China to strengthen military coordination with Russia
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | December 24, 2020
The joint aerial strategic patrol held by the air forces of Russia and China on December 22 over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea makes a big statement in the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region. Chinese experts have hinted that such events could become “routine” in future.
The Chinese and Russian defence ministries made a joint announcement on the occasion Tuesday. China sent four nuclear-capable H-6K strategic bombers “to form a joint formation” with two of Russia’s famous Tu-95 bombers (NATO reporting name: “Bear”) to conduct the joint patrol as “part of annual military cooperation plan” between the two countries.
The announcement said the joint patrol “aims to further develop the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination in the new era, and enhance the level of the two militaries’ strategic coordination and joint operational capability to jointly safeguard global strategic stability.”
Curiously, only a month ago, on November 6, two Tupolev Tu-95MS strategic missile-carrying bombers of Russia’s Aerospace Force had performed a scheduled 8-hour flight over the neutral waters of the Sea of Japan and the north-western Pacific. Russia’s Defense Ministry said “At some sections of the route, the strategic missile-carrying bombers were escorted by Su-35S fighters.”
Russia’s Tu-95MS Strategic Bomber (Filephoto)
Clearly, the joint patrol with China was not an absolute must from the perspective of Russia’s national defence. But its optics and messaging mattered. This has everything to do with the regional setting with the US and its partners stepping up.
On Dec. 19, USS Mustin conducted a transit through the Taiwan Strait; on Dec. 20, Taiwan conducted a live-fire drill in the Pratas Islands (approx. 300 kms from mainland China) and plans to conduct another on Dec. 27. Pratas Islands are strategically located near the gateway to the South China Sea and are a waypoint for oil tankers and Chinese vessels en route to the Pacific Ocean.
Last week, Taiwan launched its first missile corvette, which the Taiwanese press described as an “aircraft carrier killer”, even as PLA Navy’s first Chinese-made aircraft carrier, the Shandong, completed its third sea trial in a 23-day transit in the Bohai Sea.
Also this month, a US Navy Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) consisting of the USS Makin Island and USS Somerset (LPD 25) patrolled the South China Sea and conducted “unscripted” live-fire drills. The Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times angrily called the ARG “US muscle-flexing actions” that “could damage regional stability,” and commented that “China should be prepared to confront the US in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits no matter who sits in the White House.”
Japan has bestirred itself lately, inviting like-minded Western countries to send military units to the Far East signalling that they are united in seeking a free and open Indo-Pacific region. The US, French and Japanese navies conducted integrated exercises in the Philippine Sea in December focusing on anti-submarine warfare; another joint military exercise is planned for May on an outlying Japanese island; the UK plans to send an aircraft carrier strike group to conduct joint exercises with the US Navy and Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) early next year.
The Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi held talks last week with his German counterpart Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer where he “expressed hope that a German vessel” would join exercises with the JMSDF in 2021 and “suggested it would assist the international community’s efforts to ensure the right of passage of vessels through the South China Sea if the German warship would traverse waters” over which Beijing claims jurisdiction.
Taiwan Navy’s first stealth ‘carrier killer’ corvette Tuo Jiang
Amidst all this, the US’ Naval Service released an integrated maritime strategy designed to take a “more assertive (approach) to prevail in day-to-day competition (with China) as we uphold the rules-based order and deter our competitors from pursuing armed aggression.” Also, the US secretary of the Navy has called for the reestablishment of the 1st Fleet, a numbered Navy fleet, “in the crossroads between the Indian and the Pacific oceans.”
On Dec. 18, the US began building on the second Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in October by organising a virtual “Quad” meeting of senior diplomatic officials from the US, Australia, India and Japan. The US State Department readout said the four countries discussed “practical ways … to coordinate efforts to support countries vulnerable to malign and coercive economic actions in the Indo-Pacific region.”
There is much speculation about how the [prospective] Biden administration will approach the Indo-Pacific. So far, Biden has not mentioned Quad, but he uses the phrase “Indo-Pacific.” But instead of discussing a “free and open” Indo-Pacific (as Trump does), Biden uses the phrase “secure and prosperous.”
To be sure, given the high stakes involved, China and Russia will not take chances. Their joint aerial patrol Tuesday reflects common concern over the region’s strategic stability. Both countries take note of growing interference by extra-regional powers inciting frictions, potentially posing a major threat to regional peace. Meanwhile, the US is deploying anti-missile systems and keeps talking about a NATO-like military alliance in Asia.
