Moderna CEO says the World will have to Live with Covid ‘Forever’
Comments by Brian Shilhavy | Health Impact News | January 14, 2021
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel announced today that the “SARS-CoV-2 is not going away,” and that “We are going to live with this virus, we think, forever,” at a panel discussion at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference.
The CEO of Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna warned Wednesday that the coronavirus that has brought world economies to a standstill and overwhelmed hospitals will be around “forever.”
Public health officials and infectious disease experts have said there is a high likelihood that Covid-19 will become an endemic disease, meaning it will become present in communities at all times, though likely at lower levels than it is now.
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel appeared to agree Wednesday that Covid-19 will become endemic, saying “SARS-CoV-2 is not going away.”
“We are going to live with this virus, we think, forever,” he said during a panel discussion at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference. (Source.)
Who these “Public health officials and infectious disease experts” were was not mentioned, nor any references to studies or anything else.
But they don’t need them, apparently, as simply stating it as so is enough, especially if the major networks owned by Big Pharma back you up.
And there couldn’t be a conflict of interest here, could there? After all, he is the CEO of one of the two companies currently distributing billions of doses of the new COVID mRNA injections, making him a very wealthy man.
What else would you expect him to say? He wants a continuous revenue stream, and his company has already stated that the mRNA technology being injected into people is an “operating system,” the “Software of Life,” so just like any other operating system it needs to be regularly updated to fight new viruses.
The bigger news story here is that the vast majority of the American public will actually believe what this guy says and line up to get their injections.
See also:
A Pandemic Reading List for Left, Right, and Libertarians
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | American Institute for Economic Research | January 14, 2021
Daily the news is pouring in: SARS-CoV-2 behaves like a textbook respiratory virus in its vectors of transmission and its conferring immunity. It is not and never was a strange and unfamiliar pathogenic meteor hitting the earth warranting panic to the point of shutting down the normal course of life.
The policy response should have followed the proven path of the past: vulnerable people protecting themselves while non-vulnerable populations go about life as normal with an expectation of exposure. This was the settled presumption of public health. This is what the Great Barrington Declaration said and it is what Public Health England is saying now.
Why did all this happen? Did sizable parts of the world fail to pay attention in 9th grade biology class when the subjects of viruses and immunity were discussed? For that matter, is this stuff not taught anymore?
I’m just not sure what accounts for this sudden loss of knowledge. I do know that people who specialize in political economy were blindsided last March with the policy response to pandemic. Nothing like widespread lockdowns had ever been attempted in the US, which accounts for why so little has actually been written about it. The result was that many intellectuals – on all sides! – found themselves unprepared. Subjects like cell biology and infectious disease are not topics usually examined by economists and philosophers, so many people decided to say nothing at all, thereby granting the lockdowners a free hand that dominated public discussion.
I had been variously writing on the topic of pandemic policy responses since 2006, but beyond the general conviction that government would only make things worse, I too was unprepared to deal with the specifics concerning viruses and their mitigation. Is it really true that closing restaurants and churches makes a contribution to stopping disease spread? Is forcing people apart actually a sound response to the presence of a pathogen? Is there no other path to minimizing the social harm of a virus other than waiting for a vaccine? For that matter, can a virus really be stopped?
Answering these questions takes more than political or ideological conviction. It requires at least some knowledge of cell biology, pathogens, pandemic history, public health practices, and immunological history. I scrambled to get up to speed so that I could understand more thoroughly and write in a more compelling way.
Mostly this consisted of reading as many medical studies on Covid as possible, in addition to listening to endless hours of talks online by specialists. That was essential. Even so, what I really needed was to embed myself in the bigger topic more deeply.
The books below provided me the most help on this intellectual journey.
The History of Public Health, by Paul Rosen. This fascinating treatise was first published in 1958 and reissued in 1993 with new material. It is a wonderful introduction to the whole concept of public health and how it evolved through the centuries. A major theme of the book is how poor understanding of disease dominated public health from the ancient world through the 19th century. Ignorance and fear led to a run-from-the-miasma mentality. Once the science of cell biology improved, so too did public health.
The last bout of medieval-style brutality toward disease was in 1918, after which public health got very very serious and swore that nothing like that would happen again. The turning point occurred when it became clear that large-scale collective efforts to beat back and hide from pathogens were futile and tremendously harmful. Instead, disease is something to be managed by doctors and their patients. The job of public health became to focus on clean sanitation and water and otherwise give a message of calm, and clear recommendations to people in light of medical resources.
