the fact that the US had been planning a war in the Middle east for a decade prior to the event. The US decision to invade and occupy Afghanistan and to depose Saddam Hussein was made during Western liberal democracy’s ‘uni-polar moment’, a fleeting window which Francis Fukuyama would describe as ‘the end of history’ — the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union during which the US was the world’s only superpower. 9-11 was a staged event which provided the pretext for maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military force in the new century. There are several key policy documents which spell this out if you could be bothered reading them. They even talk about the need for a Pearl Harbour like event to galvanise public opinion. At least two of the authors of these documents had specifically mentioned attacks on the World Trade Centre prior to September 11, 2001.

With the benefit of hindsight, how can policy directives such as Richard Perle’s “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”, and PNAC’s “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century” be seen as anything less than manifestos by the conspirators themselves? Similarly the article by Ashton B. Carter, John Deutch, and Philip Zelikow entitled Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger which appeared in Foreign Affairs November/December 1998 edition presents chilling circumstantial evidence of foreknowledge of the events.

Most incriminating of all, however, is the Patriot Act. Passed into law soon after the 9-11 attacks, this draconian bill expanded terrorism laws to include ‘domestic terrorism’ and subjected US citizens, journalists, whistle blowers and political organisations to surveillance, wiretapping, harassment, and potential criminal action.

Within seven weeks, October 24th 2001, the House of Representatives was presented with the Patriot Act and passed it the next day. After the Senate passed it President Bush signed it the following day. Later it would be revealed that not one congressman read the 900 page Patriot Act before voting for it, nor does anyone know who wrote it, which makes many believe the Patriot Act was sitting in some right-winger, globalist’s desk just waiting for something like 9-11 to happen.

— Randolph Polasek, Powers Behind JFK Assassination (Expanded Edition, October 8, 2009)

The World Economic Forum’s COVID Action Platform is a comprehensive plan for world governance, covering every aspect of life, from employment, to food production, to mobility, to management of oceans and forests — everything from the biggest issues — ‘great power politics’, right down to the micro-management of our daily lives — religion, ethics, human rights, mental health, and even ‘human enhancement’, aka, transhumanism. The platform is presented as a manifesto for the new era into which we are being thrust; an era of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘impact investment’ through human capital bonds. Much like the Patriot Act, it is difficult to believe that such an incredibly dense, user-interactive online document could have been written start-to-finish during the initial weeks of the unfolding Covid pandemic. It is simply too comprehensive. Was this document also sitting around in some globalist’s desk just waiting for the right moment?

The Covid Action Platform presents a blueprint for the hostile takeover of every aspect of human decision making; a undertaking which is being accomplished right now, through blockchain technologies, image recognition and mechanised translation; through deep learning algorithms which make use of our smartphones and computers and employ cutting edge technologies such as facial recognition and speech translation to assimilate whole libraries of information about us — a vast neural network capable of making accurate predictions about our behaviour — in particular, our purchasing habits. In this late stage of capitalism our value to the ruling class is increasingly as consumers rather than producers. Ever wondered how it is that products and services are advertised on our screens immediately following a phone call or private conversation? Even now artificial intelligence is plotting our behaviour and making predictions based on the data it collects. The more information we feed it, the more it is able to predict and control us.

[The human population is controlled] via digital identity systems tied to cashless benefit payments within the context of a militarized 5G, IoT [Internet of Things], and AR [augmented reality] environment. The billionaire class has built and is rapidly putting the finishing touches on infrastructure to run human capital social impact markets that will securitize the lives of most people as data streams. The technology that underlies this 4IR automation will hasten the death of the planet. The World Economic Forum is advancing a technocratic system of control and domination of humanity and the planet… Why should we agree to this? It is a profound sickness of Western culture. Hubris. Sick. And totally ignoring the impact our actions have on the natural world around us.

— Alison Hawver McDowell, Wrench in the Gears

It is the need for increased surveillance and data gathering capability that is currently driving the roll out of 5G technology. Our new augmented reality lifestyles are going to require a great deal more speed and bandwidth, not to mention all those new driverless trucks on the road. Is this perhaps also why the horse shit peddlers are claiming that 5G itself is spreading the virus? Leaving aside the potential harmful effects of electromagnetic radiation in confined spaces, blaming 5G for the pandemic is about as nuanced as blaming ‘the Jooz’ for 9-11. And yet 5G does play a crucial role in this conspiracy. It will provide the extra capacity needed to micro-manage our lives when we are eventually released from lockdown into a world of digital surveillance, biometric I.D. and social credit.

The layoffs and retrenchments of workers by the million also present new opportunities to bring online automation on a scale hitherto imagined. We should not be surprised that figures like HRH the Prince of Wales and other illustrious world leaders are now calling this a golden opportunity to reshape the world. The ruling class are literally calling for a new social contract. Would you let your employer ‘renegotiate’ your contract without your union representative present? There is no historical precedent for the ruling class giving up their power and privilege. Why would they do so now?

We are indeed entering Huxley’s Brave New World; a digital panopticon where our every move will be tracked and traced; where Universal Basic Income will function as behavioural scrip; where our Covid Passes will provide access to public spaces. All of these things will be packaged and sold as the solution to our current predicament; the way we ‘reopen’ our economies and return to normal. All thanks to Covid-19.

This is a social engineering on steroids. It is not, however, unprecedented. Our rulers have made no secret of their plans to implement technocracy, couched in terms from the sublime “the systems approach to complex global challenges” to the brazenly unabashed “the self direction of human evolution”. From Julian Huxley’s foundational philosophy of Unesco to the managerial technocracy described by Carroll Quigley and Edward Bernays; from David Rockefeller’s work on global governance to Jacques Attali’s Brief History of the Future, the conceptual framework has been spelled out clearly for more than a century for anyone willing to pay attention. Texts once dismissed as works of speculative fiction now look more like the blueprints of mad scientists, social Darwinists and Malthusian eugenicists. These are the manifestos of the elite. We are living in HG Wells Open Conspiracy; in Aldous Huxley’s Ultimate Revolution. Covid 19 is simply providing the theatrical smoke and fog between acts.