In sum, the joint patrol signals that China and Russia are “the linchpins of peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region and Eurasia. They have no intention to challenge the regional order. They are propelled to respond to external powers which threaten regional security”, as a prominent think tanker at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Yang Jin, put it.
Chinese pundits have discussed the pros and cons of a Sino-Russian military alliance, the consensus opinion being that in the prevailing security environment, the existing format of strategic partnership serves the purpose of meeting common challenges while giving flexibility to serve the self-interests each side. Having said that, military alliance also remains “a last option for the worst situation – when the US or another country launches a war that forces China and Russia to fight side by side” — to quote Yang.
An editorial in the Chinese Communist Party daily Global Times noted, “China and Russia have no intention of forming a military alliance because it cannot resolve the comprehensive challenges the two countries have to face” but the pressure from the US and its allies have “provided an important external impetus” to the strengthening of the comprehensive strategic cooperation as such, including military cooperation.
“As long as they cooperate strategically and jointly deal with challenges, they can generate effective deterrent, form a joint force to deal with specific problems, resist the attempts to suppress the two countries and curb the US’ international misconduct,” the editorial said.
The US-Russia-China triangle is sure to transform under the [prospective] Biden presidency if Washington sets sights on Moscow as the biggest threat to the US national security. Unsurprisingly, Beijing is signalling that the China-Russia strategic partnership should remain close and continue to be strengthened to handle increasing pressure from the US, even if Biden might ease tensions with Beijing.
This strategic emphasis is the leitmotif of an unusually lengthy report by Xinhua in the People’s Daily on the phone conversation between the State Councilor and Foreign minister Wang Yi with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on December 22.
Data giant Palantir’s murky track record raises alarming questions about secret, potentially illegal £23 million NHS deal
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | December 23, 2020
Palantir has won a huge contract to continue its work on the NHS Covid-19 Data Store. But the British public will have no way of knowing how the private information the company has been granted access to will be used.
The potentially illegal two-year deal, which began on December 12, was awarded under the Crown Commercial Services G-Cloud 11 Framework, a ‘streamlined’ – i.e. much-accelerated – system typically used for minor contracts, which doesn’t require a tender to be published. Under the terms of the agreement, the store will rely on Palantir’s Foundry data until at least December 2022.
The store was established in March to manage Covid-19 data and inform the government’s response to the virus. Palantir was one of several tech firms hired for the project, for the princely sum of £1, and ever since has been granted access to sensitive data such as patients’ ages, addresses, health conditions, treatments and whether they smoke or drink, among other private information.
Such information is clearly a highly valuable commodity, exclusive oversight of which is fraught with opportunity for abuse, but Whitehall insists any personally-identifying details are aggregated or anonymized prior to being shared with Palantir et al.
Despite these reassurances, the deal did not go unchallenged – not least because the contracts underpinning the deal weren’t published until June, mere hours before a legal action brought by political campaigning website openDemocracy and law firm Foxglove to secure their release was due to commence.
A very secret weapon
An even cursory review of Palantir’s operations starkly underlines why so many should be concerned about its involvement with the NHS, and its access to such intimate patient particulars.
Co-founder Peter Thiel’s inspiration for the company was a desire to repurpose the fraud recognition systems of PayPal – which he also co-founded – for defense and security applications. Most established investors weren’t interested in his pitch, but it caught the attention of In-Q-Tel, the little-known venture capital wing of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which gifted the start-up US$2 million in 2004.
A decade later, Palantir was valued in the billions and pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, primarily from US government agencies, including the CIA, Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Special Operations Command.
The company’s ‘Gotham’ platform pools these entities’ disparate and sprawling databases and allows for the effective sorting, management and cross-referencing of information contained therein.
These capabilities can be put to predictive purposes – for example, soldiers in Afghanistan used the tool to combine maps, intelligence reports, and reports of roadside bombings to plan missions. As a result, Bloomberg dubbed Palantir the War on Terror’s “secret weapon,” and Gotham also became of intense interest to law enforcement agencies the world over.
Due to the veil of secrecy surrounding Palantir’s commercial activities, the total number of forces employing the technology globally is unknown – although the company isn’t only opaque about what services it provides to which clients, but has been outright dishonest at the nature of its government partnerships in the past.
Usage metrics
In 2018, it was revealed police in New Orleans utilized Palantir software to trace targets’ ties to gang members, link suspects’ criminal histories, analyze social media, and forecast the likelihood individuals would commit crimes or become a victim thereof.