The hardest challenge for public health was to get common people to understand the scalability of their own immune systems, so that people would stop fearing exposure as such but rather embrace evolutionary reality. After World War II, this became a major feature of public education.
Rosen further emphasizes how modern public health differs from ancient and medieval theory in that it is never about chasing away a single pathogen. Rather, public health must consider all aspects of health including economic and mental health. So panicking by running away from a germ is completely contrary to modern public health, to say nothing of lockdowns, which have zero to do with health.
One thing that slightly bothers is Rosen’s tendency to attribute all improvement in health to science and better policies. He has a whole chapter on the strange disappearance of a vast number of diseases after WWI. He thinks it is due to better sanitation and so on, which is undoubtedly true in part. But even while reading, I couldn’t shake Sunetra Gupta’s point that trade and migration vastly improved immune systems. It was a natural process of tossing off naive systems for exposed systems that made the largest contribution to longer lives and better health.
Molecular & Cell Biology For Dummies, by Rene Fester Kratz. This quick Kindle download provides an accurate look at the core of the topic at hand while minimizing the amount of technical and medical razzle-dazzle you would otherwise face with a first-year textbook from medical school. Not having an extensive background in this topic myself, I not only found the book fascinating; I was amazed that I found it fascinating! The human immune system shares features with any complex evolved system: as a reader you cannot help but be in awe of its workings and interactions with the world. In a year in which the lockdowners tried to pretend as if the immune is nonoperational without a vaccine, this introduction to disease basics is an outstanding corrective.
Smallpox: The Death of a Disease: The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer, by Donald A. Henderson. This is a spectacular history of one of the greatest triumphs in modern medicine. It is also beautifully written. Inoculation against smallpox has been around since the 18th century, and the vaccine since the late 19th century. The real challenges that met the eradicators – the author himself among the most famous and dedicated of them all – was about production, distribution, and administration. Here was what requires decades of work, and Henderson chronicles the litany of difficulties he faced around the world. I think of this book often these days given the completely predictable chaos of Covid vaccine distribution in 2021.
The Plague, by Albert Camus. This short but powerful book, written about the author’s own quarantine and published in 1947, is a work of fiction that speaks to the terrifying reality of lockdowns in the midst of a plague – the sort of plague that takes people down ferociously and brutally. He captures perfectly how the fear of sickness and death taps into a primal instinct and causes first denial and then panic. He speaks profoundly to the loss of direction and purpose in the midst of lockdown, the isolation and psychological damage that being cut off from the normal flow of life brings about. And he speaks to the loss of control felt both by citizens and officials when confronted with a mysterious pathogen, and just how disorienting it is to discover that the disease is smarter and more powerful than any of us.
Coronavirus and Economic Crisis, edited by Peter C. Earle. I am listing this one not because I have several essays in it, but rather because this book compiles some of the best research and writing from the early months of the pandemic lockdown. It is filled with white-hot passion and tremendous erudition. It also provides proof that what many of our writers predicted came true: tremendous social, cultural, and economic damage. We were warned at the time that we were acting too soon in publishing this, and it is true that AIER was just about first out the door with a book on the topic. But it turned out to serve as a great inspiration to others, and gave the principles that guided the opposition to lockdowns for the rest of the year. In the meantime, AIER released three additional books on the topic in addition to my own book Liberty or Lockdown.
Pandemic responses will continue to serve as a convenient rationale for government interventions in the future. Anyone who has a concern for human liberty and prosperity should be armed with intellectual ammunition to combat this huge increase in government power. We need more than ideological instincts here; to fully understand, we need to be aware of the sciences of infectious disease and the discipline of public health.
At this point, ignorance threatens everything we hold dear. We owe the cause of freedom some effort on our part to read up, learn, and be prepared for the long battle ahead.
Felony Murder and Gen. Rene Schneider
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | January 14, 2021
Some legal experts are speculating about the possibility that people who participated in the January 6 Capitol melee could be charged with murdering Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, even though they did not participate in his killing. The felony-murder rule holds that if a person is involved in the commission of a felony in a conspiracy with others, he can be charged with murder even though others in the conspiracy did the killing.
When I read that, I immediately thought about the kidnapping and murder of Chilean General Rene Schneider, who was killed in 1970. In fact, it’s interesting that while the members of Congress and the mainstream press express shock and outrage over recent events in the Capitol, they have long been non-plussed by the shocking and outrageous violence that U.S. government officials instigated and in which they participated in 1970.