Technocracy is no more compatible with human happiness than Ayn Rand’s theory of rational self interest, but this, we are told, is what progress demands, and history shows there is little we can do to stop revolutionary change. Do we become Luddites? Do we join the masses with their pitchforks and go out and set fire to the 5G ‘cancer towers’? Or do we recognise Robert Frost’s truism that “the best way out is always through”?

It’s clear that technology is here to stay. Alas, the shape of our future will depend entirely on those who control it. Failing a return to fashion of the guillotine, power is likely to remain concentrated in the hands of an increasingly small and elite group. We might find comfort, however, in the fact that hubris seldom has the final word in human affairs, and we can be reasonably assured that Huxley’s ultimate revolution will be every bit as fleeting as Fukuyama’s End of History.

This article was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2020 at 9:56am and is filed under 9-11, Afghanistan, Bill Gates, Capitalism, Censorship, COVID-19 (coronavirus), Digital Banking, Disinformation, Economy/Economics, Espionage/”Intelligence”, Eugenics, Fearmongering, Lockdown, Media, Middle East, Militarism, Narrative, Neoliberalism, Opinion, Pandemics, Ruling Elite, Technology, Unemployment, Vaccines.

Have you noticed recently that things are collapsing?

Sure, the right-wing, nationalist rulers of many countries never stop telling us that they have made their nations “great” again.

But we would have to be dislocated from reality not to notice that something is wrong―very wrong.  After all, the world is currently engulfed in a coronavirus pandemic that has already infected over 12.5 million people, taken over 550,000 lives, and created massive economic disruption.  And the pandemic is accelerating, while, according to scientists, new and more terrible diseases are in the offing.

Moreover, we are now experiencing a rapidly-growing environmental catastrophe.  Not only are industrial pollutants poisoning the air, the water, and the land as never before, but climate change is making the planet uninhabitable.  Extreme heat, drought, storms, floods, melting glaciers, and rising sea levels are wreaking havoc on an unprecedented scale.  This June, the temperature in the Arctic reached 100.4 degrees fahrenheit―the hottest on record.

In addition, defying all reason, nations persist in arming themselves for a nuclear war that will destroy virtually all life on earth.  Publicly threatening nuclear war and casting aside or rejecting major nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties, the nuclear powers are currently engaged in an extensive nuclear weapons buildup, with the U.S. government alone planning to spend at least $1.5 trillion on this project.  In response to the looming catastrophe, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently placed the hands of their famous “Doomsday Clock” at 100 seconds to midnight―the most dangerous setting in its 73-year history.

Even if these disastrous developments fail to snuff out the human race, plenty of mass misery can be expected from the rising economic and social inequality occurring around the globe.  According to a UN study, released in January 2020, 70 percent of the world’s people suffer from growing economic inequality.  In a foreword to the study, UN Secretary General António Guterres declared that the world is confronting “the harsh realities of a deeply unequal landscape,” characterized by “a vicious cycle of inequality, frustration, and discontent.”  Feeding on popular fears and anxieties, racism and xenophobia are on the rise.

But extinction or, at best, mass misery, need not be humanity’s fate.  Thanks to very substantial advances in knowledge over the centuries, plus the efforts of creative thinkers and determined reform movements, human beings have shown a remarkable ability to confront challenges and to improve the human condition.  From the abolition of slavery to the creation of public education, the banning of child labor, the guaranteeing of old age security, the legalization of unions, the recognition of women’s rights, and the defense of gay rights, previously unimaginable changes have been promoted and implemented.

Why should we assume that we are incapable of responding to today’s crises?  Working together, physicians and other scientists have either eradicated or dramatically reduced the range of numerous diseases, including smallpox, polio, guinea worm, malaria, and measles.  Responding to climate change activism, scientists and engineers have developed methods to utilize solar and wind power to replace fossil fuels.  Similarly, critics of the nuclear arms race and wise statesmen have fostered nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties and helped prevent nuclear war.  Furthermore, numerous movements have succeeded, on occasion, in securing a more equitable distribution of wealth and a reduction in discrimination.

Of course, the changes necessary to cope with today’s crises will not be obtained easily.  To successfully battle pandemics, it will be essential to create a far stronger public health system, accessible to everyone.  Combatting climate change will almost certainly require challenging the vast power of the fossil fuel industry.  To avert nuclear war, it will probably be necessary to both ban nuclear weapons and create a stronger international security system.  And when it comes to securing greater economic and social equality, limiting corporate greed, taxing the rich, and reducing deep-seated prejudices remain imperative.

Even if these conditions are met, however, another challenge remains, for implementing these kinds of changes necessitates action on a worldwide basis.  After all, disease pandemics, climate catastrophe, nuclear war, and economic and social inequality are global problems that require global solutions.  As the director general of the World Health Organization remarked in late June, the greatest threat to humanity from the coronavirus is not the virus itself, but “the lack of global solidarity” in dealing with it.  He added:  “We cannot defeat this pandemic with a divided world.”  Much the same could be said about overcoming the other onrushing disasters.

Although there is not much time left before the world succumbs to one or more catastrophes, human beings have been able to alter their behavior and institutions.  Let’s hope they will rouse themselves and do so again.

This article was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2020 at 5:57pm and is filed under Climate Change, COVID-19 (coronavirus), Environment, Fossil Fuel Emissions, Global Warming, Health/Medical, Nukes, Pandemics, Pollution, Sustainability.