Several high-profile convictions of violent, murderous drug gangs were secured in the process, although it was operated in total secrecy for five years until exposure by tech website the Verge, with even the city council totally unaware.
The tendency toward concealment may at least in part be attributable to public outcry over predictive policing programs, which exhibit seemingly invariable racial bias. Even algorithms that do not specifically use race as a metric have been found prone to this prejudice, due to the inclusion of ancillary variables such as socio-economic background, education, and location.
Still, significant light was shed on how authorities use Gotham, and what information it collates, in September 2020, when two Los Angeles Police Department training documents – ‘Intermediate Course’ and ‘Advance Course’ – used to instruct officers on the workings of the system were leaked.
The data collected on citizens – both law-abiding and those with criminal records, or suspected of having committed a crime, or even being connected in any way to individuals who have – includes sex, race, names, contact details, addresses, prior warrants, mugshots, surveillance photos, personal relationships, past and current employers, and even tattoos, scars, piercings and other identifying features.
According to an ‘LAPD Palantir Usage Metrics’ document, in excess of 5,000 officers – accounting for half the Department’s members – had access to Gotham in 2016, and in that year, they collectively ran around 60,000 searches through the system in support of over 10,000 cases.
Such a cutting-edge service doesn’t come cheap, with subscriptions running to millions of dollars annually. This sizable investment comes despite questions hanging over Palantir’s predictive policing effectiveness, which may suggest the software’s value to authorities doesn’t necessarily lie in its crime-fighting prowess.
Official figures indicate violent crime rates remained virtually unchanged in Los Angeles from 2009 to 2019, while aggravated assaults increased. However, non-violent crime did fall over the same period, in particular burglary and vehicle theft.
‘Without any safeguards
Troublingly, crucial portions of Palantir’s NHS contract are entirely redacted, including sections titled “limit of parties’ liability,”“authorised user groups,” and “data integration and analytics capability for self-service” – which covers how many “authorised users” are permitted to create and modify tools designed using the data, and the data sets involved.
In other words, the public presently has no way of knowing precisely what private information Palantir has been granted access to, how it will be used, and with who and what it can be shared with.
Shocking stuff indeed, yet the mainstream UK media and lawmakers alike have been almost entirely silent on what should at the very least be the subject of intense national debate. Amazingly, the company’s name has been mentioned a grand total of twice in parliamentary debates over the course of 2020, and only once in a critical context.
This wall of establishment silence stands in stark contrast to the US, where legislators – including Senator Elizabeth Warren – have prominently raised privacy concerns over Palantir’s participation in ‘HHS Protect’, a program launched by the Department of Health and Human Services to track the spread of coronavirus. Under its auspices, the company harvests data from a variety of federal, state and local government sources, healthcare facilities, colleges, and more.
“The inclusion of Protected Health Information in this database raises serious privacy concerns,” a coalition of Democratic senators wrote in July. “Neither HHS nor Palantir has publicly detailed what it plans to do with this, or what privacy safeguards have been put in place, if any. We are concerned that, without any safeguards, data in HHS Protect could be used by other federal agencies in unexpected, unregulated, and potentially harmful ways.”
While ministers claim life in the UK will begin returning to “normal” around Easter 2021, the length of the deal places Palantir in a position of immense and entirely unaccountable privilege at the heart of an institution which theoretically provides vital services to every British citizen, for the next two years and potentially beyond.
Readers may wish to ask themselves who or what their elected representatives are truly working for, and which interests they ultimately serve – or better yet, pose these queries to parliamentarians directly.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
Escalation in Cyberspace Raises Risk of Nuclear Attacks, Russia’s General Staff Chief Says
Sputnik – 24.12.2020
MOSCOW – The expansion of military confrontation to cyberspace and space increases risks of interference into control systems and use of nuclear weapons, Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s armed force’s general staff, said on Thursday.
“Military confrontation is spreading to cyberspace and outer space. As a result, we see increasing risks of incidents due to interference into the functioning of systems of control and nuclear weapons use,” Gerasimov said at a meeting with foreign diplomats.
Nuclear deterrence remains the key element of Russia’s military security, the official stressed.
“Nuclear weapons are seen as means to force potential enemies to abstain from launching aggression against our country. Statements about the ‘escalation for de-escalation’ concept, allegedly adopted by the armed forces, are fake. There is nothing similar to that in the Russian documents,” Gerasimov stressed.
Russia prioritises obligations under international arms control deals in its nuclear deterrence policies, the general staff chief said.