Schneider was the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces. He was a man of deep integrity, had a family, and believed that it was the duty of the military to support and defend the constitution of the country.
In the 1970 presidential election, the Chilean people delivered a plurality of votes to a man named Salvador Allende, who U.S. officials reviled because he was a socialist. Like President Kennedy ten years before, Allende was interested in establishing friendly relations with the communist world, including the Soviet Union and Cuba, two official Cold War enemies of the U.S. national-security establishment. Keep in mind that in 1970, the Cold War was still continuing and that the communists were defeating U.S. military and CIA forces in the Vietnam War.
U.S. officials determined that Allende posed a grave threat to “national security” — not only the “national security” of the United States but also the “national security” of Chile. They decided to prevent his accession to the presidency, either through bribes to the Chilean congress or through a U.S.-supported coup that would install a right-wing military dictatorship in the country.
There was one big obstacle to a coup: Gen. Rene Schneider.
The Chilean constitution provided for only two ways to remove a duly elected president from office: by impeachment (and conviction) or through the next election. The Chilean constitution did not provide for a coup as a third way to remove a president from office.
The Chilean congress had been unable to secure enough votes to remove Allende from office through impeachment. That left the next election, which would have meant that Allende would stay in office for the next 6 years.
Schneider’s position was very simple: Since the Constitution did not provide for a coup to remove the president, the military could not act to remove him.
The U.S. national-security establishment’s position was different: While it too favored supporting and defending the U.S. Constitution, it held that there was an implicit exception to the rule, which was: Whenever a country’s president is determined to be a grave threat to the “national security” of his own country, it becomes the the moral duty of the national-security establishment to protect “national security” by removing the president from office. (As I point out in an upcoming article in FFF’s monthly journal Future of Freedom, this mindset has clear ramifications in the Kennedy assassination, which occurred ten years prior to Allende’s election.)
In order to achieve the coup, it was necessary to remove Schneider as an obstacle. Thus, U.S. officials within the CIA and other parts of the U.S. government entered into a conspiracy to kidnap Schneider.
Now, before a go further, I know what some of you are thinking: “Conspiracy theory, Jacob! Conspiracy theory! There is no way that officials of the U.S. government would ever conspire to violently kidnap an innocent man! It’s outrageous that you would even suggest such a thing about our government!”
But the fact is that that this conspiracy did in fact occur, notwithstanding the fervent mindset that some might have to deny its existence. The CIA secretly hired the kidnappers, paid them money, including hush money after the fact, and even smuggled high-powered weapons into the country, which they gave to their Chilean co-conspirators.
When the kidnappers attempted to kidnap Schneider on the streets of Santiago, he was armed and fought back. The kidnappers shot him and Schneider died three days later from his wounds.
The CIA claimed that it never intended to murder Schneider. It said that it just wanted to kidnap him. However, that claim has the word “lie” written all over it. After all, what could they have done with him after kidnapping him? They couldn’t return him, given that would have restored him as the obstacle to the coup. Moreover, if they returned him, he might have been able to lead law-enforcement personnel to the kidnappers and ultimately to the CIA. Thus, it is a virtual certainty that Schneider would have been killed by one of the kidnappers and that the CIA would have dutifully expressed shock.
Nonetheless, enter the felony-murder rule. Kidnapping is a felony. So is conspiracy to kidnap. Under the felony-murder rule, the U.S. conspirators were as responsible for Schneider’s murders as the actual killers.
The CIA and other U.S. officials who participated in the conspiracy tried desperately to keep their involvement in the conspiracy secret. People who suspected their complicity in the plot were undoubtedly labeled “conspiracy theorists.” But investigators in the private sector kept pushing and ultimately the truth came out: The CIA and other U.S. officials had participated in a felony, with the conspiracy taking place in both Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Nonetheless, the Justice Department has never charged any of the conspirators with kidnapping or murder or conspiracy to commit kidnapping and murder. Keep in mind that there is no statute of limitations for murder. But even if a federal grand jury were to return a criminal indictment, it is a virtual certainty that the federal judiciary would immediately dismiss it on grounds of “national security.”
It’s probably worth mentioning that when the family of Rene Schneider sued in federal district court for Schneider’s wrongful death, the federal courts threw them out on their ears, without even permitting them to take depositions that could have determined the full extent of the conspiracy. When it comes to extraordinary measures to protect “national security,” including kidnapping and assassination, secrecy in a national-security state is always paramount.
But that’s the nature of any national-security state: omnipotent power to inflict violence on innocent people with immunity and impunity, even while decrying violence committed by others.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education.
Poland slams social media deplatforming of Trump as government readies anti-censorship law
RT | January 14, 2021
The Polish government has decried social media platforms’ (mis)handling of US President Donald Trump’s accounts as Warsaw prepares to pass its own legislation to stop ideological censorship.
Facebook’s decision to remove Trump’s account was politically motivated, hypocritical, and “amounts to censorship,” Deputy Justice Minister Sebastian Kaleta told local media.
Under the country’s new anti-censorship law, “removing lawful content would directly violate the law, and this will have to be respected by the platforms that operate in Poland,” he explained to Polish outlet Rzeczpospolita.
PM Mateusz Morawiecki made similar comments earlier this week, though he did not mention the US president by name. “Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not,” he wrote on Facebook. “There can be no consent to censorship.”
“Censorship of free speech, which is the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is now returning in the form of a new, commercial mechanism to combat those who think differently,” Morawiecki continued.
The new anti-censorship law, first unveiled last month, will allow users whose content is taken down by the Big Tech companies to petition a special court if they believe the content did not violate Polish law and should be restored. The user may first file a complaint to the platform, which has 24 hours to restore the ‘offending’ content if they agree it does not violate Polish law.
If the platform refuses, however, the user has 48 hours to petition a court newly created for this purpose. Should the court find in favor of the censored user over a seven-day consideration period, the censoring platform can be fined up to €1.8 million.
Polish government figures, especially those on the right wing of the political spectrum, have had their own struggles with Facebook censorship in the past. The platform kicked Konfederacja party MP Janusz Korwin-Mikke off the site in November despite some 780,000 followers, alleging he had repeatedly violated “community standards.”
Morawiecki has called for the EU to adopt similar rules for governing social media, though the multinational group’s current trajectory seems to lean toward punishing platforms for not removing ‘offensive’ content quickly enough.
However, individual countries such as France are starting to push back against the dominance of Big Tech. French finance minister Bruno Le Maire recently referred to the tech titans as a “digital oligarchy” and “one of the threats” to democracy.
As when Poland first announced the new rule, social media users tired of being tread on by Facebook and Twitter expressed their approval.
Trump Impeached Again, Nearly Half the Country Opposed
By Stephen Lendman | January 14, 2021
There’s no ambiguity about Trump’s legion of supporters.
On average, polls show that nearly half of voting-age Americans oppose impeaching Trump and removing him from office.
Yet Wednesday on the House floor, lynch mob “justice” triumphed over the rule of law.
Trump became the first US president impeached twice.
Both times were for politicized reasons with no legitimacy — Wednesday’s process largely along party lines.
Ten Republicans joined with 222 undemocratic Dems.
One article of impeachment falsely accused Trump of “willfully inciting violence against the government of the United States.”
His public remarks and tweets did nothing of the sort. He urged nonviolence on January 6, not the other way around.
Once again on Wednesday from the White House, Trump denounced week ago Capitol Hill violence, urging calm.
The die was cast. Dems out for blood and their establishment media, press agents have been going all-out to deny Trump a second term — along with wanting him defrocked, humiliated, and prevented from holding public office ahead for the wrong reasons, not legitimate ones.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said that the article of impeachment will be sent to the Senate straightaway.
Separately, he turned reality on its head by the following Big Lie on national television, saying:
“The timing was thrust upon us by the actions of the president of the United States (sic).”
“The fact that he is leaving should not divert us from holding accountable behavior which many of us believe is treasonous behavior and criminal behavior (sic).”
At earliest, Senate trial won’t begin until January 19 as things now stand — two days before Trump’s tenure ends.
A two-thirds super-majority is needed for conviction, a high bar to cross, what never happened before in US history.
Will Trump be the US president to be removed from office following impeachment?
If not, will he be convicted by a Senate super-majority post-tenure?
What’s unthinkable based on the fabricated charge of inciting insurrection is unlikely but possible.
That’s the depth to which the state of the nation sank, greater depths likely ahead.
The rule of law died long ago in Washington.
9/11 added an exclamation point.
Made-in-the-USA covid (that’s renamed seasonal flu) and orchestrated Main Street economic collapse last year, continuing with no end of it in prospect, added two more.
Orchestrated by anti-Trump dark forces, last week’s Capitol Hill coup attempt added another.
In response to Trump’s politicized impeachment 2.0, Law Professor Jonathan Turley said the following:
Wednesday’s “snap” impeachment of Trump “dispense(d) with the traditional hearing or inquiry of impeachment.”