Democracies Don’t Start Wars. But Democrats Do
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 24, 2020
It may have been President Bill Clinton who once justified his wrecking of the Balkans by observing that liberal interventionism to bring about regime change is a good thing because “Democracies don’t start wars with other democracies.” Or it might have been George W. Bush talking about Iraq or even Barack Obama justifying his destruction of Libya or his interventions relating to Syria and Ukraine. The principle is the same when the world’s only superpower decides to throw its weight around.
The idea that pluralistic democracies are somehow less inclined to go to war has in fact been around for a couple of hundred years and was first elaborated by Immanuel Kant in an essay entitled “Perpetual Peace” that was published in 1795. Kant may have been engaging in some tongue in cheek as the French relatively liberal republic, the “Directory,” was at that time preparing to invade Italy to spread the revolution. The presumption that “democracies” are somehow more pacific than other forms of government is based on the principle that it is in theory more difficult to convince an entire nation of the desirability of initiating armed conflict compared to what happens in a monarchy where only one man or woman has to be persuaded.
The American Revolution, which preceded Kant, was clearly not fought on the principle that kings are prone to start wars while republics are not, and, indeed, the “republican” United States has nearly always been engaged in what most observers would consider to be wars throughout its history. And a review of the history of the European wars of the past two hundred years suggests that it is also overly simple to suggest that democracies eschew fighting each other. There are, after all, many different kinds of governments, most with constitutions, many of which are quite politically liberal even if they are headed by a monarch or oligarchy. They have found themselves on different sides in the conflicts that have troubled Europe since the time of Napoleon.
And wars are often popular, witness the lines of enthusiastic young men lining up to enlist when the Triple Entente took on the Germans and Austrians to begin the First World War. So, war might be less likely among established democracies, but it should be conceded that the same national interests that drive a dictatorship can equally impact on a more pluralistic form of government, particularly if the media “the territory of lies” is in on the game. One recalls how the Hearst newspaper chain created the false narrative that resulted in the U.S.’s first great overseas imperial venture, the Spanish-American War. More recently, the mainstream media in the United States has supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the destabilization of Syria, and the regime change in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Libya.
So now we Americans have the ultimate liberal democratic regime about to resume power, possibly with a majority in both houses of Congress to back up the presidency. But something is missing in that the campaigning Democrats never talked about a peace dividend, and now that they are returning the airwaves are notable for Senators like Mark Warner asking if the alleged Russian hacking of U.S. computers is an “act of war?” Senator Dick Durbin has no doubts on the issue, having declared it “virtually a declaration of war.” And Joe Biden appears to be on board, considering punishment for Moscow. Are we about to experience Russiagate all over? In fact, belligerency is not unique to Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo. War is in the air, and large majority of the Democratic Party recently voted for the pork-bloated National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), endorsing a policy of U.S. global military dominance for the foreseeable future. If you are an American who would like to see national health insurance, a large majority among Democrats, forget about it!
But more to the point, the Democrats have a worse track record than do the Republicans when it comes to starting unnecessary wars. Donald Trump made the point of denouncing “stupid wars” when he was running for office and has returned to that theme also in the past several weeks, though he did little enough to practice what he preached until it was too late and too little. Clinton notoriously intervened in the Balkans and bombed a pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan and a cluster of tents in Afghanistan to draw attention away from his affair with Monica Lewinsky. His secretary of State Madeleine Albright thought the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. sanctions was “worth it.” Barack Obama tried to destroy Syria, interfered in Ukraine and succeeded in turning Libya into an ungovernable mess while compiling a “kill list” and assassinating U.S. citizens overseas using drones.
If you want to go back farther, Woodrow Wilson involved the U.S. in World War One while Franklin D. Roosevelt connived at America’s entry into the Second World War. FDR’s successor Harry Truman dropped two atomic bombs on civilian targets in Japan, killing as many as 200,000. Japan was preparing to surrender, which was known to the White House and Pentagon, making the first use of nuclear weapons completely unnecessary and one might call it a “war crime.” Truman also got involved in Korea and John F. Kennedy started the intervention in Vietnam, though there are indications that he was planning to withdraw from it when he was killed. The only Democratic president who failed to start one or more wars was the much-denigrated Jimmy Carter.