“There was no opportunity to debate the language or the implications of the language.”
“(T)he rush to judgment could become a parade of constitutional horribles.”
It’s “ripe for challenge on the Senate floor and even later in the federal courts.”
Impeachment “language… is sweeping and raises serious concerns of this standard for future presidents.”
Trump’s remarks did not rise to the level of “criminal incitement…”
“(T)he Senate should reject the impeachment if on the basis that an impeachment of a former president is unwarranted and likely unconstitutional.”
It’s based on invented reasons, not legitimate ones.
Turley is a sharp Trump critic as am I — for justifiable reasons, not phony ones to satisfy vengeful Dems.
Impeaching Trump twice for politicized reasons — along with seeking lynch mob “justice” against him throughout his tenure — proves conclusively that Dems are self-serving and unfit to lead the nation.
Their involvement in staging a Capitol Hill coup attempt against a sitting president left the state of the nation and rule of law in tatters.
Post-inauguration of unelected Biden/Harris next week, will they declare martial law?
Will tyranny follow on their watch?
A pox on both right wings of the one-party state.
On her website, Sharyl Attkisson posted results of what she called “a recent unscientific poll of more than 640 people,” adding:
“When asked if they generally trust (US) election integrity, 70% said ‘Absolutely no’ and 19% said ‘More no than yes’ for a total of 89% expressing skepticism.”
“Another 6% said they tend to trust election integrity: 2% said ‘Absolutely yes’ and 4% said ‘More yes than no.’ ”
Along with earlier stolen US federal elections since the early 19th century, media-supported Election 2020 theft may have been most brazen of all.
Events post-election, leading up to last week’s orchestrated Capitol Hill coup attempt, Wednesday’s impeachment, and what may follow are proof positive of a nation dismissive of the rule of law.
It’s on a fast track to full-blown tyranny if not challenged by nonviolent mass action in the streets before it’s too late.
Stephen Lendman’s two Wall Street books are timely reading:
How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War
Alert: the operation to squash protests in America – PART ONE
By Jon Rappoport | January 14, 2021
The Department of Justice has announced it’s mounting a full-scale operation to arrest and charge people who broke into the Capitol on January 6.
There will be a wide-ranging menu of charges, starting with criminal trespass, and moving all the way to weapons possession, theft of National Security data, assault, and sedition.
The DOJ list of charges is meant to impress the American people.
Of course, an impressive DOJ list could have been leveled against thousands of people who participated in Antifa/BLM-led burning, looting, theft, and assault across the US over the past six months.
But that didn’t happen.
Those violent riots were a form of “insurrection,” but the label was never applied.
And Big Tech never considered banning social media users who planned and supported the riots.
From here on out, people will need to announce quite specifically what they’re protesting against. I’m talking, of course, about protests against the brutal COVID lockdowns.
Because you can be sure the government/media complex will paint such people with the “Capitol-break-in” brush. That’s part of this operation to squash dissent.
On a related note, social media are censoring users, and news media are censoring their own talent, if the issue of the stolen election continues to be raised. However, there is no expiration date on accusations of vote fraud.
Remember, after Trump won the 2016 election, Democrats spent the next three years claiming he didn’t win, but instead was part of a Russian conspiracy that handed him the presidency. Who was censored for saying THAT?
Back to the protests: As I’ve mentioned in prior articles, equating distinct events, and thus turning them into “the same event,” is part and parcel of mind control.
A hundred bereft business owners, who have been driven into bankruptcy by the COVID lockdowns, gathering near a governor’s office to protest, will be equated with “crazy dangerous Trumpers who believe the election was stolen.”
This is no accident. It’s standard operating procedure in the world of intelligence-agency campaigns.
If the CIA wants to maintain a foreign dictator in office, because he makes favorable deals with mega-corporations to loot and plunder his country, they’ll spread vast disinformation about the rebels who want free elections:
“The rebel force threatening to unseat the president is led by the cult of child-killers who have been ravaging families in the countryside…”
Closer to home, imagine something like this: “The group called Citizens for a Free Nation, who showed up at the governors’ mansion last week to protest COVID safety measures, is largely composed of unhinged anti-vaxxers and Trump supporters, some of whom may have attended the January 6 rally at the Capitol, which resulted in an act of insurrection. Police and FBI are investigating…”
Behind it all? A determination to suppress resistance to the COVID lockdowns, aka mass imprisonments.
The Police State knows the months of lockdowns and economic destruction have driven more and more people to the wall. The US population is a dry tinder forest in a season of high heat and no rain.
Controlling the population is a major problem. So those who stand up and visibly break out of jail have to be made into despicable illustrations of Something Else.
What label is at hand? By mere coincidence: INSURRECTIONISTS, “who broke into the Capitol on January 6, the day that will live in infamy.”
That label can now be applied anywhere. It’s a major item on the game board of intelligence-agency operations. When dissenting heads pop up, paint them with it.
Nevertheless, protests are still legal and legitimate. People who run them need to articulate what they’re about, over and over, in very clear fashion.
Americans, who’ve lived with more freedom and security than people in other parts of the world, tend to think their government, when it muscles in, signifies The End and Total Defeat.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Freedom never dies.
It is an eternal quality.
Syria: 70 notables assassinated in YPG-controlled areas
MEMO | January 14, 2021
In recent months, the areas controlled by the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the governorate of Deir ez-Zor (eastern Syria) have witnessed assassinations of notables and respected personalities on a near-daily basis.
Local sources in the governorate revealed on Wednesday that they had documented about 70 assassinations of notables in the YPG-controlled areas over the last five months.
The sources told Anadolu Agency that unknown individuals carried out assassinations on an almost daily basis, since the murder of Leader of Al-Aqeedat tribe Mutashar Al-Hafl in August 2020, taking advantage of the significant security deterioration in the YPG areas.
The sources added that last November, in the town of Al-Sijr, unidentified individuals assassinated Abdul-Razzaq Al-Muhammad and Ibrahim Al-Attiyah (nicknamed Abu Bakr Qadisiyah), a former commander of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) who was known for his strong opposition to the YPG.
On Sunday, unidentified gunmen assassinated Sheikh Talyush Eshatat, his son Mahmoud and another unidentified person, after storming his house in the town of Al-Hawaij. Former FSA Commander Ahmed Al-Alwan and his son were also killed in the city of Al-Busayrah in the countryside of Deir ez-Zor, according to the same source.
Following the murders, the High Council for Syrian Tribes and Clans issued a statement condemning the assassinations targeting notables and well-known personalities in the region.
According to the statement, the council: “Condemns in the name of its Arab, Kurdish, Turkmen and Syriac-Assyrian components all terrorist operations that targeted the Syrian people in general, and the tribal sheikhs and tribesmen in particular in the Deir ez-Zor governorate.”
The statement held: “Terrorist organisations that want to manipulate the tribal components and end their presence in the region”, responsible for the assassinations.
Earlier, the Syrian Al-Aqeedat tribe demanded that the international coalition hand over the administration of the Arab regions in eastern Syria to the locals, accusing the SDF, which is dominated by the YPG terror group, of carelessness in pursuing the assassinators.
Several towns in the eastern countryside of Deir ez-Zor have witnessed mass protests against the assassinations. At the same time, the YPG responded by attacking and besieging the towns, leading to civilian fatalities and injuries in addition to dozens of arrests.
In “Staggering” Lack Of Self-Awareness, Twitter Lectures Uganda On Principles Of ‘Open Internet’
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | January 13, 2021
Twitter decided that now would be a good time to weigh in on how things are going in Uganda of all places, where Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has taken the drastic action of temporarily banning Facebook and Twitter in the final hours leading up to Thursday’s general elections for the presidency and parliament.
Museveni argued that the US-based social media platforms are engaged in censorship that unfairly targets his campaign while propping up opposition frontrunner candidate Bobi Wine. After being on a days-long massive purge of pro-Trump accounts in the US which began when the president himself was permanently banned, Twitter had this to say, and without irony:
“We strongly condemn internet shutdowns…
Billionaire co-founder of AQR Capital Management Cliff Asness immediately said exactly what was on everyone’s mind: “The lack of self-awareness is staggering.”
It is indeed yet another example of Twitter being completely blinded by the hypocrisy as to the way it exercises its immense power in its own backyard (or worse, the major Silicon Valley moguls are quite aware and simply don’t care).
This also after Amazon, Apple and Google agreed in unison to destroy Parlor as it was politically expedient, apparently. And now Twitter is actually lecturing the head of a foreign state on not violating the “principles of the Open Internet”.
So much for that “open” internet…
As for Uganda a long list of online platforms are currently down alongside Twitter and Facebook ahead of the election, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Skype, Snapchat, Viber, Google Play and others.
Facebook actually admitted to the AP that it indeed took down many users promoting Museveni as it alleged his campaign “used fake and duplicate accounts to manage pages, comment on other people’s content, impersonate users, re-share posts in groups to make them appear more popular than they were. Given the impending election in Uganda, we moved quickly to investigate and take down this network.”