So, it is Joe Biden’s turn at the wheel. One has to question the philosophy of government that he brings with him as he has never found a war that he didn’t support and several of his cabinet choices are undeniably hardliners on what they refer to as national security. The lobbies are also putting pressure on Biden to do the “right thing,” which for them is to continue an interventionist foreign policy. The Israeli connected Foundation for the Defense Democracies (FDD) has not surprisingly issued a collection of essays that carries the title “Defending Forward: Securing America by Projecting Military Power Abroad.” If one had to bet at this point “defending forward” will be what the Biden Administration is all about. And oh, by the way, as democracies don’t go to war with democracies, it will only be the designated bad guys who will be on the receiving end of America’s military might. Or at least that is how the tale will be told.
Philip Giraldi, Ph.D. is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.
For 55 Percent Of Americans, 2020 Has Been “A Personal Financial Disaster”
By Michael Snyder | Activist Post | December 24, 2020
One of the big reasons why so many Americans are angry about the size of the “stimulus payments” in the COVID relief bill that Congress just passed is because this year has truly been a “financial disaster” for millions upon millions of people.
More Americans than ever before are just barely scraping by from month to month, and $600 is just not going to go very far. In 2020, small businesses have been getting slaughtered by the thousands, millions of Americans are in imminent danger of being evicted from their homes, and more than 70 million new claims for unemployment benefits have been filed since the COVID pandemic first started. The U.S. has plunged into a brutal economic depression, and most of the country is desperately hoping that the federal government will do more to bail them out.
Of course the truth is that we can’t actually afford another 900 billion dollar “stimulus package” on top of all the other “stimulus packages” that were already passed this year.
We are already 27.5 trillion dollars in debt, and all of this reckless spending is putting us on a highway to hyperinflation.
But most Americans don’t really care that we are literally destroying our national finances. Most people are in desperate need of money, and the vast majority of them want checks from the government as soon as possible.
A OnePoll survey that was just released asked Americans about the current state of their finances, and that survey discovered that a whopping 55 percent of us consider this year to be “a personal financial disaster”…
While there is no question 2020 has been an unparalleled health challenge, many are not losing sight of how devastating the year was for their wallets as well. A new survey finds over half of Americans (55%) consider 2020 a personal financial disaster.
That is over half the country!
And for those that are employed, that same survey found that 62 percent are planning to take on a second job in 2021 in an attempt to make ends meet…
Among employed respondents (59% in total), seven in 10 say they need a raise at their job in order to make ends meet. Sixty-two percent plan on taking on a second job in 2021 to meet their financial goals next year.
That number can’t possibly be correct, can it?
Of course there aren’t that many jobs to go around. Already, there are millions upon millions of Americans that can’t find a “first job”. As I discussed the other day, we have got unemployed workers sleeping in lawn chairs or sleeping in their own vehicles because that is all they can afford at this point.
We haven’t seen anything like this since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and this latest wave of lockdowns is making things even worse.
With so many Americans financially hurting, it shouldn’t be a surprise that millions of households are getting behind on their rent and mortgage payments…
One-in-seven renters with family incomes from $35,000 to $100,000 were not current on their rent in November. The overwhelming majority of these renters – 79.9% — expected to face eviction within two months. Similarly, 9.6% of homeowners with a mortgage were not current on their mortgage in November. And 56.1% of those homeowners expected they will be foreclosed on in the subsequent two months.
Congress keeps extending moratoriums on rent and mortgage payments, and that has been financially devastating landlords and mortgage holders.
At some point the moratoriums must end, and when that happens we are going to see a tsunami of evictions that will be absolutely unprecedented in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, many Americans are going very deep into debt in a desperate attempt to keep themselves afloat financially…
More than one-third of households with incomes between $35,000 and $100,000 borrowed from credit cards, other loans as well as from friends and family to pay for their current expenses in November. Soon, debt payments will come due, burdening families that still suffer from long-term unemployment and added health care costs. This could mean rising credit default rates as well as spillovers of economic pain to other households, from who people borrowed to pay their bills.
If economic conditions were to “return to normal” in 2021, most Americans would be able to weather this financial storm just like they did in 2008 and 2009.
But things are not going to return to normal next year.
Instead, this new wave of lockdowns is going to cause thousands of more businesses to close and will force millions more Americans on to the unemployment rolls.
What we are doing to our small businesses is absolutely criminal. At this point, small business revenues are down more than 32 percent nationwide since the month of January…
Small business revenues have also taken a hit nationwide. The national average is a decrease of 32.1 percent in small business revenue since January. Washington D.C. had the worst loss in the nation at 61.6 percent. Oregon small businesses lost 16.3 percent. Illinois small businesses saw 39.2 percent decline in revenue since January.