Museveni responded by vowing “there is no way anybody should come and decide for our country” – in reference to the US tech oligarchs during a national address over the crisis.
Again, Twitter is now oh-so-worried about principles of free speech and #OpenInternet – as it stated in its official message – in far away foreign countries like Uganda, but is not batting an eye while simultaneously shutting down thousands of conservative accounts.
Biden Exploits His Capitol Gains
By Diana Johnstone | Consortiumnews | January 11, 2021
What happened in the Capitol on Jan. 6 was not surprising. It could have been avoided. It could have been prevented if the Democratic Establishment which held onto keys of power throughout Trump’s mandate had truly wanted a smooth presidential transition. For months prior to the election, the elite Transition Integrity Project was spreading the alarm, loudly echoed by liberal media, that Trump would lose and refuse to acknowledge his loss.
There was a simple, obvious way to avoid such a drama. In an article for Consortium News last August, I suggested how this could be done.
“It seems to me that if the Democratic establishment gave priority to a peaceful election and transition, against the possibility that Trump might reject the results, the smart and reasonable thing to do would be to reassure him on the two counts which they suggest might incite him to balk: postal vote fraud accusations and the threat of criminal charges against him. […]
As for postal balloting, it should be conceivable that Trump’s misgivings are justified. […] In an age when anyone can photocopy any document, when mails are slow and when there are many ways in which ballots might be destroyed, such misgivings are not far-fetched. […]
For the sake of domestic peace, why not try to find a compromise? Kamala Harris has introduced legislation to generalize postal balloting. Why not, instead, extend polling time, opening polls not only on the second Tuesday in November but on the preceding Saturday and Sunday? This would provide time to allow voters afraid of Covid-19 to keep distances from each other, as they do when they go to the supermarket. It would reduce the number of absentee ballots, the time needed for counting and above all the suspicions attached to postal voting. But the more wary Trump is of postal voting, the more Democrats insist on making it universal.
It becomes clearer and clearer that hatred of Trump has reached such a pitch, that for the Democratic establishment and its hangers-on, defeating Trump at the polls is not enough. They are practically inciting him to contest the election. Then they can have something more exciting and decisive: a genuine regime change.”
So indeed what we got was something more exciting. Not exactly regime change, because we are seeing instead a powerful reaffirmation of the regime that was really still there during Trump’s largely deformed four-year term. The haste with which his aides and allies desert him in his last hour makes this clear. He was always a president without a team, operating on hunches, rhetoric and advice from his son-in-law and a few insiders who were really outsiders.
But what we are getting is indeed exciting: an alleged “insurrection” supposedly incited by Trump to “steal the election” (which it had absolutely no way of doing). The scenes of disorder have been instantly exploited to plunge him and his followers into an abyss of ignominy, if not criminal proceedings and imprisonment.
More Like Otpor
What happened on Jan. 6 was not an insurrection. Anyone wanting to know what an insurrection is should look up the U.S.-sponsored armed uprising that overthrew duly elected Chilean President Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973. The Capitol disturbance was more like what happened when U.S.-trained “Otpor” militants broke into the Serbian parliament in the midst of that country’s 2000 presidential election and set fire to ballot boxes.
Or check out a particularly pertinent insurrection when truly violent demonstrators took over the Ukrainian Parliament in 2014 and overthrew the government, an event hailed by then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden as a great victory for democracy. Then there was the Hillary-endorsed coup in Honduras, the almost successful attempt to overthrow democracy in Bolivia, the U.S.-backed Guaido farce in Venezuela, etc., etc., etc.
No, an insurrection is not when a large crowd of people who feel their candidate has been cheated vent their indignation by managing to break into “their” parliament with no purpose in mind. Most of the intruders milled about taking selfies with no clear idea what to do next. By world standards, the “violence” on Jan. 6 was very mild indeed, the only gun violence being the fatal shooting of an unarmed Trump enthusiast, Ashli Babbitt, who could easily have been pushed back from her adventurous attempt to climb over a barricade.
The intrusion was so far from carrying out a pro-Trump plan that it had the opposite effect. The immediate political result of the eruption of the undisciplined crowd was to prevent Republican Senators who were so inclined from presenting their arguments against the legitimacy of the November vote. If anything, the action worked in the favor of President-elect Biden.
One might think that in his moment of victory, a true statesman would demonstrate the qualities it takes to lead a nation by offering to bring all people together as fellow Americans. He did quite the opposite.