Every day, more small businesses are closing up shop permanently.
Millions of hopes and dreams have been brutally crushed, and there is nothing that our politicians can say or do that will bring those businesses back to life.
If you have lost a business or a job this year, then that would definitely qualify as one of the “personal financial disasters” of 2020.
And as you have seen in this article, you are far from alone.
Most of the nation is deeply hurting, and the road ahead is only going to get more challenging.
In the short term, “stimulus payments” from the federal government will definitely help tens of millions of suffering Americans.
But of course every additional dollar that our government borrows and spends just makes our long-term problems even worse.
A national economic meltdown has begun, and our politicians will try lots of things to mitigate the damage, but all of their “solutions” will only help temporarily.
This is going to be an exceedingly dark chapter for America, but most Americans still do not understand the true nature of the crisis that is now unfolding all around us.
Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
WHO Deletes Naturally Acquired Immunity from Its Website
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | American Institute for Economic Research | December 23, 2020
Maybe you have some sense that something fishy is going on? Same. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Coronavirus lived on surfaces until it didn’t. Masks didn’t work until they did, then they did not. There is asymptomatic transmission, except there isn’t. Lockdowns work to control the virus except they do not. All these people are sick without symptoms until, whoops, PCR tests are wildly inaccurate because they were never intended to be diagnostic tools. Everyone is in danger of the virus except they aren’t. It spreads in schools except it doesn’t.
On it goes. Daily. It’s no wonder that so many people have stopped believing anything that “public health authorities” say. In combination with governors and other autocrats doing their bidding, they set out to take away freedom and human rights and expected us to thank them for saving our lives. At some point this year (for me it was March 12) life began feeling like a dystopian novel of your choice.
Well, now I have another piece of evidence to add to the mile-high pile of fishy mess. The World Health Organization, for reasons unknown, has suddenly changed its definition of a core conception of immunology: herd immunity. Its discovery was one of the major achievements of 20th century science, gradually emerging in the 1920s and then becoming ever more refined throughout the 20th century.
Herd immunity is a fascinating observation that you can trace to biological reality or statistical probability theory, whichever you prefer. (It is certainly not a “strategy” so ignore any media source that describes it that way.) Herd immunity speaks directly, and with explanatory power, to the empirical observation that respiratory viruses are either widespread and mostly mild (common cold) or very severe and short-lived (Ebola).
Why is this? The reason is that when a virus kills its host, it cannot migrate. The more aggressively it does this, the less it spreads. If the virus doesn’t kill its host, it can hop to others through all the usual means. When you get a virus and fight it off, your immune system encodes that information in a way that builds immunity to it. When it happens to enough people (and each case is different so we can’t put a clear number on it) the virus loses its pandemic quality and becomes endemic, which is to say predictable and manageable. Each new generation incorporates that information through more exposure.
This is what one would call Virology/Immunology 101. It’s what you read in every textbook. It’s been taught in 9th grade cell biology for probably 80 years. Observing the operations of this evolutionary phenomenon is pretty wonderful because it increases one’s respect for the way in which human biology has adapted to the presence of pathogens without absolutely freaking out.
And the discovery of this fascinating dynamic in cell biology is a major reason why public health became so smart in the 20th century. We kept calm. We managed viruses with medical professionals: doctor/patient relationships. We avoided the Medieval tendency to run around with hair on fire but rather used rationality and intelligence. Even the New York Times recognizes that natural immunity is powerful with Covid-19, which is not in the least bit surprising.
Until one day, this strange institution called the World Health Organization – once glorious because it was mainly responsible for the eradication of smallpox – has suddenly decided to delete everything I just wrote from cell biology basics. It has literally changed the science in a Soviet-like way. It has removed with the delete key any mention of natural immunities from its website. It has taken the additional step of actually mischaracterizing the structure and functioning of vaccines.
So that you will believe me, I will try to be as precise as possible. Here is the website from June 9, 2020. You can see it here on Archive.org. You have to move down the page and click on the question about herd immunity. You see the following.
That’s pretty darn accurate overall. Even the statement that the threshold is “not yet clear” is correct. There are cross immunities to Covid from other coronaviruses and there is T cell memory that contributes to natural immunity.
Some estimates are as low as 10%, which is a far cry from the modelled 70% estimate of virus immunity that is standard within the pharmaceutical realm. Real life is vastly more complicated than models, in economics or epidemiology. The WHO’s past statement is a solid, if “pop,” description.
However, in a screenshot dated November 13, 2020, we read the following note that somehow pretends as if human beings do not have immune systems at all but rather rely entirely on big pharma to inject things into our blood.
What this note at the World Health Organization has done is deleted what amounts to the entire million-year history of humankind in its delicate dance with pathogens. You could only gather from this that all of us are nothing but blank and unimprovable slates on which the pharmaceutical industry writes its signature.
In effect, this change at WHO ignores and even wipes out 100 years of medical advances in virology, immunology, and epidemiology. It is thoroughly unscientific – shilling for the vaccine industry in exactly the way the conspiracy theorists say that WHO has been doing since the beginning of this pandemic.
What’s even more strange is the claim that a vaccine protects people from a virus rather than exposing them to it. What’s amazing about this claim is that a vaccine works precisely by firing up the immune system through exposure. Why I had to type those words is truly beyond me. This has been known for centuries. There is simply no way for medical science completely to replace the human immune system. It can only game it via what used to be called inoculation.
Take from this what you will. It is a sign of the times. For nearly a full year, the media has been telling us that “science” requires that we comply with their dictates that run contrary to every tenet of liberalism, every expectation we’ve developed in the modern world that we can live freely and with the certainty of rights. Then “science” took over and our human rights were slammed. And now the “science” is actually deleting its own history, airbrushing over what it used to know and replacing it with something misleading at best and patently false at worst.
I cannot say why, exactly, the WHO did this. Given the events of the past nine or ten months, however, it is reasonable to assume that politics are at play. Since the beginning of the pandemic, those who have been pushing lockdowns and hysteria over the coronavirus have resisted the idea of natural herd immunity, instead insisting that we must live in lockdown until a vaccine is developed.
That is why the Great Barrington Declaration, written by three of the world’s preeminent epidemiologists and which advocated embracing the phenomenon of herd immunity as a way of protecting the vulnerable and minimizing harms to society, was met with such venom. Now we see the WHO, too, succumbing to political pressure. This is the only rational explanation for changing the definition of herd immunity that has existed for the past century.
The science has not changed; only the politics have. And that is precisely why it is so dangerous and deadly to subject virus management to the forces of politics. Eventually the science too bends to the duplicitous character of the political industry.
When the existing textbooks that students use in college contradict the latest official pronouncements from the authorities during a crisis in which the ruling class is clearly attempting to seize permanent power, we’ve got a problem.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
France Forced To POSTPONE ‘Health Dictatorship’ Vaccine Legislation
Massive backlash against “vaccine blackmail” means delay in proposed legislation
By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 24, 2020
A radical bill proposed by the French Government that would see unvaccinated people refused basic services such as public transport has been put on ice after a massive backlash.
The proposed law mandates that citizens have proof of a negative COVID test or “preventative treatment, including the administration of a vaccine” in order to “access transport or to some locations, as well as certain activities.”
However, the government has been forced to delay the legislation after angry protests.
French Health Minister Olivier Véran publicly postponed the bill in an announcement Tuesday evening.
“Because there needs to be trust for the French people to go and get vaccinated of their own free will, because we’re still in a state of sanitary crisis … the government won’t present the text [to the National Assembly] for several months, before we’re out of the crisis,” Véran stated.
The bill was lambasted by political figures across the spectrum, with conservative MP Fabien Di Filippo labelling it “vaccine blackmail.”
RN leader Marine Le Pen branded the vaccine measure “essentially totalitarian.”
“In a backhanded way, this bill does not aim to make vaccinations mandatory, but will prevent anybody who doesn’t comply from having a social life,” she said.
RN party spokesman Sebastien Chenu called the plan a “health dictatorship,” while centrist senator Nathalie Goulet said the draft was “an attack on public freedoms.”
Guillaume Peltier, deputy leader of the center-right LR party, warned that the law would allow the government to “get all the power to suspend our freedoms without parliamentary control.”
France’s vaccination program, set to get underway on Sunday, will not be mandatory, but a majority of 55% of citizens say they will not get the shot.
As we previously highlighted, France has imposed some of the strictest lockdown measures in Europe, with citizens having to fill out a form every time they leave their home.
Meet ‘Dr’ Tony Blair, warmonger turned vaccination guru and health passport promoter
By Neil Clark | RT | December 23, 2020
Former British PM Tony Blair is calling for millions to be vaccinated with a single dose in a radical acceleration of the vax programme and also for the roll-out of health passports. But what, exactly, is his medical expertise?