The very next day after the Capitol happening, in his small fiscal haven home state of Delaware, Biden raged against his opponents as a terrorist mob, no less.
“They weren’t protestors,” he proclaimed. “Don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic. It’s that simple.”
Trump, said Biden, “has unleashed an all-out assault on our institutions of democracy from the outset, and yesterday was but the culmination of that unrelenting attack.” Trump had poisoned the political environment by using “language that autocrats and dictators use all over the world to hold on to power.”
Biden’s own language certainly sounded less like a magnanimous winner uniting his people than like that used by autocrats and dictators to hold onto power. Trump was trying to “deny the will of the American people,” he said, much as Trump said of him. The whole problem was that “the will of the American people” was far from unanimous.
The Authoritarian Center
So even before his inauguration, President-elect Biden has given us a bitter taste of days ahead. There is to be no sacred unity, but deepened division between The Good (woke liberals), the Bad (Russians and other enemies of Our Democracy) and the Ugly Americans, to be labeled Domestic Terrorists, White Supremacists and fascists.
The authoritarian center, ranging from opportunistic Republicans to The Squad, can rally around the necessary purge of Domestic Terrorists, silencing their communications and getting them properly fired from their jobs.
The Establishment has long been determined to crush Trump. But there is talk of “purging” all his followers as well. Biden is already speaking like a War President, calling for measures to combat the internal enemy such as accompany major wars.
The oligarchic nature of the American War Party is revealed by the haste with which privately owned social media enterprises silence dissent – even the still acting President of the United States. Indeed, who really rules the United States? Is the president only an agent of economic powers whose role is to serve their interests? And the trouble with Trump is that he had not been picked for the job.
Trump managed to appeal to millions of discontented Americans without offering any coherent practical program to replace the War Party with policies capable of transforming the nation into a haven of peace and prosperity. His confusion mirrored the ideological confusion of a population scandalously undereducated in history and political ideas. The illusion that Trump was the leader dissident Americans needed cost Ashli Babbit her life and led thousands of Trump voters into what amounts to a trap. Trump himself was led into the trap.
A completely different approach to politics is needed to restore democracy to America. All appeals to identities and ideologies can only deepen the confusion and divisions, because they prevent people from understanding each other.
The Biden administration appears intent on strengthening such confusion and divisions precisely by recourse to identities and ideologies. I firmly believe that only a scrupulously rational, open-minded, factual and pragmatic approach to clearly defined practical problems could bring peace to the United States, a peace that could favor peace in the world.
From outside the melee, it is easy to define the serious issues that should dominate political debate in the United States. But instead of that, we hear a torrential exchange of insults. The establishment elite cannot stoop to exchange viewpoints with populists denounced as deplorable, racist, misogynist, white supremacist, fascist and now even “terrorist.”
The populists’ unfocused denunciation of the elite describes Wall Street Democrats as “socialists” and veers off into accusations of genocidal vaccination campaigns, occult pedophile rites and Satanism. Instead of anything resembling a clear political division, America is increasingly split by blind, burning mutual hatred.
What American political life needs is not more censorship, but the self-censorship of reason. That is very far away.
Massive new gas field discovered in Russia’s Far East
RT | January 13, 2021
Russian energy giant Rosneft has announced the discovery of a huge gas condensate field in the Far Eastern republic of Yakutia. It contains over 75 billion cubic meters of natural gas and 1.4 million tons of condensate.
The new deposit is part of the company’s drilling campaign to explore the region’s oil and gas potential.
The discovery was made by Rosneft’s subsidiary Taas-Yuryakh Neftegazodobycha. A joint venture between Rosneft (50.1 percent), BP and a consortium of Indian companies, Taas-Yuryakh Neftegazodobycha operates in 10 license areas. Among those is the Srednebotuobinskoye oil and gas condensate field, which is one of the largest assets of Rosneft in Eastern Siberia.
Rosneft recently announced discoveries of large oil and gas fields in the Kara Sea, saying that overall, more than 30 “prospective structures” were identified there. The results of the drilling prove “the discovery of a new Kara offshore oil province,” the energy giant said.
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By Thomas S. Harrington | CounterPunch | August 19, 2016
… What will almost never be talked about are the many very good reasons a person from the vast region stretching from Morrocco in the west, to Pakistan in the east, have to be very angry at, and to feel highly vengeful toward, the US, its strategic puppeteer Israel, and their slavishly loyal European compadres like France, Germany and Great Britain. … Read full article
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