‘Listen to the experts.’ ‘Follow the science.’ Two phrases we’ve heard ad nauseam in 2020.
But who qualifies as an ‘expert’ or ‘scientist’ is highly selective. A whole host of medical and scientific professionals who have argued against lockdowns as an anti-coronavirus strategy have been dismissed as ‘cranks’: we saw that quite clearly in the way the distinguished authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were treated.
By way of contrast, those with no qualifications in ‘the science’ have been elevated as public health gurus, simply because they are pro-lockdown and espouse the ‘official narrative’.
The most obvious example of these double standards is Bill Gates, a rather geekish multi-billionaire American computer software tycoon with a nice line in sweaters who is regarded as the ‘go-to’ man by leading news channels on what we should do next about Covid-19.
Gates’ funding of public health bodies and university departments – and media outlets too – is extraordinary. But that shouldn’t hide the fact that he is not a qualified doctor. Yet criticise Gates’ interventions and you’ll be screamed at by the very same people who say we shouldn’t be listening to experienced medical/scientific professionals who take a very different view. And so it is with Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.
‘The Blair Creature’ – to give him Peter Hitchens’ wonderful nickname – has emerged, on the day before Christmas Eve, to call for as many people as possible in Britain to get a special New Year present. “The aim should be to vaccinate as many people as possible in the coming months,” Blair writes in The Independent.
The target should be to cover a majority of the population by the end of February. “We should consider using all the available doses in January as first doses, that is, not keeping back half for second doses,” he continues. That’s despite the two vaccines in question only being licensed on the basis that people receive two doses.
Let’s remind ourselves of Tony Blair’s qualifications for giving advice on vaccination programmes. Er, he doesn’t have any. He studied law at Oxford where he played in a pop group called Ugly Rumours. He became a barrister, not a doctor or scientist. Then of course he went into politics, bombing various countries.
Yet here he is pontificating as if he’s some kind of world expert on vaccine programmes. But rather than focus on his lack of qualifications in immunology, the same ‘centrist’ crowd (many of whom hurled rather large stones at the genuine experts who did oppose lockdowns), laud the intervention of ‘The Blair Creature’. Tony is speaking, so we all must stop whatever we’re doing and listen.
Really? I’ll only start listening to Blair’s advice when those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that he assured us could be assembled and launched within 45 minutes turn up. Why on earth should we trust someone who launched an illegal war based on false accusations?
This is not even about the vaccine. It’s about loud ‘this is what needs to be done’ statements on Covid-19 coming from people who have no medical education, while those who do are being sidelined for not toeing the ‘party line’.
It’s not just mass ‘single dose’ vaccinations by the end of February that Blair is keen to see rolled out. He wants health passports too. “Prepare for a form of health passport now,” he says. “I know all the objections, but it will happen. It’s the only way the world will function and for lockdowns to no longer be the sole course of action.”
This is another example of ‘it’s not what is said, but who says it’ in operation. For several months, a number of commentators (myself included) have warned about the roll-out of health passports and how our freedom to travel, attend sports and cultural events, or even go to the shops could be dependent on us possessing one.
But we were dismissed as ‘conspiracy theorists’ or worse, even though the World Economic Forum has been enthusiastically promoting such schemes.
Now Tony Blair, the great idol of those who spend their lives calling others ‘conspiracy theorists’, says that health passports “will happen”. Got that? “Will happen.” Not ‘might happen’, or ‘will happen if governments and the public decide they’re a good thing’, but “will happen”.
There is not meant to be any debate on the matter. The Davos elites have decided. We plebs are merely expected to wait in line for our jabs, and then gratefully receive our health passports without which we won’t be able to do things we took for granted just 12 months ago.
Following ‘doctor’s orders’? Or implementing a dystopian ‘Great Reset’ political agenda with terrible consequences for personal liberty? You decide.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66
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The NYT’s latest Russiagate story on George Papadopoulos is not believable
Attempt to distance Russiagate investigation from discredited Trump Dossier fails on Papadopoulos’s inherent unreliability as a witness
By Alexander Mercouris | The Duran | January 1, 2018
As confidence in Robert Mueller’s investigation crumbles there have been the inevitable leaks intended to suggest that the Russiagate investigation is still on track and that despite the increasing appearances to the contrary there is actually some reality to the case it is investigating.
The leaks take the form of claims that Mueller is planning to issue a “supplemental indictment” of Paul Manafort supposedly fleshing out the tax evasion and money laundering claims he has brought against him, and more information about the strange case of George Papadopoulos. … continue
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